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.