Makes a difference, doesn't it?

Why CMOs keep getting fired.

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.

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).

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.

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

Citi redux, reduxed.

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

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.

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.

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.

You were great. Now get out.

A recent Ad Age article says that Absolut's new advertising--the first since the famous "bottle" campaign--is driving sales. This is in sharp contrast to the last few years, when the brand's sales were flat to declining.

Campaigns with "legs" are so rare in our business, I hate it when one of them needs to be shown the door, like bad guests who have overstayed their welcome. It justs fuels the ADD-like behavior of clients who tire of their ads long before their customers even know they exist.

Hank Seiden

Hank Seiden, founding partner of my agency, passed away this week after a long battle with prostate cancer.

The memorial service was on Friday, and many of the advertising luminaries of his era—Jerry Della Femina, Tony Isidore, Dick Tarlow—came to pay their respects.

Funerals in general being for the benefit of family and friends and not industry insiders, there wasn’t a lot of advertising talk in the service. But Hank had a number of strong beliefs about advertising, beliefs he was not shy about expressing in his columns and books.

Hank’s central belief was that strategy is more important than execution. In other words, a brilliant strategy will work even when couched in a crappy execution, but a crappy strategy cannot be saved even by the most brilliant execution.





Right or wrong, this was a peculiar stance for a creative director to take, and it put him, both metaphorically and often literally, on the client side of the table. It also earned him the scorn of many in the creative community—a scorn which he wore as a kind of badge of honor.

Hank was a copywriter by training and a creative director by title, but in truth he was really what we now call a planner. He was superb at helping his clients chart a course for where they should position their products vs. the competition, who they should talk to, and what these prospects would find persuasive. He was completely indifferent to the craft aspects of the process, whether out of true lack of interest or feigned, I’ll never know. And predictably, with every passing year, he grew further and further disengaged from what he dismissively called “the fun and games of the business.”

Hank was also a brilliant client handler, and he inspired intense loyalty from a lot of very senior client-side executives. After retiring from Jordan Case, he was able to draw on that loyalty to start what is now Seiden Advertising. I joined Seiden at Hank’s invitation in 2000, essentially to take over as Creative Director because he was finally ready to hang it up.

This was only fitting, I guess, because 26 years previously, Hank had also been my first boss in advertising, at Hicks & Greist. I was there for little over a year, but learned a huge amount from him. There’s no doubt that a lot of my bedrock beliefs about communication were formed during that time.

A lot of what I learned from Hank I’ve since unlearned. I think craft is holy. I think strategy doesn’t matter in a lot of categories, and I think bad execution can ruin a smart strategy.

But, hey, everyone has to start somewhere. I started with a guy who knew a real idea when he saw it, and saw past the smoke and mirrors that still occasionally blind us.

And for that, I’ll always be grateful.

Time well spent

This is the Whole Earth Catalog.

It came out in 1969.

Printed on newsprint, in hot type and black ink.

It is an instruction manual for the world we have just begun to live in.

The subtitle is “Access to tools.”

A line that would work today for Charles Schwab, Williams-Sonoma, Adobe.

The Whole Earth Catalog contained some of the earliest references to:

Composters

Solar heating

Dry wall screws

accupressure

and a bunch of other stuff you can now get down at the mall.

It was embraced by people who viewed commerce with contempt, who mistrusted the Man. who were both deeply idealistic and reflexively cynical.

They pored over it, learned from it--and bought things from it. Lots and lots of things.

If you make ads, you could do worse than spending some time with the Whole Earth Catalog. You can find it, cheap in digital form, not so cheap in analog, on its direct descendant, the internet.

Totally authentic bullshit.

In this week's Adweek, someone named Kamau High wrote a nonsensical piece entitled "Six Trends You Should Know." Trend #1: Authenticity.

The idea of authenticity as a fashion is so richly ironic and so sad, because it suggests that the author (and most of his readers) have no fucking idea of what authenticity is.

Authenticity is not a trend. It is the result of not knowing or not caring about trends. It's a Carrhart barn jacket on a farmer, not on a hipster. It's barbecue in the Texas hill country, not at Hill Country. It's the Paris in France, not the one at Epcot.

The greatest thing ever written about authenticity--what it is, and why it matters--is Julian Barnes' novel England, England. Read it. You won't be sorry. Then continue on with Mr. High's article on 2008 trends.

Trend #2: Faux Traditionalism.

New Year's Resolutions

Find nicer ways to say no to clients.

Find more occasions to say yes to clients.

Use less stock photography, or at least use it differently.

Dress better in the office. It suggests to people that I have my shit together.

Don’t just network when I want something.

Go 100% pun-free.

Make an ad that works on a 2 inch screen.

Be the same person on the business that I was during the pitch.

Re-read Ernie Schenck’s essay in the current CA at least once a month to keep my head from journeying too far up my ass.

In America, anyone can advertise whenever they want.

I watched the Las Vegas Democratic debate Thursday night, start to finish (and an odd finish it was, going out on the inane diamonds-or-pearls question), but nothing the candidates said could match the accompanying ads for highlighting this country’s weirdness.

I’m not sure if this was somebody’s idea of a joke, but one of the big advertisers was Clean Coal USA, which if you wipe away the light, airy, blue sky art direction, is the same grimy coal industry it’s always been.

That’s right. America’s coal mine owners crawled out of Dick Cheney’s butt long enough to underwrite the Democratic Presidential candidates’ prime-time debate.

Am I missing something? Are all these candidates in the bag already? Have they cut their deal with Big Energy? (Say it isn’t so, Dennis!) Or are the mining interests playing some kind of deep game, hoping that the more Americans watch these people bloviate, the more they’ll be inclined to commit to Mitt?

Oh—there was also a jaw-droppingly cheap and bad :60 DR spot for some sort of CD video bible. It showed a white nuclear family smiling and hugging on the couch as they watched the faux-parchment pages flick by on their big ol’ flatscreen.

Somehow, I don’t think they were TIVOing the debate while they watched.

Meeting cute in the Obituary column

Died yesterday and reported in adjoining obituaries: Peg Bracken, author of the "I Hate to Cook" cookbook, and Vincent DeDomenico, creator of Rice-A-Roni.

Three years before Betty Friedan told '60s women it was OK to be bored by kitchen duties, Bracken showed them how to short-circuit them with convenience foods. And a grateful food industry, Mr. DeDomenico, included, was right there to help.

Bracken, by the way, was an advertising copywriter. There's a shocker. Her recipe for "Skid Row Stroganoff":

Start cooking these noodles, first dropping a bouillon cube into the noodle water. Brown the garlic, onion and crumbled beef in the oil. Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.

What do people see when they look at ads?

