Jonathan Salem Baskin's Dim Bulb

Look Out Any Window

Shakespeare was unconvinced that “seeing is believing,” as his plays and sonnets are filled with characters seeing things that aren’t real and missing things that are. Or maybe he knew that believers see as easily and convincingly as seers believe. Nothing is ever as it seemed in much of anything he wrote.

The disparity between what we can sense explicitly and what we know to be true has gone from literary device to everyday life as our technologies have increased our vision father than we could see unassisted. The combination of computer processing power and the ubiquity of the Internet mean our present includes seeing into the future -- weather forecasting is a miracle, if you think of it, and even if it’s imperfect, just as the way companies predict supply and demand needs is as brilliant as it’s boring -- just as it means seeing broader and more removed perspectives (trends, themes, movements in culture, economics, and politics).

It seems like less and less of what we know is based on what we see immediately and tangibly in front of us. Most of the information that matters to us is mediated in any number of ways, and then managed explicitly and implicitly by our foregone conclusions and beliefs.

In other words, we don’t need to see something to believe it, and we don’t need to believe things we see. Nowadays, it’s simply good enough to know what’s true irrespective of how we arrive at those conclusions.

It makes for some chronic cognitive dissonance in our lives, I think, and raises interesting challenges for communicators of any ilk, whether artistic, community, or commercial.

Have you noticed out of the ordinary high number of empty storefronts and homes with “for sale” signs  in front of them? Was last year’s weather far more severe than you ever expected, or this winter not only mild but strangely so? Is packaging on products getting flimsier and in-person service more gruff and unsatisfying? Are roads and bridges bumpier than in years past, and does there seem to be more errant bits of garbage laying about? Is the unpredictable complexity of life on our planet proof of randomness or design? If and when we encounter homeless people on the street, are they victims of forces beyond their control, or culpable for making our own lives more difficult?

The people who have clear answers to these questions usually come up with them before they ever bother looking out their own windows. For the rest of us, we’re left in a confused muddle in which the lack of clear evidence (to us) is proof of our own shortcomings of values or conviction (to them).

This sets up an interesting challenge for we marketers. Brands were always artificial constructs, and their promises rarely more than tangentially associated with real-world facts that could be verified with a look out (or in) a window. Cars, vacuum cleaners, and computers make their owners happy internally first and foremost, just as perfumes and clothing fashions convince those who wear them that they’re going to influence those who see them. As long as these fantasies were perpetuated, brands could sell themselves to customers and charge for the service.

The peer-to-peer (P2P) nature of the social web has challenged this equation. The reasoning is that consumers can now share their actual experiences - compare what’s going on outside one window with that of another -- and thereby hold businesses accountable for the promises they make. Consumers are getting smarter because of the information available to them, which makes them tougher to sell to and more demanding to keep loyal.

Really?

Is it possible that we believe things about science, religion, politics, economics, and culture with no accountability to demonstrable reality, but that we’ve swung in the opposite direction when it comes to making reasoned and fact-based decisions about what toothpaste to buy?

Our values are absolute when it comes to everything but shopping?

I want it to be true, actually, in that I think it would be far easier to sell things to people based on facts and actions instead of fantasies and promises. P2P connectivity should empower businesses to not just listen to imagined “voice of the consumer” but build actual insights into their statistical controls. It would give the world better and more needed products and services, too.

But most big brands are betting on the opposite, throwing many millions at creating social media and traditional marketing campaigns that consciously and aggressively serve creativity and entertainment in lieu of facts. P2P networks are platforms on which to share beliefs and feelings about the artifice of branding itself -- liking commercials and participating in online marketing campaigns -- and not of interest to brands in any other proactive ways (they’re places for complaints, but that’s a customer service function, and the occasional pressure campaign, which gets handled by the lawyers).

I wonder. It seems Shakespearean, in a tragic sort of way.

(Image Credit: Look out any window)

Bright Lights Project - Susan G. Komen

Late last week, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation announced that it would no longer fund Planned Parenthood, claiming that its policy had been changed to bar it from giving money to organizations that were “under investigation.” A public outcry erupted, accusing the Foundation that it had made a political decision -- the “investigation” in Congress was sponsored by a virulently conservative Republican, and one of its top exec’s opposition to Planned Parenthood was a matter of public record -- which prompted the Foundation’s CEO to go on TV and claim that the move had been based instead on the need to connect money to specific medical services (and that Planned Parenthood only referred women to said services).

I watched the CEO give an uncomfortable interview on MSNBC, repeating her statement as if it were a mantra that got stronger through repetition. The public outcry continued. Then, only a few days ago, the Foundation reversed its policy, somewhat, and the exec who’d been uninvolved in the original decision resigned, running straight to Fox News where she admitted she was instrumental in making it.

This is a sorry disaster on a number of levels, but as a communicator I can’t help but think that the wounds were most self-inflicted and unnecessary. Susan G. Komen can fund whatever it wants to fund, and no giver, large or small, owes Planned Parenthood anything.

The problem is that it seemed as though nobody was telling the truth.

