advertising fml

A vice, as far as vices I am publicly willing to admit to, that I have is daily checking of the website FML. Because when things start to go bad, it’s awfully nice to know that it could be worse.

Advertising seemed like the perfect profession to have a dedicated version of the site. With all of the things that could go wrong and f someone’s life coupled with the expressive nature of ad folk, I am frankly surprised that it hasn’t been started yet. In fact, during my blogging hiatus I often thought of starting just a website.

But then work was so busy I never had time. FML.

things better left unsaid

I think that it would be difficult to be a proper columnist because of the reactions of the people who you write about unflatteringly. Pure honesty compels one to be as straightforward and, well, honest about a subject. And, often, that means that said subject (or, as has happened more than one, people that assume they are the subject when they are not) has their feelings hurt. It’s even worse as a blogger because the medium is disrespected as amateur and the posts generally characterized as biting even when they are meant not to be.

Is it better to not write at all?

Perhaps.

Or maybe that is the reason so many people choose boring subjects or direct their venom at inanimate objects like systems and society. They’re unlikely to get complaints or hear through the grapevine how hurtful they are.

infomercial mania!

Occasionally your subconscious will notice it.

Like some ephemeral wisp of a conscious thought.

It will happen when you’re watching TV and you have what feels like déjà vu…because you swear that you just saw that same commercial a minute before, but for a different brand. And with slightly different details.

It just happened to me (only it was the online version, where I saw one spot on a blog and another on YouTube) with two infomercial-themed commercials…and it was the same sensation as when I saw all those monkey-themed commercials last year and the year before when it was the dancing inanimate objects-themed spot traffic jam.

The first is this effort from Bud Light. That, awesomely, you can’t embed. Though you can be their facebook friend, so they totally have the social media aspect covered.

Wankers.

Anyway, I suppose it was bound to happen. The whole infomercial thing had been in the news lately with the ShamWow guy getting into a tussle with a hooker and then the death of Billy Mays. So it was top of mind.

And like much of the culture chaff that gets top of mind of the collection conscious, it gets turned into a commercial.

Sometimes, into lots of commercials.

Like this VitaminWater effort (featuring Canadian Celebrity Steve Nash – a hilarious line):

I might be a bit rusty because of my extended blogging vacation, but I have no real comment on this beyond the pure noticing that is has happened…and that it is pretty funny when you imagine the account people at each agency running around in a tizzy wondering whether to alert their client and trying to figure out how to spin it as in no way detrimental to their own infomercial effort.

dr pepsi, i mean dr pepper’s celeb-tastic advertising

You know that soda company that uses the borrowed interest of celebrities in all of their ads to help sell their sugary beverages? You know, the one the soda brand that you can automatically tell the ad is for because it features a celebrity that you kinda forgot about touting the great taste and refreshing nature of their product? It’s the brand that just ditched their long-time agency.

It’s Dr Pepper.

Of course, instead of getting rid of their long-time agency for a fresh approach that moved away from the old celebrity-based ad formula like Pepsi did when they ditched BBDO for Chiat/Day, Dr Pepper ditched Y&R for Deutsch/LA.

And instead of jettisoning a played-out soda advertising stereotype, Dr Pepper just stole the one Pepsi had discarded.

I can see the Deutsch team selling this idea in:

Deutsch: Our strategy is a proven success – it worked for Pepsi for years and they have way more market share than you

Dr Pepper: True. They do have more market share. But don’t they really own the celebrity formula?

Deutsch: They did own the celebrity formula. Not anymore. Now you do.

Dr Pepper: But they spent probably a billion dollars over almost four decades connecting their brand with celebrity razzmatazz.

Deutsch: Right. And now they have stopped.

Dr Pepper: They have stopped so now we can take over their equity?

Deutsch: Exactly! We’re like the equity zombie brand, just moving in and taking a bite of what they have and irrevocably making it ours in one fell swoop! It makes sense, buy the idea

Dr Pepper: I’m convinced. Let’s make ads.

