I met with a young account person today. She struck a chord when she said this to me:
"'Just Do It' has been replaced by 'Just Talk About It.'"
Thursday, April 14, 2011
New York in April.
On Thursdays, pretty much without fail, I treat myself to a two-mile or so walk through Central Park, a walk which I refuse to interrupt with tweets, e's or phone calls. Occasionally I listen to Mahler, Mingus or Monk. Today I looked at the buds and listened to the wind.
You should try it, giving yourself half an hour on earth.
Advertising through the ages.
Many years ago I taught some advertising courses at the School of Visual Arts in New York and for the Boston Ad Club when I worked in Boston. One of the things I tried to do in teaching students to look at and evaluate advertising is to strip decoration from the equation. I wanted to get at the essence of what made an ad good, not merely the trends.
What I did was fairly simple. I went through old awards annuals and photocopied award winning ads from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s. As you can imagine, on the surface these ads had little in common. The same way a Caravaggio might have little in common with a Monet. And Chaucer might have little to do with John Updike.
But as all creatures on earth essentially come from the same microscopic core (read "Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body" by Neil Shubin) all good communications are related.
They have stopping power.
They make a promise.
They are interesting.
They make you think.
They leave you feeling.
They are memorable.
We dress ads, language, photographs, typography differently than we used to. And yes, style matters and style changes. But the essence of what makes a good communication doesn't.
What I did was fairly simple. I went through old awards annuals and photocopied award winning ads from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s. As you can imagine, on the surface these ads had little in common. The same way a Caravaggio might have little in common with a Monet. And Chaucer might have little to do with John Updike.
But as all creatures on earth essentially come from the same microscopic core (read "Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body" by Neil Shubin) all good communications are related.
They have stopping power.
They make a promise.
They are interesting.
They make you think.
They leave you feeling.
They are memorable.
We dress ads, language, photographs, typography differently than we used to. And yes, style matters and style changes. But the essence of what makes a good communication doesn't.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
How I was trained.
Over 20 years ago I worked at an agency called Ally & Gargano. Many people regard it as the greatest American agency that ever was. It launched FedEx. Fiat. Volvo. Saab. MCI. Dunkin' Donuts and other important brands.
My boss gave me the typewritten guidance below when I started there. I have carried it with me ever since.
1. Grab Attention. Picture someone’s busy day. The dog is barking, the kids are screaming, the phone is ringing. What will make them stop at your ad? Is your communication compelling enough to break through all the other clutter—of the world around them, and all the other communications and features. Remember, nobody goes online or checks their mail or buys a newspaper or magazine to read the ads.
2. The Singularity of the Idea. People have neither the time nor the inclination to sit there trying to figure out what you’re trying to say. Take one idea and make it the major thrust of your communication. Work in a “Pyramid” fashion. Start with one idea and broaden it via other product attributes and support in the copy.
3. Hit them where they live. Upset people. Make them think. Challenge them. Have people look at your product or service in a way they’ve never looked at it before. Legendary Advertising man Carl Ally said it neatly, “Advertising should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”
4. Unique Benefit. Unless the product is a total parity product (meaning that it is exactly like any other product in its category) there is something unique about it. Find it. Make it into a benefit. If there is nothing unique, look harder. Find something. If you still cannot find a point of difference, take the major product benefit and do the best communication for that product category.
5. Market Position. Where is your product in the marketplace. Is it the leader? Is it #2? Use its position to your best advantage. Look what Avis did as #2. (We try harder.)
6. What Do People Really Feel? People will tell you they think and feel one way, when in reality they may feel totally different. Think of what somebody really buys a product for, the satisfaction they get from it. The better psychologist you are, the better communicator you will be.
7. Words and Pictures. The visual and the headline together should be greater than the sum of the parts. Each should be the crucial element of the communication. If the headline or the visual can stand entirely on its own, it means the other element is merely window dressing. The story of the communication should ideally be told with the headline and visual working as a unit, paying each other off.
8. Promise a Story. A quick, catchy headline with a visual is fine…for a billboard or a banner. But other communications should have more depth. It should carry the promise of a story behind the message.
9. Does it Feel Right? Pick up your communication after you’ve put it aside for a day or two. Does it communicate? Is it strong? Is it interesting? If not, start over. Once in a while you’ll be brilliant right off the bat. Most of the time it’s a matter of throwing it out and doing it over again. When you’ve been lazy, it shows. Be honest with yourself. Ask yourself if it feels right. Gut reactions are important.
