Update: This post was supposed to post on MLK day last week, but I’ve been too busy to edit it until now. Just pretend that you’re reading it last Monday. Thanks :p

Advertising, an abridged history: In the begining there was branded packaging and it was awesome, then everyone started doing it and it wasn’t enough, so a few started doing print ads and traveling salesmen, but then everyone started doing print and that wasn’t enough, then radio happened and soap operas and radio ads started, and soon everyone started advertising on the radio, and then TV happened and a few started advertising on TV, then more, then everyone, then we got cable and there were a million specialized channels (ok, at first there were like 15, but just stick with me, I’m going somewhere with this increasingly long sentence) and everyone was advertising everywhere on the TV, not just in comercial breaks but also in product placement and script mentions, and then the internet happened, and everyone got a website (because you had to, remember?) and then started email newsletters and banner ads. And then, 180-odd some years later, someone thought to look back on all this work, on the advertising landscape they had been a part of creating. He looked back and he said, “Well, shit.” Everyone was doing all this stuff, and no one was paying attention anymore.

Welcome to the age of popup blockers, DVRs, Bittorrent and all the other fun and ad-blocking technology that computers and the internet have brought us. But, I have dream.

I have a dream that someday soon, advertisers will realize that everyone hates them not because they hate products, or buying things, but because they hate being talked at. They hate having 18 minutes of every 1 hour TV block (30%) filled with messages talking at them, in broad unspecific language. They hate seeing 15 banners on the left side of every 3rd web site they hit. They hate having 7 netfix pop-unders reveal themselves after they close their browser window. They hate that advertising, 99% of the time, adds nothing to the culture, or the conversation.

I have a dream that someday soon, advertisers of all stripes will realize that we can do more with our craft. We can engage consumers in a valuable way, answering specific questions, helping them solve specific problems that they have, and doing good for the community as a whole. It’s not just a fantasy. Last year KFC took on an initivive where they paid to fill pot holes in city streets, as long as they could paint their logo on the patches. This year Pepsi shifted it’s Super Bowl budget to it’s Refresh Project, where the company will take ideas from it’s customers to use that money to advance social causes (aka chairity).

Are these executions perfect? No, but they’re a start. And they’re trying to do something more than just make noise. I have a dream, that someday cause marketing will become the norm, not the exception, and then we as advertisers can feel good about the work we do day in and day out, instead of knowing that we’re just adding to the dull roar of modern life.

So you may have noticed the huge break between my post on the 1st and…well, right now. I was waiting to see if I could continue blogging. I started a new job last week (at an agency here in Seattle that I don’t know if I’ll name or not, but right now I’m not going to) and I was waiting to see if I could continue blogging without violating any company rules. (Don’t believe that an employer can keep you from blogging? Look it up. That’s what the last huge multi-month hole in the updates here was all about.) So, with that news I have to say the obligatory:

All opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer, it’s holding company or anyone else.

I have a new post lined up for tomorrow, see ya then

Welcome to 2010. Like Y2K before it, nothing especially huge went down last night (except that Dick Clark was once again replaced by Ryan Seacrest, and I think we’re all a little worse off because of it.) I’m not a huge fan of recaps, which is why you didn’t see any here in the last weeks. However, I am all about predictions, and I have one to make about our newest new year based on what I saw in the last few weeks of 2009.

2010 will be the year of sharing

Yeah, I know, shocking right? But we actually have evidence to back this one up now, and it’s not just X million Facebook users now and Brand Y has 15 fanpages and 22 twitter accounts. Yes, the number of people using the most popular social media services are up, as are the number of big companies paying attention now. But more importantly, the number of social media services is growing. The number of people with “smart” phones is growing aka mobile internet usage is growing.

Notice how I haven’t talked about businesses using social media? It doesn’t matter if they’re using it, or have plans to use it right now, because the important thing that’s happening is their audiences are moving into the world of online sharing. (The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is boomers, so it’s not just us damn kids leading this charge.) And they’re not just sharing opinions, they’re sharing art and culture from across the globe. This is going to be where marketers are going to have to go, and the smart ones will not just take their messages to these new services and communities, they’ll participate in them, they’ll listen to them and they’ll learn from them.

