The Art of Einstein

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mad Men Stories IV: "Clusterf**ks I have Known"

My friend Dick Clark, erstwhile art director and TV director who's seen it all, writes:  " We   didn’t know we were working in "The Golden Age of Advertising".  We just wanted to do "good", and most of us knew  it when we saw it.

But we were also aware of the “ritual dance”.

One I remember was painfully illustrative of what became known as the “creative clusterf**k”. It was one of those urgent, work-through-lunch exercises making print “roughs” for the truck division of a major automotive account.   I was “partnered” with a very bright copywriter named Charlie, a soft-spoken southerner with the self-mocking sense of humor that comes with confidence. I recollect being pleasantly surprised at how quickly we established a rhythm. We were cranking out “roughs” like a giant letter-sorter at the post office. A constant flow of full page magazine layouts began to paper the floor-to-ceiling cork board of my office.

 We were really humpin’ when  the phone rang. Charlie answered it. The caller was a junior account executive, a prototypical young New York ad man right out of a casting call for Mad Men. (They’ve gotten that part consistently right.) This kid had one of those voices which require the recipient of the call to hold the phone 6 to 8 inches from the ear.   I heard the whole conversation.

Charlie: “Clark’s office . . . Charlie here.”

Junior: “ Charlie! This is Brad! How you guys doin’?”

Charlie: “Well . . . we’re gainin’ on it. Got some stuff.”

Junior: “Terrific! More fuel for the fire, huh?   Got some world-beaters in there? Some break-throughs? Award winners?”

Charlie: “No. Mostly they’re pretty dull. Actually, a few are flat-out awful but one or two might be headed the right direction. We figure to hit ‘mediocre’ just  about dead center.”

Junior: “ . . . (very long pause) . . . Okay-y-y. See you at three.”  Click.

In fact, some of what we did that day became the theme of became a fairly durable campaign.

I don’t think the constant fight to raise creative standards we were continually waging has ever been the plot line for an episode of Mad Men.

Charlie and I said “Hi” a lot and had lunch a couple of times, but he moved on shortlyafter our “clusterf**k”. To Doyle, Dane, Bernbach as I recall.

 

 

 

Mad Men Stories III - Rank Hath Priviliges - More True Tales From Madison Avenue In The Days of The 3-Martini Lunch

 My first job out of grad school was  at J Walter Thompson Co in the Graybar Building, 420 Lexington Ave.  They gave me a battered Smith Corona, a ream of yellow paper, and I was a copywriter.  It wasn't long before I learned about pecking orders.

A very big suit had been imported from some lesser agency to work in the Ford group and pour oil on troubled waters in Dearborn.  JWT was quite a bankerly place then, and though there was in-fighting nobody’d seen anything like him.

We read a lot about “branding” one’s self these days.  What this big swinging d**k  did was have his assistant (they were called secretaries then) make a lunch reservation and then be sure she paged him at the restaurant - an accepted practice before cell phones and good for name recognition.  One day he called a meeting and nobody showed up.  He did not last long.

There was much movement of offices on the 10^th floor where we writers sat.  The furniture in one’s office was definitely a signal.  JWT had a large stash of antique chairs, desks, tables, etc., that had been collected  over the years by Mrs. Stanley Resor, the boss’s wife.  The most expensive stuff  was assigned to the big dogs.  The furniture wrangler at Thompson was a lady who always seemed to be rushing from one important assignment to the next.  Her name was Margaret Tempest and the furniture she kept constantly in motion was referred to as “tempest tossed.” 

After two years I moved up the street to Benton & Bowles, still a copywriter, but with more money and more responsibility.  The Margaret Tempest at B&B was named Anne Octaveck.  She moved at flank speed -  about twice as fast as Ms. Tempest. 

I landed there in an office facing 52^nd street, between Sam Miller and Ed McCabe, both journeyman copywriters like me.  I discovered that I’d played lacrosse in college against Sam.  Ed went on to greater things. 

Before long a move was decreed and I was sent to an office at the other end of the floor.  I felt I was moving up in the world, for though the window looked out on an air shaft I was many steps closer to the creative director's office.   One day, not long after I’d settled in,  Anne O. went streaking by my office,  glanced in and stopped dead in her tracks.  She stalked in and stared at the plain, ordinary, industrial strength table lamp on my desk.  “You can’t have that lamp,” she said.  “That’s a group head’s lamp.”  Whereupon she got to her knees, unplugged it and took it away, presumably to bestow it on someone who’d just been promoted.

You can’t make this stuff up.

 

 

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. 

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. 

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. 

Heroes of the Internet. The first (and perhaps only one) in a series.

