Jonathan Salem Baskin's Dim Bulb

Bright Lights Project -- Aon

Aon, a large insurance broker headquartered about 20 minutes from my house in the suburbs north of Chicago, announced earlier this month that it is moving its corporate headquarters to London. Company execs were quoted saying that the move was intended to “reinforce the global connectivity of the firm” by moving its leadership closer to the emerging markets it serves and London insurance hub with which it works.

Of course, it’s a lie, only in the spirit of many corporate announcements: It’s plausibly true, and was probably relevant at some stage in the decision-making process (versus contending with a relocation to, say, the top of a mountain in Tibet, which would make conducting business more difficult).

The UK government recently liberalized its tax law -- something called the “controlled foreign companies” taxation regime -- that lets companies based in London drastically lower tax payments on foreign profits. If Aon is headquartered there, its sales in the US as well as in those emerging markets will be considered foreign income.

So it’s a scheme for the company to keep more of the money it earns. The Chicago Tribune reports that relocating execs are getting paid exorbitant amounts of money to ease their transition to life in London (move allowances, help with rental or mortgage payments, transportation assistance, etc.). There must be a whole lot of tax savings pegged to stay in Aon’s bank accounts.

Wouldn’t it be great if it simply told everyone the truth?

The closest CEO Greg Case to come to admitting it was to say that “...the fundamental driver behind this decision was strategic.” What does that mean? It means he had a compelling financial reason to choose London over Chicago, but doesn’t have the respect for his customers or critics to say so. Boeing did something similar when it relocated to Chicago, claiming it was to build a larger business (whatever that means) instead of admitting it was escaping its unions, and benefitting from huge tax breaks.

Issuing half-truths or overt lies seems so needless when it comes to corporate relocations, especially since the financial deals underlying them are usually knowable from regulatory filings or city development reports. If the entities moving make good to their abandoned staff, the whole shebang is sad for the region losing the jobs but balanced by the place that’s getting them. Business involves making tough decisions (companies choose, ignore, and fire vendors and suppliers of every stripe every day). Relocating offices or factories is one of them. We all get it.

So why lie? I think it makes the execs feel better, somewhat, as they repeat the public rationale enough perhaps to believe it. It also fits in with standard marketing and branding canon: Say it and it will be so. Touting some minor benefit of moving as the major benefit is not too far removed from promoting brand attributes that are ephemeral, imagined outright, or also simply not true. Marketers do it all the time.

And then they wonder why consumers don’t believe much of anything marketers say to them.

If Aon followed the bad advice of lying about its corporate move when it didn’t have to, I’ve got to wonder what else it fibs about. How many of the press releases it issued over the past month (or years) contained half-truths or purposefully obfuscated the truth? How many other companies are similarly afflicted? Could there be a disbelief discount that is factored into its stock price, or a fibbing factor that potential clients or partners charge the company when they analyze Aon’s pitches or promises? I bet there is.

I don’t have three bullet points ideas about what Aon could do to remedy this situation, other than tell the truth. Not just this time, but all the time.

Yuck

Sam Adams is crowdsourcing a limited edition beer. It’s bad marketing and even dumber business strategy.

It evidences standard practice for social promotions these days, though, so I’m sure the company will get industry praise for it. It's based on two of the core tenets of social marketing, in that 1) digital media have empowered consumers to know and do pretty much everything, and 2) consumers want to have ongoing conversations with brands.

Both premises are false, and the Sam Adams beer promo is a good example of why.

First, most people will never know most things let alone be expert at more than a few things about anything in particular. Access to the world wide web is immensely empowering and informative but I think we marketers have grossly overstated the qualities of knowledge or skill that might come with that access. Patients can certainly research medical information but they can’t necessarily (or reliably) vet the useful from the inane, and their conclusions shouldn’t replace those of a doctors. Same goes for the law or accounting, not to mention designing cars or rocket ships. Or beer.

There might be one out of a hundred (or fewer) Sam Adams customers who know enough about beer to actually propose its ingredients, but the overwhelmingly vast number of consumers are expert only in drinking it.

So the company will end up with a good beer that involved a minuscule number of its customers, at best, or an undrinkable swill, at worst and most likely.

This crowdsourcing thing is also bad news for the brand overall. Isn’t Sam Adams supposed to know how to make beer? Strip away all of the emotional and other associative benefits that brand experts see the company attaching to its brand and aren’t you left with, well, ingredients, brewing expertise, and distribution? Forget what the brand stands for and consider what it stands upon.

The company’s marketers are happy to throw away this once rock-solid platform in exchange for the glib, throw-away benefits of telling the world that a collection of strangers can do it as well or better.

I just don’t get it.

