Display Ads: the New Subliminal Advertising

In the days of Ye Olde Marketing there was a belief in "subliminal advertising" -- the idea that TV commercials would be spliced with fleeting images, usually sexual, to overpower your psyche and make you buy something you didn't need.

Although the science behind subliminal stimuli is interesting, it's never really been used in advertising and we have no examples of it ever working.  Most of the urban legend is based on a 1957 movie theater experiment that never actually happened.  

Comedian Steven Wright sent this up with one of his 1980s one-liners:  "I saw a Subliminal Advertising executive….but only for a second."

Online Display is the New Subliminal Advertising

This all came to mind when reading the Internet Advertising Bureau's latest viewability standards:  "Desktop display ads to be considered viewable if 50% of their pixels are in view for a minimum of one second."

Banner ad?
I didn't see any
banner ad.

50% of the ad for just one second.  We used to call that subliminal advertising.

In a not very subliminal display of honesty, the IAB press release on this topic is headlined "100% Viewability Measurement Is Not Yet Possible".

Advertisers know this, as Kraft says it rejects 75-85% of online ad impressions and Google says 56% of online impressions actually aren't seen.

It's Like We Never Noticed This Before

How did we get to this point?

The Internet didn't used to allow advertising at all, banning it until 1991.  The first form of advertising was actually email — yes, direct mail — which as we all know spawned spam.  The first clickable display ad came in 1993, and in 1994 Wired started selling banner ads to clients like AT&T, with a click-through rate of 44% (no, that's not a typo, and we should point out that the click bait was an online tour of seven of the world's most acclaimed art museums).

These initial approaches revealed a direct-response mindset, and unrealistic expectations as to how perfectly measurable advertising would be on the Internet.  Not quite!  As click-through rates have dropped to infinitesimal numbers, online display has gone from marketing's Holy Grail to just billboards posted on the Information Superhighway.  Today's tools don't consistently measure page takeovers, road blocks and other customized placements.  As IAB president Randall Rothenberg said, "Different ad units, browsers, ad placements, vendors and measurement methodologies yield wildly different viewability numbers."  If you were expecting an accounting exercise that neatly reconciled everything, we don't have one.

The goal is "100% viewability" and at some point we'll get there.  In the meantime there will be some tough discussions among advertisers, agencies, media and researchers.  

Meanwhile, the irony is that an urban legend from 1957 is reality in 2015.

The State of TV Advertising on the Eve of the Super Bowl

The Super Bowl has always symbolized the power of TV advertising.  Is that power waning?

Many business journalists seem to think the Super Bowl is the last bastion of TV advertising.  Just this morning as I was writing this post, The Economist daily news digest arrived, calling the Super Bowl "something increasingly rare in television: a programme that people watch live and in large numbers."

Surprise! Most TV Viewing is Still Done on a TV

Now let me explain
"Programmatic" to you

Actually, Live TV viewing is holding steady at about 4-1/2 hours per day.  Yes, 66.8% of Broadband Users Under 35 watch TV on a combination of these devices, but for all age groups most TV viewing is still done on a TV.  

This will shock Upper West Siders who binge-watch Orange Is The New Black on Netflix.  But regular people are watching live sports, NCIS, Dancing With The Stars, American Idol, Judge Judy and Big Bang Theory.  Bazinga!  

But Fragmentation Will Continue

TV was never dying; it was just following audiences to new platforms.  Cable supplanted Broadcast and new devices emerged like DVRs, OTT, Online and Mobile.  There will always be big audiences, but they will continue fragmenting.  In Ye Olde Marketing buying and selling TV was relatively straightforward and audience delivery was measured by Nielsen.  But now audiences are fragmented and sometimes not even measured.  Only Netflix knows how big the audience for Orange or House of Cards really is.  (A Los Angeles Times reporter tried thinking it through.)

The Super Bowl doesn't have this problem.  The marquee advertising will air during NBC's broadcast, and people will see it on TVs, tablets and other places.  The audiences will be big enough that few advertisers will worry about under-delivery against their $4.5 million (unless they're spending that money in the 4th quarter of a one-sided blowout).

The Revolution May Not Be Televised, but TV Will Be Personalized

But even in a big event that almost everyone watches or knows about, we see the future of TV:  Personalization.  For the Super Bowl it takes the form of second- and third-screen programming, i.e. game analysis, ad analysis and social media traffic.  Little of this is driven from broadcaster to audience; it's more of a conversation where both participate.  The famous Oreo dunk-in-the-dark tweet generated very small response:  15,000 Retweets and 20,000 Likes.  (In fact they probably generated more blog posts than that, but I digress.)  But it's OK because they learned how be part of people's conversations.  

In the same way, Oreo's latest stunt -- yes, it's a stunt -- using programmatic methods to buy a :15 in the Erie (Pennsylvania) DMA is a harbinger of things to come.  "Programmatic" is one of those words that's taken on too many meanings, but it's generally associated with media buying, just like the online ad world from which it came.  Its real value will be as a pathway to addressable TV, a way for audiences to customize the programs they see -- and advertisers to customize the messages that make them possible.

Enjoy the game -- and the ads -- and know that you'll always have plenty of company watching that first screen.  Keep one eye on those other screens, too, because they're a window to the future.

