i [love] marketing.

in the search of an ideal coffehouse.

Last week, I came across a WSJ article "Bringing the Buzz Back to the Cafe". The piece would have remained one of those "save for later, maybe read" things, if the subtitle of the sentence haven't captured my attention. It said: "Once they plotted revolutions, now they're typing blogs. Today's cafe society is a weak decaf."

I found it annoying.

It reflects a thoroughly modernist blindness in which cafes represent a physical blueprint of intellectual debate. More importantly, it reflects thinking that things should not change; and if they do, it's probably for the worse: "At any given moment, a typical New York coffeehouse looks like an especially sedate telemarketing center. Recently, there's been a movement afoot to limit the use of laptops. The laptoppers hog the tables, but they do the coffeehouse experience an even deeper disservice. They make it a solitary one, and it's a different kind of solitude from the stance sung by Hemingway. You're not just alone—you're in another universe entirely, inaccessible to anyone not directly behind you."

"They do the coffeehouse experience an even deeper disservice"? I find it strange to think that there is THE coffeehouse experience. I don't find it surprising, though. The idea of a coffeehouse as the iconic playground for rationality has most famously been immortalized in the Habermas' concept of the "public sphere". In public sphere, men come together to freely exchange their opinions and engage in a rational debate. It's a space free from both the materialistic confines of the market and bureaucratic confines of the state.

And if public sphere is a space of pure and unbiased reason, the coffeehouse is its physical manifestation.

Great.

In reality, Habermas' idea is narrow and hopelessly bourgeois (the women, the poor, the minorities are suspiciously missing from rational debate). It is also inexplicably stubborn.

From the article: "In the late 19th century, the global nexus of café culture returned to Vienna for arguably the greatest stretch of coffee-fueled creativity known to man. This is when every convention of the modern coffeehouse—the many-antlered coat rack, the marble tabletop, the day's newspaper spread Torah-like on bamboo holders—fell into place, and its role as the intellectual sparring ring was cemented." 

Intellectual sparring ring? Why? Just because a specific period of time (19th century in Europe) gave rise to a specific class (bourgeois) which find it convenient to gather at the specific public places ("salons" and coffeehouses) to do something (exercise their "rationality") does not mean that at all times, all people, all places and all activities possible there will display the same "intellectual sparring ring" quality.

This is obvious, and I think that more interesting is the question whether rationality should be used at all as a prototype for any debate. Debates are, more often than not, messy, opinionated, personal, and emotional. This certainly doesn't mean that their topics are such; only the way we address them regularly are. There is less than slight possibility that people are not so rational even in the situations when they are debating things that require the use of reason.

And finally: "And yet it seems that we're losing the coffeehouse—less to the usual suspects like the Internet and Dunkin' Donuts than to our own politeness. We've brought the noise level down to a whisper and are in the process of losing even the whisper: Enter the modern café and the loudest sound you'll hear will be someone typing, in ALL CAPS, an angry blog comment. We've become a nation of coffee sophisticates—to the point where McDonald's feels compelled to roll out some semblance of an espresso program—but we're still rubes when it comes to the real purpose of the place: It's not the coffee. It's what your brain does on it."

Human brain on caffeine can do a lot of wonderful things. Debate is just one of them.

proto-pie chart

A simple math to keep in mind tomorrow. The image found here.

instructions.

This, like many many other surprising and impressive things, was first discovered by a remarkable explorer of the Internet, Diana Hong.

web is an inexhaustible source of data aggregates.

Here is yet another way to triangulate publicly available data. This time, the tool asks what Twitter lists say about you.

What's funny is that this thing showed up almost simultaneously with the Twitter lists. People are obsessed with self-reflexivity. As soon as there's a new way to organize data, be sure the way to organize meta data will follow.

p.s. I love the "suits" moment.

i like this situation.

Something happened here. More good stuff on this blog.

uncertain times call for glorious past.

At some point last week, I came across on Facebook a quote from a New Yorker article on Mad Men that Noah put there.  This reminded me of a post that I have written here more than a year ago about the wonders of Mad Men popularity. The main thing that puzzled me back then was not why people watch Mad Men, but more interestingly, why now? Would this show be popular in the nineties? Or even, 7-8 years ago? Is there anything in the current time + the state of media & advertising that provided a set of circumstances for its topics to be popular right now?

