How do you like the new Microsoft campaign now?

I’ve been the lone supporter of the new Microsoft ad campaign in our office. I think it’s fun, does a lot to humanize Microsoft and, most importantly, it’s got people talking about the company!

Ad one and two did nothing for my co-workers at GigPark. Let’s see if the new spot changes their minds :) …

Jerry Seinfeld. Pitchman for … Microsoft?

Microsoft and their new ad agency have signed Jerry Seinfeld to help pitch Windows in their upcoming campaign (reported here and a bunch of other places). But … isn’t that a Mac in the corner of the Seinfeld apartment? Hypocrite! :)

“Marketing is the price you pay for being unremarkable”

Quote from Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad – via Carsonified.

I’ve read this quote before, but it hit home this morning having just gone through a big PR push for GigPark.

I chose to interpret the quote like this: Rather than spending a lot of money on marketing, it’s always better to spend your time and money building a remarkable product/company that people want to talk about and journalists want to write about.

I still believe that PR/marketing/advertising experts can be an incredible resource to help you spread the word, but they shouldn’t be used to drum up interest in a product or company that isn’t, in some way, remarkable.

Marketing democracy on YouTube

Having spent 7 years working in advertising agencies I can attest to the fact that the ad business has a pretty warped concept of what the ‘truth’ is. Agencies don’t often lie, they just choose to focus on points that mislead people about the products they are selling. Of course good advertising (the kind that I produced ;)) never bullshits anyone, but unfortunately good advertising is not the majority of what gets produced.

I have always been a big fan of work from citizens or groups that aim to talk back to brands in public spaces and attempt to set the record straight. Adbusters call it subvertising, but usually it just involves someone climbing up on a billboard and changing the text or image on an ad to make a statement.

Unfortunately changing a billboard takes a lot of effort and the threat of going to jail or getting a hefty fine puts people off.

One way I’m increasingly seeing people talking back to brands is on YouTube. Lately I’ve noticed more people using advertising spoofs, which have been going on for a long time, to make statements and sometimes present some truth about what is being advertised in the original ad. Subvertising on YouTube is less work than a billboard, less dangerous and if you do a good job you have the opportunity to reach many more people.

Here is a simple example of an ad for an energy company in New Zealand being jammed with some ‘truth’.

The original ad:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw8QJWdC650]

The ‘fixed’ ad:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i12qJ-Nejgk]

Well, I wouldn’t use it.

When I joined my first advertising agency at the tender at of 18 I was given some great advice that has guided me through many situations in my career. It came from a seasoned copywriter named Carl. He said the definition of a professional in the advertising business is someone who can reach beyond the kinds of people they are familiar with and create ads that appeal to people that they would never normally come into contact with in their daily lives.

Carl said that when he first started out he wrote great ads for young men and lousy ads aimed at anyone else. The day he realized he’d become a good copywriter was the day he wrote a great ad aimed at teenage girls in the morning and a great one for dentures in the afternoon.

I think this is a fundamental insight into business. Just like creating ads, you become good at creating products when you can create something compelling for people who aren’t like you. I spent 4 years working as an Account Planner in London and this was something I needed to remind myself of every day. I had to stretch myself to get inside the heads of different types of people and understand how they see the world and why they make certain decisions. It’s a great exercise.

The other implication applies to when you are assessing the merits of something.

When I explain our business, GigPark, to people the first reaction I usually get is either:

1. Cool, I’d use that. I think you’ve got a great business there. Or sometimes…
2. Hmmm, I’m not sure I’d use that. I don’t think you have a business.

This is a completely natural reaction for most people. What surprises me though is how many people who’s job it is to asses the merits of a business react this way. Surely, these people would be better served by assessing which groups a product might be targeted at, understanding what motivates them and deducing how they might react. Will a person planning their wedding use the product, or a couple who have recently moved into a new neighborhood?

Having said that it is always the job of the person presenting an idea to make the audience do as little work as possible. If I’m explaining a concept and someone can’t easily understand who the product would appeal to and why, then that is my fault, not theirs. I’ll keep practicing!

Sutori: Blast Radius goes to work for customers as well as clients

I was finally introduced to Sutori this week by a friend that works at Blast Radius, a digital agency with Canadian offices in Vancouver and Toronto. Sutori is a site that lets people rate products they buy and encourages corporations to participate and react to the feedback.

Sutori in their own words:

We believe that today’s customers have more power than ever. Power to make informed choices. To connect with each other and share unbiased advice, opinions and stories.

We’ve created Sutori to channel that power. To capture the stories that bind us all together in our shared lives as customers. And to make it easy for companies to listen to and learn from those stories.