Well, I do get it when I consider the bill of goods that brands have been sold when it comes to social engagement: The pitch is that consumers want to talk to brands (and tell them what to do, more than occasionally), so brands have to come up with ongoing ways to do so. Brands have voices that are now translatable into actual images and words positioned on social technology platforms as prompts or responses to the images and words posted by consumers. Conversations are the replacement for one-way advertising and other marketing tools that used to tell consumers things...that they then went about talking and having conversations about thereafter (in-person, on the phone, and any other way people used to converse before Facebook and Twitter claimed to own the idea).

By focusing on the mechanism of conversation and not its substance, brands are missing the real truth and power of peer-to-peer technology.

Since consumers always had conversations -- and always used them as the basis for gaining, vetting, and then making their purchase decisions -- the availability of real-time and ubiquitous information is a change, for sure, but it doesn’t change the nature of conversation itself. People talk to other people. Always did, always will.. So when brands come up with ways to pretend that brands can talk too, like just other consumers with particular opinions or points of view, they’re actually they’re actually choosing to provide less meaningful content into those conversations.

You see, people talk about brands, not with them.

So every tidbit of nonsense the social media marketers create to occupy space in conversations fills a space that could have been filled by something useful, meaningful, relevant, or -- gasp -- related to making a sale. When Sam Adams chooses to talk to consumers as if it were just another participant in the conversation, it loses the opportunity to insert something into the conversation that might actually benefit the participants.

Brands don’t have voices as much as consumer voice their feelings and opinions about brands.

Here’s a simple test to consider if you don’t agree: imagine if Sam Adams didn’t conduct its beer-making social campaign. Would anybody miss it? I hate to get all utilitarian on you but if brands can’t think of something meaningful to say to consumers, why should they say anything at all?

Sam Adams should stick to expertly making great brews that it sells to consumers expertly. As for this campaign and the beer it’ll create, all I can say is:

Yuck.

(Image credit: the patriotic brewer)

Bright Lights Project - Standard & Poor's Rating Services

Standard & Poor’s is one of three major American rating agencies (Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investor Services are the others). They’re in the business of assessing risk of various financial instruments and the reliability of the companies and governments that issue or trade them, and their ratings affect both investor interest and the prices paid for said financial paper.

Last week S&P lowered the rating of France and Austria by a notch, just like it did to the US last year. It reduced the ratings of seven other European countries by two ticks.

I can’t believe the world didn’t laugh out loud.

To say that the ratings these agencies produce are vague, biased, and regularly incorrect business would be an understatement. Remember, these are the folks who were as surprised as the rest of us by the mortgage meltdown. They rely on the companies they monitor for their funding, which would be at least a slight hint of conflict of interest in any other industry. The ratings schemes themselves are so complicated and nuanced that they make the government’s Threat Level rankings a paragon of clarity, which allows them to claim retroactively that they noted things, they sort of, kind of.

S&P and their ilk are foxes guarding the hen house, at best, and inmates running the asylum more like it. The only reason anybody gives them any credence is that they assume everybody else does. It’s a giant house of cards. OK, enough of the cliches. You get my point.

The ratings moves last week tell us nothing new or important, but rather reflect the fact that those European countries have been making bad governance decisions for, oh, more than a decade. It’s like S&P announced that the US just landed astronauts on the Moon.

Ratings agencies are an artifact of a distant past when we gave authority to opaque institutions and couldn’t see or track what they did with our trust. Only now we can see...all too clearly. In my inexpert opinion the days of S&P and the others are numbered. Disagree? Who’d yourather trust: A ratings agency in bed with the company it rates via secret processes and incomprehensible code words, or a handful of inspired twentysomethings armed with an Internet connection and the mandate to discover wrongdoing or patterns of concern?

S&P needs to discover new sources of credibility that warrant our trust, and it’s not impossible to do. Here are three thought-starters:

• Become Truly Neutral -- It will never be credible for ratings agencies to rate companies that in any way contribute to them financially, even indirectly. Full stop. Maybe they each contribute funds to create an endowment that is henceforth independent of their slightest influence? I know there are probably a zillion arguments why financial institutions would never do it, but that should be a not-so subtle hint that it’s EXACTLY why they need to do something like it. I’m sure there are other funding models that would get to the same outcome.

• Simplfy The Metrics -- I’m sorry, but I can’t fathom the difference between a rating of “AAA” and “AAA-,” and I’d bet good money that nobody else can, either. It’s just that a routine has built up around such nonsense so there’s a dollar figure attached to each incremental change. But that is derivative measure; it doesn’t tell us anything substantive or original about the underlying financial tool. Why not figure out how to risk being somewhat or wholly right or wrong on analyses sometimes instead of being always right and wrong at the same time?

• Embrace Transparency -- Ultimately it’s not the ratings themselves that possess any authority or credibility but the way the agencies get to them. So why not figure out how to involve as many inputs into the methodologies as possible -- from the specifically qualified, like expert analyses, to the crowdsourced trolling that the rest of us do online -- and then publish it? The proprietary value would be in S&P’s ability to pull it off, not dream up the list.

