Make love not war Part 2

I've been married for more than 6 years and I've known my wife for more than 8. By now, we should know each other pretty well, wouldn't you think? When we are with friends she has to listen to stories she heard gazillion times before, and she still manages to smile or laugh when the punchline comes around.

I think these moments and habits partners know intimately, make us believe we know the other person. But, once in a while, we're in the middle of a conversation and one of us shares a moment or story we never heard before. And it reminds all of us that we do know a lot about our partner but we don't know everything. (And, by the way, each person is evolving each and every day.)

An entire industry has been built around the idea to avoid these personal and revealing moments. Instead, we discuss the lives of others on TMZ, PerezHilton or awfulplasticsurgery.com. These are just diversions and white noise.

The real stories are with your family, your friends, colleagues. You can wait all your life to hear these stories and experience amazing moments. Or you can simply ask. But don't ask if you're not ready for an answer. Meaning: if you're too busy/pre-occupied to listen, don't even bother asking. As you can read in 'Listening Is An Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project', by Dave Isay:

"If we take the time to listen, we'll find wisdom, wonder and poetry in the lives and stories of the people all around us."

As discussed in my previous post, we have to change our marketing lingo in order to find meaningful connections between brands and people. Once we embraced a more personal, dare I say more loving language, we need to embrace the idea of listening as an act of love. Just like the first date when we force ourselves to ask questions and listen, brands need to listen to people to show 'their love'. It's hard for me to use deep-rooted emotional words to describe the brand-people relationship. But that trepidation shows me that this is something we need to work on and develop.

Successful marketing needs to be rooted in discovering the stories that make people unique and the dreams that drive them. Everything else is just a diversion and white noise.

Thanks to Tom Peters for the inspiration and Ira Glass for constantly pushing the idea of listening as an act of love.

Web 2.0 - How to do it right

Seth Godin has a great post about the new world of marketing and how organizations have to adopt to succeed in the Web 2.0 world (Or whatever you want to call it.)

He writes:

"Organizations don’t fail because the Web and the New Marketing don’t work. They fail because the Web and the New Marketing work only when applied to the right organization. New Media makes a promise to the consumer. If the organization is unable to keep that promise, then it fails.

New Marketing—whipped cream and a cherry on top—isn’t magical. What’s magical is what happens when an organization uses the New Marketing to become something it didn’t used to be—it’s not just the marketing that’s transformed, but the entire organization. Just as technology propelled certain organizations through the Industrial Revolution, this new kind of marketing is driving the right organizations through the digital revolution.

You can become the right organization. You can align your organization from the bottom up to sync with New Marketing, and you can transform your organization into one that thrives on the new rules."

Too many organizations still apply the old rules and structures to their marketing approach. Seth points out that if Web 2.0 strategies and tactics don't work, you should have a long, hard look at your organization and not put the dunce cap on your Web 2.0 strategy.

If your company had the right structure and organization 10 years, chances are very good you have to adjust today. Or better yesterday.

CTR of <1%. Don't monkeys score higher?

Great piece in AdAge from Mike Hartley of ZooZoom.com about the lack of good content and media integration on most online sites.

"To learn what works, brands must invest more in knowing the environments their target groups enjoy. They must understand the content in these environments, not just statistics about their use. Brands must invest more in production and evaluating what happened. It's relatively cheap to do so; mistakes are more easily forgiven because everyone sees the internet as an experiment, and the dividends are likely to be significant.

Considered steady strategic development in a medium that has already changed the nature of our relations and will continue to do so still seems rare. It's not "You are in danger if you don't" (although it may be) as much as "Why on earth are you missing such fine opportunities?" The Prius and a commitment to greener technology is a good example to consider. Toyota didn't become the world's largest car manufacturer by owning the lowest common denominator; it invested in an innovative and nonprofitable market that was obvious would become profitable."