There will be enough PR execs deconstructing the mess and how it could have played out. Susan G. Komen could have announced it was delisting Planned Parenthood because of its involvement in reproductive issues, citing the Foundation’s mandate to focus on breast cancer. It could have skipped making such a decision in the first place.

I’m interested in what it does next. The brand is tainted. What can it do to restore its reputation? Here are three thought-starter ideas:

• Clarify its agenda, and make it public -- Why wouldn’t its every guideline and vague intention for its activities be transparently available to everyone? Had people known where its Board was going with its thought processes back in November when the discussions about targeting Planned Parenthood got serious, maybe it would have gotten useful feedback that would have influenced subsequent actions. Or not. But the days of dropping bombshell announcements on an unsuspecting world are all but over. Even Apple can’t keep a secret completely. The Foundation’s conversations with its constituent groups is ongoing, so why not make it meaningfully so?

• Reallocate its giving -- Susan G. Komen is a pretty inefficient charitable organization, from the low level of its giving-to-expenses ratio (which some put at only $.17 of every $1 going to actually helping women) to the salaries it pays its staff, such as that recently-resigned exec who was reportedly earning something like $300,000 a year. Wouldn’t this be a perfect time for it to revisit its giving priorities in a truly meaningful way and come up with some big news about how its going to get more proactive and have a greater impact on women’s health? Further, if it really only wants to give money directly to recipients who provide services related to breast cancer, why not rejigger its grant-making thereupon? Susan G. Komen can ignore abortions and birth control if it wants to. It just needs to be clear as to why.

• Change the subject -- Like any cancer, breast cancer is a disease that has been fought primarily through prevention (like better lifestyles and healthcare overall) and early screening and treatment. Many experts say that we’re no closer to curing cancer than we are to figuring out how to live forever. So the very idea of a “race” to a cure is a wonderful metaphor and the runs themselves a great call to action, but ultimately (and sadly) the Foundation is going to have a fight to fight for many, many years to come. So how about coming up with a new, huge, really meaningful program to improve its results? If X number of women are diagnosed with breast cancer this year, how about targeting a Y reduction in 5 years, or a Z-month increase in survival? Make it snappy and memorable and involving, but get off the nonsense about abortion and birth control and refocus on the real purpose of the Foundation.

If you hadn’t already noticed, none of my ideas have anything to do with marketing or PR, per se. That’s because the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure’s problem boils down to real, meaningful actions. It can’t talk its way to respect, or restore its reputation with a catchy marketing campaign. Actions are where truth comes from and, as the past week’s events reveal, we’re inevitably led back to them in search of truth, whether we’re supporters or critics.

Susan G. Komen doesn’t have an image problem. It has a reality problem.

Why Super Bowl Ads Suck

I know, they’re funny, and ads with animals and/or kids can't lose. Last night was a ritual for some of us to judge and compare the commercials during a football game that we otherwise wouldn’t have watched. We’re going to spend a few days enduring incessant “best of” lists, marketers will perform some complex gymnastics to explain why the spots are brilliant business strategy, and ad agencies will refer back to all this buzz when it’s time to revive their pitches to sell Super Bowl spots to their clients next year.

But the ads suck, and here’s why:

• Advertising is in decline. Consumers have lost their faith and reliance on ads.

• Instead, they’ve adopted social media tools to research and make many purchasing decisions.

• This shift is as much a result of advertising’s failures as social media’s benefits (there is ample evidence that it’s a woefully imperfect and incomplete substitute).

• The Super Bowl encourages ads that are silly, entertaining, and have no discernible link to purchase decisions.

• Not only do these ads reaffirm the reasons people ultimately hate advertising, but also spam social media platforms with the same effect. So we are entertained, but we really don’t care.

Celebrating Super Bowl ads is kind of like praising restaurants for their atmosphere and decor while ignoring the fact that their kitchens are empty...or the food sucks. Super Bowl ads are empty communication calories. And that goes for the overtly silly ones (most of them) and the purposefully serious ones (like Chryslter's "Halftime in America," which was a beautifully produced 2-minute paen that was as inspiring and commercially-inert as fist-pumping to "Born in the USA").

I can’t begin to fathom why advertisers and their agencies so willingly perpetuate this annual industry-sized act of self-immolation. It guess it could be used for making big announcements to a large audience -- like a virtual trade show floor, only for any product or service that had huge news to share -- but apparently the strategy is to create brilliant ways to pleasantly waste everyone’s time while presuming to make lots of outdated branding associations and whatnot that consumers have already rejected. Or not even trying.

I think it’s a pleasant distraction from an otherwise ugly situation for brand marketing. Many big ad agencies started off 2012 with significant staff layoffs. Big brands have similarly slashed marketing people (Microsoft and P&G) and ad spending (Unilever). Nobody has figured out the math on what works (or why). It’s reasonably certain that the Super Bowl hoopla isn’t any help, though.

