SXSW Panel Entry

Well, me and my friend Kyle submitted a panel concept to SXSW. We’ve somehow managed to make the cut for voting. Who knows what’ll happen next. Maybe we’ll to go Austin and hang out with people smarter than us. I hope so.

Here’s the link:

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/6928

What is Digital strategy?

In the traditional ad world—print, TV and radio—we hang our hat on strategy. It’s our reason for the ad. Our argument. We hold up our polished print or wisecracking television scripts next to our strategic statement, and we ask ourselves, “Did we accomplish what we set out to accomplish with this piece of communication?” Then we argue about it for a while and come to a decision. Or we look at our piece of communication and think, “Dear God! This is smart! How do we sum this up in a smart strategy and sell it?”

The latter way, backing a strategy out of an execution is more difficult to pull off, because it sends the creatives in too many directions (Especially on the typical 3-4 day turn around). But, since we are so familiar with these traditional pieces of media, these types of situations are easy enough to handle. Everyone in the room can easily get on board or kill a print or TV idea—because we’ve been doing it for years. We’ve all been on a shoot. We understand the process. Not just technically, but strategically.

The world of digital is much harder to think about. There are few scripts. As a matter of fact, the agency and the client don’t even have control over the end product most of the time. Especially in instances of social media or other user generated stuff.

In other instances, such as webisodes, banner ads, and microsites—there is more control—and it’s a lot easier for clients and agencies to wrap their collective heads around. We can look at non-interactive banners like fancy-shmancy print ads. We can look at webisodes like online television. And most of us have enough surfing experience that we get the basics of an easy user interface.

Before we get into what a digital strategy might be, I want to make a clear distinction between online stuff that the agency creates and online stuff that the agency doesn’t create. Let’s put them in two separate boxes. Let’s call one socially active advertising and the other controlled online advertising.

I’m not making a nomenclature parallel between the two terms on purpose. For a moment, let’s think about them separately. The connecting threads are that they use the same technologies, and that we view them through the same relative lens, a digital display. But that’s where their similarities end.

For both of them there needs to be a strategy, and that strategy may or may not be the same strategy that happens in general advertising. For the purposes of this document, I’m going to put that strategy on its own island—separate from the general strategy, more specific.

When we produce a roadside billboard, there are a number of strategies going on. The general messaging strategy that’s on the billboard and the strategic placement of the billboard. We have billboards for a hotel because that hotel is near. Hotels are for travelers, and if you’re on the road, you’re traveling. The general messaging tells us what kind of place the hotel is.

How that messaging is focused is how we talk about strategy. The media strategy for this is talked about as well, but it isn’t a measuring stick used for the general messaging. Most of the time it’s obvious. In the meetings I’ve been in there hasn’t been an explicit measuring stick for our socially active advertising. And because of this, there’s no way for us to have an intelligent conversation about socially active marketing.

Internally, from a presentation perspective agencies are falling short, because there is no strategy. There is no frame of reference for any of the ideas that are presented. Thus, the decision makers don’t know how they are supposed to think about those ideas.

Socially Active Advertising

There are a few questions we need to ask when we come up with a digital strategy for socially active advertising. And there is also an assumption we can make.
Assumption: Right now, there’s an online conversation going on about your brand or industry. 
Assumptions are a bad idea right? Fine. Test it. Google an industry or product. You’ll find a conversation somewhere. Nail polish, automobiles, cell phone carriers, Gene Simmons, breath mints, vacuum cleaners, scented candles, light bulbs. Everything.

Here are the questions you need to ask when you stumble on that blog, twitter feed or consumer advocate site.

• Do I want to react to it?

• What’s the best way to react to it?

• Do I want to start a new conversation?

• If I do start a new conversation will it be relevant and enjoyed by my audience?

The most important question to ask is “What is that conversation?” That’s how you can start to form your strategy.

Currently, there’s a conversation online about how poopy a hotel’s rooms are. So that hotel needs a plan to react to that conversation. On a general level, what are their options?

• They can enter the conversation as it is on the customer’s terms.

• They can ignore that the conversation exists and try to start their own conversation.

• They can start a separate conversation in reaction to the conversation that already exists. This may involve a company setting up a forum, and then inviting customers to comment.

After a company has chosen a way to talk online, then they can figure what to say. For instance, in the hotel example, people are saying that they have poopy rooms.
On the customer’s terms: The hotel can individually address the customer’s complaints and offer them something or try and prove them wrong.
They can ignore: The hotel can exclaim, “We’ve got great rooms!” If you say something loud enough and long enough, people start believing you—Right?
Conversation in reaction: The hotel can say, “Hey we think our rooms are pretty great, what do you think?” Or, “We want your help in evaluating the services we offer. What do you like, what do you dislike.”

