Archive for January, 2010

Goldman Sachs’s Generosity Looks Hollow

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

goldman_sachs

If there’s one profession that has probably dropped below advertisers on the respect level in the past few years, it would be investment bankers. Not only did they take their fair share of blame for the ongoing economic catastrophe, but now they are sinking to new lows in the court of public opinion thanks to the billions in bonuses that are about to be paid out. In fact, a recent WSJ study found that total compensation for bankers will be up 18% in 2009 to $145 billion—that’s amid a year that took a Fed rescue plan! One company in particular, Goldman Sachs, is facing a storm of anger as it prepares to pay out roughly $10 billion in bonuses to its bankers. That doesn’t seem right to the millions of Americans who are still struggling to pay the bills (and who didn’t have a hand in destroying the markets), and neither does Goldman’s halfhearted attempts to buy them off with charitable giving.

Let’s definitely give the brainiacs at Goldman Sachs credit for trying to defuse a public attack by creating new forms of charitable giving. In November the company set up a $500 million fund to make loans to small businesses. The fund is being overseen by Warren Buffett, who is a trusted leader but has a conflict of interest as a large Goldman shareholder. Now the company is considering a plan to require its executives and other top managers to give a percentage of their bonuses to charities. This number could also reach into the hundreds of millions.

While any money that goes away from new yachts for rich bankers and instead to small businesses and worthy charities is great, I believe Goldman Sachs will gain little from its sudden interest in generosity. The key problem is that the American people are not idiots. They can see for themselves that the giving is a drop in the multi-billion-dollar bucket. They know that the company is dreadfully fearful of government legislation that could pare back its gains—permanently. President Obama is considering a $90 billion “financial responsibility tax.” If you doubt that Congress will ever pass something like this, just ask the executives at AIG how a government pay cap feels.

On the other hand, if Goldman or some other large financial services brand had made giving part of their culture for years, there might be an opportunity to secure big bonuses and grow market share. In fact, Goldman Sachs actually has some significant giving in its company history, as its early partners backed Albert Einstein and helped establish the NAACP. Alas, those days are far away, and any company that has to force its partners to give away a percentage of outsized gains has lost any true charitable culture that ever existed.

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Posted in Cause Related, Government, Marketing Without Meaning | No Comments »

Marriott Mars Your Stay with In-Toilet Ads

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

marriott toilet ad

Every few weeks I feel compelled to share an example of how big companies are taking the marketing and advertising fields to new lows. Today’s example comes from one of my field operatives, Jonathan Richman, who spotted the advertisement for Toto toilets in his room at the Marriott Renaissance in Washington, D.C. It’s sad, but true, and a good opportunity to step back and think about the economics of this new ad space.

Let’s start with an analysis of the advertising itself. Marriott is providing a platform for the Toto brand to advertise its innovative new toilet, including the chance to learn more at cleanishappy.com. The toilet seat is a piece of visual real-estate that has been previously untapped. And people who stay at pricey hotels are likely those a brand such as Toto would love to reach. But there are a few problems here. The biggest miss is the fact that Toto is advertising its product on a toilet that is NOT a Toto. This leaves a negative impression on both Toto and Marriott. Why tease the customer and remind him that this toilet will not clean him properly? It’s like going to a restaurant and getting an ad on your table for better food at another restaurant. The second issue is that people do not like to get engaged in toilets. We want to do our business and move on, and we want to focus on hitting the “target” rather than getting distracted by ad copy.

But let’s continue by looking at the numbers behind this new advertising medium to understand the size of the prize. Heck, maybe this is a huge moneymaker for Marriott and part of the next evolution of marketing. Here’s a few things that I calculated and assumed:

  • Let’s assume that these ads were placed on every single Marriott hotel room around the world. That totals 560,000 rooms in 2008 (last numbers I could find).
  • Marriott averages 73.5% occupancy in its rooms.
  • Let’s say only 1 impression per guest per day “counts” in a toilet seat media buy.
  • Let’s assume Marriott gets a high, targeted CPM of $50. That’s $50 in revenue for every 1,000 people who view these ads each day.
  • If all of its ad space were sold, that would mean a grand total of $20,580 in toilet seat advertising revenue per year for Marriott.

