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.

Hot Pants!

This is supposed to be a blog about the making of ads, but since Macs are the computer of choice for 99.99% of creatives, let me put this out there:

Mac laptops run hot. Fry-your-thighs hot.

Apple was supposed to address this issue with the new Intel-powered laptops but as the proud owner of one, let me tell you: mission not accomplished.

So here's a product idea for someone to implement. I claim no intellectual rights. Make a thin, portable pad with high insulating qualities I can put between my MacBook Pro and my parboiled legs. I'll love you for it and so, I suspect, will a lot of other copywriters.

Insert visual pun here.

I think it all started with Hush Puppies.

In the late '80s, Fallon McElligott (yes, boys and girls, it was not always just Fallon) created a great campaign for the hopelessly dorky shoe brand in which an appropriately-propped basset hound stood in for whichever style was being featured.

(For a nice article about the genesis of this campaign, click here.)

But this approach—the visual pun—has, in the succeeding two decades, spread over and overwhelmed the worldwide advertising landscape like conceptual kudzu.

Open any issue of Archive at random and you’ll see ad after ad featuring a visual pun riffing off the brand name or the product’s function. In the lower right hand corner (often cropped to bleed off the page) is a logo or pack shot, sometimes coupled with a numbingly self-evident line of copy like “Kills Bugs” or “Sexy Lingerie.”

Here’s a recent example from the current issue:














If you break this ad down, it is structurally exactly the same as the Hush Puppies ad. Portfolios coming out of the ad schools are just filled with layouts like this, no doubt because they tend to do well in the shows.

Many of the same young creatives who would gag and roll their eyes at 70s-era verbal puns (“A fresh approach to frozen peas”) think Photoshopping an insurance-company logo into the shape of a down comforter is kick-ass creative.

Puns, whether visual or verbal, are what they’ve always been: a lazy man’s way out. They require no understanding of the product or the people who might use it, substituting glibness for soul.

Except.

I can think of two good cases for exception. The first is when the pun lets you say something you can’t—or shouldn’t-- say straight up. The Hush Puppies work is a good example of this. Does anybody want see the literal version of ventilated shoes at work?

The second is when you’re not allowed to say anything. The long-running British Silk Cut campaign was a brilliant solution to this problem (it may actually pre-date the Hush Puppies work, and therefore be the Mother of All Visual Pun Campaigns).

These situations aside--and there aren’t that many of them, really—thinking of how your ad can be of some value in the world usually leads to better, more original work.

Slogans than don't suck (1)

Can we just all stop for a second and bow down to whoever wrote
“When banks compete, you win” for Lending Tree?

It is a small miracle of copywriting.

First of all, it boils down a complicated process—a reverse auction in which financial vendors review your online credit application and credit history and generate a loan offer—into five words.

In the same five words, it makes it clear what the benefit is to you.

It’s written in perfect iambic meter, the da DUM cadence rolling right into your brain.

And it’s pitch-perfect in tone, neither overselling or underselling.

Gems like this don’t get much recognition in awards shows, or in creative circles in general. Lines or slogans are increasingly viewed as hopelessly passé, an afterthought for the client.

But even in this post-literate age, a well-crafted line is a meme not be trifled with.

Copywriters: there is no shame in the writing of a good slogan, even if there is no glory.

Clients: when your line rocks, you win.

Apprentice Admakers

Am I the only one who thinks a suspiciously high number of the tasks on "The Apprentice" involves coming up with ads?

One week it was to shoot a tv commercial. Then it was a print ad. Then a large outdoor poster.
Donny Deutsch was a judge. Then Linda Kaplan Thaler. Then Donny again. Then some clients.

And the work! Crazy bad. A couple of weeks ago the task was to come up with an outdoor billboard for a new cereal. The winning "idea" was a woman in a track suit gulping cereal out of the box. Don't ask about the loser.

But what can you expect?

As I said in my last post, when clients think creating advertising requires no special skills and agencies do little to dissuade them, you get little apprentice admakers "concepting" for five minutes and some poor wretch in the bullpen at Deutsch comping it up for viewing.

Do it yourself. Not.

There was a campaign a couple of years back for Holiday Inn Express in which ordinary people do jobs for which they are supremely unqualified—brain surgery, nuclear reactor maintenance etc.—and perform perfectly, thanks solely to a good night’s sleep.

In the real world, of course, this doesn’t happen—just ask Michael Brown, late head of FEMA. But we tend to forgive the hyperbole because, well, it’s advertising.

Advertising conceived, written, filmed and edited by professionals.

All of which makes the current rage to hand over the responsibility for the creation of advertising to the people being advertised to, very weird indeed.

