Mad Men - Don's Still Out of Time

SPOILER ALERT

Mad Men ended with a reshowing of the Coke “I’d like to teach the world to sing” also known as “Hilltop” commercial. And while the reason is ambiguous many people including my wife read it as Don, inspired by his experience in Big Sur, has been reinspired and gone back to McCann Erickson and written that ad.

Don, a man of the 50s, had been struggling to come to terms with the 60s but it seems he has now got his mojo back and has produced one of the seminal ads of its time. Ad Age rate it as #53 in its best ads of the century. But has he?

As my wife also reminded me, we never liked that ad. It was cheesy and completely out of tune with 1971.

The ad is really a hangover from the Summer of Love in 1967.  That was when eastern religions, love and peace were at their height; when living in perfect harmony and peace throughout the land was a believable ideal.

In the four years since then a lot happened. There were the Vietnam War protests. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s assassinations (1968), The Chicago Democratic Convention (1968),the election of Nixon (1969), the Rolling Stones Altamont concert (1969), Charles Manson and the Sharon Tate murders (1969) the Kent State massacre that inspired Neil Young to write Ohio.(1970).

The truth is the ideals of the Hilltop commercial were long gone. There was a new grittiness and reality in the air. 1971 was a big year. All in the Family debuted.  Big Movies included “A Clockwork Orange” and “Dirty Harry”. The music we listened to included Led Zeppelin IV (“Stairway to heaven”, Who’s Next (“Won’t get fooled again”), Marvin Gaye's "What’s Going On" and David Bowie’s Hunky Dory (“Life on Mars”).  The themes were alienation and rebellion, cynicism and dystopias. Woodstock, which was the last gasp of hippie culture, was in 1969 and even there the star was Jimi Hendrix, who later that year penned the incredible "Machine Gun". His hard-edged brand matched the new reality rather than the Summer of Love influenced Jefferson Airplane.

Even Coke had a hard time. It’s ideals of happiness and innocence were out of touch with the 70s. Pepsi discovered the 60s well before Coke with its “Choice of New Generation” in 1965 and with the Pepsi Taste Challenge became a real competitor in the 70s.  Coke and McCann struggled through this period.

If Don did write ‘Hilltop’ he had certainly moved on from the suits and cigarettes of the 50s. And he has created a great piece of storytelling and television. But sadly for him, just as he comes to terms with the 60s the rest of the world has moved into the 70s. His theme soing is not "I'd like to teach the world to sing" but the Rolling Stones  'Out of time'.

You don't know what's going on
You've been away for far too long
You can't come back and think you are still mine
You're out of touch, my baby

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MAD MEN SEASON FINALE – WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN

SPOILER ALERT

 

My wife and I were watching the finale of Mad Men earlier this week.

When it ended I felt very depressed. I felt the ending was cynical and contrived and a betrayal of what went before.

The way the main characters’ plots were tied up was a bit pat, but who doesn’t like happy endings.  I was OK with Joan setting up her own business, Roger disappearing with Megan’s Mom, and Pete becoming a client seemed natural.

But Peggy and Stan ending up together was a Harlequin ending that didn’t have any kind of ring of truth about it. But I bit my tongue – after all Don was in an existential crisis that wouldn’t end in a pat way. But no. He has a Kumbaya moment and ends up smiling and chanting mantras.

And then there was that cut to the Coke “I’d like to teach the world to sing” commercial; one of the most famous commercials ever made. Now whether the intent is to say Don went on and wrote it is beside the point at this stage. It acts as an epitaph for the program as a whole. 

It seemed like Matt Weiner was cynically playing with reality.

The endings he created were all unrealistic happy endings that were a betrayal of the reality of the characterization he had taken years to project. And then as a symbol of this he chose Coke to make a mockery of that artificiality. Coke was, of course, “the real thing” and promised happiness and that we could live in “perfect harmony”.  The very fantasy the characters were now living. 
 
It is as if they all moved from the real world to that of advertising.

And to rub salt in, the only major character to have a bad ending was Don’s wife Betty, the one main character no longer part of the world of advertising. She is terminally ill with lung cancer, no doubt brought on by smoking cigarettes, the very product Don starts out advertising in Episode 1, Season 1. (“Smoke gets in your eyes”). 

Although others don’t read it as cynically as this, others have some similar views. 1.2.3.

So I’m pretty depressed seeing my whole life as a career advertising person mocked in this way.

But then my wife speaks. She's always been smarter than me. “I never liked that ad” she says, “too cheesy, especially that song.”

Now we were both ending high school in 1971 when that ad came out and I realize she’s right. I never liked the ad either. So why should I care about Mad Men mocking it and the fantasy it portrayed.  Heck. I mocked it as well.

We never bought into the utopia offered by Coke. The bubblegum song in the ad that became a hit for the New Seekers was not what we listened to.  We knew then that all that glitters is not gold and that you can’t buy a stairway to heaven.  Well Matt Weiner – We won’t get fooled again

The World's Most Succesful Tweet?

The other day I was telling my wife about the Oreo Superbowl tweet. You remember my wife. She doesn't work in advertising, and though she is incredibly supportive she often doesn't understand what the fuss is about. 

But back to the Oreo tweet. You know the one. It happened last year with the blackout half way through the Superbowl game and Oreo, quick as a flash, tweeted “You can still dunk in the dark”.

I asked her what she thought. She said she thought it was sweet but sounded like something unnecessary I’d said when we had the blackout because of the storm, though I hadn’t been talking about dunking cookies.

I asked if she’d seen it before.

