TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

From the studios of Media Training Worldwide in New York City, this is Inside Communications. And I'm your host, Mike Baco. Since starting her own firm in 1987, Maureen Lippy has been spearheading campaigns designed for women. Today on Inside Communications, we go inside one of those campaigns. Her award winning campaign for Jenny Craig and its celebrity spokesperson, Kirsty Alley, coming up next on Inside Communications. Thanks for joining us today on Inside Communications.

Thanks for having me.

When you started your firm in 1987, you wanted to reach out in a relevant and emotional way in terms of marketing and pr. Why was that underserved at that point?

Well, I was an editor at Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and I particularly was a beauty editor. And I would get all these deliveries from these big companies and none of them were very exciting. None of them cut to the clutter. It was a shopping bag with some product and a press kit. And I thought there has to be a better way to reach the media in a creative way where your package and your product has a life of its own and cuts through the clutter and gets editors attention.

Now we see that still going on now, but is it swinging all the way in the opposite direction where sometimes editors are getting too much material, that they're overflowed with material and the message is getting cluttered in a way?

I don't think so. I think if you have a strategic creative delivery with your products, particularly in the area of beauty, although we're in all areas at Libby Taylor, but that was my last position at Harper's Bazaar. And I just felt these are the companies that are supposed to be the great marketers and they're doing such great things at Bloomingdale's and Saks and all the stores, but they're not marketing to the media in a very creative way. So no, I think there's always a place for innovation and a way to reach editors in a creative, fun way where you force them to open your package and see your product and relate to it in some way that is meaningful to them.

And one of the ways you did that was with Direct to Teens, Direct to Moms. How did that work? How did that come about? What was the brainchild behind that?

Well, for 30 years, I've been one of those women that believes that girls rule. And if you don't market to them in a creative, innovative way, they're going to just rule you out. So having all those years in the magazine world, it just made so much sense to move the same target demo to public relations. So we've been in the woman space for a long time, always trying to crack the code on what motivates women to buy and also, as I say, what motivates them to not buy your product. What is it about certain products that women just will not buy? And that is a constant study for us and we do a lot of research. And Direct to Women, dtw, dtm, Direct to Moms, and Direct to Teens is proprietary research that we offer our brands to try to understand women, to get into their souls, their hearts, their minds, to figure out where they're at and also finding them, where they're at, where they live, where their kids go to school. We're always trying to find moms, but always trying to be where a particular customer, new customer, could be. So now it's not about women's magazines the way it was 10 years ago. We've got to be in the media, but we've also got to be out on the streets finding women again where they live, play, work, worship.

And one of the times that you did that was in 2009 with an award winning campaign for Jenny Craig, really cracking the code, Best use of a celebrity. How did that come about? How did you crack the code on that? And how did that campaign become so great to the point that Kirstie Alley wound up on Oprah revealing herself in a great slimmed down body in a bikini?

Well, how it started is their business was tanking. They knew that if they didn't do something immediate and something exciting and something that would get the attention of the media, they could be out of business. And they knew that they were. Your grandmother's diet plan, you know, it was an older woman's plan and, you know, no company is going to grow with that demo. So they hired us and they hired a new advertising agency. And what we had said to them was, if you want to get features, you've got to get a celebrity, but you have to have a strategic celebrity. A celebrity that just on her own is going to get attention. And that was when Christy was doing Fat Actress and she was just out of control. And we felt that we could rein her in, really, media train her very well and get her on a diet and change her life. And we knew that the media would be watching her through all those stages. So instead of getting people at the end of the diet when she lost the £75, we would get all the magazines and the covers of these magazines throughout the journey.

How important is that to get almost a cheering section for her to have women really identify with her, maybe one month they see a great improvement. Next month, maybe she goes down a little bit. There's some unflattering pictures. But then in the end, you. You do see that end result. How important is that?

Very important, because you're creating an emotional connection with a future customer. And women, you know, they've always said that Oprah shows when she gains weight are through the roof. When she loses that weight, her ratings go down because women don't relate to her anymore. She makes them feel guilty because she's lost the weight. So I think you retain women throughout the journey of the weight loss, and they are totally committed to watching her, even the failures, you know, when she would gain some weight. That's the way it goes when you're on a diet. You go up, then you go down. You know, it's just the way it is. So women really related to Kirstie. So it was a great success story because all the entertainment magazines were covering her then. They were all competing to get new photographs of her. And of course, Oprah. We had her on Oprah three times, and I think she was on five People magazine covers.

So.

So it was a great way for an old brand to hire a celebrity who was not 22 years old. She was, I think, in her early 50s at the time, because I think she just turned.

And do you think the campaign specifically worked for that? If you hired an actress that, let's say, had some weight problems and she was in her 30s, would it have resonated as much as someone that was as known as Kirstie Alley?

I don't know. I just. Everything. The stars were aligned with Kirstie. She was so outspoken. She was outrageous. A lot of companies would not do a deal with her because they would be afraid that she would fail. And she would say, oh, the diet didn't work. So we always had a contingency plan for failure. We had a real, you know, a very serious plan as to if there was a crisis with her and she just gave up. But I think because it was Kirsty, I think because she's so emotional, she's so outspoken and so outrageous that a lot of women in her, you know, into her, in her condition, not only her age group, I think much younger women related to her, too. So, again, you know, everyone wants to create that emotional bond and connection to their customers, and I think that Kirsty was able to do that.

We've certainly seen celebrity endorsers for decades now. What change have you seen in terms of that relationship with Celebrities, is it now just becoming Kim Kardashian tweeting out paid advertising advertisements basically on our Twitter, and celebrities showing up and showing off different watches and clothes that they're wearing? Or what have you seen over the last few decades as the emotional changes?

