LaughlinOutLoud

I work back and forth between our Chicago and Milwaukee offices, so I pay close attention to three local major daily newspapers. One’s in bankruptcy, another’s stock is trading for $.59 and the third’s stock is trading for $.03. The daily paper’s themselves cost more than a share of their stock. Last time I checked a package of Cottonelle toilet tissue was selling for $3.59, just to put additional perspective on the value of newsprint.

There’s no mystery to what the problem is.  I can go online and get the same or more up to the minute content for free, so why pay?  But, this doesn’t seem like a sustainable business model either.

It’s pretty clear that people are as hungry for news as they ever were. Yet most of the online links still serve content that is funded by an old school print or broadcast brand. If they go away who exactly will pay the people who write the news? This is where advertising always comes in. If the newspapers are lucky, they’ll monetize their websites before all their reporters and columnists drift off into the blogosphere. The survivors will make money. They always do.

After all, brands are a short cut to understanding. So the online brands that gain awareness will grow and prosper. It’s interesting that bloggers are now migrating into branded websites so they can become sponsored content. Maybe the future won’t be neatly divided into main news, local news, sports, lifestyle and business. But don’t bet against it. How many different websites do we want to bookmark after all?  One thing’s for sure, the need to know what’s going on won’t go away.

Maybe the new normal will begin to look like the old normal. Only with fewer trees and dirty fingers involved.

The most predictable thing about the economy right now is its unpredictability. The only growth area is the noise level of speculation about when it will start growing again.

The majority of my friends who make a living predicting these sorts of things feel things will get worse before they get better. Most believe 2009 will be worse than 2008. From what I can tell, the people who use numbers to divine the future see darkness.

My world is less well defined by statistics. Brands are about how people feel. Perception is reality here. Our chicken or egg economic questions are: Do economic conditions drive human behavior? Or, does human behavior drive economics?

The answer to both questions has to be yes, but if consumer spending is the sign of a healthy economy, perceptions will lead reality. In that regard, I believe the economy will get better before the numbers say it will. In all likelihood, things might be better already.

How can I say that? Well, we have a new president. That fact in and of itself produces optimism. On top of that, we’re just weeks removed from a process that saw our candidates for president spend $300,000,000 in advertising that reminded every voter how bad things are and how important it is to elect the only person who could possibly make things better. The election itself took a lot of air out of the bad news balloon. As far as new bad news, we’re becoming inured to it. So we’re now at a point where good news has more potential to create more good news than bad news can generate bad.

We can also look at human nature. We’re essentially optimistic by nature. We have a constitutional right to “pursue happiness.” We play slots and buy lottery tickets in the belief that we’ll win in spite of the odds.

Maybe that’s why busts don’t last as long as booms. This once-in-a-lifetime bust may have some life left in it, but there’s no doubt in this professional optimist’s mind that 2009 will end much more optimistically than 2008 did.

Famous creative people have fewer ideas than the generic creative people. The Coen brothers walk in with a story idea and the first words out of your mouth aren’t, “what else have you got?”  So you ask yourself, what would their track record be like if they had to pitch concepts by the dozens and then go through a vetting process with focus groups?  Fargo becomes Mayberry.

You can’t run an organization without process.  But, procedure is the enemy of originality.

Most companies have a department dedicated to idea killing. Ironically, it’s called marketing. Now these bright, enthusiastic people don’t want to kill ideas, because they were put on this earth to bring ideas to life that will engage consumers and increase profits. Yet they are miscast in the role of professional filters eliminating anything that might embarrass the CEO or activate the legal department and public affairs. No wonder CMOs have such a short tenure. Their marching orders are to help win the war, but don’t get anyone shot at.

So if the corporate objective is to avoid risk first and get attention second, ideas get killed.

A healthier mind-set would be to treat every creative person as the next incarnation of Lee Clow, Alex Bogusky, or Jeff Goodby.  Looking for the brilliance in an idea is a much healthier orientation than the mental metal detector scanning for the flaw. There should be a universal no idea left behind rule. After all, a little combustibility might be just what a brand needs most.

So am I actually suggesting companies should lead with their chins and embrace controversy?

No. What is needed, though, is a little more aggression and a little less caution. Self-confident companies take bolder positions and defy conventions.

Years ago when Mastadons walked the earth and young people drank wine coolers, Hal Riney had the audacity to use geezers playing the roles of Bartels and Jaymes to sell cocktails to twenty somethings. These guys were seriously old, wore plaid shirts and suspenders and completely defied conventional wisdom. All they did was sell so much product that no one can remember any other wine cooler brand.

Today in Australia, Kotex brand is running a campaign with a beaver. Yeah, you read it right, a beaver.  It’s controversial to be sure. But no one’s getting hurt and a lot of women are buying Kotex.

