Image totally ripped from Disney

According to The Nielsen Company’s 2009 Global Online Consumer Survey, consumers’ overall trust in brand marketing messages has actually increased since 2007. This is primarily because major marketers realize more and more consumers are double-checking marketing messages that interest them with those they trust. Thus, backed by mega marketing budgets, the world’s largest brands have started integrating user feedback and actual user-generated content into core brand marketing efforts.

“The explosion in Consumer Generated Media over the last couple of years means consumers’ reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don’t, has increased significantly,”– Jonathan Carson, President of Online, International, for the Nielsen Company.

We believe this study marks the end of unilateral brand development. It shows that engaging with consumers in a meaningful way through new online tools is the best way to become more relevant to consumers, gain greater influence over purchasing decisions and add credence to outbound marketing messages. However, to truly be effective in a more socialized marketplace, brand marketers must understand the fundamentals of influence.

The Hierarchy of Influence

1 Personal Experience

The most important component in defining what a brand actually is to a consumer is an individual’s experience with a product or service. It would be incredibly difficult for a shoe insert company to convince anyone that its products were good at reducing foot pain if wearing them were painful. Many brands had forgotten this in the last decade and are in the midst of various “customer first” efforts. Do not underestimate the power of personal experience in determining a brand identity. It may be hard to believe a brand promise, but it’s impossible to ignore a brand experience.

2 Reputation
The second and most increasingly important factor in how consumers define a brand is reputation. The experiences shared by friends, family or even strangers in web forums or commenting on blogs have more clout in defining a brand’s true identity to a consumer than a billboard or TV ad ever will. Whether you want to call it reputation marketing, advocacy marketing or plain ole word-of-mouth, appealing to the opinions of key influencers will continue to be a rapidly evolving segment of brand development. Whereas your power as a marketer to alter or improve a consumer’s personal experience with a product or service is limited, the broadband web provides many opportunities to enhance a brand’s reputation.

Social tools like blogs, forums, Facebook and Twitter allow for increased interaction with customers and are an attractive option for marketers looking to influence a brand’s reputation. According to Nielsen[i], 90% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know. 70% trust the opinions of other consumers posted online – even if they are strangers. By comparison, only 62% of consumers trust messages delivered via television advertising and only 54% trust a brand’s messages delivered via opt-in emails. 

3 Brand Messaging
Marketing messages hold a distant third place in the hierarchy of influence. Meaning, just because you say your product is faster or tastes better, doesn’t mean people will believe it. In the face of a consumer’s personal experience or the trusted opinions of others, the power of your marketing messages as agents of persuasion or attitude change has been significantly degraded over the last few decades.

Lance Shields of Fast Company sums it up in his November 2008 blog post, What is Social Branding[ii] when he says,

“Our brand is not our's to control. It's our customers, our employees' and all the other people who think and talk about us behind or in front of our backs.”

The potential for social tools to enhance a brand’s reputation is clear. The problem for most marketers, even those who have embraced the value of social marketing, is that using these tools has been primarily tactical and experimental thus far. For social marketing to truly make a difference, it has to be integrated into the formative stages of a company’s branding efforts. If a person’s experiences don’t match up with a brand message or if a consumer receives two different messages from TV and Facebook, they’ll get confused. And as John Scully of Apple Computer once said, “minds ignore confusion.”

Check back for our next post, : The Building Blocks of the Socialized Brand in a few days. In the mean time, leave a comment or click Share.

Wondering if the negative comments from those around us represented an overall downward sentiment for Apple's new iPad, we ran a sentiment query to find out how bloggers, commenters, forum posters and Tweeters (aka Twits) have responded. Using a tool we use for our clients, we ran a search that excludes traditional websites and monitors the social web for real comments. You can see the results below.

The graph breaks down various social posts according to positive (Green), negative (Red) and neutral (Grey) comments. The tools we use assign the sentiment value based on the words around our keyword, "iPad" in a way that is consistent with widely accepted research methodologies. For more on how Sentiment analysis works, go here. Sentiment analysis gives us enough usable data so that we can spot trends, if not generate perfect scientific results. So, let's look at how the iPad's reputation is trending. Here's a breakdown of the above graph. 

*1/29 results as of 12:00pm on Friday 1/19.

