facebook makes me crotchety

I did the Twitter thing for a little while, but found it clunky and un-portable…which may be an indictment of my own tech savvy, sure, but I also found that I wasn’t missing a whole lot because of the news feed feature in Facebook and the way that people have been using it. Which is just like Twitter.

I find that both a relief and an annoyance.

It is a relief, somewhat obviously, because it means that I don’t have to use Twitter anymore. I get almost the exact same information, but only have to use one application. And, as an added bonus, all side conversations tend to happen as comments on wall posts so I can quickly read the whole conversation as a single unit instead of having it dispersed across my Twitter feed.

Convenience for a lazy man. It’s a concept I can get behind.

It is an annoyance because most of what people deem important enough to Tweet or wall post about is either boring or pathetically self-aggrandizing.

For example, if you are really having a great time doing all of these fun things, do you really need to post about how you are having a great time doing all of these fun things? Just like you never hear someone say “I went to Harvard, it’s a really good school” because it is obvious that Harvard is a good school, if you feel the need to talk about how much fun you are having while doing whatever activity you are doing, you’re selling too hard. The fun should be obvious. And if it isn’t and you’re trying to convince me that it is, it falls flat in a sad, “I wish you were confident enough in yourself not to try to prove how cool you are in a public forum” kind of way.

Primarily disappointing is how many people write posts like this.

Posts like “got so drunk last night and it was awesome” or “girls nights rock, so glad I went out.” They are both unoriginal and cloying attempts to prove to people who may be following your posts that you are not a complete loser.

Except by saying, in not so many words, “I am not a complete loser”…well, you’ve just proved you are.

But at least the annoyance is all in one place now. It would be worse if I had to switch applications for the same drivel.

social networking is for the already cool

Had an interesting discussion today at the House of Biz over some campaign extension tactics that we are going to be presenting to the client tomorrow…specifically, we were talking about how to extend this particular brand in social networks.

I took the stance that this would be a waste of time.

First, some background: this particular brand has a broad target that skews young, but hasn’t really broken through to be cool yet. In fact, it isn’t really all that well known yet. Which, to my mind, means that we need to get the word out…even if that means using Pleistocene-era tactics like broadcast television and other broad-reach media. Because we need people to know about the brand. And to like it.

Because unless they already know about and like the brand, why would they want to be its Facebook friend? Social networking is for the already cool, the brands that will be sought out on their merits. The brands that people want to adorn themselves with. Tattoo the logos of. Have people judge them by.

I’m afraid that I lost this argument.

And it’s fine that I did, I understand that in client meetings where a lot of work is being presented it is important to have broadly applicable thinking…lots of tactics shelter the agency from the charge of being a one-trick pony or, in the case of my agency, too old school.

But it’s still a dumb idea for this brand.

behavioral targeting complaints

I am an analog guy…and even though I have a blog, I know that this is true. I can’t help it. I am a man of my time.

That said, to the digital strategist (and you know who you are) who gets away with saying things about social media that are obvious to anyone who uses them, but not obvious to the oldsters who run the House of Biz, go fuck yourself. You are lucky to have the job you have, but you only have it while Oldy McGees run the place. And that won’t be forever.

You’ve been warned.

Anyway…I was sitting in a presentation by media to the brand team that I work on about online ad effectiveness based on type of buy (don’t judge, the lunch was free and I’ve not been able to find my ATM card for something like four weeks now). It got me thinking…with the size of our team and the amount that we go to websites appropriate to the brand we work on (and are thus followed by behavioral ads), could we be skewing the numbers on effectiveness?

Based on my hatred for the media team at the House of Biz (whoa, 4:58…let’s fire off an email to Account Management and then leave, and then Account Management gets it to me by 7 – this is a good day – and then I work all night to make it happen, not that I am bitter), yes. I sure hope so.

With all of the jazzy hand waving and shit talking that the digital media and strategy team do, you would think that they would be smart enough to exclude the company IP address from those that were behaviorally targeted.

Maybe it doesn’t matter.

But I don’t care.

I’m all sorts of fired up because it’s 8:00pm on a Friday and I’m still here, working on something that Media forgot and that Account Management just got to me.

Aren’t you glad that I’m back to blogging again?

i am back

Ok, so…it’s been quite the rollercoaster ride since Thanksgiving. Yes, it has been since Thanksgiving that I last had something advertising related to say.

And that is the funny thing about advertising – you can lose five months and not even notice it.

A mix of shoots and concepting and extension ideas and new campaigns ideas and more shoots and execution and endless client change and short deadlines and yelling at digital producers and making out with co-workers at agency happy hours and getting smacked down my Creative Director yesterday today and tomorrow, and losing pitch after pitch, and seeing friends laid off left and right, and commiserating over beers with those people to the point that I turned up at work the next afternoon, and getting promoted and finding a new Pretty AE whose shirt I look down all day…whew. It’s been busy. Exhausting. Par for the course for advertising.

