Advertising Ourselves to Death

This Is Not A Blog Post

Ok, well maybe it is. But I have to say I am drawing great inspiration from a campaign underway in the Atlanta market for Clear, a wireless internet provider.

The first piece of marketing I came across was a series of bright green balloons tied up outside a restaurant, with the Clear logo and the message "This is not a balloon." Unfortunately for the wireless company, this was the same day that Clear, the airport service for frequent travelers went under.

Despite the poor timing the guys at Clear have made a powerful entrance into the Atlanta market, not by talking bits and baud, or even speed. Rather they are making people rethink their world with a seemingly non-stop supply of message that recast park benches, restaurants, and even busses. ("This is not a bus. It is another place to watch streaming video.")

Each of the pieces is clean and simple. There's the setup line, one sentence to pay it off and the logo. No explanation of what Clear is, no pricing offer, no paragraphs of legalese. I can only imagine someone having to beat back efforts to make every piece tell the whole story.

In a nice change of pace, they use TV to do the heavy lifting, rather than just tease the consumer. The spots explain that Clear is an alternative to basic WIFI and even internet service from other cellular companies. 

Here however, Clear was again snakebit. Check out their spot which features cupcakes and sprinkles to explain the service. See if it doesn't remind you of the much funnier Verizon Wireless spot using sprinkles to explain their Friends and Families service. Someone is selling a lot of sprinkles these days.

The work is apparently from a Los Angeles shop called Secret Weapon Marketing. And despite a few stumbles, beyond their control, the work is a great example of how the pieces can work together, if you plan accordingly.

Oddly, the one piece of marketing that doesn't measure up is Clear's web site. I'm willing to bet it was done in-house or by a separate firm. Because the tone is entirely different, with boring stock images and 1-2-3 process that is devoid of any excitement. Oh well, for want of a good digital strategist.

Bing! The portal is back

Microsoft has ventured into the search engine fray once again, revamping its Live Search and rebranding it Bing. With its vast resources, Microsoft is positioning Bing as a “decision engine” rather than a search engine, trying to convince users that search engines should do more than just deliver a bunch of links.

Clearly Microsoft has technology and marketing clout, but does Bing change the playing field?

Background

For the record, Bing is Microsoft’s third foray into the world of search engines. First, there was MSN search, and then came Live Search. Neither one managed to trump Yahoo! or, later on, Google. So while Microsoft may well be the 800-pound gorilla, its success is by no means certain. Then again, Microsoft has shown repeatedly that it will keep investing in key categories until it gets it right. For reference, take a look at the battle for browser supremacy, banking software and office software.

With billions invested, Microsoft is clearly hoping Bing becomes a verb just as Google has. But the site is about much more than just outdoing Google. The site itself is an attempt to reinvent the search engine experience.Users have gone from the highly organized, click-rich environment of Yahoo! to the sparse simplicity of Google in recent years. Yahoo! attempted to be everything you needed, a portal that gave you everything from search to news, music and more. In recent years, Google has added many features, all geared toward letting users customize their experiences through iGoogle and desktop widgets.

Bing appears to be navigating a path challenging both Yahoo! and Google.

Louis Vuitton's bag of stupidity

[by Todd] Seriously, there are some folks at Louis Vuitton that need to be unemployed.

Last fall Danish artist Nadia Plesner started selling the t-shirt shown here on her site to raise money for victims of genocide in Darfur. She calls it a Simple Living t-shirt. And offers this explanation:

My illustration Simple Living is an idea inspired by the medias constant cover of completely meaningless things. My thought was: Since doing nothing but wearing designer bags and small ugly dogs apparently is enough to get you on a magazine cover, maybe it is worth a try for people who actually deserves and needs attention.

Perhaps not the most pointed of commentaries, but the shirt makes a nice statement about pop culture and desperation of Darfur's victims. The shirt existed in relative obscurity for five months, that is until the folks at Louis Vuitton got stupid.

In February, the Intellectual Property Director decided this was the perfect time to flex some muscle and throw down a cease and desist letter, complete with patronizing comments. (Here's a PDF of the letter.)

“Although we applaud your efforts to raise awareness and funds to help Darfur, a most worthy cause, we cannot help noticing that the design of the Simple Living Products includes the reproduction of a bag infringing on Louis Vuitton’s Intellectual Property Rights, in particular the Louis Vuitton Monogram Multicolore Trademark to which it is confusingly similar. We are surprised of such a promotion of a counterfeit bag.”

