The Quisenblog

If you want an example of what can happen if your brand loses its focus and doesn’t go “all-in” to stand for something meaningful, unique and true, consider the case of Volvo.

Back in the early 1970s, Volvo’s agency, Scali McCabe & Sloves (SMS) of New York, was tasked with developing a campaign that would elevate what until then had been a quirky Swedish car company that became the poster child for the “boxy” (unsexy) sedan.

SMS talked to scores of drivers who swore by their Volvos, and in the end, one piece of insight stuck out. Rabid Volvo fans tended to be better educated, more liberal and tended to make decisions less on emotion and more on cold hard facts (at least that’s what they reported). If Mercedes was the brand for the Wall Streeter, and BMW for the aspirational mid-level exec, then Volvo was for the college professor.

Volvo ad from Scali, McCabe Sloves, circa 1974

The agency then created a campaign (mainly in magazines and newspapers) around the “facts” that seemed important to Volvo’s buyers. The campaign was built around the tagline “The car for people who think.”

For more than fifteen years, Volvo held to this position, and over time, became known for its uncompromising commitment to safety, as exemplified by such things as crash-resistant passenger cages and rear windshield wipers. For time, they actually used crash test dummies as the brand’s “spokespeople.” Volvo was seen (and actually was) as the carmaker who was on the cutting edge of safety technology.

Volvo’s ads unapologetically featured long copy, and were designed to “look like” the vehicles themselves, eschewing fancy lifestyle or performance photos and stylish, contemporary fonts. With a fraction of the budget that most European automakers boasted, Volvo not only carved out a meaningful niche for itself, but also saw sales rise impressively, topping out around 140,000 vehicles. Drivers who bought Volvos did so because they thought of themselves (and wanted to be seen) as thoughtful people who weren’t swayed by “less significant” things like styling and performance. Volvos became huge with the Chai Tea-drinking, NPR-listening, pipe-smoking, Utne Reader-reading, “Twin Peaks”-watching “leather elbow patch crowd.”

Then, starting in the 1990s, Volvo inexplicably made a dramatic turn. Management made the decision to compete head-on with the fast-growing German marques. They started turning out more “stylish” models. Added turbo-powered performance. And basically, chose to compete with the Germans on their turf, instead of forcing them to play defense on the whole “safety” position.

Volvo definitely paid the price for trying to be like everyone else. Their sales have fallen by half since 2004. The company has gone through a couple of ownership changes, first sold to Ford Motor Co., then recently to Geeley Automotive of China in 2010.

Besides losing their safety positioning, Volvo also lost their safety edge. None of their models have showed up in the top ten of the National Highway Safety Board crash tests for many years. Younger drivers likely have no feeling about the brand, if they are aware of it at all.

But perhaps, Volvo died for you. It stands as an example of what happens when you have a strong position that is meaningful to a decent percentage of the category’s buyers, and then fail to invest in it, both through an operational and marketing standpoint.

Given the tough comeptitive landscape of the auto industry, it’s hard to see Volvo making any kind of dramatic comeback in the near future, at least here in the states. There are a quarter of a billion drivers in China, though, and that may prove to be Volvo’s next hunting ground.

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Of the 56 national commercials that were broadcast during the Super Bowl, how many do you remember?

There are those that have been much talked about: The Dodge Ram “Paul Harvey” spot, Bud’s heart-string tugging “Clydesdale” spot, Samsung’s “Brainstorming” spot, Doritos “Goat 4 Sale.” And yeah, you probably remember the disgusting Go Daddy “Kiss” spot (for the wrong reasons). But how many others can you name off the top of your head?

Chances are you won’t be able to name more than three or four more unprompted, despite the fact that we’re less than a week removed from the Super Bowl. Not exactly good news for the other 40 to 45 advertisers who shelled out a cool $3.8 million to appear in the, uh, super bowl of advertising (sorry).

While some may say the reason for this is that this year’s crop of spots wasn’t the best. And that Super Bowl ads have become somewhat formulaic (being brash and being different makes you just like everybody else).

To make matters worse, the link between getting an ad on the Super Bowl and achieving actual marketing goals is getting more and more nebulous. A recent study from eMarketer.com revealed that while 75% of the audience finds the spots entertaining, only 10% view them as being “persuasive.”

