Suuuurrrge!!

This may be the age of the Internet, but there are still many books to be read. One that I’ve been into of late is Citizen Marketers – When People are the Message by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. I highly recommend it.

Arriving at chapter five of this fine effort, I was amazed to find the story of something out of my own murky past. It’s described very accurately in the book as “an alien-green, highly-caffeinated soda called Surge…MIA since 2002.”

The story unfolds that a gentleman by the name of Eric Karakovack from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, whom the book describes as a “genial, outgoing, and sincere” web developer is a passionate fan of Surge. He teamed up with another Surge fan by the name of Avery Lund and together they launched SaveSurge.org. The site features “500 pages of Surge testimonials, photographs of Surge marketing paraphernalia, and recipes for Surge Jell-O and Surge Cookies.”

And get this: “Twelve-packs of the soda four years past their expiration date have sold for $152 on eBay.”

Back in 1996, I was a creative director at Leo Burnett. At Leo, everyone worked together as a cohesive team. Not. No, what really happened was that creative groups basically mauled, kicked and outworked each other trying to win assignments. To win meant glory, money, promotions. To lose meant going to work at J. Walter Thompson.

Our group won a few and lost a few. But one of our victories was an assignment from Coca-Cola for the introduction of Surge. Developed to drive a wedge into the very successful Pepsi brand of Mountain Dew, Surge was indeed an “alien-green, highly-caffeinated” liquid.

The creative team of Phil Gayter and Joe Gallo authored, and with producer Stuart Kramer, filmed a series of spots for the brand. They were a bit ahead of their time, featuring groups of urban guys who set up over-the-top competitions to get their hands on the brand.

How did the spots do? This from Citizen Marketers: “For a while, Surge did OK as a product: 69 million cases sold in its first year. A respectable number for a niche soda. Two years later, Surge lost its marketing fizz. Sales dropped 25 percent, to 51.8 million cases. A year after that, Surge sales didn’t, and they slid another 48 percent. Bottlers across the country reevaluated their investment in the brand. The publisher of Beverage Digest suspected that the demise was caused by marketing inattention, saying Coke did not dedicate enough resources for it to escape the formidable shadow of Mountain Dew, which is made by Coke’s archenemy, PepsiCo. Like a rolling blackout, Surge disappeared from store shelves. By February 2002, most bottlers had stopped producing it.”

Now there is not only SaveSurge.com, but also a SaveSurge Hall of Fame and “Save Surge-The Movie,” 28 minutes worth of soda hunting. There is also a new test market brand from Coca-Cola called Vault, which the Surgers seem to like a lot. This in turn has caused Mr. Karkovack to build and launch VaultKicks.org. So it looks like Fort Dew will again be under surge, er, siege.

You might want to check out SaveSurge.org and VaultKicks.org. Obviously these are great examples of “citizen marketers” who are leading companies like Coca-Cola into the brave new world of economic democracy.

As for my part, I’m glad to have played a small role in the whole thing. You see, when I was presented with the idea from Gayter and Gallo, I fortunately did a very smart thing.

I didn’t kill it.

A Heartland Welcome.

All of us at Blue Horse are extremely happy to announce that we are partnering with a new client, Heartland Credit Union.

Based in Madison, member-owned Heartland serves southwestern Wisconsin and eastern Iowa from seven locations. They were established in 1936 to serve a local Madison telephone company. Today they offer a full array of financial services including savings, checking, auto and home loans, business and agriculture loans as well as financial management services.

Heartland is a very progressive organization. They are a sponsor of Money Smart Week, a statewide financial literacy effort. If you’d like to learn more about them, go to www.heartlandcu.org.

Blue Horse will handle advertising development, execution and placement for the good folks at Heartland. We look forward to doing excellent work for them and to sharing a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Thank you for choosing Blue Horse!

What weighs 20,769 pounds and could very well be the answer to your marketing problems?

You have to admit that in the continuing battle between “big” and “smart”, the big guy usually wins. If you have an unlimited pile of cash, it makes any job a lot easier. Get Warren Buffett to bankroll your company’s marketing and your margin for error is well, rather wide.

