JPMorgan Chase announced earlier this week that it plans to hire 1,500 new mortgage and small business bankers by the end of 2010. I think this is a tremendous branding opportunity.

"We have invested in new systems, aggressively grown our capacity and are now looking to increase our sales force," said its head of home lending in a statement reported on CNN.

Up to now, you could have fooled me.

Ever since the economic meltdown began, the communications from Chase and its competitors have been just shy of criminal: no details, no insight, no evidence of any action other than page after page of paternalistic, insulting branding blather that amounted to little more than saying "don’t worry, we've been through tough times...just trust us."

Financial firms received billions and billions of dollars because their very stuctures and ways of doing business were suspect, if not revealed to have failed outright. The few actions we learned about -- paying one another giant bonuses, raising fees whenever possible, and resisting government exhortations to please .loan money to customers so the rest of the economy can get out of the crush of your ineptitude -- told us much more than the branded communications. Oh, and we learned from the government that the firms were actively working to stifle any efforts at improved or increased oversight.

We still don't know what has changed, if anything. I've written before that there is an ugly, nagging, gaping hole in the spot where customers used to place their trust in financial institutions. No creative slogan could restore the qualities of credibility and authenticity upon which these firms once relied. I am shocked that none of them have done anything to repair their reputations.

This is why I find the news from Chase so encouraging. Hiring staff is doing something other than hiring branding gurus to invent nonsense marketing. It might not be terribly strategic, and rather simply a staffing up for an anticipated uptick in loan applications, but if I were advising the bank, I'd find a way to make it a catalyst for communicating real change:

• How will its loan offerings be different?
• Who will they be targeting (i.e. will it be more selective)?
• Will there be different vetting processes for approving loans, whether mortgage or commercial?
• Are there lending goals for regions and/or sectors, so people can feel involved?
• What are the loan servicing changes that will help make borrowers feel more secure/less likely to default?
• Could there be real, meaningful synergies between Chase financial products, instead of treating customers as targets for cross-selling exploitation?
• If there are new or improved regulatory and reporting conventions supporting this new phase in the bank’s growth, what are they and how could they matter to borrowers?

The Bulb Asks:

• Did your last financial or operational news announcement support the ongoing narrative of your brand?
• Do you identify & communicate things your business does differently than your competition vs. what positioning differences you want your customers to know?
• How can you translate your corporate news into terms that matter more to your customers than to your branding?

(NOTE: This essay draws on a chapter in my new book, Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, which identifies nine radical branding and marketing insights for innovative business leaders to watch as we roll into 2010).

Home runs are fun to watch, but the nearly great plays are more illustrative and instructive.

We marketers tend to focus on successes, holding them up as proof of what’s possible, whether in conference presentations or new business pitches. "Show me an example" is the litmus test of ideas that deserve to get shared and mimicked; go-forward plans are based on what we learn from standouts and exceptions. This has been true since brands ran their first newspaper and radio ads. The most glorious social media campaigns of 2009 will yield a bevy of flattering copies in 2010.

I think we set ourselves up for failure when we try to "learn" from the most successful case histories, primarily because you can't separate a campaign from its context and goals. Every circumstance is unique, and the variables involved and both varied and often times unknowable. Chance drives the zillions of intersections between expectation and outcome, so discerning why something worked is a loaded, imprecise challenge. Even if we could nail every detail of a success, the limitations of physics and human skill would make repeating it unlikely.

So why don't we spend more time studying the also-rans?

Granted, it's a less sexy agency pitch -- welcome to our reel of sorta good campaigns -- and it might be hard for a corporate middle manager to allocate time to reviewing things that failed, but almost great ideas are far easier to explore:

• What were the expected actions that didn't happen?
• What unforeseen factors influenced the campaign?
• How were the goals mismatched to the content of the program?
• Were there unintended benefits? Drawbacks?
• Might the successes have been extended or multiplied?

The facts you discovered would allow for something the futurists call "scenario planning," which means you could use your insights as a modeling tool, and thereby really understand the underlying mechanics that might differentiate "almost" from "totally."

Contrast this with relying on the happenstance and sometimes outright magic that drives the biggest successes. A blogger chances upon a topic. A community forms around it for some reason or another. A store sells out, a competitor falters. It's a particularly sunny or rainy month. Lightening strikes. 

We see what happened as a guide to what will happen, and blithely go about constructing campaigns based on organic, unique, sometimes first-ever events occurring a second time (or many times after that).

