Stand for something: A lesson for brands

Bill Bernbach once said, 'If you stand for something you will always find some people for you and some people against you. If you stand for nothing you will find nobody against you and nobody for you.' I think that's a great lesson for brands. Great brands always stand for something. A lot of brands don't stand for things that are even worth discussing. I'd rather have a share of people against me that I could at least have a decent conversation with. We don't creating meaningful relationships by being benign.

What the hell is 'integrated' anyway?

Not long ago, one of my clients let me into a nice insight about what he was really searching for in a marketing agency. He described to me a Venn diagram consisting of three overlapping circles. The first circle represented paid media, so advertising in its traditional form, even if it’s online. The second circle was earned media, like PR, and whatever PR is evolving into in these days of online communities and social sharing. And the last circle was owned media, which is a pretty broad list of things that ranges from websites to extreme sporting events.

My client said that the sweet spot was right in the middle, where the three circles overlapped. To him, that was the elusive ‘integrated marketing’ that every agency in the world claims to be in their mission statement but can never really describe in a meaningful way. He felt that was the strategy through which his budgets were going to be most effective for his business and his audiences. But more than that, he also knew that this approach would allow him to use as much media and technology as he could, where he could, without betting the farm. And he’d get to try all these things together in a way that they could help each other - ads feeding events, events feeding communities, communities building advocacy which in turn helped build the brand and increase sales.

It was a nice moment of clarity for me. Even if the three circles aren’t particularly neat or tidy like he described them, I think it’s pretty easy to define that sweet spot. You start to strike a balance between paid, earned and owned while building a strategy that takes all your efforts into consideration.

I realized that’s really where my head’s been for the last couple years. I don’t really see myself as a digital guy, even though I’ve been knee-deep in digital from the beginning. I’m not really a traditional guy either, though I love a great ad, love making great ads and I know how effective a great campaign can be. And by no means am I a PR guy. If anything, I’d call myself a brand guy. Because I think ultimately, it’s the brand that’s built out of this alphabet soup of activities. Three bowls of soup, I guess.

Where it gets really interesting for me is how to fit these things together. Even wrapping my head around what actually goes inside the three circles shows me how effing much there is to know. On top of that technology moves so fast it’s almost impossible to keep up. So it puts me in a place that I find really interesting – constantly listening and learning, constantly trying new things, experimenting and always trying to do something better than the last time. There’s always a new problem to be solved, and even if you nailed it the last time, even if you really think you learned something, next time you’re still making it up as you go along.

But that’s the stuff that I find most exciting. That’s how I describe “integrated”.

Wow. It's been ages since I've blogged.

Like 99% of people who start blogs, I've let this one languish. Hell, I even let Twitter languish and that doesn't take nearly as much thought as a blog.

So I'm going to ball up my energy and start blogging furiously. (Ugh. That conjurs images). At least until I get busy again. Hopefully longer.

I bore of your analog attitude.

This is going to sound so simple it's stupid. It's such common sense, that I can't believe that NOT ONE AGENCY I'VE WORKED AT has done it: Put the 'technology' on the creative team. Yeah, it's that simple. In fact, it's where innovation comes from.

Ideas are wonderful, but flighty things so it really makes sense to include the people who can provide the the technical solutions as a part of the problem solving process. It's efficient.

Creativity means taking the bad with the good.

Nice post on Dave Trott's blog today, in which he tells a good story about an unpredictable and enigmatic old school british ad guy I've never heard of. Nice story though.

Creatives can be unpredicatable and enigmatic. Creativity is messy and non-linear. Messy and non-linear is what allows creativity to happen. So you often end up working with unpredictable, enigmatic, inconsistent, messy people. I personally like that.

Obviously, project managers don't. They want order and predictability and they do everything they can to herd the cats and get them to produce 'on time and on budget'.

Here's a nice quote from Dave Trott's post:

The good news about creativity is that it stands out.

It’s different, unusual, and sometimes it can be unsettling.

The bad news about creativity is that it stands out.

It’s different, unusual, and sometimes it can be unsettling.

But isn’t that the point?

The death of the real estate industry as we know it.

15 or so years into this internet thing, it's not difficult to see that entire fields of expertise have been utterly transformed by the digitization and commodification of information that was once rare or hard to access and therefore valuable. The real estate industry is no exception. It WILL be transformed. You can't stop the internet. Ask the immensely wealthy and powerful multinational record companies how trying to stop it is working out for them. Then ask Apple whether applying forward thinking, redefining the retail space for music has added to their bottom line.

Will all realtors be put out of work? No. There are some services they provide that are truly valuable and worth paying for. There are people who need the assistance and guidance realtors offer. So good realtors who provide needed services will survive the coming transformation. The others will find new careers. But some services that realtors provide are simply busy work, padding to help justify the fees. Realtors also provide some services that can easily be done over the internet, without human intervention. Of course most of them won't admit that. Their goal is to make every last minuscule item on their list of services seem indispensable.

The real estate industry is fundamentally flawed. Someone with a little vision, technical savvy, and a lot of capital will come along very soon and start hacking away at its roots. Look soon for TV, newspaper and web ads touting no commission and a menu of for fee services.

Hell, if I was well-capitalized I'd be doing this myself. It's only a matter of time.

I'm going to read some Foucault now.

Finally, Art Follows Advertising

As much as I hate to admit it, advertising is the ultimate copycat game. We steal ideas from everywhere.

A lot of what we do as creatives is adapt things we pick up from the world around us and gently massage them -- or bash them with a sledgehammer in my case -- until they solve the business problem we're faced with. It's not very often that are ads truely uniquely creative, or even half interesting for that matter. But there are gems on rare occasions.

So it's awesome to see 'art' take a little inspiration from advertising, rather than the other way around for once. This new video from OK Go takes some strong cues from Honda's amazing 'Cog' ad (which I've mentioned on this blog before). Obviously the notion of a Rube Goldberg machine is as old as, well, Rube Goldberg, but the similarities are strong enough that I don't think director James Frost was working in a vacuum on this one.



And for comparison, Honda's 'Cog'