I can’t know for sure that this idea didn’t come out of a stack of thirty storyboards. But wherever it started, there’s a famous creative person and famous client attached to it now. Somehow their process didn’t kill their profits.

If one thing is certain in this moment in history, Barack Obama won the branding battle.  When we see the now familiar new age patriotic symbol of a round blue circle enclosing an earth of red and white stripes, we immediately fill in a sense of hopefulness and change, a new political order.  Criticized for lacking specifics, Obama won the broader, more emotional war of themes.  He seemed on message all of the time forcing McCain to constantly react.  McCain’s message became of litany of don’t rather than do, of can’t rather than can, won’t rather than will.

There’s no question the financial market crisis that is unsparing in its carnage has put perhaps only one person into a better place.  Barack  Obama.  The economy has even turned Joe Biden into the “other Joe” in the campaign as Joe the Plumber has come to symbolize our rude awakening from the American Dream.  I hope this Alpha Joe has a good agent.

There’s no more powerful change agent than a bad economy, but that aside Obama’s ascension is a case study in the market dynamics of new brand versus old.  Positive versus negative.  Simple and direct versus detailed and pedantic.  Emotional versus rational.

Being new doesn’t hurt.  Many of today’s most familiar brands were unknown ten years ago.  Amazon, Prius, Yahoo, iPod, Starbucks, Ikea, Jet Blue, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Red Bull, Ultimate Fighting Championship, even Al Qaeda.  In spite of McCain’s try to make more, pardon the expression, liberal use of the word “change,” Brand Obama came to represent it.  The newer face has advantages here.  If Sarah Palin supporters are about to raise their hands in protest, let’s not ignore that new also represents risk.  That offsetting position was McCain’s advantage and biggest counterpoint.  Whatever he gained from choosing Palin as a running mate was certainly compromised in the lost opportunity to position Obama’s newness against him.

That being said, here are four things all brands should do in their message strategy, that Obama simply did better:

1. Avoid the past.   That’s where brands go to die.
2. Don’t be negative, be comparative.  There’s an art to pointing out the deficiencies in your opponent using tact rather than venom.  Think Mac versus PC here.
3. Take a position your opponent can’t.  Or, better yet out flank your opponent by taking their best position away from them.  Obama anticipated a historic weakness in the Democratic brand perception of tax and spend, so he got out in front of the issue early by offering the entire middle class a tax break.  McCain was trumped on his best issue.
4. Keep it simple.

It’s not likely that great brand strategies alone can make great presidents.  But they can make one brand win over the other.  Which can put the winner in a position to let all the other tests determine his or her greatness.

A little vibration on my thigh signals the arrival of a text message.  The billboard up ahead is digital, sending out a different message every 8 seconds.  The elevator pitches me lunch options on the way to the lobby.  News, weather and sports are on 24/7. Whatever it is I may become interested in next, there’s a magazine, cable channel and three thousand blogs about it.

Despite the endless flow of information we are presented with everyday, it seems as if no one’s got the time to read.  Thank you for taking an exception here.  Item: Publishers are decrying the fact that young men simply don’t read.  Item:  More and more we’re becoming a multi-lingual nation where we no longer read the same language, and when we do, it is difficult for everyone to understand the same idioms.  The result: Clever headlines aimed at catching people’s attention are not getting the reaction they are looking for.

So I better choose my words carefully, here.  We all should.

We’re spewing more words to less effect than any time in our history.  An art director friend of mine suggested we should respond by simply spewing more pictures.  I think he’s right.

The successful marketers are emphasizing design throughout their brands.  Simplicity has become the essence of cool.

Martin Luther said, “The fewer the words, the better the prayer.”  Apparently, not a lot of people got the message.  The cathedrals of Europe sit empty.

Marketers better listen or their pews could sit empty too. That white noise you’re hearing out there is saying, “Keep it simple.”

Chief Marketing Officers are under increasing pressure as the economy slows. They’re expected to produce instant results with some marketing fairy dust. The average tenure of a CMO is something south of two years. This churn suggests a lot of companies are creating change for its own sake. It seems that all of the media coverage of new media versus old and the collapse of mass media has led to an expectation that there’s a solution right around the corner that surely a new CMO will know all about.

Expecting CMO’s to predict future media habits is little like asking someone to read an eye chart with the letters on the back.

One of the more interesting people I’ve met, Ryan Matthews, makes a living as a marketing futurist. He calls himself the Black Monk, a moniker that justifies his sizable day rate all by itself. He’s self-confident enough to admit that predicting the future is inherently a fraudulent practice. Dark and mysterious is this future business.

