Among my many blessings, I am particularly grateful for long-time customers like Monika Palmore at Greasebusters. This Rockville, MD-based commercial kitchen cleaning and fire prevention firm hired Julie & Company over a decade ago to create a new brand and website. Since that time, Greasebusters has grown like gangbusters. If you've visited a national chain like McDonalds, TGIFridays, or Bob Evans, Greasebusters has probably cleaned that kitchen exhaust system. The company also works with privately owned restaurants, government facilities, hospitals, and other commercial eating establishments, too.
Since I redesigned the corporate site a couple of years ago, the company has expanded even further. Greasebusters now offers a full-fledged franchising program throughout the United States. The program's new website, GreasebustersFranchise.com, launched this morning. Targeted to potential franchisees, the site provides information about the Greasebusters brand, corporate history and values, the franchise program, and available territories. Greasebusters now offers franchises in every state and in Vancouver, Canada, too.
I designed the new website to be responsive, which means that the site automatically displays optimally for the device on which its being displayed. The image below shows how it displays on a desktop computer.
But on an iPhone, the website reconstitutes optimally for a smaller screen size.
I also designed the site for the WordPress content management system which allows authorized staff members to make changes from any web browser and improves search engine placement.
If you know people who are looking to be their own boss, have them check out GreasebustersFranchise.com. Or for business owners who need superlative branding and website design, visit www.julieandcompany.com or call 301-330-9353.
Since 1989, Absolute Pressure Cleaning Equipment has provided a variety of high pressure cleaning equipment, accessories, cleaning detergents and supplies for professional industrial and commercial cleaning companies.
The BEFORE Website
The Problem
Absolute spent several years working with ineffective and unprofessional web design companies. The company's most recent website:
Offered incredibly ineffective branding that made the company look like a provider of pressure washing services rather than a distributor of professional cleaning equipment
Made the company indistinguishable from its competitors
Relied on the look and feel of John Deere, the farm equipment company, further confusing potential customers
The AFTER Website
The Solution, by Julie & Company
After losing both time and money, Absolute hired Julie & Company to to build a compelling branding and web presence. Julie & Company:
Created a new logo that rebranded Absolute and set it apart from its competition
Focused on the company’s commitment to selling US-manufactured products
Provided detailed pages that feature the company’s equipment, accessories, and detergents
Delivered visually interesting experience for potential customers
The Client Says
Over the past four years, Absolute has worked with a number of web companies who just could not get the job done. Our owner is hard to please, but these companies did a terrible job, too. Julie & Company, as per usual, did a spectacular job with the branding and website – our owner is 100 percent happy, which I hope you take as a HUGE compliment because it is.
Every sport strives to avoid the loser's L. Super Bowl 50 is no exception. To avoid connotations of defeat, the NFL has drop-kicked L, the Roman numeral for 50, in favor of the numeric 50.
Photo credit: NFL/ABC News
Since Super Bowl V in 1971, the NFL has used only Roman numerals to indicate the number of the Super Bowl being played. This system remained unchanged, even for potentially controversial numbers like XXX, which is 30 in Roman numerals but is also a generally accepted symbol of erotic content.
In 2016, however, the NFL will instead use Arabic numbering for the Super Bowl. The San Francisco host committee lobbied the NFL to use Arabic numbers instead of the L, a well-recognized symbol of losers and losing. The NFL has indicated that, after 50, it will return to Roman numerals, starting with Super Bowl LI in 2017.
Most official materials for the Super Bowl will now use the Super Bowl logo with 50 in the background, rather than the L. Some variations of the 50 logo designs will include icons from the San Francisco skyline around the Lombardi Trophy, which has itself only been a part of the logo since 2010.
Susan Coll, the best-selling author of books like Beach Week, Acceptance, and Rockville Pike, is publishing her latest book, The Stager, this spring. It's a comedy of rabbits and real estate in the D.C. suburbs. As the book description on Amazon states, "Questions of friendship, loyalty, fidelity, sobriety, and sanity are raised to hilarious effect in this dark comedy of how we live now in the age of planned communities, cookie-cutter mansions, and cutthroat careerism." Sounds like the burbs to me.
I've worked with Susan for years. I met her during a book club discussion of Rockville Pike and built her first website soon after. With the release of each of her new books, I update the site. This time, I moved her website to the WordPresscontent management system and freshened up the look and feel. "This is a fabulous web site. Truly, you did a fantastic
job! Thank you so much," she wrote this morning.
