Wanted: Writers Who Write Well

I'm in New York this week, the Mecca of the ad biz, and, coincidentally over the past few weeks I've come across a number of Creative Directors (San Francisco and Bend, OR - AAF Western Region Meeting - as well as NY) who've all expressed the same opinion: many young copywriters have no clue as to what their job comprises and how to do it professionally.

Part of the problem is that so many of you don't read much (we found that out on last Tuesday evening) and, I'm convinced, reading helps you to be a better writer.

Let me suggest that reading advertising is easy. It's everywhere. Can you concept better headlines than the ones you see every day? I hope so. Most are lame and many ads go without a damn headline - confusing or under-delivering your message to your target audience.

If you're interested in a job in advertising writing ads, here's a link to a website that tests writers about headlines. Including how to create ad effectiveness via a great freaking headline.

Scroll down the page if you dare. Survivors may have talent AND the skills to do the job.

Ad writers, read it and learn.
Non-writers, ditto.

Not a bad headline, if I say so myself. Find an ad with a sloppy headline, write a better one and send them to me along with the name of the product, via Comment below!

I'll post the best one or two here so you might bask in the adulation of your peers.

Would You Respect a Medium Who Let You Walk All Over It?

What advice would you give these people? Hit "comments" below and express your opinion...
GP

Look There, On the Floor -- College Bookstore Campaign A 'Downer'
By Amy Corr , Monday, September 22, 2008

LevelVision's College Bookstore Network is bringing its latest ad medium to more than 300 college campus bookstores this year. If you don't see it, look down -- for chances are, you'll be standing on it.

Video screens that are less than 1" thick will be placed on bookstore floors, running a combination of infotainment and ads.

Among the colleges participating in this program are: Ball State, Michigan State University, Northeastern Illinois University, Purdue University, University of Michigan, and University of Minnesota.

The floor displays are made with heavy-duty glass and are coated with an anti-slip finish.

Programming segments, which can be altered in real-time, will range from "Top Five Ways to Go Green" to "Cooking Segments" to current weather forecasts.

While I'm all for the idea of coming up with new ways to grab the attention of college students and their visiting family and friends, I can't imagine someone willingly watching infotainment that's on the ground. And with all those feet stepping on the displays, I imagine they'll need to be cleaned numerous times a day. I'm eager to hear about student feedback. There's something good in this concept, but it needs to be tweaked... at the very least, placed at a more eye-level locale.

First a Flash of Light, Then the Rumble of Thunder

Every once in a while I come across something to cause little lightning storms inside my head. On the subject of history is was a 1970s book and TV series called Connections by James Burke. In the 80s, while I was president of an ad agency, it was Tom Peters' treatise on management, In Search of Excellence. And when I was in grad school in history in the late 90s, I was thunderstruck by the new ideas in William Cronon's Changes in the Land : Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England - the book that launched the practice of environmental history - and It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own by Richard White that helped form my view of American Western history. Let me not leave out Lawrence Olivier's King Lear, Kenneth Branaugh's Henry V and RM Koster's obscure, but no less electric, The Dissertation.

The common experience was that each provided me with a way to sharpen my curiosity about (or appreciation of) a difficult topic and gave me the impetus to better structure my notions regarding each. When I met Tom Peters at the National Association of Broadcasters meeting in 2001, I told him that reading his book led me into lots of trouble in the business world. He replied with what he and I already knew, "That was the point!"

Well, I saw something Friday in Bend, Oregon, that caused another cranial storm.

Yesterday, those of us attending the American Advertising Federation Western Region Meeting saw a presentation - crackling with ideas, insight and humor - by author Scott Bedbury founder of Brandstream, Inc., that represented a semester-long course in branding - miraculously shrunk to about 120 brain-buzzing minutes.

Bedbury is Northwest-born (University of Oregon School of Journalism) guy who cut his teeth at ad agency Cole & Weber and who subsequently drove the marketing machines at both Nike and Starbucks.