 “Don’t be silly. I’m not on Twitter. You know that. Is anyone apart from that Matt Galloway?” (She likes Metro Morning).

“Well actually 19.7% of Canadians are on Twitter.”

"And how many follow Oreo?" (She knows more than she lets on).

"About 5000 at the time."

“Doesn’t sound that much to me.”

“Well the big thing is the number of people who shared it with their friends.”

“Well how many?”

“Over 15,000.”

“So how many people saw this ad?”

“Around 3 million.”

“And how many people saw the Superbowl?”

“About 108 million in the US plus another 7 in Canada .”

“So nearly 40 times more people saw that nice Budweiser ad with the horses than your silly tweet. Am I supposed to be impressed?”

I decided more wine was needed.

Go Canada Go!

My wife is amazing. She doesn’t work in advertising but she is completely supportive of me – the late nights, stress, job insecurity and everything. Of course she doesn’t actually understand the business. She thinks it’s crazy. I try to explain but with limited success.

It happened recently while we watching the TV around the time of the Olympics. This Audi ad came on said Canada was “Land of Quattro”. This is the sort of thing that gets my wife riled up.

“But Audi’s a German car. Why are they saying they're Canadian? Is that allowed?”

Before she got on her phone to email the ASC I explained that the ad wasn’t saying it was Canadian just that it was built for Canadian conditions. She looked dubious but I might have got away with it if I hadn’t decided to try to push my point home.

“Besides it’s part of a worldwide campaign. They’re running similar ads in Britain and other countries”. And I pulled up the UK version on my iPad to show her. It was a mistake. (By the way there’s also Jamaica, Italy, Germany, china, Finland etc.)

“So it’s not even made for Canada. It’s made for everywhere. It’s worse than I thought. I hate it when foreign companies pretend to be Canadian. Take Target for example. I love Target. You know I insist we go to one when we visit the US. So why do they want to wrap themselves in Canadian imagery in their ads. I just reminds me I can’t get the same choice and the same prices here. And then there’s that Samsung ad….”

I admit I started to tune out here.  I did catch a something about how it was OK for Tim Horton’s. I was going to mention that Timmies Canadianness wasn’t quite that straightforward but decided I’d leave that to another day.

“Oh look the match is about to start”. It was Canada – USA in women’s hockey. At least that turned out OK.

Anti-Social Advertisers

Why aren’t advertisers spending money on Social Media?

They know it’s popular. People now spend an average of around 7 hours a month on Social Networks with key target groups like young people using Social Media a lot more. And yet worldwide advertisers only spend just over 1% of their budgets on Social Media. They spend 50 times as much on TV.

Other research quoted by Scott Monty shows that marketers rate Social Media #4 in terms of ROI as a marketing channel but #6 in terms of budget allocation. Mass media is #7 in ROI but #4 in budget allocation.

Part of it is the newness of the medium. It took TV 26 years and a world war to overtake radio as a medium in terms of ad expenditure. And Social Networks only started 11 years ago with Friendster in 2002. But I don’t think that is all.

It is to do with the nature of the medium. Newspapers are primarily about information. Ads are a natural fit. They tell you something about the brand. Radio and TV’s role is entertainment. It took advertisers a while to realize this. Early ads were essential print ads brought to life. It was only when brands like Kodak and Timex discovered the power of narrative to entertain that the medium took off. Now all the best TV ads convey a message while entertaining you.

Social Media is essentially social (Duh!). It is about connecting with other people, being part of a community and sharing things. It is about conversations between people with shared interests. Advertisers find it hard to contribute to this.

We say that brands are like people but this is just a conceit. I don’t want to be friends or have a relationship with a brand in the way I do my human friends. So brands can rarely be a member of my Social Network. That doesn’t mean they can’t have a role. The best brands do. Red Bull is a curator for what I care about, providing material for my social group to form around. Oreo provides a forum for me to connect with other Oreo lovers in a lighthearted way.Converse allows me to show my creative counter-culture side. Starbucks continues its passion for coffee. As such they act more like they do as brands rather than using Social Media as a communications medium.

But the fact is that it is not an easy fit and we as advertisers are still finding our way. Until we do Social Media will stay the poor relation and not get its fair share of advertisers’ spending.

Why don't we ask more questions?

Nowadays in advertising we are exhort to engage our target in a conversation. For example Nick Moore from Wunderman gave a great talk at Cannes saying just this. Simlilarly Seth Godin exhorts us, “Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.”

But how?

Our creative briefs are based on single-minded propositions. Our creative brings these alive and gets a message across. We measure the impact our message has in terms of reach and message recall.

Our aim is to tell people something about ourselves in the most creative and engaging way we can.

But is that how you’d start a conversation in real life?

No. You’d start by asking questions.

How are you doing?

How’s the new job going?

Did you see what Jennifer Lopez was wearing at the Oscars?

What about them Leafs?

Or as a particularly ineffective friend of mine used to say to girls in bars ‘What’s the word?’

So why don’t we ask more questions in advertising?

We know it works. Here are some great examples to inspire us. But we need more.

Wendy’s famously asked ‘Where’s the beef?’

Shirley Polykoff asked ‘Does she or doesn’t she?

Caramilk challenged us with “How do they get the caramel in the Caramilk bar?’

And Dove has asked us ‘ Grey or Gorgeous?’ and most recently – ‘Does retouching distrort your perception of beauty?’

Great examples. But there must be more out there. Please send me some and I’ll post them.

TV Advertising is Dead

Seems a lot of people are saying this 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 

But as an old school ad guy I'm been resisting the idea that TV is dead. And of course at one level it isn’t true. TV advertising is still over 40% of all ad spending and is projected to remain so. Young people still spend four times as much time watching TV as they do on Social Media. There'll be a need for mass advertising for some time yet.

