Arguing From The Extreme

One of the really annoying habits of advertising people is arguing from the extreme.

By arguing from the extreme, I mean taking the most extraordinary example of something and using this extraordinary case as if it were the norm.

This has been going on for years. Whenever I would get in a discussion with someone about account planning I would always get an earful about "got milk?" Whenever I would express skepticism about a "branding" campaign, I would always get a lecture about "Just Do It." Whenever I asked for data about the effectiveness of online media I got a recap of "subservient chicken."

I acknowledge that those campaigns were terrific and successful. But they were extreme cases. Extreme cases don't tell us anything about the general, they tell us only about the specific.

How about the thousands of smelly turds produced by account planning? How about the parade of abominable branding campaigns? How about the zillions of commercial web pages that got no hits today.

Arguing from the extreme takes a case that is a couple of standard deviations from normal and pretends it's average. This is nonsense. The fact that "got milk?" is terrific advertising tells me nothing about account planning. It tells me that Goodby made a good campaign.

If you want to convince me that account planning has representated a substantial step forward in the effectiveness of advertising, I don't want anecdotes. I want to see data that show that, in general, campaigns developed with the benefit of account planning are more effective than those developed before planning became de riguer. If you accept what you read in the trades about the diminishing effectiveness of advertising, you'd have to believe the exact opposite.

The fact that Enrico Fermi was a physics genius tells us nothing about Italians. It tells us something about Enrico Fermi.

My Overnight Social Media Success

On Sunday evening I published a new book on Amazon. On Monday afternoon -- 18 hours later -- it was the 2nd best-selling advertising eBook on Amazon.

How did I do it? Social media.

But wait a minute, Bob. Isn't it you who is always throwing rocks at social media?

Yes, that's the same me.

So, have you changed your mind?

Not a bit.

So, you're a hypocrite?

Hypocrite is the term that people who can't draw distinctions frequently use to describe people who can.  Let me explain.

One of the most irresponsible and universal tricks in the advertising toolkit is what I call "arguing from the extreme." You take the most extreme, unlikely case of something and use it as an example of what you  pretend is commonplace.

I saw it all the time when people used to use "got milk" as a typical example of the efficacy of account planning. Or when they used "Just Do It" to justify their dim "branding" ads. And now they use "Old Spice" as an example of the everyday magical powers of social media. It's like pointing to Kobe Bryant and saying, see, basketball is easy.

My payoff had a little to do with social media and a lot more to do with long-term marketing strategy -- which is the antithesis of most social media schemes.

Here's how I became an overnight social media success.

1. First I wrote and published a book called The Ad Contrarian. This took a couple of years. 

2. Next I started a blog called The Ad Contrarian. 

3. Then I spent virtually every Saturday morning for five years roughing out ideas for Ad Contrarian blog posts. 

4. For almost five years I spent at least two hours a day -- usually between 3 and 5 am -- writing my blog.

5. I also spent at least an hour every day scouring online and offline sources for blog post ideas. 

6. I wrote several articles for trade publications sticking assiduously to my "Ad Contrarian" POV. 

7. As a result, I developed a nice body of subscribers for my blog. I try to keep it fresh, entertaining, and controversial to attract non-subscribers every day. 

8. Although I have several thousand Twitter followers, I act to maintain credibility by only tweeting about the blog when there is something I believe is unusually interesting in it.

9. To develop credibility among my readers, I have never used my blog to promote my agency. 

10. In order to advance The Ad Contrarian I have traveled frequently to do speaking engagements and never accepted money.

So that's how I achieved overnight success in social media. And that's why social media hustlers infuriate me. Their facile crap, their smug ignorance of real marketing strategy, and their promises of magic make me ill.

And when naive clients tell me they want to do some of that "social media stuff, you know like Twitter and Facebook" -- for which they will assign responsibility to the lowest ranking person in their organization -- I have to leave the room.

I have built a social media brand. I know what it takes. I know how useless most social media bullshit is and how hard the people work who do it right.

