This Blog Sits at the

Straight out of Aristotle

Metro North is not the same as True North, or even Magnetic North. Metro North veers quite distinctly to the east and it is marked by a railroad track that runs from NYC to New Haven and beyond.

There are stations and the stations have ads and that ads are, well, a little amateurish and darn good fun for this anthropologist and all the other marketing types who use this track to get to and from Madison Ave. Indeed, Metro North is to marketing what Australia is to evolution: the place were weird stuff happens...and that's ok. 

Take the ad I have photographed here.  Accountant as super hero.  Really?  I mean, really?  If there is a creature in the universe less like a super hero, it's an accountant.  Or so the stereotypes tell us.  Totally unfair, of course. And for all we know some accountants live lives of real adventure. Enron accountants, do you think?

So it's wrong to generalize this way, but it is also probably wrong to advertise...this way.  Part of the problem is that this ad is trying too hard. A good ad is an act of metaphor. It transfer meaning from a world we know to a world we don't.  In this case, it invites us to transfer what we know about superheroes to what we know about accountants.  (This is straight out of Aristotle.)  But some acts of transfer are more possible than others.

But perhaps I am missing the "premise."  In the strange world that is Metro North, a new physics may apply.  In this world, superheros are just little less heroic.  Accountants a lot more grand. And the two are close enough, transfer is possible. 

I am on the West coast and running out of time.  So this investigation of the cultural properties of alternate realities are going to have to wait for another occasion.

Celebrity gridlock

"The Magic of Macy's" features celebrities decorating for the holidays.  We see Usher, Jessica Simpson, Donald Trump, Martha Stewart, P Diddy, Tommy Hilfiger, Kenneth Cole, and Russell Simmons (pictured).

This is the "stack and rack 'em" approach to celebrity endorsement.  If one star is good, eight is better.  It gives coverage.  Chances are, someone in this gang of eight will speak to the consumer.

So it's good for Macy's, perhaps.  What about the celebrities?  What does it mean for Usher to be seen with Hilfiger?  What about Donald Trump and P Diddy? 

Without research, we can't know for certain.  On balance, it's probably good for Martha Stewart.  It takes her out of that sui generis bubble into the world.  On balance, it's bad for Kenneth Cole.  Here's a guy who helped pioneer social marketing and now he shares the screen with that monster of self-regard, Donald Trump. 

The agency must answer for giving us Jessica Simpson as an airhead. Could they not have cast her against type?  The "ditzy blonde" used to charm us.  Now she is an embarrassment, an actual "retard."  Jessica Simpson may wish to dismantle the women's movement.  Macy's shouldn't help. 

And why does Tommy Hilfiger say "Santa, you're really working that red velvet thing."  I mean, really.  It sounds like he's flirting with Santa.  This just seems wrong.  Surely what happens at Macy's stays at Macy's. 

On balance, it feels like everyone looses.  Even Macy's.  It is interesting to "crash" stars together in this way.  This sort of thing can be good for a brand.  But these celebrities in this treatment end up something less than the sum of their parts.  It's as if we have stumbled into a dystopia where stars gather for a close up only to discover that they must share the camera with some one else. 

References

See the ad for Macy's on YouTube here. 

Sir John Boots It Badly

There is a video of Sir John Hegarty on line that shows the master commit himself to misapprehensions so unpardonable that it is clear he should be relieved of his knighthood and sent to the tower for an indeterminate period of time and at least till he comes to his senses.

Sir John on good creative, marketing and taste.  Click here.

Sir John tells us that, finally, creative decisions come down to taste.  Do we like the  creative in question, or do we not? Advertising, he says, is about creating desire.  We must make people want the product.  In the old days, we did this be insisting on a point of difference, a special ingredient.  Now, it's the way we communicate with the consumer.  And that's about taste.  We are increasingly living in a fashion world.  We are dominated by it.  Taste is important and you can't teach it. 

There are several things wrong with this argument, but I want to point out the most obvious: that one of the most powerful people in the world of British advertising has just declared intellectual bankruptcy. 

All the world is persuaded that there is something wrong with advertising.  The New Media people claim that TV ads are dead.  Clients have always nurtured their suspicions and now they are in full out revolt.  The academics cannot figure out what makes this bumble bee capable of flight.  The "critical" theories have no such difficulty, and routinely find advertising to be the chief culprit in the creation of false consciousness, consumer manipulation and every ill that ails us.  The consumer is happily TIVOing ads out of existence.  The agency world is in disarray.  The world of marketing is the throes of crisis.

This might have been the moment from something oracular.  As one of the senior members of the profession, Sir John might have stepped forward and poured oil upon the water.  He might have recited verities to reassure us.  Or he might have broken new ground and issued a new model for understanding what advertising is. 

Not a chance.  No, Sir John choose this moment to tell us that advertising is effectively mysterious, inscrutable and unteachable. Bravo, sir.  That's leadership! 

With this declaration, we are back in the black box that advertising created after World War II.  Advertising, agencies told the client, was a thoroughly creative process.  Only the agency could do it.  Only the agency could evaluate it.  Only the agency could be trusted to invent it.  The client was obliged to keep her distance...and pay the bills.  The quid pro quo was clear.  We, the agency, give you ads.  You, the client, pay us hard-stopping amounts of money.  Oh, and one more thing: go away.

In the old days, this black box approach to advertising was not a bad idea.  It kept the least talented cooks out of the creative kitchen. It left the agency free to do its best work.  But now that clients have got smarter, now that the agency world is in crisis, now that advertising is effectively being taken away from the agency world, this might not be the best time to retreat into a naive obscurantism, and the pretense that advertising is, well, imponderable. 

Unless, shudder, it's true.  Could it be that one of the most powerful men in British advertising has no idea how advertising works?  Could he really believe that it's just taste?  That it's all about fashion. That there is no meaning manufacture here to be understood, refined, build upon, taken forward.  No bold new thinking that shows how the challenge of new media can be turned to advantage?

Don't tell me this is the best you can do, Sir John.  You spent a life time managing the creative process, and your epiphany is that it's all about taste and fashion?  Maybe the world of advertising is beyond all hope.  Perhaps we should read this declaration of intellectual bankruptcy as a requiem for the field.   

References

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Minstrel Marketing and the Hegarty Trade-off.  This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  June 24, 2005. here.
(For a kinder view of Sir John's significance)

Acknowledgments

With thanks to the following for bringing the video to our attention:

Serendipity Book here.

PSFK here.

The Gatorade Propel Ad

Gatorade's Propel introduced a new ad on Monday during 24.  It shows a giant running through the streets of San Francisco.  The giant is a loose assembly of  traffic signs, post-it notes, taxi cabs, jack hammers, phones ringing, TVs on loud, people shouting, a baby screaming, a boss exploding.

Eventually the giant begins to break apart and things fall away, until finally he is an ordinary man running in a singlet and shorts.  He pauses, finally, drinks deeply of the Propel bottle and a voice-over says,

Fit has a feeling and a water.  Propel, the fitness water.

Propel, and the agency Element 79 Partners, calls this spot the "stress monster."

It's easy enough to "reverse engineer" the marketing here.  Stress Monster is dedicated the simple proposition that exercise makes stress go away.  This is well established as an understanding in our culture. It's well established as a reality in the lives of millions of Americans.   

Meaning management sometimes goes like this.  The idea is not to find a new meaning for the brand.  The idea is go after an existing meaning with new vigor and skill.  In the language of marketing, the idea is to "own" an idea that is already out there. 

When we say we "own" a meaning, we mean we have discovered it's most essential, powerful properties and made these as our own.  This is hard to do well, but when it works the brand (Propel) and the meaning (stress reduction) are mutually presupposing.  When they're done really, really well, it is now impossible to think about one without thinking about the other. 

And that's the way, I think, to think about Stress Monster.  It is part of Propel's effort to own stress reduction.  Does this ad succeed? I have to say they made a pretty good run at it.  (No pun intended.)  Pam and I were dozing when it came on, and we looked at one another and just laughed with wonder and admiration.  Look what just charged through the living room!

