Marketing Wilderness

STEVE NASH IS... TOYOTA

2011-10-18T12:39:00.042-04:00

As a business and marketing tool, celebrity endorsement is a double-edged sword, much like humour is. The difference is that the cost, and therefore the stakes, for celebrity endorsement is usually much higher than they are for humour. Forget for a moment that the concept of celebrity in Western society is an oddly moving target these days (odd as in the wrong direction).

As with most marketing concepts, celebrity endorsement is reptilian-brain simple: I love the person/what they stand for/what they can do, therefore I love the product/service/opinion they endorse. But rather than run down the list of celebrity endorsements that have gone horribly wrong (no, the Nike/Tiger Woods partnership still isn't one yet), I'd like to show you one that really works for me.

Last May/June, Toyota Canada created two long videos featuring NBA superstar Steve Nash. Have a look:

First of all, you couldn't pick a safer sports celebrity. Nash is:

universally recognised as a superstar & future Hall of Famer in his sport
Canadian
personally stable and publicly squeaky-clean to a fault, as in almost boring, as in the Wayne Gretzky of Hoops
not over-exposed for celebrity endorsement

In fact, the creative here has fun with Nash's public persona and shows us that underneath all that dedication to greatness, and constantly improving on that greatness, there is a real and interesting person. Someone who isn't boring to a fault. Or embarrassingly self-effacing. Someone with a genuine but quirky & off-beat sense of humour. Wait a minute—isn't that what we call being a Canadian? I think it is.

And who is Toyota? Isn't that the Japanese company that quietly and stealthily became the biggest automotive brand in the world? Isn't Toyota the brand that painstakingly built its reputation on practicality, safety and reliability rather than extravagance, styling and sexiness? Isn't Toyota the brand that was publicly flayed a year and a half ago for having defective braking and acceleration systems, put through a US congressional probe and ended up recalling 7.5 million vehicles in North America over the issue? Weren't senior Toyota executives roundly criticised for not instantly apologising to the public for their errors with abject effusiveness^[1]?

And isn't Toyota the brand that was totally exonerated for the braking & acceleration problems by the NHTSA & NASA in February, 2011, a few months before this campaign started? I think is was.

This Canadian campaign says all the right things about Toyota to Canadians. It's brilliant, in a Canadian way. No "WE TOLD YOU SO". Instead, a clever return to what made Toyota a great brand all along. But oddly, the marketing industry hasn't seen it that way (if the blogoshere is any indication), and the campaign seems to have ended after these two spots. So maybe this isn't such brilliant marketing after all?

Oh I think it is.

Notes and references:

There was some relevant precedence for Toyota’s behaviour throughout this ordeal. In the mid-80s, a CBS 60 Minutes segment accused Audi of “sudden unintended acceleration” causing deaths. The five-year fallout almost ruined Audi in North America. It was eventually proven that 60 Minutes had engineered the failure for its episode. The NHTSA ended up exonerating Audi, 60 Minutes did not. Audi eventually revived itself to become the fastest growing luxury car brand in North America in the last five years, but the incident set Audi back at least 10 years.

IDLE HANDS SPEAK SOCIAL MEDIA TRUTH

2011-07-13T15:24:00.009-04:00

Things are clearly a bit slow (or depressing, or both) over in the creative department at Tribal DDB New York. Slow enough that they had the time to create the Wheel of Concept, Digital Edition. Take a spin by clicking here.

Funny it is, but as is so often the case with inside humour, there is uncomfortable truth at the core. Here are the truths that makes this ironically hilarious:

Social & digital have been the shiny red ball in the client’s eyes for some time now, whether they really understand what the technology can bring to their marketing or not.
The minority of marketers really understand how social/digital fits in the ideal marketing mix for their business.
60% of North American marketers are currently going to social media specialists to learn how social media can help them, and are oddly reassured when they are pitched as much social media as they can possibly source from the marketing budget, no matter how or if social media fits in their consumers' purchase decison process.
Quality integrated marketing agencies like Tribal DDB know all of the above, and yet even they have to struggle with giving their clients what they want, or giving them what they need in the social/digital area, and for some brands, want and need are not the same thing.
The Wheel of Concept wouldn't work (or be funny) in a "non-digital version".

This wicked little gag took some deep technical talent too – notice that if you enter a brand name that isn’t widely known, the Wheel of Concept goes out and finds it for you with un-nerving speed.

Notes and references:

Hand-face image by Funatico

HOW TO RUN A MARKETING PARTNER REVIEW

2011-06-21T13:46:00.012-04:00

I've been exposed to the full spectrum of review processes over the years, from sticking-needles-in-your-eyes to OMG-what-a-wonderful-relationship-that-would-be. Here's what I believe works best for all parties.

1. Keep your list of participants as small as possible. A short list of three is ideal. If you can, avoid the formal long-list step. Unless you are the government (and have no choice) or plan to do nothing other than run the review process for three months, never publicly advertise a pitch for your business.

2. Skipping the long-list step usually means you need to rely on references from people who directly know or have worked with your short-list agencies, which is always the best type of general reference anyway.

3. Request that the credentials part of the formal pitch meeting be very short – 10 minutes at the most. Agency credentials presentations tend to be more about sizzle and creative awards than business results. They do serve to prove that the agency can actually do great creative, assuming the same creative people are in place, which is more relevant than asking agencies to come up with creative for your company when they’ve just met you. Make sure you hold the presenters’ feet to the fire on business results of any past creative you are exposed to.

4. Have your short-list agencies sign a Non-Disclosure/Confidentiality Agreement so you can share real information about your company.

5. Make the pitch about the agency’s response to a real business/marketing issue you are facing. There must be a reason you are putting your company through this process. That real business issue should be presented exactly the same way to all participants through a formal brief. What you should be looking for is strategic thinking on marketing, media, creative, or a combination of these if you are looking for a partner to manage your brand or be truly full-service.

6. You should always provide a budget or budget levels as this forces discipline upon the agency. Real business issues always have a budget, or a need for a positive benefit/cost outcome. Acknowledging that if you provide a budget, the agency will always spend it, at least you will be presented ideas that are within the realm of fiscal reality. This is a key reason that speculative creative presented in a pitch meeting (without a budget) is rarely the creative that ends up seeing the light of day.

7. If you want speculative creative, be prepared to pay something for it. As mentioned above, proving creative ability is best done at the credentials stage. Another key reason that pitch creative is rarely what you go forward with is that even a great agency can rarely get your entire business and your industry as well as you do in two short weeks. Otherwise would suggest they are much smarter than you are about your business.

A request for speculative creative favours the big (bigger = higher cost structure = more expensive to work with long term) and the not-currently-busy competitors (there’s usually a reason why). Paying for speculative creative, even below regular rates, also keeps you out of trouble in the event you actually go with a creative idea that bears even slight resemblance to one pitched by a losing agency.

8. Don’t rush the development process between briefing and presentation. A busy agency needs two to three weeks to do strategic thinking for a new client properly.

9. Think of this process as speed-dating. You are about to enter into a very important and hopefully long-term relationship based on knowing the other party for just a few weeks. Watch how your courting bachelors & bachelorettes conduct themselves at every step of the review process. As in the analogy, how your charming suitors behave in the pitch process is the best they will ever be.

A key part of the process is asking the right questions. Some clients believe that in the interest of pitch integrity, anything shared with any one agency must be shared with all pitch participants. As long as the initial brief is thorough and consistent, pitch participants should reap the benefit of asking the right questions, and the client should consider this part of what they are looking for in a partner.

10. Choose your partner based on your desired combination of quality of thinking, process and personal chemistry.

HOW TO AVOID A RELATIONSHIP REVIEW

2011-05-27T12:44:00.016-04:00

You avoid a relationship review by having a relationship review.

Let me be more specific: You avoid the big, formal competitive business relationship review (which the agency world so colourfully albeit inaccurately calls the gang bang) by having regular little reviews along the way.

These annual or biannual reviews should be formal and analog (face-to-face) meetings for that purpose alone. Both parties need to be prepared to discuss positives and negatives from their point of view. There needs to be quantifiable next steps agreed to in the meeting, with timelines, even if they are as far out as the time of the next review.

If there is a need for the big competitive agency review, there is a list of things the client company should do to optimise their results, but that list is better handled in a separate post.

