This past weekend hundreds of mom (and dad) bloggers gathered in Laguna Niguel, CA for the fifth annual Mom 2.0 Summit. The conference was created as a place for bloggers and brands to connect to share best practices and to discuss partnership opportunities. As usual, the cream of the crop bloggers (such as Christine Koh of Boston Mamas and Liz Gumbinner of Cool Mom Picks), brands (like Dove and Whirlpool) and even celebrities (Amanda Peet and Nia Vardalos) were in attendance.

I had the honor of joining three intelligent and savvy marketers, Cindy Meltzer founder of the Social Craft, Monica Teague Clark Whirlpool Corporation’s Senior Manager of PR & Brand Experience, and Adam Keats Senior Vice President at Weber Shandwick, to speak on the panel titled New Partnership Opportunities: Influence Beyond your Blog and the Shifting Priority on Expressions Over Impressions. With the help of moderator Doug French, we spoke to a room of bloggers about how they can use their interests, expertise and offline affiliations to partner with brands in ways that extend beyond the blog. This includes extended and one-off brand ambassadorships and partnerships.

We discussed how blogger/brand relationships are like dating – it takes a sincere effort from both parties to make the relationship work. Monica from Whirlpool added a family metaphor, explaining that once bloggers are in the Whirlpool “family” they are always part of the team. Like a family, we are interested in bloggers beyond their blog, we want to learn about their entire sphere of influence – online and offline. There was plenty of blogger/brand “dating” at Mom 2.0. A reminder that the most enduring relationships are initiated face-to-face.

Filed under: Blogger Relations, Events and Conferences by Caitlin-Melnick - 4 Comments →

By Mike Rush, 360PR @Home Practice Leader

My trip out to Chicago for the Housewares Show was fitting.  With inclement weather following me wherever I seem to travel (which I   dodged by a hair), I hunkered down on my flight with 360PR’s latest book club read, What The Dog Saw by Malcom Gladwell, which details the rise of Ron Popeil, inventor of the Chop-O-Matic and king of direct response TV infomercials.  I couldn’t help but think of our favorite As-Seen-On-TV brand at 360PR, The Snuggie, and how we PR folks are all pitchmen (and women), too.

For those of you that have never attended the Housewares Show, especially foodies, there are a number of questions you find yourself pondering in awe:  “Do I have enough storage space below my kitchen countertop to fit this?”  “Will a magnificent lime green mixer still look good in 10 years?” and “If only they were passing out samples…and I had brought an extra suitcase or two.”

After a full day of combing the show floor (which could have easily been a week), I was able to surmise a few emerging trends for 2013:

Colors.  Lots of them.  Retro colors on appliances started to pop up a few years ago – and I wished my mother had held onto her avocado-colored blender from the ‘70s.  But, this year, housewares are emulating ‘80s fashion, with turquoise, fuchsia, baby blue, and hot pink to even KitchenAid mixers in leopard and zebra prints.  Every year, PANTONE, the world’s authority on color standardization, selects the Color of the Year – and for 2013, it’s Emerald Green.

Kids as Foodies. With the rise of food TV for the whole family, like Food Network’s Cupcake Wars or TLC’s Cake Boss, kids are becoming serious foodies.  And food creations are becoming a central part of after-school and weekend fun for parents and kids.  Take 360PR client FamilyFun magazine – they nailed this trend early (check out my favorite “Treat of the Month” from February – Punxsutawney Pudding Cup).  Baking, cooking, and even cleaning up the mess that follows are all activities marketers see as a celebrated and fun opportunities for families – from OXO and Bakelicious to smaller companies like Boston Warehouse’s “Smart Cookie” line of kitchenware, which are designed specifically for kids’ small hands but are clearly not toys.

Brands Playing Nice in the Sandbox.   Last year, 360 launched the first-ever Honeywell with Febreze fan, which merged the $38 billion Honeywell brand with Procter & Gamble’s $900 million Febreze® brand to deliver air circulation AND odor elimination.  This year’s Housewares Show spotlighted a few unexpected partnerships.  SodaStream announced a strategic agreement with Ocean Spray for “a portfolio of juice blend concentrates co-developed exclusively for the SodaStream home beverage carbonation system.”  iRobot’s Roomba also now comes with neat accessories – scent strips developed with Yankee Candle so that the mobile vacuum cleans the floor and freshens the air.

Filed under: Consumer Marketing, Events and Conferences, PR Industry, Retail by Admin - 2 Comments →

In the wake of blizzard “Nemo” earlier this month, I headed to New York for the perfect storm of fashion, toys and canines – Fashion Week, Toy Fair and the Westminster Dog Show. I’ve always found it curious that these three big events – drawing very different audiences – collide annually. Imagine being the producer at the Today Show or the editor on the photo desk at the Times who has to sort through the myriad of story pitches.

