Brand Shorthand

Media Strategy, Media Proliferation ... and Miller Lite

• Mark Vandegrift and Lorraine Kessler • Season 1 • Episode 3

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Mark and Lorraine take a quick detour to discuss the latest beer commercial fiasco: Miller Lite. Then we dive into the topic of media strategy. Why does media strategy matter so much in marketing? Why does media strategy always seem to be an afterthought? And what makes for good media strategy? We answer these questions and more, while providing some great examples of brands who have executed their media strategy well.

If you dig all things marketing, advertising, and positioning, spend 30-ish with Mark and Lorraine.

Mark Vandegrift:

Welcome to the latest episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, also known as Thing 2. With me is the other side of our collective positioning brain, Thing 1 … Lorraine, to interpret the latest goings on in the world of marketing. And indeed, unfortunately, there are definitely the latest goings on, enough so that we're going to interrupt our regularly scheduled topic. which is media, but only for a few minutes. We'll get to the topic of media in a moment. 

 

So… guess what, Lorraine, we're back in the world of beer advertising and boycotts. On the heels of Bud Light's misstep, which we covered in our last episode, and I'm not sure if you heard, but the news on that front is that sales continue to spiral, not just for Bud Light, but for the entire Anheuser-Busch portfolio. It's amazing. But this week, we have a different beer brand and it's racing to the top of that woke mountain, for lack of a better term. Fun fact though, this ad hit the airwaves in March before Bud Light’s commercial, but it seemed that very few people saw it, and now it's going viral. 

 

Before we show the video, I will say that the intent is good. but I think the execution is completely wrong. Undoing the objectification of women is a very noble goal. I applaud it. But there are about, I don't know, three, four gazillion ways to do this better than what you're about to see. 

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Lorraine, that keeps going for a little bit longer, but boy, I'm just shaking my head. What's your take on this?

 

Lorraine Kessler:

Well, you know, it took me a while to kind of think about this. And as you said, the intention is good. I'm not even sure I agree with that. I mean, I don't understand why there's an apologist throwback, right? We're in a whole new generation of women, several past boomers. And so why bring this back? I call it the apologist throwback. You know, when you look at what Miller Lite is trying to do based on their own executives' words. 50% of their audience is 18 to 50, and skew, as you would assume, mostly male. And so the executive at Miller Lite said they want to attract more 21 to 34-year-olds to the brand. That's number one. But they also want to increase their reach to women, which is, of course, an important demographic. And in their own language, they said they believe that beer advertising in general as alienated women. But then they go on to say something – and I think this is really key – the messaging around low calorie, great taste resonates well with women. 

 

This is the Miller Lite position, right? Remember the old ads with Joe Namath? Tastes great. Low calorie… tastes great. So why not stick to the position and simply deliver it in a refreshed new way? I think the apologetic throwback was an amazing distraction from their position, which they said they felt resonated with women well. So this is one time where I believe research could have been very useful to them in terms of concept testing to see what message, if any. would really attract more women to this mediocre, mid-isle swill that Miller Lite calls beer. But to me, research would have helped in this situation before spending all these tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on this campaign.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Yeah, I can't speak to the objectification of women for obvious reasons. But I don't support it. I have two daughters and they actually both agreed with the intent of the spot, but that by the time they got to the end of the commercial, they lost the whole purpose of what the commercial was for. It was like the wokeness gets in the way of the message and the message gets in the way of advertising beer, which is going back to this: can't we just stick to basic beer commercials? I think you noted in our last episode that Domino's needed to detour to fix the perception about their pizza quality. And once they got back to that – that's what we called table stakes – they could focus on their position, which is pizza delivery. I don't think this feels like that same approach. We're talking values versus a pizza recipe. Those really just aren't the same thing.

 

Lorraine Kessler:

Yeah, I don't believe so either. I mean, if we get back to brass tacks, right? Miller Lite wants to sell more beer, and they want to sell more beer specifically to women. So the question here is the apologist approach that they took reaching back, if you will, to something that doesn't fit the times to apologize for that decades after. Why even raise the issue? It's just a total impediment. Now, I will say that one of the brands, and I will reach back because I can, that did a fantastic job appealing to women was Virginia Slims, right? It was a great example of how old stereotypes, if you go look back at some old Virginia Slims commercials, you'll see how old stereotypes of women kind of confined in their role as just wives and mothers. It was portrayed as antiquated in a clever setup for their product of saying, hey, it's a new generation for the liberation of women, which is when Virginia Slims really came to the forefront, I think, in the 70s. So their approach, contrary to Miller Lite's, was, more light … pun intended. It was clever, very smart, and it worked. I mean, it just worked.

