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main page | Monthly archives | Forward to July
June 30, 2004
Although people can and do change their minds, some opinions are simply immoveable. This article, from the Wharton School’s Knowledge@Wharton (PA) discusses
“stickiness,” the connection between social identity and judgment (and branding):
Advertising
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More evidence that a branding message isn’t about saying “we’re
better” or even “we’re different.” It’s about saying “we’re you.”
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June 29, 2004
File this under Committees That Don’t Understand Branding, a very fat
file indeed. Here’s the article, about branding Iowa City, from the Iowa
City Press-Citizen (IA):
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Here’s a taste of committee-think in action, should you care to read it:
In 2001, ICAD [the Iowa City Area Development Group] and a consultant completed a branding process for the community that resulted in a brand statement, which included: “REACH for Iowa City: A community with a world-class combination of Recreation, Education, Arts, Culture and Healthcare.”
Included? You mean there’s more? And this has been on the table since 2001?
I don’t know whether to feel exasperation or commiseration toward the branding consultant.
On the one hand, one purpose of an outside consultant is to protect the client
from themselves. On the other hand, I’ve faced similar committees, with,
sadly, similarly stupid results in the end, and not for lack of trying. The line itself,
especially that REACH acronym, positively reeks of desperate inclusiveness.
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June 28, 2004
Inevitability file: someone got a book out about “branded entertainment.” Here’s an
excerpt from Madison & Vine: Why the Entertainment
and Advertising Industries Must Converge to Survive, courtesy Ad Age (QwikFIND ID AAP75U):
Advertising
copywriter blog link
The author, Scott Donaton, is an Ad Age editor, and the article (bylined by Donaton) has a whiff of self-promotion. And why not – this looks to be an important new book for advertising practitioners. This particular chapter deals with pitfalls in uniting brand-oriented content and entertainment, and the edited excerpt is a terrific read. I liked the recommendation, attributed to Steve Heyer of Coca Cola, that the key to successful brand/entertainment integration is to be “critically incidental.” That’s brilliant. And, I especially liked Donaton’s injunction that “forgetting that the consumer comes first is a surefire model for disaster.” That’s true of everything we do. I think there’s too much advertising-focused marketing these days, and too little consumer-focused marketing.
There are no new concepts in this excerpt, which deals with past examples. But, there’s lots of great stuff, and I’ll definitely read the book to see how Donaton spins his premise forward.
(By the way, for a backward look at how advertising/entertainment convergence
worked in the old days, read “Soapland,” James Thurber’s readable and
relevant study of the radio serial, collected in The Beast in Me and Other
Animals.)
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June 27, 2004
A weekend entry because I read this article about product placement and corporate
sponsorship in Sunday’s San Diego Union-Tribune (CA):
Advertising
copywriter blog link
I found the history fascinating, going all the way back to what is thought to be the world’s first sports endorsement deal, between Winchester Repeating Arms and exhibition marksman Adolph “Ad” (good nickname, that) Toepperwein, in 1901. This deal would last 50 years, which would be astounding today, and the close relationship lasted even longer. Winchester also signed Ad’s wife, Elizabeth, who was as good a shot as he was despite having not picked up a rifle until meeting him. The Toepperweins toured together, putting on exhibitions and breaking records. The marriage was by all accounts a happy one, and lasted until Elizabeth’s death in 1945, pointing up another difference between the sports celebrity of yesterday and today.
Toepperwein had a background that primed him to seize upon commercial
endorsement as a way to both promote his talent and augment his income. His
father was a noted Texas gunsmith, and Ad himself, before he became famous,
worked in the media, as a daily cartoonist for the San Antonio Express.
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June 25, 2004
More about the rise of “branded entertainment,” from the Sun-Sentinel (FL):
Advertising
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Although the concept is nothing new (radio programs and magazines were
doing the same thing 100 years ago), the environment is. Not only are
regulations more complex and restrictive, but audiences are more skeptical of
all advertising and branding messages, including those integrated into
entertainment. Commoditizing product placement within programming is not the
answer. Providing brand-centered value to the audience, however, is.
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June 24, 2004
Mass marketing is declared dead like a phoenix, in this excellent article from Media
Post:
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copywriter blog link
What we lowly copywriters have known all along has finally dawned upwards
into C-level marketing circles: customers are not persuaded en masse, they are
persuaded (often in masses) one at a time. Now that the trend is shifting
from broad mass-market appeals to focused micro-market messages, dare one hope
that we’ll also see a renaissance in copywriting?