In assessing the quality of the relationship, clients need to remember their agencies need at least two of three critical things:

The opportunity to do good work–strategically, creatively, or both.
A healthy personal relationship with key senior people.
The ability to make a profit.

Every good relationship opportunity deserves some investment spending, but in the medium & long term, agencies (and clients) always need #3.

Agencies need to know that their clients want them to be as involved in their business as they can be. It shows personal commitment and it allows their partners to better understand what strategies will work for the business. It may even allow their partners to come up with new and better strategies and creative ideas through the insight that comes with closeness to customers and daily business operations.

Agencies need to understand that just like them, their clients need at least two of the three critical business relationship things above, and that over the medium & long term, clients need to believe that their investment in their partners produces a bottom line profit.

Personally, I struggle with this on-going review thinking in practice. It falls into the “easier to preach than practice” category for me. But I know it is the right way to run a business, and for that matter, your life.

When I started in this business, I made a conscious decision to keep my personal and business lives separate. I naively thought that a business relationship should be about the results, and that personal friendship part was a it’s-harder-to-fire-your-friends philosophy^[1]. But even modest personal friendship in a business relationship leads to more communication of what’s good for both parties, and what isn’t. And that's always a good thing. I also discovered I never had a bad business relationship with someone who was already a friend.

I’m learning, slowly.

Notes and references:

Articulated to me exactly this way more than once by senior agency people over the years.

YOU LIKE ME? REALLY?

2011-03-21T00:19:00.028-04:00

Advertising Age and the Ipsos Observer people released new research^[1] in mid-February that sought to better understand the social media habits of US consumers.

To no one’s surprise, Facebook is the dominant social network through which users want to receive communications from marketers.

Nearly 75% of Facebook users have liked a brand, and more than 33% have liked six or more. That’s a lot of love, certainly enough to excite marketers.

And why do Facebook users like brands? The number one reason is the hope of getting discounts and other rewards from the marketer. This means Liking isn’t a brand builder, it’s a discounting technique to build brand sales volume. Admittedly, less sophisticated consumers may see liking as increasing a brand’s desirability, but that positive effect can’t last forever.

TNS released a similar study in late 2010, which included Canadians, and found:

We have an average of five brand friends (similar to liking) across all social media we're using, above the global average of four
We also befriend brands mainly to get free stuff
26% of social media users have searched a product or service in a social network, presumably because they believe the brand conversation is more credible in that medium

Facebook liking is to liking the way Facebook friending is to friendship. Powerful if used wisely, but like so much of what's on the Internet, it's not what it appears to be.

There is no like button for this post, but if you like it, as in really like it, follow me at the top right of this page.

Notes and references:

CHIRPING FROM THE CHEAP SEATS

2011-01-25T23:11:00.010-05:00

Please allow me to re-visit what is now very old news in the social media world. Somehow I missed it when it happened.

Malcolm Gladwell, journalist and author of significant acclaim, wrote an article which appeared in The New Yorker magazine’s October 2010 issue titled:

Small Change—Why the revolution will not be tweeted.^[1]

It takes a while for the full thesis to unfold, but it is summarized in an image caption right at the start: “Social media can’t provide what social change requires.”

It turns out that Canadian-raised Gladwell has long been reticent to embrace social media as exuberantly as many other big thinkers in the business and marketing worlds^[2]. Because of his stature as author of best-sellers The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008) & What the Dog Saw (2009), organizations devoted to new technology and media are constantly trying to get Gladwell to speak at their events. Had these groups done their homework a bit better, they would know that Gladwell is a qualified (as in thoughtful) advocate of what they hold most dear. For the cynical: this reticence is not a publicity stunt on Gladwell’s part. In fact, it’s a logical progression of the earlier thinking of his first three books, particularly Outliers.

The New Yorker article caused an up-roar amongst the new media cognoscenti. Apparently, Gladwell (despite earlier indications of big-braininess) “just doesn’t get it”, they said. Gladwell was blogged and twittered within an inch of his life, because the anonymity of social media makes it very easy for anyone and everyone to chirp from the cheap seats. The seems that the rules of formal debate—or those of Marquess of Queensberry—don’t apply here.

The rule of doing your homework before pontificating to the masses doesn’t seem to apply either. Even a cursory read of the whole New Yorker article clearly reveals Gladwell is not saying that social media isn’t revolutionising social culture or even marketing. He is saying that it cannot create the kind of grassroots, deep personal commitment that real social change requires—the kind of high-risk social activism like the American civil rights movement was in the 1960s & 1970s.

Too often in the marketing world, editorial opinions in traditional media and blogs in the social media universe read more like jargon-filled ads pitching what the author wants to sell. Or feels the need to protect from any form of perceived dissent.

Here’s what I hope my marketing peers take away from this regarding social media:

There’s no editor or referee out there checking our facts, bias or manners, so it’s up to us. If you need some direction on the latter, ask Auntie E.
The difference between collaboration and self-promotion is fairly obvious to your readers.
Lighten up already that social media may not be the 21^st century’s greatest innovation. We’ve got 89 years to go yet.

Notes and references:

The New Yorker, October 2010, pg 42
Globe and Mail, Malcolm Gladwell, The quiet Canadian, April 4, 2010.

SURPRISES & NOT FROM THE MEDIA WORLD

2011-01-06T09:00:00.008-05:00

It makes sense to be forward-looking at the beginning of the year. Some of what I learned in researching-up for this topic was a surprise to me, and some of it, luckily, actually made sense:

1. Where Online Media is Going
It’s always discussed with a mixture of abject reverence and mysteriousness due to its sheer complexity, fragmentation and speed of change. It’s just another medium, albeit a very important one. It’s the fastest growing aggregate medium, now ranking #2 in Canada, at 20% of total 2010 dollars, behind television and ahead of newspapers in spending for the first time^[1]. By 2013, it will be 25% of all media spending, matching TV. What surprised me is:

Two thirds of Internet ad spending is currently text-based – search and classified. Search, the biggest component, is strictly a search engine algorithm. Not much room there for the kind of creativity that brand marketing needs. There are predictions^[2] that search is about to become more graphic, meaning your search result will expand into a rich media display ad. For a price.
Newspapers are relying more and more on online reading of their content, although the ability to get readers to pay for that is still (and may always be) elusive. It’s also true that the majority of content on the Internet (outside of pornography and the user-generated segment) comes from the traditional news media. So the Internet won’t kill traditional newspapers anytime soon, rather, their symbiotic relationship will continue to evolve.
Mobile is the new darling segment of Internet media. I think it’s most useful to think of mobile as another access point to Internet media. Apps (at least those beyond the single-function ones) are currently very expensive programs running on smart phones that replicate the web and interact with the Internet. Smart marketers will utilize mobile versions of their websites, and evolve technologies from that platform.

2. Canada Compared to the World
Media spending follows economic trends, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Canada and Australia will see more growth in media investment this year than other developed countries. What surprised me is:

Developing media markets are what is driving global media growth: Brazil, Russia, India and China^[1]—the same countries that economists now have an acronym for.
Mobile media is relatively bigger and growing faster in developing media markets than developed ones. As always, there’s a practical reason for this—Internet access is expensive in developing markets. Since mobile phone networks are cheaper to build than land line networks, almost everyone has a mobile handset, and phones are a cheaper access point to the Internet, followed next by Internet cafes.

3. Television
It’s still the most important medium. TV’s sight & sound technology keeps getting better, program selection is greater and PVR & other recording technologies have increased total viewing, even with the commercials. A :30 second spot in the 2011 Super Bowl is going for a record high $1.7 million. All this despite increased Internet use. What surprised me is:

TV is also very big in developing markets where programming is not completely government-controlled—meaning every BRIC country other than China. Owning a TV in India is the same kind of status symbol as owning a car. In Brazil, TVs are even being bought by people living in villages without distributed electrical service.

4. Social Media
Only part of spending in this media segment is captured by media research – the paid (display) advertising part. The owned part is not—consumer interaction with and on brand websites and blogs, etc. Neither is the earned part—consumer conversations. What surprised me is:

I don’t think many consumers understand (or want to understand) that there are small armies of paid brand endorsers out there in the social media world. The mommy-blogger phenomenon is real, but there’s a catch. Payment can be cash or free product & services. Either way, it still creates a bias that isn’t in (reputable) traditional media.