Some seriously big-time advertisers are doing it, like Mastercard and Chevy. The thinking, I guess, is: everyone (that is, everyone under 30) is comfortable with the technology of content creation, so let them have at it. Let consumers “define the brands on their own terms” as the planners would say.

I would say: not so fast.

First of all, there’s a big difference between creating content and creating ads. People make mixes and movies and FaceBook shrines because it’s all about them, and it’s fun. Who’s going to spend quality time, on their own dime, creating something that, if it came from anybody else, they’d try to avoid?

People who are trying to become ad professionals, that’s who.

Or people looking to game the process with snarky sendups. Just ask Chevrolet, whose DIY Tahoe campaign resulted in a deluge of “Tahoe Sucks” ad parodies posted for public viewing.

Then there’s the peculiar spectacle of ad agencies charging clients hefty creative fees for the idea that consumers should supply the creative. That is, if I may say so, totally meta. Agencies are having a hard enough time justifying their existence. Acting like ten percenters for unpaid consumer creative honchos doesn’t help.

Finally, there’s the uncomfortably undemocratic fact that most consumer-generated ads suck. Most consumer-generated content in general sucks, but when it’s the movie of your life, or your girlfriend’s, who cares? When it’s a spot for Maalox, and it’s on TV, it’s a different story.

In the early 90s, as interactive technology emerged, industry executives imagined a future where consumers decided the crucial plot turns and outcomes of their favorite shows.

That didn’t happen, and you know why? Because we didn’t want to write our own shows. We wanted to leave it to the pros.

One of two alternate realities about creating effective advertising is true:

1. This is a professional discipline requiring real skills worth paying for.
2. Anyone can do it, and should.

I have to believe it’s No.1. Running “Fill in the blank” ads encourages clients to believe it’s No.2.

I'll have an ad. Straight up, please.

I don't know about you, but I like my ads served straight.

Not "under the radar."
Not pretending to be blog, chat, tv show, editorial, video game, how-to manual or global positioning applet.

Are you advertising something to me? I want your name, your logo and your real web address.

When someone tells you something useful, or makes you laugh or helps you see things differently, don't you want to know that person's name?

What sends a lot of ads into Tivo oblivion isn't that they're ads but that they're boring and stupid. People don't need to be "disarmed" with unbranded ads masquerading as content. They just need a reason to care about the brand.

Don't think of it as calamity. Think of it as an opportunity!

In a rare--and somewhat appalling-- display of candor, a Citigroup/Smith Barney ad in yesterday's WSJ explored the possible financial upside of an avian flu pandemic.

Coming as a "strategic brief" from two of their senior research directors, the ad is chillingly nonchalant: "The investing implications of Avian Flu could be large, pandemic or not."

No doubt true: double-down on Cipro, respirator makers and pork (the other white meat), and you could maybe make a pile if Big Bird hits. How you'd get all that money out of the bank through the hysterical mobs and the National Guard tanks is another story. But that's where smart financial advisors can make all the difference!

That big red Citigroup umbrella sure covers a pretty broad spectrum. On one end you've got Citibank, whose message that life matters more than money is conveyed beautifully in its "Live Richly" campaign. On the other, you've got Smith Barney, whose perhaps inadvertent message is neatly captured in the title of their FREE report: "Avian Flu: Science, Scenarios & Stock Ideas."

Seeing Ghosts

Today on the Times Square Shuttle my subway car was given over to the latest round of Continental Airlines ads--the "Work Hard. Fly Right." campaign that's run since 1998.

I was the creative director on this campaign at Ayer. Not the writer--Jack Cardone wrote the line. Not the art director--Mike Grieco developed the blue field/gold globe/white type look.
And they run the business creatively to this day, now at Kaplan Thaler.

I did what creative directors on big brands do: picked the winner out of the line-up, got everyone saluting internally, sold it to the client, sold it to the client's resentful international agency roster and fought off the forces of re-think during the campaign's infancy.

Seeing the work in the subway--hell, getting on a Continental flight and looking at the cocktail napkin--is an odd experience. I see the whole back-story: the brief, the tissues up on the wall, Gordon Bethune, then-CEO of Continental, laughing and cussing. I feel an intimate connection to this work. But it's a ghostly connection. These ads live on, but in a different plane of existence than mine.

All creatives who have contributed to long-lasting campaigns have had this feeling--like they're Alec Baldwin and Gina Davis walking around their house in Beetlejuice. It's both gratifying and creepy when work lives on after you have moved on.

Talk about late to the party.

An advertising copywriter starting a blog.
Talk about late to the party.



I feel like the last creative to use morphing in the 80s.
Or the creative force behind the umpteenth "mockumentary" campaign in the 90s.


But hey.

Unless I write something interesting, the only one who will know that I'm dipping my virtual toe into the datastream is me.

And if I do write something worth reading, linking, responding to, well then:
I'm not too late.