Zeno Group Blog

It can happen to the best of us. One day you are the most sought after consumer by companies and the next you are all but forgotten. The coveted younger female consumer is not only perceived to have the money and desire to shop, they are often viewed as the most active in social media. Oh contraire. Women over 55 are the fastest growing segment on Facebook and 65% of online apparel sales are made by women over 35. No surprise — we mature women have years of shopping experience under our belts and are good at it. Shopping online is efficient, fun and collaborative and when insomnia hits, a great way to spend those early morning hours. Yet many web sites just don’t get that we may have the money and desire, but also need products that appeal to us and not just our daughters.

Years ago a wise and experienced mom handed me a parenting book that helped shape and define my approach to child-rearing. The book, Blessings of a Skinned Knee, articulates the importance of allowing our children to fail in order for them to learn how to succeed. Just as life is often not fair or easy, we all know that overcoming obstacles is critical for success. That is why I choose to find life lessons from this challenging economy for ourselves, our clients and for our children. It is important for kids to see that we too can handle adversity and can creativity find solutions to our problems. I find that our family is eating home more, finding ways to spend time together that involve doing rather than spending and being more thoughtful about purchases. As moms and marketers to moms, we know the importance of sharing information, from best buys to best practices. Mom bloggers are so powerful because we get the importance of finding solutions and sharing experiences. Teaching and modeling resourcefulness and optimism is a great life lesson. We can calculate the costs of daily savings or our net worth, but the price of teaching our children to learn how to falter and not give up: priceless.

When it comes to sports media, four letters dominate the conversation: ESPN. Over the past 30 years, ESPN has grown from a scoffed at start-up cable network to one of the most influential brands in sports and media. As a senior director with ESPN Communications, Bill Hofheimer helps oversee media relations efforts for the “worldwide leader in sports.” Among the ESPN properties Hofheimer handles is ESPN’s coverage of Monday Night Football. Recently I posed five questions to Bill about the work of ESPN’s communications squad.

Q: What are the goals of the ESPN media relations department?
A: ESPN’s mission is to serve sports fans, so at the end of the day it all comes down to that ultimate purpose. In our department specifically, we view ourselves as the company storytellers. Much of our day-to-day efforts are focused on securing placements that drive viewership and awareness of ESPN content and products. That includes the networks and everything from radio and dot com to broadband, ESPN The Magazine, etc. From a broader perspective, our department goal is to be an advocate for the company and to help tell the positive stories we have as an organization, both internally and externally.

Q: What types of stories does your team try to pro-actively secure? Is it difficult to break through the cycle of coverage that simply reports ESPN Nielsen ratings and schedules of upcoming programming?
A: We proactively pitch a lot of stories that offer behind the scenes access to bring this perspective to sports fans. What’s it like in a production truck at a Monday Night Football game, in the pit at a NASCAR race or in the half-pipe at the X Games? Who are all the people — not just the on-camera personalities — working on the telecasts and what do their jobs entail? We work closely with our production staff in offering these kinds of opportunities to media and I think our efforts are appreciated because not all networks seem as open as ESPN. Fortunately, there is a lot of interest in ESPN because the company is involved in a variety of businesses and always trying new things.

Q: As a network, ESPN has always been very brand conscious. What role does the media relations team play in promoting the overall ESPN brand?
A: Fans have a very personal relationship with ESPN and that is not taken for granted. We understand how situations can play out in the media and in the public eye. If a program or initiative seems to go against the brand image, our department is quick to raise the flag. We try to bring this critical eye to everything we do. Another important function is to clarify misconceptions about ESPN. So much is written about ESPN by both traditional and non-traditional media. When a writer or a fan doesn’t have all the facts, or even “gets it wrong,” we want to make sure the information is corrected. We try to be very proactive in this regard and it all goes back to protecting the ESPN brand.

Q: Sports bloggers often like to have some fun at ESPN’s expense. What is your department’s policy towards bloggers? Are you actively engaging with any of them or do you take a grin and bear it approach to many of them?
A: We work very openly with bloggers. You have to have this approach. They are becoming increasingly influential. There are a handful we work with on a regular basis and I think we have established very good relationships with them. We encourage them to contact our office if they have questions and we hear from them often. They reach out to us when they are writing something about ESPN and give us an opportunity to respond. They have access to materials we make available to traditional media. We also arrange interviews for them and invite them to events. You understand that there is going to be some level of humor and snark in what bloggers write, and not everything will be positive, but the fact that we have dialogue with them shows their willingness to be fair and to present ESPN’s side of an issue. That’s great.

