Some time ago when I worked on the west coast--yes, I have spent time out of Manhattan--I developed something I call "The Brand Denigration Theory." How I came upon this thesis was pretty simple.
HP, my client at the time, was doing brilliant brand work. They were also doing horrific work for their PCs. Work that was shrill, discounted and crass. Of course, they added brand accoutrement and decorations to make sure their PC work looked like their brand work.
The net result of these two distinct actions was that they canceled each other out. One was saying HP is classy and premium. The other was saying HP is cheap and available. The consumer cannot resolve such contradiction. The consumer is left confused and without a clear understanding of who, in this case, HP is.
Houston, we have a problem.
With the onslaught of alternative distribution channels like a company's website and You Tube, the demand for cheap video is greater than ever. It must be cheap, of course, because the size of the audience it reaches is small, at least in comparison to a TV audience, and thus these channels don't therefore support television-level production values.
In other words what happens to your beautiful million-dollar spot when it's butted up against a $30K web video?
We speak a lot about integration in our business. We make things look-alike. We'll end the million-dollar spot and the $30K web video with the same logo treatment. But the spirit of each will contradict each other. Each will denigrate the other and cancel each other out.
Regardless of how we try to convince each other that this is all ok.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
The tyranny of numbers.
Back about a decade ago I worked on the server business for IBM. The market trend at that time in the business was all in the direction of cheaper PC-based machines that ran on Intel chips. Dell, who were used to selling on a stance of value and used to selling directly, dominated the market. My client (who later became my friend) decided we should do as Dell was doing and try to sell servers "directly off the page."
After we started running ads, my client told me a story. His boss asked him how the ads were pulling. He replied, "sales are up 400%." What he later told his boss was that the ads sold eight machines, up from two from the previous week. A 400% gain.
Of late, it seems to me, we have had a proliferation of data. And, more to the point, a proliferation of people who analyze data and interpolate out of that data what is called "business intelligence." Most often the data is about as meaningful as my server example above. It's not exactly a lie but it's not exactly something you should or can learn from.
I think about this when I think about all the effort clients make to post videos on their You Tube pages or the time and money they spend creating Facebook pages. All to get a dozen or two eyeballs of dubious value. I'm sure those You Tube videos that gain 136 views in a month are ballasted by data that says something like "but we're trending up 11% week over week."
That might be true. But what does it mean?
After we started running ads, my client told me a story. His boss asked him how the ads were pulling. He replied, "sales are up 400%." What he later told his boss was that the ads sold eight machines, up from two from the previous week. A 400% gain.
Of late, it seems to me, we have had a proliferation of data. And, more to the point, a proliferation of people who analyze data and interpolate out of that data what is called "business intelligence." Most often the data is about as meaningful as my server example above. It's not exactly a lie but it's not exactly something you should or can learn from.
I think about this when I think about all the effort clients make to post videos on their You Tube pages or the time and money they spend creating Facebook pages. All to get a dozen or two eyeballs of dubious value. I'm sure those You Tube videos that gain 136 views in a month are ballasted by data that says something like "but we're trending up 11% week over week."
That might be true. But what does it mean?
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Liking.
At the risk of being called a troglodyte, a cretin, a flat-earther or a red-state Senator, I must herein admit that I don't understand the concept of "Liking" something on Facebook. Not the value it delivers to brands, but why I would announce to the world that I like this brand or that.
I understand most people walk around "in public" (as my mother would hiss) festooned with logos, but perhaps I am inured to that banality--it's been around longer.
My relationship with brands is pretty simple and will remain that way. There's an elementary value exchange. I spend money on them if I like what they offer me. I may even talk about them if they do something fabulous. In other words, I'm mostly quid pro quo with brands. Treat me well, I'll keep buying you. That's the deal.
Liking something seems like a PDI. A public display of insecurity or maybe vacuity. I am not a person in my own right, it says to me, I am only a reflection of the brands I like.
I understand most people walk around "in public" (as my mother would hiss) festooned with logos, but perhaps I am inured to that banality--it's been around longer.
My relationship with brands is pretty simple and will remain that way. There's an elementary value exchange. I spend money on them if I like what they offer me. I may even talk about them if they do something fabulous. In other words, I'm mostly quid pro quo with brands. Treat me well, I'll keep buying you. That's the deal.
Liking something seems like a PDI. A public display of insecurity or maybe vacuity. I am not a person in my own right, it says to me, I am only a reflection of the brands I like.
More Churchill.
If you want to learn how to be a great creative or a great client you'd be better served by reading about Winston Churchill than you would be by poring through awards annuals or studying marketing at a university.