So here are my picks for the commercials that sucked the most, and why (in no particular order since they’re all bad):

Priceline -- The Shatner commercials have been wonderfully successful for over a decade because the ads have been gloriously simple and effective: Priceline negotiates the travel deals its customers request, and Shatner pretty much repeated this mantra in a variety of ways. What sucks now is that the company is abandoning its only product difference and going to a fixed-price offering a la Travelocity and all of its competitors. The Super Bowl spot has Shatner plunging to his death in a metaphoric reference to this change in policy, and the company has encouraged us to focus on his “retirement” as simply a marketing ploy (will he rise from the dead like J. R. Ewing?). It’s a willful distraction from the underlying change in company practices which utterly blows up its brand and reputation. Priceline chose to tease and play with its audience instead of use the opportunity to tell it the truth (creatively and inspiringly, of course).

Coke -- I remember when Coca-Cola signed the deal with Creative Artists in Hollywood in the early 1990s, and how asking non-advertising experts to create advertising was heralded as a brilliant idea. The polar bears cavorting with bottles of Coke were one of the early results of that partnership. They were dumb then and they’re dumb now. Coke has been often brilliant with advertising that said “Drink Coke” (sometimes literally) and helping consumers understand that its ubiquitous availability made it an inescapable standard. The polar bears do nothing of the sort and, worse, the CGI isn’t even cuddly.

VW -- I thought last year’s kid dressed up as Darth Vader was so wonderful, even though making the connection to VW for any other reason than it was smart enough to hire a smart agency to come up with the spot. This one requires extraordinary feats of consumer attention, patience, and creativity in order to qualify as an ad, really: So the dog goes on a diet and works out so he can chase a VW bug, and then we're transported to the bar in Star Wars so aliens can rate the commercial against last year's spot. All of which should remind us of...what...how yes, how none of it has anything to do with VW? Also, thisad referencing another ad business must violate some basic rule of advertising (remember Microsoft saying nothing about its own products while its “I’m a PC” campaign?).

Cars.com -- Sorry, this one was just really bad. First, the alien head popping up behind the guy is too “M.I.B” and it’s kinda uncomfortably freaky. Second, the singing is irritating, not funny, and it requires far too much deconstruction by the viewer (he’s singing because he’s happy he has information he gathered on cars.com, I gather). Third, the spot gives you no understanding of how, why, or what cars.com actually gave that consumer, other than grafting a singing alien head onto his back.

CareerBulder -- The chimp thing never worked for me because it raises such a basic conundrum: If arguably every person who works in an office thinks at least one or some of his or her associates are as irritating as monkeys, then isn’t every office filled with monkeys? If CareerBuilder wants to tell us that there’s no escape, or that in the end we’re all monkeys, then this is a smart ad. It has also generated protests from animal rights groups for making monkeys seem to friendly and happy when they’re an endangered species (or something like that). Controversy is an old standard in the marketing game, and if generating it with this spot was purposeful, it’s doubly stupid.

GoDaddy -- OK, this stuff makes Cars.com seem like Masterpiece Theatre. There’s nothing I can say other than that there’s something tragically wrong with a company that spends so much money to tell so many people that it has horrible judgment.

Acura -- When this spot started I was scared it was going to be like those terrible spots for Microsoft in which Jerry Seinfeld slummed with Bill Gates in a discount shoe store. This one got pretty funny but it was in the same vein...all about Jerry and not at all about the product. The very idea that Mr. Famous Guy would go to any lengths to bribe Joe Nobody is a reach, at best. Also, it used to be the Detroit Big Three who so expertly wasted marketing money to motivate consumers to not buy their cars (to the tune of $6 billion spent in one of the years leading up to the recent economic meltdown). Those brands are actually coming out with much better advertising these days (I love what’s coming out of Ford), so maybe the ad agencies turned to the Japanese companies to steal their money instead? Did you catch the stuff from Toyota? Equally pointless, but very creatively so.

Honda -- This was perhaps my favorite bad spot, only because I loved Ferris Bueller's Day Off and I’m impressed by how youthful Matthew Broderick has stayed. But as advertising it illustrates only how far afield a brand can go to say nothing about itself. The spot has nothing to do with Honda and everything to do with references to an old movie, which I’m sure the strategists reasoned would appeal to the consumer demographic for the van (it’s a van they’re selling, right?). But ads are supposed to convey information that said consumers can use -- David Ogilvy wrote that a great ad was one that didn’t draw attention to itself, but instead imparted understanding and inspiration about a product or service). This ad is all about this ad. Any brand could have funded it.

In fact, the Honda spot has my vote for the most-talked about commercial (it was already the most-watched ad on YouTube a few days ago), and then the most-forgotten brand sponsor.

There were lots of other bad spots -- but again, I was entertained by a few, like the little kid taking a pee in the pool -- but they all sucked for one or more of the reasons I’ve already mentioned.

It makes me sad, really. So much money, time, and creativity wasted on further ruining the reputation and future of advertising as a communications approach. So as you catch one more “best of” list or laugh with a friend about one of the spots, ask yourself if any of it will matter at all to your next purchase decision.

Ads are supposed to sell, and all the Super Bowl ads did was sell the medium down the river.

They sucked.

(Image credit: Ferris Redux)

Bright Lights Project -- Ad Agencies

The fallout of digital technology and its social applications continues to wash across the communications industry, with many leading advertising agencies starting 2012 with staff reductions while big-name brands like Microsoft and P&G fire hundreds of their marketers.