In other words, they do a poor job of selling. Even the top-rated spots don’t really hero the product (okay, Tide’s “Montana Miracle Stain” DID sell Tide). Take the (way too many) car commercials for example. Audi made a high school dweeb “more courageous.” Hyundai featured The Flaming Lips in a commercial I still don’t understand. Kia’s “Space Babies” had to do with making up stories for your kids (it did sell voice command for its sound system. Yeah, that oughta sell a bazillion cars). Even charmers like the Toyota “Genie” and the aforementioned Ram spot were short on “reasons why” (let’s see, the Rav 4 doesn’t have a spare tire, and Rams are for farmers). And last year’s hit, VW’s “Darth Vader” spot? If memory serves, it focused on the vehicle’s remote start.

A few weeks before the Super Bowl, Jonathan Salem Baskin penned an article for Advertising Age titled “The Super Bowl is a commercial for what’s wrong with advertising.” Baskin writes, “A beauty pageant isn’t marketing, and it distracts ad makers from their real purpose. The ‘best’ spots rarely correlate with any real-world success…instead prompting clicks and ‘likes’ about the ads themselves.”

He then cites statistics that show how brands have suffered in recent years: 25% of all brands’ reputations with the public have cratered; less than half of consumers trust advertising (down 25% from 2009, according to Nielsen); and customer loyalty is down in almost all categories, with brands more and more having to fight for customers on a transaction-by-transaction basis.

In other words, other than creating a masturbatory experience for the brands that run the ads and the agencies that create them, it’s hard to find any other tangible benefits that come from an ad presence in The Big Game.

So where does the ad industry go from here? My guess is not much will change in 2014. It’s harder to jump off a bandwagon than jump on one.

But if you’re not selling the soda, beer, or snack food that’s generally consumed at Super Bowl parties, you’d be better off banking your wad and get back to doing some REAL brand advertising.

To view the entire batch of this year’s Super Bowl commercials, click here.

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With the Super Bowl looming just around the corner, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit the “Grand-Daddy of Today’s Super Bowl Extravaganzas”–Apple’s “1984” commercial.

Folks in our business tend to view “1984” with an almost religious reverence. They’ll say “This is the spot that made Apple the major player it is today!”

While I hate to rain on a good story, this is a bit of revisionist history.

While most would agree that piece of advertising was brilliant in just about every sense of the word, the spot reflected who Apple is now, not who Apple was then. In 1984 (and for several years afterward), MacIntosh was derided as a “toy” computer that wasn’t practical for business purposes, despite sporting cool new features like the mouse and the graphic user interface, Hardly any software was created for it. It was grossly underpowered. And it was way more expensive than IBM’s or Compaq’s rival PCs.

Truth be told, it wasn’t until the rise of the desktop publishing era later in the decade that the Mac found its niche.

It’s important to note that while Apple initially didn’t deliver on the promise of “1984,” over time it definitely did. The spot was pure aspiration. It was a line in the sand, a gauntlet thrown down, a true “vision statement” for the company and the brand. The spot basically communicated, “Apple is the company that produces technology products built around the user’s needs. Apple stands for technology you WANT to use.”

In many ways, the vision of Apple from the mid-80s, given its products’ capabilities, was quite audacious. It is precisely this audaciousness that can keep an organization and a brand moving in the right direction.

The aspirational aspect of building a brand should never be underrated.

And on a strictly personal note, go Niners.

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“How will we know that this will work?”

This is the logical question for marketers to ask when presented with a new advertising concept or marketing tactic. As much as they might like the idea–and as much as they are reassured by those who have created it–they yearn for some form of impartial information that will “prove” to them that the concept we’re presenting will outperform all others.

A decade ago, whenever a marketer asked that question of any ad creative presenting new work, the answer most likely was some variation of “trust me.” For support, we could point to consumer behavioral studies or similar case histories or previous experiences we’ve had with similar marketing problems. But at the end of the day, it came down to “Based on our experience, we believe this will work.”

Today, however, we in the creative industries have an unlikely ally: data. I say “unlikely” because for decades, creatives were trained to be skeptical of people bearing spreadsheets. Especially when it came to trying to apply hard numbers to emotionally-based creative concepts.

To be clear, there is a huge difference between “research” and “data.” “Research” is an undertaking to discover a specific answer to a specific question or concern (“Do viewers understand what the key message of this commercial is?”). Most research requires a fair amount of subjectivity to extrapolate precious few data points to form a conclusion. “Data,” on the other hand, are ongoing real-time streams of engagement metrics. Data provide “snapshots in time” that are based around action, not interpretation.