Typography: From Sublime to Ridiculous

Not everything in advertising has changed.  Typography is still an art.

In the days of Ye Olde Marketing, typography was a labor of love as art directors worked with typographers and keyliners to put the copy in exactly the right font, size and placement.

Here in the 21^st Century, of course, all this can be edited on a screen.  But it still has to be done, and done well.

Here are two examples from the Out-of-Home advertising medium – one sublime, one ridiculous.

This Is Your Typography

I’ve admired the Colorado tourism billboard, shown at right, for the past couple of months.  It’s a beautiful snowy landscape that dramatizes the Centennial State’s natural beauty.

What really struck me, though, was the typography.  The line of copy separates its six words in a way that further dramatizes the landscape and – if I may – the benefit.

How.  Sublime.  It.  Is.  To.  Be.  Small.

Bravo.

This Is Your Typography on Drugs

Our next example might have been forgivable coming from the state that just legalized marijuana, but ironically it comes from the product whose original recipe included the coca leaf.

Diet Coke’s new campaign has had a lot of negative publicity, and I don’t mean to pile on.  The point is that typography mattered a lot.

“You’re On” could have been a terrific line for Diet Coke if it wasn’t adjacent to the brand’s logo, which in and of itself is very intricate typography.

Both ads, unfortunately, wound up giving the white stuff a starring role.

What I Learned from a Real-Life Mad Man

“He loved watching Mad Men.  He lived that life.”

That’s what Dick Mincheff’s daughter told me.  The only thing is, Dick’s story has a happier ending than Don Draper’s.  But more about all that in a moment.

Tribute to an Ad Man

Dick Mincheff

Dick Mincheff, a Leo Burnett veteran who started at the agency in 1961, died recently at age 74, survived by his wife, Monica, four children and five grandchildren.  He earned a journalism degree at Miami of Ohio, served in the U.S. Army Reserves psychological warfare battalion, and went to work at Burnett, spending many of his years on the Philip Morris business.  He had a hand in building the Marlboro brand and repositioning Virginia Slims.  He retired from the agency in 1999.

When I joined Burnett, Dick was in the autumn of his career, running the Unocal (Union 76) and Dewar’s Scotch accounts.  One day I was promoted to AE and found myself reporting to him directly.  This would prove to be a formative period in my career, which was a good thing because I could benefit from his experience, his seen-it-all sense of history, and his personal integrity.  Not only that – he was so cool he made the Rat Pack look like a bunch of nerds.  No, really.

If you called Central Casting looking for an ad man, Dick is what would show up.  Tall, tan, always dressed in an impeccably tailored suit.  When we went to Los Angeles, staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Bel-Air, he was in his element.  Equally, though, in the conference room, his command of client business information showed the substance behind the style.  Substance – that’s what truly reassures clients that we’re professional enough to be trusted with their reputation.

He had a way with clients.  They sensed he had their best interests in mind, and on top of that, his power of persuasion was formidable.  My first major TV production project was the annual package of four or five commercials for Unocal – the old Murph campaign.  The price tag was a little higher than usual, and Dick made the phone call to sell it.  I was told to be patient:  “Dick is in there ‘Minching’ the client.”

Minch – that’s what we called him – knew and worked with Leo Burnett himself.  In fact Leo asked Minch to write a point-of-view on copy strategy, which turned into a six-page memo that I was privileged to read one day.  The memo was titled “Stratagem” and had Leo’s notes all over it, written in his trademark green ink.

You know from watching Mad Men that in the ‘60s cigarettes were common in agencies and the advertising they produced.  While researching this article I found this document detailing his role in a Philip Morris marketing seminar.

Requiem for a Mad Man

That brings us to the Mad Men part of the story.

As of this writing, Mad Men just finished its latest season with the calendar set at November 1968.  Don Draper’s lot in life seems dismal, the result of his own bad choices.  It’s too early to say whether his story has a happy ending, but it doesn’t look pretty.

Dick Mincheff’s life turned out way better.  Sure, he made some bad choices of his own.  Dick would be the first to admit those.  Unlike Draper, however, Dick helped others.  He had a knack for encouraging, cajoling and pushing colleagues to do their best.

Helping others continued in his retirement.  Dick counseled business owners and recently laid off senior executives via SCORE, the Service Corps Of Retired Executives, a program of the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Lastly, and most importantly, Dick kept his family together.  He and Monica were married 54 years.  Three of their children lived nearby in the Portland, Oregon area; the other lived in Chicago.  That’s where I last saw him, when he was in town visiting his daughter.

3 Lessons from a Real-Life Mad Man

This blog is about embracing the future.  So what can we learn from a real-life account guy of the ‘60s?

Genuinely love the ad business.  Dick took great care with the creative process, not only knowing how to recognize a strategy, but how to make it inspiring for the creative team.  He was a student of the business, always observing newly-released campaigns and what they meant.  He made a habit of checking out what was in development around the agency, constantly curious about what friends were creating.

Genuinely care for your client’s business.  Minch knew that clients innately understand when someone at the agency doesn’t respect them.  He set the tone for me and others by showing enthusiasm for the client’s business and interest in learning everything about it.  This is far from the cynicism you see Sunday nights on AMC, and way above the crank-stuff-out mentality of today’s project management culture.

