Archive for the 'Brands' Category

Thought experiment time.

Pretend for a moment that the nation’s publishers met Godfather-style in a smoke-filled room somewhere high atop midtown Sixth Avenue. Everyone is there: The Random House overlords; the Simon & Schuster bosses; the charming and benevolent folk who run McGraw-Hill. All the other bigwigs. In the corner there’s a nice dairy tray with lox and whitefish, but no one’s paying attention to that. The business at hand is way too life and death. The industry heads agree – yes, they’ve been flooding the marketplace with too many books. Too many authors for too many niches and too few eyes.

So they’ve reached a decision. They’re tightening the reins and establishing what amounts to a basement. Let the Internet have its laissez faire free-for-all. That’s what it’s intended for, damn it. But the ink-and-binding set will move in the opposite direction: only credentialed, worthy writers get to publish under commercial banners. Word tumbles down to the editorial gatekeepers that, yes, or rather no, there will be no more taking chances on just anyone’s two bit thesis. Err on the side of exclusion. If something looks like it should be relegated to the vanity presses, it should.

“We can’t afford to take chances on a slush pile’s silt. The draw bridges are rising up, and we’re taking the express elevator to the upper floors of our ivory tower.”

So here’s the question: is there anything wrong with this?

Sure it’s elitist. But we’re evolving into a culture that can allow for a healthy dose of selective elitism when needed. You aren’t Spielberg? So what. Throw that video of your toddler angrily dropping Fuck-words on the family cat onto YouTube. If it’s compelling, a few million people will watch it. Or maybe they’ll prefer your neighbor’s video of Grandpa belching out the national anthem.

But you’ll be better off, either way, because the chance of someone in Singapore seeing your adventures in auteurism is much higher than if you decided to try for a dozen years to secure foreign distribution through Universal.

It’s an extreme and not completely analogous example, but there’s truth to it. Despite all those fancy technological advancements and truncated attention spans leading publishing gradually down the path to the dinosaur graveyard, books matter. They still have cachet. Having your name on the spine right above Knopf or St. Martin’s or Penguin-Putnam still means something to *you as a writer (*did I say me?).

But walk into any Barnes & Noble and look on those overflowing tables. Just gander at some of the people “playing author” right now. It’s one thing to be an expert in a particular field and have a little assistance, whether from a ghostwriter or a co-author, like many in business do. But some of these books are midlife crises with acknowledgments, an index and a marketing budget.

Just because you’re good at one thing, doesn’t mean that you’re a natural in another. It seems true in the book biz. Some people have compelling stories that should be told. Most people do not. And the filters are broken.

There’s a reason we call them vanity presses. They appeal to those self-absorbed bits of every person’s soul, or the bulbs that light whenever you pick up Tolstoy and murmur with your eyes ablaze, “Shit. I could do that.” So go ahead. Publish. Do it independently. Write up your masterpiece, put it on Amazon or in the back of your van, and take it to the people at a state fair. If it’s good it’ll sell—you just have to make them open it up.

The home-schooled child who wrote that dragon book proved just that. More likely, what you wrote is really just for your friends and associates…it’s not good and will not sell. At which point . . . think about giving up. Because just like it’s not every morning a shower karaoke balladeer winds up on Sony BMG, not every halfwit who can “keyboard” (type) and spare time to jot it down, should wind up clogging an already ridiculously congested publishing pipeline.

[I will add that just because you aren’t a pro writer doesn’t mean you need to stop reading books and posting fantastic blog comments….]

Misguided teen queen Jamie Lynn Spears appeared last night on ABC’s new show, Miss Guided. In dictionaries all across America, the entries for irony just exploded.

The “second” Spears (gee, we need a spare) played a troubled teen debating between going to college or sticking around for a boyfriend. For those of you shacking up in Saddam’s old spiderhole, Jamie Lynn just made the decision to have a baby and take some time off from her acting career.

Is this life imitating art or the other way around?

Her sabbatical is treating her well - things have never been better for SpearsSpare! By taking time off, she meant taking time to get even more famous. Though her pregnancy goes against Nickelodeon’s wholesome image, ratings for her show, Zoey 101 have soared. And the hype around her appearance on Miss Guided… well, I’m even talking about it. (Shame on me, I know.)

