All posts from AdPulp

Tech Flash, "Seattle's Technology News Source," held their annual Summer BBQ and Ping-Pong Tournament, at the Showbox Sodo on Wednesday.

Portlanders Jeff Hardison of McClenahan Bruer and Nate DiNiro of UncleNate.com, made the trip to compete in foosball.

According to Tech Flash, "they also arranged in advance to get shirts from a variety of tech startups in the Portland area, then donned different shirts for each game. The idea was to show how seriously Portland takes its geeky sports, while giving their hometown companies some northern exposure."

We at AdPulp are extremely grateful to Hardison for the idea and his execution thereof--note the t-shirt he's holding in the photo above. Yes, it's the AdPulp juice carton t-shirt!

Ed Cotton of Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners is thinking big thoughts again. This time about sustainability and what brands might do to radically embrace it.

...although a whole industry exists to refurbish, re-sell and repair old products, it's not branded and at the forefront of the brand experience. If brands were to get behind it and support and create the infrastructure, it would create a whole new brand relationship.

From the onset, consumers would be looking for brands through a different lens; they would be thinking about a lifetime of experience, they would be looking for reliability, for service skills and for the technological know-how to update when required.

Cotton started thinking about these ideas after learning how BMW is dedicated to servicing the 600,000 classic BMW cars still on the road today.

Imagine if Apple felt that way about their expensive devises. It's easy to imagine, but hard to conceive.

In what appears to be a twist on iterative marketing, Razorfish is unveiling its newest offering--Razorfish Agile--which intends to help C-level executives develop products and services faster and more efficiently.

Razorfish describes their "agile" concept as a faster way for designers and technologists to launch websites and digital marketing campaigns, especially where complex application development is required. Instead of specialists creating polished designs and handing them off to each other in assembly-line fashion for development, agile teams work in collaboration to quickly develop and revise prototypes based on customer feedback.

"CMOs are letting go of their obsession with producing one-shot campaigns based on a single idea," said Razorfish Chief Technology Officer Ray Velez. "The agile test-and-learn approach is becoming especially popular as CMOs respond to pressure to prove their value constantly through innovation."

The agency's training program educates clients on issues such as how to create a schedule and estimate costs for an agile project, and how to build agile teams.

PREVIOUSLY ON ADPULP: Fighting Words (a post about iterative marketing).

Luke Sullivan, Copywriter.

I somehow can't imagine his name without the professional designation, given how synonymous the two are. Of course, Sullivan's more than a Copywriter today. He's also Senior VP/Managing Group Creative Director at GSD&M in Austin and the author Hey Whipple Squeeze This, one of the more instructive "how-to" books available on the topic of creating advertising. Sullivan also has a new blog called Hey Whipple. Thankfully, it's not an obvious ad for his book, but a furthering of his thoughts on the ad business.

Enough with the introductions. I know you know who he is. But did you know his portfolio once sucked? Okay then, please read on...

Q. Your former colleague Bob Barrie now has his name on the door. Do you ever think about running your own shop?

A. Nope. Because I know how hard it is. It was hard for me just moving from copywriter to a creative director, in the sense of moving away from the front lines of the work. Once you're a partner, man, you're even further away from the work. Well, at least that's how it felt to me. I don't know how Bob does it, but it would be too much for me.

Q. Is social media important to you? Or would you prefer to avoid it?

A. I have really enjoyed discovering first the online world back in like '97 or so, and now more recently social. Yeah. I am not plugged into everything though. Just Facebook and Twitter, though I do maintain a page on LinkedIn. I sorta look at Linkedin is the office, Facebook is a backyard BBQ, and Twitter is a cocktail party. That kinda sums it up for me.

Q. Does an aspiring copywriter today need to show more than ads in their book? Is web content also needed, given clients' voracious need for it today?

A. Very true. I cannot bring myself to hire someone who doesn't have a serious amount of digital work in his or her book. But here's the main thing I look for (after, of course, great ideas executed across a variety of media): I look for CRAFT. For writers, this means, well, the craft of writing. The quickest way for me to judge that ability is in good old-fashioned headlines. So I recommend having some good ol' print or outdoor, work where the entire piece is held up with a strong headline. This is important for juniors given that the jobs a junior writer is handed are often small print jobs with no photography budget. Jobs where you pretty much need to solve the whole thing using nothing but words. So, advice to writers: write.

Q. Tell me what you drew you to GSD&M and what are the best things are about the agency and living/working in Austin?

A. I love GSD&M and I love Austin. First of all, it's kinda weird to be working in such a big agency in such a small town. In fact, GSD&M is the biggest place I've ever worked. Also, check out our client roster. It's amazing to work on all these blue-chip brands from our little Texas town: the U.S. Air Force, BMW, Goodyear, Norwegian Cruise Line, L.L.Bean, and of course Southwest Airlines. Sorry if I sound like I'm from the PR department, but that's the way it is. The single best thing about working here (which I felt the minute I walked in the door in 2003) was the warmth of the culture. You can't invent culture. You can't buy it. You can't ship it in or transplant it. You either have culture or you don't and GSD&M has the strongest culture I've felt in my 31 years in the business. It is extremely familial; which is especially cool given the size of this place.

And as for Austin, man, it's such a cool town. Patton Oswalt the comedian did a show here and he made fun of us. "Austin would elect a hacky-sack for mayor if they could." It's just a bunch of hippies down here. Everybody has a tattoo and everybody is in a band. There's SXSW Interactive every year and a couple years back, during Austin City Limits, I remember coming home one night and sitting on my back porch and listening to the Rolling Stones play live, from the park just over the hill. Yes, it's very hot here, from about June till September. But when you think about it, pretty much every section of the country has four months of crummy, whether it's Portland's rain or Minneapolis's snow. Four months of somethin' that kinda sucks; ours is heat. But as my wife says, "You don't have to scrape heat off your windshield before you drive into work." One last thing. Austin is NOT Texas. Dallas is Texas. We're just....well, we're Austin.

Q. Are you only as good as your last ad?

A. Oh, I've always thought that was a little harsh. And back when I was a harsh little ad critter, yes, that was my credo. But I found this made me beat myself up, pretty much all the time. I was in a constant funk about it. The thing is, creative people are prone to this kind of silly shit no matter what field they're in. We take our work and ourselves too seriously. I once heard that it is the responsibility of the artist "to last." To survive. The great ones, they do. The people worried about what they look like, worried "Am I only as good as my last ad," I'm not sure having that much fear and friction in your head would be a good way to work, not if you want to have a long career. It'd be like that Jackson Browne lyric, where the "sound of your own wheels drives you crazy."

Q. Do you have an iPad and or iPhone? Why or why not?

A. Of course, I have both, you nutty nut. I will buy everything that company makes. I love everything about the company. I love their vertically integrated art direction. The sparsity, the use of white, it defines the way their website looks, their TV spots, the design of their products, the way the stores look, all the way down to the dang boxes you carry out of the store. In fact, their packaging's so cool, I still haven't thrown away the box my iPad came in. Stupid, I know, but it it's just so well-made. The sense of quality just seems to come off the box in waves.

Q. Do you work more than 40 hours a week?

A. One of the best parts about the culture of GSD&M (and Fallon too, as I remember it) is a sense of work-life balance. Yes, we work our asses off, but when you're done, you go home. Sure, during pitches, we're here around the clock, drinkin' the tepid coffee and eatin' cold pizza. But when you're done, you're done. There is no unspoken code here that says you gotta be here all the time. I think that leads to low morale and then burnout.

Q. What led you to advertising as a profession? Did you grow up wanting to write copy?

A. I grew up reading comic books: Spider-Man, Daredevil. Then I started making my own comic books, which if you look at a comic, it's basically a storyboard. Telling stories with words and pictures. It took me a couple of years out of college to put those two together: telling stories with words and pictures, and advertising. Lordy, I remember the first book I put together to get into the business. What Tom McElligott and Ron Anderson saw in me I will never know. But man it sucked. But somehow I got in.

Q. Can you explain to me-a doubter-why industry awards shows matter as much as they do? To me, peer evaluation seems like the wrong metric to base one's career on.

A. I'm all over the map about this one. I grew up positively insane about working the awards circuit. I think that's probably pretty normal for younger creatives.

The reason? I see ad careers in terms of three stages. Early on, it's about GETTIN' FAMOUS. That's what awards help do. Then, once you've got a bit of a name goin', that's when the juniors say, "Man, I oughta get paid more if I'm doin' so great" which, of course, is when the second chapter kicks in - GETTIN' MONEY. Then, when the final third of a career comes around, maybe when you got kids to worry about, a house, a spouse, when you have a life ... well, but then it's all about GETTIN' STABILITY. You want a job that will last. You don't wanna have to move your family around. So, with that sort of career track in mind, I get the whole awards thing.

On the other hand, if you get too into awards, it'll start to effect your work. Because now, instead of sitting down to solve a business problem and to write to a particular audience, you could be writing with an award show audience in mind. It's conceivable one could begin to work with a sort of Super Bowl "How-can-I-amaze-everybody" kind of mindset, one that may not be right for the problem at hand.

Q. What are your favorite ad campaigns that debuted over the last year or two?

A. Apple vs PC.
The Most Interesting Man in the World for Dos Equis.
Google Chrome Labs.
And I love this new work from Leo Burnett for Allstate, featuring that cool actor named Dean Winters as "Mayhem."