Genuinely respect your co-workers.  To be sure, some co-workers annoyed Minch.  But he never ranted about them or saw himself a better person; he tried to be patient and kind.  He also showed respect by setting high standards.  Expecting great things of people communicates that you believe in them.

Minch wasn’t famous, but he was respected, and my hope is that you find some inspiration in his story.

How to Survive the Ad Biz in 2013

This past year I had lunch with a friend who used to run his own agency.  He closed it ten years ago and built a brand strategy consultancy.  Although he calls on marketing executives, and sees agency people in meetings, he was remarkably removed from goings-on in the advertising business.  Stopping for a moment, he thought, and said:  “My overall impression is ‘turbulence’.”

It was either this...
or start in the mail
room.

We won’t argue with that:  Turbulence.  Clients continue changing agencies at a rapid pace.  Assignments are spread among different agencies, either within or across holding companies.  It’s a buyer’s market, with agency fees generally down.  There were more layoffs last week, and many others change jobs voluntarily.  How do you survive all this turbulence?

It’s not just advertising.  Also this year, Fast Company announced “The Four-Year Career” and advised that “career planning is an oxymoron”.  The gist was that you may as well plan for constant career change because it’s going to happen to you anyway.  Their modern definition of a career path:  “Tacking swiftly from job to job and field to field, learning new skills all the while.” 

How to Survive the Ad Biz in 2013

This blog made a similar point in How To Get Ahead in Advertising:  “Advancement is not so much a straight line through one discipline, but tacking like a sailboat across various disciplines.  We will always need specialists, but it’s the generalists who will advance the farthest in agencies of the future.”

In the days of Ye Olde Marketing, there were fewer specialties, therefore, fewer specialists, so becoming a generalist was more achievable.  Most of the ways to reach consumers only reached them, i.e., with one-way messages from advertisers to audiences.  Today, there are many, many specialties and new ones invented all the time.  Media has multiplied and specialists have proliferated.

You’re already a specialist by virtue of what you do every day.  Copywriter.  Art director.  Social media community manager.  Web developer.  Shopper marketer.  Account executive.  Everyone shows up for work to do a specific thing.  You probably don’t expect to be doing that job forever.  How do you become a generalist, too?

Be Curious

First, be curious.  While you’re doing that job, have good peripheral vision, paying attention to how others contribute.  If you’re at an agency with many different services, take advantage of the many opportunities to learn.  If you’re at a specialist agency, for example a digital shop, you can still learn because by nature the work will intersect with other disciplines.  For example, your mobile app may also be part of a shopper marketing program.  You can also read about a couple of disciplines you haven’t learned yet.  Pick a couple of topics and focus on those.

Be Courageous

Second, be courageous.  Take a step outside the comfort zone of your day-to-day activity and try a new specialty.  I’ve been impressed by the willingness of up-and-comers to move from one discipline to another.  We even ran a program that rotated account executives over a two-year period among advertising, direct, digital, shopper and experiential.  More experienced people should do this, too.  I had a colleague who took his 25 years writing successful TV commercials and applied it to writing all the SEM copy we did for a large client.

Capabilities lead to Possibilities

Over time, you will go from specialist in a couple of areas to generalist who can see the big picture.  That kind of perspective gives you two super-powers.  One is that you are obviously more marketable.  The other is that you are more effective.  You’re not just a specialist playing your position well, you have a sense of how the other parts of the marketing program come together.  Ultimately, you’ll be qualified for a job to centrally run those interdisciplinary marketing efforts, either as a client, creative director, or agency account lead.

Put another way, capabilities lead to possibilities.  You need possibilities.  You could lose your job, it could bore you, or it could cease to exist, but chances are you won’t be doing the same job four years from now.  The trick isn’t just to survive, it’s to survive by growing along with the industry.

Three Things Killing Account Management

The first post in this series made the case that advertising agency account management is at a crossroads.  The best account people are the ones who bring business-building ideas to their clients.  Many people still do this, but there are also a lot of people with no ideas, no curiosity, and not much else beyond project management.  If we continue down this path, account management will become a lost art.

Second of a series

Bag Carriers and Flower Pots

For decades, “bag carrier” was the worst epithet you could throw at an account person.  To be sure, one of my tasks as an assistant account executive at Leo Burnett was to carry the bag, but once we arrived at the meeting, my job was to help sell what the bag contained.

Years later in Latin America, a Mexican client, commenting on the meeting participation of one of our account executives, told me:  “No necesitamos un florero.”  We don’t need a vase, or flower pot.  This, too, is an old phenomenon.  What makes the modern situation different?

Three Things Killing Account Management

There are three things threatening the role of today’s account executive.  All three things are realities but none of them need to be barriers.  These are factors to leverage, not limit, what an account person can do.

1. Surrender of Strategy

There have been two major changes in the advertising agency model over the past two decades.  One is the unbundling of media planning and buying.  The other is the advent of Strategic Planning.  Account management surrendered responsibility in both cases.

