PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

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…)

If you saw Jim Stengel, CMO of P&G, interviewed in the most recent Fortune, you probably paused as I did when I saw him get emotional about commodities. Here’s some of what he said:

“I hate it when someone says they’re in a commodity category. We don’t accept that there are any commodity categories. We are growing Charmin and Bounty very well, and if there is any category that people could say is a commodity, it’s paper towels and tissues. We have developed tremendous equities, tremendous loyalties from our consumers. So, no, I think that is a cop-out. That is bad marketing and an excuse. We are not in any commodity categories.”

How often over the course of a month does a BtoB marketer hear a client or prospect whine that they’re in a commodity category? No doubt pretty often. How often do they respond as Stengel does? Based on what you see when you flip through most magazines, a lot less frequently. If there is inspirational equity in a product or service – and you could argue that anything possesses it if paper towels do – it rarely makes it to the surface or is even pursued.

Look at the target customer. How well do you know them? What’s the inspiration? What’s the aspiration? A freelance team I know once went through a supermarket and chose the most commodity product they could find, bouillon cubes, and designed a campaign around them for their book. As I remember, it focused on the entire experience of opening the cube: where you likely were, what you were likely thinking, and how relaxing it was to be cooking from scratch rather than sitting in traffic. It worked for me. And there’s no barrier that exists just because we’re in BtoB to say we can’t be inspiring and compelling, either.

It’s working for Jim Stengel with a $6.7 billion ad budget, so it should be workable at our slightly lower budgets, too.

Although I try not to bring politics to the workplace (it’s still a bit too volatile, even in Cambridge), I thought Frank Rich had an interesting point about Karl Rove’s resignation in yesterday’s New York Times.

The piece, entitled He Got Out While the Getting Was Good, notes that Rove’s style — tightly controlled, top-down messages that are centrally managed — effective as it was in 2002, is hopelessly out of date in 2007, with the rise of You Tube and other social media outlets.

To quote Rich, “A year [after George Allen's 'macaca' incident], leading Republicans are still clueless and panicked about this new medium, which is why they, unlike their Democratic counterparts, pulled out of even a tightly controlled CNN-YouTube debate. It took smart young conservative bloggers like a former Republican National Committee operative, Patrick Ruffini, to shame them into reinstating the debate for November, lest the entire G.O.P. field look as pathetically out of touch as it is.”

Whatever you think about Rich or Rove, what’s interesting is how quickly web journalists and content distribution have upended the age-old centrism and control structure in a government. The same is increasingly true for corporations. If you think you can control your message from above in an age of social media, you, too, may soon be announcing that you’re leaving your post to spend more time with your children.

Two articles in the July 9/16 BusinessWeek provide a welcome reminder that effectiveness measures are by no means absolute, and depend entirely on your goals. In the first piece Jon Fine provides an update on Project Apollo, a pilot test of radio and TV advertising effectiveness, and ACNielsen Homescan, which lets consumers scan product purchases into a database. The usual suspects (Kraft, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever) are funding the project, which has turned up early results that may significantly reduce marketing waste in ‘old media’ channels, especially among light users of products.

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By now all of us have seen the Geico cavemen, characters in a Martin Agency campaign launched in 2004 and originally intended to stop right there, with three spots. According to a Rob Walker piece in today’s Times Magazine, the idea was to present humor as a way to alleviate the spectacular lack of interest in car insurance: not unlike the way that gazing at the area just to the left or right of a star in a telescope seems to provide more visual payoff than staring at it directly. Now, three years later, the cavemen are on their way to a possible sitcom. This is either a surefire way to kill off any popularity the cavemen have generated, or more likely, another instance of the crossing of media, entertainment and content that characterize early 21st century advertising and branding. What interested me most about the phenomenon, though, was what spurred the client and agency to create more spots: blogging.
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