Coca-Cola Still #1 Valued Brand. But...

As the story says, "Consumers lost trust in brands this year as the recession deepened."

Here it is as reported by Associated Press/USA Today.

btw: Consumer trust didn't go down everywhere. Google takes the #7 spot in the order, up 25% over last year.

Starbucks: another perspective

We talked about Starbucks in class on Wednesday. Here's another point of view: author Kevin Maney thinks Starbucks big mistake was when it tried to be both a special experience (the music, purple chairs, the Italian cup sizes, etc.) and convenient (one on every corner) at the same time.

A pretty interesting thesis. Get the story here.

Leno Show Backed by $10MM Campaign

We talked - last week - about NBC and its desperation to save production money by "stripping" a Monday through Friday show from 10 to 11 pm starring Jay Leno.

Looks like the network is as serious as a heart attack.

NY Times advertising columnist, Stuart Elliott, explains NBC's predicament and the "off channel marketing" strategy that the network hopes will make this balloon rise.

nytimes.com may require a free registration to see this article.

The Beatles: Still the Strongest Brand in Music

The recent success of the game "The Beatles: Rock Band" has cast new light on the legendary quartet which seems to be as profitable as ever.

How do they do it? By managing the brand very deliberately and carefully.

Here's a column in today's AdAge online by Beth Snyder Bulik that tells the story.

Chaos? Or creative destruction?

As a follow-up to yesterday's post:

Why is it that whatever things are like, good or bad, we seem to think that's the way things will be from now on. Jimmy Carter talked of a national "malaise." And recently we experienced an "illogical exuberance" that was the lemming's cliff that failed to warn us about the coming crash.

Stephan Jay Gould once wrote an essay about why Joe DiMaggio's 56 consecutive game hitting streak would (probably) never be broken. The numbers, he wrote, are always chaotic near the beginning of any undertaking - which is where Joe was in 1941 - and then they flatten out.*

So along comes Jeff Goodby and in an AdAge (maybe OpEd?) column, he says pretty much the same thing about Bob Garfield's book.

Whistling past the graveyard? Or insightful thinking.

What do you say?

*(In checking these numbers I discovered that DiMaggio, when playing with the San Francisco Seals, had a 61 game streak.)

Whining About Advertising

Every once in a while somebody starts the whining again. Advertising is bad. Bad, bad , bad. Badder than bad. It's, well, pretty darn terrible.

Bob Garfield, advertising critic for AdAge, quotes Samuel Johnson who, in 1759, wrote "Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic" foreshadowing Howard Gossage's "Is Advertising Worth Saving?"

Karl Marx gave the ad business a colorful spin when he wrote "Advertising is a bloated maggot feeding on the decaying corpse of capitalism."

Vance Packard hammered pretty hard on both advertising and consumerism in the 50s with "The Hidden Persuaders," and Wired magazine asked, on the cover of its February 1994 issue, "Is Advertising Finally Dead?"

And, of course, Adbusters is always with us.

Now it's Bob Garfield himself is winge-ing, of a sort, in a new book, The Chaos Scenario.

This morning's commentary on OnlineMediaDaily's "Over the Line" feature by George Simpson decides advertising is "Unloved. But Effective."

Here's a video that promotes The Chaos Scenario:






An interesting rant.

I HATE Ads That Try to Scare Me

Here's an ad by Cramer-Krassalt for National Preparedness Month "which encourages people to be ready for any kind of disaster the universe might throw our way. Even the inexplicable, gravity-defying kind." Watch this:



What cultural crap!

Read what AdFreak says about our "government's emphasis on U.S. citizens' self-preparedness seems to confirm what most Americans already know: We'd better not rely on our government for help in times of disaster." Or not.

You're in College, Who Do You Trust?

The the 2009 edition of Alloy Media + Marketing's College Explorer survey says Johnson & Johnson, Sony and Apple are at the top of your "who do you trust" list.

Here's the whole story on Media Daily News.

Sound about right to you? Or not?

Why Not Merge TV and Internet?

"Michael Kokernak, a 20-year television industry veteran, has spent the past 13 years researching and inventing monetization technologies for the digital spectrum."

And Mr. Kokernak also suggests the modest proposition in the above headline.

Read his rationale here.

What do you think?

PC Strikes Back!

We talked in class last week about the great Mac vs. PC campaign from TBWA\Chiat\Day for Apple.

Here's a big archive of the spots starting in 2006 to today.

The New York Times this morning featured a really interesting article by Devin Leonard about Microsoft's own I'm a PC campaign (via Crispin, Porter & Bogusky), headlined "Hey, PC, Who Taught You to Fight Back?"

Note: nytimes offers free access when you register.

Yawning in class? Ouch!

McDonald's, not one of my favorites, humbles me this morning with an example of how truth makes advertising work.

Here's the story in this morning's Boston Globe.

btw: when you get to the bottom of the story, the "media and advertising professor at BU" suggests that this spot may be mistaken for programming. Do you agree?

Advertising Works.

Go figure.

Unilever's new CEO, Paul Polman, banks on increased advertising and marketing - and comes out smelling sweet as, if not a rose, at least like AXE Revitalizing Shower Gel.

Here's the story on this morning's adage.com.

