One of the benefits of having worked at Procter & Gamble (I was in marketing for six years from 1997 to 2004) is access to an alumni club of thousands of the smartest business minds in the world. Every two years the P&G Alumni Network hosts a global summit that brings together top leaders from around the world, including a few of the top current leaders still at P&G. Two years ago the event in Cincinnati was outstanding, so long ago I made plans to attend this year’s event in Rome, which was held two weeks ago. I took the opportunity to take the family on a vacation through Italy, which means this post is a little delayed, but I wanted to share some highlights of the sessions from the event.

The theme of the sessions was “improving consumers’ lives long term—a sustainability challenge,” and I found much in common with the Marketing with Meaning idea that I write about weekly in this space. Below are a few of my notes, on a speaker-by-speaker basis:

Fernando Aguirre, CEO of Chiquita Brands International

Chiquita seems to be making very positive moves on the sustainability front, a big plus for a company that uses natural resources heavily and works mainly in developing nations with rain forests, where problems seem to be significant and global biodiversity is in the balance. Aguirre talked about how his company is making several moves to embrace sustainability. For example, it is testing a new cleaning and packing station process that reduces water use from 80,000 to 3,000 cubic meters of water, which, if moved throughout the company’s operations, could save 3.4 billion gallons of water per year.

He specifically shared the case study of Chiquita’s challenge in Europe a few years ago, when cheap imports from questionable companies threatened the company’s sales results. Chiquita chose to highlight its sustainable harvesting practices and secured an endorsement from The Rainbow Alliance. Marketing highlighted Chiquita’s efforts and the Rainbow Alliance’s support, and as a result sales actually increased despite the huge price pressure. In other words, Chiquita’s sustainability positioning helped it differentiate a commodity and retain premium pricing. Because of these practices, Chiquita is now attracting “green” investors. Not a bad value equation case study.

Toni Belloni, Group Managing Director, LVMH

LVMH is one of the world’s most impressive houses of brands. The company is a luxury machine, with more than 60 brands ranging in sales from more than $5 billion to less than $5 million. Belloni oversees the company, but it is a very independent group of brands. He talked candidly about how this makes it difficult to drive a corporate sustainability movement. Another challenge is the fact that his luxury brands often work with very small “mom and pop” craftsmen, so it is hard to force them to live up to sustainability standards.

Nevertheless, the company is making a lot of progress. One example is a much-improved volume forecasting process and model that is helping shift shipping from airplanes to sea transport. The big downside of sea transport is that it can take many weeks longer to move goods. But better volume forecasting and planning can make a big difference. Shipping not only reduces transport costs by 90%, but it also cuts emissions by 80%.

I was very interested to hear that LVMH as a company is focused on the cause of supporting arts and culture around the world. In what is a perfect fit for the luxury brands and their consumer targets, it sponsors more than 30 art exhibitions every year, and created a “Haute Couture Academy” to encourage interest in the field and develop future hires.

Stef Kranendijk, CEO, Desso Group

The Desso Group is one of the world’s largest makers of carpets. A few years ago Kranendijk read the book Cradle to Cradle, a manifesto meant to convince companies that they can improve the world and improve their business results by pursuing more sustainable manufacturing processes. Stef decided to remake his company according to the manifesto, and he spoke about how his company is recycling carpet, using fewer chemicals, and innovating in areas such as office noise reduction. I gave him an advance copy of my book and I hope that he now reinvents his marketing according to my manifesto!

Len Sauers, VP, Global Sustainability, P&G

Sauers was one of the notable attendees who is not yet an alum of Procter. He was a perfect fit to speak in the conference theme of sustainability. He first spoke about P&G research into what consumers are willing to pay for more sustainable products. About 9% say they will pay more, 72% will pay the same or less, and about 17% ignore the sustainability issue altogether.

He went on to describe how the P&G corporate drive for sustainability can result in innovation down to individual products. For example, the company discovered that the Laundry Detergent category had the biggest negative energy impact among all of P&G’s businesses. That’s because a lot of energy is used in hot water washing cycles. This in turn helped drive innovation on brands such as Tide and Ariel that allow for better cleaning in cold water. And by advertising the benefits of cold water washing, P&G is helping to educate consumers on this simple yet meaningful step to reduce energy consumption. In the Netherlands alone, the company’s efforts have helped convince 52% of consumers to wash in cold water versus just 7% a few years ago.

