The Art of Einstein

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There’s a very good chance I’ve been a car enthusiast since before you were born.

 So when I was backed into a corner about my thesis topic while a grad student at Michigan State and managed to persuade my advisor that the advertising of the Packard Motor Car Company would be a fit subject, I pretty much thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

Now that it's been aged in fine pine bookshelves for many years this morsel of minor scholarship has been revised, updated and actually published, not by a vanity press but by a card-carrying book publisher, McFarland Press , in the mountains of North Carolina, the land of my birth.  

After two years of fussing, it can now actually be purchased from McFarland online or at Barnes & Noble, Amazon et al.  Put the title “Ask the Man Who Owns One” in the query box and it comes right up.  There’s even a website dedicated to it  where you can see 25 of the 145 illustrations that are in the book.  

It’s turns out to be a pretty good story if you’re interested in cars or advertising - in spite of the fact that it was written in the bloom of youth before I’d ever written an ad for pay.  I had the opportunity to talk with people who had worked for the company in its prime and some who made advertising for it as far back as 1925.  If you're able to transport yourself back to the 1930's, you'll find the  work from Young & Rubicam a creative revolution in its own right.

Should you know anyone who’s interested in how a brand was built before ‘branding’ was the vogue, pass the word along.  The reproduction of the ads is disappointing and the lay out artist was on drugs. But if cars or ads are your thing, you may find something of interest here.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. 

 

Is Apple the new Ma Bell?

Judge Green and your Justice Department dismantled Ma Bell 28 years ago.  A lot of people thought it was about time.  Cigars were passed out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange!             

But most Americans loved the telephone company.  She was dependable.  Customer service was off the charts.  The Operator answered in 2 rings and never uttered a discouraging word.  Employees were trained relentlessly to be courteous and helpful.  And Ma Bell was also a great place to work.  Remind you of anyone?

Dan Gilmor’s column in Salon the other day reminded me how my affection for my Apple devices parallels how most of us felt about the old phone company.  And how Apple has made being loved and admired as good a policy in the free-for-all 2010 marketplace as it was for a 20^th century regulated monopoly.

 From the very beginning Apple, like Ma Bell, has been a profoundly customer-centric organization.  They’ve understood that people, like an electric current, follow the past of least resistance.  In the wired world there wasn’t anything easier to use than a black telephone.  Today the unwired world nobody comes close to the iPhone and Appleware in general.

I’ve been researching android phones lately (strictly business) and am just stunned at the tower of Babel wireless has become.  Multiple handsets running multiple operating systems.  Multiple carriers with multiple service plans.  Fall in love with a phone and you often discover that the carrier who offers it doesn’t serve your area (happened to me).  Then please decide on how many minutes you want to buy, which talk, text, and data plans work for you.  Some phones are free - some cost hundreds of dollars.  And by the way, how many megapixels would you like on your phone’s camera!  The friction in this market is incredible.

Buying an iPhone, however, is as simple as “Good Night Moon”.  One carrier.  One OS.  Two phones.  And they’ll even teach you how to use it. 

Bingo!

 

 

 

  

DISCLOSURE: I AM NOT A MEMBER OF THE BODY-WASH GENERATION!

I was brought up using soap.

    So while I may have seen the Old Spice guy once or twice on TV, the  spot sailed quietly over my head without intruding on my purchase behavior.                                

    Actually I didn’t pay any mind to the Old Spice guy until his star blazed across the YouTube firmament, after which he showed up in a group conversation on an email list I frequent

    It took television + YouTube + email from friends to get my attention - which seems to be the way things work in the heated up mediasphere we occupy.  It’s not enough to simply spend lots of money airing your message either.  If the advertising doesn’t ignite a firestorm of chatter the product is likely to languish.  It might keep its spot in the plan-o-gram, but there’s no guarantee.                  Once, buying a bunch of TV time and sending the foot soldiers on their way with a promotion was all you needed to get famous and move product.  As Marvin Hoenig, a great DDB writer, once said - “I have a BIG idea.  Spend 20 million bucks on it.”  You have to be lots craftier these days. 

        What’s interesting about the OSG spot is how P&G has changed.  And how it hasn’t.  Weiden & Kennedy was obviously given lots of rope.  And after some false starts   they finally got just about everything right  The right actor, with the right smirk, the right sense of humor and self mockery, and the right set of words - a surprising progression of set ups in which production values don’t overwhelm the story or the presenter.  Nice.                

