“Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn't just going strong, it has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet—its structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.”
The struggle between Facebook and Google represents some of the same challenges happening in the advertising industry now. Those with the belief that “data is everything” complain that advertising hasn’t yet worked in social spaces, mostly because click through rates are even more terrible than usual and banners are ignored.
Data strives to make things black and white. People make things nuanced and contradictory. But I think Facebook’s struggle should be a guide for many of us working in advertising, whether we’re technically advertising or not.
Those of us that really give a shit about understanding people, the ones who aren’t likely to buy into the massive new ads from the OPA, those that felt queasy about interstitials even if they did give a higher click through rate, aren’t anti-data. But that data should be used to support our missions, not create them.
A cold-hearted reliance on numbers alone can make you small-minded and myopic. It can lead you to take shortcuts in the name of trial. It can bundle you in short-term success, celebrating fixing the coffee maker in a sinking ship.
Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” I would venture to guess that he didn’t mean that knowledge is unimportant, but simply a tool to inform and check our creativity, not one meant to dictate each following step.
As I’ve been saying of late. Balance is everything. Data can’t explain meaning. Nor does an insight or an uncovered behavior describe a person in whole. So keep the curiosity and fearlessness of your gut and the layered understanding that data can provide, both tempered by the knowledge the neither are absolute.
“I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.”
I'm probably posting this a bit late, but the greatest agency in the land - Connecticut's Plaid is back on tour across the states with what I believe is the third iteration of Plaid Nation. And this time they're sponsored!
Anyway, check out the tour site here, the blog here, daily video updates here, and twitter feed here.
And for folks in KC, Branson, Memphis, Jackson and New Orleans, full schedule is here.
(and here's some freebies they sent me. being sniffed by some random cat.)
So a friend of mine is in the process of opening a bar in Dallas. We got into a back and forth on email about advertising, particularly for crappy light beer. I thought you guys might find it somewhat interesting, and frankly, I needed a post and this is written. Score!
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Alright, Jeff – you word whip me, and I’ll word whip you back.
As far as the beer commercials, those generally work best, at least in aggregate (in my opinion), when they mix between certain market positions (taste great, less filling, cold refreshment, whatever) and messages that are more about tacitly saying “we get you” (without saying we get you).
Look at the Bud Light Wassup commercials, or the Bud frog spots– that was bud light’s genius. (Just like one of my favorite nonsense ads ever – the Cadbury Gorilla) – the entirety of the communication isn’t really staking out a functional position, but saying – hey – I'm like you, I like the same stuff you like. Maybe we should hang out every once in awhile? You could throw a lot of Burger King’s King related stuff in that camp, as well.
As far as the cold-activated bottle, flavor protectors, stuff like that – that’s a sign of a company getting past advertising. Generally, when we’re thinking conceptually, we’re looking not just at the content of the advertising, but what sort of stuff can we relate with the audience through, what is the experience of buying/using the product, can we build a new utility into the product that increases the distinctiveness or interestingness?
So you mentioned the CMO of Miller saying the most important attribute of successful beer being (1) taste and (2) refreshment.
I would call bullshit (at least for most people). My list - 1. What do your friends drink, 2. What do your friends drink, and 3. What do you want your friends to think you drink. That may be different if you’re talking to beer connoisseurs, but for the middle market behemoths like Miller, Bud and Coors, I have trouble believing that the difference in taste, or particularly something as ethereal as refreshment, is that great.
If you actually look at most taste tests, what people say they like versus what they actually like turns into one big, mushy gray area. People say they like stuff that they won’t as much if they saw the label. There’s a cool study where they taste-tested wines by only giving the respondent its price. Of course, they’d be given the same wine at $5 and $45. Guess which one most liked better.
Same goes for taste studies on store brand vs. premium brands in supermarkets. People don’t seem to notice taste differences until they’re told the brand. Think of the Pepsi challenge, even if people chose Coke 50% of the time – who cares – you’re at least forcing your customer to ask the question, which is a good thing when you’re not the market leader.
But this is the nature of brands. I saw another study the other day that if our brains were computers, they’d be constantly consuming about 100 million bits of information per second. But you can only actively think about 200-300 bits. So what our brain acts as more than anything else is a filter, and brands or branding is simply taking advantage of that primal nature. Brands are shortcuts, things you trust buying without much consideration.