Also new this week is new branding and website for Opulent Beverages, a relatively new drink distributor based in the MidAtlantic. Opulent's product lines include several high-end waters, fruit juices, and health drinks. I had a ball developing the brand with the president, Tonya Davis. I wanted to give her a fresh, retro, and classic look that would set her apart from her competition.
Tonya is happy, as evidenced by her most recent message: "The website looks great! Color, contrast, font sizes and space all work together, creating a polished look." In the near future, I hope to add e-commerce to the site as well as a separate login area for her wholesale customers.
Today I'm proud to announce the launch of our latest new branding and website, PlateSafe Locks, a new security device created by one of our favorite clients, Shawn Mahaney of RestoreATag. Shawn, literally the world's best antique license plate restorer, developed these U.S. patented, tamper-resistant locks to address the growing problem of license plate theft, which has risen by an astounding 36 percent in the United States.
PlateSafe Locks can be used on any vehicle, including antiques. They are also useful around the home, at work, or in any commercial application where items are secured by mounting screws or bolts.
Shawn has made RestoreATag such a tremendous success. I look forward to seeing his PlateSafe Locks in auto parts and home improvement stores across the country.
Congratulations, Shawn, and thanks for your business!
Is there anything I love more than dogs? No. I love dogs more than anything, especially my dog, Moose. He's the love of my life (and that doesn't take anything away from my boyfriend, btw).
When Dr. Susie Homire contacted me about branding and web design for her dog behavior consulting company, Lead Your Pack, I was delighted. Finally! A chance to work with dogs. Creating her logo and look and feel were truly an act of love. In fact, that was the goal: show that love of all canines is at the heart of Susie's work.
Frustrated and frightened dog owners come to Susie looking for strategies to relieve their dogs' aggression toward other people or dogs, fear, home destruction, and more. Susie works closely with the owners to develop the just-right solutions to their dogs' particular issues. She teaches them to lead their pack with confidence, love, and understanding, whether they have one dog or 10.
I was happy to sneak a pug in this design - it's not my pug, but it's the next best thing. And he's yawning no less - my dog spends a third of his life yawning, a third sleeping, and a third begging for food. Maybe I ought to call Susie Homire. :-)
As a devout knitter, nothing is more fun than designing for a knitwear designer. This is especially the case for Julia Farwell-Clay. I've loved her work since she first hit the scene with her innovative, inherently wearable sweater patterns. Julia designed my favorite cardigan, the Hiro - I loved making it and I love wearing it. I'm knitting another of her sweaters right now. Julia just rocks.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with Julia to create a fresh, fun brand that expresses her unique design sensibility. The website literally puts her terrific patterns front and center and makes it easy for knitters to both explore her work and purchase her patterns.
The website uses a WordPress content management system, which makes it easy for Julia to maintain the site herself and to blog, too.
If you're looking to make an amazing sweater, check out www.juliafarwellclay.com. Or contact Julie & Company today to give your company a new look or a new website.
Few elections in life end with a unanimous vote. People come to their ballot box with different experiences, childhoods, and educations. But if you ask a man to vote for his favorite color, you are bound to get the same response: BLUE.
I make this observation after almost two decades in business. As an expert logo designer, I've never had a man tell me his favorite color is violet, fuchsia, or orange. Or even azure, beryl, sapphire, or cerulean for that matter. He likes blue and he wants his logo to be blue, too.
To prove my point, check out just some of the world's most famous blue logos. Behind each one of them, I'm willing to bet there's a dude whose favorite color is blue.
From the Washington Post, June 6, 2013, by Tom Jackman
Prince William County’s new two-blue-square logo is being pulled down from county letterhead and signs, county clothes and county vehicles after the Board of Supervisors decided Tuesday it wasn’t ready for prime time, yet. Supervisor John Jenkins (D-Neabsco) said the public hadn’t had a chance to weigh in on the logo, and “I didn’t want to see us bring some kind of logo out here that had no meaning to the people of Prince William County.”
Supervisor Peter Candland (R-Gainesville) said the logo should articulate the identity of the county, not just be a symbol. “This logo was meant to mean something,” Candland said.
So the board, in addition to issuing a “cease, desist and rescind” directive to county staff, ordered up a work session for July 16, to decide the next step in rebranding the county.
County communications director Jason Grant said the logo was developed as part of a process to unify Prince William’s marketing approach. A design firm in Michigan, familiar to Prince William economic development official Brent Heavner who previously worked in Michigan, was enlisted to come up with a design, and agreed to do it for $750, Grant said. Board members wondered Tuesday why a local company couldn’t have been involved.
Grant said the design was shown to all the supervisors except Jenkins, and that most approved. But Jenkins felt the board should have voted on it and allowed the public to participate in the process. He was surprised to see it starting to turn up all over the county without a board vote or a public hearing. “The approval process,” Jenkins said, “just bothers the dickens out of me.”
Jenkins’ directive to suspend use of the logo was based in part on the public’s “overall dislike for the design of the proposed logo.” As proof, he cited a Washington Post online poll from these very environs, where 70 percent of the 400-plus respondents voted, “It’s bad. Start over.” Seventeen percent voted, “It’s OK,” and 13 percent voted for, “I like it. It’s a keeper.”
Candland said the mission of the logo was to represent Prince William County to the world.
“We spent $750,” Candland said, “to develop a logo that represents hopefully hundreds of millions of dollars in Prince William County. I think we’re selling ourselves short.”
Candland said county uniforms were being changed, county decals were being changed, and this was “a much broader change than was ever portrayed to me.” The logo was intended to replace individual agency logos with one county-wide logo. “I don’t think the logo was properly vetted,” Candland said. “For a Michigan firm to develop the face of our economic development department is troubling to me.”
Many business people think that a logo can only be successful if it has an icon, such as the Nike swoosh, the little Tivo guy, the Mercedes modified peace sign, or the NBC peacock.
However, the world's best-known and most beloved brands don't use an icon. Check out the small sampling below and you'll see what we mean. A text-only logo done in an interesting and memorable way is a terrific way to brand your business.
When it comes to company names, I am adamant: NO acronyms. Why? Because they are impossible to remember and impossible to brand.
Maybe I'm more sensitive to this problem because I grew up in the Washington area which is awash in acronyms. Over 140,000 people here work for Federal agencies, - DoD, CIA, FBI, FDA, FEMA, etc. - so many that George Washington University has put together a glossary! These agencies compound the problem by creating more and more acronyms within their organizations. Life is just one big can of alphabet soup.
So if you're choosing a corporate or product name, skip the acronym. No one will remember which three letters you've chosen. Ever. Is it MBA or MAB or AMB? Only the business owner knows for sure.
Another reason to avoid acronyms? Other organizations already have your three letters no matter which three letters they are. For example, take ATG. A quick Google search shows that ATG stands for:
ATG Stores
Oracle's Art Technology Group
ATG Rehab
Advanced Techology Group
Applied Technology Group
ATG Credit
ATG E-Commerce Platform
ATG Electronics
ATG Records
Attorney's Title Guaranty Fund
Attorney General of Washington State
And so on
This makes ATG - or any other acronym - impossible to brand. Branding is all about uniqueness. If your company name is the same as a gazillion other companies' names, you're not unique - and your company is difficult if not impossible to brand.
What do weapons, burglar alarms, and condoms have in common? Their sales all boomed in 2009 with condom sales up 22 percent since 2008. Why?
The answer can perhaps be found in Nigeria and Chile -- two countries I visited on my globetrotting tour promoting "Buyology." Surprisingly, neither country has detected the "R" word. When asking government officials why that was the case, the explanation was simple: The media simply hadn’t picked it up yet. As no-one had read about it, the recession, therefore, never arrived.
Is this whole thing just a well-orchestrated media story, containing one essential ingredient, fear?
When you’re told that the world soon will go under due to a gigantic financial crises, what is the first thing you do? Save money. Suddenly the local retailer around the corner will lose revenue from your less frequent visits and fire staff -- the same staff who now will spend less -- and buy less in your company. You’ve just witnessed the cycles of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As sophisticated as we seem to be, we still should remind ourselves that our ancient brothers were monkeys with basic needs: sex, food, survival, and sleep. Even though we may convince ourselves that our lives are much more sophisticated than that, exactly those parameters seem surprisingly dominant when push comes to shove and the recession starts dominating the world situation, explaining why condom, weapon, and burglar alarm sales have increased.