        But while P&G has lightened up over they years, they haven’t lost their soap opera mojo.  Once upon a time, P&G required that every frame in a storyboard have a written justification.  Whether they still ask for that I don’t know.  But every frame in this OSG spot is devoted to the story, and the proposition.  Wacky as it seems, it’s a very disciplined commercial.  Not a frame wasted.  To top it off,  Ad Age reports that  Old Spice body wash has actually gained market share since the spot  and its online components appeared.  

     How often does that happen? 

Naming Your Baby

Things have come to a nasty pass in the agency biz.

Being hired by a procurement officer is surely a sign of vendorship, not partnership. And apple carts   continue to be upset at every turn.

Marketing once was a piece of the advertising pie. Now advertising has become a sub-set of marketing, and the Rodney Dangerfield in the marketing mix.  Ad types who were once counted on for wise counsel are now vendors who don’t get no respect.  

And new generations of digital agencies has contributed to this reversal of fortune. Here’s what I mean.  A list of advertising agencies popped up on my screen the other day.  The list included : Juniper Park, Rockfish, Big Spaceship, Unknownlab, Victors & Spoils, Ground Zero, and Toy.  No Weiden.  No Kennedy  No Fallon. No Bogusky.  So who’s in charge?  Who’s responsible?   Who’s minding the store?  In a service business, where relationships matter,  does it really make sense to hide behind a name that make you sound like a rock group? 

Naming your new company after the partners may sound quaint in this digital era, but there’s much to recommend it.

• It establishes a unique identity for your firm - making your URL safe.
• It clearly differentiates you and your crew from everyone else.
• It lets everyone know who’s in charge, where the buck stops, etc.
• It tells the client, who may very well not be working directly with the names on the letterhead, who to call when the relationship hits a rough patch. 
•  It identifies responsibility and by doing so builds trust and authenticity.

Every rule has exceptions and so does this one.  But in the end I believe that personality wins.  And most business people with an ad budget burning a hole in their pocket will feel more comfortable and confident entrusting it to stand up people who aren't afraid their name on the door.  

 

The New Fiesta has arrived. So? Where’s the Beef?

 Used to be the new Fords didn’t show up in showrooms till September.   But now, a full 6 months before the Super Bowl, the 2011 Ford Fiesta has arrived - with an announcement  commercial that fairly shouts “Suddenly it’s 1960”. 

It’s a surprising spot. (You can watch it below).   Not offensive - but a commercial that obviously cost millions, and utterly fails to tell any kind of story.  If it offers a reason to head for a Ford store and have a look, I missed it entirely.  It’s merely sixty seconds of fanfare.

Pay close attention and you can pick up a few  copy points.  The Sync audio  system ( so good it’s reason enough to buy a Ford) gets a quick mentioned but no explanation.  Like too much advertising the carnival barker lies just below the surface.  The excitement is in the presentation, with the hope that the hoopla will cast a rosy glow on the product .   

Back  ‘the big three’ ruled the industry all an announcement spot had to do was announce that the circus was coming to town (i.e. the new Chevy’s had arrived.)   Showroom traffic materialized shortly afterward.

The Fiesta announcement seems to say that nothing’s changed in the past 50 year.  It assumes brand loyalty is immutable.  It ignores the open warfare for share that exists among a raft of players in the Fiesta segment.  In fact, if the Fiesta is just coming up on your radar screen this does little to position it.

What’s so baffling is that ad critics and creative columnists  have crowned pleasant but irrelevant spot with all kinds of creative plaudits.  It may even win some awards down the road. 

How out of touch these folks are just blows my mind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everyting I Need to Know About Marketing I Learned From Steve Jobs

 Ken  Segall and I had a long, chatty lunch a week or so ago.  Once upon a time Ken and I worked together at LGFE.  He’s been around tech advertising as a creative type for years - many of them spent working on Apple at Chiat Day.

            Jobs, he says, is passionate about keeping things simple - which dovetails in a way with a long ago lesson I learned from a New Yorker editor who, when I asked him what he did as an editor, replied “It’s very simple.”  “I am a surrogate for the reader.”  His job, in other words, was be sure that ideas, no matter how complicated, were easily understood.  He was a sort of customer advocate who made things simple, as Apple has been striving to make computing simple for as long as I can remember.

            Back in the era of green screens and DOS prompts, Apple borrowed the icons that had been developed at Xerox PARC and introduced them on Macintosh in 1984.  Suddenly using a personal computer became hugely simpler.  Microsoft saw the light and went to work developing Windows.