Before the hotel sets foot on the online landscape, whether its Twitter, Facebook, TripAdvisor—They need to decide how they will enter the conversation that is currently going on. They need to listen. If they do not listen to the current conversation then how are they going to enter it?

Let’s take it to a dinner party scenario. Two friends are having a conversation over cocktails about the hotels they frequent on their business travels. One says, “Dude, I stayed at a the Dew Drop Inn in Des Moines. Don’t ever go there. It’s awful.” The other guy says, “You think that one’s bad. You should see the Continental Comfy Inn in Omaha.”

Then the Dew Drop Inn, a stranger with a clear agenda, enters the conversation:

• They can enter the conversation right then and there.

• They can learn from the conversation and apply it somewhere else.

• They can create a forum and invite customers to talk about them.

Regardless of how they enter the conversation, what do they say? The response could be as impersonal is as a press release, or it could be as personal as directly responding to a customer. Neither way is right or wrong. The important thing is that the hotel should respond with something engaging. And by engaging I don’t mean with fancy copy. They should actually engage with a customer, to keep the conversation going—something that will elicit a response.
Honest engagement is the key to having a healthy conversation online.

In a later post I’ll do my darndest to define what that is. But for now, honest engagement is when a company is talking with an individual or too a blog in an open and transparent manner. A way that isn’t so carefully worded that no one knows what the company is actually trying to say.

I’m so viral I can barely stand it.

It’s time to talk about a small section of socially active advertising people like to refer to as viral advertising. Yes, I know. Everybody knows what a viral video is. Sometimes it’s a fat kid pretending like he is Luke Skywalker, crazy wedding video, or one of my personal favorites, “David after dentist.” Where a kid is completely off his tree with medication after going to the dentist.

What do all of these have in common? Millions and millions people all over the world looked at it. Most laughed. And they don’t sell anything. Nothing. Zippo. Nada.

I don’t know how many meeting I’ve been in where a client has requested, “Something Viral.” It’s possible of course to make a funny video that somebody might pass around to their friends. And it’s possible that video might sell them something. However, it’s highly unlikely.
I call this a small section of advertising. Not that viral videos are a small part of the online world, they aren’t. In Time’s Top Ten Viral Videos of 2009, one was an ad. It came in ninth, the client was Post-it notes. Seventh was “United Breaks Guitars” a music video about United Airlines breaking someone’s guitar on a flight. Nothing else had to with advertising or a product. There is no real consistent content link. There is no formula. There is no format. What’s for sure is they are all surprising. Some are lewd, some are cute but all are unexpected.

And by the way, the Post-it note video was made from a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Not a client or an agency. It definitely could’ve been.
This is the where you should ask me what my point is.

If you are a client or an agency and want to try and make a video that has the potential to go viral—don’t make advertising. Make something cool. Take a risk. Your logo probably won’t be there at the end on an art card. It won’t sync up with your current campaign. And chances are it won’t sell anybody anything. So what will it do? That’s still up in the air. I can tell you this, I’d never heard of Carlton Beer, but I have now. This ad aired in Australia. It went viral soon after.

The moral of the story? If you want to make a video go viral, don’t make advertising. Make something cool.
Stay tuned for a post on Controlled Online Advertising

Attack of the Brand Zombies

What is a brand zombie? It is a marketing professional who believes they have a brand, but don’t. Their brand is dead to customers but still walking around eating as many brains as it can. Plundering the catacombs of potential customers minds like a messy drunk chick at a frat party, bumping into walls, grunting, spitting up on itself, and asking everyone around to hold it just for a second.

And when customers hold it, the “needle moves” –people buy stuff. Then customers walk away quickly forgetting where they bought their HD TV, bag of onions or blouse. Not because they had a good or bad experience, but because they had no experience at all.

Just so you know, I’m not talking about brands that people don’t like e.g. Meryl Lynch, BP, United Airlines. They actually have a brand, however worse than customers hating you is customers not knowing who you are. It’s a lot easier to change people’s perception from hate to love than it is to change people’s perception from nothing to love.

Your brand could be a zombie for several reasons. It went through a price war and lost (Nobody wins price wars). It doesn’t say anything memorable. It has adopted strategies that their competitors are using. There’s lots more, but I’m not smart enough to think of them right now.