Not necessarily what they’re supposed to, as this very cool experiment seems to suggest. Thanks to The New Shelton Wet/Dry blog for finding this fascinating (appalling?) piece of research.



In a rigorous controlled study 52% of the people who were asked to look at this picture could not recall the woman falling to her death.

For every creative who ever fought tooth and nail to keep the composition of his ad just so—which is to say, all of us—this is sobering stuff.

Take these pretty nice lingerie ads, courtesy of AdGoodness, for example. Here's one, if you're too lazy to click:



It's all about controlling the viewer’s eye and directing it to a particular, uh, place.

But what if the headline has it all wrong? What if the viewer remembers only the Tyrannosaurus? Or only the zebra rug?

And we're arguing about the placement of the logo?

Brands come and go, but "Blade Runner" still rocks.

I saw the newly-released "Blade Runner" this week.

Gone is the stupid narrative VO and hilariously inappropriate happy ending.
What remains, remastered and gorgeous, is Ridley Scott's vision of the near future.

And a big honking Pan AM logo glowing through the murk in the evening LA sky.

"Blade Runner" has a lot to say about the fragility and impermanence of life. And, maybe, of brands.

Post-pitch

Yesterday was the finale of a 3-month pitch, the full-on gantlet type: detailed RFP, “chemistry” meeting, interim working meeting, and the ultimate presentation to the CEO and her courtiers.

It was good. Real good. Smoke-a-cigarette-after good.

I quit cigarettes 23 years ago, so this post and its musings will have to do.

Honestly—is there anything better than a clean brief and no process except kick as much ass as you can in the time allotted? Pitches—especially those where agencies are asked to do spec creative—are fubar in many ways, and everyone whinges about it at 4As meetings and such. But looked at another way, it’s what we do in its purest form, and at no point in the agency-client relationship is it going to get better.

And being a principal in a small agency, and having a partner who knows what he’s doing, I know we can leave it all on the field and make some other agency beat us.

I worked at two large agencies where that wasn’t the case.

At both places, there would be this moment at the end of pitches that I dreaded: the CEO Takes Off His Reading Glasses and Stands Up Moment. Otherwise known as the If You Just Shut the Fuck Up We’ll Win This Moment. Where in 5 minutes of pointless bloviation, the guy would demonstrate that a) he hadn’t seen the work or thought about the prospect’s business until right before the presentation; and b) would in all likelihood continue at that level of involvement going forward. And months of work and 2 hours of great presentation would go down the drain.

I don’t know if we’re going to get this business. I think we should. But I’ll have no regrets if we don’t. I think I’m going to go walk the dog now. And smoke a cigar.

Cultural Alzheimer's?

The old cliche is that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.
In world affairs, the consequences are usually tragic. In advertising, they're more often inadvertently hilarious.

Last night I heard Electric Light Orchestra's "Hold on Tight to your Dreams" emanating from the TV and I thought, "What the fuck! The National Coffee Association is back on air?"

Because for those of us whose memories stretch back that far, that music is inextricably tied to a cheesy effort to make coffee hip. It was in the pre-Starbuck '80s when coffee sales were tubing and an entire generation was chugging cola for breakfast.

Except now it's the sountrack for the advertising for the new Honda Accord, which is a pretty good looking car from a pretty classy brand and now there's a sonic layer of cheese all over it.

At least in my mind. But here's my question: are the creators (and approvers) of the Honda work...
a) oblivious to the music's prior advertising life?
b) aware but don't care?
c) ironically commenting on it in some meta way that's beyond my comprehension, like sampling crap 70s pop songs in rap beats?

Freelance Envy

I had a bout of Freelance Envy recently, having brought in a team for a project I was just beyond the beyond-o on. They did their thing (very well, I might add), dropped off the files and their invoice and said the magic words, the words only freelancers get to say:

“Here you go. Hope you like it.”

I never had the intestinal fortitude to go freelance full time. Waiting for the phone to ring while writing out mortgage checks was just not something I could handle.

There was a brief period years ago while I was “exploring other opportunities” as the press release put it, when I did freelance, and boy, was it fun. It was good money, too, but honestly, if it weren’t for those pesky mortgage checks, I would have done it for free.

Think about it: an agency pulls freelancers in for only two reasons: 1) they’re short-staffed and the client’s freaking; or 2) the people on staff (or the last batch of freelancers) couldn’t crack it and the client’s freaking. Either way, the agency is desperate and at least temporarily open to a new take on things.

Not coincidentally, those are the optimum conditions for creating great work. Add to that the fact that you don’t have to deal with internal politics or client comments, and it’s a pretty sweet gig. You’re the Gunslinger. You come into town, take care of business, and ride off into the sunset.

But then two nights ago The Seven Samurai was on TV and I thought about those master-less ronin, with nothing but their swords and their honor as they wandered from gig to gig, and thought about all the great work freelancers do that wind up as meeting fodder, or with some other jackass’s name on it for the award shows.

That’s the flip side of “Here you go. Hope you like it.” And it is no small price to pay for freedom.

Ideate this.

I love the new IBM commercials that riff off the stupid jargon infecting the process of coming up with new ideas. One part New Age hooey, one part consultant corporate babble, one part Dr. Phil "everyone's got a good idea" faux-empowerment, it's all captured beautifully in this campaign.

Here's my question: how many people within IBM (those good ol' "internal stakeholders") looked at these ads and didn't get the joke? IBM, like most other big companies, especially in tech, can ideate with the best of them.

A cursory look through IBM's website uncovered the following subjects:
"Expanding the innovation horizon"
"Drive strategic change"
"Transform your workforce"

That's halfway home on Bullshit Bingo, the way I play it.

By the way, if you've never played it, pick up your score cards here.

Please, no more:

Plink-plinky pseudo-Phillip Glass piano scores that are supposed to signal "thoughtful."

Question-themed copy. Don't ask me where I want to go, what I want to do, what my dreams are, what I'm working for.

Sales "events."

Drawings layered onto photography meant to suggest "possibility." Sprint: haven't you seen the Microsoft spots?

Looking off-camera when you're supposed to be looking at me. Sam Waterston (and Bob Giraldi): I'm talking to you. I'd look at you, too. if you were here.


Vodka commercials filmed on yachts not tied up in the marina. If you want to get drunk and be a danger to others on the water, get a Cigarette boat.

In case you were considering a career in advertising...

...take a long hard look at this article from last week's NYT magazine:

It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World - New York Times.

Especially this part:

"The plan is to build a global digital ad network that uses offshore labor to create thousands of versions of ads. Then, using data about consumers and computer algorithms, the network will decide which advertising message to show at which moment to every person who turns on a computer, cellphone or — eventually — a television."