10. Presentation. Work doesn’t sell itself. When you present, cover all the bases. Explain the concept behind the communication. Give the reasons for your approach. Explain the tagline. The visual. Type and layout treatments. Then reveal the communication and read the headline. And by the way, if you work at most agencies, you have to go through a few rounds of meetings just to get out the door. These are practice rounds. Use them to coalesce your thoughts and hone your presentation.
11. Communication is part art, part science. As with any art, there are no absolutes. The magic that makes communication work is the result of logic, research and hard work. There is learning you can use to make your communication work harder. But again, there are no absolutes. If there were, every communication would get great results, every ad would be an award-winner and every company would be in the Fortune 500.
12. Research. Research. Research. Find out as much about your product as you can. Experience it. Read all you can. Sometimes a fact you find on page 42 of an Annual Report can be the key to the whole idea. A minor detail can be a spark.
My boss gave me the typewritten guidance below when I started there. I have carried it with me ever since.
1. Grab Attention. Picture someone’s busy day. The dog is barking, the kids are screaming, the phone is ringing. What will make them stop at your ad? Is your communication compelling enough to break through all the other clutter—of the world around them, and all the other communications and features. Remember, nobody goes online or checks their mail or buys a newspaper or magazine to read the ads.
2. The Singularity of the Idea. People have neither the time nor the inclination to sit there trying to figure out what you’re trying to say. Take one idea and make it the major thrust of your communication. Work in a “Pyramid” fashion. Start with one idea and broaden it via other product attributes and support in the copy.
3. Hit them where they live. Upset people. Make them think. Challenge them. Have people look at your product or service in a way they’ve never looked at it before. Legendary Advertising man Carl Ally said it neatly, “Advertising should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”
4. Unique Benefit. Unless the product is a total parity product (meaning that it is exactly like any other product in its category) there is something unique about it. Find it. Make it into a benefit. If there is nothing unique, look harder. Find something. If you still cannot find a point of difference, take the major product benefit and do the best communication for that product category.
5. Market Position. Where is your product in the marketplace. Is it the leader? Is it #2? Use its position to your best advantage. Look what Avis did as #2. (We try harder.)
6. What Do People Really Feel? People will tell you they think and feel one way, when in reality they may feel totally different. Think of what somebody really buys a product for, the satisfaction they get from it. The better psychologist you are, the better communicator you will be.
7. Words and Pictures. The visual and the headline together should be greater than the sum of the parts. Each should be the crucial element of the communication. If the headline or the visual can stand entirely on its own, it means the other element is merely window dressing. The story of the communication should ideally be told with the headline and visual working as a unit, paying each other off.
8. Promise a Story. A quick, catchy headline with a visual is fine…for a billboard or a banner. But other communications should have more depth. It should carry the promise of a story behind the message.
9. Does it Feel Right? Pick up your communication after you’ve put it aside for a day or two. Does it communicate? Is it strong? Is it interesting? If not, start over. Once in a while you’ll be brilliant right off the bat. Most of the time it’s a matter of throwing it out and doing it over again. When you’ve been lazy, it shows. Be honest with yourself. Ask yourself if it feels right. Gut reactions are important.
10. Presentation. Work doesn’t sell itself. When you present, cover all the bases. Explain the concept behind the communication. Give the reasons for your approach. Explain the tagline. The visual. Type and layout treatments. Then reveal the communication and read the headline. And by the way, if you work at most agencies, you have to go through a few rounds of meetings just to get out the door. These are practice rounds. Use them to coalesce your thoughts and hone your presentation.
11. Communication is part art, part science. As with any art, there are no absolutes. The magic that makes communication work is the result of logic, research and hard work. There is learning you can use to make your communication work harder. But again, there are no absolutes. If there were, every communication would get great results, every ad would be an award-winner and every company would be in the Fortune 500.
12. Research. Research. Research. Find out as much about your product as you can. Experience it. Read all you can. Sometimes a fact you find on page 42 of an Annual Report can be the key to the whole idea. A minor detail can be a spark.
Some more on Flip and taglines.
Growing up in the business, the tagline was always the apotheosis of the craft of advertising. The tagline represented what a company stood for, what made it unique usually in eight words or less.
"When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight."
"The world's most experienced airline."
"The ultimate driving machine."
"We run the tightest ship in the shipping business."
"It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken."
Today, lines like the above are excoriated as old-fashioned. They don't evoke images of happy people gayly using your product. Instead they involve your brain and thinking.