Mad Men Stories : #3 - Something Fishy at Doyle Graf Mabley

Neil Gluckin, former agency type, wrote recently:  In some agencies, the “fish tank” was an open space where people sat at desks with no privacy. At Doyle Graf Mabley, the small agency where I worked in the frenzied 1980s, the fish tank was literal: a good-sized tank for tropical fish equipped with a miniature diver and treasure chest, swaying plants, a  gurgling pump and four actual fish, two red and two black.   The tank was placed in the office of the book-keeper/office manager, a hard-as-nails type I'll call Jane, who referred to her home, Staten Island, as the Mother Country.   DGM's owner told Jane that feeding the fish every day was part of her job. Jane demurred, saying that she had no intention of feeding those f*****g fish. The owner, who had fresh red carnations delivered to his office every Monday morning, laughed at Jane's cheekiness and went off to check his tie in the mirror.

Jane kept her word, refraining  from sprinkling even one orange, brown or violet flake of fish food into the bubbling tank. Every two weeks or so, the fish went belly up. Whereupon the owner would laugh and send his chauffeur to a nearby tropical fish store to buy four more.

Mad Men Stories: #2 Another Brilliant Ad by Accident

Bruce Richter, a former LGFE colleague writes: 

Your "Ads By Accident" story reminded me of a Perdue Chicken ad Amy Schottenfels and I did way back at Scali [McCabe & Sloves]. We were working on a campaign for something entirely different one weekend and all we kept hearing from the guys in the bullpen across the hall was, "Where's the beef?", "Where's the beef?", "Where's the beef?" You remember the phenomenon.  [ The Wendy’s commercial that made Clara Peller a household name for at least one Clio season]. And finally one of us just yelled out, "Who gives a sh*t where the beef is!" We looked at each other, threw Frank's face on a page, stuck his name under the edited quote (didn’t even include the logo), and on Monday showed it to Ed McCabe who made it happen practically overnight. 

 

 

Mad Men Stories : #1 - Ads by Accident

“Einstein, eh?  You must be good at math.”  I hear that a lot.  Just as I hear that I must love the HBO series “Mad Men” because I was in the business back then.  Wrong on both counts.  I am almost totally innumerate.   And “Mad Men” isn’t like it was at all.  

It was more like this.

Tiffany & Co was among our name clients. Walter Hoving, the proprietor was surely the shrewdest shop keeper on Fifth Avenue.  He was also an aristocrat of another age with opinions he had no hesitation about sharing via ads in Tiffany's  franchiser position on page 3 of The New York Times.   

One December Citibank put an aluminum Christmas tree on Park avenue in front of its offices.  As I recall it was about 20 feet tall, absolutely gleamed, and was bathed by blue and magenta spotlights  after dark.  It greatly offended Mr Hoving who promptly wrote an advertisements denouncing it.  I was appalled by the tone of his copy and ever watchful of our agency’s reputation said to Barbara who ran the account “we can’t say this.”  “Well” she said, “If you don’t think we can say it you’d better tell Mr. Hoving because I’m certainly not going to.”   

A day later I was ushered into his intimidating presence, ad in hand.   “It sounds snobby” I croaked.   He looked down at me and said with great deliberation “young man, I want it to sound snobby.”   

Of course the ad ran.  But I made a vow.  “if he wants snobby, I’ll give him snobby.”  And the snobbiest thing I could think of  was ad with no merchandise in it  (this works well for large corporations, but given the option, most retailers choose to put things that are for sale in their advertising ). 

Expecting the worst we laid out the ad you see here.  An empty ring box with a two word headline: ‘Mission Accomplished.’  To my astonishment, Hoving loved it.  Tiffany ran it in newspapers and magazines for several years - a happy advertising accident.

The story came to mind a few months ago when friend Kevin O’Neill who teaches advertising in the Newhouse School at Syracuse asked if I had a copy of the ad.  Now, forty years after it was written he told me he uses it in class.  Why?   “I just love the freakin' ad, “ he said “and have used it to illustrate a couple of things. First, the power of inviting the reader to participate, to complete a story that the ad only suggests.  In this case, the reader provides virtually everything: the candlelight dinner, the quick gasp as the box hinges open, the glint of the jewel itself. As important, it's a splendid example of an ad that unleashes every ounce of a  brand's weighty history,   I flog my students about mastering a brand's back story, mining it for clues to its meaning and, perhaps, finding useful elements for its contemporary advertising. “ 

Nothing so thoughtful occurred to me at the time.  I was just trying to one-up Walter Hoving.   

PS:  If you have a Mad Men story send it and I'll publish it here.  

Oh How I Wish Again That I Was in Michigan - but especially Ann Arbor

Even though I'm a copywriter I’ve always been fussy about type, layout, readability, the sound-track, the voice-over and the message they send.  Because, the non-verbal components of a message really are the body language of a brand.

