Archive for February, 2007

How did lying become so fashionable—again!

Lately it appears everyone has foregone lessons of our recent forefathers (Mr. WorldCom, Mr. Rigas, and MS Living) and it’s right back to “what can I get away with” time.

We’ve entered a period where it’s too easy to get caught now since our faithful media consists of citizen journalists who will do absolutely anything for a scoop—like lose sleep and not get paid. The trip down is way too low these days.

Past few years have exposed corporate greed and disdain for the consumer at its finest, Enron being the poster child. Weren’t we shocked, despite our common opinion of corporate giants being anything but flattering? Ah, remember how particularly outlandish those few individuals behaved. The late Ken Lay was face of a sinister corporate evildoing. Faces like ours, with a nose and eyes, but at the same time something alien. People knowingly took advantage of regular folks in ways even 80’s players like Michael Milken could not fathom.

Afterwards, people like me who write, research, teach and practice PR were waiting for a new age of ethics. Nothing spawned, nothing earned—right?

Well, not exactly. In 2006 there was more out-and-out fibbing by giant players than thought possible: Edelman’s blogging for Wal-Mart BS, Sony’s bizarrely slow battery recall and $4.25 million paid-out for illegal anti-copying software, Bausch & Lomb’s faulty solutions, and Taco Bell’s mishandling of many vegetables.

Denials were the in look until corporations got smacked in the head by facts.

It is as if the go-to-jail years are shades of Bobby Ewing stepping out of a fantasy shower (reference “Dallas”)!

Lying is that thing our mothers warned us about. Look, I’m hardly a Saint –I’ve had a BlackBerry pager for going on 10 years and always claim to be somewhere I’m not.

But if you service people for a living, all you have are good looks and your word. Why ruin either; why even exaggerate! It makes a journalist who reports the lie look like a dolt, so therefore your problems get louder and more public. Not to mention the ethical problems.

I get muttering something you quickly regret. Politicians buy back what they say every day. If it happens, if you or someone in your company lies, call back, apologize, make amends. Say some unruly devil made you do it. But don’t stand by your insolence

Bausch & Lomb’s spokespeople imagined aloud that bouts of illness from their brand of contact lens solution was not entirely their fault when it was. I found that odd; beleaguered pharmaceutical companies usually do okay with stopping bad situations from worsening. They know delay will merely exacerbate. “If you don’t know what to say or how much to say,” I’ve told pharma clients at my firm, “you end up making people mad by not saying anything—or making things up.”

It may seem obvious (it’s not) but you can “get away with” telling the truth by jumping up with outside data from a third-party source – government, surveyors or testers –that you give to press before they start to wonder and thereby emphasize the safety of your product or pinpoint whatever problems exist. External data is somebody else’s reputation so it’s seen as cool.

As for citizen bloggers and podcasters and e-mail trend shouters, if you treat aggressively under full disclosure, you will rebound without folks thinking “I caught them.” Use all open channels to talk about what happened, analyze what went wrong, demonstrate how quickly you jumped!

Want proof that honesty wins any tough battle? Try Phillip Morris, which has gone above and beyond a government settlement in shouting mea culpa. A firm not known to be open has been quite grassroots with their forthrightness. They devoted resources and spoke out on TV and radio, in blogs, chat rooms, consumer and/or investor sites. They even dove into shallow end of the pool with AOL and MSN.

Hollywood has taught us poorly. But it’s one thing for Miss Kidman to pretend to be wed to Mr. Urban or Mr. Aiken to pretend to be a hot-blooded American girl-chaser. These are performers paid to beguile us and sell something that is pure fantasy! Entirely different for a firm to bemoan a problem via big media with statements they and we know is pure nonsense.

What I’ve learned from the post-dot-com workaday is smack in the middle of Punk Marketing book, which is a few days from its loud release. Here, Simmons and I unveil a heckuva convenient truth:

Knowing that what you do passes the bullshit test and is meaningful, honest and interesting, plus has some measure of heart, is all it takes to make it in the world of sales, marketing, PR, and all fields of “service.” If your work doesn’t fit the above, please find something else to do.

It’s a fact: informed people want to be told what’s up. So have a heart, pull the Band-Aid brand bandage off, and dole those facts out. We’d rather laugh at Katie Couric than you, anyway!

