I remember watching a highly successful adman (dubbed “the Grocer” by the venerable Prouk*), phone wedged into the crook of his neck, tiny spanking Guccis resting on the marble desktop, barking into the phone while admiring the pink perfection of his manicured fist:
“I’m thinkin’ TV, I’m thinkin’ three – no – four – yeah that’s it – four thousand GRPs a week. I’m thinkin’ we cover this town with billboards…”
He hadn’t a fucking clue what he was talking about.
Some hapless media knob would be tasked with contriving a media buy that on a blocking chart could pass for the promised commercial blitzkrieg, but with a budget that wouldn’t cover the Grocer’s dry cleaning bills for a week.
A recurring theme of conversations between me and my late mate (he’s dead and he was irritatingly tardy when not dead) concerned the need to be either a genius or as dumb as a barbell to really get on in advertising. Given the need to bolster the sagging confidence of nervous nellies before they’ll part with their money, universally acknowledged creative or strategic brilliance is a self-evident advantage. But when cloddishness is accompanied (as only it can be) by bombast and evangelical certainty it can be very persuasive in a business where no one knows what’s right.
Which is why the Grocer’s rich and I’m not.
*Gary Prouk, former Chairman and Creative Director: Scali, McCabe, Sloves (Canada) Inc.
To my everlasting disappointment I’m a very slow reader. Which means I get through a couple of books a month – perhaps three. Which leads to the following distressing piece of math: based on an optimistic 50 year run between school-leaving and the onset of senility, or an articulated lorry and assuming a generous 30 books a year, my entire lifetime literary input will amount to a measly 1,500 books.
I own close to 1,500 books. I suppose I should start giving them away. On the other hand that makes my lifetime customer value to Heather fucking Reisman* a cool $30K. That crappy little loyalty card doesn’t seem so generous now – particularly since I pay $15 per annum for the privilege – another $750 jangling in Heather and Gerry’s bedside change jar.
This distressing calculation merely reinforces my determination to never read a “business” book.
*owner of Chapters/Indigo book chain which, to all intents and purposes, has eviscerated the retail book trade in Canada
Marketing should be the easiest gig going. Most people have wallets stuffed full of money, all of which they are going to – all of which they are bound and determined to spend (borne out by the pitiful savings rates in most developed economies). All we have to do is convince them to spend some of it with us.
I was looking at Dave Trott’s agency website. I love their idea of predatory thinking, the strategic underpinning of an idea being expressed as the “predatory thought”. It’s a refreshingly honest way of looking at business that channels everyone directly to the real job at hand. Preying on someone else’s share of wallet is what we do. Prouk (former Chairwallah & CD of Scali McCabe Sloves, Toronto) used to say he loved attending bi-monthly Nielsen market share audits because: “they’re the body count.”
Years ago, Ries & Trout put it slightly differently when they said that in aptly positioning our brand, by definition, we reposition the competition.
The idea of predatory behaviour doesn’t sit well with most Canadians. The Protestant work ethic, which despite our vaunted multiculturalism still underscores much of life on the tundra, means we imbue the work we do with great seriousness and moral purpose. Taking a cue from our national critter the beaver, diligence is a virtue, but the vulpine instinct is not part of the national character.
Marketing has no function if not to take a sale away from someone else. No matter how unique your offering, Mr. & Mrs. Punter will spend the money with someone else if not with you. If you’re a charity, the job is to deprive some other charity of a potential donation, or a store of a purchase that would otherwise have been made with that money; if you’re Crest it’s to steal share of pearly whites from Colgate or a store brand; if you’re the Army then you have to lure potential recruits away from the police or industry or the BNP.
Wal-Mart is a voracious hunter of other stores’ customers: drugstore customers, supermarket customers, clothing store customers. Everything they do is designed to bag a sale that would otherwise have gone somewhere else.
Marketing Magazine (in Canada) is polling readers to determine the best TV spot of the Winter Olympic schmaltz fest. I don’t know how they determined the list and, having assiduously avoided watching the country engage in its conjoined pastimes of self-aggrandisement and self-flagellation, I haven’t seen what else was on offer.
As dull, predictable and decidedly non-carnivorous a collection of corporate cuddliness it would be difficult to find. And yet this probably represents the largest marketing investment any of these companies have made in a decade. Millions of Canadians glued to the telly, the audience happily captive once again, for an entire fortnight, and all they have to say is “we’re nice folks, just like you”.