In January I met Deb Chance on line and by chance.  The Dining Stones she invented, and was selling somewhere out in ‘the long tail’ had been reviewed at Springwise, a website any early adopter has to love, and was enthusiastic.     

So, since I don’t already have enough kitchen gadgets gathering dust, I went to her website.   I had a question and fired off an email. 

The First reason Deb is my hero – She did not turn my email over to the automata – that class of machines that responds to my Congressman’s email, the phone company’s email etc.  Deb answered my email herself. 

“Hi Arthur.  Sorry for the delay in response.  Our product was featured on Springwise and a number of other newspapers picked up the story, so my inbox has been overwhelmingly full.  I work full-time for a securities investment firm and run Dining Stones at night and on weekends, so there is a lag time for me…. with the volume lately, I just can't keep up.”  How can you not trust this person, her answer, her product! 

Another question triggered a second email

Second reason Deb is my hero.  She is using the net to make her dreams come true..  “I have an entrepreneurial spirit and have dreamed of having my own business for over 20 years”, she wrote. “ I am a foodie. I make up my own recipes all the time.  I used to name them, I even had a funny one called ‘Back Porch Surprise’ which I made one winter when our fridge went out and we set all our food on the back porch to keep cold until we had a replacement.”

Muchas gracias, y'all

I got my butt kicked into the 21^st century last week.  It happened on my road trip  up the east side  of the US,  from Hobe Sound in south Florida to Katonah, just north of New York City.

I don’t do this often enough, and when the opportunity comes along I always try to route myself through North Carolina, ‘The Land of the Long Leaf Pine”  and land of my birth.

A few miles after crossing the NC/SC border I took at left at  Lumberton NC  and headed up Rte 211 to Red Springs, Raeford – destination Chapel Hill.   Two-lane blacktop all the way.  I love it.

As the miles ticked by I started to see interesting signs, like  “Se habla Espanol”  -“Iglesia Santa Maria”.  When I was in school at UNC the state was pretty much 100% black and white and while I had trouble with the accent at times, English was the first and only language.  Now this?

“What gives?” I asked my friend Sharon who has lived in Kinston NC long enough that I think of her as a native.   Her reply opened my eyes.

“North Carolina is home to the fastest-growing Hispanic population in the country.  That's right -- not CA, or AZ, or TX, or NM.  The Old North State.  I sit on an advocacy task force for our Community Health Center with at least two Hispanic members and two Hispanic staff people; all of our public agencies have Spanish-speaking staff;  several churches now hold a Spanish-language service to their Sunday rosters.

Kinston is typical, and this is a town of only 24,000 people.  More than 5 years ago, I was driving cross country to a meeting in Wilmington and rounded the curve between Beulaville and Chinquapin -- and nearly had a wreck.  St. James Baptist Church had morphed into Iglesias Santiago. The state legislature is practically under siege to reverse a law it passed four years ago granting in-state tuition at state educational institutions (including Blue Heaven) to the American-born children of illegal immigrants. So that's what gives.

A friend and ex-colleague who lives in Chapel Hill added, “ ALL the service people -- plumbers, painters, electricians, yard maintenance--are hispanic.  A working knowledge of Spanish is becoming vital.  Why NC?  This a builder's mecca and one of the fastest growing states in the nation.  NC passed NJ last year as the tenth most populous and Raleigh is the new Seattle, a magnet for young people.  As a realtor said, "We are the new Florida (for retirees)."

The melting pot of our grand parents is bubbling all over again, in every corner of the country.  I imagine on my next trip there I’ll be having salsa with my hush puppies.

 

 

 

 

 

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)

Random Acts of Blindness

Why do I get the feeling that the marketers I deal with wear blindfolds, like kids playing pin the tail on the donkey?  

The letter I got from my Volvo dealer last week says it all.  His database wanted to be sure everything was going swimmingly with the wagon I bought a few years ago.  But his database (who I’ve never met) had no way of knowing that I haven’t owned that Volvo in years. 

The same week someone from BMW sent a letter wishing me happy birthday.  The BMW is long gone, too.

I wonder why these geniuses don’t ask some of the sales people, who sit around waiting to ignore the next person who walks through the showroom door, to man the phones.  Call customers.  Have a conversation.  Build a relationship.    

Last week’s mail also brought a ‘personalized’ letter from an audiologist.  Someone had sold him a list of generation H (hearing aid) types.  The letter promised benefits that would “greatly effect (sic) my life”.   (When I typed the previous sentence even my grammar checker caught the mistake),

These letters don’t build relationships.  What’s more they really piss me off.