Don't use me to argue from the extreme.

The Investment Idiots Of Advertising

In the world of financial investing, there are plenty of ways to be an idiot and lose boxcars full of money.

Perhaps the most obvious way is to listen to the arguments of headline grabbing financial writers. They will write very convincing articles about how you should put all your money in gold, or tech stocks, or European bond funds, or condominium developments.

Or you should take all your money out of gold, or tech stocks, or European bond funds, or condominium developments.

In a world of media overload, the only way for them to attract attention is to advocate sensational measures.

We have the same thing in the advertising and marketing world. We are deluged with books, articles, and conferences in which the most extreme assertions are the ones that grab the headlines.

We have had over a decade of extreme nonsense about the death of advertising; the death of television; the death of radio; the miracle of interactivity; the magic of social media marketing. It has all been a bunch of melodramatic bullshit.

We have been subjected to a non-stop barrage of bad marketing investment advice by people who are not smart enough to gain attention by giving sound guidance, but are just smart enough to gain attention by promulgating hysterical nonsense.

In many ways, investing in advertising is more difficult than personal investing. You can follow your personal investments on a day-to-day basis and see how they're doing.

But advertising and marketing investments are much more difficult to track. First of all, there are so many variables. Then there is the lag time.

When Pepsi launched the biggest social media marketing experiment in history -- the Pepsi Refresh Project -- it took them over a year and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue to realize what a disaster it had been.

But that's what you get when you follow the overblown rhetoric of advertising investment idiots. They trade on fear of missing out (FOMO) and they stampede naive marketers into believing their turgid narratives.

Sadly, if you're going to be an advertising or marketing "expert" you have to have something radical or extreme to say or nobody pays attention.

As we've said here many times, no one ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same.

The Anecdote Epidemic

I noticed it my first week in the ad business -- the naive belief in anecdotes.

As a junior copywriter I was amazed that account directors and creative directors could get away with it. They would stand before clients and tell the story of this company or that agency that did this or that and had remarkable results. And then they would inflate the anecdote into a rationale for what they were selling.

And the client would sit there and buy it.

It astounded me.

As time went on it only got worse. Specious claims about account planning or copy testing or whatever went unchallenged.

Then anecdotes went national. I would go to conferences and listen to experts tell how this thing or that medium (the one they were pitching) created a huge success. And the audience would accept it as if it were the rule.

There was no demand for what the normal results were.

And now, with the advent of the web, anecdotes have gone global. The most extreme case of anything is accepted as typical. So Zappos -- the most radical case of social media success -- became the case history that proved the standard power of social media.

We are in an endless echosystem of success stories about web marketing -- first it was podcasts, blogs and banners, then widgets and QR codes, now it's social media and content. And the thing that all these success stories have in common is that they are free of industry norms.

I have seen evidence that search and email -- as categories -- are effective online marketing activities.

But I have yet to see one disinterested study that shows me anything convincing about the standard effectiveness of podcasts, blogs, banners, QR codes, social, content, etc. If you know of any, please send them my way.

You would think that with the amount of money being spent on line, marketers would demand more than just anecdotes and outlier case histories. But it's hard to exaggerate the lemming-ocracy in marketing today.

Social Media And The Utopian Instinct

Last week I wrote a silly post called Social Media Madness Goes Global which poked fun at a ridiculous piece of utopian nonsense called A Perpetual State Of Beta...

"We are now living our lives in a perpetual state of beta through social media. It’s a new social frontier, or ‘third place’ which is filled with opportunity, where personal and professional participation culminate in a ‘reconnection’ to what is good and true..."

Fortunately, most social media professionals are not as brain-addled as this guy. However, this baloney and its ilk demonstrate a naive streak of utopianism in some of social media's most extreme proselytizers.

The origin of social media utopianism can probably be traced to The Cluetrain Manifesto, a very influential book of the late-90's (which I have also taken the liberty of poking fun at.) Cluetrain gave us the beginnings of web evangelism...

