Belly of the Beast

The ad that should have run today.

2011-08-08T22:59:00.003-04:00

Money talks. Bullshit walks. And if any brand needed building right now, the United States of America would be it.

You say goodbye. I say hello.

2011-06-15T17:13:00.004-04:00

The Thursday before Memorial Day weekend one set of doors closed and another set opened. Phone and internet carried over with nary a hiccup, no deadlines were missed, no clients inconvenienced.

Right now the new space still feels tingly and unexplored, more possibility than reality. I know familiarity and comfort will come. I hope they don’t come too soon.

Because I don't tweet

2011-05-30T19:24:00.004-04:00

I happily interrupt this blog to link? Embed? Like?our client Shire's Brave Awards site.

Nonvertising

2011-04-27T17:56:00.008-04:00

This was a Pizza Hut
Now it's all covered with daisies
you got it you got it

--Talking Heads, "(Nothing but) Flowers"

What is the future of advertising?

Here's an idea: reward customers by relieving them of the burden of seeing ads. It's based on the not-particularly brilliant insight that most people avoid advertising if they can. So if you're a marketer and you're trying to forge bonds of loyalty with your customers, why not give them what they want: nonvertising.

Here's how it works. Let's say you're Coors Light. And let's say you're on track to hit your numbers for sales and profitability. To thank your loyal customers, you give back the 8 minutes of time you bought on the NFL game of the week. You don't sell it off to another advertiser. You give it back to the customer and tell them you did so.

Conversely, if sales or share starts to slip, the advertising returns. And your target is made to see inane re-edits of NFL coach press conferences until he puts down that Bud Light and locks and loads the Silver Bullet instead.

This, of course, is the exact opposite of what advertisers do now. As their market share goes up, brands tend to increase their ad spending. This, ultimately, becomes counter-productive because--did I mention?--people don't like advertising.

Nonvertising is already happening at the margins. It just doesn't have a name yet. Think about when your local NPR station does its fundraising drive. They tell you before it starts: cough up your contribution and if we get enough money we'll cut the fund drive short by a day. Ira Glass and the Car Talk guys know you don't want to sit there and hear them yammer about public radio's funding shortfall and the big bad Federal government meanies. And they leverage that fact to their benefit--and ours.

Another example: ad-free "premium" versions of websites like Pandora. You want a clean, clutter-free environment? Pay for it.
Now this isn't a perfect analogy because the advertiser has no say (and no upside) in whether the customer is subjected to his ads or not...it's between the site and the user. But still, the basic thinking is the same: use your customer's desire not to be bombarded with ads as a way to increase traction.

There's a lovely old science fiction short story by Frederik Pohl called "The Midas Plague." Written in the 1950s, when post-war American prosperity was really ramping up, it imagined a time in the not-too-distant future when the greatest challenge society faced was material over-abundance. If people didn't consume in large enough amounts, at a fast enough rate, the wheels of commerce (which in those days largely meant manufacturing, of course) would grind to a halt. In this future, our notion of wealth and poverty was turned on its head. The poorest people were saddled with the most material goods. Their lives were a constant grind of purchasing and consuming, played out in enormous gilded palaces and huge cars. Those at the apex of society, on the other hand, had the means to avoid this misfortunate, and lived in the luxury of austere simplicity.

Now substitute "advertising" for washing machines, lawn mowers and color TVs, and you have the world the way it is (or at least, America the way it is): the well-to-do watch PBS and TV on demand, drive through streets lined with trees, not billboards, and listen to satellite radio in the car. Their Macs are a shimmering expanse of aluminum, 100% decal-free. They prefer environments and media with few or no ads, and pay for the privilege.

Advertising does not suffer from lack of efficacy. It suffers from too much muchness. Brands that figure out how to lessen that, in a way that customers can identify with that brand, stand to benefit greatly.

Something in the water.

2011-04-18T16:13:00.008-04:00

These are versions of a font called Neutraface. Look familiar? They should. The Neutraface font family was introduced in 2002 and has increased in popularity every year since then, with 2009 being some kind of tipping point. Now you see it everywhere. Here's an ad currently running for Wells Fargo:

That's Neutraface slab in Roman and italic. Here's AT&T Wireless:

Neutraface demi text italic.

Between these two brands alone, Neutraface probably has north of $200 million behind it.

Why am I geeking out about a typeface? Because type is one of those unseen forces that shape fashion in graphic design and advertising. Back in December, I wrote about how it is that ads wind up looking like other ads, often in unrelated categories to different audiences. I touched on factors as lofty as parallel evolution and as banal as common thievery and client dictate. But the fourth factor, which I called "something in the water," I left for a later post. Well, type is something in the water. You toss it in, everyone drinks it and in a couple of years, art directors everywhere are showing the symptoms.

Color is another unseen hand. Every year Pantone and a few other influencers decide what the on-trend colors for the next year will be and everyone from fashion designers to paint manufacturers to designers take a swig. Here's this year's color, by the way:

Honeysuckle. Bet you didn't see that one coming. But now that you know, keep your eye peeled. You'll be amazed how often you see it.

A last thought on this subject (for now): how many adjoining boxes containing type, background colors and artwork did you see in ads before Quark, with its text and picture boxes, appeared in the mid-90s?

Really?

2011-04-15T13:12:00.001-04:00

Tina Fey, Creative Director

2011-03-21T15:09:00.002-04:00

I guess even people who write (hilariously) for a living need a writing outlet and lately Tina Fey has chosen The New Yorker as hers.

In last week's essay, entitled "Lessons from Late Night," she talks about things she's learned from Lorne Michaels about managing creative people; and while I'm sure neither Miss Fey, Mr. Michaels or anyone who's ever been on SNL means advertising writers and art directors when they use the term "creative people," the lessons were fantastically apt.

Ipad technology, subscription firewalls and a healthy fear of intellectual property lawyers keep me from linking you directly to the article, but let me quote one especially insightful passage and then recommend you pony up for the real deal, in print or in Conde Nast's beautifully designed app. Here, the first thing Tina learned from Lorne Michaels: producing is about discouraging creativity.

A TV show comprises many departments--costumes, props, talent, graphics, set dressing, transportation. Everyone in every department wants to show off his or her skills and contribute creatively to the show, which is a blessing. You're grateful to work with people who are talented and enthusiastic about their jobs. You would think that in your capacity as a producer ylur job would be to chum up creativity, but mostly your job is to police enthusiasm. You may have an occasion where the script calls for a bran muffin on a white plate, and people from the props department show up with a bran cake in the shape of Santa Claus sitting on a silver platter that says "Welcome to Denmark" on it. "We just thought it would be funny," they say. And you have to find a polite way to explain that the character is Jewish, so eating Santa's face might have negative connotations, and the silver tray, while beautiful, is creating a weird glare on camera, and maybe let's just go with the bran muffin on the white plate.

R.I.P.

2011-03-15T10:11:00.003-04:00

Most Deadheads are familiar with this logo. Few knew its provenance until the Owsley obits started coming out yesterday. Fewer still (including, at this point, me) knew the nickname came from early-onset adolescent hairiness. From such random beginnings do brands grow.

Well met in Hell.

2011-03-09T15:18:00.003-05:00

Even when a site's only reason for being is to aggregate and sell eyeballs by pimping stories to Google search bots, it can create a strange beauty. Here, a screen grab from HuffPo a few hours ago:

The Bachman Effect.

2011-02-10T11:12:00.003-05:00

How stupid should advertising be to accurately reflect and connect with its target?

Depends on who you ask. David Ogilvy famously wrote, “the customer isn’t stupid. She’s your mother.” Well, we’re not going to touch that one.

In many categories, the rule of thumb is to write to a sixth-grade education. I can live with that. Sixth graders know all sorts of facts, some useful and some not. U.S. history is pretty fresh in their heads, and the kids not stuck in Kansas or some compound in Utah know about evolution. More importantly, they are at an age where they are beginning to understand the adult world and its rules are not what they seem. Their BS meter is on high alert.

Yeah, I wouldn’t mind making ads for sixth graders. What I do mind is writing ads for people who forgot everything they knew in sixth grade, and are damn proud of it because it frees them to make shit up, or—if that requires too much mental effort—believe without a moment’s hesitation the shit other people make up.

Which brings me to Michelle Bachman, the ~~jester~~U.S. Representative from Minnesota. Gail Collins accurately characterized her a few weeks ago as, essentially, Tracy Flick hit by the stoopid stick. I don’t want to go into a long recitation of her lies, malapropisms and shaky grasp of historical fact. This is an advertising blog, after all. So let me bring this back to the subject at hand.

Are we making ads for people for people so fucking stupid, they think Michelle Bachman has something useful to say? If so, can we rock it Bachman-style and just make crazy claims and accusations?

Here’s one:

Tide’s bulls-eye design is a secret Al Quaeda missile-targeting program. Buy Gain instead and fight terrorism.

Or how about this:

Ten out of 12 signers of the Constitution preferred Pappa John’s pizza to Dominos. Pappa John: the Founding Pappa pizza.

I don’t think Fox would have a problem with either of these, do you? And if other networks’ Clearance departments have a problem, perhaps we can ask them why they see Michelle Bachman’s lie-strewn diatribes as “news” and make no effort to fact-check?

Coincidence or rip-off?

2010-12-22T13:24:00.000-05:00

These two ads were 50 feet apart in the 68th Street station on the #6 subway station. Besides both being tagged by a certain Mr. "Tasty," they share the use of overlapping color layers containing reversed-out white type. The layers themselves are similar organic, rounded semi-blobs. The resemblance, at least to people who ponder art direction in public places, is startling.

And for clients, vexing. Like furious socialites at a charity event who show up rocking the same expensive couture frock as a competitor, at least one if not two CMOs are asking their agency WTF?

Well, WTF usually has one of four possible answers. Here they are:

1. Parallel evolution. Subject different designs to the same evolutionary forces and demands, and they will evolve similar solutions. The classic example used to illustrate this phenomenon is the similar shape of sharks, dolphins and F-15 fighter planes. Fish, mammal, machine, all evolved to be able to hunt, track and kill moving at high speed through a resistant medium.

In the advertising world, parallel evolution means: give reasonably competent creative teams working on different brands the same brief, stuffed with the same "insights" from asking the same questions to the same focus groups in Paramus, subject their work to the same testing methodology, and you will get more or less the same results, arrived at independently, no copying involved.

That's why you typically see this type of imitation in work within the same category, and usually in a category where there's a lot of research and testing. It's why you'll see four different campaigns for diabetes products, all of which have people in the ads saying "I took control." Listen to enough patients suffering from diabetes say "I don't feel in control of my life" and that's what happens.

2. Agency-driven imitation. This is an ugly subject but ripoffs happen.Walk down the halls of any large agency creative department and you will see someone feverishly flipping through recent One Show and CA annuals looking for "inspiration." The thinking usually runs along the line of, Well this ad won an award for a mountain bike brand. If I use it for my small regional BtoB office supply account, what's the harm?
Besides which, we changed the original Franklin Gothic to Meta Bold!