And you wonder why you're always explaining yourself and defending your budget?

We're going to get inundated with "best of" lists over the next few months, just like we've spent 2009 celebrating successes to give hope to our struggling industry. But I'd challenge you to understand the almost great ideas...really smart, strategic programs that were well conceived, delivered, and then stopped short of realizing their full potential:

• Viral videos that got watched a lot, but stopped short of prompting a sale (or getting consumers tangibly and reliably closer to one).
• Promotional campaigns that seemed too good to be true (promise overload that defied belief).
• A customer service problem that was adequately fixed, but not extended into a sales opportunity.
• Contributions from unlikely sources, like distribution or finance.

The Bulb Asks:

• Are you basing your 2010 expectations on unrepeatable exceptions?
• Can you take the successes of the case histories you're presented, and explicitly confirm the tangible benefits (i.e. achieving something other than awareness)? 
• If you can identify the causal links that lead to success, does that mean you can build campaigns that are far more reliable (and relegate stunning success to the nice to have category instead of risking your job on it)? 

Have you noticed that most conversations about branding inevitably include references to Harley-Davidson and Apple? Sprinkle in mentions of Coke, Facebook, and Zappos, and you get the context of every agency pitch for more spending on brand engagement, loyalty, or whatever else these examples might suggest.

I suggest you ban these references from your next conversation. Forget about them altogether.

Marketing's dim science lets itself get distracted and misled by the stand-outs and exceptions. It's no surprise, since we're in the standing-out business (and think of ourselves as quite exceptional, thank you very much), but we tend to read a lot of meaning into uniquely complex accomplishments that can't be copied because of their unique complexity:

• See what Apple does? When you mimic it, you're just copying the detritus of its imagery, or producing lame mockups of its design (which is what its competitors have done, both in computers and smartphones).
• Want Harley's rabid customer loyalty? Start a company in the midwest a long time ago, cater to an exclusive niche customer, and still watch your income drop by more than four-fifths last quarter (i.e. great name but no new customers).
• Do you want to be a household name like Coke? Spend umpteen billions on every medium known to man for about 100 years.
• Facebook look like an opportunity? Find investors who will let you give stuff away for free, perhaps forever. Good luck with that.

Only we can't, for two primary reasons:

1. Your brand can't duplicate all of the operational and contextual realities that make those brands real. You can't even know them all; what you see instead is the marketing "layer" that often trails the actions and events that accomplish the differentiating. Brand communications is a fascinating shadow play on a cave wall; the brands you are told to copy by spending marketing dollars to manipulate what people think are succeeding because they spend operational dollars impacting how people behave. Asking marketers to explain this operational reality is like asking an adolescent why an airplane can fly, and being told  "because the pilot is really, really good."
2. Even if you could know and copy the operational and contextual realities of exceptional brands, you'd fail because they’re already onto changing them. In fact, their successes should be an indication of what you shouldn't try to implement, because it was already done. Think how many brands opened retail showcase stores without any purpose, or the rapid spread of cookie-cutter promotions on Facebook. Exceptional brands do exceptional things that defy the experts' case histories and recommendations. Yet you're peddled the rehash of yesterday's news, and told that some truisms warrant your efforts at accomplishing something similar. 

Scientists know that you have to take outlier data out of any experiment for risk of skewing or simply confusing the results. We see the impact of allowing political discourse to be run by extreme, absolute positions. A soprano's highest note is considered a peak and not the home of her range. You get the idea.

So why still do we try to understand brands by studying the anomalies?

(NOTE: This essay draws on a chapter in my new book, Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs, which identifies nine radical branding and marketing insights for innovative business leaders to watch as we roll into 2010)

If video killed the radio star, wasn't video supposed to obliterate text?

It hasn't. Not even close. Who would have thought that 2009 would witness instead the continued resurgence of the written word?

The language was sometimes indeterminable, and the conversations often unrepeatable without a blush added to the shrug, but text has proven amazingly resilient as a communications medium. Words "work" on printed pages and mobile phone screens (i.e. cross-platform), find utility for marketing strategies old and new (you can use them to declare, or to converse), and prove convenient and adaptable for users young and old.

Think back to a few good creative communications ideas that had to be translated into imagery, and then required deconstruction by viewers. Seems like a long way to go to make a statement, doesn't it? I'm all for a funny clip, and it's very true that a picture can tell a thousand words...but most of the time, 99% of those words get misused, misinterpreted, or outright ignored.

