David Burn
Writer, Editor and Entrepreneur
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- SummaryI'm a writer, brand strategist and content developer who leads teams skilled at creating meaningful bonds between prospects and brands, care of a highest common denominator approach to marketing communications.
If you run an established or emerging company and you want more people to know and care about it, I will help uncover the core truths about your company, and serve those truths up in ways that consistently build the brand and grow your business.Specialties: Strategic thinking, creative concepting, copywriting, brand planning, social media activation and content development. I also spot and motivate talent, present creative and win business.Experience- Apr 2009 - PresentChief Storyteller / Bonehook
- Oct 2004 - PresentCo-Founder & Editor / AdPulp
- May 2006 - Dec 2008Content Director / BFG Communications
- Jan 1995 - Apr 2006Copywriter / Various
Education-
1983 - 1987Franklin & Marshall College
Additional Information-
Websites:
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Tweets
- "Hare Cologne is the brand developed for High Ants Bonarda grapes." #Medoza #Argentina http://t.co/D6hudHuZ - great wine for the $
- LA Roadtrip - a little slideshow and travelogue from xobruno http://t.co/fssuWqbq
- @CommonsBrewery sounds amazing, will have to swing by and try it - thanks for the Tweets up
- #FF @diancrawford @urbangrindpdx @tiltagency #marketing #technology #coffee - hook it up Portland (and beyond)May 25, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- May 25, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @waltonian @GBVeerman yes, the Midwest is a giant place - to me anything east of the Mississippi River is the Mideast
- I'm at Taco Del Mar (West Linn, Oregon) http://t.co/LZxxwEI7
- @CloudNineMedia hadn't considered it until now, let's see, Jared Leto perhaps
- 'What Did I Miss?': TV Attention Suffers A Big Hit From Second Screens http://t.co/8AUM5k3U via @mediapost
- GREAT GATSBY Trailer (2012) Movie HD: http://t.co/k9euyzaY film looks good, but DiCaprio as Gatsby is a tough sell
- 46% of business owners with revenues under $5 mil transferred personal assets to their business over the past 6 months http://t.co/ArhKxacE
- "the last thing anyone needs is another source of voiceless, middle-of-the-road, commodity journalism" -Dan Froomkin http://t.co/Bw2I7xTW
- "Vast wealth isn’t enough; they want deference, too, and they’re doing their best to buy it." -Paul Krugman on Wall St. http://t.co/1xWh9PmvMay 25, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Advance notice: "The AdPulp Interview" with @GBVeerman of Astronaut Brand Studio in Sioux Falls will be up on the site today.May 25, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Maiden voyage to this new beerstablishment. (@ Gigantic Brewing Company) [pic]: http://t.co/33tcubJ8
- Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL http://t.co/AE2BrnXx via @CNET
- @burnstrong @OPB @pbsmediashift I will complete the story @toxictoxictoxic but not on Twitter - thanks for the nudge!
- @garyvee IDK who @markwschaefer is referring to - I named you herein merely to make the point that w/out names people will speculate
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Posts
- May 08, 12
We took a marvelous land cruise to Northern California last month. The highlight of the trip wasn’t the Southern Oregon coast, the redwoods, Mendocino County, or Marin. Those were highlights, but the highlight was having dinner with friends in San Francisco on Friday the 13th.
Our friend Andy made a reservation for five at Lot 7 on Valencia. The place had me at Hamachi Crudo, but everything else was off the hook, as well. Including the ambiance, the oversized photographs of San Francisco in the 1930s, and of course, the company around the table.
Andy is a builder and an entrepreneur, so it’s always fun to hear what’s going on with him. He spent the past several years introducing the California market to the environmental advantages of kegged wine. In fact, Lot 7 carries Andy’s wine and I like how they make the most of the presentation, delivering the red liquid in an artfully designed carafe.
Feel this with me. The air in San Francisco is rarefied, and the light makes everything look rich. In other words, it’s not like other places. And one could, without hesitation, extend that thought to California. California is not like other places.
Andy asked me how things are going with Bonehook here in Portland, and I replied it’s going okay. He said many people in Oregon are coming from a place of scarcity, whereas Californians are all about abundance. He said, tell a friend in Oregon about your new business idea, and they’ll pause and eventually say, “that sounds hard.” In California, on the other hand, the friend gets excited, introduces you to their contacts in the field and encourages you to go for it.
This little tale of two states — the states of scarcity and abundance — lodged in my brain and I’ve been mulling them over ever since. While it is true that Oregon doesn’t have the number of jobs, the economic might, or the vast opportunities that can be found in California, it’s wrong to think of Oregon as a place short on resources. In fact, no place in the United States has the right to think it’s coming from a place of scarcity. Scarcity simply isn’t real here. All of America is awash in abundance. We haven’t spread the wealth to every person and every family, but that doesn’t mean the wealth of this nation is limited in supply. It means it we have a distribution problem.
On the way home last month, we recognized how good it felt to be in California, but it felt even better to return to Oregon. Would I love to see Oregonians become a bit more free-wheeling in their ways? Yes, I would. Would a more open and inclusive mindset — not just politeness, but genuine friendliness — also open Oregon up to bigger and better business opportunities? Of course. Bottom line though, I can only do what I can do about it. I can be more open, friendly and free-spirited, and I can build my business in Oregon, whatever the challenges.
- Apr 07, 12
Ray Bradbury is spectacular. His mind is immense and his advice for other writers is both generous and magnificent.
In 2001, Bradbury spoke at the Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University. He was 80 years old at the time. Today is he 91.
During this talk, he says, “Writing is not a serious business, it’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun at it. It is not work. If it’s work, stop it and do something else.”
“I’ve never worked a day in my life,” Bradbury says “The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me my joy.”
Bradbury prescribes a routine that includes writing one short story a week. He also suggests that we fill our minds with lots of ideas from all disciplines, and that we read one short story, one poem and one essay each night before bed. He cautions that most modern literature will not suffice, because it is crap. To avoid the crap trap, Bradbury suggests the short stories of Roald Dahl, Guy de Maupassant, John Cheever, Richard Matheson, Nigel Kneel, John Collier, Edith Wharton, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He also loves the essays of George Bernard Shaw, and suggests we locate a copy of Do we agree?: A debate between G. K. Chesterton and Bernard Shaw.
Bradbury favors the provocative statement, which make listening to him fun. For instance, he says writers should not attend college. He also says he doesn’t plan, or outline, a story. Rather, he discovers it as he writes.
Bradbury has a sign above his work station that reads “Don’t Think.” This reminds him to keep his intellect at bay, and feel his way through the narrative.
Frankly, I can’t get enough of this wise man’s counsel. Which is why I went from the above video to the following two treasures from the mid-1970s and 1963, respectively.
Another important note from this writer of Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and many other books and screenplays deals with the dispatching of doubters. He advises that a writer can’t have any such people in his or her life, and that these friends and/or family must be fired if they insist on negative evaluations of one’s chosen path.
- Mar 30, 12
“Instrumental in traveling is the participation in it, the belief in progress, the witnessing of passage.” – Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers’ first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, is a travel journal with a lot of internal gyrations, a.k.a. dialogue from the narrator, whose mind “hovers and churns.” I just finished reading the 400-page book on the Kindle, and now I want to reflect on some of its themes and stylistic devices.
Will, the protagonist and narrator, departs Chicago O’Hare with his best bud Hand, for Senegal, Morocco, Estonia and Latvia. The trip is motivated by their friend’s death in a car accident and the consequent desire to offload $80,000 that Will came by unexpectedly (thanks to his silhouette being used on a new lightbulb package).
Adam Mars-Jones of The Observer notes that the book “might be a bleak and uneasy satire on American ignorance and cultural consumerism, with Will’s and Hand’s currency-scattering mission only slightly exaggerating the ridiculousness of over-ambitious holidays – If-this-is-Monday-this-must-be-Tallinn-or-maybe-Riga. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the intention. The title of the book is mystical-technical (finally explained as the motto of the Jumping People, an apocryphal South American tribe), but the style is pushy-flashy, dedicated to producing elaborate effects.”
That’s a solid read by Mars-Jones. The two characters are ridiculous in the way that two “normal dudes” who grew up in Milwaukee might be. Hand and Will are not Wayne and Garth, but they’re not all that far away from these overly-exaggerated characters.
Eggers makes some interesting choices in the construction of the book. He indicates to the reader when Will is talking to himself by placing an em dash in front of a thought. So, you’ll be reading along in a plot-driven passage, and then be dealt a series of dashes, with inner imaginings of the somewhat paranoid, totally addled narrator.
Eggers also time shifts the story, and puts the narrative in Hand’s hands about two-thirds of the way in, before circling back around for a Will-narrated finish. Which is weird, and a bit frustrating because Hand contradicts the things we as readers have come to believe. It does work to shed more light on the situation, but it’s not a fine light, where all looks happy and good.
Ultimately, You Shall Know Our Velocity, is a book with a message. The message is don’t waste time. And don’t run from things, like time, that can’t be outrun. It’s a wonderful philosophy, delivered by clowns in this instance, but that’s okay. We don’t always want our philosophies from a professor, poet or pundit.
