me write. you read.

Did they get it right?

For most social media skeptics out there (see everybody not peddling social media like it’s the next incarnation of the television), there’s an enormously growing amount of speculation that Twitter isn’t the social tool that social media folks say it’s going to be. I would lump myself into said category, as well. And while the Brand Bowl 2010 is a really nice concept, both for a show of technology and agency prowess, I think it’s the wrong metric and the wrong thing to show expertise in.

Brand Bowl 2010

Let me explain. Everybody who’s anybody is angling for the next best thing in the ad business. Whether it be one of the various and sundry social applications on the web, say twitter, yelp, ning, digg, delicious, etc, etc, etc, brands can’t afford to be the farm on just one of these. Because, in truth, the social media application doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hit the target audience well. So, let’s use the “results” from Brand Bowl as an example. The Focus on the Family spot, which was quite possibly the most controversial and tame spot in Super Bowl memory, got lots of love in the Twittersphere. Why? It was both controversial AND it bore the exact subject matter that people oft tweet about: politics, religion and controversy. So, naturally, it would grade high on that scale. However, that does nothing to monitor effectiveness, strength of message or any other necessary metric to determine ROI on a Super Bowl spot.

All that’s really to say is that I truly believe anybody still putting Twitter in any sort of elevated status in the social media sphere has it all wrong. Most people who work in brand building in any sort don’t believe it has much longer of a shelf life in terms of the overall brand discussion. It faded quicker than MySpace and most younger consumers are onto something else. I wouldn’t have used it to measure effectiveness of anything. But that’s me.

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 »

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.

Is Twitter the next MySpace?

Does anybody else remember how awesome 2005 was? The economy was rolling, jobs were plentiful and MySpace was all the rage. It was everything. Marketers all over the fruited plains were making sure their brands had a MySpace page. People were blogging on how MySpace was changing the industry. It was almost as awesome as the Adkins Diet.

Now, raise your hand if you still even use your MySpace account any more. Thought so. This is precisely why I feel like Twitter will inevitably fade out of relevance in the next 5 years. Granted, I feel like marketers and agencies alike need to engage in social media and know how to properly wield it as a tactic in their overall brand strategies, but what’s the breaking point? Seeing the numbers for Twitter’s growth (something like 1400%) are troublesome for those who think it’s gonna be bigger than advertising on the television set. It’s a great tool and it should be used wisely, but make no mistake: Twitter has a shelf-life. And when it gets so saturated with your mom, your pastor and your high school English teacher that consumers start to leave, then something else will inevitably take its place.

However, I feel certain that Twitter hasn’t even come close to reaching its zenith. It’s got a long way to go down the monetization path before it gets oversaturated. People are just now figuring out how to make money off of it, so until Apple or some other worthy, cash-laden suitor makes an offer, it’s safe to work into a basic strategy. But I am afraid too many people are leaving agencies only to start social media companies who’s business model is based on the idea of twitter being relevant indefinitely. Well, I hate to break it to you, but it will fade from relevance.

Many of these agencies are also predicated on the idea that social media is right for every brand out there. Also, a farce. Many solid brands have no need of social media because their target audience is almost wholly not online. But no worries. Somebody is inevitably pitching social media to them.

I am a huge fan of the practice as a supplement to good marketing strategy, but as I’ve often stated, don’t make it the focal point of your strategies or of your agency. And especially not on one social media outlet.

Lots of good content. No conclusions.

Has anybody else noticed that most social media, web 2.0 and “the future of advertising” presentations have absolutely no conclusions?

Those of you who work with me know that I am a presentation junkie. I scour the web for really good ones, constantly try to up my game on style and do things that break the rules whenever possible. Because of that, I have become a pretty harsh critic of most presentations and a huge fans of the ones that are solid on communicating their intended purpose. But what’s the point of presenting information to someone without making some sort of recommendation for how they use it?

I base this on a point of view on a deck that I viewed yesterday by David Armano, who just left Critical Mass to join the unaptly titled Dachis Corporation. Here’s the deck:

Read more »

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.

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.
Read more »