Middle managers should write more books: Thoughts on James P. Othmer’s Adland
James P. Othmer’s Adland is a humble book and you should buy and read it precisely because it is a humble book.
In its humility, it is an absolutely essential antidote to much of what currently passes itself off as thought leadership. It is the opposite of guru speak.
You can’t swing a dead paradigm these days without hearing advertising being dismissed. The problem with this isn’t that advertising isn’t guilty of any number of sins– ranging venality to inanity–which could plausibly justify its dismissal. The problem is that the people who feel the need to dismiss advertising also feel the need to distort advertising to the point of parody.
A recent blog post which otherwise seriously attempted to discuss the viability of the advertising concept of the Big Idea in the age of small media invoked Don Draper as a representative of contemporary advertising. To restate: a recent blog invoked a fictional character from 1961 as representative of actual advertising in 2009. This is a little like someone attempting to enter the health care debate by referencing Doc on Gunsmoke. (The sad thing is, I think there may have been a point beneath the parody.)
Here’s the deal: if I don’t trust your descriptions, I don’t trust your prescriptions.
I trust Othmer’s descriptions. It is not that Adland paints a happy picture of advertising. The industry Othmer describes features a sadly recognizable mix of foot-dragging and bandwagon jumping, ethical queasiness and intermittent inspiration.
The triumph of Adland is that he writes about his own experience in large old-line agencies with honesty and detail. In these passages, he writes as what we used to call a “do-ru”–i.e., as someone actually responsible for doing work.
He switches from memoirist to journalist, making a valiant effort to talk to the actual people doing the actual work that is contemporary advertising. He gets out there into the trenches. Is it his fault that the trenches in this case are conference rooms with lemon fizzy water and really good bagels?
He writes about a 2000 pitch in which Y and R –venerable or vestigial, depending on your perspective–scrambled to keep an account in the-then nascent digital age. He writes about what it is like to do a big commercial shoot on the beaches of Normandy and in post apartheid South Africa. He describes the feeling of trying to please a roomful of vulgar millionaires who have made their millions selling fried chicken. He takes the now received idea that the average consumer is bombarded with three figures worth of messages a day and catalogs his actual experience as a recipient of messages over the course of twenty four hours. He visits Leo Burnett, the people who gave us Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Dough Boy; he also visits the people who gave us the Subservient Chicken and the amazingly successful viral campaign for Trent Reznor.
In its humility Adland does precisely what George Orwell said writing should do in Politics and the English Language. He refuses slippery, self-serving abstractions. (Some readers may wish for Othmer to tease an ethical system out of his experience. I didn’t. For that. there’s John O’Toole’s The Trouble With Advertising.) He insists on language that describes recognizable, compromised, nuanced, sometimes cheery reality.
You might still dismiss advertising. Othmer did. He quit the business to become a novelist and journalist.
But you will dismiss the industry as it actually exists, not as the punchline at a social media conference.
Available Sept 15. Shout out to @commongoodbooks for the Advance Reader’s Copy
I sign onto Facebook and notice a friend of mine is a fan of Nick Hornby.
I realize: hey, I’m a fan of Nick Hornby, too!
When I click on his fan page, I further realize he has issued a third volume in the awesome Believer series of collected reviews/columns; this one has a rocking title: Shakespeare Wrote for Money. Having been completely sold on this by the previous volumes–holy smokes: a literary brand . . . a series with a distinct identity–I resolve to buy it.
On the way home from the grocery store, I stop at common good books (@commongoodbooks to you) and buy a copy.
There are all sorts of implications swirling around this, but I like to bring marketing down to moments because that’s what marketing is: a series of successful moments.
Three of those implications:
1. Social media is great for the arts, because people naturally talk about books and movies and music. They naturally become fans of authors.
2. This transaction, which took less than a day, was the culmination of a whole bunch of work on the part of Nick Hornby and the Believer. The brand–by which I mean a set of credible promises about quality and values signaled by smart graphic design–had spent years building in my head.
3. Would I have bought it at Common Good if they hadn’t been on twitter? Yes. They are my neighborhood bookstore. But twitter has somehow knitted me closer to them. I’ve gone from customer to champion.
Huggies: Poopface 3 | Print (image) | Creativity Online.