Perhaps. At first, I thought that Mad Men popularity may be accidental. (It never actually is). I mean, the show that takes place in the 60's, depicts professional+private relationships on the time long gone (and not particularly missed), and is set is set in a traditional advertising agency world, is so popular right now when that same world has almost been transformed beyond recognition?

Well, maybe precisely because of this transformation. The narrative pretty clearly reflects the "glorious past", "legendary times", and (currently considered) "mythical events" (think yapping gender inequality).

Every group (professional, generational), culture, and nation has these legendary times and events. That's not new. More interesting is when and why they start to dig them out. Usually, it's at the times of overwhelming uncertainty.

This uncertainty can precede some giant turmoil, a dramatic break with the past, or the final stages of one kind of order and its replacement with something else. For example, 1930s Germany rediscovered its mythical past at times of incredible economic crisis and wounded national pride just before WWII and the crash of the Weimar Republic; Churchill frequently recalled memories of Lord Nelson before difficult and bloody war battles; and the current New York has been trying really hard to remind us of the old New York amid all the new condos via, for example, last year's movies "The Wackness" and "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist." Hard times indeed call for the glorious past. 

But so do the uncertain ones. Uncertainty does not need to signify some impeding change; it can also be the result of continuous, volatile, and unpredictable changes. In this case, uncertainty actually becomes an enduring condition - a state of affairs in itself and by itself. When people loose footing - when they face things they can't easily explain with what they know, when they are forced to think about doing things differently, and when they can't really rely anymore on the established rules, they need to cling to something.

Usually, this something is "good old times". And if history offers any lesson, epic memories come forth when they need to help us cope with change.

p.s. I suspect that a show set in a digital agency would be way less popular. But I may be wrong.

A Mood-Lifting Event

The buzz about Burberry's social networking site has been going on for couple of months now, and since the site launched on Monday NYT had made it official. Regardless of the fact that some people may question the purpose of such an effort, I think that Burberry is pretty brave in trying to do things differently. For the first time ever, a luxury fashion brand is full-on experimenting with digital. Let's see what happens first, make conclusions later. 

p.s. I was accused of being a woman in the photo. Considerably lifted my mood.

Evidence. Missing.

This morning, I read this excellent NYT article, "Making Health Care Better", by David Leonhardt. Although the article deals with something (almost) completely different, it reminded me of the increasingly mentioned need for measurement and empirical evidence of selected brand solutions in the marketing industry.

A far-fetched analogy? Perhaps. But it does tackle the "intuition" vs. "empiricism" approaches to the way we solve client's problems - in marketing. More often than not, in the absence of empirical criteria (or because of our unwillingness to look for it), we rely on our intuitive reasoning instead of on the observation.

And more often than not, we judge the work of others based on our taste, intuition, and relationships we have with those who made that work. 

And that's the problem. According to the article, "Intuition is not simply belief; it springs from this knowledge. A doctor making an intuitive diagnosis is doing so on the basis of thousands of hours spent treating patients. The problem, however, is that the mind is not particularly good at sorting through this knowledge and weighing different parts appropriately. We give too much weight to information that confirms our suspicions or that is highly memorable."

How can we then decide that a campaign was "better" than another one? We rarely look at a campaign data - partly because the actual metrics data is proprietary and not available to anyone beyond walls of an agency and of their clients. What we do is rely on our experience.

But ... "When a person says, ‘In my experience,’ what’s actually happening is you’re being dominated by one or two recent cases that you can recall or by some distant case that was either particularly good or particularly bad." Famous behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman claims that "Intuitive diagnosis is reliable when people have a lot of relevant feedback. The feedback needs to come quickly and to be clear."

General, and generally available, feedback mechanisms and benchmarks for success don't really exist. While it may not have been possible before to know exactly if a TV/print/outdoors/radio campaign influenced particular brand affinity and purchase decisions, digital lets us do things differently.