You can see the number of social mentions that our tools could clearly identify as negative are growing. We see a clear trend towards negativity as compared to positive or neutral mentions from 1/27 to 1/28. While this is by no means a decisive prediction of the iPad's overall success (and recognizing that trends can sway widely after the announcement of a new product that you can't yet touch), we think Apple is in a good place to start listening to the types of negative comments that might be negatively influencing the opinions of others who may share a neutral or positive opionion of the product. 

Here are a few actual quotes taken from the study:

www.cartoonbrew.com Like so many others, I was eagerly anticipating Apple’s iPad, but the device falls shorts in many areas, including in its usefulness to the animation community.

@Vonster: Does the vast spacing between the icons on the iPad bug anyone else? // yes! makes it seem even more like a bigger iPod touch.

Comment from blog featured on reddit.com – good point. steve jobs is the jesus of techies and the ipad is the nickelback of computing devices.

Perhaps there has been a problem in the marketing message, but more and more people seem to be struggling to find value with the iPad. If Apple is listening to what their audience has to say about it through the blogs, comments and tweets like the ones above, they have a real opportunity to speak to these challenges. However, if the product is a true turkey...as the old saying goes, "Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.

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If you're interested in having Big Scary Cranium perform a social audit for your company, contact us here.

There is a lot of exciting information coming out about how Social Media is changing branding.

Check out this new information from Nielsen showing how for the first time in many years, consumers are putting MORE creedence into marketing messages. Download the full PDF, here.

We're currently developing a white paper detailing what this means to branding and how to take advantage of this new and exciting trend. Enter your email in the box to the right to get it once we've finished editing.

Back in July, I wrote about Twitter's traffic plateau and speculated as to whether or not it was due to a cyclical pause or a real shortcoming in the famed 140 character publisher's offering. Looking again at the traffic numbers, you'd really think something was amiss with Twitter.

An estimated drop of six million visitors in six months looks pretty substantial, but looks can be deceiving. Yes, there are loads of people who simply hate or don't understand Twitter. Even during it's July peak, traffic watchers were quick to point out the nearly 70% abandon rate of first-time Tweeters.

However, the apps may be hiding the real reason for the decline in traffic. More people are using Twitter via Tweetdeck or through automated services like Sendible. My SEO friends tell me traffic counts likely don't measure Twitter activity as it eminates from these apps. That's likely a big culprit. But is that all?

At some point, traffic has to level off. We're probably not there yet, but count on Twitter becoming just another tool in the shed. It may still be the "next big thing" in marketing, but it's certainly not "the only big thing." Blog traffic still eclipses Twitter usage by any count.

Just remember, Twitter is a micro-focused broadcast resource more than it is a social networking tool. Marketers should remember that Twitter is a great way for consumers to practice low-impact voyeurism. They are less likely do respond to a particular post via Twitter as they are via Facebook, but they may be more likely to see it. Plus, now that Facebook has brilliantly connected your Wall Posts to your Twitter Page, there's less reason to use Twitter for the same reasons you'd use Facebook. It's akin to Disney World offering to give you a free ride to your Disney hotel from the airport - this way it's harder for you to venture off to Unversal Studios in a rental car.

So, no. Twitter isn't dying, much to the dismay of curmudgeons everywhere. But the traffic count highlights how much more complicated online communications are becoming. Quantifying success will continue to be an interesting challenge.

It's amazing how many companies try to "get on Facebook" before figuring out a communications strategy. After doing this for a while now, I can tell you that nothing reveals gaps in a marketing plan quite like social media. That's why we always start with a brand's existing Positioning Statement before even attempting to build a presence on the social web. We believe whatever a product or service promises to do for customers should extend to their efforts on the social web.

However, sometimes we realize halfway through the process of crafting a social campaign that the brand positioning needs to be addresses before we can be successful. Social media marketing is perhaps the one marketing media that is most closely in tune with customers and can be a litmus test of sorts as to how relevant a brand's marketing messages truly are. In situations where we realize a gap, we often recommend ways to address a brand's positioning so that it better matches needs, wants or expectations held by their customers – all the while taking into account the marketing positions held by competitors.

Other times, as with LEED Consulting firm, BVM Engineering, we are able to "start over" and help guide a company through crafting a unique brand position before jumping into marketing collateral or social media marketing. In cases like this, we can take into account competing voices in the marketplace, examine how outside factors have changed the industry and look carefully at what potential customers need from providers like BVM Engineering before revealing a new brand presence to the world. Not surprisingly, this tends to work out better for everyone.