For something so immediate and compelling, you couldn't find a medium better able to substitute the simulacra of a connection for the transfer of actual content or meaning.

As opposed to video, text is a "hot medium," if you buy into Marshall McLuhan's theories about media (and I do, for the most part). Even when viewed online, words engage a single sense, and thereby establish a direct connection that is richer in specific information and meaning than more participatory, or "cool" multimedia experiences.

When we're blown away by a video, we translate it into words to label our reactions, code our memories, and subsequently share our thoughts. Even reduced to tweets and abbreviations, text remains the most facile communications engine available to us, only you wouldn't know it from all of the media excitement and agency sales efforts to tell us otherwise. 

Worse, it's not just that companies have been misled by the lure of the moving image; 2009 has been a banner year for slogans and gibberish in business communications, from nonsense adjectives in press releases, to incomprehensible statements about branding. Companies spent time orchestrating faux conversations instead of contributing to real ones; corporate strategies were described in blatheriffic doublespeak; popular phrases, like "innovation," were used to obfuscate the purposes of new management teams, as well as new products. 

Why do businesses use words so poorly?

Maybe because words seem free when compared with the cost of producing a video or sound file. Perhaps because social media conversations are so fast and frequent that specific word choices seem less important. One of my pet peeves is that we still use words to satisfy ourselves; we talk to our aspirations for our brands, and not to make those direct connections to readers.

I think the year proved that what companies say matters, whether as the inputs into social media, or as the tool by which they make those direct connections with their consumers. But it has to be accurate, honest, and credible. It's harder to get away with a lie when it's literally spelled out; conversely, if we use words to state truths (and avoid all of the nuances that distract or lessen them), then text is a powerful tool that transports across technology platforms, and works with all age groups.

I believe that 2010 will give us great and useful opportunities to use video and other media to communicate with our customers, but I suggest that there’ll be even more, better, easier, and more cost-effective chances to wring more impact and value out of the lowly, simple, written word.

The Bulb Asks:

• Do your press releases need so many adjectives? Is your product really “world class,” and what does that mean, anyway?
• Are you telling your social networks things that really matter, not just what your brand lexicon might dictate?
• Will your next communication tell something meaningful, relevant and useful, or will you expect your customers to decipher something? Think less secret code, and more direct statement.

(Bright Lights & Dim Bulbs contains 10 tips on this topic and 8 others)

I understand the argument for teachers: there are educators who genuinely think space exploration is cool, and want to use it to encourage their students to study science. Boosters of manned missions see education as a leverage point for recruiting future boosters. NASA itself pursued the idea up until Christa McAuliffe was killed in the Challenger explosion in 1986.

"We believe that space should be for everyone" explained the program manager for Teachers In Space, "and what better group of people to demonstrate that than teachers."

Only it's not for everyone. There's a good case to be made that it's not for human beings at all.

Outer space is an incomprehensibly dangerous place. Nowhere else are people more threatened by circumstances and less likely to survive mishaps. The exploration business makes amateur mountain peak climbing seem tame, if not outright boring. And safe. Sending teachers into this environment makes about as much sense as sending them into combat.

There's a lot that could be done to better promote space exploration, and it has everything to do with adventure.

Back in the 18th Century, scientists tagged along on merchant routes and military expeditions. Much of what they discovered or studied wasn't the stuff of high drama -- cataloging beetle species and weather measurements were no more awe-inspiring than they would be now -- but the journeys themselves were full it it. These scientists were explorers, and they were celebrated for their fearlessness (unless, of course, they got killed along the way, which happened quite regularly). It helped that they were really, really young (by our standards of life expectancy). 

Collecting flower and plant seeds might sound dull, but doing it a gazillion miles away from civilization and home, and doing so without any backup, was the stuff of legend.

Teachers are just too obviously symbols on their rides into space, even if they participate in some study of their sleeping habits (or something) up there. They're tourists, and that doesn't teach anybody much of anything. We need to capture that citizen scientist and adventurer spirit of exploration in centuries past, and I think the way we could do it is by launching teenagers instead.

Think about it: your average teen today has more education than many adults could have even imagined a generation ago, not to mention more technology at her or his fingertips than was used by NASA since its founding. How about creating engaging, risky, utterly rocking projects for them to pull off, and then hooking them up to enough real-time social media so they can share their every burp with their followers?  Why not create tasks that only teenagers could do? You could include them in the development and prep for future launches. Make space exploration the realm of the very few, the very talented, and the most adventurous of every new generation.