But I am back.

And I mean it this time.

Back, of course, means that I will post in the usual desultory way…but at least I am posting. And I plan to post until I actually get that Crispin job or we get busy again at the House of Biz.

I have missed you.

And am glad that we’re back together again.

happy thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all! With this, my second Thanksgiving since starting this blogging thing, I thought that I would celebrate with this turkey of an ad:

I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did. And have a great holiday.

the revolution in modern communications

I had a minor emergency the other day. It could have been a major emergency but (I am going to go ahead and ruin the ending here) things worked out when it was all said and done. Before I give up any more of the story, let’s get right to it.

I had to make a trip into the office this weekend and, dutifully, I went, fully expecting that it would not be a long trip. It wasn’t. Or at least it wasn’t until I walked out of the office to grab a soda and snack at the deli down the street and realized, as the office door shut behind me, that my keys (including office key card) and cell phone were upstairs.

And, this being the weekend, I would have to wait until someone else came by before I could retrieve them.

Because of the revolution in modern communications, I had no option but to sit and wait and hope that the rain would hold off until some other poor sap turned up to put in a lonely weekend shift behind a desk…my cell phone, with all of its numbers stored safely inside (numbers stored so safely behind autodial and my contacts list that I know maybe three actual phone numbers anymore…and one of those numbers is 911) was beyond reach.

So I couldn’t call someone.

My cell phone, with its oh so necessary internet connectivity, was sitting at my desk next to my keys so I couldn’t e-mail or IM or leave a Facebook message or make a desperate plea over Twitter or in any way contact someone digitally.

Modern technology had brought instant communication to my fingertips and I had left the best that modern communication offers sitting on my desk.

With my keys.

I was distraught and then handled this emergency with the aplomb and clear thinking that characterize me in desperate situations. I assed my situation and realized that I was starving first and locked out second, walked down to the deli to get a sandwich and soda and then walked back to the office and waited it out. Eventually I was let in the office by the cute kid of one of the cleaning crew.

The day was saved.

And I, so I was never without the ability to contact people again, promptly velcroed my phone to my hand. It is going to be awkward to do certain things with such an arrangement and I definitely type slower, but after the terror of being rendered fully incommunicado by such a simple error I vowed simply “never again.”

What does this mean for advertisers? I don’t know. For that sort of analysis, you’re better off reading Alan Wolk take on the divergence of calling and data as represented by people who have two phones, one for each of those uses (I am one of those people, driven mainly by my work-provided phone that I use mostly for e-mail and my “home use phone” that I actually take calls one…in the sad situation mentioned above I had the bad luck to leave both of them at my desk. Go figure).

While you read, remember: divergence is the continual pattern of technology in the modern era.

There is a cult of convergence, but people tend to order their technology as they order their lives. And they don’t want one-size-fits all devices for their lives. They want specialization.

intel’s digital video face-off

My old art director partner from my days in New York was kind of a technology dork.

In many ways, I think that art directors have to be technology dorks…at least if they want to be good (which is similar to how copywriters, if they want to be good, need to read everything they can get their hands on). He is pretty good. Which is why, when I asked him to check out this site that Intel did for their new processor, with the crying-out-for-a-copywriter name Intel Core i7 Processor Extreme Edition, I guess that I wasn’t surprised that he thought it was pretty cool.

I didn’t really get it.

And thought that it was slow to get to the point.

But I am also not the target and too much technology talk bores me. He countered by saying that it was cool, in a Iron Chef sort of way, to see the hook, which was a 70 minute digital animation battle between two creative types on computers using the new processor and some mega-high-powered Adobe software that could eventually, if it falls into terrorist hands, turn the whole world into a scene from TRON.

Created by a company called Ignite Social Media, this is just the sort of targeted content that seems to grab the interest of those in the narrow consumer base.

And that is cool because, well, there are only so many people who will ever need, let alone buy, the products that are being shilled.

Also, because it sort of always comes back to me, I like any site that has a section specifically set up for bloggers.

It makes me think that these guys get it.

he’s the ecd, not jesus

There is nothing wrong with the Cult of Creativity that pervades ad agencies. I don’t say this self-servingly either, the fact of the matter is that creativity is each agency’s product and it would be strange if it weren’t celebrated. The Cult of Creativity is nice because, especially for the creatives stuck working late trying, again and again, to re-write a headline about XXXX, the adulation at the end of the tunnel (and, if it’s a good shop, the adulation in the tunnel…yes, sex jokes are hacky) makes it worth it.

Egos are a big driver of hard workers.