Beneath all of the blather issued in various public statements about “being leaner” and “recognizing the shift to new technologies” is an uglier reality: these businesses are undergoing structural change that is nowhere near complete, and it’s change that few of them understand because they’ve been blinded by their hopes and beliefs about what should be happening. This destructive dichotomy is nowhere more apparent than at the big advertising agencies (at least it is to me).

In a sentence, social marketing can’t and never will replace advertising.

Most definitions of the word “advertising” describe it as efforts made to inform or persuade action by a group or audience. That means that any communications activity for which a company pays money could be considered advertising. Such a definition  should include expenditures on social media. New media are tools that require somewhat different uses, but used for the same purpose and targeted on the same goal as old media. Advertising by another name.

Only most ad agencies have swallowed whole the premise that social media aren't commercial speech whatsoever, but rather a new mode of communication that requires substance that doesn’t actively or overtly sell and new measures of how not selling ultimately contributes to selling. Actually, they’ve willingly sold this idea to clients who bought the same evangelism from the digerati.

Social media are advertising...it’s just that we’re starting to see the inescapable proof that it’s mostly bad and ineffective advertising that makes it harder to pay the bills even as it thrills its proponents.

We’ll see this disconnect become evermore apparent on Sunday’s Super Bowl, as brands and their agency enablers will waste many millions to demonstrate that silly and useless advertising doesn’t get any smarter or useful when its repurposed onto social media platforms. It’s just more expansively bad.

While the folks responsible for this nonsense will ardently make the case that views and clicks are the same thing as belief and action, expect more staff firings.

Of course, the transformational impact of digital tech is very real, only it has little to do with marketers hatching make-believe theories about branding and everything to do with true peer-to-peer (“P2P”) connectivity. P2P is changing the way public institutions are structure and function, as well as doing the same to corporations, where technology has been changing activities less visible than marketing for many years (supply chain, resource management). The social web is truly reshaping our economy and our world, but the branding campaigns coming from advertising agencies have little to nothing to do with it.

They just show that advertising agencies aren’t and won’t be immune to the transformation that is overwhelming their clients. Maybe it’s time to stop promoting the easy answers of social media and start acknowledging the new opportunities such change offers for them to make old-fashioned profits. Here are three thought-starters on how:

• Build real communities -- The idea that individuals rely on one another for everything from recommendations on purchases to experiences of safety and love is as old as civilization itself, yet online marketers pretend that they came up with the idea only a few years ago. That’s why most online communities they create are low-involvement and transient, and why efforts to up the time people spend with them are the least effective metric of success. Real communities are born to accomplish real things, not “engage with brands,” which presents immense opportunities for brands to re-imagine how they assemble and approach their lists of customers (or would-be customers). It also suggests that agencies might want to consider developing the capacity to identify and sustain communities. Is is too far-fetched to imagine ad agencies as content providers and community managers who offer those benefits to their clients?

• Outsource skills -- The opportunities for finding and benefiting from skills that may not reside within the walls of a company building are huge. Applying the right skills to the right tasks instead of trying to use general skills on all tasks makes economic and, now thanks to digital technology, management sense. Only most agencies are configured to do things they way they want to...proverbial round holes into which the square pegs of every client need must fit. Many of their clients have been reconfiguring toward an outsourced resources model for years, and learning that the key to doing so is to have crystal clear definitions of purpose and approach. So they can’t embrace outsourcing skills until they come to terms with what they’d want to accomplish (see the front of this essay). It’s not a reach to imagine ad agencies as keepers of goals and processes, along with communities, that allow them to custom configure solutions for every client. As the rest of the corporate world has already learned, you never have to fire employees if you never have to hire them. The work might be better, too.

• Tell clients the truth -- Speaking of being keepers of things, this is the hardest but perhaps the most lucrative opportunity for ad agencies. Imagine if agencies were arbiters of truth and not purveyors of entertainment or other time-wasters. They could act as true translators of business strategy and marketing expectations, instead of feeling forced to play to client weaknesses and broker their dreams. So less creative invention and more honest I/O, whether realized through ideas, tech, or people. Agencies could compete (or be ranked by) how successfully they performed this function...measured by size and quality of customer communities, sustainability of relationships over time and, of course, cost and revenue involved in selling to them. It would require that agencies start telling the truth about how to get there, though. Social media aren't advertising, at least not as currently practiced. P2P is something much, much more.

I don’t know if any of my ideas would work, but I’m certain that the current approach isn’t working. It might make sense to try to right the ships before the next round of agency and/or client bloodletting.

What do you think?

(Image credit: Agencies, are you losing?)

Turning Point

At the turn of the last century, AOL was the household name when it came to Internet access (not to mention a reliable source for spam CDs in everyone’s snailmailboxes). It was a portal...no, the portal to Internet experience through which people passed in order to access the content there.

In early 2001 AOL took over Time Warner in hopes of owning all of that content people were accessing. The transaction would create the 4th or 5th richest company in the world (with a market cap of $350 billion) through the second-largest such transaction ever. “The deal [will] validate the Internet’s role as the leader in the new world economy, while redefining what the next generation of digital-based leaders will look like,” crooned CNNMoney.

