enabling advertising lies

From time to time when I tell someone that I work in advertising, I have to deal with complaints about how advertising is just misleading and that brands and agencies lie and so on and on (and on and on and on). From my side of the fence, of course, I am not only trying not to be untruthful but struggle every day with overbearing legal departments that basically do the copywriting for me, telling me what I can say and how I can say it (at least in certain categories).

Most recently, my grandmother asked me how it was possible for the tiny Smart car to get the highest possible crash test rating.

I looked it up and yes, this gas-powered Power Wheels of a car was awarded the highest-possible score for crashworthiness in frontal and side-impact collisions by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

Without further research, it is plausible to assume, as my grandmother did, that the Smart car rates as well as, say, the 5,000 lb Mercedes C-Class that my grandfather bought her for their 50th wedding anniversary. It doesn’t really gut check that it is possible that these two cars could be equally as safe in front and side crashes, but if the government says so…

Except what the IIHS and the government aren’t telling you is that they rank cars only against others of the same type…so that while the Smart car may be the safest car in the MicroMachine category it is hardly safe compared to much larger, heavier cars.

A brand or an ad agency can advertise an IIHS rating, content that they are being honest in what they are doing – and they are – and yet still be misleading.

Because they are, unwittingly, being misleading.

It would be far more reasonable, honest and informative to have an objective standard by which to judge all cars against each other (and not just against cars in its class) so that consumers could make an informed choice…

An appropriate rating scale could effectively warn consumers of the inherent safety trade-off they make when they choose a smaller car (they may still make the trade-off, which is fine, but at least they know it is a trade-off) instead of, how the current system does it, making consumers blissfully unaware that their ridiculous little Smart car, despite its “good” rating, is likely to be squashed like a bug if it runs into anything larger than a bike messenger.

It may not make environmentalists happy as the scale would clearly show that a person is much less likely to die in an accident in a full-sized car than a compact or subcompact, surely driving at least a few consumers to purchase a larger car, but it would be truthful.

And truth is advertising is supposed to be a good thing.

richards group gave home depot some discipline

Home Depot used to be big time. Sure, it still is in terms of turnover and position on the Fortune 500, but there was a time when people were simply Apple-style passionate about shopping at Home Depot. And to work there, that was even better.

Bob Nardelli, now running Chrysler into the ground, shook the place up, moved away from some of the core tenets that made Home Depot great and left the place worse than it was before he got there.

If you know anyone with Home Depot connections, you know that he’s not exactly an Atlanta favorite.

Nardelli is out and now it looks like Richards Group, Dallas, is going to be out as well. As AdPulp reports, Home Depot is working with consultants as it prepares to put all aspects of its half-billion dollar communications business into review.

From a creative advertising perspective, Richards Group did functional work:

Retail is always challenging to advertise for, though Target is an example of where smart thinking and creativity can break through, and Home Depot’s ads always left me thinking that there was an opportunity missed. Especially in Home Depot’s heyday, when there was so much passion about the brand that was just never taken advantage of.

Balancing that out to some extent is my love for the Home Depot jingle/music bed.

Every time a Home Depot spot ran, I immediately knew what brand it was for even if I wasn’t looking at the television, and the homey, Americana sound fit perfectly into the idea of Home Depot helping the common man build his home and achieve the American Dream.

Richards Group and Home Depot marketing were disciplined about building the brand on the back of this memorable tune and sticking with it long enough for it to become ubiquitous and instantly memorable – which in this day and age of brand managers bouncing around from here to there like Hollywood starlets, each wanting to put their own special little stamp on the marketing, it saying a lot for their rigor and focus.

And it is the reason why, though the spots won’t ever win any awards, I like them.

It’s smart, disciplined advertising.

car guys & more on traffic

Some years ago when Fallon still had the BMW account and I still worked at Fallon, a very good account guy on the interactive side of the business confided that he desperately wanted to get onto a new account because we was worried that he would soon be pigeonholed as “a car guy.”

Looking at the Tom Cordner, who has started up new Mitsubishi agency Traffic, that may not be a bad thing.

Cordner had previously worked at Ford while at JWT and on Lexus while at Team One (an agency that he actually founded). Certainly, he was more senior that this account guy, but there is clearly the opportunity to make something happen with a little bit of expertise in a category like automotive.

Just ask Tom Cordner.

The problem with car advertising, of course, is that there are far too many makes and models of cars out there so it’s really boom and bust based on fads. Take the SmartCar, for example:

I don’t care what you may have thought on your trip to Europe when you saw these zipping around the cobbled streets of Milan and parking perpendicular to a parallel-parked Maserati, these cars suck.

