Branding Ad Vice

Before You Try To Slip One By Your Prospects

Exaggeration Doesn’t Pay

I was eating breakfast minding my own business the other morning when an ad came on the radio that asked how I would like to read 1,000 times faster.  Hmm, that’s enough to put down the shredded wheat for a moment. 

The ad went on to ask what it would be right to read 10 books in the time it takes to read one.  Math wasn’t my favorite subject back in school, but reading 10 times faster is much different than 1,000.  The ad goes on to say that you can increase your reading speed by 1,000% - that’s not the same as reading 1,000 times faster.  Maybe they didn’t make the claim of reading 1,000 times faster.

It took me three times to actually realize that the first line does say “1,000 times faster not 1,000% faster.”  Inaccuracies in advertising drive me crazy.  A pre-produced television ad for jewelers shows pictures of Monument Valley.  The voice over states that “the rocks were carved by glaciers and must be 10,000 feet tall.”   No they were carved by erosion and are only 1,000 feet tall.  If they can’t get that right, how accurate are they about the jewelry?

Perhaps a normal person wouldn’t notice, but why risk they lie when the truth is just as interesting and more believable? 

Jihad Car Sale - My Two Cents

I’ve written more than my share of car dealer ads over the past 3 decades.  Most of them (until I learned to just say no) were little more than factory incentive drivel that would do little or nothing to drive a consumer into a particular dealership.  I think most ads for new car dealers miss the boat.  But that’s another post.

From time to time I’d become so crazed about saying the same old thing that I’d write something outrageously stupid jut to maintain my sanity.  I’m not sure if that’s what happened at Dennis Mitsubishi last week but they’ve sure gotten a lot of publicity for an ad that hasn’t run.

If you haven’t caught the story yet, Google “Jihad Car Sale” and you’ll find over 1.5 million references to the commercial.  Here’s one of the original stories (read).

In the commercial, Keith Dennis of Dennis Mitsubishi talks about "launching a jihad on the automotive market."

Sales representatives "will be wearing burkas all weekend long," the ad says. One of the vehicles on sale "can comfortably seat up to 12 jihadists in the back."

"Our prices are lower than the evildoers’ every day. Just ask the pope!"  The ad says. "Friday is fatwa Friday, with free rubber swords for the kiddies."

The ad is allegedly scheduled to run September 28th but a little voice in the back of my head says the whole episode was designed as a publicity stunt.  Somehow word of the ad was leaked to the media.  Hmm.  And tens of thousands of people (including me) have commented for or against something they’ve only heard about from a second or third hand source.  Here we have a non-event creating a firestorm in less than a week – Interesting.

The stunt has given Keith Dennis more publicity than any advertising he’s ever paid for – maybe all of his advertising combined.  I’m just guessing, but traffic at Dennis Mitsubishi will be higher than normal this weekend. That would seem to be the goal wouldn’t it?

Dazed And Confused

Thoughts on a few things I read or heard during my summer travels around America. 

Back to school furniture sale (I wonder if the Betty Ford Clinic has a program for “Sale” Addiction?)

Lowest prices in the world!  Save 15% (I wonder if they’ve factored in the currency exchange rate?)

… for all of your group meeting needs, business or leisure.  (I expected more from American Airlines).

#1 For All Your Garage Needs (I need my garage cleaned out.)

We're So Sorry Dr. Z

On September 1st Daimler Chrysler AG Chairman Dieter Zetsche was, for all intents and purposes, fired as advertising spokesperson after only 2 months (more).  Perhaps you’ve seen the grandfatherly Dr. Z answering questions about the German engineering incorporated in Chrysler and Dodge vehicles.

Chrysler sales slumped during the 2 months of the ads so Dr. Z is gone replaced by a 72 month zero interest promotion.  The original thinking was if Lee Iacocca could do it in the 80s why not Dr. Z in 2006? 

You may remember that Chrysler chairman Iacocca led the company through a remarkable turnaround in the early 1980s and appeared in ads talking about improved production quality. His famous selling line: "If you can find a better car, buy it."  The phrase made sense in the early 80s.  Chrysler had re-tooled and introduced the innovative K-Cars and the first mini-van.

You may not remember the return of Lee Iacocca in the fall of 2005.  Chrysler put out a series of ads featuring the retired CEO and a string of  “celebrities” including Snoop Dog, Jason Alexander and his grand daughter.  “If you can find a better car, but it,” didn’t hold as much water and I’m fairly sure that Snoop fan has no idea who the old geezer was.