Outer space isn't a museum in need of a docent, it's a rough-and-tumble abyss full of unimaginable risks. Who better than teenagers to ignore those facts and really engage in the experience...and, in doing so, provide the real catalyst for getting the rest of us to pay attention again?

Does advertising need augmented reality?

Augmented Reality, or "AR," is one of the ideas buzzing around the advertising world these days. The premise is that consumers don't want to look at static ads any longer, so there are various ways to augment them with technology that makes them move, speak, or appear in 3-D. Unlike passive advertising, AR embeds interactivity that lets people engage with marketing content.

Cool. Only that's not AR. It's just a fancy name for creating ads for the sake of creating ads. The industry would do well to avoid pursuing the sham.

AR is a real thing; fighter pilots have been experiencing it for years via something called a "heads up display" that beams relevant readings and info on their cockpit windows (or onto their visors). The information augments their experience of reality. A GPS device guiding your car around a traffic jam is AR. Similarly, you could argue that any device or medium that adds content in real-time -- like Twitter, or even a mobile phone call -- adds a dimension that wasn't otherwise there.

The more seamless the integration, of course, the more real the augmenting goes. You don't need to read sci-fi to imagine walking through an apparel store and seeing cost of production, number of returns, and other pertinent information displayed over a stack of sweaters, or some aggregated VU-like personality rating meter floating next to strangers at a party. Wear glasses, lenses on your eyes, or have a chip implanted in your brain. AR is real, it's really cool, and it's the future.

But it's a far cry from a multimedia ad.

If anything, AR represents an opportunity to incorporate marketing communications -- or, more broadly, publishing content -- into consumers' lives. The key would be to refocus away from trying to be funny or distracting, and instead contribute to experience.  So Neutrogena could partner with Ray-Ban to sell sunglasses that measured UV radiation and advised on time spent in the sun. A restaurant could update a real-time list of favorite menu items, or post preparation times. An iPhone app called Bionic Eye purports do add content over a real-time view of your surroundings, though the layer is filled with nonsense advertising (it's the right thought, though).

The solutions could be simple or complicated, relying on existing technology or prompting invention. But you don't need special glasses to see that true AR-driven solutions won't look like advertising.

The Bulb Asks:

• Are you spending money trying to get your ads to be more engaging instead of your brand?
• Could you help improve your consumers' experience with something your business knows?  How might you share it with them in a meaningful way?
• If you didn't feel the need to "fix" your ads, or use the ad model to communicate with your consumers, what would you come up with?

The Lincoln MKS sorta kinda looks like most other sedans, perhaps even luxuriously so. The ad makes this fact very plain, and does so in a very plain, generic, this-is-what-car-companies-do sort of way. Flashback to a couple of years ago and you'd see the same garbage: quick cuts of car exteriors and interiors interspersed with the vehicle speeding down (a. urban street, b. long, winding mountain road, and/or c. spinning or sliding to a stop). The commercial could have been made in the 1970s for all it shares in terms of unique content or relevant messaging.

I thought car makers would have realized by now that these sheet metal love paeans do nothing except mollify dealers who shouldn't be dictating advertising creative, and put money into the pockets of ad creatives who make a living mollifying dealers. $6 billion spent by Detroit last year proved the point that doing the same thing over and over again doesn't sell cars.

And there's the rub, because Ford isn't doing the same thing, at least not operationally. The EcoBoost engine is a cool, unique innovation, and the company is pulling a Wal-Mart by standardizing an environmentally-friendly product vs. making some symbolic green gesture and hyping the hell out of it. The engine gets 20% better fuel economy and generates 15% fewer CO2 emissions and, like Wal-Mart committing to putting affordable fluorescent bulbs on its store shelves, Ford is going to put it into a half million of its vehicles over the next 5 years.

This is a real, meaningful step, yet Ford seems to be going out of its way to keep it a secret. Instead, its branding is a broken record, going so far as to repurpose the 70s song "Don't Fear The Reaper." I don't know about you, but about the only thing this TV spot does is make me want more cowbell.

I can imagine the logic that drove the strategy, though, and I suspect it relied on two false assumptions: first, that automotive branding is still all about imaginary aspirations, desires and ego. Those emotions are key drivers of sales, but the way brands get to them -- whether for cars or anything else -- is based on meaning, relevance and utility, and not so much on the traditional artifice of branding. Sexy is still sexy, but you get it by doing sexy things, not declaring them. The Lincoln MKS spots show me stuff but tell me absolutely nothing that matters.