At the moment any viewer can choose to ignore TV commercials that irritate them by:
a) leaving the room for a pee
b) using our remote control to change channels
c) fast-forwarding through them with our TiVo-like thingies

But, the problem is that the advertisers don’t know we’re ignoring them because the data isn’t there so we (because we fit in the demographic being targeted) are extremely likely to see the same irritating commercial again before too very long. And we’ll go through A,B or C once more.

Being constantly exposed to bad commericals sours the bunch for all TV ads. As soon as one pops up that we dislike we most likely skip the rest of the commercial break, not bothering to find out if there were others in there that were actually worth watching. And over time we get used to thinking Tv commercials are irritating and so start to skip ALL commercial breaks.

This is precisely what has been happening over the past few years: viewers have learned to expect TV commercials to be bad and so have started to avoid them altogether. And advertisers (and their poor poor agencies) have been forced to try other “clever” techniques to reach us, in the strangest of places.

Of course the problem isn’t TiVo or the remote control. No more so than the problem is having a toilet nearby to pee in when the ads come on. And the problem isn’t that TV advertising doesn’t work - TV advertising can be incredibly effective. The problem is that bad ads are ruining it for everyone.

We all instintively know this, so I won’t labor the point, but I will offer a solution that might actually change the game so that BAD ads die and GOOD ads survive.

Imagine a TV remote control with a simple red button on it that says “Block.” If the viewer pushes this during a commercial then he or she will never be shown that commercial again. It will simply be blocked from his TV set. Over time, the more an individual viewer blocks commercials that don’t appeal to him or her, the more good commercials will remain.

My guess is that there will be a pretty consistent reaction across viewers to the same ads. For the most part people will agree on which ads are bad and which are good. And pretty quickly advertisers that are responsible for bad ads will discover they are wasting their money and will need to find ways to create commercials that people actually like. Now that’s a revolutionary thought.

Soon only good TV commercials will be shown and people will once more stay watching dutifully through the breaks because they like what they’re seeing, and will save their pee until the shitty network promos come on.

OK, so I know there are issues with this idea. For instance, if there are multiple people in a household, why should the taste of one of them affect the rest? And I’m not even sure it’s technologically possible…but my guess is it is.

I’m going to patent the idea, make my fortune, and save the advertising industry all in one fell swoop. What a hero.

The Super Bowl represents the last watercooler moment for TV advertising. With the splintering of the media into a million different pieces across the airwaves, online, in games (video, that is) and everywhere else that will sell space to marketers, the Bowl is still a place where millions of young guys gather around their 70 inch plasmas and LCDs to share an entertainment experience. And advertisers know they have a chance to reach this precious demographic with gold old-fashioned TV commercials. Who can say TV advertsing is dead when an advertiser like Anheuser-Busch spends $25 million on Super Bowl commercials? Right? Right…?

And the agencies had better come up with the goods to prove that they can still woo the consumers with their fare.

Over the last 10 or 15 years the big lumbering agencies have become specialists in creating big lumbering TV-centric campaigns and are smarting from the blasphemy spoken by many with data to back it up that commercials are no longer reaching the people they need to reach, and those that they do reach, fast forward through them on TiVo or their cable operators own brand of DVR.

The Super Bowl is the agencies’ chance to prove that TV advertising can be great, that sponsored online search, branded entertainment, viral marketing and the like are no more than flashes in the pan and will crawol back from whence they came before too long.

But even this one last great advertising showcase - the Super Bowl - shows the case for TV comercials is far from proven. The advertising on display in the multiple breaks is not uninimously great. In fact, for the most part, the fare served up for the 41st Bowl was pretty damned poor given what’s at stake.

For one, there was an unhealthy a celebration of violence as a mode of humor. Not just slapstick, although there was plenty of that too, but people hitting each other or fighting or committing mass suicide. Isn’t the Super Bowl supposed to be a family show? I mean wasn’t that the problem with Janet Jackson’s nipple popping out a couple of years ago? But I guess violence is OK for young kids to see (my son is three and I had to turn the TV off when the ads came on) and to model their behavior on. Nice example Mad Ave.