Deutsch: Dr Dre is still relevant, right? What the hell, let’s start with him…

an improbably bad presentation

A very strange day at the Official Ad Agency of the Daily Biz today…a very strange day. One of those days where you walk in and your boss in a bad to volubly bad mood, your producer is in a volubly bad mood to such a bad mood she’s not even talking and the intern is hungover because they actually have a social life (whereas mine was given up to the golden god of advertising long ago).

That’s not the strange part.

Cranky ad people aren’t that unusual (I think that it’s because most people’s pants are too tight – not only is it demonstrably true by looking around you that most ad people wear pants that are too tight, tight pants make people irritable. That is a fact). What made the day strange is all the intrigue…a potential double-agent, a rollercoaster of emotion, no donuts or coffee for a morning meeting…

Let me set the scene.

Presentation of work to client. Main team is at the mothership, but one team member with a particularly close relationship with the client but not necessarily with the rest of the team (didn’t quite see eye-to-eye on what we were presenting) is at the client’s home base.

Presentation begins. Client is clearly distracted. Our team member is clearly the distractor.

Presentation continues. Isn’t going well. Is cut off early. Resumes a short time later. Shit show in full Barnum & Bailey glory. Drama onboard the mothership. Lots of putting the phone on mute and dropping f-bombs. At our own team member. Who people can assume is undermining us.

Presentation ends. Client makes immediate decisions. Decisions made are exactly what the account team guessed would happen and are in line with what the team would agree to.

Entire team walks out of the room with a bad taste in their mouth.

The clock strikes 9:30.

The day didn’t get any better.

the parker challenge nine months later

I so totally got called out it’s like I was pwned in a virtual call-out-a-palooza or something.

And it hurt. Because that’s what being pwned does to a person.

It hurts them.

It particularly hurt because I got called out in a post over at Tribble Ad Agency and that post was from the end of January. That’s right. Some nine months ago.

And in said post, I was tagged to write seven facts about myself if, to quote the author, “he could ever get me to post again.” It’s the Parker Challenge. And I was totally a part of it. Ish.

It may be late, but if we call the pub for an extension and push print production hard enough, I have no doubt that they’ll be able to fit my revised copy into a keyline, get final client approval and ship it out before it all goes to press. Seriously. I do it all the time and it’s always worked.

Though I do admit that this is a record for tardiness.

1. I would rather be no other place in the entire world in June than in Minneapolis.

2. I think that social media shiny baubles like Twitter, Facebook, etc are tactics, not a strategy.

3. I have reprints of the first print ads that I ever did framed and hung up on a wall. They are only six years old but feel as outdated Kerri Martin.

4. Bob Garfield remains among the most self-important blowhards I have had the pleasure of disliking. If it is true that you can judge a man by his enemies, he just went up in my estimation.

5. I may have told one person about my secret identity…and I shouldn’t have. She, possibly in cahoots with her friends, continually comment negatively on my blog. It’s kind of sad. But then again, blogging about advertising is also kind of sad, making it difficult to determine who wins this round.

6. Betty Draper is totally on my list.

7. If you want to order me a drink at the bar, please make it a vodka on the rocks with three olives.

Since I am so late to the game, I’m not going to tag any other bloggers…at least not for the next nine months until I get around to it.

ipg in danger of bankruptcy

So, here I am just poking around the internet as you do on a typical workday afternoon when I happen upon a Yahoo article about flailing companies…and what relevant-to-this-blog company do I find on that list?

Michael Rawth’s Interpublic Group.

IPG sits tenth on the list of companies deemed by Yahoo, using a very simple (to a fault among anyone more serious about economics than an ad blogger) formula that determines perceived bankruptcy risk among companies with a market cap over $3 billion.

Says Yahoo, “As one of the largest advertising and marketing companies in the world, IPG was slammed by the global recession…revenues have fallen double digits and the company’s exposure to General Motors as its largest client hasn’t helped.”

Luckily, I don’t think that anyone at an IPG agency expected a Christmas bonus anyway…

microsoft reminds me of me back in junior high

When I was in junior high, I was really uncool. No, no. Seriously.

I was so uncool that by the end of junior high, right before I escape to the blissfully fresh start that was a Catholic school over 30 miles away and people who didn’t know me during the “awkward years”, I was desperate and would actively try just about anything – a new look, a new feigned interest, whatever – to be cool. It was crazy, but I was desperate.