You thought globalization was only about customer service reps and toys made out of lead? Think again!

I don't know what's worse--exploiting cheap foreign labor to crank out endless versions of ads that suck in the first place; or the idea of being replaced by an algorithm. It's not just media planners who should find this prospect frightening. Art directors, writers, planners, we're all grist for the mill.

I'm a short-timer. A few more years and I hang up the spikes. So this shit won't come down on me. But for people coming into the business, it's a whole new reason to march at the next G-8 summit.

The other 28 and a half seconds were just copy mandatories anyway.

Engaging at Any Speed? Commercials Put to Test - New York Times

It's hard to believe this article and the people and activities in it aren't a goof. Desperate media sales types trying to prove that 30 second commercials mashed by a DVR into 1.5 seconds of ultra-high speed gobbledegook still work?

Anyway, is it just us old farts that remember the first appearance of these little nuggets circa 1987 in Max Headroom? They called them "blipverts" then, and they had the unfortunate effect of blowing the viewer's head to pieces. Too much data in too little time, apparently.

That wouldn't be a problem now. Most current spots are so content-less, you could condense 100 of them into a nanosecond and you'd still be safe.

It's all a blur.

Marketers Struggle to Get Folks to Stay Put for the Commercials - New York Times

"The whole goal here is to blur the line between content and advertising message,” said Hank Close, president for ad sales at MTV Networks."

Listening to a media-sales executive exult that his network’s goal is to completely blur the distinction between content and advertising is like listening to a tobacco-industry executive talking about how cigarettes are nothing more than an optimized nicotine-delivery system.

The difference is, the tobacco guys were talking behind closed doors. This guy’s Tourette’s-like outburst was freely directed at the press.

Every time the firewall between advertising and content is torn down, it ends in tears.
The GEICO cavemen kicked ass in commercials. Advance sneak peaks at the TV series suggest it won’t last 2 weeks. Ham-fisted product placement eventually made series like “The Apprentice” and “Queer Eye” unwatchable. Ad guy Brian Tierney’s takeover of the Philadelphia Enquirer is headed down the same dead-end street.

The same technology that empowers viewers to fastforward past crap commercials also lets them post the good ones on YouTube and leverage the client's media buy by orders of magnitude. The challenge, Mr. Close, is not to pollute content with badly disguised ad messaging, but to make ads that merit watching.

Citi: not so pretty.

Well, it had to happen I guess, but seeing the awful reality of it is almost too much to take. Citibank or Citicorp or Citi or whatever it is has junked its “Live Richly” campaign in favor of ….of….

“Let’s get it done.”

The red arch logo has been wrenched from its context as an umbrella (necessary with the divestiture of Travellers is my guess) and turned into a bridge. Because Citi is your bridge from dream to reality. From a sketch on a napkin to an IPO. From, let's see...from Dick Cheney on a carrier deck to Dick Cheney in a perp walk.

The inevitable anthem intro commercial rounds up all the usual suspects: the simple, repetitive Phillip Glass-like score; the hopeful children; the intense entrepreneurs; the retired couple on the dock; the proud college graduate. 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.

“Live Richly” had its detractors, and for sure a bank talking about money not being everything in life is an easy targets for cynics, but jeez, at least they took a shot. It avoided most financial-advertising clichés, it appealed to people’s better nature, and it set them apart. In a category where 90% of what you can say is regulated by statute, that’s pretty good. 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.

Period abuse.

Forgot to mention in my last post that this new Travelers campaign ends with this somewhat opaque slogan:



Not sure what it means, but I'll let it go. It's planner BS they had to paste onto the work to put it "on brief". No, the thing I want to focus on is the period abuse. The. Way. An extra period. Is inserted. To make the line. Punchier.

Copywriters do this all the time. I know I have (Weight Watchers. Real food. Real life. Real results.). And there is a hilarious passage in Matthew Beaumont's book E in which the agency's hack Creative Director is ID'd by a former art director partner by the period abuse in his emails.

And no wonder. Maybe as a reaction to chronic period abuse by their writers, most art directors hate putting one period, let alone 2 or 3, in headlines or tag lines. Why mess up nicely kerned type with some random...dots?

Risky business.

I made my own advertising mash-up last night. In my head. No editing software necessary.

I was watching Heroes (itself a pretty good mash-up of comix, sci-fi and nerdy soap opera) and a spot came on with this sleazy character named Risk. Risk wears a cream-colored zoot suit and throws banana peels out there for you to slip on.

I think this spot was a :60. It was lonnnnnng. And, as is the fashion, it saved mention of the advertiser to the very end. Which gave my overly active imagination plenty of time to fill in the blanks. I’d been seeing a ton of new print ads from Marsh (aka Marsh & McClennan before the scandal) that looked like this:




So, naturally, I thought this new spot was the TV translation. Here he is--the Upside of Risk we've been looking for! Except what could be the Upside of a meddling douchebag who looked like Snidely Whiplash? Wow, I thought to myself, where was Marsh going with this?

And then a telltale red umbrella appeared, and the Travelers Insurance logo. And some drivel about how Risk never sleeps so your unsurance needs to keep up, which I assume means minimizing the downside and not finding the up. And, suddenly, my mash-up movie was over. But for 55 seconds, the commercial playing in my head was not the one on the TV.

Oh, the humanity!

I consume a lot of business media, so I’m seeing a lot of human-ness lately.

Cisco is running a campaign about something called “The Human Network” which must be what I’m on right now because my wireless connection speed is dial-up slow.

And a few pages later, Dow (aka Dow Chemical) brings us “The Human Element,” which I guess is...them?

These two outfits must have gone to the same focus group, in which they found out that people think big business is cold, impersonal and amoral. Hence the need to “humanize” their respective brands.

“Human” is one of those words that, when you see it in the context of advertising, is best understood by putting the word “not” in front of it. So, for example, when Dow says it’s all about “The Human Element”, what they mean is “The not-Human Element.” It’s Dow Chemical, for Chrissakes. Better living through chemistry!

Here’s some other terms that, like “human,” pretty reliably mean their exact opposite when used in advertising:

Personal
State of the art
Smart
Caring
Green
Unique

Feel free to add your own to the list.

One stand-up guy.

I’ve always admired Mike Hughes of The Martin Agency, and a recent conversation with him in Creativity (or as they typographically refer to themselves, Creat Ivity), only reconfirms my respect.

Hughes freely admits that he didn’t like the gecko concept when it was first presented, and only relented after repeated pitches by his team—and only because he believed it was just a one-shot.

How many creative directors do you know who will cop to something like that? A lot of history has been rewritten by CDs who claim early support—or, worse, authorship—of ideas that they originally crapped on.

