The Worst TV Spot I've Seen In a While

Once upon a time, there was a TV show in San Francisco called Dance Party. Now, this is before I moved to San Francisco, but I'd heard of it from locals. Kathleen - my spouse - remembers it vividly. Remembered that it was on channel 5 and watched it all the time.

My friend, Dennis Rosselli - who went to Riordan - remembers that if somebody showed up to high school wearing a tie, every noontime wag would holler, "Hey, look who's going on Dance Party after school!"

So that's the background for AdGabbers critique this morning (I wonder if Steve Hall, is from the Bay Area, too?) of an unusually bad commercial. Or is it that bad?

Strategically, it's aimed at bay area boomers like Kathleen and Dennis who may never have heard of Weaver's before but would recognize Dance Party in an instant and - so the advertiser hopes - will remember the name. Might work, but not much brand building here, however.

I suspect that KOFY Channel 20 made the "retail" spot for Weaver's Coffee & Tea - which I had no knowledge of until seeing AdGabber. Not a bad media plan, though, with costs down due to the economy a local TV buy is probably pretty efficient.

Turns out John Weaver is a local aging surf dude who learned to roast coffee at Peet's, where the Starbucks guys trained.

I'll look for the brand, but hate the TV spot. I guess it might be working, already.

David Ogilvy: father of modern advertising

As a young, enthusiastic advertising professional (I was still a jack-of-all-trades, headed for a couple of solid years writing copy and producing spots) I was influenced by the writing of some of the greats of so-called "modern advertising." These would eventually include Jerry Della Femina, Jay Chiat and - when I joined management, and eventually was named president of an ad agency and then proprietor of my own ad venture - Tom Peters. And, of course Howard Gossage, who some argue, is the first of the post-modern ad minds (followed by Riney, Goodby, et al).

Each of these, in different ways. helped me to understand the world of advertising but the first one I read was David Ogilvy.

Fortune editor at large Patricia Sellers reminds us today, with a "Postcard from the Pinnacles of Power," how wise Ogilvy was about the business of advertising - and about the life of the people who work in it.

Here's David Ogilvy in action (you might want to save this for sometime when you have some time - it's 55 minutes, but worth it):

I Think It Was Leo Burnett Who Said:

"Nothing kills a bad product quicker than good advertising."

If that's the truly the case, then Twitter might be good advertising for movie goers... but not for some movie makers.

Part of the story, as told last Friday on National Public Radio's All Thing's Considered, is movie fans who see the pictures early and spread "peer reviews" praising or damning the films.

Meanwhile, reuters.com blames Twitter for the quickness of this thumbs up/thumbs down networking, some of which - says Reuters' Alex Dobuzinskis - happens while viewers are still in the theater.

"Interesting fact about recessions ... they end."

Or so says a line on a series of billboards funded by an anonymous East Coast donor who is disturbed by America's Chicken Little reaction to the recession. The campaign is called "Recession 101" and the space is being provided pro-bono by "members of the Outdoor Advertising Agency of America" says the post on msnbc.com. (Sidebar: a Google search for "Outdoor Advertising Agency of America" shows only references to this story. I suspect that they really mean "Outdoor Advertising Association of America.")

Meanwhile, MediaPostDaily has an article this morning that trumpets Ad Spending Confidence Rebounds, Improves For Most Major Media. The survey indicates that ad spending confidence bottomed out in the spring of 2009 and that it's on the rebound. Granted that "confidence in spending" is not the actual signing of a big check, but as "Recession 101" says, "Interesting fact about recessions ... they end."

We All Hate Some Ads: but a study shows that we don't hate all ads

We've all met them. People who condemn advertising for "blighting" our TV, movie and computer screens - plus more mundane "opportunities" like radio, highway billboards, over urinals and on grocery store floors - with advertising. Or who say, "I never make a buying decision using ads because I don't pay attention to advertising." Or who theorize that "advertising makes people buy things they don't want or need."

Each one of these has an element of truth. Advertising in general has overcrowded all of our lives with ads for crap or copycat products and/or badly conceived and badly executed ads.

There's plenty to hate right there, but read on.

This, from today's adweek.com, is the top line results of a global survey that found, among other things, that "67 percent of respondents agreeing (including 14 percent agreeing 'strongly') that 'Advertising funds low-cost and free content on the Internet, TV, newspapers and other media.' Likewise, 81 percent agreed (22 percent strongly) that 'Advertising and sponsorship are important to fund sporting events, art exhibitions and cultural events.'"

Pretty interesting stuff to think about.

Mobile Ads About to Live Up to Potential

I had lunch Monday with a former student who works in mobile-handset advertising. The conversation, naturally, turned to business and how powerful that medium could eventually be.

This morning forbes.com has a story by Laurie Burkitt headlined Commercials On The Go that underscores our chat with some hard data, some history of the business and how mobile media is starting to work with TV networks.

btw: my former student, now a very busy mobile media professional, is looking for interns. If you'd like to get in on the proverbial ground floor, let me know and I'll send you the details.

Could You Live Without Facebook?

While I find Facebook a very convenient way to stay in touch, I probably could live without it.