New TV Spots for NFL via Grey

Here's the first look at the campaign for the National Football League created by Grey/NY using the (up to) 1,000 frames per minute Phantom camera.

I promised I'd get them to you as soon as I found 'em. Turns out, they found me - via Creativity online.

Ad Campaigns Launching This Week

Here's the latest from around the world.

The Gap Takes TV Budget and Tosses It To Facebook

In one of the strangest strategies I've seen, The Gap will use a Facebook page as the focus of an advertising campaign headlined "Born to Fit." The campaign revolves around "a new line of denim wear to help revive its sagging brand," according to ClickZ, a blog dedicated to digital marketing.

The Gap's digital agency, AKQA/San Francisco "created an (iPhone) app called the StyleMixer that lets users mix and match outfits and interact with friends on The Gap's Facebook page," says ClickZ and "the app will also reveal undisclosed 'surprises' when near a Gap store."

The new denim line is called "1969," the year the first Gap store opened. I remember shopping that store, which in those early days sold mostly Levi's brand products. It was located fairly close to San Francisco State in an old theater building, I think, on Ocean Avenue and it was always busy. Everyone was wearing denim in 1969.

The Facebook page was launched last Thursday and, as of this writing, already has 333,038 fans. I was the most recent registrant.

Why So Few Female Creative Directors?

At the AdAge "Women to Watch in Advertising" luncheon, Tiffany Kosel, CD at Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, speaks up on the above question.

It's a 3-minute AdAge, so hang around for the finish - which is true as well as funny.

Les Paul: Musician, Inventor, Brand

It might seem odd to think of people as brands - but we are. Every one of us is perceived by others as an individual with a specific history, reputation and persona, which adds up to who we are recognized as and what we stand for. Tom Peters, one of my business heroes, wrote about it, "The Brand Called You," in Fast Company - but that's a topic for another post.

This one is about the legendary Les Paul, whose brand stood for excellance and innovation, and who died last week at the age of 94. I was lucky enough to have seen him perform last March 23rd at the Iridium Jazz Club in Manhattan. The pictures here were taken by my friend, Phil Kann. Phil is a copywriter from the Bay Area who's worked in NY advertising for several years.

Les Paul seemed to have a clear picture of how to become a brand, and he talked about it during his show. He was a talented and versatile guitar player - but that's not enough in the age of the individual. Someone once told him that, while playing in a band, his playing wasn't loud enough. So he spent several years developing the solid-body electric guitar. You can buy one at most stores that sell guitars, it's the Les Paul model made by Gibson, the instrument that changed the sound of music in the last half of the 20th century.

He told a story about how he used to record while on the road. He, his wife Mary Ford - the vocalist for most of his hit records - and the trio would set up and tape in any room that had interesting acoustics.

Suddenly his bass player wanted to go back to college to study physics but, Les said, he was a damn good bass player. So he fooled around with a second recording head and - viola! - multi track recording was born. Les shipped the tapes "home" so the bassman could add his part while still being a physics student.

The night we were at the show, he pulled a guy out of the audience and made him take the stage. "This man," said Les, "taught me how to make Lego robots." Turns out the man is an engineer at IBM and he travels to schools and teaches kids how to make robots, intending to get them interested in computer science. Les Paul invited him over to his house and took a robot-making lesson.

How well did Les do? "I've had a lot of bright students," said Mr. Lego Robot, "but that old guy behind the guitar is the brightest one yet."

How did "Les Paul" become a "brand" in the music world (and beyond)? Simple. He was always ahead of most everybody else and always working on a problem that needed solving. He once said, "I just do these things because there's nobody else to do them." He chose his route carefully and followed it. Most of all, he stood for something.

Here's the obituary in last Thursday's New York Times [free with registration]. Scroll down for a real treat, a nytimes.com video of Les Paul telling his own story.

"Mad Men" Returns Tonight

The third season of the advertising soap opera begins tonight at 10 pm on AMC, and I hope the show rises again to the standards of Season 1. Here's some of the buzz:

AMC's official Everything Mad Men page.

USA Today chews on the marketing power of the series.

The blog, tv.com, wonders 'What the Heck is Going to Happen On Mad Men?'

Frank Rich, in this morning's NY Times, contrasts MM to Woodstock in a really interesting column titled 'Mad Men Crashes Woodstock's Birthday.' Rich suggests that the early 196o's era fictional TV show is more relavent to 2009 than is the famous music festival of 1969. I think he's right. (Free access with registration)

At any rate, I'll be watching.

MONDAY MORNING UPDATE:
This MM review from TIME magazine pretty much sums up my opinions of episode 3.1 (except I found the hat distracting).

Let me know what you think.

A Big Idea Starts With a Big Question

One of the cool things about advertising is that every day you're surrounded by people who look at things differently than you. All businesses talk about "embracing diversity of opinion," but in advertising, ideas are the product and creativity is the essence of everybody's job (OK, maybe not the accountant, but that accountant needs to understand creativity in order to be effective).

The blog, Presentation Zen, has an interesting topic this morning, "10 Tips on how to think like a designer," and like any big idea it starts with a big question.

"Most people do not really think about design and designers, let alone think of themselves as designers. But what, if anything, can regular people — teachers, students, business people of all types — learn from designers and from thinking like a designer?"

Creativity Top 5

The early August edition.

Here's what's new.