iMedia: Jaffe Juice: A Leap of Faith
Joseph Jaffe reports on Reebok's chief marketer revealing that its enormous success with its Terry Tate campaign - and its resulting use of the Internet as an ad medium - was largely an accident. The concept came off the shelf, rather than having been created based on a marketing objective. It was just something fun to do that was sold in to management partly due to a fumbled presentation in which CMO Micky Pant got tackled and, surreally, got an ovation for standing back up, bloodied at the podium.
Worse, even after seeing the experiment work, Reebok's now-ex CMO still believes that the Internet doesn't provide all that much value, and advocated a sort of "Being There" strategy for holistic marketing. That may suit Pant well in his new startup endeavor in India.