Hughes also volunteered that while he was not initially keen on the gecko he had a lot of heart for an idea revolving around flying monkeys, which was pulled after only a few days on air. Not surprisingly, no one else is trying to horn in on the credits for that one.

Sloppy seconds

Advertising Age - Kmart Hands DraftFCB $200 Million Creative Account

To quote my daughters: Ewwww.

Weren’t DraftFCB’s presentation boards for Kmart still damp from Julie’s embrace?

I’ll leave the Julie-bashing to others. But K-Mart! Have some self-respect. Do you really have such WalMart envy? They’re falling over themselves trying to be Target. And didn’t you see Howard’s video address to his troops? He’s Sammy Glick and Ursula the Sea Witch’s love child!

These are the End Times.

Nike is falling out of love with W&K.

Altoids dumped Leo Burnett.

Dead people come back to life and talk about popcorn.

What other signs do we need? Lee Clow’s head turning 360% around on his neck?

It’s time to get right with whoever your deity is.

Google, AKQA, R/Greenberg and a few other lucky souls are locked and loaded for The Rapture.



The rest of us will be left here to contend with The Beast, forced to prove ROI endlessly, speaking corporate babble we don’t even understand, locked in a focus-group facility for an eternity while harpies shriek and tear at our work.

In the meantime, we just got a nice new piece of business . Things are looking up!

It's about the work...pause Not!

It’s enough to cause terminal cognitive dissonance.

On one hand you’ve got sad but familiar stories like VW getting pulled from Arnold, or Altoids from Burnett, when newly-installed clients bring in old agency buddies. Relationship trumps the work.

On the other hand, you’ve got Bob Barrie and Stuart D' Rozario taking the entire honking United business with them from long-time agency Fallon, where they created their beautiful campaign. Work trumps relationship.

Or…not? What it’s hard for outside observers to ever know is: did the decision makers at United keep the business with its creators because, bottom-line, it’s about the work? Or were Barrie and D'Rozario, and not anyone in management, the key relationship people?

The easy answer is: both. United likes and trusts these two guys, and appreciates and values their work. And I hope that’s actually true.

But it’s also possible—I know because I’ve seen it—that the United folks have no idea why the work is good. They may have bought total shit work at some earlier point in time and might be capable of doing it again in the future but right now, they believe that Barrie and D'Rozario “get them” and their business and like hanging with them and it’s just a happy coincidence that they can do kick-ass work too.

“Lightning in a bottle” my business partner Matt Seiden calls it. When it happens to you, make the most of it.

While I was out.

It’s been weeks since I’ve posted to this blog and the readership stats have, predictably, flatlined.

I was warned early on in this exercise by no less a blog authority than George Parker that the key to readership was frequent posting. Clearly this is a lesson I haven’t fully internalized and that’s because I keep mistaking what I’m doing for writing, which it only superficially resembles.

Blogging looks like writing. I use a word processor, I compose, I edit, I search for the right word or phrase. But what’s wanted in a blog is not lapidary prose but frequent electronic stimuli…intermittent reinforcement for people with short attention spans and lots of options.

So having proved to my satisfaction that blog postings, unlike limited-edition sneakers, do not gain in value from scarcity, I’m going to try for a few weeks to post every day and see what that fetches. If I don’t see a readership spike, I will have to confront the harrowing possibility that the problem is content—i.e. I suck at this—rather than frequency.

But I don’t want to confront that idea yet. Maybe I can post my way out of this.

Bill Bernbach would be proud.

Lost in all the schadenfreude about Crispin Porter and its Volkswagen work—the departure of client champion Kerry Martin, the strange “Fast” creature, the proto-Nazi designer—are these two lovely print ads.

Every agency that has worked on VW since it left Doyle Dane has kept the iconic Avant Garde typeface and the spare, white-space aesthetic. But no agency has been comfortable enough in its own creative skin to return to the original, classic layout and copy approach.

Just as it took certified Red-baiter Richard Nixon to finally establish diplomatic ties with Communist China, it took CPB to do these ads. Not just because they have nothing to prove creatively, but because someone there actually knows how to write.

The copy sells hard but gracefully and is 100% bullshit-free. The style is literate and witty but in no way condescending or snarky. If Crispin does wind up losing this business, it will be a shame. These ads are the real deal.

Dogs rule. BMWs suck.

So I'm watching the Westminster Dog Show, which, given the...um..specialized nature of its audience, has lots of commercials featuring dogs.

Most of these commercials are for Pedigree, and they're great. Of course, when the brief is to encourage people to donate to a dog-rescue fund, and the audience by definition loves dogs, if you can't do a nice spot you should just give it up. Dogs rule, indeed.

And then this BMW spot comes on. Guy whistles for his Weimariner to go out for a spin. Dog looks dubious. Dog exits frame, reappears wearing a crash helmet. Now he looks dubious and ashamed. Against his better judgment, dog hops into back of BMW wagon. Guy stomps on the accelerator, hurling his dog against the rear windshield as he peels out of the driveway.

Nice creative choice to run on a dog show, guys. Note to dogs waiting for new owners in shelters: if someone comes in and jangles BMW keys at you...bite him. You're better off where you are.

Super Bowl Bench Warmers

I think the big winners and losers have been pretty well documented, don't you?

I'm sickly drawn in this post to the ads consigned to Purgatory, neither praised nor derided. I'm fascinated by the forgettable. If you're going to pay $2.5 MM to air a spot, at least try. Take a shot. Fail Big, like Snickers or Garmin. But no. Anyone remember these?

Ford F 150. Lots of parts coming together to make...um...a truck. Like Honda's "Cog" with all the coolness stripped away.

Prudential. Rocks are good for skipping. Rocks are good for massage. Rocks are good for...let me guess...I feel it coming...insurance.

Ford Edge. Let's see, the vehicle's name is "Edge" so let's have it ride (in clumsy CGI) on the edge. And have some rocker sing "I like to live on the edge." Which means, of course, that he doesn't.

And my grand prix for Forgetability, the least remembered, least-talked about spot on the Super Bowl:

PNC Bank. They ran the pitch mood piece. Aimless vignettes of people walking, children smiling, people tapping on keyboads...what--you don't remember? What about when the AVO talked about helping you meet your goals and your dreams? No? Surely you remember the line at the end:

PNC. Leading the way.

I did. Which is deeply troubling.

Taking it to focus groups. That's the hard part.

You know that scene in “A League of Their Own” where Gina Davis decides to hang up her cleats after hubby Bill Pullman comes home from the war? Where she tells Tom Hanks that playing pro baseball was just too hard? Hanks looks at her in disgust and says “It’s supposed to be hard. If it was easy, everyone could do it.”