So, at the end of the day, the opportunity for Marriott here is not even a rounding error on a rounding error when dropped into the company’s total annual revenue of $12.9 billion. You can stop there and wonder why the company would bother going along with this asinine idea. But let’s take it a step further: What if Marriott actually pisses people off with these advertisements and hurts its business? How many people would it take to stop choosing Marriott for their travel needs because they don’t appreciate the eyeball pollution and toilet tease. Here are some more numbers:

  • The average revenue per room per day for Marriott is $121.34.
  • It only takes 170 fewer stays (.03% of total stays) to offset the $20,580 ad revenue gain.

So if only a tiny handful of the many thousand people who see these ads are turned off, then the whole effort is worthless. Further, there’s the negative word of mouth that comes from road warriors who share this story. In Jonathan Richman’s case, this intrusive advertising reminded him of the $12.95 the hotel is charging him for Wi-Fi access (when even McDonald’s is giving it away for free). Also throw in the more than 15,000 people who have seen Jonathan’s photo when he posted it on Reddit in the past week. If “only” 15,000 people around the world get pissed off and stay one less day each, the company loses $1.8 million!

So, at minimum, Marriott really should have thought more about its overall business and more about making its guests enjoy a pleasant experience rather than slapping on some ads for a few extra bucks. And it could even turn this Toto partnership into an example of Marketing with Meaning. Why not actually install some of these whiz-bang new super-clean Toto toilets in its high-end Renaissance rooms? We’ve already seen Westin make a major brand impact by doing little things in its rooms such as the Heavenly Bed and Heavenly Shower. Why not innovate with the equivalent of a Heavenly Toilet? That would be a great trial opportunity for Toto as well as a way for Marriott to show that it is investing in a better stay experience.

Am I missing something here? Why would Marriott ever agree to this? What would it take for the company to put its toilet money where its mouth is? Does your brand preference for Marriott change in seeing this?

Posted in Marketing Without Meaning | 5 Comments »

Update on Marketing with Meaning Coverage

Monday, January 25th, 2010

1to1blog

I’ve been lucky enough lately to have some very nice coverage of my book and want to share what’s new in the past week or two.

First, I wrote a guest blog post for 1to1 Media, a division of the Peppers & Rogers Group. I can think of no organization that has supported meaningful relationship marketing for longer, so it was a real treat to be featured there. I chose to tackle the issue of “scale,” which continues to bedevil big, traditional marketers. Check it out here.

Second, David Kinard invited me to join him in a podcast interview about my book and the Marketing with Meaning concept. That’s available at this link.

Finally, Ambal Balakrishnan published her e-book of trends and predictions from content marketing thought leaders last week. I am very honored to be included in her collection and encourage you to take a read here.

So the next evolution of marketing rolls on…. Thanks, dear readers, for supporting us from the very beginning.

Posted in book, content | No Comments »

Coke Captures a Moment of Happiness

Thursday, January 21st, 2010


I believe that one of the biggest opportunities for Marketing with Meaning lies with brands that are used to spending a lot of money on traditional advertising campaigns that have historically been launched mainly to remind people that the brands exist. Instead, they have an opportunity to create marketing that people choose to engage with and advertising that itself adds value to people’s lives. A few weeks ago I wrote about how brands that lack innovation can win by adding value, and last year this article I wrote in Adweek showed how brands such as Gatorade and Ask.com have hurt sales by continuing to trot out new ad campaigns. One company that is gradually moving forward on the meaningful marketing scale is Coca-Cola—and the video above is just its latest chapter in its next evolution.

