Baskin Dim Bulb branding advertising social media business strategy

A Textbook Case

Unlike its response to the 1982 product tampering crisis, Tylenol is writing a textbook case with its reaction to the FDA's concerns about dosage...a case history of what not to do.

Last week, an advisory panel of doctors and consumer representatives (whoever they are) announced that:

• The recommended maximum adult single and daily dosages of nonprescription acetaminophen for adults should be lowered
• The 1,000-mg OTC version should be upgraded to prescription-only status
• Every prescription version of the drug should carry a serious safety warning, and
• Products that combine acetaminophen with other drugs (like decongestants) should be banned entirely

Why the draconian recommendations? 

It seems that it's pretty easy to inadvertently get too much acetaminophen into your system, and that doing so is a major cause of liver damage.  More than half of such cases involve prescription use, but I sense that the advisory panel is concerned that consumers just don't grasp how potentially dangerous an overdose can be (or easy to do).  I know I sure didn't.  I've popped an extra Tylenol or two on more than one occasion.  Turns out that the FDA has been worried about this very danger since 1977.

Who knows what the agency will finally issue as a ruling, but it's interesting to watch the response to the crisis coming out of Tylenol:

There is no crisis.

The company has declared via newspaper ads and PR that Tylenol is safe when taken in the recommended doses.  It "shares the FDA's goal" of helping to ensure that products are used safely, etc.  Nothing has changed, and consumers have nothing to worry about. 

This is a far cry from its much-celebrated response to the product tampering issues in the early 1980s.  Then, it yanked all its products from store shelves, invented a new safety wrap for bottle-tops, and forced much of the CPG industry to follow in its footsteps.  It was a different crisis, for sure, and perhaps it had little choice regarding its response.  And while we mostly credit it as a PR case history, it was really an operational reality event.  Tylenol did real things, and PR simply communicated it. 

Now, we're only getting words that are disconnected from reality.  The language it uses is disingenuous, at best.  Its newspaper ad:

• Declares "nearly 50 million adults and children in the U.S. rely on acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol," without clarifying that a lot of that reliance is on products other than Tylenol
• Claims that, when taken as directed, "doctors know" that Tylenol "...is the safest brand of pain reliever you can use," without explaining how they know what doctors know, or that generic pain relievers aren't more or less safe than one another, by definition
• Advises that the product's safety has been "...well established through more than 50 years of clinical use and scientific investigation," when that research and investigation (and the numbers of people sick with liver problems in hospitals) are what prompted the latest recommendations from the FDA's advisory panel

Some really smart writer penned this blather, thinking that all the crisis needed was a witty retort.  Yet the strategy leaves one fundamental question unanswered, and it's in the center of the newspaper ad:

"However, as with any medicine, it’s important for you to know that misusing Tylenol can be harmful.  If you take more than the recommended dose (overdose), you can cause serious liver injury."

One time?  One pill over the limit?  What does liver damage feel like?  How will I know?  Is the stuff that powerful? 

The fact that those two sentences go unanswered renders everything else moot.  What a missed opportunity to follow its own lead, and respond to a challenge to its brand with some substantive action.  Here's what it could have done:

• Where are the third-parties?  Corporate reputations are at all-time lows, and nobody believes declarations on web pages or ads, so why didn't Tylenol enlist some credible third-parties to talk with/for it?  Maybe some of those "consumer representatives" who participated in the advisory group?  Where is the outsider affirmation that Tylenol gets the context of what's going on, and isn't just trying to make us get what it wants us to believe?
• Where's the detailed, proactive help?  How many permutations of Tylenol are there?  100?  Do they all contain the same amount of acetaminophen?  What are the most likely conflicts, whether within the Tylenol brand family, or with other leading brand names?  Publishing a help line isn't enough; ultimately, Tylenol isn't a product (it’s a generic drug), but rather a service, so the branding needs to deliver ongoing information and help...from which would emerge reassurance
• What happened to real action?  Maybe smaller dosages, or less active ingredients/pill make sense?  How about dispensers that meter dosage?  What about developing a truly integrated wellness product offering, so Tylenol could all but guarantee that its pain killer and nasal decongestant wouldn't fry consumer livers?

