As Cramer's Executive Vice President of Digital Marketing, Darren combines technological and strategic marketing expertise, providing direction and leadership for Cramer's Digital Marketing, Design and Planning teams. Since joining Cramer, Darren has successfully integrated the latest digital capabilities and emerging marketing trends, broadening the reach and impact of our clients' integrated marketing solutions. In only 24 months, Darren’s leadership led to doubling of the company's Digital Solutions business. Darren also serves on Cramer's Executive Board, steering technology decisions company-wide.
Darren brings more than a decade of interactive, technology, and strategic experience to Cramer, from diverse industries around the globe. He served as Chief Operating Officer and Partner at InterMedia Interactive Solutions, a technology solutions company with offices in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Pune, India.
Prior to joining InterMedia, Darren was the Head of Global Interactive Marketing and Business for PUMA, developing PUMA’s global interactive strategy as well as their online store from concept to completion. As creative lead, Darren introduced lifestyle concepts to the site that spoke to PUMA’s fashion-conscience, livin’-life-to-the-fullest consumers. Among the age of dot-com and Internet failures, PUMA’s online store reached break-even within 6 months of launch and grew to 2 1/2% of USA revenue.
Darren is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Milton Academy, and is a guest speaker on interactive marketing and business consulting practices at Babson College.
Extreme blending…literally
By Darren Ross
For those who have ever had a bad day on the course – check out willitblend.com and see what happens when golf balls are put into a Blendtec blender.
I saw a link on youtube and clicked through to watch a pseudo-scientist show us how this consumer blender can mince up golf balls. Beyond the fact that the power of this blender is quite astonishing, I am blown away but the simplicity of this marketing effort. This video alone has been viewed 1,371,935 in the last 5 days. Now, I realize that a lot of that traffic is not ‘the right audience’ for the proto-typical blender buyer but, at the very worst; Blendtec has definitely used youtube as an engine for creating awareness. I picked up the video front the front page of youtube.
We discussed in our Ad 2.0 session at Innovation Day the concept of ROI in this case. Specifically we asked, does this type of media have a better ROI than a Superbowl ad? The answer of course is that it depends on the purpose of the campaign. Each medium connects to another (tv to internet to internet to commerce) but I would argue that the willitblend approach is interesting as it all ties into an end point to purchase the blenders within 2 clicks – pretty compelling. Of course, for mass awareness, 90M plus impressions during the Superbowl (400M pre and post) is going to be hard to beat but I am not sure that’s exactly what the blender folks had in mind. Plus, I am only guessing here, but the price tag of the Superbowl spots may be a little expensive for a division of this size company (82M gross revenues for KTEC, Blendtec’s parent company)
Regardless of the marketing goals and tactics chosen, pretty fun to watch someone throw things into a blender.
