The Art of Einstein

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 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. 

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.