I keep thinking it's going to, I think, I keep thinking that we can't go on like this. We can't be adoring celebrities and buying products that they endorse. But it doesn't seem to go away. I think the weekly entertainment magazines just keep that alive. They keep showing these celebrities wearing certain clothes and they're always telling you what clothes they're wearing or what watches, what makeup it. For some reason, young women particularly are still very just in love with these celebrities and, and believe in what they're selling. There's a point of saturation. There's a point where I think older people say, my God, will it ever end? But they're still, they're selling products, but I think it has to be a very strategic selection. You just can't go, go out and buy a celebrity. We're also finding that a lot of our brands, they don't want celebrities, they want real women. They want real women who have accomplished something. Ordinary women doing extraordinary things. So we're finding that more and more of our brands are moving away from the celebrities and want to go direct to consumers via digital and talking to them directly, engaging with them online. They'd rather put their money into that than spending 2, 3, 4, $500,000 on a celebrity. That's. But it's a one off.

And is that making your job harder or easier? Going back to more or less the nuts and bolts of making that emotional connection, not always having to rely on a celebrity?

I think it's great. We prefer it. We are not one of those agencies that says, oh, we've got to go out and get a celebrity. It makes it easier for us to have a celebrity. But I think to go after real women and to go after the demo that our brands are looking for is the better way to go. I personally would try to move our clients away from celebrities because I think it's just, it's getting old, it's getting stale. It's not. Everyone's looking for authenticity and I think young people see right through it. It's much harder to get young people to believe in that endorsement. They know they're getting paid and sometimes they get really turned off by it. So you have to be very, very careful. It's a, it's A tricky road to go down these days. So it's completely changed.

How has the industry changed now that people are becoming more savvy? You mentioned younger women, teenagers, people that are coming into the workforce have had social media in their life, have had the Internet in their life pretty much since they can remember. How's that changing how you go about making that emotional connection with them?

Well, we have to find them. We have to find them wherever they are, and we have to do interesting things for them. And if it's young males, we know social media is the way to go. It could be through gaming. It could be something, you know, something that makes sense to them and that excites them. It could be with sports, finding them some way in the sports arena. If it's young women, it can be a younger celebrity or that we use online, who is on Twitter, and people, young women are relating to her because she's tweeting all day long. And there are those celebrities that do that.

So you may go after someone that their daughter may know, but that the mom, the grandma might not have any idea because it's such a niche that they're in in terms of having 100,000 or a million Twitter followers, but you might not see them on TV or in commercials all the time.

Absolutely. And those celebrities that are on Twitter are the ones that we want to get to. And the bloggers, you know, I mean, five years ago, we didn't know what bloggers were, and now, particularly in the beauty category, the fashion category, anything that has to do with lifestyle and stuff, style, bloggers are ruling that arena. It used to be it was the media, it was editors, but now bloggers have tremendous power, and we are building close relationships with our important bloggers.

How important is it to reach out to those bloggers, those influencers is what they're called online. How important is it to go after them to get placements on their blog, reviews on their blog, versus, say, getting someone on the Today show or the local news in a specific area? Have you been seeing it sort of crossing paths in terms of making that the important avenue to hit in terms of getting onto those blogs and those influencers?

I think that it's great to be in women's magazines. It's great to be on the Today show. You have to be everywhere. But you can't underestimate the value of bloggers. And we keep thinking that their influence is going to go away, but it's not. It's getting bigger, it's getting stronger. We have to know them. We have to live with them, we have to market to them in creative ways. We have to get them to love our brands, but we have to be authentic and we have to be transparent. We have to make sure that they understand that they're looking for products that work and products that are relevant and products that they can comfortably speak about.

Do you give a little bit more leeway to the bloggers and the influencers than you would say, a traditional media outlet in terms of getting them a product a little bit earlier, allowing them to test it out to. To have a little bit more interaction with people in corporate or with a celebrity endorser? Is it basically still the same level?

I feel for us, the editors and the bloggers are. We relate to them the same way, very similar ways that the very influential editors will give products too early, as we will to the bloggers and get them to try it. We'll start seeding products before they hit market because again, we're trying to build up our influential base so that when the product hits the market, they'll start blogging about it and it'll. You'll start reading about it in women's magazines. So I would say they're equally as important and we market to them in very similar ways.

What, what do you see coming forward? You mentioned five years ago we didn't even know what a blog was. What do you see? Not necessarily five years out, because with technology, who can really predict what's coming five years from now, but let's just say in the next year, after the holidays, going into 2012. What do you see as some of the bigger changes?

Well, I think when you think about what's the one thing that almost everybody in the country has, it's a cell phone. So I think mobile marketing is going to get stronger, it's going to get more direct. And I think we're initiating programs right now that are so exciting and it can involve gaming, it can involve all sorts of interesting things. But we know whoever we're going after, that's the one thing they have. If you're going after hairstylists, for instance, you don't know that they have computers. And that's a, you know, a small group, but a group of very influential people. In the beauty category, we don't know that they all have computers, but we know they have cell phones and we know that they're watching every day. They're picking it up, they're using it. So I think mobile marketing is going to get much stronger and get go direct to potential new customers. In a much bigger way. So that's what we see. And of course digital is and social marketing and social media is just never going to go away. We just have to be smarter, more creative, be very authentic with the programs that we develop and make them fun and engaging and that's what makes our business so, you know, as a PR professional the business has changed so dramatically in the last four or five years and it's just so exciting because there's so many new ways of reaching customers. And the bottom line is we're all about selling product. If we as PR professionals are not thinking about sales and selling cases of product for our brands, then I say to clients you should fire us because that's the bottom line on us. The ROI is so critically important right now.

And we say thank you to to you, Maureen, for joining us today on INSIDE Communications.

Thank you, Mike. It was my pleasure.