Cheil USA's i-group wins a Bronze MIXX AWARD

The hits just keep coming for the Juke by Samsung campaign. Cheil USA's i-group picked up a MIXX Award September 23, 2008. We collected the bronze award in the Widget Marketing category for the Juke by Samsung campaign

See all the MIXX 2008 award winners here.

Brian Gield (senior copywriter), Johanna Rustia (art director) and Jennifer Friedberg (General manager/The I) were on hand to collect the award.

Congrats to the team:
Johanna Rustia and Bernell Clifford, art directors; Jeff Babson and Brian Gield, copywriters; Chris Mogen, design director, interactive; Ann Marie Mathis, interactive creative director; Howard Levenson, senior project manager; Joseph Andreana, project manager; Christine Nelson, account supervisor; Laurie O'Connor, associate media director

Making Home Appliance Irresistable

In the Fall of 2007, Cheil Canada was given the task of creating an advertising strategy for Samsung’s Home Appliance division. 2008 marked a significant year for the division as it would be their first full year of carrying a complete range of kitchen appliances, and their first foray into mass advertising. The brand was in its introductory phase and we had to capitalize on the opportunity to establish a premium brand perception with consumers.

When reviewing the competitive landscape, we faced the challenge of competing with brands that had a long history and strong brand equity in the appliance world. Our challenge: how do we stand out and reach our consumers in a unique and more targeted way?

Working with a very limited advertising budget, our first goal was to stretch our media dollars and find ways to look more massive than our budget could afford. Our objective was to rapidly build brand awareness through high reach and frequency against our target to achieve immediate awareness nationally. Who was our target? The “super mom,”- educated and stylish, she values design in her home. She balances any combination of home, work, community and personal time, is a key decision maker, and influences all purchase decisions that affect the home.

Full page dishwasher print ad that ran
nationally (Canada) in various publications.

Full page refrigerator print ad that ran
nationally (Canada) in various publications.

Knowing that our target is extremely busy, we needed to find media channels that spoke directly to her. We chose media properties that were established and credible in the world of design and home décor. Being a new brand, we wanted to associate ourselves with established media partners which in turn would help to build our credibility. We partnered with Canadian House & Home magazine, a premium magazine and resource in home décor, to create advertorials that combined design tips from an interior designer with details about the innovative technology that’s built into every Samsung appliance. With every advertorial insertion, we also ran one of a series of four ads from an original campaign created by Cheil Canada, each featuring a different home appliance.

We knew our budget did not afford us the opportunity to create television spots, but we felt it was an important medium that could help us build our reach rapidly. We partnered with Home and Garden Television Canada and created vignettes with Jay Purvis, a well known Canadian television design host, that focused on renovating tips and how Samsung appliances fit in with renovating your kitchen or laundry space. In the Quebec market, we partnered with Canal Vie, a television channel similar to HGTV to create Samsung billboards. This helped us to establish a blurred line of endorsement for the home appliance brand.

We also wanted to capitalize on the beauty of the appliances themselves and give consumers the opportunity to experience them firsthand. We targeted consumer shows with a female focus that competitors were not attending. This allowed us to be the exclusive home appliance brand represented, therefore reaching a captive audience.

Full page range print ad that ran
nationally (Canada) in various publications.

Our goal was to connect with our target in many different ways while at the same time ensuring that every touchpoint was consistent. Creatively, our advertising objective was to equate the Samsung brand with stunning and innovative appliances. Our advertising theme became “Irresistible Innovation” – the notion that Samsung appliances are so irresistible, that the clothes that just came out of the machine are dying to get back in. We created print executions for dishwasher, laundry, fridge and range. The “Irresistible Innovation” tagline appears in every form of activation from television, advertorials and brochures to the booth created for consumer shows. We wanted to ensure that when our consumer experienced Samsung home appliances, they had the same brand experience flipping through their magazine at home as when they were visiting a retail store.

Reaching our target in the various stages of their purchase cycle in a consistent, innovative way has helped us build a premium brand for Samsung in the Home Appliance category. Our “Irresistible Innovation” campaign has garnered accolades from consumers as well as Samsung customers such as Sears, Future Shop and The Brick.