"...the web is touching our most ancient of needs: to connect."

"Millions have flocked to the net...because it seemed to offer some intangible quality long missing in action from modern life..."
 
"Many of those drawn into this world find themselves exploring a freedom never before imagined."

Yeah, right. Freedom to watch porn, upload pictures of your cat, and hurl anonymous stink bombs.

I don't know about you, but this kind of Shangri-la-di-da officially annoys the shit out of me. Virtually all of human barbarity can be traced to some crackpot group's utopian dream.

Believe it or not, young proto-nazis would sit around strumming guitars on college campuses in Germany in the 1920's and sing about the glorious spirit that resided in the ecologically pristine woodlands of the fatherland. They had a romantic longing for a "volkisch" paradise. We know how that one ended up.

The nazi and communist nightmares, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and today's jihadists, all provide clear lessons that the utopian vision tends to spawn the most appalling human savagery. The nazis wanted to purify us. The communists wanted to free us from materialism. Religious fundamentalists sought (and still seek) to create heaven on earth.

I enjoy social media and I am not for a moment suggesting that social media zealots are burning heretics at the stake or building concentration camps. I am saying, however, that the more they erect ideological scaffolding around social media and spout utopian blather, the more they give me the creeps.

The Crisis Of Advertising, Part 5: What To Do

The first four parts of this series were the fun parts -- whining about all the problems. This is the not fun part -- finding answers.

I've written three drafts of this post and I still don't know what the hell I'm trying to say. The Crisis of Advertising? I have no idea what to do about it and anyone who says he does is full of shit.

The first draft said we were going the way of the music industry, i.e., evaporating. That's just simply not going to happen.

The second draft said that BDAs (big, dumb agencies) were going to turn into black holes, exploding under the gravitational pressure of their own mass. That's not going to happen either.

So here are some random thoughts about how the agency business needs to change, how you as an agency or you as an individual might want to think about what's next.

• Contrary to all the nonsense you read, advertising is not dead. You can't swing a dead account planner without hitting an ad. It's everywhere -- urinals, grocery check-out separators, dry cleaning bags. Advertising is thriving, but ad agencies aren't.

• There just isn't enough value anymore in big, slow, expensive ad agencies. Smart, industrious clients can cobble together small groups to get the work done at lesser cost and with superior creativity. They just don't know it yet.

• The most important client-side marketing job currently does not exist: Someone to coordinate the activities of a variety of small, nimble marketing and advertising resource providers.

• The idea that global agencies can provide global marketing solutions is an idiotic fraud that anyone with the intelligence of a gnat can see through. You can't find a single agency to get done everything you need done in Houston, how the hell are they supposed to do it worldwide? That global agencies even exist is a testament to the laziness of global marketers.

• There will always be a place for BDAs because there will always be BDCs.
  

• There will also be a place for regional, independent agencies because there will always be entrepreneurs and regional advertisers.

• The middle, however, will continue to collapse. This will create big failures and enormous opportunities.

• The web has turned us all into liars. We pretend the web has opened up huge new advertising opportunities when we secretly know that it has mostly been a dismal failure as an advertising medium. We cling to the few big successes and argue from the extreme. We pretend we know how to "do it all", but we don't. We pretend to be "media neutral" but secretly are either broadcast-centric, print-centric or web-centric.

• The strategic part of what agencies do is going to disappear. Smart clients have no confidence in account planning. Those who haven't yet, will soon take strategy away from agencies and place it in-house or in the hands of consultants.

• All their baloney notwithstanding, the huge media buying conglomerates have commoditized media buying and it is becoming a price war.
  

• The one and only leverageable asset agencies will be left with will be creativity. The definition of creativity has evolved into more than just making ads, and it will continue to evolve.
  

• Agencies will try to create relationships with creative resources outside the industry (directors, writers, performers) and, as always, this will fail. You will need your own outstanding creative resources.