It isn’t Dr. Z’s fault that his ads weren’t compelling.  I happen to like many Chrysler products (I don’t own any – I just like them) but a Chrysler isn’t a Mercedes no matter how you spin it.  Where the original “If you find a better car…” line in the sand tone rang true in 1983, Dr. Z’s discussion of German automotive superiority was met with a collective “So what?” by consumers.  Which is pretty much the same reaction Chrysler is going to get from 72 month zero interest financing.  Why not just pay us to take the cars off your hands?

Now that’d be something to talk about.

Don't Touch That Dial

The television ratings folks at Nielsen are going to start rating ads, or rather providing estimates for the number of people who don’t change the channel during commercial breaks (more).  I’m not sure the information will be very helpful.  I’ve been known to leave the room during commercial breaks, and quite often turn the volume off to avoid obnoxious ads such as Time Warner’s Beep Beep dot com.  In both cases the TV is on but the ads make no impact.

Over in Radioland, Arbitron is working on getting their personal people meter system fully accredited.  PPM technology should give advertisers the ability to see how many people change radio stations during those mind-numbing four and five-minute commercial breaks.  That should be an eye opener.   Once again hearing an ad and listening to it are two different things.  PPM only measures hearing (sort of) and not whether anyone is listening.

In a perfect world all ad writers and producers would take the time to create great ads for thier local clients, ads that viewers and listeners would pay more attention too.  In that case, we wouldn’t have to wonder about how many people tune out.   Are you doing your part or are you helping advertisers flush their ad dollars down the drain?

My Customers Are Different And Other Fairy Tales

Are you keeping track of what your potential customers are doing in the privacy of their homes and offices?  If you aren’t, it’s time to do so.  I’m surprised how many times business owners will tell me that “My customers are different, they don’t use the Internet,” or “Our customers wait for our ads to come out in the newspaper.”  Whatever.

According to a recent Harris Interactive study cited by Wall Street Journal Online, the profile of online users is looking more like the profile of the overall population. Approximately 77% of Americans are now online, up from 74% in the previous poll in 2005, and compared with 57% back in 2000. In 1995, only 9% of U.S. adults reported they went online.

Let’s break it down by age:
Adults 18 to 29 make up 21% of the population and 24% of Internet users
Adults 30 to 39 make up 18% of the population and 22% of Internet users
Adults 40 to 49 make up 20% of the population and 22% of Internet users
Adults 50 to 64 make up 22% of the population and 22% of Internet users
Adults 65+ make up 16% of the population but only 8% of Internet users

The results also show that adults with higher education and income levels represent a greater share of the online population than the population at large. 

So unless your customer is over 65 with less than a high school education making less than 25k per year it’s a pretty good bet that they’re online.  And whether or not you are personally on line your business needs to be.

At a recent advertising seminar in Asheville North Caroline I asked an audience of 100+ business owners how many subscribed to the daily newspaper.  You could hear the gasp when less than a dozen hands went up.  Might be one of the reasons that newspapers are increasing their online presence. 

I’ve had the extreme good fortune to travel the country meeting with business owners in towns and cities big and small.  People in America are more similar than you might imagine.  If you still believe your customers are different, you might start asking them how often they’re online.  The answer might surprise you.

If You Believe This...

Huckster - One who uses aggressive, showy, and sometimes devious methods to promote or sell a product.

The older I get the less tolerant I am for advertising BS.  Here's an ad for a car dealer in Illinois I heard the other day.

“Don’t miss our HUGE FOUR DAY SALE of unclaimed vehicles, over 1,000 new and used vehicles to be sold at a fraction of their original price.”

One thousand unclaimed vehicles… I can’t imagine someone taking a car in for service and not bothering to pick it up so perhaps these vehicles came from valet parking attendants who need to make room room.  Is it possible that Toyota dropped the cars off at the dock and forgot about them or they were obtained from the flooded 9th Ward of New Orleans?  “Unclaimed vehicles” my great white behind.  They’ve got a thousand vehicles they haven’t been able to unload.  Maybe the dealership figures people are too stupid to see through their sleight of hand use of words until it’s too late.

It wouldn’t surprise me if  “sold at a fraction of their original price” amounted to about  99/100 of the MSRP either.  If you can’t trust what someone says in their advertising, you probably can’t trust them at all.  And we wonder why consumers are fed up with advertising.

Abraham Lincoln said it best,  “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

Here's My Two Cents

I don’t clip and save coupons.  It always seemed to me that I’d end up buying more stuff I didn’t need to “save” a few cents.  However my wife Chris was going through an insert for one of the local grocery store chains over the weekend and thought I might enjoy reading the “rules” for their double discount coupon promotion.

