The Back of a Napkin

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Marketers and ad professionals are attracted to shiny new toys. They look to technology as a panacea for reaching and influencing buyer behaviour. Newspapers, radio, tv, the Internet, big data, social media, AI, and whatever is next. There is one thing missing in this equation.

The fact is all great ads regardless of medium or platform start out on a whiteboard, a flip chart, a notebook, or the back of a napkin.

Print ads are therefore the gold standard. If an ad or campaign cannot compel from a single sheet of paper, no algorithm will save it. Technology will just irritate consumers with irrelevant and poorly timed ads. In other words, why make something flawed more efficient?

Recently, I came across two sets of print ads that share characteristics. They draw you in visually. They create allure and make a promise. They know their audience. Someone sweated over them and were proud in the end. In a time when more means more, these were designed to cut through the clutter that advertising and converging technologies have created.

Great ads start with a Bic pen not an algorithm. Look ahead and see if you agree.

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Bauhaus Ha

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Spoiler alert…this may be for design nerds only. Imagine extremely recognizable and memorable logos. What comes to mind? An Apple. A Golden Arch. A Swoosh.

What comes to mind when you hear Bauhaus? No, it is not an Oktoberfest pop-up beer hall. The Staatliches Bauhaus, commonly known as the Bauhaus, was a German art school that ran from 1919 to 1933, It combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught.[

So, some talented folks smooshed, or swooshed, modern logos into the Bauhaus style. Here is the result and they would look awesome on a t-shirt (or a New Wave retrospective music collection).

Brand Consultancies, Do This

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Four years ago, I wrote the article, Branding Needs Rebranding. In hindsight, the title was a tad misleading because it covered the lack of differentiation and delivery between brand consultancies, it was not an indictment of the entirety of branding. I argued, branding is largely premised on differentiation, so shouldn’t the consultancies be different?

Today, the processes and methodologies of branding and rebranding from consultancies remain the same. Meanwhile, many of the larger consultancies have undergone different kinds of change. Prominent ones have left poor-performing markets and shuttered practice areas where margins grew slim.

Those under the large holding companies have been grouped together for synergies, more on the cost side, than revenue growth. This cycle of consolidation and rationalization is nothing new in the larger communications industry, but it could be less severe or avoided…more on that in a bit.

Let’s set the stage by looking back. Prior to 2000, branding was a nascent practice and profession. Then it exploded. Books, conferences, job titles, and businesses sprung up around brand. The sad fact is, “brand” became a buzzword and consultancies focused on building repeatable processes and methodologies, creating an uninspired assembly line of parity. Brand became ubiquitous but lost its edge.

Same Process, Same Result
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Why the Agency World Loved and Hated Mad Men

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This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Agency Post.

In 2007, I was brand new to the storied advertising agency DDB, having been appointed Chief Communications Officer. One of the first memos that hit my desk was a “heads up” that Doyle Dane Bernbach was going to be featured in a new television series. Creator Matthew Weiner had consulted with the agency prior to production and my arrival, but we did not know how the agency was to be treated in the storyline for Mad Men.

Fast-forward all these years, and I am happy to say that DDB fared the best in the quips and portrayals of Madison Avenue agencies (McCann was continuously trashed, BBDO had a short bad turn). I can honestly say that I would have watched and been loyal to the show regardless of my employer or career. It is an amazing trip through my adolescence and profession, as well as, our shared history and pop culture.

Now that the show has long been finished, I’m feeling nostalgic for all of the nostalgia the show provided. Mad Men was cleverly premised on investigating the past by monitoring the effect of change. Throughout, we witnessed our troubled public and private lives, personal struggle, and even surrender in the face of social upheaval.

Booze = Good

And Now, a Word From Our Sponsors

The series addressed race, gender roles, war, free love, assassinations, office politics, infidelity, addiction, and occasionally, advertising. On the last subject, it has been surprising that so little discussion has taken place on the impact mass production coupled with mass advertising had on society. This commercialism turned people into consumers and products into brands, and we have never been the same. 

Nor did the series adequately tackle the quality of advertising in the period. In the 1960s, advertising became a game of more, not better. In The Idea Writers: Copywriting in a New Media and Marketing Era, Teressa Iezzi writes:

For every Think Small (a DDB campaign for Volkswagen) in the 1960s, there was a bottomless bowl of the same insufferable dross that’s served up on any given commercial break and that covers the ground from forgettable waste of everyone’s time and money to actively annoying disincentive to ever buy the product being advertised.

It is amazing that, given the volume of work from this era, each notable agency can cite only a small number of standout campaigns. For Ogilvy & Mather, it is The Man in the Hathaway Shirt who sported a black eye patch adding mystery to his decision to wear only Hathaway shirts. The roguish adventurer drove sport cars, sailed yachts, courted women, held an elephant’s tusk, and inspected a shotgun all in the same crisp white shirt. 

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The Best Defunct Company Logos

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Some are instantly recognizable while others verge on being lost to history. The list is neither exhaustive or scientific, it is highly subjective like so much of branding. If you have some cool ones to add, let us know.

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When Commerce Met Art

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As my readers know, I am a huge fan of marketing history (to the point of being supremely nerdy). Over the past few years, I went back through the centuries to find great stories for my book, Why Marketing Works. That research missed a very cool tale that I am happy now to share. It involves Walter Paepcke and his company, Container Corporation of America (CCA).

