The MADMAN Rants on the Evolution of Marketing

Blowing Up Retail....The Tipping Point Has Come & Gone

2017-04-25T15:29:00.004-04:00

BBC.com

4.5 MIN. READ:

The Jetsons’ flying car I’ve been waiting for since 1962 has arrived (click to watch the video!), but I still can’t try on clothes virtually in every store I go into. Where’s the retail tech revolution we were promised!?! AI, VR, holographics. I want it NOW!

Today’s bricks and mortar (B&M) retail environment is pretty boring, if not depressing. Stores have been turned into warehouses to ensure your choices are in stock within driving distance (exploiting Amazon’s ‘last mile’ barrier). I couldn’t squeeze through the rolling racks in the men’s section at Sears recently. Even my corner convenience store is offering ‘order online and pick up in store’ and Amazon, Google Shopping and Ali Babba are continuing to gradually suck the lifeblood out of everyone’s best efforts at eCommerce. (At Canada’s Hudson Bay department store the clerks now encourage you to go online and buy an item for 40% less, then give them the code and they simply bag it and hand it over. It’s all about changing mindsets and habits and moving volume.)

Stores are closing at a rapid pace and the majority of openings are focused on wealthy neighbourhoods. Openings that are getting a lot of coverage are either ‘Pure Play’ going offline, like Amazon’s GO locations, or ‘Own Brand’ stores, a trend that started with Apple Stores in 2001, spread to Tesla, Nike and many other brands, now including the very successful Lindt Chocolate stores staffed by Brand Momentum in malls across Canada. Recently BMI began rolling out RBH’s IQOS demonstration shops in Toronto and Vancouver to introduce a new way of inhaling no smoke while consuming a cigarette replacement. Pop-up Shops are cute, but hardly the immersive high tech experience we were promised some years ago. Sure, like the Jetsons’ flying car, tech takes times to catch up with our imaginations, but the reality is that, like the music industry waking up one morning to find their office doors locked by the bankruptcy lawyers, retail disruption has come and gone.

We don’t talk about it much, but Capitalism is retail’s biggest problem. As Richard D. Wolff of Democracy at Work likes to say, when Capitalism does what it’s designed to do (continually make more profit through growth and/or cost cutting), ultimately it kills itself. Think about it. Every corporation traded on the global gambling pool that is the stock market must grow by 10%+ per year, or the wealthy stop buying its stock. To grow, Boards of Directors have to either cut wages or ship the jobs overseas, thus gradually cutting the spending power of the entire population to the point where they cannot afford the corporation’s products, or they have to leverage mergers and acquisitions. The latter tactic is inevitably leading to relatively few global corporations and tons of start-ups vying to get bought up by the mega-corps.

When corporations become global powerhouses, they have the power to make the rules, nationally, regionally and globally (humans are both greedy and opportunistic at heart, and the least ethical are most driven to become rich or politicians). There is no other way for a capitalist corporation to go, other than to grow to the point that it eventually exploits everything it can out of the masses to increase revenue and profit.

Which are today’s fastest growing corporations that have unprecedented daily interactions with average people? Amazon, Google and Ali Babba. Interestingly, growth has replaced profit as their primary goal. They don’t even try to make a profit, they just reinvest in growth every year and investors seem happy to keep buying their stock. The unprecedented advantage these firms have over B&M retailers is data – every single time we use Google, or buy from Amazon, they are learning more about us. Over time they are getting smarter and smarter about how to leverage that information to create more compelling (addictive) interactions. This is a tool that no amount of incentivization around “Please go to our website and fill out a survey for a chance to win!” is going to bring to the B&M retail chains.

Meanwhile, the Long Tail (thousands of new products from new and existing manufacturers) is sucking sales volume from long established bulwarks of Branding at P&G, Kimberly Clark, Reckitt Benckiser and the rest and we’re seeing the first declines in performance for many brands in North America in decades. No wonder that these firms are rushing to get listed at the top of Amazon’s Subscription service -- if they can get into the “First Basket” of regular monthly grocery orders, up to 80% of those reordered products will never change if the concept of monthly deliveries manages to gain real traction. (And why wouldn’t it? Once you ‘get’ that it is easier and cheaper for Amazon to send you all that regular stuff, it means less tedious shopping and more time for more exciting stuff.)

So where am I going with this? Amazon and Google, unfettered by the need to worry about making a profit, are free to just keep growing, exploiting every niche opportunity and disrupting as they go, wiping out retailers as they do so. Like Walmart and their ‘big box’ brethren who wiped out the retailers on Main Street and are now shutting stores if the jobless, destitute people in an area cannot afford to shop there, the Amazon and Google behemoths will continue to roll relentlessly forward, opening their own stores or acquiring the chains they bankrupt, leaving big box centers scattered among the most densely populated areas and upscale shopping centers in the wealthiest neighbourhoods.

So what really is next for B&M retail?

Retail technology is where I’m putting my money. To enhance the in-store shopping experience chains are going to have to double down on exciting technological gadgetry and anything else that enhances Shopper Engagement. The staff are going to have to whip up mocaccinos and give foot massages [I’m joking, they’re going to have to be super knowledgeable, impeccable and more like your bestie (best friend) than ever before]. Staffing and training firms like Brand Momentum, who find and manage the best candidates to be Brand Ambassadors for in store experiences, are going to do well.

The Future of Retail:

In B&M chains big data and RFID (radio frequency identification) is going to have to get so refined by AI (artificial intelligence) and VR (virtual reality) that as you walk past what looks like an inanimate mannequin it will turn out to be a hologram OF YOU with the latest fashions of the type of stuff you bought IN THAT SEASON THE YEAR BEFORE morphing over it, reading your eyes to see which outfit most appeals to you, while (in a voice most appropriate for your sexual orientation) it negotiates in real time with you to find a price point you’ll say yes to and the transaction will happen automatically. The items on the shelf will then glow and ping on the shelf nearby while your smartwatch guides you towards them and then directs you to the fitting rooms -- if you feel the need to check the fit (eventually won’t because the invisible laser scanner will have determined your precise current shape and offered you the exactly correct size of each item).

I just made all of that last part up.

But it’s all still going to happen, just not soon, and it won't be the 'magic sauce' that will rescue B&M chains from Amazon-induced bankruptcy. ;-)

•••

Kevin is a Concept Inventor: innovative business-building concepts and breakthrough solutions. Want more of his insights and how they can help your marketing efforts? Book a conversation with him today: KevinLenard@Gmail.com

Branding Is Being Made Irrelevant By Amazon and Google

2017-04-18T12:29:00.002-04:00

4 MIN. READ

Back in 2007 I had a moment. Not a senior moment, but a career-changing insight into a prejudice I'd long held as a 'push marketer':

Hair-netted seniors giving out samples is the lowest form of marketing. NOT!

Turns out they're the highest form. To secure my then wife's job, I took up the challenge of explaining to CIM's CEO and senior team (Consumer Impact Marketing, now part of Mosaic) why they were on the leading edge of a growth business and why they should elevate LAUNCH!, their 'trinkets & trash' department (my ex's description) that produced branded merchandise for contests and giveaways, up to become the strategic and creative lead for their experiential marketing division (LAUNCH! grew steadily to become and remain a powerhouse in Canada). In the process I became a convert to the inestimable value of connecting humans to brands through one on one conversations.

Back then it was exactly ten years since the release of the most momentous new insight into the marketing industry, and perhaps the entire human species, since the Internet was switched on in 1989: The Experience Economy (Pine & Gilmore, 1997). That simple understanding, that after 50 years of consumerism, people had shifted to wanting great experiences much more than they wanted stuff, SHOULD have led to billions of dollars of television spending being shifted into Experiential Marketing – but our human weakness for ‘shiny & new’ distracted us with digital, social and blockchain. (Whatever that is, but hey! Don Tapscott makes a lot of money peddling ‘shiny & new’ to the gullible masses!)

To be fair, probably the single biggest barrier to XM winning the largest slice of the media mix pie that it deserves was CPM. Cost per thousand impressions was such an integral and bedrock measure in the business that comparing pennies to hundreds of dollars was just too shocking a shift, especially with the arrival of the Procurement Department. Still, Admiral Grace Hopper got it right in noting:

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.'

Branding is something that we’ve “always done this way” for 100 years, so why is it beginning to fade? Because people, especially young people, just don’t care as much about symbols of status today the way people did after the end of the second of two world wars. Back then the Developed World was transforming as Capitalism drove higher incomes and empowered Consumerism (“Keeping up with the Joneses”). People had increasing disposable income and tourism was in its infancy.

Young people today grew up in relative wealth and even the poorest kids, with easy credit for mom and dad, have had a lot of ‘branded stuff’ growing up and many ‘caught the travel bug’ with family trips to Florida or Cancun. Consumerism is no longer something to aspire to, in fact, if you want to rebel against mom and dad’s values, you are likely to reject Consumerism and embrace ‘Doing Good’ experiences, quitting your new job to build housing in the developing world.

Plane travel and all-inclusive vacations are now so commonplace that thousands of weddings now
take place on Caribbean beaches with the entire group of family and friends in attendance, forgoing wedding gifts in lieu of covering travel costs. Now THAT is a big change versus a few decades ago and reflects the trend toward experiences over stuff. In fact, when couples have already filled their condos with trendy, reasonably-priced stuff from stores like TJ Max, Marshall’s, Home Sense/Winners and Ross Dress for Less, the old idea of the ‘gift registry’ for a set of fine china and silverware has greatly eroded the significance of branding, cheapening all of the brands sold in those outlets immeasurably. I can’t give away my recently departed aunt’s set of fine china.

First the generic ‘own label’ brands at all the major grocery and pharmacy chains (and eventually generic stores like Canada’s “No Frills”) chipped away at the perceived value of brands in consumers’ minds, then the big box wholesale clubs like Costco and Sam’s Club took the process a step further. Today’s young people have grown up consuming no-brand products and are well educated in the “same as branded” generic reality.

“The Extermination of Branding”?

‘Disruption’ is what is going to kill off the now age-old business of branding. The new way to carve out niches for growth is to go after any way of doing things that is “the way it has always been done,” and Google and Amazon have virtually unlimited resources and the constant pressure of the gambling pool for the global rich that we call the stock market. Grow at a minimum of 10% per year or see your stock price slide. In fact, grow at MORE than 10% (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.) and you don’t even have to turn a profit!

What these firms are doing RELENTLESSLY is searching for the next business model that they can infect and then hollow out. The opportunity they see with branding is ripe. All the money that marketers invest in building brands is money that Amazon and Google can discount and offer consumers the same for much less. Google is undermining Amazon with algorithms that search the marketplace and offer the same or better prices than Amazon’s. Amazon is using their algorithms to figure out what we need before we need it, essentially undermining Google by preempting search.

Who loses?

Brands that relied on advertising and the consumers’ perceived value of premium branding. If I can ask Amazon’s Echo (“Alexa”) or Google’s Home for double A batteries and I’m offered their own label brand for much less than Eveready or Duracell, with the reassurance from the device that theirs is equal in quality, my new ‘relationship’ with a trusted source of stuff, information and ‘advice.’ If I’m a manufacturer supplying these new online retail powerhouses with a growing supply of generic soap or batteries AND my stockholders are demanding ever more cost cutting…

Who gets fired first?

The Marketing Department. When the manufacturers develop new flavours or products and Amazon or Google can announce the news directly to the family without interrupting their shows or games or conversations, who gets fired next? The advertising industry.

Who wins?

The agencies who put young Brand Ambassadors out into the streets and at events and hair-netted seniors giving out samples in big box stores: Experiential Marketing. And it is these same agencies who should be leading the way to invent and maintain the most impactful ways to engage and maintain relationships with influencers WITHOUT destroying their credibility by paying them for positive mentions.

Watch this 25 min. talk by Scott Galloway on the looming axing of CMO’s and their teams: How Amazon is Dismantling Retail

•••

Kevin is a Concept Inventor: innovative business-building concepts and breakthrough solutions. Want more of his insights and how they can help your marketing efforts? Book a conversation with him today. Some topics you might be intrigued by:

“Credibility is Critical to ‘Influencer Marketing,’ yet it DIES When We Pay Influencers.” Are you a guilty party?
“The Death of the Ad Agency Model was Instigated in 1992, Giving Birth to What?” – A template for a new MarCom Agency business model
“If It’s Now All About 1-on-1 Engagement, Why Isn’t 80% of Your Media Budget in X?” – “The Experience Economy,” came out in 1997. We just got distracted by ‘shiny and new,’ but shouldn’t experiential marketing be getting a bigger slice of the pie?
“Bubbles Burst, Always” – The US economy is set to explode very soon, have you and your company prepared for the inevitable crash?
“The Diversity We Cannot Name” – It’s the odd characters who sometimes have the most to offer. I explain who they are and how to get the most out of them.

Contact: Kevin.Lenard@Gmail.com

"Influencer Marketing"! Why Do We Work SO Hard at Killing the Goose?

2017-04-17T14:06:00.002-04:00

3.5 MIN. READ: Why is it so hard for we humans to do the smart thing, instead of doing what we've always done?

You know what got us really excited about the ads we made back in the 90's? People talking about them 'around the water cooler.' In other words we hoped for 'earned media,' better known as 'positive PR,' or even 'personal recommendations.' We were arrogant enough to think that if our ads were impactful enough, buyers of the product we advertised would 'spread their influence' and we'd see increased share of market. Sadly we weren't wrong, but the effect wasn't caused by our brilliance, most of the time, but rather simply by the social oddities of human nature: the more we see a brand, the more likely we are to buy it.

The single most significant change that the Internet has had upon marketing is what? Not digital ads. Not 'big data' (oh, that's huge, but it is an incremental change that became exponential). Not ads on mobile phones or geo-targeting (although it will eventually help bring us to the Holy Grail of marketing, more on this in a bit). The biggest thing underlies all the "SHINY & NEW" labels that the marketing journalists have come up with: instant, free and broadly distributed personal recommendations. The labels we've churned through of late with breathless hyperbole:

Social Marketing • Content Marketing • Influencer Marketing

Think about it. These are all the same thing and used to be called PR, also known as 'earned media,' whether the medium is a TV breakfast show or a popular blogger's site or feed.

Not just because I had my own agency on the beach in Cancun for many years I like the PESO model I came across recently:

Some versions of this model put the “Content” category title over different things, but I see Content as being in the dead center as, for the consumer of the content, the line between professionally produced and broadcast content (‘Paid,’ ‘Earned’ and ‘Owned’), versus unpaid amateurs' posts/tweets/feeds (‘Shared’) has become immaterial. It’s all just information and/or entertainment to the average sales prospect. I’ve added the split between ‘Push Efforts’ that the Brand can control and ‘Pull Results’ that they can’t, recognizing that there is some cross-over, like the brand’s Facebook fan page and Twitter account.

Now the author of this example of the PESO model put ‘Influencer Engagement’ between ‘Earned’ and ‘Social,’ which puts it squarely (excuse the visual pun) in the ‘Pull Results’ region. What happens when, especially in Canada where we don’t yet have a law like the US has implemented that requires all brand advocates to declare if/what they’ve been compensated for their endorsement, the Brand pays people to say good things about their product? That is in NO WAY either ‘Earned’ or ‘Shared’ (found/discovered) ‘Pull Results,’ these are clearly ‘Paid’ and ‘Owned’ (especially if directed/scripted) ‘Push Efforts.’

At Bruinco's recent BConExpo content-related conference in Toronto a panel discussion was featured titled “Standing Out in a Sea of Influencers,” moderated by Bree Rody-Mantha. The panelists recounted their recent efforts in the realm of influencers and what struck me was the fact that, for an admittedly low-engagement product like Honey Nut cheerios, Emma Eriksson of General Mills Canada had merely paid some online celebrities for a testimonial in what was an advertorial. I couldn’t resist opening my big mouth to highlight the distinct difference between the ‘Push Efforts’ of General Mills and the largely ‘Pull Results’ of Budweiser, recounted by Andrew Oosterhuis of Labatt Breweries of Canada. (Serena Tam of Clorox Canada described efforts that fell somewhat more in the middle of push and pull for Brita Water Filters.)

The concern that I raised then, and continue to be somewhat apoplectic about, is that the moment marketers PAY influencers/advocates for positive reviews, they destroy the credibility of these folks. Why am I giving Labatt a pass when they sought out the right kind of influencer based upon their followers, their demographics, psychographics and style and then gave them tickets and travel expenses to music festivals and the like, only requesting that they drink Bud and mention their consumption? Because there is a fundamental difference between being paid to be positive about a product you may not even like and being ‘placed’ in a consumption environment you very much enjoy.

The best experiential engagements between brands and consumers are the ones in which the brand fits naturally and relevantly. When people get free shampoos with scalp massages and hair styling afterwards out in the middle of a downtown square or market, it may be weird, but it is free and fun and earns a bunch of media coverage and social shares. When Frank’s Red Hot sauce puts on a rib eating contest at a music festival or foodie convention, the same thing happens. If the experience is fun, interesting, entertaining and might help improve my 'social capital' I just might post a photo of it on social media. If it gets me REALLY engaged or really enjoying the product, I just might blog or tweet about it, VOLUNTARILY.

Brand Momentum Event

Sadly, when General Mills tries to co-opt the plight of the imperiled honey bees by giving out wild flower seeds to every customer at the checkout of a grocery store to help promote a better urban environment for bees (a noble cause), the customers ask “Why would I want more bees in my backyard? I’m scared of bees!” and the clerk comments “Yeah, most people feel that way, but we were told to offer a packet to every customer.” Now I can imagine a bunch of creative and strategically sound ideas to turn this challenge around for Honey Nut Cheerios, but the sad fact is that this knee-jerk tendency our industry has of seizing every new opportunity for garnering genuine ‘Push Results’ and going back to the ‘Push Efforts’ we are most familiar with simply destroys the value and potential of new tools for brands to forge truly authentic and enduring human connections.

What is what I call 'The Holy Grail of Marketing'? Fully addressable advertising wherein we see only ads for products we're interested in, when we are interested, with zero repetition. Once we get there, marketers won't have to push so much as they'll find their ideal buyers organically and naturally. Customers will 'pull' ads they want and will be happy to watch them, as long as they feel that marketing efforts are relevant and credible.

