Jonathan Salem Baskin's Dim Bulb -- Analysis & Musing from a Global Brand Strategist

Stop Laughing

When Sarah Palin told Muslims to "refudiate" plans for a mosque near 9/11's ground zero a few weeks ago, I was shocked that some media talking heads dismissed her because she invented a word. They need to stop laughing.

On the language front, refudiate is a helluva lot more understandable than many of the words, abbreviations, and acronyms that get tweeted these days. Everyone knew what she meant, at least kinda, and if we want to analyze or mock the use of language by political or public figures, there are similarly enough sub-subordinate clauses, parenthetical interludes, and passive verbs in most comments from President Obama to warrant a deconstructing chuckle.

Her idea deserved a more reasoned analysis mostly because it was so unreasonable. What was she asking "peaceful Muslims" to do, exactly? Whose heartland did she believe the construction plans "stabbed?" There were factual inaccuracies: the plans call for a community center, not a mosque, and it's located 2 blocks away from the site, not at it. Her follow-up statement didn't mention that its promoters  are renowned for advocating interfaith dialogue, they're all Americans, and the local political and community leaders approved the plans.

More broadly, her logic was suspect: even if the plans were for a mosque, would that mean that Jews shouldn't build temples in or near the West Bank (or in Jerusalem)? Should Christians be banned from building churches in Arab or Muslim countries? Blood is spilled regularly because the Dome of the Rock is so close to the Western Wall, and in many countries Christians are indeed prohibited from publicly practicing their religion (not only because of theocratic differences, as evidenced by the Communist Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, for instance).

Shouldn't all Americans refudiate such intolerance, whether here or abroad?

It's not easy or always comfortable, but I say such thinking is at the core of American exceptionalism. We are different from everyone else because we hold ourselves to higher standards; our beliefs are pure Enlightenment idealism that are impossible to live up to. What makes us different is that we try. We're better than everyone else when we practice what we preach. So our exceptionalism isn't about what rules and norms we're allowed to break but rather how hard we work to do better than other countries.

Anyway, this laughing thing really bothers me. It's condescending and it only serves to confirm Palin's claims of being persecuted and attacked. The same goes for Glenn Beck or any other rabble-rousers, irrespective of their political leanings. I caught recently a clip of his loony declaration that the new Financial Reform legislation meant the American republic had "died." The video edit was meant to elicit a laugh, but his point about the bill's length (2300 pages) deserved more: Glass-Steagall was all of 53 pages long. It's hard not to suspect that something's wrong, but is the problem that printers used too much ink and thereby killed democracy? Hahaha...er...we didn't talk about it.

One word or too many words...the ideas coming from national personalities deserve reasoned and fair attention, not glib derision. Take away talk radio and the talk shows on Fox and MSNBC, and the rest of the mediasphere that claims to be "mainstream" risks falling for the political calculations of one party or the other if they take such comments anything less than seriously. A smirk or snarky comment isn't reporting, however much focus groups have told you that your audience will appreciate it. Laughing is lamestream.

It doesn't help that so much nuttiness comes from those who oppose the current Adminstration. You can stifle a laugh only so many times in response to accusations that President Obama is a foreign usurper, or that he's a socialist. But there are serious policy differences behind these wild claims -- or there need to be, if those people supporting them want a turn at running things -- and it's the media’s job to bring those issues into the light of day. Similarly, it's too easy to contrast the nuttiness with the apparently serious policy moves coming from the party in power, and in doing so make the nuttiness seem nuttier.

This isn't fair, or particularly honest, as the President's policies could be equally nutty, or they could well be partially or completely wrong. They're just not as funny or easy to laugh at. Michelle Malkin rants about the Democrats' reign of darkness? Funny. Al Gore on global warming, or the intricacies of cap and trade? Not so funn...zzzzzzzzzz.

I don't believe conservatives and liberals are at war in America, or that patriots are busy standing up to the unpatriotic. Extremist minorities and their chosen evangelists want us to believe otherwise, and when our media (or we as citizens) laugh at ideas, we do their bidding and advance their interests. We need to stop shooting the imperfect messengers and missing our chance to talk about or understand perfectly valid or relevant ideas. Our national debate is between what’s rational and what’s stupid, and we’re losing our ability to tell the difference.

And that's nothing to laugh at.

(Photo credit: The screen grab of Wrongway Peachfuzz appears on numerous sites and I can't tell who has the rights to it, so here's where I found the image that I used: http://02varvara.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/the-gang-that-can%E2%80%99t-shoot-straight-matusiak-gets-his-facts-wrong-again/)

Interruption vs. Engagement, Revised

Last week in Advertising Age, I tried to argue that we marketers should reevaluate our approaches to "interruption" and "engagement" marketing, as I think we're using both terms incorrectly. Budgets are getting shifted away from the short commercials of traditional media into longer social experiences of new media, like Old Spice's recent  campaign, as if the latter's entertainment can replace the former's historic utility.

