Subversive

We’re back from our vacation (we’ve got another planned for the first week of August, too). It was a great week away. We avoided email, cell phones, and general, 24-7-connectedness in all of its forms. Nancy might have sent a few emails, but I’m not sure. I didn’t send or read a single email, nor a Tweet; nor did I check Facebook nor my voicemail even once. In fact, my phone was stowed in a bag that remained in the back of our vehicle for the entire week and I didn’t even charge it until I returned to work this morning. That also means no Posterous, no UberTwitter, no FourSquare.

I watched exactly two halves of World Cup football, an out or two of Red Sox baseball, and two minutes of a weather report prior to a party that we hosted. On Saturday. Instead, I got my news through the paper, read some books, played with my kids, hung out with my wife, our family and friends and was present in a non-technologically-mitigated fashion. It was awesome. It was liberating. It felt subversive. Somewhere, someone is tut-tutting me, shaking their head in disbelief and pity, thinking to themselves that I’ve committed some sort of career/small business/personal-brand suicide. So be it. The world did not collapse. We’re still here, and back at it. Projects are continuing, starting up, and, finishing. Work continues. We are plugged in, yet again. We wait with bated breath for the next time we get to disconnect.

We are closed for vacation. If you’d like to contact us, click here.
We’ll respond when we return. See you July 12, 2010.

The invitation

Here’s an interesting ad I found researching some back issues on wired.com. It nicely blends online advertising and crowd-sourcing to solicit ideas for future editorial content for the magazine. I’m a fan of OLA, as I’ve mentioned before, and while I may not always click on ads I do notice them and like to point out good concepts, or cool executions. Online ads aren’t dead, and given the fact that large marketers continue to pour budgets into them, and executions continue to improve, and functionality to deepen, I’d say that there is still a future for this channel, and the imaginative marketer.

Filled in the data field.

I have often commented to friends that I love nothing more than a fresh box of crayons or a new palette of paints, and glibly ascribed my interest in design blogs to this same craving for color and creative possibility. But seeing lulu in action reminded me of my favorite days as a brand planner. The days when I grab giant pieces of paper and chunky markers and “block out” a brand’s themes, core values, or key customer insights.

In my work as a brand consultant, I have done a fair amount of soul searching to uncover my own core competency and strength. What I have found is that my clients need and truly benefit from my roll-up-your-sleeves creative approach to crafting messages. We work together to highlight what is most relevant about their brand, we cut and paste the key customer insights together into a story that is easy for their teams to embrace and use to make stronger connections between what people want and what they offer. From brand values, to positioning, to message strategy, we create a consistent and compelling plan to bring their brand to life.

I may be working with words, ideas, customer quotes, and consumer trends instead of fabric and color swatches, but the process is quite similar. We build a brand palette or story for a given season in quite the same way my design idols build a visual story for a room or newly renovated apartment.

All of this makes me smile and want to get right back to work!

Data overload?

I’ve been spending some time on ESPN.com the past couple weeks (more than usual) checking out commentary about the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the NBA Finals, and MLB phenom Stephen Strasburg. I’m not sure it’s a great experience anymore and it makes me wonder: how much content is too much content? There is written, graphical, and video content on the average ESPN.com page. Each competes for attention and, invariably, only one can win out — at least in my brain.

Sometimes, depending on the article, I’m stopped dead by the auto-start video and then don’t read the article. Other times, as in the page at the top of this post, I jump to the article and start reading, realizing part way down that there is also a video feed — the audio of which I can hear, but for some reason, some way, completely missed the visual part. I became aware of this when something in the audio caught my ear and I switched from reading to listening, but my eyes continued to scan the words and I missed both what was said, and what I’d read. It was jarring because there was a distinct switch in my brain from reading to listening of which I was very aware.

I wonder if I should be able to both read and listen at the same time (I can’t and never have been able to — I did my homework in silence as a high-schooler). I either need to read or look/listen but I can’t do both, and I wonder if others find the same thing. One other thing that I’ve noticed on ESPN.com during this playoff season is that much of their content is strictly video, and I find that somewhat off-putting. I like to read, and consider myself a reader, and ingest much of my knowledge through words, more so than watching video.