This means that we don't have to judge works of others purely on elusive criteria of "creativity", but on actual data on how this creativity fared with people (what did they do? and what did they do next?). It's not that we don't talk about this stuff - we may even be talking too much. The problem is that we don't do enough about it:

"The explosion of medical research over the last century has produced a dizzying number of treatments for different ailments. To enter mainstream use, any such treatment typically needs to clear a high bar. It will be subject to randomized trials, statistical-significance tests, the peer-review process of academic journals and the scrutiny of government regulators. Yet once a treatment enters the mainstream — once we know whether it works in certain situations — science is largely left behind. The next questions — when to use it and on which patients — become matters of judgment, not measurement. The decision is, once again, left to a doctor’s informed intuition."

And then, there's aversion to criticism. (Unfortunately, not everyone reacts like Alex Bogusky to a critique. I thought his humility is a great example: "I was just so excited to have a review in LA Times that the fact that it was harsh didn't really hurt my feelings much. To survive 20+ years in the advertising industry, my feelings dried up and  blew away long ago. I do miss them. But without feelings in the way it was easy to appreciate how lucky I was to even get reviewed.") The rest of us, however, often choose to ignore - or worse yet, devalue - anything that suggest an alternative:

"The journal Health Affairs will soon publish a survey of the chairmen of more than 700 hospitals. Its main message is that many hospitals are not even aware of what they do well and what they don’t. The physicians who conducted the survey, Ashish Jha and Arnold Epstein, gave the chairmen a list of issues — including financial performance, organizational strategy and the quality of health care — and asked them to name their board’s two top priorities. Roughly half did not name the quality of care. Yet the chairmen said they believed that the care at their hospitals was above average. Even at those hospitals that Medicare data suggest are among the worst in the country, 58 percent of the chairmen said they thought their hospital was above average. Not a single one said the hospital was below average."

Turns out, the main problem is not admitting that we can do our job better.  The problem is pretending that we can't.

Rearview Mirror.

There are some good questions there on Andy Awards blog. They are all the usual suspects, but no matter - they are relevant for the industry, and that's what counts.

First of them is "Do big ideas still matter?" This is the ad industry favorite. Everyone loves the big idea. They love it even more if its theirs. The whole current ad industry model, with its awards and "show me your portfolio"-type of expertise, is based on who had more good ideas in the past.

When we think about and give examples of big advertising ideas, we do that only after an idea had already become big (otherwise, we wouldn't know about it - right?). In other words, we don't know if something's big until it, well, becomes big.

And then we treat it as a sufficient explanation for its success. For "Got Milk?" we say, "it resonated well with consumers"; for "Dove Evolution" we say "it tapped into needs of the target"; for "Do the Right Thing" we think "it's a great summary of the experience". If these big ideas have not - for some reason or another - become big, we would say "they missed the target", "they projected the wrong image" or, "they don't know their audience."

The problem is, we don't know any of this in advance. We simply don't know why and how a campaign idea becomes big. An analysis of Ad Age's "Top 15 Slogans of the Century" reveals that there isn't a single rule: "Even an informal Internet study shows there is little agency agreement on what makes a great slogan. Just determining the essential ingredients is still a mystery."

We also don't know if an alternative to a proven big ideas (Dove Evolution, Got Milk, Do the Right Thing) might have been even bigger and better. Big ideas never have an alternative.

And then, we like to attribute brand and sales lifts to our campaigns, in a "before-and-after manner". But simply because something happened in between before and after, do we have enough info to claim a causal relationship? Free coupon redemption may spike when we release free coupons as a part of the campaign (an example that an ECD of a big digital agency recently used as a "proof" of his campaign success) but free coupon redemption would spike anyway and at any time when free coupons are released. Can you attribute this occurrence to your campaign - or, to an already existing dynamic of people's behavior?

Finally, we don't have anything - any benchmark or a control group - to compare our big idea-based campaign to. How do we know that our campaign is not, in fact, a complete failure under a given circumstances? Just because there was some effect, this does not mean that we can label it as a success. Maybe that very same campaign, tweaked a bit, would actually get way more users interested?

The truth is, we could know all of this. A little testing and experimentation and monitoring could actually answer the question of why some ideas become big and others don't. Why no one asks about that?

(the image of Pikachu found here)

New ownership?

A couple of days ago, I came across this site, Rent The Runway, done by Hard Candy Shell. The concept seems simple enough: pick a piece of clothing, order it + wear it, and then return it via mail. Something like Netflix model applied to (expensive) clothes.