Dozens of smart folks chimed in with ideas that either improved on what I'd tried to say, or added thoughts that had never occurred to me. I want to thank all of them...except for the numbnut who declared that "advertising is lies, all lies" and called us "paid prevaricators." I have no idea what he was doing slumming with us in one of the Inferno's outer rings, as he clearly belongs further in.

I'd like to riff on what I found to be the most consistent and insightful commentary:

First, it was obvious that I muddled my basic premise. My point was that we've let our understanding of form dictate the function of our marketing efforts: social campaigns (or viral videos, in particular to the Old Spice case that was news last week and today is, well, Q.E.D.) can't be overtly commercial because people wouldn't seek them out or sit through them. Conversely, commercials have to sell and sell quickly/simply because they're so short, which is why people hate them. I think the semantics around these media limits our understanding and use of them.

Isn't interruption a brief engagement, and engagement a lengthy interruption?

That's the definitional challenge I'd hoped to make, but it didn't come across as forcefully as my case for reconsidering interruption (and, by default, my attack on engagement). A number of comments helped me see how I misstated my thinking on this point.

A related insight was that a number of people didn't buy my premise that we can still hope to sell to consumers, irrespective of medium. Some folks parroted the permission marketing nonsense that I think glorifies the egg without giving the chicken its due, but even they weren't altogether wrong. Consumers do not want to be sold the empty promises and silly nonsense that has passed for creative advertising for the past half century or more. But they still want communications that are truthful, relevant, and have some meaningful utility. My point was that advertising isn't bad; rather, we need to clarify what constitutes bad advertising, and then maybe the next step wouldn't be to avoid selling altogether, which is what much of the social media canon proscribes.

This leads to another group of comments I got that complained I'd presented the decision between traditional/new marketing as "either/or."  But it is, at least in a number of companies that are trying to maximize limited marketing budgets and shifting money away from produced content (like TV spots) to social. And since the purposes of each approach are somewhat mutually exclusive because of how we've chosen to define them, it often also comes down to a decision between "selling" and "entertaining." I agree that this shouldn't be the case, though.

I think the most insightful comments argued forcefully for an answer that lies somewhere in the middle -- that engagement through social should be a part of a marketing strategy and not a stand-in for the strategy itself -- but I'm still struggling with how to make that answer a reality. It statement just feels no different from the argument that sugary cereal should be a part of every balanced breakfast: surround something with good stuff and it becomes good, too, at least by any aggregate measure.

I understand the yearning to make social matter, and I share it. There's so much about the interactivity, the reality and real-time-ness, and the ubiquity of social media engagement that impacts every business, whether we acknowledge it or not. But that belief isn't a rationale for throwing out every time-tested expectation for marketing in order to create a social campaign, nor to thereafter set forth to discover or invent proof that our belief is correct.

Which brings me back to semantics. If successful "engagement" means getting consumers to pay attention to something with no commercial message, no relevance to their needs, no truthful content about a product, service, or business, and no future utility, then most social media campaigns are gigantic successes. But I'd call them a waste of time, or at least the risk of one. You can call swapping empty social calories for an interaction that could have had more value for a consumer and a brand anything you want, and even wish for it to be good, but that doesn't it make it so.

Conversely, if "interruption" means telling consumers things they don't care about, can't use, and aren't even true, then that's a waste of time, too. It's an interaction that no brand can afford today.

The fundamental point I’d hoped to make in my Advertising Age column was that we need to get past these silly definitions and made-up expectations, and realize that interruption and engagement are simply two ways of describing much the same thing. Conversation. And if it's truthful, relevant, and offers utility, it works, whatever we call it. The devil's in the details.

Thanks again to everyone for participating in the conversation. If you want to continue the chat, feel free to comment below and let's have at it!

Losing Our Religion

Yesterday, President Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It's a 2,300 page bill containing 533 new regulations. 38% of Americans have never heard of it. Another 33% couldn't explain its key deliverable.

If the point of the legislation is to restore confidence in the financial system, it seems like it's dead on delivery, and you can bet that opinion of the bill is only going to get worse (or at best, muddled) as the administration's principled opposition continues to debate settled law and the nutjobs scream that it's further proof of an alien invasion. Consumers are going to continue to lose their faith in the markets.

This isn't good for Wall Street.

Historically, trust in the financial industry has always been tenuous and inconsistent. We've been suspicious of big finance ever since Alexander Hamilton argued its case in the early days of the republic. Financiers are a necessary evil whom we tolerate for what they do even as we're dumbfounded by how they do it; other than celebrating them during the brief years leading up to major market crashes (1920s and 1980s, for starters), Americans have spent most of their time being scared and suspicious.

We've also been mostly uninvolved. You wouldn't know it from any given day's breezy financial news coverage but individual stock ownership is the exception in American life, not the rule. Slightly more than half of households held stocks in 2005 (56.9 million). That's up from 44 million in 1998, and a whopping 2.5 million in 1960. Only 8% of ALL Americans owned stocks in 1955. Before that, financial markets were the exclusive purview of guys in black top hats like that character in Monopoly.

