Good Change/Bad Change

Political season is almost over, and it's time to talk about change. Good change, bad change, and the fact that we might all soon be standing on a street corner begging for change.

A funny thing, this concept of "change." When it comes to marketing, particularly in politics, it's a good thing (when times are bad, the challenger has two basic rules: run on "change" and tie your opponent to the current unpopular president). But it occurs to me that there's one kind of change that nobody likes: a candidate that seems to change during the course of the campaign.

Think back to the Gore-Bush debates. Back in those heady times, when we were blissfully unaware of the terrorist attack, wars and global recession soon to come, we had the luxury of fixating on eye rolls and sighs. After Al Gore showed much of both in his less-than-stellar first debate performance, an interesting thing happened: His handlers sat him down in front of a TV and made him watch Saturday Night Live's Darrell Hammond do his Gore imitation. "See?" the handlers said. "People see you as stiff and uptight. You have to change that."

And what did Gore do? He started wearing earth tones, doing morning-show interviews while sitting in an easy chair, and most notably, seeming to do his next debate performance on Xanax.

I remember thinking that it was a horrible decision. Sure, if we had never seen the other Gore, this Gore might seem more pleasant. But more important, people saw that Gore would change based on their perceptions of him. That's far worse, because it shows weakness. (His handlers blew it even more by leaking the SNL sit-down story to the media.)

In the next election, what was the angle that the Republicans introduced early and rode to victory? "Our guy is resolute; their guy is a flip-flopper." Hillary Clinton refused to change when it came to her initial approval of the war in Iraq, but what really hurt was the perception that she changed her personality on the campaign trail almost weekly. And McCain, who as of this writing is down eight points nationally, has always had a tough time convincing people that the current self-proclaimed "maverick" is the same guy as the media-dubbed maverick of 2000. (In the final presidential debate, most people saw one angry guy and one guy who remains calm under attack. They preferred the latter.)

Before you make any radical changes to your product, service or entire corporate brand, think about whether it's change that people want, rather than change you think they need.

Words Matter

Paraguay?

I've been on record as saying that I think Starbucks and McDonald's are trying too hard to become one another. I said it nearly a year ago after Starbucks started selling breakfast sandwiches and McDonald's announced it was creating barista bars to hock its McCafe gourmet coffee products.

I'll stand by the prediction that neither experiment will last, although it's pretty clear who's doing it better: McDonald's. When I try to think off the top of my head of an ad campaign that is truly succeeding (meaning, it's memorable, people talk about it, and you remember whom it's for), I think of the McDonald's McCafe spots. You know the ads. There's one with two guys, one with two women. Each follows the same "unmasking" formula: Closeted regular folk remove their veils of snobbery under the reverse enlightenment of the golden arches.

Because my biggest pet peeve about American culture is the latent hostility toward curiosity and intellect that emerges during each presidential election, it pains me to admit that these ads are very good. Why? Because they fit the brand. McDonald's isn't actually trying to be Starbucks (and it's not; the iced hazelnut coffee I tried a week ago was god-awful). It's saying that its products are low-attitude.

The ads are memorable because they're expertly written, acted and edited. People talk about them because they're funny and they strike a universal chord (all people feel the pressure to act contrary to their true natures in some way every day). And you remember whom they're for because their ultimate message travels with, not against, the grain of how we already perceive McDonald's.

True, I'll be surprised if the barista bars are still around in 10 years, but until then, well done, Ronald.

Robot in a Wheelchair

I've been a member Think Tank Thursdays for several years now. T3 isn't your typical writers' group, which is exactly why I go. Instead of a group of dour novelists "workshopping" their prologues to death, it's a good-humored cabal of screenwriters who pitch their script ideas. The point is to see how good your concepts are before you ever put 12-pt. Courier font to virtual paper. There is no "workshopping" involved.

Having given and received many a movie pitch, I've figured out the hallmark of a truly good one. It isn't the pitch that draws silence because it's so airtight (like the one about a rogue Israeli soldier and Palestinian terrorist who jointly conspire to bring peace to the Middle East by threatening to detonate a nuclear device if the two sides don't hash out a peace deal in 48 hours). Nor is it the ones that leave people speechless because they're so awful (like the one that started as an interesting tale of corporate fraud, only to degrade into the author's personal conspiracy theory of Paul Wellstone's death).