This is not good, but it has its evil counterpart in reason number three:

3. Client-driven imitation. If you haven't been in a situation where a client has said to you, "Give me something just like that Old Spice guy on the horse," you haven't been in the business long enough. Rough-around-the-edges clients who didn't go to corporate finishing school or who are so senior or so rich they don't give a shit, will tell it to you that blatantly. The MBA types are a little more subtle: they'll send you a link or a clip of ad they like. They'll causally drop a reference to the fact that their boss, or their boss's boss, thinks the new Snickers campaign is great, and if the next round of work doesn't show the product logo being used in a playful, iconic way, they'' drop another hint. Eventually, someone in agency management will dope-slap the creative team and the imitative campaign will be dutifully presented...and bought.

4. Something in the water. The last reason similar ads, or similar approaches to graphic design problems crop up has nothing to do with anything as obvious as the desire to copy or moving with the herd. It is something more mysterious, more ineffable and--because it doesn't just affect advertising but also fashion, art and science, much more interesting. Interesting enough to deserve its own post, which hopefully will appear soon.

I heard you the first time.

2010-12-14T10:24:00.003-05:00

In the first commercial break after start of play in last night's Giants-Vikings game, a new commercial from Chrysler was shown in 3 of the 6 slots.

Is that the "no matter how long your piss break is, you're gonna see this spot" media strategy? Kind of like a roadblock buy, but a urethra-block instead?

Jesus, people, do your homework: viewers don't leave a game until the 4th quarter or unless it's a blowout. They'll see your spot! And if you have that much money to burn on the buy, do all the agency creatives, producers, gaffers, grips and post houses a favor: shoot a 2nd spot.

It's not the assignment. It's what you do with it.

2010-12-10T17:18:00.003-05:00

I was going to post about the unbelievably annoying Quiznos spot, but that would just be spreading garbage around, not confining or destroying it as it warrants.

Instead, a shout-out to a little bit of loveliness:

While creatives whinge about the confines put upon them for their next million-dollar campaign, someone—maybe a package designer, maybe a freelancer, maybe a waiter at Redhead—saw a way to take the humble “Use by…” freshness-dating requirement and turn it into a totally unexpected delight.

Of time, salt, and the power of randomness.

2010-11-09T15:04:00.005-05:00

I read foodie magazines and this month they all have ads for Morton Mediterranean Sea Salt, the Morton people being no fools and also readers of the same titles they advertise in. So they’re getting with the program, keeping their brand on trend, etc. etc.

The ads are neither good nor bad, just workman-like expressions of the carefully calculated marketing strategy that informed them. They carry a whiff of focus groups reacting to mood boards full of Tuscan revelry, picnics in the vineyards, whitewashed seaside villas, figs and olives.

One thing they never could have focus-grouped their way to, however, was the Morton icon, the 100-year old little girl in the rain with her umbrella and her freely-flowing salt.

When it rains it pours. That sounds so lovely, doesn’t it? Like Emily Dickinson meets Peggy Olson.

The parallel “it”s, the riff on an old saying (old even in 1890), the succinct expression of product difference (Morton invented the process to keep table salt from caking in humid weather). It’s so…good.

But if the Morton girl and her tagline were not an accident of history, beloved and beyond harm from change-agent CMOs and the Peter Arnells of the world, could she be created now? What brief could lead a creative team to this girl, too young to be the purchaser, outside in the rain away from kitchen and cupboard, carelessly wasting the product as she walks?

This, I believe, is what Mark Fenske meant when he wrote “Nobody ever did a good ad by writing to the strategy.” Strategies are rational; focus groups, absurdly so. The little girl, carrying her mother’s purchase home upside down as little girls do (or did, when the store was down the block instead of at the mall, and children were still allowed to go do errands without an adult riding shotgun), splashing happily in the rain: she is not the product of rational process. She and the other random happy hand-me-downs of brand history are a precious gift.

That rarest of things: a good banner ad

2010-11-02T14:00:00.004-04:00

Instead of a takeover, a dripover. Much more interesting, much less intrusive.

10 Ads I don't want to see in #-D

2010-11-01T14:40:00.005-04:00

With 3-D TVs already in stores at prices that are hurtling down towards the magic $1000 level, it's time to think about the implications for advertising. 3-D opens up new vistas for product demos, sexual come-ons and intrusive spokespeople you didn't want in your living room even when they were flat. Here, for example, are 10 spots I'm glad were made in the pre-3-D era and which I hope never return dimensionally enhanced:

1. Calvin Klein underwear. TMI times 3.

2. Olive Garden. Looks disgusting already.

3. Mohegan Sun. At least now I can look away.

4. Cialis. Ew.

5. Charmin. Too close for comfort.

6. Carl Paladino for Governor. Don't tase me, bro!

7. Carnival Cruise Lines. No escape.

8. Mucinex. The stuff of nightmares.

9. Lysol Toilet Bowl Cleaner. Not going down that hole.

10. Progressive Insurance. Surround-Flo would be overwhelming.

"So that's what occasional irregularity looks like."

Adventures in ad placement, cont'd.

2010-10-14T11:04:00.003-04:00

Seen in the Scottish Highlands. Maybe not the best place to advertise a thrilling adventure ride in a tricked-out Land Rover, laddies.

Please familiarize yourself with the safety information in the following commercial.

2010-10-12T23:16:00.000-04:00

The new Delta campaign from Weiden & Kennedy is shot in docu-black and white, so you know it’s serious.

Serious as a heart attack, actually. I don’t have a transcript of the actual copy, but here’s what I remember: after posing the rhetorical question “What does it take to fly?” (violating Feinberg’s rule of never starting a conversation with a disinterested party by asking a fake question), the VO goes on to say something like you have to head into the wind, or you won’t be able to generate enough lift to take off. And we see someone who’s clearly a flight instructor making the point to a nervous-looking newbie pilot.

Now, being a writer of copy, I know this whole thing is just a big, winged metaphor for the newly-merged Delta/Northwest entity fearlessly facing stiff economic headwinds and embracing change. I get it, I get it. I don’t care, but I get it.

Still. I was on a plane going to Scotland from JFK last week, waiting our turn to take off, and all I could think was, Are we facing into the wind? What if we’re not? Did I pack too much shit in my duffle? Is my life insurance paid up? How cold is Jamaica Bay this time of year?

This is not what you want your flying public thinking about with your, um, launch spot. And the theme line—“Keep climbing.” Sweet Jesus! Who wants to hear that snatch of cockpit chatter?

Climb! Climb, dammit!

My life in pictures

2010-09-28T11:23:00.003-04:00

Two campaigns I'm intimately involved with, one now and one back in the day, cohabiting the same transit billboard.

To the reasonable question, "Can't you do anything that doesn't have a blue background and big headline-as-art?" the answer is yes, but I agree you wouldn't know it from this, er, mini-portfolio.

Thanks to Peter Hubbel for noticing and capturing.

Dispatch from Social-Media Loserville.

2010-09-10T11:57:00.003-04:00

What happens when you join Facebook and get alternately creeped out and annoyed by it so you have no "Friends"?

You get publicly humiliated.

My daughter was kind/cruel enough to show me what popped up on her Facebook homepage last week:

I have no idea how many other zillions of people saw this. And please, no mercy friendings. I don't want your digital pity.

Accidental truth in advertising.

2010-09-06T12:20:00.005-04:00

Some advertisers get so twisted up in their own lies and are so tone-deaf that they wind up inadvertently speaking the truth.

Consider if you will the new campaign from United Healthcare. The theme line is “Health in numbers.”

Why would a managed-care organization ever say something like that? Are they insane? Did a bitter proof-reader or disgruntled studio person remove the words “is not” between “Health” and “in” after one too many denied claims?

Numbers, after all, are not the solution, at least not to the average person. Numbers are the f****** problem. Policy numbers, claim numbers, phone numbers, reason for denial numbers, annual cap on benefits numbers, and the ever-rising number you see on your paycheck every 2 weeks that gets paid out to maintain your coverage.

So did United Healthcare and its agency have a massive wave of contrition, and decide to confess the truth—that healthcare insurance has been reduced to a dehumanized, soulless algorithm?

I’m guessing no. I’m guessing they got clever. They decided to cleverly turn a liability into an asset in the grand tradition of Volkswagen and Benson &Hedges, and make “numbers” mean something good.
If you can choke back the bile long enough to dig into the advertising, you’ll see what I mean: numbers=size=leverage=data=more benefits for more people.

And just to make sure you hate not just the words but the pictures, they plaster numbers all over people’s bodies and foreheads, conjuring up everything from concentration-camp tattoos to UPC codes to some grim near-future dystopia where we truly are nothing but numbers.

But why quibble? Once they used the word “numbers” in the same sentence as the word “health”, they were screwed. Too clever by half, they went 180º from the truth and wound up being honest entirely by accident.

Santa or else.

2010-08-06T12:39:00.003-04:00

SPOLER ALERT: DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED MAD MEN SEASON FOUR EPISODE TWO.

The haze of liquor and cigarette smoke that hangs langorously over Mad Men doesn’t obscure the piercing truths about our business that still have the capacity to hurt.

Last week’s episode, when the Lucky Strike client Lee Garner, a good ol’ boy and closeted homosexual (he had Sal fired in Season 3 when his advances were rebuffed) forced Roger to put on the Santa suit at the office Christmas party, it tore at my heart.

In a beauifully nuanced escalation, the client went from jovial “suggestion” to more insistent request to a chilling command. And it was made all the worse by playing out in front of the entire staff.

And by the fact that it was Roger.

Choosing Pete would have meant nothing. Steeped in self-loathing, Pete would have seen donning the Santa suit as an escape from himself, not to mention a career-enhancer.

Don? Wasn’t gonna happen. And Lee knew it.

Burt Cooper? He already plays the jovial fool.

No...to exert maximum authority and to inflict maximum pain, the client chose Roger...elegant, patrician, unflappable Roger. Roger, whose ties to American Tobacco go back a generation on either side. Roger, whose inherited relationship occasionally lulls him into believing he is something other than a vendor.

Put on the suit, Roger. Put it on so I can remind you of exactly where you stand in the order of things. Put it on for your wife, your partners and all the employees with their stricken expressions to see.

As I sat there and watched in sick fascination, my wife turned to me and asked if anything like that ever happened to me and my partners.

A highlight reel of slights and humiliations, verbal cuffings and inappropriate demands unspooled through my head.

Not that overtly, I said. But do some clients look for and exploit opportunities to make us choose between our dignity and our paycheck? Yes.

We may just have to put on the beard, or carry the sack, or bellow “Ho, ho, ho,” but it’s putting on the Santa suit, it’s still uncomfortable, and the alternative, the unspoken “or else” is still terrifying in its unknowability.

Spies like us.

2010-07-15T14:57:00.003-04:00

With the ten Russian deep-cover spies safely in the hands of the KGB (and wishing they were back waiting in the checkout line at Costco), it got me thinking what good advertising creatives they’d be.