 

This is not clever. It's not very smart. And in fact, you know, why throw in the additional offense of the S word, in this whole thing that's going around? I mean, one, alright so it's offensive to objectify women, but it's not offensive to put profanity in the middle of your ad and make it not just a character, but a centerpiece? So there's just so many things wrong with this that says, you know, to me, this is a deficiency of strategic creative. 

 

If they really wanted to sell more beer to women, a better strategy would be what? A totally new brand with an un-Miller name, not at all connected to Miller, not like Bud Light to Budweiser. That's why the Budweiser franchise is being harmed by the wokeness, is because there's too close an association between Bud Light and Budweiser. But a totally un-Miller name, that would be a better idea. However, I would have to say as a positioning strategist, and economics inform your move, they would, I'm not a fan of chasing the category, which is mass aisle swill down by creating another brand to attack myself. But this would be a great strategy for a startup. Great strategy.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Mm-hmm. Well, I hope we can do an episode in the future that doesn't have beer commercials at the heart of it.

 

Lorraine Kessler:

Yeah.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

This is crazy. But, you know, I think things go and they ebb and flow. And obviously we're having some interesting conversations on these beer category commercials.

 

But let's get to the topic that we had planned, which was media. And people might say, well, why media? And we talked last time about our 4C filter and Customer is one of those 4Cs. And a positioning idea can't be great if it isn't relevant to a big enough set of customers to keep us in business, right? And most marketers call this a niche. Well, a niche has to be big enough that we have enough customers to be able to create revenue to sustain the business. 

 

So a niche can be smaller or larger, but at the end of the day, positioning is sacrificial in nature. You're picking a customer and that customer has to care about our idea. So the first rule that we always talk about is don't create too small of a niche. But the second, and this is almost always overlooked, is that you need to be able to reach the niche. And how do we reach that niche? That is through media. So Lorraine … Thing 1… Why should we care about media as it relates to positioning?

 

Lorraine Kessler:

Well, obviously, you can have the greatest message in the world, but that really represents the core customer you're going after or the core customer you represent. And I want to make this point that we made, I think, in a prior podcast, that psychology trumps demographics. The demographics bubble up as a result of the psychology you're going after, choosy mothers, mothers who want white or whites, men who want fast sports cars, right? 

 

So there's a psychology to it. It's very important that you choose media that is going to get the right eyeballs or ears on what you're trying to get across, right? Eyeballs. 

 

But, you know, I think I'd like to just back up a little bit. I mean, Marshall McLuhan, everybody knows this quote, or most people in our business know this quote. I don't think they think about it too much. Quotes kind of become their own thing, but he said, “medium is the message” right? And what did he mean by that? We talked about the four Cs – one of those is context. Context matters. So while the proposition matters, right what you're saying, where it's seen and heard, is an experience is absolutely as important. And I'd like to change the provocative word preposition “the medium is the message” to “medium is a message,” okay? 

 

I don't want to rob from the message itself, but I think McLuhan said that to be provocative. He made THE to be provocative so what does it really mean? It means that not all media is equal in how we perceive it. Marketing is again all about perceptions so beyond targeting the audience, which is a big fascination today because we can do it, you know, with greater strategic skill than ever before, surgical skill than ever before. But beyond targeting, what we really need to consider as a media person is the quality of the media, the quality of the context, right? If I see a media in a very targeted Facebook ad, that has a certain value. But if I see that brand — that I never heard of — while TV viewing, it's going to have a different value. And I think these are some of the deeper considerations that make media very tricky and very difficult today for the media strategist.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Yeah, and we both remember the days when we had about 10 media channels from which to choose. I think the main ones were TV, radio, outdoor, newspaper, and maybe trade publications. So that's really only five, I think I named there. It's hard to believe, but we used to think that that was complex, right? But today we have the MADtech 10,000, and it's a list of only the top 10,000 marketing and advertising platforms. It doesn't include all of them. And by the way, for those that may not be familiar with that term, MADtech is simply: Marketing … Advertising … TECHnology. So the M, the AD … MAD technology. 

