Copywriter Karen Goldfarb

The 40 strangest agency names

FB-RSS Feed for Karen Goldfarb — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 22:21:18 +0000

From our friends at Ad Freak, who ask:

If you were launching a new agency today, what would you call it?

They then offer an impressively quirky list that includes the new Kids Love Jetlag, which families nicely with sister agencies Hello, Sunshine and Furious Monkeys, all the brain trusts of France’s eccentric Fred & Farid Group. Naked is also a nice one. It’s a clothing-optional agency, of course, where employees get a subsidized gym membership as part of their compensation package. (I’m making this up.)

Me, I’d probably call mine “I Must B Off My Meds 2 Start N Agency” though I’d entertain shorter options. Maybe just “Off R Meds,” and then, of course, go after pharma accounts.

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I’d sure like to see this creative brief

FB-RSS Feed for Karen Goldfarb — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:21:45 +0000

‘Miss O!’ diet drinks paint woman as animals that blithely drop good guys who are looking for commitment or–heaven help us–making them dinner. Really? I guess that may sound good to the 20-somethings who like “dirty boys,” as my friends used to call them, or have revenge fantasies, or want to assume the stereotypical male jackass role. Again, would love to see the brief’s description of the target audience, because whatever possessed the creatives to deliver this approach must have had some fairly negative insights about some aspect of the target, or the target’s target.

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Karen — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 20:57:57 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

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A perfect product tie-in

FB-RSS Feed for Karen Goldfarb — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 21:51:49 +0000

Snoop Dogg is promoting his new line of Kingsize Slim Rolling Papers with a unique smokable book. Created from rolling papers printed with his lyrics and bound with hemp and twine, it’s the perfect promotional item to reflect Snoop’s glorious career. And arrest record.

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Orange Enlists TSA Types to Silence Your Cell Phone at the Movies

FB-RSS Feed for Karen Goldfarb — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:54:49 +0000

Played this ad at full volume during John Carter last night. Of course, I was alone at the time.

Ad of the Day: Orange Enlists TSA Types to Silence Your Cell Phone at the Movies | Adweek

Why does everybody hate the TSA so much? Totally kidding. I know why. Orange, a U.K. telecom, scores points off our very own Transportation Safety Administration in the silence-your-cell-phone ad below from Fallon London, now running in British cinemas. And you can practically hear American voices cheering them on…

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“Until 40 percent off, ‘the customer doesn’t even pay attention.’” Amen.

FB-RSS Feed for Karen Goldfarb — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:57:50 +0000

From the New York Times. By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD P. T. Vineburgh has a sense of how much things should cost, and on a recent trip to the Boston jeweler Shreve, Crump & Low, he was not afraid to say so. “I know these things are significantly marked up,” Mr. Vineburgh, 33, said about Chelsea clocks priced at several hundred dollars. “I said, ‘I’m buying three; I’d like 15 or 20 percent off.’ ” Sold. Pricing has always been a tug of war between retailer and shopper, with the retailer having more muscle. No more. Thanks to the Internet and shopping comparison apps, price-wise shoppers are haggling. Mr. Vineburgh, a real estate agent, has a closet full of haggled items, including shirts from Jos. A. Bank and the Brooks Brothers outlet. If retailers balk, some shoppers walk; there is always Amazon and eBay. The shifting balance of power has many stores scrambling for pricing strategies that get beyond the time-worn cycle of markups and discounts — and still make them money. But can they outfox the newly empowered consumers? J. C. Penney has introduced a streamlined system: daily prices, lower monthlong specials and clearance prices. Mango, the fashion retailer, has cut all prices by one-fifth. Stein Mart, the specialty chain, has reduced its coupons. Supervalu, the grocery chain, has sworn off heavy promotions and lowered some prices. Even Walmart has pledged to match competitors’ prices if it sets its own too high. “The customer knows the right price,” said the chief executive of J. C. Penney, Ron Johnson. “We can raise the price all we want; she’s only going to pay the right price. And why is that? Because she’s an expert.” Penney’s argues its proof is in the math. Over the last decade, higher prices did not make customers spend more, said Mr. Johnson, who took over the top job last year after running the retail operations at Apple. An item that cost Penney’s $10 in 2002 was typically marked up to $28. By 2011, a $10 item had been marked up to $40. But the price the customer actually paid for the $10 item increased only 5 cents during that period — to $15.95, from $15.90. Until 40 percent off, “the customer doesn’t even pay attention,” Mr. Johnson said. Ronald S. Friedman, the head of the retail group at Marcum L.L.P., an accounting firm that advises department stores and manufacturers, said the average markup for apparel at a department store began around 65 percent. Over 10 weeks, the stores will go to 25 or 30 percent off, then 50 percent off, 60 percent, and finally 70 percent or more, a discount so deep that the stores sometimes sell below cost. “The shopper knows to wait for the sale,” he said. “They know the prices are inflated when they first come out.” The new pricing at J. C. Penney is intended to break that mind-set, and the company is betting its turnaround on it. The store has cut prices by about 40 percent versus before the change, and rounded prices to the nearest dollar ($12, say, versus $11.95 or $11.99). After that first tier of regular prices are specials, which last a month rather than a day or a few hours. And Tier 3 is clearance items, which go on sale the first and third Friday of every month, in tandem with many paycheck cycles. J. C. Penney calls it “fair and square pricing,” but some consumers seem to find it confusing. “I really, really miss my coupons,” Robyn Anderson-Beard wrote on the retailer’s Facebook page. Bobbi Cada wrote: This “is not a change at all, there has never been a day in all of my shopping at JCP where ANYTHING has been full price.” And visiting a J. C. Penney in Florida this month, Michelle Clark, a Morgan Stanley analyst, took note of “sales associates that had difficulty explaining the new pricing strategy,” along with a lack of shoppers. Mr. Johnson said in late February that in the first three weeks, sales were trending below a year ago, but “it is way too early to jump to any conclusions on our new pricing strategy.” Rafi Mohammed, a pricing consultant, said Penney’s merchandise was not unusual enough to draw customers into stores without significant markdowns. “A lot of people feel good about saving money and having a notion of, ‘I saved X percent,’ ” he said. “Consumers do code a $19.99 very differently than a $20.” And history is not on Penney’s side, as similar celebrated pricing experiments have failed. American Airlines tried a system similar to Penney’s in 1992 — and abandoned it after six months. Pointing out that tickets were usually sold for far under face value thanks to promotions, American executives announced that the airline would eliminate 86 percent of the fares it offered. But competitors immediately began undercutting American’s new straightforward prices. Also, about six years ago, after Macy’s took over a group of regional department stores, it decided that coupons were misleading. It slashed the number of coupons. Within a year, it reinstated the coupons; consumers, it turned out, loved them. “I think it underestimates what a sport discount hunting is,” Mark Ellwood, author of “Chasing the Sale,” a coming book on discounting, said of coupon hunters. “They’re like mathletes with credit cards.” Still, Penney’s is not alone in trying to win over the price-smart shopper. Stein Mart is simplifying its pricing, saying it will reduce coupons by 50 percent this year and get away from the falsely high price tags. “Our prices were built up to a point which was untenable, and the customer realized that,” Jay Stein, Stein Mart’s chairman and interim chief executive, said this month. Urban Outfitters and American Eagle Outfitters are both reworking prices to get away from too-heavy promotions, while Mango has made the bold move of reducing prices by 20 percent beginning this spring. Supervalu recently cut prices on 200 produce items and says it will be reducing sales and “promoting everyday fair pricing,” its chief executive, Craig R. Herkert, said. In the end, it is shoppers like Mr. Vineburgh, the Boston haggler, who will determine if the new strategies work. When something is priced right, he says, he does not try to haggle. Recently he paid the asking price for a composite hockey stick that was marked down to $70, from $150. “The right price, to me, is what I’m willing to pay for something,” he said.