Flip's tagline "Do you flip?" was existential in its meaninglessness. It did nothing to say what Flip did well or better than anyone else. It merely asserted that you were happy if you flipped.
A case in point, and one I've written about before, is BMW. They now use the single word "Joy" as their tagline. (Hopefully, now that they've fired their agency, they'll retire this line.) Joy is not ownable, not unique, not intrinsic to the brand.
Taglines have gone from brand to bland.
If you can put it on someone else's ad, it's no good on yours.
"When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight."
"The world's most experienced airline."
"The ultimate driving machine."
"We run the tightest ship in the shipping business."
"It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken."
Today, lines like the above are excoriated as old-fashioned. They don't evoke images of happy people gayly using your product. Instead they involve your brain and thinking.
Flip's tagline "Do you flip?" was existential in its meaninglessness. It did nothing to say what Flip did well or better than anyone else. It merely asserted that you were happy if you flipped.
A case in point, and one I've written about before, is BMW. They now use the single word "Joy" as their tagline. (Hopefully, now that they've fired their agency, they'll retire this line.) Joy is not ownable, not unique, not intrinsic to the brand.
Taglines have gone from brand to bland.
If you can put it on someone else's ad, it's no good on yours.
Flip flop.
"The New York Times" reported today that in just four years the Flip camcorder has gone from 'hot' to 'not.' Cisco Systems, who bought Flip for $590 million just two years ago has shut down its video camera division. The Flip, which was wondrous and transformational when it burst onto the scene, was buried by smart phones (how smart are they, really, when you can't even have a decent call on one) with video capabilities.
The obsolescence of Flip provides, I think, three lessons.
One, Cisco Systems, which is a b-to-b provider had no real business buying a consumer brand. They succumbed to Apple-envy. Thought they could be cool, hip and on everyone's lips. Cool is not the answer to everything. Cisco's market cap hovers around $100 billion. They've earned their heft by being good, reliable, innovative and boring. Some times that's enough.
Two, Flip was one of those products that was going to change everything. Kodak, Sony and other manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon and came out with their own "me-too" flip-alikes. Very few products, services, songs, celebrities, words, politicians change everything. Everything doesn't very much like to change.
Three, when Flip went "big time," they did insipid advertising that showed happy people made even happier because they "flipped." Each blandishment ended with the question "do you Flip?" Dumb, gratuitous and without any ownable benefit. I'm not saying advertising would have kept Flip in business, we'll never know if it would have, but I contend good advertising would have helped.
The obsolescence of Flip provides, I think, three lessons.
One, Cisco Systems, which is a b-to-b provider had no real business buying a consumer brand. They succumbed to Apple-envy. Thought they could be cool, hip and on everyone's lips. Cool is not the answer to everything. Cisco's market cap hovers around $100 billion. They've earned their heft by being good, reliable, innovative and boring. Some times that's enough.
Two, Flip was one of those products that was going to change everything. Kodak, Sony and other manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon and came out with their own "me-too" flip-alikes. Very few products, services, songs, celebrities, words, politicians change everything. Everything doesn't very much like to change.
Three, when Flip went "big time," they did insipid advertising that showed happy people made even happier because they "flipped." Each blandishment ended with the question "do you Flip?" Dumb, gratuitous and without any ownable benefit. I'm not saying advertising would have kept Flip in business, we'll never know if it would have, but I contend good advertising would have helped.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Fear ascendant.
Years ago when I was a creative director on AT&T at what was then known as FCB, I presented a spot to the client that featured a Jewish mother. The clients bought the spot and then their FEAR started. "You're not going to make that "ethnic" are you?" They kept asking me. (Ethnic in this case being code for Jewish.)
"Well, there's not a lot to the spot if it's straight," I maintained.
We cast a wonderful actress in the spot, Tovah Feldshuh, and somehow got her approved.
"She won't be doing it ethnic," they kept reminding me.
We shot the spot and I was walking off location with my producer. "They're really concerned about it being too ethnic. Oh, and by the way, what should we do about music?" he asked.
"Klezmer," was my answer.
What I realized subconsciously then and what I realize more overtly now is that our business is a war against the fear of clients. (Not to mention internal agency fear.)
We have as a society grown more timorous. There are warning messages on pretzel bags warning of sodium ingestion. Warnings on seltzer bottles that the contents could explode and put out your eye. There are warnings everywhere that have taken the place of what we used to call common sense. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
D'uh.
Clients are afraid of fear. They seek to avoid it at all costs. They pick. They perseverate. They procrastinate. All because they are afraid of doing things differently from how they've always been done.