If I have a complaint, it's that the ad insists on a certain literalism.  The stress is represented by showing things that cause stress.  And running is shown quite literally to make these fall away.  And the man takes a drink just as the voice over claims glory for the brand.  And the song we hear is the Queen and David Bowie version of Under Pressure. ("Pressure, pressing down on me, pressing down on you.") 

I shouldn't complain.  Because all the pieces, and especially the song, work to perfection.  We might just as well say that these simple devices are good bones, and the stuff of a marketing clarity. Or, to put this another way, this literalism adds up to so much more than the sum of its parts, that we have no real grounds for complaint.

Someone who was trained in the anthropology of James George Frazer, and his great work, The Golden Bough, might want to point out that the composite man evokes several folkloric creatures, the Leviathan, the Golem, the Chimera, all of them, as he is, desperate, haunted figures, cursed by their complication, feverishly in need of release from same.  But then I am not trained in the anthropology of James George Frazer, so never mind. 

As I have tried to argue here before, we are compilations of influence, contacts, ideas, loosely assembled and not always well organized or articulated.   Stress Monster is the unhappiest face of this new form.   

References

Lazare, Lewis.  2007.  Element 79 waters down ad monster.  Chicago Sun-Times.  March 15, 2007. here.

There is one version of the ad from Propel itself.  Click on "Stress Monster" once you've gone here. 

There is a much clearer reproduction at 'boards.  here.

Hats off the team responsible for Stress Monster:

Agency: Element 79 Partners
Producer: Tom Cronin
Creative Director: Doug Behm/Jon Flannery
Writer: Ron D'Innocenzo
Art Director: Doug Behm/Jon Flannery
Production Company: Harvest Films
Director: Baker Smith
Editorial Company: Lost Planet LA
Executive Producer: Betsy Beale
Producer: Romi Laine/Wade Weliever
Editor: Paul Martinez
Assistant Editor: Ryan Dahlman
Colorist: Stephan Stefan Sonnenfeld, Company 3 LA
VFX: Asylum
VFX Executive Producer: Michael Pardee       
VFX Supervisor: Mitch Drain             
Senior VFX Producer: Stepahanie Gilgar      
CG supervisor: Sean Faden               
Lead 3d Animator: Matt Hackett         
Online Artist: Robert John Moggach
Mixer: Loren Silber, Lime Studios
Sound Design: 740 Sound Design, Exec Producer Scott Ganary

Super Bowl XLI: ads evaluated

I watched the Super Bowl yesterday, resolving to grade the ads even as I watched the game.  Chicago's early promise and eventual collapse made it hard to concentrate so it wasn't until this morning that I went through the ads carefully.   I used 5 categories: 5 (best) to 1 (appalling). 

The question is whether anyone in America is now making ads the way Tony Dungy makes football teams.  Well, yes, the Super Bowl ads showed a few moments of class 5 genius.  And there was work that ranged from the capable (4) to the competent (3).  But there was also quite a lot of bad work (2), proving yet again that the agency world cannot protect itself (or the client) from rank incompetence.  And yesterday, there were a couple of absolute stinkers (1), demonstrating that some agencies are still able to persuade the client to  fund the public destruction of their brand equity.

That there should be good work should not surprise us.  The agency world has always been skilled at the task the corporation is only now attempting to master: how to get everything out of the way of a great idea and then how to get everything out of the way of a great execution of that idea. 

This is spectacularly difficult process at the best of times, but now the agency is tormented by the idea that they must include the consumer in the process, to allow for a process of cocreation of brand meaning and equity.  The secret of agency genius has always been to keep consumers, the corporation and other civilians out of the brainstorm.  Now the question is how to let them in...and still engage in good meaning manufacture.   Yesterday's experiments prove how tough this is going to be.

That's the internal challenge.  The external challenge is how to hold one's own against the proliferation of new media: the internet, social networks, product placement, video in-game advertising, guerrilla marketing, cell phone ads, Google line ads.  But all of this is all little advertising, frequently concept and creativity free.  The Super Bowl, then, comes as an opportunity for an industry to reassert its primacy, to showcase the state of the art, and to stun the competitors into silence.  On the whole, I don't think yesterday's effort will have that effect.   

Ok, here are my ratings.   I arrived at them using an incredibly complicated algorithm that weighed spectacle, intelligience, creativity, wit, strategy, execution, theme, and vivacity.  (All of this in my head!!!)  If there is a bias here, and of course there is a bias here, it is an anthropological one.  My real question: with what imagination, intelligence, and economy did the agency use the cultural materials at its disposal.  More precisely, how well did the agency make brand meaning out of cultural meaning?

5 stars (best)

E*TRADE -  One Finger
BBDO New York
for the adcritic replay of this ad, click here. 

Agency:
BBDO New York
Chief Creative Officers:
David Lubars, Bill Bruce
Director:
Paul Middleditch, HSI Productions / Plaza Films
Production Company:
HSI Productions / Plaza Films
Editorial Company:
Beast

Coca-Cola - Happiness Factory
Wieden & Kennedy/Amsterdam
here.

Agency:
Wieden & Kennedy/Amsterdam
Executive Creative Director:
Al Moseley,
John Norman
Creative Director:
Rick Condos,
Hunter Hindman
Agency Executive Producer:
Tom Dunlap
Agency Producer:
Darryl Hagans
Production Company:
Psyop/NY
Director:
Kylie Matulick,
Todd Mueller
Director of Photography:
Ray Coates
Executive Producer:
Matt Buels,
Tim Nunn
Producer:
Boo Wong
Sound Design:
Amber Music
Sound Designer:
Bill Chesley
Music Company:
Human/NY
Live Action Production Company:
Hungry Man/NY
Live Action Director:
Peter Lydon
Mix Engineer:
Hillary Kew
Executive Producer (Design):
Justin Booth-Clibborn

Sierra Mist - Karate
BBDO New York
here.

Client:
Pepsi
Agency:
BBDO New York
Chief Creative Officer:
David Lubars
Copywriter:
Jim LeMaitre
Executive Producer:
Hyatt Choate
Senior Producer:
Amy Wertheimer
Executive Music Producer:
Loren Parkins
Production Company:
Hungry Man - New York
Director:
Hank Perlman
Director of Photography:
Joe DiSalvo
Editorial Company:
Nomad Editing Company, Inc
Editor:
Tom Muldoon
VFX/SFX:
The Mill
Music:
Alexander Lasarenko / Tonal

4 stars (better)

E*Trade - Robbery
BBDO New York
here.

NFL - Hard to say goodbye
NFL
here. 

Bud Select - Just a Game
Cannonball
here.

Nationwide - Rolling' VIP
T:M Advertising
here.

Toyota - See - Saw
Saatchi & Saatchi LA
here. 

Toyota - Ramp
Saatchi & Saatchi LA
here.

Coca-Cola - Especially Today
Widen Kennedy Portland
here.

Bud Light - Fist Bump
DDB Chicago
here. 

Budweiser - Clydesdale Spot
DDB Chicago
here.

Coca-Cola - Videogame
Wieden Kennedy/Portland
here.

