me write. you read.

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.

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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.

Employment Branding: A Defense

So, over on another blog, I read an article insinuating that employment branding was nothing more than a way for agencies to schnooker money from talent managers. You can read the initial article here.

Here’s my response:

Wow.
So let’s all take a step back from the rhetoric so we can analyze this problem objectively. First of all, I can easily say that no one of competence has ever really explained employment branding to you or shown you numeric results of how it can positively affect a company. And, I assure you from experience, it can.

So let’s start with the basics:
Employment branding refers to a larger group of services that treat recruitment and retention efforts like building a brand. It has nothing to do with creating brand-building tv spots like Nike or Apple, rather it has everything to do with using the same emotional triggers (often seen in good advertising and design) that draw someone to a brand outside of just rational benefits. Think Nike or Apple. Their products are more expensive, but their branding makes people want to buy them for the association and perception benefits.

Case in point, the EVP, or employer value proposition, is an attempt to define the intangible qualities of working with your company. Other than their balance sheet and dental plan, what motivates me to want to work for Google over Yahoo; Nike over Reebok; or The Home Depot over Lowe’s? Sure, many of those things will be tertiary employee benefits, like bringing your dog to work or not working in a sweat shop, but they make a difference. Recruitment advertising throws a laundry list up on an 8.5×11 flyer and hopes somebody notices. It’s a classic push strategy. Employment branding takes those ideas and shapes them into a message that features the benefit of working with that company to a candidate. It uses both emotional and rational messaging to draw them into that company.

Just like in a retail brand, the manifestation of an employment brand is the combination of several talent facing and employee facing concepts, including talent management software, referral programs, college recruitment programs, signature experiences, internal communications and recruitment. Shaping a consistent look and feel that delivers on a company’s core values is really where the agency comes in. They should be able to help a CTO or HR manager extract most of the core ideas for the employment brand from the company vision statement and extended intangible benefits. Then the agency can help them express that creatively in a campaign. Also, the agency should help them place it in different media that just classifieds and Monster. There are too many opportunities out there to get in front of potential candidates that just “the old standby’s.”

And with the economy in the shape it’s in, it’s more important than ever to make sure you’re getting the right people, not just warm bodies. Because your applicant flow will be far greater now, you need to be actively screening for good people that share your core values. Again, this is where EB comes in. Not only should it screen in the right people, it should effectively screen out the scrubs you don’t want. In work that we’ve done in our past, we’ve flat out told people that “this job isn’t for everyone.” You know what that effectively does? It tells the lazy dude to buzz off and encourages the competitive candidate to step up and apply. We’ve also done work that showcased different working environments that stiffer, more corporate types would hate. And in numeric, quantifiable ways, it has worked. But don’t just take it from me, take it from the Marine Corps. They used the “We’re looking for a few good men” line starting in 1776, and for over 200 years it helped them attract a different breed of soldier. Screening worked then, and iit will continue to work today.

I know you like to think that agency folk don’t know what they’re talking about because it’s easy to hate on agencies. We lie, cheat and steal just like Darrin Stephens or Mel Gibson from What Women Want. However, some of us actually do our homework, know what we’re talking about and make a difference for our clients. Some of us do great creative work that’s strategically sound and helps HR managers get better people. So before you cast wide aspersions that employment branding is throwing millions of dollars away, dig a tad deeper. It does work.

Actually, check out a presentation I did on the basic case for Employment Branding.
It’s featured on www.Insightory.com this week as their key insight.

My Presentations at insightory.com

So, I was asked by the good folks over at insightory.com to post some of my presentations. My deck on employment branding called “Causality” is currently the key insight. Check them out when you get a chance.

The client relationship

I often ponder the ad industry. Where it’s going, who’s going to be the next big player and what’s wrong with it.
Many times nothing comes of it, but today my ponderings drifted into a far more philosophical territory. What truly makes a good client relationship? What is a client’s ultimate loyalty to? Is it the cost of doing business with you, whether high or low; is it the location of their ad agency, whether local or NYC; is it the quality of the service or the quality of the creative; or is a combination of all of these things. But beyond the why, the real point of ponderance I had was, “why does a client choose to stay with you?”

See. The boys from Sterling Cooper now how it's done. A good looking CD.

There’s one type of client that I like to refer to as a “Golf Course Account” or the type of account that simply picks their agency on the golf course. That’s the kind of account that agency principle’s love and creatives despise. When the client relationship is based on nothing more than an inferior handicap, a few Michelob’s and a wager on a missed putt, there’s nothing that awesome creative and strategy can do to save a business when a better schmoozer in a foursome comes along next time that dude is at the country club. It’s a dangerous way to construct an agency and an even harder way to keep talented people around. They want to win business on the merits of their work, not on the ability of their boss to shank a drive.
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I really loathe Popeye’s new stuff

Wow. I couldn’t believe the first few Popeye’s spots when they aired recently. I honestly thought I was watching a spot from the 70s when racial stereotyping was the way to go in advertising. Not only is the character portrayal amazingly stereotypical, but it’s also just bad work.

