LaughlinOutLoud

Many years ago there was a wonderful New Yorker cartoon of two advertising types standing in an aisle of the grocery store. It was so many years ago they were both guys and both wearing coats and ties. You could tell the account guy because his hair was parted and he wore a striped tie. The creative guy had a curly hippie ʻfro and huge flowery tie. They were looking at a large woman in a house dress with her hair in
curlers who was staring at the choices in a frozen food case. The caption read, “Thatʼs your target audience.” Times have changed, but some things havenʼt.

Weʼve gotten better at getting closer to our target audience. Social media will bring us even closer as we get better at taking advantage of the immediacy and intimacy it gives us. But thereʼs a dark side to knowing our customer too well, too.

Itʼs true that if you lose your brand loyalists you lose your brand. In a tough economy thereʼs more interest and effort at zeroing in on our best customers. But itʼs also true that brand loyalists may be the least likely to want to see their brands change. Learning and listening should not about eliminating risk. It should be about reducing the odds of getting it wrong. Steve Jobs has pointed out that the trouble with asking the consumer
what they want is that by the time you can give it to them they want something else. One of the most exciting things about the chaotic media landscape is that we can get to know our customers better. But, letʼs not ever be afraid to surprise them with what weʼve learned. And letʼs also push ourselves to talk to somebody new. And donʼt forget to stick your nose in the store to see whoʼs buying it.

Long ago when my dad entered the job market, things were tough.  The country was in the midst of a depression and there weren’t many jobs available.  It didn’t take long before he realized he needed to tap into family, friends and trusted professionals, in order to get his foot in the door and gain employment.  He needed to network to stand out amongst the masses.

As time passed and I grew older, I soon found myself looking for employment as well.  It was time for me to begin supporting myself and I needed to see what was available in the marketplace.  So I ran to the corner gas station, picked up a copy of the local newspaper, circled a few jobs and sent my resume to 10 or 20 companies through snail mail.  Since I had never met the recipients of my resumes, I did my best to highlight my work history and achievements in a concise single page, hoping to catch their attention.

Years went by and soon my kids needed a job.  They searched the big job boards.  Within minutes, they could copy and paste their resumes into the online submission portal, sometimes with only a simple change to the subject line.  Off it went and within minutes they got an automated response from the HR department, thanking them for their patience as all the applicants were screened.  It was a cold and impersonal way for them to get their personal information out there, but it was quick and efficient for them and the HR people.

Come into the present and we find we’ve come full circle.  As in the days of my dad’s job search, jobs are few, times are tough, and we find that one of the best ways to land a job may be through a “connection.”  So I thought we’d put together a few ideas that might help you with your own job search.  Things that may help you get “connected.”

Know your target company. Research them, friend them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter.  I know this sounds weird, but if you get to meet this special person (HR rep or company rep), you might want to treat it like a first date.  Listen intently, show an interest, bring your best attributes to the table and, most importantly, know something about them so you can talk about them too.  Make a connection.

Set up a LinkedIn page and make sure it’s up to date. This way you’re linked or can become connected.  Plus, once set up, recruiters can find you too.  (Yes, we search LinkedIn to stay on top of our industries and follow talent.  We also use it to research you.  And you can research us too!)  Use LinkedIn for networking purposes, joining groups and organizations, and positioning yourself as an expert on a certain topic.  Answer group questions and participate in discussions.  Again, get connected.

And, if possible, set up a website for yourself. Include samples of your work, creative pieces and writing, as it pertains to your profession.  When you write or talk with a recruiter, include your link.  It’s another way to be connected.  Remember, HR people and recruiters are digital creatures too.  We’re out there sharing your social space, looking for a few good people.

Dark thoughts started with e-mail from our executive producer in Chicago. He sent a link to a podcast called What’s Next for Advertising from National Public Radio (an ad free medium ironically).

Catching up after three days in the Chequamegon National Forest, this e-mail found me receptive to primal concerns. It was a slight adjustment from questions like, “Is that wolf poop?” to being in the right frame of mind to think about professional survival.