Strategic Planning makes agencies better in two ways.  First, it adds to the team someone tasked with understanding the consumer better than anyone else.  Second, its deliverable is great creative.  Great strategy doesn’t matter unless it results in great creative.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with some incredible strategic planners who bring both benefits.  I’ve also seen some account people walk away and let those strategic planners do it alone. 

This is tragic, partly because account people used to do both of these things.  Embracing strategic planning, however, doesn’t mean surrendering the responsibility to add value via consumer insight and sharp strategy. 

The implication is that account management does less thinking, and hence is less useful to clients.  So how are they spending their time instead?

2. Project Management

In many places account management has yielded to project management.  One big reason why:  Labor-based compensation.

In the days of Ye Olde Marketing, when clients paid agencies a 15% commission on media and production, agencies had the financial flexibility to throw a lot of smart people at the business, people who brought the clients business-building ideas.  As the commissions dwindled, budgets got tighter, and one day everyone was getting paid by the hour.

We’ve already criticized labor-based compensation in another post.  The point here is different:  Labor-based compensation depends on a defined Scope of Work consisting of specific projects.  We’re expected to spend x hours delivering y number of TV commercials, mobile apps, shelf talkers or direct mail letters.  Rarely does the scope include “a POV on how larger consumer trends affect our starter-and-refill strategy.” 

In other words, agencies only paid to deliver ads aren’t likely to budget for staff hours devoted to added-value.  The account people will do whatever they must to get the ads out the door.  That’s more like project management:  write the timetable, schedule the meetings, and recap it in the email.  Everything must run smoothly in the agency.

3. Inward Focus

This is the most pernicious part.  Account people who disconnect themselves from consumers and strategy, working instead on project management, inevitably wind up with an inward focus.  That’s deadly in this business.  If your only contact with a client is answering their phone call, if your only understanding of a consumer comes from what you read, and if your only cooperation with colleagues is transactional, then your world is very small.

Advertising’s world is big.  That’s one of the things I love most about it.  Advertising gets you out of yourself.  You learn about human behavior and human achievement.  That is, why people buy the things that people invent.

Next:  Bad Account Management Leads to Bad Creative

Account Management at a Crossroads

Is great account management a lost art at advertising agencies?

First of a series

Like everything else in advertising, account management is changing.  In this case, though, it may not be changing for the better of agencies and their clients.

Account People of Ye Olde Marketing

I never advocate for a return to the past, but a fast review of history is instructive.  Advertising agencies have only been around for a century or so, growing out of the business of media sales, especially newspapers.  Up through the 1940s, when radio was an important medium, the account executive was a multipurpose player, handling clients, research, copy, talent and production.  (If you want a good insight on this period, read The Hucksters by Frederic Wakeman.)  Starting with the creative revolution of the 1960s, the modern account executive role took shape.  The guy (yes, they were mainly guys) who represented the agency to the client and the client to the agency.

Some Things Don’t Change

Regardless of era, the greatest account people then and now are the ones who bring ideas to their client.  Creative people bring creative ideas, media people bring media ideas, and planners bring strategy, but the account people should bring business building ideas.  It’s not enough to know what the agency sells and how to deliver on it.  You have to gain intimate knowledge of the client’s business (like this and this).

Something Changed

In the last decade or so, there have been signs that account management lost its way.  While you can still find great account people at advertising agencies, you also find many who bring no ideas, no curiosity, and not much else beyond project management.  Read these points of view by Babita Baruah, Lakshmipathy Bhat and Robert Solomon and see if they don’t ring true.  A year or so ago the New York Times ran an article suggesting the “account executive” title was outdated.  Back in 2010, Advertising Age observed that some agencies were indeed cutting the department entirely.

Something Needs to Change

I’ve had this discussion with a number of people from around the industry, and unfortunately there is a lot of agreement.  Delving deeper, there’s a sense that more experienced account people know or remember what it’s like to be a business partner, not an order taker.  We’re not training the less experienced people, however, like we used to do.  The art is getting lost because we are not passing it along.

Account Management at a Crossroads

Starting with this and a few more posts, we’ll try to start a discussion about the state of account management, and how to ensure it adds value in the modern advertising agency.  I’d welcome your comments and suggestions, starting in the space below.

Next:  Three Things Killing Account Management

Advertising Jumps the Shark, Gets Back on Track

Does content deliver advertising or does advertising deliver content?

Joe Mandese at MediaPost has the answer for you, in a piece headlined “Advertising Jumps The Shark: Becomes Conduit For Content”.  

But first let’s get through that headline.

Jumping the Shark

Numerous readers pointed out in the comments section that the headline misused the term “jump the shark”.  Any student of pop culture knows the story:  On the 1970s sitcom Happy Days, Fonzie water skis over a shark, a moment now seen as the point where the show lost its original purpose – a fond look back at the 1950s – and got just plain silly.

Let’s first admit that the advertising industry has jumped the shark many more times than Fonzie, before or since.  We’ve jumped the shark via pointless line extensions, bad strategies, failed campaigns and poor planning.  Mea culpa.

Conduit for Content

In this case, the alleged shark jump is the launch of a new digital advertising platform that pulls existing Internet content into online ads.  It seems like a simple concept – link ads and content – but there’s a bit more involved.

