Brand Strategy. Steve Poppe, Founder.

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Advertising

Marmot’s super bowl spot.

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November 11, 2019

(This post originaly appeared February 10, 2016, then was taken down die to a hack.)

I love the Marmot brand. I ski in Marmot, I sleep in Marmot, I do outdoors stuff in Marmot. I want to own more of it. The gear is well-designed, engineered-to-the-max and good looking. They’ve done a wonderful job with branding and marketing. (I have tend pole that bent, and it doesn’t even bother me. Why? Because Marmot is like family.)

Then, before the Super Bowl, I saw a Marmot teaser ad campaign and knew I wasn’t going to like. Super Sunday I saw the real thing. It’s a Goodby, Silverstein and Partners spot, focusing around, you guessed it, a marmot. Were this toilet tissue or insurance, maybe. But cuddly talking Marmot? Oy. I can only imagine the 2 other campaigns the agency pitched to beat this one. It should never have been presented. Lazy ass trade craft. It is so unfitting of the brand.

I can just imagine the engineers in the goose down research center, breathing feathers all day, watching the game on TV with their friends. “A talking marmot, really?” No wonder advertising and marketing people have a bad name in engineering focused companies.

As a brand strategy guy and Marmot fan it was a sad day. Even if the spot tested off the charts with the teens and tweens – the next generation of buyers – it was a brand mistake. A 5 million dollar mistake. And that’s a lot of feathers.

Peace.

Creative by the pound.

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November 20, 2012

Paul Ottellini is stepping down as Intel’s CEO in May. Implicit in the announcement was the notion that his leadership did not evolve or lead Intel into the mobile device age. It seems Intel is no longer inside the hand candy owned by nearly every man, woman and child in America and the ROW (rest of world). This announcement and an article on the transformation of education thanks to MOOCS (massive open online courses) got me thinking about the fate of ad agencies and whether they are evolving with the times.

Let’s face it, it’s sad but true, outside of the third world humanity’s purpose on planet earth is “buy stuff.” That’s why we go to school, work and pay taxes. Advertising used to be about pushing product and product preference on would-be consumers, but today consumers are wound up and ready to buy, so marketers aren’t as much interested in creating demand as they are in predisposing consumers toward their products. The web is the big pre-disposer. Broadcast and print are still great tools, yet these days they’re mere sign posts. The real selling takes place after the ad. Agencies that sell creative by the pound are not seeing this — the total picture. It’s great to have top reputation for creativity, though it is better to have a full understanding of modern marketing: brand planning, lifecycle, loyalty, aftercare, twitch points, insouciance, and timing. Honestly, not many shops have this view.

Great creative is a price of entry for ad agencies but the web has changed marketing. Moving the desks around, being media-agnostic and practicing all sorts of other marko-babble are not going to fix the profitability and value of the ad agency business. It needs a new box.

Mr. Ottellini didn’t change the box. IPG’s Michael Roth isn’t going to do it. Tom Bedacarre would like to. Carl Johnson-ish. We need a savant. Peace!

Selling business.

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September 16, 2013

Native advertising is defined by some as advertising done to look like the content of the media on which it appears. The ads are tailored to the media. A couple of decades ago if you made your TV ad to look like a newscast and scheduled it to run on the evening news, standards and practices would not approve it. It had gone too native. Lately, I’ve seen some cable stations using program actors to promote products in commercial pods during the show. It’s worth a rewind…until you see it’s an ad. Smart idea actually.

In the web world, native advertising is doing similar things, allowing marketers to appear to offer site content but then pulling the rug out quickly to reveal a product endorsement. It is a way forward, and if does properly effective yet it will make us callous to the media channel.

I’m all about value…and native advertising has the ability to add a little value to the selling message, but it does detract from the media channel’s integrity.

But here’s the thing. Today many regular ads aren’t native to their own selling message. So why be native to a media property. Ads are typically native to humor, to visual extravagance, to performance and story but not the product. Let’s fix that first before we go mucking up other media channels.

Great consumer insights married to emotional and logical selling schemes are the way forward. Let’s not forget we are in the selling business. Peace.