Panel with Sir Martin Sorrell (CEO, WPP), Kevin Roberts (CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi), and Jim Stengel (Former Global Marketing Officer, P&G)

In one of the most disappointing parts of the event because earlier sessions ran very long, this panel of marketing giants was cut short. But there were a few good highlights from these strong voices for our industry.

Sir Martin spent time talking about how clients talk about holistic marketing, but their biggest barrier is actually their own behavior. They cannot seem to overcome the internal politics and silos of their organizations: “The amount of time we see our clients wasting on bureaucracy and infighting is appalling.” I wholeheartedly agree.

Kevin Roberts had some witty and accurate lines about what’s wrong with marketing today and what we need to do to fix it. Some of my favorites:

• “The consumer is still not the boss at P&G; the brand is the boss… Consumers want to participate in building the brand.”
• “It’s not B2B and B2C; it’s P2P—People to People.”
• “Stop talking about touchpoints. Like the expression “counting eyeballs,” that’s not good enough. It’s about creating engagements, and we should measure return on involvement.”

John Pepper, Former P&G CEO and Disney Nonexecutive Chairman

Just days before the event, Procter announced that the CEO baton would be passing from A.G. Lafley to Bob McDonald, and we were lucky enough to have both A.G. and Bob join our event in Rome. What made the moment even more special was when John Pepper, another former P&G CEO, spoke for a few minutes about the success of A.G. and his confidence in Bob. I personally agree with John that Bob McDonald is a great choice for the role. I got to work for Bob when I was on the Tide brand in the late ’90s and found him to be an inspirational leader. (As an aside, on the Laundry floor I was jokingly known as “Little Bob” and McDonald was “Big Bob.”)

After praising Bob, Pepper talked a bit about how Disney thinks about sustainability in its operations and marketing. He made a great point about how “it’s key to record the company’s efforts around sustainability and promote them internally so that employees understand and value the work.” Pepper also talked about how Disney has a powerful ability to encourage sustainability and positive causes through its media channels and parks. Currently there are park exhibits that educate visitors about the need for environmental improvement, and Hannah Montana recently kicked off a Disney Channel effort that encourages kids to play a role in improving the world (see Disney.com/friendsforchange).

Finally, Pepper provided me with my personal highlight of the event. After his session I went up to hand him an advance copy of my book. The first thing he said was, “Well, any time someone gives me a book I have them sign it.” I was very touched to hear this request, which was actually the first time I have ever signed a copy of my book.

This interaction with John Pepper and the P&G alumni event itself reminded me of how special my time with this company has been. P&G took a risk in hiring me out of business school, and gave me incredible opportunities to challenge myself on big brands with big budgets. It trained me well and exposed me to some of the best marketers in the world. Now that I’m on the agency side with P&G as a client, the company has been an important partner for our success and growth as an agency—challenging us to continually take our game up a notch, and treating us with respect and fairness. Procter & Gamble has certainly improved my life and I look forward to continuing to build its business as an alum and agency partner.

As most marketing readers likely know, last week was the annual Cannes Advertising Festival in France—unarguably the world’s most prominent advertising industry get-together, where the brightest creative minds in our business gather to compare the best work over the past 12 months. Last year I got to attend for the first time (with blog posts here if you’re interested), but this year I was on vacation in Italy with my family instead of Cannes.

I missed one of the biggest moments of the history of my company, Bridge Worldwide, when our team won a Gold Cyber Lions award for the Pringles banner ad above. While “only” a banner, this remarkable little ad unit offers a great case study in meaningful marketing for both B2C and B2B.

The Consumer Story: Once You Click, You Can’t Stop

Before reading any further, go ahead and click on the banner above. A new window will open to our staging server where you can see our banner in context, just like the judges at Cannes did. Spend as much or as little time interacting with it and return here to keep reading…

…Welcome back. If you’re anything like the Cannes award judges or the thousands of other people who have viewed this ad online in the past few days, you enjoyed, too. Our team created a banner ad that makes people laugh for a few minutes, and then share it with their friends online. This happens to be a perfect fit with what the Pringles brand itself is all about: a few minutes of fun, and sharing with friends.

What I love about this ad is that it takes banner space that most people ignore or find annoying, and turns it into a fun, engaging moment of play with the brand. That five minutes of fun is rewarding for the viewer who chooses to engage with it, falling under a category of meaningful marketing that we call “Entertaining Connections.”