I understand that ESPN is a broadcast outlet, and it has a wealth of ready-made, rights-controlled, content at its disposal. There is certainly something for every type of user on the site but at some point it gets too overwhelming and you’re left not quite sure what you just encountered because too much has been thrown at you at once. ESPN.com seems to me to be skirting the boundaries of what’s really possible for the human brain to process, or at least the human brain of a guy in his late-30s, who sits pretty squarely in the middle (well, OK, upper end) of ESPN’s demographic.

Am I just an aging anachronism, out of step with the evolution of the web, or are some sites over-stuffed and approaching some sort of content saturation point?

John Madden, grinder par excellence

No, I’m not talking about the Sub, the Hero or the Hoagie, I’m talking about the unheralded players on hockey teams who go out night after night, and shift after shift and do the little things that their teams need to have done in order to win. It might be carrying the puck deep into an opponent’s end even though they are gassed; finishing a check in order to wear down an opponent; or, throwing oneself in front of a shot. It’s not glorious. It’s not high profile. It certainly doesn’t garner the headlines as does the game winning goal in overtime but the job of a grinder is an invaluable asset to his team and absolutely required to win.

I’ve been watching a decent amount of hockey this spring — playoff hockey is the best — and have watched hundreds of games over the years, even being so fortunate as to attend the New Jersey Devil’s playoff march in 2003 ( which culminated with a NJ Game 7 victory in the Stanley Cup Finals…). The one common denominator to all of this hockey is that the team with the best grinders is the team that wins. A roster can be loaded with smooth skating stars of dazzling ability and talent. These stars will score their goals, probably even the OT game-winner, but they can’t do their job without the grinders.

When a team needs an energy boost, a spark, or needs to counter and disrupt an opponent’s momentum, the grinders are sent out to deliver. The grinders also chip in at the least likely times (though if you watch enough hockey you can almost sense when some anonymous winger is going to make the small but necessary play of the night) and these little, often unnoticed plays are what make the difference between winning and losing.

Now, of course, the connection to advertising. You can have the most gifted and talented players on your team, but unless you’ve got grinders who do what needs to get done, day in and day out, campaign after campaign all the flash and brilliance will never make it to market. The guys who collect the awards, and the hosannas of the management team are the stars. The grinders are ones who brought it to life and made it happen, by digging deep, and finishing their checks when needed. It’s great to watch the starts do their thing, but never forget the grinders.

A brief note on this post: it began coalescing during the Boston/Philly series-debacle when someone who’s sort of in between a grinder and a star, Scott Hartnell (former 1st round draft picks, aren’t really grinders, but he plays like one) essentially terrorized the Bruins and created space for stars to pick the Bruins apart by doing all sorts of little things really well. There’s also a great post here about why hockey and agencies are similar, that came out yesterday and made me realize I wasn’t crazy to be seeing the parallels…

Moore says at one point in the article

When you’re in business, there are two doors you can walk through. You can walk through the door where you treat the customer like your guest, operating by the rule that the customer is always right. Or you can be cutthroat. The first door is the door of kindness. That’s the one I decided to walk through.

“The customer is always right” is a business saw that’s as old as the hills, but is the customer always right? I think it’s more true in certain businesses than in others.

If a customer buys a steak in a restaurant, and says it’s no good, they are right. If a customer comes into a dry cleaner and says the shirt is badly pressed, they are right. What, however, if the customer wants to pour money into Yellow Pages advertisements? What about the customer who wants to build a pure Flash site, or the customer who wants to use his 14 year old nephew “to do social media,” are they right? (perhaps I should be nervous about that last one, kids today are pretty good)

As marketing pros, people who are paid for our expertise, there are assuredly times when the customer is not right. We will try to dissuade them from doing things that we don’t think are best for their business, and lay out the reasons why — though this can often-times proves tricky. We don’t always reach a consensus. Because this is a service industry, we will, ultimately, do what the client wants. It does not mean, however, that the client is right. Like Bob Moore we eschew the cut-throat approach. We strive to treat customers like guests. In a service industry though there is a thin line between serving your customer well, and throwing their money down the tubes in order to do what they want because they are the customer.

