Develop a corporate culture that is ALL about innovation, excellence, and competitiveness. Congrats, you're now among the top 1% of companies.
Develop a brand that is about something more than just your product. Something meaningful to real people and differentiated from everyone else.
Put together a product development strategy to compliment your new brand strategy.
Develop a brilliant tagline, logo, and advertising campaign to establish your brand identity.
Be bold and don't be afraid to offend people. Dan Weiden famously said about Nike advertising, "Truth is, if we didn't get a bunch of complaints after we ran an ad, chances are it didn't work."
There, you're done. Now wasn't that easy? (insert sarc-mark here)
In my 15 years of advertising, I've met a lot of companies who say they want to be like Nike. So they come to their advertising professionals and ask them to create the next Nike. Well, it's just not that easy. Alas, I wish it was.
Your ad people can't make you like Nike. You simply can't be like Nike unless you actually ARE like Nike. Innovation must run deep in the culture of your company. You must take risks. Big ones. You must be willing to develop a million dollar ad and then not run it if it didn't come out right. You must be willing to wake people up. Everyone at your company must want to be the best. You must be willing to chase your competition with a frigging chain saw.
“Our job is to wake up the consumers”
says Knight. “If we become predictable, that’s not waking them up.” Phil Knight
So I guess the question goes back to you. Are you like Nike?
If not, then you're much better off if you just try to be yourself.
I've been thinking a lot about check-box marketing lately. Basically, it's marketers who use their influence to get things done - a lot of things done- without investing in a process that would involve doing good quality work and supporting the brand in a meaningful way. They cross a lot of items off their to-do list and wind up actually not doing much for anything.
When I think about where I want to work next, I find myself abhorrent to the though of working with check-box marketers (check-box anything, really). Because while I admire the "get it done" attitude, I find that at the end of the day it bankrupted everyone involved (including the brand). You didn't do anything truly worth doing. You didn't learn anything truly worth learning. People are not left with anything to display to future employers (or even to themselves) that they were particularly proud of. Some of the things they may have done in a situation might have been excellent given the circumstances - poor brief, no time, no money, etc.. But they would not be judged favorably outside of the environment in which they were created.
So I am going to use the next job to double down on quality and really do only excellent work.
BNET has a roundup of the most despicable advertisements of this entire year and here they are:
10. Red House Furniture:"Where White People and Black People buy furniture." Actually pretty funny in a mostly unintended sort of way. How they thought it would sell furniture is beyond me.
9. Boost Mobile: Mrs. "Claus Screws Frosty the Snowman." Also pretty funny. With most of the nation's politicians, athletes, and Hollywood celebs cheating on their spouses, I fail to see why a claymation version of Mrs. Claus bopping Frosty is all that offensive. At least she does admit that it is wrong.
8. Volvo: "Vampires drive them. They also drive motorcycles, but don't think about that." Another movie tie-in ad that the business people thought would be a good idea because it seems smart, but that never actually made sense, you know, in REALITY. I actually pity the creatives that had to do this because, well, I pity myself when I have to do it.
7. Jamison Beer. "Ho White and the 7 Dwarves" Pictured here. I actually think it's kinda funny and I appreciate the juvenile humor. The BNET writer didn't like it. But then, I doubt he's in the target demo of immature 15-year-old-at-heart guy guys who never liked the story Snow White in the first place.
6. Miracle Whip. "Don't Be So Mayo. Be hip and trendy like these paid actors doing weird things in a cheeky way." It's hard to put your finger on what's wrong with this ad that's trying so desperately hard to make their sandwich spread fit right in with their wrongheaded perception of "young people" cultural norms. I don't know what it is, just rubs me the wrong way.
5. Palm Pre: "Tamara Hope Pretends To Reflect on Juggling as a metaphor for multi-tasking."Sometimes so many things irk you about an ad that it's hard to parse out exactly what they all are. Was it the overly sentimental tone that she uses? Is it the fact that I waited all that time to find out that
she's employing a hackneyed metaphor? Is it that her eyes are telling me that she has a really good story for me, but her eyes lied? It could be all of these things and the music that just piled on the over-try.
4) General Motors: "We're reinventing ourselves because obviously the old "ourselves" was bloated, inefficient, and lazy. Oh, and unprofitable."So I actually thought this ad was pretty well done. It was obviously inexpensive to make, so that fits with a bankrupt company advertising in the first place. The V/O was nice, the writing was fine, the music worked, and the clips they chose were active and upbeat.
3) Ralph Lauren: "Filippa Hamilton as deathcamp survivor with rad clothes."A print ad that actually got posted to the site "photoshipdisasters.blogspot.com." She reminds me of someone though. She reminds me of the blond assistant to the evil mastermind in The Incredibles. She also reminds me of licorice rope and eels.
2) World Wildlife Fund: "Let's employ the World Trade Center attacks to get people off their asses to save the animals."Sounds like a bad idea to me. But I wouldn't know since DM9DDB Brasil removed the YouTube video. Bummer. Instead, I give you this nice video of that famous graduation speech set to lounge music.
1) Virgin Mobile: "Case of the disembodied mouth." The woman puts her cell phone down and her mouth gets detached from her face and continues the conversation with her mom. I actually liked this ad. Kinda. It's trippy. But I wonder where the girl went.
The results of a CMO opinion poll came out and, surprise, they reflected poorly on their advertising agencies. In turn, the blog Agency Spy, being written by ad men and women, laid down some not-so-loving advice for their CMO's brethren to consider, if not memorize and put under their pillow at night.
The first one tickled me, "Here's an idea,
why don't you stay in your job for longer than a year and a half - the
average length of tenure for a CMO? Breaks in brand leadership
generally kill off the current marketing strategy before it has a
chance to soar and spread ancillary wings. Let's say you come in.
