The Law of Negative Identification

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One of the cornerstones of brand identification is choosing a strategy for your company.  This can be an incredibly difficult task for many small to midsize companies, because their leaders (or boards, or branding agencies) may have varying views about what gives them the strongest advantages in the marketplace. So “choosing” the strategic path always creates a fear of leaving something out, overlooking something really valuable.  You might hear “if we decide we’re a service-oriented company, how can we communicate our ability to develop great products?”  Or “if we go to market on our great distribution abilities, how can we also get the message across about our great prices?”

When making the difficult decisions about how to communicate who and what you are, it can sometimes be easier to assert & identify who and what you’re NOT.  I call this the Law of Negative Identification.  This law is a perfect place to start when having the “who are we?” or “what should we be doing next?” conversations.  It also helps you position yourself against and among your competitors.  If you happen to be a company that has a great distribution strategy and also has great prices, it may also be true that you are NOT an excellent manufacturer.  Now that you have that important nugget in hand, you can go club your nearest competitor (who may happen to dabble in manufacturing) over the head with it.

Remember Porter’s postulate:  “A company go outperform its rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve.”  In an endless sea of business categories, flush with same-ness, the differences are what enable you to get noticed.  If every one of your competitors is wearing a shade of red, you could really stand out by NOT wearing red…imagine how visible you’d be if you wore the FIRST green in the category, the first yellow, the first blue.

So how to decide what you’re not?  We usually start with the important stuff, like “where do you make most of your money?”  Or “where do you make the best margins?”  That usually wins most debates, but not always.  Sometimes, companies put brand first, or stick with their core strengths, even if the grass looks greener on the other side of the ROI fence.  That’s okay, as long as you’re not considering – not even remotely – becoming something you’re just not equipped or designed or engineered to be.  Look long and hard at your balance sheet.  Look long and hard at your people. Find the strengths and exploit them.  Find the weaknesses (or pure absences in some cases) and use those as the first pieces of your strategy puzzle.

So, who are you?  Or more appropriately, who are you not?

Death and Social Media

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This is a morbid way to discuss an idea, but let’s talk about death.  And while we’re at it, let’s talk about social media. I was (briefly, fleetingly) thinking about what would happen after I die, and the kinds of things people would remember about me.  (And more exactly, the kinds of things I hope people will remember about me.)

In my life, (and I’m not quite done yet,) I have created volumes of content in the social media world:  blog posts, and blog comments, Facebook statuses and comments and likes and picture uploads and all those Tweets, reTweets and direct messages on Twitter!  I’ve yelled about firing the head coach of my beloved Buffalo Bills on the fan forums on buffalobills.com, and helped people solve technical problems on support forums for Apple computers and some software platforms.  I’ve written record and book reviews on iTunes and Amazon.  I’ve even commented on videos posted on YouTube!  (Eeek.  What a geek.)

So I wondered, will this become part of what people remember about me?  Will there be people at my funeral saying, “yeah, nice guy…oh! And did you see his Tweets from the IAB mobile conference back in 2010?  So insightful.” Instead of a collage of photos, will there be a screen somewhere with a streaming feed of my life’s digital output?

On one had, I seriously doubt that these bits and bytes of my recommendations, forwards, hashtag snips and extemporanea will have any bearing on what people think about me. But on the other, there’s no getting around the fact that social media content is now a contributing editor to my legacy.  I also submit that I think it would be an interesting, revealing and even fairly intimate way to chronologically peek into the ebbs and flows of my (mostly) professional life.  Which makes me think:  are we (am I?) Tweeting accordingly?  Is the overall tone of my social commentary admirable/useful/honorable?  Will my children be proud of what they read?  Does it really matter how many check-ins I have, or if I’m the bloody mayor of some local bar?  Jeez…maybe we better start looking at all of this in context.

In older days, we might have discovered a diary under a bed, or a journal tucked away in a closet somewhere, long after the departure of a loved one.  But now, we have a digitized database of someone’s every thought and comment for years and years.  And since most people in the world will never author a book, or write a professional article in a real journal, or be interviewed for television or radio, is the chronicling of social media verbiage a new means to endure? [Uh oh, I think I smell a new business model being hatched.]

Relax. With marketing, price is NOT the issue.

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If you’re looking for an advertising agency or a marketing communications firm or a web developer or a direct marketing partner, there’s good news.  You won’t be shopping on price.

This is kind of weird for most market consumers – virtually everything we buy has a price attached to it, and generally, the choice we make on any given purchase tends to include price as a determining factor.