Much ink is being spilled on this as well in the traditional media. The Wall Street Journal ran two articles last week in the B section and the always thoughtful Peggy Noonan also opined in her Saturday column about privacy and exhibitionism and what it means to us as not just individuals, but rather as Human Beings (capitalization intentional). I also got into it on my Facebook page, partly because all of the talk really made me think and partly because I wanted to see what others thought. I did consider dropping my Facebook account, but opted instead to scale back on what I share. Now, I was not a huge sharer, some favorite bands and books, marital status, company name, city, some hobbies. The wave of negativity spooked me a bit, I must admit, but feel much better for having locked down my account some more. Facebook is a valuable tool as my colleague Greg Wood reminded me and it’s an easy place to connect and re-connect to people who are friends and also resources who are invaluable in my line of work.

Over the past week, the reactions of Facebookers, and others in the online-space have been very interesting and compelled Facebook to both adapt and clarify their policies. Facebook has had some mis-steps over the past year, but they are a relatively young company in a very fluid market. They seem to test and learn as they push the boundaries and expand the usability and functionality of the platform. Facebook, like any business today seems to be fairly responsive to user concerns (the negativity to the last functionality upgrade notwithstanding) and they adjust course to respond to the concerns of their users. There is too much at stake not to. The danger, as I see it, and one that Gordon Crovits mentions in his piece in Monday’s WSJ (5/24/10), is that this should not be taken as an opportunity by the political class to protect us from big, bad, Mark Zuckerberg.

These new tools come with responsibilities for users too. If you want to publish the most intimate details of your life in a public sphere, then have at it; but, be prepared for the negative consequences. Understand that you control your information, and that you can and should share it in a way that makes sense to yourself, jibes with your values, and helps you achieve your goals for using the social space (social media goals apply to both individuals and corporations). It seems far better to me to allow people and companies to figure this out together (as is happening now with Facebook) than let the government begin dictating terms and conditions to us. If we cede ground to the government in this discussion, and let them swoop in and “save” us, the web in general, and social sites in particular will become very different places. You can count on that.

If you took the three minutes or so to play it I think that you’d agree that it’s fun and that it makes some interesting commentary on the media-verse in which we live. It’s high energy and filled with stars, many of them even I, the most casual of football/soccer fans, know. The comments at AdAge though are what make me chuckle the most. Some are fawning, some are predictably xenophobic and soccer-hating (what a post, I get to work two ancient-Greek-rooted words into it!), and some highlight the absolute brilliance of ad-world navel gazing.

It’s unfortunate how many need to take the contrarian point of view to show how smart they are via their skepticism. The stone-tossers question the lack of branding, the wisdom behind not having certain players (who are their sponsors? If it’s not Nike, they won’t be in the ad), the relevance of the World Cup to the American market and blah blah blah. (Though I must admit that the guy who commented that Ronaldinho won’t even be playing for Brazil this year makes a good point, Nike and W&K should have caught that and found another Brazilian player instead).

Just enjoy the ad. It’s a nifty work of video art that pays homage to a much-loved sport and some of the stars who play it (who happen to be under contract to Nike), and shows the interconnectedness of media, sports and communication. It won’t cure cancer; it won’t end malaria in Africa; it won’t bring harmony to the Korean Peninsula. Stop showing off, stop jockeying for your next gig in your next agency because if I’m not mistaken you’re probably not at Wieden & Kennedy, Amsterdam working on that strategy, that media buy, or that spot. Most of us are not, and that’s OK.

I’m committing to writing at least two posts each month for the rest of the spring and summer. Notice the heinous gap in my blog, and learn from my mistakes.