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June 23, 2004
Branding a product or service or company often starts with a name. Here’s a good naming primer, from this month’s Inc. Magazine:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
I’ve created dozens of company, product, and service names, and it’s one of the more fun
copywriting projects. Fun, and a lot of work, requiring all the discipline of
creating an ad, distilled down to a word or two. One approach is the made-up or
irrelevant brand name, which relies on frequency to build recognition through
media weight. Another approach is the explanatory brand name, which combines
relevant words or parts of words to build comprehension through semantic
meaning. Both of those approaches are invariably well-represented in the concept
generation phase. In the end, however, the brand name must connect emotionally,
as-is, where-is, which means the budget, lifecycle, and timeline all must be
taken into account. Read the jump story too, a Q&A session with naming
expert Alex Frankel.
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June 22, 2004
Youth-oriented marketing may be in for a comeuppance (a fine old-fashioned word, that). Here’s a great article looking at
the 35+ demographic, from the Kansas City Star (MO):
Advertising
copywriter blog link
I printed out this article because I wanted a hard copy to study, highlight,
notate, and file, and I urge you to do so too. There’s a lot of good stuff
here, from a broad historical perspective on American consumerism to a brief
real-life advertising case study. And, statistics like this tidbit: age 40+
households control 91% of the population’s net worth and 65% of the
population’s discretionary spending. I’m a creative guy, not a numbers
guy, but no one can ignore figures like that.
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June 21, 2004
A town in Oregon hangs its hopes on branding. Here’s the article, from
yesterday’s New York Times:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Frogs?
Big ideas are usually simple. And, being simple, they often appear dumb, or, obvious, or not an idea at all. Yet, there is power in simplicity, should the advertiser (whether a community or a company) have the guts to persist.
I remember a conversation with another freelance copywriter many years ago. He shook his head in disbelief about the direction he had received from the designer on a project. “He told me the concept for the piece was ‘blue.’ Blue! And that was the concept!”
I’ve come to believe that that designer may have had something.
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June 18, 2004
Cigarette maker Brown & Williamson gets into trouble for an ad campaign and promotion that,
according to the New York Attorney General, targets children through its use of hip-hop music. Here’s the article, from the The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY):
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Let’s get beyond the issues related to cigarette marketing. This case
points up the difficulty of capitalizing on trends in advertising. The
generation gap, that psychosocial fixture of the 60s and 70s, is gone.
More and more, pop culture transcends and confounds demographic categorization.
Even though today’s marketing person is inundated with data about
everything from media to consumer behavior, in the end it hardly matters any
more. Mass market motivation takes place on an increasingly individual level,
which undermines the concept of broad demographic appeals. The result is a
fragmented and complex market in which the touchpoints may be both single and
singular: a 9-year-old inner city kid and a 35-year-old suburbanite, connected
only by a love of (for example) hip-hop music.
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June 17, 2004
Introducing (again) the latest old concept to hit print advertising: pre-testing. Here’s the article, from Media Daily News:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
First, I’m a big believer in testing at all stages of advertising development.
That said, one key factor that the article doesn’t address is that testing costs have increased to the point of diminishing returns for many print-based ad campaigns. Spending half the media budget on pre-testing is neither feasible nor advisable. The percentage of budget for testing is lower with television advertising because the media costs are higher and the audiences (and, therefore, the marketing messages) are generally broader.
A huge part of what has driven up testing costs, is increased complexity due to the increased influence of advertising researchers who have a deep understanding of research and only a superficial understanding of advertising. The comment from one research director that “you can really produce one of each (print ad) if you want” reveals the fundamental disconnect between advertising practitioners and researchers.
Finally, web-based testing of print advertising, as one company proposes, will produce results as valid as print-based testing of television advertising. The medium is intrinsic to both the message and the audience.
The whole thing strikes me as a strong argument for the reintegration of
research, media, account service, and creative in this new-fangled business unit I like to call
an advertising agency.
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June 16, 2004
There’s something ghoulishly fascinating about reading marketing
post-mortems. Here’s a good one from The Money Programme from BBC News, about
Coca Cola’s disastrous U.K. launch of Dasani bottled water:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
In reading this, one can see an otherworldly attempt by Coke to separate the product reality from the brand mythology. That is unsustainable: strike one. Then, there was the culturally ignorant choice of bottling location, which allowed the product to be connected with a classic and well-known episode of a very well-known sit-com: a minor detail but, because of its relevance, strike two. As for the contamination issue, that was sheer bad luck, but it was the third strike. Dasani might have survived any combination of two of these. But three was the tipping point, even for a company with the resources of Coca Cola, and within five weeks of launch Dasani was no more.
For another good product failure case study involving a popular U.S. brand in
the U.K., see my blog entry for December 3, 2003, about P&G’s Sunny
Delight.
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June 15, 2004
A follow-up to my May 20 entry, about the advertising cat-fight between Anheuser-Busch and Miller Brewing Company.
After puffing up their fur and taking a few soft-pawed swipes at each other
through the courts, both sides are standing down, sort of. Here’s the article, from the New York Times:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Going negative to taint a competitor works to sell everything from political
candidates to financial services, but there’s a nuance to packaged goods
advertising that seems to be missing here. Without saying I agree with the
strategy, because I don’t, my primary criticism is directed at the
execution. Hanging an entire campaign on cleverly deriding a competitor was a
ham-handed approach. There’s a way for a copywriter to throw a reader’s
internal emphasis on what appears, in all innocence, to be a throw-away line.
That may be what needed to happen here to give legs to the campaign.
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June 14, 2004
Back on track (so to speak) with an advertising-related entry. This article, from the Associated Press via the Daytona Beach (FL) News-Journal, looks at
online technology that tracks your web browsing behavior to serve up relevant ads:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
With that in mind, here’s a counter-link: Ad-aware, a
program that identifies, quarantines, and removes spyware, tracking programs, and data mining cookies. I run it daily, and every time it catches and removes about 35
low-grade “threats.”
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June 13, 2004
A totally off-topic entry, but it’s my blog and it’s Sunday. I was re-reading Typhoon, a short story by Joseph Conrad. You can read the full
text here:
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copywriter blog link
Am I alone in thinking that Captain MacWhirr, far from being a simpleton,
embodies a Zen-like wisdom in his processes and actions? Did Conrad study Zen? An Internet search turned up nothing, yet to me the connection seems crystal clear.
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June 11, 2004
As a quick follow-up on my entry on Wednesday (June 9), here’s an article about soccer (or football)
teams and their
brands, from BBC News:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
It’s all about sales. And sales, for a sports team, hinges as much on
branding as it does on having a winning season. By the way, if you haven’t yet listened to the Brand It Like Beckham radio programs linked to on the 9th, you should.
They’re good.
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June 10, 2004
Copywriting pop quiz: all else being equal, which line is likely to generate
more sales?
1. “Spend $50 and you’ll get a free gift.”
Or,
2. “Get a free gift when you spend $50.”
Formulate your response, then read this article on the importance of testing, from CIO.com (MA):
Advertising
copywriter blog link
The weasel term “free gift” (yuck!) aside, I thought the first one was better because it sounded like a more credible offer. Offer #2 seemed to give me something, then snatch it away with a condition, focusing my attention on the weasel instead of the offer.
So, it was no surprise to me that the first line outpulled the second in A/B
testing. What did surprise me, was that the first
line outpulled the second by a whopping 50%. Testing pays. But, so does
honesty.
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June 9, 2004
And now for something completely different: a four-part radio program (or,
programme) called Brand It Like Beckham, about professional sports and
branding, airing this week on BBC Radio Five Live:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Meetings kept me from tuning in live via Internet, but I finally got around
to listening to the archived programs from Monday and Tuesday, and they’re well worthwhile.
Each one is about 30 minutes long. Program One focused on individual personalities,
while Program Two was about building a brand around teams. There are two more
segments to go (airing today and Thursday) and I will
definitely be tuning in for them. If you miss it live, look for the “Listen Again” links for
the archived streaming audio.
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June 8, 2004
A good article about creativity, from Local Tech Wire (SC):
Advertising
copywriter blog link
The only words I will add are not my own. They’re Bill Bernbach’s: “The heart of creativity is
discipline.”
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June 7, 2004
After I wrote Saturday’s entry about kids and advertising (scroll down one entry to see it), I read this
relevant column by child psychologist John Rosemond in my local newspaper. But, I couldn’t link to it for you, so here’s the
same column, from the more search-friendly Sun Herald
(MS):
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Because I create advertising for a living, I can clearly see the media techniques used in children’s brainwashing – oops, read that programming (still a good term for it, though, on many levels). It’s what Rosemond calls “flicker.” Watch the camera work on any kid’s show, and you’ll see what I mean. Turn off the sound, use a stopwatch, and time the scenes. You’ll see how even so-called educational programming is priming kids to learn in video bites of 5 to 10 seconds or less. I’m no child development expert, but that can’t be good.
Because I create advertising for a living, my own kids simply don’t watch tv
regularly (by that I mean it’s typical for multiple weeks to go by without the television being
turned on). They see occasional programs (with either their Mom or me watching
with them) as treats, and because the rise in media and brand awareness make it
socially important for kids to be culturally literate at an earlier age (a
four-year-old in pre-school, for instance, probably needs to know the characters
in shows like Arthur and Sesame Street, even if they’re not a
part of the household routine). I’m lucky, though, because both my wife and
I work at home. So, we can be present for our kids in a way that simply isn’t
an option for many parents. But that, too, may be more of a choice than some
people think.