This crisis isn't over.  But I fear that Tylenol has already written the textbook entry on its response.

HAL Did It

Yesterday's report on the causes of the crash of Air France Flight 447 is incomplete, and the reliability of the investigation's findings will never be without question.  But the broad conclusion is probably all-too true: the computer had something to do with it.

Well, it's more than likely that many automated systems played roles in the accident, but it seems to have started with the plane's speed sensors yielding incoherent readings.  The bad data may have tricked other systems in doing things that weren't in the best interests of staying aloft.  Analysis of the wreckage suggests that the pilots tried to land the plane on the water, as if they'd eventually wrested control from the computers, only too late.

Automation is a wonderful and frightening aspect of our lives, isn't it?

From toasters to power steering, we rely on machines to do things that our ancestors either had to do manually, or couldn't do at all.  Computers have made that automation much more pervasive: we expect our hard drives to preserve our family pictures, just as engineers at nuclear power reactors depend on software programs to make sure the fuel rods don't overheat. 

I'm a firm believer in habit and routines as powerful brand attributes, and computerized automation is a key strategy for delivering it.  Subscriptions, 1-click purchasing, product suggestions based on past interests, and automatic upgrades/renewals are as important as any conscious attachment to a product or service, perhaps even more so.  From a functional perspective, "smart" devices can outperform "dumb" ones, generally, which means they can charge more for delivering better experiences.

Only now I'm becoming more aware of the downside to relying on something unconsciously, and it's called dependence.  An automated function requires an abrogation of authority, or power, from beneficiary to provider.  Because the platform on which I type this essay has all of the editing functions represented as buttons, I've never had to learn how to program in HTML.  I rely on cruise control in my car to keep my speed constant, instead of learning to to do with foot and pedal.  Forget to send me the subscription renewal, and I might neglect to prompt it myself.

When the pitot probes fail, the plane is sent into a literal tailspin.

We're not always aware how much we give up more in order to get more from our automated devices and services; making automation smarter, or more pervasive, doesn't necessarily mean it's any more reliable.  Greater responsibilities increase the range of possible failures.  Even if machines achieved consciousness, they'd still be prone to making the same mistakes in judgment that we make, wouldn't they, or it, or whatever?  God forbid machines developed attitude, like HAL9000 did in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

This condition in our lives is what fuels some of the interest in the Maker movement; their premise is that we'll find greater fulfillment from our lives by taking active control of them.  That means making stuff instead of outsourcing it to someone or something else. 

I wonder if events like the Air France crash (or any of the lesser, daily instances of automated things failing to perform) will get people thinking about the trade-offs they make in their lives between control and benefit? 

• Could a next high-tech gizmo purposefully put more user controls back into users' hands? 
• Maybe a subscription service could solicit more engagement, more often?
• Imagine automatic monitors, sensors, or services that required active, conscious involvement from operators, not less?

At least when it comes to critical stuff, like managing ICBMs or flying airplanes, maybe we don't want HAL to be able to do it?  

Crime & Punishment

So Bernie Madoff gets sentenced to 150 years in prison for his swindle, and the judge says that the verdict sends a message "that Mr. Madoff's crimes were extraordinarily evil."

No, it doesn't.

A 150 year prison sentence is incomprehensible. It's a number that you just can't compute; it doesn't fit into any reasonable comparison or equation.  We don't measure anything in 150 year increments, let alone a human life.  Prison itself is hard to understand, especially the sort of place that a white-collar criminal auteur like Madoff might call home.  Will his minimum-security apartment lack a widescreen TV?

There's just this disconnect between the crime and the punishment or, for that matter, simply the two events.  It's similar to the disconnects going on in lots of news these days, like GM squandering billions, getting billions more from taxpayers, and then declaring bankruptcy.  How about the big financial institutions' bad lending, getting bailouts, and then raising every fee that isn't etched in stone (and avoiding the lending said bailouts were supposed to prompt)?

No, when we get told things that just don't compute, our natural inclination is to question credibility, at best, and suspect falsehood and conspiracy, more than likely.  There's almost a rolling narrative into which we put, and then can connect, all the recent news relating to the economy.  The high-concept for this movie we're watching goes something like this:

Rapacious corporate interests rob the little guy, over and over, and never get punished.

