OF COURSE it was going to happen after publishing something like my last post. Heavy sigh. Joan writes;

Your points on this are well taken BUT consider if you lost your mother, father, son, daughter, wife or husband to suicide via a bridge jumping. Would you feel entertained by such an advertisement? Since 32,000 Americans complete suicide each year and each of these suicides guinely effects a minimum of 6-8 people, that is a huge group of people to offend…not to mention all of the mental health practitioners, physicians and researchers who are working to save lives.

PLEASE don’t think of me as an insensitive brute! I think you missed my point. I’m not endorsing what GM did … I would probably not have done the bridge-jumping thing. BUT, I would have definitely gone far enough to upset some OTHER group!

Consider the Nationwide Insurance commercial with Kevin Federline that heated up the Restaurant Industry to the point where they too asked to have the ad pulled. Before getting all wound up, I’m NOT comparing “rapping in a restaurant” to “suicide”. However, you can’t discount the fact that this group of restauranteurs were truly upset by the commercial! Did the Nationwide marketing team purposely try to tick off people who work in restaurants OR did they simply play on the idea that everyone has dreams … some dream BIG … let’s call it “the human condition”. If you can imagine a kid working as a fry cook dreaming of being a rap star you can then actually picture in your mind the commercial happening in real life. The play on the idea comes when an actual rap star (and I use that term VERY loosely) is caught in the act. FUNNY STUFF!

More on the Human Condition:
This was a topic of quite a bit of discussion/debate in our office today. The effectiveness of all three of these ads is based on; observation of the human condition and of stereotypes. The human condition of the GM ad is; how do people in an automobile plant feel when they worry about the quality of their work? Do they fear for their jobs? If they lose their job, how will it affect them? THAT’S the “human condition.”

So, if the GM ad doesn’t work, WHERE did they go wrong? I would say they tapped into the wrong emotion - too much fear and sadness! There are VERY few people who will walk away from watching that ad with the feeling that it was “funny” … or they could “relate with it” … or that “GM really cares” … or “GM must understand quality because I too have those fears”. Why? Because the visual of a robot waking from a suicide dream is STILL on the topic of suicide, it’s almost impossible to get the viewer focused back on any other emotion. Yes, emotions are powerful and HUGELY important in the development of great brand/advertising.

Back to the KFed fiasco…. what’s the human condition? It’s the reality that people have dreams beyond where their jobs are located. If the marketing team for Nationwide would have instead picked garbage truck drivers, or dental hygienists, or dishwasher repairmen, or hotel bellhops, or, or, or …. I’m sure we would have somebody else up in arms instead of restauranteurs. That’s not really the point though is it? The point is that KFed put himself out there in a self-deprecating display that was intended to be funny.

Final Words:
Again, my last post was NOT to defend or endorse the GM ad. It was to point out that emotions are powerful things and when you use them in your brand development (AND YOU SHOULD), you run the risk of polarizing the world. To this I say “GREAT!!” If I can polarize the world with my own brand and only get 1/10th of 1 percent of all the people on the planet to be true, die-hard, dyed in the wool, evangelists for my company …€” and the other 99.9% think I’m looney …€” I’ll be MORE than happy to provide services only to those 6 Million people on my side. This is a MUCH better strategy than to be completely bland and safe with nobody on your side.

Keep those cards and letters comin’!

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A couple of advertising issues in the news:

1) The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has asked that GM pull it’s ad that features an assembly line robot jumping off a bridge.

2) The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) AND the Human Rights Campaign have similarly asked Masterfoods (makers of the Snickers bar) to pull their most recent ad, claiming it is offensive and defamatory to gays and lesbians.

Let me begin by stating that creating an ad campaign that potentially endangers lives, offends the majority of viewers or severely degrades corporate brand value is just plain bad. Consider the recent Cartoon Network “Bomb Scare” ad campaign in Boston … definitely not good for sales.

HOWEVER, when you create a campaign that is edgy, bold and differentiates you from your competitors, you should expect some people to get a little T.O.’d. If that doesn’t happen at all, you probably didn’t take the idea far enough. Water down your ads to the point where nobody even comments, and you also water down your effectiveness.

What really gets my goat is the kinds of reactions the above ads got. Let’s take them one at a time….

1) The GM ad DIDN’T show the robot jumping off a bridge, it showed a robot dreaming about jumping off of a bridge. Minor distinction, for sure, but it’s important. If you’re going to create an ad that portrays a robot with anthropomorphic qualities of fear, depression, loss and sorrow, you might show it having such a terrible dream. This commercial is NOT an endorsement of bridge-jumping … it is simply the portrayal of something totally unexpected …€” a robot thinking like a human. It’s this unexpected idea that makes the ad powerful.