Well, I just took a look at the 5 final “consumer-generated” Doritos spots for the Superbowl, and you know what?

Apparently, everyone can do it. As George Parker pointed out, these are not bad spots. (Well, "Live the Flavor” is a pretty bad spot but the other 4 are pretty good.)

And as any number of people have pointed out (and others, including me, predicted), the people who created them are not exactly amateurs. They are art school students, aspiring filmmakers etc.

But as I watched the spots, I was struck by something else. These spots were not only pretty professional-looking, they all had the distinct feel of Superbowl spots…that sort of BBDO/DDB jokey-hyerbolic comedic style. The guy who duct-tapes his roommate to keep him away from the bag of Doritos. The rock climber who loses his grip because he’s clutching a bag of Doritos.

This is old school TV creative. Not bad. But not new. If you showed it to David Lubars he’d kick you out of his office. And this is the future of advertising? Having people who are trying to break into the business do work none of us would view as fresh?

Age and Advertising, Part Two

Literature is strewn with examples of writers creating and inhabiting characters totally unlike themselves. James Joyce’s Molly Bloom... Michael Haddon's autistic Christopher Boone... characters like these are so convincingly wrought, they stand as feats of pure imagination.

And then there’s advertising.

Walk around any creative department and it’s 1955. Women (and gay men) work on cosmetics. Men work on cars. Young men work on beer. Middle-aged creatives, what few there are, are in management or herded off to work on pharma.

Defenders of this caste system invoke the “Write about what you know” approach, saying (if not necessarily believing) that creatives whose age and gender mirror the target group will have better “insights” that “resonate” at a deeper level.

Excuse me, but how insightful do you have to be to introduce a new stuffed-crust pizza? And anyway, aren’t the “insights”--so hard-won in endless rounds of focus groups—already there on the brief?

Off the record, agency managers will tell you that client comfort has a lot to do with it too. I have a very good friend who lost her job working—of course—on a feminine hygiene product account when a new client decided she was too old.
Talk about double jeopardy!

Let’s suppose, just for a moment, that casting by age for different types of accounts makes sense. Let’s say you have the Red Bull business. Do you really want a 50+ creative working on it? Speaking personally, there’s no part of my life that requires knocking back a lethal shot of caffeine at 2 AM. None. The only thing that’s going to give me wings at this point is going to the Hereafter.

So fine: to work on a young person’s product it sometimes helps to be young. But now let’s turn the question around. To work on an older person’s product, does it help to be older?

This is where things get fucked up. Because the typecasting only runs in one direction. No one has a problem with a 28-year-old creative working on life insurance, cognac, luxury sedans or (women only please) wrinkle cream. But maybe they should.

Just as there are ads—I’m sorry, I mean branded consumer engagement content—that are totally five minutes ago for their 20-something target, there are also ads that are hilariously wrong for their 55-year-old customer.

Here’s a good rule of thumb:

If you are someone who still sees a role for Red Bull in your life, you have no insight into life insurance.

The plant tour

Yesterday I got on my client’s corporate jet and flew to Nebraska to take the plant tour, thereby violating Fenske’s Anti-Law #9.

What can I say? Private jets are fun, even when you’re going to a factory in Nebraska in January. It’s like my children, when they were little: they thought the coolest part of any trip, whether it was DisneyWorld or the Berkshires or LA, was room service.

Clients like creatives to take the plant tour because there’s the possibility they’ll see something there to inspire them creatively; also maybe because they secretly delight in seeing smartypants hipsters so far out of their comfort zones. But the truth is, beyond a certain point, additional knowledge about how a product is made isn’t usually helpful. It either bores people or tears away their illusions (e.g., hot dogs).

Still, spending a day with people who live outside the irony zone and care to an incredible degree about making the best product they can, can get a guy pretty motivated about making ads, so going on the plant tour accomplished its goal, if not in the way the client intended.

Embedding an idea in shit doesn't make it viral.

Bad ads get ignored.
Good ads get noticed.
Great ads go viral.

And they always have. The difference is, people used to say "Did you see that commercial last night?'" and now they just put it up on YouTube.

The Dove transformation spot would have been talked about and shared 20 years ago.
"Where's the beef?" would be getting a zillion hits on YouTube if it had debuted last week.

Either way, a meme is replicating itself through the culture. Same process, new petri dish.

What I learned from the 2006 CA Advertising Annual

The Communication Arts Advertising Annual arrived yesterday and I fell upon it eagerly. Here is what I’ve learned:

1. If you want to do award-winning work, move to Singapore.

2. Everywhere but in the US, board games appear to be the most heavily advertised consumer product. That or Legos.

3. Contrary to what your account supervisor told you, 4-color spreads make good sense and are affordable for every client, regardless of budget.

4. A new agency can get into the CA Annual executing the old agency’s campaign (see pages 30 & 66).

5. Procter & Gamble can and will buy great work (Tide to Go, Cascade).

6. They will also buy incomprehensible dreck (Folgers) if you let them.

7. Radio is (and maybe always will be) your best shot at winning.

8. If there are no jobs in Singapore, move to Bangkok.

Change agents and the agencies they love.

If you’re going to flush your career down the toilet, are you really going to do it for this guy?

Just because he has an Aston Martin doesn’t make him Sean Connery. No matter how many cups of Nobu’s house sake you’ve downed.

Wal-Mart Fires Marketing Star and Ad Agency - New York Times

Arts and Crafts

Enough about art.

I’m here to talk about craft.

Not the Martha and her hot-glue gun kind of craft.

Or those dreadful outdoor fairs filled with stained-glass wine coasters and Labrador retrievers made out of macramé.

No, I’m talking about the look-how-beautifully-everything-fits-together kind of craft.

The first-you-make-the-sushi-rice-for-seven-years-and-then-you-can-slice-the-fish kind of craft.

And my point is that while a few ads do legitimately aspire to the level of art, craft is what keeps hundreds of ads every year from outright sucking.

Say “craft” to many in our business and the image that comes to mind is the prima donna sociopath, endlessly re-kerning type while the traffic manager flips out. If there’s someone like that at your agency, he may or may not be an artist. But he’s not a craftsman.*

Real craftsmen have a smoothness, an economy of thought and movement, that tempers their obsessive attention to detail. “Measure twice, cut once,” as the carpenter’s maxim goes.

Here are some other differences between art and craft:

Artists want—no, need-- their creation to be new and original.

Craftsmen have different, more immediate worries. Is it well-made? Is it honest? Does it work? Will it wear well?

The joy of art is in the conceiving and the beholding. The joy of craft is in the making.

Artists sign their work. Craftsmen do their work, and if they do it well and long enough, the work itself becomes a calling card.