I am talking about wartime Churchill, though almost any period in his nearly century-long life would serve.
First and foremost Churchill was about doing. He was about finding a task that could rally masses of people and then finding small (sometimes insignificant) actions that moved the assemblage closer to completing that task. Small victories lead to capital V victory.
In World War II, his first great victory, Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, was staving off defeat. His second great victory, his North Africa campaign against the Italians, was finding a way to have a string of victories. Good news for his generals, his soldiers and the citizenry back home.
Think of all the clients who are outnumbered, as England was, and who therefore throw in the sponge and allow themselves to become a second or third tier brand.
Think of all the clients who never attack but always lay low lest they lose some battle.
The aim of advertising is to win marketshare against all sorts of odds. Most often your brand will be outspent or out-somethinged. You have to find a way to win. Not a way to hide.
So that's it, in a nutshell. Under adversity you have two choices: You can act scared. Or you can act like Churchill.
I am talking about wartime Churchill, though almost any period in his nearly century-long life would serve.
First and foremost Churchill was about doing. He was about finding a task that could rally masses of people and then finding small (sometimes insignificant) actions that moved the assemblage closer to completing that task. Small victories lead to capital V victory.
In World War II, his first great victory, Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, was staving off defeat. His second great victory, his North Africa campaign against the Italians, was finding a way to have a string of victories. Good news for his generals, his soldiers and the citizenry back home.
Think of all the clients who are outnumbered, as England was, and who therefore throw in the sponge and allow themselves to become a second or third tier brand.
Think of all the clients who never attack but always lay low lest they lose some battle.
The aim of advertising is to win marketshare against all sorts of odds. Most often your brand will be outspent or out-somethinged. You have to find a way to win. Not a way to hide.
So that's it, in a nutshell. Under adversity you have two choices: You can act scared. Or you can act like Churchill.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Ed Butler, my-ex boss.
One of the things my ex-boss Ed Butler taught me I've carried with me for almost two decades. Ed, like so many of his generation, served in the army against his will. It was one of those rare times in our history since WWII that there were no wars going on, so days in the army meant dealing with officious sergeants and numbing regulations. Ed figured out how to avoid most of that. His secret? Carry a clipboard at all times.
My father and the day after.
By some anomaly of my birth date, I was in first grade when I was just five. I never felt unable to keep up with kids who were, at least from a percentage point of view, significantly older than I, but looking back on being the youngest, I suppose there was a lot I just didn’t get. I don’t know if that had to do with my age and level of development or if I was just not that interested in what was going on around me. I think I spent a fair portion of my time tuned out or tuned into my head. I remember looking intensely at the reading books we had in class and studying the coloring of the drawings—the very dot patterns--and the curves of the serifs in the type.
Maybe if I were a kid today I would have been poked and prodded, analyzed and pronounced ADD or ADHD or even mildly autistic. But whatever the case, I survived being lost in my world probably better than I would have survived participating in most other worlds. Once I remember holding an oval ceramic ashtray over my head in my parents’ living room and letting it drop to the linoleum because I wanted to study its path on its way down. That experiment got me more than a few whacks on my ass though the ashtray still sits to this day in my mother’s house, neatly glued together and barely showing its breaks.
When John Kennedy was shot I was sitting in school in first grade and the principal’s voice came on over the loud speaker announcing that the president was shot. I heard it wrong, or misunderstood what was said, and pictured the president being stood against the bright blue doors at the end of our elementary school hallway and executed. I didn’t understand why or what. But the next thing I knew, we got to leave school early to go home. (This was a simpler time. We could walk home or run—at five years old—without a parent or guardian, even past a small swamp that was overgrown and scary with skunk cabbage.)
The television was on when I got home with my mother watching. My brother and I watched, too, grainy tel-star beamed images from Dallas alternating with sonorous announcers from just miles away in Manhattan. We weren’t allowed to change the channel. My mother was watching.
Usually my brother and I watched after school a show of cartoons hosted by an actor pretending he was a charming and affable Irish cop. He called himself “Officer Joe Bolton” and he bored us with little anecdotes and admonishments to behave and do our homework between playing Dick Tracy cartoons with villains like “the Frog” or “Joe Jitsu” or “Hemlock Holmes.” Or he played old Popeye the Sailor cartoons, with Popeye vanquishing Bluto to win Olive only to have to go through the whole thing again in the next cartoon, though Olive always seemed like a whiner and a two-face to me. But this day we would watch no cartoons. The president had been killed.
My father got home late that night and sat in the living room dominating our sole TV and whispering about the end of everything with my mother. My brother and I ran around the house, trying to figure out how to be busy and silent until bedtime with no TV to watch and no noise allowed.