2) Although stereotypes are generally “bad”, they can’t be ignored and they can sometimes be the basis for a wealth of ad ideas. The stereo-type of two manly-men working in a garage, head down in an engine compartment (right or wrong), is something most people ‘get’. The unexpected event is when one guy leans over to eat the candy bar out of the other guy’s mouth (a la The Lady and the Tramp spaghetti scene). YOWZA! If that were to ever actually happen in the real world, what would you expect these two testosterone-laden guys to do?? I’m bettin’ a bit of macho, chest hair pulling is in order! This isn’t defamatory against gays and lesbians any more than the Jack McFarland character’s (Will & Grace) comments about straight guys was defamatory to heterosexuals. Both cases are simply portraying a character doing pretty much what you’d expect them to do.

Lesson to be learned; If you’re in the process of creating brand, don’t let these kinds of events instill ANY kind of fear in your decision-making. BE BOLD! Don’t be afraid to differentiate!

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Taking back large portions of your life by recording long television programs (called time shifting) is a great idea. Tim Sanders gives us his strategy for using Tivo to record football games so he catches up to the real-time event somewhere in the fourth quarter. This way he sees the entire game, catches the exciting ending at the same time as everyone else and completely skips all of the commercials.

There’s only one problem with that plan. What if you’re like me and you LIKE to watch the commercials? OK, maybe not ALL of them … and certainly not the same ones over and over and over and over (like during football games). But, I do like to check in on advertising strategies, rate the creativity, score the impact of the message, judge the editing … generally keep tabs on the world of advertising. Watching TV commercials, for me, is like fishing. It’s A LOT of boring mediocrity punctuated with just a few choice ads that make it all worth while. Believe me, I DO understand that I’m a little freaky in this regard (and if you just made a mental crack about the word “little”, you can contact my wife to join the club … she’s the president!) Sigh.

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Hoooorah!  Finally a jury conviction of a phisher under the CAN-SPAM Act established four years ago (yes, it’s been that long).  Depending on the outcome of the June 11th sentencing of Jeffrey Goodin, maybe the legal system will been seen, for the first time, as having some teeth.  Mr. Goodin may be facing up to 101 years in prison!  Although we’re still a long way off from stemming the flood of spam, at least it’s a step in the right direction.

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Advertising Lab points us to a press release from London based BunnyFoot … a renowned eye-tracking analysis firm. Apparently, they’re able to demonstrate that advertisements placed inside video games don’t perform as well as expected. In the first example photo, it’s conclusive that teenage boys prefer to look at Lara Croft’s butt rather than ad placements. DUH!

Don’t get me wrong, I think that there’s HUGE value in this type of study. I would even go so far as to say I’d be interested in purchasing the Tobii Eyetracking System to perform this type of analysis in-house. That being said, however, I think it should also be noted that good decision making doesn’t need to be this complex.

It’s ALL about focus. Consider your target audience’s focus on their needs … even superficial needs. When they’re at work, they need to write emails and create reports and make widgets. They don’t need to look at banner ads in an email message or on a web page. When they need to watch a television show (this is one of those superficial ones), they don’t need to hear an Australian guy pitch a car wax. When they do need to buy a car wax, they’re focused on that ONE specific task and need little else, in that moment.

Viral marketing, permission marketing, social networking, blogging, forums, etc. are all exploding right now. Why? Because these, for the most part, aren’t interuptive advertising. The consumer is allowed to focus on a buying decision in a way that gives them more control. The product or service isn’t unexpectedly thrown in their face. These new non-intrusive venues are focused not on the product itself as much as they focus on the consumer … and their needs.

Am I suggesting that companies abandon all advertising? Heck no. Just dont’ expect the same return on investment as some of these other, less “traditional” strategies. More to the point; regardless of the medium you choose for your advertising, focus the message on consumer need and emotion, NOT on your product or service.

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Let me start a few little ditties and we’ll see how long it takes for you to be able to tell me what the product/company is AND for you to sing the rest of the song. Here we go…

• Mmm Mmm Good
• I wish I was an <Mmm hmm hmm hmm> Weiner
• Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun
• I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing
• You Deserve a Break Today

How’d you do? 100%?

In the 1950’s, just about every television commercial used jingles to reinforce the brand experience. The tendency has dropped off. For those smart companies that DO take the extra time to firm up brand with some form of audio, the benefits are significant;

• It’s easier to remember the ad (a la the experiment above)
• Since your competitors aren’t likely using audio/music, it’s a powerful differentiator
• Music is a powerful emotional trigger
• Music styles can help zero in on your target audience
• Memorable music lyrics can reinforce information about your company and your products/services (phone numbers, address, benefits, features, etc.)

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I’m making this a short post this morning because I just spent 35-40 minutes answering trivia questions. What a blast! Thanks to Apryl Duncan for putting together all of these tests. How good is your tagline recall? Think you know Super Bowl commercials? Do you find yourself whistling TV ad jingles from the 80s? Find out if you’re destined for greatness in the ad biz.

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