Today’s data are empirical, and can take much of the subjectivity out of the equation. For example, you can evaluate your email subject lines by seeing what your “open” rates are. You can measure how many more clicks Facebook ad “version A” got than “version B.” You can see where visitors are dropping off your web site. You can compare click-to-conversion ratios. You can quantify which content your audience has amplified or engaged with and which they didn’t.

Most importantly, today’s data make it easier to “course correct” during your marketing efforts, no longer forcing you to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” and pull the plug on a concept, tactic or a program because a single element underperformed. Today’s marketing is less about “campaigns” that have a fixed beginning and end, and more about measuring and sustaining ongoing engagement from your audiences.

Let me tell you, as a creative, the “era of data” takes a lot of heat off. Not just when analytics prove the times we are right, but more importantly to give us insight into how we can make efforts we’ve launched better.

And rather than stifling creativity, my belief is that data can help drive it. Bold marketers, rather than casting about for reassurance when presented with a bold concept, are more and more likely to say, “Let’s run with it, then see how it does,” knowing that the knobs can always be tweaked down the road.

The basic tools required to get started in capturing data are free (or cheap) and are relatively easy to use (find out more about that in this post).

It was deparment store maven John Wannamaker who supposedly said about advertising, “I know I’m wasting half of my money. The problem is, I don’t know which half.”

Today’s data and analytics might just help him figure that out.

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One of the most under appreciated aspects of social media and how it can affect your marketing is how they give you the ability to ‘listen in’ on consumers.

By setting up listening posts online, whether through conversation monitors like Social Mention, keyword tools like Google Alerts or trending topic tools like Twitter hashtags, you can not only get a sense of what the public is saying about you, your products and competitors online. In many cases it can even give you inspiration.

One recent example of this is the case with Samsung and its Galaxy III smart phone.

Samsung’s latest television ads, which mock Apple’s recent release of its new iPhone 5, seem to be striking a chord with consumers, at least judging by its popularity on YouTube (32 million+ views as of this writing). The South Korean electronics maker credits part of its success to the fact that the insight behind its advertising came straight from the consumer’s mouth (or in this case, the consumers keyboard).

According to Samsung, the ads’ scripts were based on “hundreds of thousands” of Tweets the company monitored that complained or poked fun at specific features of the iPhone 5. Here’s on example of the TV campaign.

One of the customers says: “I heard that you have to have an adapter to use the dock on the new one.” Another young man chimes in: “Yeah, yeah but they make the coolest adapters.” Reportedly, those lines and other parts of the ad’s script came straight from Twitter conversations.

This is just one example of how social media are helping marketers shape their ad campaigns, or even their products themselves. Procter & Gamble’s Duracell Battery division used data from social media to help it develop the Duracell Powermat, a portable device that allows smart phone charging on the go. Duracell’s decision to use iconic red and green battery signals came about after social media analytics found that people often referred to the color of their battery signal when they were expressing frustration about losing power.

It’s rare that social media monitoring alone will provide all the marketing answers for you. But it’s one more tool to use to get a “voice of the customer” that just might lead to some inspired executions, whether through ad messaging or product refinement.

Just listen.

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If you are interested in exploring guerilla marketing (or, if you prefer, non-traditional marketing) because you’re committed to creating something outrageous, standing out from the crowd, hitting people with an unexpected message when their guards are down and perhaps inciting a viral campaign, then it might just be for you. If you’re interested in guerilla because you want to save money or don’t have the budget for a mass media campaign, prepare to be disappointed.

“Guerilla marketing” is often defined as hitting consumers (prospects) with marketing messages either in places they don’t expect them, or in ways they don’t expect. While guerilla campaigns are rarely scalable, they can break through the mind-numbing clutter we each have to deal with each day, and can help consumers think about you and your offerings in a new, fresh way.

That is, if you do it right. And let me just say it here: guerilla marketing is not a cheaper way to do marketing. While it is true you won’t have the media expenses of a more traditional mass media campaign, you will have a lot of expenses mass media campaigns don’t incur. A lot of what we in the business refer to as “man hours”–fabrication costs, research and preparation, event planning and hosting, content creation, fulfillment and follow-up. All things you don’t have to worry about in the “set-and-forget” world of paid media advertising.

So how do you know if the non-traditional approach you’re considering will be a hit or an exercise in futility? As it turns out, many of the most successful guerilla marketing efforts have a lot in common. More specifically, they’re able to unequivocally answer “yes” to each of these questions:

• Is it surprising/quirky/unexpected? Unlike with mass media marketing, where you can buy attention, with non-traditional marketing, you have to earn it. Your content has to be disarming, and catch people with their guards down. These beer stein decals installed on glass doors are but one example.