In this changed media world, relevant marketing is the only way to go. Limited production budgets for digital marketing often don't allow to be relevant on all sites. The old mantra of "This campaign should work on each and every channel" doesn't apply anymore. It has to be changed to: "How can we communicate a relevant message delivering a specific positioning suited for this specific channel?"
It's much more work than we're used to. But it's so much more exciting.

Another good one

You have to stay with it for a while but the payoff is worth it. For a change a commercial that's not in your face and allows for intellectual connections.

I could see this as an intriguing online campaign (the video would have to be cut down a bit) with companion units and exploratory website. Commercials are great teasers, they work so much better when they are supported with experiential information.

Everybody talks about Googleclick and Microatlas

Not many people are talking about Experian's acquisition of Hitwise.
My strong belief is that we will see the evolution of 2 main marketing models:
a) Highly targeted marketing, based on data models
b) Experience marketing based on consumer insights and emotional connections

Does anyone remember that Experian houses all the FICO scores and has an impressive amount of consumer data? This knowledge with targeting techniques could Experian turn into a real powerhouse.

Design and Advertising

I'm a copywriter by trade but since I started in the advertising business, I've been working with designers each and every day.

The importance of copy has diminished in the last few years since the advent of digital media. Design is becoming more important from day to day in our advertising lives.

adliterate wrote a piece about the role of design in advertising. Here are a few excerpts:

"But anyone in advertising or design that has worked closely with the other will know that a truely collaborative relationship is not easy.

Part of the problem is that, just like the relatioship between the US and UK, advertising and design are separated by a common language.

I have felt this separation most acutely working with identity agencies but even working with in-house designers can be a challenge when the two of you think you are in agreement but mean something totally different.

So I thought I'd record the differences (albeit from an advertising perspective) in order that an understanding of them will promote fraternal love and co-operation.

1) When advertising people talk about a brand we mean the set of associations that exist in peoples minds. While designers clearly think this is important for them the brand is much more about the mark or identity. Our brand is nebulous theirs is concrete - it's what the identity looks like and the values that it embodies.

2) As a result advertising people see themselves as shepherds marshaling brand associations over time, whereas designers prefer to see themselves as police laying down the law of the brand and then enforcing it, often using their favourite tool - the Spirit Book.

3) Advertising people prize originality above any other value (we are obsessed with things that have never been done before regardless of whether this is relevant to success) while design people prize control over any other value (the extent to which they can control every manifestation of their creation). That's why they like Spirit Books so much.

4) So when it comes to integration advertising people try to encourage strategic coherence across all channels and activities whereas design people like to see executional consistency.

5) Designers often create things that are permanent manifestations of the brand - the packaging, the retail facia, the staff uniforms and of course the brand's physical representation in the form of a mark. As a result they are very conscious that these things need to last and rise above trends and fads. Advertising people produce things that are instantly disposable, the temporary manifestations of the brand so they like to play with cultural currency and at best to contribute to it. Perhaps this is one reason why advertising people like things being funny and designers do not.

6) Advertising people burn up ferociously expensive media this makes them very conscious of the need for it to deliver results. Design people tend to use relatively cheap media in comparison. It is costly to re-badge every retail outlet but that investment will last a decade (unless you are Abbey). Indeed many things that the designer controls have to be produced anyway - like packaging or stationary, bags or uniforms. This leads to a fundamental difference in the urgency with which activity is supposed to work and often makes design more commercially passive when advertising seeks to be more commercially aggressive.

7) Having said that, design people are often more focused on solving problems (especially industrial designers) since their training is in finding and solving real problems in people's lives or with the status quo. This means that they are often asked to and can think more fundamentally about, how it should be solved. Take the problem of left handed people being unable to use a pair of scissors, advertising people would approach this by telling left handed people how to use the existing scissors better whereas design people would create a new pair of scissors.

