Associated Press, July 8, 2007

Companies Explore New Ways of Reaching Consumers

CINCINNATI (AP) - She calls herself "an irresistible babe" with a fondness for strawberries and champagne, and encourages people to use her MySpace page to send "naughty (or nice)" e-mail cards.

Her online friends include TV celebrity/model Brody Jenner and the Australian singer-songwriter known as New Buffalo, among an eclectic, colorful, tens of thousands-strong, group.

"Miss Irresistible" is a new face of a five-decade-old toothpaste brand, Procter & Gamble Co.'s Crest. She also illustrates how large companies increasingly are trying multiple new outlets -- such as social networking and online video-sharing -- as they try to lure the attention of consumers who have a smorgasbord of information and entertainment choices.

"I think there's a lot of experimentation going on right now," said King Hill, president of DigiKnow Inc., an interactive marketing agency. "It's very complicated, although it's very, very exciting."

Companies such as IBM Corp. and Comcast Corp. have established presences on the "Second Life" virtual reality world, Unilever Corp. just launched an online food/cooking video series on Yahoo, while Anheuser-Busch Inc. this year started its own entertainment Web site called Bud.TV, which the company recently said was being improved after a decline in visitors.

"I think a lot of marketing today is little neurotic," said Gary Stibel, a marketing analyst who heads New England Consulting Group. "You've got people going off in all different directions and it is less focused than it once was."

Hill said the advantages to new technologies include being able to target smaller groups of consumers and lower costs than traditional mass-media campaigns. But he said many companies are still learning how to evaluate the impact of the new marketing and deciding which of dozens of techniques to use.

Because of all the competing choices, today's marketing, Stibel said, faces tough challenges to "get attention No. 1; it has to hold attention long enough to deliver a message; and then the message has to be both compelling and memorable." He cites P&G as an example of a company that is effectively targeting different audiences with different media.

In the past year, P&G has also promoted Crest products on the college-oriented Facebook.com site and in a mobile campaign with dating quizzes and tips aimed at text-messaging club-goers.

The consumer-products company recently had contests for video-recorded jingles for the Pringles chips brand and to create a Mr. Clean commercial for posting on the YouTube video-sharing site. The company created an online forum for women's issues, and myriad micro-Web sites with various approaches.

"In terms of how we do marketing, this has really exploded in approaches, methodologies, measurement systems," said James Stengel, the P&G global marketing officer who has said that the traditional marketing model is broken.

"Consumers are right now very dynamic in their media habits," said Stengel, whose company, which spends nearly $7 billion a year on global advertising, helped pioneer television soap operas. "If you stay in touch with that and you want to be relevant in their lives, obviously, a lot of things change ... It's the same reason we got into television 60 years ago."

Four decades after its memorable thick-ketchup commercial featuring Carly Simon's song "Anticipation," H.J. Heinz Co. has consumers submitting homemade commercials this summer in what it says is the brand's broadest promotion, including YouTube and online advertising tied to Google.com searches.

"This is really sort of the latest evolution in our strategy to directly engage our consumers," said David Ciesenski, vice president for ketchup for Pittsburgh-based Heinz, among several companies that have had make-your-own-ad promotions this year.

The Top This TV contest has brought hundreds of submitted videos. They range from the humorously poignant -- a boy tells about his father taking his own Heinz bottle to baseball games to pour on hot dogs -- to the strange -- a young man brushes his teeth with ketchup.

P&G utilized Facebook for a college concert contest -- the four schools that got the most sign-ups for a Facebook group called "Smile State" won a free on-campus concert this spring.

Adam Kincaid, a North Carolina State University freshman who says he typically spends as much as an hour a day on Facebook, said he frequently visited the Crest site to see submitted photos and listen to songs. He said it didn't look or feel like an advertising site.

"It was more interactive," said Kincaid, who attended the free show his school won by the group Young Love and began using Crest's teeth-whitening strips after trying samples handed out at the concert.

Kevin Buss, a P&G interactive manager, said the Facebook site was repeatedly updated, highlighting new artists, contests and news and video on upcoming music and movies.

"You can't just have a stagnant page for this group," he said.

An emerging frontier is mobile marketing, with use of text messaging. Meijer Inc., a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based retailer, recently expanded throughout its Midwestern chain a system that alerts customers to impending gasoline price increases.

The system was developed by SmartReply Inc., which also enables Crate & Barrel customers to get word of sales and specials by text. Mike Romano, SmartReply executive vice president, said companies are taking increasing note of the possibilities as texting has spread beyond youths to become common among young and middle-age adults.

But amid all the new outlets, Stibel advises marketers not to leave the old media on the shelf. He said television remains a powerful weapon.

"People are going to realize that it is not going away," he said.