I recently suggested that advertising can thrive in the new media world if it cedes the consideration space in the marketing process to web sites and social media and focuses more on awareness. This means creating memorable images. You can’t get much more memorable than a baby’s poop face.
I also suggested that those of us who create advertising need to facilitate and filter the, let’s say, bounty of social media. Well, these photos of babies doing what babies do were provided by customers from a Flickr feed.
I suggested that ads need to distill the brand essence. This campaign contains three words: any time, anywhere.
Tip of the hat to @miamiadschool, for pointing me at this great campaign.
Advertising needs some PR. It’s been described as a tax on mediocrity and a sign of failure. I miss the good old days when I was just a prostitute.
Since we’re dismissing entire industries, a definition seems in order here. I define advertising as controlled messages in controlled media.
But I don’t think this is what the advertising-is-failure contingent is talking about. Google sells advertising, and I don’t think anyone would claim they sell failure. Geek Squad sprays its logo onto anything that moves and, as a part of Best Buy, promotes itself through television ads.
When people rag on advertising, they seem to be talking about what Luke Sullivan called hold-the-product-up-and-smile TV commercials. And that kind of advertising does seem to be in trouble, helped along by the recession. The print habitat of other ads has vanished.
For now, the web slogs along with a combination of what Jeff Jarvis usefully calls “goodwill content,” what I’ll call display window content (look at my thinking), branded entertainment, inspired amateurism, venture capital, and generally lousy ads. Mousy classifieds. Twitchy banners. Inert logos.
But I don’t think advertising is dead.
At some point, if we want magazine-like content, or if we simply want to keep the servers running, we either have to accept ads or pay for content. As with TV, we’ll do probably do a little of both.
And despite its promise, social media isn’t ready to replace advertising and, for deep structural reasons, I suspect it never will be.
Social media can be anti-social.
Like all media, social media has its drawbacks.
What I high mindedly call “the conversation” is the aggregate of blogs, blog comments, customer-generated reviews, social media status updates, forwarded videos of cats having bad days, chat rooms, user forums, and tweets. Some of this is an authentic back and forth between a brand and its customers. And some of the above is mean-spirited, banal, clueless, sub-literate, off-brand, outlying, spammy, covertly paid-for, of dubious provenance, and self-serving.
True word of mouth has its own problems. The “awesome doesn’t need advertising” model ignores the difference between high engagement and low engagement products. Going on about search engines may or may not be a sign of boorishness. Going on about toothpaste pretty much always is.
Such critiques also ignore the real function of advertising which is not to pour a good sauce on bad meat but to distill a brand essence and accelerate awareness. This role is perfectly compatible with energetic word of mouth and high product quality. Just ask Apple.
Less a paradigm shift than a paradigm nudge.
Advertising isn’t dying but it is changing.
Sought advertising is already becoming more powerful; bought advertising will become less powerful. And this isn’t just about YouTube. In the forthcoming Adland, James P Othmer talks about networks measuring how many viewers drop off during a commercial—and adjusting the price to reflect the ad quality.
Social media looks like it is forcing ads to be less puffy.
However flawed, “the conversation” can yield testimonials, insights, and, yes, engagement.
The possibilities are ridiculous: short films, custom games, cross media scavenger hunts, interactive narrative arcs, tweeted events, all sorts of branded grooviness.
The real message is not an obituary, but a challenge: be remarkable, be honest, be attentive, be thoughtful about media.
Well. If I must.
Thanks to Glenn Hilton for pointing me to the study cited above. For a great review of the possibilities of our new media world look at Othmer’s book or Juicing The Orange by Pat Fallon and Fred Senn.
Something has changed in the past months: I don’t suffer gurus lightly. Catch phrases catch in my throat.
Pronouncements such as “Advertising is a failure” and “Information wants to be free” get me agitated. And when I get agitated, I know it’s time to ask myself: what’s really going on.
After all:
Free is neither new nor radical. Any 50s housewife who sampled the latest TV dinner at the Supermarket before going home to watch the Texaco Star Theater could have told you that. I am writing this essay for free.
After all:
Fallon was calling out the big advertisers for their failed imaginations and inflated budgets in 1981. Twenty years before that, Bernbach insisted that good advertising made bad products fail faster.
Some business authors have always nonchalantly tossed around ideas. In the 90s, every business was expected to emulate Starbucks and provide a semi-theatrical premium-priced retail experience. If you whined “but we make widgets and compete on price,” you were soundly thwacked.