Aside from great data on clicks and time spent with the ad, we measure its success in the word of mouth that it is drawing. Since winning the award and posting the ad on our staging server we are seeing a steady, growing number of people discovering the ad and sharing it with their social networks. Twitter in particular is becoming the barometer of the buzz, and I’m seeing about one person per minute Twittering about the ad with 100% positive comments. Here’s a sample of some of my favorite recent comments from search.twitter.com:

• @steveklabnik: Best. Ad. Ever.  Pringles are amazing.
• @MegLG: A banner ad that is actually engaging…Can hands: Pringles. I probably just made someone a million $ for clicking so much.
• @lisahattery: Bored? Go here…Click on the banner ad. Keep clicking. It’s not spam or porn, I swear. I want Pringles.
• @floatnsink: This is probably the best & only advertisement that I want to click.
• @stuartwitts: Award winning banner ad from Pringles. Great work. Can’t remember last time a banner ad made me laugh.
• @adamcoomes: Best banner ad I’ve ever seen. This is hilarious! Props to Pringles.
• @hunterupton: please please PLEASE! check out this banner ad. Hilarious Pringles! it’s the best i’ve ever seen!

The Cannes judges agreed completely. In a video that was shown during the Cyber Lions event Wednesday night, they said they each spent 5 minutes on the banner, laughing out loud at their desks. Our Pringles banner was one of only 19 Gold Lions that were awarded in the entire digital category, and only six of these went to U.S.-based agencies. But what are awards for, anyway…?

It’s Starting to Go Viral

Over the weekend we started to notice comments and traffic to our staging server spike. We worked to post links on Fark, Digg, Reddit, BuzzFeed, and other places. I checked in with our Tech team Saturday afternoon and learned that more than 100,000 people had visited the page in the past day! If this was a number of views on YouTube, we would consider it a viral video success with that number alone. It will be fun to watch the traffic this week and see the other places it gets picked up.

Building the Bridge Worldwide Brand

Advertising awards are a big deal in our industry. Thousands of entries are made every year to awards shows like Cannes, with each agency hoping to get credit for the work they have done. The purpose of awards is mainly for agency marketing, a business-to-business approach. Awards allow agencies to brag about the quality of their creative work in new business pitches. But are they meaningful marketing in a B2B environment?

Many, many advertising industry pundits cry that we are too obsessed with awards. But I actually do believe that they can be meaningful to the companies that are searching for an agency partner. Here’s the rationale: First, the creative work is really the number-one thing that brands need in their advertising agencies. It’s the job they cannot do themselves. Second, it’s very, very difficult to judge the quality of an agency’s creative product through the pitching process. Case studies show work for other clients, but it is difficult to judge it because beauty is in the mind of the brief holder—i.e., clients can’t judge whether work for a different business than their own was successful or not. As a result, clients look for other ways to get comfortable with the creative potential of prospective partners.

Here’s where awards can come in—they give clients an impartial measure of the quality of creative work. Agencies that have won awards have “proof” that the work was good, as measured by very experienced judges, and as measured against many other agencies that are putting their best work up against it. While creative quality is only one piece of what clients need to see in an agency, and awards are only one of several ways to judge this, winning a big award such as a Cannes Lion shows that our agency can do some of the best work in the world.

A Cannes Lions award can also be very meaningful to an agency’s current clients. Our Pringles brand team and the senior management at P&G were ecstatic about this recognition. Within minutes of the announcement we were cheered by email from clients at all levels. A handful of top leaders got to see the show in person and they enjoyed a toast together in Cannes, immediately talking excitedly about what else we could do in this space. For P&G as a whole, it was the company’s first-ever Gold Lion in the digital category. This award is another step in the world’s largest marketer’s shift to winning in the still-developing digital space.

This win renews current clients’ confidence in us as an agency partner, shows them that we can help them compete with the best in the world, and challenges them to buy “bigger” work that we bring to them.

Impact on Our Company Culture

As an agency we only first visited the show in person last year. Our three-person delegation of Jay Woffington (President), Peter Schwartz (Chief Creative Officer), and me talked often during that week about the work we saw and wondered what it would take for us to bring home a Gold Lion. We decided that we wanted one and that our company was up to the challenge. We thought it would be a three- to five-year journey, and as Jay said, “I knew we had the ability, the talented people, and the desire… but an award such as this is not easy.”