Price War Zombie: This will kill your brand by making it seem cheap, and not in a good way. You’ve decided to put starbursts on every piece of communication you generate because you believe driving store traffic in the short term is more important than people respecting you. It’s the marketing equivalent of a one night stand. The brand decides to go out one night, dress a little sluttier than normal to attract a good shagging. Just remember, your customer won’t respect you in the morning and probably won’t call you back.

Unmemorable Zombie: You could’ve gotten yourself in this predicament a few ways. It could’ve been from watered down advertising. It could’ve been trying to be all things to all people. It could’ve been from trusting creative judgement to focus groups rather than trying to do it yourself. Or you could’ve tried to say so many things in your communication efforts that it became white noise. Either way, no one remembers you. You’re the guy that the company laid-off and no one noticed because you had no impact and no ideas.

Strategic Zombie: You’ve laid awake at night trying to figure out a new way to say “have it your way.” Stop trying. Somebody already said it. Or you’ve decided to put your business strategy on a billboard: “Every Day Low Prices” “60% off department store prices.” When so many businesses are saying this, all of those business start occupying the same space in customer’s minds. You will get lost, adrift in a sea of percentage symbols and ad-speak that barely worked in the 50s. You went to a party and wore the same dress as 6 other girls at the party–on purpose.

So what do you do? Stop eating brains for one. Suck it up and say something, even if it’s polarizing–even if it doesn’t hit every corner of your target audience. Who knows, you might even create an audience that never existed before. Then you’ll be the guy at the party telling a bunch of cool stories that no one has heard of before.

A brief history of the world the Internet and everything. Starting in 1992

In the early 90s just when the online space was exploding, life was grand. Ad budgets flowed like the Mississippi River. Retainers were as big as Mastodons. Pluto was still a planet. Amazon was just a river. Arrested Development was only a band, and Mark Zuckerburg was just starting elementary school.

Some businesses panicked—others cashed in. It was the beginning of yet another revolution in information. The greatest since some dude named Gutenberg.

And if you were a business in 1992, you were hit by a staggering notion. “If I doth not existeth online, to the world I am most surely parished! To the quick! Would any man constructeth thee an interwebbernet paging system!”

Then nerds from all over the world straightened their glasses, mumbled to themselves, and went at it.

We were so young then.

We didn’t have web designers. We had coders. And because of this, if anything online looked good it was a happy accident. Information flow and user-interface people didn’t really exist.

Fast-forward to 1999.

The Euro was established. The Violent Femmes wrote the theme for Sponge Bob Square Pants. The Y2K bug was looming, as well as the “Livin’ La Vida Loca” earworm. We all thought Yahoo was going to take over the world. What came to be known as Wi-Fi, was standardized. Napster was one-year-old. Google finally exists.

Hop to 2000. We kick it off with the culmination of the Y2K panic—which I personally experienced 5 times due to an international flight. Then cur-blewy. The Internet bubble bursts. It was a huge mess. Cleaning crews are called in from Eastern Europe and Chad. Next, high-speed Internet is attainable for customers.

SixDegrees.com—one of the first modern-day social networking sites folded because of enormous amounts of spam and user abuse. Two years later Friendster takes the stage, and does well.

Wasn’t that a nice trip down partial memory lane? I think so. So what can we learn? Bunches. More than I can calculate in this essay. But for the purposes of web design and social networking there’s at least one phrase to note.

1992: If I don’t have a webpage, my business is dead to the world.

Since then we’ve learned a few things. Websites have more of a purpose than to prove validity. They are a communication tool, and any time businesses are attempting to communicate something—they need a plan. So, we’ve gotten smarter. Now we develop plans for how and what we want to communicate with our own little corner of the Internet.

2010: If I’m not taking advantage of social media, I’m dead to the world.

See above. Make a plan. Just because a business has a facebook page doesn’t mean anything unless that business understands why they have a facebook page. Or twitter feed or blog. Or whatever the next big thing is.

Stay tuned for more entries of what that plan can be.

Here’s a somewhat relevant video for you to laugh at.

Welcome to the future of advertising, and by future I mean, RUN!!!!!

So, there’s lot s of theories on which form of advertising works. No one really knows–Is it the low budget awkwardness of Head-On spots (apply directly to the forehead)? The aspirational high budget slickness that is Nike? The social statement that was Dove’s true beauty campaign? Or is it about being as disruptive as possible with new technology and ad placements. At some point in time will everyone be paid by an advertiser just to be inundated with a product’s blinky-factor? I dunno, but I hope to God it doesn’t look anything like this:

Little People & Men Without Pants

The question isn’t why are men in tighty-whities somewhat amusing—or even why they are so funny right now. The question is: How did two unrelated products end up with the same visual gag? And not only that, but how the hell did they end up back-to-back in the effing Super Bowl?! And then the same thing happens with Dr. Pepper’s “Little Kiss” and the miniaturized Punxsutawney Polamalu. Two little-people site gags back-to-back sprinkled with E-trade talking babies.

