Lay’s is kicking off a nationwide experiential tour featuring the company’s potato farmers.

The PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay division brand is using a mobile greenhouse designed to bring a rural farm experience to city-based consumers. The six-city tour kicked off July 26 in New York City’s Times Square. Other cities on the tour are Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas.

Visitors to the 70-foot-long, 10-foot-wide and 14-foot-high traveling greenhouse can see plants that result in the ingredients in the potato chips and meet a Lay’s potato farmer. Interactive displays also are available. Consumers will find out about the tour via public relations, Facebook, Twitter and any local media coverage. The Lay’s campaigns are supported by multiple agency partners: Juniper Park (advertising) OMD (media buying), The Marketing Arm (events) and Ketchum (public relations).

The tour is an extension of the ad campaign that launched last year featuring the farmers that grow potatoes for Lay’s, says Linda Bethea, Lay’s brand manager, potato chip portfolio.

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Endeavour Marketing & Media: A Full-Service Marketing and Advertising Agency in Murfreesboro, TN

With retailers forced to take a hard look at their bottom lines during the recession, catalogs are adjusting, but not disappearing, says Leslie Linevsky, founder of Catalogs.com. As postage rates climb and customers become concerned about the environmental impact, retailers are scaling back on the number of catalogs they mail out and are using them to drive traffic to their websites.

Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys New York, says retailers are becoming more creative when it comes to catalogs.

“I think because the Internet is so exciting and so immediate, we have to up the ante with direct mail and really make direct-mail pieces memorable, make them into keepers,” he says.

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Endeavour Marketing & Media, A Full Service Advertising Agency in Murfreesboro, Tennessee

YORK, Pa. (AdAge.com) — If a consumer types a brand name into the Google search box, a home-page link should — and likely will — appear as one of the top listings.

But does the same thing happen when typing in a generic keyword relevant to that business? Say, “home repair” for Home Depot or “gifts” for Harry & David? That depends on how well they’re optimized for Google. And in the case of those two examples, Home Depot and Harry & David website links don’t even make it to the first page of Google, according to a recent study by Covario that evaluated the search-engine optimization health of 100 branded websites.

There are many reasons why a brand might not appear high on Google search. It could be that too many companies are vying to optimize the same keyword, or that a competitor’s linking strategy is more robust, or that the brands simply aren’t buying keyword ads. Covario tested for what it determined were three key indicators of search health: content usage, link strategy and technical construction.

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Endeavour Marketing & Media – A Full-Service Advertising Agency in Murfreesboro, TN

Mar 22, 2010 -

In this series of two posts, I will explain the coming shift from pushing information using the principles of the semantic web. This first post is about the business drivers and the need for businesses to react better to increasingly complex customer demands.

1. We are shifting from pushing information to pulling it. Media companies know that they will have to give their consumers full control to pull stories, news, music, television, movies, and all their content to them when they want it, where they want it, the way they want it. This shift is coming to all industries, from medicine to banking to cars and toys.

2. The shift has already begun. The financial reporting industry has already embraced the semantic web and has built the largest commercial ecosystem of online, interoperable data so far. Many other industries are gearing up to follow. Your industry is no exception.

3. Products will be pulled. As you take a product off the shelf, you’ll be pulling on the entire supply chain, causing a ripple effect back to the manufacturer. Your customers will start pulling your products from you, rather than you pushing them. Customers will be much more involved in product development; cycles will shorten dramatically.

4. Big hint: This goes for marketing, too. Push marketing will become less and less relevant. Customers will say what they are looking for and you will have to respond on their terms, not yours.

5. Services will be pulled as well. A building will order its own supplies and maintenance services. Your services may be combined with those of your competitor without you even knowing it. Customers will dictate the terms and you will have to go along.

6. Most business processes will invert. The sales-oriented or solutions-oriented culture many companies have will be much less profitable, as market and customer-driven processes rise. Customers will soon be in a position to enter their desires in a way that can fit into your manufacturing or production processes directly.

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Harold Henn
Endeavour Marketing and Media

Happy Holidays!

I’m not surprised by all the ad accounts going into review in the automotive sector. I predict there will be many more in the next 12 months. Most will blame it on the recession, but I think that’s just an excuse. The fact is the business of marketing cars is too often mishandled because most agencies lack a fundamental understanding of how the industry operates.

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NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Much of the buzz you’re hearing now that “Where the Wild Things Are” has finally opened is about making sense of what the movie’s No. 1 position atop the box office means. By most standards, a haul of $32.5 million is the mark of a solid performer, but there’s a feeling that the PG-rated movie would have done even better had it lured more of a family crowd, which, one would think, would be a natural for a movie based on a beloved children’s book.

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