PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

Thanks to DJ Howatt, I have my nose in the Harvard Business Review for the first time in too long. (When did it go up to $18 an issue?)

The piece he blogged about is called “The Four Truths of the Storyteller,” by Peter Guber. I’ve been seeing Guber’s name in the press for years and know that he’s on the respected side of the feared/respected line in Hollywood (did I mention he’s from Newton, MA?). I can’t say I’m a huge fan of all his films (he did executive produce Midnight Express), but like a pharmaceutical scientist, the fact that he actually got 50 films ‘into the clinic’ (that is, produced) says a lot about his tenacity.

His piece on narrative and its role in effective communications is a winner. And the thesis is simple: to tell a powerful story, you must show truth to yourself, to the audience, to the moment, and to the mission at hand. What interested me was the way the word ‘brand’ can be swapped out for ’story’ or ’storyteller’ in some of the piece’s signature quotes. Brands, after all, are stories.

Here are a few favorites (call it a miniature linguistic mashup):
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If any of you have saved an issue of say, Fast Company or Red Herring from late 1999 or early 2000 – my favorite issue contains an article on how Google is a completely silly name and that the company will go nowhere with it – you’ll notice how picking up the magazine may threaten to put your back out. (Best to leave it on the floor as a doorstop.) Today, only Vanity Fair, W, and Oprah seem to be infested with print ads in the way that tech publications used to be. Average issues of ComputerWorld or BIO-IT World seem as thin as the inserts that used to be tipped into the dotcom-era magazines of seven years ago.

Which is precisely why there may be more value than you think in print advertising right now. Prices, certainly, have never been more negotiable. As I mentioned in a previous post, one vendor offered to throw in the print program free if we bought the online program for a client. And though marketing may be a game of fishing where the fish are most of the time, success also is a function of standing out where your competitors aren’t. To quote my colleague Mike O’Toole, it’s all part of good marketing arbitrage.

No, print subscriptions aren’t what they used to be. Readership is down and advertising is down. But your target audience is still spending time with magazines and print publications. The eyeballs aren’t always online. And if you had the opportunity to be the only advertiser in a magazine along with Microsoft, IBM and SAP, wouldn’t you jump at the chance?

Any time a book or article predicts the end of something (the end of history, for example), people take notice. So it’s hard to ignore the new IBM report called The End of Advertising as We Know It.

You’ll note that the title hedges a bit: it’s not the end of advertising per se, just as we know it, so that in five years the ad environment will be virtually unrecognizable, and that things will change more by 2012 than they did between 1957 and 2007.

I have to say I have my doubts. Just as people sometimes like to knock analyst predictions by saying a new sub-niche of a sub-niche IT solutions offering will be “a $0 billion market by 2010,” pushing the accelerator all the way to an even split between user-generated and agency-generated ads seems a bit much. Sure, you can look at trend lines and CAGR rates and tell me that the TV and computer will meld (portable eBook reader, anyone?), but I have a hard time believing that mobile, interactive, in-game and Web will completely dominate and erase the newspaper, magazine and outdoor industries. Yes, Sao Paolo may have outlawed billboards (God bless them), but there’s simply too much skin in the game to replace what we’ve known and do it so quickly. I see it more as additive: more choices, more possibilites, more potential integration points.

Call me a dinosaur, but take off the Prada glasses first. The future may not be so far away after all. In the meantime, read the report. It’s good.

We’re in the thick of the fall season right now, which means a huge push of work that clients either want to see completed or signed by the the time everyone scatters for the holidays (one of our client’s marketing departments literally goes dark for the last two weeks of December). Add to this sales meetings preparation, closing out marketing budgets, and budget planning for 2008, and the atmosphere is often superheated. Not the best environment in which to make logical, even-handed decisions about marketing programs.

All of which explains why I love Elaine Fogel for writing the Marketing Profs piece “How to Influence Marketing Decisions When Your Boss or Client is Dead Wrong” (if you’re not a Marketing Profs subscriber, you can sign up for a two-day free trial to read the piece). Is there anyone in marketing who hasn’t walked out to their car gnashing their teeth at the short-sightedness or politically half-baked reasoning a client (or a boss) has taken in landing on a direction? We once had a client who wouldn’t let us share a PowerPoint presentation with his CMO because a few of the slides had 4 bullet points, and he only focused on slides with 3 or 5 bullets.

What I like about Fogel’s approach are her realism and her optimism.
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Adbusters is a curious experience, if you’ve never picked up this ‘culturejammer’ journal at your local Whole Paycheck. Presented in a magazine format, it contains no ads whatsoever, though if you visit their Vancouver-based Web site you can pick up a nice anti-sweatshop, cruelty-free, pro-grassroots travel mug for your plug-in hybrid. The stories, such as they are, are more like editorials or rants, usually over doctored photographs of capitalist porn (i.e., advertising). I can’t help thinking after a dozen pages, ‘Where have you gone, Tom Frank and The Baffler?’

That said, the most current Adbusters interested me because they actually interviewed an advertising person, Bob Garfield. (more…)