Career Advice

I'm always amazed by the number of creatives I know who tell me that they "really ought to get around to doing some digital work" in the same tone and manner they use when they say they "really ought to get around to losing some weight."

I kind of want to shake them and say "if you're over 30 and all you have in your book is print and TV-- if you have a "book" instead of a website-- the future, my friend, is not looking very bright indeed."

Now making the leap isn't easy for general creatives, especially for art directors. But it's something you've got to do if you want to keep working in this business. And you've got to learn it for real too, really get it. So many people try and fake it and wind up sounding even more foolish, as they bring up technology that was last relevant during the Clinton administration.

It's not that digital is the be all and end all. But we're moving towards it, not away from it. In other words guys, it ain't going away.

Limited time only, act now, and all that.

Arenas' New Shoes

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article on the potential dangers of celebrity blogging: Washington Wizards star guard Gilbert Arenas has a blog on nba.com (for those of you who aren't sports fans, he’s a well-known basketball player) and decided to post a critique of the Adidas shoe that was to bear his name.

His critique was pretty harsh:

"I'm sitting there looking at the shoe like 'I hope you guys aren't serious. Because I'm not going to wear this shoe. ... Nobody is going to wear this shoe," said the blog post. He said parts of it reminded him of a "ballerina."

Adidas was understandably upset, although after the public airing, they resolved their differences and now have a shoe that Arenas loves.

So is this a reason for companies to shy away from blogging? Not at all.

First off, it reinforces the notion that Arenas is honest and outspoken: that he’s not going to put his name on any old shoe just to get the money. This gives the consumer confidence that their hero actually vetted the shoe himself and was involved in the design process.

Companies need to realize that what consumers crave is authenticity. That we’re able to see through the PR fronts and fake personas they create and that all we ask of them—and their spokespeople-- is plain talk and honesty. It’s why ad campaigns that speak to an actual truth are so effective, even if that truth isn’t 100% flattering to the client: people value a company that speaks the truth far more than they value a company that has no faults.

At a time when even TV commercials featuring real people are routinely assumed to be shot using actors, a real person being him or herself on a blog is definitely going to help, not hurt.

Lunchtime Entertainment

Until they take it down.
Another brilliant Saturday Night Live Digital Short from Andy Samberg and friends with landsmen Jake Gyllenhall and Adam Levine making cameos.

1984 All Over Again

In what's sure to become a legend among ad folks, Arnold focus-grouped an "board-o-matic" of the classic "1984" commercial with real live people (who'd presumably never seen it) and then created this video, which includes "recommendations" from the focus group for the Hatch Awards, a well-known Boston-based award show.

As you may have guessed, the reason this will become legendary is that the focus groups hated the spot, generally considered one of the best TV commercials ever made, and their recommendations on how to improve it are universally awful.

Thanks to Catherine Taylor and her most excellent Adverganza blog for bringing this to our attention.

I've always wanted to take a bunch of famous movie scenes-- Rhett and Scarlett in Gone With The Wind, DeNiro in Taxi Driver, Cruise in Risky Business, Bogey & Bacall in Casablanca-- and make them into animatics, with agency people providing bad voiceovers. Just to show how absurd the whole notion of testing TV commercials in this format is.

Mad Men No More

AMC via NY Observer

Two recent articles, one in Ad Age, the other in the New York Observer focus on how advertising has lost its mojo and try to explain why.

They both get it wrong too, the Ad Age article focusing on the exclusion of women and minorities during that era (true enough, but not sure what it has to do with anything) and the Observer focusing on the types of clients (big pharma) the industry now uses to pay the bills.

The articles were so off, I actually posted a comment on the Observer article, which went something like this (NB: It makes more sense if you read the Observer first.)

Interesting article but you skipped over the main reason advertising agencies lost their glamor: in the late 80s and early 90s, the major agencies were all acquired by 4 major holding companies: WPP, IPG, Omnicom and Publicis. These holding companies have come in, cut staff dramatically, demanded stricter accountability on expenses, and, most importantly, cut salaries dramatically, even at the very top levels.