An Argument Against the Usefulness of QR Codes

FB-RSS Feed for Karen Goldfarb — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:35:16 +0000

I haven't used one. Keep meaning to but then I just go on living my life. From MarketingProfs Mobile: We've been talking about QR codes—those slightly out-of-focus, black-and-white squares—for several years now. "Conceptually, this is neat," writes Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic. "People who are looking at paper but connected to the Internet via their phones can combine the two in one seamless experience." We see QR Codes everywhere—but do we use them? Not really. According to comScore, 14 million people—a scant 6.2% of mobile users—scanned a QR code in June. Forrester research found an even slighter number of Americans—5%—use QR codes. And it's a situation that's unlikely to change. "[T]here is widespread confusion about how precisely these things are supposed to work," he notes, "despite years of marketers telling us about them, even among tech-friendly groups like college students." One reason might be that there's little incentive to figure them out. By the time you open the app that scans the QR code, wait for it to focus, and reach the desired content, you could have tapped a keyword into a browser and found an even broader base of information without the narrow focus of a marketing campaign. This is why the QR code strikes Madrigal as an intermediate technology. "I think print magazine ads work and I think digital campaigns work," he says. "But when I look at a QR code, I don't see the future."

Morgan Stanley

Karen — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 21:40:01 +0000

A different take on financial banners. I was Associate Creative Director for the campaign. Click on images below to view.

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George Lois: How I Tricked Aunt Jemima Into Making Syrup

FB-RSS Feed for Karen Goldfarb — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 15:50:41 +0000

Back in the good ol’ days. Via Adweek.

If you missed NPR’s interview yesterday with legendary adman George Lois about his new book, Damn Good Advice, it’s worth going back and giving it a listen. The highlight for me was hearing the tale of how Lois (in his version of the story, at least) single-handedly invented Aunt Jemima syrup.

It’s one of those advertising yarns you’d expect to have heard a million times over, and possibly you have, but it was new to me. When Lois was working the Aunt Jemima account, the Quaker-owned brand was known for pancake mix but didn’t make a syrup. “I said to them, ‘How come you guys don’t have a syrup? You own the pancake business,’ ” Lois recounts in the NPR interview. “And they said, ‘Well, that’s not our business,’ and they came up with 12 reasons why they don’t have it.”

Not getting any traction after months of pressing the issue, Lois decided to drop the idea into a consumer survey about pancake habits. “The last question in this questionnaire about pancakes listed a bunch of syrups, and I included the words ‘Aunt Jemima syrup,’ and I said, ‘Which of these syrups have you bought in the past year?’ And something like 90 percent of the people circled that they had bought Aunt Jemima syrup, which was nonexistent. … I showed them my research and said ’90 percent of Americans believe they are already buying Aunt Jemima syrup. Would you please make Aunt Jemima syrup?’ And of course they created the syrup, and they became the leading syrup brand in the world in two days.”

Just goes to show, there’s no limit to what creativity can accomplish when you add in some pestering and unsolicited advice. Photo: Phaidon Press.

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Advertising is a really weird business. Just ask Jean Paul Gaultier’s Marionettes.

FB-RSS Feed for Karen Goldfarb — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 20:13:23 +0000

Ad Campaign: Jean Paul Gaultier Whips Marionettes Into Shape for Diet Coke

Diet soda is one of the few substances scientifically known to be ingested by fashion models. So, it’s not completely off the wall that Jean Paul Gaultier has been named creative director for Diet Coke in Europe. (He replaces Karl Lagerfeld in the role.) What is off the wall is the new ad campaign. See it here.

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