“As an artist yourself, we hope that you regognize the need to respect other artists’ rights and Louis Vuitton’s Intellectual Property Rights which include the Louis Vuitton Monogram Multicolore trademark.”

What pray tell could have possibly led anyone, with any modicum of authority, to think this was a good idea? How did they think for one moment that sending a threat would play out well for them? To her credit, the artist wrote back and tried to give them a graceful way out, pointing out that the bag was a generic reference to all such accessories. (Here's her response.)

"However, I must inform You, that the bag in my drawing is inspired by - and refers to - designers bags in general – not a Louis Vuitton bag. If you take a closer look, you will also notice, that the pattern in my drawing is not the pattern which is used in the design of a Loius Vuitton bag. The name Louis Vuitton is in no way mentioned or referred to, neither in my drawing, nor in the campaign as such.”

Correction, the company's name wasn't mentioned, until now. To add insult to stupidity the designer brand, which has invested millions to cultivate its image, is pissing it away by now filing suit against the artist. Go ahead and set a Google News filter on this one, and watch for it on the network morning shows.

And of course the letters and lawsuit have helped the artist's cause. I asked her by email if sales were up. I got a response in 20 minutes.

Yes, all the writing about the story has definitely helped the sales! My lawyer has advised me not to give any numbers just yet, but as soon as I can, I will let you know.

Come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised to see the design licensed and on sale in a civic-minded shop near you soon. Which means others will follow suit, and soon Louis Vuitton will need a pad of C&D letters to keep up with demand.

Now that's brand stewardship.

It seemed like such a good idea

[by Todd] Sure social networking is a big, powerful idea. But sometimes it's worth thinking about just how odd these new concepts are, especially if taken out of context.

Tell me again how all 711 of those people are really your friends.

The real lack of diversity that's killing advertising

[by Todd] Time for some exercise. Pick a client's issue you're trying to crack. Got it? Now, stand up, walk around whatever passes for an office where you work and talk to four people about it. Come on back when you're done, I'll wait.

Back already? Of the four people you talked to how many have professional experience outside the advertising or marketing industry? If your answer is two or more then I'll bet you work for an interactive agency.

Less than that, my money says you work for a brand agency. And further more, I'll hazard a guess your company is scared witless about the future.

Advertising has become an incestuous industry that crafts young talent in the image of old hands and mines for talent in the competitor's break room. The result is that agencies lack the diversity of experiences to tackle the challenges they face today.

Yet clients keep throwing challenges on the table and ask advertising agencies to think differently about the solutions. Of course they come back with subtle variations of the tried and true, that's what the collective braintrust knows. Over at Forrester, Mary Beth Kemp (my new favorite source of thought starters) calls it The Conflict of Interest of Change.

Hence the conflict of interest. The challenge to agencies is assuring current operations while building the future. Or, perhaps in some cases, just getting the most out of current operations.

This isn't a conflict of interest, it's a systematic inbred lack of situational awareness. The people who need to lead the change have no point of reference, no varied experiences, no diversity of background.

Just over a decade ago I was cranking out stories about cops, crime and national disasters to hit three deadlines daily for The Dallas Morning News. The guy sitting next to me wore a flight suit in the Marine Corps before considering the exciting world of account service. Our ECD used to work in television production. And the rest of the team is just as random. (The eastern european heavy metal singer probably sets the grading curve.)

So what? When we sit down to ponder a business challenge there is a massive range of experiences at the table. Each of us comes at problem from not just a different approach, but an entirely different direction. And the resulting discussion isn't just splitting hairs.

To be fair, interactive agencies have an unfair advantage. We're new.

All of us came from some other industry, even those who jumped over from advertising agencies. We came here by reinventing ourselves. There was no defined career path that said your next step is to leave behind what you know and jump into a new industry.

But I worry our industry is working hard to give up that huge advantage. Think about the slots you have open today. If someone applied for a mid- or senior-level position and didn't have any interactive experience would you even give them an interview? If not you're killing us.

The interactive business has grown explosively because we made it up as we went, trying stuff because no one knew better. What we DID know was that there HAD to be a better way to do business. If we don't fight like hell to keep that edge then a few decades from now an upstart industry will bemoan our inability to recognize the need for change.

Media is messing it up, all over again

[by Todd] Here we go, again.

Media agencies have decided they need to be in the content collection business. Witness Mindshare's fragmentation into four units, one of which will "invent content" for benefit of their clients. And with it we see yet again the agency world skipping merrily down the roads of foolishness traveled so many times before.

There isn't much I remember from my college course, and even less from those on advertising. But, if memory serves, here's the history of advertising agencies in a nutshell.