Yes, 2011 looks interesting. There will be growth and opportunity, and I can still learn by being surprised.

Notes and references:

Zenith Optimedia, Advertising Spending Forecast, Dec 6, 2010.
Contagious, 11 Digital Predictions for 2011, Jan 4, 2011.

WIELDING THE SWORDS OF HUMOUR

2010-11-30T20:14:00.065-05:00

No weapon in the marketers’ arsenal is as potentially powerful and so often misused as humour.

At the most simplistic level, humour in marketing works like this: If an ad makes us smile, we like the ad and the brand too. I get the distinct impression that any brand advertiser in the Super Bowl never gets deeper than this level of thinking.

At the next level of complexity, it might work like this: Humour interrupts our thought process and makes us momentarily joyful. Joy disarms us, and allows us to receive other well-presented information about the brand, and remember it. When everything works, humour delivers brand awareness, positioning and liking.

Exactly because it’s so powerful, humour is very well researched. Fred Beard^[1] has the rigorous academic approach to humour covered, at least in the North American context. Curiously, Sigmund Freud even weighed in on our topic area, in what some consider a ground-breaking piece of work from 1928^[2]. Curious because this theorising had nothing to do with sex, and hence, its understandable obscurity (see sidebar, unless you want to stay on topic).

But Freud may have been the first person to make the key distinction between “wit and the comic” as very different types of humour. Yet despite this help from academia and mankind’s heavy-weight thinkers, the very definition of what humour is still eludes us. If you don’t agree, try writing one down and show it to someone else. I remember once reading humour defined as “the unexpected”. Brilliant—humour is irony! Five minutes later I had perversely come up with five examples that ruined it.

Humour is very culture-bound, gender-bound and age & time-bound. On the cultural aspect of humour: I’ve often joked that there are no stand-up comics in Germany. I stand-up corrected: the most popular is Michael Mittermeier. His countrymen clearly love his act. Take my word for it—his humour is lost on North American sensibilities. Even his bits on the Nazis. Conversely, the comedic genius of Robin Williams in his stand-up prime (1982 to 1986, by my calendar) is lost on Germans.

Humour is even personality-bound. Within the same culture, gender and age-range, people disagree on what’s funny and what’s not. In the marketing context, it’s tough for both clients and agency people to remember the target consumer’s sense of humour is the one that matters most. I think that using humour wisely in marketing requires more mutual trust between all the stakeholders in the creative development process than anything else they do together. And therein lies the real challenge, which is part of the reason for Marketing Wilderness.

Then there’s the delicate balancing act of making sure the humour doesn’t over-power the brand message or even the brand identification. This is where I think Dr Freud helps: wit is a more restrained, precise and strategically-compatible form of humour than the comic.

But despite all these challenges, smart marketers can wield the sword like a nuclear weapon in a conventional war:

To wit: Apple’s Get-a-MAC campaign. The ad pundits like to say the campaign went on much too long, but how many modern campaigns can you name that could generate more than 65 TV/video executions over four years? The actors are both their respective iconic founders (Jobs & Gates) and the people who own the products. And the MAC guy is the person we all aspire to be. So right and so cleverly restrained in being so, he can’t help but be cool. This is big-brained wit, but you never mistake what the better brand is, and why. Check this amazing TV example from mid-year one, and the online rich-media ad following.

To the comic (and defying the idea that humour is time-bound): Alka Seltzer’s 1969 classic “Spicy Meatball” TV spot. You laugh at the star, but there is real subtly and nuance in his performance. He’s a regular guy made to look buffoonish by circumstance, rather than actually being a buffoon. Everyone can empathise with his predicament, and I will argue you can’t not remember the brand here. And this was innovative in that it was long before the out-takes phenomenon took hold in movies or commercials.

Things can go horribly wrong with humour, For example, this 2005 TV commercial for GoodLife Fitness. Mercifully, its on-air lifespan was about that of a May Fly and thankfully, it didn’t kill the brand. I get that the intention here was parody, but it still hurts me to watch.

Dear readers, please do two things for me (us):

If you watched the GoodLife spot, please watch the Old Spice commercial below before you leave. It's the 2010 Cannes Film Lions Grand Prize winner, it integrated beautifully with social media, and as a nice little extra, it increased brand sales by double digits. Humour makes it work for men and women.
If you know of better examples for the very best and the very worst in marketing humour (and don’t be bound by the television/video format), share with me/us.

I’ve gone on quite a long time this time, and I’m feeling like our relationship is becoming decidedly, uh, one-sided.

Bueller?... anyone?

Notes and references:

Beard, Fred, “Humor in Advertising: A Review of the Research Literature, 1993-2003,” in Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Corporate and Marketing Communications (CMC), ed. T. C. Melewar (2004).
Freud, Sigmund,"Humour", International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 9 (1928).

REVISION TO: THINKING OUTSIDE THE GRID

2010-11-09T23:26:00.003-05:00

I hate it when truth gets in the way of a good story. I recently had a long and interesting chat with the senior marketing person at Audi Canada during the period I wrote about in an Oct 5th post on this blog. Now I need to revise my earlier post.

Though I know the CI guidelines for Porsche intimately and have seen Volkswagen's, I have never seen Audi's. I took a convenient shortcut and logically assumed they would be identical to those of the sister brands. It turns out that Audi CI guidelines are much simpler and allow for much more market-by-market interpretation. "Pure and clean" is how they are described internally (as opposed to "the grid"), and Audi Canada actually followed them more closely than many other countries have.

So Lowe Roche wasn't renegade at all, but their Audi ads are still great. Audi Canada wasn't breaking the rules for the right reasons either, but they did guide their brand to amazing results. Kudos should really go to Audi AG for creating less rigid rules for global marketing communications. They were the ones thinking outside the grid. Thank goodness someone was.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE GRID

2010-10-05T15:49:00.030-04:00

Marketing gurus and practitioners are constantly talking about how vitally important it is to project a consistent brand image. And it is. Everyone understands this best at the literal level, which has resulted in the creation and enforcement of corporate or brand identity guidelines.

These can range from single-page logo sheets to encyclopedic sets of huge, beautifully-designed and richly-printed books and binders that cover brand image rules in all of its possible forms. Everyone recognizes the inherent wisdom of the phrase “think globally, act locally”, but rigorous corporate identity (CI) standards definitely put the emphasis on the thinking globally part.

At several different times and places in my career, I’ve had the good fortune of working with the Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche brands. For those of you who don’t know, Porsche is just now (in 2011) falling under the technical ownership and control of Volkswagen AG. With Porsche, Volkswagen Group’s brand portfolio now numbers more than 10. But VW and Porsche started with the same engineer, so their history together is the deepest and their DNA is the closest of the group. Acquired in 1965, Audi is a relative newcomer to Volkswagen Group.

Each of VW, Audi and Porsche has extensive and similar CI manuals, which all suppliers and partners are expected to adhere to, in every country where the brand is present. The problem is that these guidelines were developed in the era when the magazine media was king for carmakers—before the Internet, if you can imagine that. Creating ads outside of magazines puts you outside CI standards in seconds. The graphic template or ad grid makes communications mostly a copywriting exercise. Graphic design is reduced to photo selection. The grid makes big ideas very difficult to come by.

Over the last couple of years, Audi Canada seems to have gone its own way in marketing communications, clearly different than Audi in America and other mature markets around the world.

Now take a look at the recent business results for the Audi and Porsche brands in Canada and the USA, keeping in mind that Porsche Cars Canada, Porsche Cars North America (US) and Audi of Amercia are by-the-CI-book marketers. Audi Canada is not.

Porsche Cars Canada is certainly doing well, all things considered, but Audi Canada is on fire. Audi is on fire around the world too, driven by emerging market success, which actually has little to do with marketing, and more to do with model policy, manufacturing and distribution. But Audi’s recent success in Canada—a mature market for the brand—means it is doing a lot of things right, and marketing communications is clearly one of them.

Congratulations to Audi Canada for being brave enough to trust their agency Lowe Roche in working outside the grid. This is really living the wisdom of “think globally, act locally”.

SHOPPING BETTER THAN SEX? RESEARCH PROVES IT.