By setting this goal and sharing our experiences with the company upon our return last year, it got our teams fired up and determined. I believe our work across the board was better in the past 12 months, and we felt confident enough to submit four pieces for Cannes. We were excited just to be short-listed for one, and the Pringles Gold win blew everyone away.

What I love is that this is truly “the agency’s award.” Our Creative Director on Pringles, Jason Bender, accepted the award on behalf of many who made it a success. As people were congratulating him late into Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, he continually deferred credit to the team behind it. And to paraphrase Bender, we all woke up Thursday morning as employees of a Cannes Gold-winning agency. I couldn’t be more proud of the team and of the agency I work for.

Conclusion

I hope this story illustrates how meaningful marketing can be a multilayered win for your brand or agency. Marketing with meaning breaks through the clutter to deliver quality work and business-building results, it gets your clients and new business prospects excited, and it can help make your company a great place to work.

As for Cannes, the statue wasn’t even back in the U.S. before Peter came to me talking about how we have a chance to win the “agency of the year” Cyber Lion next year—and I think our other creative teams are anxious to get in the spotlight next year. It will be fun to see the impact of this award on our agency in the year to come, and I’m so excited to be a part of it.

A few weeks ago, Jonathan Richman from my team at Bridge Worldwide sent me this photo of complimentary disinfecting wipes that are available at our local Kroger stores near the shopping carts at the store entrance. I’m not sure if he specifically noticed this due to Swine Flu concerns, his growing traffic at his blog, Dose of Digital, or the fact that he is reading an advance copy of my book. Whatever the reason, it’s a nice reminder that little details can make a powerful impression on customers.

Kroger (full disclosure: a client of ours) has actually been providing free disinfecting wipes for years. It is a very smart way to show the quality of service and amount of concern for shoppers at a “moment of truth,” that first step into the store. Interestingly, I could see an argument that providing these wipes could actually be a negative: They could send a signal that the store is dirty. But Kroger took the risk because it is the right thing to do for its customers. The recent concern over Swine Flu makes it even more critical.

Is this marketing? Is this a service? I’m not sure and it doesn’t really matter. What counts is that Kroger was thinking about the details and caring for the people who come through its doors each week. And the moment this blog post went up, it became word-of-mouth marketing… with meaning.

What I love most about digital is that it opens up so many simple ways to provide meaningful marketing to a brand’s customers. As much as we all like to spend hours developing deep digital strategies and playing with the latest innovations, it’s often best to go to the absolutely simplest slam dunks that you can think of. My current favorite example of a no-brainer in meaningful digital marketing is a program called MeetAtPanera.

MeetAtPanera.com is a very simple website that allows people to set up a meeting with a friend or group of friends and send invitations to join up at Panera. It is a natural outgrowth of Panera’s historical strategy of embracing community meetings and friend join-ups. Its restaurants provide free Wi-Fi access, have open seating with moveable tables, and usually include a “community room” that can be reserved for large meetings at no charge. The business benefit of this approach is clear-cut: By embracing groups, Panera brings in a large number of regular visitors, who repay it with recurring business.

The MeetAtPanera tool is basic but complete. You can select the restaurant to meet at as well as a time, and send the invite to multiple email addresses. Each invite arrives with driving directions and an option to add the event to your calendar. No registration is required, and there is no email list that you are automatically pre-checked to join. There is even an offer for a free coffee for you and your group if you bring in the invitations.

If there is anything to complain about it’s the fact that this could be done instead with other tools that people are already comfortable with. Most people will likely either just send an email to friends, or potentially use Facebook to set up an event. But that’s OK; some people will use the tool and feel more connected and loyal to the Panera brand. And the cost to set up this small site is likely very, very small.

So kudos to Panera for making the effort to add some value via this online invite system. Although I’m unlikely to personally use it for setting up meetings, it reminds me that this brand is working to keep my business.

It’s time for some fun on a Thursday, folks. One of my readers, who I am choosing not to identify, pointed me to an article on Newsweek.com about the rising issue of low testosterone among men. It seems that as many as 13 million middle-aged men in the United States suffer from this issue. For some, the answer is increasingly a prescription for a steroid such as AndroGel, but new and old studies show that simply having an erection—including by watching porn—is enough to get low testosterone levels up to snuff. And so this, dear readers, is the question of the day: Should AndroGel be offering free porn on its website?