1. Agencies created to buy ads in newspapers for clients.
2. Started units to create ads, that it could then place in newspapers.
3. Created radio shows, where actors read the ads that people were no longer reading in newspapers.
4. Created TV shows, to place ads that were no longer performing in radio or newspapers.
5. Break free from the ad agencies they'd created, because not everyone wanted to pay big bucks to make ads that media units could then place in newspapers, radio or television.
6. Spun off interactive media groups, because buying ads online wasn't as clean and easy as buying ads in newspapers, radio and television.
7. Realized they'd made a mistake and are now trying to become all things to all people, again.

I may be missing some interim steps, but then again AdPrin was at 8:40 in the morning, and many days that just seemed to be an unreasonable hour to be awake. (God, I miss college.)

At every turn agencies first try to take on responsibility for creating something, then they ultimately spin off that discipline. That's because creating content, albeit ads, shows or events, is fundamentally different from buying and measuring the impact of spending the client's money. If you need any validation for that just compared notes of what a creative director thinks is cool versus a media director.

So now Mindshare has Déjà vu all over again and will start cranking out content for benefit of their clients. The announcement came just in time for a report from Forrester, Content Consumers Want. But the news for Mindshare isn't good. It isn't enough to know which consumers your brand wants to connect with, you have to understand what content people are willing to accept from your brand.

Over on one of the Forrester blogs Mary Beth Kemp makes the point like this:

Content is just an excuse to interact and build a relationship with consumers.  If the content is not connected with deep consumer intelligence and individualized data, media agencies are missing half the opportunity.

Is it just me, or does that sound like the job of account planners, analytic teams and strategists. How many of those have you seen sitting among the media planners?

But this isn't just a folly of media units. It is another symptom of the demise of brand agencies. Wake up idiots. Your own media partners, formerly your in-house colleagues, think you're too dumb/slow/indifferent to learn new tactics. While you continue to have dozens of creatives concepting bigger and more more expensive commercials, clients are looking for nimble, more efficient and measurable ideas.

So here we go again. Take note of the date, because five to seven years from now all these "invention" groups, as Mindshare will call it's effort, will be spun off into new agencies. And 40 years from now we'll go through the exercise all over again.

This just in... Who cares?

[by Todd] Can someone tell me, in 30 minutes or less, why I should care at all about Twitter? Seriously, I'd love to figure this out. According to Leigh companies need to have their ear to Twitter in order to get the first glimpse of brand nightmares headed their way.

But, try as I might, I fail to see Twitter as anything more than a curiosity among a precious few nerds.

Hang on. Let me back up my rant and try this again.

Leigh is right, every company on the face of the planet should have a plan for responding to consumer outcry. And no plan should be complete without incorporating listening to and responding in the UGC world. But deciding just when and how to respond is the truly tricky part.

Way back in News 105 (a.k.a learning how to write a news story) we were told that key elements of newsworthiness were timeliness, proximity and impact. So that two-car crash that tied up rush hour traffic for you is a big story at home, but not likely to matter much to people a couple hundred miles away.

Of course all this was long before anyone created a blog, or "twittered" (damn, that just sounds wrong). Suddenly geography isn't the easy calculation it once was. And timeliness has been sliced down to nano seconds compared to what it once was. But impact, that remains the gold standard. Which brings me back to my rant.

Companies need to keep a keen focus on asking "Who cares?" whenever an issue pops up on the radar. If person X, blogging on a site with five links raises an issue, then I care a lot less than if it is on a site frequently cited on 100s of other sites.

Double ditto with Twitter. Yes, I want to know what's being said. But I can't imagine ever pulling a play book off the shelf and initiating a disaster response program based on a Twitter. All too often it's just a handful of like-minded technophiles whispering among themselves.

The critical skill required is an ability to understand what makes news. Shame on any public relations agency or brand agency that isn't studying daily how stories move between the user generated world and mainstream media. But never let three executives talking among themselves about something they found on Twitter trigger a full-scale response.

So I would add the following to Leigh's game plan. Call on professionals. Either keep a public relations firm on retainer, or have one in your Rolodex. Then, when you hear a whisper on Twitter, or see your brand on Technorati, call on a pro and ask them to help evaluate the risk.

After all, there's nothing worse than a company taking a spark of unrest and pouring fuel on it to create a full-blown conflagration.

Charlie Kicked My @**

[by Todd] Parents with video cameras are my mortal enemy. And if you work for an advertising agency they should be yours too.

Seriously.

They're making all of us look bad.