I just knew a show about the future of advertising had to have a Shakespearean plot to it. The final scene of Act III would end with the stage littered with bodies.

I listened and I wasn’t disappointed.

Mass media dies. The big agencies are next to go. After all, why would a consumer listen to an ad when a blogger can tell them what to buy? The podcast goes way beyond the killing of Madmen, too. It also predicts the end of mass marketing. Not even Proctor & Gamble comes out this story alive.

The argument goes that without mass media, mass-market brands can’t do the volume they require. Something about efficiencies getting lost. It’s hard to survive inefficiency. There is no known cure.

But then things get brighter. There are some Utopian speculations about how more “backyard” brands will pop-up and inherit the earth. I hear birds chirping and butterflies fluttering. As the media fragments, it gets more specialized, actually helping niche brands find niche markets.

For big brands life just gets a little more complicated. The challenge will be to partner with the media and create big audiences – more like the old days than the nowadays really.

What will remain a challenge for both large brands and small is to have ideas. They’ll need concepts around which to organize their marketing. They’ll need us.

Things aren’t as scary as they seem. Yes, it was wolf poop. Yes, my dog and I are still here.

But first, take a look at Ogilvy’s and Crispin’s new web-sites.

These are new designs that position both agencies as leading edge by using aggregated media stories about them and their clients as an opening screen.

I love the urgency and energy.  In both cases, the clutter that I’ve been fighting professionally all these years has become the organizing concept.  In a weird twist on Marshall Mcluhan’s insight of the medium becoming the message, we’ve seen the Bauhaus movement toward white space and simplicity yield to a supernova of design.  These sites are like trying to read the Congressional Record on acid.   Yet they work.

There’s a wonderful irony at work here.  Agencies are using clutter to demonstrate their ability to cut through it.  These sites serve as a vivid demonstration that the loss of control a lot of marketers are experiencing puts an even greater emphasis on ideas that elbow their way into our consciousness.

Maybe what we’re seeing is the transitional period from white space to white noise as a design maxim.

I was recently pointed in the direction of gapminder.org (thanks Brian). What an incredible idea. Their vision is to “unveil the beauty of statistics for a factbased world view.” So, um, no small feat.

Hans Rosling, a site co-founder and multiple-time contributer to TED – the Technology Entertainment and Design conference – has a video on the site titled “Chimpanzees Know Better.” In it, he explains why his highly-educated
students are less successful at identifying countries with higher child mortality rates than a chimpanzee faced with the same task. He says:

Itʼs much tougher to teach facts about the world because we already think we know about the world.

He then goes on to show how his studentsʼ worldview is stuck in the reality of the year that he was born.

Hans Rosling is a professor of global health. But his is an approach we can all learn from. Too often, truth is accepted as truth. The way it is becomes the way it will be. Iʼm looking at you, music industry.

And thatʼs the trouble with truth. It can become too permanent. In a world thatʼs changing quickly, itʼs not just unknowns that need to be explored.

A great tweet earlier this week from @davidwain re-focused me on just how much I take for granted.

This is insane – type in literally anything and hit return – watch what happens http://tinyurl.com/1c2 7:14 PM Aug 24th from Tweetie

And then I saw this video. Itʼs about the future of newspapers on your home computer. And itʼs absolutely surreal. There are ideas that are surprisingly right and so much that is really wrong. But it made me think. As we look out to the horizon, what inconceivable concepts (that need to be introduced with the words, “Imagine if you will…”) will we be taking for granted next?

The fate of newspapers has been reported on and debated ad nauseam. Time will tell, but itʼs safe to say that in its current form the newspaper model of today faces significant challenges.

And the newspaper industry is, no doubt, to blame. An article by Jack Shafer from earlier this year made a compelling case that newspapers shouldnʼt be surprised by any of this. As early as the 1970s, newspapers “considered themselves vulnerable to new entrants and were worrying aloud to anyone who would listen about falling readership.” That said, once technologies – like long forgotten videotex – were determined to pose no threat to the newsprint model, papers were happy to move on. Too much defense, not enough offense. But thatʼs another subject for another post.