I know it's not true (gulp), but when the punishment doesn't even hint at coming close to matching the crime, it's hard not to lose at least a little faith.

I'm not advocating that Madoff should get the rack, or sit in an iron maiden.  Torture isn't allowed (we only used it on suspects, remember?), and who cares if a 71-year-old financier screams out in pain?  It would be pitiful and hollow, and no amount of his suffering would equal the suffering he caused to his victims.

No, the real punishment would be to go after the people he enriched.

A Ponzi scheme has to keep people happy in order to survive.  Madoff was expert at collecting money from new investors, and using it to pay to older investors; you know, all of those numbnuts who couldn't read a financial statement, and believed Madoff's promises of unimaginably impossible returns.  The money Madoff used to make their dreams of riches come true came from newer victims, who were thus more likely to be among the ruined when the scam collapsed.  They didn't have enough time to get paid-off by even newer victims.

Buying stolen property is a crime, as long as it can be proven that the purchaser should have "reasonably" known the goods had been illegally acquired.  Well, what were Madoff's promised investment returns?  Nobody understood how he could do it -- his payoffs defied every reasonable explanation, and flew in the face of every tidbit of financial teaching, history, and news -- yet his early investors were happy to ignore such disconnects because the money was so good.

If any petty criminal bought a TV that only cost $.10 on the dollar, or sold a car for a price that no legitimate seller could match, the case would be simple: they shoulda known better.  When things are too good to be true, they usually are.  So why is it we hear so much about regular-guy victims who are willing to stand outside a courtroom and yell, and not the rich folks whom he helped pocket billions of ill-begotten funds?

Making the beneficiaries of the Ponzi scheme pay (or simply return their stolen goods) would make a lot more sense.  Madoff is a bad guy and he should rot in jail, but the "extraordinary evil" of his crime was that others were allowed to profit from it.

Evolution Is A Lie, Too

A Burger King franchisee recently chose to market its outlets by taking a position on a contentious issue.  It would be a brilliant move if it wasn't so utterly stupid.

I guess they presume their customers are suspicious of the theory of global warming, so declaring the sentiment would 1) get folks' attention, and 2) make them want to buy a Whopper.

It's no more dumb than any of the social media nonsense BK has initiated over the past few years.  The company prides itself on doing things that insult, offend, or otherwise amuse people with campaigns that it says "participate in the conversation."  None of these campaigns actually sell anything other than some possible street cred for having dared to spend money not selling anything (how totally cool is that, dude?).

It's hard to put street cred in the bank, though.

As for this signage, the franchisee is trying to tell the local base of customer something that matters to them, albeit unrelated to the business or experience of retailing fast food.  The implicit declaration is that McDonald's believes in that commie plot to stop machines from spewing filth into the air.  Buy BK if you're a stalwart for burning oil and coal; hell, let's split some atoms while we’re at it!

This is all they have to tell us about the brand?

Global warming is something the politicos call a wedge issue, because people have strong opinions on it one way or another, and those opinions are less the result of reasoned thought, and more the outcome of more instinctual, heartfelt beliefs.  By choosing it as a trigger for a thought about hamburgers, however briefly, the franchisee is gambling that enough folks will say "hell yeah, I agree and, come to think of it, I need to get me a Whopper." 

Maybe it's easier do to, or a better investment to make, than trying to actually convince would-be customers of some unique BK benefit?  If so, it might suggest other biases that the franchisee might want to consider.  Imagine the next series of signs over its outlets:

• The Jews Did It.  Try Our Grilled Chicken Burrito
• Your Healthcare Coverage Is Fine.  Double Whopper Sale!
• Obama Is A Moslem.  Sausage & Eggs Only $1.49
• Evolution Is A Lie.  Get Two Large Fries For Price Of One

I read that Burger King corporate wasn't too happy with the signage, and went to great lengths to declare that denying global climate change wasn't an official company position.

But between reactionary politics and inane social media campaigns, what is?