- Mar 26, 12
Since moving to Portland, Oregon in 2008 I’ve been digging on emerging acts like Weinland, Blind Pilot and Blitzen Trapper. But some of top indie rocks acts in the world are also living and working in Puddletown, and their sizable ripples are being felt on coasts near and far.
Modest Mouse, The Shins, The Decemberists and Spoon are all tied to this two-rivers city in some way, and The Shins first new album in five years is on a lot of playlists right now, mine included.
The New York Times notes that with “Port of Morrow” James Mercer, 41, faces what could be his biggest challenge. “Since the Shins were last heard from he has dismissed the rest of the band and remade it as a semipermanent collective of well-traveled professionals, and also moved further away from the Shins’ scruffy origins with a tightly produced, eclectic record. Will his fans accept the changes?”
The touring version of the Shins includes the guitarist Jessica Dobson, who has played with Beck; the bassist Yuuki Matthews, of the band Crystal Skulls; Joe Plummer, the drummer in Modest Mouse; and Richard Swift, a songwriter and go-to indie producer.
The Times doesn’t mention anything about “Port of Morrow” reaching new fans. But I consider myself a new fan, even though I’ve been listening to “Chutes Too Marrow” for some time now.
Greg Kot of Chicago Tribune argues that the results are decidedly mixed:
Fans of the band’s relatively modest indie releases may find the production oddly sparkly, layered with keyboards, wordless harmonies, and exotic little noisemakers and ear-catching details. But Mercer’s gift for the insinuating melody remains acute, and his lyrics have never been more straight-forward.
I don’t feel that the results are mixed, but as I said, I am a relatively new fan, so I’m not carrying a cart full of indie rock baggage.
By the way, Port of Morrow, near Boardman, Oregon, contains all the industrial infrastructure you’ll need to grow your business.
- Mar 20, 12
Carlos Santana is one of my musical heros. He’s also a board member and part owner of premium spirits brand, Tequila Casa Noble.
I don’t drink a lot of tequila, and I can’t say that I have ever tried Casa Noble, but now that I know Carlos’ role in the company, I will give the product a sip or two. Yes, it’s that easy to get me to sample the product. We’ll see about cost, taste, availability and all the rest.
I have to say, I love that Carlos reveals himself in the video, but the construction of the piece isn’t beautifully rendered, as it needs to be. Premium brands need to go all out on their production values, or doubt creeps in.
Speaking of Carlos and doubt creeping in, did you hear he’s doing a two-year “residency” at House of Blues in Las Vegas? I may find myself attending some of these shows, but I can’t help reflecting on how this is an unfamiliar time in rock and roll. For one, ticket prices to live shows are freaking outrageous.
Grateful Dead’s bass player, Phil Lesh, is also about to embark on a residency program at his own venue, Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, Calif. His opening ten-night run is just about sold out, although it looks like there are a couple $300 VIP tickets and $150 general admission tickets remaining. It’s enough to lead a psychedelic rock fan to drink.
- Mar 07, 12
Digital Book World is running an interview with Seth Godin, author of several best selling business books, including Unleashing the Ideavirus, The Bootstrapper’s Bible, Purple Cow, All Marketers Are Liars, Poke the Box, and more.
Here’s a slice of the interview, where Godin advises writers to walk way from their financial expectations.
Q. Many authors hear your message about being willing to give away their books for free, or to focus on spreading their message but their question is: “I’ve got rent to pay so how do I turn that into cash money?”
A. Who said you have a right to cash money from writing? I gave hundreds of speeches before I got paid to write one. I’ve written more than 4000 blog posts for free.
Poets don’t get paid (often), but there’s no poetry shortage. The future is going to be filled with amateurs, and the truly talented and persistent will make a great living. But the days of journeyman writers who make a good living by the word – over.
I don’t know how these halcyon days of writerly bounty could be over, if they never existed in the first place. The great majority of writers have always struggled to earn their way in the world. They either work odd jobs like bartender or taxicab driver, or they find a way to apply themselves as a teacher, or in a commercial setting like advertising, publishing, journalism or entertainment.
The future is going to be filled with amateurs, says Godin. And Mathew Ingram of GigaOm, commenting on Godin’s piece, is right to note “the rise of the amateur, powered by the democratization of distribution provided by the Web and social media.” Although “amateur” sounds more and more archaic to my ear each day. I prefer the word “apprentice.” There’s pro, semi-pro and apprentice. Apprentice captures seriousness of intent, in a way amateur does not.
Certainly, there are plenty of amateur writers, amateur photographers, and so on. Which is great, people need enriching hobbies. But the premise is about getting paid to write, and that’s why it makes sense to reframe the discussion around pro, semi-pro and apprentice. These are the people hoping to make money from their writing, and the people equipped to do so, via a mix of talent, training and good fortune.
Regarding Godin’s advice to offer content for free, I agree, as long as there’s a mix of paid and free in the writer’s bag. He says he’s offered more than 4000 blog posts for free. Great, I have offered more than 10,000 for free, but he also sells books, and I sell advertising (on AdPulp) and my writing there sometimes leads discerning readers to hire me to write copy for them. In other words, we get paid to write for free.
Thankfully, the buzz around free is starting to fade a bit. I’m actually happy to see so many newspapers begin to charge for their online editions. When you have exclusive content, as many city newspapers do, you can and should charge for it. The rise of eBooks is another game changer, where authors can and should charge a small price for their homemade digital book or booklet.
I do appreciate what Godin is saying, and it is good to approach your craft with humility. At the same time, a pro is a pro, and pros get paid. As do semi-pros, and on occasion, apprentices.
Bonus content from last fall:
- Mar 02, 12
Have you heard New Multitudes, a super group made of Americana torchbearers: Jay Farrar (Son Volt), Will Johnson (Centro-matic), Anders Parker (Varnaline), and Jim James (My Morning Jacket)?
The group’s new record is an intimate interpretation of Woody Guthrie’s previously unrecorded lyrics.
Parker, who I had the honor of interviewing in Sept. 2008, described his own and the band’s process in the Burlington Free Press:
It’s a distinct and singular honor to be involved in this project. Visiting the archives would’ve been enough. But setting Woody’s words to music has been a fundamentally life-altering experience. His words and music and the life he led are an inspiration, and the vibrancy of his being still resonates and shines. He’s a beacon.
New Multitudes cut some amazing tracks on this record. Parker writes about how natural it all was. You can hear it on “Old L.A.” and other tracks. The music sounds free and easy. It also sounds timeless, like the Eagles could have recorded the song in the 1970s or perhaps, Dawes today.
Of course, Billy Bragg and Wilco made two albums of unrecorded Woodie Guthrie songs in 1998 and 2000 respectively, and both Mermaid Avenue editions are stellar works at the very top of many an audiophile’s pile.
How many more albums will be pulled from the Guthrie slush pile? As many as humanly possible, I hope. When I posted the Burlington Free Press article on Facebook, my friend Kate replied, “Woody was the musical poet for the unions. We need to sing his songs again — for the good of men, women, children and our Mother Earth.”
- Feb 23, 12
I am pleased to see the Portland microbrew scene begin to work its way to the suburbs. Sure, there are suburban Portland breweries now, but not enough of them. And having a McMenamin’s in your town is far from adequate for real fans of Oregon-made beer.
Yes, that same McMenamin’s would rule in Fort Worth, Texas, but this isn’t Fort Worth. This is Beervana.
As a resident of the “South Shore” (of the Willamette), I am particularly pleased to learn of two new moves that will have an impact locally. According to The Oregonian, Stickmen Brewery and Skewery will open this spring in downtown Lake Oswego, and Breakside Brewery plans to open a production facility and tasting room in the International Way area of Milwaukie, near Dave’s Killer Bread and Bob’s Red Mill.
The partners at Stickmen Brewery and Skewery, are working with Sean Herron of the Big Idea restaurant consulting group, and plan to serve Yakitori-style meat skewers.
Breakside, in NE Portland, also collaborates with local chefs at popular and high-end restaurants, such as Le Pigeon, Wildwood and Podnah’s Pit, to create beers specifically for the restaurant. The new facility will enable the brewery to keep the restaurants stocked while widening Breakside’s market.
Photo Credit: Eater
- Feb 18, 12
Be The Void, the new album from Philly-based rockers Dr. Dog dropped on Feb. 7th, and the band is out touring and doing radio promos to support it.
You can stream the new album here.
Sounds to me like the Dog is filling the void, rather than being the void, but it’s clearly all good.
In other recently released album news, The Black Keys are back at it with El Camino, which debuted last December. I like this fuller Black Keys sound that the new band lineup affords.
Next up in the new record category is Galactic with Carnivale Electricos, which goes on sale wherever fine jams are sold this coming Tuesday.
- Feb 17, 12
I love when an environmental issue, or any issue, helps to melt the artificial construct of political lines between people and communities come together to face off against corporate agressors.
Thankfully, that’s exactly what’s going on in Nebraska, Texas and other communities that would be directly impacted by the proposed Keystone Pipeline.