Above: Product stickers were created highlighting key product
features. Stickers are being used across Canada at
all retail stores carrying Samsung appliances.

Below: Brochures were produced for the
retail environment highlighting product features
and specifications.

Angela Fitzpatrick
Senior Account Executive
Cheil Canada

Cannes 2008: The Year of Storytelling

When I was a kid, I had a dog. And one day the vet said that heartworm was a risk for all young dogs and that we should give the animal a pill once a day as a preventive measure. Problem is, the vet said, most dogs didn’t seem to like the taste of the pill and in order to get it down, we had to slip it into its dog food. The dog would eat the food, unaware that the medicine was nestled into the meal. Problem solved.

I tell you this story for two reasons: First, it is a situation that is analogous to advertising in some basic sense. Advertisers all have a pill of information they want their audience to consume. But if you just tell people the information cold, they tend to miss or forget it. As ad folks, we are the ones who make the information more palatable by weaving it into some more entertaining, interesting, digestible form. Now, consumers are not dogs and our advertising creations are not dog food (usually), but I think you get the idea.

The second reason I tell this story is that it illustrates the larger point that was the theme at Cannes this year: the importance of storytelling as a means of conveying information. I could have begun this article simply saying, “Advertisers often have to make pieces of information more palatable by weaving them into stories” — but where’s the fun in that? Would you have kept reading? Maybe, maybe not. But engaging the audience in a story is a time-tested way to pique people’s interest and make them more likely to absorb your information, whatever it may be.

The following is a look at five secrets to telling a good story – and how Cannes winners used them to generate publicity for their brands.

1. Involving the audience makes a good story. Simpsonizeme.com generated tons of attention for Burger King and ‘The Simpsons Movie’ by enabling people to see how they would appear in a Simpsons world. By uploading a photo of themselves and feeding them into the Simpsonizer, people could transform themselves into bona fide Simpsons characters. It was an idea that brought people into the experience and generated lots of D’oh!
2. Ordinary people who become heroes makes a good story. The genius of the common man is celebrated in Bud Light’s ‘Real Men of Genius’ TV and radio campaign. From the Edible Panties Inventor to Overzealous Flag Football Player, the Real Men of Genius campaign sends up quirky aspects of American culture in a brilliantly fresh way. Audiences across the country buzzed about each new spot.

3. Practical jokes make a good story. Burger King’s ‘Whopper Freakout’ prank got attention by essentially ‘punking’ their customers. Burger King told their customers that they – the self-proclaimed “Home of the Whopper” – had officially discontinued the Whopper. The customers’ reactions were videotaped and put online. It was a royal success in generating publicity on both the Web and TV.
4. A little shock value makes for a good story. Finetra ‘The bed and bedding experts’ used a little shock value to grab attention in a print campaign recently. Using the line, “Where even nightmares come to rest,” Finetra showed children asleep in bed with their arms wrapped around horrific sleeping monsters. The effect of seeing innocent children and these fanged beasts together dialed-up the shock value and Finetra brand awareness all at once.

5. A great character makes for a good story. Stavros, a German practitioner of ‘position art’ is the creation of Nokia to promote the GPS feature of their phones. By using the feature on the phones, he showed how people could actually create pictures across miles of landscape. The character’s unflagging self-seriousness – evidenced by his insistence on referring to himself in the third person– and unwavering enthusiasm for the world’s newest art form, was just the right mix of pomposity and pluck to introduce an interesting use for these phones.
Tom McManus
Creative Director
Cheil USA

Around the World with Samsung.com

After almost 13 months, 250,000 frequent flyer miles and thousands of transcontinental phone calls, emails and instant-messages, the Samsung.com sites for Chile, Peru and Argentina launched on June 23rd. This marked the successful finish of the Samsung.com global rollout project.The team, comprising of professionals from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, China, and of course Korea, fought language barriers, IT and content setbacks and toughest of all, time zones, to cross the finish line.

