me write. you read.

The Book of Chuck

Awesome. If God were American, he’d totally sanction this Bible.

Latest stats about Millennial workers: grab the Tums

As if employers weren’t already scratching their heads enough about Gen Y, the recession has made it even more difficult for managers to understand them. And, unfortunately, the latest round of data to surface about Millennials and their work environment will be less than comforting for most employers.

The generation that expects everything is only going to get more in the coming years, according to a recent study done by the Center for Labor Market Studies. By the spring of 2009, less than 30 percent of work-aged teens (16-19) were employed in the labor market, the lowest levels seen since WWII. So not only are mom and dad having to shell out more allowance money while they’re in high school, but they should expect to see them back in about 5 years. The same study also revealed that less than half of the nation’s 4 million college graduates age 25 and under were working in jobs that required a college degree. That’s down from 54 percent for the same period last year. And top that off with this snippet from September 4th’s New York Times:

According to today’s job report, the overall unemployment rate (the percentage of people in the labor force not working but looking for work) in August rose to 9.7 percent, its highest level in 26 years. The teenage unemployment rate, however, is at 25.5 percent, its highest level since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping track of such data in1948.

And if the picture wasn’t already difficult for employers, consider some additional research done by fahrenHEIGHT360.com. According to their polling data, 70 percent of Millennials will leave their first job within 2 years. And by 2015, Millennials will comprise 40 percent of the entire labor market.

So, let’s get this straight: Only 30 percent of teenagers are currently in the work force; for every 1 that’s working, 3 can’t get a job; and when the ones that go to college get out, they can expect a job that doesn’t require a degree for the next few years. Oh, and the ones that do find a job, will leave it within 2 years. And to top it all off, this massively inexperienced labor force will dominate the entire labor market in the next 10 years.

For all the talent managers out there who just choked down a handful of Tums, just take a deep breath, swallow that mouthful of fruity chalk and read onward. There is hope. First of all, I think everyone in the HR field should read Tammy Erickson’s article about the rising leadership of Generation X. Xers possess many traits that counteract the misfortunes of Millennials and are young enough still to provide solid leadership and contribution at all levels of a company. And from our perspective, Xers should be a key target for your employment branding.

Secondly, the Millennial generation is massive; therefore, the 25 percent who worked through high school and got a good job immediately after graduating from college are a significantly larger pool of talent than you might imagine. They will be smart, competitive and ready to work hard to keep a job because they had to work hard just to get one. They will be amazingly tech savvy, resilient and able to wear many hats. They typically work well in teams, desire inclusion and are the kind of people that generally believe that there is a solution to a problem, even if it seems like there’s not one. This core group that represents the best of their generation is passionate, optimistic and ready to take on new challenges. The only problem is: everybody wants them. I guarantee your best competitors already have a plan to load up with this group to backfill for the cascading tide of Baby Boomers exiting the workforce in the next 10 years.

So the real question is, what are you doing today to attract this group and retain them? If companies don’t start this process now, they will most likely end up with the 28 year old who’s working his absolutely first job.

The Discipline of Targeting

This topic has been rolling around in my noggin for quite some time, and after watching last night’s episode of Mad Men (3:2), I decided it was time to go ahead and put pencil to paper. Or keyboard to blog. Whichever suits your fancy. So here’s the crux of it: good consumer targeting takes remarkable discipline from both the agency and the client. Allow me to explain.

As marketing professionals we should always be able to watch a spot on TV and immediately decipher the target audience. Beer spots: men. Lifetime promos: women. It should be that easy, but it’s not. Why? Ineffective and inefficient targeting. I was watching TV the other night and a spot for a certain brand of yogurt comes on. The main character is an attractive young woman shopping at a grocery store. Shes very flirty with the camera, the setup is way over the top and the ending is downright odd. To my maleness, there was sexuality in play from the character. My wife, who is a retired account director herself, totally missed it. She just thought it was weird to end a spot like that. But to the trained male eye, there was far too much “naughtiness” in the spot for it to be accidental. From my point of view, the spot came off as if it was the result of dude-think: a bunch of guys sitting around concepting and ending up on something that appealed more to them than it does the target audience. OR, it could be that the client was a dude and chose something that skewed more to his liking than the target audience.

In recent years, I’ve noticed too many brands suffer from something very similar that I like to call “Cocktail Party Syndrome.” This popular condition is when marketers try to make a brand more palatable for their cocktail party friends than to be true to the brand’s actual and potential target audience. It’s hard for an egotistical creative director, account director or even CMO to look their swanky friends in the eye and proudly say, “We just cut new price/items shells for Brand X, and I think it’s really going to shake things up in the lower-income rural markets of the Great Plains.” That’s not cool. What’s cool is to say, “We’re totally reinventing our target audience. We want the brand to be the Target of our industry. We’re shifting from a lower-income based consumer to a middle and upper income individual. They have more disposable income anyway, right?” That sounds awesome to your peers because you sound like a trailblazer. But it takes a disciplined, strategic mind to have the gumption to know your target audience and stay focused on the business at hand. Despite how much fun it would potentially be to take it there, not every brand will be Target or Apple or VW or Chipotle or even Burger King. The solutions that have transformed good brands into great brands arent prescriptive because brand maintenance is not as simple as one solution fits all.

