Ordinary Advertising

Coming up with a decent angle on Super Bowl advertising that doesn’t just bounce back and forth between composing paeans to a few and taking swipes at the rest is a bitch. However, if I put this off much longer, we’ll be talking about the advertising on XLIII. So I’ve settled on the notion of risk.

“Risk” as we all know is a) a great board game if you happen to have a few friends you wouldn’t mind seeing the back of for a good six months or so, b) anathema to the world of business, marketing and advertising in particular and c) more or less unavoidable every time you put a piece of communications out for the world to see, especially on the Super Bowl. Continue reading ‘Irkutsk Or Kaputsk’

One of my most perspicacious readers, of which I have more than my fair share, was inspired by a recent post to offer up this seemingly obvious, but all-too-often overlooked perspective on mergers & acquisitions. (You can read his entire comment at “1+1=0″.) What Tom pointed out was that whenever a company of “real” value acquires one of “perceived” value, the results are frequently lamentable.

I thought this would be a good screen for evaluating the recent offer by Microsoft (a company of unquestionable “real” value) for Yahoo! (a company that may be a little long in the “perceived” department). To be fair, on the real side of the ledger, Yahoo has some holdings–like its stake in Alibaba–that could be easily converted into cash by MSFT. It also has a ton of e-mail and IM users, although hardly $44.6 billion worth. And it has a well-known name, some great engineering talent and positive cash flow. None of which would explain the 62% premium in Microsoft’s initial offer, though. Continue reading ‘21/7′

The story goes that Aylwin Lewis, the poor (in a manner of speaking since it appears he’s still going to collect his $1MM salary for a few more years) CEO of Sears Holdings, who just got thrown overboard (as opposed to Edward Lampert who’s simply been relegated to any spot on the boat besides the bridge), once made a minor error in arithmetic. He was attempting to describe the synergistic possibilities of the Sears-Kmart merger and said that “1+1=2″, when obviously what he meant in this instance was that 1+1 would equal 3.

What prompts this math lesson is an article I read in the Wall Street Journal last week that was headlined: “Google and Publicis Share Ad Know-How”, a pooling of acumen that struck me as being about as likely to add to that body of knowledge as a book with the title “How  To Make Love Like The Guy Who Does The Crop Report” would to that area of interest.

Delving further into the text to see what “know-how” these titans of the business might have to offer one another, I discovered that the two firms “have been working together on using technology to improve advertising.” Oh, really, improve in what way? I couldn’t help but wonder. Certainly they can’t mean “improve” as in make advertising that is more extraordinary in its content and approach.

First off, that’s not Google’s mission. Near as I can tell, Google’s mission is to Hoover up every ad dollar in existence and find something to do with them that will not qualify under some value system as “evil.” (Rumor has it the ghost of Mao is being channeled as we speak.) And given Publicis’ provenance, you’d have to assume its management knows that the most direct way to improve the quality of the work its agencies produce would be to hire more people skilled in that area and fully support their efforts to make it happen.

So they must be talking about using technology to do something else–target the ads more precisely or place them more intelligently, I’d have to guess. Which leads me to one of the numerous soapboxes I’m forever clambering upon. (In fact, it might just be easier if I numbered these things.) Soapbox #16: What difference does it make how well you target and place a piece of communications if the communication itself is so ordinary it’s barely worth paying attention to in the first place? Not much if you ask me.

Which reminds me of a joke I just read. Two bored dealers are standing at the craps table in a casino when a beautiful woman walks up and asks to put down a $20,000 bet on a single roll of the dice. The dealers take her money at which point she says, “I hope it’s okay, but I feel much luckier when I’m completely nude.” With that, she strips down, the dice are rolled and she starts jumping up and down shouting, “I won! I won!” Then she picks up her winnings and her clothes, hugs the two dealers and quickly departs. At which point one of the dealers turns to the other and asks, “What did she roll?” And he says, “I don’t know–I thought you were watching.”

Much as I hate to rain on Publicis and Google’s parade (I’m such a liar), the truth is while technology may be capable of accomplishing many things, crafting a message worthy of attention is not one of them.

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.