Today, Solvay Pharmaceuticals, the maker of AndroGel, is pursuing the classic strategy of driving awareness of a condition it calls “Low T” through TV advertising and a website. The company hopes that the condition is recognized by men as much as “ED” or “BPH“. If you’re male, watch sports, and haven’t seen the ads yet, you soon will.

Driving awareness of a real health issue that guys don’t talk about, and using the safety of a private website to answer questions, can be very meaningful. But I wonder if there is an opportunity for AndroGel to do more than simply motivate men to, once again, ask their doctor if a new drug is right for them. The website for AndroGel only mentions various prescription answers to low testosterone, thus missing the chance to educate men on other potential (ahem, natural) remedies.

Why not follow the path of Tylenol’s “Feel Better” campaign, which has used print and outdoor ads to educate consumers about how they can avoid headaches by eating breakfast or drinking plenty of water, and soothe muscle aches by getting a partner to massage their shoulders?

There is certainly no undersupply of adult content on the Web that men can use to raise their testosterone levels without medication. After all, Newsweek reports that:

Forty million people, most of whom are men and a large chunk of them married, visit a porn site each month. A quarter of all Internet search engine requests and 35 percent of all downloads are for porn.”

But AndroGel could do more to bring a full solution to Low T men and attract attention around the issue it solves. At minimum, the brand could provide information about how there are natural ways to increase testosterone levels. This would increase trust among patients and prescribing doctors alike that Solvay is not simply pushing pills. Thinking more creatively, AndroGel might provide tips on how men can safely enjoy adult material without encountering problems on office computers or being surprised by family members. It might seem silly, but check out (NSFW) this guy whose porn screensaver kicked in during a meeting. This might cause some “attention” in the media, but isn’t that what marketers aim for? And if the marketing is a meaningful solution to this issue, the brand is standing on firm ground.

Now, all giggles aside, I don’t seriously believe AndroGel should or will actively encourage porn viewership, but there are little things it can do to better deliver on its mission, no matter how stiff the marketing challenge.

Sometimes it’s good to take a step back from the day to day of the marketing world and Twitter stream and step into a good book about life. A few weeks ago my friend Jay gave me just such a reminder by giving me his copy of Man’s Search for Meaning, a book by Viktor E. Frankl first published in 1959. Of course Jay knows my mission in this blog well, and while it was an enjoyable read for diversion, it also reinforced my belief in the mission of creating Marketing with Meaning.

Man’s Search for Meaning is Frankl’s memoir of his survival of the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Unlike other stories of holocaust suffering and survival that you may have read, Frankl’s perspective as a psychiatrist results in a unique examination of the meaning of suffering and of life. His years in tortuous conditions provided him with the opportunity to see how many of his fellow men and his own mind were affected.

Frankl discovered that the people who tended to survive 1-in-28 odds were those who had some purpose to live for—say, a wife and children, an unwritten novel, or, in Frankl’s case, to teach the lessons that he learned in the concentration camp. Interestingly, Frankl suggests that growing cases of drug abuse and depression are a result of too many people who feel they have no meaning in their lives.

Two specific quotes stood out for me in reading this book, and drive me to continuously positively impact the world. First, a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche:

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

This was one of Frankl’s key discoveries in the concentration camps, but he expanded it in his psychotherapy research and practice in the years after the war. By choosing a “why” to live, suffering itself can be given meaning. While my personal suffering is tiny in comparison to Frankl’s, I find a personal connection to these words. This project and upcoming book around Marketing with Meaning has taken a toll on my personal and family life, and there have been setbacks and disappointments, but the possibility of changing the world for the better—and early feedback from you, dear readers—provides a powerful “why” to keep me going.

A second quote by Frankl is similarly powerful:

Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

Who has not had the fantasy of going back to a time and place in your past, and, having the confidence and knowledge of today, acting much more confident and directed? That is the guidance of Frankl, a concept that confronts man with “life’s finiteness as well as the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself.”

This concept is what gets me up at 6 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday mornings to write this blog or work on the book. It’s my personal conviction to “not leave anything on the court” in the game of life goals. My biggest fear is not failure itself, but rather the failure to do some small thing that could have helped create success because I was lazy or over-confident.

I am glad to have something bigger than myself to live and struggle for, and I am proud that this work around Marketing with Meaning has already touched a handful of people around the world. I hope to not only create meaning for myself, but spark a new meaning of life for millions of other marketers around the world. Perhaps that is what Frankl meant when he said:

Being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actually realizes himself.”