Art is high-maintenance. Who does the maintaining? Craftsmen.

Art concerns itself with Big Things. Craft is democratic. Small-space trade ads, national TV campaigns, they all are things to be crafted. And if anything, the craft shines more brightly in the dark recesses of the obscure trade journal than in the glare of prime time.

Because, let’s face it, not a lot of people notice.

Only stubborn pride in craft compels an art director to slave over all those nasty titles in the Summer Sales Event spot so they come out clean and graphically coherent.

Meter, rhythm, syntax—if they’re in that bank-ad body copy at all, it’s because a craft-obsessed writer put them there.

That’s why, if I were a client, and I had to choose whether artists or craftsmen worked on my business, it would be such a no-brainer. It’s like asking a homeowner about to do a major addition whether he’d rather have Frank Gehry or Norm Abrams from “This Old House.”

Hell, I bet even Frank Gehry would rather have Norm.








*Apologies upfront to female practitioners. Craftsperson? Craftswoman? The language hasn’t caught up to the reality of your skills.

Age and Advertising, Part One

I had a boss early in my career who framed the age-and-advertising issue perfectly. His theory was that as you got older, particularly in the creative end of the business, you encountered two stages of eyeball-rolling from the young people in your office:

Stage One: They wait until they leave your office to roll their eyes.
Stage Two: They don’t.

The goal, he said, was to get out of the business before things had progressed to Stage Two.

Stage One is something you learn to live with if you’re going to manage creative people. If you can’t endure the fact that killing the creative team’s wild-posting-on-urinals campaign earned you a huge eyeball-roll the minute they left your office, you can’t be a creative director.

But now I’m roughly the age (mid-fifties) that boss was when he broke it down for me. Many of my friends in the business have gotten the boot for age-related reasons. I make cultural references that produce blank looks on the faces of 20-somethings. Am I approaching Stage Two?

And if I am, what does that mean?

Do creatives lose it as they get older? Certainly, if you look at the award shows, most of the most innovative new work comes from younger creatives. From this, it’s easy to conclude that creativity, like gray cells, muscle mass and hair, is something that just ebbs away over time. And certainly there’s nothing sadder than watching an older creative trying to recycle past work to solve a new assignment. (I’ve seen guys in their 20s pull that crap, too. The only difference is they have a smaller supply to draw on.)

But is it really true? It’s hard to know. For one thing, there are simply far more creatives in their 20s and 30s than in their 50s. There are more because everyone likes it that way. Agency management likes it that way because younger creatives are cheaper. Creative directors like it that way because the rosy glow of youth freshens their own older vibe. And clients like it that way because, godammit, we need some fresh thinking around here. With the ranks of creative departments so tilted towards youth, statistics work in their favor. Their sheer numbers mean they do most of the really good work. Of course, it also mean they do most of the really bad work.

Are older creatives less willing to try new things? That’s certainly the rep, but again, it’s not clear whether this is just perception becoming its own reality. In most agencies, “give it to the kids to work on” is the automatic response when traditional solutions won’t do.

But in my own experience, the opposite often happens. The kids, being new to the game and having no sense of what’s gone before, often wind up recapitulating the history of advertising in their own explorations. (And since life is basically unfair, pointing out that they have—totally accidentally, of course—come up with an idea first done in 1977, just makes me more of a loser. Cue the eyeball roll. Not that I’m bitter or anything.)

Whereas the older creatives I know are desperate to do something totally different because they’ve been forced back into traditional solutions their entire careers. They also have the advantage of actually knowing what’s been done before.

Who do you suppose more appreciates having the door to the cage opened—the newly hatched chick or the bird that’s been there all its life?

Next installment in this discussion (not necessarily the next post): Do you have to be young to write young?

Mmmm...sketchy.

Not a super-big deal, but:

Has anyone else noticed that the Quizno's spots have 4 "Mmms" on the title card but five in the AVO track? Dos being one "M" short make them somehow less toasty?

So much for audio-video sync.
Or maybe I should just get out more.

Separated at birth?

This is not supposed to be a political blog, but take a long look at these two pictures.
The close-set eyes. The eyebrows. The nose. The thin mouth barely supressing a smirk.
Every wonder why you don't see these two guys in the same place at the same time?

September 12th.

Everyone has their own way of commemorating events.

Yesterday I bought a lamb gyro for lunch from the cart guy on 45th off of 3rd. He’s Egyptian. He asked me if I wanted hot sauce and I said, no, can’t take the heartburn anymore. He nodded sagely and said, “Like me. We are too old.” He gave me extra white sauce to compensate. I laughed. He laughed. I walked back to the office with my gyro, looking at the robin’s-egg blue sky—same as it was five years ago--loving New York and feeling hopeful.

Waiting for the light to turn, I watched a panhandler work the passing crowd. “Spare change? Spare change? How about a fucking penny? Can’t any of you motherfuckers spare a fucking penny?”

Now that’s copywriting with attitude, I thought. And, this being New York, it was working.

Whatever you do, don't talk.

This morning’s Stuart Elliot column in the NYT is grisly/funny evidence of what happens if you try to talk about advertising to journalists (even careful, knowledgeable ones like Stuart). You wind up saying things like this:

“I didn’t pop my head out of a focus-group room in 6 weeks.” And: “This audience doesn’t want to be advertised to.” (Others do?) And besides: if this audience has a particular loathing for advertising, grilling them in focus-group rooms for six weeks about which “concept” they like will teach you what, exactly?

This: “[This audience] doesn’t want to be told what to do. ‘Free to be’ says ‘you can be anything you want to be and you’re welcome at the CW.’”

(“Free to Be,” by the way, is the CW network’s new theme/strategy, and is yet another great instance of David Nottoli’s Tyranny of Consumer Insight point discussed in my last post.)

I have this vision of this guy’s PR handler sitting in the office, pleading with his eyes for the guy to stop, please stop, omigod please stop, while Stuart calmly sits there, writing down these bon mots verbatim.

Because here’s the deal: talking about advertising to civilians makes you sound like an idiot. That doesn’t mean that advertising is idiotic per se, although all manner of stupid things are said and done in our business every day. It just means it doesn’t translate well to people who are not compelled to drink whatever flavor of Kool-Aid you’re chugging.

While talking about advertising can make anyone look like an idiot, it seems to take its heaviest toll on client marketing execs like this guy from the CW network. Creatives, in general, are too introspective and paranoid to say anything ridiculous, although the ECD on this CW campaign waxed pretty poetic about the color green in the same article. Senior agency account managers don’t want to commit career seppuku by being more quotable than their client.