What's left is a much more corporate, much less creative environment where no one sticks around because there's no way to get rich or even close to it. Lupinacci is dead-on in his take that the sort of people who were once attracted to the ad business are now all working for Google.

If there are small hot start-up agencies like Anamoly, they are quickly snapped up by the holding companies as soon as they show any signs of growth. And given the holding companies deep pockets who can blame the owners for cashing out for millions.

A final factor in the death of Madison Avenue is that clients are no longer particularly New York-centric. The hot agency of the moment, Crispin Porter Bogusky (Burger King, VW) is based out of Miami and Boulder. Goodby Silverstein (Hyundai, Comcast, Sprint, HP) another powerhouse is in San Francisco and Wieden and Kennedy (Nike) is in Portland, Oregon.

As for Richard Kirshenbaum, he's not exaggerating: he really is the last famous ad man left in New York.

Your Brand Is Not My Friend

I mean when you think of it, it's kind of creepy. Facebook is the 21st century diner or malt shop. It's where teens and young adults go to hang out.

And the last thing they want is some salesperson coming up in their face and trying to have a "conversation" with them while they're figuring out when they're going to the movies. They don't want to talk to you. They want to talk to their friends.

There's a prominent real estate family here in New York City called the Lefraks. About 10 years ago, they decided to change the family name to LeFrak. And I remember thinking to myself at the time "Who do they think they're fooling? I mean do they really think that all these society types are going to see the new name, slap their foreheads and say "Oh, so they're French! All this time I thought they were Jewish, but they're really French! Muffy, quick, now we can invite the LeFraks over to the club."

Well I get the same feeling about advertising agencies these days. We're sales people. We sell our clients products. But suddenly nobody wants to be a salesperson anymore. They're into "conversation." And consumers, I've now learned, aren't consumers anymore. They're "friends." But really people, who are you fooling? Your Brand Is Not My Friend™.

Look. When I was 23, a site like Facebook would have been my second home. Keeping track of the daily comings and goings of my 100 closest friends? Check. Comparing our tastes in music, movies, books, photos, and travel destinations? Check. And when I wasn't on Facebook, I'd have been Twittering everyone I knew that I was going to the store. And then leaving it. With a middle Twitter to let them know that the cashier was being way too slow.

And while I was busy Facebooking and Twittering, the absolute last person I'd have wanted to hear from is an advertiser. I mean when you think of it, it's kind of creepy. Facebook is the 21st century diner or malt shop. It's where teens and young adults go to hang out. And the last thing they want is some salesperson coming up in their face and trying to have a "conversation" with them while they're figuring out when they're going to the movies. They don't want to talk to you. They want to talk to their friends.

The whole appeal of social media sites is their independence from corporate advertisers. People like the fact that they can say whatever they want to their friends without any interference from anyone or anything that seems "official" or "corporate."Yes, they'll tolerate banner ads or search ads on the page, the same way that in the diner they tolerated placemats with ads on them or a Coke sign on the soda machine: that sort of advertising is innocuous and quickly becomes part of the scenery.

So I'm not sure where we've developed this conceit that people want to hear from brands. Because they truly don't. At least not in settings where the primary objective is to talk to and interact with your actual friends. (And your brands, people, are not our friends.)

On a blog or message board dedicated to a particular subject, they might listen to someone from a company, especially if that person is someone whose name they all recognize. (In other words, if Steve Jobs himself were to post on a computer message board, people would be thrilled. But a generic post from Apple or from some unknown VP at Apple would be at most, unwelcome.)

Now there are some brands–I call them Prom King Brands–that people don't mind "conversing" with, so long as they can do it in the brands own space (as opposed to MySpace.) These are the brands that have somehow managed to build a better mousetrap, but there are no more than a dozen of them and you here on DailyFix can probably name them all by heart (I'll start: Nike, Apple, Starbucks, Virgin, Whole Foods– ) Sports teams, TV shows, rock bands and movies fall into this category as well.

The rest of you are out of luck. You're not a Prom King and people aren't lining up to hang with you. So while Starbucks could probably start a Frappuccino Lovers Group on Facebook (for all I know, they already have), no one's going to be joining a Maxwell House Lovers group anytime soon. So if Your Brand Is Not My Friend™, does that mean you should run screaming from Web 2.0 and Social Media?

