Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

GOOGLE TO MAD MEN: SUCK IT

I remember early in my advertising career going into a presentation for a client that was launching a loyalty program for its customers. As is often the case, in spite of claims that everything is 'integrated' on the agency side, the mass advertising creative guys presented their TV and print ideas and my art director partner and I showed our direct mail concepts.

It was one of the first times I had to share the stage during a presentation with the "mass guys" and the experience was eye-opening.

The client hung on every one of their words, she smiled, she joked, she nodded. 

Then the "direct guys" presented. Her demeanor changed nearly instantly. She became impatient, annoyed, unfriendly, silent.

It was like the classic Looney Tunes skit with Michigan J. Frog. Griiiiiibbit.

It wasn't that the creative work we were presenting was significantly different or less appealing or clever than what she had just seen for TV and print. It was that TV and print are Hollywood baby! They're when a client sees her company's name in lights. Direct marketing, on the other hand, is usually perceived as the ugly step-sister.

It's like Nebraska competing with New York for tourism dollars.

It's like being Mitt Romney and sharing the stage with Sarah Palin. (God help us all.)

It's like Stephen Hawking vying for a woman's affection with George Clooney.

This always struck me as unfair because it's clear that direct marketing -- whether it's online or off -- is smarter, more profitable advertising. It's more targeted, can tell a deeper story and is measurable. You know when it works and when it flops. The mass side has always struck me as a lot of song and dance -- as entertaining as the ditty might be -- but when it's time to show me the money...

So, there's a little part of me -- okay a big, big part of me -- that's loving how Google is dramatically changing the advertising landscape. Or as former Viacom president Mel Karmazin described it: "fucking with the magic."

The magic, of course, is the last 75 years of mass advertising dominance, when the print and radio and TV guys -- and they were usually guys, boys, Mad Men -- pranced into company boardrooms, did their song and dance, made clients swoon and exited stage left.

It was a great deal while it lasted. And, of course, there's still a big place for mass advertising to get the message out to as many people as possible and build brands. But the Mad Men have had their day and, whether they like it or not, now they'll have to share the stage with Stephen Hawking -- and Google.

PROCRASTINATION AND THE ART OF REWARDING YOURSELF.

I'm a closet procrastinator. 

There, I said it.

You'd probably never know it because I'm the one who always gets his work done on time. But it turns out, that's one of the antidotes to my procrastination tendencies: if I have a deadline -- a real one -- I'm fine. If it's a "get it done whenever" deadline, I'm toast.

Another solution to my time-wasting proclivities, I've discovered, is rewarding myself. If I have an assignment I know will take me 20 hours, I break it down into discrete chunks with Scooby Snacks in between.

For example, I'll work two hours then have lunch, or go to the gym, or go for a Starbucks grande ice green tea (sweetened). If I know I have eight hours straight of work ahead of me, I procrastinate.

Writing my book, I've discovered, has been my undoing. I can do client work as I've just described. I can write these blog posts nearly every day, again, because I can usually rifle them off in an hour. But making progress on my book has been a disaster because (a) I have no real deadline that needs to be enforced, and (b) it just seems never-ending. I'm 200 pages in with no end in sight and no real sense of how it's all going to come together. Which explains why, despite having a lot more flexibility in my work schedule over the last three months, I've only written about ten pages.

In the immortal words of Scooby: "Awrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrwwwwwwwwwwrrrr."

Now here's the brilliant Dan Ariely on the psychology of procrastination:

JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER.

 

Just like people who say they never stuff their face on McDonald's, those who claim to never judge a book by its cover are mostly full of it.

Paying attention or assigning inordinate value to what's on the surface is mostly why tall people make more money than the height-challenged and why you're more likely to pick up a magazine with Boris Kodjoe on the cover than Gary Busey. (Sorry Gary.)

If you ever wondered how much effort goes into designing a cover, British author David McCandless recounts the ordeal over his great book Information is Beautiful (called The Visual Miscellaneum in North America with, of course, a different cover!)

So, which of the UK covers do you like best? And would you pick up the final British or North American version first?

THE KEY TO SUCCESS: DEPENDABILITY.

You might remember my blog post a few weeks back about my parents selling their home. Well yesterday my mom recounted to me her recent horror stories in the new condo with the painter and "floor guy," both of whom, for different reasons, didn't deliver on the work they promised.

I also blogged last week on how underpromising and overdelivering are the keys to doing well. Jodee Redmond over at freelancewritinggigs.com comes at it slightly differently but pretty much ends up in the same place. She writes:

"Yes, it helps to be familiar with the style of writing the client wants, but a person who is reasonably intelligent and a bit adventurous can figure it out if the client can provide an example of what he or she wants.

Having a good base of knowledge in a particular subject area is also good to have. If necessary, we can conduct research to obtain the level of understanding needed for the projects we take on. A lot of projects require a certain amount of research anyway, since we need to tackle the project from a certain angle to meet the client’s needs.

You can have degrees up the yin yang and be a complete Brainiac in the subject area involved, but if the client knows or doesn’t believe that you are going to show up when needed and stick with the project until it’s done, they are going to hire someone else."

What it comes down to, in the end, is having someone you can count on. When I think of the professionals I've crossed paths with, the ones I enjoy working with most aren't just talented, they do their work with as little drama as possible. And you can depend on them to help you get the job done properly every time.

Seth's Blog: In search of a jealous chipmunk

You guessed it, we're wild animals too, a lot of the time. Marketing that preys on fear (buy duct tape!) has the shortest path to follow to success, because the public can't wait to get scared. An entire portion of our brain (the same brain the lizard has) is dedicated to fear. And it can't wait to spring into action.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

THOU SHALT NOT LITTER.

A day after Earth Day (I'm a late bloomer), it struck me that the 10 Commandments don't include a proviso on littering and I wondered whether it would have made a difference if, way back when, the writers of the Bible (okay, 'God' if you're so inclined) had ditched a couple of superfluous items (the great George Carlin explains) and included one on littering.

Would it have made a difference?

To read this fantastic post in the New York Times by Bruce Buschel on stealing, I'm going to say probably not -- though the wonderfully wise Dan Ariely has his take on the usefulness of commandments, and suggests they do help us be a little nicer.

The problem ends up being, as it often is, one of relativity. It's clear to us dumping tons of garbage into a stream is bad but how about a chewed glob of gum? Or a cigarette butt? These two, albeit tiny in themselves, account for an inordinate and irritating amount of crap I see at my feet every day. But because they're so small and seemingly inoffensive, we justify the offense, just as we convince ourselves that stealing Post-It notes or a pen at work or pawning off bullshit derivatives isn't really stealing.

MULTICULTURAL SOCIAL MEDIA.

I've never understood people's fear and loathing of 'others.'

Maybe it's because I grew up in a bi-cultural Jewish household -- my father's roots are in Eastern Europe and my mother's are in Egypt and Syria -- where my mom's family thought of my dad's as low-class potato eaters and my dad's family called my mother's "camel drivers." Whatever the reason, it's always seemed alien and idiotic to me to hate or mistrust people based on the color of their skin, the way they speak or the spices they use in their food.

Where technology has in many ways brought us together, it has paradoxically pulled us a part as well -- moronic 'birthers,' 'Tea Partiers' and anti-immigration radicals come to mind. (Did Native Americans consider the Mayflower pilgrims who sailed into Plymouth Harbor illegal immigrants? Just wondering. But I digress.)

Social media too, which brings out kooks on both sides, has the potential to help us understand one another.

Jessica Faye Carter of Nette Media and blogger at Technicultr, offers up 8 social media strategies to engage multicultural consumers -- strategies that don't pander but rather seek to reach out to and connect with the real non-white, non-male, non-straight world out there. Carter writes:

"It can be easy for companies to get caught up in “groupthink” and rely on the opinions of marketing experts when developing culturally-relevant campaigns. [Stacey] Frantz [of American Airlines] advises companies to trust their audience: '[C]hallenge your organization to trust people who live as minorities, value their input into the site and don’t try to make it appeal to everyone.  Delivering culturally-relevant, fresh content is central to your success.'"

It's worth a read.

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A WRITER'S THEORY OF RELATIVITY.

Human beings are adept at framing things in black and white -- maybe it gives us more comfort, greater certitude amid all the uncertainty -- but everything is really a shade of gray and most of what we know now is based on what we knew or didn't know before.