I bought his business book A New Brand World, some time ago, but haven't yet opened it. Shame on me for the delay. I've moved it to "next" in my to-read stack.

Here's Bedbury, on a more formal occasion, introducing his theory of motivating staff using Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.



It was a great afternoon, a high voltage current of ideas about the mystery we call "branding." I'm glad I was there to savor it.

I'm in Central Oregon for an AAF Meeting

If anything dramatic happens, I'll let you know.
GP
Seventh Mountain Resort, Bend, OR

Meanwhile, this for your consideration:
Most valued brands and brand values*. Please, why is it always the same hands that go up?

*We're doing our part to support one US icon; we just bought a Ford.
GP&KP

Having Fun With Stuff

Eepybird is the name of the duo who brought us the fountains of Diet Coke powered by Mentos.

Well, they're back, and this time it's Post-it Notes that are sent center stage.



Sidenote: Coca Cola wanted nothing to do with the Coke/Mentos "experiment," ("outside the brand" said a stentorian voice in an Atlanta accent) but now they seem to embrace the bird. I guess the brand has loosened up.

Gates/Seinfeld Saga Continues

Yes, installment 2 is on the tube.

Jerry and Bill are somewhere in suburbia, raising their mutual lamp to find "real people." Instead they find four minutes and thirty seconds of semi-weiredness.

Still no product (or punchline) in sight. Here's what ADWEEK has to say.

Fox, NBC have Hulu; CBS To Stream on Social Sites

We've known for a long time that people (maybe you, certainly me) use a PC while watching TV. Now the two activites have made another step toward convergence.

Last spring Fox and NBCU formed a partnership to stream selected programming via the internet with a service called Hulu - and I, for one, love the convenience of on-demand television on my laptop.

CBS will soon begin streaming programs on Facebook, MySpace and iGoogle, among others.

Want To Make Some Ads (and win some cash?)

The National Yellow Pages Association does this yearly.

Interested?

Garfield Fires a Volley at New Microsoft Ad

Bob Garfield has seen the new Seinfeld/Gates TV spot for Microsoft and he gives it only two stars.

The always readable critic for AdAge writes today, "Have you seen the new Microsoft spot from Crispin Porter & Bogusky, the one with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates? It's got its funny moments, in a goofy Seinfeldian way, but otherwise constitutes one of the weirder chapters in advertising history."

While I agree that Apple is largely responsible for this, Crispin's sass answer to the brilliant PC vs. Mac campaign, I don't agree that it's all that confusing and, if you watch it a couple of times, there are hints as to how the new OS might be marketed. And it's pretty damn funny, too.

Here's the rest of the story.

Twitter a Brand Builder?

Apparently so, says Business Week.

I wonder, do the Branders follow you if you misspell their name? Hmm.

Sometimes Advertising Makes Me Proud

Legendary adman Leo Burnett (his eponymous Agency survives him) once wrote, "Let's gear our advertising to sell goods, but let's recognize also that advertising has a broad social responsibility."

That responsibility usually manifests itself with organized community service activities like the Ad Council and it's many nationwide pro bono campaigns. But sometimes it broadens further into something more improvised, like the following via a collision ("meeting" would be too weak a term) of Ariana Huffington and Rich Silverstein at an event at Google last year.

This, from the Huffington Post, November 15, 2007:
"Silverstein, who as co-chairman of Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners was behind the famous "Got Milk?" ad campaign and the Budweiser frogs, had such a grasp of what makes for effective communication in radio, movies, TV, and online, that I thought he might have some ideas on how to help the Democrats, who continue to struggle with framing an election where they are holding all the cards. He did. When I suggested that he blog about his ideas, he said that since he usually expresses himself best in visual terms, he wanted to see if he could 'blog visually.'