The platform’s purveyor, Kontera, claims to be able to identify the most relevant content and serve it in web display, social and mobile ads.  That’s a bit more complicated than a shark jump – and more revolutionary.

3 Reasons Why it Matters

Mandese’s right, this is an important development the entire advertising industry should watch.

1.  It makes advertising useful, informative and/or entertaining.  These are the three things audiences seek in any medium.  For some reason we’ve been relearning that lesson the hard way in the digital advertising world.  In this case, Kontera claims to be supplying content that’s already popular, and hence should make ads more relevant.

 
2.     It adds sanity to online advertising.  Most web display advertising is the opposite of shooting fish in a barrel – more a minnow in the ocean.  You run ads that get clicked at infinitesimally low rates, paying only for those very small results.  Matching truly relevant content to truly relevant ads could significantly shift the equation of supply and demand.
 
3.     It challenges the distribution model.  Whether on TV, online or in-store, content normally is a means of distributing advertising.  That is, a :30-spot interrupts the program you were watching.  Kontera allows advertisers to buy ad space and use it to distribute all kinds of content.  Extrapolating that beyond web display ads, you can see how it would change journalism, entertainment and information in general.

Fond Look Back at the 1950s

If you read further down in the comments section of Mandese’s article, you’ll see an arcane conversation between him and me about whether it was also true in the 1950s that “advertising (was) a means for distributing content,” much like Kontera.  My point is that Radio and TV shows of the period, like soap operas and Texaco Star Theater, were also examples of brands delivering content.  (Mandese disagreed.)

It doesn’t really matter.  The only thing it proves is that for the past fifty years we’ve been force-feeding audiences our advertising when they wanted to see their content.  Up to now web display ads have followed that same model.

If, as an industry, we succeed in reversing that, and make advertising a means for distributing content, we won’t be jumping the shark.  We’ll be back on track.

When Plural is Really Anti-Social

Today's post is brought to you by the letter "S"

Just like 70 million other people, we watched the U.S. presidential debate this past Wednesday night.  I caught the first half hour on NPR while driving home, and joined Mrs. Ad Majorem watching the rest on ABC News.  Before leaving work I checked Twitter to see what hashtags would be in circulation, because of course I expected to participate in the national conversation. 

A #debate about #debates

My unscientific sample of tweeps, political consultants and other citizens led me to believe that #debate would be the default hashtag for most people.  Some put #Debate2012 or some variation.  Others with an agenda put hashtags supporting their candidate.  But #debate seemed like a good one.

Watching on TV, however, I noticed that ABC was encouraging the hashtag #debates – the plural.  Why not just #debate?  You’ve only got 140 characters, why use one of them on a vestigial “S”? 

Look at that S-car go!

It turns out that ABC News was following Twitter's lead.  According to a Twitter blog post, they declared #debates as the official hashtag.

It had never occurred to me to check and see what Twitter was pushing.  My normal procedure is to check and see what people are doing.  

It's not hard to imagine that Twitter has an internal team working on this series of debates:  producers, editors, journalists and social media experts.  They may be “the debates group” or they may just tell people, “We work on coverage of the debates.”  Sitting around the conference room table, it would be easy to agree on #debates as a hashtag.  

The Twitterverse looked at it differently, however.  No one watching at home was thinking about a series of debates.  This was the big night everyone in the U.S. had anticipated for weeks.  The social media commentary was about what happened that very night.

Put another way, I don't think anyone imagined #SaveBigBird.  

Maybe Twitter wanted something trackable.  I give them credit for not using #TwitterDebates -- you know, something “branded”.  Still, pushing an "official" hashtag reflects the mindset of an Old Media company used to broadcasting and big numbers.  Social Media works differently.  The relevant measure might be share of conversation, or the number of conversations in which they participated.

Watch and Learn

In the end this is a mental exercise.  Watch what is happening around you, and game it out.  Learn from what others do.  In this case the lesson is:  Not even Twitter can control its own conversation.  Try to swim with the tide, perhaps influence it, but don't imagine you can control or measure it according to some standard of Ye Olde Marketing.

What Mad Men Teaches Us About Advertising in 2012



The Diversity Committee will see you now

I didn’t watch Mad Men last night. I’m living it today.

There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia, mind you. That early 1960s era is of particular interest to me. On my desk is a small photo of my grandfather taken right about that time.

In addition, I believe history teaches us a lot. In the same way following world history makes us better citizens, following advertising history makes us better at what we do.

What we do is sell. And modern times are the best times to be doing just that. The last great upheaval in advertising was driven by television, but it only happened once. Digital technology drives new upheavals all the time. It’s happening so fast that few can keep up with it or understand it. Major CPG companies struggle; former Mad Men seem to understand. But as Matt Nelson of Tribal DDB put it, now is the golden era for advertising.

In a similar reflection, Duff Stewart of GSD&M said “a successful leader in advertising… today is defined by curiosity.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. (Well – I tried, here and here.) With such a menu of challenges and buffet of media options, more than ever we can say “it’s all advertising” and get to the task of selling in new ways. We have much to learn.

One thing Mad Men can teach us is how little progress we’ve made on diversity. There’s more diversity among media options than the employees who practice them. It’s the best time to be in advertising – but it could be better.