Matthews points out that most predictions are the result of projecting the most recent history. The new, new things are harbingers of the next big thing. This is like imagining what’s down the road by looking at the rear view mirror.

Retailer, The Gap recently announced it was no longer using television advertising because it was no longer effective as a medium. We could easily use this as yet more evidence for the end of the 30-second spot. Yet, sister company, Old Navy, is running one of their best TV campaigns in years. Same company, two divergent brand strategies.

Maybe the reality is that marketing will always be best described by the famous John Wanamaker observation, “I know that only half of my advertising works. The trouble is I don’t know which half.”

The irony is that the work that is most measurable, that requiring immediate action, is also the least emotional, the least sticky over time. So at a time when marketers want to shake things up, it’s quite often the tried and true that produces the immediate result. It seems to me the smart brands are adopting new things incrementally and resisting the temptation to always be on deal.

2008 is the Chinese Year of the Rat. You have to give the lowly rat credit for at least one good characteristic. It’s a survivor. Appropriate if we’re thinking about how brands need to adapt in the future in order to avoid extermination in a tough global economy. While it would be smart to know more about the Chinese than what year it is, let’s also keep in mind it wasn’t long ago that everyone was conceding the future to the Japanese. While the Japanese continue to be best-in-class manufacturers and marketers, they’re certainly not steam-rolling the world the way futurists in the 80’s were predicting.

I’m convinced planning for the future is like managing a financial portfolio. Since no one can possibly know what’s going to happen, why not decide how much risk you can or should tolerate and plan accordingly? All too often companies want to blow up their marketing platforms and revolutionize things.

Yet the best brands seem to make the subtlest changes, they evolve slowly, steadily and ceaselessly.

Cottonelle toilet paper is out there using guerrilla marketing in addition to traditional media. Dove soap made wonderful use of publicity, traditional media and the web in its “real beauty” campaign. IBM is selling high-end, high technology business-to-business products like blade servers on mass media network television. These marketers know they have to try new things, yet they see the value of doing many of the same things in interesting, integrated ways.

When times get tough, it’s good to remember that the changes you make are no more important than the changes you resist.

Sudden, radical change is probably never a good idea. It takes a long time for people to catch on. So it’s probably much riskier to do something radical at precisely the time you’re most tempted to.

Mark Twain described himself as being opposed to change, but in favor of progress. I think that pretty well summarizes how one might want to look at the future. The fact is we’ll never need to change everything if we’re continually making progress with the things we’re doing. Good times or bad.

The best brand people often make something out of nothing. It’s still called white
space. And it’s still the most important principal in good design.

The notion that less is more is one of the oldest arguments in advertising. It’s almost
laughable that anyone would argue with the aesthetic of a clean, simple message. After
all, Bill Bernbach won that argument once and for all 40 years ago with all those classic
VW ads. DDB launched a new school of advertising. My generation was inspired to get
into the business as art became a partner to commerce. The thinking went along the
lines that if we were going to intrude on people’s entertainment, why not be interesting
and engaging about.

We’ve obviously lost our way. Print advertising is harder to read than it ever was thanks
to image manipulation software and the ability to layer type and tone. With longer
commercial breaks, higher costs and shorter spots, TV has gotten much worse, too.
And thanks to technology, designers can digitize the clutter and put it on-line in a
comprehension defying jumble. Welcome to new media.

It might be a good time to put the design monster back in its cage.

Clean communications is largely the result of the Bauhaus movement, the invention of
Helvetica type and the insights of advertising design pioneers in the 60s like Helmut
Krone.

In a brilliant 2007 documentary called HELVETICA, director Gary Hustwit chronicles
how this type innovation swept corporate logos, signage, collateral information and all
forms of mass communication. This movement coincided with the Golden Age of
advertising in the 60s and 70s. Helvetica type cleaned up all forms of mass
communication.

This film comes along at a good time. Between technology and a grunge movement in
the 90s advertising design lost its way. We can blame media costs for pushing clients to
want to pack more information into their advertising, but media costs have always been
too high. If anything, with a fragmented audience, we should be leaner and simpler with
our message anyway.

This argument is further supported by another timely re-visit to the white space
argument. In a 2006 article in the Journal of Consumer Research, academics John W.
Pracejus, G. Douglas Olsen and Thomas C. O’Guinn prove the value of negative pace
in an article entitled, “How Nothing Became Something: White Space Rhetoric, History,
and Meaning”

I’ll save you the details, consumers perceive messages with greater white space to
come from brands that are leaders. They perceive higher quality, prestige, trust, and
less risk when the only variable is the amount of white space itself. The executive
summary of this research: say less, you’ll get more out of it.

