Ads and Inspiration

Crumpler is one of my favourite brands as they’re an Australian Company, provide great quality products, and are fantastic at engaging their community online. They are active across many online communities such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Creating content is the main way of engaging their consumers in the long run as their bags are long lasting, thus aren’t a regular purchase. The majority of their business would be with new customers or customers that are buying multiple bags, so keeping these multiple purchasers engaged in the brand is one the best ways to increase the chances that they will purchase a Crumpler bag again. This is doubly important as they fit in a niche in the market, targeting the more passionate individuals that are willing to pay for quality rather than the mass market.

SEO wise Crumpler does a good job in a search for “messenger bag“ Crumpler’s website comes up as the second organic listing, and a search for “camera bag“ comes up as the first organic listing. Even when searching for “bag“ Crumpler comes up as the second organic listing, so their SEO work is really well done for such a large category. When searching directly for “Crumpler“ the information in the search results page is well displayed (as seen below) with good use of the title tag, site links giving quick access to the categories of bags, and local locations popping up on the Google Maps snippet. Crumpler does a really good job at engaging their consumers via social media and aiding their discovery in search engines, through good SEO, generating quality content and good coding of their website. However this is important for a small company like Crumpler who doesn’t have the marketing dollars to spend on traditional ad campaigns. Really the only way that they could improve their SEO and possibly make it number one under “messenger bag” is for them to create a Google+ page to gain some more authenticity.

Though I guess what else would you expect of a company who has a strong online retail presence.

A lot of people have been bitching about a Liberal Party member being the focus of an assignment at QUT seen here: Queensland University of Technology marketing students given assignment to develop campaign for Federal LNP candidate Bill Glasson

I have two main opinions about this:

Number 1 - If you ever talk about a client to a person outside an agency you’d most likely be sacked. Even as a university student you should treat it as a real brief, or simply give up on having a career in the marketing, advertising, and public relations industry.

Number 2 - You are going to have to work on clients you don’t like or even hate. Again this is part of the industry, you won’t get far if you don’t suck it up and just get on with it.

Sure I’m not a huge fan of the Liberal Party’s opinions in certain areas, that doesn’t mean I can’t develop a good strategy for their communications. You don’t get to pick and choose in this industry until you’re the MD, and you’ll have to put up with worse clients than a Liberal Party member before you get to that point!

When it comes to beer advertising it is a difficult job to create advertising as there are many rules that influence the what an ad can say and show. This has lead in the past to large alcohol brands to create large, expensive, entertaining ads such as the Big Ad, and Beer Chase for Carlton Draught. This seems to have lead to a habit from the larger companies to rely on “campaigns” as their main form of advertising to their consumers.

Where as digital has less of an emphasis on campaigns with most digital activity simply providing either entertainment to their audience or engagement with their audience. According to research done by L2 Heineken is the most digitally engaged beer with a combination of a quality website (including mobile website), digital advertising, and a quality social experience for it;s consumers. Heineken is very good at providing entertainment to it’s fans on their Facebook Page with engaging content like it’s most recent “The Candidate” video.

I think the reason that there are still a lot of beer brands that are lagging behind is that many of the marketing executives in the bigger companies have gotten into the mindset that “campaigns” are the best way to sell beer, and their ad spend is better served on traditional advertising. However in the craft beer industry digital promotions is one of the biggest focuses with many blogs noticing the trend towards craft beers engaging consumers on social media platforms, this has lead to greater exposure for these smaller brands at an extremely low cost. So although the larger companies CMO’s are slowing down the engagement achieved with their consumers, it is allowing the smaller brands that don’t have anywhere as many marketing dollars to spend a chance to engage audiences and get sales.