The Art of Einstein

An Advertising Tale

One of advertising’s most distinguished early practitioners was Commodore J. Walter Thompson. 

With his dignified bearing he was among the first to put forth advertising as a profession.  He was utterly tireless and insisted on making every moment of every day as productive as possible.  In an era of hansom cabs and horse drawn trolleys the quickest way to get around New York was the elevated train system.  So when he had an appointment he often chose this speediest, if not grandest, form of transportation.   

One windy day in March the Commodore found himself seated aboard the “el” when a young man carrying a sandwich boarded the train and squeezed into the seat next to him.

The sandwich board was large and bulky; two-sided and about five feet tall by three feet wide.  One side promoted the virtues of a local restaurant while the other side proclaimed the benefits of painless dentistry. 

As the train rattled on the young man kept glancing at the Commodore, eager to engage this distinguished gentleman in conversation.  But the Commodore remained aloof.

Summoning up all his nerve the sandwich board man finally broke the ice.  “ Good morning, sir,” he said.  “I’m on my way to work, are you?”  The commodore ack nowledged that he too was headed for his job.

“And what is your profession sir?” asked the sandwich board man 

“ I am in the advertising business,” replied the commodore. 

A wide smile lit the younger man;s face.

“What a coincidence," he said. "I’m in advertising, too. Ain’t it hell when the wind blows!”

My good  friend Chuck Francis never tired of telling this story from the files of his Idea Bank.  It cracked him up every time.   

 

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.  

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. 

I don't know much about branding. But I know one when I see one!

At some point in the last 20 years‘advertising lost its mojo and the buzzword du jour became ‘branding’.   

Ever since then, I’ve been trying to figure out what  exactly a person means when they talk about ‘branding’. 

We all know about burning a cattleman’s imprint on a dogie’s rump.  That aside, the trouble with branding is that what it is seems to depend on who you ask.  The only sure thing is that branding has become a reason to spend millions of dollars on marketing activities that have no direct responsibility for producing sales.  I'm no carney barker but this is nuts.

Advertising types will tell you branding really is another word for advertising and doing lots more of it is a good idea. Designers will talk about graphics, typography, packaging, and bringing the logo into the 21^st century. Brand consultants, the true poets of branding, will advise you to get in touch with your brand personality, brand DNA, and brand values before you make a move.  

It's confusing.  I googled ‘branding’ a minute ago and got more than 44 million hits! Even a search of Amazon brings up 51, 471 branding references.   Who’s a person to believe? 

Back in the 20^th century when advertising was marketing's steamroller, you could still build a brand using print and broadcast media.  Ivory soap did it when your great grandparents were kids. Maxwell House did it on radio in the 40’s.  Volkswagen did it in print during the 60’s.   Frank Perdue took his tender chickens to television and did it in the 70’s.  But time marches on.  In the past 25 years, it’s hard to think of a brand that has risen to greatness on the back of an advertising campaign. I’m not sure anyone is to blame.  Media has become so fractionated that advertising simply doesn’t have the impact it once did.

Today, anyone with an idea and a personal computer can get 15 minutes of mind space (and fame) on the Internet.   The cost of communication (and distribution via a website) is trivial, so everyone seems to be taking a crack at it.  But gaining awareness is only part of the battle.   Building a brand in the yeasty media environment that surrounds us can only be accomplished by getting a product into the hands of consumers – and creating an experience that so thoroughly excites-and-delights that the delightees will share the good news with their friends.  Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others make sharing the good news easy.  

However, there’s a very practical approach to getting a brand built and nourished in 2009 and beyond.  And I'd get into it right now.  But this is a blog not a novel so I will lay out the formula in the next post.  Stay tuned.

The Uses of The Past

I spent a day this week with my pal Bruce and his merry men at The History Factory in our nation’s capital.

Bruce and I have been friends since the day, about 20 years ago, when he first let me in on what he was up to.  He had been working at the Smithsonian where his job was saying “no” to companies who’d asked the museum to pull together historic material to help them celebrate an opening, an anniversary, a retirement, or milestone of some kind.  The Smithsonian, big and wonderful as it is, doesn’t do that kind of work.  But Bruce saw an opportunity.  The History Factory is now a global business.

 In our first conversation, Bruce knocked me flat when he said “The past is the springboard to company’s future” at which point a light bulb went on and  I said “A-men brother”.  So while The History Factory organizes and manages the archives of large corporations,  I’m convinced it’s really in the branding business.

Brand stories, after all,  are rooted in a company’s past – but for some reason the past embarrasses some corporations.   My first job out of school was at J Walter Thompson, then the world’s largest advertising agency.   I started there, as a copywriter, and soon  found myself working on Ford  advertising.  As a car enthusiast, I knew the history of the company and its cars fairly well.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned that 70 years of Ford history, that included cars  hobbyists idolized, was out of bounds.  To my amazement I found that Ford was so rattled by it’s ‘tin-lizzie’ past that the famous Ford blue oval logo hobbiests revered, didn’t appear on their cars and was forbidden in their advertising.