And yet I’m still mad.
Here is why: We are in a recession. I have never had so many friends out of work.
So when a blogger insists that the New York Times decision to charge for online content is a “devolution,” I think: how is a country which thinks journalists shouldn’t be able to pay their mortgages more evolved? Who pays the rent on that African bureau?
When Jeff Jarvis announces that “advertising is a failure,” I think of friends waking at four in the morning hoping there won’t be more layoffs.
I don’t want happy talk. If anything, it’s even more important to say what is broken.
In other times, I would regard many of our current memes as sloppy but suggestive. Advertising is failure? Yes, a world in which sought messages compete with bought messages is an improvement. Yes, advertising has been nudged to the awareness end of the marketing spectrum as forums and sites occupy the consideration space. That’s a far cry from failure, though.
I am less patient these days. Now, speaker-fee-inflating, book-promoting, blog-ready aphorisms just feel reckless.
Notes: I cannot for the life of me locate the blog post which referred to the New York Times decision to charge for online content as a devolution. I hope I imagined it, although hallucinating blog posts would be a new low. And tip of the hat to @jmctigue who suggested in a tweet that the responsibility of thought leaders at the present time might be an interesting topic.
After a morning of hunching and squinting, I wolfed down some lunch, flopped on the couch, and opened Wired.
I’d had enough of the internet’s version of good enough: the templated blog designs, the unedited writing, the amateur video, the stock photos, the self-serving research, the email pings and update interruptions, the twitchy or pinched ads. Most of all, I’d had enough of the internet’s content. Too much of the supposedly cutting-edge thinking I’d encountered had the stale recirculated quality of airplane air.
As I began flipping through Wired, two things occurred to me: 1) I love magazines.
And 2) Chris Anderson is a great ink-on-dead-trees-for-money magazine editor.
With my head on a pillow and my legs stretched out, I learned about Muslim contributions to science; Google’s ad pricing formula; various tubes including OrigamiTube; an array of super-duper vacuums; and a new album by David Lynch, one of the guys from Gnarls Barkley, and some producer I’d never heard of but who seemed cool. The world seemed a wonderful place in the original sense of the term: full of wonders.
Many of the ads did not suck, and they all paid their way.
I was reminded of what editors can do. They can prompt, subsidize, gather, challenge, filter, distill, enhance, orchestrate, and present writing like no one else. They can make thought pieces punchier and fact pieces smoother.
Thanks to the editors at the New Yorker–another magazine on my coffee table that day–I remember phrases from movie reviews and I get to the end of multi-thousand word profiles of disgraced banking CEOs, scientists who wrote their dissertation on the Venusian climate, and obscure federal agency heads.
And yet I have heard a smugness that verges on glee when some “old media” that doesn’t “get it” stumbles.
Yes, the web may usefully replace many trade pubs and glorified catalogs. While the job losses are tragic, the correction may be needed.
But to say that the web in anything like its current form replaces what the best editors do at the best print magazines is to misunderstand the web itself. The web is a place to search and scan, archive and converse, annotate and link, purchase and complain. But it is not anywhere close to recreating the experience of reading Wired or the New Yorker, even though those publications are online.
To dismiss those ad-funded, gate-keeping, paper-based, pleasantly floppy and portable marvels as “old media,” and to take any satisfaction in their troubles, is to applaud the destruction of a part of Western Civilization.
Modern advertising was born in 1905 when John E. Kennedy defined advertising as “salesmanship in print.” Over the years, the media expanded, but the definition endured. In the 1960s, Bill Bernbach, the driving force behind the Creative Revolution, reminded us: “Today everybody is talking ‘Creativity,’ and frankly, that’s got me worried. I fear lest we keep the good taste and lose the sell. . . I fear that we may be entering an age of phonies.”
I have been wondering how Billy Mays could sell so hard and still be so likeable. I was wondering why, when a local package design firm asked me to come up with some package copy for a product of his, I thought: “Cool.” I was wondering why ESPN, which does some of the best advertising being created today, used him to introduce its internet offerings.
The answer is simple enough: Billy Mays was no phony.
He reminded me that the moral difference that really matters isn’t the difference between hard sell and soft sell.
The moral difference that matters is this: do you believe in your product or don’t you?
