Kogod MBA candidates enrolled in the Advanced Advertising Practicum, are working directly with Long & Foster as their client to gain important real world professional experience. Students are responsible for client meetings, marketing research, planning and development of communications strategy, developing an integrated marketing plan, and social media strategies based on the client’s business objectives.  The graduate students will present their final findings in a formal presentation to Long & Foster leadership.

“Our brand stands for something, from the past, today, and into the future,” said Barry Redler, Chief Marketing Officer of The Long & Foster Companies. “What that is and how it changes over time is critical knowledge for a marketer. I am thrilled to have an outstanding group of MBA candidates help us think about our brand positioning for the future.  These smart, young professionals ask the tough questions, probe the delicate issues, and assess solutions from new and different vantage points.  It’s a refreshing and exhilarating experience that should add value for our company and our sales associates.”

RP3 has a tradition of engaging with the academic community to derive innovative outcomes. From showcasing client brands in classroom projects, providing industry thought leadership, and practical hands-on experience, this collaboration fuels creativity, knowledge and innovation.

“It will be energizing to see how the next generation of marketing and communications practitioners perceive the issues and challenges that we as industry professional wrestle with everyday,” said John Heenan Chief Marketing Officer for RP3 and the course instructor.  “They are the emerging consumers who will shape marketing practices for years to come. It is quite extraordinary for the students to be able to develop fresh new strategies using digital and social media to help a storied brand engage with consumers.”

Over the water cooler, a co-worker mentioned an interesting competition that she had heard about.  The award: one million dollars. It peaked my interest as I immediately saw an opportunity to apply my professional experience to the situation.

The contest was being held by All American Pet Brands. Jumping on the bandwagon of so many now popular reality TV shows where the viewers vote for their “favorite [INSERT ANY TOPIC YOU CAN THINK OF HERE]”, they were holding an online competition that would determine America’s favorite dog.  People could enter their pup into 12 weekly competitions.  Each week the public could vote for the dog that they liked best.  The winner of each of the 12 weeks would then be entered into a final round of competition where they would go head to head (or tail to tail in this case) for the chance to win $1 million.

Well, I have a dog.  He’s darn cute.  Moreover, I’m a marketer.  And, I’d like to think, a smart one at that.

How hard could it be to get my pup more votes than Tuffy or Miss Ellie?  If I can increase my clients’ business 250% in five short months, I can surely get my dog, Romo, a few thousand votes.  So I approached this marketing challenge as I would any of my other accounts. Below is the resulting case study:

Challenge:

Motivate an audience that is bombarded with action requests (“accept my friend request”, “add me on LinkedIn”, “become a fan”, “comment on my blog”, “follow my tweets”….) to take a series of steps to vote for Romo

Objective:

Generate votes for Romo.

Target Audience:

General Public, No HHI requirements

Budget:

$0.00

Strategy:

Phase I

Maximize existing social networks and contacts.

-       Social Media

• “Vote” solicitations were posted on social networking sites where over 750 friends were reminded repeatedly to vote for Romo daily.
• Friends were encouraged to post the same solicitations on their own pages, expanding the universe of social networking voters to well over 10,000

-       E-blasts

• E-blasts were sent to various audiences within my personal network; the messaging was tailored to each audience to best encourage action

Phase II

Find creative ways to extend reach. (Again, $0 budget)

-        Radio

• Called a local popular morning radio station and offered them $100,000 cut of the $1million prize should they support Romo. Received  over 15 minutes of air time publicity during a key morning drive hour

-       Web

• A link to vote for Romo was posted on the radio station’s website, which receives over 500,000 hits a day

Results:

My marketing efforts, namely the radio promotion, drove tens of thousands of votes all at once, which unfortunately  caused the competition’s tallying system to shut down.  Validation emails that acknowledge a person’s registration and allow them to vote were not sent until the day after the competition ended.

In summary, Romo did not win. But the marketing worked to perfection, and without a flaw in the tallying program, this marketer would have been $1 million dollars richer (actually $900,000)… and likely not writing this blog.

As someone who worked on the EA Sports brand for 5 years including the first campaign for Tiger Woods ’99 (I wrote the spots and had the pleasure of working with a young Mr. Woods on set) it’s fascinating to look back at how simple it was then. Build buzz with the core gamer crowd. Check. Run a few print ads in the gaming pubs to ensure favorable reviews. Check. Blanket the airwaves with some slick spots. Check. Then sit back and watch sales explode like a Nike One ball off Tiger’s driver. Not that we didn’t try to push the envelope. The formula just worked too well to tinker with at that point.

Considering that video games are the ultimate in user engagement, it only makes sense that marketing them has become more of an experience as well. New gaming platforms have made it possible to play pretty much anytime, anywhere. Social media makes it easier than ever to connect and compete with other gamers. It’s the perfect storm where product, new technology and new media have advanced simultaneously, feeding each other in the process.

As marketers in all categories race to harness the power of new media and technology, EA is way ahead of the curve. Let’s hope those with less inherently engaging products and services can follow their lead.

When we started RP3, I knew we had “good people” on our team.  Good in every sense of the word – talented, honest, committed and socially responsible.