8) And finally our ideas of quality are based on different criteria. The concept of Good Design is absolute, in others words there is a notion of good design and poor design and while design genius can not be taught, good design can - there are real principles upon which it is based. There is no such absolute concept of good advertising and a pretence that there is often leads to commercially irrelevant decision making. Good advertising is whatever works for this audience today, good design is eternal. This is one of the reasons that we still sit on chairs designed by mid-Century legends (like Eames or Breuer) but laugh at advertising from the same era.

Neither camp is right or wrong we simply come from different traditions that value different things in the work we produce and from the people that produce it. And the more we understand and appreciate this the better our attempts at collaboration will be."

Advertisers try to verbalize ideas. Designers tend to express their vision in a visual language. Clearly, our lives have shifted towards a hyper-visual world and verbalized ideas have become less effective and important.

What advertising, design, marketing and PR don't do well, or not at all, is the live conversation, dialogue, interaction, chatter, gossips, silly talk, water cooler chatter, reviews, recommendations, blog outpourings, etc.

Our tribe lives revolve around gazillion of things while design contributes some tribal art and advertising tries to spread shared stories and fairy tales. But the real conversation happens outside. Design and advertising have to develop a new language, a new art and new stories to connect with all of us. Or we'll be looking at them from the outside in. As paying customer of museums.

Pluto is not a planet

Bob Garfield just published a provocative piece on Adage.com discussing the Post-Advertising Age.
Because he's a gifted writer, you should read the whole column. But because we're all ADD'ing through this life, I'll be happy to post some of the most poignant parts:

"Maybe you'd better lean forward. Presently you will be given five reasons to consider something barely imaginable: a post-apocalyptic media world substantially devoid of brand advertising as we have long known it.

It's a world in which Canadian trees are left standing and broadcast towers aren't. It's a world in which consumer engagement occurs without consumer interruption, in which listening trumps dictating, in which the internet is a dollar store for movies and series, in which ad agencies are marginalized and Cannes is deserted in the third week of June. It is a world, to be specific, in which marketing -- and even branding -- are conducted without much reliance on the 30-second spot or glossy spread.

Because nobody is much interested in seeing them, and because soon they will be largely unnecessary.

Perhaps you are already rolling your eyes. Perhaps you believe that vast structures on which vast societies and vast economies depend do not easily lose their primacy. Perhaps you believe that the TV commercial and magazine spread -- and radio spot and newspaper classified -- are forever and immutable, like the planets orbiting the sun. Good for you.

Now, say hello to Pluto -- the suddenly former planet. Forever and immutable, it turns out, are subject to demotion. This could be grim news for the agency business, which continues its erratic Pluto-like orbit around marketing budgets as if unaware that it has lost its stature -- and its relevance is next to go. In due course, you shall see how circumstances have conspired to threaten its place on the cosmic map altogether."

"Nor does the disruption end there. Since spring 2005, according to Magna Global USA, DVR penetration has doubled to 20% from 10%, and Forrester Research predicts it will reach half of U.S. households within three years -- well beyond the threshold at which 40% of advertisers say they will dramatically reduce their TV buys. Meanwhile, after years of steady growth in spite of steadily declining audiences, the broadcast-upfront market last year was down 5%. Coca-Cola, never a big upfront player, pulled out altogether. So did Johnson & Johnson, which shifted $250 million online. According to TNS, General Motors slashed $600 million from its 2006 ad spend. Is somebody nervous? Half of the 109 national advertisers surveyed by Forrester in 2006 said their ad agencies and media agencies were "ill-equipped" to deal with changes in the TV environment."

"Mass media, of course, do not exist in a vacuum. They have a perfect symbiotic relationship with mass marketing. Advertising underwrites the content. The content delivers audience. Audiences receive the marketing messages and patronize the advertisers, and so on in what for centuries was an efficient cycle of economic life. The first element of Chaos presumes the fragmentation of mass media creates a different sort of cycle: an inexorable death spiral, in which audience fragmentation and ad-avoidance hardware lead to an exodus of advertisers, leading in turn to an exodus of capital, leading to a decline in the quality of content, leading to further audience defection, leading to further advertiser defection and so on to oblivion. The refugees -- audience and marketers alike -- flee to the internet. There they encounter the second, and more ominous, Chaos component: the internet's awkward infancy.