The Yahoos At Yahoo

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Word has it that Yahoo is going to debut new branding in the fall, courtesy of a newly-hired CMO who has a newly hired coterie of her favorite branding gurus.  There's nothing surprising about this news: one of the first things new top marketers usually do is hire new vendors to reinvigorate or change the brand.  It's what they do.

Here's what usually happens next:

• Within about 18 months or so, she or he gets fired because the beautiful new branding didn't have any measurable impact on the business
• The exec swaps jobs with another similarly failed exec at another company
• They trade vendors, and hire new teams to do new branding, and
• Repeat

There's a thriving ecosystem to support this carousel, from large branding firms, like Interbrand and Landor, and major ad agencies, to smaller shops and one-person operations.  Everybody has a proprietary methodology, approach, or process to churn through client money; most, if not all, rely on lots of surveys and studies of various interested parties -- often called "stakeholder groups" -- to discover what they think about the brand.

Then some fresh, new branding is invented and revealed to the world via a company's web site, advertising, logo, and any other point where the brand touches said stakeholders (usually called "touchpoints," not surprisingly).

Here's the conundrum: it doesn't matter. 

I wrote an entire book about why this approach to communicating business purpose to consumers is not only outdated, but effectively damaging to the qualities of authenticity, relevance, and meaning upon which purchase decisions rely.  The traditional approach to branding, no matter how expertly or creatively realized via new media, is still an old, failed idea.  You need look no further than all the money the Detroit automakers have spent ($6 billion in 2008 alone) to see proof of this truism. 

There's absolutely nothing that a new branding campaign from Yahoo can tell its consumers, or would-be purchasers.  Period.  Carol Bartz, the new CEO, has effectively said as much, telling a reporter at an event in march "The best way to change the perception is to do a good job and then talk about it." 

The thing is, Yahoo doesn't need new branding to talk about whatever it's doing that's worth talking about.  It just has to do it and then talk about it, using all of the tools at its disposal to be authentic, relevant, and meaningful. 

What's worth talking about is operational reality, and the participation of third-parties that can confirm those truths.  The branding emerges from that stuff, and isn't a glossy label slapped over it.  And it can’t precede that stuff, either, which is exactly what I worry Yahoo is going to do.

Hiring the big gurus to do their branding thing belies a fundamental unawareness or misunderstanding of the reality that Ms. Bartz herself has referenced...or a blithe willingness to put the company's marketing way out ahead of what the business can deliver. 

I guess it doesn't really matter, in the end: people will choose to use or ignore Yahoo based on what its business delivers, irrespective of what the branding says.  The branding really only matters to the people it enriches. 

If the business succeeds, the branding folks will take part of the credit.  If profits don't materialize, the marketers and their agencies will walk away, their heads held high and certain in the belief that they were right (and consumers were wrong)...and then go do the same thing to the next company.

What a bunch of yahoos!

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Nutcase Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is trying to connect unrest to Obama and America, after so vociferously accusing the Brits of meddling that they've pretty much quit the country (we've not been there officially since Iran's "students" gave our embassy staff the invitation to stay indefinitely).

He has no other choice, really.  As the spokesmodel for a totalitarian theocracy, his job is to keep the people in a constant state of fear, and thus the state constantly at war.  There's just no good explanation for the direct experiences and subsequent posts, tweets, and vids of violent repression unless:

1. The victims were really the perpetrators, and
2. The government was protecting everyone else

It's wacky logic, but it's nothing new.  The Nazis and Soviets used the strategy to turn much of the 20th Century into a mindless bloodbath.  The North Koreans are doing it right now, as are many of the more petty, but no less evil dictators who haunt the people of Africa.

It's a social strategy, too, in that it depends not as much on enforcement as it does on complicity; sure, there are the KGB, brownshirts, and Basij thugs who carry and use the guns and clubs, but it's the wider, general awareness of their existence that vests a citizenry in tolerating, and thereby maintaining, the Status Quo.  A specific instance of violence or other crime becomes less shocking because people sort of knew it could happen, or that it had already happened before.

This makes them at least passive supporters of a regime, in that they share a risk that any revelation of its crimes would reveal their guilt, too, whether prosecutable, or simply moral.  They might be desensitized to the evil, but they are unable to disassociate themselves from it. 