I look at Wal-Mart and Olive Garden as excellent examples of knowing your audience and speaking to them. Wal-Mart had a few missteps over the last few years, but they totally have it down now. Olive Garden, while not appealing to me, appeals to their audience and has the consistent growth to prove it.

I re-reference Mad Men again. The model of “Men want her and women want to be her” is completely false, and we have absolutely grown past this as an industry. However, it takes incredible discipline for individuals in advertising to not fall into this mindset when your target audience is not yourself. Its ok to create work that doesnt appeal to you. Its all about being objective versus subjective. And thats an entirely different post altogether.

Anybody else think an agency B-team did the latest round here?

In advertising, nothing may be harder than keeping a long-running, high-frequency campaign fresh. I give the Martin Agency huge credit for keeping the cavemen campaign at least interesting, if not odd, for it’s long run, and especially at the ridiculous TRPs they run that campaign at. But, the Progressive “Flo” campaign, well, to me it seems like they pulled their A-Team off of it (and no not Face, Murdock, Hannibal and BA) and put in their second stringers. Why? The first two or three rounds of ideas had a clear beginning, middle and end and did a good job selling the product. But the last few executions have fallen way short. They talk about the product, but the endings have been almost as awkward as a Will Ferrell/Molly Shannon sketch. The fist explosions. The awkward exchanged with the biker dude. The weirdness of introducing classic literary figure of Captain Ahab into an otherwise surreal, everyman environment. In any case, I always wonder if consumers notice it when the creative quality of a campaign wanes.

Really good stereotypers

Recently, I’ve been working on a minority-focused campaign, and it’s done nothing but made me ask lots of questions. Now, for a typical white guy working in the ad industry, I am blessed to both work for a minority-owned firm and have very candid relationships with several black people I work with, which means they will give me nothing but honest feedback on whether or not an idea is treading too close to that mythical line of offensiveness. And for our whole creative team, that’s an invaluable asset. But this process has made me analyze the way other brands flail in their attempts to market to segments by ethnography instead of demography. All that’s to say: I don’t think anybody is getting minority-targeted marketing right.

Read more »

Finally: My letter to the editor in Harvard Business Review

I submitted this content back in March, and it’s just now making it to the presses. The good people at HBR were extremely good to work with, even when they cut out 1/2 the content of my letter. What can I say? They said keep it under 400 words, and I kept it at 397.
Here’s the text:
Gen Y in the Workforce

Dear Editor:

If you take a step back and analyze the situation objectively, there seems to be something broken in the way companies approach Millennials (see Tamara J. Erickson’s article “Gen Y in the Workforce,” February 2009). What typically starts out as nothing more than a lack of understanding often grows into an opinion that Gen Y is simply a lazy, disrespectful lot.

Gen Xers and Baby Boomers view their jobs the same way: You are what you do. Today’s younger workforce, however, has the exact opposite perspective: Millennials see their jobs as an extension of their lives, not the other way around. And since their lives are fast-paced, communication-saturated, friend-rich, and change-filled, they have high hopes that their jobs will mirror that lifestyle. So why wouldn’t they be disenchanted when they haven’t gotten a promotion after six months on the job and when they get in trouble for Facebooking at work? They expect more from their jobs than a paycheck, but few managers are willing to give it to them. Millennials want to believe in what they are doing and want to know they are being heard.

While coddling is certainly not the answer, flexibility and accountability are. Remember, this is the generation that was force-fed group projects at every level of education, from elementary school through graduate programs, so how could we expect them not to be convinced that vertical collaboration is the best way to solve a problem?

Mark Ervin

Director of Creative
o2ideas
Birmingham, Alabama

5 out of 100 is pretty sad

In the most recent issue of Fast Company, they released their list of the 100 most creative people in business. Of the esteemed 100, only 5 of them work for a company that does “marketing” of any variety:
32: Lee Clow, TBWA
39: Greg Hahn, BBDO
59: Noah Brier, Barbarian Group
81 & 82: Karin Hibma & Michael Cronan, Cronan

So, um, wow. I thought we were supposed to be the most creative people in business? What happened here? I thought marketing was the marriage of creativity and business; that we were tasked with creatively solving business problems; that the greater ad industry was the helm of creativity. Not so, according to FC.