No, the pitches with real potential are the ones that make people talk... the ones that provide such an appealing and versatile platform that they start chiming in, "Yeah, and then you could do this..." because they instantly want to make the movie their own.

Sure, this can annoy the pitcher, because the new ideas often conflict with his or her own. But if you accept the fact that film is by far the world's most collaborative art form, it's absolutely the best outcome. What you want, ultimately, is for a producer, a director and some actors to want to make your project their own. Barring self-financing, that's the only way your movie will ever get made at all.

Another long-winded analogy for marketing campaigns? Yes. The era of making your campaign completely airtight and closed off is pretty much over. Younger generations have grown up expecting to take any piece of creative work and make it their own, whether it's remixing their favorite song, shooting their own ad for your product, or re-editing the trailer for your movie. In short, everything has become film. Everything is a collaboration. And the quicker you accept that, and more you care more about authoring a good platform instead of taking credit for every product that platform generates, the better off you'll be.

P.S. Why "Robot in a Wheelchair"? In my favorite all-time pitch, a 20-something guy outlined his idea for a sitcom including the character of a robot in a wheelchair. I just thought it was funny.

Flurble

I came across a ground-breaking new social media tool the other day that I think every marketing director and VP needs to know about right now.

Flurble combines the stickiness of Facebook, the immediacy of Twitter, the social bookmarking capabilities of del.icio.us, the searchability of Google, YouTube's instantaneous viralocity, and Digg's peer-to-peer interest group features. If you're looking for something that attracts the IM-addicted, text-savvy, iPhone app-loving emerging market, it's all about Flurble.

In fact, if I may be so bold, I would say that if your website isn't Flurblized in the next three months, you're going to miss a very big boat. If you don't believe me, I'd put money down that your competitors are implementing it (and licking their chops at the prospect of stealing your customers) as we speak.

What is Flurble? Absolutely nothing. It doesn't exist. I made it up.

Why? Two reasons: One, I'm cruel that way. Two, while I am a serious believer in (and user of) social media tools, I continue to think that marketing directors should resist the temptation to trust anyone who touts "the next best thing" on that still-developing frontier. I've been in meetings where I thought I could throw out a ridiculous word like "flurble" and make people's eyes light up.

But that would be branding malpractice. I prefer satire. :)

What Do Punditry & Marketing Have in Common?

I've been watching the Democratic National Convention. While most criticisms about conventions are directed at their informercialness, my biggest criticism is of the coverage itself. Punditry has hit a new low. It now takes a dozen people to say absolutely nothing.

Most of the time I'm watching the so-called experts, I'm wondering why in the world they're not talking to real people. To hear a pundit say, "The strength of this speech is that it appeals to the blue-collar working-class swing-voter in Scranton"--and then NOT cut to an actual blue-collar working-class swing-voter from Scranton--seems absurd.

The Internet (specifically social media) has brought this expectation with it. Call it the death of the filter. CNN's entire "Best Political Team on Television" is a filter based on the old model of Expert->Consumer. Most people under 30 don't go for filters. They don't know who James Carville is, nor do they care what he thinks. Or if they do care what he thinks, their next question is, "What do my friends think about what James Carville thinks?"

As with so many things these days, I saw this as another analogy in marketing. So many times, people try to be the speculative pundit filter. In extreme cases, they actually don't care what their customers think. More often, they simply "think" they already know. But they don't actually ask. They'd rather speculate, so they can't be proven wrong.

I've been working on a product that addresses this, which is in a beta phase right now. Call it a way of eliminating Pat Buchanan and James Carville and getting right to Scranton.

Whose Ad Is This?

(I'm a little late in commenting on this campaign, but I think the point is timeless.)

I'm guessing that the ad above rings a bell. It's a TV campaign where disembodied hands create an image in the negative space of sand against a light board, then seamlessly transform that image into another one, then another.

It's visually stunning and hypnotic. I've researched it and discovered that the hands belong to Israeli artist Ilana Yahav, who is the only person in the world doing this kind of art.

I love this campaign, yet ultimately, I think it's utterly ineffective.

Whether I'm right or wrong depends on the answer to this question: If you've seen these ads, can you tell me (without cheating) which company they are for?