2010-09-23T00:13:00.019-04:00

A research study was reported in the mainstream news media yesterday. Inexplicably, it caught my attention: “TITILATED BY THE SALES TAG—Turns out people can get as excited spotting a deal as they do watching porn.”^[1] The article’s thesis is based on a recent study by Britain’s Westminister University and the Institute of Promotional Marketing. And right there before the article starts is the killer anecdotal comment from a professional bargain shopper, “It’s one of the highest forms of pleasure... I don’t want to say [it’s like] sex, but close to it.”

Pardon me, but either I’m not shopping in the right stores, or there are a lot of people out there having truly awful sex lives. So let’s look deeper into this research, the same way we should always analysing, say, marketing research.

First, check for research sponsor bias: is the organisation that executed or paid for the research likely to gain or lose based on its outcome? In this context, the university is unassailable. You could argue that the promotional marketing institute does have something to gain, but these results seem more than a little bit over-the-top for believable self-promotion. I’m pretty sure their business model would be intact even if they couldn’t prove polyester-clad housewives (or househusbands) were having spontaneous orgasms in the clearance aisle of Walmarts around the world.

Next, look at methodology, paying particular attention to the sample size and sample definition. No sample size is reported, but the subjects were British. If the Broadway hit “No Sex Please, We’re Canadian!” already came and went, I missed it.^[2]

The study used eye movement and pupil dilation as the measure of “emotional arousal”. On a scale of 1 to 10, both bargain shopping and pornography scored between 5 and 7. Full stop here: 5 or 6 out of 10 doesn’t seem that impressive to me—for sex or shopping. And allow me to be self-anecdotal and suggest that there’s a lot more going on in the sexually-aroused human body than twitching eyes and dilating pupils.

Lastly, use your instincts to make sure the research results are free from basic flaws in deduction and that the causal link makes sense. Well, it’s wrong to deduce that looking at pictures of other people having sex is the same as having sex. Even the news article’s factually-libertine author struggled to explain how bargain shopping might be causing emotional arousal.

So that’s a bit of a disappointment. Turns out shopping really isn’t better than sex. Here’s what is true: research results are rarely wrong, but we need to make sure we asked the right questions of the right people and made the right deductions from the results.

Notes and references:

Globe and Mail, Sep 21, 2010.
Real research shows that people in the UK have sex significantly more frequently than North Americans, right up there behind the French. Just couldn’t resist the comment (this one, or that one).

WHAT DOES YOUR BRAND STAND FOR?

2010-08-12T22:16:00.006-04:00

As both marketer and consumer, I’ve always been attracted to brands that stand for something beyond making money. How a brand handles adversity (product or service problem in the market), or any controversy, is a very good indicator of the values of the company and people behind the brand.

Every couple of years, a brand comes up with a marketing campaign that sparks some level of public controversy. Usually, the marketer will remove the offending marketing campaign, or the offending part of it--even when not required by a media watchdog entity. Almost always, a re-edit has the same net effect as removing the creative altogether.

Sometimes, it’s pretty clear that the creative being publicly criticised was ill-advised and should never have been brought to air in the first place. During the 2007 Super Bowl, GM ran a TV commercial in which a dreaming quality control robot is so distraught over losing his job in the GM plant, it throws itself off a bridge. As you may have guessed, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention got testy and GM quickly edited and largely withdrew the spot. I’m surprised the auto unions didn’t get involved as well.

Sometimes, it isn’t clear whether a particular piece of creative is a mistake for the brand. In 2009, out-there household cleaning marketer Method ran a viral video in which a woman is boisterously voyeured in her shower by residual soap scum. You need to see this one to get the flavour of it. A bit creepy, in my opinion, but not clearly wrong for the brand. Method pulled the spot, though not quite so quickly as GM.

But there are times when pulling creative reflects negatively on the brand, because it really shouldn’t have been done. The best example I can remember is a TV commercial done by Mazda for its MPV Minivan in 1993. In it, the family dog does a running commentary on the experience of his first ride in the new vehicle. Off the top it’s, “There's enough room in here to swing a cat!” Later in the journey, a cat darts out in front of the van and the dog urges his owner (who is driving) to "Get the cat! Get the cat!" When the master fails, it’s “Darn those ABS brakes!". Unfortunately, there is no video available on this, so you will have to take my word that the spot was very well executed. But cat owners are a curious group, with the same sense of humour as their pets. You know that if Mazda had reversed the roles of cat and dog, there would have been no public issue, except somehow, the creative wouldn’t have been as good. Mazda quickly acquiesced and edited out the cat-people-offending parts, which left the spot…(wait for it)…toothless.

I would feel better today about Mazda and the cars they make if they had stood their ground in 1993 and said, “No, this is just a little humour based on an ages-old rivalry between man’s two best friends, and we’re using it as an entertaining way to point out the benefits of our van.” And it’s not because I’m a dog person, or that the undemocratic power of the vitriolic vocal minority has always bothered me.

Lesson for the client: Be brave, if you know you are right. You will always win more hearts than you will lose, and hearts equal sales.

Lesson for the agency: Remember it takes much more courage to be the client in this situation. Make sure you both have a complaint-response action plan that fits the brand positioning before your creative hits the media.

One more thing: What do all of these brand controversies have in common? They all use humour, and humour is very personal and culture-dependant (and a huge topic deserving of its own post, or maybe its own blog). It’s a tremendously powerful double-edged sword which must be wielded very carefully.

Notes and references:

Strategy Magazine, April 19, 1993, "Mazda Gets Cat Calls.".

THE GRACIOUSNESS OF “NO”

2010-07-06T15:45:00.029-04:00

Throughout history, every generation seems to accuse those following of being less socially polite and respectful. There is a lot at play in this comment. It can’t be completely true or we would all be treating one another like Neanderthals by now. I think it’s the language of good manners that changes more than the actions, and in the end, it’s the latter that count most.

It would help us all to think of good manners in business as being identical to social etiquette. In every meeting there is a guest and host, some form of invitation and a follow-up thank you. That seems simple, doesn’t it? Of course you can hire a business etiquette consultant, who, for thousands of dollars, can make the prospect of improving your business manners seem very complicated and mysterious. Or you could spend a little bit of time with someone like my Aunt Eileen.

Auntie E grew up in Depression-era rural Canada (the real Depression). She’s farm folk and inspiringly proud of it. Every day she steps outside her home to Elysian Fields. Her life might seem simple, but it isn't easy. Like so many farm people, she has a built-in bullshit detector that the CIA would die for. In conversation, she looks you in the eye and doesn’t let go. She thinks the Queen’s English is worth preserving, along with all her local colloquialisms. Etiquette is not a word she would ever use. To her, manners are all about treating other people with honesty, respect and friendliness, until they prove themselves unworthy.

Here’s a sample of what Auntie E would tell you about business manners:

If you set a date for getting back to someone, keep it. If you don’t have an answer at the expected time, tell your contact that, and set a new date for getting back. This doesn’t require a big explanation.
If you are going to be more than 5 to 10 minutes late for a meeting, as either host or guest, call the other person and offer to re-schedule at their convenience. Rural people can’t use the traffic excuse, so they just tell the truth. It works better anyway.
Never fill your dance card up with straw men (you may need to consult your country friends on this one).

There is one key area we encounter much more often in business than we do socially (hopefully). It’s the formal rejection: rejection of an idea, a proposal, a partnership or a deal.

If “Yes” is not the answer, can we please just say “No”? No is brilliantly concise and clear, and allows the receiving party to move on. No shows respect for the other party’s time and effort. No is socially mature, as opposed to avoiding saying No by not saying anything.

No doesn’t require a big explanation, but it does require some talk so the receiving party can learn something for the future. Focus on why someone else got Yes. After the receiving party is clear on what No applies to, they need to accept it with respect. A clear specific No means No, not “change my mind.”

The last time I spoke to Auntie E about what I do for a living, she said, “Marketing, is it? That’s a city job for sure. Seems like a lot of mumbo-jumbo that’s really about common sense—I hope you don’t mind my saying so, dear.”

And that is why I’ll take my Queen of the Furrows over overly-made-up Ms Business Etiquette Consultant any day.

Notes and references:

Aunt Eileen is a fictitious name for a wonderful person I have the privilege of knowing. As I'm sure she would say, it’s only polite to protect a friend's real identity in an environment as uncivilized as the web.