Interestingly, the number of American households that own their own homes has stayed effectively flat (low 60%) since the 1960s.

Has the recent spike in stock market investment been driven by faith in the system? Yes, to a degree: investing's benefits have been aggressively promoted -- we've all seen those long-enough perspectives that prove the stock markets outperform the returns of bonds or bank deposits -- and there have been those investors who enthusiastically convince themselves that a free-market, self-empowering, I-can-outsmart-the-next-guy fantasy can make gambling legit (day trading as sexy slot machine: discuss).

But I'd wager that IRAs (invented in 1974), 401(k) plans, and fears of keeping pace with inflation have driven most folks’ adoption of stock ownership. Not clearly a "best of worst options" commitment, but something in that general direction. For the half of Americans who do it, we've done it because we're supposed to, not because we actively want to.

Only we're losing what little faith we had.

Individual investors have been withdrawing more money from American stock funds than they put in since 2002, with minor exceptions. It started when Enron and WorldCom revealed the depths of manipulation and chicanery that could go on behind closed boardroom doors. The Internet bubble immediately prior didn't help, and our current mortgage miasma has just made it worse. Most people are aware again that there's no good way to understand or predict what the markets will do unless you step back, squint, and see only a big, impersonal picture. If you honestly think you're the incredibly brilliant exception to this fact, you're nuts.

Glass-Steagall was passed in 1932 to curb some of the manipulative excesses that had led to the stock market crash a few years earlier. It was followed by creation of the FDIC in 1933 to give individuals a level of certainty and comfort with their bank deposits as a backstop to any subsequent market crash. I'm sure these bills did hundreds of other things, too, but they offered headline-worthy benefits that non-experts could understand. And it still took over 40 years for individual investors to get into the stock market.

Now we're losing our faith again.

The Obama administration may or may not accrue any political capital for its investment of time and its reputation in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. I honestly don't care. But the legislation comes at a crucial time for Wall Street; an inflection point, perhaps, that could determine the content and context of the conversations financial firms will have with individual investors, and the populace at large, for the next decade or more.

Why should we trust stock markets to be efficient and transparent? What are banks doing to make loans more responsibly (and often, hopefully)? How will the new legislation affect operations, and how will that benefit individual clients? How will it ensure that some gigantic deal or practice doesn’t sink the entire economy? What’s actually, specifically, and reliably different -- and better -- today from yesterday or a year ago?

All I've read about Wall Street lately are the enormous profits the big banks collected in the last quarter (Wells Fargo up 12% to $2.9 billion, B of A up 15% to 2.8 billion, JP Morgan Chase earned $4.6 billion and Citigroup $2.7 billion). The advertising and branding from the financial firms has been the same "trust us, don’t worry" nonsense they've been propagating since long before the latest crisis. Enough with the long-view arguments. Our lives are too short for them to work anymore.

The government can't fix this problem, either substantively or perceptually. Wall Street needs to step up and change its conversation with us. Tell us why we should believe again. No, show us proof for our faith. Doing so would constitute a true miracle.

(Photo credit: this image appears on a number of web sites and blogs, so I'm assuming that it's public domain. Please tell me if you know otherwise.)

Now What?

Old Spice has made history, dominating YouTube last week with 8 of the 11 most-watched videos on Friday and racking up tens of millions of views. Its "Smell Like a Man" campaign, in which its spokesmodel quickly shot mostly unscripted and hilariously funny replies to nearly 200 online inquiries (including some from famous people), prompted numerous copycat videos and got covered by just about every news outlet in America.

Now what?

The half-life of viral fame is short. A gnat lives 200+ times longer. There have been numerous top ten lists on YouTube since Friday, not to mention other notable clips, burps, accusations and sundry ephemera discoverable across the web. Old Spice didn't announce or share anything particularly memorable, and certainly nothing ownable. The  campaign was wildly creative and fun; no brand can claim either quality. The bet is that the residual afterimage will make it more likely that the Old Spice logo will jump out when shoppers next face that wall of otherwise identical deodorant options at their favorite stores. Kinda like remembering an accident on the side of the road, only with a smile.

Who cares if the vast majority of viewers were even potential or current customers who may or may not do the shopping? The entire audience might just like to smell bad for all Old Spice knows. But the campaign got lots of people to think about the brand, even for a moment, and it was brilliant on any number of levels. I'm most impressed by the execution...the thing was fast and still really, really good. There's probably a lot to learn from how they pulled it off (kudos to Wieden + Kennedy).

Still...now what?

I polled the dim bulb universe and we've come up with three thought-starter ideas, all of which skew heavily toward our bias for selling:

• The Most Manly Man Contest -- A proof-of-purchase will let people submit their own stories for possible selection and feature on sites, in a commercial, or whatever. Repeat purchases up the chances of winning.

• Secret Admirer Program -- People can buy and send product to men anonymously, perhaps with a playful note or something. Make it risque and charge extra for the service.