Spider Charts Are Just Wrong

If you work in marketing or advertising, chances are you’ve seen a spider chart. These are supposed to impress upon us the vast number of consumer touchpoints reached by your IMC plan.

Although actual arachnids have eight legs, most marketing spider charts have many more. The more the merrier! Surround the consumer! I call this spidermania. You can see some examples, here, here and here.

There is a corollary effect to spidermania: Matching Luggage. This is the persistent belief that all marketing communications for a brand or product must look exactly alike.

Where did Spider Charts come from?

In the days of Ye Olde Marketing the media landscape was known territory and easy to navigate for clients, agencies and consumers. Even if your map went beyond broadcast and print media to include public relations or sports marketing or – remember this one? – guerrilla marketing, the task of budget allocation was straightforward.

When cable TV exploded, direct marketing matured, the Internet emerged and shopper marketing was invented, the landscape looked like those parts of Medieval maps warning Here Be Dragons. We tried in vain to organize everything in a way that made sense. Spider charts became a widely used tool.

Spider Charts illustrate how Clients and Agencies Use Media

The problem is that spider charts represent how marketing and advertising people use media. This perspective distorts your view in three ways:

1. You can’t guarantee a consumer will see all these things. They may look nice on the conference room wall, but what if the consumer only sees one or two executions? Will you still achieve your goal?
2. Assumes a “push” approach to marketing communications. Reach. Frequency. Penetration. These are important but we can no longer succeed with them alone. Some legs of the spider don’t work that way.
3. Misses the role of dialogue among consumers. Word-of-mouth has always outperformed any advertising, it was just hard to know how – until now. Social Media is not “push” nor “pull” but friends recommending things to friends. Spider charts miss that.

So what’s a better way?

Gigantic Venn Diagram Illustrates How Consumers Use Media

Marketing communications today is like a Gigantic Venn Diagram, its design constantly shifting from client to client, and from project to project. It would be nice if all the various media would just stay still for a moment and let us plan a client’s marketing communications. But it won’t. There will always be some new medium, platform or tactic bubbling up in the minds of programmers, entrepreneurs or venture capitalists.

By the way, this is wonderful. The Gigantic Venn Diagram may be confounding, but it should also be exciting. This is the best time in history to work in marketing communications.

It’s also reality. Consumers use these different media interchangeably and simultaneously. TV and Social Media. Mobile and Retail. QR codes and Direct Mail.

So what looks good on the conference room wall?

You may like spider charts for presentation purposes, and if it works for you, at least proceed with caution. Here are three other ways.

· Divide according to the purchase cycle. Many of you use the path to purchase or a funnel diagram to describe how the different media work together. We have been working with McKinsey for the past three years utilizing their Consumer Decision Journey.
· Organize according to media usage. Imagine a chart that divides advertising (communication that interrupts and/or persuades) from information or entertainment (communication that invites participation). Consumers use these very differently and so should we.
· Draw a Gigantic Venn Diagram. Honestly I am not sure yet if the GVD is a good presentation tool or maybe just a way to think about things during the planning process. It has definitely helped immerse me in a particular project, but only after I’ve done my homework.

That homework is critical. The same consumer insight that drives a creative brief should drive a channel plan. If you haven’t done that work, then you won’t get anywhere.

In any case, my hope is that phony spidermania has bitten the dust.

Account. Creative. Planner. Client. Um, Media?

You may have the seen the above chart already; it’s making the rounds of social media among advertising people this week. Summarizing some stereotypes about account people, creative, planners and clients, it also cross-references how they all perceive one another. (Click the image to enlarge it.) It’s funny because it’s true.

In fact it first came to me via an email from Mike Keeler saying, “Sent from my brother. True.” Then someone else replied pointing out that it’s also incomplete: “Genius! But yet again media has been left out!” Ouch. It isn’t funny because it’s true.

The same thing happened last year with another bit of agency satire, an infographic called “The Anatomy Of An Agency”. The roles in that case were accounts, art director, copywriter, developer, and finance. Media was left out there, too.

Do these ads even run anywhere?

Recently we asked if Creative and Media have forgotten each other. Perhaps it comes from the spinoff of media agencies back in the 1990s. Perhaps it’s too much focus on the steps required to get an ad out the door. But at some point you’ve got to ask yourself where is a consumer going to see this creative work?

It’s not an academic question, and it applies equally to SEM copy, Direct Mail, banner ads and TV commercials. In fact that’s why the question is even more important than it was in the days of Ye Olde Marketing. The media landscape is such a Gigantic Venn Diagram that Media, or Comms Planning, is absolutely vital.

In fact, not only is it vital, it’s fun. As we traded comments on this subject, Keeler reminded me that “In this rapidly developing world of new media, the planning and buying of media is one of the most creative aspects of any campaign.”

A Modest Proposal

Anyone want to take a crack at how Media fits into “Perception in the Advertising World”?

Don Pegler's True Legacy

Don Pegler was known in advertising for drawing animated characters. He was known to everyone else in his life as a man of character.

Don, an advertising legend, died last Monday after a battle with cancer. During his career as an illustrator and art director at Foote, Cone & Belding he created the Raid Bugs for S.C. Johnson. I had the pleasure of working with him near the end of his career and in his so-called retirement.

