Consumers have this same type of selective hearing. They are increasingly equipped to tune out marketing messaging in every medium, particularly classic television advertising. A Deloitte study showed that 86% of television viewers regularly fast-forwarded ads.

Some advertisers respond to this phenomenon by designing ads to be watched at 12 times normal speed (featuring lingering shots of brands, logos, and characters).

I think a better takeaway is to create advertising so good that viewers choose to watch.

Last month, TiVo hosted the Third Annual “Battle of the Consumer Electronics Brands at CES”. They tracked second-by-second fast-forward rates for different brands. TiVo SVP Tara Maitra framed the winners this way, “In the age of on-demand television viewing it’s not necessarily the consumer technology brand who runs the most ads that’s the winner in terms of capturing eyeballs — it’s the one who finds a better way to keep consumers from picking up the remote and moving on to other content.”

In other words, increasing the quality of the content is more important than increasing the media spend. It raises the bar on advertising to create better quality content, content that passes the “fast forward test”.

I think marketers need to regularly ask themselves if their marketing passes the “fast-forward test”. Because that’s the evaluation that consumers are making, remote in hand.

(Marketoonist Tuesday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Tuesday, an extra day because of the US holiday. Thanks!)

On a related note, I wanted to share that I’m giving a talk next month at Digital Marketing World, put on by MarketingProfs. It’s a free virtual conference, so you’re all invited on March 9 at 1:00 EST (and to register now). My talk is titled “Content Worth Sharing: What Marketers Can Learn From Cartoons“. It will include a 30-minute cartoon-packed talk, an interview with Ann Handley (Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and author of Content Rules) and some Q&A chat. Hope to see you there!

(Thanks to my wife Tallie for suggesting that the Larson cartoon would make a funny commentary on advertising clutter).

Some marketers challenge the very idea of measuring social media ROI as antiquated, similar to asking the ROI of having telephones in the office.

Yet social media won’t be taken seriously by finance directors as long as the answer is to dodge the question.

I liked this distinction from Hal Thomas in a recent Mashable article: “Social media is the vehicle, not the destination. You can’t just ask, ‘What’s the ROI of social media?’ You have to ask, ‘What’s the ROI of specific activities that we engage in via social media?”

A good place to start thinking about the ROI of specific social media activities is Olivier Blanchard’s comprehensive book, Social Media ROI. Olivier follows a philosophy that “ROI is 100% media-agnostic” and shows how to draw conclusions from the social media metrics that are there.

“Forgetting to tie the easy numbers to something of substance can send your program down the wrong measurement path. Measurement, analysis, and reporting therefore require context: A single metric, taken at random, is as relevant or worthless as one chooses to make it. But as part of a greater whole, supported by a plethora of data points telling their piece of a bigger story, that piece of data can be meaningful and find its true value.”

I’m interested to hear how you think about ROI for social media programs.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

PR crises are nothing new. The field of crisis management originated with the environmental and industrial disasters of the 1980′s (Exxon Valdez, Tylenol). But they are more acute than ever thanks to social media. How a brand handles itself in a crisis is a far greater litmus test of what the brand stands for than any mission statement it writes or marketing plan it executes.

Most brands won’t face a PR disaster at the same scale of a sinking ship or rebuke from Senators. But every brand does face crisis: an ad that offends, a product malfunction, a spokesperson caught in an infidelity scandal.

Brand teams should spend time thinking about how they would handle a crisis, large or small. Marketers can’t plan for every single thing that could go wrong, but they should establish ground rules. And make sure that they have the right team in place. Waiting until a crisis happens is too late.

I like the perspective of Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals. In an Inc. magazine column last year, he detailed how 37signals handled a product disaster, mainly by being human.

“I’ve been a customer of companies that don’t know how to respond to a crisis. These outfits don’t own up to the problem. They hedge, they tiptoe, they get their PR departments to issue abstract nonapology apologies.”

“People don’t judge you on the basis of your mistakes—they judge you on the manner in which you own up to them. In my experience, most companies do a terrible job of taking blame. They lob press releases. Or they apologize for the inconvenience. Resist that temptation and say you’re sorry like you’re apologizing to a friend. Be good—and your customers will be good right back to you.”