But what interests me is the complete change in balance of interest creative teams have in it and other channels. A few years ago online advertising, events and social media were the poor cousins creatively. They were done by the promotional agency, the direct response agency or the PR agency. The creative teams at the ad agency would look down their noses at it. And I was with them. We threw in an ambient ad or an event but our heart was in the TV. But that has all changed. Creative teams at 'traditional' agencies are clamouring to do viral videos, events and other non-traditional approaches.

And I've had a change of heart too.

I recently asked my students (I teach creative advertising) to find ‘cool’ advertising ideas. Less than a quarter were regular TV ads. There are still some great TV ads out there they found – Direct TV and Honda CRV for example. But more, though still video in format, were viral or interactive videos e.g. the Guardian's 3 Little Pigs ad, Smart's Water's use of Jennifer Aniston (though I don't know who got the better deal) the UK’s anti-knife campaign or Skittles “Touch the Rainbow”.  

But the really interesting ones were not even lead by video.

Take NAB’s Canned Grand Prix winning campaign from Australia. People believed the banks there were all in a cosy relationship so NAB publicly broke up with them using advertising, social media, PR. It actually broke through Twitter.

And promotions and events are now cool. Take this Cannes award winner for Bing and Jay-Z which uses every channel possible to engage people. Or these variations on the flash mob idea: the Budweiser Flash Fans and the Nike Catch the Flash.

Or this ad which uses You Tube perfectly. I won’t give away the brand as that will give away the ending but check it out.

And Facebook doesn’t have to be sad ads about finding a mate near where you live as this campaign for Mix FM shows.

And as they say on Creativity.com ‘then there’s this’. Is it advertising? I don't know but I don't care either.

Why are my students impressed?

Simple.

Firstly they are great ideas whatever the channel.

Secondly they are winning awards. Many of the campaigns mentioned above are Cannes award winners. And some of the most interesting winning camapigns are interactive. Take Tribal’s Carousel ad for Philips. Or Dove’s Evolution.

And Canadian agencies are doing well in this area. Many of the above examples are Canadian. BBDO won Strategy’s agency of the year lead by non-traditional campaigns. A good friend of mine Siobhan McCarthy presented some BBDO ads to my students. The four campaigns she chose were all non-traditional: the Cannes winning Rotisserie Channel they developed for Swiss Chalet , as well as the Skittles campaign already mentioned, Tropicana Arctic Sun and BBDO Proximity’s M&M’s Find Red.  She could also have mentioned Gillette’s Personal Grooming campaign (also here).

A few years ago I could never have created a list like this of non-traditional ads I admire. Now its easy. And I've undoubtedly missed out some great examples - if I've missed your favourite let me know.

The truth is that the exciting creative opportunities exist in non-traditional media nowadays. And to that extent TV advertising is dead.

All for a Good Cause

Are you getting a bit tired of all these goody-goody advertising campaigns? I am.


Take Hellman’s Mayonnaise for example. It recently won the Cassies Grand Prix – the Cassies are Canada’s Advertising Effectiveness Awards. Their campaign involved creating community gardens in cities and later promoting local food.

All very worthy – it’s a Good Cause.

And Hellman’s isn’t the first to gain the Cassies approval. Last year the Grand Prix winner was Sun Chips for their promotion of their green production and packaging. And in 2007 it was Dove for the Campaign for Real Beauty.

Now part of all this is guilt reduction by the juries (that’s the last Cassies award I’m ever going to win). They feel better about working in advertising if they can feel we are making the world a better place and so they vote for campaigns like this.

But that isn’t all of it. These campaigns work. That’s the whole point of the Cassies. Hellman’s mayonnaise increased its brand share from 24% to 29% when it advertised this way. Sun Chips and Dove similarly proved their in-market success.

Now we are in a period of marketing when the brand is all and the brand is mostly defined by its values and beliefs rather than its product performance. The fact is there is little to choose between most brands in terms of their performance. So we end up choosing on more intangible things – like whether we feel it is a brand for me because of what it believes in. And what it believes in is demonstrated by what it does e.g. Urban Gardens.

And there’s another factor which I’ve talked about before and that’s positive consumer activism. I drive a hybrid at least partially to encourage the manufacturers to invest in these kind of products. It certainly isn’t to save money on gas. I’d have to drive it for over 8 years to do that. And I stop at Sunoco for gas rather than Esso because at least they’re trying to be more environmentally responsible. So by buying Hellman’s I’m encouraging that attitude – as opposed to Miracle Whip’s punk rock “I will not tone it down”.

But I’m starting to feel manipulated. But the link of Community Gardens to Hellman’s is somewhat tenuous. Yes Hellman’s is ‘Real’ in that it is made from natural ingredients but it isn’t local. And they had a total of only 5 gardens, each with 12 plots that consumers could apply for. They probably spent several times the cost of the plots advertising their largesse in creating them.

You wonder how deep these beliefs and values go. As we know Dove is made by Unilever that also produces Axe – hardly a model of enlightened views of female beauty.

I’ll still go with Hellman’s for now. Like I said about Sunoco, at least they’re trying. And they are putting some money in. But I am starting to look a bit harder at them and other Good Cause advertisers to see how real their commitment is.

Who's brand is it anyway?

Pity poor Howard Schultz. With imagination, skill and hard work he builds one of the great new brands of recent years – worth $3.3 billion as a brand Starbucks is one of the most valuable 100 brands in the world according to Interbrand. And yet when he tries to change the logo on his brand all he gets is grief.