Someday some smart agency will create a position called Chief Fear Officer. That person's job will be nothing but calming people down. He will become rich and famous.
Monday, April 11, 2011
A New York story.
This is 100% true and almost 100% incredible.
I left work early tonight, around 6:30. The weather was nice out and I had had enough. I work on W. 39th Street and my wife works on E. 40th St. When I can I grab a cab, we head across town, I pick up my wife in front of her building, then we head uptown to where our apartment is.
Tonight, despite the warm weather, it was hard to find a cab. Then I spotted one across 8th Avenue discharging a passenger at the light on 40th Street. I hustled across the street, negotiated my destination with the cabbie and hopped in, all before the light changed.
We started talking. Talking to cab drivers is one of the great joys of living in New York. You meet people from all over the world and they often have interesting stories to tell.
One of the first things I do when I get into a cab is check the hack license. Licenses are numbered sequentially. A new driver's number today is around 520,000. The other day I had a driver whose number was 318,000. He'd been driving since 1971.
My driver tonight had a 500 number, but he seemed older. I checked his number again and then I noticed his name "Korotzer," his license said.
"Your name is Korotzer?" I asked.
"Yeah. Why do you ask?"
"My wife has an uncle named Korotzer."
"Then we're related," he enthused. "My father always said 'if you ever meet someone named Korotzer, you're related.' There just aren't that many of us. What's your wife's uncle's first name?"
"Joel." I replied.
"I know Joel. He retired from Kaiser, yeah!? And his brother Terry, up north?"
"That's right," I answered.
We stopped to pick up my wife. She and cousin Barry went through their entire family tree.
I gave him a $20 for a $12.90 fare.
I left work early tonight, around 6:30. The weather was nice out and I had had enough. I work on W. 39th Street and my wife works on E. 40th St. When I can I grab a cab, we head across town, I pick up my wife in front of her building, then we head uptown to where our apartment is.
Tonight, despite the warm weather, it was hard to find a cab. Then I spotted one across 8th Avenue discharging a passenger at the light on 40th Street. I hustled across the street, negotiated my destination with the cabbie and hopped in, all before the light changed.
We started talking. Talking to cab drivers is one of the great joys of living in New York. You meet people from all over the world and they often have interesting stories to tell.
One of the first things I do when I get into a cab is check the hack license. Licenses are numbered sequentially. A new driver's number today is around 520,000. The other day I had a driver whose number was 318,000. He'd been driving since 1971.
My driver tonight had a 500 number, but he seemed older. I checked his number again and then I noticed his name "Korotzer," his license said.
"Your name is Korotzer?" I asked.
"Yeah. Why do you ask?"
"My wife has an uncle named Korotzer."
"Then we're related," he enthused. "My father always said 'if you ever meet someone named Korotzer, you're related.' There just aren't that many of us. What's your wife's uncle's first name?"
"Joel." I replied.
"I know Joel. He retired from Kaiser, yeah!? And his brother Terry, up north?"
"That's right," I answered.
We stopped to pick up my wife. She and cousin Barry went through their entire family tree.
I gave him a $20 for a $12.90 fare.
New York, 1971.
The other day, one of “The New York Times’” film critics, AO Scott, had a video piece about William Friedkin’s 1971 movie “The French Connection.” I watched the piece, including about two minutes of a seminal chase scene and realized I hadn’t seen the movie since I was 14 or 15 and lit out of school to see it with friends—even though we were probably too young to properly get into the theatre.
What I saw in Scott’s video review was the New York I grew up in. A faster and more brutal place than the New York I live in now. A threatening place where it seemed like people were lining up to kick the shit out of other people and the cops were too busy kicking the shit out of people to prevent people from kicking the shit out of you.
I remember playing a high-school baseball game in Central Park. The grass on the Great Lawn was brown, there was little actual growth. The outfield with rutted by car or truck tires—park vehicles drove willy-nilly over the park. In the outfield ruts you would see drug paraphernalia. Needles. Syringes. I was playing outfield one game, in the white double-knit uniform we wore in those days and two guys walked over to me—it was quiet in the outfield--and tried to sell me drugs. That was par for the course, just the way things were. Everybody or nearly everybody had a mugging story. My friend Jill was a fairly adept runner, capable of a 7-minute/mile pace over the length of a 10K. She was mugged during a race and she wasn’t even running alone. Many of my friends also had run-ins with cops, cops who would harass you if you had long hair, suspecting there was a legitimate link between hair-length and marijuana possession.