I am regularly dumbfounded that the financial services industry keeps getting away with propagating nonsense to the world and the world pretty much takes it at face value. The problem is that much of it, and these ratings in particular, possess no real value at all. S&P could change the game if it wanted, but I guess it sees no reason to. Maybe it has assessed its own business using the same brilliant tools is used to discover that those European countries weren’t worth what they claimed.

Stay tuned. I’d expect the ratings agencies to announce shortly that the stock market crashed in 2000.

Invent New Sports

There’s been little to no snow this winter, which has been a gift to those of us who commute in America’s northernly cities but an absolute existential disaster for ski resorts. You just can’t make enough snow (or keep making it fast enough) to come anywhere close to providing the sort of skiing experiences that most skiers expect. I can slide down ice in my driveway with no pricey lift ticket required.

This season could be a fluke, as there’ve been rotten snowfall tallies in years past, but what if it’s the shape of things to come? While folks continue to happily declare whether or not they believe in global climate change, the global climate seems to be changing: chunks of the polar ice cap are falling off and melting; droughts are plaguing normally less dry regions; severe weather seems to be getting more severe and frequent; species of insects and birds are either thriving or dying out thanks to changed temperature norms measured by only a few degrees.

So what if the snow isn’t going to be all that great at our nation’s ski slopes next year, or the year thereafter? Even if it does return doesn’t this year’s miasma reveal a core weakness in the ski resort business model, and suggest that doing something about it might make sense? I think so. I think it’s time to do some brand extending.

If you take snow out of the equation, it turns out that ski resorts are left with quite a lot of really great assets, from beautiful scenery to usable accommodations. So why not get to work right now on things like:

• Invent new sports -- Downhill skiing didn’t emerge naturally from the mountain tops. Somebody looked at snowy inclines and had to invent it, and then lots of people adapted and improved it. Why not come up with new activities that better suit today’s circumstances? My one idea is something that unites zip lines and rider choice, so you have to make split-second decisions at Y junctures as you careen down the mountainside. I know there are lots better ideas.

• Create facilitated experiences -- Resorts are great places for families and groups to congregate and do things...many different things...so why couldn’t the resorts create specific facilitated experiences, like art weekends or science fiction adventures? Sundance used to do this with art and theatre programs during the summer, and it was hugely fun. Think Disney activity cruise only in the mountains. And better.

• Host UGVs (“User-Generated Vacations”) -- Maybe the absolute opposite of facilitated vacations would work, in that resorts could offer potential guests a laundry list of activities (from outdoor active to indoor relaxation, and from groups to solitary exploration) and then craft custom user-generated vacations. They could differentiate themselves by level of expertise and attention to detail in crafting such activities.

Could Whistler be the place for science adventures? Jackson Hole the destination for families interested in nature? What about swinging singles? I dunno.

There are probably a lot more and better ideas to contemplate, and perhaps the resorts are already doing so. It’s just that sitting on your hands and waiting for it to snow isn’t a business strategy. I’m surprised we haven’t already heard of such invention from them.

(Image credit: from the Heyday)

Bright Lights Project - The Consumer Electronics Show

The 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show ("CES") started two days ago in Las Vegas. Close to 150,000 people are milling around almost 2 million square feet of exhibition space filled with thousands of displays. Every device imaginable is playing, broadcasting, or otherwise beeping. Mainstream media types are trying to figure out what it all means. Bloggers have been flown there and often hired by companies so they can spontaneously tell the mainstream folks what’s what.

If you ever wondered what a doomed brontosaurus looked like as it struggled for its life in a tar pit that would eventually consume it, you need look no further than CES.

It could take many years and occur unevenly, with bad years followed by marginally good ones. But the only real reason CES has survived this long has less to do with its own success and more to do with the failure of its competition. There used to be other national shows (like COMDEX), many regional, and endless local trade events at which makers of stuff -- in this case, electronics, but also in most other industries in which stuff is manufactured -- used to get together with potential distributors and sellers to promote their wares. In a world of snail mail and expensive airfares, it made sense to bring everyone together now and then to disseminate information and cut deals.

Those days are long gone, as are those other electronics trade shows that used to vie for attention. CES is simply the last party left standing (which is similar to Best Buy’s strategy on the retailing side).

No company has to be at the show, and its attendance numbers hide the fact that major industry movers (like Apple) don’t show there. Microsoft has announced it is pulling out after this year. The very idea that any brand should structure and time its new product announcements to gibe with the event schedule is not only broken but ineffective; in an era when we can tell anybody anything anytime, CES is a stupid anachronism. I’ve spoken privately to huge, global brands that hate having to reveal products in January that won’t ship until the spring or later.