Q. You wrote the book on making better ads. Can you also speak briefly here on the magic of creative presentations and selling the work?

A. If you wanna get ahead in this business, and I mean really ahead, you are gonna have to good at presenting. There's no way around it. Now the thing is, you can have a very good and long career in advertising and never present. You can be a "below the line" sort of creative who just stays in his/her office and cranks out the great stuff. But in order to move up the corporate ladder (and that is a good thing, people), you gotta get good at presenting. Getting great at presenting would be even better, but not everybody is great at this stuff.

Present every chance you get, whether internally at the agency or in front of clients. Practice is the only way I know how to improve at it. Well, there is one other way, happened to me back in 1981. I spent about a year and a half goofing around as a stand-up comic and going on stages all over Minneapolis. Man, you wanna talk about getting confidence? Getting up there and learning how to get an audience on your side is extraordinary training for presenting concepts to a client. It doesn't come without pain. I can remember DYING several times. There probably isn't a worse feeling in the world than DYING on stage. Ouch.

Q. Some people have claimed there's been something of a talent drain in advertising, of late. Are agency people (and clients) as talented and intelligent as always?

A. I don't see it. The rise of the ad schools has resulted in a very robust pool of candidates to pick from. I am seeing so many amazing books. Sorry, but I disagree with this one.

When you first land on Red Bull's Facebook page, this is what you see:

Naturally, Facebook's "Like" button is at the top of all these arrows. My guess is most people do what I did and click "Like."

Note: after you "Like" this page and become a "fan" of Red Bull, you don't see this appeal any longer.

As of Sunday night, season four of Mad Men season is underway.

The first episode of the season is called "Public Relations" and it opens on a scene at a Manhattan restaurant where a wounded Korean War vet now working for Ad Age interviews a stoic Don Draper. Draper plays modest, and credits this feigned modesty to his Midwest upbringing.

Another interesting storyline in "Public Relations" is the use of Portland sportswear company, Jantzen. Draper, who just described himself as Midwest modest, has a real problem with the modesty he sees in the Janzten brand. In fact, Draper refers to the clients as "prudes" before throwing them out of the agency after a poor presentation. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner is a stickler for details, so I can't help but wonder how accurate this depiction of the Jantzen brand in 1964 is.

I also wonder about what kind of sales uptick the brand may be seeing this week, as a result of the Mad Men integration. Draper may have cast Jantzen out of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (SCDP), but I doubt real life consumers of the show (and swimwear) are taking his words to heart.

Let's have a look at Janzten's modern day offerings, shall we?

Available at Popina in NE Portland

Maybe the brand was prudish in 1964. I don't know. But it's sexy now.

Back to the Draper-tantrum for a minute. Creative people in advertising are known as hotheads--it's a type from central casting. Even so, I bristled at Draper's treatment of the two gentlemen from Portland, who came to him eager for answers to their marketing problems. Draper's dismissiveness might play well on TV, but in real life, great creatives step up, not aside.

Daniel Lyons of Newsweek wrote an interesting piece about the business side of Huffington Post, a new media company with $30 million in revenue.

HuffPo has a big audience--24.3 million unique visitors last month, nearly as many as The New York Times--but like most Web sites, it can't monetize it very well. Right now, HuffPo generates just over $1 per reader per year. That's nothing compared with the mainstream-media outlets that HuffPo hopes to displace. Cable-TV networks and print newspapers collect hundreds of dollars per year from each subscriber, and then generate hundreds of millions in ad revenue on top of that.

The hard truth is that advertisers want to put messages on Web sites, but they just don't want to pay very much for that privilege. And perhaps for good reason. When was the last time you clicked on an Internet ad? Or even noticed one? "Maybe it's time that someone says the unsayable--that online advertising just doesn't work. A Web site turns out to be a not very good advertising vehicle," says Michael Wolff, the Vanity Fair columnist who also runs Newser.

It seems that Wolff may not be an avid reader of Ad Contrarian, a man who dutifully waves the Online Advertising Sucks flag each week.

That online advertising sucks is a debate and a business problem that will not go away. We've certainly touched on this topic hundreds of times here at AdPulp, but what progress are we making toward solid answers to shaky questions? And what exactly are we, as advertising professionals, learning from this? Do we find it maddening or humbling?

Frankly, very few mediums have proven resistant to the advertising bug. Will digital ultimately prove resistant? I don't think so. I think what's already happening is we're slowly learning to operate on slimmer margins. Companies like HuffPo are learning faster than most, which is why they have a fighting chance to be profitable over the long term.

