9 years ago the Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp, Belgium.
Hometown of our agency These Days, part of the Wunderman/WPP Network.
Also 89 years ago Lester Wunderman, one of the living legends of the advertising agency world,
was born. Lester started the Wunderman multi-million-dollar business, coined the term “direct marketing” and our agency remains a thought leader in the industry but Lester’s early days story is still relevant.
89 years ago the Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp (Belgium) and hometown of our agency These Days part of the Wunderman/WPP Network.
Also 89 years ago Lester Wunderman, one of the living legends of the advertising agency world,was born. Lester started the Wunderman multi-million-dollar business, coined the term “direct marketing” and anno 2009 our agency remains a thought leader in the industry. But read on since Lester’s early days story is still relevant to all of us. To summarize:
Lester and his brother, Irving, started an advertising agency in New York City during the height of The Great Depression “because no one would hire us.”
Lester had no clients and used to walk around from office to office selling himself. At one point he saw a man about to jump out of a window and pulled him off the ledge. The man thanked Lester and asked how he could repay the favor. Lester asked for his advertising business, and thus won his first client.
The pressure to win in this tough marketplace drove Lester Wunderman to “promise clients that their advertising would deliver results.”
According to Wunderman: “We couldn’t sell on our experience or awards, and we didn’t have an education in advertising. All we could really say was that we got results.”
“No matter how much firepower other agencies had they couldn’t win if we had results.”
Obviously, in this case the pressure to survive as a business led Wunderman to innovate in a way that drove improvement for both his clients and his business. The idea of results-based-marketing is seen today in marketers’ focus on Return on Investment and, eventually, the idea of relationship and data-driven marketing. Here’s Lester addressing all Wunderman creative directors worldwide, talking about our agency’s mission of accountable creativity.
Today the idea is that to win in a world of consumer control, you should listen instead of shouting and create marketing that people actually choose to engage with. Advertising becomes a dialogue that becomes an invitation to a relationship. Thus, the legacy of improvement doesn’t stop with one man or one business, but can echo through the generations.
For those who have been a sleep for the last 3 days, let me give you a small recap of Kimberley.
Kimberley Vlaeminck, an 18-year old Belgian girl, wanted to be even more beautiful than she already was (uhm…). So she decided to have 3 little stars tattoo’d on her face, next to her left eye. But poor Kimberley was so tired, probably from the school exams or the partying afterwards, that she fell asleep during the tattoo-process (or how do you call it?). The tattooist, never a real genius with numbers, and so pleased with the few stars he had already put on Kimberley’s face, suddenly felt that his moment of glory had arrived and started tattooing stars like crazy. Finally, after a well deserved nap, Kimberley woke up, and was so NOT pleased with…. 56 stars on her face.
The news of this truely sad, sad story was frontpage news on almost any Belgian newspaper and was covered by all television news shows. But even faster than the tottooist could count to 10, Kimberley’s 56 stars travelled around the world and was covered on multiple international media such as The Daily Mail, The Mirror, Algemeen Dagblad, and even the BBC!
And of course everyone else talked about it Facebook, Netlog, Twitter, and tons of blogs. The YouTube video below was already viewed 143252 times within 3 days after the facts. The agency Famous even came out with the ‘Kimbelizer‘ app, or check the screenshot in this blogpost if the App would be down.
I don’t know about you, but in my humble opinion and being a down-to-earth guy, this smells like a hoax and is appearing to become 1 of the most wide-spread buzz-campaigns in Belgium (and beyond). How can you fall asleep while being tattood on your face? How can you tattoo 56 stars when your client only orders 3? Something is not right.
My hunch is that this is a buzz campaign for MNM, a Belgian radio station, as they have the same stars in their logo and Famous was their agency that rolled out the strategy when the radiostation was launched. Some of my colleagues think that Starbucks is behind it, other thinks it’s all about ‘K2 zoekt K3‘ (which I’m not going to explain ;) ).
But hoax or not, I was quite interested in the impact of this story on the social media channels, and wanted to know how fast the ball is rolling. So I did a quick scan with Radian6, a powerful social media monitoring solution which we, at These Days, use for our social media research and analysis of our word of mouth campaigns.
Here are some quick reports I cam up with within 10 minutes:
Topic Trends: From this widget we see that the most buzz was created at day 1 when this ‘drama’ was first made public. At the speed of lightning the news traveled very fast. Then the storm went down a bit but from day 3, probably due to the ‘Kimbelizer‘ app. Buzz buzz buzz…
River of News: Via the River of News we can take a look at all post, tweets, comments, video’s, etc that have been published. This widget allows the marketeer to verify what is being said about his campaign, and if this hoax is being experienced as positive or negative.At the same time, via this widget you can take part of the conversations by adding comments, tweeting, replying, etc directly from Radian6.
In addition some content could bring new ideas to the marketing/communication team, so they can build their buzz campaign further on top of it.
Top Influencers: Who is taking part into the conversation, or in this case the hype? Who is spreading the word? Who can the marketeers use for future steps in this campaign? In other words, who are the (positive and negative) influencers? At the same time this widget gives you an idea about the network of each influencer so you get an idea how big his or her reach is.
Media Type Analysis: Via which channels is this story spread? This will help you to decide on which channels to focus for the remaining of the campaign, or help you identify where you need to put a bit more resources.
I have not taken the time to really analyze the collected data and evaluate the real impact of this campaign so far. As said, these reports were created with Radian6 within 10 minutes. But of course you need some human resources to validate the different posts that were tracked, to do the analysis and optimize the further campaign strategy.
But almost on the fly you can get your hands on an incredible amount of extensive and powerful data on what is happening with the conversation that was launched.
Anyway, I hope Kimberley will be happy again at some point. And hopefully MNM will get more listeners due to Kimberley. Although it will not include me!
Also 89 years ago Lester Wunderman, one of the living legends of the advertising agency world,was born. Lester started the Wunderman multi-million-dollar business, coined the term “direct marketing” and anno 2009 our agency remains a thought leader in the industry. But read on since Lester’s early days story is still relevant to all of us. To summarize:
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