Coca-Cola has been one of the biggest traditional advertisers out there, but I do believe it is turning itself into a meaningful marketing machine. In my book I included the examples of its Happiness Factory mini-movies, and its industry-leading Coke Rewards loyalty program. The company got into entertaining iPhone apps quickly. And in Cannes in July I wrote up the example of its new interactive vending machines.

I believe the biggest lesson here is that Coke has focused its Brand Purpose on “Creating Happiness.” If you step back and think about what the Coca-Cola product aspires to do, it tries to create a moment of happiness in an otherwise regular day. Traditionally the company has tried to inspire happiness through its marketing by showing carefully crafted ads with actors playing out scenes in commercials. In truth, this viral video is not too far away from an “ad”—but the key difference is that we see Coca-Cola doing something fun in the real world, and we smile, LOL, and forward this video to friends.

There is another smaller, yet important lesson here around how in-person, guerrilla marketing efforts can go viral and gain scale when you capture them on video. This mirrors the approach by Burger King in its award-winning Whopper Freakout campaign. In both cases the production quality and editing of this piece is fantastic, we see real people and reactions rather than scripted actors, and we actually can see and feel the fun for ourselves.

Of course we have no way of seeing if this video sells six-packs, but the YouTube results suggest this effort was worth the cost of a video crew and handful of props. When I first saw this video on its first day, Tuesday, January 12, there were about 40,000 views. Writing this post on Sunday, January 17 it was up to 400,000. That’s a lot of people choosing to engage with an ad, and coming away with a much more positive connection with the brand. And it’s even more evidence that billion-dollar traditional brands can make the move to Marketing with Meaning.

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Posted in Connection, Entertainment, purpose, video | 1 Comment »

Google Builds Its Brand by Challenging China

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

google china flowers

Somewhere along my career I heard that character is defined by who or what you choose to fight against. A character’s foils define who he or she is—and “define” here means both creating and describing. Churchill was defined by his stand against Hitler. Lincoln was defined by his belief in a unified United States. And Superman is defined by his fight against those who would bring evil upon mankind. I keep this in mind here at this blog, choosing to call out meaningless marketers from time to time, at risk of pissing off prospective clients and partners. This lesson can be applied to Brand Characters as well, and Google—the most valuable brand in the world—took a large step toward further defining and improving itself by taking a stand against the evil within the Chinese government last week.

For those who missed the news, last week Google issued a threat to shut down its operations in China after it discovered several, likely government-backed attempts to hack into its servers in order to uncover dissidents’ emails. Google also spoke against the continuing censorship of search results. The business press expressed general shock and awe at the move, wondering how any company could ignore China, and then speculating that this was merely a way for Google to save face in a market where it is not the leader.

I do believe this was a highly calculated move by Google and its company leaders—they would never make such a big move without a lot of strategic thinking and analysis. However I believe the company’s choice is not another Machiavellian move by a bunch of MBAs. Rather, it is the product of a company culture that is founded on a desire to truly improve the world, and a fear for “doing evil.”

Since its very early days as a public company, Google has acted in ways that exemplify its culture, while founding hardcore capitalists. Google allows people to spend 20% of their time on projects of their own choosing. They splurge on free gourmet meals for all employees. And when the company issued an IPO it warned prospective shareholders that it would focus on the long term and refrain from artificially smoothing out earnings results to make large investors happy.

Perhaps one of its most-debated cultural features is the company’s belief that “You can make money without doing evil.” This phrase has attracted many positive feelings toward Google, especially in the technology world where everyone from dominant leaders such as Microsoft to legions of spammers and phishers abuse their access to our computers. This statement has opened Google up to criticism as well—ranging from its avoidance of taxes in the U.K. to using its leading search business to crowd out competitors in new markets. But nothing challenged the company more both internally and among the court of public opinion as when Google agreed to the Chinese government’s demand for censored results when it entered the country in January 2006.