Though, in fact, I don't really use Social Media as much as I might.

Here's a report on a study from this morning's OnlineMedia Daily that shows Facebook is America's favorite with 78 million regular users - and that 71% of us say we "can't live without it."

To put this study (by Anderson Analytics) in another perspective, here's media critic Joseph Jaffe on more practical aspects of new media, it's use or misuse as a selling tool and thinking critically about research in general:

10,000 Lakes and a Number of Pretty Good Ad Agencies

The advertising community in Minneapolis has just launched a campaign to lure ad folks to "The Land of 10,000 Lakes."

Stuart Elliott tells the story of MinneADpolis in today's nytimes.com.

I have deep roots in Minnesota. Ancestors on my mother's side homesteaded on the prairie in Stearns County in 1848. Samuel Manon Clayton, my grandfather's grandfather, served with distinction in the 4th Minnesota Infantry Volunteers in the Civil war. My paternal great-grandfather, an immigrant from Bavaria, opened a meat market in St. Paul in 1886.

It seems I've got cousins all over the state.

Is it San Francisco? No, not quite. But it is a solid ad center, second only in the midwest to Chicago. Fallon, one of the great creative agencies, was founded in Minneapolis. Carmichael Lynch and Campbell Mithun made advertising history there, too.

Here's the web site. And here's the MinneADpolis YouTube channel.

When you go looking for a career in advertising, MinneADpolis should be on your prospecting list.

Why the Internet Should Be Accredited As An Institution of Higher Learning

I present for your information and edification my new favorite education site, thanks to AdRants.

My old favorite sinks - but not too deeply - to Number 2.

The Dead Poet Wants You to Wear Levi's

Levi Strauss & Company launches a major new campaign Wednesday (via Wieden & Kennedy, Portland) according to New York Times advertising critic, Stuart Elliott, who writes, "The campaign, which begins Wednesday, will include commercials on television, online and in movie theaters; print advertisements; outdoor and transit signs and posters; social media sites like Facebook; event marketing; and a contest on a section of the brand’s own Web site." (NYTimes offers free access with registration.)

The "anthem" TV spot features audio that is from an 1890s Edison-made wax cylinder thought to be 19th century American poet Walt Whitman reciting his poem, America.

The website loads pretty slow, or at least it did this morning, so have patience.

You might also like to read what Creative Review has to say.

What do you think of this campaign - especially if you're the target!

Hooray for the R/W/B!

(Some of this is from my blog of last 4th of July; the 2009 edition adds a few new thoughts and a couple of videos.)

One of my favorite movies - and my favorite to watch today - is 1776, closely adapted from the Broadway musical of the same name. My inner history geek warns you to not take it too much as literal history (hey, it's a musical)! But much of the dialog between John Adams and his wife Abigail is lifted from their letters to each other during the period. And lots of the dialog of other characters - including Jefferson - is quoted from correspondence, too, much of it from later years as 1776 was remembered.

Here's my favorite number from the show, Ben Franklin (Howard Da Silva), Thomas Jefferson (Ken Howard) and John Adams (William Daniels) are in the hallway outside of the Continental Congress meeting room as the Declaration of Independance is read for the first time - and the three are already making myths for the new United States:



One musical number, Cool, Cool Considerate Men, is a slap at conservative southern-colony representatives - most of them astride vast land holdings and considerable family fortunes - who balked at signing, or even debating, the Declaration. When the play was presented at the Nixon White House, legend has it that the President asked composer Sherman Edwards to cut the number from the show. According to that legend, Edwards refused.

What seems pretty certain, however, was that when the play became film, then still-President Nixon asked old California friend and movie magnate Jack Warner to delete the offending tune. Warner, who produced the movie, complied.

The film was released without the offending song and the eventual VHS version was that one.

Years later, when the DVD was compiled, several scenes were reinstated, including CCCM. Here it is. See what you think of it:



I'm sure that's the version that'll be on TV tonight. It's scheduled to be shown on cable channel TCM (commercial-free, I believe) at 7:15pm PDT.

Or rent from Netflix.

Sidebar: In the year 1776, Benjamin Franklin had recently returned from five years in England where he'd been appealing to Parliament to reverse oppressive taxes and/or grant Parliamentary representation to the American colonies which, he was sure, would rebel if these considerations were not made. Frustrated in his attempts, he returned to America, became a member of the Congress and, well, you know the rest.

Franklin was also probably the wealthiest man in America at the time. His fortune, essentially due to his ad-supported publishing enterprises, is the reason why he is considered by some historians as "America's first advertising man."

Printers Dance Outshines Network, Wins Award

D&AD (originally founded as British Design and Art Direction) is an English organization dedicated to representing "the global creative, design and advertising communities. Since 1962, D&AD has set industry standards, educated and inspired the next generation and, more recently, has demonstrated the impact of creativity and innovation on enhancing business performance," says their website.

They also have an initiative to support "New Creatives" and advertising students.

Steve Hall of advertising blog AdRants calls our attention to the fact that a couple of ad aspirants named Matt Robinson and Tom Wigglesworth won a D&AD Student Award for this HP spot:



Note Steve's end comment, "The only thing that's a bit unclear? The work is actually for HP Workstations and not the printers."