So that leaves poor Mr. or Ms. Sr. VP-Marketing to tell us why their new ad campaign will rock our world. Some cautiously opt to utter something unoriginal like “We felt we needed to cut through the clutter” in order to try to at least containthe damage.

For those desiring to go beyond the old clichés, the temptation is to put on that new-media-pioneer hat: “We wanted to find innovative new ways to engage our consumer” etc. etc.

And if that’s too tame, you can actually try to explain, as the hapless guy from the CW did, why your new advertising is a great idea. But if I were you, I wouldn’t. Nothing good can come of it.

Instead, I would do what generations of creatives, faced with the absurdity of articulating why they picked this typeface or that color, have done: gesture to the layouts or the roughcut or whatever, and say:

I think the work pretty much speaks for itself.

Garbage in, garbage out, garbage all around

Sidewalk Life: The Tyranny of Consumer Insights

David Nottoli makes a dead-on observation in this post from his excellent blog. For any creative who ever wondered why the briefs for the new deodorant, the online banking service and the fast-casual restaurant chain all have the same consumer insight, this is why.

63%? I'll take it.

Advertising Age - New Book Reports 37% of All Advertising Is Wasted

Well, I know everyone is riffing off this news as confirmation of Wanamaker's old crack about advertising, but for Chrissakes--63% of advertising works? I'll take it.

30% gets you to the Hall of Fame in baseball. Success of new product introductions? Around 10% or less. Marriage success rate in the family-values lovin' U.S. of A is around 50%.

Think about it: 63% of all the ads you see--mere images and words about foot odor and insurance and hamburger joints, competing for your attention with other unsought commercial messages as well as whatever content you're actually trying to look at or read...do what they're supposed to do.

If our industry wasn't so drenched in self-loathing, we'd view this as vindication, not embarassment.

I know nottink!

I’m guessing that Dieter Zetsche is smart, down-to-earth and charming in person. I’m also guessing that becoming his company’s spokes-mensch was not his idea.

But turning him into an alternately terrifying and clownish Teutonic tool—whose idea was that?

Sometimes, the best thing a creative can do for the work is to just get the hell out of the way.

It's not easy pretending to be Green

What is it about doing “look how green we are” corporate ads that drives companies to make up ridiculous terms for what they’re doing?

First GE came up with “ecomagination,” which, given the company’s history with PCBs in the Hudson River, must mean “our imaginary ecological commitment.” Or maybe it means “it takes a hell of an imagination to call our coal-mining technology ecologically sensitive.”

Now Honda is jumping in with “enviromentology.” So silly—and so unnecessary, because Honda has been a leader in fuel efficiency and cleaner emissions for decades.

Curiously, the copy leads off with some belligerent noise about preferring to let the company’s actions speak for themselves rather than just writing about it. But, ummm, you are writing about it.

Here’s a thought: rather than “enviromentology” and “ecomagination,” why not just call it what it is: trying to do the right thing.

I say “trying” because the dominant color when it comes to balancing a company’s roles as profit engine and corporate citizen is not green. It’s gray. The trade-offs are complicated and the win-wins are infrequent. And I say this as a spotted-owl-kissing, dam-blowing, Nature Conservancy-giving greenie.

That’s why I respect BP’s take on environmental issues and responsibilities. It’s full of nuance and shades of gray (even when they highlight the buzzwords in yellow), and notably short on easy answers. I think they’re trying, and that—not an overactive ecomagination—is what counts.

A different kind of cool.

A week spent flyfishing in the Canadian Rockies empties the mind of most thoughts about advertising. Which allowed this thought to find its way in:

We coastal sophisticates use irony to keep an emotional distance and to avoid embarrassing displays of enthusiasm and happiness.

Southwestern Alberta, however, is a 100% irony-free zone, and it’s like breathing pure oxygen—utterly refreshing and slightly giddy-making. So how do flyfishing guides, who are among the coolest people anywhere, keep their cool in the face of jaw-dropping scenery and 24-inch trout?

Understatement.

“Pretty nice sky, there, don’t you think?”

“Decent fish you got there.”

We in the ad business could use more understatement and less irony. Is the advertising world ready for “Introducing a new truck that's not half bad”?

I don’t know. But we’d feel better. We’d be less ironic. And we’d be a whole lot better-liked.

The arc.

Agency-client relationships have an arc, just like movie plots and short-lived romances. The arc typically has five points:

Admiration.
Infatuation.
Habituation.
Alienation.
Termination.

Let’s look at each one, and for you agency young ‘uns who haven’t traversed a full arc yet, don’t despair. Sometimes these things can stay at Habituation for years.

Admiration. The client starts to hear about a new shop. Maybe he reads a trade magazine article. Or he meets the creative director. Or maybe he sees an ad he likes and tracks down the shop responsible. Whatever. He goes to the agency’s web site and likes what he sees. He asks around and likes what he hears. He googles the agency’s principals. He finds himself daydreaming about working with this new shop. His current shop doesn’t know it yet, but they’re toast.

Infatuation. With or without the pretense of a review, the client has consummated his relationship with the new agency. The people--they’re so bright and shiny and new! And their ideas—so bold! Their media plans—so nontraditional! Where have these people been all my life? And the wrap party for the anthem spot? Dude!

Habituation. He can’t remember exactly when. It was such a gradual thing. One day, the process was a smoothly-running machine. Everyone on the same page, deadlines all getting met. The next day: a kind of comfortable boredom. Business as usual. Not in a bad way—we’ve got a total Vulcan mind-meld going. But do the senses tingle? No they do not.

Alienation. If the client saw one more podcast-driven idea, he was going to scream. The art director’s piercings were no longer exciting—they were tiresome. The Account Supe’s verbal tics—were they ever endearing? He thinks maybe once. But not now. Every flaw, every glitch seemed to be magnified, like zits in a make-up mirror. And that franchise meeting where the new campaign was shown? What a nightmare!

Termination. What was the name of that agency the West Coast sales manager was talking about last night? They sounded kind of cool. Wonder what their site looks like.
Wow. Very cool. Wonder if this is the right time to make a change?

That’s right—it’s the Great Circle of Life. One agency’s alienated client is another agency’s smitten stalker.

If, It, whatever.

Has anyone else noticed the remarkable resemblance between Met Life's new "If" campaign and eBay's "It" work?

Squint slightly, or have a couple of mojitos, and the two ads will appear identical...each with two giant, Stonehenge-like letters dominating the page.

Seems to me they'd be better off swapping, though. Wouldn't Met Life rather be about "it" than "if"? So much more certain-sounding. And wouldn't eBay's serendipitous nature be nicely captured by "if"?

I'm sorry, what was the question?

An ad currently running for the Lexus ES starts off with this headline-as-question:

“Is it possible to engineer desire?”