They had to slog through some nasty summer Southern thunderstorms, but they finally got into the ATL and I was privileged to meet up with Matt, Kristien, Darryl, Renato and RJ from Humongo Nation 2010.

Humongo Nation is a project of Humongo, formerly known as Plaid. This marks the 4th year they've loaded up a van and done a 2-week stretch through a slice of America. This year, it's a Boston-Miami route, where they're seeing marketing folks and other good peeps along the way.

Darryl told me that publicity from the tour has helped his agency gain a higher profile, leading to some new clients and an acquisition by Source Marketing, an MDC company. So it's both business and fun, with a large dose of connectivity. You can follow them on Twitter and check out their tour website to see videos, read their tour (and food) blogs, and see what it's all about. It sure beats most agencies' self-promotion efforts.

As you may know from previous reports here, Humongo Nation is an annual tour by Connecticut-based agency, Humongo. The team travels around in a Ford Flex and stops in to see various ad people along their route. People like BeanCast host, Bob Knorpp, in Greensboro, NC.

Knorpp breaks some interesting news in his segment, which starts at 5:36 minutes in. He says he's starting another podcast in conjunction with Ad Age. He also outs himself as the heretofore anonymous Tweeter behind @bogusbogusky.

I also like how Knorpp says he works to give back to the ad community with his show. "It starts a conversation, not just among the guests, but also among the listeners."

Speaking of sparking conversations, Humongo blog Brand Flakes for Breakfast, is being guest written while the crew is on the road, and one of the posts put up last week by @dabitch is something we discussed on The BeanCast last night.

Here are two very different takes on how best to respond to the environmental crisis unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico:

While neither ad is compelling from a craft point of view, I did defend the UnFucktheGulf effort for reaching beyond the typical rhetoric we see over and over again from environmental groups.

Green messaging needs to evolve if it's going to impact a larger segment of the American population. I salute UnFucktheGulf for bringing some righteous anger to the YouTube party and for understanding that t-shirts sell better than stand-alone issue-oriented outrage.

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese is placing giant smiling noodles at marquee locations like Wrigley Field and Navy Pier in Chicago and Fisherman's Wharf Pier 39 in San Francisco, according to Adweek.

In addition to these two-ton statue placements, MediaVest worked with Monster Media on interactive storefront displays that all but say cheese, using facial recognition technology to make the noodle smile back at passersby.

Bob Knorpp of The BeanCast (audio link) gathered a gaggle of ad bloggers (myself included) last night to record Episode 112: Boobies And Kittens of his marketing podcast.

Subscribe to The BeanCast Fast Takes Marketing Podcast on iTunes

Knorpp guided us through a great set of topics, including competing fund raising efforts for the Gulf disaster; Alyssa Milano's shakedown of P&G; Facebook's numbers and the site's poor user experience; the creation of Social Media Marketing silos by big agencies and holding companies; and Dr. Pepper's UK Facebook promo that blew up in the brand's face.

This was my third appearance on the show and the first chance I've had to rap with George Parker of AdScam and Åsk Wäppling of Adland.tv. Bill Green of Make The Logo Bigger was on the program too and I always enjoy his radio voice and his ability to dissect a story on the fly. On the other hand, my radio voice needs work. I sound angry and excitable in places, for no good reason.

I'm appearing on Bob Knorpp's weekly radio show, The BeanCast, tonight along with Bill Green, Åsk Wäppling and George Parker.

We will be talking about Facebook, among other things. It's a topic that can not be avoided today. Even The New York Times can't leave it alone. Yesterday in "Week in Review" the paper framed Facebook's week like this:

It was a typically vexing week for Facebook. On the one hand, the social-networking service signed up its 500 millionth active user. On the other hand, it was found to be one of the least popular private-sector companies in the United States by the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Apparently, Americans were more satisfied filing their taxes online than they were posting updates on their Facebook page.

Of course, one of the perception problems Facebook is facing is a problem of it's own making. By defining themselves as a "social utility," they've reminded us that whatever we think about them, positive or negative, there's no ridding ourselves of this updating menace compulsion.

The Times piece also references something social media scholar, Danah Boyd, wrote last spring:

"I hate all of the utilities of my life. Venomous hatred. And because they're monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I'm not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them."

Personally, I gave FB up for five or six months but eventually came back into the fold because, for a certain portion of my friends, Facebook is the internet. It's not a utility, it's the main attraction, the go to place to catch up on things and spend some personal time.

Like it or not, I also have a professional obligation to keep up on Facebook, to understand why and how it works, and why it matters to our culture and to marketers. And it's not easy to do, all this upkeep. I'd love your help, to be honest. If you're up for it, head over to AdPulp's Wall and make some noise.