Two interesting perspectives that have seen fewer headlines:

The first is a Malcolm Gladwell thought experiment: “What if we had started with everything online, and paper was only invented five years ago?” Weʼd no longer have to “lug our laptops to the breakfast table every morning.” The new solution would be lighter and more portable. Said another way, being first isnʼt always best.

The second is from a Bill Simmonsʼ podcast on espn.com. I realize that this is not the epicenter of leading business thought. But the observation is insightful. (Side note: Simmons is also responsible for one of my favorite, yet-to-be-established positions: The VP of Common Sense.) At the time that newspapers were trying to figure out how to
monetize the online experience, nobody (not you, not me, not anybody) was comfortable buying things online. If The New York Times was just going online today, the proposition of a daily paid subscription would be *much* more palatable than it was in 1995.

I get my news online. We donʼt subscribe to any papers at my household. So Iʼm no newspaper-apologist. But the easy answer (Newspapers are dumb! The internet is better!) rarely gives the full perspective.

I’m on vacation this week. Up north in Wisconsin. In that spirit, I’m letting other people do my work for me. And so I offer a six-pack of quotes I’ve read – or been reminded of – recently. Quotes I really like.

“I check Twitter about 20 times a day to learn what my brand is.” — Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu

“The top ten ‘in demand jobs’ in 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist.” — Did You Know 3.0, created by Karl Fisch

“[Social media tools] don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” — Clay Shirky

“Three ways to add value: IDEAS (create opportunity). INSIGHT (solve problems). INSPIRATION (expand possibilities).” — @sallyhogshead, via Twitter

“The way to be interesting is to be interested.” — Russell Davies

“You do not merely want to be considered the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.” — Jerry Garcia

This green movement is for real. It certainly can’t be argued that consumers’ green consciousness is growing rapidly. And, for many, the issue is reaching emergency status. It’s no longer about protecting the planet, it’s about saving it.

That growing consumer interest is just one more reason that it’s not so much if you have a green policy for your brand – it’s what that green policy is. But before we declare green the new black – at least as it relates to the bottom line – green isn’t a positioning strategy unless it makes sense for your brand’s story.

Look at Nike. They’re going green. For all the right reasons. But, according to a nice piece in Business Week, they’re keeping it quiet. I guess I don’t covet the Nike+ system due to it’s greenness.

Green is an equity you can own. Just like being durable. Or fast. Or bigger, faster, stronger, smarter. But is it authentic? Is it a point of differentiation or parody? Does it offer another “reason to believe?” Does your category reward it?

It’s not whether your brand should be greener. It should. It’s whether it makes sense to make it a part of your story. And, just like everything else, that depends.

It’s been almost a year since I worked on the PR team for the Harley-Davidson Museum launch.  As I enjoy the start of summer, I can’t help but think back to the interaction I had with my team, the client and the client’s customers around the world.

Having the opportunity to get face-to-face with Harley-Davidson enthusiasts was a memorable experience I’m not likely to forget anytime soon. Everyone always had a story to share and an affinity for the brand that is unlike anything else I’ve seen.  I’m a pretty passionate person and have my specific likes, but I can’t say I’ve gone so far as to tattoo a brand name or image to my body.  These people are hardcore!

Passion can go a long way in marketing.  I love that here at L/C, I’m surrounded by people who bring that passion to work, helping to make our clients stand out amongst the media clutter out there and really make an impact on consumers.

This week, we launched an ad campaign that highlights our accomplishment in garnering more than 279 million impressions for the Museum’s opening.  This is definitely something I’m proud of; but to me, working with the Harley-Davidson Museum was more than a number, it was an adventure.  From working on a satellite media tour at 3 a.m. to months of building relationships with travel writers across the country to late night team meetings, it may have been a long journey, but it was quite the ride.