We're happy to have been called in by Resource Real Estate Marketing to help solve this problem for BVM Engineering. We've finished stage one, but can't quite reveal the actual brand position yet. Check back once we've nailed the creative portion with RRM and we should see an example of what happens when you balance customer needs, competing claims and opportunities provided by the newly social web to make a business successful.

Direct Response advertising has always been the ugly workhorse of the marketing world. I don’t think any agency ever made the cover of Creativity magazine for their brilliant use of the phrase “call now.” However, direct response ads draw traffic and do lead to sales for certain target segments. In fact, direct response TV spending hit $5.1 Billion in 2007. 

If your business has found success using direct response ads in the past, you may want to explore how to utilize social media to augment your marketing efforts. One easy way to get started is by using Facebook’s new Direct Response ad units. They’re currently still in testing with Chick-fil-A, but I’m assuming they’ll be a big hit and we’ll see something similar offered to the rest of us within a few days or weeks. 

Nate Elliott, principal analyst at Forrester Research, thinks that this type of direct response ad unit will work best for packaged goods companies and retailers.

“If a marketer is looking to launch a new product, or change a consumer's opinion of a product, then [sampling] is a good strategy,” he said. – pulled from http://www.dmnews.com/facebook-debuts-direct-response-ad-units/article/148027/

 

Sampling is a great tactic for promotion. Integrating these new direct response ads can be a great way to provide real value to your existing Facebook fans and draw new fans who can continue to receive exclusive offers from your brand in addition to other news feed updates that otherwise improve their lives.

As they say, “It’s better to be first than best.” So, start thinking of how social Direct Response ad units might help you out before someone else beats you to it. 

Sure, your company blog (or blogs) is an important resource for sharing company information, building expertise, enhancing search engine optimization and more. But new developments this year might start chipping away at least one of your blog’s roles.

A curious thing happened this last April, all sorts of blogs saw a significant decrease in traffic. In some cases, traffic fell off for 60 days or so and quickly recovered. However, some blogs, like the Realtor mainstay ActiveRain, experienced crushing declines that have left traffic relatively flat for the year. What does this mean for blogs as a whole? According to Forrester Research, people don't trust your blog. But even so, we think there's another, more structural factor at play. 

Take a look at this ActiveRain traffic estimate from Quantcast. You can see the erratic pattern take a nosedive in early Spring.

 Likewise, see how traffic to blogs hosted by Blogger plummeted around the same time. Traffic eventually recovered, but what caused the massive decline in visits?

 Now, let’s look at Social Media’s darling Facebook’s traffic estimate from the same period. Jeepers, April was the start of a very good year for Mr. Zuckerberg, wasn’t it?

 Does this signal the beginning of the blog swan song? The Big Scary Cranium has thought about it and our answer is a resounding, “nah.” There’s still plenty of future for company blogs, but it’s role is an ever changing one. Blogs gained in popularity because they allowed people to release and digest information faster than traditional media could. Today, Facebook and Twitter enable these same people to share information even more quickly. So, while blogs may become less attractive as sources for breaking news, they remain important centers of knowledge sharing and expertise building.

Many of ActiveRain’s blogs are based on sharing newsworthy events in the Real Estate industry. We’re willing to bet that a careful study of blogs hosted by ActiveRain would reveal the more influential “expert” blogs suffered less dramatic traffic declines than those based on aggregating or commenting on industry news.

So, keep showing the world how smart you are though your blog, save the breaking news for your social profiles. What do you think? Did Facebook kill the blog star in April?

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It doesn't matter if you're a commercial insurance provider, bicycle maker or alcoholic beverage vendor, all signs point to increasing consumer and B to B focus on web content as an important tool in helping everyday and long-term strategic decision making. Those who want to master effective online marketing in the next decade need to be sure to include a strong content strategy as part of their media mix. Yes, online ads are effective. Behavioral targeting and Rich Media can work. However, to get that all-important referral or word of mouth mention, be sure to provide relevant information to your target customers. This leads to instant brand affinity and the added emotional trust bridge that comes with being an established thought leader. 

Time Warner has made its share of mistakes, but their AOL division seems to recognize that the social web is revealing a few best practices. In a move to redefine themselves, AOL has announced that they will become "the internet's largest provider of content in two years." Quite a leap, given their former strategy of flooding the world with cheap internet starter disks. 