Only the Internet bubble had already popped. Though the NASDAQ stock index had doubled in value between 1999 and 2000, it had already lost 10% of its value three months later. Nearly 400 publicly traded Internet companies represented about 8% of the entire value of US stocks, yet few of them ever had a chance of becoming profitable.  They started folding later that year and, once the AOL/Time Warner takeover was completed, the collapses started at the big companies: WorldCom, Global Crossing, JDS Uniphase, Covad and NorthPoint went belly-up, as had and would many more wanna-bes, like Pets.com, Boo.com, and InsertStupidVCBurningIdeaHere.com. The Industry Standard magazine, which tracked and promoted the dot-com phenomenon and sold more advertising pages than any magazine in America in 2000 was bankrupt by August, 2001.

Companies that survived, like Amazon and eBay, did so because they relied on proven and explicable business truisms, and not on the glib alchemy of content and connectivity that made it so easy to believe in the dot-com bubble and its progeny. Time Warner eventually spit out AOL in 2009 for chump change, having proven its old-fashioned dinosaur media properties, though battered, had more real value than the magic imagined by AOL’s financiers.

Fast-forward to Next Week, 2012, and Facebook’s possible IPO. While the numbers aren’t anywhere near as immense -- it could raise $10 billion with a valuation of something north of $75 billion -- it’s still likely to be far more than what Google got only a handful of years ago ($1.9 billion for a valuation of $23). And there are also storm clouds on the horizon, both for Facebook (a recent survey found that only 1% of the highly-touted “fans” of brands actually do anything) and the latest wave of Internet darlings as a group (Groupon is trading below its IPO price, even though it was similarly touted to “own” the Internet couponing/crowdsourcing phenomenon, and LinkedIn stock has lost half its value in less than a year).

There’s no problem if you believe what’s being said about the Facebook deal’s underwriters. They’re supposedly forsaking their normal fees just to have a hand in the deal, and it’s all but certain that they’ll find ready investors if and when the offering occurs. “The underwriters will have to do very little convincing to investors,” said one business professor, quoted by Reuters.

But it’s quite possible that the social bubble is already leaking the way the dot-com bubble was losing gas when AOL acquired Time Warner.

Both the perpetual motion mechanism of social engagement and the specific claims to hosting it are looking suspect. Visitors aren’t the same as users, who aren’t the same as paying customers (or customers paying attention). The made-up calculators of social value are not looking so smart or solid when contrasted with the more reliable measures of business behavior valued with dollar signs. Big brand names that have wholly embraced social marketing have failed to produce much by it (Kodak was an early adopter and was first to the bankruptcy line, and Pepsi's dabble in lieu of Super Bowl advertising wasn't enough to keep it away from this year's broadcast). There’s no good correlation between business success and doing anything via online social networks, at least not any successes that can’t be explained by other means.

It sure can help, but skipping it -- the way social marketing is currently practiced -- isn’t sure to hurt. So Facebook is a nice-to-have, until it gets replaced by another service or tool (or culture simply passes by its full-disclosure approach to human relations). It might take many years or just a few, but continued technological evolution, and Facebook’s (or any businesses’) ability to stay ahead of it is certainly up for debate.

Maybe we’ll look back at the IPO as the turning point? By then we’ll be into the next bubble, though. So perhaps the short-term strategy is to buy-in and then get out ASAP? Watch what the underwriters do...

(Image credit: Money to be made)

Bright Lights Project -- Aon

Aon, a large insurance broker headquartered about 20 minutes from my house in the suburbs north of Chicago, announced earlier this month that it is moving its corporate headquarters to London. Company execs were quoted saying that the move was intended to “reinforce the global connectivity of the firm” by moving its leadership closer to the emerging markets it serves and London insurance hub with which it works.

Of course, it’s a lie, only in the spirit of many corporate announcements: It’s plausibly true, and was probably relevant at some stage in the decision-making process (versus contending with a relocation to, say, the top of a mountain in Tibet, which would make conducting business more difficult).

The UK government recently liberalized its tax law -- something called the “controlled foreign companies” taxation regime -- that lets companies based in London drastically lower tax payments on foreign profits. If Aon is headquartered there, its sales in the US as well as in those emerging markets will be considered foreign income.

So it’s a scheme for the company to keep more of the money it earns. The Chicago Tribune reports that relocating execs are getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to ease their transition to life in London (move allowances, help with rental or mortgage payments, transportation assistance, etc.). There must be a whole lot of tax savings pegged to stay in Aon’s bank accounts.

Wouldn’t it be great if it simply told everyone the truth?

The closest CEO Greg Case to come to admitting it was to say that “...the fundamental driver behind this decision was strategic.” What does that mean? It means he had a compelling financial reason to choose London over Chicago, but doesn’t have the respect for his customers or critics to say so. Boeing did something similar when it relocated to Chicago, claiming it was to build a larger business (whatever that means) instead of admitting it was escaping its unions, and benefitting from huge tax breaks.

