PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

I was in New York recently listening to some focus groups on enterprise security. The people on the other side of the glass oversaw the safety of tens or hundreds of thousands of employees. They were smart and articulate (and God bless them, they also liked our creative). When we came to the channel survey portion of each group, it was striking how many subjects enthusiastically supported the idea of a one-minute video or even a one-minute podcast as a call to action.

“Sure,” one of the more cranky executives said, “I’d give a minute of my time to hear more.” (more…)

This intriguing question comes via a media colleague, who found it in a Columbia Business School ad.

Clearly, we will be building mass brands and niche brands in the future, but what sort, with what tools and with what kind of partners?

I thought Kevin Maney’s perspective on this question was pretty interesting in his new Portfolio piece, “Free for All.”

When you look at the tectonic shifts in the music industry that have taken place since 1999, those days of paying $9.99 for a new B-52s album and $28 for a ticket to see them live seem like 200 years ago. For example:

* Radiohead lets the user choose the price for In Rainbows

* Nine Inch Nails releases its latest album only to its Web site (though, like Radiohead, you could pay a huge premium for a deluxe edition, both of which have sold out)

* Timbaland has cut an exclusive music deal with Verizon Wireless

* 99% of all downloaded music in China is illegal, and 85% of all CDs sold are pirated

* Concert revenue is surging ($3.9 billion in 2007), CD sales are cratering. If you’ve purchased a concert ticket lately, you know that all too well.

So what may be coming?

* All musical content becomes free, with a mass brand paying seven figures to give the CD away free with its identity and messaging associated with it. (Or to quote Maney, “Any day now, I expect to find a flash drive with a Radiohead song on it inside a specially marked box of Cap’n Crunch.”)

* Groups make money only from sponsorship and touring, using their music as the content play. (Since when did anyone ever pay for a music video, or a CIO for a white paper?)

* Lots more experimentation, “like a teenager’s goth phase.” To this list add Elvis Costello’s Sundance Channel talk show, U2’s 3D movie, and any number of endorsement deals, commercials, and merchandising plays assembled from industry fragments as the music labels begin to crash and burn.
In the end, it’s about giving away the perfect format of the artist’s brand for free (why not? It can be produced and sold for virtually nothing) but exacting a premium for the non-reproducible, thrilling, experience of the artist’s brand.

Does anything here apply to brand building in our world?

If the future of brands is about stepping beyond the perfect print and TV ad proscenium into the human experiential, I’d say just about everything.

I had some interesting conversations today about marketing and the future evolution of brands, a few hours’ worth with one of my favorite clients, the rest with my favorite colleague and someone I was meeting for the first time. It has always been interesting to me how spending time with truly creative thinkers ups my game as a thinker. As the old Yiddish saying goes, “When you make a friend, take a step up.”

What I was pondering today was this: most Web sites in BtoB are silent films. There’s a sort of backdrop quality to them, a lifelessness, and almost no meaningful sound or vision. They are like the 2D sets in silent movies and just about as authentic in feeling. They don’t really talk to or interact with you, so until the next little injection of content, the intertitle card with the language on it, you really have to guess what the characters are saying, what the narrative arc is, and what the key dialogue is. The expressions are somewhat exaggerated or off (bad stock photography is the wooden silent actor of the 21st century). You’re held at a remove from it all because it’s…silent.

Where Web sites want to move is into the Talkie era: the era of full stereo sound synchronized to movement, the era of storytelling that really reaches out and involves the user, the state of a medium starting to realize its full potential. In film that era began in 1927 or so, with The Jazz Singer. There’s only about two minutes of synchronized talking and acting in the film, but movies could never go back afterward.

It might make sense to look at your Web site the same way. Is it really engaging your audiences, or is it mute? Does it deliver a story, or just a series of title cards? Is it experiential, or just a 2D storefront with a few frills attached?

One of our major goals for 2008 is to bring BtoB companies into the era of the talkie Web presence. Once you’ve seen the engagement measures and longer visits to your little marketing theater, you really can’t go back again. And that’s a very good thing.

In recessionary times (see under GE, Earnings Statement, 4.11.08), companies nearly always become more conservative about the value of marketing. That’s no surprise, though I’m still taken aback, working through my third economic downturn in this industry, at how quickly the winds shift. Just yesterday I heard about a client whose $10 million marketing budget had, in the course of five months, been whittled down to just north of $900,000 at the lower edge of the range.

So is marketing an investment or a line item expense, and what business problems can it solve? Local academic marketing programs often ask someone from PJA to come in and present the BtoB perspective on these eternal questions (see under John Wanamaker, advertising budget, which half is wasted), and though these are basic tenets of marketing, it never hurts to be reminded during an economic period when business common sense is often the first thing to suffer.

Here’s the list our head of interactive plans to present at an upcoming marketing class in a lecture hall near you: (more…)

As much as I admire and like a lot of industry analysts we talk to (we’re actually a Gartner customer: makes me feel wistful that some of these people get to think about one industry niche 24 x 7 x 365), there’s always a Cassandra-like note in their reports, not unlike a Tom Peters book. Something along the lines of, “If you don’t undertake these 11 priorities this quarter and reinvent your business process platform by end of year, you’ll be seriously behind your competitors or pushing up the daisies. Et cetera.”

Which would be a serious problem if a lot of companies didn’t have those ‘job’ things to do. One antidote to these pronouncements came recently when I was interviewing a CEO about recent job cuts and whether he was worried about retaining his big stars. His response: “Most of them don’t have the option to go, honestly. And of the few that do, half of those are subject to the same inertia that everybody is subject to, so they’re not going anywhere.”

As you probably know, Forrester now creates a lot of reports for “marketing leadership professionals.” Or as I thought to myself on first seeing one of these documents, “Oh, great. They’re not satisfied making my clients feel guilty about falling behind; now they’re doing the same thing with agencies.”

All this throat-clearing aside, I have read and can recommend a recent report called The Connected Agency by Mary Beth Kemp and Peter Kim that’s getting a lot of buzz (and yes, you can check the records: I did pay my $279 for it). (more…)