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’
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Seems like it’s about time I got back to just talking about ads for a while. So I went into my “dumb & dumber” file and came up with these two. Although I should probably call it my “sad and sadder” file in this case since both of these ads are for brands owned by Procter & Gamble. The same Procter & Gamble that’s been talking a blue streak about the importance of doing better advertising for several years now–sending people to Cannes, hiring better agencies, giving speeches at advertising confabs–the whole nine yards.
In fact, speaking of nine yards, I just read that P&G is even going to take another run at advertising on the Super Bowl, rumor has it with a Tide spot that won a silver lion last year. Which, if nothing else, ought to pry at least another half star out of Garfield one would hope.
But what is Procter & Gamble’s real problem? I’m convinced their heart is in the right place. And they’re certainly saying all the right things. So why does so much of their advertising end up like what you see here, about as ordinary as the day is long? My hunch is there’s simply no one down in Cincinnati who has a firm grasp on how to identify and cultivate extraordinary advertising, especially in its nascent form. So they end up–to use the technical term–”fucked.” Continue reading ‘Low Tide’
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?’
Are clients really completely clueless or is it just me? (Don’t answer that.) I honestly wonder sometimes. For example, when I read–as I did a month ago–that Dell has decided to shift its entire account to WPP.
Now these consolidations are nothing new. As The Wall Street Journal article reporting on this story indicated, clients desperately want their marketing communications partners to “figure out a way to foster more collaboration between the people who create ads for TV and print and the other experts who do things such as research consumer behavior or craft Web ads.”
A desire I completely understand–although the only way to satisfy it may be to hold these various contributors at gunpoint–but the sentence that immediately followed the quote above really threw me. Because what WPP has promised Dell is that it will “…create a new agency that will eventually oversee all these tasks.” A promise I can’t really hold against WPP since I don’t think there’s a holding company out there that wouldn’t promise a client a canoe complete with its own lunar landing module in return for $1.5 billion in annual billings. Continue reading ‘Professor Plum In The Boardroom…?’
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’
If the first issue of The Wall Street Journal for 2008 was any indication, the outlook for advertising is anything but sanguine this year. What makes me say this are the “five trends to watch in 2008″ Suzanne Vranica set forth in a column entitled “Ad Houses Will Need To Be More Nimble” that appeared on January 3rd.
Nimble at what, you wonder? Well, to hear Ms. Vranica tell it, the first pressing issue is “new structure” because “…marketers want more cooperation between the executives who create ads for TV and newspapers and those who craft Web ads or perform less glamorous tasks such as researching consumer behavior.” So, in other words, integration remains the Holy Grail of this business as it has since King Arthur’s round table was a two-top? Continue reading ‘No Idea’
There’s no question the culture we live in is just a wee bit obsessed with measuring things. And nowhere is this more evident than in the marketing/advertising world’s seemingly mindless embrace of the Internet as a medium. Just look at the golconda of “metrics” it provides, for god’s sake!
However, as the subhead to an article in The Economist recently (and pointedly) put it: “Such a lot of data, so little information”. Oh, I understand the position marketers find themselves in. With accountability all the rage, lacking numerical support for one’s actions can be a career-limiting move. But when this intrepid quest for data approaches the point where it rivals the hunt for dental floss after a meal of corn on the cob, something is wrong.
Or, given the lead paragraph in this article, maybe it’s everything: “Imagine you’re an advertiser, you want to place your banners on the most popular website, and you want to know how much to pay. Globally, the leading site is Google, which has the most ‘page views’. Or is it Microsoft, whose various sites have, in the jargon, the most ‘time spent’? Or should you go by unique users, duration, hits, click-through, impressions, queries, sessions, streams or engagement?”
Apparently, no one knows for sure, including Bob Ivins of comScore, who’s quoted in the article as saying the web generates data like “a fire hose shoots water” and determining what any of it means, if anything, is a challenge not unlike “putting a straw into the fire hose to take a sip”. And only a few sentences later, there’s this doozy attributed to an unnamed, internet “old-timer” who came right out and admitted: “We produced hit numbers because we could, not because it was useful.”
Which gets me to wondering if we aren’t asking the internet–with its myriad quantitative resources–to answer a question no amount of data can resolve: How long is a piece of string? Or worse still, running the very real risk of doing what Jim Albert, a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Bowling Green State University, warned of when he said “You can prove any silly hypothesis…by running a statistical test on tons of data.”
