We Love Small Business

Our culture monitoring shows that small business is the new black. Since Small Business Saturday is this weekend, we thought we’d share our findings on what’s making this sector so hot. We see three key reasons.
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Unlocking New Possibilities with Cultural Context

This diagram reflects how we build strategies at Peter Mayer for our major clients. It formalizes the integration of cultural context into our internal processes and how we present unified brand and media strategies to clients.
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Making Sense of the “Selfieconomy”

A cultural opportunity can be defined as an opportunity that leverages a particular phenomenon or behavioral shift. In this blog post, we’re looking at selfies, seen today as the pinnacle of narcissism (which literally translates to “self love”). Marketers began incorporating selfies into their campaigns as early as 2014, with Samsung having a seminal moment in 2013 during Ellen Degeneres’ selfie at the Oscars that year.
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Peter Mayer’s Approach to Content Marketing

Content marketing requires a significant investment to be successful. There are pitfalls for brands that rush into it, and failing in these endeavors is a very public affair. An agency is vital for guiding brands through new content-focused marketing. Peter Mayer understands the content publishing cycle, and has a 360-approach brand strategy and a track record for growing business. We understand a solid content strategy is the backbone for any content marketing plan.
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Social Media and the High Bar Set For Motherhood

Motherhood is hard. And in many ways, we’re making it harder than it ever has been; we are rewriting the job description for the “good mom.” This shift is partly due to the role technology – and social media in particular – is playing in our lives.
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Marketing a University? Get Social.

This is the time of year when parents high-five each other – or pull out the tissues, as the case may be – as they see their kids off to school. New Orleans is again flooded with new degree hopefuls at our fantastic anchor schools, Loyola University and Tulane University. The smell of sorority rush hangs in the air.
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Focus on one thing and you won’t get dizzy

It seems that almost every six months or so there is another new platform to engage consumers. To steal their time, their eyeballs, their attention. And that can be particularly dizzying for agencies and our clients as we chase consumer behavior the way some disingenuous politicians chase voters. “Research says you like the environment – so do I!” Ugh. Fake and transparent. That’s not what I want advertising to be.
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The Rise of the Real Mom

At Peter Mayer, we believe culture is everything. It sets the context for everything we perceive. We’ve been exploring the culture of moms. After all, in the U.S., there are 75 million mothers, all of whom influence 85 percent of their households’ purchases. That’s about $2.1 trillion per year in spending, according to the Marketing to Moms Coalition.
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Why I Love the New Honda Fit Campaign

I have no ax to grind by the below review.

I don’t know the creatives at the agency or really anybody involved.

I am just enjoying the current work for Honda Fit featuring just-slacker-enough comedian Nick Thune. What I enjoy most is that the commercials manage to give us just a tiny dose of automobile info and a whole lot of attitude.
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The Curious Give and Take of Sports and Social Media

It’s fall which, at my house, means football.

So far this season, we’ve been enjoying watching our Oregon Ducks take down their opponents from the comfort of our chips-and-queso-dotted couch, but man, those stands at Autzen Stadium look good. Going to a game – the noise! The camaraderie! The tailgating! The collective breath-holding! – has long been the ultimate experience of a sporting event; sitting at home or even cheering in a bar with a hundred of your closest friends pales in comparison to being there for the real thing.
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The Power of Shared Cultural Values

If demographic data was the Holy Grail in the 20th century for targeting consumers, cultural insight is the go-to tool for connecting today. For instance, the demographic of women 25-54 holds a staggeringly wide range of beliefs and values. With the data to back up cultural insights, why waste time trying to forge a connection with all of them when you can communicate more meaningfully – and match brand values – with those with whom you share a common set of beliefs?
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You Are What You Eat: Three Societal Trends Impacting Our Thoughts on Food

Bacon, cupcakes, kale, quinoa. Food trends are easy to spot: when places like Panda Express and Jamba Juice incorporate kale into their dishes, magazines feature it on their covers and The New York Times writes about whether a food city like New Orleans eats it, well, that’s not a coincidence.

In reality, specific food trends such as these are indications of larger movements. Here’s a look at three.
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Getting Intimate with the Destination: Three Blurred Lines in Travel

Just as Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” was inescapable last summer, blurred lines in the travel industry is a theme that can’t be avoided. In this post, we look at three distinct (but blurry) areas that are redefining what it means to travel.
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What’s Your Cultural Lens?