All that said, sometimes it all goes a little too far.

Like at Official Most-Favored Agency of the Daily Biz, Y&R, where the obsequiousness toward and belief in the amazingness of their ECDs has reached messianic proportions. Seriously. Barack Obama would be jealous of such fervent and unquestioning support.

There is a very nice young woman in the employ of Y&R New York who lived in my old apartment building (I moved and therefore feel like I can start to talk more about my life in ‘the city.’). I met her one day in the stairwell of the classic New York five-floor walkup as she despairingly considered her bags of groceries and the unhappy thought of walking up the stairs with them. I helped her out. I’m that kind of guy.

She and I grab a drink every so often and one time I even joined her at a Y&R happy hour (I justified it by calling it research and considering that there was at least the off chance that I could take home a drunk ad chick)…and it was at said happy hour that I realized that she was not the only one who regarded each and every ECD (that title is like VP at a bank, just thrown around at old-line agencies like Y&R) at the agency to be brimming with brilliance and cloaked in creativity.

It got so bad that I considered taking a vial of water, labeling it “water used in XXXX’s shower” and selling it on eBay.

It would be marginally sacreligious because of the obvious parallels with actual holy water, but these Y&R people pretty much consider that shit divine so why not? I might even make some money off of it.

peyton manning is priceless

I have always thought, without any actual corroborating evidence to support my gut feeling on the subject, that Peyton Manning is a lot like Hansel from Zoolander. Stick with me on this one.

The guy is in a lot of commercials. A lot of commercials. A lot. Really, a lot.

I can see him turning up to the set, meeting the agency people and sitting to talk to the client who is, of course, over the moon excited that they are actually talking to Peyton Manning. Not wanting to be “those people” who talk to him about what he is thinking during a two-minute drill, they ask him how he likes acting.

And he says something, with all the genuine feeling that he can muster, like, “I love acting, and I care desperately about what I do. Do I know what product I’m selling? No. Do I know what I am doing today? No. But I’m here. And I am going to give it my best shot.”

And he means it.

That said, I like Peyton Manning. I think that he is a down to earth kind of guy who is really funny given the right sort of script that plays off of his ability to play light self-deprecation for a laugh…which means that, though he may be a little bit played out, it kind of doesn’t matter. He is strangely able to move past the fact that he is in every commercial ever because he is pretty likeable. And good at being in advertising.

Even online advertising, like the current Mastercard work from MRM New York.

It’s an old concept, the personalized video from a famous person, with a famous person who is an advertising hooker, and yet it doesn’t fall on its face.

Peyton Manning comes off just like he always does…as a salt of the earth guy who is accidentally famous that you wouldn’t mind having a beer with. And the video is cut just right so it’s hard to tell at first that it’s one of those personalized videos and not actually cut that way.

I don’t really know what it is trying to sell, but when do you in a Peyton Manning ad?

Peyton Manning ads are about one thing: Peyton Manning. Who is pretty funny.

p.t. barnum marketing courtesy of dr pepper

The marketing geniuses at Dr Pepper (caution: post may contain sarcasm-like substance) came up with another one of those forgettable P.T. Barnum stunts they are famous for a while back, promising to give free Dr Pepper to everyone if the totally relevant Guns ‘n’ Roses ever finished their 17 years -in-the-making album Chinese Democracy.

Surprise, surprise, the album was not only released this year, but released on November 23rd!

And…wait…aren’t there 23 flavors in every Dr Pepper? By jove! Dr Pepper just cracked a big ol’ egg of marketing genius all over us!

Too bad all the marketing genius wasn’t put toward figuring out how to execute against this execrable idea…, as reported at Perez Hilton, Dr Pepper’s servers could handle the traffic and their site was unavailable for most of the day that consumers were supposed to be able to get their free soda.

I guess when they took up that new ‘drink it slow’ positioning, the whole company took it to heart.

(And yes, the above is the best joke that I could come up with. I am far too angry at this marketing ineptitude to be at all funny at the moment. I have admitted it. Let’s move on.)

One-off, stunt-y marketing ideas like this that do nothing to build the actual brand are the kind of marketing that comes from executives that desperately need PR because they are looking for their next job. Whether that is because, like a Julie Roehm, they are soulless corporate climbers, or, like Dr Pepper’s own Sean Gleason, because they know that they are about to be laid off, this sort of idea is soundbite marketing, devoid of an ounce of strategy. It gives bloggers, Oprah, etc something small to say about the brand, but it builds nothing.

It is hacky and cheap.

The fact that Dr Pepper wasn’t prepared for the response to their stunt is only the surface of a deep ineptitude that runs deep in their marketing department.

Good luck, Deutsch/LA. At least you know that you can’t do any worse.