What this all really means is even the tubby internet flunkies recognize that people still use the web for getting information. What we want you to know is that marketing best practices are quickly turning towards helping people share this information. Your company needs to have a blog, a facebook presence or Twitter page so that you can not only push content to your potential customers, but listen and gain an excuse to start talking to them beyond the ad agency. The single marketing message pushed to many can become many marketing messages shared with many – with even more follow-up conversations that can lead to sales. 

So, get started. Form a content task group. Before you start pulling information, figure out what your customers want to hear. If you don't know what that is, it's time to do some research. If you can't afford a massive research effort, you can wing it with some informal interviews. Find out as much about your customer as possible so you can start sending them information that enhances their lives. If you do that, maybe you can sprinkle in some messages about your product. Just remember you have to gain their trust, first. 

Next, figure out our message strategy. Don't just start posting and twoting all over Al Gore's webbernet. Develop a 3 month plan that follows your communication strategy and business goals, just be sure to leave room for timely updates as they happen. 

Be consistent. Once you start gaining an audience, be sure not to leave them hanging. Research and post regularly. In short, you are no longer just a company. If you want to get the most out of social marketing, you have to embrace your future as a publisher – niche as it may be. 

Three years ago I was working at an Interactive agency. I remember all the hubub exploding on blogs about mobile marketing, mobile advertising, yada yada. The problem was there weren't enough end users playing with mobile apps to justify costs. One year ago I remember being at a different big anonymous agency, talking to a neighboring city's creative leader about how he wanted to make his office the "mobile leader" for the company. Even at that time it was a dream that was being held back by the general public's reluctancy to embrace apps as a ubiquitous part of daily life.

Looking back, I don't blame our clients for their hesitancy in diving into what was then expensive mobile application guesswork. Sure, the bold brands were early to stake their claims in mobile marketing before the rest, but the PR value doubtlessly added to the final effort's overall worth.

Today, things look to be a bit different. There are actually a few case studies to show how mobile marketing can work. What's more, the social and mobile worlds seem to be gently colliding like drops of mercury.

In a new MediaPost article, Mark Walsh talks about how Blackberry is moving from playing catch-up to innovating in the social space while Facebook is enabling more SMS functionality. Geez, finally. Here's the link. 

As the number of Facebook users continue to skyrocket, it’s interesting to watch Twitter’s seemingly stagnant numbers. This is an important point for marketers looking to plan next year’s budget by the start of football season. Is the recent leveling off of traffic a sign that the webbernet’s favorite pony has a gimp leg or is the Type B personality-driven social tool just taking a breather?

In February, traffic to Twitter followed Facebook’s example and skyrocketed, doubling from 7MM visitors to 14MM visitors. In the next month, another impressive 30 day gain resulted in roughly 19MM visitors. However, May’s numbers saw no significant increase, according to compete.com.

Some attribute the February-April jump to the curiosity factor. Maybe it was just the blogosphere and social evangelists fueling the hordes of social gawkers. Extraordinarily high abandon rates would support this theory. However, people aren’t abandoning Twitter as if it were a fad like Jams or feathered hair. When you see the likes of Mary Hart on Entertainment Tonight asking viewers to follow breaking celebrity news on Twitter, you know it’s at least inching towards mainstream usage.

I personally think we’re all suffering from a bit of the Paradox of Choice when it comes to Twitter. There are simply too many tools coming out each month, too many things to learn for the average user. From hashtags to FollowFridays, FutureTweets to Friendfeeds, those outside the marketing world are likely suffering a bit of information overload. If you look at Quantcasts’s analysis of Twitter users, many of Twitter’s core users aren’t too far from the generation that had trouble programming the VCR.

I think what’s important to note is that we as marketers have to follow our Marketing 101 teachings when it comes to using sites like Twitter. Keep it simple for the audience. There will always be the 20% of our audience that keeps up with the latest tools and techniques, but 80% of those who even chose to indulge our messages on Twitter just want relevant tweets that improve their lives in some way – be it entertainment, fodder for thought leadership within their personal tribes or functional ways to make life more efficient. Follow these tips and you should be fine…at least for the next 6 months or so.

• Keep tweets well under 140 characters, this will make them more likely to be read and shared.