Pepsi’s big announcement a couple weeks ago helps validate this idea and show that conventional one-way advertising is loosing some of it’s shine. And while they’re not specifically investing in social media, the shift shows that the way budgets, big budgets, are allocated is in flux. Like everything it’s only a matter of time, but mark my blog post, sharing is going to be the in thing for 2010.

In the last few days I’ve read a lot of articles that have been popping up on Twitter talking about how much is too much information to share in the new social media tubes. While some of them are just common sense, a lot of them take on the voice I can only describe as the “brand consultant.” Now, I have no problem with brand consulting (I do a little myself from time to time) and the concept of the “personal brand”. However, as with most things that come from the mouths of consultants and “gurus” in their blogs, most of what I’ve read is over generalized assumptions disguised as “rules.” We don’t need so many rules. (If you just thought “Badges?!?! We don need no stinkin badges.” when you read that last sentence, you are officially on my brain wavelength :p)

Are there limits that you should have when posting to services like Twitter and the new and improved more internet exposed Facebook? Absolutely. But they depend on who you are, what you’re there for, and who your audience is. Honestly, they’re pretty much like the rules that you’d follow if you were talking to people anywhere in public. When you break it down, the internet is a public place, common sense and good manners prevail, but not to the extent that you become a sales pitch and nothing more. I can’t buy into the idea of essentially sterilizing your social media personality in the name of personal branding. That’s just not good marketing in general. Why? Because no one wants to buy boring stuff, and if you’re boring no one will want to buy you. And the fear of “alienating” your fellows by exposing some of who you really are is a sure fire way to becoming boring, predicable and just like all the other people afraid of the same thing.

Do I need to know when you’re eating Cheerios? Maybe, if you’re a food critic, or you’re really trying to get in with Cheerio lovers. What about when you get a flat tire? Sure, because maybe someone can help, or if nothing else you have an interesting conversation starter about changing a tire where ever you happen to be. (Don’t believe me, tweet about something mundanely bad happening to you and see how many tweets of concern you get. Unless you’ve already alienated your subscribers by being totally boring you’ll get at least a few.) To put it simply, these stupid little details that aren’t “necessary” according to the gurus are actually very important. They act as conversation starters, insights into who you are so you become more than a square picture firing links to your blog and your website every few minutes.

This fear of over sharing isn’t unjustified, but it’s very similar to a fear a lot of marketing directors have, and that’s the fear of failing. It’s the reason 80% of advertising and entertainment is derivative and it’s the reason that a lot of these so called social media experts are also derivative. (Don’t believe me? Find 5 and see if they don’t follow the: link to their own blog + link to other SM blogs + link to mashable + promote upcoming talks, books, podcasts, etc formula.) Copying something you know will work is the safe bet, and brands becoming more humanized, more conversational is new, uncharted territory. Ultimately some major player will take the risk, and we’ll see everyone else jump on board, to try and reap the same benefits. And the benefits of moving away from being a faceless entity and becoming a group of interesting people will be huge for companies of all sizes. At least until the robots take over the Earth, maybe that’s what all the gurus are planning for.

This morning I went to a marketing breakfast, I know exciting right? Hey, for the record any time you can get free bacon, it’s totally worth whatever else is happening around the bacon. Now normally a marketing event, even one with bacon, wouldn’t be blog worthy. Twitter worthy, yes, but how am I planing on wringing a whole blog post out of it? Especially considering how wordy most of my posts are? Well, it turns out this particular even revealed an important insight (and no, it’ wasn’t that video email, the topic of the event, is awesome.)

What I learned this morning was this: In a room of 25 marketing professionals, I was the only one who wasn’t thinking of the internet as a broadcast medium.

It’s also important to note (trust me, it’ll be important later) that I was, as far as I could tell, the youngest person in the room full of heads of marketing, marketing managers, brand managers and even a couple CEOs.

Even email, something that everyone who works in an office uses a million times a week, was nothing more than a broadcast medium to these people. Now, they had just been told how they could attach their fifteen second spot to that email, but my guess was this was the popular thought even before the video email pitch. The problem is, email is inherently interactive. I can hit reply and talk back, even if I just get a form message as a response, I have options other than “watch this” or “don’t watch this.” This missed opportunity to interact got me thinking.

