After all its not Spain, but Coke’s World Cup Song is considered to be the World Cup Champion. Waving flags only means one thing – associating the Coke Product to two things young consumers care most – Soccer and Music.

As such, Music industry executives have been making an unusual visit to Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta a gauge on how successful the World Cup Soccer Marketing blitz is. They simply want to learn how Coke turned a song entitled “Wavin’ Flag” by little known singer into a world cup anthem. As a matter of fact, the song hit 17 countries in less than a year. Truly, word of mouth is such a great thing in the music industry.

Initially, the plan was only to create a song good enough to entice stadiums. But along the way, it changed the way Coke works with many recording and entertainment companies. They exceeded expectations from the organization.

The result was emphatic! The musical centerpiece became Coca Cola’s or perhaps the world’s largest marketing campaign ever. It reached 160 countries, where they expect to boost volume sales to more than 6 percent, as four years ago they did the same in a smaller marketing effort.

The truth is, Coke did a very awesome job, as being able to tie the campaign to a song that easily crossed borders was critical. Coke had hoped to use of a single global theme that would save them 45 million dollars in costs. And right now, with the result, it seems like the savings had doubled because of the effectiveness of the campaign.

Now, the new challenge for Coke is how to discover new way to tie its brand to things young consumer care about without being heavy handed. They may even expand to video games among many other creative ideas.

It isn’t a surprise when one learns that a typical American diet consist of heavy loads of fats, salt and sugar. As a matter of fact, a research shows that television ads for food may be skewing our decision on what we eat in powerful ways.

To exactly figure out the research, a team studied food commercials that appeared during the 84 hour prime time period programing and 12 hours Saturday morning cartoons bbroadcast over the major US networks during one month in 2004. And the result? The team calculated the nutritional content of a 2,000 calorie a day diet containing only foods that were advertised on television. It exceeded the government’s recommended daily amount of fat by more than 20 times and had 25 times the recommended daily intake.

And the effects were prevalent. Kids in America suffer obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure at a faster pace than in any other nations. Can you just think about how many McDonald’s, how many Dominos, how many Starbucks, as well as a bunch more of burger houses and sugar-added coffees there are? They are just countless.

M0reover, the sources of nutrition in the Television ad diet were almost the exact opposite of what the government food pyramid recommends. Instead of making up the smallest proportion of a day’s calorie, as nutritionists advise. Couple this nutritional inversion with the fact that marketing campaigns are notoriously effective in influencing people’s behavior and the result is what many nutrition experts call a toxic environment — one that dissuades Americans from making healthy food choices and encourages inactivity.

The study might not affect much to people who are way well knowledgeable about proper diet. So the next time you decide to be health, it might just be as simple as trimming down those advertised food products.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1993220,00.html#ixzz0rNzzQO15

When nothing else happens, and everything else seems desperate, many companies try to resort in some innovative activities such as creating sexy and saucy ads thinking it would sell their product. Truly, the same thing happened with Chrysler, where they are heating up Dodges advertising campaign like that of Fiats with Gallic sizzle.

However, the sad story is that sex appeal had virtually disappeared from American car marketing. This is practically perhaps of their liberated culture where everything seems to be natural for them. It doesn’t create a head turn. Unlike in Asia, it does create a head turn because sex appeal isn’t natural in their conservative culture.

Moreover, Chrysler is turning European car again from time. However it is no longer the Germans who are calling the shots. It is now the Italians from Fiat and their French marketing chief are in charge. The next generation of Chryslers and Dodges will resemble the quirky little cars at that zip around Rome.

And they are doing a branding makeover with the goal of attracting younger, hipper, and wealthier customers. But they were too much known for creating controversy. For one, Fiat apologized to China after a European Lancia ad starring Richard Gere obliquely backed and independent Tibet. In US, they featured Mikhail Gorbachev, Poland’s Lech Walesa, and Mohammed Yunus, who founded microlender Grameen Bank. Each man climbs out of a 300 sedan, and a fourth car arrives empty. An announcer dedicates the ad to jailed Burmese democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi.

Whatever their plans may be – their planned sexy and saucy advertisements must take into consideration the cultural differences among nations. Because obviously, no on wants their past mistakes to recur again and again.

Stuart Snyder is the head of Time Warner’s Cartoon Network. Last year, they found out their rating has been faltering so they decided to find more ways on how to reach out to the young audiences. Yes, because the most coveted market these days are the “BOYS”, which comprise nearly 30 million ages 5 to 19 in the United States population.

Boys are one-of-a-kind consumers who spend billions each year on toys, food, apparels, video games and gadgets. So as Cartoon Network’s strategy to reach this dominant-gender market, they add more live action shows. In mid-August this year, it premiered two shows – Bobb’e Says, a show about a kid going around telling people what not to do, and Dude, What Would Happen, about three teens conducting science experiments.

Moreover, they had three shows coming that are boy-centric, which have been greeted positively with its stable advertisers including Lego, who created a promotional campaign awarding tie-in toys for George Lucas’ Star Wars: The Clone Wars program.

Another indication of the potential boys market is the acquisition of Walt Disney of Marvel Entertainment. The cost was estimated to be about $4 billion dollars.

In the case of News Corporation’s FUELTV, an action sports channel for ages 13-24 years old, it has attracted major advertisers such as Mountain Dew, Red Bull and Electronic Arts. The potential of the boys market is truly an emerging one. More and more businesses are tapping it.

Although many would still believe that boys are harder to get than girls probably because of the shopaholic nature of girls. But when it comes to boy-centric business, it would probably be something that softens a boy’s heart, just like a father softens her heart for her daughter.

With these new profound strategies, companies are looking forward that business and ratings would eventually recover.

Let us face it; recession is not an indication for you to stop your advertising campaign. Though, it might be hard pressed due to the tightening budget, but by creatively and strategically handling this business aspect, it might just be as good any proposition.

The best way for you to be able to handle this well is to be practical and realistic than ever about your spending habit on advertising. Each company has certain principles that guides through how things shall be done and executed. Two are particularly most relevant in these times.

First, you should create an advertising campaign that is focused on changing behavior of your target consumers, not their attitudes. A good case in point is for you to find out how easy is it for a multibillionaire to drive a Benz or a BMW rather than convincing him that either one is better than the other. This also goes by with gambling. It is always easier for you to be convinced to go to a Casino rather than convincing you it is a smart thing to do.

So it always goes that the goal for any of your campaigns is to give your customers every practical reason to try. You have to ignore certain interest and put focus to these, otherwise it would be even more difficult and a more expensive proposition when you try to change attitudes.

Just simply give target consumers a reason to change their behavior such as spending habits among many other aspects. After all, she will most likely respond to a good deal or a special offer or products with far more better innovation and differentiations.

The second target must be the so-called high-yield category – the category that refers to businesses that accounts between 70 to 80 percent of the consumption. For example, fast food category yields about 70 percent consumption in food business’ sales volume.

Advertising is not for the timid. But as long as you know and understand your goal, strategy and reason it shall move through.