Go Canada.
*Credit: Gary Prouk, former Chairman and Creative Director: Scali, McCabe, Sloves (Canada) Inc.
The irritating bit about the certitude of the advertising-is-dead, the-answer-is-awesomeness, canned-peas-are-an-experience, Facebook-is-fab, twitter-is-tops nouvelle vague is that there’s no real evidence to support the prognostications, theories, assured pronouncements from august symposia, and the information ‘broken telephone’ of the blog- and twitter-spheres.
It simply hasn’t been around long enough for reliable data or examples in terms of sales and other value creation over the long term. I’ve yet to see a case study that demonstrates anything other than a one-time effect. Or an example of sustained attititude change among a significant portion of the target. Or anything that relates a social media campaign to sales (other than using it as a straight sales channel which is not the same thing at all).
That’s the frustrating thing about new: it’s untested, has no history, the future is anybody’s and everybody’s best guess.
And yet there are library loads of statistics and case studies for the effects of the now besmirched and discredited use of traditional media advertising. This apparent squandering of funds can be correlated to (inter alia): awareness, trial, repeat purchase, positive attitude shift, brand preference, brand loyalty, creating word of mouth, changing behaviour, creating sustainable competitive advantage, justifying a premium price, extending product use or developing a previously untapped user base, and increasing a company’s stock price.
Then there’s the fact that most social media “successes” are for brands built by advertising, the awkward issue of cause and effect generally being swept away on a wave of triumphal euphoria.
Thousands of campaigns, decades worth of data, and myriad cases of moribund brands getting the Lazarus treatment from which to learn and arrive at informed decisions. All of which some suggest, should be consigned to the shredder or the recycling bin.
It seems a bit silly that the best alternative to not knowing which 50% of your budget is wasted, is potentially wasting 100%.
The comforting thing about traditional media is that everyone knows the rules. TV ads are proscribed in length, no sweariness, no nudity, no poofters (not on the Superbowl at any rate); the space to be filled in the newspaper or magazine is fixed by the media buy and so on. And while we’re more than capable of filling those 60 seconds or quarter pages with drivel, the amount of drivel the benighted punter has to put up with is mercifully limited.
On the web in theory, there are no such constraints. So, Woot! as they say. Before you know it NSFW ads with tits, bums, willies, sweariness and LGBTs are the new normal in a kind of cathartic eruption of the pent up frustrations of generations of writers, art directors and filmmakers.
The potential for self-indulgence will inevitably be an issue in a medium where anything goes and nothing is proven. Of course what to me seems self-indulgent could well turn out to be the web’s version of the Marlboro Cowboy (which though rarely referenced these days must surely be the most effective ad campaign of all time, anywhere).
These two “films” for Pringle, the legendary Scottish sweater manufacturer, are an interesting case in point.
This animated piece makes great use of the freedom of the web in terms of content, duration, humour and so on. The voice over is a lovely piece of both writing and performance. It bears repeat viewing and it puts the brand in an interesting and unexpected new light, at least for me, Pringle hitherto being as personally relevant as Wayne Gretzky golf wear.
On the other hand, while Tilda Swinton is both gorgeous and a very capable actress, I can barely make it through this ‘film’. Turgid and clichéd as Celtic mythic imagery goes, you can almost hear the director in the long overdue final scene shouting, “All right dear, you’re running now, start running Tilda dahling.”
I’ve no doubt it was all very jolly for those involved in the production.
H.T. http://grahamcreative.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/pringle/
The most interesting thing about McKim Advertising was that Anson McKim, the founder, was killed by a train owned by Canadian Pacific, his largest client.
What was then Canada’s oldest agency was where I started in the business.
The owners were a spectral group of very old, very grey and very rich men who ensconced themselves on one deep carpeted and dark paneled floor, inaccessible to the plebs who kept their coffers from falling below the ‘fill’ line.
McKim was a significant contributor of cash and cannon fodder to the Progressive Conservative Party (Canada’s milquetoast version of the Republican Party) and it was made clear to me early on that it would be a serious mistake to balk at the opportunity to do my bit should I be called upon come election time. Conformity was the sine qua non for success in those hallowed halls. I never did get a chance to regale them with my very particular views on the Progressive Conservative Party.