Great creatives are natural snoops and voyeurs. They are not Joe Sixpack, but they need to create beer ads for him. They are not Soccer Moms (well, most aren’t) but they need to sell them cookies, hand sanitizer, minivans and back-to-school supplies. They are not Seniors but they need to sympathize with their aches and pains and need for financial security. Most agency creatives are urban hipsters, frat boys, geeks, emos or some other strain of boho.

So what you have are these well-educated aesthetes living undercover...listening, observing, furtively turning on Fox, scooting in and out of Wal-Mart on the DL, trying to understand regular Americans and, via the ads they make, trying to become one with them.

Every Tide commercial you ever saw, every redneck ad about huntin’, fishin’ and racin’, was an act of subterfuge, carefully concocted by people who have spied on these worlds, but who are Other.

So when the Kremlin gets done “debriefing” you, you clever moles, you may want to think about putting together your books. Anyone who can put together that convincing a facade of American strip-mall consumerism is someone who can sell anything.

Alex Bogusky's gone. I'm not.

2010-07-06T17:44:00.002-04:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704525704575341131866209048.html

From what I gather, Alex Bogusky's been getting out of advertising for a while..first the diet books, then the Dilbert-worthy move to "Chief Disruption Officer" at holding company MDC, and now peacing out for good.

What causes one of the best-known and most successful creative directors of the last 10 years to hang it up at the age of 47?
Is it boredom? After you've collected your 20th Gold Pencil and enough Lions to devour Siegfried & Roy, does the job of creative director seem pointless? What happened to the "My best work is ahead of me" mindset?

Lots of creative directors go onto 2nd lives that are more lucrative and maybe more fulfilling than their first ones. Look at Jim Patterson or Andy Spade or (heaven forbid) Donny Deutsch. But these guys never kicked ass creatively to the degree that Bogusky did, so it's easy to imagine their needing to scratch the itch a different way.

Then there's the whole sub-category of advertising copywriters who made the switch to commercially successful writers--Peter Mayle, Augusten Burroughs, Robert Goolrick. I don't know about Mayle, but the last two worked for me at different times, and though very different people, have in common a healthy disdain for advertising, copywriting, and everything and everyone associated with the occupation.

They're all gone, out of the business. Part of me thinks I should at least be curious about joining them.

But I'm not.

I want to keep doing this while I still have my wits about me. I like making ads. I like learning new ways to make ads. I like working with artisans--photographers, directors, editors, musicians--to make ads real. I get a ridiculous child-like thrill seeing my work, or the work of people I manage, go out into the world.

You'll get my keyboard when you pry it from my stiff cold fingers.

Because "very small" didn't sound right.

2010-06-21T14:59:00.002-04:00

John Lennon's handwritten lyrics. These are the "finished" words. The other side of the page has even more scratch-outs.

Sold at Sotheby's on Friday for $1.2 million.

All out of proportion

2010-06-10T16:30:00.004-04:00

Live sports, broadcast in HD, seen on a properly configured HD TV, is a visual treat. Watching commercials dropped into that broadcast: much less so. Last night watching the Yankees game I saw, in one commercial pod, the following:

--a spot letterboxed vertically and horizontally

--a spot stretched to fit 16:9

--a spot in 4:3 with vertical letterboxing

While TV manufacturers are busy hawking the next technology--3D--advertisers and their agencies and production partners are still coping with HD and widescreen.

Like Afghanistan, there are no good options, only bad and more bad. Consider: if you finish your spot in cinema (widescreen) 16:9, viewers with regular (4:3) TVs will see it horizontally letterboxed. If you finish it 4:3, viewers with widescreen TVs will either see it vertically letterboxed or stretched like Super Putty to fit the screen.

Wait, you say. Widescreen is here to stay, and so is HD. Maybe, but remember: that big beautiful 1080p screen needs to be properly configured and provided with HD signal. The first is beyond most people's capability and the second is rarer than you think. Why do you suppose all those TVs in bars, gyms, banks and lobbies have their Fox talking heads all looking unnaturally wide (and Rush even more so)? Because no one set the controls. And all those Law & Order episodes cha-chunging away till for the rest of time? Low-def, baby.

The interesting thing (to me at least) is: no one outside the business even notices. First, because it's a commercial break and who cares, and second, because in a world of Flips, grainy videos and 2-inch screens, production issues don't matter much.

But take it from me: if you're selling a weight-loss product, you do not want your client seeing her commercial with everyone in it looking like a double-wide trailer because it's been stretched to fit the screen.

No thanks, I’d rather watch grainy video of oil gushing into the Gulf all day long.

2010-06-07T16:41:00.003-04:00

I thought my last post would also be my last word on BP’s benighted ad campaign, because it’s hard to have an original take on something that every last man, woman and child on earth think is stupid.

So instead, to take my mind off all the unpleasantness, I YouTubed up an instructional video on fly tying. I’d be walled off from all the noise, in my own fly fishing geekdom, and I’d be safe.

And then I saw this:

Never mind how frikkin' ridiculous this is. If I wanted to watch BP CEO Tony Hayward lying through his teeth, I don't need to go on BP's YouTube site. I can watch the same clip, with better commentary, on Jon Stewart.

No, my question is: How did they find me? And why? It’s like one their tar balls washing up in an Indiana cornfield instead of a Gulf Coast beach. Does BP have so much money to throw at this ad campaign that they can afford to target the most obscure reaches of the internet? Is this ad also appearing on sex dungeon sites? Or Elvis impersonator sites?

BP: go aggregate Liz Cheney’s eyeballs. Leave mine alone!

I hate BP. But I hate myself more.

2010-06-03T09:54:00.003-04:00

In an early post on this blog, I expressed some qualified admiration for the nuanced way BP approached the energy/environment discussion when its corporate campaign launched around 4 years ago.

Reading that post now, with BP trying to suppress pictures of dead animals and denying the sub-surface plumes clearly visible from space, I want to throw up.

But it's not about me and my gullibility, is it? Let's shift the discussion and think about someone with much bigger problems than mine. Let's think about the person who has to write the ads running now.

Let's imagine that it's a guy (for no good reason other than to pick a pronoun).

He's in his mid-30s, a Group Creative Director somewhere (they wouldn't give this to a junior creative). He lives in Park Slope. He and his wife belong to a food cooperative. The only car in his life is a hybrid and has a Zip logo on it.

He thinks BP is a bunch of lying, Earth-despoiling wankers. But he needs this job.

Painfully, letter by gut-wrenching letter, he types out the words

We will get it done. We will make this right.

He stares at what he's written. He looks at his fingers, at the keyboard. He is a marionette. He is a cockroach. He is only following orders.

His art director pops his head in. "Make sure it fits on 2 lines" he says.

Same shit, different accent.

2010-05-20T12:58:00.003-04:00

I’m back from two weeks in Scotland and I’ve watched a good bit of British television waiting for the sun to set sometime after 11 PM so I could go to sleep. And that meant the chance to watch a lot of UK advertising.

I’m here to report that it’s fookin’ rubbish, as the Scots would say. Just as we Americans generally mistake an English accent for a sign of intelligence, we hear those same plummy tones in their spots and give terrible English advertising a free pass.

What’s remarkable is how the advertising in each category tends to suck more or less exactly as much as its counterpart in the States. Royal Bank of Scotland, which imploded more thoroughly than Citi or Wachovia and is now owned by the taxpayers, is running “real people” testimonials with the line “Here for you.” Sound familiar?

Jaguars and BMWs veer around hairpin turns in cool, desaturated, misty worlds devoid of oncoming vehicles to a trendy music track. Sound familiar?

An analgesic...can’t remember which one...was a cheesy problem/solution POS with a graphic demo showing the wonder ingredient rushing to “the site of the pain.”

Fairy Liquid (P&G’s UK version of Dawn) is doing a down-through-the-generations-mums-have-always-trusted-Fairy spot. Sepia to black and white to Kodachrome to today. Classic Procter twaddle.

Speaking of Procter & Gamble, they started this “If it works here, it’ll work there” business years ago. They even had a name for it: Search and Re-apply. Really. I know firsthand because I was always being asked to try the campaign that worked in Yemen or Uruguay or Chechnia back when I worked on P&G business.

And of course, depressingly, they were right, as they are about most things having to do with marketing. People are all the same. Blood pudding at breakfast instead of bacon doesn’t make for a different insight. It’s just a different part of the pig. The only reason for a global brand to do different advertising in each country is politics...keep the locals feeling empowered.

That’s why I want to laugh when I hear clients at focus groups in New Jersey (the world capital of focus groups) say that perhaps they should do more groups in Minneapolis or San Diego or wherever to get a more varied perspective.

Are you kidding? You can go to fookin’ Scotland an’ ye’ll hear the same bollocks, mate!

Look both ways before you name that thing.

2010-04-26T14:30:00.002-04:00

So I was driving along this weekend listening to NPR and I heard the following:

"This program was made possible by Barnes & Noble, makers of the Nookie reader."

Christ, I thought, aren't there enough compendia of nookie in the world already?

Two minutes online set me straight: Nook® E-Reader.

A suggestion to anyone in the business of naming stuff, especially stuff whose modifier or descriptor ("E-reader") is not common parlance yet:

Put it in a sentence. Read it out loud. Sometimes the word right in front or right in back of your brand name can combine in unpleasant and unexpected ways.

What Nike and the Catholic Church have in common.

2010-04-09T15:21:00.002-04:00

Well, for one thing they both exploit children.

For another, they are both so hermetically sealed off from the world of their constituents that it can lead them to say and do stupid and hateful things.

The Nike Tiger spot: mea culpa? Teachable moment? B-roll of a news item no longer news? Orville Deadenbacher II?

Who cares? It's the fact that Nike thought it was OK to leverage this miserable behavior in any way that's so galling.

You have to actually believe that preserving the millions of dollar of equity Nike built up through Tiger trumps simple human decency, in order to do an ad like this.

Sort of like you have to think the reputation of the organization is more important than the sufferings of individuals in order to compare criticism by its victims to anti-Semitism.

As the Semites would say, it's a shonda.

Footlong, I wish I knew how to quit you.

2010-03-29T10:40:00.004-04:00

Three posts in a row about Subway advertising? That's the meme talking.

But obsession spun into revulsion yesterday. During one of the car/fast food/cellphone/car/fast food commercial breaks interrupted on occasion by the NCAA tournament, a new Subway spot appeared featuring two guys and footlong meatball subs.

Their shared passion for...meatballs and footlongs...sends them off into a homoerotic reverie. When they snap back to the here and now, awkwardness and overcompensating bro-ness ensues.

Ugh. Didn't Snickers try this bullshit on the Super Bowl last year, playing homophobia for cheap laughs with the frat boy set? Just because Subway is (quite rightly) perceived as skewing towards women with their emphasis on healthy eating and weight loss doesn't justify this stupidity.

"I think I'll just stick with the turkey wrap."

$5 foot longs are f---ing fabulous!