Cheil Brazil, established in 2002 in Sao Paulo, has played a

pivotal role in building the Samsung Electronics brand
in the Latin American market. The Cheil and
Samsung Brazil team deserves a warm obrigado.

The Samsung.com redesign is a high level initiative to provide a best-in-class website to all Samsung subsidiaries across the globe, from sales powerhouses United States and China to their smaller brethren, Lithuania and Peru. Utilizing a platform created by Samsung OSG (Online Strategy Group) assisted by the triumvirate partnership group of Boston Consulting Group, IBM, and Digitas (providing strategy, process and creative, respectively), the 55 Samsung.com sites around the world share the same clean aesthetic, high-style photography, and deep product content.

One of the major advantages of the new platform comes from our study of economics, that of ‘economy of scale.’ Previously, each subsidiary created online marketing materials only equal to their proportionate budget. As can be imagined, the online marketing budget for Peru (pop. 28M) is slightly less than that of the United States (pop. 305M) based on their size and the percentage of population online. However, with the new Samsung.com platform and structure, Peru, despite their limited resources is able to ‘piggyback’ on the marketing muscle of the United States, providing their consumers with product microsites and other online marketing materials they would otherwise be unable to afford.

No animals were injured during the construction of this site.

Although you can’t tell, the site was built in the shadow of the lovely San Cristobal.

Another advantage to the ‘globalization’ of Samsung.com is the newfound ability to share online marketing advances between markets. An example is the current US web 2.0 initiative of providing consumer-generated reviews on product pages. Previously, this initiative would be constrained to the U.S. due to a lack of communication across Samsung.com entities, with the advent of Samsung’s global online strategy group and the corresponding Cheil online marketing council, this type of initiative can quickly and easily be vetted by the initiating country and, if successful, rolled out globally. This allows Samsung to group-source innovation and quickly spread it throughout the network.

Cheil has played an integral part in this year-long rollout. The North America/Latin America regional headquarters, located in the Ridgefield Park, NJ offices of Cheil have been responsible for nine North American and Latin American countries, spanning from Canada to Argentina. With a staff of six account managers and one copywriter, the NALA group was responsible for organizing all the content development for the site and orchestrating the third party vendors during the site build. With terrific support from the OMC headquarters team in Seoul (often working 20 hour days), the NALA group was able to launch all sites on time. Now as we move into the operations phase, the team is focused on developing the improvements that will make the Samsung.com global network a true best-in-class web presence.

With the help from our partner Elyptics,
Samsung.com Argentina launched on schedule.

David Glitzer
Director, Online Marketing Center
Cheil USA

Fantasy Sports: No Longer a Marketing Fantasy

When people began playing Fantasy Sports in the early 1980s, it didn’t exactly catch on like wildfire. At the time, Fantasy Sports were a complicated, involved hobby for only the die-hard sports fanatic, an extremely small but involved segment of the population. Pre-Internet times meant no access to player statistics, hence league members would be forced to calculate their scores by hand on a weekly basis using the box scores printed in the local newspaper. This was extremely time-consuming (take it from someone who actually did this), and significantly limited the growth of the industry.

Today, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Fantasy Sports in 2008 has become mainstream, with an estimated 34 million U.S. consumers having participated in a fantasy sports game. ESPN has regular fantasy sports draft programming on the air, radio stations have fantasy sports specific content, and there are thousands of websites dedicated to learning, playing, and mastering the craft.

Effect on marketing With the population of active fantasy sports conservatively estimated at 19 million in 2007 according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA), it was only a matter of time before serious marketers began to enter the arena in droves. Coca-Cola and Toyota are currently presenting sponsors of the most popular Fantasy Football game at Yahoo! Sports. General Motors and Geico sponsor ESPN’s Fantasy Football, while CBS Fantasy Sports is sponsored by Bud Light.

Fantasy Sports sponsorships are not limited, however, to just the most popular game hosting sites. Samsung channel partner Circuit City, recently launched the Circuit City presents “YouTube Fanalyst Channel.” The channel provides a compilation of Fantasy Football analyst videos hosted on YouTube, plus contest opportunities for owners to create their own analysis to win prizes. As new games emerge, we can expect that more will be available.