It's 13C (55F) out right now, which seems positively balmy in April. But last October when it was 13C, I was bitching about how cold it was.

Relativity.

I think I'm a pretty good writer. Some have told me I'm very good. The truth is, I really have no clue whether I'm great or good or bad except by gauging the response people have to how and what I write. And by comparing myself to others.

Yeah, mostly that last bit.

When a friend asked me recently if I thought I was good, I outlined my writer's theory of relativity:

"It's not that I'm such a great writer. I think it's just that so many others are so bad."

We'd all like to think we're objectively talented, gorgeous, kind. But we can only ever really know we're better than this guy and worse than that other one. I think I'm basically a good person but, again, relative to what, to whom? I'm no Mother Theresa -- hell, it turns out even Mother Theresa was no Mother Theresa.

The same relativity seems to apply to my strengths as a businessperson. Before I went out on my own, freelancers never failed to tell me how tough it was out there. It's certainly not easy, but I suspect that part of the reason they were finding it so hard was that they weren't particularly good at the business of customer service and promoting themselves.

If you're not replying to clients' emails or returning their calls quickly, or if you haven't even bothered to put up your portfolio online or update your damn LinkedIn page, is it any wonder your potential clients are finding someone better -- or, at least, better than you?

Relativity, my friends. It's what makes the world go around.

IPAD SUCCESS: THE SMARTEST THING I'VE READ TODAY.

I meant to blog about this last week, but the Miami sun gave me amnesia.

Seth Godin clearly outlines the incredibly successful tactics Apple has used to sell its iPod, iPhone and now iPad -- $150,000,000 of which were sold in its first day. They're rules every marketer knows but they're worth repeating because it appears we all get a little amnesia of our own sometimes.

Some of Godin's best suggestions:

Earn a permission asset. Over 25 years, Apple has earned the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to their tribe. They can get the word out about a new product without a lot of money because one by one, they've signed people up. They didn't sell 300,000 iPads in one day, they sold them over a few decades.

Make a product worth talking about. Sounds obvious. If it's so obvious, then why don't the other big companies ship stuff like this? Most of them are paralyzed going to meetings where they sand off the rough edges.

Create a culture of wonder. Microsoft certainly has the engineers, the developers and the money to launch this. So why did they do the Zune instead? Because they never did the hard cultural work of creating the internal expectation that shipping products like this is possible and important.

Be willing to fail. Bold bets succeed--and sometimes they don't. Is that okay with you? Launching the iPad had to be even more frightening than launching a book...

Don't worry so much about conventional wisdom. The iPad is a closed system (not like the web) because so many Apple users like closed systems.

Don't worry so much about having a big launch day. It looks good in the newspaper, but almost every successful brand or product (Nike, JetBlue, Starbucks, IBM...) didn't start that way.

And my favorite:

Don't try to please everyone. There are countless people who don't want one, haven't heard of one or actively hate it. So what? (Please don't gloss over this one just because it's short. In fact, it's the biggest challenge on this list).

YES WE CAN: SELF-EMPLOYMENT ONE MONTH IN.

Despite my reputation as a glass half-empty kind of guy, my first inclination in most situations is to give a person or situation the benefit of the doubt and hope for the best. It's why I had my money on Barack Obama when everyone was saying it'd never happen. And it's why I give my all to any work I do, even if experience tells me there'll be painful challenges along the way.

*

But when it came to my art director partner and I striking it on our own as Noggin Advertising, I was nervous. Would we have enough work? Where would the new clients come from? What if the money ran out and when? My calculations were always based on worst-case scenarios.

It wasn't that I thought the two of us weren't good at what we did. I just worried no one else would think so. Or maybe people had just been nice all this time. Or they'd forget we existed.

Something I never really contemplated was: what if it all went well?

Like really f*&#ing well.

Now Mr. Empty Glass is still nagging me: "It's only been a month, dumb ass" and "this pace can't continue indefinitely" and "feh, beginner's luck."

Maybe. But so far, our month-long second life in advertising has been better than we could have hoped for -- by a long shot.

So pour me another one. Month Two, here we come...

* Image of a clever Berlitz ad that phonetically reads "Yes We Can" with words in English, French and Hebrew.