2010-03-23T16:24:00.006-04:00

Vice President Biden caught on mic; calls health care bill a 'big f---ing deal'

How long before the F-bomb is dropped into advertising? It's going to be in my lifetime, I'm pretty sure of that. And maybe even while I'm still sentient.

Why am I so sure? Because I hear it every night on teevee, and every day seeping through someone's ear buds on the subway or the elevator. Advertising lags popular culture and mores, but only by about 5 years. By the time the generation of marketers raised on Jay-Z and The Sopranos makes it to the C-suite, you're gonna hear advertising that sounds just like open-mike night at the White House.

By the way, not to carp or anything, but "big f---ing deal" usually means it's not a big f---ing deal at all. What the Vice President meant to say was "...f---ing big deal" as in "That $5 foot long is f---ing fabulous!"

They're ambulance-chasing scum, but they can write a mean headline.

2010-03-19T11:59:00.003-04:00

Law firms are right up there with dermatologists and local real estate agents for horrendous ads. They all seem to think that a wildly grinning shot of the boss, combined with Microsoft Word clip art and garish typography, are the ticket. For New York subway riders, Dr. Zizmor's oeuvre is the apotheosis of the genre.

But a few days ago, on the back of a city bus, I saw a simply art-directed ad for a slip-and-fall law firm (whose name I forget, unfortunately) with a picture of a hand gripping a cane and this headline:

We've never seen a cane strong enough to support a whole family.

Whoever wrote that, if handing out business cards in the ER doesn't work out for you, give me a call.

And the winner for Next Bit of Hip Jargon Destined to Wind Up in an Ad for a Tired,Dated Brand is...

2010-03-12T10:40:00.003-05:00

..."I'd hit that."

The critical moment may have been when Gabourey Sidibe said it about Gerald Butler on the Oscar red carpet show.

You watch. "I'd hit that" will wind up being the new theme for Pepsi or Bud Light or KFC in, oh, 12-18 months. That's the usual time lag.

The ur-moment for this type of thing was when Buick--Buick!--appropriated "It's all good" for a while in the early 2000s. Although I guess car companies would shy away from this one. "I'd hit that" and unintended acceleration problems don't mix, even in adland.

The perfect killer meme.

2010-03-10T15:09:00.005-05:00

Admit it. "Five Dollar foot long" is the last thing you hear in your head before you go to sleep and the first thing you think when you wake up.

It's OK. You've been attacked and overwhelmed by a perfect storm of a meme, as has everyone else. We're just mindless bots in Subway's world, and if you don't believe it, check the numbers. $3.8 billion in footlongs is a frikkin' pandemic of footlong consumption.

Who came up with this killer mental tapeworm? Hint: not corporate, not the ad agency and it wasn't heard first in a focus group room. A franchisee in Miami did it because he likes round numbers and it's easier giving change on a $5 item than it is on a $10.

So much for the consumer engagement strategy.

So why, why, is "$5 foot long" so mercilessly effective? Let's break it down.

First, it's a jingle. The biggest dirty secret of advertising is that jingles work. No creative under the age of 60 wants to do them, the great jingle houses are all gone, but jingles are what everyone remembers.

Second, "Five dollar foot long" is an incredibly felicitous combination of sounds. It rolls off the tongue like it was coated with mayo, and the alliterative repetition of F sounds gives it that final touch.

Third, it's amazingly and incontestably dirty, yet manages not to offend those whose minds don't go that way...whoever they are. I mean, it's a full 12 inches long! And only $5! That's a lot of...value.

As Jessica Simpson said, in reference to full 1080p HD television, "I don't know what it is, but I want it."

Taking down the wall.

2010-03-03T10:00:00.004-05:00

Now roll them cases out and lift them amps
Haul them trusses down and get'em up them ramps...

But when that last guitar's been packed away
You know that I still want to play
So just make sure you got it all set to go
Before you come for my piano

I haven't posted for 2 weeks because I haven't done anything for 2 weeks except wrangle a huge, complicated new-business pitch into shape. The presentation was yesterday, it was kick-ass and now we wait.

And now I take down the wall.

The wall is covered in cork tile, and I've had one everywhere I've worked since I became responsible for other people's work.

The wall is the only way I know where I am on a project. It starts with a brief, pinned up on the extreme upper left, and then blankness. Slowly, thoughts, questions, to-dos, swipe, scrawled end-lines fill the wall. These, in turn, are replaced by layouts, scripts and key frames, and then comps, storyboards and ominous patches of bare brown cork representing stuff that still needs doing.

Eventually the wall gets filled, and its next role comes into play. The pieces get rearranged, clumped into buckets, put into order...and some get tossed. At this point, the wall is not a chalkboard, it's a scoreboard. And since my office door is open 99% of the time, everyone comes by to check the score.

It's all very low-tech and also, especially at the end, very 30,000 feet, which makes it easy to forget how every piece of paper that went up on that wall was turned into something actual and beautiful by incredibly dedicated, hardworking people working crazy stupid hours.

From the elegant "place mats" that greeted clients as they took their seats to the rocking goodie-bags they got on the way out; from the perfectly edited video clips to the carefully recreated retail shelf environment they assembled in the presentation room; from the hours of taping and transcribing interviews to the wee hours of proofreading and revising, here's to Meredith, Matt D, Kim M, Jess, Anthony, Katie and Liz.

And now the wall comes down...easy as pulling out a tack. Five minutes, and the wall is bare again. This afternoon, the first casting selects from an upcoming shoot go up.

But the band's on the bus
And they're waiting to go
We've got to drive all night and do a show in Chicago
or Detroit, I don't know
We do so many shows in a row
And these towns all look the same
We just pass the time in our hotel rooms
And wander 'round backstage
Till those lights come up and we hear that crowd
And we remember why we came

--Jackson Browne, from "The Load-out"

Here's your hoop. Now jump.

2010-02-19T15:01:00.003-05:00

I'm in the middle of a big (for us) new-business pitch, and I'm also just wrapping up reading Game Change by Mark Helperin and John Heileman, an unbelievably fascinating inside look at the 2008 Presidential race.

A pitch, in theory at list, allows a prospective buyer (the client) to sample the actual wares of different sellers (i.e., agencies) under controlled circumstances. You can't just stand up and yammer for 2 hours and win a pitch. You have to analyze a problem, figure out a strategy, come up with novel ideas about how to execute, and throw in a few tiebreakers...a research video, a store mockup, or some other kind of meeting theater.

Maybe we should consider doing something like that for major political contests. Instead of watching candidates debate, posture, speechify and trash one another and then have to commit to one of them for at least 4 years, maybe we give them all the same brief and tell them to come back in 6 weeks with a presentation.

I'd rather watch a mood ripomatic than a political attack ad any day, and watching vendors jump through hoops is much more fun than listening to them bullshit.

Just leave the search consultants out of it.

Football, life and everything else.

2010-02-08T14:20:00.004-05:00

My PC friends aren’t going to like this, but I saw nothing wrong with the Tim Tebow commercial. I vehemently disagree with the anti-abortion position it espouses, but this spot made its point simply, inoffensively, and pretty effectively.

In fact, the strongest emotion it evoked in me was frustration. Frustration with Planned Parenthood, NOW and other pro-choice groups who have let themselves and their cause get outmaneuvered and out-communicated. “Pro-choice” would describe 90% of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, but none of the talent there is being utilized.

I have this nagging feeling that pro-choice groups feel they are morally above something as unseemly as communication strategy or advertising...that these are activities only the Dark Side indulges in. Part of that whole “I’d rather be pure and lose than compromised and win” mind-set that cripples the Left.

I say: Shut the F up and go out and find your own upstanding mother and children. Film her talking about how she made an incredibly difficult and painful decision years earlier, when her circumstances would have condemned a child to abandonment or worse. Let her show her love and pride in her children. Put it on the Super Bowl and pass the nachos.

You’ll have something to cheer for and you’ll be doing your own daughters a big favor.

What's become of the baby?

2010-01-27T10:41:00.004-05:00

Why is there a new baby on E-Trade commercials? Why does he have a new voice? Why is he less funny?

Don’t ask E-Trade. They’re pretending it’s the same kid, with the headline on their landing page announcing “The E-Trade Baby is back!”

Here are some possible explanations:

1) They didn’t shoot enough footage of the original baby before he turned big and uncute.

2) E-Trade got a new CMO who wanted a baby who was “on his team.”

3) The original copywriter left Grey and is now an ECD somewhere.

4) The original copywriter was also the original baby voice.

5) Somebody thought it would be a good idea to “optimize” the campaign as it headed into its second year.

My guess is the answer is some mix of all of the above. Really wonderful ad campaigns truly are lightning in a bottle, much more so than anyone associated with them would ever admit. Change even one element of the mix, and the spark is gone.

The speech is free. The media buy's gonna cost you.

2010-01-24T14:47:00.005-05:00

I get paid to turn the business priorities of large companies into messages that influence how people think.

It puts bread on the table, children through college, and the occasional smile on my face.

So you’d think, when the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 this week that corporations were entitled to the same First Amendment rights as individual citizens, that I’d be as happy as Newt Gingrich.

I’m not.

For Justices Kennedy, Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas, let me point out some differences between people and corporations.

People have feelings, beliefs, hopes and fears. Corporations do not.

People have families. Corporations do not.

People have morals. Corporations do not.

People are mortal. Corporations, properly managed, can live forever.

People speak their minds in barber shop or blogs. Corporations buy TV commercials.

Do you really want to give an entity that has no obligation to do anything in this world except make money the right of free speech?

When I write an ad, I can’t lie. I can’t say using the competitor’s calling plan leads to genital herpes. Why? Not because it’s not true. Not because my client company doesn’t like telling fibs. The reason I can’t make stuff up is because my client can get sued and lose a boatload of money. Corporations don’t like getting sued.

But now any company or trade group with the money can pour millions of dollars into baseless lies about “issues” and candidates with no fear of legal or financial exposure.
Nice job, Supremes. Nice job.

Is that a Na'vi in your Happy Meal?

2009-12-30T10:40:00.003-05:00

A few days ago I saw "Avatar", which is the best argument in recent years for the continued existence of movie theaters. The visual experience is overwhelming, and the old-fashioned good-triumphs-over-evil storyline prompts communal feelings of joy and triumph.

The very next day I saw a McDonalds promotional spot that, in the way these spots do, mashed together bite-and-smile shots with clips from "Avatar". I don't blame McDonalds for jumping on the "Avatar" bus, and I certainly don't fault James Cameron and his bankers for laying off a chunk of their $350 million bet. The co-promotion itself is pretty ambitious, with scannable code on McDonalds packaging that you show to your computer's webcam to unlock proprietary "Avatar" content online.

But the :30 spot is a horror. I've worked on fast food, so I know the promo spots go to the B-team. It just kills me to see images from this beautiful movie flattened, shrunk and dunked in ketchup. How much better it would have been to have 2 dudes shoving fries in their face talking about the movie:

"Didja see Avatar yet?"
"No--how was it?"
"Awesome."
"Really? Like...how?"
"Can't really describe it, man. You gotta see it. Don't eat that last fry."
"Just tell me about that blue chick."
"You gotta see it. Talking about it just ruins it."

etc etc

Sampling laundry detergent or cookies works. Sampling art: not so much. Here it would have been better to suggest, conceal and tease.