Now, I can easily say that about 10% of my loathing is nothing more than jealousy to work on a brand like Popeye’s, and about 40% of it is the fact that an Austin agency did a horrendous job representing the flavor of New Orleans. For someone who once lived in the Crescent City, I am really disappointed at the rebrand. They aimed incredibly low (fleur-de-lis and saxaphones) to hit people’s trite, hackneyed stereotypes of New Orleans with the brand work, so why would I expect anything less from their tv work? I mean, really, has anybody on that account been to New Orleans other than the Quarter or during Mardi Gras? OK, and the Garden District to see Trent Reznor’s house? There is so much life and culture and color that bubbles out of every stinky sewer, sweaty restaurant and great recipe in that retchedly awesome town that you would think somebody could throw up a red flag and say, “Um, this work is incredibly lame.” It’s like doing a MEGA-DEALS promo for BMW. That’s not how you sell something as awesome as the food of New Orleans. Granted, I kinda dig the tagline, but the rest of the brand is really just lame. Anybody could slap a Church’s, Captain D’s, Long John Silver’s, Chubby’s, etc logo on the work, and nobody would know the difference.
What’s that?
You used orange?
That’s what makes it unique?
Oh, and you slapped a fleur-de-lis all up on it.
Got it. My bad.
The fact is, it’s just over the top, stereotypical, mediocre work. This looks somebody brought in some old hired guns that was passed their prime when Copperplate was in vogue. The tv in particular is just awful. Granted, there’s a nugget of a good idea in there. I can see it, but it doesn’t come out on the screen. Having a “fried chicken expert” in the kitchen of your store is neat. Real neat. Like this one sassy lady cooks all the chicken in all your stores, or at least macro manages all 400 of your corporate and franchisee stores across the country. That seems very plausible. Wait a minute, scratch that nugget comment.
So where does the campaign go from here? Do we get more racial, more trite and more muddled with other fried-centric brands? Or do you focus on the idea that makes Popeyes unique among all QSR competitors: Louisiana, Fast.
And I hate to say this (because PC I am not), but if their agency were at least a minority owned firm (like we are), you could give Popeye’s a pass. But GSDM is definitely not. So good luck, Popeye’s, in cleaning this up. I think you might want to hire a minority firm to step in, clean up your work and prove that you’re not in bed with racists.
But that’s just me, the jealous, New Orleans ex-pat CD who loves good advertising and Cajun food.

We killed the media?

It’s often nice to see one broken business model throwing stones at another broken business model. That’s kind of like the Unions blaming the auto industry for making their cars too expensive because they pay their workers too much. But for anybody to insinuate that the Rock Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, et al, are declaring bankruptcy and floundering in their own ink because advertising sucks, you’re more stupider than I thought.

In today’s New York Times, their Idea of the Day references an article from TechCrunch and another from The Economist to bolster their case that the shuttering of newspapers across America is all the fault of advertisers. This notion suggests that our work is bad and people don’t want advertising, therefore we’ve been the crutch that fed their fetid business model for years. We’re already the most hated profession in America, so why not pile on a bit more, eh? It’s way easier to blame somebody else. In Disney’s animated film, Meet the Robinsons, the antagonist, Mike “Goob” Yagoobian, makes this great comment: “Hmmm, let’s see: take responsibility for my own life or blame you. Ding, ding, ding, ding! Blame you wins hands down!” So for anybody associated with newspapers, this is so much easier to do. They could look at their archaic business model or the fact that they’ve all become opinion papers instead of journalists, but I think they would much rather find somebody else to blame. And under the current “blame somebody else” zeitgeist, it’s perfect.

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Two of my favorite things: helvetica and moleskine

Ask anybody I work with, and they’ll tell you just how much I’ve grown to love type in the past few months. This little journal is probably the apex of that love. These babies have been out for almost 6 months now, but that doesn’t mean they’ve gotten any less awesome. There’s no better concepting book out there, and what creative isn’t an absolute sucker for really clean, chunky Swiss design. It would be one thing if they were just well designed, but they just photograph so well.
The only problem is they’re only available from Moleskine Asia.

What the heck is this spot about?

This just might be the best example ever of an ad that says nothing, tries to confuse the audience and is a complete and total misrepresentation of facts. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the reason our industry is so negatively stereotyped.

Dig for just about 5 minutes and you’ll realize how much you’re not a fan of the Employee Free Choice Act. That is unless you’re a Democrat from an industrial state where the unions have a stranglehold on politics; you are a union organizer in a non-union shop; or your last name is Hoffa. For everybody else in these United States, this thing is just a bad idea. In essence, it removed the ability for a company to vote on unionization matters by secret ballot. The idea of a secret ballot is fundamental to elections being uninfluenced by outside forces. It’s like having somebody over your shoulder screaming at you because you voted different from how they voted. Imagine if white supremacists were at your polling place threatening you because you were voting for Obama. That would’ve been discouraging, no matter how much hope you had. The same can be said for workers who don’t want to unionize because they know the damage it could have to their job and their company in the long run. They don’t want to be coerced or even cajoled into it by somebody who knows how they voted.