This is how dictatorships socialize their control.

This explains why all the tweets documenting the horrible events in Iran didn't really change anybody's actions, and why Ahmadinejad's lastest mad rants probably will: neither is a surprise.  Both fit into the ongoing narrative that everyone already knew.  Sure, terrible things happened, but foreign agitators were behind it.  They had to be. 

There's a bigger social milieu that goes beyond the mechanisms of chatting and sharing also explains why conversation itself is powerless to change this sort of Status Quo, irrespective of how advanced or engaging the social tools might be.  People can't talk themselves out of it.  Only force works, either directed from outside (as in the Allies bombing Germany into rubble, so it simply couldn’t fight anymore), or inside (the Soviet system no longer able to feed, clothe, or house its people).

From what I hear, the economics within Iran are not good, so maybe it's inching toward a collapse a la East Germany.  Depressed oil prices are probably far more important to the future of that country than Twitter or Facebook.  

Are We Serving Conversation?

Consider this: conversation is to selling what cooking is to eating. 

Process.

Not ingredients, nor consumption. 

How, not what. 

You wouldn't know it from the hype and confusion that surrounds the social media space, though.  Conversation is an absolute good, an ideal that, once achieved, spins off numerous lesser benefits.  It's a synonym for selling.  If only our businesses talked to consumers more often, the brands would be strengthened, and the bottom-lines improved.

Well, I've had some conversations in the last week with marketers -- my consumers -- that really made my stomach churn. 

It seems that lots of them buy into a Conventional Wisdom that goes something like this:

• Consumers have rejected the distribution methods we once used to sell stuff to them; they don't like ads, and they want to do much more talking and creating, and less of the watching, listening, or obeying that once constituted our approach of telling them why they should care about our brands
• So we have to migrate our efforts to new, conversational media, in which we no longer sell our brands, per se, but encourage people to talk about our branding.  They will propagate our marketing by their very act of being social, and our active engagement with them has a benefit that replaces our old-fashioned efforts at declaring benefits
• This POV doesn't stop with marketing; we can't really talk about social media without reconfiguring the way our entire companies do business.  So we aren't just stopping the crude selling our marketing used to deliver.  We need to get everyone else in the enterprise to change what they do, too

More than a few times last week, I suggested that while this was such an uber-cool new perspective on the cosmos, didn't we have get back to selling stuff?  One marketing expert told me "if you try to sell stuff, you won't."

Humm.

I asked another friend "does it make sense to tell your entire organization it has to change before you can sell something?" to which she responded "social media are transformative, so there's no other choice."

Ah.

I challenged a third contact that maybe consumers hadn't rejected the media of traditional ad distribution -- as they're behaving the same inert watching and consuming on YouTube and Twitter that they once did via broadcast TV -- but rather that they'd just given up on all the branding nonsense we'd thrown at them.  They didn't like ads because we'd stopped telling them stuff that mattered.

"No, today's consumers are different," he replied.

I get it.  The world is different, and marketers have to reconfigure their entire organizations, and redefine everything they themselves once did.  Only then will the ultimate purpose and benefit -- sales -- emerge from their efforts. 

I'm seeing lots of cooking.  Great recipes.  Inventive combinations.  Creative names for new dishes. 

Only have the cooks forgotten to stay focused on the ingredients, and neglected to figure out if anybody wants to eat what they're cooking?

The Last Shuttle

Boeing has just delayed test flights of its new 787 Dreamliner, and we should pay attention to what's going on, so we can tell our grandchildren: like NASA's space shuttle, this aircraft is the last of its breed. 

The 787 has at least three determinants of extinction written into its DNA:

First, its design.  The 787 is the most complex airplane ever conceived, which defies even the most basic paradigm of design science: solutions should get simpler over time, not more complicated.  Creating a new flying machine isn't the same as, say, improving the reliability of a coffeemaker, or even finding ways for car models to share platform parts.  But the physics of flight haven't changed since the Universe was created, let alone the first 777 rolled off the assembly line.  This new plane should do all the things it needs to do more effectively and efficiently, shouldn’t it? 