Who’s to blame! Let’s go with Juno. Jamie Lynn’s publicists are not idiots, and we know the Spears clan has a knack for drawing attention (self-promotion is too generous). They saw the amniotic fluid on the wall after Juno went big and so they said “Here’s a way to make JLS super known.” Quietly dealing with the situation back home on the Bayou wouldn’t work for this management. Instead they SOLD the story to OK! magazine for seven figures. A nation of kids now considers her the real life Juno McGuff. Except, instead of being the cheese to someone’s macaroni, Jamie Lynn is the Easy Mac for the college kid on a budget (no offense meant to Easy Mac).

In my last post on celebrity babies, I intentionally barely touched on this. There’s just something unsettling about babies having babies. I’m old school, but there’s a way to handle very public scandals that, while acknowledging mistakes, deals with the repercussions soberly. It reflects strong character and just happens to be the healthy way to live a life. It’s a personal opinion, and the public, at least in the long term, appreciates it more than a naked parade around the town square.

That respect/goodwill counts when trying to make a career in the public sphere.

A wise man named Jack Handy once said, “To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there’s no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.” These wise words remind me of the Spears clan. Their lives are primetime dramas, except there are no ratings, nothing but shame gained, and at the end of the third trimester, Jamie Lynn really will have a baby, G-d love her. Sometimes bad publicity is just bad publicity.

The Financial Times reported yesterday that Apple is considering launching an “all you can eat” iTunes service that would allow customers to get unlimited access to the iTunes library in exchange for their paying a premium for iPods and iPhones. This mirrors Nokia’s “comes with music” offer the Finnish company announced last December in which folks will be able to get all of Universal Music library of music by paying a premium on top of the price of a Nokia phone. The FT reported that Apple might also be examining a subscription service in which iPhone customers pay a monthly charge as part of their phone bill to get unlimited access to iTunes tunes.

What’s interesting about this is that Apple is proving itself once again to be adept at shifting and innovating as the market moves. Rather than simply sticking to the business model that has made them the most successful seller of music downloads (by far), the black turtle-necked one has recognized that being the biggest in ANYTHING is no guarantee of future success. Consumers don’t like being taken for granted and if something new and shiny comes along, such as unlimited music, they might easily be tempted to dump their iPods or iPhones in favor of a cool new Nokia phone that gives it to them. And data shows that consumers would be willing to pay a $100 premium for as device to get unlimited music over its lifetime, or $7-8 a month in extra subscription charges.

To be a Punk Marketer you have to put yourself in the shoes of the consumer (however smelly they might be) and imagine what they want and need. As a starting point, assume there is no brand loyalty, even for a brand as “cool” and iconic as Apple, and that consumers are fickle and will change allegiance as fast as it takes to say, “but this ones cheaper!” Research is useful for that, but so is intuition and common sense, and Jobs is a master at understanding what will appeal to consumers emotionally without having to see proof of it. And the other thing that Apple consistently does is to set its own standards, not be governed by those of the industry. Each product they come out with doesn’t just improve on the competition, it redefines the market. Sure, the iPhone has its problems (most of of them because AT&T’s network isn’t good enough), but it has set the standard for all future mobile devices leaving all but rival Nokia, with its new N-95 phone, scrambling in the dust.

This week Starbucks left millions of rush hour commuters parched and disappointed when they found out the coffee joint was closed for a 3.5 hour barista training session and forced loyal customers to find an alternate way to quench their caffeine and Bonnie Raitt cravings (whoever pumps their music in loves Raittster).

Now Starbucks, which I publicly renamed “The Gap of the Coffee World” in a local paper, insists this wasn’t a publicity stunt… And yet we at Punk Marketing Central know better. Come on, coffee dudes, we could smell it.

The newspapers carried headlines (brought to them from puppy dog PR people) that said things like “Starbucks, totally awesome” and “Coffee, not just for ingestion anymore.” For a non-publicity stunt, it was a kind of a genius happening, and there is surely no shame in rising above the noisy news world.