Demographics The lure of Fantasy Sports to Fortune 500 companies is simple – according to MRI data, the Fantasy Football player is almost 3x more likely to watch National Football League games and content than the average person, and the audience is involved and engaged in the content.

When you couple this information with the high frequency of user visits to fantasy sports sites, brands can expect increased exposure of key messages that are target appropriate. According to the FSTA, approximately 75 percent of all visitors to fantasy content sites are male, skew towards an income of $75K+, and nearly 1/3 third are in the sought after 25-34 age range. Furthermore, more than 37% of fantasy sports users spend over 4 hours per week on fantasy sports related sites.

Implications Fantasy Sports consumers are a triple threat to marketers – the key young male marketing demographic with a higher income range, consistent and guaranteed partner site traffic, and long term investment/engagement in the content. As participation continues to grow at 7-10 percent/year (Source FTSA), Fantasy Sports will continue to be a lucrative opportunity for companies to reach consumers where they are engaged and receptive.

Jed Michaelson
Account Supervisor, Brand Management
Cheil USA

The latest consumer electronics campaign positioned Samsung as a market leader in the industry, while promoting home theater as the new norm.

Timeframe: Q4 2008
Account Director: Bob Carmody
Creative Director: Tom McManus
Account Supervisor: Stephen Fanuele
Art Director: Tom Kane
Copywriter: Brin Banta

CCA wins an OMMA

Johanna and Jeff accepting the award

CCA wins an OMMA for Best Integrated Campaign: Technology CCA iGroup picked up an OMMA Award September 18th 2008. They won in the category of: Best Integrated Campaign in technology and were a finalist in the widgets category. Jeffrey Babson (copywriter) and Johanna Rustia (art director) were on hand to collect the award. Congrats to the team: Johanna Rustia and Bernell Clifford, art directors; Jeff Babson and Brian Gield, copywriters; Chris Mogen, design director, interactive; Ann Marie Mathis, interactive creative director; Howard Levenson, senior project manager; Joseph Andreana, project manager; Christine Nelson, account supervisor; Laurie O'Connor, associate media director

Gimme! – Basically, we are all Self-Centered

John Hallward, President of Ipsos ASI, a leading advertising research firm, presented excerpts from his latest book Gimme! to Cheil staff at the NJ office on April 29. Ipsos ASI is a leading global advertising research firm, and is part of the worldwide Ipsos Group. Ipsos ASI offers a full range of advertising research solutions to help clients make the best decisions at all stages of the advertising process: advertising development, advertising pre-testing for qualifying advertising, advertising tracking, and brand equity/brand health evaluation. Ipsos ASI has also recently introduced new holistic integrated advertising assessment. The firm focuses on providing advertisers with the insights to help in the development, evaluation, and improvement of their advertising efforts to help them build stronger marketing performance for healthier brands.

John Hallward is the President of Global Product Management at Ipsos ASI.
In his first book, Gimme! The Human Nature of Successful Marketing,
Hallward explores our evolutionary traits to help marketers, brand managers,
public relations professionals, advertising executives, and even
politicians better tap into primary human motivations for greater success.

Hallward argued that much of what and who we are today is the product of evolutionary processes. Human beings, for example, are genetically wired as such to develop social needs, friendships, morals, habits, emotions, short and long-term memories, among other characteristics. Though we are born with the “gimmes,” we are taught to suppress them as we grow in society. But the “gimmes,” as Hallward observes, do not fade away. They are activated, for instance, when we choose a brand: “How will I be perceived if I choose X instead of Y?” or, “What emotional payoffs do I get for choosing X over Y?” An understanding of how human brains work allows us to become better marketers.