• Shorten links and track with bit.ly or another service

• Plan tweets ahead of time but leave room for spur of the moment updates

• Don’t use marketing speak. Be off-the-cuff and write like a real person

• Make your number one goal to provide utility, not sales

• Don’t stop tweeting, update at least 3-6 times per day

So, you’ve got an ad agency and you’ve got a few in-house copywriters. Each of these finely polished wordsmiths have been banging on keys for various brands to develop branded copy that sounds “curiously effervescent” or “approachably sexy.” I know, I started in this business as a copywriter myself. I’ve also seen first hand how dangerous it can be to set your brochure monkey lose on your social communications.

Think of your Dad if you ever accompanied him on “take your kid to work day” or if you caught him on a work-related phone call during the weekend. Even as kids, we could all sense the change in his tone and voice. The somewhat fake sincerity combined with a quarter octave lowering of the voice made him sound more official and authoritative. Likewise, after my mother started her own business, her voice would take on a smoother and butterier tone than when she was asking my brother or me about our teachers.

The point is you can’t use your brochure or even web copy style when communicating with customers and prospects via social media. We’re all trained to expect marketing speak. We all tense up a bit when we pick up that brochure, knowing full well that the words we read have been spun to draw us into a branded web. This is your dad ad work type copy.

When engaged with a social outlet like Facebook, people generally have their guard down. Messages are short, informal and likeable without being too flowery or obviously engineered. This is your dad on the porch, bouncing you on his knee. Now, imagine if he started talking to you in his work voice, attempting to convince you to do the dishes. You wouldn’t like it, would you?

There’s no quicker way to raise someone’s guard than to try to sell to him or her when in a comfortable environment. The backlash can be dangerous to your long-term prospects of forming relationships. I recommend undergoing a copy voice exercise prior to any major social media engagement. It’s ok to pull copy points from existing collateral, but do NOT regurgitate existing copy. It just looks lazy.

I grabbed this clip from my favorite childhood show to illustrate the point.

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I'm struck by the number of brands that insist on attempting to bolster their customer base with ridiculous visual chiches. Shouting from the rooftops, really?

 See Dunkin Donuts Coffee Commercial:

Funny then how Rachael Ray, the spokesperson hired to shill DD coffee, torpedoed Dunkin Donuts authenticity when she was quoted saying: "What is this shit!? Give me MY coffee" at a promotional event. Cue millions of clicks as Rachael Ray fans scour the web looking to see what her favorite coffee REALLY is.

Again, the day of the "Key Message" is over. You can always start with a Key Message, but you must be prepared for the Brand Conversation that follows. Also, best be sure your brand advocates are actually advocates.

P.T. Barnum is famously quoted as saying “there’s a sucker born every minute.” And if “love is being stupid together” as Paul Valery says then one could argue that many of the marketing efforts put forth since the invention of the television were designed to make fools fall in love with dumb products.

I’m not saying that people are stupid or that ad agencies are simplistic, but there has been an obvious shift in the mindset of the American consumer. Now that people are losing jobs, houses and spouses, they’re taking a second look at their Acura and seeing the Honda beneath. They’re wondering how much good that 13th skin cream actually did over the last few years. I think the sentiment was best captured by our former president in this brief clip:



Again, I’m not saying consumers have been stupid – but if they have been in the past, they appear to be less so today. A recent article by The Economist highlights a few points that might not come as much of a surprise.

1. Marketing ploys aren’t working like they used to
2. A rebound won’t necessarily mean the return to impulse buying
3. The historically high savings rate is a game-changer
4. There is a “Backlash Against Bling”
5. Consumers don’t trust businesses or their messages any more
6. Social media will become a more trusted form of communication

So if indeed it takes being knocked in the head a few times, maybe the downturn is a good thing for consumerism as a whole. We certainly had taken the whole “bling” thing past the point of shame. Maybe now we can adjust Mr. Barnum’s proclamation to reflect the times. Perhaps there’s a sucker born every other minute.

Be careful about putting your brand on too high of a pedestal. You never know when a rumor might knock it off.

Glenwood Park is an Atlanta community recognized worldwide as a model for turning inner-city brownfields into sustainable, community-focused living spaces. The 28 acre mix of residences, businesses and retail is a weekend hotpot and one of my favorite places to get a cup of coffee or taco.

The developers, Green Street Properties, worked very hard to make sure each of the residences were  Earthcraft certified and built with as many sustainable processes and products as possible – except the main square’s fountain, apparently.

Word of mouth negates branding

Walking through Glenwood Park with a few representatives from a new client, I commented on the quaint beauty of the fountain pictured below.