Here goes:

Coupons will only be doubled on Wednesday June 21st.
Customers must present the store’s club card at time of checkout.
Customers must spend $25 in a single transaction in order to double coupons (after tax, store coupons and club card discounts).
Only manufacturers coupons with a face value of a dollar or less will be doubled.
A limit of 5 manufacturers coupons can be doubled.

Thank you sir may I have another. 

If the thought of losing money on a promotion doesn’t appeal to you and you can’t justify the loss in order to increase store traffic then don’t do the promotion.  The more time it takes to read the fine print, the weaker the idea.  There are people who will jump through all these hoops to save an additional five dollars, most likely the same people who’ll make sure they spend $25 and not once cent more.  In the meantime, the store comes across as a penny-pinching nit-picking miser.  It doesn't make cents to me .

A Picture's Not Worth A Thousand Words

Have you ever sat in quicksand?  I was sitting on my drafting stool working on a few ads the other day, when suddenly the seat began to sink.  When you write on a 36” high workspace, a 22” chair is jus this side of useless.  Picking my chin off the table, I Google” heavy duty drafting stool” and get 143,000 results in .48 seconds.  This should be easy.

Wrong.

When you get right down to it, all gosh darn stools look pretty much the same.   I found plenty of pictures but not much in the way of useful information.  I needed to know if the “Buttomatic 2500 HD” takes more abuse than the “Task Master 20,” but it seems no one shares such useful data online. 

Now a normal person might say, “Why don’t you just call someone and ask?”  I’m a stubborn son-of-a-gun on a mission.  That's why.  After wasting a half hour on this project it wasn’t about finding a replacement stool, it was about finding the information. 

Forty-five minutes later I was ready to throw in the towel.  Sitting low on the horizon, hands straining to reach the keyboard I decided to see what Office Max might have available locally (Office Max didn’t show up on the first 10 or 15 pages of search results so I hadn’t been to their site).  Suddenly, The Holy Grail of information appeared before my eyes; sizes, fabrics, descriptions of how much use each chair could handle. Feeling a bit like Goldilocks, I narrowed my choices based on  Office Max's incredible search function.   Now, the only thing I needed to know was whether $219 was a good price. 

Office Chairs Unlimited had the same chair “open box,” for $40 less and I figured that as long as I was there I might as well see what else they carry... And there it was, the drafting chair of my dreams, sturdier, with arms and a better warranty than the Office Max chair for $10 less.  Cahloo! Cahlay!  Only one problem, I didn't know anything about Office Chairs Unlimited.  Back to Google “Office Chairs Unlimited Reviews.”  The 500 people who reviewed OCU on BizRate gave them a green smiley face.  Sold.  The chair should be here Monday or Tuesday. 

What do people need to know when they come to your website?  More often than not they need more than a picture and a brief description.  “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark,” the incredible new book from Wizards Of The Web Brian and Jeff Eisenberg provides fantastic insight into the new world of empowered consumers.  It’s great reading that even technophobes can understand.

A final note:  I do not know much about the technical aspects of websites, so all I can say is that it must be magic that without registering the Office Chairs Unlimited checkout page had my billing and delivery address along with my email address already listed.  Now isn’t that convenient? 

Memories Are Made Of This

The latest press release of PRNewswire (the same folks who provided “McDonalds Iced Coffee As An Accessory”),  touts "Viral Videos." 

WARNING:  Watching viral videos at  YouTube, IFilm or Yahoo while at work may adversely impact your next performance review. 

In the press release, Doug Heinlein of The Art Institute of Seattle refers to a “viral video circa 2002-2003, featuring a chicken-man dancing in an apartment, it was sponsored by Kentucky Fried Chicken, but with no branding that you could see. They just wanted people to think about chickens." (more)

Here are today’s lessons:

First, do not take things your read as gospel – even press releases.  The viral video Mr. Heinlein refers to is called  “Subservient Chicken” a 2004 campaign sponsored by Burger King not KFC.

Second, being cute and memorable doesn’t equate to being effective.  I'm sure Doug Heinlien has plenty of other things to think about and, like the rest of us, can’t be expected to remember everything.   The purpose of the video was to promote (rather bizarrely) BK TenderCrisp.  While the Burger King Logo opened the video and there were links to Burger King on the video’s page, the only thing most people remember is the chicken.

On the other hand this ads combines creativity with a memorable message.

Attempting to be creative for creativity’s sake is a gamble.   To be sure, everyone will laugh and say how wonderful and funny you are.  But what will the audience take away from the experience?  The memory of failed campaigns and wasted dollars tend to stick with advertisers for a long long time.