Here's the deal. Yesterday my girls were running around repeating, in their best fake British accent, "Charlie bit my finger, again" and laughing hysterically. Obviously this was a lame line from some Nickelodeon show that will be invading my world for the next couple weeks, I figured. Or not.

Chloe explained to me with a very disappointed tone that the saying was from "the funniest video ever."
And indeed, she may be right. Search the phrase on Google and more than two dozen pages of links pop up, all inspired by this YouTube video.

Missing the gut-busting value of the video? Yeah, me too. But it's been viewed 17.4 million times, copied and shown elsewhere tens of thousands more and rated by more than 39,000 viewers. Then there are the spoofs, that dreaded but inevitable measure of viral success.

All of this because some kid gets his finger bitten repeatedly by his infant brother.

What am I missing? There are tens of millions of dollars being spent by agencies and advertisers trying to figure out how to move messages in the viral channel. Books are filling the bookshelves, and newsletters cluttering inboxes, all purporting to expose the magic formula.

And yet mom and dad kick our collective butts.

Yea, yea. I know we should be heartened by magic of how the Internet gives all of us a shot at the magic, our 15MB of fame.

That would be heart warming approach. But this is advertising and people should only feel good when we pay big bucks to make a commercial then interrupt their viewing pleasure. Right?

Hmm, I wonder if that kid is available for cameos.

Reality would like to be added as one of your friends!

[by Todd] What the hell is going on around here these days? Have we forgotten what it means to be marketers?

Facebook applications, widgets, WAP marketing, scrapable media? In the past month no fewer than four major presentations, webinars and white papers have crossed my desk focusing on the future of marketing. Each has been persuasive in drawing a future where consumer control is cemented and marketers demand more measurement for the money they spend.

And yet they are all wrong.

The future of marketing isn’t in new and exciting technology. It is in what we say, not where it’s said.

Look, I’m as much a geek for all the new toys as the next guy. New Facebook app that shows my lineage back to the Czar of Russia, heck yes. A widget that tracks the orbital decay of the moon, tell me where to click.

But take a close look at any discussion of Web 2.0, 3.0 or beyond, and odds are that you won’t find any talk about the message, only how it is delivered. And that’s not right.

If you want to serve your clients and your agency well, screw the technology. There are always people around who can figure out how to make it work. Focus your attention on what to say, and to whom. Content is the real coin of the realm, now more than ever.

What can you offer your customer to gain their attention and time? Look at the airlines – flight delays, last minute sales, special offers; customers fall all over themselves requesting that information.

Or maybe your customers will step forward for inside information, legal of course, the type of stuff that feeds their need to be the first to know. Look at your own inbox. How many news alerts do you have just so that you can know something before your colleagues or friends?

Technology doesn’t create that content. It is merely a tool for making it more accessible to your customers.

The same can be said for the printing press and radio. Indeed, I’d suggest that media barons were the first integrated marketers. They realized that by feeding people’s need for information, they could serve up a heaping side dish of advertising. Unfortunately their grandchildren seem to have forgotten that lesson. But that’s another rant.

Admittedly not every company has valuable content laying around. That’s when it pays to listen. What are your customers talking about? What excites them? Find that and then create a stage for their interests.

Look at Doritos. Who beyond the age of 14 is going to spend hours in the world of cheese-flavored tortilla chips? But, their target audience will spend countless hours wrapped up in music and MySpace. Enter Crash the Super Bowl, where this year Doritos lets fans pick what unknown band will get 60-seconds of coveted airtime.

This isn’t some annoying product placement, where shoving a brand name into a show either goes unnoticed or interrupts my viewing pleasure. This is rock-solid marketing 101 in the Internet age. Doritos is using its clout and budget to empower its customers. By leveraging the content from these bands, it is gaining a deeper connection with Doritos target market.

I seriously doubt someone on that project said "MySpace is cool. Let's do something with that?" Get the point? Please, tell me you do.

So, by all means learn all you can about the newest digital toys. Just remember Internet speed can kill a bad idea just as quickly as it will accelerate a good one.

Four months and little sleep later...

[by Todd] Lessons learned along the way while we produced America's Marines and Our.Marines.com:

1. The people of Columbia, TN, may be my favorite folks on the planet.
2. A cracked tooth left untended will carve a path of pain and devastation.
3. Catching a flight from Atlanta to Louisville is far harder than you'd think.
4. Everyone should be required to witness dawn at the Grand Canyon.
5. Real stories from real people are always better than anything from a copywriter.

If you haven't check out the Our.Marines.com, please do. But first watch this: