I went out to dinner the other night and got food poisoning. Consequently, I spent the remainder of the night in a cold sweat crawling between my bed and my bathroom.
Fortunately there were some moments that were free of both gastric distress and prayers for a quick death. During one of these moments I had a flash of insight.
For years I have been trying to figure out what makes a good ad person better than an average ad person. There are some people who are just better at it than others.
They seem to have an intuitive understanding of what's going to work and what's not going to work. They are not deluded by marketing cliches or expert opinions. They draw their conclusions from a kind of personal understanding rather than conventional wisdom. I've spent a lot of hours trying to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes them exceptional.
My previous theories about this have been too intellectual. I have hypothesized that they have a deeper psychological understanding of human motivation. But I've never really been happy with this explanation. It seems very much like a tautology.
Then the other night, slithering on hands and knees from the bed to the bathroom, it struck me. There's a much simpler and more satisfying explanation. The attribute that makes people exceptional at advertising is that they're better at noticing things. They're good noticers.
They notice what people really do. They notice what people have in their refrigerators. They notice the little lies that people tell themselves and each other. They notice the contradictions between attitudes and behaviors. They notice the small, seemingly irrelevant things that most people don't notice.
Average advertising people are good listeners. Exceptional advertising people are good noticers.
Good musicians have an intuitive quality that is hard to explain. To an average person, a song is a pattern of rhythm and a series of notes. But a good musician can hear and understand the hidden structure of a song. She intuitively understands how the music is built. She can listen to it once and play it.
Good ad people can do the same. They can hear people talk about their buying habits and intuitively understand the hidden structure of their behavior.
I believe this is the result of a heightened ability to notice things.
I now understand the origin of deep insights -- food poisoning. Next time I get the Hershey squirts I'm going to direct my focus toward figuring out where the hell the universe came from and win myself a Nobel Prize.
February 13, 2012
What Makes An Ad Person Exceptional?
February 09, 2012
The Mass Marketing Zombie
“You’re seeing the end of the era of mass marketing." Jim Nail, Principle Analyst for Forrester Research, The New York Times, 2004.A few weeks ago, in a post entitled "Does Targeting Work?" we explored the popular idea that "the era of mass marketing" has ended as a result of our new found ability to target individual consumers. We concluded that not only has our ability to target individuals not lead to better results, it has actually lead to substantially worse results.
"As we have developed the ability to target people more and more precisely on the web, click-through rates of these hyper-targeted ads have dropped dramatically."Facts, however, never seem to bother ideologues. They just re-arrange their justifications.
A second part of the theory of the death of mass marketing is that consumers are no longer susceptible to mass-delivered marketing messages (code for ads) and what they are really finding compelling is "content" -- whatever the hell that means -- that lives on the web. Once again, this belief is more a product of ideology than facts.
In fact, mass marketing, as enabled by mass media, is becoming frighteningly ubiquitous.
The world's most successful brands have learned to use mass media to achieve share-of-mind ascendancy and make it immensely difficult for new entries into a vast swath of consumer goods and service categories. You want to introduce a new brand of toothpaste or peanut butter? Good luck.
The ability to utilize and influence mass media has become as important as manufacturing and customer service in creating successful marketing enterprises.
You don't have to dig very deep to find examples of awful companies (think banks, telecom, airlines, food) whose reputations among consumers are abysmal, but whose size has allowed them to dominate media and consequently dominate marketing in their categories.
The people who keep insisting that mass media and mass marketing are dead are brilliant at seeing all the trees, but are blind to the forest. They know about every app, widget, and website, but they can't see that it's all melding with TV, print, and radio to create an even more pervasive mega-media that is infecting and affecting everything we say and do.
To emphasize my point, here is a list. Can you tell what it's a list of?
The iPhone
Casey Anthony
Kim Kardashian
Katy Perry
Jennifer Lopez
Lindsay Lohan
American Idol
Jennifer Aniston
The earthquake in Japan
Osama bin Laden
The fact that the web has become so big so fast was supposed to mean TV would shrivel and eventually die. In fact, TV viewing is at its highest point ever. The web has just added to -- not replaced -- the amount of media we are gorging on. And that amount is alarming.
If you believe that mass marketing is going to disappear, then you must also believe that by some miracle mass media will defy every precedent in history and become more pervasive but less influential.
There will be emails arriving later today explaining to me how I just don't get it. How people no longer trust advertising and are relying on peer-to-peer recommendations to make buying decisions.
Before you write that email, let me reply: No, you don't get it. Sure people use the web in a social way to find stuff and get information. But the peer-to-peer stuff is the tip of the web iceberg. It is dwarfed by the way the web has become just another engine for spreading the media gospel of what we are supposed to believe and how we are supposed to behave. Once again, we are seeing a tree and missing a forest.
Right now, YouTube is producing a slew of new "channels." They have a decidedly familiar ring to them: sitcoms, sports, scripted series, celebrity showcases. Although the long-promised convergence of the web and TV has not yet arrived there is one thing we can deduce from YouTube's effort -- no one wants TV to be more like the web. They want the web to be more like TV.
In fact, if there is one thing that last Sunday's Super Bowl orgy should have taught us it is that TV is driving web usage and the web is driving TV usage. They are joined at the hip. Defining one as a mass medium and the other as a peer-to-peer social medium or a marketer-to-consumer personal medium is a game for fools.
It is never wise to draw straight lines between the present and the future. History and culture don't move in straight lines. (This is why the predictions of experts are so often laughable from a distance.) Nonetheless, if the trends that exist today continue on their current trajectories, mass media -- including the web -- will dominate marketing as never before. They may ultimately result in "the end of the era of mass marketing." And usher in a new era of hyper-mass marketing.
February 08, 2012
My Dysfunctional Super Bowl Spot
During my creative director days I was a pretty good copywriter. By no means a great one, but usually pretty good.
My one shot at Super Bowl glory came in the mid-90's. I was commissioned to write a Super Bowl spot -- but not just any Super Bowl spot. I believe I may have written the world's first TV spot for erectile dysfunction. You can only imagine how proud how I am.
It was the year before Viagra was introduced. The product was called Muse. It was a tiny little suppository pill. Now, I'm not going to tell you where you put this tiny little suppository pill because this a family-friendly blog. Use your imagination and try not to scream.
Remember, this was a time at which nobody had ever even said "erectile dysfuntion" out loud on television. Consequently, we did a very modest, demure spot. No creepy, horny old people in bathtubs.
Ed Asner did the voice over and visually it was simply typography reinforcing Ed's copy points. We bought time on the Super Bowl and were ready for a firestorm.
A few days before the Super Bowl, however, the network decided that America was not ready for erectile dysfunction. They canceled the spot.
You might say that, yes, I wrote a Super Bowl spot. But because of NBC, I never got it up.
The Best Super Bowl Spot That No One Saw
This spot for Old Milwaukee beer ran in only one market during the Super Bowl -- North Platte, Nebraska, the 2nd smallest TV market in America. It is by far the funniest and most memorable Super Bowl spot I have seen. It puts to shame all the big, loud, and witless inanities that tried to pass for creativity on Sunday.
Thanks to David Burn at AdPulp for this.
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