How to sell buying less.

2009-12-21T17:55:00.004-05:00

One of the nicest sentiments I’ve seen expressed in any, er, branded content this holiday season isn’t even a holiday ad.

It’s eBay’s new campaign, an example of which you see above. If you can't read the headline, it says "Last year's music player at half price still plays this year's music at full volume."

The urge to get and have will always be with us, but eBay’s message that gently used things can still have meaning and value is a good one, and in sync with the 2009 zeitgeist without being manipulative.

Spending $150 for last year’s model instead of $300 for this year’s doesn’t automatically mean $150 left over for charitable giving. Or debt reduction. Or savings for college. But it at least opens the door of possibility, and gets you thinking.

Not to mention, it’s a very smart, insightful way to get people to think differently about eBay, and it isn’t even the first. Goodby’s “People are good” campaign of a few years back, when people still feared internet commerce with strangers, was crazy good too.

The only off-note is the stupid endline “Come to think of it”, which has been used on everything from cigarettes to cars to food—usually by brands that are on the brink of extinction because no on thinks about them anymore.

The best endline would have been no endline. But that doesn’t take away from a singular achievement: a campaign that sells its product hard at the same time it encourages you to be a better person.

It took a lying evil behemoth to get me to blog again.

2009-12-10T11:36:00.003-05:00

It’s no blinding insight that advertising often resorts to, ahem, a selective presentation of facts to make its case. So do we all, every day, in our dealings with others. Freshly blown-out hair and artful make-up are a selective presentation of the facts. Your resume is a selective presentation of the facts. That guy’s picture on match.com is a selective presentation of the facts.

We live in a world of truthiness. We know our mileage may vary. We know prescription drugs have all sorts of side-effects. We get it. But there are instances in advertising, as in life, where the presentation is so utterly, fantastically deceitful, so at odds with “the facts on the ground” as the generals say, that even a lard-ass, narcoleptic failed blogger is roused to protest.

Seen this ad?

You can’t have missed it. AT&T, which was seeing big share gains against Verizon Wireless purely because of its exclusive iPhone offering, was knocked on its ass when Verizon Wireless started its “We have a map for that” counter-terrorism surge. “We have a map” isn’t going to win anything at Cannes this year, but it’s tearing a new one for AT&T by reminding everyone of a simple truth: AT&T’s coverage sucks. That they appropriate and pervert Apple’s “We have an app for that” to deliver the message just makes it nastier and more memorable. And the visual comparison of Verizon’s coverage, blotting out the entire map of the United States except that place in Idaho where the Unabomber lived, to the hollowed-out emptiness that is AT&T’s coverage, is incredibly powerful.

So how did that anemic coverage schematic grow into the vast orange, sea-to-shining-sea coverage map in AT&T’s ad?

They lied. Not in the “We can grow your penis overnight” way of low-life, unregulated advertisers. Because AT&T isn’t a corner hustler. It’s a big company, with a big legal department. So they did it the old-fashioned way: in the fine print.

As a service to readers in their baby-boom years, and to young ‘uns who read digital newspapers, let me bump it up a few point sizes, make it nice and big so you can read it:

“Map depicts an approximation of outdoor coverage. Map may include areas served by unaffiliated carriers, and may depict their licensed area rather than an approximation of their coverage. Actual coverage area may differ substantially from map graphics.”

“Actual coverage may differ substantially from map graphics.” This is not “Your mileage may vary,” brothers and sisters. This isn’t even Glen Beck on a bad day. This is lying, corporate style. For shame.

Getting 'Faced.

2009-10-28T16:12:00.003-04:00

After disdaining Facebook from afar ever since my daughters starting obsessing over it 4 years ago, I joined up 3 weeks ago so I could disdain it up close.

I was not disappointed.

After I completed the signup process, the first person suggested to me as a Friend (as opposed to a l/c friend, who is someone you actually know and like and see from time to time) was my 75-year old former boss from the ‘80s, now living la vida loca in Boca. Facebook had clearly jumped the shark long before my sad 57-year old self signed up.

I went to my Homepage?/Room?/Place?/Wall? and gazed in wonderment at the spectacle unfolding before my eyes. I felt guilty and ashamed—but not enough to keep me from scrolling, mesmerized, through the idle thoughts of current employees, bikini photos of ex-employees and the minute-by-minute documentation of all these people’s lives.

It would be easy to think, Jesus, who cares? Except that each dispatch—“Just got back from the dentist.” “Psyched for the weekend!!!” “Having ramen for dinner.”—is greeted with a chorus of thumbs-up validating comments.

I felt like Shelly Duvall's character in The Shining when she discovers the bat-shit crazy stuff Jack Nicholson's been writing all this time. The horror!

Three weeks rummaging through this dumpster of compromising pictures, coma-inducing reportage and rampant narcissism lead me to these conclusions:

1. People have way too much time on their hands.

2. Facebook is an irony-free zone. It may be a relatively new medium, but it’s about as edgy and cynical as Lutheran Bible camp.

3. Using a Facebook Wall to talk to someone is like using a Predator Drone to conduct diplomacy.

4. When your client, regardless of category or target demographic, asks you whether they should have a Faebook “presence” (the word itself is a dead giveaway), say No.

Regarding the latter, I used to say No without having ever been on Facebook myself. Now I can say No with much greater confidence. And, because I’d never ask a client to do something I wouldn’t do myself, I’m de-Friending?Listing?Booking? myself today.

A challenging day.

2009-10-15T15:59:00.006-04:00

Humankind cannot bear too much reality."
--T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"

It's been a challenging day.

The weather has been challenging, the fraudulent use of my credit card in Madrid is a challenge, and my painting contractor's sudden, unexplained disappearance will certainly pose a challenge going forward.

My 3rd quarter mutual fund letters to shareholders make abundant use of the word "challenging," as do CEOs reporting missed targets on analyst calls. Having all their franchise players injured was certainly a challenge for the Mets.

The beauty of "challenging", as opposed to, say, "totally and completely fucked," is that challenge is noble and invites rising, whereas total and complete fucked-upness is depressing and invites sitting down or--even better--going to sleep.

Euphemisms have their place in civilized life. They grace the skids for little white lies meant as a kindness, and they minimize the gross factor in discussions about bodily functions. But I've never understood euphemisms that mask truths, fool no one, and leave neither speaker or listener feeling better.

Make yourself scarce.

2009-10-09T16:29:00.004-04:00

Seeing these new Starbucks ads everywhere confirmed my feeling that whatever elan this brand once had, it has lost. In fact, the sheer ubiquity of the campaign added to the problem. I mean, here’s an ad that basically sells scarcity—we use only 3% of the world’s beans—and then they plaster the message everywhere!

Part of what used to make Starbucks cool was that they didn’t advertise. Yes, they did the occasional (and sweet) holiday effort, but they didn’t spend a lot, the ads didn’t sell very hard, and it all felt artisanal and small-bore...exactly what you want from makers of $3.00 cups of coffee. Dropping $100 million on an ad campaign says “We’re the Micky D of coffee” no matter what the headline is.

In a spectacularly misguided effort at social-network relevancy, Starbucks CEO Howard Shutlz laid out his thinking for the company’s “partners” (read: hourly employees) in this YouTube video:

If you’ve built your brand through advertising (as, for instance, Folgers did in coffee), then there are good reasons to keep advertising. If you built your brand as “the third place”—essentially, an experience rather than a bunch of product claims—then advertising ought to be a waste of money at best.

Bring back the dead guy in the fedora.

2009-10-06T17:02:00.003-04:00

Let's say you were Lexus and you were introducing a vehicle in a new segment, somewhere between the ES and GS. Wouldn't this be an appropriate headline? Builds on their endline of the last 20 years or so, highlights a new entry, has the self-confidence bordering on swagger that Lexus has earned.

Too bad it's an ad for...Buick. What? You didn't notice that?

A new-business koan.

2009-10-02T16:27:00.004-04:00

Which is worse: not getting past the RFP stage of a pitch and then seeing the hilariously bad new campaign from the winning agency? Or not getting past the RFP stage of a pitch and seeing the so-good-it-hurts kickass campaign from the winning agency?

Where the wild type treatments are.

2009-10-01T10:42:00.003-04:00

One is for rebellious children of all ages.
The other one is for...rebellious children of all ages.

What makes an ad look old?

2009-08-31T16:58:00.002-04:00

I was leafing through Penthouse while getting my hair cut and...

Wait. It's not what you think. It was the April 1974 issue of Penthouse, part of a big moldy stack my trendy barbershop found and keeps on hand. As a sociological artifact it was fascinating, on a lot of counts, most of which are not appropriate to discuss in a family blog.

Being the focused adman I am, I skipped right by Miss April, the Penthouse Forum and other appeals to my baser instincts, and focused on the ads. They seemed older--far older--than their 35 years, and I tried to figure out why. One obvious reason is that most of them were for cigarettes, but cigarette advertising wasn't banned until relatively recently, so that wasn't it.

There was the grainy, dirty quality of the photo reproduction--but now that look is slavishly recreated for its retro appeal. Ditto the haircuts and outfits (and 'staches on the guys).

ThenI realized what it was that dated those ads as surely as carbon dates rock: the typography.

Windsor. Remember Windsor? Sam Scali used it for Perdue then everybody got on board.
And Avant Garde. Lots of Avant Garde Extra Bold. Which now looks very not avant garde. And everything tracked super-tight so all the letters touched and the kerned characters got so intertwined they were almost x-rated.

I stared at that type and got a whiff of antiquity. Which is ironic because a few weeks before, I had been in Rome and while walking through the Coliseum, I had admired all the, um, Roman type chiseled into the ancient stone and thought, 2000 years later, that it looked remarkably fresh.

Nothing says “We care” like a good ™ at the end.

2009-07-27T15:05:00.003-04:00

You’re in good hands with Allstate.™

Reach out and touch someone.™

When you care enough to send the very best.™

When companies try to get all warm and fuzzy, often it’s the two little letters
in superscript that give the show away. Yo, all you $500/hr. intellectual property lawyers out there: isn’t there a way to protect ownership other than stamping the equivalent of “Hands off my themeline” all over your stuff?

The answer:

2009-06-23T09:18:00.006-04:00

NO SCHOOL ON TUESDAY

What, in that stew of facts, could possibly be more relevant to the average parent? Or more exciting to the average child?

Your final exam in Marketing 101 consists of this question:

2009-06-22T09:51:00.002-04:00

You need to send out a newsletter to parents and children of all California public schools to let them know of an upcoming event. Here are the pertinent facts:

1) The state has received a $500 million dollar anonymous gift to fund science and math education for every student, K-12, in the state.

2) All teachers, principals, and other administrators will gather next Tuesday in Sacramento to undergo special training for this initiative.