Earlier this week I was introduced multiple times by a friend of mine as an “ad man”. Ok, you’re no doubt thinking, that makes sense, you do advertising. But it didn’t sit right with me. It just didn’t sound right. When I think of an “ad man” I think of Bill Bernbach, Leo Burnett or even Don Draper. All of these men are my heros, but I have a feeling most of them would be hard pressed to be as successful in the internet era.

The “ad man”, as he has been classically described, is a dying breed. Focused on telling a great story, capturing and holding an audience’s attention, and getting them to remember a product. All sounds great right? While the guiding principle of “it’s all about the idea” may continue to drive creative departments, thinking about your idea as anything other than a foundation for customer interaction is quickly becoming a waste of time. It’s great to have an idea, but if you try to control the way it looks, feels, smells and tastes everywhere it’s seen, it’s not nearly as effective. Consumers don’t just want to interact with a brand, they demand it. The price of brand loyalty in the age of the internet is a piece of your brand. That’s the cost of entry. The “toll” if you will. You have to give it over to them, and when you do they don’t just buy your brand, they live it.

But most companies aren’t thinking about their brands this way. They’re not trying to figure out how to make their internet marketing a foundation their customers can build a personalized brand experience on. Their trying to figure out how to make it more like their print and TV ads from 15 years ago. They want to “capture eyeballs”, measure time spent viewing content. They want a passive audience that simply doesn’t exist on the net (and is increasingly becoming harder to find on TV.) Their more concerned in measuring success in CTRs and CPMs than they are measuring it in comments, facebook fans, response videos or mentions in tweets.

This is important to know, because it means our job as advertisers isn’t just to sell our client’s product to the customers (it’s really never been that easy, at least not in the last 25 years from what I’ve heard) but now it’s all about convincing the client that they need to stop trying to control their audience and start playing with them.

The “ad man” is passing into history, this is the era of the “customer experience dude.”

Black Friday. Retailer’s favorite day of the year… except for last year when sales were down 3.4% from 2007. I worked in retail most of my working life (starting at age 15, a wild and crazy 12 years ago and ending 3 years ago when I no longer needed my 2nd job working at a grocery store) so Black Friday was always a fascinating day that I hated with the intensity of a billion white hot super novas. So this year, watching from afar, I started thinking about Black Friday 2009 and the effects it’s success or failure will have on our industry.

This is where things get fuzzy for you people who love facts and citation, because I don’t know a lot of this for sure. So put on your speculation helmets. You should also note that I’m writing this on Monday morning, before any results are published and before Cyber Monday has even jumped into full gear.

Like I said before, Black Friday sales for 2008 were down 3.4% from 2007( Gather.com ) and the projections are down for this year. Aside from cries from armchair economists of “the economy is in full upswing and fine now!” that increased sales numbers would bring, what would it mean for retail advertising going forward? I don’t have any numbers on retail ad spending for 2009 (because no one does yet) and I don’t have any numbers on Black Friday specific ad spending for 2009 (because no one outside of agencies buying media for those ads and the companies themselves probably ever will), but what I do have is reports all year about how spending on advertising in general will be down 5-8% for 2009. So what does it mean for us if retailers managed to grow sales while cutting ad spending?

This year’s Black Friday was different than previous ones, in that a lot of stores (most notably K-Mart and Radio Shack) started the festivities on Thanksgiving day, staying open through the holiday and starting their sales early. Other retailers opened earlier this year than the traditional 6am. Best Buy stores were open at midnight, Old Navy opened at 3am. Then there’s the price cutting. I’ve heard speculation that prices were slashed to all new lows this year, especially on electronics. So the formula for Black Friday 2009 appears to have been: Stay open longer, cut prices deeper. Notice the lack of anything that has to do with advertising in that synopsis.

I didn’t go to any stores on Friday. I try to avoid the masses of crazed soccer moms and teenage girls trying to get shoes, computers, clothes and whatever else they have to have at crazy prices. (I worked it for 9 years, I’ve had my fill of angry, tired shoppers) so I can’t say that it seemed more crowded than last year, or that there was a lot of in-store advertising going on. My instinct tells me that other than signs that say “This is where the 5 $159 laptops we had at this store were” in-store advertising wasn’t any more or less than is normally is. So what happens to us? What would increased sales with decreased advertising mean for the industry? I feel fairly certain it will start discussions between CMOs and CEOs about “how necessary is all this advertising spending really?” Will retail advertising become a more depressed area of our already depressed industry?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I don’t know if we’ll even have to answer them yet, since we don’t have the sales results for this year yet. But what if we do? Would it be the first sign that advertising as we know it is becoming less important in modern marketing? And if so, how do we adjust to stay relevant?