Bud Light - But He's Got Bud Light
DDB Chicago
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=b4d51164

3 stars (good)

GM - Robot
Deutsch/Los Angeles
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=4f2a6054

Chevrolet - Ain't We Got Love
Campbell-Ewald
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=b5c8d8ea

Taco Bell - Big Game
Draft FCB/Irvine
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=425d6acc

T-Mobile - Icon
Publicis West - Seattle
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=2e4e17b2

Emerald Nuts - Boogeyman
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=92e8e1d2

Hewlett-Packard - Orange County Choppers
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners - San Francisco
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=0ec7b725

IZOD - In the Snow
In-house
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=ff399dcd

Honda Slalom
RPA
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=b341cd6c

CareerBuilder.com - Darts
Cramer-Krasselt
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=37c98ef5

CareerBuilder.com - Promotion Pit
Carmer-Kasselt
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=fc783f2a

Bud Light - Great Apes
Mortar
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=36ab11ce

Spring - Connectile Dysfunction
Publicis Hal Riney
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=b0407b09

Doritos - Checkout Girl
Kristin Dehnert
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=38835277

Sierre Mist - Combover
BBDO New York
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=d71c0aa8

Pizza Hut - Poparazzi
BBDO New York
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=2c33620e

2 stars (not so good)

Bud Light - Rock, Papre, Scissors
DDB Chicago
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=9234aa74

Blockbuster - Mouse Click-Click Away
Doner
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=9ac640c5

Bud Light - Classroom
LatinWorks Marketing
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=75bd1609

King Pharmaceuticals and American Heart Association - Heart Attack
Glowworm
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=f8363328

Bud Light - Reception
DDB Chicago
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=8c907fc1

FedEx - Moon office
BBDO New York
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=b6f8c04b

Van Heusen - A Man's Walk
In-house
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=0c95ad95

FedEx - Not What It Seems
BBDO New York
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=3912a98f

Flomax - Biking
Grey Worldwide
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=eb42252a

CareerBuilder.com - Performance Evaluation
Cramer-Krasselt
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=a1c0a188

Snapple -Wise Man
Cliff Freeman and Partnrs/NY
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=fa1a775e

Honda -Elvis
RPA
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=1b1e8a0c

Budweiser -King Crab
DDB Chicago
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/category.php?search_criteria=Super%20Bowl%20XLI

FedEx - Not what it seems
BBDO New York
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=3912a98f

Chevrolet - Car Wash
Campbell-Ewald (consumer created)
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=13417a09

GoDaddycom - The office -Marketing
In-house
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=12c0b8d1

Doritos - Chip Lover's Dream
Jared Cicon, consumer created
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=ec2d10c4

Doritos -Duct Tape
Joe Herbert (consumer created)
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=c126b0f2

Doritos - Live the Flavor
Dale Backus (consumer created)
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=a40a5dfb

Pizza Hut - Herd
BBDO New York
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=35b9c376

1 star (please)

Garmin - Maposaurus
Fallon
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=6248e838

Snickers - Mechanics
TBWAChiatDay New York
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=45b118d5

Salesgenie.com - Pierce-Bostt
Vinod Gupta
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=e6275844

Doritos - Mouse Trap
Billy Federight (consumer created)
http://adage.com/superbowlspots07/superbowl.php?seed=5c7a3c80

Acknowledgments

Thanks to www.blackprofs.com for the picture of Tony Dungy.

Thanks to Adage.com and adcritic.com for coverage of the Superbowl ads.

My "top 10" ads for 2006

I don't say these are the best ads of 2006.  They're the ones that impressed me as great pieces of marketing. 

There is a good deal of chatter about the "revolution" taking place in advertising as a result of new media and new messaging.  But I believe we have yet to understand the cultural content and power of the more traditional venues, and especially the 30 second TV spot. 

Here's my salute to my favorites.

ad:                          Rosie
client:                  Volvo
agency:               Euro RSCG Worldwide
for more details:
Meet Rosie, scourge of the new advertising (here).

ad:               Light It Up           
client:      The Coca-Cola Company
agency:    Foote Cone & Belding New York
for more details:
Lighting it up at the Coca-Cola Company (here).

ads:                    The LeBrons
client:              Nike
agency:           Weiden + Kennedy
for more details:
The LeBrons (here).

ad(s):                  All the Geico spots running in 2006
client:                 Geico.com
agency:              The Martin Agency
for more details:
Craig Ferguson (brand exemplar?) (here).

ad:                    Working Wealth
client:            Smith Barney
agency:         Hill Holliday, New York
for more details:
Parsing the symbolic language of the Smith Barney ad (here).

ad:                    Where the bloody hell are you?
client:            Australia
agency:         M&C Saatchi, Sydney
for more details:
Marketing Nations: Good News From Australia (here).

ad:                     Intel chips inside
client:            Apple
agency:         TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles
for more details:
Branding Brilliance from Apple (here).

ad:                      Peyton Manning as a fan
client:              Mastercard
agency:           McCann-Erickson New York
for more details:
Peyton Manning: The man and the brand (here).

ad:                   My Life, My Card: M. Night Shyamalan
client:           AmEx
agency:        Ogilvy         
for more details:
Branding, Cocreation and Amex Theater (here).
Oscar advertising (here).

ad:                        Chevy Cocreation website
client:                Chevrolet/General Motors
agency:             Campbell Ewald
for more details:
Chevy cocreation (here). 

Meet Rosie, scourge of the new advertising

Volvo and Nissan both have ads on TV at the moment.  One recalls the greatness that was advertising, the other gives us advertising's dismal present. 

The Nissan ad is called "Seven Days in a Sentra" and it features a young man spending a week in his car. At the end of the first spot, Marc Horowitz looks into the camera and says, "this could get interesting." 

But it never does. There was a time, 10 years ago, when this idea was fresh and funny.  Now it is an exercise in the obvious, right down to Marc's garden gnome, that object of the college prank transplanted to the mainstream by the movie Amelie and then forced into over exposure by those tremendously bad Travelocity ads.

Now the odd thing is that the campaign is adored by Barbara Lippert, Adweek's brilliant judge of advertising.  So maybe I'm wrong.  But I can't help feeling that the creative team sat down and decided to "get a little crazy" in pursuit of a younger consumer.  One of the new rules of advertising: don't ever patronize your market, especially when they enjoy acute sensitivity to contemporary culture in general and marketing in particular. 

(It is perhaps too easy to blame the agency [TBWA\CHIAT\DAY, Playa Del Rey].  Ever since Carlos Ghosn moved the Nissan marketing team to Nashville, we have had to wonder what the costs might be.  Maybe this sort of ad plays in Nashville.  More probably, when you live in Nashville, it's hard to see that it doesn't play on the coasts.)

Lippert likes the Sentra campaign she says because there is "genius...in the casting." 

Horowitz's good-natured, quirky, inventive and flexible approach to life is delightful to watch.

But in an era of really gifted comics and satirists, people capable of interrogating contemporary life until the seams burst and the lining tears away (think Jon Heder [Napoleon Dynamite] or Sasha Baron Cohen [Borat], ) this ends up looking "indie lite," or agit prop with the "agit" excised, or performance art turned into dinner theatre.  (When your average frat boy would have been wittier, you know you have a problem.) 

Now to the good news: a Volvo ad called "Rosie" that features a little girl chattering away as her Dad buckles her into the back seat of the family car. 

This is advertising as we used to make it.  Someone sat down and thought about the value proposition of any car from a father's point of view (something like "safe passage"), the standard feature of the Volvo value proposition ("really safe passage"), and then looked for a way to propose this proposition in a manner that is interesting and powerful.

Sweet Jerusalem, they hit this one so far out of the park, it's still traveling.  Rosie, a little girl of about 5, is talking, talking, and talking (as above, complete with visual aid).  We can't tell what she is saying.  She could be reporting a story, she could be making one up.  (Actually, it's hard to tell: is Rosie telling the story, or is the story, with its calls for dramatic gesture and exclamation, telling her?)  Dad hesitates to close the door for fear of interrupting, but it's clear to us (and to him) that there is no interrupting this great spill of detail, enthusiasm and fluting talk.

One of the things I love about the ad is that "Dad" is played with restraint.  It would have been easy to have him "mug" his reaction or signal how achingly sweet this moment is.  But, no, that would have been patronizing.   Rosie is plenty because Rosie is everything.  We know exactly what is going on here.  No additional indexing, no additional "viewing instructions" are necessary.  What we get from Dad, at the end of the spot, is the littlest smile as he drives away.  Rosie, of course, is still talking.

Rosie's talking jag is the sort of thing that one parent might report back to another.  It's possible that the grandparent's might hear about it. But it is also the sort of thing that is so deeply implicated in family life that, chances are, it will not stay in memory.  After the fact, Dad might say, "yeah, that Rosie has always been a chatter box" but the treasure of this moment will not make it into the family's "oral tradition," into the scrap book or into the attic.  It is evanescent.  It is gone.

Someone at the agency went and recovered it.  (Did they get it from research?  Did it come from a brainstorm?)  And they seized on it as a way for us to think about "really safe passage" and the value that Volvo creates.  Left to their own devices, the automotive engineers will wow us with side impact tests and braking stats.  And we can communicate these to the consumer with promises of "safety."  And, bless them, even in a focus group, the consumer pretends to be interested, because, hey, who isn't interested in safety?