The challenge is how to keep good people motivated and inspired.  In this economy, it’s not going to happen with robust compensation plans.  We have to make every penny work twice as hard.  So we’ve opted to focus our attention on things that matter to “good people” and that is – giving them the opportunity to work on something they believe in.  For RP3, giving back doesn’t mean doing a few pro bono projects to win creative awards.  That’s what many agencies do.  It means seeking organizations that we can get involved with – at the business level – to help them thrive and achieve their goals.  It means dedicating ourselves to work that makes a difference.

In our case this work has come from several organizations.  The Washington Area Women’s Foundation is one of them.  We are using our creative and social media talents to help them amplify their message and support the lives of underprivileged women and girls.  Another is our work for Prison Fellowship, where we dedicate our creative resources to help improve the prison system, decrease the recidivism rate and reduce the enormous financial burden of prisons on our country.

The work will be coming soon on our site.  The benefits of the work, from the standpoint of motivating and inspiring our team, are already here.

I was in a meeting the other day for one of our newest clients, the Washington Area Women’s Foundation. They believe in a holistic approach that targets food security, health care, job training & security, access to child care, and transportation for girls and women in the area. Their premise: If you invest in a girl or a woman in your own community, you’re investing in the whole community.

I was stricken by how this women (and some guys who “get it”, as they would say), from different backgrounds, with different areas of expertise, came together in such a spirit of community. The camaraderie, common purpose, shared goals. A spirit of community that is sometimes lost in the daily grind – easy to overlook in the crush of deadlines or the frantic need to cross 20 things off a list in 12 minutes.

12 minutes*. That’s about the amount of time it took RP3 to open its doors. And for those of you who have started your own businesses, it’s not even close to being enough time. But yet, in that psychotically short period of time, a community was born. And this community, not unlike our friends at the Women’s Foundation, is an independent group of people – women and guys who get it – if you will, who are real people fighting to make a difference. That’s not to say that women are the key to success – but there is something to be said about the bridges that can be built.

I’ve seen the networks expand, and I’ve seen the gauntlet thrown by RP3′s own president, who happens to be a woman. As a woman, a minority woman, who has often come up upon the rigid threat of the glass ceiling, it is amazingly refreshing to be here, right now, at this juncture in time. At that conference room table. In this efficient microcosm of a company. It’s a challenge I’m willing to take.

* slight exaggeration, for illustrative purposes only

Great things have risen from the ashes of a recession. As painful as it is, necessity seems true to her calling as the mother of invention. Case in point, HP was inauspiciously born in a Palo Alto garage at the end of the Great Depression. Burger King, during the Eisenhower recession, introduced the infamous Whopper. LexisNexis launched during Nixon’s recession, as did FedEx and Microsoft. CNN and MTV started in Carter’s recession-plagued 1980s. The list goes on and on up to today.

It may seem a little pretentious to associate with these classics, or maybe not. In the midst of the current recession we’ve launched a new marketing agency, RP3. Incubated for five years within one of the Mid-Atlantic’s most successful, most award-winning advertising agencies, RP3 has emerged as a new generation of companies that fills the void between the tarnished traditional ad agency model and the nascent digital agency experiment.

Lead by President Beth Johnson, Creative Director Jim Lansbury, and Strategic Planner Scott Gold, we will build on the philosophy of great creative work with a new vision for what “creative” really works in this tough marketing environment. The necessity to change is driven by marketer’s dissatisfaction – my agency is too slow, too costly, too deeply invested in the past. RP3 takes what is effective from that shattered past and combines it with innovative insights into today’s empowered consumer. We will push the newest engagement and results techniques fueled by a passion for powerful creative ideas. The bottom line – we short-circuit the tangle processes of the past to make scarce marketing dollars work better and faster.

The catalyst for all this came from achieving surprising results in unexpected ways despite a tanking economy. Our CPG client reports increases up to 20% compared to non-campaign markets. Our beverage client opened up new distribution in one of the most competitive categories. Our real estate developer increased unit sales while the market declined as much as 40%.

You can see surprising results in the making at http://rp3agency.com and http://tinyurl.com/rp3agency

Please let me know what you think about our new hybrid agency and what it will take to once again make marketing the engine that drives our new economy. Stop on by. Drinks on me.

@jheenan

Image via WikipediLook at Hyundai, the brand that brought job loss protection to the forefront of the consumer’s mind. Great publicity for the brand, great attention-getting promotion, great way to get people to better appreciate their brand – yet their sales are way down, their profits are slipping, their stock sinks. Yet wait a moment. Analysts are congratulating them for investing in marketing during such tough times. They get an optimistic outlook unlike the other car brands.

http://tinyurl.com/c3p6do

Is their CEO thinking; sales down – job loss promotion must be a failure, fire the CMO?

Wrong. Just ask the analysts. In a declining market, promotional efforts like job loss protection ease the decline, soften the fall, and predispose the consumer to appreciate the brand even if they are not of a mind to buy today. They will be more likely to consider Hyundai when they do come into the market. The lesson. Low response rates, less than expected leads, sluggish sales, poor immediate performance does not mean a campaign failed. The real question to ask is what would have happened to Hyundai if they did nothing!