WHAT WE CAN ALL LEARN FROM MOUNTAIN BIKING

2010-06-04T16:16:00.090-04:00

In case you hadn't guessed, one of my very favorite things is mountain biking. There are many reasons for this:

You do it outdoors, often in incredibly beautiful places
It's a big physical and mental challenge without the monotony of road biking or spinning
It's safer than road biking, but admittedly, a bit more dangerous than spinning
On a perfect day in the woods, there's a childlike giddiness to biking that sets your spirit free
It attracts some very interesting people

I'm a later-in-life convert to this sport, through wonderfully serendipitous circumstances, which is probably part of the magic for me. Uncharacteristically, I learned the basics of riding the right way—from world-class competitors and riders in the best all-round mountain biking place in the world: Whistler, BC. For details on the amazing camp I first went to five years ago, visit http://www.dirtseries.com/.

Like anything transformative, there are lessons from mountain biking that can guide us in other parts of our lives, even marketing. It's all here, but I'll leave it to you, fair reader, to make the analogies you want:

Always look ahead to where you want to go, rather than focusing on where you are, or just slightly ahead of where you are. This is how the rider sets up for a turn to maximise speed through it, gears up or down in advance of an uphill or downhill to minimize energy expended, or successfully negotiates a narrow bridge or raised log (this last one being my personal nemesis). In all three of these situations, not focusing far enough ahead results in over and under-correction.

Live in a neutral position while you are riding forward with confidence and aggressiveness. Bikers position their bodies to be completely neutral so they can quickly react to changes in the terrain. When not powering, feet stay level so the body can be vertically neutral and so pedals don't catch on obstacles. The body is vertically neutral so you aren't on the seat, but not so tall that your centre of gravity is too high. Horizontal neutrality allows for corrective body counter-weighting backward and forwards. You get the idea.

Trust your ride. Let it go, so it can do its job. As with so many sports, trusting your equipment to handle that steep, speedy decent, absorb the compression of that big drop or bang through that impossible-looking rock garden is the biggest breakthrough you will ever have. If you just let it, your bike can do it.

Keep your ride in top condition. Biking is never just about the rider, so care for your equipment. A well-kept $800 bike will beat a rode-hard-and-put-away-wet $5,000 bike every time. Check it before and after every ride and you will find those little things that can be fixed easily before they become big problems. Believe it or not, you will come to love the zen¹ of mountain bike maintenance.

Remember that what you are doing is supposed to be fun. Sure there are challenges to be conquered and races to be won—both of which seem a lot like work. And there's also the falling down. But with mountain biking, even getting dirty is fun, which is a good thing considering you get a little bit of mud, blood or both on you every ride. Wear your riding bruises and scars with pride, because what you are doing is bloody amazing. Your smile is never brighter than when it's shining through the mud-spatter of a great ride. And fun is always infectious.

Notes and references:

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values", Robert M. Pirsig, 1974 and "Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance", Lennard Zinn, 1996.
Thank you Candace, Lorrraine, Tera, Mike, Thomas and Wade of Dirt Series for what you taught me, and most importantly, thank you Single Track Minds.

DARWIN & THE ELUSIVE INTERNET BUSINESS MODEL

2010-05-31T23:54:00.043-04:00

What do Facebook, YouTube & Twitter all have in common? Quite a few things, actually:

All three are hugely popular Internet-based social media (admittedly, YouTube doesn’t usually get called social media, but based on the next point, it is)
All depend on their users/members for content creation
Like so many things on the Internet, use is free
All were created 4-5 years ago
All have brand values in the billions of dollars—though none are publicly-owned with a true market value
All now depend on advertising as their key revenue source
All have yet to show profitability

The last point is the most interesting one to me. The lesson we keep learning is that it’s very, very tough to make money on the Internet, at least doing anything honest, legal or moral. Social media is supposed to be all about engagement and one-to-one contact rather than using the interruption model of traditional media. Yet the businesses behind have all turned to various forms of advertising to make a profit—most of them interruptive.

Facebook^[1] started May 17, 2004 out of Mark Zuckerberg’s university dorm. Defined the term social media. Announced it was “cash flow positive” in Sep, 2009 (as soon as Facebook is actually profitable, you’ll certainly hear about it). 400 million members worldwide, 50% logging in daily. Ad revenue has grown more slowly than membership, with $260 million in ad revenue predicted for 2010. A very wide range of brand/acquisition values have been reported, all in the multiple billions, but interestingly, no IPO just yet.

YouTube^[1] started Feb 14, 2005 by three young PayPal employees looking for a better way to share party videos. Officially launched in Dec, 2005 and quickly became the world’s largest video sharing site. As of this month, over 2 billion views per day, now being used very much like a mainstream medium. Ads started showing up in early 2008. Bought in 2006 for $1.65 billion by Google, who is still not reporting profitability for its investment.

Twitter^[1] started Mar 21, 2006, the brainchild of Jack Dorsey and other board members of podcasting company Odeo, as a conscious commercial effort to take social media mobile. Now with over 100 million users, 55 million 140-character tweets a day, and 600 million search queries. Ashton Kutcher is still the world's leading tweeter with 4.8 million followers (?!). Just now introducing ads called “promoted tweets”. No consistent estimate of timeline on profitability.

So if the darlings of new media can't make money despite being ubiquitous, who can? Well, Google can. In fact, it could be considered the biggest brand in the world^[2]. But Google started as a much-needed service that users couldn't create on their own. In 2009, profit was $6.5 billion on $23.7 billion in revenue, 97% of it from search-targeted advertising^[3]. Outside the ad revenue business model there's Apple's iTunes, which celebrated its 5 billionth paid music download a few months ago—a more impressive business story than any iProduct is. Amazon.com does the same, and profitably, for book publishing.

Darwinian theory tell us that businesses which can't make money evolve or die. Facebook and YouTube will certainly not be dying out anytime soon, but to be profitable they will need to provide users with original content and continue to grow their user bases in the older demographic ranges which are willing to pay for it.

Marketers using social media need to remember that engagement is great as long as you are engaging with consumers with both the desire and ability to pay for your product or service. Depending on how valuable the purchase is, engagement can't take forever either. Just like any other media throughout history. And it is very difficult to engage consumers in a medium, at least in the long term, without some form of original content that fulfils a real need.

Notes and references:

Numbers and statistics from website-monitoring.com, augmented by Wikipedia.
BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands, Millward Brown Optimor, 2010.
Royal Pingdom.

AVOIDING THE HIDDEN COST OF COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

2010-05-05T00:32:00.016-04:00

There is no escaping modern communication technology. In business, you must use email, a smart phone and some sort of online meeting program. These tools certainly can be more directly cost-efficient than conversing and meeting the old-fashioned (human) way. But unless they are used with some balance, the the hidden cost can be fatal.

Voice mail, email and now mobile texting are powerful communication control mechanisms. I believe it's this control that makes them so appealing and so addictive. You can control when you deal with requests––those coming from you and those coming to you. But the point is that it’s all on your schedule, not the other party’s. It seems like two-way communication with a bit of a time delay, but it’s really one-way communication, devoid of tonality and human context. Somehow, smiley icons and semi-colon winkies just don't cut it in business communications when you get past your teen years. At least half of human communication is tonality and context, especially at the ends of the emotional spectrum. We humans tend to fill in own assumptions on the missing tonality of a conversation, and it’s easy to be categorically wrong when doing so.

The hidden cost of all this wonderful technology is huge: it can cost you the human relationship. Not instantly, but slowly and insidiously. So how can we avoid that?

Remember what email & texting is good for: stating facts & details, providing easy links to background information and the previous conversation thread. Covering your ass. Remember what email & texting isn’t good for: Anything sensitive. Collaboration that requires lots of short back & forth conversation. Inspiring with personality.

No matter what, talk by phone with your key customers & clients at least once a week, as long as it is for a real reason. Meet with them at least monthly.

Alternate between online meetings/teleconferences and face-to-face meetings. For the latter, just make sure you respect the other party’s time.

Every once in a while, write a nice note, with a pen on real writing paper or note card. You can still write, can’t you?