•••

Kevin is an inventor. An inventor of concepts and breakthrough solutions. Want more of his insights and how they can help your marketing efforts? Book a conversation with him today. Some topics you might engage him about:

“Bubbles Burst, Always” – the US economy is set to explode very soon, have you and your company prepared for the inevitable crash?
“The Workplace Diversity that We Never Talk About” – a look back at the evolution of human behaviour and how we’re missing opportunities to work together more effectively and honestly.
“The Death of the Ad Agency Model was Instigated in 1992, Giving Birth to What?” – Consider a new MarCom Agency business model.
“It’s the Brand Experience, Stupid!” – today’s focus on ‘one-on-one engagement’ was initiated in 1997 in “The Experience Economy” and it will eventually grab the biggest slice of the media pie, we just got distracted by ‘shiny and new’ for the past 20 years.

Contact: Kevin.Lenard@Gmail.com

Pepsi Demonstrates Why In-House Creative Departments Can't Work

2017-04-07T12:58:00.002-04:00

6 MIN. READ Yeah, that Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad SUCKED. That’s what you get when you bring creative in-house, Pepsi. It’s inevitable because that formula simply cannot work, for reasons I’ll explain.

The Extermination of the Client Service Buffer

“Yay! Now our Brand Managers can talk directly to the Creatives and eliminate that useless function of Account Managers!” What the clients don’t get is that these ‘handlers’ played a far more important role than they could grasp. Those so-called ‘suits’ and ‘bag carriers’ were:

A shoulder to cry on.
Buffers against criticism.
Cheerleaders and pep-talkers.
Strategic guides.
Punching bags.
Project Managers.
The ‘warm-up band.’
The ones who demanded that more than one concept got presented.
Time-buyers.
Negotiators.
Sources of inspiration.

Without them the creatives have nowhere to hide to lick their wounds, or create. Good luck with that.

It's Been Attempted Before -- Never Successfully

My worst experience in agency work ever was with CIL Paints here in Toronto. Worst EVER (and I spent 6 years in Cancun selling agency services to entitled and astonishingly arrogant third generation children of Mexico's 1% families). CIL is basically a chemical company. Its ranks are filled with chemical engineers and chemists. Guess what their favorite task at work is? Getting the chance to "input on creative." Believe it or not, every new packaging design and advertisement concept gets circulated to a bunch of these folks and each one is empowered to 'comment.' Ever wonder why paint can labels look so entirely uninspired? That's why.

To demonstrate just how 'creative' the folks at CIL are, back in the late 80's they decided all this baloney of putting up with creative prima donnas from agencies and their snooty attitude towards the nay-saying from the CIL battery of 'clients' was to create their own in-house 'agency.' Wasn't too long before every single new designer, copywriter and art director ran out the doors screaming, so they went back to farming the work out, but as of a few years back they were still circulating all the proposals for internal 'input' and getting sad design as a result.

In-House Content Creation Client-Side

So what's the newest trend in this decade? In-house content creation. Why farm it out when you can just hire a bunch of low-cost copywriters and have them crank out posts and tweets day in and day out. Back in 2014 Pepsi did this with the high-minded idea, apparently generated by the visionary Brad Jakeman, that they could create marketing efforts that were more like Red Bull's, who has an in-house agency. Sadly there seems to be a fundamental difference between the work that Red Bull Creative cranks out and that of Pepsi's 'Creators League Studio.'

“The Creators League Studio”

Really? I'm pretty sure that name illustrates just what's wrong with the underlying concept for this corporate department, and that it starts with Brad Jakeman. While Red Bull started out as an unknown little brand that HAD to 'find its wings' before it could fly and has a strong, young, disruptive internal ethic, Pepsi’s marketing team is a department within a global corporate giant, a department led by an (apparently) cantankerous, late-career wannabe visionary trying to emulate the breakout star in his category. Pepsi is trying too hard, and it shows up in this sad ad (but then Jakeman is in the unenviable position of having to be Trump-like in an effort to look like a hero to his CEO and board and thus defer his inevitable firing for as long as possible).

Self-Love Feels SO Good!

I can tell you what comes out of a team who only works on a single brand and has a name like “The Creators League,” they believe in the power of their own snake oil. And how can they not? They have only each other and a single brand to focus on every day. A HUGE element of what empowers the creativity in any agency is the fact (downplayed to the clients) that everyone gets exposed to multiple brands and categories every day. Yes, Pepsi may have a wide lineup of brands that includes Dorritos with its success at UGC, but I’d bet that the people who worked on this Kendall Jenner ad focus on nothing but Pepsi 24/7.

Drinking the Corporate Koolaid

The other major psychological barrier any in-house department faces is the internal Koolaid. To get anything improved you have to first get senior management to buy into the concept first. I’d make another bet that whatever the insights were that led to this naïve piece, they were heavily referenced with management repeatedly leading up to the development of the concept and, given the constraint of buying into the insight, the final concept was a foregone conclusion. Using an external agency means working with a group that is immersed in a deep soup of diverse new insights every day and they are constantly holding their ideas up to the filter of what is happening all around them.

Comfort vs. Healthy Self-Doubt

Agencies have one powerful motivator going for them: the door. It will hit them in the ass as they get directed out if their work isn’t hitting the mark, not so for an internal team. The Creators League are full-time Pepsi employees with stock options and pensions, protected in a way any real agency team is not. They may get very excited over the thrill of concocting and producing a big new TV spot, but the nagging discomfort that lives in the back of the minds of experienced agency folks is something I’m certain The Creators League was free of, as was demonstrated by a press release that went out when the spot aired that rings just a bit smug, supremely confident that they have it all figured out and have hit the nail on the head:

Pepsi Press Release: April 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/
Throughout 2017, Pepsi® is celebrating life's "Live For Now" moments. Moments when we decide to let go, choose to act, follow our passion and nothing holds us back. "Jump In," a short film that depicts these moments and stars Kendall Jenner, captures the spirit and actions of those people that jump in to every moment. It features multiple lives, stories and emotional connections that show passion, joy, unbound and uninhibited moments. No matter the occasion, big or small, these are the moments that make us feel alive.

The "Jump In" Pepsi Moments film takes a more progressive approach to truly reflect today's generation and what living for now looks like. Kendall is the latest in an impactful line-up of global icons to work with Pepsi and she exemplifies owning "Live For Now" moments.

The commercial features music from a voice of today's generation, the artist behind "Lions"- Skip Marley (Island Records).

The creative, which will be seen globally across TV and digital, was produced by PepsiCo's in-house content creation arm, Creators League Studio. It showcases elements of the Pepsi disruptive design program that combines icons with expressive typography to capture the moments that ignite action. Moments iconography will be across packaging, out of home and in-store for the full Pepsi trademark of blue, black and silver offerings.

Swimming in a Sea of Nay-Sayers

I predict that we are going to see clients learning that truly strategically creative brains are rare and thrive only in an atmosphere free of corporate nay-sayers. I’ve worked with them for several decades, day in, day out, and I can attest to the fact that they need special handling if you want to get the most out of them. Even housed in separate, trendy, ‘creative’ spaces, if their salary depends upon them getting approval on their concepts from the same execs responsible for signing their paychecks, three things are going to happen:

We’re going to see a bunch of really bad ideas being foisted upon us, just like this Pepsi ad.
A lot of really great strategically creative people are going to quit working for these in-house ‘agencies’ (a misnomer, so ‘studio’ is indeed more appropriate) in frustration.
The people who continue to work for them will prove to be tradespeople, not the deeply strategic and brilliantly creative artists that every brand needs to generate really breakthrough ideas.

The reality is that the old agency model worked for many good reasons, but was killed off by Capitalism: the demand by shareholders who control gradually larger and larger, and therefore more influential, global marketers all demanding 10% growth per year. This happens, in part, through cutting costs by forcing all the profit, and therefore the high salaries the really genius people command, out of the agencies.

The downward cycle of cost cutting forced upon the agencies pushed those who really are strategic and creative geniuses out of the business. The clients then began complaining about the decline in creativity (not clear if they noticed the lack of strategic thinking…) that their cost-cutting efforts had precipitated. I find it sadly ironic that their solution is now to try to create their own agencies in-house, but what essential, fundamental element is missing from their new model? See "Client Service" in the first point above.

•••

“Bubbles Burst, Always” – The US economy is set to explode very soon, have you and your company prepared for the inevitable crash?
“The Diversity that Cannot be Named” – A look back at the evolution of human behaviour and how we’re missing opportunities to work together more effectively and honestly.
“The Death of the Ad Agency Model was Instigated in 1992, Giving Birth to What?” – A new MarCom Agency business model for your consideration.
“It’s the Brand Experience, Stupid!” – Today’s focus on ‘one-on-one engagement’ was initiated in 1997 in “The Experience Economy” and it will eventually grab the biggest slice of the media pie, we just got distracted by ‘shiny and new’ for the past 20 years.

Contact: Kevin.Lenard@Gmail.com

2017: The Year The Ad Agency Died

2017-02-13T16:28:00.000-05:00

3 MIN. READ

The ad agency business model has been on life support since the mid-90's when Procurement torpedoed it by forcing the media departments out. Profitability has been gradually bleeding out ever since due to the on-boarding of 'new capabilities' (increasing overhead) and ever more billing model changes (slashing profit further) foisted upon the industry by the demand for 10% annual growth by client shareholders.

Long live the lean and agile MarCom Agency Model: an eclectic squad of proven strategic/creative thinkers who outsource the varied capabilities needed for any given client project, incentivized by a commission 'bump' on for sales that exceed an agreed target.

The Marketing Industry is at a tipping point:

Consumers have been demanding something that traditional marketers have been VERY reluctant to give them: a return to the kind of marketing that simply works best, a return to human nature. And our fellow humans have never stopped begging for this since day one.
The strategic future of the Marketing Industry was laid out 20 years ago. It was exactly what consumers wanted, but most marketers have spent the intervening two decades distracted by 'shiny and new' instead of heeding the simple message...it's The Experience Economy, stupid! (Pine & Gilmore, 1997)
The new Social Media (the first electronic 'social medium' was the home phone) have led to a breakthrough in what has always been marketing’s ‘holy grail’ — a shift in focus from ‘push’ efforts to ‘pull’ results. People love the latter....the former not so much.
A ton of successful new business models emerged from 'push-pull disruption,' but not at the traditional ad agencies. Sadly they've just continued plodding and have grown into ever larger dinosaurs. (Like newspapers, they were built on a platform that has gone extinct and their business model of 'we do it all in-house' has led them to grow far too large to adapt to the new climate.)
There has never been a more urgent need to bridge 'The Traditional Sales-Marketing Divide' in order to leverage the increase in efficiency and effectiveness that comes with better aligned Sales and Marketing efforts, but few CEOs have proven sufficiently visionary to mandate it.
P&G, arguably the marketer with the single most influence on ad agencies globally, has just announced that they will further 'squeeze' agency contracts in 2017 to eliminate any 'wiggle room' with regard to extracting revenue by 'cost-plus-ing' items under the table. Along with impetuous decisions at the top in the US that will likely spark the next Great Depression that the US credit bubbles are setting the world up for, this will very likely be the year that the first major global agency goes bankrupt. More will surely follow, likely preceded by media firms.

(What gets forgotten in the shareholder-driven push for 10% annual growth is that if any business cannot make really substantial profit, the best and brightest will not work in it, shifting their career choices to less 'regulated' sectors like, say, inventing the derivative market in financial services.)

Ad Age, in this May 2016 article, sort of spoke to what the new business model for marketing 'partners' might look like, but they didn't really spell it out, since it's tough to sink the boat when you're in it. Ad Age depends on a good will from their dinosaur agency clients and isn't about to eat crackers in bed, but the answer is in this article if you ignore most of what the dinosaur agency execs are saying.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Source: Upton Sinclair from ‘I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked,’ 1933

The new "MarCom Agency" business model is simple:

Divest of ALL those in-house capabilities other than superb thinking (including data analysis), project management and human resource recruitment and outsource as required (including creative)
Insist on a bonus for higher-than-expected sales (it was the agency's IP that drove the volume!)
Remind the client that the smartest, most agile minds WILL NOT thrive inside a client office (a hypercritical environment by nature) AND that they need to be incentivized with high pay (higher hourly fees)
Focus on superb brand experiences (one-on-one engagement) as the primary in-going strategy
Bring media planning and placement BACK in-house (there's virtually no ATL anymore)
Collaborate with clients -- but be a true 'one stop shop' to reduce their current time spent coordinating with a dozen different agencies for content, social, shopper, experiential, digital, media, promo, etc.
Keep the teams lean and adaptable.

Essentially: break up the old network model and create fluid, lean and adaptable teams who work on different brands as demand rises and falls.

•••

'The Future of Marketing Experience' is a 1 hour long interactive discussion designed for marketing decision-makers that I can do for you and your marketing and sales team, and even your agency! While I was consulting with Brand Momentum I adapted my original content for their unique business model, but the message is relevant to the marketing industry as a whole and can be customized for your vertical. Book a slot today to get a very different perspective on where marketing budgets need to shift next: KevinLenard@Gmail.com

Slide #7 from "The Future of Marketing Experience":

Why "Casual" Clothing (Not "Business Casual") is Hurting Your Performance at Work

2017-01-06T09:01:00.002-05:00

What NOT to wear at an office job:

How exactly did "Business Casual" turn into "Anything Goes"?

The ‘New Normal’ is a deeply problematic aspect of human nature. It is our innate tendency, born of ego and tribalism, to quickly adapt culturally to whatever circumstance we find ourselves in AND feel genuinely ‘offended’ when anyone challenges our assumptions about what we believe to be our ‘new normal.’ However humans also have a bunch of other innate, instinctive, hard-wired reactions we cannot ‘wish away,’ like the reality that what we are dressed in actually effects our performance — studies prove that wearing a lab coat makes people more effective at work. Moreover, what we wear imprints a very powerful message in the brains of everyone we work with in terms of where, at an unconscious level, they perceive your place is in the heirarchy.

Attractive people get better jobs and higher salaries because our brains are hard-wired to want to have them around us (i.e. in our ‘tribe’ of fellow workers) because their appearance instinctively conveys superior health/genes/survival. Similarly we don’t want to be surrounded (trigger warning for Social Justice Warriors!) by people who do not convey superior health: those who are too thin or fat, look sick, act anti-socially, etc. (an intractable, instinctive perception of how well the other members of our tribe will be in fighting, or out-running, a sabre-toother tiger). As humans we have a vast array of inherent, uncontrollable reactions to other humans and what we see in casual dress in the office is not simply a ‘trend,’ but tribalism, the desire for everyone to dress in a similar fashion and a STRONG desire to dress like the most successful people out there, most of whom no longer wear suits.

Among the older bosses, there is also a growing trend to 'be sensitive' to the more junior people and do nothing that might 'intimidate them,' hence a tendency to try to dress like they do. If Gen Y demands that they be allowed to wear Ugg boots or flip flops and torn shorts to the office, then senior management needs to 'follow their lead' to fit in and be 'taken seriously' rather than dominating their poorly paid junior people by wearing expensive suits. This new 'politically correct' baloney ignores the reality of human nature and, in so doing, sets the bosses up for being treated like 'just another one of the workers' whose opinion carries no more weight than the newest college graduate. Not a good plan. Learn from their mistake...

I’m an old fart and wear a jacket and tie every day to an ad agency bereft of these ancient symbols of professionalism. After I began working there and 'bringing sexy back,' as I described my work wear style, I noticed a gradual shift in the office with the senior guys beginning to wear suits without ties some days and the younger guys sporting the occasional jacket. We humans react to our tribal norms unconsciously, and seeing others wearing symbols of professionalism cause us to desire to step up and want to also look more professional. It’s not ‘stifling creativity,’ it’s a demonstration of a willingness to ‘represent’ that we recognise what we are being asked to do in this place we call an office is quite different from what is expected of us outside of the office.

A 2020 addendum: Humans function on the basis of cultural ‘signals’ to each other, and formal dress is just such a signal, hence the reason that we feel very different walking into a formal wedding or gala ball than we do walking into a basement house party. Get a clue and begin emulate NOT those very rare entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley or gangster rap stars, but the professional businessperson you wish to be in YOUR place of work.

Formal business attire was NEVER about the 'oppressive white male dominated hierarchy,' it was always about 'human nature and the dominance hierarchy,' which tends to be male, as women generally don't see the point in all the posturing and 'one-upmanship' men take part in so naturally and unconsciously. Wearing a 'uniform' that sets those at the top apart from those lower down started with tribal chiefs wearing a necklace of animal teeth and a headdress and human nature has changed IN NO WAY since then. Again, get a clue.

Take it from me, the author of "Just One Cynic's Opinion" and a perpetual student of human nature, that if getting ahead in your career is a goal, you should be dressing one step up from whatever the person in the role you aspire to is wearing. This applies to both genders, although women need to apply more subtle fashion choices to achieve the same ends.

Simply put, if you happen to be a man and there's a man in the role you aspire to who wears 'all casual,' all the time, then wear a dress shirt all the time. If he wears a dress shirt, wear a sports jacket. If he wears a jacket with jeans, wear a suit. If he wears a suit, but no tie, you be the tie-wearing suit-guy. You get the picture. It's subtle, but it's just the way our very visual, social species works.

(And for the women reading this, cement this in your psyches: dressing professionally ALWAYS means NOT being sexy -- lots of makeup and tight or short skirts and any decolletage at all says to the reptilian brains of all other business professionals that: "Being professional is not my first goal, finding a baby-daddy is." That may be sad, but it is true at an subconscious level and no amount of protesting about it is going to change 7 million years of evolution. You can get angry, or you can learn how to understand our similar, but very different brain wiring and use that knowledge to your advantage. Sexy has ZERO place in the workplace, despite all those Hollywood costume designers and directors suggesting the opposite.)

Hey, don't listen to me! Listen to this Shark Tank business mogul:

It's Tough To Sink The Boat When You're In It...2017 Could Be Traumatic For Agencies

2016-11-22T15:13:00.002-05:00

8 MIN. READ It's difficult to witness the tortured musings and machinations of my colleagues labouring within the now defunct ad agency business model. They pay their house, car and private school payments from the meager and ever diminishing proceeds from it, so how can they approach the issue of shooting the aged Triple Crown winning horse with the broken leg and decide upon the only humane solution with emotional detachment? They have to put it out of its misery, but doing so heralds the reality of financial hardship, uncertainty and change -- and there's nothing most humans hate more than change. Sadly their salary depends upon them not understanding the solution.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Upton Sinclair from ‘I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked,’ 1933

Having read so many new articles on this topic recently, it feels mean spirited to point out that the ad agency model that industry insiders are discussing a repair for is not unlike the newspaper business model today. Both were born in a bygone age wherein the fundamentals were vastly different and they then lived in symbiosis for 200+ years, creation of advertising campaigns paying the salaries of the agencies' staff and the ad placements paying that of the newspapers. It's clear today to see that no matter what the newspapers attempt to do in terms of shifting to an online business model, most of them will go belly up because there is simply no longer any need to maintain several teams of journalists with slightly different political bents in every city of the world, printing news stories on paper and hand delivering them door to door. The newspaper biz is vastly overstaffed for today's swiftly evaporating demand. The 300+ year old daily newspaper business model is well and truly dead (The Daily Courant was first published in London on March 11, 1702).