But when the pitch is about safety, the particular gets lost in the general.  Yes, we all believe in safety, in the way we all believe in motherhood or iPods.  But for God's sake, safety does not work as a brand proposition, and it isn't something Volvo can claim for itself, unless it is made vivid, actual, human, and urgent.

Rosie is safety made vivid, actual, human and urgent.  It is when we see a little girl telling a story from her Dad's point of view that see how much safety matters.  Now it's clear.  Now it's clear that Volvo is worth every penny of the price premium, and the styling shortfall, that Volvo obliges us to pay for it. 

There are several ways to express the value augmentation, the meaning manufacture, taking place here.  Here's one: Rosie's story > (augments)  Rosie's charm > Rosie's vulnerability > Dad's responsibility and solicitude > Volvo's safety. Actually, we could parse it a couple of ways.  And this too is the measure of a great ad.  It has a kind of semiotic redundancy built into it.  We can see it several ways but we always up back in the same place. 

But enough about the anthropology.  What about the advertising?  It turns out we can choose.  We can choose between agencies that chase after new segments with palid recitations of the kind of thing the consumer can do better while sleepwalking.  Or we can tell human and branding stories with such power that the world comes to us.  If advertising (and marketing and anthropology) learned anything in the 1990s, it was this: don't play your consumer, don't patronize.  Do what you do as well as you can do.  Find the value propositions and tell its story with all the creative power and cultural knowledge the agency has at its disposal.  Or, as we might now put it, find the Rosie within. 

References

Anonymous.  2006.  Nissan's Long Haul To Nashville.  BusinessWeek.  July 3, 2006.  here.

Lippert, Barbara.  2006.  Living la Vida Nissan: TBWA's inventive campaign stars a man, a car and a life.  Adweek. October 23, 2006, p. 26. here.

For a YouTube version of the Volvo ad, here.

Hats off to the authors of this ad:
(details courtesy of Euro RSCG Worldwide)

Title of campaign – Volvo “Who Would You Give a Volvo To?”

Network - Euro RSCG Worldwide

Office – Euro RSCG Worldwide

New York

Advertiser - Ford Motor Company

Brand - Volvo Cars

North America

Product Category - Automotive

Launch Month/Year – September 2006

Geographical Area –

North America

AGENCY credits-

Global Chief Executive Officer: David Jones

Chief Executive Officer, NY and San Francisco: Ron Berger

Executive Creative Director: Jeff Kling

Creative Director: Nick Cohen

Art Director: Julie Lamb

Copywriter: Risa Mickenberg

Contributor: Sharoz Marakechi

Director of Broadcast Production: Joe Guyt

Director of Broadcast Production, Business Affairs: Cathy Pitegoff

Associate Producer: Becky Burkhard

Group Account Director: Ian Marlowe

Account Mgmt: Edward Yu, Caroline Jackson and Amy Richardson

Business Manager: Deborah Steeg

Talent: Dawn Kerr

PRODUCTION credits

Production Company AND City: Furlined,

Los Angeles

Director: Pekka Hara

Director of Photography: Joaquin Baca-Asay

Executive Producer: David Thorne

Producer: Rob Stark

The death of modern advertising

There a couple of ways to look at the future of advertising.  With clarity or with panic.  Lord Saatchi has chosen to panic.

In the pages of the Financial Times, he warns of the death of advertising.  Lord Saatchi believes that advertising has been extinquished by a change in culture and commerce:

nowadays only brutally simple ideas get through. They travel lighter, they travel faster.

WhatI am describing here is a new business model for marketing, appropriate to the digital age.   In this model, companies compete for global ownership of one word in the public mind.

This is "one word equity".

In this new business model, companies seek to build one word equity - to define the one characteristic they most want instantly associated with their brand around the world, and then own it. That is one-word equity.

Lord Saatchi believes that the work of advertising is now clear.  It is to find the one word,

the word that guides everywhere. And once it is found, never to forsake it. How do you find that   word? There are 750,000 words in the English language. How do you know which is the right one? It is difficult.

The pain comes from the ruthless paring down of the paragraph to the sentence and the sentence down to the word. One-word equity is the most priceless asset in the new world of the new technologies. Discover it and you have the route to salvation and eternal life.

To call this stupid, well, is this really the one word I'm hunting for? Moronic?  Brain damaged? Sorry, that's two words.  Insensate?  There is one priceless word for what Lord Saatchi has written, but I need to do a little more paring.  I'll get back to you.

In the meantime, let's examine Lord Saatchi's claim.  He believes that the hunt for the one, true word is driven by a change in culture and the consumer. Culture has got faster and more complicated.  Check.  The consumer is now a digital native who thinks in new ways.  His branin has rewired itself, responding faster, recalling less.  Check.  The consumer suffers CPA "continuous partial attention."  Check.  So advertising is dead.  Check, please.

The premises are sound.  The conclusion is insane.  Lord Saatchi peers into the future and loses his nerve almost immediately.  Hold, Lord Saatchi, might the new consumer offer new life to advertising?  After all, this is a creature who can monitor several media, detect tiny messages, accomplish acrobatic acts of analysis thereupon.  The evidence collected by the likes of MIT's Henry Jenkins points to the emergence of a consumer with extraordinary powers of assimilation and understanding. 

But of course, advertising cannot remain unchanged in the face of this consumer.  But it is not clear that it has died, nor that it should now be confined to the capitivity of single words. I think that the new consumer releases the agency from all that old USP [unique selling proposition] and KISS [keep it simple, stupid] nonsense  I believe that if we could climb in our Rocky and Bullwinkle time machine and ask the adverisers of the 1950s London and Manhattan if they might like to have the new consumer or the old one, that would be unanimous in their enthusiasm for the new.

Lord Saatchi has two choices in the face of the new consumer.  One was to change advertising to give it new power.  The other was to kill it, first by declaration in the pages of the Financial Times and then with his new "one word equity" model.  Fine work, Lord Saatchi.  We will carrying on the revolution without you. 

References

Saatchi.  Maurice. 2006.  The Strange Death of Modern Advertising.  June 22, 2006.  p. 13.  here. 

BMW claims meaning for the brand

The new "enemy of ideas" spot for BMW captures corporate citizens we all of us know too well.  These are the people who like to say "no," the ones who resist, resent, and refuse innovation. 

In the BMW ad, they says things like "Let me play the devil's advocate," or "With all due respect, but" and the ad has us understand that this is the language of obfuscation, and they are the agents of orthodoxy. 

In another spot called "euphemisms," we hear a corporate citizen say "You've presented some very challenging ideas" and the ad offers a translation: "I am scared of your thinking."  "Keep that idea in your back pocket" is translated as "Your idea is about to die a slow death."

Brilliant.  This is an important new cultural territory.  It is now clear just about everywhere in the corporate world that innovation is the new order of the day.  BusinessWeek has said we now have an innovation economy.  As culture and commerce change in this way, new meanings open up for the brand, and I was wondering when someone's brand would step up to claim it.  It looked for awhile as if HP might make itself a special friend of dynamism, but that campaign seemed finally to lose its way. 

Now BMW has seized the opportunity: "at BMW ideas are everything and as an independent company, we make sure great ideas live on to become Ultimate Driving Machines."  Apparently, BMW means to make itself the "Company of Ideas."

The campaign is by GSD&M.  I don't have the names of the creative team at GSD&M or at BMW, but good on ya, mates.  This is good work.  Let us hope that it does as much for the corporation as it does for the brand.  I will supply these if I can, but right now I have less than a minute to press time. 

References

Anonmymous.  2006. BMW Unveils New Advertising Campaign.  The Auto Channel.  May 8, 2006.  here.  

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Death by Committee.  This Blog Sits At the.  April 6, 2005.  here.

The new Passat ad II

A Passat ad, discussed yesterday,  is now running on TV.  It features people shouting their insecurities from a megaphone.  One of these people, a man in a yellow car, says:

Because I am compensating for my shortcomings!

Because I am compensating for my shortcomings!

But the same ad on YouTube has this man saying:

Because mine is only about yeah big.

Because mine is only about yeah big.