• Shoppers' Inspiration -- A purchase coupon activates access to a "personalized" vmail that shoppers can get from Mr. Manly Man before they have to embark on their next set of errands. "You're sexy and beautiful and I smell good" sort of thing.

Riffing even further, imagine if one of these ideas (or a better one) were attached to last week's virtual shenanigans? A sales conversion process that closer to "here's this, do that" is usually far more effective and profitable than one that relies on the "somewhere, someday, somehow, think something for some reason" approach. An extreme version of this angle would be Denny's Super Bowl ad that helped it give away 2 million free breakfasts. It did nothing to build on those behaviors (i.e. what incentive encouraged those eaters to come back and bring their friends?) and they've just recently fired their agency (Goodby, Silverstein & Partners), but you get the point.

Now what? should be the baked into the front-end of every new campaign creative; in these days of clutter and distractions the deliverable can't only be awareness or chuckles, no matter how immense the numbers. Just making noise is an idea that was old 50 years ago anyway. Truly new thinking requires creative approaches to connecting all that activity made possible by the Internet into actions that put money into the pockets of businesses.

Maybe Old Spice has done just that, and we're going to be blown away by how brilliantly they translate their initial, passing fame into sales transactions. I hope so. The manly man thing is just too funny to waste on branding.

Abbreviated Meaning

When did brevity become a synonym for clarity or truth?

For most of human history, it was the exact opposite. What was brief was least important, as usually the format of a statement dictated the attention it deserved. Shortness was equated with incompleteness, which meant that things communicated quickly were more suspect and were considered less trustworthy (a rapid-fire sales pitch or the unknown threat of someone "of few words" being two examples). The common bias was that brevity could be the same as stupidity. It wasn't consistently the case, of course, but it was believed that someone saying little often meant that they had little worth saying.

Conversely, meaning meant nuance, and length was often required to communicate it, so aspiring artists, legislators, and theologians studied rhetoric -- the art of persuasive writing or speaking -- and then honed their skills in debate before presuming to make the case on a topic or issue to an audience. Church sermons were long. So were books and poems. Speeches and sentences had clauses and then subordinate clauses, as if the comma was a dare to the listener or reader. The test of successful communications wasn't if a presenter could earn someone's attention, but rather was someone capable of grasping what he or she was being told.

And yet reasonably ill-educated people still appreciated this communication. How else could Shakespeare get his audiences to laugh and cry at long soliloquies and dense literary allusions? Parishioners would scream out in ecstasy as 18th Century evangelist Jonathan Edwards mumbled his way through endless sermons that relied heavily on detailed Biblical quotes. Try following the speeches from Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, each of which went on for more than 3 hours. They were major live events, made national news, and Lincoln reformatted them into a book that people found so compelling that it helped get him the nomination for President in 1860.

Now, at least when it comes to marketing, if you can't express a thought in 140 characters or less, you risk being left out of the conversation. Ideas need to be reduced to bullet points. Pictures are even better because they can say things without actually saying anything. The marketplace can be best understood by short, pithy observations, and strategies need to be based on simple declarations. More conversation. Less selling. Provide content. New everything.

For students of behavior and human emotions, this a strange predicament. The reality of marketing is a giant textbook, and we're happy reading the Cliff Notes and then writing our book reports as a series of yes/no questions.

Yet it's intoxicating...that feeling you get when you've just read or pondered something that suggests greatness without requiring that you literally understand it. The stuff doesn't have to be exact as much as cool in a visceral way. Quips are quipalicious. Bulleted lists are empowering because they let you touch big things without having to hold them (or get your hands dirty). Business books that make one point and then repeat it for 200 pages, no matter how ludicrous, are far easier to read than those that make, say, two, and actual participation in conversations is much easier in short bursts because they can be forwarded and swapped as easily as the prompting content. Got a marketing issue? Here's a top-ten list of things to do. Add a one-liner comment. Then forward it. It's all quite entertaining.

It's as if the more information we can get, the less of any individual idea we want. We trade substance for frequency. Choose immediacy over nuance. Confuse volume with meaning.

I pride myself as a follower of Occam's razor: things shouldn't be extended more than necessary (i.e. simpler is better). But there's value in detail, nuance, and the very experience of time in portions longer than nanoseconds that I worry we marketers have lost. We're busier than ever, but do we allow ourselves the time and mental space necessary to truly comprehend what the hell it is we’re doing? The challenges of understanding today's consumer and marketplace overall just can't be distilled into posts no longer than a sentence.

That's why I have a nagging suspicion that nobody is ever going to want to revisit our "best" marketing Tweets, or reread the most popular business books of our times...unless The People of the Future want to understand why we chose to forget that shorter and faster isn't necessarily better or more truthful.

(Photo credit: Angela Mabray, and here's her website)

Is Love Enough?

ESPN is launching today a new branding ad campaign intended "to demonstrate our love of sports," according to one of its execs quoted in The New York Times.