This is America. The land of big cars and wide-open spaces. While it may make sense to drive this car among the Vespas of the world, you are going to die in even a minor brush with a Yukon…and even a 4Runner or a BMW 5 Series. For savings of, what, maybe $200 a year over a real car like a Mazda, you can drive a ridiculous-looking death trap with no actual space for regular-sized Americans or anything larger than a cup of coffee.

On a positive note, you can lord it over your friends that you drive such a trendy car.

Do it quickly though so you can get your smugness in before you get totaled in a head-on collision with a bike messenger.

Car purchases, which you would expect to be very rational and planned out, are really just big-ticket impulse buys. With the long life of each model (about 3 years before a facelift, 7 years total before a redesign as a rough industry average) based on manufacturing considerations, advertising and branding is critical to keep moving metal if you’re not a passion brand or a fad car.

Mitsubishi is neither and Traffic have their work cut out for them.

subaru’s lemon & the power of advertising

I was walking around town yesterday when, while patiently waiting at an intersection, a Subaru Tribeca passed directly in front of me. Leave aside for a second that the Tribeca is one of the least attractive cars being sold in America today:

The Tribeca was covered with graffiti, presumably applied by the owner, that said “Subaru’s [sic] suck,” had a big picture of a lemon and included, on the other side of the car, additional anti-Subaru slogans that I couldn’t read but am sure were of the same level of discourse.

That’s not quite what “it’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru” is supposed to invoke.

At a certain point there are always going to be people who make purchases that they may end up regretting…and all the advertising in the world is going to struggle to convince people who have regrets and those that trust the opinion of the consumers with regrets that the brand in question is a good brand.

No amount of messaging tweaking or innovative media placement or outreach will really help, though those things may make it harder for people to be convinced that the brand is bad if the advertising is strong.

Take Apple, for example, which sold me a lemon of a MacBook (it has been serviced by Apple twice in three months and just crashed again this weekend, erasing my hard drive and, in a fit of pique, my external hard drive that I had connected when it crashed). Even as I write of this frustration, Mac users are happily considering me an anomaly.

Now imagine if the computer in question were a Dell.

Or I was talking about cars like I was before…and the brand was Toyota instead of Subaru.

My brother used to work summers at a Dodge dealership near our house and the running joke when that the clutch could actually fall out of a Toyota and consumers would think that it was just regular maintenance but if a Dodge needed an oil change consumers were bitching about what a crappy car Dodge was.

And that is the power of advertising.

wpp’s new name for project davinci

WPP’s new agency created just for Dell, the former Project DaVinci, has been officially named Synarchy…noting the vague similarity to anarchy and having the tickle of a memory from a history class long ago in my head I looked up the word to see what it meant, exactly.

The short definition is “rule by a secret elite.”

If that doesn’t just define most ad agencies, especially huge, faceless and leaderless conglomerations like Project DaVinci/Synarchy, then nothing does. In the case of Synarchy, which does not have a CEO yet, the elite that is running the place is even more secretive than usual…which is making recruiting an issue.

Anecdotally, a number of people that I know were willing to keep an open mind about the place pending who ran it (advertising is all about your connections, and if your guy is on top then it makes sense to fall in with him). But there is nobody running it. So they are staying on the fence. As are, based on the challenges Synarchy is having in staffing out, a lot of other people.

So who are the cabal in charge of the synarchic Synarchy?

Living up to the awful name, it’s a secret.

(There are additional meanings to the word, including a connection to European fascism through Vichy France. Which is nice.)

yellowbook rebrands (and even adds some utility)

Yellowbook, the former Yellow Book, has re-branded itself. No, I am not sure what the difference is either, but the brand says that it is supposed to be sleeker to position it as a “forward-thinking, innovative digital force.”

The new tagline “say yellow to the future” is apparently going to further this goal.

A new ad campaign by Gotham is helping to support the re-branding and get the digitally-focused super-futuristic look out there.

They just don’t want to get it too far out there…the spots are not on YouTube yet. Instead, they are housed at the completely unhelpful and difficult to navigate corporate website right here.

The key change, and the one that is best positioned to help Yellowbook moving forward, is the newly designed print directories and redesigned user interface at yellowbook.com because, let’s be honest, difficulty of use is the major reason that most people skip the yellow pages these days. It’s just easier to type the name into Google.