The propaganda value of CES is also faulty, at best. Not only do a number of promised  ‘big’ products announced there go on to utter failure in the marketplace, but the event always throws out some wanna-be fantasy of what electronics retailing should be, in the hopes that the consuming public will buy it. New music playing configurations, 3D TV, and the annual “networked home” blather get presented as somehow insightful when they’re really overtly presumptive sales pitches (if I hear about tablet computers one more time, I think I'm going to puke). The idea that any industry can get together to tell us what we should care about (and spend our money on) are long gone.

Its organizers must know that the very model of hosting such a gig is no longer valid. But it doesn’t have to be doomed. The key is transforming it into a truly two-way conversation. Here are three thought-starter ideas:

• A giant new product dev focus group -- Maybe people attend the event to participate in real studies, interviews, or other exchanges about what they expect or want in devices and performance? CES could figure out the mechanics for making these attendees available to manufacturers or other sell-side entities. This could also lay the foundation for conversations that extended far prior and post-event, but otherwise transforming CES into the event at which the world tells the consumer electronics industry what it wants, and not the place at which the industry tells the world what it should do.

• A networking event, only for real -- Anybody who owns more than one electronics device knows that the 800 lb. gorilla in the room is connectivity followed closely by service. More and more devices have multiple parents (my iPhone has at least three players behind it, between Apple, AT&T, and GoDaddy, and that’s not counting a single app). Yet few of the exhibitors at CES have done much to figure out how their offerings fit in with one another; they’ve all bought shared space at an event in which they make separate presentations. Why couldn’t CES take responsibility for sussing out how things work together and build that into the messaging?

• Certify products and attendees -- The ugly underside of the consumer electronics industry is that people really don’t need most of the stuff, especially the regular upgrades and many of the peripherals and add-ons that crowd the exhibition halls at CES. There’s an even larger universe of people who play a role in the industry, from sales folks and new product developers, to one-timer entrepreneurs and all those guys from Asia who get stuffed into the “international” hall and get deprived of oxygen. What if CES took responsibility for analyzing and somehow publicly ranking both the people and the stuff they make or touch. Give everyone and everything a record that is searchable and reliable. Build an open community, based on facts, to which everyone would want to belong and use.

I really do see a chance for the consumer electronics industry to be radically engaging and transparent. CES could have a future, but it would look dramatically different than the show presently underway in Vegas. My gut tells me, unfortunately, that they’ll stick with what they know best for a long as the dinosaur can keep its head above the tar.

CES is an 1950‘s era trade show. It’s 2012, and people are there now to tell one another what they’re supposed to do, and the media will hype whatever they’re told to hype.

And then the rest of us will go out and buy whatever Apple introduces next.

What do you think?

(Image credit: when trade shows meant something)

Here's to the Dreamers!

I suggested in my column in Advertising Age last week that all of the hoopla over Super Bowl ads didn’t do the advertising business a service, primarily because it values commercials that are entertaining (self-consciously so) vs. intended to sell products or build substantive branded relationships. I said that doing so doesn't promote the idea that advertising is a reliable, meaningful way to communicate, but pretty much comes off like a circus.

Most folks (like 100+) seemed to agree with my assessment, though some tweets simply teed-up my essay with a “what do you think?” added before the link, and most of the half-dozen or so comments posted following my story argued vociferously in favor of Super Bowl ads.

One of them, from somebody named Tim McMahon in Omaha, Nebraska, made a very impassioned case for them, declaring that ads can and should be forces for change...business, cultural, you name it. He said that I made a cogent business argument for why ads should actually sell stuff, but qualified it to be “...like so many things that are rational and well reasoned and flow from the CMO’s suite...IT’S WRONG!”

The thing is, I don’t disagree with him. I just think we’re talking about two very different things.

Well, almost, but let me get that out of the way first. He cited the usual squishy math to make the very cases he said weren’t necessary to make: The Apple “1984” ad helped Apple to grow into a successful brand; “Made in Detroit” from Chrysler led to sales that were “off the charts; VW’s “Darth Vader” spot had 47 million views on YouTube, which qualifies as great ROI.

Not quite. As I said in my column, making such claims -- which lack any causal connection to the results they cite -- is like saying ads should take credit for the rising and setting of the sun. There’s no proof whatsoever that “Made in Detroit” on the Super Bowl sold any cars, or even how it factored into the overall campaign, considering it was aired all over the place (and Chrysler did some brilliant car-making and dealer communicating). Ditto for the Vader spot, which I’d argue the vast majority of viewers couldn’t even tell you whether it came from VW, Chrysler, or a floor wax brand. And Apple’s iconic spot introduced product shortages, performance issues (no software), and a thousand-dollar price rise to try and manage the mismanagement before Steve Jobs was forced out of the company for having shown such poor leadership.

So I think Mr. McMahon should skip trying to make the business case for Super Bowl ads and stick to his stronger, more meaningful point:

They’re not supposed to sell anything.

