Raj: Focus on Super Bowl silly, almost deadly ad move

September 11, 2000

BY MICHAEL KRAUSS

This is one of an ongoing series of articles on interactive marketing leaders who are doing things other marketers can learn from. They're not yet household names, but will be in the headlines tomorrow. They're the emerging leaders of an emerging marketing discipline

Name, rank and serial number: Zain Raj, 36, executive vice president and managing director of the Digital Branding Practice of Foote, Cone & Belding. Bachelor’s degree in Economics at Sydenham College, Bombay, India, 1984. Master’s degree in Business, Jamnalal Bajaj College, Bombay, 1986. Worked at Grey Advertising in Bombay and New Delhi, India, from 1985 to 1990. Launched Nintendo in India. Moved to the States in 1990; joined Wunderman Cato Johnson, then J. Walter Thompson, 1994; recruited to FCB, 1996.

Mantra: "If you build a brand correctly, you actually build a business."

On Digital Branding: "We wanted to create a best-in-class capability to provide strategy as well as execution services to a new breed of brands. Look at all the bad advertising. It treated consumers like idiots. Take Drugstore.com, with a naked woman sitting in a bathtub talking to people in her office—stuff that’s so counterintuitive to how consumers want to build relationships. I knew we could do better." Clients include Amazon.com, CBSMarketWatch.com, TheSource.com, 3Com (Digital Branding launched Palm Pilot) and WebTV.

Where digital brands go wrong: "They try too hard to attract attention. Nothing kills a bad product as much as advertising." That’s where the dot-coms erred during the Super Bowl, he says. "You’ve got to do more than build awareness and trial. Most of the brands that did (advertise during the last Super Bowl) are on the endangered species list now."

Where we are now: "Internet advertisers threw away all the rules. Now, we’re discovering there’s some value in the old rules. Among them: Advertising is not the only way. "Blowing your entire budget on a Super Bowl (ad) is silly. Use the entire marketing mix."

On who’s doing it well: "Yahoo!. They’re fulfilling a consumer need while starting a relationship. There are things we need to do to get the reciprocal interaction over time to build that relationship. Yahoo! does them."

Michael Krauss is a partner with Diamond Technology Partners in Chicago.
He can be reached at news@ama.org.