Our brain is largely oriented to our vision. We see in our minds. We judge first impressions with our eyes in a split second. Our brain is constantly engaged in creating basic triggers or memory units – associations, visions, mnemonics and metaphors – for easy future retrieval. Try remembering this:
O T T F F S S E N T

It would require quite an effort to lodge this in our brains and be able to retrieve it at a later point. You likely found no relevant meaning, mnemonic, or cue to recall a random array of characters. But try saving it after understanding the pattern behind the characters.
O T T F F S S E N T
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten

In our complex environment, we simplify information units as a way to cope with the huge overload of stimuli. The units of memory are burned into our neural networks by several factors such as duration and intensity of stimuli and extent of neural processing. The latter, in turn, is dependent on quantity of rehearsals, simplicity, relevance and quantity of emotions attached to memory. Any one incoming stimulus fires upon tens of thousands of neurons. This creates a lot of brain activity, neural firing, and complexity.

Humans have habits. We follow routines. We like predictability. Following routines lets us forget the details and “reasoning.” Marketers need to disrupt purchase habits in bold ways to engage the brain.

Consumers feel much more than they think. Consumers do not think in a rational, well-reasoned manner. We judge cars by the sound the car door makes. We are influenced by the “new car” smell. Each and every stimulus that we attend to gets tagged with an emotional evaluation (i.e., good/bad). Thus, “rational” is not the opposite of “emotional.” Rather, they are basically two sides of the same coin. Decision making is about evaluating the emotion associated with every memory unit. An understanding of the memory units and the emotions that come into play helps design a communication strategy.

Marketing, then, has two fundamental roles according to Hallward: 1. Get it in: get the right desired associations into the brain, in a rich, intense manner, as a neat “summary memory unit”. 2. Trigger it: get recalled and activate the attitudes at the right time (i.e., the purchase time).

Sanjeev Bhatt
Strategic Research Architect
Cheil USA

Taking Social Media on the Road

Cheil Worldwide and Samsung Nationwide took part in a social media educational program that kicked off on April 30, 2008, at our New Jersey headquarters. As the Interactive Creative Director for Cheil, I felt it was important to educate the clients on the core principles that make up social media, the ‘tools of the trade’ and some best and worst-case scenarios for brands that have embarked into this new territory, or worse, been thrust into it by their own consumers.

I enlisted the help of C.C. Chapman and Steve Coulson of the Advance Guard who helped me kick off the tour. C.C., a long time podcaster and blogger, and Steve, a creative visionary with a wealth of traditional agency experience, helped lay the groundwork for the presentation. The discussion quickly took shape, revolving around these key issues:

What is social media? How does it work?

How does a brand engage the consumer within the social media space?

Where do we start? How can we adapt as marketers and as a brand in this new space?

The two-hour long session covered everything from blogger outreach and micro-blogging to virtual worlds. The dialogue within each session varied depending on the business challenges faced by our client’s particular line of business. I expected the clients to be very focused on metrics. I even went so far as to craft a full-blown metrics chart in preparation for the onslaught of raised eyebrows in answer to the question, “What’s the ROI?” Maybe I fell prey to headlines I read about the hesitation of brands to engage the space. Even though there aren’t traditional benchmarks, it’s clear to me that clients understand the value, and more importantly, the need to get started. Instead I learned that their concerns lay not with how to engage in a dialogue with the consumer, but with whom to engage in that dialogue.

Corporations and brands are now faced with the following questions:

Some Tools of the Trade

■ Blogs: A web site that has regularly updated content. Most have a set theme or topic and/or serve as an online diary, where the topic is based on personal experiences.

■ Social Networks: Sites where individuals gather to connect and share information. All have the ability to connect/befriend other people and most allow for the sharing, and commenting on of content.

■ Podcasting: Internet radio that anyone with a computer and a microphone can create. Rich media content that consumers can subscribe to and enjoy on their own schedule, and on their device of choice from anywhere.

■ Wikis: Web sites in which everyone has the ability to add and edit the content. Self-policing using the theory of the wisdom of crowds, which believes the more people that contribute, the more accurate the information is.

■ Microblogging: Allows people to send short updates to their community via multiple channels including SMS and instant messaging. Real-time public timeline of messages from people around the world interacting with each other.

■ Internet Video: We live in an on-demand world now. Consumers want to consume entertainment on their schedule and not anyone else’s. Online video allows social interaction and viewing on the consumers’ schedule rather than someone else’s.