Q: Now in its 30th year, ESPN has evolved from a single cable network into a global media presence. Where do you see ESPN heading over the next decade?
A: I have been here myself for less than four years and I am amazed at how much ESPN has grown during this time. It’s an exciting place to work. In the next decade, digital media will be a major area of focus. ESPN360.com, ESPN’s broadband network, delivers more than 3,000 live events per year and that number is sure to grow in the years ahead, as will the amount of ESPN content you will be able to get on mobile devices and ESPN.com. With 15 original versions of SportsCenter produced around the world in nine different languages, ESPN also understands the global popularity of sports. International growth will be another key area with various ESPN networks and the company’s interest in such sports as cricket, rugby and soccer/football.

Here are some articles the Zeno team has been reading from April 16th through May 13th:

• WSJ.com: Study: More Women Named to Boards
• Online Marketing Blog: 25 Social Media Marketing Tips from Dell, Comcast, HP, Wells Fargo, Best Buy, General Mills, Ford, UPS, Home Depot, Cirque du Soleil
• NYTimes.com: A Video Prank at Domino’s Damages Its Brand

When the world’s most influential consumer speaks, marketers listen. Well, at least now they do. Once relegated to a niche market, research shows that women are marketers’ MVC—Most Valuable Consumer. She makes upwards of 80% of all household purchases and drives $5 trillion in consumer spending. Women spend and influence household purchases beyond most marketers’ wildest expectations. For example, not only does she pay the bills (80%), but she also takes care of auto repairs (65%) and even influences the digital cable selection in 92% of American households. She’s not a niche market – in most cases, she is the market.

Then why is it that it’s taking so long for her to get the respect – and the products – she deserves when shopping the aisles at her local Target store? This was a hot topic at this year’s M2W Marketing-to-Women conference held last week in Chicago. As a part of Zeno Group’s Speaking Female practice, dedicated to just this topic, I sat with the best and the brightest marketers and thought-leaders in the field who shared my passion and discussed strategies, practices and trends in our pursuit. We discussed a woman’s propensity to become social butterflies – social media, that is. We’ve all heard the reports, and it’s true, women are all a-flutter about Twitter. And it’s official; mark your calendar, effective April 17th women have adopted Twitter. Why? The Oprah Effect, April 17th will go down in the history books as the day Oprah posted her first tweet, resulting in an immediate 24% spike in visitors to the Twitter Web site. So goes Oprah, and so go American women.

It all makes sense. Dr. Melissa Read of Engauge told us that women’s brains are wired differently than men’s. Women need to feel engaged in relationships more than men, whether it’s the girlfriend grapevine or the companies with whom they choose to do business. Women are wired to need this interaction, or dialogue.

While the insights, research and discourse on social media measurement set the room abuzz, the voice that emerged above all else was that of Marti Barletta, author of Marketing to Women, PrimeTime Women and a pioneer in the field. Simply, she said, “Don’t ignore her.” While we’ve come a long way with smart and effective campaigns that that speak to women, there’s still a good distance to go. Marketers, women want to be heard and it’s time to listen. Her voice can be heard booming with BlogHer, in the workplace and at the grocery check-out. For any marketing communications campaign to be effective with this MVC, marketers must engage and be engaged in a dialogue with her. Regardless of gender, it’s just good business.

Simple, maybe. Priceless, definitely.

If you follow golf, you were probably surprised to see PGA Tour pros competing this week at the Quail Hollow Championship in Charlotte. Quail Hollow? That sounds like the name of a golf course, not a car manufacturer or sizable financial institution. How could an event be going on with out a title sponsor? Well, the event does have a sponsor, but the sponsor has chosen to remain nameless rather than deal with negative publicity over unnecessary spending. The situation cries out for some well-crafted messages on the benefits of sponsorship. So where are the PR practitioners to lead the way?

As the Charlotte Business Journal points out, the event’s title sponsor, Wachovia Bank, and its parent company, Wells Fargo, decided that despite spending $7 million annually to sponsor Charlotte’s PGA event, the company was better off lurking in the shadows, opposed to facing backlash from angry Americans who view corporate spending at golf tournaments as another example of financial mismanagement. This attitude stems from a February tournament in California when title sponsor Northern Trust took a bashing in the press after details of their client entertainment practices emerged.

But rather than taking the easy way out, why isn’t the Wachovia/Wells Fargo team standing behind its sponsorship with some messages on why the deal is good for business? As the saying goes, you have to spend money to make money; isn’t that what’s happening here? Shouldn’t the bank’s communications team be bombarding us with stats on how $7 million spent at a golf tournament leads to X amount in returns? Shouldn’t we be introduced to key clients and accounts that were attracted to Wachovia thanks in part to some well-executed schmoozing at Quail Hollow? While it’s a noble move for the company to donate tickets and advertising time to charities, why are the efforts to lure customers being abandoned?

One wonders if the lack of messaging stems from a lack of evidence to support the messages. CNBC’s Darren Rovell theorizes that no one is speaking up on the value of sports sponsorships because the ROI might not exist. If that’s the case, then it’s time for the organizers and promoters of these events to get their messages ready because they’ll need plenty of help luring future sponsors.