Some strategies to think about:

• Specialize: Go against the grain. Every agency is trying to convince clients that they can do it all. Instead, be an agency that does only one thing really well. Specialize in retail, or become expert in marketing to Mid-Westerners, or only work on luxury brands, or only do creative work. Find something you can be famous for.

• Get small and do it yourself: The economics of the ad industry are going to hell. It's hard to make money. Soon big agencies may realize they can be more profitable by outsourcing to smaller, nimbler entities. Become a small, nimble entity (SNE?) Have your own clients and do contract work for BDA's.

• Confederate: Form a confederated brand with other small, nimble entities. One does strategy. One does creative. One does media planning. One does promotions. You are independent, but you work cooperatively. You provide clients with a single service or a suite of services.

• Something completely different: This is the most likely answer. The next model for the ad business is likely to be something we haven't even thought of.
  

Now is a perfect time to look at the ad industry in a new way. Throw away what you think you know. What are the big problems clients are facing? What's a new way to deliver solutions? Times of economic stress force companies to do something they hate -- search for new answers.

This is a great time for new ideas and innovative thinking. Get off your ass and do something different.

The series:
The Crisis Of Advertising, Part 1
The Crisis Of Advertising, Part 2: Consolidation
The Crisis Of Advertising, Part 3: Talent
The Crisis Of Advertising, Part 4: Brain Drain
The Crisis Of Advertising, Part 5: What To Do

Interactive My Ass:
On several occasions (like here and here) I have commented on the fraudulent idea that the internet is an interactive medium. Case in point: On Friday I posted a video and asked people to vote on whether they thought it was funny. Voting required one click of one mouse. We had 1,008 views. 49 people voted. Just to repeat, interactive my ass.

Results Of The Poll:
a) Funny-66%;
b) Not funny -20%;
c) Funny, but easily misunderstood - 14%

The Existential Adman

Before we get started, let's acknowledge that "The Existential Adman" is the worst title for a blog post in the history of online jabbering. If this thing gets 5 hits it'll be a miracle. But we soldier on unafraid...

Why do we care about advertising? Is there anything in it worthy of our attention and concern? These are the existential questions that we hope to answer in today's post.

Let's start with a wide shot and then cut to the extreme close-up. The wide shot is this: Is there anything anywhere worth caring about?

To contemplate this we need to get a sense of our place in the universe. We hear a lot of awe-inspiring banalities from gasbags like Neil deGrasse Tyson about the 100's of billions of stars in a galaxy and the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. This gives us the impression that the universe is teeming with stuff.

In fact, the universe is the emptiest thing you can imagine. Only 0.000000000000000000004 percent of the universe contains any matter. The universe has less actual substance to it than a social media pitch deck.

Our planet is not even a speck of dust on a galactic scale. On a universal scale it essentially doesn't exist. Still worried about whether your socks match?

The next depressing reality concerns our species. Our planet has been around for about 4 billion years. We humans have been here for only about 200,000 years. So what portion of the Earth's life have we been a part of? The answer again is a decimal point, a lot of zeroes, and a 4 -- .00004.

In other words, our stay here at the Planet Earth Inn and Suites has been quite a short one and, sadly,  promises not to last very much longer. The odds of us blowing ourselves up, melting ourselves, or poisoning ourselves seem to be shortening daily.

So the question is, if we are so insignificant and so temporary does anything really matter? This philosopher believes that no, nothing really matters. But in order to live an orderly life we have to pretend it matters. If we don't pretend things matter, we're all likely to wind up in the gutter drugged up and filthy. You remember college, right?

Next we get to advertising. In light of all this meaninglessness and nothingness how can anyone take advertising seriously?

Well first, of course, there's the money. We gotta pay for Netflix somehow.

But let's be honest. There's something fascinating about advertising that transcends payday.

Studying advertising helps us strip away some of the fanciful notions of human rectitude and more often than not exposes the depth of human vanity to those of us who are willing to recognize it.