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

Super Bowl advertisers are building social into their campaigns like never before. GM created a Chevy Game Time mobile app to answer trivia, win prizes, and engage during the game. Coke is hosting a live game day watching party on Facebook with its polar bears reacting to the Super Bowl and social media in real time. Others have been drip-feeding teasers of their ads on social media for weeks leading up the games.

It’s a big step from last year, when Audi tried to make a lot of hay out of simply using a Twitter hashtag at the end of their ad.

Like every year, the marketing world will be taking note. What’s notable this year is that social will be more than just an afterthought. It will be deeply integrated into the creative itself.

The most important marketing lesson of the Super Bowl is that the quality of the ads often rivals the game itself. They are “ads worth spreading“, an expression that TED coined for a competition that celebrates quality ads: “With this competition, we’re seeking to reverse the trend of online ads being aggressively forced on users. We want to nurture ads so good you choose to watch.”

Social media integration can’t help an ad that isn’t inherently worth spreading. As marketers, we should all create ads so good people choose to watch.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

Here’s one of my earliest cartoons, from 2003.

A few years ago, I helped launch the method brand in the UK. We thought sampling would help tell the brand story person-to-person. We soon discovered that most in-store sampling treated all brands the same. The sampling staff did their jobs, but it was obvious that our brand was just one of many. They had sampled oatmeal the day before and were sampling a new potato crisp flavor the next day. We were just the brand du jour.

So we set out to make our sampling remarkable. Instead of the off-the-shelf samplers, we found performance artists looking for extra work in between acting, singing, and dancing gigs (via a brilliant agency called Mash). We trained dozens of performance artists to represent the method brand. They took it as seriously as if they were taking on an acting role.

Grocery chain Tesco wouldn’t let us bring our own samplers, so we focused on DIY retailer Homebase who were more flexible. We even manned a 24-day consumer event called the Ideal Home Show. The performance artists were so persuasive and engaging, we didn’t have to give away free samples. Instead, we sold our products for full price at the stand, ultimately selling enough to cover the cost of the show. It was self-funding marketing.

At one point in the show, I spotted a sampling team for Persil, a competitor brand. They stood in the middle of the hall, frantically stuffing free samples into people’s over-stuffed bags without a word. It became just another free sample, lost in the clutter. Persil’s sampling budget dwarfed ours, but their impact was significantly less.

Many marketing tactics run on autopilot. Yet there’s always an opportunity to elevate marketing tactics to performance art.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

I find inspiration in the philosophy of Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress:

“Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it‘s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world … By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they think of your work, which in best case helps you anticipate market direction, and in worst case gives you a few people rooting for you that you can email when your team pivots to a new idea. Nothing can recreate the crucible of real usage.”

Internet companies commonly remain in Beta for extended periods of time, which allows them to adapt and evolve in the market. Yet, more frequently I see non-Internet companies doing the same thing. The aptly named BetaBrand launches a new clothing product every week. A Startup Store recently launched in New York as an ever-changing retail space that will completely change products and physical design every 4-6 weeks.

Rachel Shechtman, founder of A Startup Store, said: “We’re in beta because I don’t think it’s fair that digital companies are the only ones who get to be in beta.”

It’s not just an opportunity for startup companies either. I was struck by this recent quote from Marc Pritchard, global marketing officer at P&G: “I want P&G to adopt a ‘do-learn’ approach to brand-building. This means doing and learning simultaneously, rather than learning, learning, learning some more and then doing”

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

Yet many brands approach loyalty primarily through loyalty programs and loyalty cards that bear little relationship to true loyalty. It’s “loyalty for hire”, not “loyalty beyond reason”. When nearly every retailer has a loyalty program, loyalty cards lose their meaning.

My wife has so many loyalty cards, she can’t keep them all in her wallet. She stores them in a ziplock bag in her purse. Yet Trader Joe’s, the grocery store where she is most loyal, has no loyalty card at all. Last year, Satmetrix named Trader Joe’s the retailer with the highest customer loyalty scores in the US. Trader Joe’s generates that loyalty simply through the merits of being a remarkable retailer.

Loyalty doesn’t look like a card. Loyalty looks like this tribute video a Trader Joe’s fan created for fun. It’s already been seen 830,000 times by other Trader Joe’s fans.

What examples have you seen of brands that generate true loyalty with customers?

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

This loyalty topic reminded me of this Brand Loyalty cartoon I drew in 2005.