Last week I had the chance to lead a workshop on mobile marketing at the 3rd Annual Mobile Commerce Summit in Las Vegas, a conference focused on the financial services industry and designed to help companies figure out how to crack the code on this powerful new medium. My presentation kicked off the conference Wednesday afternoon, and I was able to share the stage with Paul Moore from Fifth Third Bank, a client of ours who we helped on the launch of the bank’s mobile banking platform. While we were nervous about filling up a three-hour workshop window and not losing people to the many distractions of Vegas, we had a nice, attentive crowd and the time flew by.

Embedded below you can see an edited version of the presentation that we gave. Alas, you had to be there to get to see the Fifth Third case and some other goodies that are not appropriate for broad sharing. Overall, the goal of the presentation was to help financial services marketers get an understanding of the way that best-in-class marketers are using mobile, and then provide a framework and industry-specific direction that they could bring to bear on their own businesses. Of course, my overall theme was that mobile marketing must be meaningful in order to earn customer attention and drive sales.

Let me know what you think, and if you find this useful, please share it with your friends.

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked by Jon Wuebben, Founder and Managing Director of Custom Copywriting, to review his new book Content Rich. I took Jon up on the invitation both for curiosity as a blogger and digital-agency leader. I also thought it would be interesting to be in the role of a review requestee, as I am currently sharing a handful of advance copies of my book with folks who might provide an endorsement blurb.

Overall, I found Content Rich to be a very strong introduction to the business side of writing good copy for small businesses that are creating their own content on websites and blogs. Businesses are beginning to realize the benefit of offering online content that is valuable to prospective customers—in other words, Marketing with Meaning. They are starting to learn that position in search rankings is like shelving at the store: the better your placement, the more likely you are to attract attention and close the sale. Small businesses also see an opportunity to rise higher in the search rankings than the size of their business would suggest. The “little guy” can even beat the big boys with search rankings.

Great content drives search results, but there is a specific skill around writing well for Web readers and the search algorithms. The primary purpose of Content Rich is to help people write content that drives search rankings, itself an art with a very big business potential. I enjoyed reading Wuebben’s personal stories of discovering this skill, and he does a good job making a very complex story fairly simple.

Content Rich delves into all of the details you would expect: how to write AdWords copy, making landing pages search-specific, press-release tips, and suggestions for social media. Throughout the book Wuebben uses case studies to bring his examples and training to life.

I feel every good review must include some opportunity areas and wish-fors as well. In this case, my biggest complaint is that Wuebben can be a bit too conversational and informal in his writing style. It is a serious topic that takes concentration; Wuebben tries to liven this “training,” but sometimes there are six or seven exclamation points on a page!

So if you are in charge of writing search-friendly content for your company or clients, I highly suggest that you read Content Rich. I can’t promise it will make you rich, but I guarantee you will learn something that you can put into use tomorrow.

My friend Pete Blackshaw has been saying for years that “customer service is the new marketing,” meaning that more and more companies are discovering that the people on the front lines of direct customer contact are having a growing potential to turn customers into brand fans or outraged detractors. Unfortunately, many big, slow, monopolistic companies refuse to see this shift. And it’s time for this customer of Time Warner Cable to put up some meaningful marketing against its poor practices.

Over the weekend, my wife shared the story of her recent frustration with Time Warner Cable. On Friday, May 29, she received an email that stated the company would no longer be accepting payments from our bank’s online bill payment provider. As you might be able to see in the actual email above, this change came with no explanation, no customer service contact to reply to, and only the general website URL for further information. Her reaction: WTF?

And so my lovely wife started to track down what was going on with our cable service. After more than an hour of digging through the website and the back and forth with an IM bot that spit back the same formulaic answers to her questions over and over, she discovered that Time Warner Cable was migrating customers to its own preferred bill-payment system. We had the “opportunity” to sign up for this, of course handing over more personal information and changing our entire bill-paying habits.

This is a horrible example of customer service from start to finish. First, the decision to disallow our preferred method of bill payment, which we use for every other service, is blatantly bad for its customers. Nearly every other company on the planet is embracing NEW options to allow bill payments, from PayPal to mobile phone, in order to provide better service and close the sale. Second, the fact that this significant change in habit came with no explanation and nothing more than a terse email is unfathomable. Only a company with a complete disregard for the customer would do such a thing. A simple email written by an actual human being with some explanation and remorse would have done wonders.