 

But no matter how many of them that we have, 10,000, 10,000 plus, the media landscape really is proliferating. And frankly, I like it that way. ‘Cause you know, I love new technology. ‘Cause I think that equals new opportunities. And with each new media platform, it seems like the marketer has that greater surgical skill that you were talking about, or that opportunity to target a tighter and tighter audience. And our challenge is always to figure out how best, if you will, to align the positioning strategy we develop with our clients with the best media to reach their target audience. So from the standpoint of choice, why is that so critically important to successfully executing positioning strategy, Lorraine?

 

Lorraine Kessler:

Well, I think the right media strategy has to start where the message starts, which is the behavior of the media viewership or listenership of the core customer. Where are they and when can I reach them? And when are they in the cycle of making a purchase decision? So today, I think the great advantage we have is we have a lot more analytics about what people are viewing, when they're viewing, and when they're making purchase decisions. So that's all great. 

 

But I would argue with you that more opportunities and more choices don't necessarily go together. A lot of these platforms and technologies really have not proven themselves to be effective. There is an inherent problem, I think, infrequently discussed, which is narrow-casting, the problem with narrow-casting, which is what we're talking about, right? Is that it's like placing the bet on the horse that all the insiders think will win or place, but it doesn't always work out that way. Does it? Because it excludes those who could be your customer. We're looking at a lot of data that is whatever it is. It's still basically theoretical. And so what happens is, you don't introduce something to what we used to do in broadcast, right? The term broadcast, for example, came from the idea that it's reaching a family. So there's children and parents, and one can suggest to the other: “hey, dad, here's a hearing aid. You have a hearing problem, right?” 

 

That's the beauty of broadcast. When you're narrowcasting, It doesn't necessarily work. I'm a huge streamer. That's all the only way I watch TV is streaming. So I have a lot of advertised subscriptions or subscriptions where advertising is in play. Now, I'm of the demographic, but I cannot tell you how many ads I see for Medicare. Do you have Medicare and Medicaid? Then you could get free groceries.  Ad nauseum, so this is a miscalculation. The amount of money spent against me on this one idea, that I'm sure is informed by data, is just totally wasteful. 

 

So, for my money, Mark, I think what the media person is challenged to do, and believe me, this is the hardest part of marketing I think today is how do we reach the audience effectively, which means cost efficiently and so that the message gets through, is that one word, balance. We need balance. Broadcast is throwing a wide net into a wide pool. Narrowcast is fishing select pools where you believe the fish, want what you, the bait you're throwing out there. I think we need a both add kind of solution. And I would keep a kind of circumspect. position on jumping on the newest things. You and I have heard in our time, all that glitters is not gold, right? And media applies. And people jumped on like social media as if they never had to advertise again, right? So do you remember Seth Godin, who from on high pronounced that intrusive marketing, or advertising is dead? It's only permission based. Well, I don't hear much from Seth anymore because there is more intrusive advertising than ever in the history of marketing in our business. You know since cave drawings were the first advertising message. You know, it's good to kind of be circumspect and to really see what the result is. 

 

The other thing is that we have learned, and you and I have talked about this a lot. Consumers don’t subtract. They add. You know, there were all these pronouncements through the generations that the internet would kill TV, and TV would kill radio, and radio would kill newspaper, and newspaper … you know, on and on. But what we found is, they just rebalance. They just find a new level, right? That the consumer integrates. We don't integrate as advertisers, the consumer does. They integrate messages. And they integrate media. 

 

So if I see a McDonald's TV ad and I see its billboard, I've integrated that in my own life. So different media cannibalizes other media, but it's all in play from a consumer standpoint. Consumers add on, they don't subtract.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Hmm. Yeah, and that's really that integration is kind of part of some of the exciting developments that are happening. You know, we adopted programmatic a long time ago, but a more recent development is the trade desk platform that we use. And what's neat about that is it's a lot of different channels, but when you go to buy it, you're buying an audience. So that audience is served up the different formats, whether it's TV, video, radio, audio, display, you name it. And it's great because we can pick the audience. So for instance, I don't need to call up Channel 19 in Cleveland and say I want to run a TV spot. And by the way, all I want is 0.5% of your actual audience. So only charge me 0.5% of what it costs to run a spot on your channel. So what's great about that is we're selecting the audience rather than the medium.

