The Power of Personality
John Gambling’s another WABC guy and he gives great endorsement. He’s another one of those hosts out there that actually wants to sample the product, and have his family sample the product, in order to make the spots seem that much more real.
It’s a great show in NY and we’ve been running with him for over a year. By the way…we’re in Ny and I’m the only one wearing black. What’s up with that?
We just started running endorsements with Judge Napolitano. You’ve probably seen him on Fox News and other shows talking about celebrity court cases or just big cases in general.
We’ll see how it goes. The show is called Brian and the Judge and it’s national. I’m sure there are some products out there (hopefully LegalZoom is one of them) where the fact that he was a Superior Court judge adds a lot of weight and credibility to the endorsement.
But you can’t deny the celebrity and the growing awareness of this sharp legal mind.
Go Judge, Go!
Let me give you a quick list of people I’ve met or had conversations with in my life: Dick Clark, George Clooney, John Cusack, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Leonard Nimoy, Neve Campbell, James Woods, Neil Patrick Harris, Laurie Metcalf, Jimmy Buffet, John McCain, Ron Howard. I’m sure there are more. All bigger than life, amazing people for various reasons. I’m not sure I was impressed by any of them as much as I was with Curtis Sliwa. I’m way too chicken to explain why he’s a bigshot, but Google him if you don’t know.
He’s breathtaking. The way Curtis tells stories. The way he balances humor with drama and danger. The way his New Yorkness comes through is absolutely compelling. Me, the people I work with, the station reps were spellbound as Curtis took us through a 10 year period of his life for over an hour.
I’m just staying this, if he can captivate three A.D.D. marketers for over an hour, imagine what he can do in 60 seconds. Actually, Ron Kuby, his WABC partner, usually does the endorsement spots and Curtis chimes in. Whatever the case, I’ll hold the Curtis and Kuby endorsement spot up against any mega-agency any day of the week if your goal is sales. I bow to the microphone of Curtis Sliwa.
(Look at me trying to be all buff next to him. The guy could kill me with his pinky).
When Ron Kuby, famous liberal attorney and WABC morning talks how host enters a room, you know it. Very funny, very loud, and very expressive. He sat down, looked around for 5 seconds and said “I’m glad you called me to this meeting…IS ANYBODY GOING TO TALK?” I’m not sure why we didn’t talk at first. I think it was because we were instantly overpowered by his persona. Certainly NY radio listerners are, because they’re buying LegalZoom product like hotcakes, and it’s due in part to his hilarious ads.
See, Kuby is an attorney. He basically tells his audience that he doesn’t know how to do all the things LegalZoom does, but could figure it out, and while he’s figuring it out, he’ll be charging $400 per hour. So he says do it right, use LegalZoom.com. Instant credibility, because he’s a lawyer. Instant attraction to the spot, because he does it so well.
Oh, one more thing. He almost always ties in the endorsed product to what he and Curtis Sliwa were just talking about. Great ads, and great radio. Almost makes me want to live in NY to listen to them every morning. Almost.
Well, if I could go to that Babbo restaurant once a week…maybe I will!
Kuby = great radio. You heard it here first. Well, probably 8th or something.
How did I not know about Glenn Beck until last year? The guy is amazing. My first thought was that he was probably another Limbaugh parrot. Nope. Glenn is about as unique as they come. Funny, self deprecating, very intelligent, passionate, and…how do I say this? Quirky? He’s a nutball. But in a good way. Anyone seen his CNN show? It’s great.
For advertisers, he’s potential gold. Why? Because he actually cares, or gives the very strong impression that he does. When we met him, he had just changed the script we were using to talk about a friend of his who used our company to create a limited liability company.
As far as radio endorsements go, it’s as good as they come. It was an honor to meet Glenn Beck (i’m the boring white guy in the light blue shirt). Go Glenn, Go.
During the LegalZoom.com New York media tour, we had the honor of meeting Bill O’Reilly, who does a phenomenal national endorsement for the company where I’m VP of advertising. I live in LA and have a lot of liberal actor friends, so you can imagine the comments I got: “how did you ever get the sulfer smell off your clothes?”, “how could you?”, “dude, you’d sell your soul for a buck”. (I also got from my conservative friends: “Can I touch your hand?”, “Oh man, you are so lucky”, and “I’m actually a liberal…how could you?”).