NIKE, TIGER & PAYBACK

2010-04-12T21:03:00.007-04:00

Nike’s “Earl and Tiger” TV commercial has created a lot of reaction, good and bad, since it aired on April 8th, one day before this year’s Masters tournament. Reviewers have called it everything from creepy to ironic to brilliant. It certainly has elements of all these. Creepy to have Tiger’s father talking to him from beyond the grave. Ironic to have the philandering Earl taking Tiger to task, however gently, for the same transgressions he was guilty of. Brilliant on Nike’s part to stay on the moral high-ground while not turning their backs on Tiger by humanising him. And also brilliant to show some bravery for their brand.

Is it creepy that Tiger would allow himself to be used in this way? I think so, but I also believe this about payback. Tiger didn’t need to do this for money: in May 2009, Forbes magazine estimated that Tiger Woods' total net worth was $600 million, and his career earnings total over $1 billion. Nike has been his single biggest sponsor.

Nike’s annual sales are almost $5 billion, and for many years now, Tiger has been their biggest single brand endorser. Nike stood by Tiger through his personal disaster (and they are the only major sponsor that did) partially because they had to and partially because they believe they can be part of the solution in his professional recovery. As long as he can win tournaments again. And isn't this what sports is really all about: trying, winning, failing, trying and winning again?

“Earl & Tiger” is what Tiger owed Nike for standing by him in his worst personal moment. And in a rare and wonderful confluence of events, look what happened:

In his return to the PGA Tour, the 2010 Masters, Tiger played very well early on and finished respectably.

The man who won, Phil Mickelson, is a poster boy for strong family values.

Nike looks brilliant.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE SUPER BOWL?

2010-02-08T16:56:00.002-05:00

Nothing's wrong with the game. In fact, it has been great the last few years, even for a non-fan like me. So shouldn't the marketing world be over-joyed about the world's biggest TV event, where over 30% of the viewers watch just to see the commercials? The answer is no, and is best explained by an excellent piece from Advertising Age titled, "Why Animals Speak in Superbowl Ads".

You may note that the author of this post, Tom Denari, runs a small US agency. His company isn't likely to have an opportunity to create advertising for the Super Bowl. We are less likely to see his level of honesty from, say, Budwiser's agency. That's a shame.

MARKETING XENOPHOBIA?

2010-01-26T23:03:00.012-05:00

An innocuous little throw-away at the end of a story in Marketing Online caught my attention and jostled my memory the other day. It was a report on Molson Canadian’s new ad campaign from Zig. The article outlines how Zig’s new campaign evolves the iconic Canadian beer brand, including the requisite client praise, and then ends with, “New York's Spring Design Partners handled logo and packaging redesign duties.”

True, the logo redesign is really an evolution, just like the rebranding, but why did Molson Coors need to go to the US to update an iconic brand logo—for Canadians?

The answer might be in who really owns the brand now, though it seems to okay for a Canadian agency to handle the advertising. What did they get? A bigger, more realistic maple leaf. Less iconic symbolism.

Rewind to 1993. Amid yet another painful restructuring under an American-born CEO, Air Canada wanted to update its fleet livery. Love it or hate it, Air Canada has to be considered an iconic Canadian brand. More so then than now, since neither WestJet nor Porter were even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. Yet the redesign work went to a high-end US design shop. What did the brand get? A bigger, more realistic maple leaf. Less iconic symbolism.

There is a reason for this identical result.

Marketers will always have a responsibility, along with agencies, in lifting Canadian marketing higher into the light. No one understands Canadian symbolism better than Canadians, so when you are dealing with a brand deep in Canadian DNA, keep the work here. This isn’t marketing xenophobia, it’s just good business.

THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS

2009-12-15T00:13:00.010-05:00

A couple of months ago, independent Toronto agency Cundari revealed the results of a self-rebranding exercise. The outcome was a revised logo and a new slogan, "It's the thought that counts." It's a nice tagline. The rebranding is all very familiar until you understand what it means to Cundari. The press release reads:

"[It represents] a fundamental shift in how we operate as an organization, putting thought leadership at the forefront," said Brent Choi, chief creative officer... Cundari will also focus on working with clients to solve problems beyond marketing... "We're no longer necessarily an ad agency or communication company," Choi said, "We want to be partners in solving problems. We ask them what keeps them up at night"...".

Presumably, this idea flows more from providence and practicality than sheer hubris: Cundari recently acquired strategy and research firm Brand 360 (this would be the providence part). And agency founder Aldo Cundari is also quoted as saying,

"As a result of challenging times in the industry, we knew that as an organization it was time to make changes not only with respect to our people, but also how we looked on paper, online and from within."

I would translate this to mean, "We need new sources of revenue." The practicality part.

My wrong-minded Canadian sensibility makes me uncomfortable with this kind of proclamation, but it shouldn't. Cundari's new positioning is exactly where Marketing Wilderness hopes the enlightened and willing in our business get to. And Cundari has been successfully doing good work for good clients long enough that I believe they have the collective wherewithal to deliver on this new promise.

But let me implore to the powers-that-be at Cundari: make sure you do this well. As you consult beyond marketing, make sure you match MBAs with MBAs, CAs with CAs and PhDs with PhDs. The world beyond marketing isn't nearly so concerned with form over content. Sheer force of personality isn't nearly so powerful a force.

That said, go get 'em!

RE-INTRODUCING THE POWER OF CREATIVE

2009-11-06T10:14:00.055-05:00

It’s all too easy to become jaded about the creative side of the marketing business with time, even if you are a creative person. It’s easy to see how this happens:

You see too many millions of dollars spent against weak or even silly creative

You experience too many really great creative ideas lost for the wrong reasons

You witness too many creative award jury deliberatiuons, and less-than-gracious acceptance speeches

I am the first to admit that no consumer has ever looked up slack-jawed from his favourite program/magazine/website/twitter feed to say, “Now THAT is a truly brilliant bit of brand strategy.” But I have been one of those jaded with marketing creative. I will even admit that every once in a while working with creative people, I've muttered “that ain’t workin” in the Mark Knopfler context^[1]. Even though I really did know better.

Then something unexpected happened three summers ago while cottaging on Georgian Bay islands. I had the opportunity to see a presentation by Bill Lishman. It was billed as a discussion of Mr Lishman’s experience in the areas of environmental and energy conservation, with a bit of art thrown in for good measure. The hook was that Lishman is the Canadian whose life inspired the 1996 Columbia Pictures film “Fly Away Home”. That’s the story of the ultralight pilot who taught Canada geese to migrate south in winter (a totally new migration path for them) by flying with them as leader of the flock.

The presentation venue was a rickety wooden movie house, shuttered dark for the clunky 35mm slide projector inside. 50 people were unnaturally still in their creaky wooden chairs as Lishman described his life experience so far in excruciating understated fashion:

He built full-scale replicas of the Apollo lunar landing module (I can’t remember why) so accurate that the Japanese bought them for a Tokyo space exposition in 1983 when NASA couldn’t provide the real thing. US scientists unaware of NASA’s failure couldn’t tell the difference from the outside.

Tired of wasting money & energy heating and cooling his farmhouse, he designed and built a super-energy-efficient dome-shaped underground home. Then he built appliances and furniture to go with the geometry of the structure. Think The Jetsons meet The Shire, but in the late 1980s, more than a decade before this sort of thing was de rigueur.

His inventions in ultralight design and bird wrangling resulted in the “Father Goose/Fly Away Home” period. This has morphed into Operation Migration, which is successfully re-establishing bird species in areas where they have long been extirpated.

And when Lishman needed money he often turned to art. Often it was commissioned sculpture from his blacksmithy. His sculptures of birds, buffalo, horses and sheep seem to capture the spirit of the animal, despite being wrought simply, sometimes minimally, from metal. They were stunning even as photographic images.

And then, this transparency clicked noisily into place in front of the projector’s bright light:

There was a nearly-unanimous collective inward breath. Instantly and inexplicably, I was almost crying. Emotion was swirling in me like a freshly-poured Guinness, and it took almost as long to settle out.

Restigouche Sam is the pride and glory of Campbellton, NB. He’s an 8.5 metre tall fountain sculpture that is perfect in micro and macro detail. Lishman has used running water, positioning and light so that his hunk of stainless steel really does look like a perfect salmon jumping out of water.