And not to mention all of the “men are *woosies” advertising. Which unfortunately may be true. I definitely identified with the Dodge spot. And for that I apologize—to everyone. And to Dodge, because i can’t afford this car.

What I really wanted to talk about here is our collective creative consciousness. I know, it sounds heavy. Forgive me for the professorial sounding slush. If you’ve got a better way to phrase it, I’m all ears.

By “collective” I mean all of us in the ad industry.

By “creative” I mean the stuff that clients buy.

By “consciousness” I mean mind.

Super Bowl ads seem to be a culmination of The Collective. And this year it brought us—men are woosies, tighty-whities are hilarious, and miniature men are entertaining. Congratulations. What I want to know is, how they all happened at once. Is it that creative directors and clients are on the same humor page across the nation? Is there so much homogeny across the creative-client spectrum that they all find the same things funny at the same time? It could be.

Months ago, concepts for Super Bowl commercials were submitted. Art directors and copywriters went into an orgasmic flurry. Millions of media dollars were spent. There were meetings, that led to more meetings, that led to hundreds of hours of labor that birthed phone calls, that led to focus groups, that led to weight gain, hair loss, the threat of divorce, and the consumption of Funyuns. Strategy was scrutinized—changed, re-changed, and tweaked. Ideas were interrogated in back rooms like Cold War spies. Millions were spent to shoot, produce and edit the commercials and POOF!

They have the same jokes in them. Remarkable.

We’ve come to accept that certain things are okay to make fun of and certain things aren’t. And once again the creative-client collaborative has spoken. The only things left to be funny about are “men are woosies” and “miniature men.” Everything else is politically unsafe.

This isn’t to advocate not making fun of men and miniature men for sure. Please do. Just for crying out loud make fun of other shit too—just to have some variety. I’m getting bored here.

Jeff and Erin’s EPIC wedding

I am truly jealous of this.

I wonder how many uninvited guests they’ll get.

Kanye, Serena, Joe and the Original Brat

… And then it occurred to me. Everyone’s not yelling at each other, it just seems that way. For crying out loud, stop crying out loud. It’s like middle school out there in TV, and nobody cool is sitting at the cool people table. I want the ball! You’re a big fat liar! Well! You’re stupid!

I’m not sure what it says about our society, and I don’t know if I want to know. I don’t blame Serena, Joe, and Kanye for being who they are. A wise man once said, “The difference between crazy and eccentric is calculated in dollars.” And you have to be kind of eccentric to get where they are, right?

Who knows? Regardless, here’s an interpretive ramble.

I guess we’re all reverting to a cast of whiny 12-year-olds hanging out on the playground — wondering why no one understands how important we are. And why not, that’s what we’ve been told right? We are important. We are good enough. Our schools, parents, and “how-to raise your children” books  practically beg us, to constantly pander to the now Gen-X and Gen-Yers about how important they are — Ergo society has developed a bunch of self-indulgent dunderheads.

Where does Joe Wilson of South Carolina fit into this scenario? I don’t know, things happen in threes I guess. Maybe you can dock somebody a generation if they serve in the Senate. Cause he’s obviously a baby-boomer. Or perhaps his outburst was less self importance and more lack of self control.

What we’ve ended up with is two entire generations, who think they are important, but refuse to try to be. Or better yet, have little concept of what real effort is. And why should they put forth effort? Important people don’t, right?

Sheesh.

At least when McEnroe went off, it became iconic. I don’t think anyone is going to be asking for a repeat performance from Serena to hock Amex. Maybe she’ll end up in a pop song.

United Breaks Guitars, Hearts, and Wind

Not only is this genius, it is an amazing example of how customers can take advantage of the craziness that is the Internet, social media, et al. These have been crazy times for awhile, and they’ll get crazier. Hopefully, United will answer this guy’s plea, and other airlines will take note. I wouldn’t be surprised if another airline came out with an ad campaign that claimed they don’t break guitars — or at least that they will fix the stuff they do break. That’s the kind of influence us little guys who buy stuff have. One day we’ll actually shuck the offensive marketing label of consumer and businesses will call us customers again. If so, guys like this should be given some credit.

The World Wide Webbernet Circa 1975

We’ve come a long way yet, we are still saying the same thing. The internet can help your business now! It will make you bolder! This is part of an IBM slideshow from 1975. To see the whole glorious thing go to: http://www.squareamerica.com/ib.htm