The result is three powerful posters that simply but graphically capture the lunacy of the modern GOP. "Here is my thinking," Silverstein told me, "What if we could TiVo the last six-plus years and play them back - without comment -- for the American people, and let them connect the dots? It's not a pretty picture." Silverstein's take away message is uncluttered and direct: 'Haven't we had enough? Democrats '08.' "

Here's what Silverstein did with that message.

Fast forward to this week: three versions ot that poster showed up in bus shelters in the Twin Cities, "all up in the faces" of Republicans local and remote - and Ariana and Rich (see the video) were on hand to make certain that the work got noticed.

In the late nineties I had a classmate in grad school (I'm a late bloomer) who'd taught high school American history in Wyoming. When asked to describe the curriculum by a local acquaintance, he waxed poetic (he thought) about new ideas of bottom-up history, about the inclusion of marginalized populations, etc. To which the inquirer responded, "That's not history, that's Social Science. History's about facts, not theories."

That's the true brilliance of Rich Silverstein's posters. They're factual. Eloquent. Arguably unarguable.

Yes, as we read down the page we all should agree - 306 million strong - we've had enough.

I'm often proud of people in advertising and the work they do. Today I'm extra proud.

Bill Gates Can Be Funny? Yes!

True story. Watch this:




Then take a look at what AdAge has to say.
Don't miss the "inside baseball" article - kind of a AdAge gossip piece.

Good Design Goes Better WIth Coke

Design is everywhere - and some of it is really original and, often, beautiful.

The very interesting website ted.com is dedicated to "technology, entertainment and design.

So when gianormous Coca-Cola, with 450 different brands, assigned David Butler to "do more with design," he knew it wouldn't be easy. One way he made things move faster: "avoid the word 'design' as much as possible" and by "identifying basic problems that design can solve."

San Francisco's Turner-Duckworth are central to the Coke re-design project.

If You're Going to Outside Lands, You Should Know...

... it's an experiment.

Sanjaya Sqeezes Out :30 More Seconds of Fame

See and hear the story here, on an AdAge 3 Minute Video.

Aussie TV Show Explains Advertising's Workings vs. Ad Glamour

OK, we have Mad Men and Donny Deutsch on the tube, but the Australian version of Public (no commercials) TV has a series devoted to the question "What makes advertising work?"

Advertising Age's Brian Steinberg writes today about the show called "The Gruen Transfer," during which a panel of advertising professionals dissect ad campaigns and try to identify why they succeeded or failed.

Nice touch, that!

My big question is "When does this this series come out on commercial DVD?"

Internet Is Big Deal for Presidential Campaigns

Internet ads to promote McCain and Obama? You bet! Under the radar? In some cases.

Here's an interview with a major player in each camp on their Media Strategy recorded for this morning's NPR program Weekend Edition Sunday: "Subtle Internet Ads Send Targeted Political Messages."

And McCain says he can't send an e-mail... hmmm.

Jaffe Juice says "swim in it"

How could fishlanguage not take a directive like that?

Especially since Jaffe promises "an unshackled, uncensored and uninhibited dialogue on the subjects of new marketing, advertising and creativity."

So take a half hour to put on your Olympic Speedo (or cut to the chase) and take a swim.

To see Joe Jaffe in action, plop yourself down right here.

AdRANTs Hates Bad Advertising

This morning, AdRANTs critic Steve Hall writes about a new Wrangler campaign that's apparently attracting brickbats in Europe.

I agree, and invoke my right not to make cheap fun of the French.

NBC On-track to Gross $120 Million on Olympics

NBC says it will sell $1.001 billion in advertising on the Beijing Olympics - $1 million more than planned - due to strong ratings, especially among young men. Subtract the $890 million in rights fees and gross revenue tops somewhere in the neighborhood of $120 million.

This post by Wayne Frieman on MediaDailyNews says 100 different companies bought ads on traditional broadcast, online, cable and mobile. Both Presidential campaigns were among the advertisers.