For this, I believe there are 2 reasons. The first is far more jaded and less plausible, but requires thought, nonetheless.
1. Is it possible that the marketing industry is far more isolated from the rest of the business world that the people we consider “rock stars” of the industry are really little more than peons in the greater business world? I think it’s highly likely. Look more closely at the names chosen. Clow is an obvious pick, since he is the Michael Corleone to Ogilvy’s Vito Corleone status. Throw somebody in from BBDO, since that’s about the only agency that most people have ever heard of (courtesy of foppish depictions of ad agencies in film. I loved Alan Alda saying “BBD and O” in What Women Want). Do ten minutes of digging past Crispin, and you’ll find Barbarian Group. And, throw in an under the radar name like Cronan, and you’ve covered your bases. And make sure you leave out Bogusky. FC has had an absurd man crush (much like most of us in the biz) on AB for quite a while now. After the big splashy feature last year and the full page blurb 18 months ago, people will begin to think they pump him up because Microsoft (CP+B’s big ole client) has a pretty hefty media buy with the magazine.
Plausible? Eh, maybe. Probable? Sure. If you’re a tad jaded.
Or, there’s the other option.
2. It’s more obvious than ever that the ad industry as a whole has grown embarrassingly stale. Most of our business models are as stale as the rehashed rehashed ideas we continue to sell clients and expect them to throw money at us because we’re creative. At least we tell the we are.
For me, this theory holds a lot more water. Think about it, the basic agency model has barely evolved since the 1960s. Watch Mad Men, and you get a sense of what most agencies are still like that. (Creative team + Account team) x Media team = Agency Model. Outside of a few noteworthy shops (Mother, Creative Orchestra), we still hire people who do one thing well and throw them together with other people that do one thing well and expect a certain outcome. And we as a group are still held creatively hostage by the invoice that our clients may or may not sign based on how the last client meeting went. Until we break these two basic molds, marketers will never live up to their potential.
We should hire multi-talented, smart people who are both creative and business savvy. We should work with clients that respect the value of a good strategic partner, but first we must re-earn that title. We still have a lot of work to overcome the Charlatan stereotype that we will do or say anything for money, because the reality is that stereotype is still resoundingly true.
So, why is it that if we are so creative that we don’t focus that energy on our own business model? I have 2 explanations. 1. It’s scary. 2. Most advertising/marketing folks are bad businessmen. They mostly don’t understand it, outside of the context of a brand. If they did, things would be way different.

Hopefully, it’s just the first reason. But I have my doubts.

Club & Rubber

A few weeks ago, somebody left hard evidence of a good time in our parking lot. Now, I know what you’re thinking: ad people. However, based on our proximity to the local high school, university and retirement community, I think it was somebody looking to do something outside other watchful eyes.

Basically, we found an expended prophylactic right next to a shattered bottle of Canadian Club. And while the scene looked like evidence of some recent debauchery, I couldn’t help but notice how awesome the shattered bottle looked. The patina of the glass. The perfectly preserved type. The contrast against the newly blackened asphalt. It seemed like so much more than a broken bottle, but a statement of the man behind the bottle. And since I’m on it, I do love the long history of Canadian Club’s advertising. Especially the new stuff. And the old stuff.
So, I snapped a picture to preserve this iconic moment in time. Ok, actually I snapped about 4 pics, this being the best one:

So, Matt Lane Harris, being the lover of all things aesthetic that he is, took it upon himself to turn this simple photo of a broken bottle into a pretty awesome gig poster for Blue Mountain.

Here’s the full gallery:

How the Mighty Fall

It’s called How the Mighty Fall, and it looks incredible. In the context of the current economy, I think it’s perfectly timed and a good shot of inspiration for lots of companies. And for those of us in the marketing arena, I think it’s particularly good to hear the words of encouragement, change and determination for the turmoil we find ourselves in. BusinessWeek did a preview of the book, which you can read here. Here’s an excerpt that explains some of his conclusions:

Never give in. Be willing to kill failed business ideas, even to shutter big operations you’ve been in for a long time, but never give up on the idea of building a great company. Be willing to evolve into an entirely different portfolio of activities, even to the point of zero overlap with what you do today, but never give up on the principles that define your culture. Be willing to embrace loss, to endure pain, to temporarily lose freedoms, but never give up faith in your ability to prevail. Be willing to form alliances with former adversaries, to accept necessary compromise, but never—ever—give up on your core values.

The path out of darkness begins with those exasperatingly persistent individuals who are constitutionally incapable of capitulation. It’s one thing to suffer a staggering defeat—as will likely happen to every enduring business and social enterprise at some point in its history—and entirely another to give up on the values and aspirations that make the protracted struggle worthwhile. Failure is not so much a physical state as a state of mind; success is falling down—and getting up one more time—without end.