Take a listen to the background music: The stock price has halved. For the first time the company has not only stopped expanding, but actually closing locations. With 171 in Manhattan alone (click here to to see what happens when one man decides to hit up every NY shoppe in 24 hours), the concept of downsizing must hit Starbucks execs right square in the caffeinated gullet.

Next they are going to for the first time stop charging customers for Wi-Fi usage. (They won’t charge for the first two hours. When your time is up, just go down the street to — Starbucks.) What to say to that? It’s about time. Who charges for Wi-Fi anymore besides Boingo!? We would rather take our coffee outside, sit on a bench and steal someone’s wireless connection. And you do too. Not to sound paranoid, but it’s creepy when you sign on at Starbucks. They ask for your address, credit card and your soul. Gets us every time. When they made the big announcement about the change last week, only to receive a resounding “duh, finally” from customers.

So Starbucks needed to turn both Wall Street and consumer attention away from what’s coming out as the bad news while reminding and/or convincing people that it’s worthwhile to spend more on a cup of coffee than our anorexically-inclined lunches. How about focusing the buzz away from crap stock news to the hopefully increasing quality of its product…

And while the coverage of the gimmick was huge I’d like to ask Howard Schultz a Punk question: Do you know who you are? Is the creation you created called Starbucks still Starbucks? The place we sat in with the milquetoast sounds around us, made us feel comfy enough to buy coffee and relax. Now it’s a machine — everything is about selling me what’s playing on an iTunes-enhanced monitor! I see products everywhere. Yep. I’m in the Gap all over again.

Barista-retooling made all the papers and broadcast news, and spread around our friend the blogosphere. Even Today did a piece in this mediocre news month. Turns out Veira and Lauer were thrilled that the human coffee-makers are trained to make their Venti Soy Lattes to a higher standard. Where in the world is Matt Lauer? Now the public knows he’s at a 30 Rock Starbucks. Not shabby PR, no way no how. And if you venture into a Starry-Eyes Bucks today, you will nbote a branded-new sticker on the door stating: “We Make The Best Espresso….” Gee, are they trying to force a point down our throats?

Starbucks claims the week’s events were all about the coffee and it’s got the level of credibility we felt from bumpy Jennifer Lopez who was no way pregnant.! Punk Marketers know much better. And sure, we love a stunt almost as much as our morning joe. Problem is, someone else snuggled up to us while Starbucks was closed. During those three point five sad hours we got to sample the Dunkin’ Donuts around the block, where we discovered a one-dollar latte with a lot more froth.

It was announced today that Crispin Porter + Bogusky won the advertising account for Microsoft’s consumer products, a piece of business with billings in excess of $300million. That is some feat and I want to be the first (alright, the 589th) to congratluate my old colleagues at the agency. They’ve come a long way since I first met them in 1997 when they were less then 100 people occupying two floors in an office tower in Coconut Grove, Florida. Not many people, even in the insular ad industry, knew of them depite the fact they’d been doing great work for a few years and even when they launched the brand Truth - still one of the best campaigns for anything anywhere - the next year they were regarded by most as a bunch of oddballs who had no place working on big mainstream brands.

Well today oddball came of age. You don’t get much more mainstream than good old Microsoft, the company that people love to hate for its size, dull-looking products and geeky persona. The big MS must have realized that to transform its image, its only hope was to completely rethink its brand and, seeing what CP+B did for companies like Burger King, they became pretty much the only choice. The runner-up for the account was Fallon, a great agency, but one that has hardly done much to add that priceless ‘cool factor’ to its clients’ brands in the last few years. What they did for BMW by creating Hollywood-quality films for the web was amazing for its bravery but, hey, that was 8 years ago now.

There are few agencies that compete with CP+B. It has almost single-handedly transformed the way advertising is defined, from a format driven discipline to something much broader and organic. The way Alex Bogusky and his creative lieutenants think about markting problems is just so markedly different from the way it works in other agencies, it just doesn’t bear comparison. Smaller agencies run by big thinking renegades have a chance to learn from CP+B and create truly media neutral, holistic campaigns, but I just don’t know how the big agencies, so used to working in the old way where media determines creative (and TV is always king), have a chance. Luckily for them there are still clients who put a premium on service above creative, and global network above big thinking, but with accounts like Microsoft handing the keys over to agencies like CP+B, I wonder for how long.