I talked a bit over Twitter with my all-time fav creative director, Diana Hong about the idea (we said all good stuff). There are a few things that come to mind when you see something like this: maybe it can spur less consumption (after all people are not really buying, they are just renting); it democratizes luxury fashion by making it more available to everyone who pays a rental fee; it quickly surfaces popular stuff so it can be a great research tool for fashion brands; and it takes away the whole social/emotional vibe of buying (and owning) a piece of wonderful and expensive clothing. After all, the concept "retail therapy" has not been invented for nothing ...

But all these thoughts may be beside the point. What services like this (and Bag, Borrow, Steal and ZipCar before it) actually show is that people today are way more comfortable with sharing than any previous generation was. They are used to mixing, combining, and renting things when and if they need them.

It all may have started in digital, with music and movie downloads and content mashups on YouTube, and gradually evolved into a relationship with tangible goods. And this also means a different relationship to the whole notion of "ownership". Something to keep in mind if you are a brand ... and also if you are in marketing (reminded me of a pretty good post that I've seen a few months back, "Does Your Brand Rent or Own?" )

And ... as for this service encouraging less consumption: if music online is any indicator, people who download free stuff end up buying more music, not less, than those who don't ... Another lesson for brands?

An update: NYT's published today an article on Rent The Runway.

Three New Yorks.

I found this quote here.

why branded entertainment?

I thought about this a bit. Couple of weeks back, Amber wrote a well thought out post on branded content over at Naked blog. She asks: “How can brands create something more interesting than advertising to win the hearts and minds of the public?” While her argument is solid in that she proposes that brands should “make what people find interesting”, I was not sure.

I am still not.

If we learned anything about branding, that's to keep in mind that history is a very poor guide to the future. Creating content that people will - or will not - like is a tricky business (just ask the movie industry). Success stories are more often exception than the rule. Success is random, and usually explained post-fact. We like selective evidence: if something worked, we say: "branded content is great." If it didn't, we simply don't mention it. Brands create content all the time, and it doesn’t always become popular. And even if we forget all of this for a moment, there is a fundamental question: why would we want to continue to do the same thing we did in the past?

Digital lets us do things differently.

In their excellent presentation, Adrian Ho & his team at Zeus Jones nicely explained the difference between "classic" and "modern" branding. Classic brands communicate an image. Modern brands deliver an experience.

Or, more specifically: classic brands are built via communications: "A (classic) brand is simply a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer." Modern brands are built through actual experience and improved by interactions: "A (modern) brand is ... simply the sum of the great ideas used to build the brand." Modern brands are defined by what they do.

Let's talk about modern brands.

Some of the most prominent and successful brands in the world are in fashion, so I looked there. I also wanted to avoid the usual suspects who do digital branding well. And then, fashion brands are notoriously  criticized for staleness of their branding practices. So I thought if even they have recently managed to do their branding differently, there's no excuse for the rest. :)

For example, digital lets us experience things in real time; and it lets us share them immediately with others. Live, real-world online streaming hit big ever since Dolce&Gabbana famously webcast their fashion show last Spring. Burberry, Alexander McQueen, Isaac Mizrahi, and others quickly followed the suit. Blogs described Burberry's stream as "almost as exciting to watch as the real show," probably because online fans were for the first time allowed to participate in the experience and provide live commentary.

Then, obviously looking to offer a brand experience that goes beyond a minisite, Burberry went on to create a social network: Art of The Trench (currently in its pre-launch version). For whatever it's worth, they are at least trying something different. As so do Luis Vuitton with its 50K Twitter acct, and Dolce&Gabbana with their YouTube project, "The Pre-Show Diaries". (For some more interesting stuff that fashion brands are doing with webcasting these days, see this morning's BOF article).

What these brands have figured out is that digital does not have to be just another brand communication channel for their pre-created content. It can also bring us a real life experience, in real time. So, the recent branding campaign that I liked the most actually comes from Coca-Cola. It's "Open Happiness" campaign sends three bloggers to more than 200 countries in a year to uncover what makes people happy. This is something that I find way more relevant and real than their Happiness Factory thingy.

These are just some of the examples. What they all have in common is not their success or failure. It's the different approach to branding that they offer.

Branded content may have indeed served the (branding) function. I wonder, though, if it still serves any purpose.