His personal story is right out of the Greatest Generation. An Army veteran, he seemed to have lived the classic Post-war American story. Don and his wife, Bridie, raised seven children in an impossibly modest (read: small) house in Park Ridge, Illinois. The photos on display at his wake showed the progression of time measured in children, grandchildren, confirmations and weddings. And of course many of his illustrations were on display.

It sounds quaint, almost cliché, to say he was a family man, active in his community. Don’t let cynicism lead you astray, because he was both of those things. The last two times I saw him were at a Park Ridge City Council meeting and at his house when my children and I stopped in to check on him. We didn’t have to check on him, of course; while we there his daughter Laurie arrived to do just that. It was clear from their easy rapport that Don had been a tremendous husband and father.

As I talked to his family, friends and neighbors this week, the memories told a tale of a man who not only treated other people well, but gave people a good feeling about themselves. We could all emulate Don’s character because it was based on simple things. A kind word. A ready smile or a good joke. A willingness to step up and do something positive rather than just complain. There was also a charming irreverence about Don (and his work). Chicago art rep Tom Maloney summed up Don well in a tweet: "Decent, humble and fun." You took him seriously because he never took himself seriously. Don inspired good things in others.

At FCB, many of Don’s friends worked on the S.C. Johnson account, which officially left the agency one month ago today. To the people who worked on SCJ, Don meant something. He symbolized our achievements: Just as the Raid Bugs is the longest-running, most-global ad campaign in history, many other accomplishments helped SCJ grow into a multibillion dollar enterprise.

More than that, Don’s example should inspire us on a personal level. That’s really his true legacy. Not what he did, but who he was.

(Please click here to read a wonderful tribute to Don written by Karen I. Hirsch, a Chicago-based photographer and former FCB colleague. Karen gets the credit for the above image of Don and his bugs.)

The Role of Creative Production

Exploding Growth in Media Formats Puts More Demand on Creative Production

It’s a cruel quirk of advertising lingo when financial terms creep into normal business practices and hijack their identity.

One such example is “below the line.” In the days of Ye Olde Marketing most agency invoices were simple calculations of a 15% commission. An accountant, faced with expenses that had to be billed as one-time fees, drew a line on the invoices and listed the non-commissionable items below it. The commission structure hardly exists anymore, but the important work of Digital and Promotion gets stuck with a moniker that connotes second-class status.

Production: "Non-Working?"

In a similar way, Media and Production expenses are defined on some budget documents as “Working” and “Non-Working.” Production is said to be “Non-Working.” More than a few agency producers have complained about this term, especially in an era of tight budgets. Anything called “Non-Working” is just begging to be reduced.

At the very same time in history that Production budgets are squeezed, its role is more important than ever. As a colleague succinctly put it the other day: Exploding growth in media formats puts more demand on creative production.

Production costs were predictable in the past. Each discipline, be it Advertising, Promotion or Direct Marketing, knew what kind of programs they could expect to do. The biggest variable was a higher cost for a more elaborate TV commercial, in-store display or mailer.

Two Kinds of Complexity

In modern times you see two kinds of added complexity. One is that there are many new channels of communication, or as my colleague put it, “media formats.” As we’ve posted before, even “TV” isn’t that simple because it entails various online versions on top of the standard broadcast :30.

The second kind of complexity is that if we truly start a project with a channel-neutral or media-neutral approach, we won’t know ahead of time what mix of old and new formats we’ll be producing.

How to Cope with Exploding Growth in Media Formats

Here are a couple of suggestions on how to cope with this new dynamic.

Consistent Brand Voice. If your brand reinvents itself every year or every quarter, you not only risk confusing your consumer, you make creative production less efficient. Even the most routine IMC program these days has many moving parts across Advertising, Retail and Digital. A consistent approach will make it easier to produce things on the fly. To be clear, the goal is not cookie-cutter creative, it’s running a tight strategic ship.

Plan ahead. A digital agency creative director joked to me once that IMC stands for “I already Made the Commercial.” Too often, TV artificially drives the process. Instead, use to your advantage the long lead times demanded by retailers. A good client-agency partnership will plan one year ahead of time for best synchronization of efforts.

Media neutral production. Starting a project with a consistent brand voice and one year of lead time is useless if you then just assign production silo by silo. How can the various specialists help one another? At some point each one has to tend to her own work, but starting everyone from the same place makes it easier to synchronize.

Be a cost-control maniac. Yes, I know what you’re thinking: That’s why God created Procurement. As marketers, however, we have a responsibility to deliver great work at a reasonable budget. Challenge yourself and your colleagues to find new ways to save money. (At some point in the near future we’ll elaborate on this point.)

Any other experiences, suggestions or questions?

Change vs. Progress

“Now that we have progress so rapid that it can be observed from year to year, no one calls it progress. People call it change, and rather than yearn for it, they brace themselves against its force.”
-- Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now*

We live in a time of such constant Change that sometimes we see only the Change and not the Progress it brings.

If all you see is Change, the typical human response is to resist, or as Brand puts it, “brace against its force.” (If you’d like to know more about Stewart Brand, click here, and you’ll also learn that this quote is actually ancient 20th Century wisdom from his book published in 1999. That seems like eons ago but the quote is more relevant than ever.)