A recent neuroscience study shows that fear drives us more than we ever would admit. Hate it or love it. The fear of losing my job, fear of losing out on my school-fee payments for my kids, or fear of ending up in the gutter. Thoughts so scary for anyone to think about that we clock into panic mode.
Remember fear and sex are two of our main drivers, and thus factors, which at the end of the day, take control once we’re in survival mode. When President Johnson ran his Daisy TV commercial up to his election, a commercial that used an A-bomb to illustrate what would happen if he wasn’t elected, the voters hated it. When junior Bush did the same in 2004 -- showing wolves entering the boarder as a metaphor to illustrate how terrorism would take over the entire country -- people hated it. However, both TV commercials had profound effects on our amygdale, a region in our brain responsible for generating fear. Yes, the voters hated both commercials when asked, yet the scan surprisingly indicated that voters still would cast a vote in favor of these politicians. They simply couldn’t resist.
Since the very beginning of the U.S. recession, the Big Three automakers have offered steep discounts in order to get rid of their cars. A majority of their cars are sold at cost, yet still no one wants to buy their cars. The fundamental problem isn’t that the cars are useless; the problem is the proposition, which has forgotten to take fear into account. Of course, no one wants to buy a car if they’re afraid of being fired tomorrow. Hyundai realized this and began to offer cars attached with an assurance: "Buy any new Hyundai, and if in the next year you lose your income, we’ll let you return it.”
In just a month Hyundai increased its sales with more than 20 percent in the U.S. alone. The returned cars? Well, so far supposedly only two cars have been returned.
Building brands in recessions is all about fear management -- to fundamentally understand how fear works, why we react as we do, and what the consequences of this are in our purchase behavior. Fear often is as irrational as everything else in our lives. When a plane drops from the sky, the airline industry knows that people fly up to 10 percent less weeks after. You don’t have to be a statistical genius to know the chances of a second plane crashing days after are substantial lower than before. All this means is that irrational propositions often are substantially more powerful than a steep discount.
Over the past months, a flurry of new banks have hit the ground in the U.S. -- banks with no track record, clear history, and unknown personnel. Their proposition is simple (We’re new, with no Wall Street links or links to the past), and consumers love it. Can you imagine such proposition just two years ago?
What does neuroscience tell us in order to cater for the consequences of a financial recession and build surviving brands? Here are three points.
There’s always good news in bad times.
One of the oldest tricks in innovation is not to ask consumers for what they want but for the problems they see. Believe me, we see a lot of problems! The fact is we rarely know what we want, but we’re amazing in pointing out problems. No one knew they wanted an airbag, but they knew they wanted safer cars. No one knew they wanted toilet seat covers, but they knew they hated to place toilet paper individually on the seat.
Ask yourself what are the problems consumers are facing during the recession? There’s a lot -- like they no longer can afford to travel to exotic destinations for holidays (which might be why those French perfumes seem to sell well; it’s kind of a whiff of Paris). We’re bored; we can’t afford fancy dinners anymore (which is why the sales of Lindt chocolate, McDonald’s, and Rubik's Cubes are going through the roof). We’re afraid of putting our money into stocks or banks (which is the reason why collectors' gold coins sold out twice last year in the U.S.). Start your innovation circle by letting the consumer point out all the problems, then convert these into problems.
Add a practical dimension to an irrational decision.
It has become fashionable to save and only buy on discount -- no matter who you are. What do you do as a brand owner? (Remember, discounting your brand typically takes seven years to recover!) The answer is simple: Add a practical dimension to the equation (explaining why a brand like Willeys boots is selling through the roof -- they’re practical as hell). No one wants to buy a fancy jacket at the moment, but if you’re able to add a practical dimension to your product, like designing the jacket so that the customers can turn the jacket inside out, featuring a second color (matching the evening dress), you’ve armed the consumer with a rational argument helping to lock in the deal. The fact may be that the consumer in reality is buying the jacket because they love the design, yet in recession times such arguments don’t hold -- the practical dimension does.
The systematic removal of fear.
Hyundai did it, and a stream of new banks are doing it: identifying the underlying reasoning why consumers won’t buy their services by fundamentally understanding fear and building a new and better product offering around it.