As one user says on the website "Who's the bonehead in your marketing department that removed the world-famous name of Starbucks Coffee from your new logo? This gold card user isn't impressed!"

And he isn’t the first to get into trouble. Gap recently had the embarrassment of proposing a changed logo and then having to change their minds. And Tropicana had similar consumer backlash to a pack change. And who can forget New Coke.

Tropicana responded to the criticisms and reversed the change because as Neil Campbell, president of Tropicana North America, said they came from some of “our most loyal consumers.”

The fact is Howard Schultz doesn’t own the Starbucks brand any more. He may own the trade mark but the brand’s consumers believe it belongs to them and you do something they don’t like at your peril.

As Schumpeter says in the Economist ‘Much of the rage in the blogosphere is driven by a sense that “they” (the corporate stiffs) have changed something without consulting “us” (the people who really matter). This ... reflects the sense that brands belong to everyone, not just to the corporations that nominally control them.’

Smart companies make use of this. Take for example the tendency for consumers to give their favourite brands nicknames. Smart companies go with the flow and adopt the names themselves. For example take Disney, Coke , Pepsi, Mini, FedEx, Bud, and Stoli.

But it is hard.

I worked on Campbell’s Soup. This is a well loved brand that occupies a space in people’s minds that Ries and Trout would be proud of. It is what love give to your children to show you love and care, particularly when they are ill. Deep archetypal analysis gave its essence as Mother’s Loving Touch.

The most popular ad amongst consumers was one called Foster Child. In this commercial a child is brought to a new foster home and is unhappy and ill until his new foster mom brings him Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. The boy says “my mom used to give me this.” The foster mom replies “So did mine.” Cue tears all round. But it did nothing for sales. It reinforced what people already knew.

To get more sales we either had to make more kids sick or find a different role for the brand as an everyday healthy meal. We did ads that presented a modern view of the family with messages about low fat and servings of vegetables. These ads did drive sales. We won a Cassies award to prove it.

Most were very popular with consumers, but one got complaints. We called it Yummy Mummy. In it a kid says to his friend “Your mom’s hot”. The friend replies “You’re so dead.” Innocuous enough but it drew the wrath of quite a few loyal users, who felt it didn’t portray the right family values. Interestingly they didn’t complain to Advertising Standards Canada. They complained to Campbells. I read this to say they weren’t offended in a broad sense. They just didn’t think their brand should act in this way. Campbells took their concerns seriously and stopped running the ad – we had plenty of others in the campaign they loved.

But the lesson is clear you don’t own the brand any more. Its users have a major stake as well.

It can be OK to move it in new directions. We did so with Campbell’s and we did with another brand I worked on. Tetley Bitter is a British icon of a beer, but in the 80s was suffering as lagers were growing. We created advertising that took the brand in a new direction and appealled to young people – the big beer drinkers. We also tested it with loyal older drinkers. They didn’t like the ads but I’ll never forget what they said. They were glad we were doing it because it was keeping their brand alive and introducing it to a new generation of drinkers who could then come to enjoy the wonderful product as much as them.

So you can change things, but only with the consumer’s permission.

There is no such thing as a new idea?

Separated at Birth

 

Pedigree?



  

Birds?



I saw a great commercial recently. It’s for Pedigree Dog Food and was done in Canada by TBWA. Essentially it shows dogs in very slow motion jumping in the air catching kibble. OK so it’s been around for a while but I’m slow. I loved it, though did worry about the level of branding – it could have been for any dog food.

But then I came across a music video called Birds, made by Pleix for a band called Vitalic. It too shows dogs “flying” through the air in super slow motion. It was made in 2006, clearly before the Pedigree ad. It is remarkably similar. It seems Pedigree has a twin.

Assuming the creators of the Pedigree ad had seen the Birds film, my first thought was what a rip off. I felt somehow cheated. It wasn’t as original as I had thought. And indeed it isn’t.

But then I thought some more about it.

First there is a great history of advertising taking ideas from art and repurposing them for commercial gain. John Everett Millais’s painting “Bubbles" was used by Pears Soap way back in the 19th Century. Budweiser’s "Whassup" was based on a short film entitled "True" by Charles Stone III. Even Ridley Scott’s "1984" for Apple owes a lot to his earlier Blade Runner.

So it doesn’t necessarily matter that they have used an existing idea. After all it wasn’t another client’s campaign they were using as inspiration. As many others have said “There is no such thing as a new idea".

The psychologist Brown said in "Social Psychology" in 1965

“So good an idea is never invented. The antecedents of the authors we have discussed have also their antecedents, and in the end, we find, the idea seems always to have existed. What has changed is the precision of its statement and the implications which are developed” p604. (Quoted in The Accidental Statistician.)



What’s more the creative team have taken the idea and given it a new meaning. In the original the dogs were flying to the music, with no particular reason given. In the Pedigree they have chosen to take off because they love the food so much they want to catch it in their mouths.

So overall I don’t feel so bad. A little disappointed maybe, but still a great ad (though my branding concerns are reinforced now I know it was designed for a different purpose originally).

I also hope that they gave credit to the originators – maybe they used them to make the ad. I hope so. Pears, Budweiser and Apple did.

If you know let me know.



You don't know me

For 1:1 marketers and data analytics devotees it is the Holy Grail. Knowing enough about me so they can tailor a message that is perfectly aimed. No wastage, and an ad I’m going to want to see because it is totally relevant for me.

Well sorry but no.

My Facebook page is full of offers to people over 50. Now that’s me. I am over 50. And it doesn’t bother me – much. I’m also getting tired of Grey Power congratulating me on being a good driver. Or Viagra ads in my e-mails (you mean everyone gets them not just me?).