If, however, you look at Change and see the Progress it brings, you won’t brace against it, but embrace it. It’s a choice that you must address introspectively: are you going to be fearful or courageous? If Change is inevitable, do you really have any other choice?

It’s better to be courageous, of course. That doesn’t mean we should be foolhardy, embracing Change just for the sake of Change, or just simply “go with the flow”. Our pursuit of Progress should be neither foolhardy nor passive. Rather, we should always use a mixture of curiosity and caution.

Change is only Progress if you’re looking for it. It takes work. You have to stay on top of the trends. You have to see how they apply to your own or your client’s business. You have to be willing to try some new things, and be able to convince your colleagues to try them, too. That’s where the caution comes in. Some of these bets will fail. If you stop and think about a new way of working, you’ll reduce the risk of failure and increase the chance of learning.

How are you doing on your goals for 2011?

We’re about a third into the calendar year. How are you doing on your goals for 2011? Maybe you set some goals or made some resolutions. There’s a very good chance you anticipated 2011 would be a year of Change and planned accordingly.

So far, would you say you’ve experienced only Change, or Progress as well? The difference is up to you.

*Hat tip: Ross McLean, who used this quotation in his presentation at SXSW.

What is IMC?

IMC, or Integrated Marketing Communications, has more than few definitions. Here’s mine: it’s Marketing.

The words “Integrated” and “Communications” are redundant

Any marketer who doesn’t integrate their various marketing communications, in even the smallest way, is so hopelessly siloed they will never survive. There’s simply no excuse in the year 2011 for developing separately your advertising, retail and digital programs. Even in a siloed organization most people acknowledge the need to work across disciplines. Even the most specialized agency acknowledges the need to cooperate with their clients’ other partners.

Thus the word “integrated” is redundant because all marketing must be integrated. I would argue, too, that “marketing” implies some kind of communications, so that word is also redundant.

IMC is just a fancy acronym for Marketing

I confess to having used the term myself, here, here, here and here. In each case the context was a program where we made a specific, dedicated effort to align all the disciplines and deliver for a client a truly integrated marketing program. This effort required a lot of heavy lifting strategically as well as during execution, not to mention the challenge of keeping all the various constituencies moving in the same direction. It’s hard work, especially if you have to wrangle a group of agencies.

We need hard work, because aligning the disciplines doesn’t come naturally. In the days of Ye Olde Marketing, advertising was relatively simple, retail was far less sophisticated, and digital didn’t exist. Today all those disciplines demand attention, so we need specific, dedicated efforts that change our behavior and help make IMC – uh, modern marketing, come naturally.

Stop calling it IMC

The risk in continuing to use the term “IMC” is that some marketers and some agencies will treat only some marketing as “integrated” – which means that other kinds of marketing are what, exactly? Disparate? Traditional? Antiquated? It starts to sound like Ye Olde Marketing.

I’m not starting to a campaign to extinguish the term “IMC”. I’m merely advising caution in using it.

Join #IMCchat Wednesday night at 7:00 p.m. Central U.S. time

Just a reminder that tomorrow night is another edition of #IMCchat, which we posted about recently.

Parents and Children, Then and Now

The recent "Your Mom Hates This" campaign for EA's Dead Space 2 (TV spot here, website here, photo at right) is driving some buzz ahead of the video game's release date next week.

It reminded me a little of the campaign 20 years ago from Wrigley's Amurol division for Bubble Tape. You can see two of the spots on YouTube, here and here.

All of us can appreciate that parent-child relationships range from respect to rebellion. When respect is the norm, there is harmony; when rebellion is the norm, there is trouble.

Does this campaign push rebellion? I'll let you be the judge. If you are interested in thinking about it a little more, read this unexpected commentary from a game reviewer who's also a mom. She liked Dead Space 2, but she didn't like stereotypes.

What is Hyper Island?

NEW YORK – This is the first of three days I’m spending at Hyper Island Master Class, a sort of boot camp for marketing and advertising people catching up on “Digital”. For more about Hyper Island, read the recent article in Fast Company, and a response of sorts published in Adweek.

Even having read about Hyper Island in advance, I didn’t know whether to expect a class in writing code for HTML5, or how to sign up for Twitter, or… well, I imagined a lot of possibilities.

Here is what I’ve gleaned so far, after the first morning’s agenda.

Change Management. While the curriculum features digital tools, case studies, best practices and important principles, the real topic of discussion is adapting to changes around us. This isn’t only a matter of increasing knowledge, it’s about increasing our ability to embrace the changes going on in our industry.

Communication is what’s changing. Digital is partly a range of media we must all learn, but its significance lies in the way it permits people to comment and connect much more rapidly than in the days of Ye Olde Marketing. Word of mouth has always been the most reliable form of marketing communication, and it’s more out of control than ever.

It’s not about how you sell something, it’s about what you sell. The old paradigm is “market what we can make”, creating ads with finely tuned messages, hoping for big awareness among a mass audience. What shatters this paradigm? Consumer experiences drive commentary far more authentic than what we can possibly say about our products or services, regardless of medium.

Time for lunch now. I’ll write more later. You can follow all the action on Twitter by searching for the hashtag #HIMC.