According to Roll Call:
Property-rights conservatives, water supply activists and landowners are banding together along the pipeline’s proposed route through Texas, challenging plans to claim land for the proposed pipeline that will run from Canada’s oil sands to Texas’ Gulf Coast.
“Crippling someone’s water supply knows no party line,” said Rita Beving, consultant to the bipartisan East Texas Sub-Regional Planning Commission. A Republican mayor and a Democratic city secretary lead the group’s fight against the pipeline.
In other words, cowboys ain’t taking any of TransCanada’s shit. Or Washington’s, for that matter.
“Lifelong Republicans are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with urban tree-huggers,” Malinda Frevert, a spokeswoman for BOLD Nebraska, said of that effort.
Check out these videos from BOLD Nebraska:
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Posts
- May 25, 12
Greg Veerman is an Astronaut, unafraid to sail into the outer reaches of Adlandia in his quest for a higher plane. In other words, he runs an agency in Sioux Falls, SD with a focus on serving clients in the clean technology and sustainable goods and services sectors. “Our job is to advance the cause of sustainability through the engine of the marketplace,” he says. That’s a mission I readily identify with, and Veerman doesn’t stop there. Pull up a chair and see for yourself what things look like 1500 miles from Madison Avenue.
Q. What, or who, led you to enter the ad biz?
A. Hemingway. After school the plan was to be him. That meant living a raw, dangerous life and writing fiction. It also meant starting at a newspaper, like Hemingway, which is how I got my first break as a writer in Portland, Oregon. I had some excellent opportunities reporting for a respected news weekly, an experience that permanently shaped how I think and write and taught me an important lesson: I wasn’t meant to be a reporter. After a few years, I’d published enough that an old buddy from college, who was a CD at up and coming Portland agency, threw me a couple bones from his world. Things worked out. So I crossed over to the dark side and have never looked back.
Q. How’d you get to Sioux Falls? And what are the pitfalls and advantages of running an agency in a small, under-the-radar market?
A. My wife is from South Dakota and she is persuasive. We came out here so we could get help from the in-laws with our two kids while she was in nursing school full time. I didn’t think we’d stay, but some cool opportunities came up and we connected with a lot of wonderful people. It’s safe here, schools are outstanding and people are really good to each other. I kind of got plugged in.
A major revelation for me was that there is indeed some very high caliber talent in Sioux Falls. There’s not as much of it as you’d find in a major city. But make no mistake: there are true A-listers lurking around these small to mid-sized markets. I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of them. Best of all, this is a Prima-Donna-Free Zone. The rock stars here work hard, produce solid creative and don’t expect adulation or fawning.
The advantage to running a shop in this kind of environment is that the community is incredibly tight-knit and generous. Both creative and production talent come to the table to work things out for projects large and small without a lot of fuss. They put a premium on relationships and accountability. And they just don’t screw each other. In part that’s the culture. I think it comes from the farming heritage of this region — people are used to being individually accountable for success or failure because on the farm, to which just about everyone has some kind of family connection, there’s no one else to blame but yourself. From a different perspective, people are good to each other because there’s nowhere to hide. Screw someone over, and you’re probably screwing a friend of a friend or someone you’re going to run into around town. So the default posture here is respect and humility. When you think about that in the world of creative services, it’s pretty refreshing.
The downside is that if you only serve clients in the local or regional area, you have a very limited pie to slice up. It’s just not a large enough single market to support a ton of agencies, and budgets tend to match up with that. Simultaneously, although the creative talent is here, and although Sioux Falls in particular has a really thriving, up-and-coming urban culture, what’s missing is that rich, dense artistic vibration that washes into every corner of life like you find in places like Minneapolis, Portland, San Francisco or Chicago. That passive inspiration, that background signal, and the demand for high creative that follows, just isn’t the same here. It’s easy to take for granted in a big urban core. We have to work harder to generate it in this town, but it happens. And I have such admiration for the friends and colleagues around here who actually create that gravity.
Q. Your agency focuses on helping clients in clean technology and renewable energy. How did you decide to focus on these emerging industries?
A. First, to play at the level I’d like for Astronaut, I knew we’d have to specialize. By becoming expert in this niche, which is actually fairly diverse, we get beyond the geographical barriers of our regional market and become a legitimate resource to companies all over the world. Second, the path is clear for clean technology and sustainable goods and services: investment is only going to increase, but not everyone in these industries is good at telling their story. This means opportunity for us and a competitive advantage for our clients. Finally, sustainability is profoundly important to me on a personal level. I grew up in Alaska and came up professionally in Oregon, two stages for that difficult dance between industry and the environment. I figured if I’m going to take a shot at running a business, I’m going to focus on something I care about. Our job is to advance the cause of sustainability through the engine of the marketplace. It’s a calling that covers all the right ground for us from a creative, business and human standpoint. It’s pretty easy to get out of bed and go to work on this assignment.
Q. Renewable energy has both B2B and B2C applications — which is more fun and more rewarding to work on?
A. The B2C opportunities are the sexiest because they have the bigger audience, but B2B is more rewarding in some ways because the institutional challenges are greater and the accomplishments seem more profound. Most of the people we serve are not used to either the work we do or the way we think — I’m talking about scientists, engineers, chemists and other rational thinkers. It’s pretty satisfying to win with these folks. And they give us the intellectual challenges that make this business so cool. We’re lucky to work with them.
Q. What qualities do you find in a great client?
A. Optimism, curiosity, communication, ambition, the ability to suspend judgment, the ability to apply good judgment. I hope our clients find these qualities in Astronaut, too.
Q. What’s the most challenging aspect to running your own agency?
A. Time. We started Astronaut in 2007. I started joking that I always wanted to run my own show, but I wanted to wait until I had a four kids and a recession. That all came together a year after we launched. So I often feel like there is not enough of me to go around and that the days run out before I even begin them. The solution of course is to have a great team and I’m lucky that the people I work with are so talented, devoted and willing to put up with me. Sometimes I honestly don’t know why they do it.
Q. Do you ever long to go back to being on staff at an agency, so you can wear one hat instead of four or five?
A. Sometimes — it would have to be the right circumstances with the right team with the right goals. A friend gave me great advice about business early on: “Burn all routes of retreat.” Don’t even give yourself the option to go back. Going forward is another matter. And that can have all kinds of different dimensions I’d welcome. I’m on a mission up in here. It’s going to drive me a good long while.
Q. Does the Midwest really have a better work ethic?
A. I hate to generalize, but hell yes. In almost 10 years out here, I’ve found that people uniformly show up early, stay late and don’t complain. Again, I think it comes straight from the farming heritage of the region. If you didn’t grow up on a farm, someone in some corner of your family did, or your friends did. And farmers are business people who are responsible for absolutely everything: if you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. Pride in workmanship and a sense of accountability are off the charts. People work their tails off and just don’t expect a parade for it afterwards. It’s a standard I’m still trying to live up to because I really like parades.
Q. Is there anyone in our business–another agency, perhaps–that you particularly admire?
A. My old role models were the creative geniuses. My new role models are those who lead teams and grow businesses. Trevor Graves at Nemo Design is an old friend and a guy who started as an A-list creative but has built something special with a lot of study and hard work. The guys at 3 Advertising in Albuquerque are people I’ve worked with and admire for the team they’ve built. They are true role models. Sullivan Higdon Sink is the definition of success for a mid-sized Midwest agency. I also respect the hell out of my friend Paul Koblik, who runs Slice Editorial out of Oakland. Even though they’re down the street from Pixar, they’re probably not going to show up in Post magazine, but they serve Fortune 100 clients who love them because their team is so tight and they’re so reliable. Those are the people I admire.
Q. Has the shift to digital impacted your work?
A. Where to start? Of course it has. And the impact has multiple dimensions, both in terms of operations and in terms of solutions we explore for clients. We deliberately choose not to have an internal digital department because there are just too many experts in too many niches of the digital world, from social media to apps to digital signage to ecommerce. I want our clients to have the right digital solution for the right job, so that means keeping a lot of different options open. And by the way, we have a couple major, major digital developers in this town who have melted faces at the highest levels of Silicon Valley and NYC. So I’m spoiled: these people are friends and I don’t need to go more than 10 minutes down the street to get with them on projects big or small.
Q. How do you advise advertising students and other prospects trying to get their first break in the business to conduct themselves?
A. Be an interesting person. Read a lot of things, not just blogs or fiction, but periodicals, non-fiction, politics and the arts. Be conversant in many subjects. Your job here is to be a professional student. The more you can prove that, the better. I once hired a young guy not because of his book (it was just okay) but becauseat the time of our interview he was “trying out Ramadan” and in the middle of fasting — this was a South Dakota kid raised an evangelical Christian. That right there is an interesting person. Be curious and learn to ask good questions. Also, iconoclasm is more interesting if it’s quiet. So you might want to read some Hemingway.
Q. What’s the best MarCom book you’ve read in the past few years?
A. This one came out a while ago, but I loved Phil Dusenberry’s Then We Set His Hair on Fire.
Q. If asked, would you want to participate in AMC’s new show, “The Pitch”?
A. I don’t think so. Over the years my ego has shrunk down enough to fit on AMC, but it’s still very fragile. I don’t know if it could bear the slings and arrows of a such public arena.
