How Doritos lost its ways

Doritos was the clear winner of the Super Bowl commercial arms race in 2007. The combination of product focus, innovative usage of UGC and refreshing ideas from semi-amateurs worked well.

This year they moved ahead with their UGC approach under title 'Doritos Crash The Super Bowl Contest'. They asked unsigned talents to submit a song, the winner, Kina Grannis, was featured in a Super Bowl commercial (above).

Sure, Kina scored a record deal with Interscope Records and the song was fine but the whole campaign didn't connect with the audience.

Why? People that didn't hear about the contest had no idea why Doritos featured a Folk Song in their commercial. Don't expect football fans at a loud party to read all the copy. It might work in a darkened board room, ain't working in a Super Bowl party madhouse. Most importantly, the product was not the hero. Last year's commercial focused on people's passion around Doritos, how they like to express their appreciation of the product to the world. This year? It's a song. Ok?

Let's look at the lyrics...

Don't break me, I bruise easily
The source of both your love and misery

I am steady, beating endlessly
While you are dozing, dreaming pretty things
Lovely things

I don't work for free
Please take care of me

This is a message from your heart
Your most devoted body part
Taking blood and making art
This is a message from your heart
Pounding away into the dark
You could thank me for a start
This is a message from your heart

Don't hurt me, I bleed constantly
My efforts leave me but flow back swiftly

My rhythm, soothing, like raindrops steady
On foggy windows when you gaze outwardly
Peacefully

Just a sappy song. No connection to Doritos or any product attributes.

I applaud Doritos for not resting on their laurels. But I gotta say that UGC without any product connection doesn't work. For me, that is.

Have we become assholes?

People love to be part of tribes. The advertising community is not different. We have the traditional tribes, the digital tribes, the Web 2.0 tribes and and and.

In the last few months I've seen a lot of blog posts, heard many podcasts and overheard conversations where the Social Media/Web 2.0 guys sounded like arrogant hypocrites: The big agencies don't get digital, everything is about the 30 second spot, they're just trying to hold on to their riches. Traditional folks have become enemies. Outdated jokes we look down upon.

And, the digital guys are the Rambo's and Rocky's of the new era. We know the answer to everything, we know where the game is going, we know the future. In short: the traditional folks sit in dark-wooded bars sipping on their three martini lunches while we sip on organic fruit elixirs changing the world one pixel at a time.

By talking and acting like this, we have become the enemy. We act like arrogant 'know-it-alls' , stopped listening to the traditional folks and, basically, turned into the people we warned others about.

In the end, we need to understand that the advertising world is a community. Sure, there will be differences, discussions, fights, politics. And we will continue to see things from our point of view and will continue to struggle accepting the 'traditional' point of view. But we have to make this a productive process, not a destruction path that goes nowhere.

The advertising community has many problems: limited attention of people, dramatically changing media usage, overwhelming amount of channels - you know the drill. That's our real enemy (if you want to call it that), not the other side of the advertising community. High School attitudes and cliques won't get us any further in tackling this enemy.

Ultimately, we should take our own advice of listen and learn to the advertising community. It's not about who's right. It's about doing the right thing in this new marketing reality. At this moment, all of us are one eyed kings and queens. Let's work together to get the whole picture.

Puzzle Solvers

Honda's UK work has been exceptional in the last few years, specifically the amazing Cog commercial.

Wieden & Kennedy's latest Honda work didn't do it for me. I really wanted to like it but it just didn't connect with me. The commercial is too long and, frankly, I couldn't give a hoot about all these engineers. If you want to solve puzzle, let people participate. Everybody is up for a good trivia quiz or a puzzle to be solved. But nobody wants to watch others solve puzzles. (Deep Announcer Voice: "Coming soon on Fox Reality - Puzzle Solvers. See Raymond Smith solve a 25,000 piece puzzle.")

But it could work really well in the interactive space: Introduce the puzzle idea through video and then let people focus on the companion unit, allowing them to solve their own puzzles. Since Honda is a brand for the people, an interactive solutions feels closer to the brand and the engagement interests people have online.