What's in a Name?

I have one of those names that people want to know about. When I first went to school in Dayton's Bluff - the old German neighborhood in St. Paul, MN, where my family kept Pabst, Inc., a grocery store - kids on the Sacred Heart school playground asked "are you from the store down the block?"

Yeah, that was us.

Of course I knew about Pabst Blue Ribbon, too, since they sponsored the Wednesday and Friday night (boxing) fights on the new medium of TV. Even though we were in no known way connected to those Milwaukee Pabsts.



It occurs to me now that those fight nights on content-hungry black and white early television might have been the first reality shows!

So, when we moved to Arizona I wasn't surprised that the Blue Ribbon connotation lingered on.

As the PBR brand shrunk (it was merged into the Heileman Old Style family in the 90s), store clerks approving my checks would nonetheless remark, "Didn't that used to be a big beer in the Midwest?"

Yeah, it was, if you were middle aged as well as Midwestern. Because in the early 21st century the brand was revived (out of sight) by marketing to 21-somethings who went to clubs catering to local indi-bands, cheap beer and a semi-boho culture.

A brilliant strategy, really: recreate a brand by refusing to acknowledge that it is a brand.

My students in the 1990's, when I began to teach at USF, called me Professor Pabst. By the turn of the 20th century - as email became common - I was GP, my signature on all electronic communications.

Since about 2004, as PBR grew to prominence in the college underground, I became Pabst. (Also Pabst to many of my faculty friends, though this is probably more due to an archaic old-school type camaraderie in which "chums" call each other by our surnames.)

Now, the moniker transmogrifies before my very eyes. For last week in an "ugly dog" contest at California's Marin-Sonoma Fair, the contest was won (or lost, depending how you keep score in such an event) by a boxer-mix with an underbite named Pabst.

It stings a little, but I'll get over it.

It's still an easier name to explain than Hitler. Or Rin-tin-tin.

Storytellers Never Go Hungry

In many ways, "pitching" is at the core of advertising, persuading clients to see things like their customers do, or persuading media outlets and publishers to make their product more flexible in order to reach more customers.* It's a process called rhetoric, and it's all about communicating (called, in the ad world, "selling") ideas.

The cornerstone of the process is in knowing how to communicate in a way that engages your target audience and expresses your ideas in a way that all can understand.

I came across an article last week in which an anthropologist hypothesized that, in the hard times of the Ice Age, humans were threatened with extinction because nothing was as it was before. Due to climate change, animals no longer migrated as before, crops could no longer be counted on to mature in the same places and times. The result was humans had to adapt, to literally change the way their brain operated and one of these adaptations was the development of a more sophisticated language - a modern language, if you will.

And with language comes story telling, one of the most powerful ways we communicate.

Here's a how-to from this morning's businessweek.com called "Let Me Tell You a Story."

If you're a fan of Mad Men, you've seen this kind of pitching, especially the Kodak pitch in the final episode of season one - "The Wheel."

My favorite Mad Men pitch.

* and many, many more

TV's Road to Become Interactive Steers Twitter-ward

Not so long ago, television tried to become a player on Second Life. Anybody here still on 2ndL? Why do I always get the same hands?

And the fantasy world of Second Life wasn't TV's only failure at interactivity. Why?

Andrew Wellenstein, from the Hollywood Reporter appeared on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday afternoon and suggested, "Perhaps there's some fundamental disconnect between the passive experience of watching TV and the interactive nature of the Internet."

Here's where to hear the whole story.

Join LinkedIn or a Frat/Sorority?

This morning's economist.com answers that Social Media "is booming, but they have not supplanted more traditional business networks."

Read this.

Spike Lee on Creativity

Film maker Spike Lee, who launched his own ad agency called "Spike DDB," in 1996, is at the same time a sharp critical analyst of the advertising business.

He was recently interviewed on creativity at the Cannes International Advertising Festival and said - among other things - "they better start hiring some of these young people quick before they start their own agency and put 'em out of business." Here's the video highlights of that interview.

Here's a blog entry, written from Cannes, in which Lee asks the question, "With user-generated content, who needs ad agencies?"

Got an answer?

Marketing Strategy: Get Out of Town!

As the travel industry shrinks - like many other businesses in this economy - marketing strategies are going farther than ever.

Here's a story from today's New York Times that recaps three of the most clever ideas [free registration].

Two Brands, One Message

DDB West has created a set of TV spots that have " the same creative theme, music, look and feel for all," but which support two distinct brands - Wells Fargo or Wachovia. And some are said to trumpet Wells Fargo and Wachovia, which may constitute a third brand.

Here's the story in this morning's MarketingDaily, a MediaPost publication.

Is this the end of the Stagecoach, possibly one of the strongest corporate images in marketing? I doubt it. In the first spot following the acquisition of Wachovia, DDB cast a shadow of the famous Wells Concord Coach on both Eastern and Western landmarks.

Here's that spot:

Who Likes Advertising?

If you're in the 18 to 34 Demographic, research says you do!

Here's the results of a Harris Poll as seen this morning on AdAge online.

Any ideas why?