Q. What do you do for fun?
A. Be a dad. It’s an ongoing project that gives me more challenges and rewards than I could invent on my own. My kids are the most interesting things in my life. I have four of them, so the fun never ends.
- May 24, 12
Lance Jensen, Chief Creative Officer at Hill Holliday in Boston, seems like a guy I would get along with and enjoy working for. But his comments below about freelancing lead me to question both my present path and the validity of his argument.
Jensen says a creative needs to have “skin in the game.” That we need to care about our ideas making it into production, and actually helping to grow a client’s business. It’s a perfectly logical point of view, except for one small fact. Many people with skin in the game couldn’t give a shit about their clients. That may not be true on Jensen’s staff, but it is true to a large degree throughout the business. It’s one of the central problems the agency business must address to make itself more useful to clients and their customers/prospects.
Additionally, I would argue that a freelancer brings more than a fresh mind to the client problems at hand. A freelancer is not bogged down with the political bullshit that exists in every agency under the sun. Therefore, the freelancer is free to think good thoughts on the client’s behalf. When you have skin in the game, you also have prickly and/or cutthroat colleagues to dodge. Which is a huge distraction. Depending on the length of service at the agency, a creative staffer may also be worn out by the daily grind.
Yes, I know many leaders at agencies big and small won’t see themselves, or their agencies, in this. I just said that many creative staffers don’t care about their clients and that the toxicity of office politics is eating away at the foundation of the agency business. Agency leaders are human, and often good people. They don’t want to see their baby painted in such stark terms. I sympathize, but my sympathy doesn’t remove the criticism.
Jensen uses the analogy of a band, and that’s one I tend to favor, as well. But let’s admit that many bands suffer from internal strife, and that after a few great albums their creative powers begin to fade. Sure, they often hang on for another 20 years, but they’re rarely as prolific or “on fire” like they once were. My point is an agency, particularly a large one, is more like a label than a band and the label needs to keep things fresh.
- May 21, 12
Chipotle knows the value of a great burrito. Chipotle also knows the value of well-written copy.
While eating lunch yesterday ay Chipotle, I encountered the following copy on the chain’s paper cup.
Chips Are Rad!
Chips might seem so little, so inconsequential…but if we didn’t have chips, how would we eat salsa? With a spoon? And then what would make salsa different than soup? And would people want to put soup on their burritos? That would be weird. I don’t mean to judge, but I think most people would rather not put soup on their burritos. And don’t even get me started on how chips can move guacamole. Oh sweet guacamole. The tiny, lowly, underappreciated chip is the salty triangle delivery method that surpasses all others in guacamole transport. If there was a chip-appreciation society, I would probably join it (as long as it didn’t meet on Wednesday nights, because I have my ceramics class on Wednesday nights, and next week I’m making a bowl) but on any other night, I would be happy to meet up with folks and talk about how awesome chips are. Actually, if no one else is going to start a society, I might have to get on that…
Note the use of first person here. First person helps make a connection. I don’t know who the chip-loving, bowl-making person is, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is the fact that someone’s telling a story, and it is a story highlighting the appetite appeal of products available at Chipotle (chips, salsa and guacamole).
Just about every other fast food chain in existence places their logo, or the logo of Coca-Cola or Pepsi on their cups. But Chipotle saw an opportunity to do more. Which leads me to ask how many storytelling opportunities are your clients leaving on the shelf?
- May 20, 12
How do you know when it is time to hire a copywriter, a.k.a one who writes text, or copy, for the purpose of marketing a product, business, person, opinion or idea?
If you’re a recruiter at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, you just know. But what if you’re not in that world? What if you work for a design shop or a Web development firm? What if you work in marketing on the client side? In these cases, the question often becomes a difficult and puzzling one. But it needn’t be that way.
The murkiness, of course, is caused by one overriding reason. Too many people think they can do what copywriters do. Which makes me wonder, do these same wannabe copywriters also think they can perform their own root canal, or defend themselves in a court of law? Perhaps, they can do these things, but unless they’re some kind of real life MacGyver, they’re bound to make a mess of things and cause undue pain.
Because AdPulp is here to help — and carefully crafted lists are helpful constructs — please review these 10 signs that you do, indeed, need to hire a copywriter.
1. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you have no idea what prospective consumers find valuable in your product or service offering.
2. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you lack the tools to express your brand’s singular idea in a concise and memorable way.
3. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you are busy doing the job you were hired to do, versus imitating the job of someone you have yet to hire.
4. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you are ready to earn and hold your audience’s attention.
5. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you realize that without a paid professional on the job, you’re actually wasting all the money you’re putting in to “a new look.”
Perhaps, these logical approaches to the problem aren’t working for you. That’s okay, a nimble copywriter can turn on a dime and head in a new direction.
6. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you start to believe David Ogilvy was born in a French Chateau.
7. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you are done messin’ with Sasquatch.
8. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you don’t want to sell your hair to a wig shop, wake up in a roadside ditch or re-enact scenes from Platoon with Charlie Sheen.
9. It’s time to hire a copywriter when the most interesting man in the world says so.
10. It’s time to hire a copywriter when you are no longer afraid to Just Do It.
- May 19, 12
PORTLAND–Twitter launched over five years ago, which is eons in Internet time. Yet, Laura Fitton, Inbound Marketing Evangelist at HubSpot and this afternoon’s Keynote speaker at Webvisions is here to say that the disruptive force that is Twitter has only just begun.
Quoting Joel Lunenfeld, who works for Twitter, Fitton says, “Twitter is like an EKG for attention.” It’s a global sensing and signaling network, she says. “Twitter relays whatever is remarkable.”
Interestingly, Fitton notes that influencer modes are subverted on Twitter. “The message is the influencer. I love that about Twitter,” she says.
Facebook is busy converting promise into cash today, but Fitton claims Facebook doesn’t have the same message propagation properties as Twitter, partly because it’s browser driven. There’s a deeply democratic aspect to Twitter thanks to its mobile interface. There are five billion ‘dumb phones’ in the world and all of them are capable of publishing via SMS, without even joining Twitter, Fitton says.
Twitter has revolutionary qualities baked in, but can it also change the marketing communications game for the better? Fitton says we must learn to turn our messages inside out, because it’s not about us, it’s about the reader. She adds that best practices on Twitter can be summed up in two words: Be useful.
“At Hubspot, our marketing solves problems for people,” she says. She advises that marketers approach their marketing like they do their products. “Make your marketing into something people will pay for,” she suggests.
She closes her talk with a discussion of #hashtags, which remind her of starlings. “They flash, form, and disappear,” she says. Fitton started a weekly Twitter-based chat around the hashtag #beonfire. “I have a show now,” she says. “Twitter-based chats are the Rotary Clubs of the future.”
Following her talk, I ask Fitton — who follows 98,228 people at this time — how she uses Twitter (technically speaking). She says she employs a “read only” technique, where she follows about 1000 people on a private account created for this purpose only. She also reads her at replies and direct messages on her @pistachio account, and uses lists to parse the content.
I ask about keeping one’s follower account under control, to reduce the blast from the fire hose. Fitton says, “You want to keep it under control however you’re reading it, but especially if you’re a business on Twitter, whom you follow shouldn’t be how you read Twitter. If you’re a business on Twitter, whom you follow should be all about who you permit to DM you.”
I also ask Fitton which MarCom practice is best prepared to manage a brand’s social media marketing. “I think the talent is lost on a few different islands,” she says. “I think the best creative — ‘like, oh wow, I really want to consume that content’ — talent is still in the advertising industry. But I feel like that’s the last industry to understand social, whereas the publicists were on it right away because they understand relationships.”
- May 17, 12
Separating fact from opinion ain’t what it used to be. There was a time when the more you read, the more engaged you were with your world. Your city. Your neighborhood. Not some imaginary world you wished could be, but the world as it actually existed outside your door.
Back in these ancient times (otherwise known as “just a few years ago”) being up on Current Events was a thing people aspired to. (See? It was even a proper noun.) The simple act of staying informed separated you from those who lived in a bubble or just couldn’t be bothered.
Part of what made this true was that the main news source for most people was the newspaper, filled with page after page of news items written by professional Writers and double-checked for clarity by professional Editors. Each story began with a simple sentence—the “lead”—that delivered the most important factual information first and ensured that regardless of what happened later (spin, cover-ups, etc—sometimes within the article itself) you at least had some facts to chew on before all the hemming-and-hawing began. Opinions were there too, of course, but they were usually relegated to one clearly labeled page at the back of the paper. Sometimes it was even called The Opinion Page. How cute.
But then came the 24-hour news cycle, niche news channels aimed at specific audiences, online news feeds and aggregators, not to mention email portals and homepages that don’t so much deliver actual news as merely use news-like headlines as filler or decoration, giving people the illusion that they’re being informed before they jump to something more important like checking out a Groupon or updating their relationship status.
Nope, these days if you’re reading about something that has just happened, you’re probably reading about it online. A place where there are many more opinions than facts. Where “What’s Happening” has been replaced by “What’s Trending”—a phrase that couldn’t sound more subjective if it tried.