I'm sure that the spots will be funny and sometimes even memorable. I've enjoyed many of the "SportsCenter" spots that Weiden & Kennedy created for it, and the same agency is producing this latest campaign, called "It's not crazy. It's sports." I'm looking forward to seeing minor leaguer baseball players talking about hand signals. Car racing teams duking it out on the highway. Footage of Moon astronauts playing golf.

I'm just not so sure that love of sports is a Big Idea worthy of an ad campaign.

First, isn't it like McDonald’s declaring "we love hamburgers," or Geiko saying the same about insurance? ESPN had better love sports, and I can't imagine the connection is a secret. I'd wager that 99 out of every 100 adult Americans surveyed would mention "sports" among the top three responses to the question "ESPN shows what type of programming?" Branding ESPN with sports is about as earth-shattering as SyFy boldly asserting that it still features sci-fi stuff.

And it's not branding anyway...it's advertising, which delivers awareness, and a connection thus forged between a brand name and some quality like funny or love has a half-life that doesn't last much beyond the surveys intended to discover it. It's impossible to own abstractions and advertising isn't the right mechanism to try; like faith, acts are required to substantiate even the most fervent declarations (or promises). Microsoft can't make PCs cool no matter how much it spends on ads, some of which are arguably very well done. McDonald's can't claim to be healthy in spite of wasting millions on sponsoring the Olympics.

Words require deeds, and that means there are two ways ads can contribute to brands: either as a priori promises -- "we will become something" -- or a posteriori, as in "look what we do." I'm a horse-before-the-cart sort of guy so I prefer narrating reality instead of getting caught up in the variability of hope. And in either case, it's surprising that so many marketers still confuse a mechanism for this communication with the substance of the result. Advertising can tell us what was or what will be. The brand is what is.

Ads (and billboards, social media campaigns, etc.) come from creative marketers. Brands come from consumers.

So, second, what does ESPN do to evidence its love of sports? Well, it dedicates multiple channels to it, along with online content and sports bars, which says a lot, but that's the function of distribution and licensing contracts. Are its programs better, or more comprehensive? Are its talking heads smarter or funnier? Can it prognosticate on contests with a higher likelihood of being right? Does it get sports scores or news before anybody else, and does it get it into the hands of its users first?

Which brings me to the recent LeBron fiasco, in which ESPN effectively prostituted itself by giving the basketball star an hour's worth of space to embarrass himself and the network. In the context of proving its commitment to sports, couldn't ESPN make the case that it had to do it? Where's the spot that addresses it head on -- in a real way, not the faux apologetic lie that Nike used to further squander its investment in Tiger Woods -- or the proactive outreach to viewers to join a conversation about it on some proprietary social tool? Similarly, why was the World Cup programming uniquely ESPN? It bought the rights. I get it. Why was it better?

Without addressing such functional experiences that support its love of sports, ESPN isn't really telling viewers anything that matters. I'm not advocating being dull, but rather that the marketers searching for ESPN's brand should look internally first, to the things it does to demonstrate its love and warrant a similar commitment from its viewers, and then get to talking about it (either proactively or retroactively). There's probably so much it could choose to do if it first tasked its resources to develop the tangible operational proof points for its positioning.

Again, the ads can't do the job of branding...the company has to do the real work so its customers can conclude it.

Third, the campaign is going to run exclusively on ESPN, which means they're going to tell existing viewers something that they probably already know. There's a logic to this strategy if it can affirm and strengthen consumer commitment. Lots of marketing money gets spent telling buyers that they were smart or cool for forking over their cash for a product or service. Though this would argue for making the content of the campaign more about the added (or better) benefits of watching ESPN. I'm not suggesting this as a creative angle but substantively the campaign should finish this sentence "You're the most amazing guy on the block because watching ESPN gives you..."

Love? Naw. The answer is much harder than that. Love isn't enough.

(Disclosure: I've spoken at ESPN corporate, had a hamburger at ESPN Zone, and I watch SportsCenter more than infrequently, so I qualify as a fan)

(Photo credit: A screen grab from espn.com)

Scary Good

Allstate Insurance is running a campaign in which the threats of trees falling on cars, teens nicking car bumpers, and pets trashing upholstery are portrayed by a character named "Mayhem." I think it's scary good advertising.

The actor, Dean Winters, is wonderfully smarmy. He was hilariously memorable as Tina Fey's self-adoring idiot ex-boyfriend on "30 Rock," and in these spots he cheerfully promises mayhem on dark roads and in crowded parking lots. He's perfect because he's sinister in the same way that stripes threaten to clash with plaid. I get the point but I'm not scared.

Which is why the critics' complaints that the spots resort to fear mongering are plain wrong. Mayhem's mischief is an expression of reality; fate (or chance) is capricious, and that's why there's such a thing as insurance in the first place. So these ads manage to tell the truth, which is 1) an immense accomplishment for the category, and 2) directionally illustrative of what other advertisers should do.