I dread the day when Minority Report style a billboard shouts at me “Colin Flint do we have the Haemorrhoid treatment for you”.

Now these might be brushed aside as examples of poor execution – if you knew more about me then you’d know that on Facebook I’m living under the illusion that I’m hip, cool and with it (and any other sadly dated phrases that prove I am anything but). So an ad offering incontinence pads is not going to go down well.
But I don’t think it’s just that.

Recently I came across a study by Joseph Turow and others from the University of Pennsylvania. They found that when asked the seemingly innocuous question, “Please tell me whether or not you want the websites you visit to show you ads that are tailored to your interests”, 66% said no. And it increases to 89% when the rider is added that the tailoring is based on other websites they have visited.

I don’t think it’s having ads that are tailored to them that people object to. It’s what is behind it. People do not want the behaviour being monitored and collected.

I used to work with a hotel chain and they had never got into direct mail. It seemed like a natural one to us so we recommended they look at it. They did, for precisely two seconds. They then asked us what would happen they wrote to me as a guest hoping that me and Mrs Flint had had a good stay with them last weekend. Point taken. We didn’t recommend it again.

I am not a number. I am a free man. You may think you know me but you don’t. So be very careful when you target me. Who your numbers say I am may not match who I think I am or capture the kind of relationship I want to have with you. You could be completely correct and still offend me in such a way that I will never use your product again.

I no longer use Grey Power for my car insurance.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/business/20090929-Tailored_Advertising.pdf

The brand that did best out of the Olympics wasn’t even a sponsor

Tim Horton’s won the gold medal for Olympic advertisers

Its ad featuring the immigrant family reuniting was rated the gold medal ad during the Olympics by Marketing Magazine readers.

Tim Hortons is second only to the Bay in terms of awareness of who are sponsors (Angus Reid Poll reported in Globe and Mail print edition Saturday Feb 27). And yet they are not even a sponsor.

Olympic sponsorship doesn’t come cheap. Sponsors paid a total of nearly $1bn to VANOC for the rights to be a sponsor Bell alone spent $200 million and RBC $110 million.

Are they getting value? Most aren’t.

I’ve sat through several post Olympics research evaluations. I was struck by two things.

Firstly only a few sponsors even get noticed. There are so many sponsors; 8 international partners, 6 national partners, 9 official supporters, 22 official suppliers, and 2 media partners. Only 3 or 4 get widely noticed. And this year it seems The Bay, Tim Horton’s and Bell are topping the list (see Angus Reid Poll mentioned).

You have to spend a lot on top of your sponsorship on advertising and the like to ensure your brand gets credit and even then it’s not assured.

Secondly companies hope to get some of the great values of the Olympics to transfer to their brand. The Olympics are the world’s biggest sporting event; the best athletes in the world go; it is both the coming together of nations and the celebration of patriotism; it is about passion, commitment and human achievement. It is the fastest, highest and fastest. These more than outweigh the blemishes on the games’ reputation so who wouldn’t want that for their brand?

However few of these values transfer to the sponsors. In fact the only thing that automatically transfers is stature. The Olympics is the world’s biggest and only big successful companies like Coke and McDonalds are associated with the Olympics, so as a sponsor you must be successful. Thus Samsung gains more stature than LG, RBC than TD. Roots got immediate credibility from their link to the Games back in Nagano back in 1998.

The rest is up to how you market the association.

Some companies try to inject some the humanity of the Olympics into their brand image. They use individual atheletes they’ve supported, their employees or cuddly characters. Examples include Rona and RBC this year, Home Depot and Petro Canada in 2008 and Bell with its beavers in 2006.

A less used approach is to draw parallels between the skill and precision that goes into manufacturing your brand and what the athletes do. The Mint took that approach this year, and Chrysler took a similar theme back in Nagano, 1998.

However, the most popular approach seems to be to attach your brand to Canadianness. So you build brand affinity with your target through shared pride in our country. Brands that are doing this for these Games include Samsung, McDonalds, Coke, Loblaws, Tim Horton's and Molson.

Some of these backfire dramatically as far as I am concerned. Coke says “This (hockey) is our game”. Well it may that as Canadians we think of hockey that way, but you Coke are not Canadian and it is not your game. I feel the same about Samsung and McDonalds claiming Canadian citizenship. They are world brands. Claiming to be Canadian is carpetbagging.

Loblaws is a Canadian company and so has the right to use the flag. But their claiming of even a small part of the credit for the athletes’ performance chaffs, especially when linked to their Blue Menu. I guess I’m not supposed to take it literally but I can’t see athletes eating Blue Menu products. It doesn’t help that the skiers, who they featured have not done well this year. Perhaps they should have stuck to unprocessed food.

On the other hand Molson says they are “Made from Canada”. This works for me. One advantage of this is it builds on a long term brand strategy and it is a Canadian brand. Even the name helps.

The Bay also works. The Olympic sponsorship seems to have allowed them to rediscover their Canadian roots after years of ignoring them. This makes me feel good about them as a brand. And the gear they’ve designed is way cooler than I’d have expected from the Bay.

But this is the area where Tim Horton’s really wins.

Their ad doesn’t mention the Olympics but taps into the patriotic feelings that the Games generate. What’s more important is that a key part of their brand is about Canadianness and has been for many years. It feels natural for them and so people associate them with the national pride of the Olympics.

It is a great, memorable ad which taps into a brand truth and that is why they get the gold medal for me.