To him, as for many people who share his views (I suspect, that is), advertising is about culture. It’s about changing the way people think, feel, and see the world around them. Great ads do a great job of contributing art to our lives; they’re “lightening in a bottle, and when done right...have staying power.” Great ads change the way companies think about themselves, as he give credit to a one-timer ad Duraliner ran on the Super Bowl in 1986 for the company’s invention of a profitable new product category. Ads become part of our cultural history, ongoing dialog, and the way we see our collective and individual futures.

Big, creative ads have squishy ROI by design, and demanding anything more from them usually impedes their invention and reduces their true return. Big ads are little movies, works of art, and/or songs. Anything as crassly commercial as selling comes sometime afterwards, at least when it comes to the really big ones that run as Super Bowl spots.

I agree with him. It’s just that he's not describing advertising. And I just can’t fathom why any business would be dumb enough to pay for it.

Businesses change the world through the function of their businesses, not the creative invention of their marketers. Apple’s daring brilliance wasn’t a TV commercial but the icon-driven GUI of the early Macintosh computers (not to mention the iTunes/iPod integration that came a generation later). Chrysler’s renaissance wasn’t properly or completely narrated by an ad but instead realized in the manufacture and retailing of a new generation of vehicles. VW...well, I’m not sure what it has accomplished, other than produced a really cute ad that I didn’t know was theirs until Mr. McMahon reminded me.

Selling things and changing the way people live is the true cultural contribution of commerce, not the limited view of those behaviors afforded to us by advertising. The operations of businesses are where the real creation, risk, and passion occur. Advertising's role is to mirror this, and to make it accessible for folks outside the enterprise to embrace and share.

The way they do that is through buying stuff, and then using it, not simply thinking fondly about it.

Nobody gets paid for producing a memorable cultural icon (see Apple in 1984), but everyone wants to reference them after the fact. When the evangelists of advertising creative celebrate image over commerce, and awareness over sales, they aren’t really talking about advertising anymore, but rather an art form that companies subsidize, sometimes inadvertently.

I have no argument with that. I love memorable ads. But I’d never recommend one to a client unless I could link it to a commercial outcome. Again, companies change the world by selling things to it. Real things, not just great ads (think less glorious cart and more enabling horse).

Mr. McMahon ended his comment with an exhortation of “...here’s the the Dreamers!” Again, I agree with him. I laud every business dreamer who wants to sell things and thereby change our culture and our lives. But if your Super Bowl ad doesn’t further that purpose -- sell -- I’d tell you to skip it. The world doesn't need a contrived celebration of marketers' self-love. It's not about how smart the ad people are who you pay to be smart. It's much more substantitive and culture-changing than that.

I’d miss the fun, but I’d rather your dream become reality, not just a memorable artifact and ad industry award-winner.

(Image credit: yeah, a big deal in retrospect)

Bright Lights Project - Mainstream Media

One of the places the idiotic “Free = Paid” financial model perpetrated by new media zealots first took hold was in the media business itself, perhaps because there was no obvious way to avoid it. Newspapers and magazines found themselves giving away the very substance of their existence much the same way looters yanking TVs through broken store windows represented a new financial model for electronics retailing.

It really didn’t matter what they did, though, since when anybody can write, record, or video stuff about anything and propagate it everywhere, it ensures that everything they create has a base value of zero (infinite supply = completely worthless, it turns out). Truth becomes an opinion, and "news" gets defined by whomever fels like defining it...or sells a technology platform to distribute it.

While the zealots celebrated this fact as an inherent quality of content and labeled anyone who disagreed (or who wanted to make a buck off of what they created) as dinosaurs of the Bad Old Era of One-Way Media Fascism, folks were still making money off of “free” media: They were called aggregators, not publishers, and some of them earned multi-million dollar deals for pulling together content they didn’t pay for creating, and then charging advertisers for putting their ads in front of the viewers who didn’t pay for looking at it. It was never free. What changed was who got paid for it.

Separately, the vast majority of amateur writers (including yours truly) continued to simply give their stuff away...not because it was free, per se, but because there was value in the conversations and opportunities it prompted. For us, Free = Other Value, and that’s not only OK but it provided cool new model for creators who didn’t have an outlet for their creations. But the new media myths that giving stuff away was smart business left most professional content creators high, dry, and penniless.

Only here we are at the start of 2012 and some of the most ancient animals in the media kingdom are charging again for their products. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times, for instance, have both figured out that if they’re going to go out of business it should be because they neglected to try to earn a living. This comes on the tails of Apple helping the music industry avoid extinction by attaching a pricetag to .mp3 downloads, and some interesting experimentation with paid TV apps.

Could it mean that there’s a future for the “Paid = Survival” model? I think so, and I see the key to realizing that success in a report last week concerning Rihanna and Advertising Age.

It seems that lots of new media sites picked up a story that an ad featuring her in her underwear qualified as the “sexiest” in a poll conducted by the ad industry magazine. Only there’d been no poll and the mag had run no such story.  But, in typical online fashion, each new site picked up the story from the last, repurposing the content to fill their pages of aggregated content without bothering to question or confirm that the story was true.