Issuing half-truths or overt lies seems so needless when it comes to corporate relocations, especially since the financial deals underlying them are usually knowable from regulatory filings or city development reports. If the entities moving make good to their abandoned staff, the whole shebang is sad for the region losing the jobs but balanced by the place that’s getting them. Business involves making tough decisions (companies choose, ignore, and fire vendors and suppliers of every stripe every day). Relocating offices or factories is one of them. We all get it.

So why lie? I think it makes the execs feel better, somewhat, as they repeat the public rationale enough perhaps to believe it. It also fits in with standard marketing and branding canon: Say it and it will be so. Touting some minor benefit of moving as the major benefit is not too far removed from promoting brand attributes that are ephemeral, imagined outright, or also simply not true. Marketers do it all the time.

And then they wonder why consumers don’t believe much of anything marketers say to them.

If Aon followed the bad advice of lying about its corporate move when it didn’t have to, I’ve got to wonder what else it fibs about. How many of the press releases it issued over the past month (or years) contained half-truths or purposefully obfuscated the truth? How many other companies are similarly afflicted? Could there be a disbelief discount that is factored into its stock price, or a fibbing factor that potential clients or partners charge the company when they analyze Aon’s pitches or promises? I bet there is.

I don’t have three bullet points ideas about what Aon could do to remedy this situation, other than tell the truth. Not just this time, but all the time.

Yuck

Sam Adams is crowdsourcing a limited edition beer. It’s bad marketing and even dumber business strategy.

It evidences standard practice for social promotions these days, though, so I’m sure the company will get industry praise for it. It's based on two of the core tenets of social marketing, in that 1) digital media have empowered consumers to know and do pretty much everything, and 2) consumers want to have ongoing conversations with brands.

Both premises are false, and the Sam Adams beer promo is a good example of why.

First, most people will never know most things let alone be expert at more than a few things about anything in particular. Access to the world wide web is immensely empowering and informative but I think we marketers have grossly overstated the qualities of knowledge or skill that might come with that access. Patients can certainly research medical information but they can’t necessarily (or reliably) vet the useful from the inane, and their conclusions shouldn’t replace those of a doctors. Same goes for the law or accounting, not to mention designing cars or rocket ships. Or beer.

There might be one out of a hundred (or fewer) Sam Adams customers who know enough about beer to actually propose its ingredients, but the overwhelmingly vast number of consumers are expert only in drinking it.

So the company will end up with a good beer that involved a minuscule number of its customers, at best, or an undrinkable swill, at worst and most likely.

This crowdsourcing thing is also bad news for the brand overall. Isn’t Sam Adams supposed to know how to make beer? Strip away all of the emotional and other associative benefits that brand experts see the company attaching to its brand and aren’t you left with, well, ingredients, brewing expertise, and distribution? Forget what the brand stands for and consider what it stands upon.

The company’s marketers are happy to throw away this once rock-solid platform in exchange for the glib, throw-away benefits of telling the world that a collection of strangers can do it as well or better.

I just don’t get it.

Well, I do get it when I consider the bill of goods that brands have been sold when it comes to social engagement: The pitch is that consumers want to talk to brands (and tell them what to do, more than occasionally), so brands have to come up with ongoing ways to do so. Brands have voices that are now translatable into actual images and words positioned on social technology platforms as prompts or responses to the images and words posted by consumers. Conversations are the replacement for one-way advertising and other marketing tools that used to tell consumers things...that they then went about talking and having conversations about thereafter (in-person, on the phone, and any other way people used to converse before Facebook and Twitter claimed to own the idea).

By focusing on the mechanism of conversation and not its substance, brands are missing the real truth and power of peer-to-peer technology.

Since consumers always had conversations -- and always used them as the basis for gaining, vetting, and then making their purchase decisions -- the availability of real-time and ubiquitous information is a change, for sure, but it doesn’t change the nature of conversation itself. People talk to other people. Always did, always will.. So when brands come up with ways to pretend that brands can talk too, like just other consumers with particular opinions or points of view, they’re actually they’re actually choosing to provide less meaningful content into those conversations.

You see, people talk about brands, not with them.

So every tidbit of nonsense the social media marketers create to occupy space in conversations fills a space that could have been filled by something useful, meaningful, relevant, or -- gasp -- related to making a sale. When Sam Adams chooses to talk to consumers as if it were just another participant in the conversation, it loses the opportunity to insert something into the conversation that might actually benefit the participants.

Brands don’t have voices as much as consumer voice their feelings and opinions about brands.

Here’s a simple test to consider if you don’t agree: imagine if Sam Adams didn’t conduct its beer-making social campaign. Would anybody miss it? I hate to get all utilitarian on you but if brands can’t think of something meaningful to say to consumers, why should they say anything at all?

Sam Adams should stick to expertly making great brews that it sells to consumers expertly. As for this campaign and the beer it’ll create, all I can say is:

Yuck.

(Image credit: the patriotic brewer)

Bright Lights Project - Standard & Poor's Rating Services

Standard & Poor’s is one of three major American rating agencies (Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investor Services are the others). They’re in the business of assessing risk of various financial instruments and the reliability of the companies and governments that issue or trade them, and their ratings affect both investor interest and the prices paid for said financial paper.

