Advertising: Appealing to a Sense of Value for Car Care

Appealing to a Sense of Value for Car Care

Robby Novak, 10, plays a character named Kid Mechanic who advises drivers to go to Meineke for routine maintenance “so small things don’t get big.”

DURING Fashion Week, everyone is trying to figure out which color will be, as the expression goes, the new black. On Madison Avenue, the new black seems not to be a color, but the word “smart.”

Using “smart” for marketing purposes is not new. Two decades ago, Magnavox advertised its electronic products with the slogan “Smart. Very smart.” Daimler brought out the Smart car in 1998. And years before either, Macy’s told shoppers, “It’s smart to be thrifty.”

In fact, it is such a use of “smart” â€" to connote being clever by being value-conscious â€" that is now growing in popularity. The reason is that five years after the financial crisis, consumers still remain cautious about spending but are willing to consider advertisements that promote buying something as worthwhile in the long term.

The trend is embodied by a campaign being introduced this week for Meineke Car Care Centers by an agency in Culver City, Calif., called Pitch. The campaign, with a budget estimated at $10 million through the end of the year, carries the theme “Drive a little smarter,” which is underlined by a new logo featuring the mnemonic device of a light bulb with a wrench in place of the filament.

“We’re repositioning the brand as helping consumers with proactive maintenance of their cars,” said Jason Moskal, chief marketing officer at the Meineke division of Driven Brands in Charlotte, N.C., rather than being a brand they turn to “when they have a problem.”

Preventive measures “bring the overall cost of maintenance down over the years and help maintain the car longer,” he added, which is important at a time when budget-conscious owners have been keeping their rides for longer than usual; according to R.L. Polk, the average car on the road is 11.4 years old, a record.

Meineke is famous for commercials that began appearing in the 1980s in which consumers proclaimed, “I’m not going to pay a lot for this muffler.” That phrase became shorthand in subsequent decades, particularly during recessions, for a consumer attitude centered on assertively searching for savings.

The new theme is “a different way into value” than its predecessor, Mr. Moskal said, adding: “We’re looking at value as being smart. It’s about what you do proactively, like spending a few dollars now to change your transmission fluid, which saves you money in the long run. The analogy I use is that it’s like going to the doctor for an annual physical.”

The campaign expresses the new theme in several ways. For instance, print ads offer explanations of automotive terms like the difference between brake pads and brake shoes. In commercials, a character named Kid Mechanic â€" played by Robby Novak, a 10-year-old known for humorous online videos from SoulPancake in which he portrays Kid President â€" advises drivers to head to Meineke for routine maintenance “so small things don’t get big.”

In one commercial, the child mechanic likens cars to U.F.O.’s: “they pick people up and nobody really knows how they work.” In a second spot, he promotes the merits of regular oil changes. In a third commercial, he declares: “Transmissions cost an arm and a leg. Transmission fluid costs like a finger, or something.”

In addition to the commercials and print ads, the campaign includes digital ads, a redesign for the Meineke Web site, a mobile scheduling app and plans to interact with customers via social media like Twitter.

The new theme is meant to be “invitational and positive,” said Xanthe Wells, executive creative director at Pitch, telling drivers this: “If you understood a little more about your car, you’d have a better experience.

“Our message is to inspire consumers to put in the little bit along the way to save a lot in the long run,” she added. “If consumers are smarter about taking care of their cars, the value is built in there.”

“The creative challenge is, how do you make education entertaining, how do you make it something people want to hear, approachable, friendly,” Ms. Wells said. “The idea of having a kid talk about car care felt the most right.”

In developing the campaign, “we had a picture of Robby up on the board and we said, ‘We should get someone like Kid President,’ ” she added. “It’s a perfect fit not because it’s borrowed interest or because he’s a YouTube personality but because he’s the representation of smart, making complicated things simple.”

Pitch is also the creative agency for another division of Driven Brands, Maaco, which specializes in body repair work and painting cars. In May, Maaco introduced a campaign from Pitch that carried the theme “It’s time for a Maacover.”

The Meineke campaign also embodies another trend, a kind of comeback or return for the concept of using brand characters and mascots in ads. In addition to Kid Mechanic, other newcomers include the Wisest Kid in the Whole World, for Campbell’s condensed soups; Johnny Conquest, a Volkswagen salesman in humorous commercials for Volkswagen of America; and Captain Zantac, an animated fireman, in commercials for Zantac antacid.

Meineke spent $29.7 million last year to advertise in major media, according to the Kantar Media division of WPP, compared with $28.9 million in 2011, $24.4 million in 2010 and $28 million in 2009.

Advertising: Appealing to a Sense of Value for Car Care

Appealing to a Sense of Value for Car Care

Robby Novak, 10, plays a character named Kid Mechanic who advises drivers to go to Meineke for routine maintenance “so small things don’t get big.”