A “content mill” created it -- another new media invention that manages to monetize putting words into the ether, oddly enough -- and the technique of floating faux news stories to promote celebrities is as old as a promotion for movie starlet Rita Hayworth in the 1930s, according to this (unsubstantiated) story.

So I think therein lurks the future for mainstream media. Here are my three thought-starters:

• Provide Transparent Authority -- I remember working in the PR business back in the bad old days and getting so frustrated that journalists (not all) insisted on being, well, legitimate. Why couldn’t they just reprint the blather I’d written for my clients? Such principles and practices are at the core of what differentiates old or ‘real’ media from the newer simulacra, so why not do a far more explicit and complete job of marketing it? If I knew that the New York Times didn’t just deliver all the news fit to print but that it was always thrice-checked, details confirmed, or whatever, perhaps I’d better estimate its value.

• Quit Giving Opinions --  A corollary to vetting news the old fashioned way (being the diametric opposite of unfiltered, immediately-available content) would be to stop passing off opinion for news, or commentary for analysis. Again, opinions are cheap and common while carefully reasoned analyses are rare, and less of something means it could be worth more...if only the propagators had a clue how to market it. The ‘fact free’ zone in which the 2012 American Presidential campaign is being waged is a perfect example. Without any consistent context, readers, listeners and viewers each possess their own sets of ‘facts’ that are usually incompatible and often laughable.

• Promote What’s Uncomfortable -- The glib approach to creating content these days requires nothing more than a quickie survey of what consumers what to know -- new diets, celeb exposes, finding Hitler’s lost gold -- and then creating those stories for their consumption (or playing to their established biases in politics, science, etc.). When Thomas Jefferson said that he’d rather have a country without a government than without newspapers, it was because of the work the Fourth Estate does in identifying, exploring, and presenting stuff we didn't think to ask for, not playing to our most base and easy interests.

I see the growing likelihood of a mainstream media resurgence. It’ll need to be based on affirming the reasons why we need it, not just by it mimicking all of the wants that are satisfied by new media outlets. Format doesn’t matter, in my book (ER, tablet screen). “Free = Paid” isn’t dead because it never lived.

I say “Paid = Paid” could continue to make a comeback in 2012. What do you think?

(Image credit: a great online story)

Customers, Not Conversations

Kodak is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, turning to renting out space to tenants on its manufacturing campus, and shopping its 1000+ digital patents (selling intellectual property to stay in business is kind of like giving away your mind in order to stay sane).

The easy explanation for its downfall is that Kodak “missed” the digital tech that similarly caused Blockbuster to collapse. Of course, this isn’t true whatsoever. I can all but guarantee that Kodak’s leaders weren’t stupid, and that they saw that their industry was changing a generation ago. It likely hired McKinsey, BSG, and every other available management consultancy to help it build thick three-ringed binders full of viable business strategies intended to navigate those changes. Granted, you’d have to wade through all the consultantese gibberish about innovation and growth to get to the real stuff, but it was there, I’m sure of it. There was no idea shortage at Kodak.

It just couldn’t communicate its way out of a paper bag.

For all of the innovative thinking going on about digital imaging, printers, and other enhanced business models it was hoping to disrupt, or whatever. Kodak’s marketing was pedestrian, at best, and woefully negligent, at least most recently.

Its mainstream marketing was traditional to the point of irrelevance. Tag lines like “Take Pictures Further,” “Share Moments, Share Life,” and “A Kodak Moment” (the last of which dated from 1961) were catchy but had no legs, no motivational purpose for the brand other than being memorable. It looked good, like pictures, but there was nothing about the marketing that was uniquely Kodak, let alone uniquely prompting to purchase. Fuji or any other brand could say the exact same things. Smart agencies threw creative things at the company that matched the aspirations of its consultant-driven plans, and everyone hoped for the best. And got the worst.

Then came Kodak’s social media experimentation, which was just shy of criminal.

Starting in the mid-2000s, the company started getting heralded for its programs to engage, interact, and implement the other buzzwords favored by new media consultants. It delivered great brand successes using social media in its B2B business; got lots of friends on its Facebook page (even wrote a how-to about it); its international business social media manager was featured in a glowing profile; and its marketing chief was so successful in implementing all of it that he had to quit the company to write books, give speeches, and run a consultancy offering his wisdom to other businesses.

In other words, everyone responsible for Kodak’s social media strategy was brilliantly successful, perhaps best illustrated by a fawing piece in the New York Times about how the company was taking its “moment” tag line and socializing it by creating a technology platform and service for people to share digital pictures. The story gushed with references to the “emotional aspects of the brand” and that the campaign would “woo an archetypal consumer” by making Kodak’s brand equity “more contemporary.” The company was doing exactly what the experts told it to do, and described it exactly the way they were told.