No advertising campaign, no matter how good (or, in the case of the current campaign by Gotham, no matter how much it over-promises) can overcome the fact that Yellowbook has just been tough to use.

The paper phone books are bulky and annoying and the brand blew its position as “grand compiler of information” by letting search engines steal a march on it.

I remember clear as day when I first started searching on the internet how I used to go to places like yellowpages.com to find things and was frustrated by how difficult it was. Then Google came into my life and I have never been back to a yellow pages site.

If Yellowbook can fix the utility issue and make their product something that consumers actually want to use, then they have a chance at success. If they can’t, then this campaign is just throwing good money after bad.

fake brands that aren’t really fake

With how much it costs to launch a brand these days, why not make the most of those fake brands that are created just for movies so asked Pete Hottelet, creator of the real-life version of Sex Panther cologne and Branwdo energy drink? It certainly lessens the amount of money that one has to spend to raise awareness, especially for products like Sex Panther that have already gained pop culture awareness from the movie.

AdPulp likes the idea, saying that there’s nothin’ stupid about capitalizing on a fake brand.

I say that the brand isn’t fake and the real nothin’ stupid is putting manufacturing and a product behind an already-built brand.

New York Times magazine has the full story, concentrated on the launch of Brawndo energy drink from the more “Idiocracy.”

Hottelet is working with Redux Beverages to develop and get to market the actual product, which apparently contains electrolytes and is “alarmingly bright green, as in the movie.” Yum.

Jamey Kirby, who runs Redux, says the brand is “all about overcommercialization.”

Apparently some people are into that. They are probably being ironic.

The video ads on the Brawndo site, commissioned by Hottelet, feature members of Picnicface, a Canadian comedy troop, shouting hilariously over-the-top pitches: “It’s like a monster truck you pour into your face!”

What a fantastic idea. Again, the marketing has pretty much already been done for these guys…sure, they probably want to do some work to make sure that consumers don’t see their product as purely a novelty (though it sort of is and it may be more profitable to just accept it and run in-and-outs…ask a Brand Manager to run some numbers for you on that), but why not run on the coattails of movies that have pop culture traction?

It cuts advertising and branding agencies out of the picture, which sucks, but otherwise the idea is brilliant.

cadbury goes wacky with its marketing

I know that I shouldn’t do another post on Cadbury Schweppes because cheap publicity is what they after (and it doesn’t come cheaper than me), but yet again the marketing folks there have done something that I just can’t ignore. Even though I really want to.

In USA Today yesterday, which I read as I repurposed it into packing material for my move, had a short snippet about Cadbury “going wacky” with their marketing.

According to a press release last week that referred to the UFO-like lights over Phoenix in late April, the lights were hostile aliens “here to eat us” and that “the best thing to do to appease these creatures” is give them 7UP. Worst case: “They’ll have something naturally delicious to wash us down with.”

First of all, this whole idea is not funny. It is the anti-funny. It kills funny with a blunt instrument and then cuts up its body and distributes it in wax paper to members of funny’s family.

Second, this marketing plan includes only a PR blast and a shipment of 7UP to “possible alien landing sites” in Phoenix and Orlando…making it completely irrelevant to, um, anyone in terms of being interesting or offering an incentive immediate purchase.

According to USA Today, Sean Gleason, head of the team that dreams up the tongue-in-cheek reactions, says it’s been a cost-effective way to get his brands noticed. “We don’t have the budgets that the big guys do. We have to make every single marketing dollar work even harder.”

I am not sure how a crazy stunt supported only by PR will maximize return on your investment, especially with your average 7UP consumer who is clearly not reading USA Today or the PR Newswire.

I do know, however, that it will get a blurb in USA Today. That is great insofar as it lets people like Sean Gleason show off to his affluent white male business friends who would never in a million years put down their Vitamin Water or Scotch for something as plebian as a 7UP but do respect the fact that yet again Mr Gleason was covered in the newspaper…it’s just not going to sell any more 7UP.

Neither is the Guns N’ Roses stunt. Or, for that matter, any other crazy stunt that results in some limited PR coverage and a blurb for Mr Gleason in USA Today.

These things don’t sell soda.

They also don’t build the brand. Nor do they get your brands noticed because your target isn’t reading USA Today or PR Newswire or the Business section of the local paper that has two sentences about advertising once a week. And ridiculous one-off stunts certainly don’t change preference or create an impulse for consumers to buy now. They have no effect on consumer behavior.

