A Monday Morning Musing — Mayhem at Mayhem?

I noticed a squib in the paper over the weekend that caught my eye. Seems like the Gekko is about to overtake Allstate as Number 2 in auto insurance. This struck me for a couple of reasons. 1) I would have thought Gekko was Number 1 (but of course it’s the one zillion year old State Farm) and 2) I would have thought that the Gekko had demolished Allstate aeons ago. This despite the Mayhem Man and the might of Allstate. So I paid some attention to the car insurance ad wars of the weekend and learned something else. The paper had pitted Mayhem Man against the Gekko as the duelling critters of insurance, but in fact, Mayhem Man isn’t the car insurance campaign for Allstate. It’s something else, another campaign where people mouth the deep voice of the actor who is the spokesperson for Allstate — a lame, forced, invisible series of rather unfunny commercials. And a light went off in my sleep deprived brain. Of course — Mayhem ISN’T the voice of Allstate Car Insurance. No wonder the Gekko is cleaning its clock. The message is muddled. Even the newspaper put Mayhem Man forward as the image of Allstate. If only Allstate would.

Which is a long way of saying — in communications it’s all about the story. Alignment, truth, veracity, the product — most of that stuff doesn’t mean anything. The best critter and the best story wins out in our cluttered, addled minds.

Or as Jimmy Stewart said in John Ford’s classic film, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,” — “when the truth disagrees with the legend — print the legend.”

Or, to put that into an advertising context, forgive me if I repeat (and no doubt mangle) my second favorite Howard Gossage quote: “The purpose of advertising is not to sell your client’s products, it’s to scare the hell out of your client’s copywriters.”

Happy Monday to you.

Getting something from “like” to “love.”

We like lots of things.

A building. A sandwich. A shirt. A TV show.

We only love a handful of things. That building we’ve always wanted to live in. That incredible sandwich we’ll probably never be able to find again that we had from a street cart in L.A. That shirt that’s getting frayed and tattered but always makes us feel great when we wear it.

The difference between “like” and “love” is not a number. It’s not even how it’s made, or how much it costs, or how often we get it. Or, to put it another way — it’s all in the mind. (Heart.)

So much of what we try to communicate has such small, or complex, differences — and people are so busy — we have to look at what makes people sit up and take notice. What makes people go from “I like it,” (which means you’ll pretty much be a commodity, or, same difference, invisible,) is “coolness.”

Fun. Clever. Enjoyable. Delight.

You have to know what you’re saying, to whom, when, and how. But, even with that, you have to turn your message into that amazing shirt that makes them feel so good. That makes them love it.

It’s not easy. Or scientific. But it’s the only thing that works. Really works.

I’m just sayin’…

Have a great weekend.

“Honey, could you get up and hit the computer — then it’ll work.”

I had a technology related kerfuffle last week and lost an entire post to this blog. Some of you got to see it, my comparing Churchill’s speech to what it takes to make a website score big. But most of you missed it. Because, well, because of technical difficulties. That post just got eaten, plain and simple. Yes, WordPress did get back to me with an e-mail from customer support — and I tried what they said, and all that was left of my Churchillian post was a couple of shreds.

Which led me to thinking — as much as we think we’ve got this Internet thing down, we are still in the dark ages. Remember when TV’s sometimes used to have coat hangers draped in tin foil sticking out of them in an vain effort to grab a fuzzy image of Johnny Carson? In many ways, our technology is in the same place. Too many passwords. Or not enough. Dropped calls. Apps v. sites. Streaming v. writing. And consider the government trying to collect tax from cloud-based retailers? What’s that going to do?

Subscribe? Free? Open platform? Closed? Steal? Borrow? On-the-go or on-the-couch? Just remember, we are all still making it up as we go along.

And pass me the tin foil.

(p.s. — perhaps someday I’ll recreate the Churchill post — how very analog of me!!!)

Mayhem — The Leo Burnett ‘Critter’ as anti-critter…

He’s there. Right alongside the Pillsbury Doughboy and The Jolly Green Giant and Tony the Tiger and Charley the Tuna. That snarly, bearded, with little piece of band-aid tape above his eye purveyor of all that is wrong with the world known as “Mayhem,” spokescritter for good ole’ Allstate insurance. Espousing all the little things that go wrong, this critter has taken his proud place among the greatest that the Leo Burnett agency has ever created. How do I know? I heard him ripped off this morning. On the radio. Some health company was touting some undecipherable disease and they gave that disease a persona just like Mayhem. But not as good. By a longshot. But still, boxed into a corner, the agency creatives reverted to the ultimate sign of someone having come up with a “big” idea. They ripped it off. (I could almost hear the cash registers ch-chinging at the Allstate company!) Another winner for Leo. And I thought, would Leo himself have approved of this downtrodden anarchistic force of evil as a spokes-critter? I do believe he would have. See, he liked the sounds of ch-chinging too.

Leo does it again.

Today’s scores: John Hegarty and the Horses, 1: Big Data, 0.

Speaking (or more like, snarling) at some sort of global conference in Europe, John Hegarty, founder of BBH and a man who knows his way around big ideas, (His company was responsible for commercials such as Levi’s ‘Laundrette’, and ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ for Audi, ‘The Axe (Lynx) Effect’ for Unilever and ‘Keep Walking’ for Johnnie Walker) took a shot at big data. More than a shot, he took a cavalry charge. Everyone was going on and on about how big data is going to be the big deal from now on, Mr. Hegarty fired off, “I’ve spent my life dealing with people who’ve got all the data in the world and yet they can’t invent anything.”