My Year One in the ad agency business was 1986 (coincidentally the world's first agency, William Taylor, was formed in 1786) at McCann Erickson in Toronto. Profitability was in the low 20's% to 30+% range at 17.5% commission. We 'gave away' ideas that turned brands into global profit machines just for the pleasure of working in a creative business. We began doing the same with strategic thinking that put these brands on steroids through the 80's and 90's. For a decent salary and reasonable profit margin we were largely responsible for the concepts that our clients continue to make billions in profit from. We were tickled pink to help out and hand over our IP, never tying compensation to results for fear our steady, and healthy, salaries might be cut.

Procurement Broke the Model

Those same clients, especially as more and more went public and were merged and went global (under the steady pressure of the inane stock market demand for 10% minimum growth per year or we'll divest in your firm and go elsewhere), brought in Procurement and set about dismantling the 200 year old ad agency business model, gutting it swiftly in the mid 90's by surgically removing our media departments. The rest is history with regard to profitability (skim off the cream...).

With the end of profit came the exodus of the brilliant and aggressive 'young turks' who powered the best of what we did. The best and brightest no longer saw the agencies as lucrative enough and, having been weaned on 'Wall Street' and 'Gordon Gekko', stated their careers in finance and used their creativity to invent the derivatives market and high risk mortgages. We all know how THAT went -- and all those derivatives are still out there, waiting to be 'repackaged' and snuck back into the market.

Businesses, Even Agencies, Are Powered by Incentivization

What every client, from Brand Management to Procurement to the C-Suite need to recognize is that, just like their firm has to make a decent return to continue to be able to produce a quality product, so do the 'idea people' who generate strategically creative concepts to super-charge their marketing efforts. Without an incentive above and beyond a 'decent salary', the talented strategic and creative people will not be working at the agencies, they'll follow the money elsewhere. Well then clients should simply bring the agency people in house! Often what humans forget is that humans are complicated.

Every single effort to bring other humans who are by nature highly creative into the hierarchy of a client's office has demonstrated that these types of personalities die in captivity. It has never worked and never will, like trying to get a group of Finance Directors to generate a new Snap Chat gimmick, creative people are simply birds of different feathers and don't work well ensconced in a milieu that is steeped in minimizing risk by analyzing everything. The insides of a manufacturing firm, by its nature, is filled with people who are empowered to say no, while creatives need "YES! Try something new and risky and 'out there'!".

Now we have all of these "Grand Hotels" (to quote Eoghan Nolan, his article on this topic linked here), these "dinosaurs", fat with 'new capability' departments that are underutilized, yet need to be paid for. Yes, some clients still like the notion of having all those capabilities under one roof, but the reality is that this business model is flawed. If asked how to strategically design a business model to provide MarCom services given today's modern reality, no one would design a 'department store model' wherein the highest spending shoppers only use ALL of the departments occasionally, leaving the full-time employees in many of these departments to do 'busy work' in return for a weekly salary.

The Problem Cannot be Fixed From the Inside

So if the business model is fundamentally broken, inappropriately designed for this day and age, the solution cannot lie in the dinosaurs getting together to negotiate how to eat less of the plant foliage that the climate is gradually reducing the quantity and quality of. The dinosaurs, faced with a changing climate, were too big to survive in the new environment. Only the small, lean and adaptable survived, and in our human environment, I'd add that only the wise, experienced, clever and creative will survive, based upon a model that is best suited to today's climate.

"Flavour of the Moment" Marketing

There is no such thing as "Fill In The Blank Marketing." There never was. The past 20 years have seen an extended Snake Oil Hustle, constantly moving the goal posts to keep the clients frantically running down the playing field with bags of money that Procurement (and each clients' shareholders) have been cutting larger and larger drainage holes in, steadily decreasing the formerly bloated TV-based budgets that were never rooted in demonstrable ROI in the first place (why do Superbowl ads REALLY cost what they do?).

All we witnessed for the past two decades were evolving tactics, not any fundamental change to how marketing is accomplished. We've seen new agencies pop up constantly who claim to specialize in:

"Experiential Marketing" (enhanced product demos/sampling),
"Digital Marketing" (ads placed on websites),
"Virtual Marketing" (product placement in virtual games/experiences like the long-forgotten 'Second Life'),
"Location-Based Marketing" (coupons delivered via GPS location),
"Mobile Marketing" (ads on smartphones),
"Social Marketing" (contests promoted on Internet-based communication software),
"Big Data Analysis Marketing" (consumer research data in much bigger data bases on ever more behavioural actions),
Now we have "Content Marketing" (enhanced public relations via Internet-based communication software).

Makes me shake my head in amazement thinking back to all the hyperbole we've all had to wade through since the mid 90's. All of the above examples of "Fill in the Blank Marketing" have been proven to simply be new tactics unworthy of their initial breathlessly enthusiastic hype.

It's ALL 'Content Marketing'

Yet ALL marketing communication has always been "Content Marketing" -- the difference was that the content of the past wasn't all that relevant, valued, authentic, one-on-one or custom-tailored. Once we moved away from benefit-based communication to emotional and insight-based content after McCann Erickson's "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" spot in 1971, the content became highly vulnerable to shrugs of indifference. Some folks got the joke or insight others didn't, yet we only produced one ad and ran it endlessly to everyone. What the new consumer-demanded, Internet-empowered shift from 'push efforts' to 'pull efforts' has led to is merely a move from an above-the-line media-weighted focus, to a PR, one-on-one, experiential strategic platform. The latter is what consumers actually wanted all along, versus what marketers want them to want.

The Solution

The ad agency business model solution today is to become as entrepreneurial and 'start up' in nature as all of the new departments or divisions that the clients are developing (in-house content creation, VC-like innovation labs, etc.). Agencies have to push back on clients to be paid a decent, profitable compensation (certainly more than is currently the norm, which P&G's Pritchard has acknowledged, but done little to address it, saying, bizarrely: "...the focus of his talk (was) on 'Raising the Creative Bar.' But he said it's time to lower pressure on agencies – which has included P&G cutting its agency and production fees the past two years by $570 million to $1.4 billion."

Um....cutting the agencies' spend by ANOTHER 25% somehow helps them feel less pressure?). The agencies have to ensure that they're managed by wise, mature, hands-on 'sages' who know what mistakes not to make and who can get the job done in a fraction of the time that it takes the underpaid recent grads who staff most of the agencies today. And this new agency business model will need to make do with a skeleton staff, zero in-house capabilities (outside of strategy, data analysis, project management and great HR), and a ton of eager freelance suppliers to be brought in for a gig as needed. They also need to bring media planning and buying back in house -- the new media mix has killed the old media firms and they must die along with the other dinosaurs. But most importantly...

Why Bother?

Because the 'big ideas' that the agencies generate are the IP that makes the clients the really big bucks. This fact is born out by all the start-ups created and run by smart, creative people of every age today (meaning there are still a lot of old farts in successful agencies). When the concept leads to incremental sales volume, the agency earns a decent commission. A few points on a billion dollars isn't chump change -- it's worth working for nothing more than a decent salary on a day-to-day basis if once in a while you get a big cheque!

This is the single biggest issue that no client really wants to acknowledge and have been sweeping aside forever -- the MarCom campaigns are what create brands and global success, not R&D, great flavours, distribution, brand management, pricing, packaging, shelf presence, merchandising, etc. Yes all of that is essential, but at the end of the day, it's the magic of the marketing communication and insights that drive the big wins, and the creators of the MarCom have always been paid peanuts and never reap the breakout rewards that their strategic-creative ideation brought to the party. If their client-approved efforts fall flat, okay, they only get their salaries, but if the brand does better than similar efforts have empowered before....

The Really Terrible News...

None of this is good news, however, for the five global holding companies that own all the dinosaurs. When the next global crash hits (and it cannot NOT hit as the US is in perilous financial shape and is about to ignite a people's revolution with the toxic tax cuts for the rich that Trump and his team of Pence-led deplorables are about to enact, the net effect of which will be to bankrupt the American government -- lower taxes = lower revenue to pay back an already mindboggling debt load carried both by the government and households and the ensuing negligible global confidence in the US dollar), I would not want to be holding a lot of stock in those five holding companies.

The ensuing bankruptcies of thousands of global agency offices is going to flood the market with desperate, experienced agency people with nowhere to take their skills other than back into the market, forming tens of thousands of new, lean, agile and adaptable agencies with no in-house capabilities and a willingness to work for nothing more than a bare minimum salary and commission on incremental sales (if that). The revolution is coming whether we start it now, willingly, or not. End of rant. ;-) #BigIdeas2017

• • •

The Future of Marketing Experience

I have a 60 minute interactive discussion to share with you and your team that many Canadian industry execs have had their minds opened by. I adapted my original material to Brand Momentum's unique business model while I was consulting with them, but the content is relevant to the marketing industry as a whole and the presentation can be customized for any vertical.

Contact me to book an hour for The Future of Marketing Experience (presentation takes about 30 mins plus another 30 mins of discussion). KevinLenard@Gmail.com

Slide #7 from The Future of Marketing Experience:

Looking Back at Predictions for 2016 -- Certainly 'Big Data' Has Gotten Far Too Much Attention!

2016-08-21T13:59:00.002-04:00

In looking back on Kimberly A. Whitler's Forbes article from November of 2015 titled "CEOs, CMOs, And Executive Recruiters Make Predictions For Marketing Leaders in 2016" I commented:

Interesting list. Lots of crossover with out much ‘distilling’ of what the key points/themes and insights might be. I agree with most, a couple that I cannot. An ‘Executive Summary’ in just four points:

‘Big Data’ Analysis & Leveraging

Has to be faster, more relevant to specific brand issues, implemented on a target by target basis in ways that are meaningful to them. (Just because something is relatively new, like the accessibility of ‘big data’ recently, does not make it scary or ‘THE LATEST NEW THING’ for business people to freak out about, any more that ‘social’ deserved this type of attention for the past decade.) Due to SEO the industry now has the capability to generate relevant mathematical algorithms to effectively extract actionable insights from the newly available data. The current hyperventilating in the marketing industry’s media has to be taken down several notches.

CMO as Manager of Change, Transparency & Conversation

This has always has been the case as CMOs are closer to the day-to-day, ever-evolving lives of the consumer than any other department is, but CEOs need to empower the CMO (or CSO, Chief Strategy Officer) to take on this role as the leader within the C-Suite since only through the mandate
of this responsibility will the CFO, CTO, etc. give up their attempts at fufilling this role. The CMO then has to employ strong consultants to help them analyse and execute internal change to keep up with today’s ever-changing marketplace.

In this role as Manager of Change, both internally (vertically and horizontally) and externally (both to suppliers and customers), the CMO will have to embrace all that today’s customer-centric marketplace demands both at the brand and corporate level: transparency (meaning deep involvement in generating both valued products and features and ensuring that they are actually delivered) and a willingness and effective channels to converse with individuals both internally and externally (social media tools), and on the back of these two mandates,

“Bridging the Traditional Sales/Marketing Divide

Through ‘sales enabling’ the CMO can play a bigger role, in part by leveraging Big Data and sales force feedback in real time, in making the sales force into ‘Brand Ambassadors’ out in the field. There is untold value to be found in doing this and Sales & Merchandising outsourcing firms can aid in uncovering it, providing the budgets are freed up to pay for the necessary time and technology required by the sales force. (See ‘consultant support’ above.)

Holistic ‘Engagement Marketing’ Efforts, NOT a New CDO Role

The steady onslaught of new media platforms and new digital technologies are now a way of life. We have seen the birth and death of various new social media, but what stands out is that, because something is understood to be ‘social’ -- just as the telephone is a social medium -- doing ‘push marketing’ in it is fraught. People do not like being interrupted in the midst of socializing by paid advertising.

Managing what works and what doesn’t in terms of new media is NOT a C-Suite function, it is a function that falls under the CMO in one realm and the CFO and CTO in theirs. Each department needs smart people to explore, monitor and analyze new tech and platforms and help judge their value. Their input on value then needs to be critically analysed for ROI potential by their C-Suite bosses and filtered of hyper-enthusiasm for mere ‘newness’.

There is zero need for a new C-suite function of a CDO (Chief Digital Officer who would be in direct competition with the CMO), although there is some point in considering installing a CSO (Chief Strategy Officer) to maintain a laser focus on why and what the firm should do next (see ‘Change Manager’ point above). The marketplace has now matured, after some 30 years of embracing the Internet, to the point where both brand new digital AND EXISTING social (PR), above/below-the-line and placement/sponsorship platforms are all on equal footing as viable options in the media mix for any brand’s marketing efforts.

What has finally emerged from all the experimentation in pay-for-click, banner and ‘social media marketing’, etc. is that in today’s now mature ‘Experience Economy’ there is only one key element in the mix that no brand’s marketing plan can leave out, and that is experiential, face-to-face trial efforts. What every brand needs is to start with a goal of developing an ‘Engagement Marketing Plan’ that begins with experiential efforts to deliver personal, real-time exposure to the brand, followed up with awareness-building, shopper marketing and follow-up loyalty-encouraging efforts.

2016: The Year The "Social Marketing" Bubble Finally Burst

2015-12-17T12:32:00.001-05:00

Between Xmas and New Years of 2006-2007 I stood in a small village's market square in central Guatemala watching the real deal: a guy standing on a soap box in the midst of a crowd of indigenous people holding up a small bottle of oil, extolling it's magical healing powers (and swallowing some to demonstrate how easily it went down).

Watching him and the enthralled crowd as he worked them up to the point that they started digging in their distinctly striped pants pockets for change, I felt nothing but admiration for a vanishing skill (outside of the Shopping Channel). I had the privilege of witnessing one of the last of the Snake Oil salesmen plying his craft.

Here before me was a real marketer (in an actual market, no less!) who, like the last of the Carney Barkers, could stand up in front of a crowd, 'balls to the wall,' and shamelessly bilk them of their money for something that had no value in terms of what his claims were (outside likely being an excellent enema agent if injected into the actual origin of his bovine excreta...). Well, not entirely true....the 'medicinal value' he was providing was in bringing hope and entertainment into the lives of remote mountain villagers devoid of much in the way of theatrics. But upon getting back to Canada a week later, I realized I was mistaken:

Snake Oil Salespeople are very much alive and well in our industry!

My career as a consultant working out how to leverage Marketing Disruption to shift the efforts of national advertisers from 'product marketing' to 'experience marketing' began right then. (A keynote I created shortly thereafter on 'Shopper Marketing' has been presented to thousands of marketers across North America by Jason Dubroy, turning him into a 'Shopper Marketing Czar'!)

I saw where the media dollars SHOULD be going -- into an effective, but infrequently invested-in medium with astounding ROI (be forewarned, the 'CPM' will get you thrown out of the CFO's office) -- and I wrote my first keynote on the subject of Conquering Marketing Disruption. The focus, unsurprisingly, dear reader, was to steer marketers away from the distraction of seductive, but inappropriate media for 'push marketing,' to a much more strategically sound, mixed-media strategy that would see them winning, not losing, the profitable ROI game in this red haze of technological advancement we're living through.

You've been had, Marketers. Seriously abused. Bamboozled.

If you control the marketing budget for a major brand, well, now you have to decide on either the humiliation of the facts coming out at trial, or just keeping quiet about it. ;-)

Use it or lose it.

The marketing industry was facing a major problem in the mid-2000's that 'got taken care of,' at least temporarily. Their huge media ATL (that's 'above the line' for the Millennials, meaning: TV, Radio, Print and Outdoor, versus promotional, PR/CRM, or sales-related efforts) budgets were hemorrhaging into digital (where there was little effectively targeted inventory to buy) and brand managers around the world were dealing with 'use it or lose it' -- spend up to your previous 'Super Bowl levels,' or see the budgets cut drastically. Agencies, on both sides of the now divorced (due to the advent of the "Procurement Department" and hence only marginally profitable, also exacerbated by the advent of the dreaded RFP -- see: "Procurement Department" immediately above) creative and media divisions, were being further fractured as they had to cut staff who, with nowhere else to go, started up thousands of new boutique agencies and offered "Will Work For Food."

With the realization that ATL advertising had never actually had any demonstrable ROI and believing that all this new digital stuff apparently was soon going to have SIGNIFICANT, PROVABLE ROI (but wasn't quite fully baked at that moment...), the burning question for marketers was:

Where can we spend all this money we used devote to TV ad placements?!?

Well. There are many clever, creative people in the ad world. In the mid to late 2000's some of them were mature and hungry, some were young and hungry, but they all had to make a buck and there were suddenly less bucks to be had beating the dying horse of 'push' advertising on ATL media (unless you still had a job working on the 'too-big-to-change-80-years-of-status-quo' clients at the dinosaur agencies).

There was something new, confusing and mysterious out there, however, and unlike trying to master how digital media is placed, tracked and evaluated, these new 'social media' were pretty easy to figure out how to mess around with. 'Social media optimization' (SMO, akin to it's sister, SEO) soon got a much sexier name: "Social Marketing," and the gold rush was ON! Virtually overnight "Social Marketing Experts" and agencies materialized by the hundreds ready to capitalize on 'pushing' ads into a space normally reserved for friends and relatives.

I don't blame the marketing masses for jumping on the first exciting new band wagon to pull into town. The Snake Oil Salespeople were offering to make sense of a confusing barrage of emerging new media and take the pressure off brand management (and many of them are my friends and colleagues, so I'm jousting with no ill will, per se...). One of the adages of Jon Jerde, the architect of the world's most stunning shopping plazas, made perfect sense:

"People go where people are."
...and now they're all on social media!

So if lots of people were suddenly spending a lot of time on these new 'social media,' then marketers should be there to interact with them! The fundamental strategic flaw in this inclination was that all social media are essentially the same as the telephone, and the last time we tried marketing on that medium it turned out to be rather poorly received. ;-) Don't get me wrong, telemarketing works for
many specific applications, as does 'social media optimization,' the latter is just not the answer to our future-of-marketing prayers that the Snake Oil Salespeople have been bamboozling us into believing. (Just because it has 'media' in its name, doesn't mean its ripe for placing 'push' ads in it, or even 'pull-ish' paid ads/promotions.)