And sales tanked.

How is it that the branding could be so successful and the business such a failure? It speaks to the disconnect between marketing, whether described as traditional or cutting-edge, and the realities of the marketplace.

No real communities were built. Nobody really cared, as nothing the company was providing to the marketplace really mattered. All of the customers engaged in the various campaigns weren’t really involved beyond a passing click or forward. They had no vested interest in the company or its continued existence. It was easy, quick, and pointless. The “social” coming out of Kodak wasn’t really “social” at all. It was just bad marketing.

Imagine instead if Kodak had addressed the challenge of true engagement, and come up with ways to enlist communities that would have had a direct impact on its sales success….so less new media genius, and more integrated business strategy:

• Could Kodak have become a company that truly belonged to its customers through the products and services it offered? 

• Could it have defined a new model for operationalizing all of those great management consultant plans, and used social tools to do different, meaningful, and sustainable things with and for its stakeholder groups? 

• Could its social media strategy been synonymous with its business strategy?

The management challenge wasn’t to innovate, per se, but to see the reality of the situation and address it. The company got lots of innovation, but none of it mattered. Maybe things were destined to turn out this way no matter what it did, but what it chose to do certainly didn’t help change or forestall that outcome. The marketplace demanded real innovation if Kodak was to survive, but instead it got generic, throwaway nonsense.

What a waste. So while all of the architects of this failure go on to promote such stuff for other businesses, we marketers should use this sorry tale to ask ourselves a question:

It’s about customers, not conversations, right?

(Image credit: more than a brand)

Bright Lights Project - 2012

Do you make New Year resolutions? I do, and I generally stick to a good number of them, though never completely or consistently. Being an irritatingly hopeful person on most days during the year, this Sunday is my chance to shift my natural inclinations into overdrive. I’m going to drink less alcohol, eat more fruit and vegetables, be a better husband and dad, finish the play I’ve been writing for the past decade, do great work for clients and, well, generally strive to do everything next year I’ve been striving to do this year, only with enhanced strivation.

Maybe I’m missing something by being so self-centered? Maybe all of us should look beyond the comfortable confines of our bathroom mirrors and contemplate what we hope everyone else will resolve to do in 2012? Perhaps if we all think somewhat similar things, the collective force of our hopes for one another will actually prompt action (a sort of force in numbers kind of thing, a la morphic resonance).

Or it’ll just feel good to do.

So what would you propose the rest of humanity use as resolutions for 2012? Here are my three thought-starters:

• Be nicer. Perhaps this is my advancing decrepitude talking but don’t people seem more rude, hurried, or downright unpleasant than they used to be? I’m talking about all the small interactions that shouldn’t mean anything -- folks in line at Starbuck’s, driving on the freeway, sitting behind you at a movie theatre -- that now seem to be a drag, as if they’re meant to be constant reminders that we’ve surpassed the limitations of courtesy and the artificialities of good manners. We’re all the worse for it. I wish that everyone would resolve to show the slightest regard for strangers, not just reserving it for their immediate family and friends. Chew gum with their mouths closed. Close their cell phones when walking down grocery store aisles. Hold doors open for one another. Add up a zillion of such little gestures and you get a big improvement in the quality of our lives.

• Tuck in your shirts. I know it’s fashionable to dress like a human Weeble these days, but long, oversized, untucked shirts allow millions of Americans to overlook the fact that not being able to see their toes is a bad thing. Ditto for the many midriffs that should never be allowed to see the light of day. So one of my resolutions would be for everyone to tuck in their shirts. It would force some to realize just how overweight they are, and maybe inspire them to do something about it (which would remedy our collective financial responsibility for helping fund their individual lifestyle choices of fatness). I’d add my hope that those doofy pants that aren’t shorts or long pants (but something uncomfortably between the two lengths) would go away altogether, but the shirt thing would yield more immediate and visually apparent benefits.

• Say we more than me. The social media technology revolution has empowered all of us to declare our tastes, interests, and opinions on anything and everything. The ether is filled with what each of us wants to fill it with, creating an infinite number of shared spaces in which we express our individuality. But there’s a reason why Time magazine declared 2011 the year of protest...it’s easier to hold up our opinions or anger for concurrent comparison than it is to engage one another on issues on which we disagree, or which require collaborative action other than a complaint or mutual clicking of a “like” button. The rare times we learn of shared, proactive opinions is when mainstream journalists or politicians reference a generic “Americans” or “people” in order to make their own excruciatingly individual, personal points. We need less imaginary community and more real ones, so I say everyone resolve to stop griping and start cooperating.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. New Year’s resolutions have a far higher likelihood of coming true if they’re simple goals, not some stretch goals that have eluded our grasp in years prior. I think the three I’ve proposed for the entire human race are quite sensible.

Come to think of it, I'm going to add them to my own list. So if you run into an old guy smiling as he holds the door open for you (while he's wearing his shirt tucked in), it might be me.