Of course there are those in the advertising business who, despite all evidence to the contrary, believe that peoples' consuming habits are motivated by high-minded principles and not by self-interest.

But to those of us who accept humanity warts and all, advertising presents a unique lens through which we can view human behavior in a way that is not always evident in other lines of endeavor.

And now for the existential answers:

Does advertising mean anything? No.

Is it interesting? Yes.

The Prius Balloon Boy

After being exposed as hysterical, incompetent buffoons by the "balloon boy" story a few months ago, you'd think our media brainiacs would be a little more vigilant in their reporting.

According to Forbes.com however, they've been taken in again by another con artist named James Sikes -- this time doing enormous, perhaps irreparable damage to Toyota (full disclosure, they're a client of mine.)

In a story entitled Toyota Hybrid Horror Hoax, Michael Fumento in Forbes.com says, "Virtually every aspect of Sikes's story as told to reporters makes no sense."

Let's start at the beginning.

Last Tuesday, March 9, Toyota was presenting evidence to reporters at a press conference about testimony that was given to Congress and aired by ABC-TV by professor Dave Gilbert, of Southern Illinois University's auto technology department. Gilbert maintained that he had found a possible source of sudden acceleration. The evidence being presented made it clear that Gilbert was wrong.

In fact, it turned out that Gilbert was paid by a "safety research" company that was working on behalf of lawyers who were in the process of suing Toyota. It also turned out that ABC had doctored the footage in their report.

Toyota had an independent testing firm replicate Gilbert's "experiment."

"We did what Dr. Gilbert and ABC should have done to test the real-world relevance of Dr. Gilbert's findings," said Toyota spokesman Mike Michels. Gilbert's experiment was "completely unrealistic. He rewired and reengineered a vehicle in multiple ways in a specific sequence that is impossible to occur."

This conclusion was shared by J. Christian Gerdes, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford who is the director of Stanford's Center for Automotive Research.

But trying to demonstrate facts to reporters is a waste of time. The news media will take sensationalism over facts every day. And that day, Sikes's sensational story broke and the media flooded the airways with it.

In a call to 911, Sikes claimed that his accelerator was stuck and he was going 90 mph and could not slow down. Furthermore, the Highway Patrol responded and in order to get the car to stop had to pull in front of the car. I'm sure you've all heard this story.

Well, according to Fumento, it's all a bunch of bullshit. You can read about it in this article.

Here's the amazing part.  While repeating word-for-word all of Sikes's claims, and, in fact, amplifying them, no one in the hysterical news media bothered to find out the following:

• According to Forbes, Sikes and his wife filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and are over $700,000 in debt. At the time of their filing, they owed Toyota Financial Services over $20,000 on the lease of their Prius. When questioned by a website on whether they owed money on the Prius, Sikes denied being behind on his payments.

• According to Forbes, "Sikes also has a history of filing insurance claims for allegedly stolen items that are slowly coming to light. In 2001 he filed a police report with the Merced County Sheriff's Department for $58,000 in stolen property, including jewelry, a prosumer mini-DV camera and gear, and $24,000 in cash." 

• According to TV station Fox40 in Sacramento, CA
• His bankruptcy documents show a 2008 payment of $7,400 for an allegedly stolen saxophone and clothes.
• "He's been on TV before, and seems to cherish the attention. In 2006 he was on television, winning $55,000 on "The Big Spin." As a real estate agent in San Diego, he boasts of his celebrity clients, including Constance Ramos of "Extreme Home Makeover." "

• Apparently, Sikes has a reputation as a scammer. William Sweet, who says he's Sikes's former business partner says:  
• "As soon as i heard the words "Jim Sikes" I immediately woke up out of a dead sleep and thought "uh oh what the hell is this guy up to now?" He's trying to do a scam, and get in on that lawsuit for the Toyota thing, that's immediately what i thought."
• According to Fox40, "Jim Pernetti with AAA California Document Services says he's also aware of Sikes' past..."I've been warned that he used to do business here," Pernetti told FOX40, "and that I should be wary of anything with him."

