Stay with the White Elephant

It seems like everywhere I turn companies have decided to cancel their holiday parties this year. Citing dropping stock prices, sinking revenues, overall economy worries, etc., organizations of all sizes and types are joining the trend. Even companies that are doing well are forgoing the yearly festivities because they would be “inappropriate” or “insensitive” in this time of uncertainty and layoffs. Apparently scaling down from previous year’s party is not enough-

It is a tough decision.

Celebrating the holiday season has a very human basis to it that is independent of whether these are good times or bad. Companies can’t treat a traditional event, even one as unnatural and stilted as subjecting everyone’s spouse to my drunken 08 reflection and 09 outlook. You spend so much time around these people during the year that it is flat necessary to get a quick peak into who they spend all their other time with, and what they are like when they bring that new fiancé that nobody has yet seen. I understand not wanting to insult employee’s intelligence when they overhear sales totals, but what about your guys you can’t do without? Doesn’t their morale count?

Sure you have to be sensitive to budgetary concerns but that should mean scale back, not phase out.

Survey calls for recycling of old handsets

Nokia Communications Manager East and Central Africa, Dorothy Ooko briefs the press on the newly launched Take Back and Recycling Campaign in Kenya for old handsets. Please click here to view Nokias efforts for e-waste in Africa.

Part 2: Designing the Papa John's Collection Program

This multipart project consisted of on-air advertising, web messaging and, most importantly, internal communication for the Papa Johns Pizza team. We were confident in our ability to get the web portion of the campaign dialed in and get recycling collection boxes to the stores for customers who picked up. Management at Papa Johns was excited about the new promotion as well, but their internal communication would be intense. Papa John’s marketing team had to communicate to 81 store managers and also wanted to provide incentives for both stores and employees.

Looking at the radio spots, we needed to reach the 313K KYGO weekly audience. We calculated the 41 Colorado stores who deliver thousands of pizzas per week in coordination with the $17K in advertising budget dollars for the 40-day length of the campaign. We put our heads together and decided on the evening drive time. There would be a 3:30 to 7:00 p.m. 30-second drive time spot and the 60-second live version that would hit the drive time audience between the hours of 5:00 to 6:30 p.m. by the drive time DJ Catfish. We really liked the fact that a personality would carry our message. Sometimes the best you can do is make these decisions based on personal habits and advice from the experts in radio. I have a tendency to change the channel when I hear a commercial but when my DJ keeps talking into his segment I generally listen. According to our calculations, if 2% of the 313K listeners who heard our message, believe in our mission, and donated their phone over the life of the campaign, we would break even and at worst get some good exposure out of this campaign. If we got over 2% then it would be high fives all the way around.

We placed the Papa Johns banner on the Cellular Recycler home page linking to the campaign details page. If a participating customer would want to learn more on where the donations would be going or what would happen to their old phone they wouldn’t have to dig too deep to get their desired information.

We knew when writing this 30-second spot, there is little time and many words needed to get a point across. Our order of priority was: free breadsticks, give without giving during the holiday season, Papa Johns Pizza, supporting our troops, and THEN Cellular Recycler. Our name says what we do but the last thing on our mind was brand recognition because the focus was phone collection.

Read Part 1 of this series.