3) Leading scientists and mathematicians from around the world will be in attendance.

What is your headline for the newsletter?

NB: There is only one right answer.

Answer in the next post.

My thanks to Dick and Barbara Holt for supplying me with this wonderful thought experiment.

What if we made periods a happy time?

2009-06-15T16:10:00.000-04:00

This is hardly breaking news, or even a new insight. Rather, it's a bitterly funny data point on the endless cluelessness of marketers when it comes to women.

Ir comes in the form of a letter written by Wendi Aarons to the Always brand manager (male, of course) at Procter and Gamble. It's well worth your time to read the entire screed, but here, to whet your appetite, is the opening salvo:

Dear Mr. Thatcher,

I have been a loyal user of your Always maxi pads for over 20 years, and I appreciate many of their features. Why, without the LeakGuard Core™ or Dri-Weave™ absorbency, I'd probably never go horseback riding or salsa dancing, and I'd certainly steer clear of running up and down the beach in tight, white shorts. But my favorite feature has to be your revolutionary Flexi-Wings. Kudos on being the only company smart enough to realize how crucial it is that maxi pads be aerodynamic. I can't tell you how safe and secure I feel each month knowing there's a little F-16 in my pants.

It only gets better from there. Given the fact there is a whole ecosystem of consultants, research firms, academics, agency leaders etc. who specialize in telling the Mr. Thatchers of the world "what women want," it's amazing that these tone-deaf marketing efforts crop up so often.

Even with a wife of 29 years and 3 daughters, I don't profess to know what women want.But here's a suggestion:

Pretend you're talking to a guy.

Whatever you lose in feminine sensibility, you will avoid sounding like a pandering, condescending idiot. If men had menstrual cramps, saying "Have a happy period, bro" would get you killed.

And if this turns into a depression, we're golden!

2009-06-12T16:37:00.004-04:00

CMOs continue to the say the darndest things. Wal-Mart CMO Stephen Quinn had this gem in this week's Ad Age:

"We were fortunate that this recession came along. It played to our positioning really well."

Yes, Stephen, it's true. Wal-Mart was very well-positioned for customers facing job loss, foreclosure and loss of life savings. Nothing like that Katrina thing where all the shoppers were cooped up in the Superdome!

Christ, it's enough to make one yearn for the return of Julie Roehm.

Adventures in media, continued.

2009-05-21T11:27:00.004-04:00

After your Metro-North ad has been used as a poker table, anything can happen. In this case, the ad became infinitely more attention-grabbing than its hackneyed right-side-up version.

A temporary breach in the firewall.

2009-05-15T15:10:00.003-04:00

"Good fences make good neighbors" was how Robert Frost put it. "Don't shit in your own backyard" was my father's version. They were both right and that's why, as a matter of policy and self-preservation, I usually don't post about specific happenings at my agency. Nor do I use this blog as a vehicle to promote our work.

But today I'm making an exception. We launched our new Seiden agency website this morning and I like it a lot. Not too self-conscious, not hard to navigate, easy on the eyes. I'm sure in 18 months it will look like a Pontiac Aztec to me, but right now I couldn't be happier.

Stimulate this.

2009-05-12T19:09:00.001-04:00

One of the many odious aspects of focus groups is using the term “stimulus” to refer to the creative work being subjected to the group’s malevolent scrutiny.

When I think of a stimulus, I think of a cattle prod. Or a latexed digit going where I don’t want it to. Which is maybe apt, since another odious focus group term is “probe,” as in “Let’s probe to see if this image is polarizing.”

Painful. Dehumanizing. Clinical. Stimuli are meant to provoke reaction. But often the reaction they provoke, in the stimulated and stimulator alike, is: please please stop.

Throwing out the work.

2009-04-30T20:07:00.004-04:00

I was hunting for an old ad to illustrate a typography point to my creative team and as I dug, I started to throw.

I threw out things that started their life as physical mechanicals. Things that were set in hot type. Things that were set by Photo-Lettering and couriered back and forth. I tossed things that never were, and now never will be, digital files.

I threw work that was laminated because lamination was the archived pdf of its day. There were cheap laminations, and fancy ones with non-glare plastic, rounded edges and felt backing.

I didn’t throw away everything. Some of this stuff still elicits a “Huh...this really isn’t bad.” Some of it smiles back at me from an earlier, sweeter moment in time. But most of it was there because it used to ride around in a large black pleather bag (hence the felt backing) trying to get me a job.

These ads were trendy-looking at some point, and now look as bad as a ‘70s haircut. Or they were ads demonstrating I had experience in a category, something we mock clients for in RFPs but have no hesitation doing for our own careers.

Portfolios, physical or digital, are no longer useful in my life. The ads that were in them no longer need to sell me or impress others or tell much of a story of any kind. The ones that still make me proud go back in the drawer. The rest can go.

Ethan Coen, kickass copywriter

2009-04-20T18:41:00.004-04:00

Coen Brother Ethan, it turns out, is not just a stupidly great screenwriter, but a poet as well. And, being the ironic, self-aware dude he is, he refused to read his work aloud. So Bill Macy read for him. You can hear it in its entirety here. But here is the title and repeating lyric:

"The Drunken Driver has the right of way."

Tell me that isn't the best headline for any safety-themed car ad ever written.

Here's to you, Mr. Bounce-it-by-Billingsley!

2009-04-15T17:52:00.002-04:00

I’ve got a new campaign that’s flapping its wings furiously, trying to get off the ground, and if it succeeds, it will be because of a client.

We bitch about clients when they kill or maim good work. But we forget what a Herculean task they have if they actually embrace our vision. The layers. The “stakeholders.” The politics. The bean-counters. The lawyers. The processes. The sheer inertial mass of a huge organization that needs to be overcome.

And there, slogging through it with our precious idea in his hand, is our client, in his soul-crushing, Orwellian office park with little more to help him than his belief in our idea and his own sheer tenacity.

How often does it happen? Not very. Then again, how often do we do work that justifies his thankless journey?

"I think it needs kids or animals."

Speechless.

2009-04-13T12:23:00.002-04:00

I’ve gone dark for a few weeks. Never a good blog-viewership move.

Why? I’m speechless.

Here are some things I’m speechless about:

Ad Age asking Julie Roehm to be on an expert panel.

Twitter.

The SpongeBob square bootie thing for Burger King.

Bank of America corporate advertising.

Republican “Tea Parties.”

The Celebrex :60 legal disclaimer spot.

When the bile rises high enough in the gorge, words can no longer escape.

Guaranteed 32% less bad.

2009-03-13T16:06:00.006-04:00

One theory about this week's nice spike in the stock market is that it was driven by news that shit isn't as bad as it could be. Here's a quote from today's New York Times:

"General Electric, the blue-chip corporation, was stripped of its triple-A credit rating, an emblem of business prowess it proudly held since 1956. But its rating fell just one notch, less than some analysts predicted. Shares of G.E. soared 13 percent...
Less bad was good enough."

Maybe in these diminished times, diminished claims have their place. Think about all those DTC fair-balance warnings...we could make some kickass claims out of those:

"Shown to be 24% less likely to cause blindness, insanity or death than other cholesterol reducers."

The coal lobby's "Clean Coal" ads, which the Coen brothers savagely and appropriately turned upside down (thanks for the tipoff, American Copywriter dudes) can escape further ridicule with the truth:

"Burning coal causes less dirty, polluting smoke than burning dung or discarded tires."

Ads of the Great Recession, Part Two.

2009-03-09T11:07:00.003-04:00

A glimmer of genius in the gloom of recession and perpetual retail blowout sales. Snaps to New York retro-crockery merchant Fishs Eddy.

Advertising is a contact sport.

2009-03-06T14:03:00.004-05:00

You are not here to marvel at the size of this woman's diamond. You are here to marvel that she, along with me and two other people at our agency, are not dead.

We were returning from a very successful client presentation, walking east on 33rd Street, when a 50-lb. chunk of ice fell from the building roof ledge and landed two feet away. Kimb's left hand took the ice-shrapnel hit and today she's typing revisions. Way to play hurt, Kimb!

I'm not sure, but I think this is outside our scope of service with this client.

My fishmonger is better than your agency copywriter.

2009-03-05T12:15:00.003-05:00

Seen this morning driving up 49th Street:

How do I get Peter Arnell's job?

2009-02-23T09:37:00.004-05:00

Advertising - Tropicana Discovers Some Buyers Are Passionate About Packaging - NYTimes.com

The man's a serial ad criminal. You'd think Celine Deon for Chrysler would be enough to kill any five people's careers. But no! Weeks after blathering to the press about the genius of putting a hemispherical cap on his washed-out, generic-looking Tropicana redesign, Arnell was asked by Stuart Eliott to comment on the brand's decision to dump it after only a few weeks. His thought?

"Tropicana is doing exactly what they should be doing."

Show the work first.

2009-02-12T15:14:00.002-05:00

Here's an idea.

Show the work first. Then get the strategy approved.

I know it's not gonna happen. But it would save so much aggravation.

This is not quite the same thing as Mark Fenske's "no one ever wrote a good ad by looking at a strategy."

It's more "No client ever looked at a strategy and had any idea what kind of advertising it would lead to."

Showing the work first would lead to better strategies. And fewer tears.

The real 800-lb. gorilla

2009-02-10T12:59:00.006-05:00

Eric Webber's excellent recent post on the triumph of cheesy commercials like the Snuggie and ShamWow spots and the Cash4Gold Super Bowl ad highlight the difficulty of justifying huge production budgets, especially in these cash-strapped times. As Eric and his commentators pointed out, insanely expensive but crappy commercials like the new Bank of America campaign, financed on the taxpayer's dime, don't help.

But for all the talk about budget woes and ROI as the reason clients push back on pricey top-drawer production, there's another factor that never gets discussed. Insurance-peddling primates aside, it's the real 800 lb. gorilla in the room whenever clients and agency people talk craft and production value.

I'm talking about taste.

Or more properly, the lack of it on the part of many clients.

No one talks about taste because it gets uncomfortably into class issues and reeks of snobbery. It's undemocratic and toally non-PC. There's no "your taste" and "my taste." There's only good taste and bad taste, and neither correlates in any way whatsoever to people's intelligence, character or ability. Some of the biggest jerks I know have impeccably curated and art-directed lives, and some of the finest people live in houses decorated by Wal-mart.

But nontheless, taste is real. Agency folk, and especially creatives--tend to have strong aesthetic sensibilities. They can be poor as church mice living in a 400 sq. ft. rathole, but it'll be the best-looking rathole you've ever seen. If they own or wear anything tacky, it will be purely in an ironic way--the irony, of course, being lost on their clients.

Aesthetics is not a driving force in the lives of most American middle-class businesspeople. Work, family, community, church, sports, hobbies...these things come first. And because there is far more tasteless, tacky or just plain uninspiring stuff in this world than there is stylish, authentic and beautiful, the odds are overwhelming that the icky stuff will find its way into these people's homes and wardrobes.