• Does it amplify the brand’s story outside the traditional media space? Getting attention is great. But if it doesn’t play back to your core brand story (and what you want people to say about you), you’re likely wasting your time. This urinal poster for the Arizona Science Center is an example of linking non-traditional creative and media to boost the brand.



• Is it sustainable? Coming up with a “blockbuster” event might sound like a good idea, but too often these are little more than closed-ended tactics. This video for Coca Cola showcases one event (in this case, rewarding good samaritans who turned in an unattended wallet with tickets to a soccer match), but it leads to a bigger pay off for the brand–“Buy That Person A Coke.” Works for honest folks who turn in wallets. Works in hundreds of other situations too.
• Is it supported? Is it a stand-alone execution, or is it tied to other things the brand is doing, both on- and off-line? Social media provides your brand many possible ways to reach people. Plan ahead to determine how to amplify your guerilla tactics through social. Check out this video to see how The Opticians Council Of Canada amplified their guerilla tactics.
• Can it do things in a way that can’t be done in a traditional media space? Getting out of the two-dimensional world gives you lots of possibilities to explore. Check out this guerilla tactic for a gym.



• Is it disruptive, without being inconveniencing or annoying? People are used to advertising messages being restricted to specific times and spaces (magazine pages, TV programming breaks, etc.). Once you venture outside the expected ad media, you run the risk of irritating your audience and building resentment against you. If you’re going to intrude into their lives, you better make it worthwhile for them.

With the rise of social media, and your audience’s ability to share and spread things that interest them, guerilla marketing can serve to garner tons of attention to the brand, ignite word of mouth and generate ample free media, and get people talking about the brand. (Old Spice’s “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” and Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice“ are two of the most famous examples).

In the not-so-best cases, brands have wasted a ton of money, resources and good will developing stuff that their audiences, to put it bluntly, could care less about (Cisco’s “Ted From Accounting” web series comes to mind).

For 50 great examples of guerilla tactics that worked, click here.

The net of it then, is that in regard to guerilla tactics, while spending money is not a sure-fire recipe for success, not spending it is a sure-fire way to fail.

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One of the many marketing newsletters I received this week came from Marketing Sherpa. The guest-written main article was a lesson on crafting the right “subject line” for your emails that would generate the highest “open rate.” Good information. But it was the title of the article that really got my attention: “Which performs better: Creativity or Clarity?”

That got me thinking. Are there really folks out there who view the whole clarity/creativity dynamic as “either/or?” Who somehow think if something is “creative” that it can’t be “clear?”

To most of us in the business, being “clear” is actually the first consideration when being “creative.’

In its most basic form, creativity is “making the mundane interesting.” In an era where we’re overloaded with both targeted and random messages coming at us from all quarters (by some estimates as many as 5,000 ‘selling’ messages each day), making your communications interesting is a must. Unless your marketing offer is so unabashedly attention getting on its own (”Cure for cancer, just $10!”), you’re going to need some help rising above the pedestrian drivel our well-honed BS filters are good at keeping on the periphery of our consciousness.

Granted, there are practitioners who’ll go to any length to get your attention, even if the way they earn your attention has nothing to do with their actual offerings or benefits (Go Daddy, anyone?). Such practitioners are actually doing a disservice to both their clients and the public at large. As ad legend Bill Bernbach once said “It makes sense to run an ad with a man standing on his head only if you’re demonstrating pants that keep things from falling out of the pockets.”

True creativity doesn’t conflate with clarity. It builds from the Universal Truth of a product or brand, and presents it in a somewhat unexpected yet memorable way. This alchemy that creates something that is both clear and creative is most definitely the “heavy lifting” of our profession.

On some occasion, a marketer may shy away from a “creative” solution because he feels some readers/viewers might not “get it.” But as I mentioned in a guest post some time ago, it is poison to create for the dullards. This recent spot for FedEx is an example of how you can be creative without leaving the masses in the dust. It unmistakenly communicates “FedEx provides small businesses a competitive advantage,” but it does it in a way that is fun, memorable and relevant.

Be clear. But be creative. It’s not either/or.

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The purpose of camouflage is to help you blend in with the environment. The idea behind it is to mask your presence so it’s hard to identify exactly who you are.

This might work great for duck hunting. Not so great for an ad campaign. In these days where consumers are bombarded by anywhere from 3,000 to 7,000 messages a day, and are spending 6.5 hours a day consuming media, it’s not such a great idea for your messages and commercials to look like everybody else’s. To camouflage yourself in the marketplace.

You want your advertising and marketing communications to stick out. You want to be the guy in the loud day-glo lime-and-orange jacket, or the colorful tie-dyed t-shirt. Not the camouflage dude.

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If I hand you a brick and ask, “How many uses can you think of for this?,” you’ll probably come back to me with a dozen or so uses, all of the functional, yeah-I-sort-of-expected-that variety. You may use it to build a wall. Or pave a patio. Build a house. Or even use it as a paperweight.

If, however, I asked you, “What 40 ways can you think of to use this?,” I’m likely to get a whole different kind of list. After exhausting the obvious uses above, you’ll find yourself uncomfortably searching for other unthought-of uses. Some will be totally silly, or non-sequitar. But before long (probably around number 25 or 30), you’ll actually hit on something truly original (paint it gold and hand it out as a Fort Knox souvenir…). It is here, at this uncomfortable point when you think you’ve exhausted all practical uses for the brick, where true creativity lives. It’s where you start to find new connections between the object at hand and the world around you. You start thinking beyond the obvious solutions. Your ego stops judging every passing thought in the name of quantity.

Creativity can be defined as the process through which the mind finds formerly unrecognized relationships between two entities or ideas. It is something that allows our audience to see something in a different way.

Creativity is hard. It is a trip into uncharted territory. It is bumping into ideas that quite frankly you don’t know how to judge or evaluate.

It is taking the obvious and making it interesting.

Knowing how our mind’s creativity works is the reason few advertising creatives settle on the first idea (or handful of ideas) they find. The thinking being, if it was that obvious to me, it must be obvious to everyone, therefore there’s nothing new or exciting about it. Truly creative solutions are a bit unnerving, not because they are provocative or irrelevant, but because you’ve never seen something quite like this, and your mind doesn’t know how to evaluate them.

So next time you’re presented with an idea or concept that makes you a little uneasy, avoid the reaction of rejecting it out of hand because it is “different.” Deconstruct it to see how that idea was developed. See if it answers the needs spelled out in the creative brief. Live with it for a time. Then form your conclusion.

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Let’s say you run the credit card division at American Express. To build revenue (and profits) for your division, you need to do three things: 1) get more people to apply for and use your card, 2) get more merchants to accept your card, and most importantly 3) make your card the preferred method of payment by both consumers and retailers.

Now let’s talk about the barriers to entry. For consumers, it is the fact that the annual fees for your card far exceed those of the MasterCard and Visa cards they can get at their banks, and the fact that fewer merchants accept the card. And for merchants, the barriers are that the merchant fees are significantly higher than with MasterCard or Visa, and that fewer customers carry the card.

So how do you grow your business? With cards dealt the way they are, clearly it’s going to take more than a clever ad campaign to overcome those significant barriers.

In this case, American Express didn’t create a campaign; they created a movement.

The movement was to champion the small Main Street businesses of America by creating “Small Business Saturday”–the Saturday immediately following Thanksgiving and the notorious “Black Friday.”

A huge part of this movement was to rally small business owners to “own” this event and to not only participate, but to also become the medium that promoted it. To harness that, American Express created an entire Small Business Tool Kit free for small business owners which included a host of Small Business Saturday tools they could use to promote their businesses, from store badges and signage to social media templates to expert advice on how to increase sales, whether they were American Express merchants or not.

And to the consumer, rather than run a campaign that said “sign up for our card,” American Express created a quasi-patriotic campaign extolling the economic impact of small businesses and rallying folks to support their local economies for that one day. No mentions of how-our-card-is-better-than-their-card or any of that business. Simply a request that we all join together to support small local businesses. Here is one of the commercials:

The results of the Small Business Saturday campaign? In just two years, 100 million Americans participated. Reported small business sales were up between 20 – 30%. Congress passed a unanimous resolution fin support of Small Business Saturday.

Since 2010, Small Business Saturday has gone from something that didn’t exist to a fixture on the shopping calendar.

Oh, and American Express’s credit card division enjoyed its largest market share ever in 2011. Here’s an engaging video case study on the overall campaign:

Great campaigns come and great campaigns go. But a movement that actually incites people can live forever. And isn’t that a smarter use of your marketing bucks?

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