Sutori was created by a small team at Blast Radius, and from what I can gather it was built on company time. I’ve always respected Blast from a distance for their commitment to innovation, good management and honesty. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve been told stories by current and past employees about how great their policies are and what a good working environment they have created. In fact, when I was editor at Dose magazine we wrote a story about what a great place Blast is to work.

But Sutori looks like a cool initiative even for a company like Blast.

The idea that the world is a different place now and that customers can talk back to corporations seems to be, unfortunately, still a pretty novel concept in the advertising world. Blast have obviously come to terms with this and have decided to create a dialog not just between their clients and customers, but between anyone and any corporation who will listen.

I hope that Blast are encouraging their clients to participate to Sutori: to listen to what customers like and what they don’t like about their products, and to react accordingly. I think that this will not only be the key to success for Blast’s clients, but also the key for Sutori. Sutori needs to be a place for customers to organize their opinions and then get corporations to listen, not just a place to complain. If they can achieve this then I think Sutori will gain momentum and become a valuable tool for all of us and all of the corporations who market to us.

I wish them the best of luck.

Appendix (can a blog post have an appendix?):

From Sutori’s FAQs here is a bit more info about them:

What is Sutori?

On Sutori, you can rate companies by posting stories about your experiences with them.

Each story is accompanied by a “goodwill rating”, which contributes to the goodwill meter—an aggregated view of how the Sutori community feels about each company.

When other users read your story, they have the option of leaving a comment or voting to agree or disagree with you.

To reflect the power of consensus, stories with many “agree” votes have a stronger impact on the goodwill meter. Similarly, stories with many “disagree” votes have less of an impact.

In addition to a centralized goodwill meter where companies can track how customers feel about them and why, Sutori also includes a mechanism whereby companies can post official responses to any story.

You can also check out the Sutori blog here.

Send this to your HR director

Flicked through the job listings in your local paper or on Monster.com lately? They’re almost always uninspiring, visually boring and just completely lame.

Which makes it even more cool when you see a recruitment campaign that doesn’t suck. Check out this listing for the editor of a small Virginia newspaper (thanks to Mathew Ingram for the link). They got staff, critics and readers involved and presented the whole thing in a nice little web package. More than anything the site tells applicants about the culture of the paper and the passion of the staff. I’m sure they’ll get some great applicants.

Toro magazine closing its doors today

I was sad to hear that the fantastic Canadian men’s magazine, Toro will not be publishing their March issue, or any more for that matter. The reason given: the advertising market in Canada. Apparently the ads dollars they were getting just couldn’t sustain their business.

Here is a quote from the press release:

(TORONTO – February 12, 2007) Toro proprietor Christopher Bratty is suspending publication of the Canadian men’s magazine he launched in April 2003. “Despite steady annual growth,” says Toro publisher Dinah Quattrin, “it’s become clear that the advertising revenue available in Canada for a general-interest men’s magazine is such that even a very high-quality book like Toro can, at best, manage to sustain itself. The prospect of significant profits wasn’t in the foreseeable future.”


UPDATE: I’ve already had a couple of emails from Dose staff suffering from flashbacks!

Does consumer PR sell products or stock?

I had a beer a couple of weeks ago with Ian Barr from Hill and Knowlton, a large PR firm here in Toronto. We were chatting about how PR is used in modern business. One question I had was how many clients were coming to him to promote a new product versus coming to him explicitly wanting to impact their share price? Now, I’m not talking about investor relation or corporate PR – that’s always been focused on share price. I’m talking about consumer facing communications.

Ian said effecting the share price was not the main reason clients gave for planning a consumer campaign but that the conversation was coming up a lot more in meetings.

I guess the point behind my question was this: In a world where citizens create the media (blogs, etc), and the investment community monitor that media, the line between investor relations and consumer PR is blurring. If you want to effect share price in this scenario you put an ad on TV (or on YouTube) – not just in the business pages. Or to stick with the PR story – you message the masses, not just the business journalists.

I wonder how long it will be until the scales tip and marketing managers talk about share price first and product launches second? Maybe soon if the Bombardier commercials that played during the Superbowl are anything to go by.

Breaking news: Bridezilla is an ad for Sunsilk

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRNntNBEUF0]

I’m sure you’ve all seen the Bridezilla clip that’s been doing the rounds: Girl completely wigs out and cuts her hair an hour before her wedding.

I got an email from a friend today, Robbie McNamara who produced it. Here is the info he passed on:

The video was directed by John Griffith and shot in the Sheraton Four Points hotel on Lakeshore Boulevard in Toronto. Heather Fox did hair and makeup and Mark Binks was the coordinator. It was intended as a non-branded viral ad for Sunsilk hair products. The advertising agency behind it was Capitol C, here in Toronto.

With over 9 million views this might be the best value for money an advertising client ever got.

There is a good story with lots more details on this at Torontoist.