DURING Fashion Week, everyone is trying to figure out which color will be, as the expression goes, the new black. On Madison Avenue, the new black seems not to be a color, but the word “smart.”

Using “smart” for marketing purposes is not new. Two decades ago, Magnavox advertised its electronic products with the slogan “Smart. Very smart.” Daimler brought out the Smart car in 1998. And years before either, Macy’s told shoppers, “It’s smart to be thrifty.”

In fact, it is such a use of “smart” â€" to connote being clever by being value-conscious â€" that is now growing in popularity. The reason is that five years after the financial crisis, consumers still remain cautious about spending but are willing to consider advertisements that promote buying something as worthwhile in the long term.

The trend is embodied by a campaign being introduced this week for Meineke Car Care Centers by an agency in Culver City, Calif., called Pitch. The campaign, with a budget estimated at $10 million through the end of the year, carries the theme “Drive a little smarter,” which is underlined by a new logo featuring the mnemonic device of a light bulb with a wrench in place of the filament.

“We’re repositioning the brand as helping consumers with proactive maintenance of their cars,” said Jason Moskal, chief marketing officer at the Meineke division of Driven Brands in Charlotte, N.C., rather than being a brand they turn to “when they have a problem.”

Preventive measures “bring the overall cost of maintenance down over the years and help maintain the car longer,” he added, which is important at a time when budget-conscious owners have been keeping their rides for longer than usual; according to R.L. Polk, the average car on the road is 11.4 years old, a record.

Meineke is famous for commercials that began appearing in the 1980s in which consumers proclaimed, “I’m not going to pay a lot for this muffler.” That phrase became shorthand in subsequent decades, particularly during recessions, for a consumer attitude centered on assertively searching for savings.

The new theme is “a different way into value” than its predecessor, Mr. Moskal said, adding: “We’re looking at value as being smart. It’s about what you do proactively, like spending a few dollars now to change your transmission fluid, which saves you money in the long run. The analogy I use is that it’s like going to the doctor for an annual physical.”

The campaign expresses the new theme in several ways. For instance, print ads offer explanations of automotive terms like the difference between brake pads and brake shoes. In commercials, a character named Kid Mechanic â€" played by Robby Novak, a 10-year-old known for humorous online videos from SoulPancake in which he portrays Kid President â€" advises drivers to head to Meineke for routine maintenance “so small things don’t get big.”

In one commercial, the child mechanic likens cars to U.F.O.’s: “they pick people up and nobody really knows how they work.” In a second spot, he promotes the merits of regular oil changes. In a third commercial, he declares: “Transmissions cost an arm and a leg. Transmission fluid costs like a finger, or something.”

In addition to the commercials and print ads, the campaign includes digital ads, a redesign for the Meineke Web site, a mobile scheduling app and plans to interact with customers via social media like Twitter.

The new theme is meant to be “invitational and positive,” said Xanthe Wells, executive creative director at Pitch, telling drivers this: “If you understood a little more about your car, you’d have a better experience.

“Our message is to inspire consumers to put in the little bit along the way to save a lot in the long run,” she added. “If consumers are smarter about taking care of their cars, the value is built in there.”

“The creative challenge is, how do you make education entertaining, how do you make it something people want to hear, approachable, friendly,” Ms. Wells said. “The idea of having a kid talk about car care felt the most right.”

In developing the campaign, “we had a picture of Robby up on the board and we said, ‘We should get someone like Kid President,’ ” she added. “It’s a perfect fit not because it’s borrowed interest or because he’s a YouTube personality but because he’s the representation of smart, making complicated things simple.”

Pitch is also the creative agency for another division of Driven Brands, Maaco, which specializes in body repair work and painting cars. In May, Maaco introduced a campaign from Pitch that carried the theme “It’s time for a Maacover.”

The Meineke campaign also embodies another trend, a kind of comeback or return for the concept of using brand characters and mascots in ads. In addition to Kid Mechanic, other newcomers include the Wisest Kid in the Whole World, for Campbell’s condensed soups; Johnny Conquest, a Volkswagen salesman in humorous commercials for Volkswagen of America; and Captain Zantac, an animated fireman, in commercials for Zantac antacid.

Meineke spent $29.7 million last year to advertise in major media, according to the Kantar Media division of WPP, compared with $28.9 million in 2011, $24.4 million in 2010 and $28 million in 2009.

With iTunes Radio, Apple Takes Aim at Pandora

A decade ago, Apple transformed the music business with its iTunes store. Now what the music industry expects from Apple is less of a revolution than a helping hand.

Tim Cook, Apple's chief, right, and the musician Elvis Costello.