Happy New Year!

(Image credit: resolutions, resolutions)

What Happened to the War on Christmas?

Well, Christmas came and went yesterday in the United States of America, with nary a shot fired (well, except for that horrible shooting in Dallas, and violence in Nigeria and other places that marred the holiday). I’m not aware of any of the faithful here who were denied their rights to celebrate it openly (we attended a Catholic mass Saturday afternoon and it was standing-room only), and the far larger legions of folks committed to junking up the outsides of their houses with lights seemed undaunted. Anybody who wanted simply to swap gifts on Christmas morning without any conscious reference to religion was free to do so.

So what happened to the War on Christmas?

There never was one, of course. It was the invention of a few Christian activist groups and Fox News, mostly, living up (or down) to the adage that nothing rallies the troops more than the threat of immediate danger. The conceit was that there’s a widespread and loosely organized conspiracy of atheists, pagans, anti-consumerists and political democrats intent on denying public acknowledgment of the holiday, and thereby ruining its private celebration. It fit into a larger narrative of an attack on Christian values overall, as if the occasional spat over nativity scenes or decorated trees on public grounds meant that the faithful were suppressed and their beliefs in danger.

It might have been good for fundraising and viewership, but nothing could be further from the truth. And we should be thankful for the facts that back it up.

First, separation of church and state works and is particularly friendly to the religious. America is the most overtly religious nation on the planet, and by a long shot: a whopping 83% belong to a religious denomination and the lion’s share are Christians. 40% go to a church service every day and more than half say that they pray weekly. One poll has nearly 8 in 10 Americans believing that angels walk among us, and a recent Baylor University survey said that almost three-fourths of its respondents believed that God not only has a personal plan for them, but takes an active role in guiding the future of the country.

Talk about fixing something that isn’t broken.

Many theories have been offered for why the U.S. has vastly more religious citizens than any other country, including those that mandate membership in a state religion upon birth (Brits and Swedes belong to a church by default). Choice is one of them, in that Americans are free to shop around for a religion they prefer, which makes them better “consumers.” Another possibility is that the utter absence of religiously-related actions by our government means that our religions stay untainted by the temporal machinations of our best and worst inclinations. Governments have the strange ability to sap the spirit out of everything they touch.

In other words, we’re religious because our public institutions assiduously avoid being so.

Second, if there ever was a War on Christmas, the Christians were the ones fighting it with one another. The issues were cultural, with Catholics choosing to sing carols and exchange gifts while Protestants chose to be a bit more somber about the whole affair, but things got pretty serious for long stretches of time. In fact, Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans cancelled Christmas when they came to power in England in 1645 (fining people for singing and gift-giving), and Pilgrims who settled America felt the same way. Christmas wasn’t celebrated in Boston from 1659 to 1681. Many “English” customs fell out of favor after the Revolution, including Christmas, so Congress met on the 25th like any other day once the Constitution was created in 1789. Christmas wasn’t even made a federal holiday until 1870. Non-believers had nothing to do with these battles.

Thankfully, the faithful no longer bicker over the appropriateness of decorated trees or the proper order of church services. They don't throw each other into prison, either. Yesterday, Americans were utterly free to commemorate the day in any way they chose, which included not commemorating it at all (going to see a movie instead, getting a jump on today’s work). We’ve had great divisions in our country that have often arose along religious dividing lines -- for centuries, the issues over which Protestants and Catholics were at bitter odds with one another spilled into economics and culture -- and we have them still.

But American Christians no longer fight over Christmas. I say that’s not just a cessation of hostilities but a true peace befitting the day’s meaning.

Third, how could there be a War on Christmas when so many of us depend on it? The American economy is dependent on consumers buying stuff, and there’s no more reliable time for them to do it than in anticipation of Christmas Day. Most retailers rely on holiday gift-buying to make their annual numbers -- the “Black Friday” sales day is named because it’s when they hope to shift their accounting ledgers from the red of losses to the black of profits -- just as most school kids and their families rely on two-weeks’ worth of mid-winter vacation to recharge their batteries.

So all Americans “celebrate” Christmas even if they do so begrudgingly or otherwise unconsciously. It doesn’t matter what the store signs say, or whether we choose to wish one another “merry Christmas,” “happy holidays,” or “glorious Festivus.” The outcome is the same and stays so year after year, probably because of the very facts that we don’t reply on official or overt recognition of the event, whether dictated by government or religious institution.

Yesterday was a chance to skip all the noise that sets we Americans at odds with one another, and overcome our fears of being embattled or disenfranchised. There are many wars underway in the world, and many of them affect us here at home in ways that are truly dangerous and frightening.

A War on Christmas isn’t one of them, and we sure don’t need to invent one. I hope everyone was able to see that yesterday, and perhaps enjoy at least one day of peace.

(Image credit: Back when the war was real)