There was a lot of context that made this such a powerful imprinted moment for me, including Mr Lishman^[2]. But if we can harness even a fraction of that kind of creative power to get people to do something good for themselves or someone else, it is a very good day. And really, strategy and media are all the context that great marketing creative needs.

Lishman says he learned more about flying from his geese than he ever taught them. No, I’m not buying it.

Notes and references:

1. “Money for Nothing”, from Dire Straits’ 1998 Money for Nothing, written by Mark Knopfler & Sting.

2. There is more about Lishman that is remarkable, including what he’s doing with ultralight flight right now: Air First Aid. Lishman is now 70, and incredibly, he may not have hit his stride yet.

All photos are courtesy of Bill Lishman.

INFORMATION-RICH, ATTENTION-POOR

2009-10-07T11:49:00.030-04:00

Last month, The Globe & Mail ran an opinion piece on the state of today’s world, “Information-rich and attention-poor.” The basic idea, as you can guess from the appropriately descriptive title, isn’t ground-breaking news. But the author, Peter Nicholson, is President of an organisation called the Council of Canadian Academies, whose purpose is “to do independent, expert assessments of the science that is relevant to important public issues.” Ironically (as you will see), I learned this last bit from Wikipedia, a process which took 15 seconds.

So what’s interesting about the article is that it’s written from an economist’s point of view. I’ve always thought of economics as the most hopelessly theoretical of the social sciences, and the fact that England produces the brightest economists in the world would seem to bear that out. But while the commercialisation of the Internet has so far been a hit-and-miss proposition, it turns out that economics explains a lot about how the information age has developed:

The abundance of data available today is staggering because it is so cheap to produce, store and access.
The cost of our time required to sift through this increasing abundance keeps increasing, creating a scarcity of attention.
Data searching tools are employed in an attempt to save us time (Google is the most financially successful internet-based company ever).
Invariably, the speed of data transfer becomes more important than its depth (I’m thinking of Twitter here).

All of this, according to Nicholson, is what is driving online behaviour and culture. If we accept the author’s assertion that attention is what turns data into knowledge, we have a knowledge crisis looming.

The abundance of information and scarcity of attention is turning knowledge into a flow rather than a stock, a river rather than a lake. Encyclopedia Britannica has become Wikipedia. Wikipedia has more than 3 million articles in it now, all created by or edited by anyone who wants to. Some of them are experts, but the point is, you just don’t know if the article you are using was created by one. Or if it was created by a unremarkable person with delusions of expertise. In Nicholson’s words, Wikipedia is the Cult of the Amateur.

But it’s built upon the past work of experts, so we’re going to need those traditional experts again, and soon. Crowd Wisdom doesn’t get us the kind of breakthrough, outside-the-box thinking that we got from people like Newton, Einstein or Watson & Crick. That kind of thinking took considerable time and attention.

Nicholson says our challenge in the information age is to “[build] up a sufficient internalized structure of concepts to be able to link with the online store of knowledge.” In other words, to be smart enough to be able to use the vast data resource available to us.

I think our challenge is to understand the difference between raw data and true knowledge, and to collectively convert as much raw data as we can into wisdom. Knowledge comes from the experience, direct or indirect, of using data for an outcome. It’s the application of data for a purpose. Knowledge requires attention and intent. And since we’re not all Einsteins, or even Brysons^[1], our individual knowledge creation will require some focus.

The real sum of all human knowledge is a vast collection of tiny (and sometimes not so tiny) points of expertise. Information technology’s best role is to facilitate the navigable networking of those points. And it all starts with our scarce attention.

Is there a lesson for marketing in any of this? Marketing people have known for a long time now that the consumer fights commercial message abundance with attention scarcity. This means:

Marketing needs to focus less on the quantity of the message and minimising the cost per exposure, and focus more on getting a relevant message to the people most likely to accept it and act on it.
Marketing needs to start with a powerful human thought, not a powerful technology. The medium is not the message, only part of it.
Marketing agencies need to think of themselves as their clients’ personal Wikipedia, at least in the realm of marketing. Less proprietary attitude. More open, shared thinking for the creation of marketing wisdom.

My head hurts. I need to go for a ride.

Notes and references:

1. “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, Bill Bryson, 2003.

THE UNFORTUNATE GREATNESS OF MAD MEN

2009-09-08T00:56:00.018-04:00

I recently forced myself to watch Mad Men because there are just too many references to the award-winning series coming up in everyday conversation these days. It even pops up in conversations about design. It is everything I feared it would be.

We could have been exposed to 60s-era sexism, racism, ageism and excess drinking, smoking and philandering through the highball glass lens of any profession. But the sixties advertising business is perfect, isn’t it? It was such a new, totally urban and unnatural industry at the time, riding the tsunami of North America’s mass consumerism, which was pushed along by the great underwater earthquake that was television.

Here’s the problem: the series is every bit as good as critics say it is––the story lines, acting, the art directing—but it exposes, once again, the worst of the advertising business. In fact, it revels in the amorality of Madison Avenue and continues the stereotype that remains today. The last time The Gallop Organization polled Americans on attitudes about honesty and ethics in various professions^[1], advertising practitioners ranked third from the bottom, just ahead of telemarketers and car salesmen. The rating of ad practitioners has been low ever since it was included in the poll in the mid-seventies, and Mad Men isn’t going to help that trend at all. Interestingly, the clergy isn’t currently cracking the top five professions—something very worthy of exploring on someone else’s blog.

The series opener, “The Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”, sets the tone. The main story line has protagonist Don Draper saving his ad agency’s big tobacco account, while clearly understanding that cigarettes kill. This ought to make him immoral rather than amoral, except that Mr Draper sees nothing wrong promoting cigarettes because consumers can always disregard his advertising and not smoke. More importantly, business is business.

Yes, marketing is clearly about making money. But it shouldn’t be about fast money or dirty money. Clients and agencies both win in the long term when good products and services are marketed honestly and strategically with some real joy in the creative.

I’ve heard many people say that Mad Men is an accurate depiction of wider cultural values of that place and time. That is probably true, more or less. Thankfully, the ad business has evolved in many ways – over half those in it are now women. Non-stop smoking and drinking is more exception than rule. You even see the odd older person still in the business. Where we may not be so advanced is in the area of ethics and professionalism. And there is no quick fix to this.

Hollywood has never been kind to the marketing business. And interestingly, entertainment marketing has always ranked with the most deceptive. From what I’ve seen, only “Nothing in Common^[2]” does the ad business any justice. How unfortunate that Mad Men is such a great show. I can only hope that with almost 30 major awards to its credit and starting its third season, maybe Mad Men's writing will become so good that the ad business part will become incidental. “Bewitched” (60s TV series) got that way, though that was through longevity, not brilliant writing. Then again, who am I kidding—can anyone ever forget Darrin's partner Larry Tate? Doesn't everyone know one?

Notes and references:

Link to Gallop Poll, 2005.
Tristar Pictures, 1986, starring Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason.

MAY I SPEAK TO A HUMAN BEING, PLEASE?

2009-07-26T20:22:00.014-04:00

I understand the need to make businesses more efficient, but I get the uncomfortable feeling that there is a head-long rush to cut people out of customer contact at every possible opportunity. Even in customer service, and that can never be good for the customer.

Nowhere is this more annoying to me personally than at the self-serve checkout at the local big-box building supply store. It seems like I’m always checking out with a loose screw from a bin number I can hardly read because I had to use my own blood to record it. There may not be many functioning pens at the nuts & bolts bins, but mercifully, there are always lots of sharp objects lying about. And every time I get to the automated register, some inappropriate juggling of merchandise and the hastily-MacGyvered tourniquet on my arm results in my placing the wrong thing in the wrong bag at the wrong time. Then comes the full public humiliation by HAL’s better half. Thanks, but I’ll stand in line for a human cashier every time, loose screw or not.

Wait, there is a more annoying example—the automated customer service phone system. Fine if what you need fits into the recorded script—otherwise you need to improvise cleverly to default to human being. And in this case, you aren’t out of the woods when you get a live person. They may be well outside your time zone, grasp of the English language and sphere of experience.

I will admit I love the ATM and Internet banking, but then the banking transactions done that way are routine and straightforward. You know when you need to see teller, still available to those who wish to wait in line.

One indication of mental instability is doing the same thing over an over again, expecting a different outcome. Let’s leave the insanity to the machines, shall we, and let human beings do the things they should be good at: understanding, advising and connecting.