Over at Toy Fair, mobile play and digital integration – bringing technology to traditional toy brands or extending traditional toy brands to digital platforms – was a driving theme. The new Barbie Digital Makeover that uses augmented reality and an array of toy robots with iPhone faces got a lot of attention. Mashable’s Andrea Smith shares a great 60-second tour of these and other tech toys that dominated this year’s Toy Fair.

Whatever the toy, tech or not, digital touch points should absolutely play a role in communicating with parents – and grandparents and aunts and uncles. More people now use smart phones than brush their teeth every day (4.8 vs. 4.2 billion globally), as Hasbro Digital VP Victor Lee pointed out in his keynote at the Digital Kids conference. Where are all those gift-givers looking for toys? Try Google for starters, which logs more than 200 million “toy” related searches every month, according to Lee, who also talked about “the power of the mommy blogger” in influencing play purchases.

Bending gender stereotypes, some of the toy industry’s biggest players are morphing so-called ‘boy toys’ to girls’ play, which poses some messaging challenges, but I, for one, view as a positive. LEGO paved the way with its hugely successful LEGO Friends line last year (image below), and Hasbro unveiled a new NERF line for girls at this year’s Toy Fair. Call it girl power.

There were some toys being marketed as ‘green,’ but more being touted for educational value. And, a parent-appealing message I heard more than once was, how games, digital and traditional, foster parent-child interaction. That’s an opportunity for a lot of brands to endear themselves to moms and dads alike, not to mention grandparents.

Toy Fair was bustling at the Javits and on Twitter – where hundreds of bloggers, journalists, buyers and other industry-watchers shared their “best toy” finds and trends. Check out the stream on these hashtags for more on Toy Fair: #toyfair, #tf13, #tfny and #digitalkids.

Filed under: Events and Conferences by LauraTomasetti - 2 Comments →

You expect to see the likes of 50 Cent, will.i.am., Rev Run, Maroon 5 and LL Cool J at the Grammy Awards. But Vegas in January? Well, they were all there – and then some – for the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show.

360PR client Jabra mixed it up for its debut of the Jabra REVO Wireless, REVO and VOX stereo headphones, hosting a dance party at the Jabra CES booth.

CES is the ultimate sensory overload, especially for the journalists and bloggers who traverse the 1.92 million square feet of the CES exhibit space to discover the most promising and buzz-worthy gadgets and gear. Jabra’s new stereo headphones were among them, with tech-influencers like Eric Limer of Gizmodo giving them a test run. “Check Out These Sweet-Sounding Multi-Touch Headphones,” said Gizmodo’s Limer.

Besides Jabra’s headphones, I’m coveting one of the various 4K TV’s, especially the Samsung UN85S9 Ultra HD TV, that was unveiled at CES.

Here are a few snaps of Jabra’s booth and those awesome new headphones to add to your tech wish list this year.

Were you out at CES?  If so, what caught your eye…and ears?

Filed under: Events and Conferences by JohnLeRoy - 1 Comment →

Last time, we dug into three invaluable, big-picture takeaways from last month’s annual PRWeek Conference, all relating to culture. Now let’s take a look at three practice-oriented learnings that emerged from the conference, all ready-to-use:

- “Player-Coach” is the new model for senior agency leadership
- Marrying content with the right social and digital channels to optimize it is part art, part science
- Multi-platform content delivery is moving from innovation to expectation

Former Chief-of-Staff to Hillary Clinton (during her White House years), and current EVP of Marketing and Communications for Travelers, Lisa Caputo, revealed what she looks for in senior staff-people and agency personnel: “Player-Coaches.” In other words, strong mentors and business leaders who also stay involved in the day-to-day work. Things simply move too fast today, and are too complex, Caputo explained, to ever disengage, rendering decision making an ongoing process. Big cheers from the gallery at 360, where a roll-up-your sleeves work ethic is a longtime operating principle.

Dusty Tucker Jenkins, Target’s VP of Communications, gave insights from her company’s uber-successful social media experience. “At Target, content is queen,” and is used to build engagement, traffic and love, Jenkins shared, blazing an affinity-building path paved by storytelling. The foodie in me loved her way of looking at channels – “Twitter is a bite, Facebook is a snack, your website is a meal” – echoing Marshall McLuhan’s seminal, and still entirely relevant observation that medium is message.

A refreshingly (and often, hilariously) candid John Skipper, President of ESPN described his network’s leadership in multi-platform distribution, arguing that great content can, and must, find a home wherever the consumer wants it. His network pioneered numerous ways to satisfy ravenous sports’ fans hunger for sports programming, starting nearly two decades ago on the desktop, then mobile, and more recently becoming one the first networks to introduce a “watch anywhere” tablet app.

Asked with all those distribution channels why ESPN didn’t land the London Olympics, he brought the crowd – and his own rhetoric – right back down to earth. “Oh, that’s easy,” Skipper quipped. “NBC outbid us by a dollar.” Reminding us all that nowhere does money talk louder than in big time sports rights.

Filed under: Events and Conferences, PR Industry by Rob Bratskeir - No Comments →