”What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate.”
Before those words became the first sentence of Trout & Reis’ famous book Positioning, they were an immortal line in the movie, Cool Hand Luke. And nothing could better summarize why 90% of all attempts at advertising go so horribly wrong.
In the movie, Paul Newman plays Luke, a compulsive troublemaker sent to the state farm for cutting off the heads of parking meters. The warden, or “captain” as he’s called, (and played wonderfully by Strother Martin) is determined to persuade Luke to behave. But Luke has a mind of his own: He doesn’t want to do what he’s told to do. Thus the captain’s exasperated comment above, delivered right after he hits Luke with a blackjack.
When Trout & Reis cited this line, they contended that a lot of advertising fails to communicate because it doesn’t position the product or service clearly enough. But, the problem is far more elemental. However well positioned a brand may be, people have an extremely limited tolerance for being told what to do or what to believe. No matter how much we beat them over the head.
Yet isn’t that exactly what a lot of mass advertising attempts to do? We determine our message—what we want people to think and do—and then we blast it at them over the world’s loudest, most expensive PA system. Then, like the frustrated warden, we stand around scratching our collective butt, utterly mystified by the fact that these pesky consumers refuse to listen to us and persist in behaving in a manner of their own choosing.
Telling someone what you want him or her to do or believe isn’t communicating with them, it’s telling them. And the difference between the two is like the difference between a paper cut and getting beheaded. Seriously, do you do everything you’re told to do? Especially by a total stranger? Do you believe anything advertisers tell you? (Actually yes, but you probably won’t admit it.) Still, in the vast majority of cases, the answer is no. Like Luke, we all resist this completely unjustified, authoritarian approach. Or in the case of something as innocuous as another stupid, ordinary ad, we just ignore it altogether.
I mean, how hard is that? Comparing notes with lots of other people, I’ve concluded we’re all pretty good at tuning out all but the most obnoxious, uninvited messages directed at us.
The remote control mute button is handy in a pinch, but most of us can sit through a pod of ads on West Wing or whatever and just drift off without resorting to anything. Same with the car’s radio: you just shift your attention away to the wind, the traffic, your own thoughts and those ordinary ads just float past like so many cumulous clouds passing overhead. You must have been on a plane sometime and watched how quickly a fellow passenger can flip past all those average ads in their copies of Forbes or Time. Except at $100,000 a page or so, the sound you should be hearing isn’t the whisper of a turning page; it should be a scream reminiscent of Dante’s 7th circle coming from the people who made or paid for those ads.
A great story I once heard
During one of the first meetings that took place between Phil Knight, Nike’s CEO, and Dan Wieden, the head of Nike’s ad agency, Dan walked in and the first words out of Phil’s mouth (just as he had said to his first ad man, John Brown) were “I hate advertising”. To which Dan instantly replied, “So do I”.
Pretty strange words to be coming from a guy who’d seen his tiny agency grow to be a $500MM+ agency doing what is normally referred to as advertising. But Wieden + Kennedy didn’t do advertising as it’s normally done. They didn’t create messages that told people what to do; they attempted to communicate with people about things of mutual interest.
Think about the bulk of Nike’s communications over the years. Did they tell you to buy their stuff for x, y or z reasons? They did not. Instead, they realized a long time ago that the best way to capture the hearts and minds (and wallets) of their target audience was to find a way to connect with them—to communicate with them—on an entirely different, and mutually rewarding level. Not to yak at them.
What they recognized—in themselves and in their audience—is that inside every person with an interest in sports and therefore, sports equipment, burns the desire to perform at a world class level, or failing that, to at least perform at his or her own personal best level. So when you’re up there preparing to tee off, you are honestly hoping, praying and legitimately trying to make this the best shot you’ve ever hit. And while the likelihood of you shooting a 67 at Muirsfield is about the same as your being named the next Pope, you and Tiger Woods still have something very much in common. That ball isn’t going anywhere until you “Just Do It”.
When he wrote those words, Dan Wieden forged an incredibly powerful, emotional connection between Nike, what Nike makes, all the professional athletes Nike employs and the millions of consumers who pay the freight. (A process begun by the guy who first tapped into this ethos, John Brown, whose eponymous Seattle ad agency created many of Nike’s earliest posters and so forth with headlines like “There is no finish line”, but Wieden crystallized it with that tagline and the rest is marketing communications history.)
