Bluesky-Walter Graff Weblog

Starbucks recently closed for three hours to ‘re-train’ their associates how to make coffee. And every single press outlets in the US went with the story. Some said that they’d loose millions in revenue shutting down to do so. No, it was simply genius marketing. Use the time to do standard training and make it an event so big that every outlet in every area of media made it a story. What’s that worth? A billion dollars in advertising, all free. Close down at night on your slowest night. Retrain your associates. Tell the press and put bright yellow signs on your door saying you will close three hours before closing time to retrain your associates. And the results of this marketing gimmick is you garnish new brand loyalty and solidify your old customer base. In the publics eye, and what they want to portray is that Starbuck’s cares and they must be making that coffee I remember being so good since they are being re-trained. Better go down and try it now. They lost nothing doing it and gained a heck of a lot of beans… well almost.

They forgot one thing. While they got press story after press story, they didn’t make it clear that they were closing to improve the quality of their coffee and bring the chain back to its roots. Aegis Group’s research arm Synovate found in a survey of 1,000 consumers that 75% of respondents knew of the closing. BUT… less than half knew why it had closed. So much for a great idea that had more press than Britney Spears going to Starbucks for a Latte. At least we know why she goes… or do we?

Coke comes through with an amazing marketing campaign. Take diet Coke and call it Zero, make a new label and put it on the shelf. It worked. Zero is selling real well. Marketing wise, you don’t concentrate on peoples old problems of needing to loose weight and ‘dieting’. No, the new generation is not into that anymore. They have given up and obviously diet Coke didn’t help them loose weight. So you take all the diet Coke and peel off the labels.  Then you you simply say zero calories as your new mantra and not only get all the ‘dieters’ to drink, but healthy folks who don’t want added sugar. Look to see diet Coke phased out conveniently when Zero has enough solid market share. It’s a great way to update a brand and all it took was a new label and a bit of advertising.

Both of these videos are probably two of the funniest videos about what goes on in advertising that I’ve ever seen. I just watched it again and it’s still great. If you haven’t seen it, now you have.

I caught this blog posted below. Sad! I worked on a number of syndicated programs that used this cheating technique to keep the ratings high. It only makes sense.

This is one reason why folks aren’t interested in television anymore. Instead of making better programming, they’ll just cheat ratings to make it seem like they are making better shows. Eventually like it did with much of syndicated talk, this will implode as you simply will not have enough people in the first place watching, even after you inflate the numbers. Once again money trumps integrity or anything else for that mater. Like newspapers, syndicators are more interested in advertising and do what they can with the ‘filler’ to keep the advertising coming. Even if it means unrealistic ratings. Most all daytime shows use a trick of offering their shows twice a day. And they are allowed to count both ratings as one to represent how many folks watch ‘the’ show. In other words they need double showings to make up for lackluster single airing ratings. But like our government the TV rating system is so dysfunctional as to be Simpson like in terms of ridiculous. Actually, come to think of it, the Simpson’s have joked about it quite well over the years.

Ratings Rant
Posted October 4th, 2007 by Shari Anne Brill

http://blogs.mediapost.com/tv_board/?p=176

Effective with the start of the 2007-08 broadcast TV season, Nielsen introduced a disturbing new calculation technique. Effective immediately, if a network rebroadcasts a given program during a single telecast week and the show contains identical national commercial and program content, it can choose to report a single rating that includes both the original airing and any other incremental unduplicated viewing from the rebroadcast. Only one rating will be produced and credited to the original date and time. No separate audience information will be reported for the secondary telecast.

As you may know, the season opener of “Heroes” contained a single advertiser, Nissan. You guessed it. NBC decided to invoke this option for the Sept. 24 premiere, which was rebroadcast this Saturday, Sept. 29, with Nissan’s ads running intact.

In other words, there are currently no national preliminary numbers for last Monday’s telecast, on the Sept. 24 prime overnight. You won’t see any numbers for “Heroes” on the Saturday night ratings file either.

The Monday Prime overnights for Sept. 24 will be re-released on Tuesday, Oct. 2. At that time, the reprocessed rating for “Heroes” will be reported, which will also include the un-duplicated audience from the second (Saturday) telecast. Interestingly, viewership for the Saturday night re-telecast will never be reported, period. The un-duplicated audience will always exist as part of the Monday number. While this practice has been done for years in syndication, keep in mind that these programs clear across multiple time periods — and network TV programming gets evaluated very differently.

That’s right, kids. We will never know how “Heroes” actually performed in its initial telecast, nor will we be able to relate the “Heroes” performance versus its time period competition. Season to date rankers for Heroes will be artificially inflated because it will include the combined Saturday audience, not to mention the impact to c3 ratings.

It looks as if I will have to start making up overnight numbers every week, because Nielsen has decided to make the wishes of one client take precedence over the needs of the many.

Needless to say I have already voiced my displeasure with Nielsen — and I can’t imagine that ABC and CBS, who also launched their new season lineup on 9/24 along with Fox and CW, would find this acceptable.