But with marketing, it’s different.  With marketing services, YOU set the price.  You say “I want this and this and that and that, and I’m willing to spend $X.”  Pretty cool position to be in, eh?  Imagine if you could walk into your favorite restaurant, and say “I want the Sea Scallops appetizer and the John Dory Entrée and I think I’ll have the Green Tea Ice Cream dessert… and I want to only pay $42 for everything.  Oh, and throw in a glass of Riesling with the entrée!”

That’s pretty much how it goes with marketing.  Let’s say you’re about to embark on an advertising campaign.  You would never solicit five proposals and then select the most inexpensive agency.  [For one thing, you couldn’t really solicit a proposal without stipulating a budget.]  And secondly, these kinds of services aren’t shopped on price.  You’re searching for ingenuity.  Or practicality.  Or intense creativity.  Or humor.  Or whatever you think might move the needle.

Buying marketing services is NOT like buying tires, where you go from shop to shop, looking for the best deal.

Unfortunately, many would-be marketers like to play the “I’m not telling you my budget” game.  They think that by withholding that parameter, they’ll get more affordable services.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.  Every ad agency, every web development company, every marketing consultant thinks they have a feasible answer to your quandary.  But we all think you should be spending a minimum of $10 million.

Here’s another rub.  The supplier (agency, developer, or restaurant owner) can simply say “no.”  [Sadly, not many of them do.  But it’s really necessary sometimes.]  Some suppliers can’t do what you’re asking for $42.  Or WON’T do what you’re asking for $42.  And those answers will help you make important decisions later on.

So, next time you’re shopping for marketing/advertising/web services, do yourself and the professional on the other side of the table a favor:  set a budget.  It’s the best way to get a straight answer, the only way to compare apples to apples when you’re reviewing your proposals, and probably one of the very few times in your professional life when YOU get to determine what something will cost.

100 Years of Advertising Agency Deliverables – In Three C’s.

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The history of advertising and marketing communications – about the last 100 years or so – has constantly demanded agencies to evolve.  And the evolutionary pace is moving faster than ever, thanks to the advent of the Internet.  New media, new technology, new formats – all of these play critical roles.  But looking backward – and then forward again – this history can be described in three primary phases, each beginning with the letter C.  And if you care to read through, there’s a bonus!

The first C:  Copywriting

In the early days of advertising, say, from its provenances through the late 1950’s, businesses engaged the services of advertising agencies mostly for their superior writing skills.  Copywriters weaved dazzling tales of adventure and promise around products and services.  The primary media were radio (you had to “paint” the scene with words) and print, mostly expressed in newspapers and the burgeoning magazine business.  Consider the scheister-ism of PT Barnum’s “Greatest Show on Earth,” long-copy (and long-promise) miracle cure-all ads and the culmination in the late 1950’s to “E-Day” for the Edsel.  Copy carried us through two world wars.

The Second C:  Commercials

By the 1960’s, art started to capture our imagination. Helmut Krone’s 2:1 layout ratio reduced copy to a shrinking afterthought:  Think Small.  Flowery language and superspun tales gave way to big, beautiful product shots, and – gasp! – moving images on the new-fangled television thingy.  For the next 50 years or so, American advertising would become a bubbling volcanic eruption of 30- and 60-second commercinematic lava.  Rain-slicked roads for car commercials, the beckoning bubbling overflow of the beer money shot, all those great talking heads and one very large, very iconic Mean Joe Green having a Coke and a Smile.    What could possibly top that?

For the better part of five decades, commercials flourished, and made advertising a sexy career choice. And even got big-time movie directors stoked about a supershort form. But in the late 1990’s there was trouble afoot. A new and powerful medium had sprung up, and there were – gulp – NO RULES.  Heck, for a long time, with no IAB, there were no STANDARDS!  But there sure were lots of eyeballs. The Internet did change everything, especially advertising.  And you could almost see the second “C” getting desperate…trying to articulate the new medium with, of all things, ANIMALS:  sock puppets, energized bunnies, and when will cavemen and chimpanzees ever get old?  It was clearly time for a new generation.

The Third C:  Content

Like its predecessors, content will change everything about how advertising agencies go about their business, about the kinds of people they will hire and about the kind of work that will be produced.  In some ways, content is already surpassing commercials – expensive to create, produce and air – as the chief and ultra-scalable deliverable.  Today, in the social media morning of marketing history, content development is as valuable to our clients as the storyboard once was and the concept outline before it.  Programs, movements, essay-writing contests, blogs, handheld video diaries, flash mobs, tweets and check-ins:  all content, and all fueled (okay mostly fueled) by our beloved industry.  Next time you’re having lunch with your client, start talking about content.  You might see a real relationship start to bloom.