In the image to the right, you will see the man in question gesturing with his hand, so to illustrate what he means by "yeah big." 

Now television has changed a lot in the last few years.  Explicit references to the male and female anatomy are not uncommon.  But I think it's safe to assume that no one on the creative team actually believed that they would be allowed to run the "yeah big" version of the Passat ad.

So why did they shoot it?  Why did they keep it?  Why did they put it on YouTube?  I think the answer has to be that they were hoping for a viral effect.  They were hoping for the kind of notice that I am now giving it. 

What kind of virality is this kind of virality?  Making an "unauthorized" version of the ad, was this supposed to make us snicker like school children and send everyone a copy?  As in "look what I found!"  Were we being given the opportunity to admire the daring of the agency and/or the client?  Maybe. 

Or maybe we're being played.  An ad was, I think, put into circulation quite deliberately.  It's not a mistake.  It's not an experiment.  It's not private exercise.  To judge by appearances, it was made for the express purpose of being "leaking to the internet."  And that's a little cynical, no.   

So we are left with a very strange combo, here.  The official version of the ad is, as I said yesterday, exemplary.  The unofficial, viral version is cynical and sophomoric. 

Um, I thought the viral ads were supposed to be more sophisticated, not less.  I guess we're still working on this "new marketing" thing. 

References

Please see yesterday's post for a fuller treatment of the ad, and praise for the "official" version. 

Acknowledgments

This blog originates in a conversation Pam and I had with Debbie Millman over dinner tonight.  Neither Pam nor Debbie should be associated with my bad tempered conclusions. 

The new Passat ad

I saw the new Passat ad on Monday night and again last night. Pam and I just stared at each other with our mouths open. 

I wish I could find the ad on line.  In fact I couldn't find as much as a single whisper.  I guess this ad is brand spanking new.   [Update: Thanks to Nicolai, I now know that the ad is on YouTube.  You can find it here.  Thank you, Nicolai!]

[Man in a blue car. He is shouting from his window with a megaphone.]

Because daddy never hugged me.

Because daddy never hugged me.

Because daddy never hugged me.

[Man and woman in white Passat drive past him.  They look at him and one another with alarm. Now they pass a bottle blonde in a red sports car. She is using her megaphone to exclaim:]

Because the more guys look at me, the more I love myself.

Because the more guys look at me, the more I love myself.

[Man and woman in Passat now pass a man sitting in his car. He uses his megaphone to say:]

Because I make more money than you!

Because I make more money than you!

[Now they pass a man in a yellow sports car. He uses his megaphone to declare:]

Because I am compensating for my shortcomings!

Because I am compensating for my shortcomings!

[Editorial note: On the YouTube version, the man is saying:

Because mine is only yeah big.]

[The Passat pulls away. Girl looks at boy. They shrug. Girl throws her megaphone out the window.}

[On the screen, a declaration appears in a tiny "consumer advisory" type face:]

Closed course. Do not throw megaphones or metaphors out your window.

[Voice over:] Volkswagen Passat, lowest ego emissions of any German made sedan.

[Close up on back panel of Volkswagen:]

"Passat" [and below that a badge that reads] "Low Ego Emissions"

Ok, the analysis:

There is a lot to like about this ad. Sure, it trashes the consumer culture, competitive brands and most consumers. Sure, it insists that non-Passat drivers are driven by childhood insecurity, sexist delirium or the rankest status competititon.

But the ad does this so well and so elegantly, all is forgiven. In advertising, it turns out, this is allowed. You can trash the industry, all your competitors and most other consumers, and that’s ok. Actually, there is a chance that the Passat marketing and creative team will get an award.

Here's the thing: all brand messages are more subtle than this.  All consumer self expressions are more nuanced.  (Well, not Donald Trump, of course.)  Naturally, that doesn't matter when Crispin Porter + Bogusky sit down to do creative for Volkswagen, nor should it have too. 

It really is a marvel, this ad.  The "trying too hard," "protesting too much" megaphones.  The "easy to recognize" stereotypes.  The effortless build, as a pretty strange proposition rolls out with perfect clarity.  But what really works is the proposition that "ego driven" drivers pollute the world.  This analogy (most cars : driving :: polluters : the environment) has the power of the zeitgeist going for it.  At a stroke Crispin Porter + Bogusky has turned every competitive brand into a Hummer.  Nice work, if you can pull it off.  And I think they did. 

The other half of the proposition (Passat drivers : all drivers :: Prius drivers : fume spewing, gas guzzler drivers), this is a little dangerous. After all, Passat drivers are in fact fume spewing and gas guzzling. But again the sheer elan of the ad pulls it off. (Only the Dickensenian anthropologist, joylessly pulling things off Tivo, is going to dwell on the problem.)

The real problem here is that the spot is a little smug. It says: "we, the Passat drivers, are the only ones who get it. We are above all this. Everyone else is a clueless, self absorbed, obnoxious jerk." 

This may be the very way Passat drivers see themselves.  (It would be very interesting to see the research and planning that went into this.)  But when you reveal this to be true, you tempt some people to say "oh, please, get over yourself." This is, for instance, pretty much the way I think about Hummer drivers. It would be a pity if it's the way Crispin Porter moved me to think about Passat drivers.

On balance, though, this is bold and brilliant advertising. Well done, Passat. Well done, CP + B.

Microsoft and the evolutionary future of on-line advertising

Microsoft is getting serious about on-line advertising.  So the titans mean to tangle.  That's Google in the blue spandex.  Microsoft in the red.  Stay well clear of the mat, ladies and gentlemen!  This is going to get ugly. 

I think Microsoft could win this one.  Clearly, they want to.  Joanne Bradford, corporate VP of global sales and marketing at Microsoft, says that the Internet ad biz, now worth $13 billion, will grow to $100 billion in 10 years. 

It won't be easy.  At the moment, Microsoft is playing catch up.  Their ad revenue grew only 7 % last quarter while Google's grew 80%.  (Yahoo grew 38%).

The problem is the MSN search engine.   It gets only 13% of our search inquiries while Google gets 45%.  (Yahoo gets 28%.)  By sewing up our searches (and, for some of us, our email), Google effectively owns the "billboards" on which internet ads appear.   

Microsoft means to address this with by creating an "adCenter" designed to give better demographic targeting and the opportunity to put ads not just on searches, but free online software services, gaming and cell phones. 

But the anthropological observation is clear.  Microsoft could win because they actually know something about advertising.  They have commissioned good advertising.  They have managed good advertising. 

Google has demonstrated a naiveté about advertising.  Their success came to them without advertising.  So they have no real world experience of what it is and why it matters.  Plus, I think they made the classic error of the quantitatively gifted.  They have looked at advertising and asked "how hard can this be?" 

They are about to find out.  And if they lose a $100 billion contest to Microsoft, naiveté (nee arrogance) in these matters will finally have a price tag.   

Here's the swing assumption.  I am betting that advertising will undergo a rapid evolution in the next few years.  It will get richer, more complex, more persuasive.  It will evolve to capture the opportunities made available by the net and the competition that $100 billion will bring to the market.

Right now, a Google ad is not much better than a newspaper classified.  It is a line or two.  No images, no music, no mystery, no power.  A 30 second spot on television can move us to tears or laughter.  A classified ad catchs our attention only if we happen to be searching for the 86 Chevy it has on offer.  Classified ads are the penny dreadfuls of the advertising world.  Advertising will begin to evolve away from this model at speed.

Classified are merely, thinly, informational.  (Real advertising helps construct the product by supplying deeper information, rules of use, and meanings mined from emotion, cognition and culture. ) Google's approach is pallid.  Proof?  When was the last time you clicked on a Google ad?  Our eyes have learned to edit-out Google advertising.  All my search activity and email contains Google ads, and I have clicked on Google advertising perhaps twice in the last 3 months.  How about you?

Online advertising is going to evolve ferociously in the next ten years.   We will move to the incorporation of movement, sounds, color, image, transmedia, cocreation, narrative, the whole flaming ball of wax.  Eventually, the internet will sustain a species of advertising that makes the present 30 second spot on television look like child's play.  Ilya Vedrashko, my colleague at MIT's C3 is particularly good on the 3D future of the internet, and when this is installed, Google's undernourishing notion of advertising will be laid bare, and Microsoft will sweep this contest. 