The Mayhem campaign is a creative solution to a strategic problem for Allstate, which is that it’s in the business of selling vitamins, not aspirin. This is why its competitors have focused on cost as the selling point; it's the wrong benefit, especially for any policyholder who has an accident, but it's easier to sell the present benefit of less cash out of their pockets in premiums, vs. the future value of quicker and more generous payouts in times of need. It's doubly tough because Allstate can't promise to be any better on the back-end -- it channels the Tubes' "What Do You Want From Life?" when it implicitly admits that you can't have that -- so the ads simply state the purposes for having insurance, which aren't to have a low monthly fee as Geiko suggests, nor is it something that consumers are qualified to structure or price, as Progressive promises.

You buy insurance to be prepared for bad things happening.

Allstate's chief marketer explained in The New York Times that "The company you do business with matters; you get what you pay for." This is far more insightful than any of the blather about what the brand stands for, or how Allstate might fit into some imaginary pie chart of insurance agency positioning that is real only in a boardroom slide presentation. It suggests a world of innovations that the company could consider to make itself truly stand out from its competition, though that would require some heavy lifting. The Mayhem ads are an easy first step. Does it pay faster than Aflac? Are its settlements more generous than State Farm's? Is it easier to get a hold of an Allstate agent at 2 a.m. on a Sunday than somebody working for American Family?

Such questions are what will ultimately distinguish the Allstate brand from its competition, especially among the aging, multi-policy households on which any insurance company should make its best margins.

So I find it funny that the one question the marketing trades seem concerned about is the fate of actor Dennis Haysbert (the President in "24"), who has appeared in the company’s spots since 2003. He's a character, or a prompt for attention that should never get confused with the brand, and nobody is keeping track of who's getting paid to appear in ads except the folks who pay for who's appearing in ads. Geese, cavemen, and irritating retail store clerks are symptoms of the insurance industry's inability (or unwillingness) to differentiate great promotions from branding. They're all tactics, nothing more, and that goes for Haysbert, too. If he comes back, great, and if not, who cares?

An exec at Allstate’s ad agency Leo Burnett evidenced a similar confusion when she commented that "Good advertising invites you into the brand" (also in the Times article). No it doesn’t. Good advertising sells stuff, or at least prompts actions that lead to selling stuff, as shown by Allstate’s low-cost competitors. The brand comes from the way policies are written and serviced, and the jury is still out on whether Allstate will live up to the prompts that its new Mayhem campaign should provide. Mayhem is great advertising, and hopefully Burnett is working overtime to help facilitate a broader, more substantive operationalization of the brand for their client.

The web site isn’t encouraging, if that's any indication so far. It wastes space rerunning the commercials (why not give extra content like outtakes for visitors who register for more info?), and visitors are presented with a next step that's a giant leap: talk to an agent or get a quote (where are more reasonable intermediate steps, like a widget that lets you check whether your state requires comprehensive coverage and spits out a generic cost of not having it, or a social media mechanism to share horror stories of bad experiences with competitors?).

But I'm hopeful. The Mayhem campaign suggests some scary good possibilities for Allstate.

(Photo: screen grab from one of the Mayhem spots, courtesy of YouTube)

Incomprehensible

I was surprised to receive this subscription renewal notice from The New Yorker last week, as I dimly remembered having re-upped a few months ago. It took me a minute to locate the proof on the invoice (I'm good for another year and a half). Why am I getting a notice now? Do they think I'm stupid?

Don't answer that second question. But I do see so much bad brand communication that it begs the question of whether the marketers' motives are sinister or just inept.

Do you understand your monthly mobile phone bill? I sure don't, or can't, as it's full of categories and ledger entries that seem compliant with the computer system that spit them out (and that's programmed in Esperanto). My mobile provider isn't trying to provide me with any useful information...no, quite the reverse. It's as if it doesn’t want me to comprehend how it arrives at my charges.

I'd throw many cable TV, Internet services, and even brokerage and bank statements into the same category. My meager investments require a monthly 10-page printout of entries and debits and transfers even though I haven't bought a stock in over a year. For all I know they've outsourced my account management to Bernie Madoff.

It's hard not to suspect that this happens on purpose.

My recent magazine invoice falls into another category of consumer confusion that's the opposite of too much information: the absence of information. We pay our bills and then move on. Many invoices are paid automatically directly from our bank accounts, so consumers aren't generally up to speed on what was paid when (or how much). The point is to take care of this stuff, kind of like managing a chronic affliction. There's nothing wrong with it as long as we can rely on the businesses we've entrusted with our ignorance.

The New Yorker invoice reminds me that we can't, as did my realization a few months ago that my cable bill was egregiously larger than the going rate for new customers. I had to call my provider and demand the same discount, which they were happy to provide. But I had to ask. Someone had made the decision to not disclose the cost disparity on my monthly invoice, and to not proactively offer it to me.