Of course, cable companies are not new to completely screwing over customers in very visible ways. My favorite example is Bob Garfield’s “Comcast Must Die” campaign. A search of any cable company and the words “sucks” or “protest” land on thousands of horror stories from people who have been treated horribly by companies that cling to one of the last market pockets of low competitiveness.

Fortunately some alternatives are starting to break into the market and break up cable companies’ hold on our lives. New competitors are entering the TV market, such as Verizon with its all-fiber FiOS system, and AT&T’s U-verse system. They are bringing down rates in the market and bringing up service levels wherever they go. Meanwhile, some local governments are getting in on the act; in Wilson, N.C., residents organized to create a city-owned broadband network with lower rates and higher speeds than Time Warner. And now a growing number of households are cutting their cable cords altogether and using broadband to download video directly. More than 900,000 people now rely on Web video alone, dealing a significant revenue blow each time it happens.

My family and I are getting ready to move to a new home in a few months. The current owners have been using DirecTV. I think it’s time to give Time Warner the boot and let a new company vie for my business. And while I’m not a heavy commercial watcher, this ad for DirecTV certainly attracts my attention…

Starbucks used to be the “it” brand in marketing circles. For years we praised its high-quality product, its infinite number of personalized orders, its friendly serving baristas, its freakishly loyal fans, and the company’s status as a “third place” in our lives between home and work. But sales are down, McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts are catching up, the brand is closing stores, and the company is desperate to pump up sales. This is certainly new ground for Starbucks and its CEO and founder, Howard Schultz. But that’s no excuse for this once forward-thinking company to delve into sponsoring a second-tier cable morning show. Alas, it seems the end may be nigh for this once-proud brand.

Yesterday we learned that Starbucks has entered a marketing deal with the MSNBC show Morning Joe with host Joe Scarborough, at a reported investment of “over $10 million.” The show has officially added a Starbucks logo and changed its name to “Morning Joe Brewed by Starbucks.” The hosts suggest that in the future they might broadcast from Starbucks locations. In the video here you can see that everyone is pretty excited about the deal. In a press release, Howard Schultz even claims this is meaningful marketing:

“This relationship is an example of the targeted approach we are taking to reach our customers in a meaningful fashion and highlight our exceptional coffee and values which have built our brand from the beginning.”

I doubt the Morning Joe audience or Starbucks loyalists are very excited. For evidence, take a read of my post last year about the negative reaction to McDonald’s similar sponsorship of the morning newscast at a Las Vegas FOX affiliate. Viewers don’t appreciate the mix between their news content and marketing interruptions. Conservatives who believe MSNBC is too liberal will turn against the brand (note that FOX & Friends has the #1 cable morning news ratings spot), and I doubt MSNBC will be as quick to report in on the brand’s troubles and controversies. There is nothing positive for the viewer such as fewer commercial breaks or better reporting. This is marketing without meaning.

Fans and employees of the brand over at the Starbucks Gossip blog don’t seem to be too thrilled about this deal. Comments include:

How much “in store labor” could $10,000,000 bring for better customer service? only time will tell if this is a good investment along with the $100,000,000 spent on the new ad campaigns.”

“Also…Morning Joe?? Really?? How relevant is that show to the coveted “Gen Y” demographic I thought Starbucks was going after with the next version of its digital strategy?”

“That adds up to 1,000 barista jobs that had to be cut for this worthless programing. I’ll give it one season before it is off the air due to low ratings. No one wants to watch a 3 hour long commercial.”

The remarkably sad story here is that for years Scarborough and crew have been drinking Starbucks on air and raving about the product for free. Now it costs $10 million for the same kind of airtime on a cable news show. I submit to you that this is a microcosm of what the brand is going through now across the nation: People are no longer proud to share their Starbucks passion, and require payment in the form of advertising reminders to keep buying the brand.

And, so, a once-great brand that generated its own marketing via great experiences and word of mouth must pay its way to relevance. I don’t have all of the answers for Starbucks. I certainly prefer efforts such as the My Starbucks Idea call for fan engagement, and the free coffee on election day. These are more meaningful efforts that forge brand relationships and pride, not to mention cost a lot less than $10 million to execute. This is one big step backward for Starbucks.