Of course, Google could take a crash course.  They could throw themselves at the feet of the great agencies and supplant naivete with sophistication.  They could hire Russell Davies, Ilya Vedrashko, or some other leading light.  They could investigate what advertising is when it isn't a classified.  This could happen.  Sure, it could. 

Revolutionary

This is Tom Messner.  He writes a column for Adweek.  In January, Tom decided to review traditional texts in the field of advertising.  The essay is called Old Testament.

This is brilliant in the way that the best of advertising discourse is often brilliant.  Just when the world has decided that advertising (of a conventional kind) is over, Messner steps forward, puts this anxiety aside with not so much as a parenthetical acknowledgment, and patiently begins the work of recovery.  What are the key texts? 

The review is filled with wonderful moments, as when Messner stops to come part first sentence translations of Proust's Swan's Way. 

Reviewing From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, by Jerry Della Femina, Messner says,

It is dated and contemporary; shrewd and unwise; avuncular and juvenile. For those who grew up in New York, going to work in advertising was not unlike going to work for steel in Pittsburgh, coal in West Virginia or tires in Akron. I always thought Della Femina had too much fun being Jerry B. Jerry to write the great American ad, but he did write the great American ad book.

Reviewing My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising, by Claude Hopkins, Messner says,

Every syllable says 19th century: He puts a period in "ads." as an abbreviation and is the embodiment of the Puritan work ethic in its best sense. David Ogilvy read his books seven times and said they changed his life; I read them once and remain untouched to that extent but moved by the spare sincerity.

If I may presume to say, this is what happens in moments of crisis.  When all the world runs shouting into the night, some people say, "Ok, let's review.  What is it we say we do?  What do we do?" in the process extracting the most powerful propositions and processes of the industry  before the naysayers succeed in burning it down. 

It's a little like Minerva taking flight at dusk,  but in this case, I think it represents a recovery of memory, a return to self, for an industry that systematically refused an idea of what it was.

In this vacuum, post war intellectuals scathingly set up shop.  And advertising became whatever they said it was.  Speaking now anthropologically, this was a very bad thing.  It encouraged the creation of a culture's self loathing and self mystification.  The intellectuals were pleased to call the advertising community our myth makers, but in fact they are more properly called our meaning makers.  Myth makers, that's a title we should reserve for the Stuart Ewen and the John Kenneth Galbraith. 

References

Messner, Tom.  2006.  The Old Testament.  Adweek.  January 16, 2006.  here.
by subscription.

Madison Avenue and the doppelganger strategy

So advertising is dead.  Everyone says so.  In its place, we'll use banner ads, email marketing, product placement, that kind of thing.  The 30 second spot?  Oh, that's dead as John Cleese's parrot. 

Right?  Well maybe.  Me, I think the argument is deeply mistaken.  I believe that nothing manufactures brand meanings like a 30 second spot. 

But I am beginning to think that I am the only one who takes this position.  From the agency world itself, we hear not a peep.  Well, there was Lovemarks, from the head of Saatchi and Saatchi, but this was a book so bad that it almost made me wish that talk of the death of advertising were true. 

Otherwise, all is quiet.

Could it be that the ad world suffers a state of paralysis?  Is it mesmerized by the new marketing and now helpless in its path.  Will MadAve go quietly?

This doesn't seem very plausible on its face. The ad biz is nothing if not "snappy with the come-backs."  This profession is well stocked with conceptual and expressive gifts.  It is occupied by people who can perform a 180 degree course correction, reinventing the entire logic of the pitch, in the 5 seconds it takes them to register "the client is not happy."  Capitalism has a secret company of improv players, and one day many of these subversives will prove to have been on the payroll of Madison Avenue.

No, I think the problem goes deeper than this, straight into the heart of the industry and the most adaptive of its adaptive strategies.   The first ethnographic work I did in Detroit was for an advertising agency.  An  agency guy saw what we were doing as particularly "new wave" and he regaled me with stories about the old days

In the 1950s, apparently, the agency had a favorite technique for managing the client.  It would go out and hire someone who was quite a lot like the client.  Actually, they sought a match so close, the effect was sometimes chilling.  The agency guy would just happen to like the same movies, the same sports teams, the same Vegas hangouts as the client.  He would kind of look like the client, talk like the client, and dress like the client.  In fact, in some cases, it was difficult to tell the difference between tweedle dum and tweedle dee, all the better to persuade Pontiac (or some other GM account) to sign those breath taking cheques and leave the agency alone. 

Call it a doppelganger strategy.  The 50s version was the most exaggerated form.  But I believe this strategy is with us still.  I believe the advertising world long ago committed itself to having no idea of what is was and what it did.  Surely, this was the smart thing to do.  I mean, if an agency insisted it used the Aaker model of advertising, well, what would happen if a client appeared who was particularly anti-aaker (I mean, of course, Aanti-Aaker)?  Surely, specificity was a bad idea.  The industry decided that on balance a clear idea of advertising would always cost an agency more than it gained it.  Oh, I don't mean to say that there weren't tendencies in the ad world.  Leo Burnett was always going to be seen as more "x" and J. Walter Thompson more "y," but, on balance, the industry conspired to create a code of silence on precisely what it was and what it did.  This was the smart, the adaptive, thing to do. 

This sort of thing costs you, I believe, in the long term.  Being all things to all people creates a certain imprecision of self definition.  After awhile, it's hard to know who you are.  In the day to day, this doesn't matter very much.  The prevailing notion seems to be, "What does it matter what they call us, as long as we just get paid?"  Everyone harbors the idea that one of these days, if we wanted to do, we could just sit down and sort this out. 

But neglected ideas have a way of disappearing.  Some, the head strong ones, will away in the night.  Others, heart strong, wither and die, proving not so heart strong at all.  And I think that's where we find the industry.  Now that there is a crisis upon us, now that there is a paradigm shift under way, now that the industry is facing the disintermediation that has destroyed once mighty industries and brands, it proves to be too late.  The cupboard is bare. 

Sir Martin Sorrell once made the sly remark that the "interactive marketing is more measurable than traditional advertising--so its more pleasurable for the decision makers."  And I think this means we are entering really perilous waters.  We know, or I think we know, that much of the best work by the agency world would never have happened if advertising had always occupied a measurable world.  Sure as shooting, the client would have measured the wrong things, leapt to the wrong conclusions, and otherwise mangled the creative opportunity without shame or apology.  (The creative director with whom I worked in Detroit told me, "If I let the client get away with it, every single ad would be about engine specs and turning ratios!")

It's as if the advertising world has been too fluid, too adaptive, too flexible and now that it is called upon to give an account of itself, it dithers.  "Don't tell me. I know this one.  Umm.  Oh, damn."  As long as the client had no options, we could pull a "St. Augustine" on them: "do not seek to understand that you may believe but believe than you may understand" aka "just give us the money, and we'll look after it."  But now that there is competition, there's trouble.

There is a darker possibility here.  It may be that the advertising world wasn't merely withholding clear and coherent ideas of what it was.  It may be that it never had these ideas in the first place or long ago ceased to believe in them.  Perhaps there was a creeping dread that there was no value here, that the whole thing was just a lark, a way to pry money out of clients, amusing one another, attending those endless award ceremonies, and dining often and richly on someone else's account.  Some may have believed secretly that the cupboard was always thus.

I hope I'm wrong.  Perhaps Sir Martin Sorrell has a blistering manuscript in his desk drawer that will throw off the cloak of the shapeshifter, renounce the ways of the doppelganger, and make the case.   Maybe the ad biz isn't dead after all.  Yeah, that's it.  Maybe, as Mr. Praline would say, it's just stunned. 

References

Cleese, John et al.  n.d. The Dead Parrot Sketch. here.

McCracken, Grant.  2006. Lovemark.  This Blog Sits at... Februrary 24, 2006. here.

