The Art of Einstein

Bailing a Leaky Boat

I have been heads down on a couple of projects and haven’t been paying attention to anything else for the past 6 weeks - this blog included.

But out of the corner of my eye I did notice that the the big cheeses of adland have been wringing hands in public lately about when the business will bounce back. 

They may be worrying about the wrong thing.

Instead, if I were Maurice Levy or Martin Sorrell I’d be worryied about Jeff Bezos and his kind.  A few years ago Bezos decided his ad dollars were wasted.  (With all the media opportunities available these days it’s easy to dump $50 million into a campaign that disappears without a trace).  Bezos, in what I think is a flash of genius, decided to deep-six his ad budget and invest the money in doing good things for his customers.  If providing a better customer experience worked, he figured the news would get around.  So, the dollars that once bought TV time went into free shipping - and the rest is history.  Customers responded, Amazon’s business went through the roof, and, by the way, changed the game for other Internet retailers. 

“Free Shipping” may not be the most creative headline but it's supported by a brilliant creative idea.

And Bezos is anything but a wild duck.  Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos says  “we actually take a lot of money that we would have normally spent on paid advertising and put it back into customer experience.”

In the Internet era, the way to build a brand is to get people to your store ( a.k.a. your website ) and give them something they can’t get in the real world.  Sometimes the offering is unique - like Twitter or Facebook (I have never seen an advertisement for either).  Sometimes it’s a commodity like books or shoes.  In any case the way to build a brand in the 21^st century has less and less to do with advertising, as we once knew it.  It’s about treating people with over-the-top care and consideration so that they 1) can’t bear not to come back and 2) can’t resist spreading the word. 

Advertising and the agencies that flog it aren’t going away in my lifetime.  But the ad biz is a leaky boat, and that’s what I’d be gloomy about if I were sitting in Martin’s chair.

 

 

 

 

I Digress, momentarily

I have just posted a couple of new favorites to the Must Read list at right.  Julie Klam, blogger and Facebook diva, is a hoot.  So is George Parker.  I enjoyed both, vastly.

Julie writes about growing up, falling in love a couple of times, shopping, shopping, shopping, living in NY and her daughter Violet.  May sound ordinary but it's anything but.

George, the worlds most blasphemous  advertising blogger, writes a very funny history of the rise and fall of advertising in the 50-some years since Vance Packard wrote "The Hidden Persuaders". 

(Full disclosure - Julie grew up around the corner in Katonah.  I have known George since forever)

David Ogilvy rides again

I went to a party last evening to mark the launch of “The King of Madison Avenue”, Ken Roman’s new biography of David Ogilvy.  

As book parties go, and I don’t get to that many, this one was splendiferous.  It was held in a glittering apartment 43 stories above Manhattan, overflowing with paintings, prints, sculpture, books, even a film of Ogilvy himself on a monitor in the library.  I think the great man would have felt very much at home.  As for me, later, after I got back to Katonah, I felt as though I’d been on vacation.