From Twitter to the Like button, to the scores of Op-Ed pieces from people you’ve never heard of that now grace the front page of every news site and trade publication around, suddenly we readers find ourselves awash in opinion with not nearly enough factual lifeboats to go around. How do we cope? By doing what all desperate drowners do: we start flailing about, eager to grab onto anything that might keep us afloat, which in this case results in people merely clinging to one another for the safety of their shared beliefs. (Which makes things even worse of course, since the only thing more helpless than a world with too many opinions is a world with only one.)
Add in the ubiquitous comments section of most websites and you reach the conclusion that to be an engaged member of the reading public today is to be surrounded by arguments. All of which makes you feel less like a reader and more like a spectator at a shouting match.
I’ve noticed the same thing happening in Advertising. Not the shouting so much (unless you work for a real jerk), but the ever-increasing supply of opinions. Big meetings where small ones used to suffice. Endless comments streaming in throughout the process via email. (FYI: Just because we’re all connected doesn’t mean we should spend all our time connecting.) All of it capped off by the constant inclusion of everyone in everything, regardless of interest, experience, talent or qualification. The more opinions the merrier. And since opinions rule over fact, there are no experts. Which means everyone’s an expert. Hooray! Participation Medals for all! Amateur hour? We call that Crowdsourcing now. A disorganized mess? No, no, no, that’s a Hive. A true buzzword in more ways than one, I suppose. (Speaking of buzzwords, can someone tell me why people stopped calling or emailing and instead started “reaching out?” It’s such a ridiculous term, and one that’s very telling about the conflicted state of the workplace psyche these days. Apparently we’re so afraid of the cutthroat capitalism we claim to love so much that we feel the need to give a cutesy name to even the most mundane workday activities. But does the simple act of rational business communication really need to be described like a rescue attempt or an invitation to join a cult? Bizarre.)
Anyway, the points I’m trying to make here are these: I think some of us are better than others at certain things, and that’s as it should be. When I pay someone for their expertise, I’d prefer they actually have some, thank you very much. I also think it should be corporate policy that some opinions matter more than others. And I think most people at work are happier knowing not only who’s in charge of a given project but that they’re actually qualified to be. Yes, good ideas can come from anywhere. But anywhere’s an awfully big place. And as such, the bad ideas—much like opinions—will always be in much greater supply.
- May 16, 12
Could you imagine laboring over a piece of copy the way old-timers like Howard Gossage did? And if you did, what would your current clients do to it after you sent a draft to them?
Thanks to these internet tubes, people everywhere are writing, all the time. Or at least, they’re typing. Has all this collective writing ability lowered the grammatical and stylistic standards of the ad industry?
That’s the conundrum for our industry: the quicker and sloppier society gets with language, the more precise we have to be. We know more precisely than ever that the right words impact sales. If you’re writing for e-commerce, mobile, SEO, or if you’re working on some utility-focused website or app, you’ve seen that even mundane phrases like “click here” get tested and altered to achieve the best results.
As a writer, it’s my obligation to mind the words I write for my clients. But I also have to be aware of the overall effect a piece of communication has. Our audience can respond to any aspect of what we do, or none at all.
It’s the subject of my new column on Talent Zoo.
- May 16, 12
I will absolutely not make judgments on agencies that appear on “The Pitch” based on how the show makes them look. The heavily edited, overly dramatic, trainwreck of a reality TV show has taken some decent people and make them look awful. I’ve met some of the participants on a few of the shows so I prefer to trust my personal judgements over some editor.
But I do want to focus on one very glaring takeaway from the most recent episode, which featured Charlotte’s BooneOakley.
We’ve written about them before (although Oakley’s comments in the linked article here are a bit ironic at first glance) and they’ve done some very cool work. But on “The Pitch,” a very big deal was made of the emergency illness of Greg Johnson, the agency’s CMO. Because without his presence, we’re led to believe the creative folks at the agency, even the senior folks, can’t (or don’t) think very strategically and need a reality check only Johnson can provide. And when they do finally make their pitch, with some interesting ideas, they have a bit of trouble explaining the rationale behind their thinking. Keith Greenstein does an admirable job of pulling together some answers when pressed by the client, but the camera shows him struggling to be convincing.
So here’s what I’m wondering: Do most creatives think strategically? I’ve always thought we had to, or else. Are young creatives even taught (or expected) to think strategically anymore? Is there really a gulf between strategic people & planners and the creatives at the most creative shops? Or is it just expected that the creatives should go as wild with their thinking as possible, and that it’s up to folks like Johnson to rein them in?
As I said, I won’t judge BooneOakley by this show, and their rejection by a client who simply wanted some viral buzz. But I was cringing watching all of them struggle without Johnson. Creatives need to be strategic. And it doesn’t have to equate to being conservative or boring.
- May 16, 12
As you know, I’ve been decompressing from the weight of much too much information. So pardon the self-referential nature of things. I’ll look outward again. Before I do, I want to point to new research from Harvard University that indicates as much as 40% of our speech is devoted to telling others about what we feel or think.
Well, that sure explains Tweetbook.
Apparently, bragging stimulates the brain’s meso-limbic dopamine system, and provides the same sensations of pleasure found in food, sex and money. “Self-disclosure is extra rewarding,” said Diana Tamir, who conducted the experiments with Harvard colleague Jason Mitchell. “People were even willing to forgo money in order to talk about themselves,” Ms. Tamir said.
Martin Lindstrom, writing in Fast Company wonders what this pleasure of self-disclosure might mean for the future of brands. “It’s likely corporate brands will offer consumers a ‘soap-box’ from which individuals can pimp their own identity,” he reasons.
In other words, the new mass marketing is one-to-one marketing.
Make your message for me, or don’t bother bothering me. These are the field conditions. Are you ready to adjust your gear, and your style of play? Because I am not the only one suffering from info inundation. Not by a long shot. Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project sometimes feels “like a lab rat, mindlessly pushing levers in search of the next source of instant but fleeting gratification.” He also reminds that in 1970, Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon said: “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Despite the crushing odds against us, corporate communicators continue to show up at work each morning armed with new possibilities — ideas that may, if perfectly executed, help clients break through the all noise and connect with people, however fleeting that connection might be. Sadly, fleeting connections is all a brand can hope for, when working from the interruption model, which continues to permeate almost everything we think, and do, in Adlandia.
Advertising that lacks an experiential opportunity is dead on arrival.
The question today is not, “What do we put inside the square frame, a.k.a. box, where ads used to dwell?”
No, the question is, “What can we put inside the box to move people to connect with each other and with the brand in real life?” Unfortunately, few ad people have experience in experiential. My suggestion is it’s time to get some, and time to think way outside whatever boxes we might find ourselves encamped in at this time.
Let me put it another way. The creative team that makes Apple ads is partly responsible for how the brand is perceived. But perception is so very thin when put up against the real life experiences happening everyday in Apple Stores. Great advertising doesn’t do much for you, when your iPhone isn’t working.
I don’t want to go into customer service, or become a circus clown to win the favor of my clients’ best prospects. I want to continue to weave narrative threads into brand tapestries. The thing that’s changed for me is I am pushing for the brand story to play live. There has to be a certain taste to it, a smell. Bottom line, people need to feel the brand, in order to care about it, remember it and share it.
- May 15, 12
We’re both in the brand identity game. So, let’s put our heads together on this. The Internet needs an identity refresh.
Please understand that this is #probono work, since there is no real client and no one to bill. We all own the Internet, right? It’s a community garden and thus our undertaking to improve it is a just cause. Plus, our investment of free labor in the future of the Internet’s brand will be noted by a Wikipedia editor.
I won’t bore you by presenting the brief for the reinvented Internet brand, but I know you need a strategy statement of some kind. Here’s one: THE INTERNET HAS A REPUTATION PROBLEM THAT GREAT ADVERTISING CAN HIDE.
Okay, let’s roll. I prepared a list of five headlines to get us moving down a conceptual path.
1. Wear Clean Underwear — All Your Friends Are Watching
2. We Make Millionaires Like Brooklyn Makes Pizza
3. Let Your Internal Cat Video Out To Play
4. Not Spanish Castle Magic, But Pretty Magical
5. Sorry for All The NoiseMy friends on Twitter also suggested a few.
6. Now With More Stuff Than Just A Second Ago. (submitted by @iamjoelwayne)
7. Google or be Googled. (submitted by @A_Trev)
8. The Internet. Capitalized for a Reason. (submitted by @stevejerman)Perhaps you think a tagline-less Internet is acceptable in today’s marketplace of ideas. No. We must place a modifier on it like a crown.
Footnote: This post was conceived on, and for, Twitter. But it also plays on blog-like things.
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Posts
- May 11, 12
“Hi my name is _____ and I am working on a project for my creative strategist class and I was hoping that you could answer these questions please?”
That’s the entire email (sans attachment) that I received from a total stranger at University of Oregon last night. It grieves me to say how common this is.
Here’s another one for reference: “Good morning, David. I am very interested in joining your agency – hence the email!”