The lesson for other sponsors? Ask yourself will people notice your efforts and transfer positive values to your brand. And ask yourself, do I need to be a sponsor to get those benefits?

Like the games themselves it is a competition. You are up against the best in the world many of whom will have deeper pockets. If your efforts are less than outstanding you will be lost amongst the non-medal finishers and see little return. If you can’t match up to the Tim Horton’s of this world, save your money and don’t bother with the Games.

#4 Man as a Pack Animal - The Importance of Fame.

In marketing we pride ourselves on targeting. Of finding and focussing on the people who may become buyers. We dismiss everything else as wasteage. But is it?

But what about the people who never will? There is growing evidence that people who will never buy our brand are important as well.

Jeremy Bullmore argues persuasively that “about the only thing that successful brands have in common is a kind of fame”.

Famous people are known by millions of people. By the same token “a brand, if it is to enjoy genuine celebrity, must be known to a circle of people that far exceeds what we in the business so chillingly call its target group”.

Part of this is people’s desire to be conformist; to do what everyone else does. This is a powerful drive. Social psychologists have found people will say black is white if other people say it first.

IPSOS have found a similar process in consumer decision making. Popularity is a major driver of the success of brands. They conclude that there is security in numbers. They use Robert Cialdini’s “Social Proof” concept to explain it: “by observing other people doing something or by knowing that others are also buying a certain product creates positive psychological factors influencing the same thing”. (Gimme! The Human Nature of Successful Marketing by John Hallward)

But that only works if your brand is widely known.

The other reason is that as pack animals what we know about a brand isn’t all that influences our buying decision. What other people think matters as well – even people who have never bought the brand in question. As Jeremy Bullmore so eloquently puts it “what’s the point of your driving about in a £50,000 BMW if 95% of us peasants don’t realize how successful you must be to own one”.

All this argues for the value of advertising your brand broadly in a “spectacularly untargeted” way. Creating a brand perception amongst a broad target will influence those people who may end up buying it.

Turning 50

A friend of mine turned 50 the other day. Another announced his retirement at 60 – though he has only retired to start a consultancy. And I'm in my mid 50s.

It got me to thinking. When I started in this business I asked what happened to people when they reached 40 – definitely old in my view then. They opened pubs and wine bars was the best response anyone could give me.

Advertising was and still largely is a young person’s profession. Other professions value the wisdom that comes with age but advertising isn’t one of them. Advertising values energy and creativity, two things believed to be associated with youth.

This isn’t necessarily true – the Economist for example identifies the creativity of “Late Bloomers”.

However it is still widely believed in the industry that youth rules.

And advertising puts little value on accumulated knowledge – one reason for the paucity of training programs in the industry.

It certainly makes me very aware of being over 50. And judging by the way some people my age in advertising dress and cut their hair I am not alone.

One result is I hate those ads on my Facebook page offering deals to those over 50.

(Don’t get me started on online “targeting”. You do not know me just because you have some data on me. I am not a number. I am a free man)

But things may be changing. As we boomers approach retirement with our amassed wealth (I wish) we become an important target and these young people just don’t get it. I don’t know who did the Grey Power ad but it wasn’t aimed at people like me and I’ll bet they’re too young to buy Grey Power.

As Rick Mercer perceptively notes the sub-text is that Grey Power customers are past it and that’s not me.

I’m equally sure that the people who wrote these next two ads – one for Sony Camcorders and one for Red Meat are. Of course, someone will tell me I’m wrong and they were written by 20 year olds but until then I’ll continue with my belief that people like me are still needed.

Sony Camcorder

Red Meat


If anyone knows how to make these images clickable please let me know. Thanks

The Age of Persuasion

I started off in advertising working with the great John Salmon at CDP in England. He always reminded us that we were guests in people’s homes and that we should reward them for the time and attention they gave us. The result of that belief was the great CDP campaigns for Heineken, Benson and Hedges, Hovis and Hamlet amongst many others. (1. Plus they’re all on You Tube see 2 as one example). It is why many people believe that British advertising is among the best in the world.

So when I read Terry O’Reilly and Mike Tennant’s book – “The Age of Persuasion” – it felt like I was coming home.

For me the whole book is worth it for just one concept – “The Contract”.

This is the unwritten contract that exists between advertisers and consumers. In the book’s words this contract “promises that advertisers must give you something in exchange for their imposition on your time, attention and space. An ad might offer useful information, an insight, or a solution to a problem. It might help pay for the TV show you’re watching or the magazine you’re reading. It might simply entertain you. The key is that it offers some tangible benefit.”

The authors have managed to say something I believe passionately way better than I ever could and for that I’m grateful.

Too often I’ve come across marketers, media owners, and advertisers who ignore this contract, seeking to force themselves on consumers with no regard to this Contract. Too often the Contact is being ignored. That is one reason why we find ad avoidance on the rise, no call lists so popular, and there are moves to tax or restrict advertising.

Many advertisers and media see the solution to ad avoidance to be to make it harder for people to avoid us. By being everywhere; by blurring the line between advertising and editorial/programmes; by having increasingly intrusive formats e.g. pop-up ads that block my reading of a web page.

But this is like the spurned lover who stalks their ex and tries to force themselves on them.

The real answer it to return to the Contract. To ensure we offer people something in return.

I see some hope. Permission marketing, if done right should mean I get messages I want. Viral marketing demands that there something people want in the ad – usually its sheer entertainment value. Spotify, the European free music service, shows that the old model from radio and TV where content is paid for by advertising still works in a new medium.

But I fear for the traditional media. Every year we seem to see more advertising minutage on our TV programs; more blurring of advertising and content; more concentration on “persuasion” despite the fact we know likeability is more important; more emphasis on intrusion rather than being invited in.