Could the EcoBoost have been used as a key differentiator? Is it possible to make green sexy? It would have been a harder challenge than regurgitating old car imagery, but perhaps it could have yielded a better campaign.

Second, I suspect that the brand gurus still equate exposure to marketing messages -- whether defined as eyeballs in front of a TV screen, or time spent chatting through a social media campaign -- as the same thing as consumption, internalization, and subsequent use.

It's not.

Consumers aren't looking for relationships with brands today, but rather hoping that brands will deliver the meaning, relevance, and utility that all the blather that brands promise to deliver. The wait time for that fulfillment is a nanosecond.  Further, the medium really isn't the message (it never was, at least wholly), though the metrics used to measure most of the activities Ford and other companies are using to replace old-fashioned media tracking seem to claim otherwise. The message is the message, which means it needs to be clear, memorable, and useful (whether it's funny, shocking, or award-winning is a means to an end). A forwarded video that is only entertaining is still only entertaining; no brand can own funny or sexy. Successful brands don't promise, they deliver. Now.

The EcoBoost engine seems to me to be a real opportunity for Ford to get consumers closer to its business and the reality of car purchase, yet it choose to use its broadcast ad buy to do the exact opposite. I'm not aware that its using social media to do anything more than get consumers chatting about their chatter. 

The company needs less distraction and obfuscation. Its new engine, and the fact that it wants to sell cars, shouldn't be kept secret.

Is it possible your deepest brand values are the ones you need to change?

In reading a review of a biography of journalist and professional dissenter I. F. Stone, I noticed a brief mention that he'd taught himself Greek late in life, and even written a book about Socrates. This jiggled loose a rusty switch in my memory: Edmund Wilson, another essayist (and hero of mine), had also chosen to learn Greek shortly before his death. His goal was to read the Bible in something close to its original tongue.

I find the gesture deeply inspiring.

Both guys were debilitated by ill-health and could have easily chosen to be angry and bored. It's what most people do, and many do it much sooner than the infirmities and indignities of aging might warrant.

The Human Condition is grossly unfair because, ultimately, it's a brief walk that ends in a catastrophe, and its latter parts usually come with the death of friends, various bodily ailments, and a realization that whatever you've accomplished along the way will inevitably turn to dust. You don't get to stick around and argue otherwise.

Wilson and Stone were no great paragons of goodness; one was a serious drinker obsessed with sex, and the other a prickly sort who may well have spied on America for the Soviets. We could debate the merits of their reporting and scholarship, though I'd argue pretty hard that Wilson's book "To The Finland Station" should be required reading for anybody who wants to understand the lure of utopian societies (and why they repeatedly fail).

But both men refused to give up. When the world wouldn't have required or expected anything from them, they decided to improve their own minds. They chose to stay engaged, to challenge themselves, and make sure that what they did tomorrow wasn’t just a recollection of what they’d did yesterday. They chose reinvention over nostalgia.

It doesn't really matter to me how they did it, per se. Ancient Greek has no inherent value in my book, and I'm not sure their last works were necessarily important or even altogether insightful. I'm simply impressed that they did it, instead of electing to watch sports, torture their families, or whatever else people do when they aren’t inspired to do much of anything at all. I feel the same way about George H.W. Bush, who insists on jumping out of airplanes to commemorate his birthdays since turning 80.

There's a lesson here, right?  All of us still have time to learn Greek.

The Bulb Asks:

• Do you think it's too late (or costly) to reinvent your brand?
• Are the qualities you rely upon for your brand values really strengths or assumptions?
• What would be the hardest thing to change about how you got to market...and might it be the best thing you could do?

Coca-Cola's old school propaganda on the beverage tax is an insult and a missed opportunity.

A full bore campaign to defeat a possible tax on sugary drinks is underway (the tax has been proposed as a possible source of revenue to support health care reform):

• The lobbying group calling itself "Americans Against Food Taxes" is running a TV spot called "Pennies" that claims a few cents' tax on the gallons of soda pop a family is obligated to buy would put undo hardship on its finances
• The trade media is claiming that a tax intended to curtail consumption "...would create serious problems and potentially impact sales for the American beverage industry"
• Coca-Cola's CEO reportedly said that the proposal was "outrageous," and that if the government could tell people what to eat and drink, "...the Soviet Union would still be around." Its full-page newspaper ads declare that "Americans are realizing the importance of living a balanced, healthy lifestyle," which is supported by the calorie counts on its labels, a smaller can size, and some sort of guidelines Coke helped bring to schools. The web site promoting these things is gloriously ill-named, over-produced, and devoid of meaningful content

1. We're talking about soda pop, not guns or nicotine
2. Coke wants us to drink as much as possible, as it should

Imagine "Are You Serious?" as the headline for a newspaper ad, and the theme woven through social media -- a contest for people to nominate other inane things to regulate or tax, for instance -- and comments by Coke execs that let us know that they know that the tax proposal is silly.

