HELSINQI CREATIVE

UnF–king Do-Gooder Advertising

Wednesday, 04 August 2010

Virtue needs to grow a pair. That's become an informal manifesto here at the HELSINQI International Tower (where, incidentally, you won't find much formal anything). There's an important place for the pure and the ultra-earnest in society. They keep us stretching for better, and for that my hat's off, no question. But there's also a place for those of us who prefer devil's food cake over angel food — so long as it's local, organic, fare trade, and rich & decadent as all unf--k.

Clearly, the (wicked) good people at UnF--ck The Gulf are devil's foodies:

Ad people (creatives, at least) have always been a sanguine lot, whether that shows up as a fun but totally irresponsible devil-may-care attitude about just giving 'em what they want or, in ironic contrast, as a wide-eyed (and not a little self-important) zeal for the role of advertising in improving the world. Check out these final pages from Frank Presbrey's History and Development of Advertising, published by Doubleday, Doran & Company in 1929:

In this field probably lies a future development of a magnitude which will give advertising full recognition as a great socializing as well as business force.... There are other big tasks of education. No newspaper or periodical can do such work in its news columns with the necessary persistence and maintain its popular circulation. Advertising, moreover, has form and methods which obtain attention for a subject that in the news columns would be skipped as dull reading by the class of people it is most desired to reach.

Advertising, by reason of its technique, possesses peculiar power as an educative force.... Who knows what it may some day be doing? A sociologist... finds that fundamentally there is one thing the matter with the world—ignorance. If everybody had all the knowledge that exists and is available, and applied to it, there would be very little unhappiness. His method for giving happiness to everyone is education of every human being in the sciences and all real knowledge. Then we should all know how to be happy.

His belief is that all wrongdoing can be done away with, and by means other than punitory restraints. The way is to make rightdoing in every action so pleasant that no person would have any desire to do wrong.

This ultima thule may some day be reached. The thought in introducing the subject here, in the closing paragraph of a book on advertising, is that modern advertising has made the life of the masses so much more pleasant by painting attractive pictures of the things that make it so, and has so completely demonstrated its ability to influence the thought of people of all classes, that when it comes to that big, all-comprehensive job of achieving an ideal social state the potent force of advertising will at least be one of the agencies through which it will be accomplished.

Now that's a flavor of optimism about the business you can't reproduce, coming as it did on the eve of the Third Reich, that immense triumph of the advertising & branding will, and WWII, the Bomb, etc. etc. etc. Or can you? Well, all that jacked-up modernist business about utopia through universal knowledge and science, quaint as it is, hasn't gone away exactly, though the conversation has branched and split and switched back dizzily in the intervening years.

But the optimism I'm optimistic about is all to do with transparency and multilateralism in communications. It trades the vision of a benevolent class of philosopher kings, whether in policy or advertising or wherever-you-like, for one of a lively, engaged conversation in which, hopefully, there's some tendency for merit to rise and BS to fall. I know, I know, going out on a limb.

But what I like about this limb is the implication that the way forward is a very canny, very creative combination of giving 'em what they want (lest they ignore you completely) with world-improving zeal — the idea being that ultimately what they want really is a better world.

In other words, time to bust out the angel-devil's food swirl cake — and eat it too.

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Incidentally, I'd like to imagine ol' Frank Presbrey would have been exhilarated by UnF--ckTheGulf, if he wasn't too busy being totally freaked out by it. ("Rats! I've created a monster!")

Advertiser-Consumer Breakup

Thursday, 29 July 2010

This one's from a couple of years ago already. The only difference is that today it'd be a minute shorter…

PS. And no, I am not endorsing Microwhatever Digital Advertising Solutions. (It's a testament to virality that I'm posting it on my Helsinqi blog nonetheless. But, hey, we're both grown-ups.)

PPS. Props to Tom Howe for bringing this vid to my attn.

Second-order decision-making

Monday, 26 July 2010

Whose idea was it in the first place to consider consumers — or, really, anyone, come to that — as rational agents making decisions based on fact and logic? It's encouraging to see people discussing behavioral economics and the distinction between (what people claim as their) preferences and real behavior. But hey, is this really anything new? The great advertisers have always understood this, if only intuitively. (Spoken like a creative, right?)