We will likely never know what the conversations were like back then or now in the offices of Google’s leadership. But I believe the censorship issue has been a personal pain-point for some time. I choose the words “personal pain-point” very carefully, as I believe these leaders and many Google employees have had serious misgivings about playing along with government censorship. This is a company that believes that access to information can make the world a better place. The leaders have more money than they could ever spend. And they have a lot of people on their side. The flagrant hacking attempt was probably the personal breaking point.

This, my friends, is why Google is the best brand in the world. The company and its people believe in something good, and genuinely desire to make the world a better place. This is why people in China are laying flowers at the company headquarters sign in Beijing. And if it continues to follow these core values, Google will be a leading company for many years to come. Who knows—Google might even help finally usher in human rights reforms and freedoms in one of the largest corners of the world.

One of the other interesting lessons here is to observe how few companies we could imagine taking a similar stand. No other tech company jumped to Google’s side, and I struggle to think of any other large company in any industry that might follow its lead (much less lead to begin with). Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has already blown off any thoughts of leaving the country. Not surprising at all; this follows Ballmer’s personality and Microsoft’s culture very well—it is a company based on beating competitors and retaining power. At least he has a personal and company culture, I suppose, as most leaders are simply beholden to the annual bonus and short-term shareholder demands.

I will continue to follow this story closely and root for Google in its heroic stand against evil. Meanwhile, I’ll continue using as many Google products and services as I can get my hands on. I hope you do the same.

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Posted in Government, culture | 2 Comments »

Linking Happiness and Meaning at Work and Home

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

happiness

For me, the start of a new year is a time to recharge the batteries with a few weeks off, and rethink about my personal work and home life. I usually try to unplug completely, and preferably take a few long-distance drives to see relatives to clear my mind. This gives me clarity to work through the past year and begin to think about what I want to work on in the year ahead. Over the holidays I had the good fortune to run across an article that aided my annual processing. In the December 21 edition of BusinessWeek, Marshall and Kelly Goldsmith share results of a study about happiness and meaning at work and at home, and they come away with some very interesting conclusions.

In a study that is at the heart of the appropriately titled forthcoming book, Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back If You Lose It, the Goldsmiths interviewed more than 3,000 professionals about what gives those people short-term satisfaction (happiness) and long-term benefit (meaning). The biggest finding from their survey is that there is a very high correlation between people’s happiness and meaning at work and home—”in other words, those who experience happiness and meaning at work tend also to experience them outside of work. Those who are miserable on the job are usually miserable at home.”

Because full-time workers spend the majority of their waking hours on the job, we might as well admit that happiness and meaning at work is the key to both in life overall. I have always felt this to be the case for myself, but I am surprised that so many others feel the same way. This idea lies in the epilogue of my book, where I describe how Marketing with Meaning not only helps improve sales and customers’ lives, but by doing the latter, we enjoy our work much more.

Another key insight in this study is that “since work and home are very different environments, our experience of happiness and meaning in life appears to have more to do with who we are than where we are.” In other words, we are responsible for our own happiness and meaning—not passive beneficiaries or victims of our work or home environments. If we are unhappy, we must take control and make changes to get to a better place.

These two lessons are what I work to practice and improve upon every year. I accept that my work has a huge impact on my home and family life, and I work to shape my career to better tap into what makes me happy and what makes life meaningful. In 2009 I had the chance to progress very well on this in seeing my book published, in watching our company grow revenue and staff at a double-digit rate, and in providing opportunities for our employees to succeed with new clients and challenges.

On the other hand, there are a few other goals that I hoped to accomplish but fell short on. After reading this article I sat down to commit to some goals that will make me happier, accomplish more meaningful results, and help our company continue to grow and succeed. One big one is to see the “Marketing with Meaning” concept take on a life of its own beyond me. For me to accomplish my goals, the concept cannot just be a “Bob thing” or even a “Bridge Worldwide thing.” I can only succeed if you make the concept your own, and, as a result find happiness and meaning in your work/home life by creating marketing that people choose to engage with, and advertising that itself adds value.