The reason why I think this approach would be more authentic (whether I'd support it or not isn't the point) is that it wouldn't crash into Coke's basic desire for all of us to drink our fool heads off:

• Drive-thru cups are sized for giants
• Restaurants push free refills
• Store bottles are so large they don't fit in some refrigerators
• Fast-food straws are wide enough to amplify sound

And, like the oil companies, the false bravado of Coke's campaign amounts to cognitive dissonance that comes across like they know that they're guilty of something.  

There's some proof that support for the tax is waning, but nobody can make the case that the campaign was responsible. Even it the effort is helping, I still question what this sort of old school propagandizing does to Coke's brand, and whether it could have been pursued in a way that was authentic and supportive of it.

I would have recommended that the company focus on an approach that was based on telling a simple fact, whether to consumers of its propaganda, or of its drinks:

It's just sugar water, stupid.

Did you miss the NASA rocket crash into the Moon on live television Friday morning? Don't worry, you didn't miss anything. Nothing happened.

It was totally cool from a conceptual standpoint: a rocket had been put into orbit around the Moon over three months ago and, at the click of a button, it was directed headfirst into a crater near the South Pole. A spacecraft named LCROSS was sent right behind it, ready to measure the billowing plume of gunk that the crashed rocket would throw into space, before itself crashing into the Moon's surface. The primary goal was to determine if there's water buried under the surface; it's an early part of something called the Constellation program, which will use moon bases to launch manned missions to Mars.

The animated versions of the crashes looked like video game combat. You could just imagine the kapow!, even though there's no sound in the vacuum of space. Classrooms around the country tuned in. People made a party of it and spent the night prior outside, ready to catch the impact on their telescopes. TV stations carried the moment of impact live, as I caught it on MSNBC.

Nothing happened.

There was this "3, 2,1..." thing and then silence. I could hear the scientists congratulating themselves, and then we saw some nerds in a small room smile and miss high-fives with one another (the setting was a far cry from the bridge of the starship Enterprise, let alone mission control for the Apollo missions). The TV hosts awkwardly transitioned back to regular programming. Kids went back to their books.

It was only after the fact that experts commented that the collision happened, and that it was a success. Telemetry (or whatever) needs to get crunched (or whatever), but those in the know were thrilled with the mission. The problem is that they weren't the target audience.

It was a yawn for the rest of us. Worse, it was a disappointment. Tell me that NASA didn't recognize the possibility that there'd be no awe-inspiring, visible explosion?

You wouldn't know it from the lead-up to the event, though. Between the animation and hype, you'd think NASA fully expected fireworks. I can understand its desire to hope for a big event. It repeatedly tries, and fails, to make space exploration more engaging.  I'm a committed supporter of manned space exploration, and it bugs me constantly that the agency promotes itself through boring, inert "gee, the wonder" educational nonsense a la a Carl Sagan special on public television, and not in the fast, easy to grasp, and engaging language and imagery familiar to people under the age of 65.

Throwing a bomb at the moon was exactly that sort of thing that would get people to look up from their smartphones and take notice. I think it would have been more exciting is NASA had promoted the idea that it didn't know what would happen.  

Instead of promising a big boom, how about getting folks engaged in conversation about, and then experience of, a true unknown? There could have been votes for whether or not there'd be a plume. Kids could have submitted ideas of what the explosion would have sounded like, were there sound. Nobody would have been expecting anything in particular to happen on Friday, which means there would have been a lot less disappointment when nothing happened at all.

I commend NASA for doing something other than acting like the boring, short-sighted government agency that it is. But it did a crappy job of managing expectations for what could have been a really cool event. 

The Bulb Asks:

• Do you spend the most marketing time focused on managing customer expectations, or making promises?
• Is one person's disappointment really a risk to the perceptions of a larger audience?
• Would it make more sense to talk about brands as 'narration' instead of 'promise?'