Having established this connection, Wieden + Kennedy was smart enough not to have Michael Jordan tell you to buy Air Jordans. No, the agency had him talk about what it’s like to be an athlete of his caliber in language so inspirational it was picked up and reprinted by sports columnists around the country. And when W+K finally got women’s footwear and apparel right, the agency didn’t tell you anything about women’s footwear and apparel. Instead, it insightfully celebrated the vast differences there are between how women see athletics versus how guys do—that for women it’s a much more personal, internal experience and not a matter of hero-worship.
Even on those rare occasions when Nike mentioned its products, such as the hysterical commercials where Spike Lee in his Mars Blackmon character tried to get Jordan to confess “it’s the shoes, right?” it was done as a total send-up of conventional, ordinary advertising. Nike and Wieden + Kennedy just had the brains and humility to credit their audience with having the intelligence to know that wearing Air Jordans would no more make you an NBA all-star than eating Kraft Macaroni & Cheese would turn your all-too-Simpsons-like family into the Huxtables.
Last, but not least, there’s that “swoosh” logo that signs off all Nike work. It’s the opposite of what most clients think their logos should be. It’s small. And it frequently appears without the word Nike at all. A recipe for disaster? Quite the contrary. Because what Nike and their pals at W+K know is that when you truly connect with your audience, when you communicate with them (not at them), you don’t have to shout your name, any more than you’d shout your name over and over at someone you’d engaged in conversation at a party. They, the advertising audience, will actively seek to know who you are and have no problem remembering your name. Because your ads were interesting, instead of ordinary.
So why aren’t all advertisers following this template?
The easiest way to get off the hook would be to say that Nike is a cool product in a cool category and thus inherently more engaging than the average breath mint or tire. But as we’ve already seen, Altoids was able to make the former interesting. And Doyle, Dane, Bernbach did a helluva job with Michelin for many years. And besides, there were sneakers before Nike and there have been sneakers since, none with advertising nearly as extraordinary.
With all due respect to the many talented people at Wieden + Kennedy, they don’t have a franchise on creating highly engaging, brand-building communications. All of us can (or should be able to) name many other efforts across a wide variety of categories that have been highly engaging and effective. Harley- Davidson’s work over the last decade. MasterCard’s “Priceless” campaign. The original “Got Milk” advertising. E*Trade, Sprite, Bud Light, VW (then and now). The list goes on.
All these campaigns have two things in common. They very effectively connected with and communicated with their respective audiences. And they prompted these customers to think and behave differently. Which we know to be true because all of these campaigns had profoundly meaningful impacts on their sponsors’ businesses. Dollars, share points and so forth.
One example I’ve followed closely is Harley-Davidson, primarily because I was working on the BMW motorcycle account when Harley and its agency Carmichael-Lynch pulled a major Lazarus move. (The biblical one, not the late Chicago ad columnist.) In the mid-80s the state of Harley’s business would best have been described as one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. The company’s corporate parent at the time, AMF, had totally screwed things up. The Japanese were eating everyone’s lunch in the large-displacement motorcycle category. And it was only by the grace of God that AMF, suddenly decided that maybe the bowling-alley business wasn’t so bad after all, and sold Harley back to its management group.
So then they ran some terrific advertising and everybody lived happily ever after, right? Well, no, not quite. First, the people who bought the Company back understood what Harley was all about, so they stopped trying to make motorcycles for everyone and went back to making what they knew how to make: big, rumbling, bad-assed hogs. Then, they asked their agency to capture and communicate the rebellious Hell’s Angel spirit of the brand to anyone who might find it appealing. Perhaps surprisingly to some, this proved to be as often CPAs and doctors as it was parolees.
Cut to the summer of 2002. There is now a two-year wait for many of Harley-Davidson’s bikes. Their margins are the envy of the industry. And this should wake up any dozing investors or CEOs in the audience: a $10,000 investment in HDI made in 1992 was worth $254,873 ten years later. Not quite as good a return as you might have garnered from Dell, EMC or Oracle (before the market swooned), but well in excess of what Wal-Mart, Pfizer or even GE delivered over the same period of time.
Doesn’t sound to me like the people at Harley would tell you half their advertising is wasted. Doesn’t look like one red cent of their advertising was wasted. Nor were any of their funds deployed to “move the peanut”. Nope, they knew who they were and what they could do and they told Carmichael-Lynch to go out and communicate it to folks.