This weekend, while you’re relaxing with friends or family, ask a question and become an observer. Ask what brands people admire and use – not just use frequently, but use purposefully and with passion. Push them beyond function, form, price, and the everyday. And sit back and listen to see if you can find the true origin of their bond.
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Peter Mayer Launched CenturyLink Prism

Eddie Snyder, VP Executive Creative Director, explains how Peter Mayer and CenturyLink bravely introduced Prism TV to real people in a room equipped with hidden cameras to see their reactions as they experienced next-generation TV for themselves. The responses were real. And the reactions were exactly as we had hoped – people got excited about a TV product that was unlike anything cable or satellite could offer them.
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Culture Fills in the Blanks

If you have ever wondered what role culture plays in our lives, consider this: in the early 1800s, asylums were filled with people who claimed to be Napoleon, the most influential man alive. Later, in the 1940s, psychotic patients would claim that their brains were being controlled by powerful radio waves, the prevailing technology.
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I Just Want To Be Friends

You’ve probably read recently that Peter Mayer released a new positioning rooted in our belief in cultural capital. The work we do, from strategy to execution and optimization, centers around unlocking the cultural connections people have with our clients’ brands.
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Why your advertising isn’t working: Consumers don’t want it

We are in the French Quarter. It’s a Friday evening in August; a breeze blows off the Mississippi River as we park and make our way to a restaurant. Above us towers a pair of buildings, gorgeous in that crumbling historic way.

I take out my iPhone and snap a picture.

“Ready?” my fiancé asks, locking his arm around mine and pulling me towards the restaurant.
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Are these shows scheduled on your DVR? Fall 2013 Broadcast Preview

Every season we evaluate the upcoming television programming. This year there are 26 new shows (14 comedies, 11 dramas and one reality). As a whole, we were underwhelmed by the new shows, but a few stood out as winners likely to get renewals.
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Web Browser Usage Stats – the Best Friend (and Worst Enemy) of Developers and QA Testers Everywhere

So I had an intriguing conversation over the weekend about supporting Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Firefox 3.6. It boggles my mind that some companies still support these outdated browsers for a number of reasons, one being that, in a number of cases, even the companies that built them have already moved on. …
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Helping brands make sense of the Big Data world

By a show of hands, how many people have heard the term “Big Data”? If your hand is not in the air then you are either lying, asleep in every single meeting or live under a rock. In all seriousness, big data has been the topic du jour in the marketing space for the last five years. But what does it really mean? How do we provide value to our clients in this space? What role do we play as the agency? Do we simply take every report and dump it into a magical, mystical tool built by Oracle, Teradata or Microsoft and then poof! Marketing insight!
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Some Days, We’ve Got It Good

Some days, we’ve got it really good. The more time we get to spend thinking about customers, talking about customers and arguing about who cares about what we sell and why, the better the day.

Days when an Internet connection becomes more than a $19.99 a month deal, more than the fastest upload speed you could ever need. It becomes a magical connection to your son in Afghanistan, your high school diploma, your first crush.
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You Are Here … But Where Is That?

Every destination, whether a popular travel mecca or a small community off the beaten path, has its own culture. Its history, its architecture, its people, its food – they all add up to a unique identity that cannot be authentically replicated anywhere else.

Throughout my years as a traveler and a tourism marketing professional, I’ve noticed that there are two types of destinations. First, there are ones that understand and embrace their culture to attract visitors. …
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Social Media ROI – Does It Exist?

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m awful at math. But throughout my 19 years of education and now in my career, math has unfortunately proven useful. And while I admit I based my unorthodox career choices on how far away I could get from simple arithmetic, I find myself using it almost daily. However, this blog post isn’t a PSA for the importance of girls and math, although I wish they had more of those when I was growing up; it is a message on the importance of social media ROI.
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Creating Cultural Brand Connections

Group Creative Director John Pucci discusses the principals and thought process behind the development of the Marucci Sports brand.

“Yes, we looked at other bats but that wasn’t going to help us. We didn’t want to be like any other bat. We looked at high-end performance automobiles … anything where technology and artistry and high performance kind of were married.”
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