Sales might be down, but do you really know why? Answers citing the recession are invalid and useless. What counts is to understand the fundamental role of fear and to turn this around to strengthen your brand. The pre-war time in the '40s gave birth to some of the world’s greatest brands. These brands all had one thing in common: They turned a threat into an opportunity. I see no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do the same.
Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Accenture Plc, the consulting company that built its marketing around Tiger Woods, removed him from its Web site yesterday. It also pulled print ads featuring the golfer, said a person with knowledge of the matter.
An image of Woods among cactuses, rotating this week on Accenture’s main page along with photographs of a skier and skaters, was no longer on display last night. Its sponsorship page excluded any mention of Woods and a search of the site for his name returned no results. Accenture pulled ads from more than one publication, said the person, who declined to name them and sought anonymity because the decision isn’t public.
This morning, a client asked for me to look at the Accenture website. I was shocked by what I found: Tiger Woods (or his body double?), lost in the cacti, confused and trapped. Meanwhile, beneath this pathetic image, the company's Twitter scroll features this particularly harrowing phrase: Failure to learn from mistakes. The irony! During the week Tiger Woods is found out to be at best a sex addict, Accenture shows him literally lost in the weeds - and even worse - lost in Accenture's weeds.
Aghast, I continued to read the Twitter scroll and discovered another ironic message, especially given that I am writing about the company's marketing missteps this morning:
Just shut up and listen? You no longer control the conversation about your company.
From today's Washington Post (see below), we read of General Motors' unprecedented dumping of its (previously invaluable) corporate brand. Instead, the company will focus solely on building individual vehicle brands.
What a smart move. All the American car brands - with the exception of perhaps Ford - are black and blue after taking billions in stimulus dollars from the Red, White, and Blue. It will be years - even decades? - before these companies recover their business and their good names.
I applaud the wise GM marketing pros who made the wise decision to fold up the umbrella brand and wait until the rain has passed.
GM to Remove Its Logo From Cars, Stress Brands
By Kimberly S. Johnson Associated Press Wednesday, August 26, 2009
DETROIT, Aug. 25 -- General Motors will begin removing its "Mark of Excellence" logo from vehicles as the company places greater emphasis on its individual brands.
GM spokesman Terry Rhadigan said Tuesday that the company would phase out the placement of the GM logo on its cars and trucks, leaving just the GMC, Chevrolet, Cadillac or Buick logos on the vehicles.
"We really want to elevate the prominence of our four core brands," he said. GM is discontinuing or selling four brands: Hummer, Saab, Pontiac and Saturn.
The final decision to remove the silver square logo was made earlier this month, although executives had mentioned the possibility of such a move months ago. The company found that consumers had a greater affinity for GM's individual brands than the corporate name.
"What we're seeing is the GM brand gets dinged big-time in terms of considering a GM vehicle," Mike DiGiovanni, GM's executive director of global market and industry analysis, said during a monthly sales conference call in April. "But when you look at Chevrolet, Cadillac and our other brands, they haven't changed." The company began putting the logos on all its vehicles in North America in 2005.
Rhadigan said removing the logo -- which is generally placed on the lower section of the door panel -- will be more difficult on some models than on others. On vehicles where a specific indentation is made in the sheet metal for the logo, phasing it out will take longer. On models such as the Camaro or Equinox, removal is easier and will begin immediately, Rhadigan said.
Taking the logos off the vehicles will save GM a "nominal" amount of money, Rhadigan said.
In the 1960s Madison Avenue era, painstakingly re-created in the cult hit television show "Mad Men," which returns Sunday for its third season, advertisers could buy a fixed block of airtime on television and be guaranteed a captive audience. That's what Winston cigarettes did for the inaugural season of "The Flintstones" in 1960; cartoon-loving prospective smokers tuned in to see Fred and Barney gleefully puffing away, shilling the product.
But now if we don't like an ad, we can zap, TiVo and DVR it into consumer oblivion. If it truly offends -- say we discover it is fake or untruthful -- we can trash the brand on our blogs or write nasty comments under the spot on YouTube.
On the other hand, if we're entertained enough by something a brand does, we can do its job for it -- by becoming its social media champion. That's what millions of people do every day. They "elf" themselves for OfficeMax each holiday season, spreading the word about discount paper products while having online fun in Santa's workshop. They forward Cadbury's "gorilla playing drums" video to anyone who likes to see a primate jam. A few years ago, they had their way with a man in a chicken suit with Burger King's "subservient chicken," which had 25 million visitors during its first 48 hours online.