HP TouchPad Ads Off…and Running.

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July 7, 2011

Hewlett-Packard is launching a new ad campaign today for the TouchPad tablet and it sounds rather messy. I read about it in The New York Times ad column and hope it’s just poor reporting. The story was written by Elizabeth Olson.

Here’s my strategic take.

HP is late to market with the tablet and needs to get noticed.
HP has a new operating system (OS), which will drive all its hardware devices. Called webOS, it will integrate their smartphones, PCs, printers, tablets and soon other devices and appliances. It’s a cool promise, but s complicated story.
Printers are a big franchise and potential differentiator, so HP wants to make them more relevant.
The purchase of Palm and the growth of the smartphone market has made the mobile business a critical growth component.
HP is not a big brand with Millennials and teens.

That is a lot of stuff to convey. If you have to say 5 things, you’ve said nothing.

The NY Times story starts out talking about a new commercial with Russell Brand. I’m feeling it. A little old school, but I’m feeling it. Then it says there are executions with stars from iCarly and Glee. The future holds spots/vids from Lebron James and Jay-Z and Lady Gaga did some work in May but has not re-upped. Add to that, all the social media contests (100 free TouchPads) and Twitter tchotch and you begin to see how it’s going to be hard to find the idea. Goodby Silverstein is a great ad shop, but it doesn’t sound as if it hasn’t corralled this herd of goats.

My head is spinning. I hope it is just a lot of info, not well organized, by a reporter from another newspaper beat. And I’m no Leo Apotheker. Peace!

Celebrate, rinse, repeat.

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August 6, 2012

I often use the word “celebrate” when talking about branding. It’s a great word. Once you have your brand idea and planks together, spending money and calories celebrating your product, service and/or customer is the best way forward. A great many ads and sales schemes focus on tearing down competitors. Consumers don’t appreciation that. They appreciate and gravitate toward the positive. “If you don’t have something nice to say…”

When it comes to advertising, too often we build ads that people like. By celebrating the above, we are building up products people like. There’s a difference. One can imply a negative, so long as it’s done by superimposing a positive. One of my favorite ad sayings is “make them feel something, then do something.” Feeling good is good. Peace!

Badvertising.

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December 30, 2021

Mission Health headquartered in Asheville, NC and owned by for-profit hospital group HCA out of Nashville has been under fire for a couple of years since its purchase. Quality of care issues have arisen, as have the cost of care, and physician attrition. Mission has some image work to do.

Hospitals are notoriously bad advertisers. The occasional big brand hospital invests in a good ad agency and the work turns out well, but that’s the exception.

The ad herewith from Mission Health is an example of poor ad craft.

The one-word headline “Commitment” is lazy. Even with the subhead “That’s my mission,” an obvious play on the brand name, the line is meaningless. These are the words of trauma Nurse Jackie, the ad’s visual:

“I am deeply committed to this community. I’ve lived here all my life and have also been a part of the Mission family for more than 20 years. Now, as Assistant Chief Nursing Officer, I play a direct role in ensuring Mission remains the top trauma center in Western North Carolina.”

Below this quote are the words “Dedicated to our patients. Committed to our employees.

Let’s parse the communications. Nurse Jackie is committed. That’s the claim. But the only proof of this (commitment) claim (better known as reason to believe) is that she has worked at Mission for 20 years and been promoted.

You can’t make a claim in an ad and not prove it. It’s a waste of money. And commitment is just about the most common ad strategy for hospitals since “care and caring.”

I really, really want Mission to succeed. They do a lot of good medical work in the community. But when it comes to advertising (and branding) they’re not committed.

Peace.

Truth and Conspiracy.

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March 29, 2021

Brand planners pay close attention to popular culture in an attempt to massage their ideas and selling schema into it. One hugely impactful, popular cultural construct today is demand for disinformation, especially related to politics and conspiracy.

Disinformation, it seems is much more interesting than typical truthful information. And when I say truthful information, I’m here talking about advertising. Nobody needs to hear me talk about advertising bombardment, it’s a given. And add to that, eighty percent of advertising is bad.