Now – if you really think about what all these brands are saying, it’s all a series of bullshit platitudes. Coors Light is the most cold? Well how the fuck do you know that? It’s sitting in the same refrigerator as the BL. I put it in my hand on it and they both feel cold. Miller – well fuck, great taste, less filling? Well, BL doesn’t feel MORE filling, does it? And great taste? Says who – that’s about the most subjective thing you could possibly say.
Either way, you do want to help people easily categorize their booze, but what you’re really doing is supplying a research subject with an answer when they say – why do you drink that? – because most people really have no idea. But people like to think of themselves as rational human beings, so they just come up with an answer that seems most plausible. Then they repeat what the advertising said, the researcher tells the agency, the agency says to the CMO – hey it worked! – and the CMO tells the CEO and the CMO gets a bigger paycheck. Woot!
But, in real life, you have to think in terms of functional drivers like taste, selection, stuff like that, emotional benefits like how a brand makes you look, feel and mesh those with the impact of social spaces on how a brand is perceived. Brand nirvana is when you have something compelling to say on all three counts.
So - for your big question – yeah, advertising works for the most part. We’re getting way better at tracking, but in short, you can see that when you advertise, sales go up and when you don’t, sales go down. There are diminishing effects when you do it too much without refreshing your message. But a lot of times, it’s also a game of chicken between multiple companies. Like Coors or BL wouldn’t need to advertise as much in a vacuum, but when you’re getting way outspent, it’s usually (not always) difficult to keep from losing share.
We are seeing an overall lessening of effectiveness in marketing spend, which does explain some of the advertising freakout, but it’s mostly because attention is splintering to lots of different channels with the internet/cable/mobile, etc. – So while people are using a ton more media than they used to, you have to advertise more and in more places to get the same affect as before, with the assumption you use the same tired advertising tactics that most still do.
As a side note, you may want to watch this video from Malcolm Gladwell at TED, it has a similar discussion of taste preferences, mostly around spaghetti sauce, but the same rules apply. Basic takeaway – back in the day, companies would test foods to try and make the perfect sauce, beer, bread, whatever – but at some point in the sixties and seventies – they realized that there is no perfect anything, there’s lots of perfect something – which is why we have a stupidly large selection of toothpaste on the shelf today. Of course, now we’re overdoing it, but that’s a different discussion.
Richard writes about the rebirth of Woolworth’s in the UK. Removed from the den of serendipity it once was, it’s now been replaced with a rather simple ecommerce site trading on the fading memories of the fledgling brand. In Canada, struggling Woolworth’s were turned into clearance centers called “The Bargain! Shop” in an effort to turn around failing stores. Now, TBS is growing and Woolworth’s is a decade removed.
Same goes for Circuit City in the States, similarly replaced by a website.
"Victrola Coffee Roasters saw the Starbucks people a lot more often.
"They spent the last 12 months in our store up on 15th [Avenue] with
these obnoxious folders that said, 'Observation,' " said Victrola owner
Dan Ollis."
But these changes do bring up a few questions concerning the nature of brands. Does recognizability trump the skepticism of a brand in a new outfit? Can a shell of a brand be bought and sold as easily today as it was yesterday? How much importance should be placed on the guts of the brand as opposed to just the façade? Or more importantly, can a brand survive by a façade alone?
More pointedly – where is a brand’s meaning derived? And when a brand, like objects, become another data point on our social graphs, can the soul of a brand really be bought and sold? Particularly if the soul itself isn’t really something you can own in the first place.
I suspect the answer to this, as with most things, is not so simple. Meaning is from the product, from the behavior of the employees and management, the color of sign and quality of communication, the proximity to one’s house and the vehemence of opinion from friends. So if a brand’s meaning is a cobbling of experience, maybe it’s just easier sometimes to start with a couple puzzle pieces in our court, or in Starbucks case, removing a couple that work against us, and try again at a starting place of an unknown somewhere rather than a known nowhere.