 

And I think this is going to happen more and more because we just simply log into our Trade Desk platform, we select the audience, we set a budget, we load up the creative we want to use and away we go. That kind of excites me because we always talk about wasted impressions versus targeted impressions. And of course, like you said, there's no perfect platform. We're not always going to hit the audience we think we want to hit, when in fact there might be other audiences out there we haven't thought about. But this still excites me. I don't know what your take is on it, but it seems like it's a more efficient way to buy media and to get the message out in a more integrated way.

 

Lorraine Kessler:

It is, I don't think it's totally proven yet. I mean, I would not, I would be delving into this particularly for business to business clients.

 

I think they have a real … a new opportunity even more so than consumer brands with programmatic. And I think what I would do and what we've done is make sure we're testing and learning within that format. Make sure there's delivery because there's a lot of promise. And I want to know what the real result is, because at the end of the day, that's what advertising agencies are responsible for, at least the result, right? And the cost per spend and is it being effective? So it's very exciting in a lot of fronts. I still think it's kind of evolving. So I would integrate. I would not put all my coin on that one kind of approach. I might just buy Channel 19 because I know I have a really strong local audience and that's the number one – I don't know which one is in Cleveland, but that's the number one news network – Or if it is and so I'm going to put my money there and kind of hedge my bets and see. So I think again we have to stay somewhat experimental and open but also know that we're constantly in a testing mode given the amount of media that's available today.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

But there's certainly nothing like we've achieved yet with Google Ads where you're paying only for someone that's already searching for your product. You only pay when they click. That really to me is about as close to Nirvana as you can get because they're already in a shopping mode because of the way they search. And I know the rest of programmatic hasn't gotten to that point, but it certainly is neat. It reminds me about what we developed quite a few years ago with our 4D approach, if you recall that: differentiate, dramatize, develop, and distribute. Obviously differentiate as our positioning work, which is what we stand for. Dramatize is getting that position dramatized in words, pictures, and sounds. And Develop is building the marketing and sales assets. I think it's that fourth D – Distribute – that gets lost in the process so often. But of course, as we've just talked about, it isn't any less important than any of the other Ds. Why do you think that this Distribute part or the media tends to get lost in the whole consideration?

 

Lorraine Kessler:

We tend to think about the distribution at the end of the game. When it should be moved forward, media strategy. Media is so tactical, there's so many mechanical things. particularly today, right? The mechanics have almost overtaken media buying. And there's so much detail that it is a very tactical function when you go to buy the media. But the planning of the media is a complete strategic function. And what happens is it's kind of like, we all figure out the position, we all figure out the message, we decide we're going to make certain, and then we tell the media, people, hey, buy me TV, buy me this, buy me that. And it's totally wrong. The media strategist should be valued as much as the positioning strategist and put way upfront in the discussion so that they are very clear on who the core customer is, how we're trying to reach them and what the budget is. And I'm going to say a little bit more about that. 

 

I do want to dovetail back to what you said about Google. Here's the unique difference between Google, right? Google's broadcast. What do they have in share of? search engine, like 90%. So it's broadcast. And what happens is the people who are interested in that ad, kind of find what they're after. So it's the audience finding what they're after in this big pool. Versus programmatic is us trying to figure out who that specific is and target them. So there's some commonality, but I think that's a pretty distinctive difference, and we'll have to see how that plays out. So anyway, I just felt like I needed to dovetail back to that. 

 

But let me go back to this problem of media. Strategy needs to be upfront. The other thing is the questions that media asks strategically need to be upfront for this reason. It's not just about what media do we want to buy, or we think we want to buy, or the client tells us they want to buy. You know, we have to discern. Is this a long story message or a short story? Is this a brand message or a promotional message? Meaning, is it indirect message, which is leading to a considered purchase at some time in the future, like insurance or car buying, or is it a direct message like “buy now, buy here” and at this price? Is this an introductory message, an introductory brand or a sustaining brand? 