Lots of people don’t like the guy. But I’ll give him this, he blows you away in person. We walked away from a brief meeting with him feeling like we were superstars. Why? Because he told us we were. The man is on the number one rated cable tv show for a reason. Probably several reasons…and we got a glimpse of them.
Here’s to you, Bill O’Reilly. I have a hard time agreeing with you a lot of times (though if you really listened to what his viewpoints were on a lot of subjects, you’d say “hey, I kind of think that, too”). But I’ll tell you this: you talk about our company like it’s going to save America. Maybe it is.
You often expect when you meet with a bonifide star, be it movie, sports, or media, that you are going to perhaps get 5 seconds of their time. During those 5 seconds they’ll be looking at their watch and talking to PAs. You’ll be lucky to get eye-to-eye contact.
Not the case with Sean Hannity. He couldn’t have been more interested in what we had to say, more engaged, and more charming. He does a phenomenal Dallas and San Diego endorsement for LegalZoom.com and will soon be talking about LegalZoom on his #2 rated national show.
Obviously, as advertisers, we’re probably going to command more attention from a media star than someone off the street, but I was still very pleasantly surprised. Sean (yes, he said “call me Sean”) invited us to his Hannity and Colmes show (Colmes was off this day, he had another liberal star sit in), entertained us with jokes during the commercial breaks, talked with us for quite a while after the show, then slung a backpack over his back and shot out the door.
Politics aside, you can see why he’s a star. And you can see why he’s such a good endorser. (By the way, I’m the dashing young guy in the black jacket and laser blue shirt standing up).
…it’s been never since my last confession.
I canceled an endorsement radio contract on something that I really believed to be working. The problem is, we have several endorsers running on this particular station in Los Angeles, and some of these endorsers have been running our ads for longer than these recently canceled guys.
Well, these guys are all about passion, and man, can they sell. However, though we certainly saw orders on the back-end, there weren’t consistently enough to be profitable for us.
My theory? The duplication on the station and overlap between programs had people typing in the code that they had heard longer. So, existing endorsers were credited basically with this new advertising.
Am I making sense? Let me back up. For the company where I work, we track everything based on a discount code that needs to be entered. So, if we’ve got an endorsement with John Smith and running 40 spots a week, and another endorsement with Janey Jane and we’re running 5 spots a week, chances are that people are going to type in “Smith” as their discount code instead of “Jane”, even if it was Janey Jane that finally pushed them over the brink of sales resistence.
Shame on me. In those situations, I should have anticipated that and figured a way to have other tracking in place…surveys, special offers, sign-in “where did you hear about us” queries. It’s all possible.
Ahhhhhhh. I heard through the grapevine of a grapevine that Jiffy Lube has ventured into Endorsement Radio because they’ve had negative press recently. I don’t know what that press is, and I’ve always had a pretty good experience there, but apparantly it’s been bad.
So they go into endorsement radio, I would think, in order to gain that trust factor back. If John and Ken on AM 640 are telling me that Jiffy Lube is the place to go and that I get a discount, I can see a lot of people giving it a try. And, if they’ve read the press, maybe the negative image is counteracted to some degree or even overcome.
My question is this. After the press goes away, and it undoubtedly will, does that mean JL is going to abandon endorsement radio and go back to boring produced spots requiring a frequency of 17 gazillion to get through to people?
I wonder.
Mobile Ad Model Uses Attention As Currency
Virgin Mobile USA is breaking new ground in mobile advertising by announcing its plan to offer customers a way to earn free talk time on their phones by watching ads – and taking tests afterward. SugarMama, as the program is called, will debut on June 14.
Pre-paid customers, when running low on minutes, will be able to boost their time by up to 75 minutes, earning one minute of talk time per 30-second commercial message viewed. The customers then fill out a survey about the product advertised.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20060530MobileAdModelUsesAttentionAsCurrency.html
This is similar to the new 411 model where callers can get free information services by hearing an ad before their desired business contact number is retrieved. Again and again, consumers have a clear choice: Pay with time or pay with money. When the people with money no longer pay attention to your ads, what are you going to do?