And I haven’t even mentioned spam, telemarketing, the proliferation of outdoor media and bad cinema ads.

Rather than honour the Contract we seem intent on assuming we are unwelcome guests and barging in anyway.

Maybe if Mr O’Reilly and Tennant’s book gets widely read we might see a change.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collett_Dickenson_Pearce
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlYMID5qCdE

#3 Man as a Pack Animal - Building Brands in Today's Market

I have argued that man is a pack animal looking to belong to a pack.

However many of the successful brands of the past 20 years have succeeded by appealing to individualism. Just think of Nike and the call to you as an individual to Just Do It, Starbucks and your choice of Low Fat Mocha Decaf Latte, and Apple with its “Think Different” theme. True, others like Sony, Microsoft and Honda have done it by a more traditional product lead brand approach, but it remains a fact that individuality builds brands.

Doesn’t this undermine my thesis?

No. In reality at their heart each of these brands appeal to a particular group of people who use those brands as a mark of belonging to that group. The individualism is not really about you as a singular entity but you as a member of a group that rejects certain values of the mainstream. The choice of the brand then becomes a badge for the particular alternative values your group holds.

Thus Nike appealed to sports enthusiasts, initially for runners, to differentiate themselves from non-serious sports people, then to other groups; basketball, soccer, and virtually every sport. (See below for other examples)

If you are truly successful then people from other groups will seek out your brand as the sub-groups’ values started to become attractive to the mainstream.

The truth is individualism is just belonging to a different pack.

But it does change the way we need to build brands nowadays.
1. We need to have values which appeal to a sub-group and which differentiate us from the incumbents.
2. We need to find new ways of targeting our desired group. Traditional mass broadcast advertising may not be the best way. Nor is 1:1 marketing since it ignores the pack appeal. Sponsorship, narrowcast advertising, cause marketing and PR may be better.
3. Rather than define our target by who they are it may be better to define them as who they are not i.e. “People like us don’t .....”

Other Examples of “Individuality” Brands

Apple initially appealed to geeks as a rejection of the mind numbing power of IBM and later Microsoft.

Starbucks to hip West Coast students as a rebellion against the blandness of Maxwell House and Dunkin Donuts.

Tommy Hilfiger to the rich elite to differentiate themselves from the plebs, then the black urban community and then back again to the white community.

Levis 501s originally to gays.

Harley Davison to Hells Angels as the modern cowboys.

Virgin sold mail order discount music to young non-conformists in 1970s Britain who wanted to put it to the Man.

Cadillac reinvented itself partially by appealing to the rap community with the bling heavy Escalade.

Even Tim Horton’s can be seen as the reasserting of ordinary Canadian values against the tide of Americanism and “cool” choices.

We still love our hits

We have all been hearing about the fragmentation of media and the death of mass. (1,2).

But according to a recent Economist article it isn’t that simple. (3)

It seems that the real blockbusters are busting out more than ever.

Some examples from the article:
1. Twilight New Moon earned more in a single day than any other movie ever.
2. Average sales of the top selling album in the UK increased by 9% between 2004 and 2008 despite total sales being 18% down. And Susan Boyle is selling well this Christmas.
3. US Network TV has lost over 20% of viewers in the last 8 years but the ratings of the top 5 shows are virtually unchanged. For example, in 2000-1 Survivor was the top show drawing 17.8m households. In 2008-9 it was American Idol with 16.5m.

Both the really big hits and the niche offerings have done well. It’s the massish stuff that is suffering – the middle rating TV; the lower chart position music.

My conclusion. While tribes, or packs as I call them, are becoming smaller and more diverse there is still a need for the mass communal experience, the sense of belonging to something bigger, the desire to share something with people at large.


1. . http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/tribal-manageme.html
2.
http://www.wunderman.com/Content/assets/11139_how_to_think_digital.pdf
3. The Economist Nov 28th 2009, Briefing Media: A World of Hits. http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14959982

#2 Man as a pack animal – Why?

Previously I have said that man is primarily a pack animal and is critical to understanding our decisions including our purchase decisions. But why are we?

Man has never been that physically powerful. To survive on the plains and forests of Africa we needed to group together. As such we could protect ourselves from predators and limit the damage to our numbers to a few weaker members in the same way a herd of gazelle does. Additionally grouping together increases our chances of trapping wildebeests and feeding ourselves.

So the prime need for survival is to belong to a pack. A solitary person has much less chance of survival.

That need survives in our genes to this day, even if there are few lions to protect ourselves from and few buffalo to trap. They explain why we enjoy supporting sports teams; why it matters that we keep up with the Jones; why it matters that people know how much our BMW cost. Why people “collect” friends on Facebook; why we are addicted to our Blackberries; and why Canadian Idol can still get mass audiences in an age of personal media.

So far this is similar to Mark Earls’ idea of man as a herd animal (1). But he ignores one key element which is particularly true of pack animals and groups of apes – your status in the pack.

Another selection process was also at work in man’s history. Within the tribe the individuals with the most status got the best and most mates and so had the best chance to pass on their genes. So the need for status is also hard wired into our DNA. But we can’t all be the alpha, so the rest of us need some kind of status which gives us some hope of both survival and passing on our genes.

So different roles within the tribe exist. We can be the leader. Or we can be the one people turn to for comfort. Or the one who makes them laugh. Or the one we all laugh at. Each of these will affect what products we buy, what clothes we wear.

We choose products that reflect or slightly enhance our position in the pack.

And our latitude to choose products from outside the norm of the pack is constrained.