They make the senders look stupid, too.  And the underlying premise, that they can save money giving a human being’s job to a computer, is highly questionable. 

Computers have zero street smarts.  They’re great at crunching numbers but not much good at building relationships.   After 50 years of intensive work, the artificial intelligence community will tell you there’s still no computer that can recognize you when you walk into the room – much less judge your mood by your expression, tone of voice, etc. – signs that human beings decode very well.

People are expensive, I suppose.  But so are :30 TV spots, NASCAR sponsorships, Catalog mailings, Customer Relationship Management applications and other methods designed to win friends and influence people.

I am not a Luddite.  I’ve been using PC’s  for 30 years and I am lost without my Mac.  But I find people delegating tasks to computers that defy common sense.

Isn’t it curious that the best internet marketers are also the ones who best understand how to involve people in the process of dealing with customers.   More about them in my upcoming series “Heroes of the Internet”

 

 

Remember Howard Zieff?

Howard died the other day after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.  I got to know him through my pal of 40 years, Dick Clark who worked for him as an assistant, collaborator, court jester, and sometime actor  (Dick was the voice-over in the unforgettable Alka-Seltzer commercial, “Spicy Meatball’ and ultimately became his rep).

In every one of the half dozen obits I’ve read (they’re all over the Internet) I’ve been struck by the raves for work he did 40 years ago (before inline skates, PC’s, iPods, the internet, or Miller Lite)  The half-life of outstanding advertising never ceases to amaze me.   

The Alka-Seltzer spot dates to 1970.  The Levy’s rye bread posters came earlier.  But none of the articles mentioned the posters he did for The New York Daily News (below) that established his reputation. The Daily News pictures didn’t need a headline - or copy for that matter.  The whole story, including dialog, was wrapped up in a photograph - like a Norman Rockwell illustration on film.  They campaign was done in the ‘50s, years before the ‘creative revolution’ of the ‘60s and ‘70s.  

Today it’s hard to realize how unique Howard’s vision was.  But if you can find an copy of LIFE from that era you'll get some idea.  The models in the advertising are right out of  “The Stepford Wives”.  Their pefect faces are wreathed in perfect smiles.  Their perfect bodies are perfectly groomed and dressed.  Howard broke that mold.  The pictures he took were populated with real people who made the advertising authentic in the same way headlines like “Lemon”  did for VW.  

His pictures had a sense of humor that’s missing in most advertising today.  The light touch, the result of exquisite casting and meticulously set ups - well - the ad just made you smile and feel good.  

There’s a new series about advertising on TNT called “Trust Me” and in last week’s episode the creative heros   

spent the hour scheming to get a high-powered director to film their spot.  In Howard’s prime, when an ordinary director’s job was to ‘shoot the board' as written, he was the first of the directors people schemed to get.  He picked the boards he wanted to shoot, and the fact that he’d take your job (at twice what you’d pay elsewhere) was an affirmation of your concept and a promise that the client was going to get a whole lot more commercial than he’d bargained for.  

Years after the creative revolution was put to bed  a hand full of writers, art directors, and agencies get credit for the work.  Howard left Madison Avenue at the top of his game, and went off to Hollywood and film career.  As a result, I think he gets much less credit than deserved for his influence on the advertising revolution 

 

OK, so a priest, a rabbi, and a copywriter walk into a bar…

Eric Silver, whose resume says he once wrote for David Letterman and also includes reference to some ‘slapstick’ work for Miller Lite, has just gone over to DDB as the creative big cheese, replacing Lee Garfinkel, who himself had a fling at stand-up comedy and has his fingerprints all over some light, amusing advertising, including work for Subaru and Pepsi.      

Having recently read Ken Roman’s bio of David Ogilvy, (one of my 'must reads in the column at right)  this changing of guard started me thinking about the use of humor in advertising, which Ogilvy hated with passion.  Perhaps because his medium was print, while funny ads are almost exclusively the province of television and radio, which have been driven from their beginnings by entertainment.

While I love a good laugh  I approach the subject of funny ads with trepidation.

Humor is a dangerous weapon in the hands of creative people - not unlike an AK-7 in the hands of a 10-year-old.  It can polarize an audience (believe it or not, some people don’t think Groucho is funny!).  Often it gains attention at the expense of what’s being advertised.   Friend Julie, a bundle of laughs in her own right, said when I asked her,  “I love funny commercials but rarely remember what the product is.”   That’s the problem.

And in truth, a lot of stuff that’s supposed to send you giggling all the way to the check-out counter is just lame.  Being funny takes extraordinary talent and is desperately hard work.   There’s a reason Jack Benny had writers.