A preview of iTunes Radio, which will make its debut on Sept. 18.

Apple’s newest music feature, iTunes Radio, will be released on Sept. 18 as part of its iOS 7 system update, the company announced on Tuesday. The service is a sleek take on Internet radio, and Apple’s ability to place the app on millions of its devices gives it an enormous potential audience from Day 1.

“It’s a huge opportunity on a global basis to accelerate the transition of radio listeners and advertising dollars from terrestrial to digital,” said Stephen Bryan, the executive vice president for digital strategy at the Warner Music Group, which releases music by Green Day, Bruno Mars and hundreds of other acts.

The service is a threat to Pandora Media, which dominates Internet radio. But music and advertising executives say that the magnitude of that threat is unclear, given Apple’s relatively late entry into streaming music and Pandora’s strong market position. Both offer free streams of music tailored to a user’s taste and supported by advertising. In August, Pandora had 72.1 million active users â€" almost all in the United States â€" who streamed 1.35 billion hours of music, according to data released by the company.

“At this point Pandora is one of the leading recipients of mobile advertising revenue, and is one of the most popular apps, period, across devices,” said Clark Fredricksen, a vice president at eMarketer, a research firm. “It’s tough to see it getting killed.”

Instead, record labels and music publishers hope that Apple’s immense marketing power will attract more advertisers and help popularize Internet radio around the world. ITunes Radio will at first be available only in the United States, but it is expected to be introduced internationally soon. Apple operates iTunes stores in 119 countries.

“It’s hard to say that Pandora hasn’t helped make Internet radio mainstream already,” said Glenn Peoples, the senior editorial analyst at Billboard. “But iTunes Radio can help it grow and can change the impressions of it in the minds of advertisers and sponsors.”

Apple is the single largest retailer of music, its downloads providing labels a crucial source of revenue as sales of CD’s drop. One feature of iTunes Radio that music companies are particularly grateful for is a prominent button to buy a song as it streams. Subscribers to Apple’s iTunes Match feature, for $24.99 a year, can have that song instantly linked through the cloud to all of their Apple devices.

In the economy of digital music, one 99-cent download can be worth more than hundreds of streams. Apple’s deals with labels call for it to pay 0.13 cents for every song streamed on iTunes Radio during its first year of operation, according to reports in Billboard and elsewhere based on Apple’s licensing contracts. That is more than Pandora’s current rate of 0.12 cents, and Apple will also pay music companies a portion of the service’s advertising revenue.

Apple is entering an already crowded Internet radio market, which besides Pandora includes Clear Channel Communications’ iHeartRadio app; radio functions offered by on-demand services like Spotify; and others like Songza that supply ready-made playlists for various occasions, like working out or hosting a dinner party. This week Microsoft expanded its Xbox Music service, which includes a radiolike function, to work on Apple and Android devices.

So far Pandora’s investors have not fled. Since news of Apple’s plans first emerged a year ago, Pandora’s stock has roughly doubled. On Tuesday it closed at $20.35, up 1 percent for the day.

Behind Time Inc. Purchase of American Express Publishing Lies a Long History

After a two-decade-long relationship between the magazine giant Time Inc. and American Express, Time Inc. plans to close quickly on its purchase of American Express’s publishing division.

“This 20-year courtship is finally being consummated in matrimony,” said Ed Kelly, president and chief executive of the American Express Publishing Corporation. He joked in a phone interview that after such a long engagement, there was no reason to delay the wedding; Time says it expects to close the deal by Oct. 1.

On Tuesday, both companies announced that Time Inc. would buy for an undisclosed sum all of American Express’s publishing titles, which include Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure along with magazines sent to selected American Express card members, like Departures and Black Ink. Time Inc. is adding these magazines to its lifestyle group, with magazines like Sunset, Real Simple and Southern Living.

American Express and Time Inc. have worked together since 1993 through a management services agreement that let them team up on advertising and back-office deals. More recently, the two companies worked on a marketing campaign for the hotel chain Westin that involves Time Inc. magazines like Fortune and Real Simple and American Express magazines like Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure.

Since 2008, when American Express changed its status to a bank holding company, it has been constrained from engaging in any businesses that are considered nonfinancial activities. That has prevented its magazines from experimenting with new sources of revenue as its competitors have.

“With how the media business is transforming itself and the regulatory environment we have been dealing with at American Express, the clock was kind of ticking for us to decide what way we wanted to go,” Mr. Kelly said.

For the past year, board members from both companies, including John Hayes, chief marketing officer for American Express, and Howard Rosen, senior vice president for Time Inc.'s finance operations, have been discussing the purchase.