The upside of all of this massive investment in social media optimization over the past decade, as well as that of the ongoing investments in digital ROI tracking and assessment tools, is that we now have a better grip on what is possible, and what is not. We now know that each additional new social medium in no way helped contribute to a fundamental change in human nature. Yes, behaviours have changed and we are now certainly carelessly continuing with the largest experiment on children that has ever happened in human history, but we've witnessed no real change in the 'consumer decision making journey' (as McKinsey is now calling it).

Turns out that the 15% of people who loved collecting/redeeming coupons obsessively before now get them via Facebook, no longer in newspapers, magazines or plastic bags hung on their front doorknob, but we've seen ZERO net increase in coupon collection or redemption. There was an uptick in promotional and contest participation as consumers began experimenting with new ways to participate -- and participation numbers have ended up higher than they were -- but nowhere near what the Snake Oil hyperbole guaranteed us we'd see (the same percentage of people are contest junkies today as before). People spend less time watching TV delivered via cable channels, but they still watch lots of shows and movies. Radio is almost as viable as it ever was and people still read journalistic content and books (today's kids not so much). Outdoor still works like it always did.

What has changed is that consumers have told us, in no uncertain terms, that they never wanted, nor ever appreciated, 'push advertising.'

Consumers LOVE 'pull' -- they hate 'push.'

Consumers LOVE relevant, targeted, timely ads -- they hate being interrupted when they're having fun watching valued content or being social. They love engaging, memorable experiences, they HATE the experience of being forced to watch/listen to ads. The old folks are paranoid about privacy issues ("One toke on a joint will mean you never become President!"), the young people couldn't care less ("My nude photo session just got posted permanently online, just like all the hot celebrities have! Here's the link..."). The 'holy grail' of marketing, 'fully addressable advertising' (ads for what any individual is interested in, when they are interested in it via behavioural and location-based tracking online), will have to wait a few more years until the Millennials can say yes to it.

So how have the brightest bulbs in the marketing industry reacted to this dramatic and sincere global protest against the old 'push marketing' model? You, dear reader, are even more clever than I thought you were! Yes, they've been working day and night to shove 'push' down the public's throat as hard as they can. Nice. Good demonstration of true emotive listening skills there. :-)

Embracing the change is actually easy, if you have the right strategists working with you, but it's FAR easier to try to go back to the 'good old days' of ATL and replicate those efforts in new media.

The ATL 'push' model worked for 80 years, why not just continue?

The sad thing is it really won't work the way it used to, as the crisis facing digital advertising is now demonstrating with AdBlocker software shutting down any ads (whether they be banners, video boxes, pop-ups or sign-ups) and bots from hackers siphoning off millions of dollars in "exposures" and "clicks." There is a very real crisis going on in the global media realm that is devaluing digital advertising exponentially. Google is in the vortex, shooting themselves (temporarily) in the foot, blindly using the kind of algorithms that revolutionized search on the (soon to be semantic) Worldwide Web to pay any site with AdSense that shows traffic. (Hang tight and let's see where that challenge leads in 2016...)

2016 will be the year that the best and brightest CMO's 'see the light' and shut down the Snake Oil Salespeople. The time has finally come, the ROI evaluation tools for digital and social media optimization have come of age, big data analytical algorithms and matrices are here and the results are on the table. Yet only one thing has drastically, fundamentally, strategically changed in the world of marketing:

'Push' is dead (almost), 'Pull' is alive and well, and consumers want to know everything they can about your brand (i.e. quality content delivered via thousands of engaging new channels on a multitude of 'always on' devices). All you need is the right strategy -- the tactics will fall out.

'Social media optimization/marketing' is nothing new, it's just happening through new channels. As we always knew, it is NOT 'push-appropriate,' is it simply what used to be called 'public relations' and 'customer relationship management.' 'Social Marketing' is merely marketers trying to get high value mentions of their brands placed/injected into news, educational and entertainment programming via a relatively low investment AND get their efforts talked about 'around the water cooler' and in consumers' social circles: not 'pushed,' but 'pulled.'

The fundamental strategic platform for shifting from 'push' to 'pull' at a holistic, core level is to remember that in 1999 Pine and Gilmore explained that our human marketplace has evolved into The Experience Economy. Consumers don't want to hear/see your brand story -- they want to experience your brand in an authentic, real-time, hands-on way. Only by shifting the majority of your marketing spend from a 'pennies per exposure' CPM model, to a 'thousand dollars per touch' (CPT) model, while embracing the creation of quality, always-changing content delivered through a thousand new and old media channels, will the rare, visionary, highly adaptable CMO's of today win tomorrow.

The shift, dear reader, is from what we used to do: "'Push' Product Marketing;" to "'Pull' Experience Marketing." Embracing 'Experiential Marketing,' as I've been advocating since 2006, is key to making this shift. #BigIdeas2016

•••

Were your thoughts provoked? Support authoritative, insightful thinking and writing by clicking here to send me a loonie. Thanks!

About Me: “Motivational Speakers” make you feel good for a few hours, then you go back to your normal life/work. My seminars and podcasts leave people fundamentally changed by understanding why our brains have evolved to make us do what we do — by understanding, we can effect real, transformative change in our behaviour and our lives.

The evolution of human behaviour has been a fascination of mine since long before I began working in marketing. My unflagging passion helped me become a global thought leader on Disruption and Experience Marketing in an era of unprecedented and overwhelming change. It’s not really all THAT complicated — we just need to get back to our roots and “marketing’s” infancy…

I can help you and your team change where you’re going and, most importantly, how you get there. Contact me for a no-fee Lunch & Learn and take the high ground with a real understanding of human motivation: kevinlenard@gmail.com; or text/call me at: 1 (647) 500–5705.

For more from Kevin Lenard:
Marketing Insights • Human Insights • Twitter

Employee 'Disengagement' (Tweeting, FB, gaming, etc.) Costs $500 bn/yr.

2015-12-03T07:32:00.001-05:00

Please go to this link for the full article by the authors at Officevibe.

How Creativity Actually Works Best, NOT Via "Every Idea is a Good Idea"!

2015-11-18T09:52:00.004-05:00

Human egos being what they are, and human nature usually being that 'lazy' is our default, a phenomenon I've often encountered in the ad business is that the creative teams (especially if there is only one dedicated team) 'fall in love' with one idea that they feel fits the brief adequately (or ideally) and they refuse to come up with another. This phenomenon was only exacerbated by the development of software that makes it simple to 'mock up' nearly finished concepts in minutes.

I solved the problem in part by writing into the creative briefs that THREE (3!) mocked up and very different campaign approaches were required to address every brief. "WHY?!?" they'd demand (wanting to get back to playing video games or the pub in numerous cases). Because experience had taught me that, in order for us to sell through the one idea we all agreed was the strongest creatively and strategically, we'd have to have a weak concept that the client would agree sucked and a second one that was OK, but wasn't breakthrough. Clients have equally big egos and need to feel like they got the chance to shoot something down. The problem of the "THIS IS THE ONLY CONCEPT WE NEED! IT'S FANTASTIC!" barrier largely went away and I always got three campaign concepts (although often even the best was mediocre -- bear with me...).

What I came to understand, and I've seen it pop up over and over, no where more frustratingly than in science where, once a scientist feels she/he is onto something new/breakthrough, it becomes nearly impossible to shift them off of their band wagon [the 'multi-verse' and the pre-Big Bang 'infinitesimal point containing all matter and energy in the cosmos' are my favourites with 'believers' in the former giving in to our complex human brain's tendency to conjure up titillating explanations for what is currently inexplicable (called 'religious beliefs' in non-scientific circles) and the latter being a similar error in allowing the elegance of mathematics to override common sense]. Like religious converts who shout "YOU'VE OFFENDED MY 'BELIEFS'! YOU MUST DIE!" (okay, usually without the last bit ;-), these otherwise calm and level-headed scientists -- who otherwise do base their careers on rigorous scientific methodology -- suddenly become extremely heated, defensive and often just a tad irrational (hands clamped tightly over ears while humming loudly) when their 'pet theory' is challenged.

[Interestingly, despite being two different worlds, what is similar in the individuals who become significant and well-recognized successes (personalities) in academia and new businesses (e.g. Carl Sagan & James Dyson, Richard Dawkins & Richard Branson, etc.) is that the KPI's (key performance indicators) that lead to success are very similar. It is the same type of high-IQ, cross-specialty expertise/adaptability, articulate, failure-resilient, highly-focused, evangelists for unique-point-of-difference concepts, who tends to rise to the top in both fields. In both worlds the individual must 'fall in love with' her/his pet theory/new product or service and 'own it' better than any competitor. The notable differences between the two fields is that, in academia, the new business
requirements for a certain amount of luck, a cut-throat focus on profit and a fair degree of hyperactivity can be exchanged for a diligent, incremental approach to research, analytical thinking and the generation of published works. Individuals with the OCD/ADHD traits I find most fascinating tend to find more latitude and opportunity in the world of new businesses than academia, but more on them later...]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Upton Sinclair, 1933

Oh, I get it. When you have spent years working on something that your salary, grants and reputation depends upon, it's tough to allow any doubt in the form of well-reasoned criticism creep in and undermine everything you've worked on and now 'believe in,' but some research into the methodology of creativity by Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, upon the value of criticism/dissent in the group creative process has demonstrated that what ACTUALLY produces the best results. This research, used by Matthew Syed in the excerpt from his book (link below) removes the veil from the 'concept generation process' and reveals that the long-held, entrenched conviction we've had that the best way to generate the most creative ideas is to put lots of people from different disciplines/departments in a room (the more the better up to the point that the quantity becomes unmanageable) and 'stay positive!' Not quite, as it turns out...

"In the 1940s, an advertising executive by the name of Alex Osborn came up with the technique of brainstorming following his frustration at the inability of employees to come up with innovative ideas for advertising campaigns. His rules:

Put the emphasis on quantity of ideas (“quantity breeds quality”);

Hold back criticism or judgment;

Be open to bizarre/strange ideas;

Blend ideas to enhance them (1+1=3)."

Over and over again I've seen this time honoured methodology developed by Osborn produce results that suck. Some of the best ideas I've ended up refining and elaborating upon were the ones that the 'Brainstorm Moderator' tossed aside as they hadn't spurred enough interest (votes) from the group. These rough gemstones looked like one of the rocks in Charlie Brown's Halloween bag, but properly cleaned, cut and polished emerged from the trash heap as the biggest ideas ever.

So what's the problem with 'brainstorming -- every idea is a good idea' that makes it suck? Ego. Like the scientists and entrepreneurs (and religious fanatics) I touched upon above, once our human ego 'falls in love' with an idea, we find it very tough to let go of it. Those initial campaign ideas might have been the very best the team could ever have come up with, but it wasn't just laziness or our human tendency to be parsimonious with our intellectual energy and 'move on' to another task once we find a solution we judge to be 'good enough' (called "cognitive miserliness" vs. "fully disjunctive reasoning"), I believe that ego presents a significant problem that needs to be muted if the best ideas are going to emerge during the creative/innovation process.

A basic problem of human nature (it evolved to give us resilience and fortitude in trying new things) is our tendency to reassure ourselves that whatever idea we've come up with is the right one. This same tendency leads us to believe we are great at things we actually suck at (click to read: "Why You Think You're Wonderful"). In traditional brainstorming sessions we erect a significant barrier to rejecting ideas that suck ASAP when we don't allow criticism from the outset, and that is what Nemeth's research has proven to be the case. Random groups that were encouraged to be critical (not mean-spirited, just realistic) versus 'staying positive' about all ideas were consistently the most creative at problem solving and generating viable ideas.

So often I felt we could have come up with better concepts than the one that the creative team had locked onto (again, ESPECIALLY so once they'd spent a lot of time mocking it up to look near-finished), but once their egos had become deeply vested, it was very tough to shake them off short of putting the concepts into testing (and having proven that 'their baby' was a dud in consumer research was akin to getting them through the death of their first born in order to start again). A partial solution was to insist that they NEVER present any concepts to me in anything more elaborate than 'cocktail napkin sketch' form, AND that they showed me every idea they'd come up with, even the ones they'd immediately rejected/abandoned. However the ego problem still rears its ugly head, and I believe this is the problem with brainstorming and it has become even more problematic with the new 'entitled generation' who have been assured since day one that all of their opinions and notions are sprinkled with fairy dust.

What I've witnessed, time and again, in brainstorming sessions where criticism is verboten, is that telltale 'smug look' that comes over the faces of many participants after they've come up with an idea they think is brilliant. At that point many of them lose interest in the session. Why? Because they feel their brilliance has done its job and they're free to 'zone out' and think about things that matter to them more, like the work waiting on their desk or what they'll do after work. Even for those who stay engaged, the fact that no criticism is allowed means that their bad ideas are still 'in play' despite having no legs. Sure, they'll get voted on in the next democratic 'no outright criticism' phase, but often times this means that concepts that were never appropriately challenged and evolved get rejected out of hand.

This excerpt post from Syed's book makes a simple, but relatively revolutionary point about how to approach the process of creative concept generation. It's well worth the read about Dyson's vacuum breakthrough and more:

Please, no more brainstorm sessions. This is how innovation really works.

Note: Dyson's name is on his company's shingle because it was him, alone, who both was frustrated by the problem of standard vacuum cleaners bag blockage issue (worried about effective vacuuming in his mid-20's, no less!) AND kept this problem in the back of his mind, spinning now and then, over and over through possible and improbable solutions until seeing a cyclonic dust collector at a wood mill and making 1+1=3 (the "EUREKA!" moment). In this age of "There's no 'I' in team!" it bears pointing out that most of the major innovations of the world have been made by very clever, usually obsessive-cumpulsive/ADHD individuals who study a wide and diverse network of interests and bring together 'threads' between previously unconnected things that others just don't see, even though after the fact everyone says it was so simple that they could have come up with it.

I believe that we are witnessing a similar confluence of aptitudes and predilections, a convergence of high or low end of various spectrums (see my article linked below regarding the labeling of personality types), in individuals who each bring the rest of us new insights into how we can better interpret fellow humans and enjoy the world we live in through new products and services. These individuals show up in all aspects of our lives and, when you stop to think on it, are remarkably similar personalities and brain types. The best comedians we all know are all near the highest end of the IQ (and "GI" - 'general intelligence') curve and are all hyper-active and obsessed with generating new material. The so-called 'new atheists all share these traits (e.g. Chris Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins), as do the journalist/academic authors/bloggers like Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and so many others. The same is true of the always hard-charging inventors of new business models and products/services like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, James Dyson and the multitude of others in the past and coming soon.

While these examples are famous, in large part, due to the fact they all also share the trait of wanting and/or being comfortable in the limelight, for each of them there are ten others who are just as OCD/ADHD and brilliant, but miss that extrovert/articulate/socially-engaging aptitude. Too often I see brilliant individuals in businesses, many of whom are socially awkward and easily crushed, being largely ignored by their team members in favour of the 'natural leaders' (or the ever-crowing wannabes). The challenge for management is to identify and empower/encourage these rough gemstones and let them, like the young Dyson, work on their own (Dan Pinks: "Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose") to generate breakthroughs. Yes, it's nice to build a strong team and there's an emotional boost that comes after hosting a successful team-building work session, but at the end of the day, the biggest breakthroughs have always come from the very bright bulbs all on their own (though perhaps the brainstorming session helped to 'frame' the problem for them). Be sure to be listening when they try to explain (they're not always good at simple explanations) what they've come up with.

"Labeling" is an Issue, not Just with Products, but People.

Twitter vs. Time, LinkedIn & "Self-Bamboozlement"

2015-11-05T11:41:00.001-05:00

"Time is Money." Well, not always (time with your loved ones isn't) -- but time is precious, I think we'd all agree.

Sadly of late we seem to have been seduced, by inadvertently pressing the "stimulus button" in certain brain circuits in our noggins, into acting like time is no longer precious, not at work and sometimes not even at home. Certainly most of us seem to be acting like time isn't as valuable as it was just a few years ago, pre-Twitter and the rest.

"Follower Counts," "Likes," "Retweets," "Posts," "Links," "#HashtagUpThe Wazoo." What did we used to do in the office with the time that so many of us now 'devote' to the constant stream of distraction (your employees call it "on the job work-related social connecting...") that we can access any time on our devices?

I have a strong conviction, based upon a lifetime of study into human nature, brain research and motivational psychology, that humans are where they are, PAST the verge of being the next 'great extinction' force on Mother Earth, due to one accident of evolution, and Twitter proves it (along with the social media "etc. list"). That predilection we all suffer from is an irresistible desire to repeat things that, at relatively low cost, give our brains a little boost. (Now think about what the not-so-nice word for that tendency is...) Lately all of us have been lowering our faces into 'Social Media' and Candy Crush Saga on our always-on devices, getting one little boost after another.

When you hear someone says something like "Nowadays I really measure my value to my employer, and my worth as a marketer, by my social engagement analytics, such as how many followers I have, how many people have liked my professional pages/posts on Facebook and LinkedIn, and how often my tweets are re-tweeted," you are hearing what I would call "self-bamboozlement." We see this same self-justification in all human beings who don't want to acknowledge that they are trapped in repetitive behaviours that have often been called 'bad habits.'

Evolution pre-programmed us, over 7 million years (we've lived in settlements for .001 % of our species' evolution, just 7,000 years), to obsess over obtaining things that give us little boosts of pleasure: foodstuffs we could only find in season in certain places, sex, the warmth of a fire, tickling a baby, being dry, dancing, being social, etc. When we lived in our natural state, as nomadic tribes, we just couldn't get enough of anything to become addicted, but the secret sauce evolved in our brains, waiting for our modern 'New Normal' to let it blossom. Addiction is a deeply insidious driving force in us that now shows up all around us: 'shopaholics', gamblers, drinkers and addictions
to sex, tanning, exercise, tattooing, eating, accumulating money, porn, even to obsessive-compulsives always doing whatever pops into their brains to get that little feel-good boost.

There's a disturbing trend on LinkedIn happening today that makes me apoplectic, it's the 'Twitterfication" of LinkedIn. It is the "I WANT TO START A MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE ON LINKEDIN TO INCREASE MY EXPOSURE, SO I'M GOING TO POST..."