-
The next morning was Saturday and my father woke me up early, poured some hot chocolate down me and wrapped me warmly in my brown corduroy Mighty Mac winter coat. We got into his 1949 Studebaker and drove into the country. Weeks earlier, long before someone gunned Kennedy down, my father’s boss had invited my father and me to go skeet-shooting.
I’m sure my father protested this. I’ve never even held a gun, I can hear him saying. But it was something his boss wanted, it, therefore represented a chance to get ahead, and my father complied. I was along as his companion, in case he got bored or needed a hand to hold.
I don’t remember much of that morning except that the sky was gray, the color of a wet newspaper and I felt the cold despite the advertised promise of my Mighty Mac. I remember picking up the red cylinders of shot from the ground and being surprised. They weren’t at all what I thought bullets would look like. I remember seeing black discs in the air and then the loud firework report of someone’s shotgun smashing a clay pigeon and taking it down. I remember walking over the ruts of the farmer’s land the men were shooting on and stopping to pay close attention to the dried out and ploughed over detritus of what used to be living stalks of corn.
Maybe if I were a kid today I would have been poked and prodded, analyzed and pronounced ADD or ADHD or even mildly autistic. But whatever the case, I survived being lost in my world probably better than I would have survived participating in most other worlds. Once I remember holding an oval ceramic ashtray over my head in my parents’ living room and letting it drop to the linoleum because I wanted to study its path on its way down. That experiment got me more than a few whacks on my ass though the ashtray still sits to this day in my mother’s house, neatly glued together and barely showing its breaks.
When John Kennedy was shot I was sitting in school in first grade and the principal’s voice came on over the loud speaker announcing that the president was shot. I heard it wrong, or misunderstood what was said, and pictured the president being stood against the bright blue doors at the end of our elementary school hallway and executed. I didn’t understand why or what. But the next thing I knew, we got to leave school early to go home. (This was a simpler time. We could walk home or run—at five years old—without a parent or guardian, even past a small swamp that was overgrown and scary with skunk cabbage.)
The television was on when I got home with my mother watching. My brother and I watched, too, grainy tel-star beamed images from Dallas alternating with sonorous announcers from just miles away in Manhattan. We weren’t allowed to change the channel. My mother was watching.
Usually my brother and I watched after school a show of cartoons hosted by an actor pretending he was a charming and affable Irish cop. He called himself “Officer Joe Bolton” and he bored us with little anecdotes and admonishments to behave and do our homework between playing Dick Tracy cartoons with villains like “the Frog” or “Joe Jitsu” or “Hemlock Holmes.” Or he played old Popeye the Sailor cartoons, with Popeye vanquishing Bluto to win Olive only to have to go through the whole thing again in the next cartoon, though Olive always seemed like a whiner and a two-face to me. But this day we would watch no cartoons. The president had been killed.
My father got home late that night and sat in the living room dominating our sole TV and whispering about the end of everything with my mother. My brother and I ran around the house, trying to figure out how to be busy and silent until bedtime with no TV to watch and no noise allowed.
-
The next morning was Saturday and my father woke me up early, poured some hot chocolate down me and wrapped me warmly in my brown corduroy Mighty Mac winter coat. We got into his 1949 Studebaker and drove into the country. Weeks earlier, long before someone gunned Kennedy down, my father’s boss had invited my father and me to go skeet-shooting.
I’m sure my father protested this. I’ve never even held a gun, I can hear him saying. But it was something his boss wanted, it, therefore represented a chance to get ahead, and my father complied. I was along as his companion, in case he got bored or needed a hand to hold.
I don’t remember much of that morning except that the sky was gray, the color of a wet newspaper and I felt the cold despite the advertised promise of my Mighty Mac. I remember picking up the red cylinders of shot from the ground and being surprised. They weren’t at all what I thought bullets would look like. I remember seeing black discs in the air and then the loud firework report of someone’s shotgun smashing a clay pigeon and taking it down. I remember walking over the ruts of the farmer’s land the men were shooting on and stopping to pay close attention to the dried out and ploughed over detritus of what used to be living stalks of corn.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Quotation of the day.
Such is the cosmic comedy of life, we spend our days on conference calls on mute. Talkative people silenced by bureaucracy and propriety. Our on mute hours interrupted by gems like this one: "Either way, I agree."
Winston Churchill on Advertising.