Today, New York is a much more benign place. The brutality comes not from petty street criminals but from Wall Street speculators, manipulators and profiteers. They wear suits and get their pills legally from their doctors. Their crimes are harder to see. The regular cops don’t intimidate anymore, though one did give a citation to one of my kids for drinking beer in public. However there are those who carry assault rifles who are meant to protect us from terrorists. They make me think of collateral damage and scare the crap out of me.
It all makes me think of the Ferris Wheel scene from Carol Reed's "The Third Man," with lines delivered by the inimitable Orson Welles' Harry Lime. "Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
What I saw in Scott’s video review was the New York I grew up in. A faster and more brutal place than the New York I live in now. A threatening place where it seemed like people were lining up to kick the shit out of other people and the cops were too busy kicking the shit out of people to prevent people from kicking the shit out of you.
I remember playing a high-school baseball game in Central Park. The grass on the Great Lawn was brown, there was little actual growth. The outfield with rutted by car or truck tires—park vehicles drove willy-nilly over the park. In the outfield ruts you would see drug paraphernalia. Needles. Syringes. I was playing outfield one game, in the white double-knit uniform we wore in those days and two guys walked over to me—it was quiet in the outfield--and tried to sell me drugs. That was par for the course, just the way things were. Everybody or nearly everybody had a mugging story. My friend Jill was a fairly adept runner, capable of a 7-minute/mile pace over the length of a 10K. She was mugged during a race and she wasn’t even running alone. Many of my friends also had run-ins with cops, cops who would harass you if you had long hair, suspecting there was a legitimate link between hair-length and marijuana possession.
Today, New York is a much more benign place. The brutality comes not from petty street criminals but from Wall Street speculators, manipulators and profiteers. They wear suits and get their pills legally from their doctors. Their crimes are harder to see. The regular cops don’t intimidate anymore, though one did give a citation to one of my kids for drinking beer in public. However there are those who carry assault rifles who are meant to protect us from terrorists. They make me think of collateral damage and scare the crap out of me.
It all makes me think of the Ferris Wheel scene from Carol Reed's "The Third Man," with lines delivered by the inimitable Orson Welles' Harry Lime. "Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
Becoming an overnight success.
Dave Trott's post this morning "How to Get Laid" http://www.cstadvertising.com/blog/2011/04/how-to-get-laid/ set me thinking about this one.
A little more than a decade ago I had the best "run" of my career. I was on a major account and was in the groove. I sold campaign after campaign after campaign. It wasn't unusual for me to open up "The New York Times" or "The Wall Street Journal" and see two or three of my ads. Seeing your ads in major newspapers feels good.
While this was going on, I started hearing things from co-workers about how "lucky" I was. How "political." How much of a "brown-nose." In short, a lot of my so-called colleagues saw my success and reckoned I did something nefarious to get there.
What they didn't see was my computer hard-drive. I had rows and rows of documents and each of those documents had scores and scores of headlines. Literally I had written probably 25 headlines for each ad that got produced. It wasn't unusual for me to have a dozen or more copy-decks, each reflecting client revisions--many of which were banal and capricious. Many times the client would say "I need an ad about _______ to be in the paper Thursday." I would stay all night working on it and show them work the next day.
No one saw the work I did. They only saw the success I achieved.
I remember talking to my daughter about it. She was 14 at the time.
"Sarah," I said, "it's taken me 40 years to become an overnight success."
A little more than a decade ago I had the best "run" of my career. I was on a major account and was in the groove. I sold campaign after campaign after campaign. It wasn't unusual for me to open up "The New York Times" or "The Wall Street Journal" and see two or three of my ads. Seeing your ads in major newspapers feels good.
While this was going on, I started hearing things from co-workers about how "lucky" I was. How "political." How much of a "brown-nose." In short, a lot of my so-called colleagues saw my success and reckoned I did something nefarious to get there.
What they didn't see was my computer hard-drive. I had rows and rows of documents and each of those documents had scores and scores of headlines. Literally I had written probably 25 headlines for each ad that got produced. It wasn't unusual for me to have a dozen or more copy-decks, each reflecting client revisions--many of which were banal and capricious. Many times the client would say "I need an ad about _______ to be in the paper Thursday." I would stay all night working on it and show them work the next day.
No one saw the work I did. They only saw the success I achieved.
I remember talking to my daughter about it. She was 14 at the time.
"Sarah," I said, "it's taken me 40 years to become an overnight success."
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