 

For example, around our town, McDonald's is running heavy billboard. And it's really some of the best creative I've seen from McDonald's in a long time. And it's very sustaining. We all know what McDonald's is. We all know what they sell. They're reminding us in a very brand-centric way with their strong colors and very engaging, through billboard. Well, that's an appropriate message. But if McDonald's was just starting out, no one knew what they were, I don't think billboard would be the right choice. So... you know, these are some of the media strategic questions. 

 

The other questions are when is the purchase cycle? You know, when is the cereal box empty? Can we time our messaging based on recency? That people typically do the grocery shopping like on Wednesdays and Thursdays. So, you know, we do that. Can't do that with considered purchase. You don't know when someone's going to change insurance or financial planners or even be in the market for a car. So, you kind of have to be there ahead of time. 

 

The other thing is, of course, the key strategic question, which is rarely asked, it always seems to be a battle, right, is what is the budget? And for whatever reason, I don't know, clients are reluctant to tell the agency what they have to spend, or more importantly, what they'd be willing to spend to get the outcome they want. And this is terribly defeating because you can't devise a media strategy or a plan without a media budget. You just can't do that well.

 

The media plan for a $60,000 budget would look very different than for a $600,000 a year plan. You know, for $60,000, you might lavish all of your resource on some PR stunt or gimmick, or one or two media. You'd have to narrow it. With $600,000, you might have opportunity to integrate in many different ways and even test and learn and do some of the newer things that we were talking about earlier with programmatic. So I don't know how to solve that current problem, but in my opinion, you know, if I could encourage clients to be transparent on their budget appetite, because we're going to find out eventually. So why waste time and money, right? We're going to find out eventually. How many times have we presented a plan and oh, I can't afford that, when they told us all along that they didn't know what their budget was? Well, then you know what you can't afford. So tell us what that is. That'd be so helpful. 

 

And then do it better sooner than later. And I think number two, account and creative directors need to be brought to the table upfront early on when these strategies are deployed.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

You know, going back to your... I'll piggyback on something you said, and it's one of my favorite examples of... picking the right media at the right time. You mentioned McDonald's and using their billboards. Aflac is one that I really like to discuss because imagine if they started out with billboards and they had a duck on them. We'd be like, what's the duck have anything to do with, anything? Well, because of the long-form format of TV and eventually even radio, you get to know the personality of the duck. you even relate the Aflac with the quack of the duck. It's a whole story that's been developed. It's a whole personality that's been developed. Now, if I do see a billboard for Aflac and it has the duck on it, I'm able to relate to that. I'm almost able to get into that world in my mind. I can hear the duck speaking to me, whatever's on that billboard. So I think that's a really good example of having a long-term media strategy that relates back to the creative strategy. So I just wanted to piggyback on that because it's not something that you think through when you're going through the upfront work to develop a brand. And yet it's so critical if we take that fourth D of distribution and wait for it to happen after everything's been created, then we're already handicapped.

 

Lorraine Kessler:

Yeah, you can imagine the conversation around the table with Aflac, right, in the beginning. The creative directors are saying, what are we gonna do with this crummy name? Right? No one can pronounce it. No one knows how to say it. So we either, A, change the name or we do what Price-Pfister did. We give people an interesting way to remember it. Price-Pfister was gonna change its name and the agency came back, the pfaucet with the pfunny name. right? And they spelled everything PF. And that worked in just reading. So obviously they had the media person, I would hope there to say, you know, this informs the media. We have to have people hear the name. 

 

And what does that name sound like? Well, it sounds like a duck quacking. So this is, you're absolutely right. It's a perfect example of how the two should inform each other.

 

Mark Vandegrift:

Well, we blew through that topic thing one. I think even with the Miller Lite interruption aside, wecould spend quite a few episodes talking media strategy and how best to reach customers. And maybe we'll get some questions about that, that we can craft a future episode around.

 

So anyhow, speaking of questions… for those who want to maybe send in questions for future episodes, you can email me at mark@innismaggiore.com. You'll see it on your screen, mark@innismaggiore.com. And as always… like, share, tell other people about Brand Shorthand. 

 

For now, we'll bid you adieu. Please join us on our next episode as we discuss a few of the 22 immutable laws. of marketing. Until then, have a great day.