Now, it probably will also do a lot of things that previous models didn't do, and this raises an intriguing question regarding the viability of manufacturing complex technology products.  The space shuttle was outdated the minute the first one arrived at Cape Canaveral; of the many things it did, many could have been done better (and cheaper), combined thereupon, or delegated to handheld and/or ground-based operation.  There's a math here that suggests

• The more things a device tries to accomplish means
• The more complicated it becomes, which
• Makes its creation take longer (from inception to delivery), and
• Heightens the risk said creation will be outdated and overly costly by the time it arrives (not to mention more prone to failures)

My prediction is that the 797 will do less than the 787, not more.

Second, its production.  While qualifying as a manufacturing job rivaling the Tower of Babel in its complexity, Boeing chose to model its production after the Biblical story, and outsourced manufacturing to disparate locations around the world. 

I know.  It sounds insane, and probably only appeared sensible on some management consultant slides that reduced the distances between factories in Seattle and Outer Mongolia to nothing more than a VOIP chat.  Making an airplane is a tough, exacting deal on a good day -- and in one place -- and the experience of trying to manage and then assemble pieces from all over the world has proven to be a major obstacle for Boeing (and why the plane is already behind schedule).

Think of what it'll do to maintenance.  With more parts and systems relying on a greater variety of sources could mean that keeping the things flying will be a challenge.  I'm all for a full-employment act for airline unions, but I wonder if the carriers are fully prepared for what that workload might entail.  I'm sure Boeing is getting ready, because it senses a lot of profit in that work.  The smart money would be on the 797 having fewer "moving parts," both literally and figuratively.

Thirdly, the marketplace.  Let's face it, air travel as an activity has less promise than it ever had before.  Whether environmental impact, cost, inconvenience, or the ready availability of alternate means of communication ("hello, avatar, meet mine"), the world isn't going to need passenger planes like it once did.  Of course there will always be a need for them -- and lots of aging planes the need to get replaced -- but there are also a number of new options for those requirements: commuter jets. 

The 787 represents the pinnacle of achievement for a big, highly complex, massively difficult maintenance approach to building technology gizmos. 

I suspect it will never be topped. 

What Comes After Innovation?

For all of you dim bulbers who are students of business fads and buzzwords, I think we're about to witness one of the major turning points in our chosen field of dabble:

"Innovation" is about to get replaced with something else.  I don't know what it is, or when it'll happen, exactly.  But I can just feel it.  Can you?

Innovation has had a great run, mostly because it's so gloriously vague; in fact, it has a conflict inherent in its definition, as "to innovate" is to try to somehow update something that's already established.  That old/new thing is manna from heaven for a business fad because such dichotomies scream out for endless explanations, amplifications, and projects that require complicated gantt project management charts to describe what defies simple, declarative sentences.

Companies have been challenged on innovation much the same way as comrades in the Soviet Union were dared to be patriots.  It was never an end result that could be measured, but rather an aspirational ideal, pursued via an incessantly variable process that was never properly realized, or thereafter durable. 

Like party officials, a generation of management consultants and business school grads made a comfortable living lecturing companies on innovation and, like all really good buzzwords, companies incorporated it into their values, mission statements, messaging, and the other subtle strains of branding nonsense.  A generation of middle-managers had their job descriptions rewritten so they could focus on educating and monitoring their fellows on their innovation-ness.

Only now, most of the those middle-managers have been let go; companies large and small are well along dismantling the Berlin Wall of Innovation -- separating the purity of business fad from the realities of the marketplace -- because, like their brethren in East Germany, they effectively awoke one morning to see that there was no there there.  Lives aren't better.  Stuff doesn't get sold more often, or more profitably, just like all those mock-heroic propaganda posters couldn't distract a population from the unpleasant reality of their lives.   

What we're left with are the empty concrete high-rises, and the drab mediocrity of balance sheets leaden with a has-been fad. 

Innovation was never a stand-alone philosophy, religion, or management approach, any more than globalization, outsourcing, or customer-centricity.  It was simply the catchy patina of insight and poetry that smart marketers -- in academia, and in the services vendors who feed in the wake of its affirmation -- applied to the boringly constants and unsexy truths of business management. 