When he was a young printer, Benjamin Franklin formed a private forum called The Junto for discussion, brainstorming and the occasional sharing of essays. In Franklin’s words, its discussion were “to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory . . .”
An abridged list of the questions which Franklin drew up to guide the Junto’s discussions included:
- Have you met with any thing in the author you last read, remarkable, or suitable to be communicated to the Junto? . . .
- Have you lately heard of any citizen’s thriving well, and by what means?
- Do you know of any fellow citizen, who has lately done a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation?
- Do you think of any thing at present, in which the Junto may be serviceable to mankind? to their country, to their friends, or to themselves?
- Hath any deserving stranger arrived in town since last meeting?
- Do you know of any deserving young beginner lately set up, whom it lies in the power of the Junto any way to encourage?
- Have you lately observed any defect in the laws, of which it would be proper to move the legislature an amendment? Or do you know of any beneficial law that is wanting?
- Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?
- In what manner can the Junto, or any of them, assist you in any of your honourable designs?
- Have you any weighty affair in hand, in which you think the advice of the Junto may be of service?
- Do you see any thing amiss in the present customs or proceedings of the Junto, which might be amended?
Switch out “Twitter” for “Junto” and it’s kind of startling. I suspect that even if a consumer twitter account becomes the pet rock of social media–everyone has one, no one knows what to do with it–I think this essentially b2b use will endure.
Inspired by my reading of Walter Isaacson’s engrossing biography of Franklin.
I originally loved the Bing ads. They tapped into a strong emotion: my dissatisfaction with the self-satisfaction of the “information age.”
We have glibly tossed around the abstraction “information.” (I do mean “we.” I am complicit in this.)
In theory, information enlightens us. In fact, we’ve created a wasteland of porn, Gong show-quality YouTube videos, sometimes grubby commerce, strings of hateful and sub-literate blog comments, rumors, and mediocre opining.
As we swam in all this “information,” those of us in America made a whole bunch of awful decisions.
When the Microsoft manifesto commercial tapped into this discrepancy—vast information, crap decisions—they struck a deep chord. Advertisers have tapped into deep emotions before. Nike sells shoes, but the subtext of its ads is “sport is religion.”
The problem is: you aren’t tapping into an emotion. You are highlighting a problem. You then need to solve the problem. Bing doesn’t, at least not in any way I can discern, although it does have some cool features.
In fact, no search engine can solve the problem of bad decision making.. Search engines cannot give us wisdom, experience, ethics, rigor, or a tradition of fiduciary responsibility.
That is what educational systems are for. That is what cultures are for.
Twitter seems built for arts organizations. They have small budgets, but those budgets are offset by passionate audiences, rich content, and articulate employees. Yet I see arts organizations fumble and sometimes even offend people on twitter.
An arts organization on twitter is like a politician on the campaign trail. You are forming a number of micro-relationships (Bill Clinton joke here) which you hope will lead to a vote, an advocate, a donation, a commitment, or an ally.
Politicians have seconds with the average voter. But in that time, the good ones seem glad to see you and willing to hear you. They hold your name in short-term memory. (The great ones hold it in long-term memory.)
Bad politicians make a show of asking for your vote but you can feel them looking over your shoulder because they just saw one of their politico buddies.
Too many art organizations are like bad politicians. They only want to talk to their buddies. They are missing opportunities to turns wisps of good feeling into true support.
I will offer up my own pettiness for the greater good here. When you ask me to spread the word about your theater festival, and I do, and you then can’t be bothered to follow me back, I am offended. When I have purchased and tweeted about your books, and I serve on the board of another literary organization in your town, and I follow you: follow me back.
You need to have a strategy for following people and I would suggest that it needs to be much more inclusive than exclusive. You do not need to follow everyone who follows you. Twitter is filled with hustlers and people who seem to relish racking up quantities of irrelevant followers. But if people show a legitimate interest in the arts, follow them. If they show interest in your organization, engage them. If they do something nice for you—a kind word, a retweet–thank them.
Finally, think about the people who are representing you. If the staff you have assigned to manage your twitter accounts are snubbing people when they should be charming them, give them a chance to reconsider their approach. This stuff seems obvious to me, but it may not be obvious to everyone. If they still don’t get twitter, assign them other tasks.
Credit: Carnivale-Carnival parade : The handshake. on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.