But issues aside, this ad is a joke. “All we ask for is a level playing field.” Yes, that’s right. All of us who are non-union workers and don’t want to be unionized want a level playing field instead of playing a game that’s stacked in the favor of unions. Workers can already choose to form a union. That’s never been an issue. This ad makes it seem like the entire US workforce is teeming with helpless average joe’s dying to get unionized. And to make matters worse, unionization drives UP the price of goods and services, meaning those items that were within a consumer’s reach during a tight economy are now outside their budget. And that probably means layoffs. Yeah, layoffs!

I think my bigger problem with this idea is that it truly defines why people hate our industry. We waste money (on tv especially), lie to people and hope nobody catches us. This is a terrible representation of our industry and a further example of why nobody trusts us.
(stepping off the soapbox now.)

Tactics vs Strategy

When the media broke a few years ago (I know, just another jaded way to say media fragmentation), the advertising agency model was broken with it. And ever since the internet really evolved into an interactive space, agencies have been scared out of their minds trying to figure out what the next silver bullet is going to be. If you’ve got any doubt, just dig a little deeper to see what Honeyshed was all about. Just click back about 18 months, and people couldn’t stop praising Honeyshed enough as the future of advertising. Even Fast Company got into the mix, calling the now-failed project “the future of digital advertising.” This is just the latest example of how a particular tactic replaced a much wiser strategy. To quote Bob Hoffman in his book The Ad Contrarian:

And yet, today’s marketers seem obsessed with the irrelevant. They have convinced themselves that the Internet is a strategy; that pathetic, desperate stunts are a shortcut to brand building; that advertising is a dying practice that has lost its relevance. Worst of all, they are joined in this by pandering agency heads—leaders of global advertising empires, some of whom have never actually practiced the art of advertising—who are so deeply fearful of every approaching quarterly report they won’t even defend the principles that made them rich and famous.

Step back in time even just a couple years and remember that everybody spent day and night trying to figure out how they could make a campaign “go viral” which is about as stupid as saying “we really hope this product will produce a global pandemic.” Agencies, brands and creatives threw gobs of money at trying to come up with the next viral video or buzz marketing stunt or interactive media. Why? Because they felt like they’d be laughed out of a client’s office if they just came back with the classic push strategies of print, radio and tv. So they created new ones. The strategy never changed, but the tactics did.

Go back a couple more years when agencies would throw 6 figures and EVP titles to anybody who knew flash programming. If you weren’t hocking flash websites to every client on the block and leading pitches with it, then you were a laughing stock amongst your agency peers. So the big agency congloms bought flash boutiques, created new agency-within-agency concepts and charged $120k for big-time websites, all the while forgetting that consumers outside NYC were barely using high speed internet and the fact that flash sites chew through band-width like an O-lineman through a Ci-Ci’s buffet line. Again, the strategy was build an awesome website for people to look at and drive them to it in all our ads. Push, push, push. The site became the driver, not the products and not in a way that consumers wanted.

Then, there’s the tactic dujour: social media. Every two-bit, out of work media strategist on the planet has repackaged themselves as a “Social Media Expert” (which actually means little more than I’m on twitter and facebook and try to make people believe I know what I’m talking about. ) Every other day on twitter, I’ll see somebody posting an article about how Social Media is a strategy and not a tactic. Trust me, if somebody says that, they have something to gain from you using their “social marketing” service. And they’re most likely naive to the broader understanding of both brand building and dialogue with consumers. That’s about as smart as saying that the only thing that matters in conversation is verbal communication. Actual words. Forget body language, tone, situation and parties present, it’s just verbal that matters. Negatory, good buddy.

I think there are a lot of people who are truly making strides in understanding how to wrangle a fragmented media. Most of them have not abandoned the 30 second spot, viral marketing, flash-based websites or social media. They’ve embraced all of them, plus excellent product offerings, good employment strategies and smart public relations strategies, to work as pieces of an overall brand strategy. Brands that have an idea of where they are trying to go have the greatest chance of getting there. It’s rare that a brand will have a good goal to achieve other than “to be the best xxxx retailer in the xxxxx.” And this is where a huge philosophical divide exists between advertising and business. No solid business on the planet exists without a plan of where they are going and how they are going to get there. It’s a shame that marketers aren’t more business savvy to understand that without a vision, there’s no where to go. And even when you have a vision for your brand, it has to be lived out in merchandising, operations, hr and production. When a brand gets to this point, it’s often magical. For somebody like Office Max, with Bob Thacker at the helm, they want to be a preferred office supply retailer for women. That’s an awesome, realistic and unowned position they can achieve. It’s genius. They incorporate everything under the sun in order to reach that goal. They probably even still use a circular, but it’s a tactic and not the strategy.

The sooner brands wake up and realize that their agencies and consultants are in job preservation mode, the better. And, the sooner agencies wake up and realize that strategy, although hard to develop, difficult to maintain and not always as rewarding at first, is the most effective, most affordable and most profitable way to build brands over time. For a recap, just watch my Silver Bullet deck on slideshare.