Complex invoices...bills when nothing is owed, or charges that exceed going rates...I'd even throw mouseprint warnings into the equation, as the required admissions that your interest rate could go to 120% or a drug could make your head explode aren't required to appear in a font size legible to humans. Information -- or call it "content" if you want to make my point topical -- becomes meaningless when it's incomprehensible, lacking, or hidden.

And we wonder why corporate reputations are at all-time lows, or why people don't trust advertising much more than they believe in the Tooth Fairy. Consumer empowerment is fine and good but it's not really empowerment if the alternative means companies can take advantage of you.

Brands can be funny or engaging. I'm all for Facebook fan pages and discounts on Twitter, and I promise to laugh at the next UGC video. But The Conversation is so much bigger than using technology tools to entertain people and, for starters, it happens via less sexy channels like billing, service statements, and warnings/usage instructions.

Brands that do a bad job in these areas are telling their customers some very important things, whether the strategy is purposeful or simply crummy by default:

• You're stupid
• You're not paying attention
• Don't worry, be happy

Either way, I find the strategy incomprehensible.

In Praise of Sloth

I've just gone through a very lengthy and painful technology transfer, and I think my takeaway is this: instead of making life easier for customers, maybe a viable brand loyalty strategy is to make it harder for them?

I know it sounds counterintuitive but what if marketers chose to deliver brand "engagement" as habit, routine, and as something so extensively embedded in customers' lives that it wouldn't be worth it -- or even consciously imaginable -- to ever change?

This approach has been a fact of life in the technology space for years, whether avowed or not.

My latest tale of woe is no different than one of yours, I'm sure. I endured years of active abuse by Comcast, upon whom I'd relied for my cable TV and Internet connections:

• Customer service was spotty, at best, so I ended up getting the wrong set-top boxes twice and had to figure out how to return them on my own dime.

• Service itself was uneven as channels would crap out unexpectedly and without subsequent explanation, including some home games for my beloved Blackhawks.

• Pricing was an utter sham, as it gave away service to lure new users at a fraction of what it charged me, which destroyed any value prop.

Yet I never bothered to change service providers, primarily because:

• The effort of making the change seemed insurmountable. Ever spent a few hours trying to get some gizmo or connection to work? You enter a zone of utter focus in which try one thing, then another and another until blam! It works, only you have no idea why, or you're so happy that you walk away and forget to detail your steps. If you're lucky enough to get 2+ gizmos working together there's only more complexity involved, and a greater likelihood that setting up another deal would require that you start from scratch.

• The investment of time and content seems proprietary, even if it's not. There's a lot to be said for knowing how to use things (like open files, order movies, whatever) so knowledge how-to is a proprietary asset, and it gets more valuable over time as you get better/faster at doing whatever it is you want to do. Add on top of that any actual exclusivity due to the technology, such as unique and/or stranded assets, and starting another configuration would literally require starting from scratch.

• Getting ripped off financially just seemed so unavoidable. Pricing in the TV and Internet services businesses are unclear and bait-and-swtichish, which has the effect of taking cost off the table almost entirely. Or at least it changes the equation from what it should be ("what can I get for how much I pay?") to what is is ("I'm going to get charged an unfair tax to get my bare minimum expectations met, at best"). 

What eventually pushed me into taking action is immaterial. But what if all those miserable qualities of my customer experience weren't the byproducts of an uncaring, inept business and instead turned into positive that it did on purpose in order to lull me into complacency? In my particular circumstance I can think of three things Comcast could have done to keep my business forever (and none of them involve looking for complaints on Twitter):

• Guaranteed support. The company's policy is that if it sends a technician and he discovers something that you should have fixed, you pay a penalty fee. While it sends or beams programming to your TV it takes no responsibility for discovering problems and proactively communicating them to customers. What if it flipped this model on its head and made sure that it 1) gave support freely and without limit, and 2) identified problems instead of hiding from them?

• Novel services. Why couldn't Comcast take full, complete, and unequivocal responsibility not only for making sure its service worked but actively encouraging customers to hook more stuff up to it? Instead of trying to control "bundles" of its own services why not enable connections with as many third-party services and devices as possible? It could let customers to literally record their own set-ups for future reference, or offer connectivity check-ups. Get itself literally hard-wired into lives.

• Lifetime customers. My fees for Comcast services should have gone down over time, not stayed high or been increased. Current customers cost much less (and earn much more) than lead-gen first-timers, and the ROI on an automatic service renewal puts to shame any return from some stupid brand advertising campaign. Why aren’t older and/or more involved customers treated like elite-level frequent fliers? 

Had it done these things I wouldn't have been a "happy" customer, per se, as much as an unconscious, automatic one. There'd have been absolutely no reason for me to ever think about changing my routine.

I wonder what this approach might look like for a non-technology brand? Are there ways McDonald's could make the prospect of visiting another fast food joint a non-starter for its customers? What about a deodorant brand or retail chain? 

Finding those answers would require asking different questions about marketing, starting with this one: do we want our customers actively engaged in our branding, or should our brand be an active part of their lives? Maybe a smart brand strategy would be to help consumers be slothful?