Or to put it another way, what came first, the gecko or 9 billion dollars?

Lacking the billions competitors are pouring into the insurance category, smarter thinking was called for on American Family Insurance. So for the fourth quarter of this year, we made the message the medium.

It begins with a new positioning for the brand. American Family Insurance has decided to focus on two key words, words that resonate with their management, their employees and their customers.

Those two words are “clear” and “fair.”

Clear and fair are values that American Family can rightly stand for in everything they do. It is how they treat each other and how they treat their customers. They are words that separate them from their competition in a very meaningful way.

The folks at Blue Horse took those two words and applied them to the printed page in some very delightful ways. Leading the charge was a freestanding newspaper insert. Printed on clear acetate, the piece literally visualized the “clear” and “fair” promise.

It wasn’t the easiest thing to make happen. We had to interview a lot of people in the newspaper business to see whether this could be done. Indeed, not every publication could handle the job (for those we did a die-cut insert). The shipment to the Las Vegas Review-Journal weighed in at a whopping 20,769 pounds for two drops! It took up 7 skids and 560 cartons.

Then we got some negative feedback from people who thought the acetate wasn’t biodegradable or recyclable. (It is!) We’re also getting a lot of notice from customers, potential customers and stakeholders alike. In other words, all the people who really need to know about the new brand position.

If you’d like to see the range of this work, just check it out on our Web site. Or better yet, contact us and we’ll come and show you the entire effort in person, including a unique four page “spread” ad in magazines that literally displays “both sides” of the clear and fair message to the reader.

In a world of exploding media choices and escalating expense, you have to think smarter if you’re not the biggest spender on the block.

And even if you are.

Transitions: Men of Tomorrow

In 1989, a youth organization was formed in Milwaukee. Known as Transitions: Men of Tomorrow, MOT is a comprehensive program designed to prepare African American and other minority males for a successful transition from youth to adulthood.

Recently, I was honored to be asked to join the board of this fine organization. The connection was made by Kathy Galliard from Mosiac Communications. She introduced me to Bill Jenkins, MOT’s president. He in turn had me chat with Rev. Vincent Montgomery, the Executive Director. I couldn’t help, but be impressed.

No one would disagree with the observation that education is of critical concern. As the needs of our schools increase, so do taxes. Oftentimes, the quality of the schools suffers as we wrestle with funding issues. The gap between rich and poor widens. Increasingly, well-to-do families send their children to private schools to escape the either real or imagined failings and dangers that plague the public schools.

One thing I’ve learned is that there is an additional “layer” forming for minority children. They lack the proper role models. They are simply not exposed to men and women who are in rewarding and productive careers. Why work hard in school when the only role models you see are entertainers and sports figures? Why care about your community when your community doesn’t seem to care about you?

And what of the parents? How are they to cope with all of this? When our children see us being a success, they internalize the reasons behind education, networking and hard work. But if they see poverty and discrimination, what is there to motivate hard work?
Where are the opportunities that “the other side” has in abundance? And how are the parents supposed to provide guidance when reality pushes in another direction?

Here are the objectives of MOT:

1. To foster a sense of belonging, accountability, responsibility, cultural pride, increased self-esteem, and respect of God, self and community.

2. To provide a mechanism for adult males to become actively involved as mentors.

3. To increase community awareness of the need and benefit for direction.

4. To provide a vehicle for broad community involvement across all social-economic levels throughout Greater Milwaukee.

5. To assist parents and the community in preparing our youth for their transition from youth to adulthood.

Divided into age groups, participants attend educational workshops, hear guest speakers, go camping, participate in community service projects and go on an annual cultural field trip (next one: Washington, D.C.). Sessions are held Saturday mornings during the school year and during an abbreviated summer program.

The program happens with volunteer mentors. And it depends on the generosity of its supporters. Currently, MOT does not have its own building. It works out of a church basement.

Know anyone with a building they’d like to donate?

For more information, contact:

Transitions, Inc.
P.O. Box 090734
Milwaukee, WI 53209
(414) 322-2950