I could go on, but I think you can see the problem. There’s no persuasion here whatsoever, no effort taken to earn my attention and no reason for me to care.
Why is this? Are people particularly lazy today? Do people feel entitled? Did we forget to teach people raised on text messaging how to write a letter? Yes to all of the above.
People are also overwhelmed by information, and their mindless conduct shows it. According to a report from the University of California, San Diego, in 28 years — from 1980 to 2008 — our consumption of information increased 350 percent. This is alarming, but it’s high time we adapt to the new reality and learn how best to function in this new info-rich environment.
Writing for Media Shift last month, Aran Levasseur points to recent brain imaging studies that show sections of our brains are highly active during down time. Levasseur goes on to suggest that we teach mindfulness in our schools. That’s a great idea, but let’s begin by practicing mindfulness in our homes (and workplaces).
Howard Rheingold is also interested in mindfulness (or metacognition) as it relates to online behavior. According to Nieman Journalism Lab, “Rheingold says we have to connect our attention to our intention and be more aware of how what we’re actively doing relates (or often doesn’t) to what we need.”
Indeed. If it is a job you need, you’re going to have to work for it, and that means approaching each company, and each person, with the utmost respect. Sending out a one line inquiry says all the wrong things. It says you’re not paying attention to detail, that you can’t be bothered to do basic research and that you have zero clue as to the core elements of persuasion.
Take this site. If any of the job seekers in question simply made time to read a tiny bit of the copy herein, they would have concluded that there are no jobs available. Only projects, which typically go to colleagues that I’ve been working with for more than a decade.
I might add that this problem is much bigger than job seekers taking the fast train to Nowheresville. I’m also consistently pitched by agency search consultants who want me to fill out a Request for Proposal (again, for someone I’ve never met, or heard of), by salespeople selling a wide variety of services and by PR agents who want me to write about their clients.
Unless you can show me that I’m not just another email address on your list, your pitch is nothing to me but noise. Naturally, many brands also suffer from this kind of me-centric behavior. That’s why I am hired to provide an outsider perspective, and help brands find the reason for prospects to care. It’s rarely easy, but it’s the only way forward.
- May 07, 12
Patrick Spenner and Karen Freeman are managing directors at Harvard Business Review. Spenner and Freeman came up with something they call the “decision simplicity index,” which measures how easy it is for consumers to gather and understand information about a brand, how much they can trust the information they find, and how readily they can weigh their options. The easier a brand makes the purchase-decision journey, the higher its decision-simplicity score and the more likely it is to be purchased, repurchased and recommended to others.
The authors argue that their findings indicate the need for a profound shift from marketers. If simplifying the purchase-decision journey is the goal, it means brands need to do more than convey product attributes. The order of the day is to also provide specs on competitive products. It may seem counterintuitive, but the prospective buyer is going to seek out that information, with or without the aid of the brand under consideration. By providing an honest assessment of the competition, a brand says to its prospects, “we are not afraid of the facts, and we’re here to help you make the best decision, regardless.”
Clearly this approach will scare many brand managers off, but Spenner and Freeman do provide examples of companies on the edge of the new frontier in radical transparency. They don’t point to any brands doing the kind of comparison shopping online that Progressive Insurance is known for, but they highlight companies where customers share tips and insights with one another. J.C. Penney and American Eagle, for instance, have capitalized on the “haul video” phenomenon by hosting unbiased haulers on their sites and in their digital communications. Neither retailer requires that the haulers show only brands purchased at its store, and the haulers are transparent about their links to the companies (Penney, for instance, gives its star haulers gift cards).
I’m slightly freaked out by the haul video concept, but I’m not a digital native, nor a teen girl. Clearly, making video confessionals is common today, and young ladies want to discuss their purchases. So, who am I to judge?
What about the world of advertising agencies? How can business-to-business buyers of marketing and communications services get the scoop on the agencies being considered for a project, or for AOR status? As far as I know there is no place to get this kind of online peer evaluation for agencies and design shops. I guess Chief Marketing Officers still do it the old-fashioned wat — they call their business school buddies and attempt to get a read on a shop’s reputation and capabilities. Should there be an Angie’s List for professional services like advertising and design? Probably. I did check to see if Yelp had any local returns under “Advertising” and it turns out Yelp does. Both Wieden + Kennedy and Leopold Ketel & Partners are listed, and both have at least one review on their Yelp page.
I can’t imagine agencies working to easy the purchase-decision journey for prospective clients by hosting community dialogue on their sites, where current and former clients (and possibly staff) would be encouraged to talk, and perhaps break down what’s right and what’s wrong with the place. Agencies, like all companies, want to protect their image and they don’t want to invite comparison shopping. But it might be time to consider a new way of doing things, because it is impossible to deny that the comparison shopping will go on, particularly for high dollar items. Of course, it is a bit scary to consider, but I believe good things can come from embracing and facilitating the journey prospects actually take.
- May 02, 12
In my hunt for work, I have visited over 100 different agencies over the years. Last month I paid my first ever visit to a PR shop — Fleishman Hillard in San Francisco. I’ve also been trying to get a meeting with the content team at Waggener Edstrom in Portland and/or Seattle for months, to no avail. Why? Because I’m a specialist in content marketing and many ad agencies have little clue about the practice. I’m not convinced PR agencies are much better, but I want to see for myself before making that call.
With this in mind, Timothy Kane’s guest piece in Ad Age is interesting to me. Kane works for Makovsky & Company, a PR shop in New York City. He makes some bold claims about PR’s reach, but let’s go with it for the moment.
Instead of trying to encapsulate your brand in a strategic statement, try writing a narrative for your brand. That’s what public relations does.
…They’re not your customers; they’re your constituents. It’s been said often, but it bears repeating: People don’t buy brands. They join them. So modern brands must function like political parties, identifying issues, expressing a coherent world view, staging debates and structuring dialogues.
I like his passion, but the fact is we all deal in brand narrative. How we tell our clients’ stories is what distinguishes one agency from another, and one marketing communications practice from another.
Kane suggests that Apple’s success is a win for PR, not advertising. He also notes that Nike is spending a lot less money on advertising these days. I think it’s pretty evident that Apple’s success is the result of superior product, supported by unrivaled branding. Nike’s success, on the other hand, is all about how their brand story plays out on TV. Maybe they don’t need to spend as much on TV as they once did, but that’s partly due to the rock solid foundation they created for the brand on TV.
I know PR shops, like every other type of agency under the sun, are desperate to tell brand stories on the Web today. There’s a lot of money on the line, and we must convey our expertise to clients so they’ll trust us with their most important tasks. And I’m not here to diminish PR, as I said above I want to learn more about the field. But help me understand, if you will, how firms that traditionally influence journalists are better prepared to reach customers and prospects? Ad agencies speak directly to customers and prospects. Granted, the vehicles they use to do so are a bit rusty, but the fact remains ad pros know how to persuade people to buy things.
I’ll conclude by saying that I spent several years working in so-called marketing services agencies. At the time, I may not have appreciated what a solid grounding in MarCom I was treated to in these environments. Now I see. The bottom line is our ability to establish interest over the long term. The interest is created by brand stories and the stories must be told in a variety of ways — in store, at branded events, online, on TV and radio, in the press and so on. Call it what you will, but to my mind “Relationship Marketing” is the roof over all our heads.
- Apr 29, 12
I read two articles last week that got my attention, but not in a good way. The first was a piece in Wired about how companies are using Klout scores — which purport to rank a person’s online social influence — to provide perks, upgrades and also to determine if a person is right for a particular job.
The other annoying article was a recap of a speech given by Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi.
Let’s start with Roberts. I often wonder if people in his position are totally out of touch with reality, or if they believe in, and enjoy, provoking their audience with inflammatory language. Roberts claimed that strategy is dead, management is dead, marketing is dead and so on. Yes, all in one speech.
“The big idea is dead. There are no more big ideas. Creative leaders should go for getting lots and lots of small ideas out there. Stop beating yourself up searching for the one big idea. Get lots of ideas out there and then let the people you interact with feed those ideas and they will make it big.”
Speed and velocity is everything today. Marketing’s jobs is to create movement and inspire people to join you.
The best approach to this type of loose rhetoric is to laugh it off, or ignore it altogether. Yet, I doubt that’s what members of Roberts’ London audience did. They no doubt listened and some of them may have even believed what they heard.
Of course, the pace of communications in today’s networked world is new, but that doesn’t mean it is good, and it doesn’t mean that we all need to jump on a speeding vehicle that’s dangerously out of control. In fact, my advice is the direct opposite of Roberts’. Slow down, pace yourself and practice on your craft.
Do you think Apple Computer buys this nonsense about the big idea being dead and the need for lots of litte ideas? Clearly, they do not. Substitute another leading company for Apple and the answer is the same. The only people playing Robert’s game are Facebook, Google and other tech industry firms. And we’ll see how that works out for them in the long run.
Now, on to Klout and what’s wrong with influencer marketing. I don’t want to focus here on what’s wrong with Klout itself (that’s been done). I want to look at how brands are using Klout.