Bad advertising shares commodity claims with little proof. “Fred Anderson Toyota offers the best customer service,” for instance. Is that misinformation? Prolly. Multiply that by 100,000 and you begin to see why consumers are not real believers in the craft. But in today’s environment, uncover a little conspiracy and you have a person’s attention.

In a recent strategy written for a potty training company, I uncovered a conspiracy worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Diaper companies were productizing and strategizing ways to keep children in diapers longer. And it worked. Fifty years ago kids were out of diapers by 18 months. Today it’s closer to 36 months.

Manipulative, greedy marketing is the worst type. People don’t want to be pushed around.

We are still up to our asses in diapers (hee hee), but this conspiracy has gotten more than a few mothers angry and we’re moving in the right direction. Truth Well Told.

Not every advertising and market campaign can be a movement, but it won’t hurt planners to dig a little deeper and give the people the drama they crave.

Peace.

Adjectives R Us.

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January 18, 2019

My alma mater Rollins College is a really neat school. A beautiful school. But sometimes its beauty overshadows the academics, so someone smart came up with an idea for a YouTube video to downplay the former and highlight the latter. The video is nicely shot but the script is terribly weak. Shame.

Once past the beauty shots and facilities recap, about a third of the video, I began counting marketing adjectives. And there were plenty. The same adjectives any school could and would use. In fact, the same adjectives any institution, company or even brand might use. Adjectives R US.

There was a good provable “idea” hidden in the copy but it was glossed over. The notion that classes are small enough to mirror post-graduate work. Sorry to say it but the video proved nothing more than a pictorial sales piece. As it stands, the video strategy “more than just pretty” lay fallow and, sadly, uncultivated.

Peace.

McAfee Advertising, Way Asleep.

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September 6, 2011

So is the brand pronounced Mac-a-fee or Mih-Caffee. (Hoe-gaarden or Who-Garden?) One of a brand’s first challenges is to make sure the name is pronounced correctly. McAfee is a killer PC protection software product, which, if I’m not mistaken. is #1 or 2 in the marketplace. It was purchased earlier this year by Intel. I’m a 3-license custy and couldn’t be happier.

But, as an ad rat (a gym rat for ads) I can’t help but see that McAfee needs a marketing boost. There is an ad in the newspaper today showing the McAfee logo as a superman emblem on a man’s chest. The pithy headline reads SAFE NEVER SLEEPS. A line they give a TM. Not sure if it qualifies as copy but in small text beneath the line reads (I’ll save you the caps) “Smarter security. Every device, every network, everywhere.”

Classic “we’re here” advertising. Is it any wonder digital advertising is cutting into traditional ad budgets? This is some lazy stuff. I’m not sure I can even type anymore I’m so disappointed. There is no claim here. And no proof. Only colors, type and photography. Why does the McAfee marketing dept. bother to get out of bed in the morning? Are you kidding me? What’s the idea?

The Idea. The Performance.

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July 3, 2014

Anything Elizabeth Hurley does I like. No really, anything. In this Droga5 ditty for Newcastle Ale, there was an idea, great copywriting and a compelling performance. It made me thirsty.

Great work contains 3 things: an idea, proof of idea and performance. Ideas without proof may take hold but don’t really impact sales. Ironically, ideas without proof are called selling. Claim, claim, claim. When someone is claiming or selling we shut down. Ideas supported by proof have the most sales impact.

In the Droga5 spot, there is an idea: America would be quite different if Britain won the Revolutionary War (#ifwewon). There is proof: the funny examples of what would be different in America today — which makes us smile, nod and even empathize. But the performance of Elizabeth Hurley takes the work to a higher level. The performance of the idea is what brings it to life.

Smart ad agency people understand this — they are paid to excel at it. Performance is a little lacking in the digital agency space, but there, it has more upside. More breadth. And I’m not talking acting here, I’m talking performance of the idea. Performance of the proof.

Think about the performance, don’t stop at strategy, creative and production. Peace.

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