"Describe the future of marketing in 140 characters."
"In two words what does 'leadership' really mean to you?"
"How has 'social marketing' made you a better person?"

OMG! WTF? LOL! Please spare us! At what point did real work and serious, conceptual thinking about what you get paid to do get replaced by an endless effort to boost your own ego by leveraging our egos? Really? How does constant checking of the number of re-tweets you've 'earned' for that latest quip or link to that witty little video translate into 'time well invested' for whoever is paying to send your kids to college? Last time I checked, your stakeholders still believe that time is money. Egging us into 'engaging' with you, even if your job is to be the corporate PR cheerleader, is not the same as generating quality content that is relevant to your service, brand or business. Frequency and volume does not equate to good branding, especially given the shift from push to pull.

And for those of you getting sucked into the 'engagement,' before you launch into a defensive, self-perpetuating litany of self-justification about how a healthy social media presence and participation is essential to being 'in touch' with the new digitally-connnected world today, just stop and, with your ego firmly in check, use your analytical, logical thinking to truly, honestly explain how, when you add up all the minutes of the day (6 minutes per hour is 10% of your paid work hour) you spend checking your 'social media platform' (e.g. checking emails, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, messages, voicemail, Reddit, Instagram, Pinterest, 'industry blogs', etc. and reading and responding/forwarding/retweeting to things that really aren't paid-work-related, versus just a few years ago when you simply worked all day at the stuff you actually do get paid for) -- explain how the majority of this obsessive distraction is actually benefiting your employer? And do so WITHOUT claiming that you found out some interesting stuff you can use to benefit the job. Yes, of course you found a tidbit or two, but are those REALLY such 'gems' that they make all the time wasted in short ego-boosts ("Ooo! Someone liked my tweet!") all day long worth it to your employer? Sorry, but I call BS. Up until a few years ago the research time you put into reading industry journals and corresponding with colleagues about issues was a fraction of what we fritter away today on so many things unrelated to our actual jobs.

What I've seen transform the marketing industry since Push Marketing fell off the precipice in the early 2000's is a desperate self-justification of self-indulgence in a brand new explosion of highly addictive ego-boosting platforms that are of little use to anyone in terms of real marketing efforts. So-called "Social Marketing" is nothing new. Nor is "Pull Marketing." These are just the same old marketing tactic of trying our best to get people to promote our brands for free by 'talking them up' with friends, family and people in the street. It used to be called Public Relations.

All that has changed is that there are more Social Media that have been added to the old Social Media, which were: talking face to face, writing letters, talking on the phone, mailing a video tape to the grandparents, etc. What has transpired is that, as the formerly ridiculously high budgets for traditional push media have begun to get challenged (no, we never had ANY ROI on TV ad spending and still don't), there has been an industry-wide self-bamboozlement to maintain the overall budget levels and shift the former TV spending into "Social Media." While it makes perfect sense to move this marketing spending into a fully demonstrable ROI effort, experiential marketing, that required TV-like budgets, but actually pays out in converting trial into loyalty, it makes NO sense to try to put Push Marketing into Pull Media (i.e. ALL Social Media) any more than it did to spend more on telemarketing or email campaigns that we know have some, but limited, effectiveness.

So the next time you hear/read someone justifying their endless, obsessive efforts to "be more popular" (i.e. "become famous") in the newest social media, do what caring people have always done with addicts: sit them down with a few other people who care about the individual for an intervention. Be frank about the way that the repetition of an activity that gives them a little boost in their brain of one or more of endorphins, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin adversely effects their work, life, relationships, etc. and try to convince them to spend less time with the similarly addicted people in their life who empower them to believe their 'new normal' is actually perfectly okay (alcoholics hang out with other alcoholics). If nothing else, please try to talk them out of turning LinkedIn into a new Twitter-like platform for useless time-wasting. ;-)

Help me kill "self-bamboozlement" at the CMO level and remember that time is still money and always has been in business. Just say no to the highly addictive boosts of pleasure that come from social media distractions and focus on real work.

As for the latest news that teens spend, on average, 60% of their waking hours on digital media (from YouTube to video games, hard core pornography and all the social media), just keep in mind that we all have gullible in participating in the most frightening social experiment on children ever conducted, and we have no idea what the outcome might be. :-( If counting re-tweets is addictive for you, imagine what handing a highly addictive device to a kid with virtual 24/7 'inebriation' due to brain chemicals/hormones and a desperate need to be socially connected does. It is nothing short of criminal, yet we all reassure ourselves that it's "The New Normal," so it's perfectly okay.

Now please heart this post and tweet it to all your contacts. I'll be checking in every few minutes...

For a feel-good moment in your day, remember that TIME IS PRECIOUS and watch: Kids Don't Love Santa - They Love You.

Our Collective Experiment on the Minds of Children

2013-02-05T10:30:00.003-05:00

The ad for Molson Canadian beer that the clip below is from apparently (according to HuffPost) got a lot of play on the Internet around February of 2013 before it vanished forever (not clear if this had anything to do with this post I wrote...). The ad leveraged our human instinct to feel "special" (nationalistic) about our Canadian tribe, but it strangely has this tiny clip in it of two girls kissing underwater:

So what's so interesting about that? The target is young males, in Canada and abroad and, having worked on beer ads for many years, I can replay the creative/account team's pitch to the breweries senior management:

"You see, we know that young guys grow up on hard-core porn online these days, gentlemen, and, let's face it, guys LOVE the idea of girl-on-girl sex and 'three-ways' with two girls, so we have to put in a shot of two girls making out to 'push that hot button'! Hey, if anyone complains we'll say it's a shout-out to the lesbian/gay community!"

Well here's the thing, that little snippet thrown in there has NOTHING to do with LGBT-friendliness. It has EVERYTHING to do with female exploitation.

Readers of my stuff know that I have an issue with marketers leveraging our baser human instincts to sell shit (despite having built a career upon it, I think there's room for exercising moral judgement in corporate decision making). Yes, I came up through the age of ardent feminism and bear the scars, but exactly the opposite social undercurrent is happening today, aided by two key things:

The fact that there are sufficient checks and balances in place in today's educational system and workplace that give most young women fairly equal opportunity, so the pressure to be 'on-guard' about equality and 'fight for it' has largely disappeared.
Online pornography is free, highly stimulating at an instinctual level, simple to access, and kids are both curious and dare each other to watch things that most adults would turn off in disgust. Watching porn has become a 'right of passage' for today's kids (yes, even your kids!).

Why are these two points so salient? Because:

A large enough body of research to have educated us that there are very REAL differences between men and women that have nothing to do with 'nurture' and everything to do with 'nature'. There are good reasons why most women aren't interested in going into engineering or politics and will become stay-at-home mom's with great enthusiasm if they get the opportunity. The 'bonding hormone' oxytocin is addictive -- it's impossible for either sex to resist the effects of it.
Study has proven that the human brain lays down it's life-long neural pathways through the teen years, only fully forming the complex connections that enable the ability to understand the long term consequences of short term actions at 25. This means that, without the censorship previous generations had that kept hardcore pornography away from us until we were in at least our late teens, today's young kids are literally immersed in it. This 'familiarity' during a time that permanent neural connections are being formed breeds a conviction that 'the new normal' is for girls to give boys what, apparently (judging by the bulk of the pornography they are exposed to), they want most: instantaneous female arousal without any romantic foreplay, girl on girl, two girls on one guy, deep-throating, lots of slapping, etc.

This is combined with a very serious underlying sense of 'entitlement' that comes NOT from their parents/family environment (no matter how liberal or conservative it is), but rather from the sum of all the shows, movies, songs and cultural stimulation they are exposed to everywhere (the World Wide Web is a very big place!).

What we're seeing in young women today is a disturbing 'sexualization' at a very young age that leads them to 'dare each other' to adhere to the 'new normal': wearing platform high-heels designed to rotate the pelvis forward and buttocks out, hemlines that are so short their private parts are on display, and
'going commando' (panty-less). Getting the attention of young males used to be easy for girls, they just had to show up. Today the guys don't really need them, they have video games and hardcore porn free and instantaneously anytime. This means the girls have to 'step-up' and work very hard to get the attention of the lads and offer them what they've become accustomed to expecting. It encourages sexual behaviour that matches what they've seen so often as they were growing up, performing for the lads, giving them what they've been encouraged to find appealing by watching very graphic, explicit sex online anytime, all the time. College-age sexual activities these days have evolved and are no longer the simple experimentation/exploration they used to be, there's a lot more 'group activity' than we'd like to believe or hear about and not a lot of 'romantic bonding'.

The marketers of Molson Canadian can hide behind "we're just reflecting the reality of young people's lives/interests/modern culture", but I beg to differ. Much of our experience with the Internet and emerging media and technology had been experimental since the mid-90's -- we didn't know going in what the long term effects would be, but we're learning now and it's time for good corporate citizens to STOP hiding behind claims of innocent "we're just giving customers what they want" and to start behaving with a social conscience. Using advertising to put out the message to girls that boys not only want them to make out with each other, but that this idea is suitable to promote on mass-market advertising for their product (an inebriation-inducing product, no less), isn't innocent, it is insidious, gratuitous, and profoundly unethical, yet it is very likely the front edge of the wave of the future of advertising.

When there are no clear lines drawn in the sand, it is up to marketers to self-censor. Molson has chosen to 'push the envelope'. Perhaps the net impact is entirely innocuous and therefore moot, but with this ad, we've reached a tipping point.

Make no mistake, that single little clip does not show two girls holding hands, or getting married, or protesting for LGBT rights, it is in the midst of a generic, directed at the majority, obviously heterosexual-male-oriented ad. It is what it is, a lewd little promotion to encourage young men to nod in excited approval, nudging their buddies in the ribs with their elbows while hoping the girls will 'get the hint'. It advertises, in the public forum, that if girls really are cool, if they really do 'get' what is expected of them by the lads, some of them, at least, will get it on with each other in a public place like the wild, drunken party depicted in the ad, and continue with what is implied to come next as the party gets wilder...

This isn't just about some old ad guy ranting about indecency, this is a serious and growing issue that we need to take a hard look at. Only NOW are we seeing the effects of a bunch of experimental, unregulated new stuff on an entire generation who have grown up being encouraged to give in to things that the young human brain finds highly addictive:

Texting each other on cell phones till 4 am (girls more so than boys)
Playing extremely violent, amoral video games (GTA) on hand-held devices, sometimes for 48 hours straight (boys more so than girls)
Eating highly appealing, empty-calorie convenience foods in large quantities
Watching hard-core pornography from a disturbingly early age
Never being exposed to real failure or disappointments
And ending every phone call with just about anyone in their immediate circle with 'I love you' (#5 & 6 especially helping to form the real roots of today's plague of 'entitlement')

We didn't know what the consequences of allowing the pharmaceutical lobby to push the government to legalize opium in nice packaging, then incentivize doctors to prescribe it en masse, now many average small and large town folks are addicted to Oxycontin and we have a major societal problem. Who knew that allowing the gun manufacturers to misuse the second amendment to make a lot of money pumping millions of handguns out of their factories into the hands of a minority of gun-addicted Americans (homes with guns have dropped from 54% in the 70's to less than 35% today), but now America has a HUGE problem with anti-social/criminal individuals having access to an unlimited, cheap supply (6,000,000 BRAND NEW guns, mostly handguns, will be sold in America this year, and more next year, and more the year after that to gradually fewer 'collectors'...).

Big challenges start innocuously, and the ones associated with the Internet and smart phones are just beginning to rear their ugly heads for the Millennial generation. I'd suggest that this little clip of two hetero girls about to kiss underwater is a red flag, not a red herring. I believe it's just the tip of the iceberg and that more are coming. Now I don't know what the consequences or impact will be for this generation and the next (maybe 'publicly broadcast' -- to all intents and purposes -- hardcore porn will be a good thing...), but it's far too close to the inner workings of human consciousness for us to sit back and shrug about.

My interest is NOT with with 'decency' (hey, when sex moves from the bedroom to the public forum, maybe our tendency to over-produce human beings gets eliminated! All the other species we're steadily squeezing off the planet will be pleased...), but with what this 'trend' indicates about the way men and women will interact in the workplace and in society in general. Where will things shift as the reality of this new generation's exposure to porn trickles down and becomes the 'new normal'?

Looks like it will be an titillating show. It will be interesting to see what 'feminism' looks like down the road...

Why "Social Media" are NOT Advertising Media

2012-12-08T15:48:00.000-05:00

What if it was 1989 and the telephone had never been invented, but we had all the rest of human technology invented up to that point?

We'd all be using the telegraph and the postal service to communicate. Radio and television would likely have a slightly bigger role in our lives as we'd have no phone calls to interrupt our leisure activities, although all that letter writing and tap-tap-tapping of Morse Code into the home telegraph unit would be time consuming...

At the behest of the US military, a guy named Tim Berners-Lee creates this thing he calls the Internet to connect the databases of human knowledge that exist on local computer networks around the world into something called the World Wide Web. It comes at vast expense for infrastructure as all the old copper telegraph lines have to be upgraded to fiber-optic around the world, but everyone agrees it seems worth it to be able to share all human knowledge virtually instantaneously.

On top of this, long-lasting rechargeable batteries and new 'wireless radio communication technology' is growing apace and the devices no longer have to be 'tethered' to power outlets and telegraph lines, so the potential is AMAZING! Companies scramble to use this new networking capability with new devices like laptop computers, handheld devices and tablets.

Then suddenly someone gets a bright idea....if we made a really small device, and used a small microphone, people could actually TALK TO EACH OTHER via these devices! With video or without! Wow! Just recharge these little gadgets and you can talk to your mother, or your stock broker, or phone Procter & Gamble and have an engaging, two-way conversation about the latest developments on Pantene shampoo!

Now you KNOW what would happen, right? The advertisers who had been using print, outdoor, TV and radio all these years to 'push' their message would scramble to exploit this new medium. Yes, they've been experimenting with 'banner ads' and email spamming on the new Internet, but this 'telephone' medium was COOL! It is one to one and suddenly everyone in the world is using it via wireless cellular phones. The marketing hype people are screaming:

"YOU HAVE TO GO WHERE PEOPLE ARE!!! You have to advertise on these new phones!"

Suddenly every brand not only needs a website, they need a phone number, a 1-800 line so that their consumers can call a computer to have engaging conversations about Dr. Scholl's foot powder. It is going to be a marketers dream! After all the confusion over which banner ads were best and print media budgets getting slashed, suddenly there's a new answer, a new medium to replace newspaper advertising!

And it's called: Telemarketing!

And at first it would seem like the Holy Grail because, sure enough, all the hyperactive 'early adopters' would be experimenting out the whazoo with these phones. They'd be ignoring their real work to experiment with all you could do with them. They'd be talking with their moms and their friends and colleagues and brand phone lines and complaint lines. They'd be shouting from the rooftops about how cool this new medium was, and gradually all the rest of the bell curve would come on board and buy a phone, so it would seem like "telemarketing" was going to replace television advertising as the newest 'push' medium, as it had two-way 'social media' capabilities for brands to have 'two-way conversations'.

But after a while, the early adopters, those 'experimenters' who try every new thing and say it is the new Pet Rock, MySpace, or SecondLife, move on to something new. They have figured out, in their hyper-intense, experimental ways, what the real long-term value of the medium is and they have registered those uses in their repertoire of technologies and they no longer are open to being interrupted while using it the way they were at first.

Gradually ALL the phone users figure out what is good and bad about the new devices/technology and they too start calling their Congressman to demand that an anti-telemarketing law be set up to prevent them from being interrupted at dinner time by unwanted phone calls. [There is a reason that,
when cellphones came out, NO LISTINGS of those numbers were ever made public. You cannot look up a cellphone number in the White Pages (.com).]

The problem is that once a TON of money has been shifted into a new medium by ALL of the world's marketers and agencies, and EVERYONE is fearful of missing a boat, people's mortgages and careers are now tied to this thing and they are so vested in it, they cannot let it go.

What we now know is that the people who are coupon-addicted (there's actually a TV reality show about them: Extreme Couponing on TLC!) are now 'liking' FaceBook brand-fan pages to get coupons and discount offers in almost identical numbers to the percentage that they used to in clipping them from newspapers, fliers and inserts. These are NOT new users, they've just shifted to a new medium. The same is true of contest-addicts. Does this mean brands have to have 'fan pages' on FaceBook? Probably, but it is not the 'next big thing' to attract NEW users, experiential marketing is where all the big media dollars will eventually shift.

Again, if the medium has the word 'social' in it, it is not an advertising-appropriate medium. That's just a simple insight into human nature based upon simple strategic thinking. Thinking strategically about 'emerging media' is what I do before allowing my clients to get so hyped up that they cut a cheque to these two girls. I can do it for your team. ;-)

Marketing 101

2012-10-24T09:05:00.003-04:00

The Day The Human Universe Changed

2012-02-29T12:56:00.000-05:00

This brilliant guy, James Burke, was my inspiration for doing what I try to do through my posts, make 1 + 1 = 3! This BBC series ran in 1978, but the points he made about the small shifts in our human history that resulted in monumental change are as valid and fresh today as they were over 30 years ago.

Here's a 4 minute edit of one of the most mind-boggling changes that has gone a step further today with the advent of the Internet. In it he points out that it was the invention of movable type in printing presses that moved us from having our databases of human knowledge stored in individual brains, to being stored in books, then in collections of books (libraries), then computers, and today in 'the cloud'.

It's not the storage, nor the quantity of information that has been the key to our vast leaps forward with technology, however, it's something quite simple that is actually changing the way children today learn and process information. Pay attention to his final question...

VIDEO BLOCKED BY BBC (although oddly they did not block the video in this post called "Hole in the Ground")

Kids today memorize very little because they no longer have to, Google is usually near at hand. What they're learning is how to find things (i.e. search and connect). What that means is not that they are less educated than earlier generations, it merely means that their brain power is freed up to think about other things, like how 1 + 1 might equal 3. What this means is that, if we put the brightest bulbs in front of the right problems, they will make leaps forward in thinking an earlier generation might not have because they've been 'programmed' differently.

The next transformational step that is about to happen is instantaneous universal translation and payments on the Internet. This is almost here, but once it happens, you'll be able to chat via Skype with a native in the depths of Borneo's jungle and order a custom-carved hatchet to be delivered overnight by UPS.

All the boundaries of our physical world, like the national boundaries that the invention of printing (standard spelling and grammar in languages) first established, and those of culture and distance, will begin to fade away once this change takes place. Once people can chat for free to people from anywhere, anytime, and exchange not just information, but goods, freely, the very notion of what's important, AND of what 'power' really means, begins to change. That's more like 1 + 1 = 11!