When one of the client reps replied that he thought the fountain had come from Italy, another rep added, “Wow, that’s reeeeally environmentally friendly. I wonder how much fuel they burned to get that local resource in place.” Cue laughter from the rest of the group, followed by jaded thinking centered on Glenwood Park’s claims of sustainability.

While it’s impossible for any community to be 100% eco-friendly, it may not have been a good idea to include a fountain rumored to be flown in from Italy as a brand centerpiece. It’s a shame because all the wood and insulation you can’t see are working very hard to live up to the community’s reputation.

Lesson One: Be sure your brand story rings true at every major touch point.

Comcast is working very hard to overcome its reputation for bad customer service. There’s a newfound effort to improve every aspect of their brand experience so they can stake a claim in their audience’s mind that can be backed up by their experience. For a community like Glenwood Park, fountains should be crafted by local artisans that require less fossil fuel for final delivery.

Lesson Two: Be humble in your messaging

Claiming to be a “New Shade of Green,” as Glenwood Park does, is smart positioning so long as you think about the expectations you’re building in people’s minds. As companies shift from “Brand Statements” to “Brand Conversations,” more attention needs to be paid to the nay sayers. If you claim to be green, someone will point out your brown spots. If you claim to be the smartest, someone will point out something you did that is dumb. That’s the reality of the comment box and blog being tied into today’s marketing efforts.

Lesson Three: Provide an Outlet

I would have liked to have seen a place on Glenwood Park's website where I could participate in discussion without submitting personal information. It would have been nice to have a place to ask about the fountain and either be informed that the fountain was indeed locally produced or learn the reasons why such a sustainable project saw fit to include it in the first place. Also, it's a good idea to provide links to social bookmarking sites or social networks in case visitors like what they see and want to share with friends.

I don't make a habit of talking about TV commercials as that's the realm of countless other ad hacks. However, this evening I was struck by a few very expensive network ads that leave me wondering what the actual effect might be.

Audi Q7 SUV Ad:

Thoughts from the Big Scary Cranium
C'mon, this is just silly, right? First of all, I understand that there are some communities where Lexus SUVs are quite common. But even the Monopoly Man is holding off a bit before getting a new Gucci frame for his monocle. I wasn't sure if the kids in this ad were confused by the endless progression of Lexi or just disappointed by their parents boring choices. But the message that a Lexus isn't good enough just seems ill timed on a day the President sacks the head of GM. At least their social strategy aligns with this nose-thumbing approach. I wonder how much cash they poured down Guy Kawasaki's throat to get him to write this glowing review. Looking at the Audi Q5 official page, I couldn't initially find a place to delve into more information through any blogs or basic social network links. Don't they at least want me to Digg the site?

I'm very disappointed that I couldn't find the Quaker "Go Humans Go" TV ad anywhere online. Here is a synopsis from JWT's website: "A TV commercial and an accompanying print ad reflect that attitude, minus any presidents, by showing a man flying to work with a jetpack on his back powered by two packages of Old Fashioned Quaker Oats." If you can find it, pls send me the link.

Thoughts from the Big Scary Cranium
I think this is a very well thought out campaign, especially for a time when people are walking away from homes like cold poker tables. Oatmeal is cheap, it's good for you and the Quaker brand has a pretty decent reputation. The timing is perfect for this kind of campaign. Even the NY Times had a few nice things to say about it.

Online, I found a decent effort to turn the message into an excuse to interact. From their main website, quakeroats.com/gohumansgo, I was able to find a Facebook page with links to very approachable Nutritionists, coordination with charity events, recipes and a bunch of other things that I found to be very appropriate for the audience and the economy. And in a move I found brilliant, it seems they invited outside bloggers to participate in their volunteer efforts and documented it all on flickr. I suppose it's ok to pander if you're trying to help people. It WOULD  be nice if they'd actually put the spot on YouTube in addition to video of their people doing volunteer work.

Five years from now

My thinking is that Quaker is securing a gaggle of newfound penny pinchers in the middle of forming new, sensible habits after years of grabbing Micky D's on the way to work. Meanwhile Audi is reaching out to an ever-shrinking demographic with a message that might come across as somewhat insulting to those who might be able to afford their product in the future. I feel pretty confident in this assessment given Quaker's substantial effort to create relevancy outside the TV world while Audi seems confident in its message such that they invite nobody to participate in their brand conversation through their main website.