One concept from social psychology I really like is ‘idiosyncrasy credits”. (2) Essentially what this means is that when you join a group you are expected to conform to that group’s norms fairly tightly. However if you conform well and help the group succeed you are given idiosyncracy credits by the group. These allow you to deviate from the group’s norms – you can act and dress differently for example. You’re ability to do this and still be accepted by the group is an external display of your status within the group. Demonstrating your individuality within the constraints of the pack is a way of demonstrating your status within the pack.

So overall as pack animals we are driven by two needs - the need to belong and the need to demonstrate status. And while other survival needs exist e.g. caring for children as they carry our genes, it is these two that explain the majority of our behaviour.

1. “Herd” Mark Earls. John Wiley 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOqCHe355p4

2. Idiosyncracy Credits comes from “Leaders, groups and influence” E.P. Hollander New York : Oxford University Press, 1964. For a description online see http://books.google.ca/books?id=kqY8SQigMnwC&pg=PT122&dq=idiosyncrasy+credits#v=onepage&q=idiosyncrasy%20credits&f=false

Man as a Pack Animal - The Myth of Individuality

The 60s had it all wrong. Life is not about “doing your own thing” and asserting your individuality.

Human beings are fundamentally pack animals. Like dogs only two things really matter.

1. Am I a member of a pack? Do I belong?
2. What is my status in that pack?

Virtually all our decisions are governed by those needs.

Take fashion. I was conducting a focus group with teenage girls a few years ago. They said that their clothes choice was a reflection of them as individuals. But as I pointed out they were all wearing Doc Martens boots. Their response – “Mine are brown”. We don’t choose our clothes to express our individuality. We choose items that identify us as members of a particular tribe – Goths, skateboarders, cool dads, businesspeople, Joe Sixpack. And then we depart from the uniform to state our position within the group – the alpha, the jester, the challenger, the runt.

Or cars. Most people feel their car says something about them. But the top selling vehicle in Canada is regularly the Honda Civic, and the best selling car in the world is the Toyota Corolla. The truth is many people find comfort in belonging to the mass. The most expressive vehicles the Beetle, PT Cruiser, Mini, TJ Cruiser– only sell in small numbers. For example the PT Cruiser at its peak in 2007 had one fourteenth of the sales of the more expensive Honda Civic.

Or beer. Particularly when you first start drinking the choice of beer is a largely communal one – bringing the wrong two-four, or asking for the wrong beer when rounds are being ordered is a major social gaff. But once you have been accepted in the group some leeway is allowed and can define you within the group – a Guinness drinker, for example.

Other people are also starting to notice that individuality is myth. Seth Godin talks about the importance of marketing to tribes and Mark Earls talks about man as a herd animal (1, 2).

Recognising this myth has major implications on how we do our marketing. Stay tuned.

1. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/tribal-manageme.html
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOqCHe355p4

Time for interactive advertising to grow up

When we look back I believe that we will see 2009 as the year when the interactive grew up and stopped being the new kid of the advertising world.

- This year the Grand Prix at Cannes went to an online film not a TV ad - Tribal and Philips’ “Carousel” (1)

- A few years ago creative people in agencies only wanted to do TV. Nowadays online is sexy. There are now many examples of great online films and interactive advertising.

- Online advertising nowadays takes a significant share of many clients’ budgets. Worldwide it is approaching 10% of total spends (2).

- There are several agencies including Razorfish and Sapient with approaching $200 million in revenue in the U.S. alone. (3) Crispen Porter has redefined what being an advertising agency means in the new world, and it often doesn’t include traditional media.

However with this new status needs to come a new maturity.

Stop claiming your new campaign will go viral. Realistically only a handful of campaigns worldwide create real buzz. Making empty promises like this is dishonest and will come back to bite us. We’ve learnt from traditional advertising that while it’s nice to have famous advertising, an ad doesn’t need to be famous to work. (4). But the online world has not really how do we use this knowledge. And the answer is not finding more ways to make my online experience painful by sticking ads on top of what I really want to look at.

We should ban the use of the terms “social media” and “marketing 2.0” (I’ve even recently been hearing marketing 3.0). It disguises lazy thinking and usually means “let’s do something cool on the web”. We rarely mean a true dialogue.

Nor should we claim online will replace TV. Radio didn’t replace print, and TV didn’t replace radio. Each has its own strengths and each has its role to play in a total communications plan.

We need to get more sophisticated in assessing effectiveness. A great advantage for online is that it is measurable. We can measure click throughs, eyeballs, and subsequent behaviour. But success is not just responses. What we are often trying to do is build a brand – to influence how people see us and feel about us. Until online takes this more seriously it will continue to be seen as just a response based medium.

All this means the specialist interactive agencies need to look out. The things I’ve talked about are the areas where traditional advertising agencies are strong. And trust me, they are all investing massively to get their share of interactive business. It used to be easy to say that the big agencies didn’t get it (5). Watch out guys, clients want their on and off line activity to work seamlessly to both sell and build the brand. Specialist agencies are starting to look less attractive, especially if they keep the “we’re the cool kids” attitude and don’t adapt to this new maturity.

The next few years will be fascinating as we grapple with how to do online advertising day in day out and not just as something sexy.

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0S7bEsTM60
2. http://www.zenithoptimedia.com/gff/pdf/Advertising%20Expenditure%20Forecasts%20%20March%202007.pdf
3. http://adage.com/datacenter/datapopup.php?article_id=108866
4. http://www.accountplanning.net/Central/InTheirOwnWords/LowInvolvementProcessing
5. http://blog.schematic.com.au/?p=93