Thank you for stopping by to read this blog or the book, and let me know how I can help myself succeed by helping you create more meaningful marketing.

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Posted in Achievement, Agency Marketing, Concept, Life | 3 Comments »

Southwest Airlines Profits from Free Bags

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

southwest bags

My friend Matt Carcieri is one of the key leaders at P&G charged with helping the company move to “Purpose-Based Branding.” If you haven’t read about this before, the central idea is that brands must turn their equities and marketing toward the pursuit of higher-level goals. In his book on the topic, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For, Roy Spence writes that brands must challenge themselves to wholeheartedly focus on this purpose for existence. At P&G, people such as Matt Carcieri and Jim Stengel helped Pampers, for example, shift toward a Purpose of improving babies’ development. Over the holidays, Matt shared a story of how Southwest Airlines—one of the central case studies in Spence’s book—is continuing to profit from its purpose.

In his book, Spence tells the story of how Southwest Airlines rose to leadership in the late 1970s and 1980s on the heels of the government’s deregulation of the airline industry. As the skies opened up to new competitors, Southwest took an underdog mentality up against the big, entrenched, oligopolistic players such as American, Pan Am, and TWA. The company’s entire employee base embraced the underdog label, and rallied around their Purpose:  to democratize air travel. This mentality drove the company to embrace shorter, point-to-point flights, enabled it to expand without unionization, and even showed in the high-quality, high-fun flight attendants and pilots. Southwest was not just another airline; it was a company on a mission to make flying more affordable and accessible. Today, Southwest is just behind Delta in total market capitalization, and did it without major mergers or dips into bankruptcy. The company was profitable again in 2008, while Delta felt a 40% net loss.

Based on Southwest’s purpose, it is no surprise that the company decided not to go along with the rest of the industry crowd and add baggage fees to the price of a ticket. According to its CEO, Gary Kelly, Southwest was giving up $300 million in revenue by not simply joining its competitors in charging a fee that fliers hate, but can do little about. But the underdog, democratic blood still pumps through Southwest’s veins, and it bucked the trend and risked angering shareholders by just saying “no.”

What’s more, Southwest saw the opportunity to promote the hell out of its commitment to “Bags Fly Free.” Baggage fees can add up to $100 per flight per person, so Southwest’s television commercials and print ads tout their fundamental competitive difference. The ads feature smiling Southwest employees talking about how much they love bags—itself an example of a strong, purpose-driven culture.

The results? Well, Southwest claims that it has captured an additional 1% of the market because of its lack of baggage fees so far. That translates to $800 million to $900 million in additional revenue. Yep, as much as three times more revenue than baggage fees would generate. And please don’t forget how this meaningful marketing choice adds to the brand equity and loyalty of travelers. We all feel a great deal of anger for airlines that use their market power to gouge us on fare prices and continually pull back on service quality. But with Southwest, we have a hero in an otherwise villainous business. This very visible issue around baggage fees further cements the good and evil brands in the business, and translates into more sales for Southwest over time.

Thanks to its strong, guiding brand purpose, and its ability to make meaningful marketing decisions, Southwest continues to be the bright spot of success in an industry that continues to look at its customers as cattle. My only problem with Southwest is that it still hasn’t come to free Cincinnati from the oppressive shackles of Delta!

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Posted in airlines, purpose | 5 Comments »

How Meaningful Marketing Can Help a Non-innovative Brand

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

dove_logo

Over the holiday break I got a very interesting email question from Al Samuelian, VP Group Media Director at media agency MPG. He was in the middle of reading my book and paused to ask, in summary: “Can you implement a Marketing with Meaning strategy if your product or service stinks?” I thought it was a great question—and one of the reasons that I love opening up this entire concept to public discussion—so I choose to share our back-and-forth thinking here.