When just 25, Paepcke inherited his father’s Chicago-based wooden crate empire. Predicting the shift to a consumer goods economy requiring smaller, lighter packaging, he moved production from wooden crates to corrugated paperboard containers. He bought a bunch of other packaging suppliers along with paper mills to ensure vertical integration and founded CCA in 1926. One smart fellow…as you will learn (read to the end to see how he and his wife are responsible for the popularity of the town of Aspen).

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The Branding Cannabis Series…#1

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Welcome to the first in a series of three papers on Cannabis Branding.

It is as if the Gold Rush and the end of Prohibition crossed paths. The legalization of recreational cannabis use includes Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, the District of Columbia, and the Northern Mariana Islands, with all but Vermont and D.C. permitting its commercial sale. On October 17, 2018, Canada legalized recreational use from coast-to-coast.

If I can provide another historic reference, this has produced a Wild West when it comes to the branding and marketing of businesses in the blooming and growing cannabis industry. Policy makers can’t keep up with the ramifications. Everyone is confused about what can be said, how they say it and to whom.

This messiness is going to have long-term impact on how the industry is viewed and perceived. Further, the mostly juvenile attempts at branding cannabis-related companies has everyone veering into Cheech and Chong territory with an overuse of green leaves and big buds. The nascent industry is “stereotypicallying” itself to the point of comedy.

Download the paper SC_BrandingCannabis_1.

A Brand is Not a Way of Life

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Recently, I met with a fashion technology startup. They are building an interesting secondhand marketplace whereby consumers can sell “lightly used” bespoke clothing. Perhaps you wore a Chanel dress once but have no call for it now or the Ralph Lauren tuxedo in the closet is gathering dust. You get the idea.

An additional service involves sending in your used expensive clothing and having it “re-imagined” by company designers. One example was a beautiful woman’s blue blouse that subsequently had one sleeve and the collar removed. These were replaced with a white lacey pattern. I must admit it looked stunning and was very unique. The company also accepts purses and bags that they will clean, restore and/or re-imagine. All in all, it is a cool concept.

Then came a very familiar probe from the founders. They told me they want to be a “lifestyle brand”. That means joining a very long list of brands with the same intent. In fact, I think every brand believes they are a lifestyle brand in some way.

Apple never claims to be anything. Ingeniously they let customers identify them in certain ways. Many suggest they are a lifestyle brand given their dominance in personal technologies. Plenty of apparel brands make the lifestyle claim especially those with a focused product set and defined market. Burton is for snowboarders, Quiksilver for surfers, Helly Hansen for sailors, Volcom for rebellious skateboarders, and Patagonia for environmentally friendly explorers.

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Does KFC’s Marketing Work?

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A press release from September 4thgot me thinking. And that is saying something, given press releases to me are an archaic form of communications. It proclaimed:

KFC is offering a college donation to the first child born on the Colonel’s birthday (Sept. 9, 2018) named Harland…. As a birthday gift from the Colonel and KFC, the first baby Harland will receive $11,000 (in honor of KFC’s 11 herbs and spices, of course!) to go towards their college education, setting them up for future success.

It got me thinking about KFC’s marketing. Is it just a series of goofy events and preposterous merchandise or is there a deeper strategy? And is any of this activity truly helping sell product? Before I answer those questions, I have a revealing confession.

I love KFC.

The brand I mean. I eat the product only once or twice a year. It is a tradition on one occasion at my namesake golf tournament, The Swystonian Institute Golf Classic. On the kick-off night, we order up more KFC than we possibly can finish, then we finish it. It tastes fantastic, but one gorge generally holds me over for the year. In my youth, it was the best damn hangover food. I treasured it cold the next day.

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Evidently Storytelling Works

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Recently, I passed an advertisement in Toronto’s underground PATH walkway in the downtown. Well, I probably passed scores without noticing. Oversized posters, television screens, storefronts, employees offering samples, consumers with purchases in bags with retailers logos. These were just a few examples of marketing on a relatively short walk to an ATM at my bank that flashed an ad during my transaction.

Anyway, back to that big poster that stopped me. It was nothing special. A bunch of text on white background. At the top it had a statistic, we make 35,000 decisions every day. That’s what gave me pause. People had to move around me as I read the entire ad. It was for a private health clinic and overall was very poor. The clinic needs to tell a more visual story and the ad’s placement sucked.

That is not why I share this story.

I thought about that stat for the rest of the day. It made me recall another. We have 65,000 thoughts every day. That adds up to 100,000 intentions in our head or close to 4,200 every hour and 70 every minute. No wonder we are all stressed, drink and cannot wait for marijuana stores to open.

Those of us in the communication business know we are exposed to over 5,000 ads every day. I deliberately chose the word, “exposed”. We don’t actually see them. We have become inured. Just as I was on my walk until something compelled me to stop. And that is the crux of marketing today.

In a world full of communications inhabited by people with busy lives and minds … how can brands meaningfully connect? The answer is as old as mankind. Storytelling. It has been, is, and will continue to be, the great connector.

Here is an assemblage of evidence proving the power and impact of storytelling.

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