The distinction is between self-image and actual behavior, and what a distinction that is. This is where hands-on experience in Zen or any real mindfulness practice provides an edge in insight. The takeaway there is that it is exceedingly difficult to know oneself with any clarity and that preferences are fickle and contextual, so that asking people what they like is flawed at best. Unless you really know how to deconstruct the results of that inquiry. The corollary is that preferences are accoutrements not unlike Rolexes or Air Jordans, which wrap us in a comfort zone of reifying self-image but which ultimately evaporate like phantoms in the cold light of day and cede to the hard habits of actual behavior.

What does all this have to do with marketing? Only everything, and it's what these bloggers — Bulik, Rubinson, Rubinson — are chewing on with respect to behavioral economics.

If market research is about discovering preferences — in artificial circumstances at that (where "We tend to study preferences at times that are divorced from a respondent being in a need state." 1) — then it is barking up only one of the right trees, and misidentifying it at that. The crucial tree is the behavioral one, the decision tree.

And vis-à-vis that tree, Joel Rubinson has a most thought-provoking post on second-order decision strategies. The nutshell is that people make preliminary decisions about how they will make a substantive decision, in order to simplify byzantine decision-making processes. These preliminary, or second-order, decisions are made, say, while bicycling to the store, when the consumer decides she's going to buy whatever's cheapest, or stick to her favorite brand, or what have you. It's a self-defense heuristic against the hassle of complicated first-order decision-making in the aisle, faced with an embarrassment of choices.

This suggests very different meta-strategies for high-profile national brands vs. price-positioned store brands, and so forth. But hey, just read Rubinson's post on Marketing insights into how we decide.

And then, let's just be done with this preferences of the rational consumer silliness.

Addendum: Malcom Gladwell on spaghetti sauce. At about 10:00, it's all about the "we don't know what we want," we hold on to a self-image. And, a strong caution against universalism, in favor of diversity.

Where have I seen Old Spice Guy before?

Monday, 19 July 2010

What's so universally appealing about the (allegedly already retired) Old Spice Guy and his ads is the lack of snark. The ads' irony is completely inclusive. They poke fun but not at anyone, certainly not anyone's expense. It should remind an increasingly cutting culture that, hey, schadenfreude is not a necessary ingredient of comedy.

And the Guy, portrayed by Isaiah Mustafa, is just so damn likeable. So where have I seen him before?

That feeling of familiarity stretches back a full century — indulge me — to the early aughts and teens when J.C. Leyendecker illustrated the Arrow Collar Man. In his book Adland (Kogan Page, 2007), Mark Tungate writes of Leyendecker's creation:

“The men he painted actually generated fan mail. They were tall, rakish, impeccably dressed and yet forever nonchalant, their cheekbones gleaming above pristine shirt collars. To use a phrase that had not yet become hackneyed, men wanted to be them and women wanted to be with them.”

Love that “actually generated fan mail.” If they'd had Twitter and YouTube back in the day, Arrow Collar Man would have been on the same shtick Old Spice Guy's been on, no doubt. But then, the adjective viral wasn't even in use until 1948.

Return on Integrity is the New Bottom Line

Thursday, 15 July 2010

At base, Integrity Marketing & Branding is perfectly intuitive, once businesses ditch the battlefield mentality for a vision of marketing as friendship, and the consumer as friend. Writing for Advertising Age in “Return on Integrity Is the New Bottom Line for Marketers,” Paul Klein observes:

Increasingly we decide what to buy in the same way that we choose our friends. The most important question is, “Can I really trust them?” According to Jeff Johnson from Kashi, “It’s no marketing secret that integrity plays a big role in how you go about forming relationships with consumers — and that translates indirectly to financial performance.”

Of course, old habits die hard and the pressure to stray into increasingly gray areas is great. The philosophy is intuitive. The challenge is implementation. (That’s why we built HELSINQI.) It helps to realize that Integrity isn’t just a feel-good choice; it has become a necessity. Notes Klein:

As we recover from a global financial crisis that was caused by decades of irresponsible business practices driven by a singular focus on the bottom line, businesses need to recognize that there is a return on integrity.

» Read the complete article

Thanks to Rich Bruer for tweeting the article.