McCracken, Grant. 2005.  When Cars Could Fly: Raymond Loewy, John Kenneth Galbraith, and the 1954 Buick.  Culture and Consumption II: marketings, meanings and brand management.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 53-90.  (for one of the accomplishments of the advertising world in the 1950s)

Sorrell, Sir Martin.  Patricia Sellers Interviews...  The Hidden Persuader.  January 27, 2004. here.

Oscar advertising: Amex goes to M. Night Shyamalan

When Peter Sealey, then VP of marketing at the Coca-Cola Company, decided he wanted Coke ads made by big-time Hollywood directors, someone had to tell him that you don't tell Martin Scorsese to reshoot something because "I can't see the label."  No, apparently, what you say is, "Thank you, Mr. Scorsece, that was great."

I thought of this during the Oscars when AMEX launched their ad by M. Night Shyamalan.   It's set in a restaurant.  Shyamalan, playing himself with real cunning and some restraint, sits by himself at a table.  As the camera pans past him we hear a "the joke's on you" laugh coming from someone who has just glimpsed the possibility the joke's on them.  This emerging note of panic is a perfect prelude to what follows.

What follows is a mother and son who look alike, a baby carriage that comes to stop before almost motionless couple, and a man who scalds himself with a touch.

The camera finds a couple who doing that thing that couples sometimes do in restaurants: have a humdinger of an argument sotto voce.  It sounds as if the man is saying, furiously, "If I don't understand a movie, I just stand up and walk out, I don't care."  Ah.

Then the man begins to choke.  He looks to his wife for help.  She returns his gaze with truck stop malevolence, and then looks across the restaurant at Shyamalan with...complicity, compliance, dull acknowledgment?  We can't tell. 

A waitress drops a couple of empty glasses from her tray.  People standing around tables suddenly disappear.  We understand that these people must have been ghosts because their departure goes unnoticed. 

A diner engaged in the most banal conversation plucks a fly out of the air with her tongue. 

Then the camera approaches a table with three guys in cowls.  One of them loses his hood as a waitress passes.  When he brings his hand up to replace the hood, we see that his forearm is tattooed with occult symbols. I have no clue what is intended here, but I came to think of these three as the monks of the apocalypse.  I happen to know that this is not the sort of clientele a restaurant normally encourages. 

Then a pretty, young waitress approaches:

"Mr. Shyamalan, I love your movies, I've seen every single one of them.  Like in the 6th Sense ..."  A deluge ensues including the charming line, "the village, first of all, I love everyone's shoes..."  Shyamalan ducks away from this witless chatter.  He doesn't have to look at her.  This is not a conversation.  It's a recitation...not quite as odd as the other things that have happened here, but something else that's, well, essentially mysterious.   

Then we here Shyamalan's voice over: "My life is about finding time to dream, that's why my card is American Express."  And now we see Shyamalan entering the restaurant.  A flurry of questions arise:  Was this not Shyamalan we saw in the first place?  Was this ad our moment of prescience?  And with his line ringing in our ears, we wonder "is this restaurant a place he will find time to dream?  Are these visions the dreams he looks for, or invasions that keep him from dreaming?  Or is the real problem chatty waitresses?" 

Notice two things.  This ad is riddled with indeterminacy, and in the presence of this indeterminacy, I start making stuff up. 

Indeterminacy used to be a "no-fly" zone in popular culture.  I was actually there when Warren Beatty confronted Robert Altman about the opening moments of McCabe and Mrs. Miller.  Altman wanted all the voices at once.  Beatty wanted one voice at a time.  It was one of those "all voices at once" conversations, I can tell you.  Actually, there was quite a lot of shouting. 

So here we are almost 20 years after Sealey's reign at the Coca-Cola Company, and things have changed most markedly.  Now American Express reaches out to a director, and the marketing team knows he will make an ad that's hard to follow.  They give him, um, a blank check with the clear knowledge that he might even make fun of people who get angry when they can't follow a movie or an ad. 

What happened?  We grew to love indeterminacy, meanings that withhold themselves, ideas that can't be thought very easily, emotions threatened to damage the instrument of feeling.  Popular culture has moved on.  On Oscar night, for instance, Robert Altman gets a life time achievement award while Warren Beatty settles into a hard earned, well deserved obscurity. 

Marketing, thanks to this kind of work, is perhaps now catching up.  In the words of Diego Scotti, VP of global advertising at AmEx, New York,

Maybe you don't need to be so loud and obvious to capture consumer attention.  When you go quieter, with longer takes, you break through more. 

They certainly have mine.  If we are sincere when we talk about cocreation, this, clearly, is one of our best methods.  When we unleash indeterminacy, consumers will rush in to make things up, including our messages and our brands.

References

Frook, John Evan.  "Always" Intact Amid Coke Shake.  Variety.  July 22, 1993. here.

Solman, Gregory.  2006.  GM tops at Oscars.  Adweek.  March 6, 2006. here.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to IF and PFSK for the head's up here.

Stuart Elliott vs. Barbara Lippert: Battle of the Bards

Fame Tracker has a cunning feature called Two Stars One Spot that performs an act of celestial economy:   If two stars are too much alike, Fame Tracker proposes an act of elimination.   

Thus did Wing Chun (Fame Tracker founder) compare Dylan McDermott and Dermot Mulroney in the "Battle of the Probably Quite Affordable Leading Men." 

Two Stars One Spot sprang to mind when I read Stuart Elliott's column on advertising this morning in the New York Times.  Now, I like Stuart Elliott but I can't help feeling he has been a little reticent and unforthcoming lately, somewhat off his game.

So this morning was a revelation.  Elliott came out swinging. 

At last, the 20th Olympic Winter Games have finally finished. Rarely have so many worked so hard to produce so dull and disappointing an outcome. And rarely have the flops, flubs and foul-ups been so overwhelming.  But enough about the advertising.

Baboom!  Stuart isn't taking prisoners.  "Far too many commercials," he said, "were unimaginative, derivative and pedestrian." 

This closes the distance between Elliott and the other great observer of advertising, Barbara Lippert.  Lippert writes a column for Adweek, and her work is splendid.  I mean, really splendid. 

And this is heartening.  Slowly but surely, popular culture has improved its critical standards.  After many painful years, the likes of Rex Reed were supplanted by the likes of Roger Ebert who was then improved upon by the likes of Lisa Schwarzbaum.

So much for the movies.  What about advertising?  Unless I'm missing someone, Lippert was the sole voice that combined the gifts of intelligence and critical acuity.  If Mr. Elliott is now in the game, that's two. 

There is plenty of room here.  My morning epiphany was premature.  It is too early for a Two Stars One Spot standoff.  Vast stretches of commercial culture remain to be assessed and assayed.  Two people is hardly enough for all the artifacts of advertising. 

Let's keep our fingers crossed.  Without gifted observers, we cannot give heart or credibility to gifted participants.  More practically, we cannot persuade clueless clients to give agencies the freedom they need to do great work.  A blessing from Lippert or Elliott, this is just the thing to keep the philistines at bay.  A wider distribution of the work of Lippert and Elliott, and before you know consumers themselves will become more intelligent, more demanding..that all creative and critical boats might rise with the tide. 

References

Chun, Wing (aka Tara Ariano).  2005.  FameTracker: 2 Stars, One Slot: McDermott vs. Mulroney.  here.

Elliott, Stuart.  2006.  More Tin Than Gold for Olympic Spots.   New York Times.  February 28, 2006.  here.

Lippert, Barbara.  2006.  Barbara Lippert's Postgame Superbowl Critique.  Adweek.  February 7, 2005.  here.

Marketing headline: what's good for the agency actually good for the brand

Is TV advertising dying?  How about brands?  There is, I think, a connection.

It is now commonplace to announce the death of TV advertising.  The new marketers are positively noisy on this theme.  The assumption is that ads will move from TV to product placement,  internet, gaming, blogging, etc.

And it's not just an assumption. In the UK, Heineken is shifting a £6.5m budget from television to sports sponsorship.  Ford now spends about 30%-40% of its ad budget on traditional advertising, compared with around 80% five years ago.  The move to online advertising is happening more quickly than expected.  According to Heath Terry of Credit Suisse First Boston, the market for online ads will increase 32 percent to $16.6 billion in 2006.