Time Inc. has undergone its own internal turmoil in recent years. Laura Lang, who was hired as Time Inc.'s chief executive in December 2011, was involved with the early negotiations. Then in March, Time Warner announced that it planned to spin off its struggling Time Inc. magazine division into a separate publicly traded company and that Ms. Lang would resign.

Joe Ripp, a former Time Warner executive who rejoined the company after Labor Day as Time Inc.'s new chief executive, worked on the final details. But there shouldn’t be too much of a cultural adjustment for both sides. Mr. Kelly noted that he started his career at Time Inc.'s People magazine.

Mr. Ripp was also involved in creating the 1993 management agreement between Time Inc. and American Express. He said in a statement about the purchase “we know their business well.”

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Audience Tunes In for Arsenio Hall’s Late-Night Return

Fans came out for the return of Arsenio Hall on Monday, lifting the first night of his new syndicated show to the top of the late-night ratings in the biggest 25 cities.

These early ratings are limited in reach, and don’t include total viewer totals, but they show that Mr. Hall clearly made a dent on Monday. In the 25 cities, “The Arsenio Hall Show” averaged a 1.0 rating in the important category of viewers between the ages of 18 and 49.

That rating was bigger in those cities than Jimmy Kimmel on ABC (0.8); Jay Leno on NBC (0.6); or David Letterman on CBS (0.5).

In addition, Mr. Hall’s overall rating of a 1.9 almost doubled what the stations in his lineup had averaged a year ago: a 1.0.

The numbers are evidence that Mr. Hall, 57 and nearly two decades away from late-night TV, can still pull in some viewers. Obviously they pale in comparison to first-night numbers for other late-night rivals, who have scored several times as high in the ratings for their premiere shows. For example, when Conan O’Brien took over the “Tonight” show in 2009 he attracted over nine million viewers and scored a 3.8 rating that 18-49 group.

Mr. Hall’s performance was impressive on another level, however: it came against the powerhouse competition of “Monday Night Football” on ESPN. The first game of the doubleheader scored the best rating â€" 11.6 â€" for an opening game since they moved to cable in 2006.

Mr. Hall mainly faced the second game, whose numbers were a bit less formidable but still potent: a 7.7 rating.

Football demonstrated its overall power all weekend as the “Sunday Night Football” opener on NBC pulled in more than 25 million viewers. That was good for ninth place for Sunday night games from all time.

NBC got a more mixed result Monday night for the premiere of its much-publicized new game show, “Million Second Quiz.” “Quiz” managed to win its hour and finished second over all among broadcast shows on the night. But it averaged only 6.5 million viewers, and lost about a half a million of them in its second half-hour.

If NBC is hoping to relive the phenomenon of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” it has some distance to go.

Yankees Moving to WFAN, Bumping the Mets

The Yankees are close to completing an agreement that will take them from WCBS-AM to WFAN next season, knocking the Mets off WFAN, their longtime radio home, for a destination to be determined.

Lonn Trost, the Yankees’ chief operating officer, declined to give any details of the change, but said, “We’re getting close.”

The Yankees would provide a stronger, higher-rated, more expensive team for WFAN, which, like WCBS, is part of CBS Radio. The Yankees deal, if completed, would be for about 10 years and $15 million to $20 million annually, according to a person briefed on the negotiations. Newsday was first to report the move.

The Yankees moved to WCBS from WABC after the 2001 season.

Whether John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman continue as the Yankees’ announcers on WFAN will ultimately be up to the team. The Yankees will consult with the station but have final approval on their broadcast team.

The Mets have been on WFAN since the station’s inception in 1987. They could go to ESPN New York, at 98.7 FM, or WOR-AM, which both showed interest in the Yankees. The rights for the Mets’ games would be less expensive.

Jeff Wilpon, the Mets’ chief operating officer, said it was “fairly accurate” that the team would be leaving WFAN.

“Right now, we’re still negotiating with numerous parties about what we’re going to do with our radio,” Wilpon said during a firehouse visit in Manhattan with Matt Harvey, David Wright and Zack Wheeler. Wilpon said the situation could be resolved in about six weeks.

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Kimmel Fools Internet With Video of Twerking Gone Wrong

Jimmy Kimmel revealed on his late-night talk show on Monday that he was the brains behind one of the best Internet pranks in recent memory.

The prank involved a video of a young woman recording herself practicing various provocative “twerking” moves for the benefit of her boyfriend, which results in disaster: her roommate enters the room, knocks her over onto a glass coffee table covered in mood-setting candles and her yoga pants catch fire â€" instigating terrified screams from the victim.

The video, with the hard-to-skip title “Worst Twerk Fail EVER - Girl Catches Fire!,” was a sensation on YouTube, attracting more than nine million views. More than that, the video became a favorite feature piece for local TV shows around the country â€" as well as for some national ones like “The View” and “Inside Edition.” All were taken in by the prank.