• Sikes operates a website called AdultSwingLife.com which isn't exactly a porn site, but isn't exactly Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood either.

I have no way of knowing whether Sikes's story has any validity. But, by any standards, Sikes is not a reliable witness and the news media had a responsibility to examine his claims, not just regurgitate them without even an "allegedly" anywhere in sight before smearing Toyota once again.

As Fumento sums it up in the Forbes story:

"Journalism schools are supposed to teach that skepticism is paramount. "If your mother says it, check it out," goes the old adage.

Yet comments on Web sites across the country reveal that practically everyone thought the Prius incident was a hoax... except for the media. They have been as determined to not investigate Sikes' claims as Sikes was to not stop his car. It's a Toyota media feeding frenzy and the media aren't about to let little things like incredible stories and readily-refutable claims get in the way."

For the latest on this story see Balloon Boy Update. 
Also be sure to read Kirk's comment below

When White People Run Wild

My daughter goes to school in Portland, OR and I've been spending some time there.

Portland is a lovely city with nice people. But it's an extreme case of what happens when white people are allowed to run wild without the palliative effect of other races.

First you notice that there are way too many bicycles clogging up the roads. And that every bicycle rider has one of those pointy-headed space-age helmets even though they're traveling at an infuriating 4 miles an hour.

Tattoos are apparently required by law, as are facial piercings. These often serve as personality substitutes.

Everything is either sustainable or said to be so (note to overly-fervent environmentalists: The second law of thermodynamics predicts that the universe is subject to something called entropy, which is pretty solid confirmation that nothing is sustainable. But we'll leave that for another day.)

And speaking of sustainability, citizens of Portland seem to have unrealistically high confidence in the resiliency of their lung tissue, as they smoke cigarets with alarming enthusiasm.

The most successful enterprises in Portland appear to be second-hand clothing stores, second-hand furniture stores, and food carts (aka, roach coaches.)

Of course, the Northwest coffee fetish is well-represented and there seems to be a coffee shop-to-inhabitant ratio of 3-to-1.

Now don't get me wrong.  I like Portland, and some of my best friends are white. It's just that these people actually put pineapple on their pizza. This is an abomination that a more diverse citizenry would never abide.

Fashion Tips For Portlanders:

For Gals: Unless you're headed to women's volleyball practice, sweatpants in the evening are a fashion no-no. Take a look around you. Sweatpants are mostly the domain of fat guys with disagreeable rashes.

For Guys: Your soul patch is way too big. It shouldn't be covering your entire chin. Check out Dizzy. This is the way you wear a soul patch. I know you're trying to look like a hip jazz player, but you look more like a clueless relief pitcher.

On The Other Hand...
...best French toast anywhere: Pazzo Ristorante, corner Broadway and Washington.

Why Clients Are Always Confused

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called "Why Creatives Are Always Confused." Today, it's clients' turn.

I have been in the advertising business now for about 200 years.

One of my quests while serving this lengthy sentence has been to try to find some universal truths about advertising. So far I've come up empty.

If someone like me -- who spends 14 hours a day thinking about advertising -- is confused, imagine how our clients, who have real jobs to contend with, must feel.

I suspect that there are no universal truths about advertising.  Advertising is a function of human behavior, and human behavior is always contingent. The only general statements you can make about human behavior are about probabilities, not absolutes.

There is nothing you can say about advertising that is always true. There is also nothing you can say about advertising that is never true.

This leads to big problems, lots of wasted money, and a very large quantity of disoriented, confused clients.

It makes it possible for a certain type of agency person -- who is articulate but often wrong -- to convince the impressionable and the naive to follow him.

It makes it commonplace to argue from the extreme and make it seem as if an improbably rare occurrence is somehow typical.

How many times have bad agencies used the brilliant Just Do It to justify pointless "branding" campaigns?

How many times have bad agencies used the ground-breaking Subservient Chicken to justify preposterous viral schemes?