So is this a good idea?  Well, that's the problem, isn't it?  It's not an idea.  It's blind rush from one side of the marketing vessel to the other.  We are abandoning TV advertising with scant regard for larger costs. 

And there are larger costs. According to the BusinessWeek Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard, Heineken has falled from #82 in 2001 to #100 in 2005.  It is, in other words, hanging on to Top 100 classification by its fingernails.  This might not be the time to move from spots  to sports.

My argument is (a) that of all the old media devices at the marketer's disposal, TV advertising created the most potent meaning and value for the brand, (b) that the new media forms of advertising are pretty modest meaning and value makers, and none competes with TV ads, and (c) that the move from TV to other forms of advertising may be expensive for the brand.

Today, I happened to stumble upon the Account Planning Group awards for 2003.  (I was searching for the exemplary Ben Malbon.)  Here are some of the things I found. 

Rebecca Morgan of Bartle Bogle Hegarty got shortlisted for work she did for Barclays.  (She may well have won the award.  I write this under a little time pressure.)

This market tries to build trust by making banks likeable - we think the job is to make Barclays seem more knowledgeable about money.

This is an interesting marketing proposition and it is impossible for me to imagine that it is something that could be accomplished outside the world of TV (and print) advertising. 

Here's another. Fern Miller of JWT got shortlisted for work he did for Nestle and Kit Kat. 

Kit Kat was being forgotten by consumers and nothing about the famous "Have a Break" campaign was helping them to remember. The solution is to reinvent the break territory, turning it from a platform for little more than well-branded entertainment into a powerful opinion about the importance of the break in this, the country with the longest working hours in Europe.

Good luck communicating this in any of the new alternatives.  I venture to say none of the campaigns that drew mentions (and awards) from APG could be undertaken in new media advertising (or old media variations). 

Summing up

I know what everyone believes: that people TIVO through ads, that television is losing its audience to gaming and the Internet, that television audiences are fragmenting, that TV channels are multiplying, that the game, is, in effect, up. 

This, too, is true: that the alternatives to TV advertising are abysmally bad.  Product placement is now regarded with suspicion.  From a meaning manufacture point of view, this was always a kind of hitchhiking, effectively borrowing the power and the narrative of the TV show or movie in question. 

Google advertising!  This is ought to be a punch line.  If advertising could be reduced to the classifieds, newspaper advertising would have been plenty, and Madison Avenue would just happen to be a street in Manhattan. 

And those colorful, motionful ads that compete for my attention on the websites of New York Times and Wall Street Journal.  That's the problem, isn't it?  I am trying to read!

I don't doubt that television is dying.  But when was the last time you discussed an ad you saw on line, or a product you saw placed in a movie?  No one cares about these ads because they do not have powers of metaphor or narrative.  The 30 second spot is a precious resource in the world of brand building.  To dispense with it is a very bad idea. 

References

For the Account Planning Group Awards for 2003, here.

Anonymous.  2006.  Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard.  BusinessWeek.  here.

Berman, Saul J. Niall Duffy and Louisa A Shipnuck.  The end of television as we know it: a future industry perspective.  Publication of the IBM Institute for Business Value. here.

Martinson, Jane 2005.  Agency says goodbye to Walter.  The Guardian.  February 18, 2005. here.

McCracken, Grant. 2006. Product placment as marketing malfaesance.  The Blog Sits At....  January 17, 2006.  here.

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Madison Avenue and Google: no contest.  This Blog Sits At ... November 1, 2o05.  here.   

Thaw, Jonathan.  2005. Online Ad Growth Accelerates, Outpacing Newspaper, TV Spending.  Bloomberg.com.  December 28, 2005. here.

Lighting it up at the Coca-Cola Company

I haven't always been an enthusiastic consumer of Coca-Cola advertising.  But the Diet Coke spots are getting steadily better. 

The "effervescent" campaign devised by Foote, Cone & Belding, New York.  Kate Beckinsale (right) appeared in a spot called Tingle.  Adrian Brody starred in a spot called Bounce.  There were a couple of other spots in the series: a girl roller skating in what looks like Santa Monica and a guy dancing in his Manhattan apartment.  (You can see the Roller Skater spot here.)   I believe this campaign was launched in 2004, a year in which the Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) spend $10 million on Diet Coke advertising. 

Not everyone shares my enthusiasm.

Despite anticipation for the new Coke commercials, at least one analyst says advertising for carbonated soft drinks in the United States, good or bad, doesn't have a huge impact on the business. "If you look at what is really going to drive the business, it is noncarbonated [drinks] and innovation," said John Faucher at JP Morgan. "It is not a new ad campaign for the core Coca-Cola brand."  (from Wilbert, below)

Golly, what are the chances that this guy has a clue about the relationship between advertising and branding?  I have the utmost respect for analysts.  They practice an empirical and intellectual engagement with the world that puts most social scientists (and, I think it's fair to say, almost all anthropologists) to shame. 

But I also know how analysts are trained and I know that there are only one or two MBA programs that can talk about the role of advertising in an penetrating way, let alone begin to assess whether a particular campaign might or might not add value to a brand.  Chances are John Faucher has not graduated from one of these.  (His remark tells us so.)

Happily, people inside TCCC are not so hampered.   

“The strategy for the global Coke campaign is to make choosing Coke a purposeful act,” said Mary Minnick, the head of marketing strategy and innovation. “We don't just want to be entertaining or be different, we want to be more relevant. We want to build a relationship with consumers, not hold a mirror up to them.”  (from Hein and Sampey, below)

This is an interesting model that marketers may with to conjure with.  In the meantime, we may admire the recent Diet Coke ad ("Haircut") that seems to me to capture and perhaps illuminate Minnick's philosophy. 

A young woman enters a very old fashioned barbershop.  She emerges triumphant.  The risk has paid off.  She went into the shop a great beauty.  She emerges a great beauty who has claimed her beauty with an act of daring and imagination. 

(Let me be perfectly clear.  The Diet Coke ad in question is from FCB.  The global campaign to which Ms. Minnick's refers is the work of Weiden and Kennedy.  I am merely supposing that what Minnick says of the global campaign gives us a glimpse of the ideas now animating ALL the advertising we will see from TCCC for the forseeable future.  This may be rash.  It may be wrong.  Consider it my demonstration that you don't have to be an analyst to put your foot in it.)

With this "light it up" spot, TCCC has laid claim to some of the more interesting cultural experiments at work in our world.  It lays claim to self ownership, self construction, self transformation, blurred boundaries, the playfulness of self presentation.

All of these were for virtually the whole of the 20th century a "no fly" zone for the Coca-Cola Company.  With its fastidious reluctance to treat these themes, PepsiCo has enjoyed a free run of the most dynamic and vital parts of contemporary culture.  More exactly, they belonged in the 1990s to Snapple and all the little brands that were prepared to conduct themselves as if they had actually noticed what was happening in popular culture. 

TCCC revved the creative engines.  It reached deep for new inspiration.  It thought on several occasions way outside the box.  But as long as it was unprepared to treat a theme like the one in "light it up" there was no way it could really light it up.  The brand remained the handsome, military officer who was not likely to add any thing to the ball.  Presentable, but a little unforthcoming in matters of conversation, humor, drama, and of course dancing.  Really, he just stands there, looking noble. 

I may have made to much of Ms. Minnick's remarks, but let's hope not.  Let us hope TCCC is preparing to rise to the challenge of contemporary culture.  (And why should it not.  After all, it made a good deal of it.)

References

Hein, Kenneth, with Kathy Sampey.  2006.  Pouring It On: Coke Unveils New Tagline, Products, Philosophy.  Brandweek.  December 08, 2005. here.

Sampey, Kathleen.  2004.  FCB: 'It's a Diet Coke Thing'.  Adweek.  May 05, 2004.

Wilbert, Caroline.  2005.  New Coke Ads for 2006.  The Atlanta Journal Constitution.  December 23, 2005.

Credits

Here, thanks to Barbara Lippert, the names of the creative team responsible for "Haircut."

Agency
Foote Cone & Belding, New York

Creative director
Gary Resch

Art director
Mark Warfield, Todd Eisner

Copywriter
Greg Wikoff

Agency producer
Kelly Fagan

Director
Robert Logevall