As the year ends

Football over Thanksgiving weekend was noteworthy in part because more of Bud Light’s comeback commercials aired. We’re left with images of Bud Light mixed with NFL team logos. That NFL sponsorship was always a Bud Light “brand equity,” and Bud Light no doubt hopes consumers are forgetting the influencer endorsement mishap that metastasized on social media and cost mucho market share loss.

Soon enough, Super Bowl commercial hype arrives. However, as all our email inboxes exploded with Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals from every possible merchant under the sun, solace could be found watching and recalling the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade commercials. NBC Universal had a promo for the Paris Olympics that I found to be hilarious. They also had a tie-in with P&G’s Dawn and their duck-story animated feature, “Migration.” Dawn has been used to save wildlife in the aftermath of oil spills was the message of the P&G spot promoting the film (a Universal release, of course).

John Travolta was on hand with his CapitalOne Santa spot, which is truly celebrity craft of the highest order. However, the mind-blowing spot was a Pixar-type animated minute-long story about a boy with special needs from Einstein-Montefiore. Wow. No matter what one knew or didn’t know about this hospital, this spot muscled them into the trinity of NYC medical giants: NewYork Presbyterian, NYU and Mt. Sinai.

Animation — not the infographic looking awfulness that adorns many a start-up’s website — is seasonally correct, but is a very tough discipline. Expensive per scene, the key is story and duration of video. Never spend more than a minute, but if you’re going on social media, you can produce a 62-second video. Watch some holiday animations and think 2024. Just stay away from all the canned stock video holiday animations — they can be cheesy.

Nonprofits often wrap up their year with a video, which often is developed by committee. The content can be agreed upon by the team, but have they gauged the audience receptivity outside the holiday premiere?

Having worked with consensus-led clientele, everybody agreeing often means less impact on the street, but high fives in the office. Advertising copywriters, art directors and producers often toil in ignominy fighting for every take on a production set and will put way more blood, sweat and tears into the project than you can imagine. Just ask to see their reels, so you don’t end up fishing for production companies that are approachable but perhaps too accommodating. A great holiday video becomes a classic and beats the living daylights out of other tactics. Of course, mixing animation with live action is also a great technique, and doable, thanks to green screens, computer processing and meticulous planning.

Now for some New Year’s resolutions:

One. Up your social media presence by crafting a content calendar. If you’re a retailer, you know the holidays we observe from MLK Day to New Year’s Eve. Seasonally, for everybody else, June and September are chockablock months with scheduled activities like graduations and back-to-school. Many folk are focused on those events, not so much your message. July and August are OK, but half the audience is on holiday one month or the other. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are akin to Black Friday with so much surrounding noise leading up to the days that audiences are less prone to be moved by your message. February to April and the latter part of May and October are very good. Given the Halloween mania, try a Halloween messaging strategy. Remember: 2024 is a presidential election year, and audiences may appreciate anything but a political message.

We’re confounded by the exodus from X, formerly known as Twitter. But, Elon Musk is a polarizing figure and even the mighty Linda Yaccarino who Musk hired can’t fix the damage done by hate speech appearing on the site. Once credibility is lost in adland, it’s adios media or agency. Sweating the small stuff is the sole criteria for agency management. Media can buy a return to grace offering a “make-good,” in essence providing more time on air and replacing the worth of the botched airing with a better frequency replacement (more $ worth).

Two. X is X-Rated, it seems. LinkedIn is awfully “same old, same old.” Then there’s YouTube, which many a small client believes is where video advertising is at. It ain’t so, Joe: Google owns it. They own SEO. Proceed at your own risk: these two platforms guarantee your competitors are in view.

Three. For B2B marketers, try some high-end impactful direct mail. Nobody gets mail much anymore. Just make sure you have a new and updated list. Most lists have about a 20% fall off rate, meaning one-fifth of the names and addresses are no longer good. Check the spelling of names, titles, even email addresses, too. The administrators who build these lists aren’t often motivated by absolute precision.

You can do well with creative emailers, but that’s akin to the low response rates of traditional direct mail: #10 envelopes carrying sales pitches, postcards and self-mailers. One decent lead out of 100 that becomes a customer is the 1% response “flat mail” enjoys. A word to the wise: the top sales folk often dismiss low response rates as the norm. They can be right, but often have never seen an impactful mailer in action.

Resolve for 2024 to study the audience, get in their sights and be unforgettable, not just memorable. Happy holidays to all and some sleepless good nights when inspiration alights.