I’m guessing the answer they’re looking for is yes-- even though the copy never says so--and that the Lexus ES is proof. Well, fine, this wouldn’t be the first car ad that tries to juxtapose emotion and science, heart and steel, etc etc etc.

But that just makes this execution derivative.

What vaults it past derivative to silly is that question mark. It’s that school of thought that says “Don’t just tell people things. Ask them instead—it’s more involving.” Ask the right question--Allstate's "Are you in good hands?" comes to mind--and the effect can be unsettling...or illuminating...but never boring. But ask the wrong question and the opposite happens. What better way to signal you know nothing about me and don't care to learn than to ask me a question I see no reason to answer? Here’s another example, for a new Canon DSLR:

“When Canon created the new EOS 30D, what were they thinking?”

I don’t know. I don’t care. But what was that copywriter thinking? That the implied meaning—Canon’s done something terrible, Canon’s gone off its rocker—would give this ad a frisson of danger?

Lawyers have a sacred rule when it comes to courtroom witness examination:
Never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to. The object, obviously, is to maintain control, avoid surprises and keep a witness from going in an unproductive direction.

Copywriters might consider a different rule: Never ask a question if people don’t care what the answer is.

How to be a better client.

There's an old saying in this business that clients get the advertising they deserve. Here are some things they don't teach in business school or discuss in marketing conferences that can increase the odds you'll get your agency's best efforts--and deserve them.

Don’t buy a dog and then bark for it. The reason you hire an ad agency is because their people can do things you can’t. Tell your agency team what your advertising needs to do, agree on how you’re going to measure it, then let them work. Telling advertising professionals how to do their job wastes their talents and your company’s money.

Value our Otherness. While an agency needs to understand its client’s culture, business model and products, they are not you. That difference is valuable. There’s already an expert on your company and its products and it’s you.

Be straight with us. All companies have politics. All employees have bosses. If either one is the reason you’re reluctant to embrace a good idea, tell us. We will respect you, empathize and work with you to deal with the problem. If you don’t tell us, we’ll have no choice but to think you don’t know a good idea when you see one.

Do not ask: Is there a better shot/take/word/phrase/layout? The creatives don’t think there is, or you would have already seen it.

Get out from behind the glass. You’re a successful young professional. Living someone else’s life, even for a few minutes, beats watching it every time. Go to a NASCAR race (not comped). Watch Fox. If you already watch Fox, listen to NPR. Walk around a neighborhood you don’t know. Eavesdrop, always. And whatever you do, when looking at the agency’s work…

Don’t think like a marketer. You were born with all the training you need to look at an ad and figure out if it’s good. Your humanity and your life experiences will steer you right. The minute you start analyzing, you’re in trouble.

Nothing claims better than...a claim.

All the shit that used to work
Don’t work now.
--Warren Zevon, “My Shit’s Fucked Up”


What is it about claims? What is the power of its siren call to clients of all stripes?

Why must everything be stronger, longer and preferred 3 to 1? How is that even possible? Some advertising domains, like wireless phone service, automotive and analgesics, seem to inhabit a parallel universe in which the laws of statistics don’t apply—everything’s above average, like Garrison Keilor’s children of Lake Woebegone.

Back in the day, claims were the backbone of that package-goods stalwart, the Reason To Believe. They were a mashup of engineering and marketing, written to make sense to civilians but still trailing their cloak of numbers and percentages from the lab. And mostly, they worked.

So the claims-driven model was exported out of the world of detergents into other arenas, often with bizarre results. I remember a Procter & Gamble client in the early 80s, during a brief, unhappy period when the company was dabbling in the soft drink business, telling me excitedly he had data to support the claim that Orange Crush was preferred to Coke by Coke drinkers.

Never mind that this was an oranges-to-cola-nuts comparison, or that if it actually mattered, Crush’s market share wouldn’t be one hundredth of Coke’s. No, this finding demanded an enthusiastic Damn-let’s-run-with-it! kind of answer.

“So?” I asked.

Not the best response, but what was true then is (here’s a claim for you) even truer now. Maybe forty percent more!

Now that anyone (assuming they cared to) could get 2 zillion user’s ratings, expert opinions and blog reviews to compare to a company’s stated claim with one mouse-click, “Nothing works better” doesn’t work as well as it used to. You say you have fewer dropped calls? That’s not what CNet says! Or Jacko in the mycellphonetotallysucks.com chatroom.

I’m using wireless service providers as an example partly because an article in the New York Times last week pointed to one reason why old-fashioned claims still make%

Rich off our backs! Wait--we are rich.

You know the guy you meet at your 25th college reunion who forces you through a Bataan death-march of reminiscences you don’t actually share?

“Hey man, remember that killer Michuocan bud we scored before the Jethro Tull concert? Or how about when I puked on your stereo during Homecoming? Good times, man, good times.”

You don’t actually remember any of it because that guy wasn’t really your friend in college—he was just some hanger-on looking to score free dope or pizza. You didn’t like him then and you don’t like him now.

That guy—let’s be frank: that asshole—is back and on our TV. The same bogus memories of shared psychedelic adventures. The same thinly disguised taker’s agenda. Except now he’s called Ameriprise.

Whoever created this disagreeable mess, shame on you.

Shame on you for thinking that showing me a ripomatic with clips from Woodstock, pictures of Che and kids with bad hairdos would induce me to roll my 401K into your outfit.

Shame on you for tarnishing images and music I associate with not caring about money with talk of wealth management.

That was then, this is now. Part of me never left Woodstock, but dude, I don’t remember seeing you there. And besides, I don’t want some stoner investing my life savings.

Cooties.

For the few of you who read this blog with any regularity, my apologies for the lack of new postings.

I’m trying very hard to keep this thing from devolving into an Apple-hating rag, but a hard crash on a Unix-based system, while rare, is not a pretty sight. My spiffy new Intel-chip based MacBook Pro dove off the deep end last week and only emerged, functional but with a slight case of amnesia, this morning after a thorough scrubbing.

This new platform is a buggy little bastard, a lot less together in reality than the hipster holding hands with the PC dork in the new Apple spot. Many perceptive writers have already pointed out that this campaign is one of Apple’s periodic returns to Kool-Aid drinking.

In the commercial, it’s the PC that gets cooties. But if the dude/computer he’s holding hands with is an Intel Dual Core-based Mac, he better wash his hands but good.

P.S. Armando, my muy macho I.T. dude, says don’t install the OS 4.6 patch, whatever that is, in case you were thinking about it.

P.P.S. Yo, Apple: the switch-testimonial commercials directed by Errol Morris were the best Apple computer advertising ever. Make some more of those. If you run out, just run the stoner-girl one again.