History lesson:

On October 22, 1965 President Lyndon Johnson signs the Highway Beautification Act into law. The law put limits on outdoor advertising along the US highway system and generally promotes “scenic enhancement and roadside development.”

––

Today I’m proposing that we, the makers of the internet, (Go ahead, make your stupid Al Gore jokes from 10 years ago. I’ll wait……hahaha remember when that guy was running for president? It’s a good thing he didn’t win or… bad… things…. might…. have…… oh never mind) set forth to put a similar plan into action of the internet¹ to promote “scenic enhancement.” So what does this mean? Well let’s get all official about it:

§ 1 – Ad placement should be logical and not overwhelm the content your site is providing

If you want a TV-style ad, do one of those “while your page is loading” ads that everyone clicks through, because there’s always a “skip this ad” button at the top. Those are way less annoying than: pop-ups, those link ads that pop up a window when you mouse over them, pop-unders, and a frame of animated gifs or flash banners all rotating out of sync around your content. And let’s be honest, how much money are these annoying ads making you anyway? CPM on most internet display advertising is crap, unless your the New York Times site. So why not ditch it all together and find some other way to cover your $200/yr server costs?

§2 – Gimmicks are so 1996, don’t make them the focus of your site.

You have this great idea for the website for your local pizza restaurant. You’re going to make a site where everyone can upload videos, and feature them on the site, oh and I guess we’ll put up the menu too somewhere. Oh yeah, and maybe we should put the address up there somewhere to, BUT THE VIDEOS! …I get it. You want to be the next youTube star or something, but guess what. I didn’t come to your website to watch wacky videos about some dude who’s gonna take a cell phone video of his junk and post it to your site just to see it make the homepage. I came to your site to find out how I could get a pizza. If you want to do wacky customer videos I’m all for it. Just make sure that I can find out what you sell and how I can buy it without your gimmick getting in my way, because if I can’t what’s the point? You’re wasting both our time. I just wanted a pizza and instead you gave me youTube.

§3 – No flashing text anywhere. Even if you’re a strobe light company.

I don’t have to explain this one do I? No one gets to use the <blink> tag anymore. EVER.

§4 – If you must do a take over ad, mute the sound and make it easy to close.

This one is very simple. 1) If I go to your site and an ad takes over and starts talking to me or making any noise at all without me telling it to, I’m going to close the window (or tab) and never come back. Ever again. 2) Make the stupid things easy to close because that’s what everyone it going to do immediately anyway. Don’t piss them off by making it hard.

I’m sure there are more sections we could add to make our internet a more beautiful place, but why should I have to do all the work? This is the internet people. We should add this to wikipedia and then all take turns adding things to it! Let’s all do our part to promote “scenic enhancement” of our internet. Afterall, it’s the only one we’ve got ².

¹ Remember when it was called the Information Superhighway and not “the web”?

² Until some scientists build a new one.

I apologize for the lack of updates this week, I’ve been swamped with work and reworking the surrounding tscreative.com website. In hindsight it would have been smart to reach out and ask for guest posts. Rest assured that next week I’ll resume writing here at PowZot (maybe even Saturday or Sunday if I get ahead on stuff). Thanks for reading, enjoy this comical 90s website staple while you’re waiting for me

As an interactive guy, I get asked a lot about mobile. It’s the future, in case you hadn’t heard, and it will replace the internet….by allowing us to access the internet… on a really really small screen… at slow speeds… future! So, interactive folk (as we prefer to be called, “those dudes over there who know about computers” works equally well) get to shape this awesome small screen, low speed future by building apps, and WAPs and maybe even Maps…later we’ll shoot some Craps…sorry I kinda got on a roll there…where was I? Oh yeah.