As long-time readers of Ad Aged know, I am an inveterate and eclectic reader. I read a lot on a lot of different topics. However, when I am feeling a bit untethered in the world (as I am now) I return my focus to Winston Churchill. For all his human-ness, for all his foibles, for all his bombast and bull-headedness, he is one of the great men of history. You could safely say he saved Western Civilization and leave it at that and you wouldn't be far off.
I am reading now "Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945" by the great historian Max Hastings. (For you Brits, the book was originally published in England as "Finest Years:
Churchill as Warlord 1940-1945.)
In the early days of Churchill's tenure as Prime Minister all seemed lost. France was falling as fast as a house of cards and the Low Countries were overrun as well. The British Expeditionary Force was all but trapped at Dunkirk and near-ready to be annihilated by the Hun.
For all that, the real reason all seemed lost was that people felt all was lost. All of France's generals, of course, and seemingly half if not more of the English government and ruling class felt there was no way to resist German forces. Plans were made to seek peace terms with the Germans.
It seems to me we often face similar situations in advertising. We work for clients who have scant resources and shrinking marketshare. We are fighting against forces that have great momentum and power. They are stealing territory from us and we have no way to resist. To use Sir Alexander Cadogan's words "no communications and no one knows what's going on, except everything's black as black."
Churchill had one weapon when things looked bleak in 1940: Resolve.
That is, he would not surrender to defeatism or anything else for that matter. Churchill resolved that he and his nation would not just fight on, they would find a way to win. Or die trying.
This is the lesson we in advertising can learn from Churchill. Resolve to fight. Resolve to win.
You might go down in flames, but it's better than relegating yourself to creating Facebook pages.
Churchill put it this way, quoting from George Borrow's 1843 prayer for England: "Fear not the result, for either thy end be a majestic and enviable one, or God shall perpetuate thy reign upon the waters."
I am reading now "Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945" by the great historian Max Hastings. (For you Brits, the book was originally published in England as "Finest Years:
Churchill as Warlord 1940-1945.)
In the early days of Churchill's tenure as Prime Minister all seemed lost. France was falling as fast as a house of cards and the Low Countries were overrun as well. The British Expeditionary Force was all but trapped at Dunkirk and near-ready to be annihilated by the Hun.
For all that, the real reason all seemed lost was that people felt all was lost. All of France's generals, of course, and seemingly half if not more of the English government and ruling class felt there was no way to resist German forces. Plans were made to seek peace terms with the Germans.
It seems to me we often face similar situations in advertising. We work for clients who have scant resources and shrinking marketshare. We are fighting against forces that have great momentum and power. They are stealing territory from us and we have no way to resist. To use Sir Alexander Cadogan's words "no communications and no one knows what's going on, except everything's black as black."
Churchill had one weapon when things looked bleak in 1940: Resolve.
That is, he would not surrender to defeatism or anything else for that matter. Churchill resolved that he and his nation would not just fight on, they would find a way to win. Or die trying.
This is the lesson we in advertising can learn from Churchill. Resolve to fight. Resolve to win.
You might go down in flames, but it's better than relegating yourself to creating Facebook pages.
Churchill put it this way, quoting from George Borrow's 1843 prayer for England: "Fear not the result, for either thy end be a majestic and enviable one, or God shall perpetuate thy reign upon the waters."
Monday, October 25, 2010
Client stories.
It seems that every client between here and kingdom come (whatever that means) has decided that the creating stories of clients who use their products will be answer all their marketing needs. Let's tell client stories! Let's show happy people! Let's use their own words! That will solve everything! People will believe them because--don'tcha see--these are real people!
Someone just mentioned that they read that there are 200,000 survivors of the holocaust. I went on www.holocaustsurvivors.org to see if I could verify this statistic. And what I found was a link to survivor stories.
Here's the thing. These people lived through one of the most horrific time periods in human history. Their stories are moving, incredibly gripping. But you know something(and I realize this is horrible) most people would look at a few of these stories and say something like "these stories all run together." Or "Yeah, I've seen that before." Or, "that's not relevant to me."
What I'm saying is that viewers hardly have interest in even the most emotionally moving stories in the world. What chance do you have with client stories about a room freshener?
Someone just mentioned that they read that there are 200,000 survivors of the holocaust. I went on www.holocaustsurvivors.org to see if I could verify this statistic. And what I found was a link to survivor stories.
Here's the thing. These people lived through one of the most horrific time periods in human history. Their stories are moving, incredibly gripping. But you know something(and I realize this is horrible) most people would look at a few of these stories and say something like "these stories all run together." Or "Yeah, I've seen that before." Or, "that's not relevant to me."
What I'm saying is that viewers hardly have interest in even the most emotionally moving stories in the world. What chance do you have with client stories about a room freshener?
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