When Your Product Is Poor

My first response was fairly short and simple: No, you cannot win if your base product or service is sub-par. Brilliant marketing can never overcome a product that fails to live up to customers’ expectations. You can look to the movie industry for many examples of big ad budget films that petered out once the pixels hit the screen. And with digital and social media, negative word of mouth travels so many times faster and farther.

Al Samuelian replied with a great story about when a car marketer visited Google recently and asked, “What should I do when I get negative online reviews or social-media chatter about service at my dealerships?” The simple reply by the panel of Google experts: “You should improve service at the dealerships.”

This point is also a good reminder for all marketers that our jobs are not just to make advertising (meaningful or otherwise), but to start with guiding the features and functions of the ultimate product that you have to sell. Marketers should have a say—preferably the final say—when it comes to product benefits, features, retail placement, pricing, customer service, and any other decision that is relevant to how it is presented to the end customer. Al suggested that it might be time for us to redefine the classic “4Ps” for the new world of digital, social, and extreme word of mouth. Not a bad idea!

But I know from my own experience that organizational structures are the biggest barrier to marketing making a difference. I remember my own meeting with a major car company when I was marketing Mr. Clean Car Care at P&G. We wanted to do a joint promotion at the car manufacturer’s national chain of dealerships and repair centers, but the marketer from Big Car, Inc. admitted that she couldn’t even get them to run a national “Buy 3 Tires, Get 1 Free” promotion. The decentralized structure of the network prevented her from managing her business. Now this error, and many others, is part of the reason that the company is tanking.

When You Don’t Have Much Innovation

The other half of our discussion revolved around brands that do not have much innovation to stand on. Sure, it’s easy to do meaningful marketing when you have a breakthrough product such as Mr. Clean Magic Eraser or Nike+, but what about the 95% of brands we work on that do not have much word-of-mouth merit?

In thinking about this question I brought up the model presented by Laura and Al Ries in their book, The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR. The central hypothesis of the book is that brands are first built on innovation—they bring some new news to the marketplace of existing players—and the best way to win is by making the news as big as possible. Hence, the book’s belief on making PR the lead focus of early marketing efforts. Then, after years in market, the strategy becomes simply reminding people that you exist and what you stand for. This is where the authors find that advertising is more effective. For example, Coke and Pepsi haven’t changed their formulas in years, so the cola war is a battle to remind people through advertising.

My belief is that Marketing with Meaning can work well for non-innovative products and brands in two ways. First, the marketing can itself bring innovation and PR news to the brand in ways that the product itself cannot. Charmin creating a mobile app that helps you find public restrooms is an incredible new way to innovate, and has earned the brand more than 500 million free news media impressions. This idea of using marketing as a way to apply innovation could open up entirely new ways of thinking for brand managers who have struggled for years with doing something new with product development. Making changes to a product formula and assembly line can take millions of dollars and thousands of hours. But cranking out an iPhone app can be done by a small team in a matter of weeks.

The second way that Marketing with Meaning can help non-innovative brands is by serving as the “memory jogger” as described by Laura and Al Ries, but in a format that has a much higher chance of earning customer attention and loyalty. My favorite example is the story of Unilever’s Dove brand. You know by now that the brand was struggling to find a new positioning in the marketplace until it seized the high, unoccupied ground of standing for “Real Beauty.” What you might not have thought about was how this happened with virtually no product news or innovation. By using its marketing to create a cause, Dove reminded people that it existed in a meaningful way.

This second point is where I believe many, many companies should be moving their marketing dollars quickly. As I wrote in this Adweek article a few months ago, the old model of ordering up a new ad campaign is not enough, and as I wrote in this post a year ago, the brands that are able to be remembered and relevant are those that actually do something rather than just saying that they stand for something.