The fourth C:  I told you there was more.

Although Content has become the unobtanium of the marketing world, there is a good chance that its reign will not last nearly as long as its forebears.  In the next 10 years (yep, you heard it here first,) if agencies cannot deliver COMMUNITY to their clients, they will be as valuable as shiny, mint-condition Edsels. And we all know where they ended up.

Five reasons David Ogilvy would like – and approve of – social media

Nader Ashway5 Comments

I’m a big fan of David Ogilvy. The principles he laid down in his books and in his work are still being expressed to great effect – decades later and in more languages he might have ever imagined – by the Ogilvy network worldwide.  When Ogilvy passed away just after his 88th birthday in 1999, he would have had no idea (as the rest of us didn’t) what incredible changes were about to re-shape the marketing and advertising landscape.   Changes like website functionality and enhancements to HTML and search and later paid search and mobile.

But David was all about was the BIG IDEA.  And while all those channels would have made sense in an expanding media world, and maybe would have made great strides under his stewardship, none would likely have tickled him or inspired him more than the proliferation of social media.  Based on some of the more important principles he articulated in “Ogilvy on Advertising,” his veritable how-to for all marketing practitioners, here are five key reasons “Uncle Dave” would have been agog over social media.

  1. The ability to articulate a unified brand image: Ogilvy wrote “products, like people, have personalities…an amalgam of many things – its name, its packaging, its price, the style of its advertising, and above all, the nature of the product itself.”  The many forms of social media allow a brand to articulate that personality across the vast expanses of the online landscape, and give its stewards (brand managers, CMOs and agency contacts) the opportunity to capitalize on that privilege or to puke it away.  As Ogilvy said, “it isn’t the {product} they choose, it’s the image.”
  2. Word of mouth: David was talking about this in the early 1980’s, while the rest of the industry came around about 20 years later.  Ogilvy was fascinated by this aspect of the business and even commented on how elements of advertising, like jingles and fashion styles, were crossing over into mainstream consumption.Of course, the bedrock of social media is word of mouth.  It starts with influencing and even starting conversations about your company or your brand, and then monitoring them.  Today’s social media tools and third-party-developed platforms allow you to develop, manage and monitor your social “voice” with increasing levels of accuracy.
  3. How to become a good copywriter: In the memorial full page ad in Adweek in August 1999, a picture of David Ogilvy was accompanied with his quote:  “I’d like to be remembered as a copywriter who had some big ideas.”  He knew the business was perched on good ideas, articulated well in copy.And what is social media but a bunch of copy?  Web copy, blog posts, comments, LinkedIn profiles, FB posts and statuses…all copy.  And the mothership of copywriting?  Twitter:  just 140 characters to say it right.  Although Uncle Dave was a fan of the long-form ad, he may have enjoyed this simple but effective restriction.  My guess is he would have summed it up thus: “It’s brilliant.  It keeps the rubbish to a minimum, and makes everyone else create new destinations from the same footpath.”
  4. Analysis, especially by medium: One important aspect of the business that intrigued Ogilvy was direct response.  He called it his “first love and secret weapon.”  He loved the  connection to visible, measurable sales.  He hailed the headline as the most important element in communicating benefits.  And he wrote that relating inquiries to the medium that produced them can help you fine tune your media selection.Ogilvy, a huge fan of direct marketing metrics and a fierce proponent of research, would have been tickled silly with modern tools like Google Analytics, or BackType (an engine that allows you to search conversation topics on blogs, mashups and other social networks.) He also would have been a master of leveraging combinations – a Twitter feed on his blog; latest posts on his Facebook fan page (jeez, how many fans would he have had?) and a LinkedIn profile that pointed to his video content on YouTube and Vimeo.  All of this of course, streamed to his fans and friends via RSS and managed simply via his Ping.fm dashboard.
  5. The #1 Miracle of Research: Ogilvy was a staunch supporter of research, writing “advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.”  In the book, he outlines 18 miracles of research.  This is #1:  “It can measure the reputation of your company among consumers…”How convenient that social media would allow Mr. Ogilvy to do virtually the same thing, in real time!  By monitoring conversations about the brands his agency advertises, or reading through recent entries of a help forum for a product his agency markets, or by measuring daily analytics on a website his agency built, David the Great would have had a moment-to-moment readout on how his brands were doing.  Probably while sipping a perfect gin on the veranda overlooking the garden at Touffou.Cheers, David.  How we miss you so.

Article also published by Nader Ashway as Five Reasons David Ogilvy Would Like – and Aprove of  – Social Media on Technorati.