Nor is it about money. Check out this double-height shrine to bad taste:

Why does this matter? Because part of what you're buying with a 1st tier director, music house, editor or photographer is his or her taste. Even if you're lucky to work with a client with good taste (there are some), someone who understands what a Nadev Kandar or Noam Murro brings to the work, you'd be hard pressed to translate it into incremental business results. Now take a client who doesn't even see the difference.

We all throw up our hands (or have Bob Garfield do it for us) when we look at Cash4Gold and see cheap sets, bad lighting, stilted dialogue and heinous graphics. A lot of clients (not to mention customers) looking at it say, "I'm sorry. What's the problem?"

That's the 800 pound gorilla talking. Good luck enlisting his help for your next production.

An annoying. Annoying. Annoying way. Way to. Way to edit.

2009-01-22T06:01:00.001-05:00

Once upon a time there was Nike’s “If you let me play” spot. It was a beautiful commercial, and edited in a startling but ultimately logical way. The echoing words, plaintive and insistent, coming from the mouths and thoughts of young women of different cultures, ages and sports, became a kind of incantation.

Fast forward to now, where this editing approach is used constantly, and annoyingly, to try to give heft to spots devoid of interest. You see it everywhere, from cereal commercials to this new IBM campaign. “We need/we need to work smarter/work smarter/smarter” indeed.

And stutter less.

Ads from the Great Recession

2009-01-08T11:02:00.009-05:00

Following the recent layoffs at O&M and elsewhere, there are maybe 32 people left to make ads for every client in the world during the Great Recession.

Some of these clients are staggering ahead, zombie-like, their ads suggesting they don't know they're actually dead and that the living are in pain. While Citi natters on about never sleeping, a concept that was novel in the pre-digital, pre-global, pre-ATM' 70s but flat-out stupid now, ING is getting with the program by championing savings and the savers who save it.

Tiffany reacted with what I thought was tremendous speed (probably because they had this campaign ready to go for the Doomsday scenario currently unfolding) with their holiday ads talking about buying fewer, better things and gifts that hold value. Moral issues aside (and they are legion), this was clever thinking.

But I knew we were well and truly deep into the Great Recession when I saw a Gillette spot pleading with people not to re-use their disposable blades. Brother, can you spare a 5-blade Fusion cartridge?

Christmas Eve, 2008

2008-12-24T21:45:00.003-05:00

Today at 1:39 PM, the Great Recession finally reached me.

No, I didn’t lose my job. I lost a half-eaten roll that was sitting on the bar at the Bar Room of the Oyster Bar in Grand Central.

A homeless man walked through the seasonal crowd, spotted my roll, made a Citizen’s Appropriation and kept walking. The bartender, a young woman, watched in horror. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked him.

“Eating a roll” he answered logically as he sauntered out and into the Terminal.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to me, mortified, and then proceeded to put a fresh basket of bread in front of me.

Then it was my turn to be mortified. Mortified that I was feasting on oysters when this guy stole my roll. Mortified that I didn’t run after him and offer to buy him lunch. Mortified most of all that I still had an appetite when all was said and done.

It's the season of giving, and giving takes many forms. The Talmud distinguishes 10 different kinds, and rank-orders them to boot. I don't know enough about my own religion, or the one that celebrates Christmas, to know if inadvertent giving even counts.

How not to be right for the times.

2008-12-11T16:50:00.003-05:00

If you had to choose between filling a prescription and filling your tummy, wouldn't this cover make the choice ever-so-much easier?

I hear their hooves, I feel their hot breath.

2008-12-09T16:06:00.002-05:00

Yesterday the New York Times reported hocking its own building for cash, the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy, ad spending was predicted to decline 30% next year and an editor friend found out her editorial company was closing up shop December 31st.

Bad mojo all around as the year slides into solstice darkness. I am incredibly thankful that our agency is healthy but the Four Horsemen of the Ad Apocalypse—Recession, ROI, DVR and Online Search—are approaching.

Before they get here, our agency’s holiday card is a propos:

My bumper sticker is better than your Cannes Press award-winning headline

2008-11-23T18:46:00.002-05:00

Seen on on the bumper sticker of a car in front of me Friday:

Don't believe everything you think.

Who are you going to believe--us or your own eyes?

2008-11-21T16:07:00.004-05:00

Seen this afternoon on CNNmoney.com

Where were we, anyway?

2008-11-10T17:34:00.002-05:00

Oh...right...advertising.

Pretty hard to think about it, let alone write about it, until after the election.
But that didn't stop Ad Age and Adweek from speculating about "what Obama's win means for Madison Avenue."

If it means anything, it's that telling outright lies doesn't appear to work as well as it used to. At least, not in the branded candidate space. But that's getting a little macro. The election's over. I haven't felt the need to go to HuffPo or 538 for days. Let's ratchet it back down to more day-to-day advertising issues.

Here's one: having the advertiser you were the TV voice of, dive headlong into the crapper. Stockard Channing's take on AIG's demise as quoted in New York Magazine: "Guess they didn't have the strength to be there." Guess not. Hope she got all her residuals.

The post-Yom Kippur, financial meltdown, possible End Times Remorse-fest

2008-10-14T09:40:00.012-04:00

I am feeling remorseful.

Yom Kippur stirred things up, and then the disappearance of 30% of my life savings whipped it into a froth. Did I, in my own small way, help bring about this calamity by prodding people to buy things they didn't need or couldn't afford? And now, will I become more compliant about unreasonable client demands in my newly hobbled financial state? Can I afford to be principled? What does being principled in the ad business mean anyway?

For those of you wondering similar things, or who just like taking stupid self-diagnostic tests, here's the First Annual Advertising Morality Gut Check Test. For each situation posed, ask yourself what you'd do, then rate your response on this scale:

1. What's the problem?
2. I'd do it, but I'd have misgivings.
3. Only if you put a gun to my head.
4. I'd quit first.

There are no right answers, but if you keep answering (1) to everything, you obviously have the morals of an iguana. And if you keep answering (4) you're either a Trustafarian or only 22. For the rest of us, most of the time, things are uncomfortably somewhere in the middle.

First Annual Advertising Morality Gut Check Test

For each situation, rate your answer from 1 thru 4 using this scale:

1. What's the problem?
2. I'd do it, but I'd have misgivings.
3. Only if you put a gun to my head.
4. I'd quit first.

Using a parity claim like “No other brand gives you more” when you know people often take this as meaning superiority.

Selling a product that’s harmful to the environment, e.g., non-recyclable, containing harmful chemicals, using high amounts of fossil fuel.

Working on a casino or horse-racing account.

Working on a liquor account.

You’ve been asked by the client to get some “younger thinking” on his business than the two early-50s creatives who now work on it.

Working on a tanning-bed account.

Working on a tobacco account, including cigars.

You have the opportunity to pitch a piece of Wal-Mart business. You detest Wal-Mart for its refusal to sell birth control but willingness to sell guns.

Using fear or doubt as a selling tool.

Using sex as a selling tool.

Persuading people to use a brand you believe is inferior to the brand you use at home.

Your client is ready to spend a significant amount of money to launch a new product. The launch effort would represent a nice piece of revenue for your shop. You believe the product has no chance of succeeding.

Persuading people to ask for an expensive brand-name Rx drug when the cheap generic works just as well.

Working on Capitol One or similar accounts that promote easy credit.

A campaign on behalf of the coal industry.

A campaign on behalf of the mortgage-broker’s association.

A campaign about the health benefits of red meat from the National Beef Council.

You’ve been asked to pitch a sugary kid’s cereal. It would be a huge win for your shop. You have an overweight child at risk of developing diabetes.

It wasn't me! It was the focus group!

Thanks, WaMu!

2008-10-01T10:49:00.003-04:00

The morning after Washington Mutual was seized by the Federal government, I received the following jolly email:

Talk about CRM! They're still looking to "deepen my engagement" after they're dead!

They call this kind of graphics-loaded push email "rich media." What do you call it when the sender is insolvent, I wonder?

Get me re-write!

2008-09-23T10:24:00.002-04:00

I went back to the NYT fiction piece on Folgers online and saw to my excitement that the story had been corrected and updated--maybe they had gotten the credits and dates right!

Well....no. Here's the correction:

Correction: September 22, 2008
The Advertising column on Friday, about a marketing campaign by Folgers coffee, misstated the type of coffee beans used by a rival, Maxwell House. It primarily uses Arabica beans, not the less expensive Robusta.

That's their story and they're sticking to it.

History is written by the victors. And reported by the lazy.

2008-09-22T16:54:00.006-04:00

I was more than a little surprised to read in last Thursday’s NYT ad column that Saatchi was Folgers Coffee “agency of over 50 years" and that "...Saatchi & Saatchi created the campaign, as well as the “Best part of waking up” jingle, which first aired in 1984."

No, and no.

Cunningham & Walsh was Folgers agency, in a relationship that predated the brand’s acquisition by Procter & Gamble. C&W created the “Waking Up” campaign before being acquired by N.W. Ayer, which became a part of D’Arcy which in turn was broken up and the P&G piece (including Folgers) wound up at Saatchi.

But who cares about this tedious chronology (besides those of us who were there)? Saatchi’s still here, and those other agencies aren’t. The Romans renamed all the Greek gods and claimed them as their own. Soviet-era history books deleted all mention, including birth records, of party apparatchiks who had fallen into disfavor. And today you can have a 30-year track record as a champion of financial deregulation and call yourself the Scourge of Wall Street.

As long as no one remembers and no one checks, you can, as Don Rumsfeld used to say, make your own reality.

And the winner in the non-traditional media category is...

2008-09-11T17:18:00.005-04:00

Thanks to Daniel Maurer at Grub Street, New York Magazine's food blog, for catching this nicely opportunistic piece of copywriting.

Pata negra, as you may have guessed, is a breed of pig. Not an Alaskan variety, as far as I know.

9/11 + 7

2008-09-11T09:28:00.000-04:00

Compared to what?

2008-09-05T12:10:00.006-04:00

Watching McCain last night demanding regime change from the status quo when the status quo was standing right in front of him, got me thinking about comparisons.

Advertisers love comparisons, and with good reason: they work. Comparing your product to something else puts its worth in context. It's what consumers do anyway--you're just helping them along.

Less sophisticated marketers do literal and heavy-handed comparisons to branded competitors, accompanied by lawyered-up copy and disclaimers, and consumers hate them for it. Even the incredibly deft Mac/PC ads get their share of blowback from people who consider them mean-spirited. (BTW--it's amazing to me no one's done the Obama/McCain version of these spots..it would seem like a YouTube no-brainer...)

But the most sophisticated marketers, like P&G and some (largely Republican) political strategists, have grasped the deeper, more insidious truth:

It doesn't matter who or what you compare yourself to, as long as the comparison is in your favor.