And then his thoughts turned to horses. He added, “Supermarkets have an incredible amount of data coming into them, and yet they didn’t realize they were flogging horsemeat to people…I would have thought someone along the line should have been looking at the broader picture. You look at too much data and you don’t actually see what’s going on around you.”

Spoken like a marketer. Someone who doesn’t take false comfort in the belt and suspenders of numbers, but who looks into the hearts and souls (and stomachs) of his audience. Not consumers, people. People who like horsies.

Data doesn’t show that. Because data only shows you what you are already looking for. That’s why, unless you’ve laid an enormous egg (sorry to mix metaphors — not really…), as anyone who has worked with data knows, if it’s at all close, numbers can be twisted to say anything.

Ask Mr. Romney. His numbers showed he’d win. Right up to the end. The democratic data crunchers, no slouches, knew they had to put some flesh and heart and message onto the those numbers to make them connect. And they did.

Data, if it’s all we rely on, is like generals who are always fighting the last war. And for extra credit, why don’t you Google “Maginot Line” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I wouldn’t want to abbreviate Mr. Hegarty’s tirade with mine. No. I’ve got to run. So I’ll let him wrap up. When talking about mobile this and app that and data streaming blah blah blah, he pronounced, and I’d like to imagine it was with more than a drop of English ire,
“the only space I want to occupy, the only space that’s interesting to me, is the one between people’s ears. That’s where I want my message to go and how I get there is an irrelevance.”

I think even the old researcher fellow Brit David Ogilvy would have agreed with that one.

Hi-Yo-Silver, Away!!!!!!

The Perils of Stock (photography that is…)

We are drowning in a sea of stock photos. A tsunami of smiling gray-haired dads and sprinting business executives and pensive hipsters and buoyant moms and kids with balloons. And while there are many experts and savants and pundits who would point to the rise of the Internet or video games or MBA’s as the cause of the immense boredom and suckitude (to use a scientific term) that cloaks all advertising these days, I believe the cause is much simpler. Stock.

It is just too damn easy to make ads that look good, look acceptible, look like real ads — for presentation, to run — by using stock photographs you pay for, or even worse, ones you swipe. Why is this so bad?

Well, it’s like eating pre-digested food. That’s bad, right? It’s like going to a restaurant and them saying to you, “you can order anything you want, as long as half of it contains hot dogs and beans.” It’s like Shakespeare attacking a new play and someone saying to him, it has to feature circus clowns, stock car racing, and a big scene involving a marching band.

The bad thing about stock is that you come to the “making things up” table with one (or two, or three, or seven…) hands tied behind your back. No matter how pretty and slick things look, YOU JUST CAN’T THINK OF ANYTHING NEW.

And what does that lead to? Yawnnnnnnn….

Luckily, there is a remedy for this. And I didn’t think of it. A caveman (or woman) did. Draw pictures. Make up pictures. Scribble stuff. You don’t even have to be able to draw that well — stick figures can do it. In fact, I’d prefer stick figures to another shot of a happy pharmacist with just the right tint of gray in his hair and half-glasses serving up…

Well, you get it.

So leave stock to the brokers, and start scribbling already!

Shooting our barefooted children in the feet — and we’re the shoemakers, or, a question about the state of the advertising business spurred on by watching the Today Show.

The Today Show has its problems. But the loss of Katie, America’s sweetheart, isn’t what I’m talking about today. I’m talking about the ads. The things that are supposed to be supporting the show. As sick as the content of the show is, the way the advertising business is treating our clients, our messages, and our viewers (consumers? customers?) is a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom.

But first, remember the old saying “the shoemaker’s children are going barefooted?” How certain people have a tendency to take care of every one else’s needs except their own? Good. Now, park that for a moment.

Remember the saying, “shooting ourselves in the feet?” How, no matter what some people do, they end up harming themselves first? Good. Now, take those two sayings, combine them, and you’ll get an idea of just how ridiculous the ad business is dealing with the media and clients and customers, as evidenced by a recent viewing of the Today Show — and just about everything else on TV. And you’ll get an idea of how, as an industry, advertising and media are conspiring to do more harm to ourselves than 10,000 Mark Zuckerbergs on steroids. OK, enough waffling. To get to the point, here’s what I saw.

I saw a pod of TOO MANY DAMN COMMERCIALS, TOO SHORT COMMERCIALS, AND TOO MANY OF THOSE DAMN PODS TOO CLOSE TOGETHER. Thus, training the audience to turn off their minds, relax and float downstream — or even worse, GO TO THE BATHROOM!

1: TOO MANY SPOTS IN THE POD. Why do we need so many commercial breaks? Especially when the content of the show itself is so weak? Can’t the networks break up the pacing of the spots a little, to surprise the audience and keep them off guard. It is so predictable, we have Pavlovianly (sic) trained them to scram.

2: WHY SUCH SHORT SPOTS? We, in the creative departments, are not immune. Our wonderful, creative, Cannes-ready scripts are chopped down to 15 second abortions. Noise, noise, noise. Who really thinks these 15 second commercials, no matter how expensive the production or how wonderful the idea can do anything to CHARM AND DELIGHT our audiences? NOISE, NOISE, NOISE.

If we, as an industry, don’t start getting back into the business of surprising and delighting our audiences (with selling messages they love because, although people hate advertising, they love great advertising), if we don’t start doing that all we are doing is cashing the checks for the passengers on the Titanic after the noble ship had already sunk.

And we’re not doing that, are we?

Are we?

Too much coffee this morning. Now for some yoga. And tofu.