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.

—

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!")

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.

The Inopportuneness of Being Earnest

Tuesday, 13 July 2010

One of the pitfalls of marketing by principled companies and organizations is Deadly Earnest Syndrome, a tragic condition that afflicts the well-meaning. It drives them to decide they have to distinguish themselves from unscrupulous advertisers by means of “pure” messaging untainted by humor, cool, style, attitude, smoke machines, or anything else that smells of dog and pony. In other words: marketing without any of the art of marketing.

DES is caused by deep ambivalence about marketing and advertising, which the afflicted associate with roguishness and duplicity: they see it as a force for evil. Which, hey, it often is. But that’s tough to reconcile with the bald fact that marketing is necessary. If marketing weren’t necessary, no one would do it. End of thought experiment.

Faced with that ambivalence, they try to promote themselves without resorting to the “tricks of the trade.” They try to market without marketing. And they wind up creating strange, conflicted monsters — messaging that’s typically either sanctimonious or tedious, or both.

I was intrigued to come across the “Tom’s of Maine Goodness Philosophy” long-format ad, on Hulu. The message is essentially a mainstream paean to the triple bottom line (of people, planet, and profit, except not so much the profit part) — which is certainly an interesting development, culturally speaking. Unfortunately it’s delivered as an artificially sweetened lecture on virtuous capitalism, whose relentless brow-knitting goodyness made me want to gnaw my own foot off.

» Read the rest of this post

Respect on the Porch

Monday, 01 February 2010

In integrity marketing, all shortcuts are dead ends.

Recently a canvasser from a nonprofit activist group whose work I respect knocked on our front door. Never mind that we were finishing dinner; that’s par for the course. The problem, as I politely pointed out, was the No Solicitors sign mounted front and center on our door.

Now, I’m a nice guy. I treat everybody with respect. Even those who don’t see the wisdom of reciprocating. I didn’t shout the guy off my porch, partly because I was curious as to how he would justify disregarding our sign. Yes, he had seen the sign, but he persisted, pointing out that we had supported them in the past, and was I aware of current Big Problem X and that now, more than ever, they needed my money, time, and any extra limbs I could spare?

The thing is, I’m also an independent-minded chap who does not take well to being sold (which doesn’t make me rare). Solicitors on our porch have been doomed to leave empty-handed. Nine times out of ten that’s because they’re pushing a religion I don’t need, including the Church of the Immaculate Vinyl Siding. The rest of the time, it’s because I simply don’t buy on impulse. The best a canvasser can hope for is that they will have made me aware of a cause that interests me enough to look further into it on my own time. I’ll weigh it against the other myriad causes I believe in, and put my support where I decide it will have the most positive effect.

That takes a long view, but canvassers are focussed on the immediate win. Once in a while, in the primordial past, they might have gotten that win from me in the form of a one-time donation. It would have come at the cost of a big loss: my resentment at having allowed myself be coerced. That’s a bad trade for everybody.

Rare is the canvasser who realizes that the more he pushes me, the more he loses me. So stupendously rare, in fact, that we quashed the whole charade and put up our No Solicitors sign. Now we eat dinner in peace without random people wasting our time and theirs.

Except in the case of Mr. Persistent. By dismissing our clearly expressed wish not to be solicited to at home, he apparently hoped to bully me into giving him his small win. Instead, I saw him off and then unsubscribed myself from the organization’s email list — a big loss. May they enjoy great success. Without me.

There are thousands, probably millions of organizations doing work I believe in. It’s a buyer’s market. Any help reducing that number and tightening my focus is welcome. Any organization that tries to make an end run around the simple respect its supporters deserve — and plainly ask for — is making the process of elimination that much easier for me.

Topic for another day: this principle extends beyond the front porch and deep into an organization’s messaging. Nonprofits are by no means above non-integrity marketing. While good organizations avoid deception per se, coercion and manipulation (read: guilt) are the typical default mode. It’s easy to see why. It’s important to understand why not.

What’s your electric intersection?

Friday, 29 January 2010

Critical Path or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love (Integrity) Marketing

Published in 1981, Critical Path is one of R. Buckminster Fuller’s last and most urgent books. In it he likens the all-in effort needed to avert planetary catastrophe to the effort to put a man on the moon. (The “critical path method” is a scheduling algorithm which was used in mega-project-managing the Space Race.)

Bucky tells us in his foreword that he wrote the book for four reasons, including:

“Because of my driving conviction that all of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly, right now.”

Well then. Might as well go back to bed.

I read Critical Path in 1989, not without dismay. For that was the terminal year of Bucky’s proposed path, the year by which, he argued, either we had to have gotten our utopia on, or we could kiss our asteroid goodbye. The idea that it all hinged on everyone suddenly embracing total honesty looked like the quixotic naïveté of a brilliant man who needed to get out of his Dymaxion house more often. But, try as I might, I never could shake the old man’s exhortation. It worked on me like a proper zen koan, for years.

The trouble is, Bucky’s right. If — indulge me in a big, blinding if here — if we are to create a sustainable life for ourselves on this planet, it won’t be by sidestepping the truth. It’s all hands on deck, and transparency is the prime directive.

Not gonna happen? Not the right question. Bucky’s mission was not to wring his hands about what the rest of us would or would not do. (There are plenty keeping that project going.) His mission was to offer a solution. So that’s what he did, to the best of his remarkable knowledge, experience, and ability. And that, compadres, is leadership. What the rest of us do with it is our responsibility.

Here’s the deal: If you want to make a difference, find the most electric intersection of:

(A) What you know and love and excel at.
(B) What the world needs.

And have at it.

For my part, part A is creativity and communication, and the zeal to champion things I’m passionate about. Which happens to be the soul of good marketing (B). And my electric intersection? Building an integrity marketing agency. Making the world unsafe for status quo marketing & advertising founded on deception, coercion, and manipulation. Proving that truthful, participatory, integrity-driven marketing is more than doable, and more than just better: it’s necessary.

Tilting at windmills? Not my concern.

So what’s your electric intersection? Are you on it? ¡Felicitaciones, compadre! Still looking? It’s close by, just waiting to be recognized. Of course, finding it is not a ticket to blisstopia. On the contrary. You have to be tough-minded. You have to be hard-nosed. Just don’t waste your energy worrying about windmills.

The question is not, Is it realistic? The question is:

Props to Bucky for planting the seeds. I like to think he would have approved of Helsinqi.
Megaprops to Lindsay Hill for watering the plant.
Apologies to Dr. Strangelove.