My Top Ten Favorite Fetishes Arachibutyrophilia - Excessive interest in peanut butter. "I discovered this when the couple that lived
beneath me got into a bit of trouble. They'd invited another couple to
join them, and the other female had a severe — and undiagnosed —
allergy to peanut butter. Moments after they'd smeared her with the
chunky goo, her breathing stepped up toward hyperventilation, and even
when scrubbed down with wet towels, her skin took on the bloated,
bubbled texture of a salted cane toad. (And I feel professionally
obliged to report that while concerned, her partner nonetheless showed
unmistakable signs of arousal.)
Within fifteen minutes, she resembled a giant tongue, and would never
be able to tolerate even the whiff of peanut butter again."
The Uniform Project As an exercise in sustainable fashion, one foxy lady wears one dress every day for an entire year. Of course, as rules sometimes do, it unleashed creativity rather than stamping it out. (via)
Radical Idea Creation from BrainStore "Imagine a CEO, CFO and a junior sales manager of our coffee
company cutting magazines together with a 40 year old mom,
some students, an office guy, a travel manager and an Italian cook with
some loud MTV music on background. After three minutes they will run
trough the yard competing who writes ideas faster. After seven minutes
they will draw pictures using gouache. After this stage, about 1000
“raw ideas” are expected to be produced." Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video
The Future of the Media Agency
"Making predictions for what's going to happen in media next week is hard, let alone undergo the ambitious challenge of trying to second guess the next five years. However, we believe our vision, which is based on rigorous research, conversations with key influencers and the collation of pertinent data and statistics, is not far-fetched. In fact, most of the predictions we make are grounded in today's reality; we are building the foundations now for a future-proof media agency in five years. So, take a trip into the future with us, use your imagination and tell us what you think."
From Wikipedia: The Hermeneutic Cycle Heidegger
(1927) developed the concept of the Hermeneutic Circle to envision a
whole in terms of a reality that was situated in the detailed
experience of everyday existence by an individual (the parts). So
understanding was developed on the basis of "fore-structures" of
understanding, that allow external phenomena to be interpreted or in a
preliminary way. Gadamer
(1975) developed this concept, leading to what is recognized as a break
with previous hermeneutic traditions. But while Heidegger saw the
hermeneutic process as cycles of self-reference that situated our
understanding in a priori prejudices, Gadamer reconceptualized the hermeneutic circle as an iterative process through which a new
understanding of a whole reality is developed by means of exploring the
detail of existence. Gadamer viewed understanding as
linguistically-mediated, through conversations with others in which
reality is explored and an agreement is reached that represents a new
understanding.[2] The centrality of conversation to the hermeneutic circle is developed by Donald Schön (1983), who characterizes design as a hermeneutic circle that is developed by means of "a conversation with the situation."
At some point we pit advertising and social media against each other when we should have been marrying those core advertising messages with meaningful social development all along. They’re forbidden lovers, those two.
For most brands, there are limitations to what can be accomplished with no advertising at all. Google advertises. Zappos is hiring an ad agency. We know when we advertise sales go up, and when we stop, it’s much more difficult to reach expectations.
This is why we need to get better at wedding these two worlds. Developing and evolving brands to help them become more conversational, meaningful and culturally able to cope with this new landscape, but still using that core of interestingness to focus a brand’s appeal.
The idea of Social Branding starts by slowly transforming away from a world where reach and frequency are king, but still takes the best pieces of what’s worked before.
Particularly for brands with deeply ingrained bureaucracies, we need to slowly and tediously replace the levels of process, the fear of the off-message, the red tape, with transparency, open communication and the encouragement of experimentation.
But those changes can be juiced from the other side as well. Those pretty advertising messages are often a company’s most recognizable outward expression of who they are. As such they certainly can go a long way in helping change how a company sees itself internally, too. Not dissimilar-ly to how you might feel in a new pair of jeans. Certainly not enough to be truly different, but probably enough to make you feel good about those 5 pounds you lost and give you the confidence to lose 5 more.
So this is where we are. We need to find the center of what makes companies interesting and different. We need to help companies build cultures based on sharing and transparency. We can help corporations feel much smaller by understanding how to peel back the layers and reveal the soul. It’s the humanizing elements that allow us to get to building the outward expressions that make the change feel more real to those both on the inside and outside.
It’s that soul that can help us find the motivating message, that focused positioning that moves people to get beyond just liking us and get to liking to buy from us. And from there, we can build the platforms for conversation, insert the people and new processes that make our communication more cumulative and extendable. And only then will our outreach work that way it truly can.
