Ordinary Advertising

So I’m at the library Saturday flipping through last week’s Adweek and AdAge–which doesn’t take long considering how thin these industry journals have become–and I spy the headline: “CMO Survey: Nearly Half to Swap Shops.”

“Well, isn’t that interesting,” says I. (Actually, thinks I, having not yet reached the point where I’m talking to my self out loud in public.) Here we have 825 chief marketing officers and fully 45%, or 371+ say they’re going to give at least one of their agency “partners” the heave-ho this year. That’s a lot of agency changes. But wait, it gets even better (or worse depending on your perspective). Because this comes on the heels of last year when 54% said they were going to smoke one of their Prada-clad brethren, and according to the article, 60% of them did exactly that.

Schumpeter must be positively chortling in his grave over this spate of “creative destruction.” But what perplexes me is: Where are all these accounts going to go? If 60% of the 371 CMOs referenced above are true to their word, 222 some-odd agencies will be needed to take this business. (Which is about 200 more than my rough approximation of how many practitioners of extraordinary advertising exist in the world today.) So I assume a lot of this “swapping” is going to be from one ordinary shop to another equally ordinary one. Which doesn’t sound especially helpful. And it still doesn’t answer the question of how will these CMOs go about finding these shops? Continue reading ‘The New “Change Agents”’

Maybe Xerox should consider leasing its next logo instead of buying it. Isn’t that supposed to be the prudent thing to do when you know you’re going to want a new one in just a few years? Which has more or less been the story with this company since 1994. Prior to that Xerox had the same logo for 26 years. But prior to that, Xerox had a lot of things.

Like a growth trajectory and stock price that made it a charter member of the “nifty fifty”, along with a couple of exceptionally good advertising agencies. One, Papert, Koenig, Lois, is mostly remembered today for having the dubious distinction of being the first ad agency to go public, but it was once quite a respectable shop. And the other, was the New York office of Needham, Harper & Steers, which under the stewardship of Lois Korey and Allen Kay, gave us (and Xerox) the Super Bowl’s first blockbuster TV spot. (Brother Dominic’s “It’s a miracle” beat Apple’s “1984″ to the punch by 7 years.) Not to mention, the first national exposure of talents like Tom Thomas. But that was then; this is now.

Now, to be fair (hey, there’s a first time for everything) the company’s original business ain’t what it used to be. But having a name with the stature of Xerox, you’d think by now they would have accomplished something other than becoming the best thing to happen to the corporate identity world since the invention of computerized kerning.
However, that would require something that probably doesn’t come easily to a company that made its name making copies: Novel thinking.

Not too long ago I wrote about an Apple banner ad that I thought was absolutely spectacular (Eeyore At Twelve O’Clock). Unfortunately, it only ran, at least on The New York Times site, for a day or so, but I hope you had a chance to see it. There’s a different one running today. However, if you miss it, you will not have missed much. It’s very ordinary. But it does demonstrate, once again, how wrong McLuhan was–at least when it comes to advertising. The medium is not the message. The message is the message. And when it fails to be the least bit engaging, it fails. Period. Regardless of the medium. Continue reading ‘Rules Of Engagement’

This site inspires a certain amount of commentary. But mostly it comes through e-mails and phone calls. So I was thrilled when Bob Pearson, a vice president at Dell, saw fit to respond in a form I could actually post. (See “Professor Plum In The Boardroom…?) And he had some interesting things to say.

One was that “We want to incorporate our customers’ insights and feedback into what we offer as close to real time as possible.” Hard to argue with that objective. Then, he went on to express this desire: “We want to be able to create new campaigns in days and weeks, not months and years.” Campaigns? Maybe. Extraordinary ones? That’ll be tough.

Finally, he makes reference to their belief that a certain amount of streamlining was in order due to the simple fact that Dell employed 869 different agencies last year. Which got me to thinking: Boy, this Da Vinci project of WPP’s is starting to look like a very good deal–for WPP at any rate. After all, if The Wall Street Journal article where I read about it is correct, and the compensation WPP is going to receive from Dell is in the $100-150MM range as it reported, then even paying each of the 1,000 employees WPP says it’s going to hire an average of $50,000-a-year will leave them with a very nice sum to play with. Continue reading ‘Da Vinci Code?’

And I don’t mean Eliot Ness. What I’m thinking about is how the world ends, or more specifically, how the world of network television is likely to end up. Will it perish at the hands of the Internet as so many pundits think? Probably not. TV will survive the Internet in much the same way radio survived TV. Too much the same way, if you ask me. Because clearly TV is heading in the same direction radio did 60 some-odd years ago.

I’m not as boned up on the subject as I should be, but what I do know is that within a decade or so of the birth of network television most of the programs that represented the apotheosis of radio did one of two things: They either died, a la “Inner Sanctum”, “Fibber McGee”, “The Bickersons” or “The Shadow”. Or they hightailed it for TV, as in “Superman”, “Gunsmoke”, “Ozzie & Harriet” and “Perry Mason”. For the obvious reason that network TV was where the money was. And as we all know, good content and good content creators always follow the money. Continue reading ‘Maybe Eliot Was Right’