Like, Microsoft desperate.

As The Girl Riot notes, they are at it again with that whole desperately trying to be cool thing. This time, it’s with a t-shirt line called “Softwear.”

Really.

The one-trick pony boys over at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky are so intensely focused on the whiz-bang “we’ll make you famous” cool factory ethos that they have forgotten what gives Microsoft its only chance of true coolness. That is, the brand’s complete uncoolness.

Microsoft is like the guys from Superbad. The brand is a corduroy pants wearing, slightly overweight and shortsighted teenager standing up against the wall at a school dance.

Microsoft is the guy from the Mac vs PC commercials.

Microsoft is a sort of disheveled, pretty dumpy, good on the inside guy who is, after all, pretty likable and certainly familiar. In fact, I like how Apple has cast for the Microsoft brand more than Microsoft had. And I am sure that I am not the only one.

Microsoft is not a hipster (nice try, t-shirts). Microsoft is not cool (I don’t care if you are a PC Mr Random Famous Person). Microsoft is not going to be made relevant because it costs less than Apple (hey, thanks for reminding me that your product is cheap and not nearly as functional or as desirable! I totally wanted the budget brand choice! First class is for losers!):

Other than a deeply flawed strategy that has cheapened the brand and trained consumers that Microsoft/PC products are only good when they’re significantly cheaper than the competition (good luck with future profit margins), I really think that the Microsoft working coming out of Boulder is solid.

Really solid.

a real life ad. mostly.

I had occasion to drive downtown for three days in a row last week, each time parking in the same parking garage. And each time I drove past an absolutely filthy dirty Subaru.

The first day it was just dirty.

The second day, someone had written “wash me” on it. It was like the commercial (by Carmichael Lynch):

And then on the third day, as you would expect when you really think about it, someone drew a big penis in the dirt on the back window.

They must have cut that in edit.

intra-agency politics…do they matter?

The headline to this post sounds a fair bit ridiculous and completely out of place on this blog. The post is better than the headline, I promise. And there is no attempt to give actual advice, either.

The question springs from a situation that recently arose here at the Official Agency of Biz. As the financial picture for the agency worsened earlier this year, it looked like layoffs were imminent…a friend of mine, who was a fine worker but perhaps not the best at their position in the agency, was very concerned that she was on the chopping block.

To ruin the ending, she was.

A lower middle level worker who had been at the agency approaching five years – making her the agency equivalent of a car with 300,000 miles on the odometer (and not in any sexual way, though that could be a follow-up post…) – and having seen a lot of changes, including a wholesale change in the agency’s executive leadership and in her account’s leadership, she was continually worried that she was “old school” and “didn’t have any political cover.” And because of those reasons, she thought, she was certain for the chop.

It was an interesting redirection on the “last in, first out” theme.

And an especially interesting stance considering that there were more than a few hires at her level who were very new (under a year) and had been hired by the old executive team.

Apparently, her specific lack of internal political allies was going to mean the end of her time at the Official Agency of Biz.

Of course, she was laid off in the end. And the other more recently hired people were not.

So did it have to do with the fact that she had no political cover? Or was it simply because she wasn’t fully funded by agency accounts and wasn’t good enough to push another person at her level off of their account and into unemployment?

Not having been included in any of the decision-making process it is impossible to tell…but if I were to take a guess, and if I weren’t what would be the point of all the finely crafted build-up, but at the lower middle levels how do politics really matter?

I can certainly see how boardroom and holding company politics can determine who makes it to the C-level suites, but it is a real leap to think that there is much beyond performance and luck that is going into the layoff decision of someone at the lower levels. Sure, had she been on a different account that could have fully funded her position, perhaps she wouldn’t have been let go. Perhaps she was equal in terms of performance with someone with her job title on another account and she would have kept her job if her luck was better.

But was it because she had no political air cover?

Hardly. It was a fatal mix of lack of billability, performance compared to peers and simple bad luck. The balance of which is probably most clear to those who did her performance review (and is something that I don’t pretend to know).

A bummer, but hardly because she was “too old school” or “didn’t have anyone senior who had her back.”

Not that I wouldn’t try my hardest to make sure I have senior level support…