“We want to create powerful brand advocates,” says Tom Norwalk, president and CEO of the Seattle Convention and Visitors Bureau, who arranged a two-day, all-expenses-paid trip for 30 high-Klout visitors. “We hope these folks will tweet and Instagram to their many followers.” Virgin America has offered free flights, Capital One has dispensed bonus loyalty points, and Chevrolet has loaned out its new Sonic subcompact for long weekends.
Here’s a video from one of the Chevy Volt drivers, who was loaned a vehicle for the weekend:
The video, which was posted last September, has just over 1000 views on YouTube. This is what Roberts means by lots of little ideas. But from a marketing communications perspective, I fail to see the point. When shopping for a car, we do listen to and seek advice from our friends and family. We may also read Consumer Reports for expert opinions. What we do not do is hunt through our Facebook and Twitter streams for insights, especially if those insights are being funded by a brand.
The video above has no reach, so even if it was a persuasive piece, no one’s seeing it. A weak commercial, with or without the benefit of celebrity star power, does a whole lot more for a brand than lots of litte ideas.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. We do live in a hyper-networked media environment today, where the “everyman” has a voice. There are plenty of positive aspects to this development, but the impact on marketing is still negligible. Go ahead and experiment with social media marketing and influencer marketing, but don’t put too many eggs in this basket.
Big ideas are always relevant and great new products and services will spread via word of mouth, but there’s still a need for traditional media. Look at Apple again. Apple uses commercials, print ads, out-of-home and email marketing to inform us and prompt us to buy. Apple’s best customers are often evangelists for the company, but Apple wisely does not lean on these super fans to do the hard work of crafting its messaging. They have Lee Clow and company for that, and there’s little doubt that Apple’s consistently great brand advertising is a huge part of the company’s off-the-charts success.
- Apr 18, 12
I’ve been thinking long and hard about blogs and return on investment for the writers, publishers and brands that commit to producing them. Given that blogs in almost every case are free to read, and that online advertising is a joke, you have to wonder what kind of return blogs provide, and why there are so many of them.
As someone who has chosen to go deep and spend nearly a decade pursuing the promise of push button publishing, I have many of my own tales to tell, and I intend to share, but first let’s look at some critical responses to the medium.
Kathleen Taylor is a freelance science writer and researcher affiliated with Oxford University. She stopped blogging on Psychology Today’s site, because the immediacy of it all didn’t fit her needs.
Blogging competes for our overwhelmed attentional resources. What attracts attention? Not slow thought, for sure. Fast responses, short statements, eye-catching titles and images, personal statements, provocative claims and moral judgements.
Yes. If we consider ad blogs for a moment, we’ll see that the sites that cram a bunch of content into their pages each day like Agency Spy and The Denver Egotist, or sites that use snarky commentary like Copyranter and AdScam are considered successful. “Provocative claims and moral judgements” have never much interested me, but I have in the past felt the need to race to complete X number of stories by end of business, a.k.a. bedtime. Thankfully, I no longer feel that pressure to produce. Not because I haven’t succeeded. Rather, because I have succeeded and found the rewards of said success lacking.
I’m pretty sure that I brought unreasonable expectations to the practice, like the ability to profit financially from my industry analysis. I also thought the community around the content would grow exponentially, that readers would stick around and actively engage. You live. You learn.
One thing I haven’t considered is how the format itself may in part be responsible for the things that haven’t quite worked as planned. Earlier today, I read If HTML5 Kills the Blog Format, I Won’t Shed a Tear by Scott M. Fulton. He rejects the limitations of the traditional time-based structure, while extending a degree of hope that HTML5 might help.
Not all articles should be created equal. Blogs are singular conveyor belts of nuggets of text. But a major news story, a feature on how to build a private cloud in your office, an interview with a mobile app developer, and some guy ranting about the stupidity of the blog format, are different beasts with varying life spans. Longer-living articles should be allowed to live longer, rather than being hurled off the conveyor belt into the void of invisibility when more replacements come along. HTML5 offers the possibility of componentized, two-dimensional layout where the Table of Contents can live and breathe again.
In another ReadWriteWeb piece Fulton argues that “news must be bundled with a service.” To which I say, absolutely. On AdPulp, the news we produce or reproduce is the “sugar coating” and the services offered for sale are copywriting, design, coding and so on. Yet, we’ve failed to make that perfectly clear. People see us as an industry news site, not a site run by ad guys available for hire. That’s a problem in need of a solution. Yet, there is no easy solve for this riddle, primarily because readers don’t visit AdPulp to be pitched, they visit for our unique take on the industry. Only rarely do readers connect the dots and say to themselves, these guys know their shit; hence, I want them on my next project or on my staff.
What I must reckon with, as co-founder and editor of AdPulp, is what if any marketplace value our unique take has. The site has always made a small amount of money each year, so there’s that. AdPulp also opens doors, but there’s a catch. The doors open so we can report on the host’s doings, not because they want to meet the guys behind AdPulp and work with us. As a professional brand builder, I can no longer tolerate that kind of marketplace confusion. While it’s easy for me to see that I’m an ad guy first, and an ad critic second, that’s asking a lot of other people.
Here, on this particular Web page the necessary balance, and clarity, is built in. This isn’t an ad blog, it’s a company Web site with a blog that covers important developments in content and marketing. Here, you know what’s behind the curtain — you know that the “news” is a loss leader, and that we’re sharing it with you to showcase our thinking, which can be rented by the hour/day/week. In other words, blogging makes sense here. I can’t say the same for AdPulp, and that pains me to some degree, but I’ve also had 7.5 years to adjust myself to the idea, so it’s not too painful.
- Apr 03, 12
Intel, the largest private employer in the state of Oregon, is “sponsoring tomorrow.” As such, the technology company is busy spending millions of dollars to create avante garde experiential marketing events that live up to that bold claim.
Tom Foremski, the journalist who coined the oft-repeated term, “every company is a media company,” recently attended The Creators Project in San Francisco, a free art and music event from Intel and Vice Media.
Foremski notes that “It could have easily been re-named ‘The Curators Project’ because of the superb collection of bands, artists, installations, and even food trucks — all carefully selected by a small team of curators.”
Foremski spoke with David Haroldsen, Intel’s Creative Director for the project. Haroldsen said Intel considers the project to be very successful in meeting its goals and that Intel loves the co-branding and its partnership with Vice (a media company charging head first into marketing services).
I make mention of the campaign, now in its third year, because event marketing and content marketing are two strong siblings, growing bigger by the day. Both fall, as so many things do now, under the larger banner of Relationship Marketing, and both offer people an immersive journey into media. The San Francisco Creators Project attracted more than 45,000 people over two days. I’m sure many of the attendees didn’t think of it as a branded event, meant to make a lasting and positive impression. It was just something fun to do, brought to you by Intel and Vice.
Maybe your firm doesn’t have Intel’s deep pockets. Not many do. But it is still possible to find shared points of interest between your brand and what’s meaningful to your prospects and customers.
Intel is weaving arts and technology together, and providing a platform to explore both. Ask yourself what kind of event would make your customers or prospects happy. Or if you prefer ask me, and we’ll find the answer together.
- Mar 22, 12
Vivian Schiller, NBC News’ Chief Digital Officer, is an orthodox minister in the House of Content.
The concept of “platform agnosticism,” the notion that legacy media companies must have their content on all digital outlets is “completely wrong,” she preaches.
Schiller says, “it’s critical for news organizations to succeed to be platform orthodox. To think about the actual platform itself, how people use it, and create an experience around your brand that is native to that platform.”
Of course, ad agencies also like to claim that they’re platform agnostic, even when they’re clearly a TV shop, or a direct shop, and so on. It’s the new “integrated marketing” this platform agnosticism, and we know how that promise worked out.
Schiller adds, “Brand is not just the quality of my news report…It’s important to think about usability, the way that the audience interacts with your brand, rather than purely about the content itself.”
In other words, the consumer doesn’t own your brand, as some have claimed, but how consumers react to it in various media defines your brand.
- Mar 19, 12
I recently learned a hard lesson about the need to pre-qualify prospective new clients that come knocking. Our natural response as “people in business” is to welcome the knocks and listen intently, hoping to identify the challenge that we can efficiently and elegantly solve. But we must also listen to the warning signs that are often plainly evident from the beginning, or trouble is likely to ensue.
In the great majority of cases, when client and agent are not on the same page, the result is no more work for the agent following the completion of the open project. Sometimes however, the client or agent can’t wait for a peaceful resolution. They must end it now. When a firing in either direction happens, you lean on the contract to determine the kill fee and move on. If there is no contract in place, both parties are at a serious disadvantage and the chance of an equitable resolution is scant.
In my recent off-the-rails experience, I heard the signals on the first call with the client, but brushed them under the rug, thinking I was premature or possibly wrong in my initial judgment. I wasn’t. What I heard on the phone that day from was enough for me decline the project, but I didn’t do that and I didn’t present a contract. Two massive mistakes that I don’t intend to make again.
Now to the tough part…how do I pre-qualify a client? It has to be a process that makes prospects feel more secure about working with me, and more excited to work with me. If, on the other hand, prospects head for the hills in a rapid about face, that too is effective.
