Apple Goes a-Branding, Part 1

Once in while, a visionary business leader comes along. This person has an inherent understanding of who and what the business is because to a large extent the business is the extended shadow of this individual.

Once in a while, this type of visionary also has a great feel for advertising. He or she understands it in a way that no one else in the organization can. This is because the advertising is, in effect, for him.  If advertising is a company's public personality, only he knows what he wants his public personality to be.

The strange part of this is that the people all around him don't comprehend what he is doing. Even after they've watched him for years, they still don't understand it.

When the visionary is gone, what happens to the advertising? Usually, one of three things.

First is that the person who takes over the visionary's job inherits the advertising. This usually doesn't last long because the person in question rarely has the creative understanding that the visionary had. She may be better at operations or finance, but it would be a miracle if she had the creative instincts of the visionary.

The second possibility is that the responsibility for advertising defaults to its usual place in the corporate structure -- the marketing department -- with the usual results: uninspired, witless advertising.

Third is that a committee of "wise men" is assembled to oversee marketing and advertising. This is often a disaster. It's like trying to replace one Otis Redding with six Justin Biebers.

I don't know which of the three is happening now at Apple, but whatever it is, it stinks.

Last year about this time, upon the retirement of Steve Jobs, I wrote a piece called Advertising And The Future Of Apple. In the post I wrote the following: 

"The product pipeline will take years to screw up. But the ad pipeline can be screwed up in no time....About a year from now, with Jobs in the background, the knuckleheads at Apple (there are knuckleheads everywhere) will have a chance to get their sweaty hands on the advertising."

Well, it's a year later and unfortunately my prediction has turned out to be accurate.

Apple's latest campaign, featuring an Apple "genius" is being roundly ridiculed throughout the advertising and marketing world. While I think this campaign is pedestrian, I don't think it is the disaster that the blogocracy would have you believe.

However, I do think it is symptomatic of something much more dangerous than just one bad campaign -- it is the third Apple campaign in a row (since Jobs' unfortunate death) that indicates to me that the new regime at Apple is not very good at "Apple" advertising.

TBWA/Chiat/Day has done so much great advertising for Apple for so long, that I have a hard time believing they are responsible for this. My experience with large organizations going through a change in leadership leads me to believe that this is an Apple problem, not an agency problem.

Sadly, I have seen this movie before. I have been involved with companies that had a brilliant leader who demanded good advertising. And I have been there when the flat tires took over and turned the advertising to crap.

There is a lot wrong with what Apple has been doing for the last year. Later this week, in our next exciting episode -- Apple Goes a-Branding, Part 2 -- we'll look at what they are doing wrong and why.

Curvin O'Rielly, R.I.P.

Curvin O'Rielly died last week. Curvin was a wonderful copywriter -- which, in my opinion, is about the highest compliment you can pay to an ad person. Curvin worked at many of the world's best ad agencies

I never met Curvin, but I knew him by reputation and from his astute comments on George Parker's blog (AdScam.)

Curvin wrote to me once. He had just finished my book (101 Contrarian Ideas...) and wrote to say that he had enjoyed it. He also wrote that it contained a serious error.

In the book I have a piece about Saturn, the car. In the piece I credited Hal Riney with creating the brilliant campaign that transformed a mediocre car into a great brand. I wrote, "He did it with his unique blend of plain-talk, humor, beauty, and bullshit."

Curvin wrote and said, "It wasn't Hal Riney who created the Saturn brand. When I arrived at his agency in Feb. 1990, he didn't have squat."

 

So let me belatedly, officially correct the record. 

 

And credit Curvin with possessing the gift of all great copywriters -- the unique blend of plain-talk, humor, beauty, and bullshit.

Curvin O'Rielly, R.I.P.

More Pressure On Facebook

Facebook shares are falling faster than panties on prom night.

They started life at $38 just a few weeks ago and, as I write this, are selling at a little over $20. A lesser man than I might remind you, for the umpteenth time, that he predicted this would happen.

While I take no pleasure in seeing innocent dumb-shits lose stacks of money in this contemptible hustle, I have to admit that I do take a certain pleasure in seeing social media con artists and their credulous disciples getting the shaft.

It seems to me, however, that Facebook's problems are just beginning. There are two reasons for this.

The first is qualitative. Before the IPO debacle, it was taken as an article of faith among the great marketing lemmingocracy that social media was magic. They couldn't exactly explain why -- other than nonsense syllables like "engagement" and "conversations" -- but they knew they had to do it because everyone else was doing it. As I've said many times, there's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend.

But now it's different. A con game falls apart very quickly when doubts start creeping in. And the Great Social-Media-Marketing-Miracle con has been severely undermined by the terrible performance of so many of the players recently.

The second big problem is quantitative. It's the old supply and demand imbalance. As I said in my post of June 5th, Facebook is going to be in some real deep snow as "locked-up" shares (shares that early owners are forbidden to sell by law) become unlocked.

According to The Wall Street Journal, about 2 billion new shares of Facebook will become "unlocked" and available for sale before the end of this year. To give you an idea of how that will affect the supply-demand relationship, there are currently only about 400 million shares available for trading. In other words, the potential number of tradeable Facebook shares will sextuple.

The best case scenario for Facebook is that early owners, hoping for an upturn at some point, will hold on to their shares. But if early owners start selling off their shares when they become unlocked, there could be a pretty nasty massacre.

There's only thing worth knowing about economics -- when big supply meets small demand, it means low, low factory-direct prices.