And no, that’s not my Luddite petticoat showing again. I like numbers, I embrace measurement, in fact, as creative people go, I’m something of a nut for empirical evidence and Data Head is my best “Cranium” category. So there. But I continue to suspect that what the sellers of the Internet as a medium are selling and what the buyers are buying are two very different things. A notion I couldn’t help reflecting upon today after I read in The New York Times that the FTC finally cleared Google’s merger (sic) with DoubleClick.
Now doesn’t this union of portal prowess and data depth prove beyond any doubt the singular attractiveness of the internet to marketers and advertisers? Maybe. But I’m reminded of what has to have been one of the economist John Maynard Keynes’ most trenchant (or at least comprehensible) observations. He compared the stock market to a beauty pageant in which the judges are required to vote on which contestant the other judges will select as the most beautiful instead of the person they would vote for themselves. So, is it not possible that the purveyors of internet advertising (Google, for one) are touting the data they can generate, not because these numbers are inherently so meaningful, but rather because their buyers find them irresistibly attractive?
That’s the trouble with measurement. Without fully understanding the motives of the people behind it, there’s not telling what you may be led to believe. Kind of like the old joke: Why do women have such poor depth perception? Because they’re forever being told that this (the span of the teller’s thumb and middle finger held as far apart as possible) is twelve inches.
Never mind the CDO, SIV, subprime mortgage debacle we’re going to have to suffer through for the next couple of years, where greed is an especially malevolent force is in the marketing/advertising arena. Particularly on those occasions when a marketer seems to feel that despite the commanding share his or her brand presently holds, it’s just not enough.
Not enough for what I’ve never been quite sure. But I have a hunch not enough to propel said executive’s career high enough, fast enough is a big part of the answer. For example, what could possibly have motivated Nike to shift the running gear portion of its account from Wieden + Kennedy to that other plus-sign monikered outfit, Crispen, Porter + Bogusky? Given W+K’s track record, so to speak, the industry was understandably nonplussed by the move. But apparently, Nike’s 57% share of the market just wasn’t enough for Nike VP of Global Marketing & Category Management, Trevor Edwards.
Not a man easily satisfied, this Trevor, considering that at the apogee of its market dominance around 1962, General Motors had to be content with a 50 share. Which is about as half-full as the stein is for Budweiser today. And then there are those slackers Google and McDonalds who can only manage shares of 42.3% or 40% of the markets they dabble in. But Nike sees an opportunity to get beyond 57%. So, we get an agency shift and a first commercial that is truly pitiful. (See for yourself at nikeplus.nike.com.)
One part bad “Quest For Fire”, one part bad “Braveheart”, one part bad “The French Connection” among other other things, and wholly miserable for the last twenty seconds culminating in the immortal words: “Need motivation.” which I don’t think will be nudging “Just Do It” from the pantheon of advertising rallying cries anytime soon.
What this travesty will do for Nike’s market share in running gear I can only guess. But I know one thing. At the end of The New York Times article where I read about this spot there was a quote from Alex Bogusky in which he said: “We didn’t want it to feel like a Nike commercial in the beginning…”
No problem, Alex, it doesn’t–in the beginning, the middle or the end.
Back in the dark ages, when art directors still sketched out their ideas with felt markers, it sometimes took an exceptional airbrush artist to bring certain concepts to life. One of them I’m sure you’re familiar with even if you were still in diapers when it first appeared because it can still be found in dorm rooms all over the country–Lars Anderson’s inimitable “blown away” guy for Maxell audio tape.
I don’t know who the retoucher was on this job, but it was a masterful bit of visual legerdemain. Something just about any idiot with a computer can pull off today–and often does–as the examples that follow bear witness. Continue reading ‘Hardly “Blown Away”’
That same art director pal who used to intone, in his Memphis accent so thick you could pour it over pancakes, “it’s easy to criticize” had another wonderful expression–for things that were unlikely to happen anytime soon such as Halley’s comet or Marty & Ralph approving a campaign the first time around–which was: “when donkeys fly.”
Well, now I’ve seen exactly such a thing. Only in this case it was a piece of internet advertising that really, truly worked: The “don’t give up on Vista” banner ad that greeted me when I opened to my Times homepage last Friday. It’s not there today, but I hope it reappears because it’s genuinely swell. Continue reading ‘Eeyore At Twelve O’Clock’