Last week S&P lowered the rating of France and Austria by a notch, just like it did to the US last year. It reduced the ratings of seven other European countries by two ticks.

I can’t believe the world didn’t laugh out loud.

To say that the ratings these agencies produce are vague, biased, and regularly incorrect business would be an understatement. Remember, these are the folks who were as surprised as the rest of us by the mortgage meltdown. They rely on the companies they monitor for their funding, which would be at least a slight hint of conflict of interest in any other industry. The ratings schemes themselves are so complicated and nuanced that they make the government’s Threat Level rankings a paragon of clarity, which allows them to claim retroactively that they noted things, they sort of, kind of.

S&P and their ilk are foxes guarding the hen house, at best, and inmates running the asylum more like it. The only reason anybody gives them any credence is that they assume everybody else does. It’s a giant house of cards. OK, enough of the cliches. You get my point.

The ratings moves last week tell us nothing new or important, but rather reflect the fact that those European countries have been making bad governance decisions for, oh, more than a decade. It’s like S&P announced that the US just landed astronauts on the Moon.

Ratings agencies are an artifact of a distant past when we gave authority to opaque institutions and couldn’t see or track what they did with our trust. Only now we can see...all too clearly. In my inexpert opinion the days of S&P and the others are numbered. Disagree? Who’d yourather trust: A ratings agency in bed with the company it rates via secret processes and incomprehensible code words, or a handful of inspired twentysomethings armed with an Internet connection and the mandate to discover wrongdoing or patterns of concern?

S&P needs to discover new sources of credibility that warrant our trust, and it’s not impossible to do. Here are three thought-starters:

• Become Truly Neutral -- It will never be credible for ratings agencies to rate companies that in any way contribute to them financially, even indirectly. Full stop. Maybe they each contribute funds to create an endowment that is henceforth independent of their slightest influence? I know there are probably a zillion arguments why financial institutions would never do it, but that should be a not-so subtle hint that it’s EXACTLY why they need to do something like it. I’m sure there are other funding models that would get to the same outcome.

• Simplfy The Metrics -- I’m sorry, but I can’t fathom the difference between a rating of “AAA” and “AAA-,” and I’d bet good money that nobody else can, either. It’s just that a routine has built up around such nonsense so there’s a dollar figure attached to each incremental change. But that is derivative measure; it doesn’t tell us anything substantive or original about the underlying financial tool. Why not figure out how to risk being somewhat or wholly right or wrong on analyses sometimes instead of being always right and wrong at the same time?

• Embrace Transparency -- Ultimately it’s not the ratings themselves that possess any authority or credibility but the way the agencies get to them. So why not figure out how to involve as many inputs into the methodologies as possible -- from the specifically qualified, like expert analyses, to the crowdsourced trolling that the rest of us do online -- and then publish it? The proprietary value would be in S&P’s ability to pull it off, not dream up the list.

I am regularly dumbfounded that the financial services industry keeps getting away with propagating nonsense to the world and the world pretty much takes it at face value. The problem is that much of it, and these ratings in particular, possess no real value at all. S&P could change the game if it wanted, but I guess it sees no reason to. Maybe it has assessed its own business using the same brilliant tools is used to discover that those European countries weren’t worth what they claimed.

Stay tuned. I’d expect the ratings agencies to announce shortly that the stock market crashed in 2000.

Invent New Sports

There’s been little to no snow this winter, which has been a gift to those of us who commute in America’s northernly cities but an absolute existential disaster for ski resorts. You just can’t make enough snow (or keep making it fast enough) to come anywhere close to providing the sort of skiing experiences that most skiers expect. I can slide down ice in my driveway with no pricey lift ticket required.

This season could be a fluke, as there’ve been rotten snowfall tallies in years past, but what if it’s the shape of things to come? While folks continue to happily declare whether or not they believe in global climate change, the global climate seems to be changing: chunks of the polar ice cap are falling off and melting; droughts are plaguing normally less dry regions; severe weather seems to be getting more severe and frequent; species of insects and birds are either thriving or dying out thanks to changed temperature norms measured by only a few degrees.

So what if the snow isn’t going to be all that great at our nation’s ski slopes next year, or the year thereafter? Even if it does return doesn’t this year’s miasma reveal a core weakness in the ski resort business model, and suggest that doing something about it might make sense? I think so. I think it’s time to do some brand extending.

If you take snow out of the equation, it turns out that ski resorts are left with quite a lot of really great assets, from beautiful scenery to usable accommodations. So why not get to work right now on things like:

• Invent new sports -- Downhill skiing didn’t emerge naturally from the mountain tops. Somebody looked at snowy inclines and had to invent it, and then lots of people adapted and improved it. Why not come up with new activities that better suit today’s circumstances? My one idea is something that unites zip lines and rider choice, so you have to make split-second decisions at Y junctures as you careen down the mountainside. I know there are lots better ideas.

• Create facilitated experiences -- Resorts are great places for families and groups to congregate and do things...many different things...so why couldn’t the resorts create specific facilitated experiences, like art weekends or science fiction adventures? Sundance used to do this with art and theatre programs during the summer, and it was hugely fun. Think Disney activity cruise only in the mountains. And better.