The Ad Cannes Job

The advertising industry's annual celebration of its creativity ended last night with an Academy Awardsish soiree for best picture. 

It's easy to bash the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, what with its parties on the southern coast of France. While there were seminars for smart people to tell one another about how smart they are, and true networking requires a closer proximity than a Twitter list, you can imagine clients wondering about the expenses involved ("why are we paying for it?") and agency types wondering about the attendance list ("why didn't I get to go?"). Giving an award to Mark Zuckerberg for being "media person of the year" is about as cutting-edge as a plastic picnic knife, and the inside baseball of its myriad other honors makes Facebook's privacy settings seem clear. 

But I say flying to the beach in France to get wasted and look for your next job beats doing it in a Marriott conference room in Des Moines. So count me in for next year, even though the thing feels like a holdover from happier times that were more flush with money and confidence. My beef isn't with the party part. It's the substance thing.

An annual orgasm of self-love -- remember, the awards aren't voted by clients or consumers -- suggests to me that the advertising industry is still unable to talk to itself about what's happening.

Creative ain't what it used to be.  Actually, it never was.

For the entirety of human history, advertising was a vehicle to get people to buy things. Creativity was important as long as it was applied to this goal; even corporate ads from the late 1800s had a direct link to a sales strategy. The greats of the ad business -- folks like James Walter Thompson, Bruce Barton, Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, and David Ogilvy -- form an unbroken chain of ad pioneers who were focused first and foremost on sales. When they talked about brands it was as an outcome of consumer preference, not and independent attribute.

All that changed in the 1960s. A new generation of consumers got picky about the promises made by those brilliant salesmen at the same time that the media channels available to them started to multiply. Ads had to deliver something more and the answer was to make them funny, self-aware and, above all, entertaining. Creativity was disconnected from its subservience to something as pedestrian as selling, and elevated to an absolute, higher good.

The history of advertising was all but rewritten to highlight creativity, and advertising was sold to clients because it was intended to achieve awareness and positioning. Whatever else followed -- direct mail, promotions, taking orders, customer service -- was the fine print that originated in some department in the agency's basement. Many times those functions were not even considered a part of the creative strategy whatsoever.

The Cannes event, started in 1954, was consciously modeled on the International Film Festival that had been held there since the late 1940s. It was intended to celebrate the same sort of "technical crafts" for which The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded its Oscars, and to do so in much the same way.

The benefits of creative ads, such as any sales result, are so self-evident as to be a given. Great ads are creative ads.

No they're not. They never were.

Great advertising gets people to do things. Meaningful things. Great ads are trustworthy and credible. They enable brands to speak with authority. Great ads aren't memorable for what they say or how they look, but rather for what they do. Thinking fond thoughts isn't a self-evidently valuable given; it's a means to an end, and nothing more. Great ads speak truth, and that truth motivates people to buy things. 

You can see the creative bias in the Lions awarded for direct and integrated, arguably two of the areas in which a connection to sales should be obvious: the direct honors went to a New Zealand broadband campaign that got users to upload videos, while the integrated award went to Best Buy for its employee-led Twitter program. Results are measured in time spent online, tweets sent, and unpaid media coverage of the campaigns themselves. Actually, the Best Buy campaign had no results in its submission but cited similar squishy returns in a recent Fast Company article. (When I challenged a group of CMOs in January to dissect the impact of Best Buy outsourcing its brand to the crowd and what it might really mean for sales, they practically lynched me for not recognizing its inherent value as a generator of awareness).

It's like basing a song review on how loud it was played. I'm stunned by how we still apply such old thinking to new media.

While Cannes celebrated creativity last week, the advertising industry continued to burn. Corporate reputations are at all-time lows. Consumers trust ads about as much as they do politicians. So much of what passes for "engagement" in marketing communications is simply "entertainment" because companies have lost the willingness to tell consumers that they want them to buy stuff. Agencies don't help them by catering to this fear, nor do they do themselves justice by promoting creative as the lead track toward finding better solutions.

I love creativity. I create music and write fiction, and I've held creative posts in agencies. Many of my best friends are far more creative than I could ever be, and I love them for it, too. But I think today's industry woes trace back to the 1960s, and to the elevation of creative over the other components of marketing communications. 

We can always find new ways to waste time for consumers' or our clients, and each new year will give the world another set of wonderfully young, brilliant, and photogenic people who embrace that idea as if it's advertising's sacred calling. Getting consumers to buy things -- using all of the tools at our disposal -- is the real creative challenge, however, and the opportunity is for us to move beyond our easy definitions of "content" and back to defining brands and branding with purpose. We need to get back to what made advertising so amazingly and importantly cool.

Without such a renewed commitment, I fear that the annual lovefest in Cannes is a reminder that the industry is still kidding itself, and that it has much self-examination left to do. 

But please count me in for next year's bash. I have no issue with a great party.