Recently, Coca-Cola® pulled what would have once been known as a “stunt.” These days, it is nothing short of marketing genius: The Happiness Machine. Click over to YouTube to watch the video The event happened on the campus of St. Johns University in Queens, New York. A Coke machine appeared to be on the fritz in the student union and instead of stealing your money, this machine was defective in your favor. A student would put in their money and an ice-cold Coke would plunk down. Then another unexpected plunk. Followed by another. And another. And another. The bewildered and amused student would then begin passing out Cokes to other passers-by. Giant grins would appear on everybody’s faces. And all of this is captured on film.
Being in the branding business, you get a lot of opportunities to launch new brands and revamp others. Probably, the most ticklish of these branding assignments is the brand re-design. This is usually a high-wire tightrope journey between a new marketing director who wants to radically update their brand and a quiet hunch that there may remain truckloads of equity in the brand’s current logo design.
Since the earliest days of the newspaper industry, the front page of the paper was laid out to get the top stories above the fold. Inside the paper, was a similar situation. Savvy ad execs like Don Draper knew that if a quarter page ad fell in the middle of that crease, readership would plummet. The fold could make you or break you. These days, this line of thinking has carried over into the Internet. There remains an abiding notion that an optimum website design lives above the fold (the depth of your browser window.) But even this is starting to change.
dPi has just named Agency Creative as agency of record. Based in Dallas, dPi is a leading provider of energy and home phone services to the growing pre-paid market. No contracts, no deposit, no I.D. are required to switch on your electricity or home phone. Just pay up front. It’s that easy. But reaching this “pay as you go” market is no easy task. They are a very diverse and mobile group. Consequently, it’s our job to break through language barriers, culture barriers and connect with the dPi customer. We do everything from TV to social media marketing. And it all has to be done in multiple languages for multiple audiences, not to mention multiple channel partners. Everything has to build the brand, as well as build demand. And, at the end of the day, we do it. We do it well. And we do it at a breakneck speed. After all, this is retail.
Black Friday’s results were an encouragement to American retailers. Sales grew a whopping .05%. Okay, strike “whopping.” Still, considering the poor state of the economy, not too shabby. But the real news is what happened online. There, sales were up 11%. That’s a hefty $595 million. Pretty “whopping.” 