We once hired John Cleese (Basil Fawlty, above) to do a radio campaign for Callard & Bowser candy.   John is serious about his nutso comedy – a and thoughtful person.  On top of that, he is a delight to work with if you play by the rules, and he made the rules quite clear   He was ready and willing to receive all the marketing wisdom we could supply.  “But please don’t try to tell me what’s funny”, he said.   The spots turned out to be a huge hit.   Leaving ‘funny’ to the pros is a big idea.

Steve Martin, and SNL aside, America doesn’t have a well-developed funny bone, either.   The Brits do humor in advertising so much better than we do.  Ditto the Aussies, Kiwi’s, and Scandinavians, etc.  Years ago I played a reel of humorous spots from around the world for a seminar I was teaching at Michigan State.  The class loved the commercials.  The more outrageous they were, the more the kids laughed.  But when I asked them why we don’t produce work of that caliber in America they said “we’re actually a  pretty conservative country”.  The work made them laugh but culturally it made them uncomfortable.  I suspect the funny stuff works better on the coasts than in the interior.

 The Tramp commercials we did for IBM taught me another lesson about humor.  The spots were big productions that put Billy Scudder, who played the Tramp, into situations where the PC always saved his bacon.  Corny as these little play-lets were, people loved them.  They liked them so much that when we researched the spots viewers actually played back copy points that weren’t even in the mentioned in the commercials.    

Julie’s brother Brian, who makes funny radio spots for a living put it another way.  “A funny spot can make you laugh many times, so when you hear the advertising message, you get a laugh. That makes listeners feel good about the advertiser and makes them more open to the product or service being sold... I'm more open to (humorous spots) than someone who is beating their chest and talking about how great they are.”

The real power of humor in advertising is that it  lowers the audiences’ defenses and humanizes big faceless companies.   The unspoken message is “we don’t take ourselves too seriously around here – we’re regular fellas just like you”.    The stiff collar, authoritarian voice that’s told us to color inside the lines all our lives is silenced.  

Bottom line:  if you can laugh at yourself  and avoid getting lost looking for laughs, you could make some friends and grab some market share.   Ogilvy might disagree, but I think that Bernbach and friends would be in my corner.

 

 

 

Time to bring back the Ecphoneme ?

I use punctuation for a living.  I’ve been doing it for years. 

And, every day I am amazed all over again at how the writing life has changed since I cut my first mimeograph stencil.  It makes you think.  The other day, for instance, pondering emoticons and other forms of email emphasis, I discovered that what newspapermen called a ‘bang’, is actually an ecphoneme!   Don’t ask me how to pronounce it.

Stylebooks advise using the ecphoneme with caution.  I have personally been  ‘advised’ by bosses I’ve worked for to “get rid of those @#$%ing exclamation marks.  They are a bad writer's crutch.”

Of all the punctuation on my keyboard the bang seems to carry the most freight.  A period is a simple signal to stop.  A comma asks politely that you pause before going on.   A bang at sentence end shrieks. This is IMPORTANT!   50% off!! Offer ends soon!!!  It’s as though the sentence were red in the face, with bulging blood vessels throbbing at the temples.

Bury me not on Madison Avenue

I’ve been trying to scrub the word ‘advertising’ from my vocabulary. 

To most people outside ‘the business’ it just means “television commercials”.

Let’s say I’m at a cocktail party and a brilliant conversationalist asks my occupation.  I say  I’m in advertising.  The question I’m then usually asked is whether I’ve done anything my inquisitor has seen on the tube.   (Which reminds me we’re going to have to retire ‘tube’ soon, too, because they’re all flat panels now.  Will YouTube need re-branding?  Think about it.) 

When someone asks that question what they’re hoping to hear is that I’ve done something they’ve seen on television, remember, and found amusing.  Chances are slim.  There’s never been a precious lot of that around.

Anyway, if what you know how to do is create TV commercials you have a valuable skill but you’re not in the advertising business as of 2009. 

Words and Deeds and Advertising

I had lunch with my friend Chuck Griffith today.  He is one of the wonderful writers who helped make our agency's reputation.  He still writes, dreams up software, and builds museum quality Shaker objects – I hesitate to say furniture because the things he builds are works of art. 

After chatting about wives, kids, grand-kids, this and that, we ended up, as usual, talking about advertising.  

Chuck is a devout Windows user and offended by the PC vs. Mac spots Apple has been running.  I find them witty, well cast, and persuasive. He likes the Geico spots with the talking gecko. Whenever one comes on the air I rush for the remote and change channels.  We both have enough experience to know that each of these campaigns are doing the job for the advertiser.  And yet each of us detests one of them.