Some people do a superb job of getting it right.  IBM has a long history of obsessing about design, initiated by Thomas Watson Jr. who hired Paul Rand, Charles and Rae Eames, and other first rank designers to make sure everything about IBM looked better than the competition.    At Apple,  Steve Jobs, to his credit, has been a maniac about design and monitored the details for 30 years.  In both cases, attention to esthetics has paid off at the box office. 

However web designers, with few exceptions, seem to be lousy at body language.  I have loved the simplicity of Google’s landing page from day one.  Malcolm Gladwell’s site is also a treat.  Much of the rest looks like a dog’s breakfast. 

Which brings me to this week’s good news/bad news body language story. 

Betty Crocker's Recipe For A Perfect Website

You may think Betty Crocker is a little "old school."  Think twice.  Betty was created 88 years ago “to respond to customer inquiries  in a more personal manner”  She was, by the way, invented by a small company to talk about a commodity product, baking flour. 

Betty and her mission came to mind the other day as I looked at a friend’s website.  I shall call my friend Tim and fudge some of his business details to protect what has always been a cordial relationsip.  

Tim is smart, honest, and focused.  He sells quality things.  Shake his hand and you know he’s a person you want to do business with.  Like most companies, what’s unique about Tim’s isn’t what’s on the shelves.  It’s his values, policies, and people that set Tim’s company apart.   Unfortunately his website does not convey this competitive advantage.  The site lacks what I call humanility - that combination of humanity and personality that elevates communication beyond features and benefits and into the realm of the intangibles that differentiate one business from another. 

There’s no recipe that applies unconditionally to every business - but Tim’s website could be a lot better if he followed what I think of as Betty’s recipe.

"Bring Me a Big Animal Book!"

I went to a memorial service on Saturday for good friend and former client Charles G Francis.  Chuck was the Grand Sachem of IBM communications and advertising for a long stretch and was in charge when our agency, LGFE, was hired.  

It was a momentous time to be hired by anyone in the computer industry but especially by IBM.  The personal computer explosion was brewing.  And while IBM was unsurpassed as a sales organization, feet on the street was their modus operandi.  Salesmen sold computers.  Advertising was for buffing the corporate image.  At the time we were hired I’m pretty sure IBM spent more on recognition events for sales people than on product advertising.  Of course everything was about to change - including my life in advertising.

Chuck didn’t actually hire LGFE, his colleagues did.  He had added us to a list of 25 agencies IBM was reviewing for a small corporate ad assignment.  If ever any agency defined the term “unlikely contender” it was us.   But against all odds we made the cut.  And when the choice came down to LGFE vs. an agency that was literally 100 times our size, Chuck recused himself from the decision process because he’d once lived next door to Dick Lord our president.   Integrity was Chuck’s middle name.

Why Advertisers Lie

 It’s no longer the outraged consumer who’s accusing advertisers of playing fast and loose with the truth.  It’s advertisers themselves!  A front-page article in the NY Times lays out a story of big brand mud-wrestling - hilarious if it was’t so sad.

AT&T is suing Verizon.  Fedex is after UPS.  Pantene is after Dove.  Campbell’s Soup is calling out Progresso.  So far this year, brands you know and presumably trust, have filed 87 complaints so far this year with the Better Business Bureau  about the truthfulness of one another’s advertising. 

Quibbling isn’t good for business.  In some countries even a mention of your competitor in ads is verboten.  Ironically,  in Campbell’s vs. Progress both parties have lost the argument.  Sales of both company’s non-condensed soups have hit the skids - a decline one analyst says is due “largely to the advertising battle.”  

So, what’s so bloody hard about telling the truth? 

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.

 

 

 

 

Warning! Brand terrorists at work!

I could not believe my eyes the first time I saw this.

Some genius over at GM gave one of his co-conspirators the go-ahead to punch a hole in the middle of the Chevy bowtie logo, stick a trunk lock in it, and slap it on the rear deck of a Chevy Cavalier.  What can these people be thinking?

The hole in the Chevy bowtie is a sign of what’s been wrong at GM and a lot of other companies for a long time. 

Teaching Advertising? Yes, but on the other hand…

A few weeks ago I several beers too many with old friend and former colleague Kevin O’Neill.   Kevin is now an associate professor of advertising at The Newhouse School at Syracuse University and seems to be having a grand time up there far from the toils of Madison Avenue. 

