Tasty Food You Forgot About: Evanston, IL Edition

I'm in Evanston, IL this weekend visiting friends. As any of you who have made the trek from Hillsdale, MI to Chicago know, the journey begins in earnest at the intersection of US 12 and I-69 South. In otherwords, Coldwater, MI.

At this particular onramp, one is greeted by the smiling visage of a "Col" Harland David Sanders, the originator of the Original Recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken. On this particular Thursday, I couldn't help but stop and have a piece of the Colonel's greasy, fatty, and incredibly delicious Original Recipe Chicken.

This experience began about a week ago - my Dad and I love to talk advertising and marketing. We wonder... Why did KFC stop marketing the Original Recipe chicken? Is it health concerns? Looking at their latest product, Kentucky Grilled Chicken, makes me think that KFC has sold the poor Colonel up the river - posthumously - by abandoning their bread-and-butter chicken in favor of the health conscious "grilled" alternative. Of course, neither is good for you, so you should just eat the original recipe because it tastes better.

But all of this made me wonder two things:

1: When is the last time you saw an ad for original recipe chicken?
2: When was the last time you ate original recipe?

I have disturbing news: KFC hasn't run an ad for Original Recipe in a long time. It is sad to think that an entire generation may grow up too worried about fat to enjoy the Colonel.

Redbox has Blockbuster seeing red

I ran across an interesting article in the USA Today on Wednesday.

I'm sure we've all seen those Redbox kiosks popping up in WalMarts, conveneience stores, and even McDonald's all over the country. What is interesting about this article is not the implication that Redbox is a potential game changer - that much is obvious - but rather this comment from Chase Carey, President of News Corp.

"Our (DVD) product rented at a dollar is grossly undervalued. It's a real issue. And we're actively determining how to deal with it."

What Mr. Carey is saying here is not fleshed out in the USA Today article - Carey thinks that a DVD rental ought to be worth more than $1 to the consumer. Most likely, Carey would hope that Redbox revert to Blockbusteresque prices of 4.99 for a 2 day New Release rental. Is this just a case of corporate greed, or is there a real "race to the bottom" being created?

A New DVD costs Blockbuster/Redbox/Netflix/etc. aproximately $18. Redbox can rent that DVD aproximately 15 times, and averages $2 a transaction (meaning that the average Redbox customer keeps the DVD for 2 days, and pays $1/day). That means that, absent other overhead costs, Redbox stands to make $12 per DVD in each machine. By the way, there are 22,000 Redbox kiosks, each offering aproximately 700 DVDs for rental, encompassing up to 200 titles.

And of course, Redbox manages to sell some DVDs to outlets once they have been rented 15 times, so there's a little more wiggle room in the numbers than a $12 figure implies.

Compare that to Blockbuster's lifecycle - $18 for a DVD, $4.95 per rental. If Blockbuster can rent that same DVD 15 times, at $4.95, they would make over $55 on the disc, plus whatever they could sell it for.

So it's clear where the motivation for Carey's comment above comes in - there's a much smaller pie for everybody to get a slice of in Redbox's world than in Blockbuster's world. And unsurprisingly, 20th Century Fox and Universal are both engaged in boycotts or lawsuits with Redbox, attempting to eliminate the competitor before it's too late.

But my Dad once told me that "Once you've paid 99 cents for a Big Mac, it's never worth more than 99 cents to you." I think that's true here: it's already embedded in the mind of the consumer that a DVD rental can cost as little as $1. If that's the case, it would behoove the rental industry to come up with new and creative ways to make a profit - like Netflix.

Skittles - Taste the... Interwebs?

Social marketing is a giant experiment. Nobody really knows what they are doing or what they are looking to get in return, but everyone knows that to succeed on the Web today, it is essential to harness the power of world of mouth in social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and the other, lesser networks.

There's a standard pattern in these situations. Companies and non-profits are scrambling to integrate facebook and twitter with their web pages, and to offer token "interactivity" to gain a few more seconds of your attention.

But a few companies are taking the plunge, for better or worse, and devoting a large portion of their resources to social media marketing techniques. Take Skittles for example.

The google results for the search term "skittles" yield 3.81 Million hits, the first of which is skittles.com. The tag for their Web site is "Skittles.com - Interweb the rainbow. Taste the rainbow."

Interweb the rainbow? What?

Entering skittles.com gives you their new site (launched March 2), which is simply an overlay that sits in the top left corner of your web browser. It sits over the twitter feed for #skittles, the facebook fan page for Skittles, or the YouTube content from the skittles channel.

The potential for word of mouth is outrageous, but this strategy has flaws. Just a few days after launch, the Skittles site was deluged with profane tweets and the site had to be redesigned to make the Twitter feed less prominent. And of course, the major question is how Skittles will measure the ROI of this campaign. How do you track sales from twitter, facebook, and youtube?

In the end, is the Skittles strategy little more than an opportunity for every alcoholic twitter user to tweet out that they made skittles infused vodka?