But getting back to the larger group of advertisers I mentioned earlier: For all they have in common, there’s much more they don’t have in common. Some of these campaigns were for expensive, highly considered purchases, some not. Some are relatively unique products, some are entirely parity. Some have a pretty obvious strategic underpinning, some are almost entirely executional. There isn’t even a pattern to the agencies that developed them: Four were created by regional agencies, three by global juggernauts. So go figure. The one thing they all did was succeed. And they did so via a remarkably obvious, but all too often ignored process.
Making the connection with your audience
What all these campaigns did so effectively (and I’d argue all successful campaigns must do) is they connected with their respective audiences. Their ads resonated with people, as you’ll sometimes hear it put. Which enabled them to communicate with people. And mirabile dictu, people’s behavior reflected this communication. Despite being saddled with the same problem that faces all mass communication—these campaigns were no more invited into people’s lives than any other—they broke through. Which begs the question, shouldn’t all advertising do that?
Of course it should. But sadly, a lot of it never even tries, largely due to one or two very dangerous advertiser/agency mindsets. The first is what I call the “look godammit, we’re spending $100K a page or $500K a half-minute, we’re ENTITLED to people’s attention” mindset. Which is patent
nonsense: You can’t rent people’s attention. No matter how much you might want to. And according to a very interesting book that came out a while ago, The Attention Economy, you should want to because as its authors Thomas Davenport and John Beck put it:
“In postindustrial societies, attention has become a more valuable currency than the kind you store in bank accounts . . . Understanding and managing attention is now the single most important determinant of business success.” The fact that The Wall Street Journal is read by x million people a day does not in any way shape or form mean your ad is read by x million people. It is read by whoever chooses to give it the time of day, which tragically could be 1/1,000,000 of x. To quote Gossage again, “People don’t read advertising, people read what they want to read and sometimes what they want to read is an ad”.
This Hertz “rent-a-person” mindset was at the heart of the dot-com debacle. People actually thought they could (and some briefly did) “monetize eyeballs”, i.e. charge advertisers for every person who viewed a page on a website that contained the advertiser’s banner ad. The dehumanized use of the word eyeballs underscores either the ignorance or arrogance of all the participants in this scam. People aren’t eyeballs, they’re human beings, living, breathing organisms fully capable of doing exactly what they did with most banner ads: ignore them completely. Banner ads were one of the more egregious examples of ad-like objects that barely attempt to engage their audience. But frankly, most ads of any sort aren’t much better. Quite possibly because their sponsors and creators never set out to engage anyone: No, they had another entirely different purpose: They wanted to inform you.
Such a seemingly innocent word, I mean, doesn’t everyone want to be informed? You the marketer of bologna, for example, think your bologna is the most wonderful thing on Earth and can’t wait to inform us at length as to why this is so. We, on the other hand, recognize this is your job—to sell everything but the squeal as the delightful expression goes in that industry. However, the only way we’re going to pay your bologna ad two seconds’ worth of attention is if it is somehow momentarily more interesting than the Oprah Winfrey interview we’re reading at the moment. It would all seem fairly obvious. But paradoxically, thousands of ads emerge from the void (conference room) every day that fly in the face of this commonsensical truth: To capture people’s attention we must engage them on their terms. Why we fail to admit this can only be explained by the second dangerous advertiser/agency mindset, which essentially decrees: “the consumer is a dope”.
Forty years ago David Ogilvy warned people at his agency to never forget “the consumer is not a moron, she’s your wife”. It would appear that all these years later, the only thing that needs to be added to this sage advice is “or your husband”. Because judging from a lot of advertising out there, we clearly don’t think our audience is as smart as we are. S-o, w-e h-a-v-e t-o s-p-e-l-l i-t o-u-t f-o-r t-h-e-m. Which is about as fun as reading that was.
Our advertising simply doesn’t seem to have much faith in our audience’s appreciation for subtlety, wit, charm, nuance or grace. We just don’t trust those rubes to connect the dots. So instead, a lot of advertising continues to tell people what to do and what to believe, enjoying all the success of the warden in Cool Hand Luke.
Worse still, this lack of respect for the intelligence of the people we’re trying to connect with leads to another behavior that is absolute anathema to effective communication. We don’t listen to these people very well, either.