He’s enjoying himself partly because he’s a terrific teacher.  I’m sure of it.  He’s one of the few people I know who can walk into a room and capture the audience almost before he opens his mouth.    In five minutes you know you’re in the presence of a man who’s kissed the Blarney stone.  This is a gift, like perfect pitch.  You can’t teach charisma anymore than you can teach Wilt Chamberlin to be tall.  You want to take people like Kevin and start a religion with them. 

His students are not only entertained, but get a good dose of  practical knowledge and come away 

What's changed? How about everything!

My friend George Parker, advertising bad boy blogger, lobbed in an email the other day.  Seems he’s been tapped to chair a panel  here in NYC all about how the business has changed in the past umpteen years, what’s wrong and what can we do  to fix it.  George asked if I’d join the fun.  Alas I will be otherwise disposed on August 20^th.   But his email got the juices flowing.  What has changed?  What can we do?

So much has changed that it’s hard to figure where to begin.  We have new tools, new media, the Internet, new emphasis on measurement and accountability, no more commissions and on and on and on.  But advertisings folk are resilient and figure out how to deal with this newness eventually.

However, I were able to be on George’s panel I would make several observations.

1.     1.  The ratio of good to terrible is about the same as it used to be.  The 80/20 rule still applies though in reality I think it’s more like 95/5.   (While we may remember “it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” we forget “this invisible shield protect’s me”)

2.     2.  Where ‘no idea’ used to hide behind production values it now hides behind computer graphics

3.     3.  The impulse to tune out advertising today is driven by the fact there’s so much more of it.  (TV commercial time has gone from about 6 minutes an hour in 1975 to about 20 currently)

4.  4.  Advertising has lost the talent for telling interesting, believable, compelling stories.

5.. 5.  Measurement rules.  It keeps client and agency from taking chances on new ideas. 

The biggest development by far, however, l is the change in the basic nature of persuasion.  

Not so long ago the marketplace was fairly simple.  You had a handful of products to choose from.  They were sold in a relatively few places.   All we ad weasels had to do was write some ads that ‘sell’.  That was no problem, and results at retail, coupon returns from direct mail, and coupons in magazines confirmed us often enough to support an occasional 3-martini lunch.

Wham.  Bam.  POW!!!  There’s no more peace in happy valley.  The marketplace has become chaotic.  Choice, for practical purposes, is now infinite.  The job an ad must do is help the consumer wade through a cornucopia of options - product and shopping venue.  Selling is no longer about persuasion.  It’s about resolving complexity - a much more difficult job.   

Ads must help consumers work their way through the noise, find what you're selling, and make a choice in your favor.  All this, knowing that they've been researching your category on line, reading reviews, and asking their friends for advice.  And they're tuned in to your selling game.  They smell phonies mile away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Don't Know Much About Branding, But... Part II

It’s pretty clear, if you’ve followed this blog, that branding discussions tire me out - too many gurus with too many theories, and no road maps.   Sure, you can run some ads and spruce up the logo, but is that really the answer?   I think not.

My view is colored by time spent inside the first Internet bubble. Everyone worked at warp speed to gain ‘first mover advantage’.  Nobody had time to invest in brand building.    You worked all night create a website for the idea.   If people tried it, liked it, and continued to use it you had the beginnings of a business.    No ‘branding’.  Pure pragmatism.

Looking back, I believe it was an ‘aha’ marketing moment.  It became clear that the fastest, most efficient way to build a brand was to persuade people to experience the product or service.   If they liked it they might continue to use it.  They might even tell others – and pretty soon you’d be an Amazon, or Quicken, or Netscape.

The number of products and services, and websites that support, them has approached infinity.  They classic way of building brands is dead.   

Do you need a tag line?

Survey Monkey showed up in the in-box the other day with a questionnaire from a friend who is advising on the re-launch of an on-line service.   The survey asked my opinion of four possible tag lines and, more provocatively, whether I thought a tag line was needed at all. 

The tag lines were fairly lame.  They didn’t position or differentiate the company.  Nor did they add any value, which is what a tag line or slogan ought to do.  (Here's a list of some breathlessly irrelevant  tag lines ).

So, is a tag line needed?   Not necessarily.  A bad one generally doesn’t do much harm.  But a good one can add a great deal of value.  “Intel inside” comes to mind as a tag line that embodied the marketing thrust of a company.  At a time in the personal computer business when IBM wanted you to believe the hardware was the reason to buy a PC, and Microsoft wanted you to believe the operating system made the difference, Intel came along and asserted that you needed to know what kind of microprocessor was in there.   The chutzpah is astonishing.  It’s like claiming that you should decide what brand of car to buy based on the piston rings in the engine.  But it worked.