The online space isn't remotely developed enough -- nor will it be anytime soon -- to absorb the advertising budgets of the top 100 marketers, to match the reach of traditional media or to fulfill the content desires of the audience. (Maybe viewers no longer demand their MTV, but what remains of the mass audience is in no hurry to surrender its Los Angeles Times and "Lost.") A collapsing old model. An unconstructed new model. Paralyzed marketers. Disenchanted consumers. It's all so ... chaotic."

(...)"Microsoft allocated to the introduction of its Vista operating system, 30% went online. If every national advertiser did the same tomorrow, Madison Avenue and Hollywood wouldn't be chaotic. They would be Pluto, relegated to some barren, subordinate outer orbit of the economy. And a lot of people would be singing a different tune."

Interesting stuff. I saw him speak tonight at the iMediaconnection Breakthrough Conference, and I was especially fascinated by the comparisons to the recent demise of the (former) planet Pluto and quotes from industry pros as well as folks like Bill Gates chiming in. This is a must read for anyone involved in the advertising industry. And make no mistake; if you work with digital signage, you are in the advertising industry as well. More than you think. I will have to let this piece sink in for a few days and will comment further on it. Until then, read it.

Now.

Keep the spark alive

Companies are good at dating: they treat you to candle-lit dinners, charm you, focus on you and can't wait to hear from you. Once you close the deal, companies become the spouse that gains 70 pounds, the husband that just wants to be left alone and the couple that stopped paying attention.

Marketers know that it's much harder to acquire a customer compared to keeping your current customers. Why then are they treating their customers so much worse than their prospects?
(I wonder about that in relationships as well: Why do people get excited about new friends and do everything to accomodate them, but don't bother to connect with current friends on an ongoing basis?).

Why is a product brochure so beautiful and the manual filled with errors and printed on the cheapest paper on earth?
Why are brand sites so easy to navigate, and support sites feel like you just encountered the end of the Internet?
That's how bad relationships and marriages feel and look like.

If we want to create loving and emotional relationships with our customers, we need to develop a plan to keep the spark alive. Here are my Top 10 ideas:


1. Try to understand the personal and relational goals of your relationship. Modify them as necessary.

2. Identify and develop mutual interests, like sports, hobbies, entertainment, etc.

3. Be willing to try something new.

4. Participate in a weekly or bi-weekly small group - read what your customers have to say about you.

5. Build up your customer in front of other business divisions.

6. Attend seminars on relationships every few months. Learn how others are developing better relationships with their customers.

7. Turn off the television, radio and computer once a month and try to communicate with your customers in innovative ways.

8. Leave little notes/gestures to express your emotion towards your customer.

9. Once a year write your customer a letter to say why you're so happy he chose you.

10. Pick a special day once a year to express how important your customer is to you. Pick an ordinary day (not determinded by anniversaries or events) and make it a surprise.

I'll leave the last word to Oscar Wilde: "Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."

TV in need of help

"TV is not dead, but if you're going to do TV, you have to create stuff that people seek out. Just because you buy 30 seconds doesn't mean you'll have an impact. You have to do something remarkable with it."—David Lubars, Creative Director, BBDO

What are we seeing here? A $40 billion industry filtering the current marketing climate to save their own skin. So what industry do you suppose spends more than any other in the U.S. on TV advertising?

Automakers remain the biggest ad spenders, accounting for nearly 12% of expenditures, according to TNS. Especially the Big 3 continue to spend heavy on TV. Effective? Don't think so. Likeable? Maybe. Helping sales? Mhhhhhmmmmm.