For years marketers have been criticized for creating unreal expectations for female
beauty. Well, marketers don’t lead culture, they follow it. Marketers just give us what
we want. We start young. Barbie dolls teach our girls that it’s ideal to be stacked and
skinny. Movie producers cast only size zero women under twenty five years old. Ok, a
few older, more solid roles exist, but Kathy Bates gets those parts.

Then Dove comes along and reminds us that real women, those a little rounder and
softer than the under-fed icons of the industry, are what is really beautiful.

The usual media circus breaks out calling our attention to the right-sizing of our beauty
standards. Models around the world can take a break from saltines and celery for a
deep dish pizza or two, perhaps washed down with beer. A consensus formed around
the notion that it’s about time we celebrate what we’ve really become: pudgy.
Reubenesque beauty is back.

Then the disclosure that perhaps these more robust models were re-touched. Outrage
is unleashed in the direction of the very marketers we were celebrating. How dare they
be so hypocritical as to suggest something is real and then enhance it with retouching.
Particularly after pitching the shots as un-retouched. The controversy quickly died down
when Dove denied any re-touching. End of story. It’s seems as our waistbands expand
our collective attention span recedes.

Welcome to the new world of marketing. It’s always been our objective to get noticed.
Now with the web 2.0 world of immediate feedback, controversy is inevitable. Believe it
or not, there were blogs that chastised Dove for suggesting its OK for women to be out
of shape. Written by men, I might add. Bill Zwecker of CBS’s morning show in Chicago
for one. Richard Roeper, the movie critic for two, who said he found the Dove
advertising, “unsettling.” Big thighs didn’t sit well with Richard.

With time for a little reflection, it might be pointed out that this campaign once-again
proved its effectiveness to get noticed. I admire the courage of corporate marketers to
push a polarizing concept into the market place. Not strictly for the sake of controversy,
but to illustrate through the debate the attributes of a brand. If a model’s skin doesn’t
need firming, why cast her for the role in a firming lotion ad?

As marketers, we’re being presented with tremendous opportunities. If we’re willing to
put our brands into the public forum, we’ll get feedback. It takes confidence and
preparation – it’s not a monologue any more. But, if the the product’s right and we’ve
got our game on, we can get mass attention with or without the media’s ability to deliver
a mass audience.

As far as the re-touching controversy goes, let’s get real. What the photographer does
with lighting and make-up isn’t intended to replicate the frozen food isle at the grocery
store. So what if a re-toucher removes a stray hair, or smoothes a curve.

In the debate between new or old media, viral or traditional advertising, push or pull
marketing, PR or product placement, one question comes out of the clutter, virtual or real. Is
there an idea in there? What are the words in the word-of-mouth campaign going to say?
What grand design will drive the digital?

You have to admire an industry that keeps finding ways to invade people’s privacy with new
technologies. I’m sure you can’t wait for your phone to start offering you Viagra when you
can’t get it up, or Tums when you can’t keep it down.

Maybe that’s why the best marketing was never an interruption. It was always a discovery.
The message never confused itself with the medium.

If you and the brand you’re working for are going to survive the next technology shift, realize
that it’s your ideas that will get you through. Artificial intelligence suggests that ideas can be
programmed. Well, not to worry, so can you. And yours will be better, or we’re all headed for
CareerBuilder.com.

Ideas occur in four steps. (It’s the third and easiest step that’ll get you down.)

Step one. Know what it is you’re trying to have an idea about. Seems obvious, but it isn’t.
Clever headlines, visuals, or publicity stunts aren’t ideas if they’re just there to get noticed.
Mixing plaids will get you noticed, too. If you can state your brand strategy in one simple,
declarative statement, you’re on your way to having an idea.

Step two. Absorb everything there is to know about the brand. It’s competitors. It’s
consumers. It’s selling channel. This is a good time to read that segmentation study.

Step three. Incubate. This is the secret step few know about, appreciate, or have the patience
to wait through. Your brain needs time to sort the data dump from step two and actually work
on the problem. It can’t produce an idea without some time off. This phenomenon is
commonly known as writer’s block. It’s shortened more careers than Donald Trump. The
antidote is relaxing. Thinking about something else doesn’t just help, it’s required.

Step four. Epiphany. The cliché is that the idea hits you in the middle of the night, or in the
shower when you least expect it. It’s true. And it’s a proven neurological fact.

James Webb Young, a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson in the early 20th century, wrote a great
little book called “A Technique For Producing Ideas.” He makes the idea process simple and
understandable.

Creative people take these steps instinctively, but knowing how ideas get made should give
anyone the confidence to work on them. Anyone except the client’s spouse or children that is.
Years of study have shown that’s where ideas go to die.

The sooner the rest of us get engaged in ideas, the sooner consumers will get engaged with
our brands no matter where they encounter them.