I think all agencies should be stuffed with creative thinkers, impassioned people, iconoclasts and social misfits. All departments, not just accounts receivable. Long before email, smart phones and call display, the best account executive I ever worked with was able to seamlessly manage one of the largest accounts in the country from a payphone in the bar where most of the senior players on the account whiled away most afternoons. He was a very resourceful suit. He became a writer and opened his own agency.
These days, there’s a lot of chatter among the conversational classes about personal branding. Because everything you do on the internet has the half life of a spent nuclear fuel rod. This video discussion by the (very smart) chaps at Thornley Fallis examines the issue of the responsibility of employees to manage their personal brands whenever they are online to ensure that it will always reflect well on the company.
It’s an unfortunately valid issue. Unfortunate because I’m not sure the idea of personal branding holds much interest for the type of people so perfectly captured in one of the most beloved of ad campaigns:
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine…
You get the picture.
Philistine that I am I have to admit I haven’t exactly been jonesing for membership in the Alex Bogusky fan club.
Attending one of the Olympian confabs of the Scali McCabe Sloves creative federation years ago, I was struck by Pat Fallon’s admission (not to be confused with being struck by Pat Fallon which was also a faint possibility) that while he was proud of his agency’s notoriety and domination at the award shows, he was frustrated that they had yet to do great work for the likes of a Chevrolet or a Tide. Big brands in big, crowded and competitive categories with limited product distinctiveness, and where success can take years rather than a single awards cycle.
CP+B has always felt a bit like that to me, more like a promotions agency (albeit a brilliant one) creating a series of spectacular advertising ‘events’ but not necessarily making sustainable brand building campaigns. Which is perhaps a predictable outcome of Bogusky’s vaunted “show me the press release” dictum.
Well I was wrong about His Alexness. He’s a fucking genius. His note to MDC employees in which he explains the role of Creative Insurgent is a template for what agencies have to do to become genuinely valuable to clients again. Which is to reaffirm (to ourselves as much as to our clients) that our real value always was and always will be the objective creativity we bring to business. But at the same time, which is what I think the great one is suggesting, we have to broaden what we mean by ‘creativity’.
Clients assume that what they need are the familiar comforts of process, certainty, guarantees and accountability (and there’s no shortage of revenue starved agencies only too happy to fake it). But they’re drowning in process and accountability. What they don’t have is an ounce of objectivity or a scintilla of creativity. And when they do go in search of objectivity, they hire clones called consultants, merely adding blinkers to an already myopic view.
Well, Colorado’s answer to J.M. Keynes has been delving into real and weighty issues. Energy and sustainability, moral and ethical conundrums, pressures on commerce to give back to as well as take from society. And because he’s not burdened by the quotidian drudgery of making plan or constrained by the bromides of those consultant-clones hired to “address” such issues, it’s more than likely he’ll come up with some unique perspective and useful ideas.
At root our value is not strategy or planning or mass media or social media or technology or research or behavioural science or even making TV ads; our real value is that we’re different. We do all those things, but they are simply the applied bit in applied creativity.
As Alex, or the Mahatma as I now refer to him, puts it “We can feel the rightness and wrongness and not even know why.” The benefits of informed instinct and applied creativity are a tough sell to those who crave certitude, but instinct not research drives innovation and instinct is what most large institutions smother.
According to his bio on BNET, Geoffrey James “has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men’s Health, Business 2.0, and… and… and…”
… And according to me he’s just penned his last. Because it is codswallop. Which is the sort of grand pronouncement Geoff seems to favour.
BNET is owned by CBS so I assume it has a substantial readership and a modicum of credibility within the business community. Which is the only reason I bother to call out clods like Geoff who make baseless, facile and sensational pronouncements concerning marketing and advertising. Like Mrs. Patrick Campbell, I don’t mind what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses, or in this case my clients.
His article is entitled Branding is Dead: Apple, Toyota, Leno & Obama Prove It. Geoff’s journalistic speciality appears to be the startling non sequitur. Viz. (all italics mine)
Apple, of course, is a highly visible corporate brand and has established numerous successful product brands. However, all the discussions after the announcement of the iPad were about the product, not about the brand.
Toyota has a highly-recognizable brand name that for decades has been associated with high quality products. However, the brouhaha over the recall shows that consumers are more than willing to change their perception of a brand for the negative, if the product no longer justifies that high opinion.