Restaff your squad. Hunt for a new agency. Hire the new agency. Go
through the creative process. Get the campaign going and then, guess
what? You're donezo. Patience is a virtue. Get some."
Clearly, it helps when your blog is anonymous.
Here are the other nine:
2. Don't rely on your stinkin' pitch consultants.
3. Don't assume your staff is serving you well...
4. Don't fight your own campaign..
5. Don't forget which agency is which..."
6. Don't blow your wad...
7. Don't act like you are the lord and master of all knowledge...
8. Don't dream think we are miracle workers...
9. Don't be a wuss...
10. Don't forget that sometimes you're too close..."
Catch the whole entertaining diatribe at at Agency Spy. Link above.
Summary: Two words: Fuck frills. Frills are way too frilly. Too 2007. Businesses that appeal to the rational side of consumers will do ok. Businesses that are unable to make the switch from "ain't this cool," marketing to "you really totally need this...and here's why," marketing will be blown asunder.
Green products have the advantage, but only if priced competitively.
Wireless devices will continue to expand as technology allows them to be media delivery systems.
National brands will offer innovation to win back store brand business. But they will more often fail than succeed.
Cinema admissions will increase fueled by growing availability of 3D movies and theatres. They do, after all, need distractions during this difficult times.
Growth of organics will slow dramatically, mainly because consumers don't really know why they were buying them beyond merely seeming more healthy.
Cash will be king, anyone trying to charge a regular monthly (subscription) fee through charging a person's credit card will take big hit.
Text messaging will go totally mainstream.
Restaurants will fail in huge numbers.
Coupon redemptions will rise.
Cooking from scratch will make a comeback. Taking your lunch to work will also be big.
Online activity will continue to explode. Online advertising will be hit less hard than traditional.
Next-generation gaming consoles will continue to gain traction.
Used book sales will increase.
Obama will shatter the lefts expectations of him by March.
Here's a video about a hot, new mobile phone from Nokia for web maniacs.
For those of us who've lived and worked outside the US, we
understand how a county's brand perception can have a direct impact on
our well-being. Rightly or wrongly, how you are regarded within a
foreign society is partly related to how your country is regarded
throughout the world (particularly if you're not fluent in the
language).
For the last 6 years, our name has been mud.
But the deterioration of brand America has much broader implications
from an economic standpoint. A country's brand perception often
influences the sale of their goods. It can play a subtle, but very real
role in whether US companies get contracts in other countries - or even
the proper licenses and certifications to conduct business. It can effect whether consumers in other cultures buy our goods. It can play
into negotiations. Bad brand perception can be detrimental to America's
standing in business communities within these other countries. It can
influence whether foreign companies enter into partnerships with
American companies. Our country's continued prosperity is partly tied
to the health of our national brand.
With Abu Ghraib torture photos, Guantanamo Bay's stain on due
process, and the U.S.'s perceived ineffectiveness from Iraq to
Hurricane Katrina, Brand America is hurting bad.
Perhaps an important questions we should be asking ourselves is
this: "Is the way that we're conducting this war on terror, our stance on the environment, our unwillingness to sit down without pre-conditions, and other
policies counterproductive to the wider agenda of the nation?" I'm not
saying our goals are wrong necessarily. I'm not saying we should back down. But the tough-guy cowboy screw-you-all politics of the White House
is a style that is doing far more harm than good.
As for the brand implications in the upcoming elections, I think Americans would do well to choose the candidate that will protect their interests while working to restore their relationships. In other words, the candidate most unlike Bush. Someone with a smooth touch, a silver tongue, a persuasive ability. Someone not John McCain.
Get all your Bullshit Observer updates wherever you want them. Put them on your blog, on your MySpace page, your Facebook page, whatever. All you have to do is click the image and go to Widgetbox.
Ten minutes ago I discovered SaysMe.TV. You Americans can buy $100 of media or more on your local stations, pick a daypart, and choose user-created ads to run. Or you can create your own ad and make money every time it runs.
"I see this as a tremendous opportunity to get the kind of messages out
that you will never see come out of campaigns because they have 55
pollsters figuring out if they should say anything about the issue," SaysMe.TV CEO Lisa Eisenpressersaid, adding that both liberal and conservative views are
welcomed on SaysMe.TV.
I don't want to suggest something undemocratic or anything, but it might be possible for folks in other countries to contribute as well. That's right Europe, I'm talkin' to you.
Stations include CNN, Comedy Central, A&E, ABC Family, and Animal Planet. You can take the tour over here.
Together with some friends, I have a new blog creation called The Conceptualist. The topic will be completely fresh ideas and it will feature the same whimsical analysis that you've come to expect from The Bullshit Observer. The idea of The Conceptualist is not just to notice new things, but to celebrate brave thinkers and to marvel at their creations.
How is this different, you ask?
Well, I think it's probably the only
blog I've seen that lives entirely in the world of ideas. It's not just about highlighting bizarre new inventions like Geekology. It's not about displaying new products like bazillions of blogs out there. It's about taking the new ideas and turning them over in our minds and seeing how they got that way and what they could become. It's as much about the why as it is about the what. In short, it's about conceptualism - the act of seeing past what is there
to what could be and talking about it.
Incidentally, the header image is my friend's daughter, Sophie swimming underwater.
This means, of course, that The Bullshit Observer will need to take a back seat for the time being. That means that my posts will be more sporatic. To any regular reader out there, I am sorry to interrupt your BSO experience.
As Americans we are bathing in bullshit every single day. It's unavoidable. So, if we can't avoid it, we might as well come to understand it. This is a group exercise, so if you'd like to point something out to us, by all means, do.
Stumble It!