But, again, they do get Sean Gleason a mention in USA Today.

expedia and the kingdom of bad movie promotions

A friend of mine is getting married this summer and, of course, the wedding is going to be in a place, southern California in this case, that requires a flight. Not that I particularly mind, but I kinda do. It would be much more convenient if he were to just get married in Midtown Manhattan. Even southern Connecticut would work.

At any rate, I was poking around the travel sites and clicked over to Expedia where I saw this example of terrible creative:

Having heard the rumors about how difficult Lucasfilm and Harrison Ford are to work with, I can only hope that Expedia and their agency Wunderman were forced into the ridiculous silhouette image of Indiana Jones that looks like it was done by my sister using MS Paint.

But the creative is not the only complaint about this program.

I hate, hate, websites that have interrupters like this that pop up onto my screen. I know that there is a skip button, however by the time that it popped up I had already partially filled in the destination area on the left and the has to sit, irritated, while this crap played on the screen. It is the anti-utility and no amount of sweepstakes promotion will make me feel okay about the time lost to this.

Additionally, tying in to a movie like Indiana Jones is a really bad idea for Expedia:
1. Everyone is doing it. Kellogg’s, M&Ms, Snickers and Burger King are all partners and they are sure to outspend Expedia. If anything, consumers will think that your messaging is their messaging.

2. It won’t drive short-term volume because, so far, there is no way for consumers to find out that Expedia is involved with the movie than if they go to the Expedia site. At that point, a sweeps entry is unlikely to convince consumers to buy from them if their price isn’t comparable to, say, Travelocity.

3. The “Summer of Adventure” promotion is a nice theme that fits with a travel company, but it isn’t differentiating. Any travel company could say that, just like any company can tie in with this movie, just like this is a bad idea.

4. If it’s not a price promotion, people don’t care (at least online). People go to sites like Expedia to look for price deals, not for a chance to enter a sweeps. Yes, there are some travel deals that are on sale (including places like Montreal that have absolutely nothing to do with Indiana Jones), but with all the Indiana Jones messaging, that gets lost. If the goal is short-term sales, just tell me that it’s a huge summer sale. If the goal is branding, there are better and more differentiating ways to do it than throwing money at Indiana Jones and a washed-up Harrison Ford.

killing the snapple brand softly

Snapple use to be a fun, innovative brand. It had great advertising with the Snapple woman, Howard Stern loved it and it seemed primed for bigger and better things…then it was sold and sold again and under the aegis of Cadbury Schweppes, it seems, to paraphrase one commenter, primed for sale to Coke or Pepsi.

Where to start? Maybe at the dated, still-not-redesigned packaging for the core product:

This is the best part of their product line-up because, though old, at least the design and logo are recognizable as Snapple. Especially the logo. There is a lot of equity in that logo…equity that the brand is stepping away from in their new Juice (that isn’t 100% juice) product:

Crappy vertical Snapple type, no more blue or red, no oval around the type. Completely forgettable. Oh, and still on shelf next to the base product…and next to the new Antioxidant Water product. Not only is this clearly a Glaceau knock-off, not only is it late to the game, not only does the label look like a cheap sales sample because of the heavy paper and crappy glue, but it has a different logo than the above products even though it sits on shelf next to them:

Let’s finish it off with the fourth product in the Snapple line-up. Also boasting a different logo treatment, the new Tea products actually taste good, but still have to sit on shelf next to the other Snapple products even though it looks nothing like any of the others. This is Branding 101. Snapple fails:

Maybe if Snapple had a bigger budget they could pull off creating all of the sub-brands as separately branding entities…but that’s a stretch. Not even Coca-Cola strays too far from the fonts and colors that make products identifiably Coke. They do that because it makes sense, because consumers want recognizable brands and products and because if they are going to spend a shit ton of money to build a brand they don’t plan to throw it away with a product design that doesn’t connect to the brand they have built.

These packages are atrocious not because they are bad designs, though it doesn’t really help Snapple’s case that they are, but because consumers driven to buy (or driven to passive preference) via advertising end up on shelf not knowing what the hell is going on.

To top it all off a little Plano-based birdie tells me that Cadbury Schweppes’ in-house production and pre-press shop Group 360, which brands itself as a digital asset management and workflow solutions shop and whose in-every-way-horrible website tells you all you need to know about the agency’s design capabilities, is going to be handling the base Snapple packaging redesign.

Not a bad gig for a bunch of low-rent studio artists and totally fitting for what the brand has become.

It’s just too bad that it’s gotten this far.