What this means, in all seriousness because I’ve reached my quota for ellipses already, is that we’re now building interactive experiences as advertising. To make it even simpler and more of a powerful statement, The Future of Advertising is Experiences.¹ Advertising in the TV era has been about creating an entertaining/informative/repetitive 30 seconds of TV to convince you to buy something for some reason. The only engagement we have with the audience is that they couldn’t find anything more interesting to do for 30 seconds but watch our spot. Now we’re actually interacting. This brings a whole new set of pitfalls

Now I know all of that wasn’t really news. We’ve been talking about it for a while now, but the news is the frequency that it’s becoming more of a mainstream channel. What this means is that the advise from the early days of the web, “You’d better have a website” has now turned into “You’d better have an app.” This is just as dangerous now as it was in 1995.

Back in the day, when the internet was ugly and blinky and limited to the stupid web safe pallet of colors, and dinosaurs roamed the earth listening to something called “cassette tapes” which replaces “records”, some business guru thought up this really catchy line: “You’d better have a website.” The problem was, no one knew what to do with their website. Most of them didn’t even know what it was. We ended up with ugly, blinky, web safe colored things that were essentially brochures. But on the web. Also they cost more than a brochure. Back then websites cost a lot more money to make, because you couldn’t buy a domain name for $7, find some high school kid (unless you found me or a few of my friends) to build you a site on the cheap and throw it on a host you paid $12/yr for. Bandwidth, storage space and domain names were not cheap until mid-dot com boom. But you HAD to have website. Because some successful business guy said so.

Flash forward to today. Mobile apps aren’t cheap to make, even if you choose just one mobile platform for you app. A lot of people don’t know what to do with them, but they know they want one. Because now “You’d better have an app.” The problem is that an app is an interactive experience. They’re a lot more memorable than a passive experience, like a TV spot or a web site. Which means that when you make a bad one and slap your logo on it, people are much more likely to remember you, but not for good reasons.

Branded applications need to do something useful (Yes, entertainment is useful if your app really is entertaining). They’re not just advertising, they’re a product themselves. Too many brands are just cramming website content into an app throwing it out there (some are even charging for this content, that you can get on their website for free.) That’s not useful. It’s not creative, and sooner or later it’s going to be broadly received by everyone as lame. As the iTunes app store begins to see more competition from the growing Android marketplace, the blackberry store, Palm and Nokia’s stores, etc we’re going to hit mobile application overload. Just like any other product, your branded apps are going to have to stand out by being useful, generating a lot of word or mouth recommendations, etc or they’re going to get a bad rep. Which means your brand is going to get a bad rep for something that’s not even your core business.

In the land of interactive experience as advertising, the consequences of doing something poorly are much higher. And like any big risk, this does come with a big reward: good experiences are remembered more. Apple’s advertising for the iPhone and it’s app store has done more than just sell their platform, they’ve set an important precedent with their slogan; we just need to make sure our client’s apps aren’t saying “Yes, me too!” but instead answer “Yes, there’s an app for that.”

¹ For now. Until something else comes along and replaces this future with an alternate 1985, where Biff owns a casino and killed your father to marry your mother.

*Warning* This is kinda a freeform, stream of thought kind of post.

While sitting down to write this morning (something I’ve been doing quite a bit of lately) I found myself staring into space…for an hour. Now this isn’t anything new, if you’ve ever seen creative people working you’ll see them at some point looking very much like they’re doing nothing. This got me thinking about advertising (as most things usually do, especially between the hours of 8a-8p) and about trends in art and culture and design. The conclusion I came to is we need a neo-minimalist movement.

What does this mean? I don’t know, I just thought about how overly complicated and shinny and “new and improved” and “now with Bacon!” everything seems to be getting lately. That’s not the point of this post though (although if we want to discuss it I’ll gladly do so). The point of this post is this: It’s important to let your mind wander around and figure things out. A lot of creative people get this, but it’s not just a technique for creative endeavors.

We’ve come to a point in our instant gratification society where we expect everything, even our brain to do it’s thing RIGHT NOW so we can move on to the next thing in our busy schedule. The answers that you get RIGHT NOW aren’t always the best ones. Our brains are amazing things, but even they need a little time to work through things.

So on this Wednesday, while you’re no doubt in the middle of your week crunching problems left and right, shifting paradigms out-side the box to maximize reach and ROI while staying top of mind in your key demographics, take a step back and just let the problem sink in. You might be shocked at the solution you come up with if you just wait a minute or two.