Here's a clip from another episode in his series, this one pointing the way forward to a time when 'free enterprise' will inevitably give way to a more balanced and fair distribution of the planet's natural resources: "Hole in the Ground"

"SOCIAL"!!! It's All About "Social Marketing"! Yeah! The Next Thing is "Social".... Oh, Hang On...

2011-11-17T19:18:00.001-05:00

Indeed. You can't do "push marketing" via a social medium, and "pull marketing" on a social medium is actually PR, so if Marketing has any future, it will not be on any medium that is social in nature...

A Decade+ of Futurist Insights: The Internet's Impact on The Future of Marketing in 4 Points

2011-09-06T07:58:00.001-04:00

(Formerly titled: "Ad Industry Titan Sounds the Death Knell for Print, Radio, TV & His Own ATL/Push Ad Agencies... And No One Notices!" PLEASE NOTE: this post was written in 2011 and speaks to my predictions of a future for the marketing industry that STILL has not quite arrived.)

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Upton Sinclair (from: I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, 1933)

Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP CEO

Though it went largely unnoticed (amazingly), one of the world's biggest advertising agency tycoons, Sir Martin Sorrell, the man behind WPP, announced the end of print as a profitable advertising-supported medium and, by extrapolation, virtually all 'above the line' media (ATL). Now if the global ad agency networks primary role for the past 100 years was to churn out creative content for ATL, then one can only wonder what Sorrell's pronouncement really means for the mid-term future of global networks. In a one page interview titled "Save the Media!" that ran in Newsweek on April 11, 2011 written by Joanne Lipman, Sorrell said the only salvation for the print medium was government subsidies (read: 'charity'), but the subsidized media examples he cited were radio and television in Britain and Australia.

4 Paragraphs & 4 Bullets on Marketing's Near-Term Future:

The ad agency business thrived for almost a century, first on a national scale, the on a global scale through the 80's and 90's, yet with the advent of the Internet it is now facing the distinct possibility of collapse, especially if the ATL media networks it is dependent upon for commissions dry up. The premise behind the global ad agency's role in the world was near-absolute control of both the message and the medium. While that made sense as long as Marshall McLuhan's insight: "The Medium is the Message", held true, once that basic tenet got turned on its head, any businesses who's primary 'reason for being' was based upon it would appear to have a very tenuous future indeed. Today's 'emerging media' landscape has reversed McLuhan's insight:

The Message is Now the Medium (link).

It has become essential for marketers to shape a message that can be managed (no longer controlled!) across an unknown number of media. At best their brand messages are being enthusiastically 'pulled' across these new media by consumers, at worst attempts are being made to 'push' the brand message into social conversations. Early adopters and people still experimenting with something intriguing and new are VERY open to marketing experiments within emerging media -- however after these new media become a truly integral part of their lives, their tolerance for ads being injected into their social space evaporates. The first adults who began using Facebook are gradually losing interest in it (not coming back as often) as the 'shiny and new' glow wears off (though Zuckerberg may yet come up with a way to make it more relevant for daily usage/visits).

New technology has made the status quo 'push marketing' model of the past repugnant, if not simply irrelevant, and this news is as difficult for the ad agency titans of today to assimilate and address as it was for the railway barons of the early 20th century when trucking/highways became the new shipping pipeline. Now certainly WPP is still making gazillions of dollars and isn't going to see their profits evaporate any time soon, but many disparate things are intricately connected in business world -- Sorrell cannot dismiss the problems ATL is facing as irrelevant to the future health of WPP. Let's keep in mind what his current strategy is: focus efforts on rushing the dying business model into the developing world before related businesses there follow the declines the 'first world' is suffering from.

The future of marketing is not all that complicated or mysterious, nor is it going away. Humans have revered status as evidenced by wearing 'brands' since our very social big-brains evolved.

It's in our DNA, brands elevate our status and make us look good!

Marketing itself will merely evolve to:

Focus first and foremost not on the image or message the brand marketer 'pushes' through ATL, but through the experience of the brand consumers get engaged with first hand via experiential efforts (see bullet-point list near the end of this post).
Revolve NOT around 'manufactured problems' (P&G's "little pieces of toilet tissue stuck to children's bottoms"), but real benefits that consumers appreciate ("The Swiffer Duster").
Embrace fully addressable advertising. No, not location-based services (LBS) that serve up coupons to your mobile phone, but advertorials fed to me only for products and services I am actually interested in, that I alone choose how often I want to watch or share.
Restrict the use of 'social media' exclusively for PR purposes: for listening to how well the brand's marketing efforts are working, engaging dis-satisfied customers in solution-finding conversations, and for offering happy customers coupons/discounts/trial flavours, contest mechanics and advertorial content that can be shared, not pushing brand messages (not ever!).

The End

Here's the Blah, Blah, Blah, "Full Treatise" Part if you have time on your hands..

Before you accuse me of getting carried away (and Sorrell has been known to 'stir the pot' in the past), let's put on our thinking caps for a moment and absorb both what he said and who he is. Then
let's evaluate what his convictions about the global media business model suggest about the health of the global ad agency business model that he is dependent upon.

The Inevitable Collapse of Traditional ATL Media Content Suppliers in TV (NBC, ABC, FOX) & Radio

"Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.

"We are not 'seats' or 'eyeballs' or 'end users' or 'consumers. We are human beings -- and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it."

(From: http://www.cluetrain.com/, home site of 1999's: "The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual")

In other words, heads up "Global Marketing Machine", 'push marketing' is well and truly dead! Long live 'pull marketing' based upon truly relevant product benefits (think the antithesis of P&G's "toilet tissue that doesn't leave invisible pieces of paper on the backside of young bears"), engaging brand experiences and contests and causes that people are happy to talk about around the water cooler and recommend to their friends.

As the music industry has had to shrink dramatically from their formerly self-inflated size, so will these related businesses, the platforms for all of which are rapidly fragmenting. The Internet (with its, as yet, dearth of fully proven business and channel/distribution models), the growing plethora of specialty TV channels and satellite radio -- all of these new channels are busy forcing this change to happen. 'Momentum' will only carry the old ATL stalwarts along so far before they go the way of Blockbuster. The new content giants are already taking over: Apple, Google, the content carrying 'pipelines' like AT&T and the wireless providers.

What Sorrell is saying is that his clients (from Ford to P&G) cannot shoulder the burden of 'supporting' ATL media on their own any longer because the Internet has rapidly depleted the ATL media providers' advertising revenue and they are going to gradually go broke. He is lobbying that it is time for the government(s) to step in and subsidize everything from newspapers and magazines, to commercial radio and TV, all of which have been, for the past 100+ years, solely advertising and subscription supported. He points to the BBC and Australian free-to-air radio and TV stations and says that today "advertising-only models don't work" because "there isn't enough advertising to go around. Period." He is saying this in light of the vast (and growing exponentially) quantity of digital ad inventory out there stealing a growing portion of media budgets from traditional media.

Sorrell believes "pay-walls, consolidation, subsidy," are the solution to augmenting the current ad-supported print business model.

Personally I suspect that the only way to get to pay-walls for print media is consolidation. No, not Rupert Murdoch-style mergers and acquisitions, but rather news aggregator/archival services like HighBeam.com through which a subscriber only has to pay one monthly fee to get access to any article that is proprietary to one source from anywhere on the worldwide web (i.e. HighBeam pays The Washington Post a few cents for every time one of one of the Post's archived articles gets read).

As for the notion of pay-walls, Sorrell also says "Consumers must pay for content if they value it." Sure, they will if they have to, but most of it's free at the moment and I, for one, am NOT going to pay each and every newspaper from around the world up to $39/month to access a proprietary article of theirs once in a blue moon (or even $0.99 per read). (I would pay a universal subscription fee of about $30/month giving me unlimited access to everyone's articles -- link to an earlier post.) To clarify, the problem in print is that, now that the WorldWide Web is overflowing with instant access to global content, the newspapers' (and news stations') old '3-4 news sources per city' model means that there is simply exponentially too many providers. That model grew up around a market need for multiple options for hard-copies of newspapers to be hand-delivered to everyone's doors -- it is now a well and truly redundant, dead model.

Why Listen to an "Odious Little Shit"?

WPP's Global Holdings (click to enlarge)

So why take the words of this "odious little shit" (as David Ogilvy famously called him) to heart? Virtually single-handedly Sorrell grew Wire & Plastics Products plc (WPP) into the world's largest advertising group by revenues. It owns a significant number of advertising, public relations, media and market research networks including Grey, Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, JWT, Ogilvy Group, Young & Rubicam and Mediacom. He bought into these firms for one single reason: substantial profit margins.

Now WPP is not in the business of selling media space, but they are in the business of buying $72 billion of it annually for their clients. If this guy doesn't have his finger on the pulse of what is going to happen next in the advertising-supported world of print, TV and radio media, no one does. From his perch high above this intimately-related business, Sorrell is seeing that WPP is soon (a relative term) going to see many of its former platforms for airing 'push advertising content' going belly up, and there will not be any buyers for the bankrupt firms since Rupert Murdoch and the other narrowly-focused ATL media barons are starting to understand that they are kings of a soon-to-be-decimated realm. (Time to jump ship!)

Once this former symbiotic relationship is fundamentally disturbed, once the 'food source' for the ad agencies is well and truly on the endangered species list, this formerly stable ecosystem will be profoundly out of balance and all the species inhabiting it will face mortal peril.

No One Has Figured Out How The Traditional Advertising Formula Might Work Online

In the meantime, in his own words, regarding everyone's efforts to develop a successful media business model in the online digital space: "I don't think there's anybody that's cracked it". (Google has 'cracked' a brand new Internet search advertising business model; Apple has done the same in inventing new models around unique new content delivery technologies like iTunes/iPods and the iPad; Amazon and eBay have dominated niches with new business models -- note that ALL of these examples revolve around brand new business models -- Sorrell's rival at Publicis, Maurice Levy, tried and failed humiliatingly with Honeyshed to shoe-horn a 'push' model onto the Net; Hulu is trying to migrate the 'dead man walking' 'push marketing TV ad model' online' that consumers so dislike, but have had to put up with until now.)

The End is Nigh for ATL

An industry colleague had this to say:

“Not sure I agree with the extrapolation from the death of print to all ATL…”

Well let me breakout the details of my prediction of the inevitable death of ATL as an ad-supported profit juggernaut:
Everyone in the industry, Sorrell included, is stating one simple fact: since Internet streaming began more and more and more ad space has been created. Hulu is just one of a thousand (and growing exponentially) sites offering TV shows online. All of them have new ad space available.
On top of this, cable has 500+ channels and growing (Oprah, Nature, local stations, etc.). All of them come with new video ad inventory.
What consumers were finally able to tell us with the advent of the Internet is that they never wanted to be force-fed 6,000, or even 600, GRP’s of our :30 TV ads. They do NOT want frequency to increase online, they ONLY want to watch ads they are interested in, and no more than once or twice. (However, if the brand really interests them the advertorial can be 20 minutes long.) In other words consumers want less and less ad frequency, which means the world needs far LESS ad inventory, and now consumers can vote for it (demand it) online by simply not watching. (On my computer I always have other windows open I click to when a forced-view ad comes on. Yes, the ad played, but I didn’t watch it.)
So the increasing volume of TV (video) ad inventory is not only not viable to be filled, the consumer is just itching for a chance to prove to the industry they never wanted even 10% as much inventory.
If every ATL network in the world makes their money by selling ad inventory at a price that has been inflated by 400% over the past 11 years (in the case of TV), and soon there will be far too much inventory to meet decreasing demand as advertisers move their efforts to more engaging media like XM, AND consumers want there to be FAR less as space out there, then all the ad-supported networks cannot avoid going bankrupt, just as the railway barons of old did when new trucks/roadways began carrying much of their volume of freight more efficiently (direct to loading docks) at a lower price.
All of which begs the question: If much of today’s ATL goes belly up, what happens to the mega ad agencies who (to date) have made their commission primarily through the purchase of grossly over-priced TV ad space?

What this means for ad agencies is an impending crisis of Goliath-slaying proportions. They will more than likely end up being faced with the mandate from their clients to spend billions of dollars on media inventory that no longer exists, the only option being to spend it on a broad swath of digital inventory for which effectiveness cannot really be tracked. [Note that, for the past 100 years, despite Nielsen's assertions to the contrary (they are another co-dependent cog in the wheel), there hasn't been any accurate cause & effect methodology to track the effectiveness of ATL. Only print, via coupons, offered an effective tracking methodology.] Everyone knows what happens when you can't spend all of your budget -- it gets cut next year!

15% Commission on Media: Assassinated by P&G

Sorrell's WPP has come through a period of devastation to the original 100 year-old ad agency business model (15% commission on media spend budgets, plus 10% commission on production budgets). Global clients, led by P&G, first insisted that all their agencies both open up offices/subsidiaries in every country that they expanded into, stretching the agency network's profitability to the breaking point as the fledgling networks struggled to buy up and then subsidize satellite agencies throughout the developing world.

About the same time a shareholder-led conviction became entrenched that ad agencies were little more than pirates, profiteering in return for coming up with some simple, silly advertising campaign concepts. This was actually quite untrue of the agencies -- their media commission business model hadn't changed since early in the century and the "creative's" working for them have fundamentally different types of brains from the analytical type that clients hire out of top universities (despite their ego's assertions to the contrary!). The tendency towards 'profiteering' was true of the businesses the agencies fed their ads through, however: the TV networks and the agencies' 'suppliers', the TV ad production companies.

Though it's not like there is any outright collusion going on, there is a co-dependent relationship wherein the ad agencies benefit as the cost of network TV ad space and the production cost of ads have soared to many by MANY times inflation. There was no real incentive for the agencies to try to control the runaway increases as they benefited from more commission revenue as media and production spending grew apace. (It is really no more costly for an agency to develop a campaign for a big brand than a small one -- the increased cost comes from having to disseminate the message further afield and manage the process.)

The clients (read: P&G) began a strategy of divide and conquer (a simple negotiating strategy their new Procurement Departments used handily: split all the costs out separately from the total, then start nickel-and-diming each now-isolated cost downwards). They insisted that the agencies' media planning/buying departments be spun-off into separate firms, taking the 1.5% to 3% commission on media spending they earned with them. Once that percentage was separated from the formerly untouchable 15%, it could be negotiated downward, especially once every former media department was now an independent 'supplier' in competition with each other. Similarly, of the original 15% commission, the remaining 12 to 13.5% earmarked for creative development and account management suddenly got arbitrarily cut to 10%, then even less as media spending got more and more fragmented and smaller agencies began under-cutting to compete.

TV Ad Production Profits Got the Same Treatment

As they succeeded in bringing down agency commissions, the major marketing firms also began putting intense pressure on the cost of TV ad production, bringing the profits in this related industry down significantly, too. (When a car or beer brand's TV ad storyboard hits a production company president's desk, an extra zero or two or three is immediately tacked on to the estimate: A. they can afford it, B. they pay for the experimentation that improves production quality across the board. The reality is that TV production is a risky and creative business, and when the chance to make a ton of money evaporates, the really skilled, creative, smart people leave the business for greener pastures and quality declines.) All of these 'cost reductions' have decimated the advertising industry's profitability.

Less $ Means Lower Quality For All Related Businesses: Ad Agencies and Suppliers

A longer term 'knock-on effect' that was unanticipated by the clients (though the stakeholders would not have cared a whit as their rewards are all tied into short-term gains) was that agency salaries dropped through the 90's and early 00's (to maintain profitability in what is a people-only service business, you have to cut the quantity and cost of employees) -- the best and brightest of a fresh bunch of creative geniuses went looking for greener fields that would challenge their brain power and pay them more handsomely. Many of them found their calling in the financial field, inventing the very creative, but built upon smoke and mirrors, derivative and leveraged-mortgage market. Others among the brightest bulbs were drawn off to the golden glow of Silicon Valley where they helped fuel the hype that lead to the IT bubble unnecessarily bursting in 2000-2001 (it burst NOT because the technology warranted a value decrease, but because the hyperbole could not be sustained -- see "The Cluetrain Manifesto", chapter 4).

Creative quality in the global ad agency business has dropped along with the agencies' value to clients ("Strategic Planning" being the first to go -- the clients happily took that in-house). For the most part, the clients couldn't care less -- they have far too many small, brand new and therefore 'shiny', competitive agencies springing up to provide them with cheap, very creative concepts while they are busy twisting their own arms to pat their own backs for how cleverly they cut network agency costs.

What the clients still don't seem to 'get' is that they have had added an enormous cost to their marketing efforts. Instead of having the old 'one stop shops' they were aiming to build when they demanded the agencies develop global networks, they are now spending endless hours in every market dealing with small shops who are all doing things that are "off brand equity". There is a huge expense involved with policing all these efforts and bringing them back in line -- or seeing many of the 'experiments' in new media careen off-course.

Ironically, clients have helped hamstring the agency networks through their compensation formulas, by tying the agencies' gradually shrinking profitability to ATL, they have forced the agencies to close their eyes to new business model opportunities.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

What these global agencies SHOULD be doing is inventing new business models for themselves AND their clients, but they haven't got the brain power or flex time/resources to do so -- they don't have the profitability to be able to attract the best and brightest creative and strategic thinkers. Their focus is, for the most part, upon profit maintenance and survival. There is a relatively simple solution, however, as Sorrell has recommended for the ATL media: Pay-walls and consolidation (subsidies are for business losers!). Since day one, by basing their compensation on commission instead of IP, agencies have discounted (given away for free) the one thing they produce that the clients cannot: creative concepts.

Yes, the egos of every Brand Manager (and many of the not-so-enlightened CMO's) constantly whispers into their ears that they are as creative as any Creative Director. But how could they be? If they were, they wouldn't be able to stand working at what they do! There simply isn't enough room in the human brain for excellence at both analytical thinking (and the dogged patience required to crank out brand plans) AND being remarkably creative. P&G Canada's GM, Tim Penner, once told me that doing my presentation on "The Future of Marketing" would be a waste of time "for my already very creative team". Sorry Tim, you don't get it both ways. P&G hires for top test score results, agencies hire for top creativity. The grind that is workaday life at P&G spits out the types who have some creative bones in their bodies in the first couple of years!

Ad Agency "Pay walls"

If ad agencies did what the clients have in working together to force the hand of the other side, if they insisted upon tying their compensation to the success of their IP, they'd be swimming in piles of money. Risky, sure, but going bankrupt slowly is risky too, and when you look at the power that a global campaign has on a brand's sales, as it is tested and rolled out, the risk is actually substantially mitigated.