I recently read that Pepsi has chosen not to advertise in this year’s Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years. Instead, the brand is planning a $20 million marketing effort to “refresh” society in real ways. Not much is known yet, but this could be a big step in moving the marketing world away from interruptive reminders and further toward meaningful connections. Stay tuned for more…

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Posted in Organizational Behavior, customer service, innovation | 3 Comments »

Book Review: “Adland”

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

adland

Just before the holiday vacation, I had the chance to attend a four-hour dinner with a diverse group of about 80 people who all happen to know our host and have some job in the fields of investing, advertising, teaching, writing, or other “new media.” I was lucky enough to be joined at my table by James Othmer, author of the new book, Adland. Interestingly, Adland was already on my shelf and in queue for holiday reading. Meeting James in person gave me more evidence that my book selection was strong and his written work certainly lived up to my positive impression in chatting with him.

Overall, Adland is a very unique and additive perspective on the future of marketing and is definitely worth your money and time. As a movie pitchman might say, it’s In Search of Excellence written by a David Ogilvy who has actually lived in and writes about the dirty trenches of the ad-agency business. Othmer tells his own story of a guy who somehow wound up in the advertising-agency business, learned how to thrive amid its crumbling, gradually discovered that it is not his calling, and escaped to a career as an fiction author (see his first book, The Futurist). Othmer returns to his old industry home in this book to share his experience with those of us still figuring out how to stick with it, and he shares insights from discussions with the leaders of some of the newest, most successful companies that are winning as the traditional-agency model falls apart.

One of the most enjoyable and cathartic elements of the book is Othmer’s stories from his work with some of the biggest advertising agencies and clients in the world. We laugh and/or cry with him through horrible bosses, time-churning pitches, and arrogant clients on million-dollar commercial shoots. Those of us who have seen this dark side of the business will enjoy Othmer’s biographical romp. But all is not dark; for example, I loved Othmer’s musings on the creative brainstorming process, and how it creates “intellectual adrenaline” that is hard to find in any other kind of business. This alone is worth the book price.

But Othmer’s book is really about the future of the advertising-agency business, as he weaves in stories of visits to and discussions with upstart agencies such as Droga5 and Fahrenheit 212—as well as old-school ad firms that seem to have crossed the chasm into new media success, such as Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. One of my favorite passages comes from Othmer’s discussions with the leaders of The Barbarian Group, who set the world on fire with Subservient Chicken in 2004. Co-founder and COO Rick Webb was asked, “Isn’t all this digital work actually more intrusive and dangerous than ‘traditional’ ads? Isn’t the Internet just another pipe through which marketers can pump more insidious, nuanced, and targeted messages?”

“On the Web, aside from banner advertising, I pretty much have to decide to experience a marketing message. I have to click on that banner, I have to visit that Web site, I have to add that Facebook app or watch that viral video. I have to start the engagement. And therefore advertisers have to incent me to do so, the same way they incent me to visit their showroom. Think of VW ads—jarring, in-your-face, edgy. They have to be, because they have to catch my attention. Now think of their showrooms. Clean, friendly, inviting, with nice couches and coffee. Because they have to be, because they have to convince me to come in. Interactive advertising is the showroom.”

Of course, it’s a perfect fit with the gospel we’re trying to espouse around Marketing with Meaning, and it’s what I talked about in a blog post here a few months ago about how digital agencies fundamentally think differently. The best line of the book comes soon after this passage, delivered by Barbarian co-founder and President Ben Palmer: “I see the Internet as a way of taking advertising back from the evil assholes.”

At the end of Adland, we see a survivor of some of the bloodiest battles in the business escape to a new career as a fiction novelist. Reading this, I felt as though I was cheering the hero, but it also left me acknowledging that I’m still knee-deep in the business that Othmer found mainly meaningless. I and many others do not necessarily have the will or means to escape. So we must try to find a way to make a living and make a difference in “adland.” For me, that’s by creating Marketing with Meaning.  I hope you do, too.

Posted in Agency Marketing, book | No Comments »