Absolutely not.

All it means is that if you're not a Prom King brand, you need to be smarter about how you use the space. Not to mention more authentic.

Let's take the Maxwell House example. The one thing we know about Maxwell House (other than that it's "good to the last drop") is that it's cheap. Very cheap, actually, in comparison to Starbucks. So you go on Facebook and find the Cheapskate Lovers group. And approach them as a salesperson. Not as a friend. Your script goes something like this: "Hey Cheapskates. Maxwell House knows how much you guys love saving money. And while our coffee is cheap enough as it is, if you go to this special Facebook Cheapskates site, we've got a dollar off coupon waiting for you."

There's a critical difference here: if you're a Prom King, you define the interaction. People come to you to talk about and be around Starbucks, to get some of the halo effect of a brand they consider very cool. And even though you're selling them big time, you can pretend it's all just a fun little "conversation."

But if you're a regular brand, you need to find a situation that fits your strengths. So if your strength is you don't cost a whole lot, you need to find a bunch of Cheapskates and then adapt yourself to their needs. And you absolutely have to do it as a salesperson. Because you can't ever pretend you're doing anything but selling them.

And if you do all that, they may actually start to like you for it. To let you hang around more often and maybe, just maybe, they'll start talking about you. Not to you, but about you.

Which at the end of the day, is a lot more valuable than having them talk about your TV commercial.

Hence the value of social media.


Originally published at MarketingProfs Daily Fix

Thinking About Hyundai

I have to say I'm really digging the new Hyundai campaign via San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein (can't assume everyone reading this is a creative anymore).

There are the TV spots above, the very nicely done website, and smart print ads with lines like “Shouldn’t a car have more air bags than cupholders?” and "Are car companies committed to quality, or to the phrase ‘committed to quality’?”

And while I really like the campaign on its own merits, it also gets Toad's Right Ads @ The Right Time Award.

Let me explain: 5 years ago, this campaign would have been laughable. Hyundais were crappy cars made in Korea and no one could pronounce the name of the company (and as Bill "Make The Logo Bigger" Green and JetPacks have pointed out, the logo sucks.)

But lately I've been hearing a lot of positive buzz about Hyundai. And I'm by no means a car guy. Various auto publications have liked Hyundai's cars better than the more expensive Japanese imports. Plus I'm definitely starting to see more of them-- the Santa Fe SUV in particular-- on the leafy, sun-dappled streets of my upscale burb.

Given all the positive buzz, the time seems perfect for a campaign like this, a campaign designed to move Hyundai into the space Volvo used to own (before they decided to try and become the Swedish Mercedes) and that Subaru kind of owns: the smart, safe car for people who could spend a lot of money on a car but choose not to. An anti-status symbol of sorts.

This is a perfect case study of how advertising can help build on buzz, rather than the other way around. Because the buzz here is authentic, e.g. the only thing Hyundai did to create it was to make better cars. And so the advertising can reinforce the buzz because it's based on truth, not smoke and mirrors.

Advertising. It's not rocket science ;)

(Side note: speaking of cars on the leafy, sun dappled streets of my upscale burb, I've noticed a dramatic increase lately in the number of Range Rovers. My suspicion is that this is largely due to the fact that Range Rover is the only luxury car brand that doesn't also have an undistinguised $28K model (yes, I know, but it's called a Land Rover, not a Range Rover.) That, and the Range Rover has a very noticeable shape which immediately lets people know you're the sort of person who can spend $80K on a car.)

Toad Debuts On Daily Fix

If you're really looking to avoid work today, you can read even more of me over at Marketing Profs Daily Fix. The editor there, Ann Handley, has a great mix of contributing writers who cover a really broad range of writers. She herself writes for The Huffington Post, which is about as good as it gets in terms of online journalism.

For me, it's a chance to reach a slightly different audience-- Daily Fix is mostly read by the people we creatives call "clients" -- and thus get a different point of view.

You can check it out here.