How many times have agencies used the wonderful got milk? campaign to justify shoddy account planning?

How many times have web hustlers used Zappos to justify expensive, ineffectual social media projects?

How many times have hack agency heads used horrible but successful used-car advertising to justify absence of creativity?

Because there are no universal truths, you can find justification for virtually anything in the annals of advertising, no matter how unlikely.

By factoring out the brilliance of the people who created Just Do It, Subservient Chicken, and got milk? agencies can pretend that there are some general principles about advertising to be drawn from them. There aren't. But clients are constantly being mislead into thinking there are.

When evaluating advertising, remember

• there are no absolutes, just probabilities
• never allow anecdotes to masquerade as principles
• even people who do brilliant, groundbreaking work have trouble reproducing it

It would make clients' lives -- and ours -- so much simpler if there were some rules about advertising that were always true. Unfortunately, there aren't.

No wonder clients are confused. No wonder I'm confused.

Maniacs With Thin Skins

“He irritates the fuck out of me. He’s got carried away with his own scepticism about the internet and it’s become a self-fulfilling prophesy.” Another blogger, on the subject of yours truly.

The fun thing about being The Ad Contrarian is that it's my job is to stick my finger in the eye of conventional advertising wisdom.

Since conventional advertising wisdom is so, well, conventional, and since it is so lacking in, um, wisdom, I seem to have an inexhaustible supply of material.

I try to be an equal opportunity non-believer. My favorite targets are brand babblers, web maniacs, account planners, researchers, and pundits. But I also like to take cheap shots at account people, media people, and creatives. You know, spreading the love.

But I've noticed something.

You can stick your finger in the eye of everyone of these groups and they'll have a sense of humor or sense of proportion about it.  Except one group -- the web maniacs.

As I've said about a million times, I have nothing against web advertising other than to call out the bullshit, hyperbole and words without meaning that extreme web hustlers are fond of.

There are plenty of smart, reasonable people working in digital media who do not make preposterous assertions; who do not think that social media is the answer to every question; who do not speak in the dreadful, impenetrable language of digi-drivel.

So why all the defensiveness and hostility when you point out those who do? Why all the animosity when you examine the short-comings, and catalog the failures of web advertising? Nobody gets all huffy when we criticize tv advertising. Or print. Or radio.

Why are these digi-wonders so sensitive about their precious internet?

And, by the way...
...about that quote at the top. As I said yesterday, I don't do prophesies. Self-fulfilling or otherwise.

How Did Amazon Become A Great Brand?

If historians are always arguing about how civilizations emerge, I guess us ad hacks can argue about how brands emerge.

Al Ries had a piece in Ad Age last week. The piece was called Let's Get Real: It's Not Marketing We Do Today, It's Branding.

The essence of the piece is that the function that was once called marketing should now be called branding. Frankly, I don't care what you call it. Richard Feynman once talked about a scientist who could tell you the Latin name of every plant in the world. Feynman said that the guy knew nothing about plants, all he knew about was what people called plants. 

Whether you call it marketing or branding or anything else is simply a question of semantics. The important question is not what you call it, but how do you do it? How do you build a strong brand?

Ries's argument about how to do it is very unconvincing to me. He is advocating the "branding first" school of business.

"...there's a new approach many companies are using that dramatizes the importance of the brand. I call it: Branding first, sales and profits second. If you can build a brand, then you should be able to figure out a way to turn that brand into a profitable enterprise."

A new approach? I don't think so. Fifteen years ago every web start-up in the world was following this "quick branding" philosophy. Hundreds of millions of advertising dollars were flushed down the toilet as hundreds of WebVans and Pets.coms followed this thinking into oblivion.

Then Ries makes another interesting claim:

"If there's an iron-clad rule in marketing, it is this: Brands are built by being first in a new category."

I wonder what he would say about this from a recent New Yorker piece written by Malcolm Gladwell -- which made the exact opposite point about Apple...