And then there were the “consumer-generated ads” from Chevy, Doritos and the NFL. The Chevy one had a bunch of guys in the street taking their clothes of because they couldn’t resist the new Chevy car SUV hybrid thing in vile orange. It was lame. The Doritos one had a guy driving a car and a girl passerby smacking their heads because they were (a)distraced by Doritos, and (b)nerds. Lame AND violent. The NFL one was a great concept about the end of the season, poorly executed by the ad agency (and shot by commercial director legend Joe Pytca). But the idea actually came from an ad guy, Gino Bona, who works in a New England ad agency (Garrand Marketing Communications), just not from one working at Doritos agency of record, Omnicom Group’s Goodby Silverstein and Partners. Goodby must have hated having to produce an ad wriiten by a guy from another agency. Maybe that’s why they screwed it up. But, the point is, it ain’t really consumer-geberated if the consumer works in advertising. Right?

There was some great work, demonstating a good strategy and a big creative idea well-executed (and that, after all, is all advertising can hope to be), notably from E*trade, Revlon, Emerald Nuts and Toyota. They each showed that TV advertsing can still be a powerful way of getting a point about a product across.

But my award for the best commercials of the Bowl goes to Coca-Cola for two excellent ads from the “Welcome to the Coke Side of Life” campaign, created by Wieden and Kennedy. Coca-Cola has not been known for great ads in the past few years, producing a bunch of vapid, happy, slappy, crappy commercials that offended no-one and appealed to exactly the same number, but it really seems to have turned the corner with this work and I tip my caps to the marketer and its agency. W+K remain one of the great agencies around, developing stellar work consistently across their clients.

Has Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency that for the past three or four years has been the poster child for the Revolution of nontraditional marketing, finally peaked?

Maybe.

To many industry observers the evidence is certainly mounting: their campaign for Orville Redenbacher popcorn that uses a dead Orville as its reanimated spokesperson, has been criticized for being tasteless; their remake of the ‘Hilltop’ TV commercial for Coca-Cola, perhaps the most iconic commercial for the brand ever, was dull; they lost the Method Home Care account to Chiat Day in LA; its high profile ‘Men of the Square Table’ campaign for Miller Beer hasn’t translated into sales; and there are rumors that VW, the car account that was handed them on a plate in September 2005, might leave the shop following the untimely departure from the automaker of Kerri Martin , its director of brand innovation and major champion of the agency (Kerri was their client at MINI and hired the agency soon after taking her new job at VW).

As an ex-Coke employee who longed to remake ‘Hilltop’ to say something about today’s world, I have to admit I was damned disappointed with how CP+B wasted this golden opportunity. I mean it’s not like you can do a remake again, at least not until the last one is dead and buried. And as an ex-CP+B employee it’s tempting to proclaim, “Ah, those were the glory days. It’s not been the same since I left” and cite the fact that Method was an account I helped win and is now gone. And as a viewer I always hated the Miller campaign because, while based on a good strategy, creatively it was always trying too hard.

But still, I don’t think they are falling. They are still the only agency in The US that is pushing boundaries creatively and redefining the meaning of advertising to be something far broader. They have made their clients’ brands part of popular culture. And they are still delivering work that is incredibly effective. The Burger King campaign, for instance, has been partly responsible for 10 consecutive quaters of positive comparable sales.

I knew them in 1997 when they were a 90-person shop working on two floors in a corporate looking office tower in Miami and even then they were doing amazing work. For me the creation of the anti-tobacco Truth brand is still one of the most brilliant marketing strategies ever developed. Not just because the work was cool to look at, but because it actually worked and reversed the upward trend in teenage smoking.

Many people have seen CP+B rise since 2003 when the agency won high profile accounts like IKEA and MINI and think their history of great work is brief, but really the work has for the most part been consistently good for almost 10 years.

But of course schadenfreude (delight in another’s misfortune) is natural from those jealous of others’ success.

Having said that, I do think the agency has some challenges. They are now BIG and split into two offices thousands of miles apart. When the creative and strategic force that is Alex Bogusky cannot interract face-to-face with everyone to shape their thinking and their work, some less than brilliant advertising is sure to slip between the cracks.

Watch this space.