God forbid Harvard Business School or McKinsey admitted that the keys to effective competitive business strategy now were no different than they were 100 years ago; the details have changed, but that's the stuff of vocational training.  And there's no serious money in that business.

So as companies today are reevaluating the resources they commit to pursuing innovative purity, I'm sure the gurus are dreaming up the next fad and commensurate buzzword.  My pick: collaboration.  All the nonsense of social media -- from the technology, to the social and as-yet incomprehensible economics -- seems just tailor-made for something far more than a marketing department experiment.

Companies will get lectured on its importance above all else.  Graduate courses will be taught, and expert consultants will create immense slides and charts on what it means.  Perhaps the next generation of employees, though a smaller group, will get their lives committed to this higher ideal.  Everyone will focus on enabling it the "right" way.

Come to think of it, that's innovation!

Amazon’s Ad Contest

Amazon has announced a competition for customers to create their own 30-second video commercials for the brand.  Two winners will each get $10,000 Amazon.com Gift Cards, and their work will be screened at "a U.S. film festival." 

Forget for a moment that the whole point of a social media campaign like this isn't to create the ads themselves -- in Amazon's case, it has never needed ads of any kind before, and isn't likely going to get particularly good ones from the crowd anyway -- but rather to use the promotion to get the attention of a wider, non-UGC-creating audience. 

So do you think anybody cares about it?  The announcement got picked up in PR-Inside.com, the virtual ghost of the Seattle PI, and the leading source of the best ways to waste marketing dollars, Brandweek.  As of last weekend, there were a whopping 13 posts in the company’s forum on the topic.

I'm surprised that Amazon would do something so dull, but then again, it often does things that are really smart.  While other businesses are "experimenting" with the conversational thing by prompting consumer conversations about conversing, Amazon has been quietly building dialogs based on its core function: recommending and selling books.  Instead of running ads to make the usual brand promises, it has made its browsing and purchasing functionality just shy of perfect (at least compared to the messy, uneven experiences available at bricks-and-mortar retailers).

The branding we get from Amazon is all about doing things at the site, not trying to frame or describe them.  It knows that the conversation aspect of business arises from the conduct of commerce, not parallel or separate from it.  Its site isn't the most beautiful, but it simply works beautifully.  This is directionally relevant knowledge for all brands, not just those that retail online.

Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't lots of opportunities for Amazon to do fun, engaging marketing.  I can think of at least three ways it could have conducted a UGC ad contest that would have been far better grounded in the reality and strength of its brand:

First, why not challenge reader communities to create ads for various genres?  Get mystery fans to produce a spot, and sci-fi readers another.  People usually feel strongly for their favorite sort of books, and are interested in sharing their obsessions with one another.  The resulting commercials could be redundantly similar, or diverge so wildly in content and/or construction that they could come from different companies.  Who'd care?  The point would be to get lots of readers involved, and use that engagement to possible attract potential readers who might get drawn to the Amazon platform by a genre interest vs. a generic one.

Second, why video and the outdated convention of a TV commercial?  It's kind of like the early Ford Motor Co. hosting a competition for the best horse riding.  Considering its aspirations for the Kindle Reader, how about a UGC contest for every historic media distribution tool?  Celebrate its digital book transmission with spots celebrating radio, kinescopes, dauggerotype photos, even print set by linotype?  What about hand-drawn and decorated pages on vellum?  This would position digital at the end of some historical path, and probably produce really interesting stuff.  Make history the topic, not just personal expressions of the company's branding.

Finally, wouldn't the cool challenge be to write something cool and compelling about a company that sells books?

How about those genre fans collaborate on a crowdsourced short story or something? Conversely, it could be a competition to scribble "the perfect sentence."  Think poetry, or a variety of written art forms.  This UGC would be a lot easier to update and share, and lots more people could get involved.  Why not allow every purchaser to contribute (or give shoppers a minimal discount if they pitch in)?

I suspect Amazon's ad contest is the result of them just not being good at doing this sort of nonsense, which is a credit to their business model.  But that doesn't mean there aren't ways to make it work.