And in the past few weeks, hundreds of thousands -- including seemingly every ad person I know -- have been playing along with AMC's ramp-up for Sunday's premiere, joining a "Mad Men Casting Call" and flocking to the meta social-media promotion "Mad Men Yourself," which lets people swap their Facebook profile pics for hip "Mad Men" avatars.
Ads in the "Mad Men" day were about the art of persuasion. Advertising today is about the art of engagement.
Nowhere was this more apparent to me than at the epicenter of advertising yet-to-come, the Brandcenter at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. During a two-day visit there I never saw a single idea in the medium that had been advertising's delivery system of choice since the days of, well, Don Draper: the 30-second network television commercial.
Instead, I saw discreetly branded viral video shorts, graphic novels and performance art. I saw Facebook and Twitter campaigns for mega-brands, and real-world scavenger hunts and online interaction with fictional characters. It didn't seem like the industry in which I'd worked for more than 20 years. When I left advertising in 2005, every major campaign still revolved around the almighty TV spot.
And this isn't happening only at VCU. For two years I visited many of the most progressive idea factories for the $670 billion-a-year global industry. Everything revolved around viral, immersive, "360 degree" advertising, with nary a martini or a TV spot in sight.
On the surface this seems pretty good, this two-way digital transparency model that seemingly makes it incumbent upon advertisers to step up the truthfulness and entertainment value of their messages. Indeed, many smarter agency-guided brands already get this and have thrived because of it. At the very least, it's much less harmful than the loosely regulated, sex-in-the-ice-cubes booze and cigarette ads churned out by the chain-smoking, sublime persuaders of the 1950s and '60s, right?
Not quite. Because while we now have the ability to assert more control over advertising, we're unwillingly being bombarded by more messages than ever, infiltrating our lives in new and increasingly insidious ways.
The market research firm Yankelovich estimates that the average American living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day. Today, estimates range from 5,000 to 20,000 ad impressions a day. To hone in on a more accurate number, one would have to determine what exactly constitutes an ad in today's ambiguous media environment. Print, radio, TV and online pop-up and banner ads are easy to tally. But what about Internet search results, recommendations on Amazon, subtle product placements in film, music and TV, and, of course, spam?
Then there's the blogosphere, where an entire cottage industry blurs the line between content and advertising, truth and spin.
This month, it was revealed that pharmaceutical companies had hired ghostwriters with no medical training to produce and disseminate "research papers" for online public consumption. Before the drug companies were the mommy bloggers -- parents writing about their children, and their children's favorite products, online. That scandal exposed an ethically tenuous relationship in which bloggers received corporate swag, and in some instances vacation junkets, in exchange for favorable, seemingly honest reviews and "content" mentions. And the brands are not shy about it. Jill Beraud, a marketing officer at PepsiCo, is on record saying that courting the mommy bloggers is a long-term effort.
The Federal Trade Commission has responded by proposing that all bloggers and the corporations that sponsor them be held accountable for the validity of the claims they make. The agency is updating its guidelines on endorsements and testimonials for first time since 1980. Good luck with that. And by that I mean assigning a task force to tackle First Amendment issues and police the entire digital universe to see if someone's passionate Huggies recommendation on MommyBloggest.com is on the up and up.
Meanwhile, members of Congress alarmed by the creeping ubiquity of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing (the United States and New Zealand are the only developed nations to permit such ads) have taken steps to rein in the people who bombard us with ads that are often accompanied by 30 seconds of legal copy about side effects including death and blindness.
In 50 years we've gone from loosely regulated advertising based on the art of persuasion, to more regulated, perfectly legal and often spectacular ads based on the art of engagement, to anything goes.
As a result, it is increasingly difficult to determine what is authentic. It is impossible to tell if a cool video clip is just that or an ad for a car, sneaker or cellphone. Is that really an environmentally responsible vehicle, or is the message pure greenwash? Is that really an unaffiliated "concerned citizen" stepping up to speak at a town hall meeting with Rockwellian authenticity, or a paid party hack who heeded the call of a social media networking blitz?
I recently spoke about all of this with a former colleague and current advertising creative director. "Eventually," he said, "the Internet always reveals the truth." The question is, when the messages come at us at the speed of light, many thousands of times a day, can it or anyone reveal it fast enough?