Both Leno and O’Brien are “brands” in and of themselves, but the reason that there was an argument in the first place was that, no matter how recognizable their brands might be, their products weren’t any good
The final event of note was Barack Obama’s state of the union address. Obama is more than a President; he’s a brand in and of himself… His speech was masterful — like all of his speeches — but in the large scheme of things, that speech is irrelevant because Barack Obama will be judged, not on his brand, but on the performance of the product.
You are so confused on this subject Geoff that I’ll let your random thought collisions speak for themselves. Most of my readers understand the difference between a product and a brand.
Think of it like the physical states of matter: a product is a solid, tangible thing, a brand is a gaseous ephemeral thing while your article is a liquid babbling thing.
The least distinctive aspect of the Winter Olympics is the fact that insane people will throw themselves off mountains or hurtle head first down spiraling ice chutes. They do so with monotonous regularity on a quadrennial basis, invariably with spectacular mountain scenery as the backdrop and a lot of powdery snow shooting up at the cameras. And after mounties and moose, the most clichéd aspect of being Canadian is that we trudge our way through life enduring a crap climate.
The BBC’s commercial for their coverage of the Winter Olympics presents a more intriguing (because unexpected) image of Canada than all the domestically produced tourism and Olympics ads put together.
On the whole Canadian marketers are slavishly literal and woefully unimaginative. The amount of money we waste on showing customers what they already know is perhaps only equaled by the amount of money we spend on research to confirm that they in fact know what we think they know.
If advertising dies anywhere I predict it will be in Canada. And it won’t have anything to do with a disrupted mediascape or the triumph of the conversation over the marketing monologue, it will simply die of boredom.
Instead of misspending my youth justifying membership in the wrong crowd I should have been studying to be an ophthalmologist? Or a dental technician. But back when I eschewed academic advancement in favour of drinking for Essex I thought very little about demography. Our generation bifurcated quite nicely along the lines of mod or rocker, hippie or skinhead.
I’m sure that right now, false teeth fitters, opticians and chiropodists are scooping up the two-up-two-down Suffolk cottages me and the wife have circled in the Guardian’s “Downsizing” homes section for our genteel if penurious retirement. And driving prices so that the proceeds from our Canadian real estate would barely afford a bathroom reno in a des. res. in Dedham.
The Globe And Mail’s Doug Saunders recently wrote about Hania Zlotnik, the lady who heads up the UN population division and who holds real answers to really important questions – like third world poverty. Demography is wonderfully concrete and revealing information. And of course it holds equally valuable clues for those of us who huck beer or biscuits for a living.
Back in 1996 demographer David Foote of the University of Toronto published Boom Bust & Echo. In it he demystified the marketing shibboleths that companies like Yankelovich would share with clients for about the price of a 2-bedroom apartment in downtown Toronto.
In 1966 the vanguard of the baby boom hit 20, while the last of them were babes in arms. Hardly surprising then that beer was the biggest game in town from 1966 to 1986 as hordes of spotty faced lads surged through adolescence on a tsunami of testosterone. And that, 25 years on, beer plays second fiddle to wines and spirits, eyewear, adult diapers and prepaid cemetery plots, now that the younger boomers’ kids are growing up and we older ones are reluctantly but inexorably fading to black.
Trying to decode the human mind is a mugs’ game. A recent survey says that the most trusted name in US news is FOX. Meanwhile Forbes declares the most trusted celebrities to be the likes of Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington. Well, for all we know Hanks regularly snorts coke off hookers’ tits and gives the little woman a good slapping once in a while. We know nothing about these men. People trust the roles they play in movies. Which is ineffably sad.
It doesn’t take a PhD in demography to understand that an aging population would follow Snap, Crackle and Pop if they could be depended upon to condemn every threat to the comfy status quo, give voice to their righteous indignation at anyone who appears to be doing better than them in the life lottery, and chivvy the President for spending tax money on healthcare for the poor. And having shucked off the cocoon of religion in which their ancestors found solace and having spent their days acquiring everything and learning nothing, the only models for good are celluloid images of men playing soldiers or impersonating stout souls.
Getting to the bottom of the bizarre and labyrinthine processes by which people arrive at how and what they think is the work of many lifetimes. Predicting what they need is considerably easier and probably a whole lot more profitable.