• Host UGVs (“User-Generated Vacations”) -- Maybe the absolute opposite of facilitated vacations would work, in that resorts could offer potential guests a laundry list of activities (from outdoor active to indoor relaxation, and from groups to solitary exploration) and then craft custom user-generated vacations. They could differentiate themselves by level of expertise and attention to detail in crafting such activities.

Could Whistler be the place for science adventures? Jackson Hole the destination for families interested in nature? What about swinging singles? I dunno.

There are probably a lot more and better ideas to contemplate, and perhaps the resorts are already doing so. It’s just that sitting on your hands and waiting for it to snow isn’t a business strategy. I’m surprised we haven’t already heard of such invention from them.

(Image credit: from the Heyday)

Bright Lights Project - The Consumer Electronics Show

The 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show ("CES") started two days ago in Las Vegas. Close to 150,000 people are milling around almost 2 million square feet of exhibition space filled with thousands of displays. Every device imaginable is playing, broadcasting, or otherwise beeping. Mainstream media types are trying to figure out what it all means. Bloggers have been flown there and often hired by companies so they can spontaneously tell the mainstream folks what’s what.

If you ever wondered what a doomed brontosaurus looked like as it struggled for its life in a tar pit that would eventually consume it, you need look no further than CES.

It could take many years and occur unevenly, with bad years followed by marginally good ones. But the only real reason CES has survived this long has less to do with its own success and more to do with the failure of its competition. There used to be other national shows (like COMDEX), many regional, and endless local trade events at which makers of stuff -- in this case, electronics, but also in most other industries in which stuff is manufactured -- used to get together with potential distributors and sellers to promote their wares. In a world of snail mail and expensive airfares, it made sense to bring everyone together now and then to disseminate information and cut deals.

Those days are long gone, as are those other electronics trade shows that used to vie for attention. CES is simply the last party left standing (which is similar to Best Buy’s strategy on the retailing side).

No company has to be at the show, and its attendance numbers hide the fact that major industry movers (like Apple) don’t show there. Microsoft has announced it is pulling out after this year. The very idea that any brand should structure and time its new product announcements to gibe with the event schedule is not only broken but ineffective; in an era when we can tell anybody anything anytime, CES is a stupid anachronism. I’ve spoken privately to huge, global brands that hate having to reveal products in January that won’t ship until the spring or later.

The propaganda value of CES is also faulty, at best. Not only do a number of promised  ‘big’ products announced there go on to utter failure in the marketplace, but the event always throws out some wanna-be fantasy of what electronics retailing should be, in the hopes that the consuming public will buy it. New music playing configurations, 3D TV, and the annual “networked home” blather get presented as somehow insightful when they’re really overtly presumptive sales pitches (if I hear about tablet computers one more time, I think I'm going to puke). The idea that any industry can get together to tell us what we should care about (and spend our money on) are long gone.

Its organizers must know that the very model of hosting such a gig is no longer valid. But it doesn’t have to be doomed. The key is transforming it into a truly two-way conversation. Here are three thought-starter ideas:

• A giant new product dev focus group -- Maybe people attend the event to participate in real studies, interviews, or other exchanges about what they expect or want in devices and performance? CES could figure out the mechanics for making these attendees available to manufacturers or other sell-side entities. This could also lay the foundation for conversations that extended far prior and post-event, but otherwise transforming CES into the event at which the world tells the consumer electronics industry what it wants, and not the place at which the industry tells the world what it should do.

• A networking event, only for real -- Anybody who owns more than one electronics device knows that the 800 lb. gorilla in the room is connectivity followed closely by service. More and more devices have multiple parents (my iPhone has at least three players behind it, between Apple, AT&T, and GoDaddy, and that’s not counting a single app). Yet few of the exhibitors at CES have done much to figure out how their offerings fit in with one another; they’ve all bought shared space at an event in which they make separate presentations. Why couldn’t CES take responsibility for sussing out how things work together and build that into the messaging?

• Certify products and attendees -- The ugly underside of the consumer electronics industry is that people really don’t need most of the stuff, especially the regular upgrades and many of the peripherals and add-ons that crowd the exhibition halls at CES. There’s an even larger universe of people who play a role in the industry, from sales folks and new product developers, to one-timer entrepreneurs and all those guys from Asia who get stuffed into the “international” hall and get deprived of oxygen. What if CES took responsibility for analyzing and somehow publicly ranking both the people and the stuff they make or touch. Give everyone and everything a record that is searchable and reliable. Build an open community, based on facts, to which everyone would want to belong and use.

I really do see a chance for the consumer electronics industry to be radically engaging and transparent. CES could have a future, but it would look dramatically different than the show presently underway in Vegas. My gut tells me, unfortunately, that they’ll stick with what they know best for a long as the dinosaur can keep its head above the tar.

CES is an 1950‘s era trade show. It’s 2012, and people are there now to tell one another what they’re supposed to do, and the media will hype whatever they’re told to hype.

And then the rest of us will go out and buy whatever Apple introduces next.

What do you think?

(Image credit: when trade shows meant something)