At its core, advertising is a tension between art, commerce and ethics. With time, consumers, brands and the law make adjustments and the balances shift. Which brings us back to 1962, and Don Draper. Would his contemporary self approve of mommy bloggers and pharma spam? Or would the man who in one episode frowned with disapproval at Doyle Dane Bernbach's revolutionary "Think Small" print ad for Volkswagen evolve and become a proponent of ethical, engaging ads?
For an answer, cue the DVR to Season One, Episode Six -- skip the ads -- when a beatnik says to Draper: "You work in advertising. . . . How do you sleep at night?"
The Mad Man's response: "On a bed made of money."
jpothmer@yahoo.com
James P. Othmer is a former advertising executive and the author of the forthcoming book "Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet."
I've been giving the state of marketing a lot of thought this summer, and I have concluded that marketing as we know it is dead - not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.
Long gone are the days of Mad Men where ad execs create campaigns that slither their ways into our hearts, minds, and wallets. Every consumer in America is now an expert on advertising - and we universally hate it. We listen to iPods and XM because we want to listen to music - not ads. We Tivo television shows so we can fast-forward through the commercials and reduce "The Office" down to 20 joyous, annoyance-free minutes. We universally enlisted in the Do-Not-Call list (even if we continue to get calls during dinner from charities and marketing research companies). And every morning, we're faced with an anemic Washington Post (or whatever daily you read/used to read) because the paper can't pay for journalism now that the advertisers vanished.
Why has this happened? For many reasons, which I'm going to write about over the coming weeks. But I'll start with Exhibit A: the Omega Watch television ad.
This dreadful piece of drek represents the worst of the worst. Why? Because it sells out all that is great and good about our country. For the sake of a buck, Omega Watches exploits our country, our dead president, our greatest scientific achievement of the past century, and worst of all, my childhood memories. IT IS JUST AWFUL. I wouldn't buy an Omega Watch ad now if it meant I could fly to the moon on its back.
(And whoever sold out JFK by allowing the use of that noble footage ought to be ashamed. Completely, utterly, and unabashedly ashamed.)
I don't object in general to Omega using its "first watch on the moon" status in its promotion. If they'd done a campy campaign with a cartoon moon and then shown a cartoon spaceman looking at an Omega watch, I'd have smiled and remembered the watch's unique status. This approach would have yielded a soft but powerful message rather than the overstated, overmarketed, absolutely nauseating patriotic 2x4 to our heads.
So this is Reason 1 why marketing is broken: because we've come to the place where everything is for sale - and we hate that fact. We all know better; we've heard about the evils of selling your soul to the devil - and the company store. Smart marketers need to recognize that some things remain above the almighty dollar - namely President Kennedy, Neil Armstrong, NASA, setting foot on the moon, and a very, very long list of other precious things.
Next time, the second reason marketing is broken: Veterinarians gone wild - or why marketing now matters more to them than my pets.
Seth Godin consistently delivers a great marketing blog, but today his message is perfect. He echoes my feeling that it's time to stop hunkering down and start growing up.
Death spiral!
You've probably seen it. The fish monger sees a decline in business, so they have less money to spend on upkeep and inventory, so they keep the fish a bit longer and don't clean up as often, so of course, business declines and then they have even less money... Eventually, you have an empty, smelly fish store that's out of business.
The doctor has fewer patients so he doesn't invest as much in training or staff and so some other patients choose to leave which means that there are even fewer patients...
The newspaper has fewer advertisers, so they can't invest as much in running stories, so people stop reading it, which means advertisers have less reason to advertise which leaves less money for stories...
As Tom Peters says, "You can't shrink your way to greatness," and yet that's what so many dying businesses try to do. They hunker down and wait for things to get better, but they don't. This isn't a dip, it's a cul de sac. It's over.
Right this minute, you still have some cash, some customers, some momentum... Instead of squandering it in a long, slow, death spiral, do something else. Buy a new platform. Move. Find new products for the customers that still trust you.
Long-time client and good friend Peter Buchanan passed this cool optical illusion on to me today. You'll never believe it, but the green and the blue in this graphic are exactly the same. Surprising, huh?
Here's the visual proof:
Just goes to show you you can't always trust what you see! To learn more about this optical illusion, read the article on Discover.