Faux One-to-one marketing gone horribly wrong

The only time we ever receive handwritten letters is around Christmas or birthdays. When I checked the family mail yesterday, I found a handwritten letter addressed to my wife. No return address, the handwriting from an older person. Intrigued, I exclaimed: "You have a personal letter." Even more intrigued, my wife opened the letter immediately to find above abomination:
A fake cutout from a newspaper (stock quotes in the back to communicate the business-savvy part of the offer) talking about a lame offer from a Ford Dealership in Glendale, California. A Post-It Note was attached: "This deal is awesome. G."

Pathetic is not the right word to describe this idea from an unknown marketing virtuoso. I leave the right word to your curse vocabulary. I guess some companies think people are really stupid. I mean, really, really stupid. Really, really, really stupid. I would like to meet the person that fell for this stunt and bought a Ford. I will make sure he'll win the Darwin Awards. And I buy him a drink.

Or, shall I worry? I mean the Post-It Note was signed with 'G'. What does 'G' stand for? Genius Marketer? Gangster? Maybe it was a threat by G-Man that there's more to come.

G-Man, I'll be ready. I fight your pathetic marketing strategy with all the might of my 1,000+ spam emails daily. G-Man, I'm waiting for you!

Polish the gravestones

TVWeek is reporting that the "seventh-season premiere of Fox’s “American Idol” was its lowest-rated in four years.
“Idol” fell from last year’s series-high premiere perch, yet was once again a ratings titan that readily blew away all competitors Tuesday night, as well as all other network premieres from earlier this season.
“Idol” received a 13.8 rating among adults 18 to 49, according to preliminary Nielsen data.
That’s down 13% from last year’s 15.8 and down 10% from 2006’s 15.3.
Among total viewers, “Idol” was seen by an average of 33.2 million, down 11% from last year."

Given the fact, that TV afficionados touted American Idol as the miracle medicine for their hemorrhaging ratings, this doesn't fare good for the TV world. Plenty cheap explantations out there (Primary Season, warmer than usual weather, the bar had $1 special, I had to wash my hair) but the real culprit is the decline of TV as the mass gathering place. The only bastion remaining is the Super Bowl. And I expect those ratings to get bigger and bigger. People long for these moments and brands are willing to pay top dollars for them.

Besides the Super Bowl, I wonder if my daughter will ever experience these water cooler moments again.

: hemorrhaging

Are we becoming cement heads?

What is my daughter going to do for entertainment in 20 years? Will she watch teens wrestling each other in their backyard, exchange cat images with dumb captions or participate in a Jackass stunt just to share with the world? That's the world being envisioned by Andrew Keen in his book 'The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture.'

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

And he continues:

“What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune,” Mr. Keen writes. “The new winners — Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie — are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites ‘aggregate.’ Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave.”

Sure, very elitist and snobbish. And he has a point. But, then again, he doesn't:

Newspapers, record labels, movie studios, TV networks, etc. have lived in this cocoon that allowed them to release products that were mostly crappy and just intended to make a buck (Can you say Wild Hogs?) All these entertainment money-making machines displayed a Country Club mentality that allowed almost nobody to break into. Sure, there is David Lynch, Bjork and Kurt Vonnegut. But for each one of them is another Rush Hour Sequel and a Britney single. Or rather 10,000 of them.

We should let the markets decide what people will use for their entertainment. And, as we know, these things come in waves: The flood of reality shows were countered with well-written shows like 'Lost'. And the flood of amateur videos will be countered with more professional content.

However, I'm worrying about newspapers. People don't like to read them anymore. When I used to fly early morning, everybody in the plane was reading the paper. Now, I'm often the only one.
Historically, people chose their paper to validate their point of view. But, even if you're a card-carrying Republican, you will find articles in the NY Times that will expand your horizon. Same is true for Democrats in the Wall Street Journal. In the era of blogs and citizen journalism, these opposing views are being drowned out by voives that cement one's point of view.
It takes a lot of work, effort and sweat to be a good journalist. Sure, some of them have gotten lazy in the last few years and the CBS/Rather affair showed that the Wiki Intelligence of the blogosphere can be utilized to validate stories/claims. But just because you have a Typepad account doesn't mean you're a journalist.

My concern is that all of us might just become cement heads, not movable, just looking in one direction, no opportunity to expand your horizon. That's not what liberty and freedom is all about.