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June 5, 2004
A rare Saturday entry, because this is extremely important. Here’s an article about advertising, branding, and kids, from the Globe and Mail
(Toronto):
Advertising
copywriter blog link
When it’s aimed at children, with still-developing brains and brain processes, advertising is more akin to brainwashing than anything else. I've ranted about this many times before (April 16, 2003, May 5 and 6, 2003, November 13 and 21, 2003, and December 5, 2003, to point to a few such entries).
As an advertising copywriter, I think the industry needs to watch its step or it’ll find itself getting regulated or legislated into creative oblivion.
As a parent
of two little boys, I think the horrible thing, and the point too many people
are missing, is that this brainwashing is happening with not just parental
consent, but actual parent approval and cooperation. When it comes to children,
the proper response to advertising, as with many negative influences, is parenting.
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June 4, 2004
For Friday, an interesting article about advertising and promoting European Union elections, from BBC News:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Individually, there are some wacky ideas here. Yet, as a whole, this is yet another example of how closely advertising and democracy are connected.
In a free-market economy, advertising does not merely present choice; it creates
choice, and in the image of the consumer no less. That’s democracy in
action.
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June 3, 2004
Blur the line between entertainment, product placement, and spoof ads, and what do you get? A lawsuit. Here’s
an article about the fallout from a (presumably) fake Absolut vodka ad that was
part of the plot on HBO’s Sex and the City, from Ad Age (QuikFIND ID AAP69L):
Advertising
copywriter blog link
The story contains one minor detail I find amusing. The model is suing in part because he says he refuses assignments involving alcohol or nudity. Faux nudity for a fake ad within a work of fiction, however, is apparently acceptable.
The real issue, though, is one of determining compensation for those who bill based on market exposure. Copywriters and art directors generally don’t, but this group includes a lot of people we work with, including photographers, illustrators, directors, models, actors, and voice talent.
Just because something is successful doesn’t mean someone can bill more for it after the fact. But, thanks to the Internet, it’s getting harder to contain exposure, even without introducing the concepts of viral marketing, buzz-building, and marketing-savvy opportunism.
For instance, was sending out a press release pointing out the fake ad part of an integrated marketing program designed to get worldwide exposure? Or was it Fair Use?
Look for more of this sort of thing until the confusion clears.
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June 2, 2004
A search on my alma mater pulled up this insightful paper on rebranding the United States, from Dr. Nancy Snow, an associate professor of communications
at Cal State Fullerton and contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
I think Dr. Snow nailed what went wrong with Charlotte Beers – a focus on tactical rather than strategic thinking, combined with an astonishing but almost complete dismissal of the real world. I ranted about this more than a year ago in my Ad Blog entry in March 2003 (scroll down to the March 19 entry).
However, it’s easy to sit on the outside and take shots at the people
doing (or trying to do) the work. I wonder if any one person can really handle the “U.S. Image
Campaign” assignment. Beers, a top advertising outsider, couldn’t.
Margaret Tutwiler, a top political insider, couldn’t. Today’s
geopolitical environment aside, given all the people and bureaucracies involved,
each with their own agenda, would you take the job?
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June 1, 2004
It’s savage the marketing guru day. Here’s a ferociously well-reasoned criticism of Al Ries’
branding tenets, from a competing guru at Marketing Profs:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
The problem as I see it, is that advertising and branding in the real world
is much more fluid than any one guru thinks. A fixed dogma may give one a
process to help respond to a real-world situation (e.g. “Ten Steps to a
Killer Brand”), but it is the real world that imposes results on the
process, not the reverse. All communication, including advertising and branding,
is fundamentally a living process (see my April 28 entry for more about that idea), and as such
yields little to dogma.
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Backwards in time to May 2004
Main page | Consumer goods | Food services | Free red pen | Healthcare | Hospitality & tourism | Internet | Manufacturing | Packaged goods | Portfolio | Real estate & construction | Retail & restaurants | Service | Technology
Why should you hire me as your advertising copywriter? | FAQ
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An advertising copywriter’s bookshelf:
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How to
become an advertising copywriter
How to write a brochure: advice from an advertising copywriter
How to write better ads
Long John Silver on writing ads
More career advice: what’s it like being
an advertising copywriter?
Napoleon’s advice to entrepreneurs,
Part I: starting the enterprise
Napoleon’s advice to entrepreneurs,
Part II: the entrepreneurial character
Napoleon’s advice to entrepreneurs,
Part III: growing the enterprise
The economy (and what to do about it)
The Tightwad
Marketing project
Advertising copywriting
mentorship
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Awards & honors | Curriculum vitae | Services
Phone and fax: (619) 465-6100
John Kuraoka, freelance advertising copywriter
6877 Barker Way
San Diego, California
92119-1301