Agencies create concepts that clients cannot. Every time they've ever tried, clients have learned that trying to bring creatives in-house is the equivalent of clipping an eagle's wings -- when they can't fly, they aren't able to do what they do. Agencies simply have to repeat this mantra, en masse, to clients: "If you want our concepts, we expect to share the rewards while you ameliorate the inherent risk in our service-provider business model with a retainer." I'm talking about a simple shift from being 'ad agencies', to becoming 'marketing agencies'. A shift from what clients have often seen as a parasitic relationship, to a truly symbiotic relationship. (And I'm not totally 'out of the loop', agencies big and small have been negotiating terms and experimenting with compensation formulas with their clients for many years, ever since the initial commission cuts began.)

Ad Agency "Consolidation"

Today's agencies, whether networks or hot-shops, resemble the fragmentation of the new media landscape (see WPP's 'bush' image above), with digital, CRM, media-planning, promotional, PR, "social", experiential (not many!), etc., divisions. The reality is that their clients' brands need a single global voice (yes, with local tweaks) and they need simplicity to keep communication costs down. Consolidating and simplifying their sevice offer, rather than desperately fragmenting it in an effort to keep up with the client's constant shopping around for new hot-shops to develop new technology opportunities for them, would offer clients what they asked of them in the first place. It's a simple shift from 'divisions' back to 'departments'.

Yes, the C-Suite is going to shriek that their current structure is predicated on separate profit centres and that trying to bring all these divisions back under one umbrella would be impossible, but I have some news for you, it is the 'fighting for profit' between all these competing internal divisions that has killed your ability to deliver a consistent message for your clients' brands. The first global agency to begin cracking this issue is going to emerge the big winner.

What's Coming Next for the Global Ad Agencies

This new crisis: the gradual (sudden?) death of many of the media networks that the agency networks are co-dependent upon, will likely be the death knell for many global ad agency giants in the coming years. Unless, that is, they take the advice of this 'mewling voice in the wilderness' to heart and follow their noses...

A Golden Future for Global Ad Agencies

IF it is possible for us to assimilate that the death of the 'push' model -- mind-numbingly repeating a brand's message to buyers and non-buyers alike -- was announced by TV viewers with the advent of the remote control, and then dealt a decisive death blow by the Internet,
AND IF we all recognize that we welcomed in "The Experience Economy" in the late '90's,
AND IF everything in marketing today is about 'pull' and 'engagement',
AND IF "the medium is no longer the message, the message is now the medium",
THEN all of today's marketing efforts must be focused upon "The Brand Experience",
By shifting a gradually larger and larger slice of their media budgets away from any 'push media' (including digital) to experiential marketing (XM), the global ad agency networks will not only give the consumers exactly what they've always demanded,
They will give their client's brands more brand trial, life-long loyalty and volume (that's what XM delivers in spades for quality, relevant-to-their-needs brands).
They will also do this with a built-in cause-and-effect tracking mechanism since face-to-face experiential marketing efforts can be designed to accommodate direct sales/results tracking with coupons, web- and mobile-based codes, contests and rewards.
By doing this the networks will maintain their media budgets because XM is much more expensive on a cost-per-exposure basis, hence it swallows BIG budgets (and when XM is managed well it delivers substantial value to consumers and therefore to clients -- what that means is it can make very healthy profit margins).
ERGO, XM is the new ATL.

XM: We're social, we like learning about brands MOST from each other.

Don't Get Side-Tracked By "New and Shiny" -- Anything Labelled "Social" Cannot Support Marketing Efforts

An important aside, most agency folks (see intro quote above) are getting totally side-tracked by 'Social Media Marketing'. Sure, it's the newest thing and is therefore drawing 'eyes', but anything labelled "social" is PR, not advertising. Why? Because it is in the same communication channel as the telephone (remember how welcome 'telemarketing' is to all of us, let alone happening in the midst of a conference call?), and as such any medium labelled "social" is 'pull', not 'push'.

You cannot manipulate anything that is 'social' without losing any credibility. YES, you can facilitate the buzz around your brand by putting social media 'tools' out there, but trying to 'push' selling messages in any way is no longer acceptable to consumers. Period. Never was, actually.

'Advertorials' = good; 'BUY NOW! Ads' = bad.
Unique, engaging one-off message = good; endless repetition of 'selling points' = bad.

A very large part of the problem is semantic and revolves around the use of the word "media". In our business, for as long as we can remember, anything labelled "media" meant something we could buy advertising space on. We tend to forget that our face-to-face conversations are conducted across a medium (sound waves through the air) that we cannot buy ad space on; that phone conversations take place on a medium we cannot buy ad space on (and no one would stand for it). Once we collectively decided that this new Internet medium that people were using to converse socially on should be called "Social Media", our industry has been trying to figure out how we can buy space on it. You cannot, anymore than "WOM", "Buzz", or "Guerrilla" are actually viable marketing tactics, all they are are 'flavour of the year' buzz-words to describe the desired results of 'push marketing' experimentation in social media and experiential marketing efforts.

Where the Next Big Acquisitions Will Happen

The most wrong-headed way for the ad agency networks to welcome XM into their portfolio of marketing tools is to try to build the expertise internally 'from scratch' like O&M's "Ogilvy Action" began attempting to do in 2007 in Canada. The simplest way (and quite possibly cheaper in the long run as existing firms are already profitable), in Canada as an example, would be for the big players to buy the big successful experiential firms like CIM (LAUNCH! Brand Marketing is their XM agency) and Mosaic, or even the medium-sized ones like Match, Inventa, or their competitors. (If you've got a piece of a successful example of one these firms anywhere in the world, hold on tight!)

But What, Really, Is The Future of Marketing?

The best analogy for the shift from 'push' to 'pull' marketing is not changing the direction of an oil supertanker at full momentum, it is more like doing the same thing for a very long train filled with agency personnel who have been chugging down a more or less straight track for decades. It doesn't require just stopping the train, it requires laying a brand new set of tracks to go off on this new direction, into a new country where the language is somewhat familiar, but the grammar is quite different. It's in no way impossible for that train full of people to go in this new direction, and some of the passengers will take to the new direction and grammatical rules fluidly, but it won't be simple or easy to make it happen.

As some of you have read me prattle on about since 2007, the initial realization that came to me listening to a PDA waving presenter speaking to Grey's P&G Euro Team at a seminar in 1997, was that the long-term future of marketing is FULLY Addressable Advertising:

Not 'LBS'*, but 100% personalized, no-repetition advertorials of nothing but stuff I'm interested in buying (click for the link).

* Location-Based Services: 'coupons' sent to your mobile phone for retailers close to where you are.

Marketers FINALLY Starting to Understand "Social Media": It's 'Pull', NOT 'Push'

2011-09-05T13:11:00.000-04:00

Credit: Gary Larson, The Far Side

For many years I've been arguing that, outside of being a NEW medium, and therefore interesting and exciting, that what is now being called "social media" has INCREDIBLE value as a tool for marketers, but only as a 'nearly real time' medium for:

Listening: allowing marketers to monitor how effective their real marketing efforts are in order to guide next steps.
Communicating directly (2-ways) with consumers to address issues quickly and with carefully constructed replies (PR).
Generating positive PR like we used to do with press releases.
Offering access to advertorials and participation in a brand's contests and causes.

Of course the rest of the marketing world is busy trying to do what they've done best since the first 'snake oil salesmen' emerged: force marketing messages into the mix to push more sales. Over time, however, the cleverest firms have started to sort out the real value of new ways to communicate with their customers and to leverage new technology: check out this article (link).

Here are my 'answers' to some remarkably un-insightful 'questions' on Quora from a couple of fine examples of the world's lemmings:

Do advertisers recognize the strength of social media as an advertising tool in the Middle East? If yes, do they prefer it over traditional advertising?

Give me a break! Social Media are a totally unproven 'advertising tool'! Zero truly proven ROI, even via the most sophisticated metrics tools today. "Social Marketing" does not exist, it is a PR channel, not a marketing channel, as time will demonstrate.

That is not to suggest that it isn't going to morph into something that is useful for marketing purposes, but right now most of the efforts being made in the 'social sphere' are 'push' related, not 'pull marketing' (with some notable exceptions). While early adopters/innovators will put up with a lot of ham-fisted 'push' tactics in the early days of any new medium (see: "Second Life"), over time as the masses adopt the medium they will demand 'push' marketing be removed, just as today's government-imposed 'Do Not Call Lists' for telemarketing illustrates.

People will talk about brands in any social millieu only because they want to. We can use social media to MONITOR their conversations, but not to thrust our brand messages into. Experiential Marketing, used in combination with LBS couponing, contests and video ads played to us because we asked to see them once ('fully addressable advertising'), will be where marketing spending shifts as 'Social Marketing' dies its rightful death.

Social Media took the air out of Experiential Media's sails, what is the next buzz-worthy Media concept to deflate Social?

You are actually asking two questions by making an assumption: Social Media has killed Experiential Marketing? While social media definitely "took the wind out of experiential
marketing's sails", it has in no way diminished it as a tool of the future!

If you buy into the shift from 'push' to 'pull' marketing that Social Media have forced upon marketers, then Experiential continues to be the leading tool in the box for brands. Experiential Marketing delivers interactive brand experiences with Brand Ambassadors in real life -- there is no more powerful tool to start a Social Media 'conversation'. Coupons, contests and other incentives can help, but they don't employ a live person to contribute information and emotional sincerity (testimonial credibility) to the initial product trial. Experiential, while vastly more expensive than other media on a 'cost per touch' basis, has the advantage of vastly superior ROI. One solitary 'exposure' has the potential to hook a loyal consumer for life. Above the Line media do not change behaviors, they can change perceptions and awareness -- Experiential Marketing changes buying behavior directly and immediately.

Sadly, in the moment that Experiential was poised to win a significantly larger slice of marketing spending, 'Social Marketing' reared its "The Latest Thing!" head and stole a huge chunk of spending based on nothing but hype, with virtually ZERO actual ROI. Social media, because they feel like familiar 'push' media, have an enormously higher 'comfort factor' for media buyers and marketers to shift spending to. Remember that TV advertising has NEVER, in the past 70 years (since 1929) had ANY really provable ROI, outside of us all knowing that if a brand hits us on the head with sufficient regularity and frequency, the pain will linger all the way to the retail aisle.

Your second question about what will follow Social, then, is first and foremost Experiential. As the hype dies down and the low ROI (now demonstrable, in part through social media, whereas back in the first 70 years of TV, we really did not have the technology to prove anything) dissuades CMO's from throwing more of their precious marketing dollars down a PR medium (anything labelled a 'social' medium, like the telephone, is not an appropriate channel for marketing efforts), the smart marketers will realize that they need to put all their efforts into true 'pull' marketing, the best medium for which is Experiential.

However where the rest of marketing spending will eventually be channelled is into Fully Addressable Advertising, delivered via personal devices and tied to location based tracking. Google, Apple and Facebook are currently in a race to get there first. No one hates ads -- they hate ads that are irrelevant to them. Offer me an ad about the latest hot sports car and I'll watch a 10 minute version, then share it with all my buddies. I'll even watch an ad about the latest diaper technology if I have a new baby.

What I WILL NOT DO is watch any ad more times than I require to "get the point". I call it "The Death of Frequency". That shift, from familiar 'push' strategies to new and mysterious 'pull' is not something most marketers are comfortable even trying. Apple has been doing it for years.

Simply Amazing. Makes Me Feel Like a Kid Reading SciFi!

2011-09-03T08:54:00.000-04:00

The "Global War on Terror" is really "The Global War on Identifying/Catching Nut-Jobs'

2011-08-26T09:12:00.000-04:00

A reply of mine to a comment on an Atlantic article brought to mind by the always-switched-on John Glyde of Mollymook, NSW, Australia on the subject of how people who lean left are just as prone to dogmatic thinking/rhetoric as those who lean right. Here's my comment (this was originally posted on my JustOneCynicsOpinion blog on May 14, 2011):

To your point about analyzing human motivations vs. cause and effect, you raise the most telling point about human nature in all of these debates, Omaryak, the underlying barrier to rational, impartial analysis being that we are social creatures with 'unnecessarily' large capacity brains (an 'accident' of evolution). That brain power leads us to be storytellers by nature and to imbue everything we experience or hear about with meaning. That fabricated 'meaning' is most often coloured by our predilections: some people's personalities make them lean towards loving tragedies, others to upbeat romantic story lines (happily ever after). Once some individuals are 'dyed in the wool' tragedy-lovers, everything becomes part of that tragic story -- conspiracies, big/small government, etc. Oliver Stone filters world news through his now-immutable predilections and cannot be objective. Christopher Hitchens, as he alludes to in his aside about his kids' school march, does as well.

Given the enormous complexity of geo-politics, most people look for simple stories in order to have some kind of 'handle' on why things happen. Some simple-minded people in the developing world (and developed world!) hang their hats on the notion that imperialist governments are responsible for propping up the dictators of their home country. They see mass-murder of citizens in the 'imperialist' country, who are as innocent of collusion as they themselves are, as being the only way to bring attention to their nation's plight. (Yes, re-read that last line and run it by some of these simpletons and they'll fist-pump enthusiastically while his 'al Queda' neighbour is busy strapping on a suicide vest to blow up civilians in his local market, the irony lost on both of them.)

My point? "Clouded by emotion" and "rhetoric of evil". Even now, after so much time has passed, after bin Laden has finally been found and killed, our predilections continue to drive us to want to legitimize bin Laden's "cause" as having a valid political platform, yet he was simply a very wealthy psychopath who had the means and motivations to latch onto a regional 'cause celebre' and leverage it to recruit suicide soldiers (each of whom was similarly, though not identically, disturbed). While there are innumerable 'causes' out there that lead to 'effects', in general the trigger-pullers are not legitimate banner-holders (Timothy McVeigh, the Shoe-Bomber, etc.), they're just murder-loving nut-jobs. "Evil" is not the possession of anything, as most people believe quite passionately, it is just the absence of both innate human empathy and our group 'socialized empathy'.

If we had a global "War on Nut-Jobs" we'd all be a lot safer from the Ghaddafi's and Kim Jong Il's, as well as the Una Bombers, McVeigh's and Waco's, let alone the bin Laden's. More in my post from September 2009 here: (Click to read post)

But my convictions wouldn't sit well with military and intelligence type's huge egos, would it? They'd go from being "Geo-Political Spy Lords" to "Nut-Job Identifiers/Catchers". No real romance/thriller story line elements in that!

The real reason that political forces around the world will never name the on-going battle between what is good for the masses versus the small, but exceedingly dangerous percentage of our human population who are murder-loving nut-jobs and megalomaniacs, is that there's not much political capital/leverage in admitting that these people have zero legitimate political motivation, that their motivations are merely to satisfy a deep-seated urge to take lives, or to be all-powerful, or both.

Britain's PM Cites "Moral Collapse" Amongst Youth for the Flash Mobs

2011-08-15T14:10:00.002-04:00

I have to say that I was originally ticked off that some people were blaming the riots perpetrated by youngsters in the UK as some kind of 'moral collapse' that is taking over British society, but then Britain's PM, David Cameron, had this to say in a speech to his constituents yesterday via CNN:

(There has been a) slow-motion moral collapse ... in parts of our country.

Irresponsibility.

Selfishness.

Behaving as if your choices have no consequences.

Children without fathers.

Schools without discipline.

Reward without effort.

Crime without punishment.

Rights without responsibilities.

Communities without control.

He promised that the government will "review every aspect of our work to mend our broken society."

Indeed. What the Brits are doing at the moment is throwing all the participants they can round up into jail, and more power to them. That's what their society's laws demand and it's exactly what needs to be done with any law breakers, swiftly and consistently, along with the general populace coming out both vocally to condemn the kids' actions and onto the streets in significant enough numbers to literally stand in the way of wanton criminality.

But back to the roots of the mayhem. While I do not think that any of it is a result of British society doing the wrong thing, or politicians and civic leaders going awry with their policies, all of the things that Cameron lists above can be said today for most developed countries' youth (and most of the developing countries' youth as well). What I'm getting at is that, while the rabid conspiracy theorists (everyone loves a good story!) will point to politics as a cause, I am a strong believer in Occam's Razor, that we should stick with the most simple explanation that mirrors the basics of human nature in individual behaviour before we start adding in complex explanations about society as a whole.

Something to consider: my "Gen X" generation grew up 'bottle-fed' on WWII movies. My early years were spent glued to the TV watching MASH, a series about the horrors of injuries in the Korean War that left only humour as a defence mechanism and "Hogan's Heroes", a similarly funny take on life in a WWII POW camp (it was a time of healing and 'moving on'). I knew intimately about the Vietnam War as the protests played out during my youth and the casualties, the returning vets, were featured in so many movies and shows. I heard first hand stories from my family elders and their friends about the suffering and death during WWII.

Want to know what the exposure of most of this new teenage generation has been to real life human suffering? (They do not watch CNN.) What these boys have been doing since they were old enough to get access to their older brother's (or Gen X dad's) video game device is play role-playing games like Grand Theft Auto, which involves winning points for criminal behaviour, and Call of Duty, which involves blowing up, shooting, knifing, etc. 'the faceless enemy'. That's it. No stories from their great-grandfather of losing your best friend to a machine gun while running through a field, just 100% virtual death and destruction.

And these boys are addicted to these games, spending endless hours playing them without leaving the couch, the teenage reward centres of their brains lighting up far more strongly, research has lately proven, than they will a few years later. If mom and dad do not intervene, they will stop going to school and will even stop sleeping to play the games endlessly. The thrill they get is just too much to resist!

Now having read that last two paragraphs, go back and re-read Cameron's list above. To this generation of boys (and a few girls) the prospect of finally getting out and, in real life, participating in Grand Theft Auto actions and Call of Duty mayhem MUST be like offering a methadone-addict his first hit of real heroin -- finally the real thing and far too strong a temptation to resist. Add to this the anonymity of a crowd, BlackBerry's untraceable PIN messaging (apparently BB has become the smartphone of choice for those in the drug trade, or who aspire to be like the thugs in the drug trade in England's poorer areas), and a brain that has not yet developed the ability to understand the long-term consequences of short-term thrills, and you will get rampaging 'flash mobs'.