WHY I'M A TERRIBLE BLOGGER

2009-07-16T12:40:00.022-04:00

I have this on good authority. The wonderfully-with-it young woman in our office who seems to know all about these things told me so. I’m not a good blogger because I don’t blog enough—it should be daily, allowing for occasional serious illness or family tragedy. She said I’m not self-absorbed enough to be a blogger (I’m paraphrasing what she euphemised). In reality, I am as self-absorbed as the next person, it’s just that I’m pretty sure the rest of the world isn’t so me-absorbed.

I told J that I wasn’t creative enough or smart enough to post a blog every day that was capable of saving the marketing world from itself. She laughed with me on this, but in the words of John Prine (the king of universally-literate songwriting), “she waited just a second too long”^[1]. Apparently, a blog does not need to stay on topic, as long as it returns to it now and again. Bloggers need to bring other things into their posts. “You’re too deep”, she said, embarrassingly charitable at this point. Maybe it was “lighten up already”.

J pointed me to a friend’s blog titled “Sex, Society, Scribbles & Scenes”^[2]. Strong lead, and an easy topic to have some passion for. Probably doesn't hurt to have a content warning "pop-up" as intellectual foreplay. Good topic range (meaning more than sex) so it’s easier to post regularly. Okay, so a good blog needs to have some passion—hopefully vocational passion will do.

20-something J is a casual blog reader and has several favourites, but has never posted a comment. She is more than capable of doing so. Bloggers need patience—a lack of comments or listed followers does not mean your blog is unread. Blog page hits and click-throughs are likely more relevant, and very measurable. Because a blog is a conversation rather than a hard-sell commercial medium, it needs to work in concert with other media—at least if it has a commercial purpose.

Thank you, J and readers, for indulging me in this journey to self-awareness. I’ll try to be a better blogger. At least I’ll know a good blog when I see one.

Notes and references:

"Far From Me", John Prine, 1971. About the amazing John Prine
About a year after this post, J's friend ended her blog referred to here, thinking it may not be a good thing for her online business.

ALL ATWITTER ABOUT NEW MEDIA

2009-05-19T13:14:00.035-04:00

This March, George Parker wrote a wonderful article for the UK’s Brand Republic titled “The Twitterisation of the Adverati^[1]”. It’s a great read—the in-going premise is right on target and the writing is Brit-witty and very entertaining. It’s a clever admonishment of ad agency people for jumping on bandwagon after new media bandwagon before they really understand what they are. Just like the news media and just like their clients. This makes us very poor advisors in the area where we are supposed to be the experts.

First off, we need to make a clear distinction between how popular and interesting a new communication medium is and how viable and valuable it is as a commercial medium for a client’s specific target group. In other words, the ad industry needs to be logical and rational when approaching new media for client’s business, just like it is for traditional media. For this conversation, let’s define new media as media technology created since the year 2000—which excludes email and the web, and includes SMS & mobile communications, social networks, blogging, Twitter, etc.

Clearly, Twitter has been hugely popular as a communication medium, but it was never intended to be for commercial messages. Neither was email, for that matter, but over a long period of time (over three decades) it has become so. But marketers have been trying to use Twitter to promote products and services as soon as it achieved mainstream buzz and noticeable critical mass in 2008. In fact, the ham-fisted efforts of marketers may be directly responsible for Twitter’s lack of stickiness with new users––its monthly attrition has recently been reported at 60%^[2].

Twitter is an easy target for this sort of criticism, in no small part due to its 140 character tweet limit, which would appear to make any density of thought (see earlier post here by this title) difficult for anyone who didn’t go through their teens hooked on Messenger or with their own texting mobile phone.

Here’s what I believe to be true:

People form their media habits in their 20s and 30s, and with some exceptions, these media remain a person’s favourite ways to consume news and entertainment.
Most people with formed media habits will experiment with new media, but for communications, not as the new primary way to enjoy news and entertainment.
Since media habits are a function of age, marketing advisors need to build models which create and prioritise the ideal media mix for the client’s target group. Budget will determine how deep into the media mix a specific campaign gets.

Clearly, you can’t build a media mix model until you really understand new media users and the medium’s strengths and weaknesses. And this is the real message here. If we do our media homework, build and apply our media mix models and find that Facebook or Twitter are the right primary or secondary mediums, then everyone wins. Bandwagon becomes Automotrice Grande Vitesse (roughly: really very fast railcar).

Notes and references:

DENSITY OF THOUGHT

2009-05-15T13:13:00.036-04:00

I’m embarrassed to admit I was never a fan of the Seinfeld show, despite the fact that I admire its phenomenal success. For some reason, I never sat through a complete episode. I’m sure if I did, I’d be hooked like most of North America was. Seinfeld was a sit-com about nothing, so I was told, so I avoided it because I assumed the same could be said for the creative force behind it. Depth is clearly not a prerequisite for entertainment industry success.

Fortunately, I was exposed to Jerry Seinfeld in a different way—through a promotional video he did for Porsche in the mid-1990s. The connection is that Seinfeld is a Porschephile, owns more than 40 Porsche models, and therefore enjoys special status with the company.

In the video, Seinfeld talks about how good stand-up comedy has density of thought—meaning simple on the surface, but with volumes of thought behind it or with layers of meaning underneath it. He speaks with intelligence and wonderfully-understated passion and makes a graceful segue to the pitch that the new 911 (993 generation) Carrera demonstrates incredible density of thought. Engineering thought, I assume, since the people who run Porsche have never been particularly comical.

Density of thought has always been part of art—“a picture is worth a thousand words”. But in the art world, it gets a bit tricky. I would argue that the viewer does all the work in creating the layers beneath what you see, not the artist. The artist just shows you the doorway.

Poetry is the writing form where density of thought is most obvious. Think Robert Frost, whose innocent little poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” evokes deep emotion and a feeling of familiarity. Sheer brilliance to an outdoor boy.

Density of thought might be easiest to see in product design. Almost anything Apple makes. Most of what Alessi designs. The Porsche Boxster—in styling and engineering.

I propose that the marketing world could use more density of thought. All too often, what we show clients is incredible lightness of thought. Great copywriting has always been about density (“Just do it.^[1].”, “Think different.^[2].”), but we need it everywhere. How about a creative brief that really is brief? A positioning statement that focuses on one great thing. A media report that takes less time to read than a complete viewing every media property in the plan. Or a marketing recommendation with two or three really good reasons for doing something rather than 10 mediocre ones. Density of thought shows confidence and respect for your audience.

Right about now is when my colleague and friend in the next office quips: “Right—I didn’t have time to write you a short note, so here’s a really long one instead.”

Inspiring density of thought in its own right. And that’s a start.

Notes and references:

Nike, Inc., 1988 - ?
Apple Inc, 1997-2002

THE COLLABORATIVE ARTISAN NETWORK

2009-04-28T13:23:00.052-04:00

I want to work with artisans. People who care dearly about what they create, whatever product or service it is. Artisans exist well beyond the world of art - fine art or commercial art. They repair and maintain motorcycles^[1], they open independent cafes beside Starbucks stores and they package their commercial printing for delivery like it was fine art.

For some reason, it has taken me a long time to articulate this feeling. It's not what they teach you to aspire to in business school. And I get that we can't all be genius-artisans like Michael Stadtländer, whose Eigensinn Farm in the backwoods of southern Georgian Bay has been ranked as one of the top 10 restaurants in the world by the New York Times^[2]. Since I don't want to be a backwoods marketing business, what I really need to do is build a collaborative network of artisans. Maybe a genius or two thrown in there for good measure. A network, internal and external, which will motivate me to contribute my best work, every day. This network can be facilitated by the Internet for a wonderfully human use of the most powerful integrated technology application on Earth today.

While you are considering how this applies to marketing, you should try:

Ezra's Pound, 238 Dupont St & 913 Dundas St W, Toronto, ON
Hank's, 9 1/2 Church St, Toronto, ON
Espresso Post, 139 Hurontario St, Collingwood, ON
Caffé Artigiano, 1101 West Pender St, Vancouver, BC

You might also contribute to this list of remarkable everyday artisans, from any walk of life.

Notes and references:

PIRSIG, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1974. 418 p.
New York Times, Nov 12, 1997