Years ago, I worked on P&G's Puffs Tissues business. The client was absolutely insistent on a side-by-side demo in the advertising for their "new and improved" product, even though Puffs had no visible, demonstrable difference vs. Kleenex. We didn't even have a good comparison to the older, "unimproved" version of Puffs. Finally, the R&D folks at Procter pointed out that Puffs were, in fact, puffed up with air as their final step in manufacturing, so why not compare them to the unpuffed (that is to say, the unfinished) version? The result: a visual of a stack of Puffs towering over a sad short stack of unpuffed Puffs. And of course, it worked like a charm.

John McCain's handlers hope the same will hold true with their candidate. Comparisons with Barack Obama are not necessarily advantageous, so why not use the departing administration, which very nicely fits the "big-spending, me-first, do-nothing" requirements, as the foil? Who cares if they're Republican? They're un-Puffed!

Thanks to AD Kim "Crazy Fingers" Magher for the Photoshop work.

Location, location, location

2008-09-03T12:02:00.003-04:00

Seen on the corner of Bowery and Spring Street yesterday:

Bet the Carerra sunglass people (the advertiser on the left--sorry for the crappy phone pic) didn't see this one coming, so to speak.

This kind of unfortunate message juxtaposition happens more often than you'd expect, in every medium. So much so that you might wonder whether some bored junior media folks are doing this for laughs after huffing a few spray cans.

If you are reading this post instead of looking up at the sky you are doing something wrong.

2008-08-27T17:18:00.004-04:00

And Ben Stein, from his quiet little corner of the New York Times Sunday Business section, will tell you why: Everybody’s Business - Connected, Yes, but Hermetically Sealed - NYTimes.com

Hats off, and bottoms up.

2008-08-13T16:09:00.005-04:00

The brief (I’m guessing) said leverage the brand’s history and heritage but make the advertising “edgy” and relevant to drinkers in their 20s.

Most creatives would say, with some justification, “We can do one or the other but not both.”

These creatives did this: (click on ad for better view)

Pure genius.

Yes we Cannes!

2008-08-12T16:38:00.004-04:00

Usually I try to gin up some original content. Today I am content to urge you to listen to PodCast 59 from the g uys at American Copywriter. I listened to it on my train ride home last week and laughed so hard my frozen Blood Orange Margarita came out my nose and nearby fellow riders moved away.

John and Tug don't get caught in the If-you-had-great-work-you'd-be-there-so-don't-bitch trap common to creatives talking about Cannes. They merely point out that such cavorting is only possible for people who work at big agencies (and, more recently, their clients) because at little shops like theirs (and mine) who's going to get the work out the door that week?

Words matter. Ask any fishmonger.

2008-08-01T09:55:00.002-04:00

A few nights ago I had a hankering for fish and stopped by the fishmarket on the way home. I was looking for fluke, which is cheap, fresh and local in New York this time of year.

I saw grey sole, lemon sole and something called flounder. But no fluke. I asked the manager if he had any. He pointed to the filets labeled flounder and said, “That’s it. But I can’t call it fluke. Customers don’t know what fluke is. They think it means mistake. I call it flounder, I sell 30 lbs. a day. I call it fluke, I sell maybe 5.”

How often, when we make ads, do we try to “educate” people on what fluke is, rather than using terminology they understand ?

Being the client.

2008-07-24T18:41:00.003-04:00

I’ve been in post-production mode for the last couple of weeks...working with editors, sound-design folks, composers, mixers etc.

I love this part, because I like collaborating with, and just hanging out with, talented people who know their craft. But that collaborative thing only goes so far. Because as far as they’re concerned...

I’m the client.

Most of the time, I can pretend that’s not true. We’re just a bunch of cool people doing our thing, right? But then I realize no one ever outright contradicts or even challenges anything I say, no matter how inane. I make casual suggestions and they get turned into new versions, posted at midnight.

This state of affairs makes me uncomfortable.

I’ll twist myself into knots talking to, say, the music composer. I’ll tell him I like #4 but could the back end be more like #2—understanding, of course, the need for the composition not to be a Frankenstein and feel integrated and my not wanting to be overly prescriptive and by the time I’m done apologizing and demonstrating my creative sensitivity, he’s already done it.

Because for him, it’s no big deal. For me it’s, Oh my God, I’m talking like a client. I’m fucking this guy’s work up. I’m taking his Juilliard training and stomping on it with my troll-like client feet.

This behavior spills over into non-work related relationships, particularly into fly fishing. If I go out fishing with a guide, my goal is to be the best client possible. Or at least not to be the asshole he curses out and ridicules later that night at the bar where all the guides hang out.

This is pathetic, I’ll be the first to admit. But I’d also be willing to bet I’m not the only person in a creative field dependent on clients that feels this way. I bet there are plenty of architects, clothing designers, game developers, as well as copywriters and art directors, who say to themselves, when the tables are turned and it’s their money and someone else’s talent:

Do not do to them what others have done to you.

Makes a difference, doesn't it?

2008-07-16T17:28:00.002-04:00

Why CMOs keep getting fired.

2008-06-17T11:13:00.001-04:00

The Kelly Award winners book came out last week, with a lot of nice ads, including a bitchin’ campaign for Oral B dental floss. An ad which I doubt ever ran except maybe once in Dental Floss Gazette because nobody, not even BBDO, can talk P&G into buying a 2-page spread to advertise dental floss. Without a word of body copy.

But I digress. All award shows have fake ads. But this award, like the Effie, is supposed to be tied to business results. Which is a bigger opportunity to game the system than submitting ads that never ran.

The “Results” for the Oral B campaign, just to pick one example, were described this way:

Exceeded awareness goals.

When did awareness become a business goal for a 100-year-old brand?

Here’s another squishily soft result, for Liberty Mutual’s “Responsibility” campaign:

Improved attitudes toward brand by 9%.

I love this campaign. It actually manages to find common ground between the needs of the insurer and the needs of the insured, which is no easy feat. And it’s beautifully executed (the TV and online even more than the print). But “improved attitudes toward brand by 9%”? That’s a pretty low performance bar since you’re starting from 0% approval. (It’s insurance, remember?)

Speaking of low bars, Duncan Donuts’ campaign to launch a new line of Smoothies purportedly boosted weekly sales 250%. Pretty impressive result until you reflect upon the fact that this is a new product introduction. So the weekly sales results prior to launch were...zero.

I wouldn’t want to explain these kinds of results to my CEO if he or she had half a brain.
Is it any wonder CMOs have the life expectancy of a mayfly?

Reduce. Re-use. Recycle. Or just shut up.

2008-06-09T17:59:00.003-04:00

Big company. Big PR problem. And in response...big, big full-page NYT ad.

Texas big. Hummer big. Forest-depleting big.

You want to run an ad campaign trying to convince people you’re not the environment’s worst enemy?

Run smaller ads. Fewer of them. Use them over again before you make new ones.

Don’t worry—no one will get bored. No one’s reading these ads any way.

Or take the media buy and fund alternative-fuel startups.

Slogans that don't suck (2).

2008-05-30T10:18:00.002-04:00

I didn’t realize how much I liked Reuters’ old line “Before it’s news it’s Reuters” until it was scrapped after the Thomson acquisition.

Let’s parse it for a moment, shall we?

First of all, there’s a clear benefit: timely information. Any more timely and you’d probably wind up explaining yourself to the SEC.

Then there’s the lovely Iambic rhythm to the phrase. And the neat parallel construction of the It’s/it’s.

This line didn’t matter much when it ran, because Reuters was about attracting advertisers, not being one. it matters less now that the company has been bought.

But that line was good craft, and I really need to believe, in a life-or-death kind of way, that good craft always matters.

Fumer, non. Publicite, oui.

2008-05-22T17:46:00.003-04:00

Seen at a cafe in Paris. Pretty good use of an unexpected medium.

Citi redux, reduxed.

2008-05-12T20:59:00.002-04:00

Citi’s New Slogan Is Said to Be Second Choice - New York Times

Well, "Let's get it done" is...done.

As I predicted it would be in my post of almost exactly a year ago. Allow me to quote from myself:

"...Citi’s dead-man-walking CEO Charlie Prince wanted to put his own stamp on the company’s image. In this derivative, clueless effort, he has succeeded wildly....When Sandy Weill comes back to rescue Citi from his own anointed successor, I’ll bet anything that “Let’s get it done” will be done as well."

Well, I didn't get the Sandy Weill part right. Turns out Vikram Pandit played executioner instead. But no matter.

The new line? An old line: "The Citi never sleeps." One can debate how differentiating that is in a world of ATMs and online banking (a world Citi pioneered), but it's literally true in one sense: with call-center reps largely based in Bangalore, they're definitely wide awake at 3 AM.

New work from Satan, Beelzebub & Partners

2008-04-22T13:44:00.002-04:00

Part of a series exploring financial opportunities in calamity. Other executions include one on monetizing Darfur relief efforts, and an ad whose headline is “How to profit from the coming global food riots.”

Why stock photography sucks.

2008-04-16T16:12:00.002-04:00

The Getty family is pretty idiosyncratic: miserly billionaires, wayward heirs, kidnappings. If only the stock photography with the Getty watermark were as interesting.

Getty Images has grown as digital photography and the internet have grown, sucking up smaller houses along the way, feeding the insatiable maw of zillions of ad agencies, editorial departments, graphic design shops and web content generators too cheap, too time-pressed or too indifferent to go out and shoot something.

There was a time when art directors drew pictures of people and things in layouts and asked clients to imagine a certain mood, a style, an emotion.

Now art directors spend hour after hour hunting in vain through the Getty catalog for a shot that resembles what they have in mind, Photoshop the crap out of it to get it even closer…and then still have to ask clients to imagine a certain mood, a style, an emotion.

Because it ain’t there in the stock image. But unlike the crude drawings in old-school AD tissues, these pictures—at least to the uneducated client eye—look, well, real.

And, by client standards, uh, just fine.

Show me a creative who hasn’t had to run the stock image he put in his comp after the client glommed on to it and wouldn’t let go and I’ll show you a dead or long-retired creative.

I know there are alternatives...Corbis, Veer, istock, Flickr etc etc. Doesn’t matter. It all looks the same. And some pictures have been used so often, on so many web pages, in so many bad B-to-B ads, they have this eerie, familiar quality to them—like supporting actors who show up on CSI and Desperate Housewives in the same week. There’s Mr. Young Techno-Hipster-with Reflected-Glow-of-His-Laptop guy! There’s the Sassy-Sister-With-Her-Groceries lady! And here’s the Peaceful-Old-Guy-on-the-Dock!

Information wants to be free, the saying goes, and I guess that goes for watermarked stock shots. But pictures, real pictures, want to be made, not downloaded.

Here--wipe your ass with this soft white Golden Lab puppy.

2008-03-09T15:26:00.002-04:00

Well, what am I supposed to think when a dog is used as a metaphor for toilet paper?

TP advertising veers between cutesy euphemism and snark. This new Cottonelle campaign manages to combines them. At least where I see it—plastered all over the Grand Central Station subway (“Too much bran?” one headline nastily enquires).

Did Charmin’s stupid “Bears shit in the woods” campaign goad Kimberly Clark into sacrificing innocent puppies to the cause of anal comfort? PETA people: you ought to get on this.