An Important Caveat

What I believe it is important to remind ourselves of is that every group needs a leader. Those who 'step up' to lead in a riot tend to be older and/or socio- or psychopathic. These 'leaders' are NOT indicative of the mob following them any more than the one car driver who murdered three young men in the Brighton riot last week by running them over was a fair representative of the individuals in the crowd. When an emotionally/psychologically unstable individual gets 'empowered' by a mob, the impulses they will act upon are far darker and lacking in normal human empathy than the other 99% of the group. Lumping these whack-jobs in with the rest and painting them all as murdering thugs is unfair.

The reality is that if I'd been born in the 90's and found myself in that group, I can imagine I would have participated in the looting and rabble-rousing, but I would never have stooped to hurting people, it is just not in my core make-up. I do know there were a few lads in my neighbourhood who could have taken things further, however, and it is for the sake of everyone in our society that this new 'flash mob' phenomenon, spurred by a sense of entitlement, a lack of real-life experience with true human suffering, new smartphone technology and social media, must be brought under control whatever the cost. These kids today grow up OUTSIDE their parents (dual or single) control -- their world integrates influences from people and groups that no kids in the past had access or exposure to. We need to guide them in new and as yet untried ways, and soon.

When Twitter/Facebook-Empowered "Flash Mobs" Turn Violent

2011-08-09T09:59:00.003-04:00

"What Sparked the London Riots?" shouts CNN this morning.

Opportunity and the tools to organize some mayhem, that's all.

When "The Media" does nothing but report without offering real human insights, they leave the door open for more carnage by leaving the impression that there is something deeply dark and mysterious taking place among average folks. Nope, it's just a bunch of young people 'having fun'. And "The Media" does it all the time:

"The People of Tottenham Take to the Streets and Riot in Anger over..."
"Vancouverites Turn to Violence in Rage Over Hockey Loss"
"Muslims Worldwide Resort to Jihad in Response to..."
"Torontonians Loot Shops in G8 Protest Against Globalisation"

When "The Media", a field that employs just as many people of average to low intelligence as any other, lumps everyone in an area or culture or religion together in a headline or article together following an incident of one kind or other, stereotypes are not just perpetuated or reinforced, they are actually created in the minds of many.

Was I the only one watching YouTube videos of hundreds of people 'taking over' a London train station for a 'spontaneous' dance performance and feeling vaguely anxious? I mean, if those well-meaning folks could do that...

I was a teen once. I was a young man in my early 20's. Had I been handed a device back then that I could carry in my pocket that would buzz and light up with an invitation to every young person within 50 kilometres to gather together in an anonymous mob downtown and either dance in synchrony, OR wreck havoc on stores and the vehicles of adults I didn't know, I have to be honest, I'd have leapt onto my bike or on the bus and, typing excitedly to every similarly-aged person I knew, I'd have invited them all to join in. Why? I don't know, it would just have seemed far too much 'fun' (read: 'illicit', 'adrenaline-inducing', 'social' and 'adult') for me not to.

As so many clever people have hastened to point out, the current rioting in the UK is NOT about the police shooting a black man. Yes, like the G8 protests in Toronto last summer, a specific or obscure 'cause celebre' gives these young males (and a few females) a cover story for letting their lack of ability to assess actions with long-term consequences and their raging hormones run wild in the streets as anonymous members of a crowd, but it is NOT about the cause, it's about feeling empowered to do something 'wild and crazy' without retribution. It started, ironically, with "flash mobs" gathering in public areas to dance, it evolved into some ne'r-do-wells seizing upon the same tools to engage in criminal action under the cover of a 'cause celebre".

Much has been made of the power of these new technologies to do good, to incite change in repressive dictatorships in the Middle East, to give average people a voice in 'just saying no' to 'push marketing', but what we're seeing now is how a simple thing like an instantaneous, free, local and global news service like Twitter, or Facebook status updates can wreck havoc. What is not being
reported is that the appeal of using these free 'services' is NOT just the ability to post some interesting information, it is the irresistible thrill that comes from being the first to post about something. It makes the poster's ego burst with hedonistic pride to believe, if only for a few seconds, that they are the first, the most popular, an integral member of a private club of popular leaders, to share new information.

When that thrill is combined with a peculiar aspect of human nature that is the tendency we all have to feel anonymous in a crowd, AND the freshly discovered area of the brain that is still being 'wired' through our teens into our early 20's that allows adults to assess and evaluate the long-term consequences of actions that might "let-off steam" (read: "pump-up adrenaline"), but are destructive (sadly particularly powerful in some 13-15 year old boys with access to cans of spray paint), we get violence, arson and looting.

I've said this before, but I'll do so again, something peculiar happened to me about 24-25, I 'suddenly' felt mature. Inside my brain something finished developing and I became aware of the gravity of life. I 'suddenly' became concerned about career and family and property ownership, whereas prior to that watershed period, I was largely focused on what pleased my brain most on a superficial level: sailboarding, girlfriends, fast vehicles, having fun. This phenomenon has now been proven to be real, an area of the brain that only finishes it's re-wiring development in the mid-20's, a neuron cross-road that controls our assessment of actions and consequences.

What I find interesting, looking back, was that there was a small percentage of the population of males my age who never did make that transition. There were guys who just continued to like doing things that were NOT positive for themselves or their society or family, like blowing things up and stealing, telling tall tales to explain away or cover up their actions. Many of this cohort were pathological liars like Casey Anthony (mother of the tottler who was killed and who's skeletal remains found near their house), some are sociopaths and a few are psychopaths with a strong desire to lead a group of willing worshippers.

These types do not exist solely in Middle Eastern dictatorships, folks, they live among every human population everywhere. They are the kids down the street, they are your kids and mine. Give these disturbed, lacking-in-empathy youngsters a tool like Twitter or Facebook status updates on a smart phone and a 'cause celebre' and you just might get a riot. You just might get a LOT of riots. Why not? Rioting is a LOT of fun and they are free to throw, free to participate in and have zero consequences for the participants! (Well, near zero, but at that age we all thought consequences would happen to one of our anonymous fellow participants, not to us.)

So what's the answer?

The answer is that same as it always has been, society stepping in and saying we don't like it. Adults have NEVER liked potential harm to their hard work or infants, to their property or themselves, or their aging parents. To prevent it we came up with laws, legals systems and police forces to uphold the laws and control the crazies among us. We came up with morals and ethics and 'societal norms' and we all collectively pitch in to maintain these norms. Lately these 'norms' include speaking up in public to chastise the parent who slaps their child to discipline them, or talking behind the back of the parents who allows their child to play in the street unsupervised, or glaring collectively at the drunk on the bus, etc. The 'norms' evolve.

In the case of the growing tendency of young people to use their cell phones to gather together virtually instantly in "flash mobs" (NOTE: they are NOT "gangs" with structure and relationships, they are merely "mobs") it is going to come down to both the police AND the general public stepping up and doing their job, lecturing our kids that this is not acceptable behaviour, monitoring what kids are up to on their cell phones both by parents, the police and self-policing software by Twitter and Facebook, adults gathering in the streets amongst the kids do to quell their enthusiasm for wrecking havoc and reinforcing "the right thing" by doing so after the fact and forcing the youngsters to do the clean up en masse. (And much of their 'flash-mob organizing' is nothing more than a Facebook status update getting passed along to different groups of other 'friends' saying "FM outside Charing Cross in 20 mins" or "Meet @ Main & 2nd @ 7:05".)

Society has always had to adapt to the misuse of new technologies to do harm, oftentimes well as is the case in most countries where gun possession is illegal, sometimes poorly, as in the US where profit and juvenile pleasure drives the law makers to allow gun makers to sell them indiscriminately. On the 'harmless' side of new technology after the phone was invented Telemarketers gradually became regulated because society in general got tired of being interrupted in the middle of dinner, but phone-tapping was also approved to monitor criminal activity. For reasons very similar to the gun problem in the US, TV advertising frequency went largely unregulated and now the Internet has given the public the ability to turn the ads off, but the Internet has also brought with it a HUGE amount of criminal activity. We're rushing to catch up and plug the holes in the dyke, but the latest rash of 'flash mob' organization means we're going to have to work faster and more effectively to regulate new technology.

Apple and Similar Brands Inadvertently Exploit Religious Zeal

2011-05-31T13:05:00.001-04:00

Comment to a FastCompany.com article by Martin Lindstrom, author of "Buyology": "How Apple And Gucci Tickle Your "God Spot"

As Martin well knows, advances in neurological research have allowed science to uncover more and more of our innate, hard-wired, universal tendencies, the need to 'believe in mysteries' being one of them. The emergence of humankind's particular consciousness brought with it a lot of traits with it that helped us come to dominate the planet. One that helps motivate us to gather together and communicate is an instinctual drive to figure out things we all don't quite understand. Now that science has answered so many of the 'magical things' that were formerly inexplicable without blind faith in a mystical religion, an entire global generation is turning away from dogmatic established religions principally because they just don't need those explanations any more -- yet their brains still want to fill up that formerly adequately stimulated capacity for faith, dogma, rituals, weekly gatherings, a search for purpose outside of simple self-satisfaction (the goal of most teens) with something.

Alongside of this 'need to believe' is an EXTREMELY compelling drive to become addicted to just about anything from gambling to sun tanning; from obsessive interests in stamp-collecting to anorexia. 70% of Americans have an unhealthy addiction to food. In step brands that many, in at first what seems bizarre, but after linking an innate need 'to believe' with a deep seated tendency toward addiction seems almost to be expected, demonstrate a religious-like devotion to. The brands add inexplicable 'meaning' to their lives, just as eating does for so many. Now ponder that last snippet in light of people no longer attending church for a moment...

Here's my take (somewhat related) post on why Web 2.0 and "FREE" will soon go the way of the dodo bird as the religious zeal wears off: http://t.co/vpsdmE4

British Voters Are About to Make Another Monumental Mistake

2011-05-05T09:19:00.012-04:00

British voters are about to be tasked with making a critical decision about what is in their best interests that, sadly, the majority are simply unequipped to make. They are going to go to the polls in a referendum, as Canadians faced not long ago, to vote on whether to abandon the antiquated status quo electoral system, "first past the post", or shift to the more democratically representative "preferential" system. We all know what the retirees who make up the majority of voters who bother to cast a vote in referendums will choose.

Example from a provincial
election. Click to enlarge.

[The difference is simply that, EVEN THOUGH the majority of voters voted against any given party, the old system gives the power in parliament to the party who beat out the next closest competitor on number of seats won. In the most recent Canadian federal election, most voters voted against the Conservatives, led by Stephen Harper, but they 'won a majority' with 39.6% of the vote. 60.4% of people who chose to vote wanted a coalition of the NDP and Liberal parties to lead the country with the Conservatives in a properly representative minority opposition to keep the coalition honest.

In other words, the 'first past the post' electoral system does not allow the wishes of the majority of Canadian voters to be represented accurately in parliament. It was invented at a time when there were only two competing parties. In our modern world, facing exponentially more complicated challenges that require nuance, plurality and compromise, the old system makes no sense, yet voters chose against change, as the politicians knew they would.]

In response to a couple of Australian political journalists' perspectives sent to me by a very clever, switched-on political watcher, John Glyde of Mollymook, NSW, here's my point of view on the option that democratic governments too often have of abdicating their responsibilities and passing the decision-making buck onto the type of people who make up the actual vote-casting majority.

What both writers are essentially bemoaning is a critical feature of the democratic system that is dysfunctional. The system entirely and completely breaks down when it gets dialed back to what most people believe is its essence, the initial ancient Greek version of it, ‘one man, one vote’. Even back then, however, it was never actually ‘one man, one vote’, it was a group of elite guys who had control of the state in their hands due to family ties, ‘noble birthright’, or wealth/power making decisions for the rest of the populace in the forum.

Our modern democratic system works fairly well when our elected representatives are temporarily relieved of the pressure of worrying about what the masses of voters might think of their decisions and are allowed to vote with their intellect, insight and experience (free even, as the American system USED to be, of party policy). This only happens in the first months or year or two of their terms after an election. The American system works slightly better than the ones that allow for non-confidence motions that spur mid-term elections because they get a full 4 years to make change happen (and compromise with the opposition), and often get 8 years if they do well up-front.

Democracy as a system works best when the electorate gets the opportunity to elect a bunch of smart, experienced and (we hope) principled representatives and then leave them alone for 4 years or so to do the job we gave them, to make the difficult, complex decisions on running our country that most of us are not smart enough, or experienced enough, nor have the interest and patience to fully research and contemplate, to make.

That election process, going to the polls every 4 or 6 years, is the only ‘referendum’ any democratic system ever needs: the chance to turf out the last majority and put in place a different one that the voters believe will better represent their collective desires and needs. It is this latter issue that is truly at the core of the debate over ‘first past the post’ and ‘preferential’, and ‘preferential’ is clearly the more democratic of the systems.

My key point is that whenever important decisions are passed off out of the political forum of parliament and into the hands of average voters in a referendum, we do NOT get smart decisions being made that are in the best interest of the majority, we ALWAYS get a lowest common denominator outcome. The ‘first past the post’ vs. ‘preferential’ systems decision is NOT something that should EVER be put to a referendum, in fact nothing in a democracy ever should.

Whenever difficult decisions get shunted out of the appropriate forum and into the hands of the hoi polloi it is usually a forgone conclusion that nothing will change, and the politicians that, together, do this use it as a political tactic (as you well know) to pass the buck to the people and say “We gave you the decision-making power and YOU chose this outcome”. I call BS. We elected THEM to make these tough decisions as, en mass, we can’t grasp the intricacies of the issues.

Looking at a bell curve of IQ and overlaying it with a bell curve of ‘indifference to interest’, and another of ‘change-averse to early-adopter’, you end up with a VAST majority of any population who are not going to vote to adopt new, complex, potentially risky (in their perception) changes to the status quo. (Examples in the US are abandoning the one dollar bill, the metric system, or most recently, gay marriage in California.) What you get EVERY time the politicos pass the buck with a referendum is the decision that makes the old, change-averse and not-so-smart mass of people who get out to vote most (post-retirement-age people, no offence intended!) most comfortable.

Any truly progressive democratic country would adopt several key systematic changes:
A ‘preferential’ electoral system.
Mechanisms to protect smart politicians from being pressured to vote on party lines vs. with their brains (the current critical flaw in the US system).
A fixed term of 4-6 years for the elected politicians to get the policies they were voted in to put in place completed.
A ban on referendums of any kind other than the general election system.
But that's just one cynic’s opinion!

The MADMAN Rants on the Evolution of Marketing

Blowing Up Retail....The Tipping Point Has Come & Gone

4.5 MIN. READ:

So what really is next for B&M retail?

The Future of Retail:

I just made all of that last part up.

Branding Is Being Made Irrelevant By Amazon and Google

Hair-netted seniors giving out samples is the lowest form of marketing. NOT!

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.'

“The Extermination of Branding”?

Who loses?

Who gets fired first?

Who wins?

"Influencer Marketing"! Why Do We Work SO Hard at Killing the Goose?

Social Marketing • Content Marketing • Influencer Marketing

Pepsi Demonstrates Why In-House Creative Departments Can't Work

The Extermination of the Client Service Buffer

It's Been Attempted Before -- Never Successfully

In-House Content Creation Client-Side

“The Creators League Studio”

Self-Love Feels SO Good!

Drinking the Corporate Koolaid

Comfort vs. Healthy Self-Doubt

Pepsi Press Release: April 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/

Swimming in a Sea of Nay-Sayers

2017: The Year The Ad Agency Died

3 MIN. READ

Long live the lean and agile MarCom Agency Model: an eclectic squad of proven strategic/creative thinkers who outsource the varied capabilities needed for any given client project, incentivized by a commission 'bump' on for sales that exceed an agreed target.

Why "Casual" Clothing (Not "Business Casual") is Hurting Your Performance at Work

It's Tough To Sink The Boat When You're In It...2017 Could Be Traumatic For Agencies

Procurement Broke the Model

Businesses, Even Agencies, Are Powered by Incentivization

The Problem Cannot be Fixed From the Inside

"Flavour of the Moment" Marketing

It's ALL 'Content Marketing'

The Solution

Why Bother?

The Really Terrible News...

Looking Back at Predictions for 2016 -- Certainly 'Big Data' Has Gotten Far Too Much Attention!

2016: The Year The "Social Marketing" Bubble Finally Burst

Snake Oil Salespeople are very much alive and well in our industry!

You've been had, Marketers. Seriously abused. Bamboozled.

Use it or lose it.

Where can we spend all this money we used devote to TV ad placements?!?

"People go where people are."

...and now they're all on social media!

Consumers LOVE 'pull' -- they hate 'push.'

The ATL 'push' model worked for 80 years, why not just continue?

'Push' is dead (almost), 'Pull' is alive and well, and consumers want to know everything they can about your brand (i.e. quality content delivered via thousands of engaging new channels on a multitude of 'always on' devices). All you need is the right strategy -- the tactics will fall out.

The shift, dear reader, is from what we used to do: "'Push' Product Marketing;" to "'Pull' Experience Marketing." Embracing 'Experiential Marketing,' as I've been advocating since 2006, is key to making this shift. #BigIdeas2016

For more from Kevin Lenard:Marketing Insights • Human Insights • Twitter

Employee 'Disengagement' (Tweeting, FB, gaming, etc.) Costs $500 bn/yr.

How Creativity Actually Works Best, NOT Via "Every Idea is a Good Idea"!

Please, no more brainstorm sessions. This is how innovation really works.

"Labeling" is an Issue, not Just with Products, but People.

Twitter vs. Time, LinkedIn & "Self-Bamboozlement"

Our Collective Experiment on the Minds of Children

Why "Social Media" are NOT Advertising Media

Marketing 101

The Day The Human Universe Changed

"SOCIAL"!!! It's All About "Social Marketing"! Yeah! The Next Thing is "Social".... Oh, Hang On...

A Decade+ of Futurist Insights: The Internet's Impact on The Future of Marketing in 4 Points

Marketers FINALLY Starting to Understand "Social Media": It's 'Pull', NOT 'Push'

Simply Amazing. Makes Me Feel Like a Kid Reading SciFi!

The "Global War on Terror" is really "The Global War on Identifying/Catching Nut-Jobs'

Britain's PM Cites "Moral Collapse" Amongst Youth for the Flash Mobs

When Twitter/Facebook-Empowered "Flash Mobs" Turn Violent

Apple and Similar Brands Inadvertently Exploit Religious Zeal

British Voters Are About to Make Another Monumental Mistake

For more from Kevin Lenard:
Marketing Insights • Human Insights • Twitter