■ Virtual Worlds: Online communities of like-minded people. Many are not “a game” in that there is not
a goal or mission. Most share the traits of a social network including friend lists, customization and the sharing of content.

■ Photo Sharing: People can upload their photos for the world to see and comment on. Flickr, the largest and most popular, provides tools for people to upload from their computers and phones.

■ Gaming: Quickly evolving category with the rise in popularity of casual gaming, branded games and dynamic in-game advertising and Alternative Reality Games (ARGs).

■ Social Bookmarking: Just like your browser favorites, but these are bookmarks you share with the world. Updatable, taggable and subscribable. Many have voting mechanisms to make popular links gain even more exposure.

Who runs this? PR? Customer Service? The Advertising Agency?

Do I need a new department within my organization?

In an organization with multiple product divisions, is it run at a corporate level? Do I evangelize my product managers? Different companies handle it in different ways. I’m hardly an expert on the topic of successful business models (I’m a creative director, not a CEO), especially in the social media space, where my senior writer, Brian Gield, has often pointed out to me that “there are no experts, only enthusiasts.” Look at how other companies are embracing the space.

Dell’s IdeaStorm website encourages users to talk about Dell – for better or worse – and
takes an active role in responding. www.dellideastorm.com

Take RichardatDell for example (http://richardatdell.blogspot.com/ and at twitter http://twitter.com/richardatdell). It’s his job to search out comments on the Internet and respond (*waves* at Richard, since I know he’ll be reading this – it’s his job after all). Dell is – or was - a company who needed to clean up their Customer Service act quickly after a Hellish Experience (sorry, bad pun intended). Dell actually now has a VP of community and conversations. Check out Dell’s ‘IdeaStorm’ website where consumers are actually encouraged to complain about Dell products. The company responds to, and updates, the consumers on progress being made to address problems posted by consumers.

The trend, however, seems to be more reactive than proactive. Take Comcast for example, which has now assigned Frank Eliason to be their ‘twitterer’. This is most likely due to another very public lashing their brand took from a blogger (notice the trend here?). I wonder if Frank’s role will expand off twitter and into forums, blogs and social networks. His role on twitter is listed as ‘Comcast Customer Outreach,’ but I question how effective twittering will be. How many of twitter’s approximate one million users are actually Comcast subscribers?

So the answers to the earlier questions? Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes. Anywhere you begin is a good start. Try starting by having customer service or product managers do a tweet scan once a week and respond to some product questions or complaints, or hire someone at a corporate level who’s empowered to talk to individuals within the organization to get answers to questions users post on the web. Or, have your agency do it (gratuitous plug intended). Unless your new ‘VP of Community’ runs around the web berating customers, slapping bloggers with cease and desists, and boasting about how great and perfect their new employer is, you’re already on your way.


Ann Marie Mathis
Interactive Creative Director
Cheil USA

Cheil has the Heart and Passion for a Great Cause

This year, Cheil Worldwide in Irvine, California donated their creative services to help promote awareness for the American Heart Association and their National Go Red Campaign in Orange County, California. Heart disease is the #1 killer of women in the U.S., and each year the American Heart Association continues the fight by raising awareness with the National Go Red Campaign. Companies, organizations and cities across America participated in raising funds and awareness by wearing red and making a donation on National Wear Red Day on Friday, February 1, 2008. With the funds raised, the American Heart Association is able to support ongoing research and education about women and heart disease.


To take the campaign one step further, the local heart association partnered with the Paul Mitchell Hair Salon and College. They offered women and men in Orange County a free opportunity to dye their hair red in celebration and to raise awareness for the day. Cheil created an electronic invitation to promote the event along with posters for use at the Paul Mitchell College. On the day of the event, we managed to color over 500 participants.

In addition to promoting the event, Cheil negotiated free bus shelter posters throughout Orange County to help raise additional awareness for women’s heart disease. We look forward to continuing our partnership with the American Heart Association to help support such an incredibly important cause. Chris Georgieff Account Director Cheil USA