"The first portable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introduced the iPod, in 2001...Smart phones started coming out in the nineteen-nineties. Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, more than a decade later... The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft..."

Ries uses Amazon as his exemplar of "branding first." It is always convenient to argue from the extreme -- take the one example of your philosophy that seems uniquely successful and ignore the thousands of flops. But Ries is being coy here. He's too smart not to know that what made Amazon a huge success was not "branding," it was an amazing and ground-breaking operations and customer service system developed by a visionary leader.

Look, brands are hugely important in commerce. Anyone who thinks brands are not important is either blind or delusional. Brands are why we have signs on stores and labels on bottles.

But the idea that brands are built by "branding" -- whatever that means -- is wrong. My view has always been that a strong brand is usually a by-product. It comes from doing a lot of things right -- like making good products, innovating, treating customers respectfully, and doing effective advertising. 

It's like happiness. The route to happiness is usually indirect. You don't achieve happiness by trying to be happy. You achieve happiness by doing something else -- spending time with people you like or learning to do something well. But trying to be happy will mostly make you miserable.

I disagree with Mr. Ries. Amazon did not become a great brand by "branding." It became a great brand by doing a lot of other things brilliantly.

Of Bozos And Businesses

My partners and I operate a small business. We have about 75 people in our company. We try to run our business in a prudent manner. We take our responsibilities to our colleagues and their families seriously. This sometimes means doing unpleasant things and making difficult decisions, but we try to keep as many people employed as we can.

Politicians in Washington and in City Hall like to use small businesses as a symbol of their concern for the average citizen. They are forever using Wall Street as their symbol for the bad guys and Main Street as their symbol for the good guys. As a small business owner, I find this offensive in the extreme.

The reason I find it offensive is that it is cynical and hypocritical. In fact, when the cameras are turned off, the influence of big business on government policy is immense, and the thought given to small business is nonexistent.

Recently The New York Times ran an article about the absurd and insane barriers one city put in the way of a person trying to start a small business. You would think that in an era in which people are losing their homes and their savings because they can't find work, the idiots who run our lives would try to make it easier to start a business and create jobs. You would be wrong.

You can read the complete Times article here. But a synopsis goes like this:

A woman in San Francisco wanted to open an ice cream parlor. Here's what she had to go through:

• It took her two years to get the permits to open her ice cream parlor
• The permit fees alone cost her $20,000
• During that two year period she had to pay rent on her retail space, even though she couldn't use it
• The city demanded that she create a detailed map of all existing businesses in the area because they didn’t have one
• The city charged her $11,000 just to turn on the water

Or, as The Times put it

"...it took two years to open...due largely to the city’s morass of permits, procedures and approvals required to start a small business. While waiting for permission to operate, she still had to pay rent and other costs, going deeper into debt each passing month without knowing for sure if she would ever be allowed to open.

(The owner) would not say exactly how much it all cost, including construction, but smiled and nodded when asked if it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars."

We're not talking about a nuclear power plant here. We're talking about a fucking ice cream parlor.

There is no excuse for this. Pandering politicians are forever telling us that small business is "the backbone of America" and that it provides 2/3 of the jobs. It's all bullshit. Utter bullshit.

The tax codes are rigged in favor of big businesses and against small businesses. Our thousands of pages of tax laws are just thousands of pages of special pleading for corporate big shots and other pressure groups with influence in Washington (nobody is even sure how many pages the federal tax law consumes. The best guess is about 17,000 pages.) I'll bet you $10 that if you examined the tax returns of Omnicom or Interpublic Group they pay less than half the taxes that my company pays as a percent of revenue. As a matter of fact, I'd bet $10,000.

The knuckleheads in federal, state and municipal government make it as difficult as possible to start and run a small business. And the people who suffer most are the people who are out of work.

Now that the ice cream parlor has opened, there are 14 more people who have jobs. And if it wasn't for inexcusable stupidity they could have had jobs 2 years ago.