I think a quick series of rather innocent questions will aid in the process:
1) Are you hiring for a tactical piece of communications, or are you looking to make an investment in your brand?
2) What percentage of your firm’s operating budget is reserved for marketing?
3) How do you feel about an outsider challenging you to think and act in ways that may make you slightly uncomfortable?
4) How do you spend your Saturdays?
The first question addresses the nature of a client-agent relationship. Great work comes from long term partnerships where there’s a lot of trust. It does not result from one-offs.
The second question addresses money head-on to help determine if there’s a match. But it’s more than that, because when the answer is, “no, we don’t have a marketing budget,” or, “we have one, but it’s very small,” the chances are the client wants a tactical piece of communications and a vendor, not a partner, to create it.
The third question is bald, and some might recoil from its shiny top. But it’s a good question nonetheless. When you hire a copywriter, or a creative team, you’re asking us to dig into the heart of your operation. To see what is special there, that might then be presented in a memorable way to prospects and customers. More times than not, the brand and its managers, need and receive a realignment during this body check. But that’s not always comforting news, even though it feels good in the end.
The last question is there to encourage a personal story, in hopes that a real human connection can be made. A transaction of services for money is good, but long term partnerships are the ideal, and that’s what I’m aiming for.
- Mar 14, 12
Recovering MBA and founder of Shibumi Creative, Matthew E. May, reminds, “If you can sell to the man in the chair, you can sell to anyone!”
McGraw-Hill’s man in the chair, is of course, skeptical about what you might be selling. Because he doesn’t know who you are, what you do, what you’re made of, or why he should take time to listen what you have to say.
May spoke to Joe Webb, a small business consultant who focuses on B2B marketing trends about the classic ad from 1958.
“These questions are timeless, not just for B2B marketing, but for all marketing, and all communicators. Here it is, more than fifty years after the appearance of this ad, and it’s still very useful for outlining a comprehensive communications campaign, and it is all the more powerful because of digital and social media. It remains a clear outline of fundamental sales and marketing questions every business must answer, and they are only intensified today.”
I think the fourth challenge in the ad, “I don’t know what your company stands for” is crucial. It’s married to the reputation challenge, and in today’s information-rich, always-on culture, a consumer can cover the basics of an introduction very quickly, but establishing a high ground for the brand is something that takes an investment of time, human resources and money.
- Mar 05, 12
I write copy. Hopefully, this fact is evident in all that we do. That’s my intention; hence, the company name, the tagline and this site where industry-specific content is freely and consistently given.
Perhaps you are asking what difference a fact like this makes. After all, lots of writers start agencies of one sort or another. For the buyer of marketing services it makes a huge difference, because writers are expert at wading through a sea of (often meaningless) data points to find that one foundational nugget that an entire campaign can rest upon. Yes, strategists do this work too, but it comes natural to writers.
For me personally, saying that Bonehook is a writer-run business helps me stay on track. I could easily steer Bonehook down the non-specialized path, where we use our abilities and connections to solve a wide variety of marketing problems for clients. That’s the standard route, and a path I know well. But it’s not why I am in business.
My goal is to get paid well to write well, and to help other writers get paid well to write well. Plain and simple. Thankfully, there’s a market for what I do, and with the rise of content marketing the market is expanding.
Would you rather see this post in a list? I can do that for you.
Five Reasons to Hire Bonehook as Your Content Marketing Team
1) We are fundamentally sound — therefore, we will focus our efforts on mining the shared points of interest between your customers and your brand.
2) We are proven — few writers have as many balls in the air as I do, and few creative directors have experience launching and running a multi-million dollar content marketing department (something I did prior to starting Bonehook).
3) We care about the right things — we care about your company, and the people who buy and use your products and services (sadly, too many of our competitors only care about industry award shows and other exercises in extreme vanity).
4) We celebrate the power of narrative — in our efforts to inform and entertain your best prospects and current customers, we will weave a thread today and another tomorrow and so on, ultimately creating a beautiful branded tapestry.
5) We believe in good times — making money is serious business, but no one’s going to pay attention to your incessant pitches all day, every day (please see point #1 above).
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Given the increase of information and media, those who want people to consume their material are fighting an uphill battle to get their attention. Anyone who does social media marketing knows how hard it is to capture people’s attention in this new ecosystem. The more stimuli there are competing for your consideration, the more that attention seekers must fight to incentivise you to look their way. More often than not, this results in psychological warfare as attention-seekers leverage any and all emotions to draw you in.
For a species that evolved to consume energy-dense foods in an environment where famine was a constant threat, losing weight and staying trimmer in a modern world of plenty fueled by marketing messages and cheap empty calories is, in fact, terrifically difficult.
When someone tells me that I, a practicing journalist, must change my job in order that his product may better adapt not to the needs of you, the reader, but instead to the whims and tastes of some outsourced delivery system, every molecule in my being must rebel.
- BlackBook is looking for a weekend blogger!BlackBook is looking for a weekend blogger covering all subjects (pop culture, music, movies, TV, art, nightlife).
- Minimum 8 posts each on Saturday and Sunday.
- Hiring immediately, payment is a flat fee.
- Long-term candidates highly preferred.
Again, our industry masters cleverly exploit this insecurity and vanity by offering glamorous but worthless trinkets and elaborately staged award schemes to keep the artists focused and motivated. Like so many demented magpies we flock around the shiny things and would peck each others eyes out to have more than anyone else. Handing out the odd gold statuette is a whole lot cheaper than dishing out stock certificates or board seats.
The power of live is that sports fans want to be able to be in the moment. So, if you’re marketing in that environment, your marketing should reflect that “in the moment” nature.
The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
I’ll be honest with you, I’ve been in the sports business, I’ve been with NBC for 34 years, and I have never seen anything like this tonight. This has blown me away,” Miller said to a media scrum at halftime of Portland’s 3-1 win. “I’ve been to NFL playoff games, and World Series game sevens, and this fanbase should be really proud of itself.
Smart phones today can store information to make our lives more efficient - information that can be scanned to make a purchase, or displayed as a ticket for admission, allowing us freedom from printed confirmations or carrying bulky wallets. However, when asked about a list of items that one could scan their mobile or smart phone for, only small minorities report having done so in each case. These are some of the results of The Harris Poll of 2,056 adults surveyed online between February 6 and 13, 2012 by Harris Interactive. Only 5% of Americans say that they have scanned their phone for admission to a movie or as an airline ticket, and fewer say they have done so to pay for clothing or electronics (3%), admission to a concert, live theater or performance (3%), to pay for a convenience item such as coffee (3%) or something else (7%).
SessionM, is introducing a service that allows publishers of mobile apps to include features similar to video games to engage users. Within apps that use the service, consumers will be able to earn points for certain activities like using the app regularly, watching a certain number of videos and contributing a review. Advertisements will be sprinkled throughout the notifications that people receive about the rewards. Players will have the option of earning bonus points by watching a video or otherwise interacting with an ad. Consumers can accumulate points through any app participating in SessionM’s network and redeem them for gift cards or discounts on purchases they make through their cellphones.
A study by Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, two professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, which will be published in the April issue of Journal of Marketing Research, also gives some insight into what makes for contagious content. It showed that, among other factors, people tend to share content that is more emotional and more positive.
Game Change, the book, was an example of campaign journalism at its most crass: an inelegant hodge-podge of rumors and supposition threaded together with a thesaurus and gall. Game Change, the movie, is an example of what happens when you remove the journalists from journalism: you get a story. (via Game Change’s gift of an improbable dignity to Sarah Palin | Ana Marie Cox | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk)
Creativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it.
Jonah Lehrer on How to Be Creative (via austinkleon)Tweet-a-Beer was brewed and bottled by tenfour and Waggener Edstrom, longtime drinking buddies in Portland, Oregon. Tweet-a-Beer connects your Twitter and PayPal accounts together to ensure that distance, agoraphobia, and gang rivalries no longer prevent you from sharing a pint.
Distributing news to online readers is much cheaper than delivering papers, so digital readers are inherently more profitable per capita, publishers say. At the Star Tribune, the 14,000 people who are paying about $100 a year for a digital subscription to the paper are bringing about $1.4 million in annual revenue. Without printing and distribution costs, more of that revenue shows up in the bottom line, publisher Michael Klingensmith says.
Meanwhile, the Star Tribune’s page views declined only about 12% since the paper began charging for full access to the website, so the revenue from new digital subscriptions exceeds revenue lost from declining traffic by 15 times, he said. “I would make that trade all day,” Mr. Klingensmith said.
Yet in the broader context of the business, those figures hardly register. The Star Tribune in the six months through September had about 100,000 fewer weekday print subscribers than it did in the same period five years earlier. The current annual price of a daily print subscription is about $244.
We found marketers are increasingly looking toward more technology complex channels, such as video and mobile, for content marketing. At the same time, they’re lessening their dependence on text-based channels including blogging, bylined articles, and online PR.
We have been told by new age charlatans that “we’re all creative people” and that all we have to do is free ourselves from the artificial restraints of our society and culture and all our creativity will flow forth. Bullshit.
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