Category: Uncategorized

Print ads can express great ideas.
They’re just hardly ever worth the money.

_{This is a pretty ad.  Unfortunately I have no idea what it’s trying to tell me.  I’m pretty sure dentists won’t know either, since mostly they practice in offices, not fields.}

A few months ago I got a call from one of my clients, who was excited.  “I got an email from a business magazine and they want to do a feature on us!  I told them you’d get back to them with all the details.”

Neither of us had ever heard of the magazine, but that didn’t matter. As long as they’re not asking my clients to pose naked or offer opinions on religion, I’m happy to take PR where I can get it.  And we’d had a lot of media exposure in mainstream channels in the previous 12 months, so I wasn’t surprised that we were getting the call.

So I called the ‘editorial assistant’ who’d contacted my client.  We discussed the feature (4 pages!  with photos! and case studies!), and the various angles we could pursue.  I investigated the magazine (something to do with ‘women in business’), which seemed legit, if a little obscure.  Over the course of 2 or 3 weeks, I provided detailed responses to questions, information about the business, and even provided the names of a couple of clients they could contact for ‘commentary’.

But then the sales pitch started:  They wanted a list of my client’s suppliers (with contact information), and I started getting emails from a sales manager type ‘recommending’ that we purchase a half-page ad to accompany our ‘feature’.  

Finally I got a bit annoyed, and called the editorial assistant.  “Look,” I said, “you pitched this to my client as a proper feature article. Now I’m getting the impression that this ‘feature’ is entirely dependent on us or our suppliers spending a lot of money.”

She denied it, of course…but after a couple more emails from the sales manager guy, we didn’t hear anything from them.

It’s all about the opportunity cost.

These days, most of my clients are small businesses who don’t have a single dollar to waste on marketing.  So spending $5000 for a half-page ad in some obscure business publication whose distribution is basically a mailing list they bought in 2006 just doesn’t make sense.

I always think about what else I could do for my client with that $5000:  I could host a networking event with good snacks, create several webinars, do a direct mail campaign, create a mobile version of their website – or my client could take 50 clients for fancy lunches, during any of which I know she could generate more business than she will through an ad in some magazine that no one ever reads.

Sure, print ads sometimes have their place.

Don’t get me wrong – I know that for some brands, print advertising works, especially as part of a larger campaign.  Big luxury brands can get a lot of mileage out of spreads in Vanity Fair or GQ, and from what I see on YouTube (where bedroom walls can often be seen in the background), kids are still cutting out ads from magazines to use as posters.  Heck, I even had this Hermes image as my computer wallpaper for a while.  Ads like these, which look like print ads but mostly live online, can generate a fair amount of brand awareness.

And I also know that even in this digital age, there’s something kind of cool about being able to pull out a printed publication and point to your very own advertisement.  For small business owners, especially, it can confer a sense of credibility, like “Wow, I have a real company, and here’s the proof.”

But ultimately, the goal of advertising – as a part of a larger marketing strategy – is to sell more stuff, and at the end of the day, a single print ad just isn’t going to do it for you.  So the next time someone calls you about advertising in a magazine you’ve never heard of, just say “no, thank you”.  I promise you’ll have made the right decision.

I don’t often talk about design on this blog, mostly because I fall into the “I don’t know much about design, but I know what I like” category.  There are plenty of people who know lots more about design than I do.

However, whenever I think about what my album cover would look like, if I ever had one (I don’t care what you say, you know you’ve thought about this too), this is what comes to mind:  Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ ‘Whipped Cream and Other Delights’.  

This guy has 650k video views. But hardly anyone has seen this video.

You don’t have to watch more than 15 seconds of this video to know it’s horrible:

The sound and video quality is terrible, the subject matter is boring, the guy is a bad speaker…and yet somehow he’s had more than 650k views in less than 2 weeks.

But he says he’s a ‘social media expert’, so maybe he’s got this worldwide following or a book or a website or something, and you just didn’t know about him yet, right?  Wrong.  He doesn’t even appear to have a website – there isn’t one listed on his YouTube profile, and my very best Googling has failed to turn up anything about this guy.  I can’t even find him on Twitter, though to be fair there seem to be about 150 ‘Daniel Cohens’ there, and some don’t have pictures or profiles.

What he’s got is some kind of hackery that YouTube hasn’t figured out yet, and here’s how I know:  When you click the ‘insights’ button on the YouTube page for this video (it’s the little bar graph box to the right of the view count), it says:

• 99.9% of the views happened on the first day the video was posted
• All of them came from a mobile device
• The demographics were exclusively ‘male, 35-44 years old’

All of this points to some kind of technical trickery that allowed him to artificially inflate his views.  I do know that videos which are genuinely popular – like this Shaytards video – show a much more varied view source, demographics and timeline.

(NOTE:  As I write this, I see that Daniel Cohen has now turned off the ability to see the insights on his videos. But almost all of his other 37 videos have fewer than 100 views, which tells me that he hasn’t got any kind of ‘following’ or loyal audience.)

Big numbers doesn’t mean anyone is actually paying attention

As far as I’m concerned, the minute someone tells you they’re a social media ‘expert’, ‘guru’, ‘ninja’ or ‘visionary’ because they’ve got big numbers, you should run the other way, for 2 reasons:

1. Anyone who really knows anything about social media knows that the landscape is changing every minute, so being a ‘guru’ is next to impossible  
2. Getting a whole lot of followers, friends, views or ‘pins’ isn’t the point of social media.  It’s what you do with those followers, friends, views and pins.

Daniel Cohen may have 650k ‘views’ of his video, but if they’ve all been generated by his army of minions in a room in Bulgaria, no real people are actually seeing the thing.  He’s not selling anything, he’s not driving traffic to a website which is selling anything, he’s not increasing his influence or opportunities for paid speaking engagements or media coverage – which means he can’t sell anything for you, either.

Within a week of getting my first job in a big advertising agency – as the assistant to the Creative Director – one of the other assistants said to me, quite casually, “Oh, I wasn’t surprised you got the job.  [Creative Director] really likes women with short hair like yours – he thinks women with really short hair are more confident.”

She wasn’t, in case you’re wondering, trying to be catty or mean.  She was simply stating a fact as she saw it.  And as I got to know my new boss better, I decided she was right:  my short hair had been a definite plus.

At the same time, I knew the rest of my appearance was woefully inadequate for my new job. Sitting in the lobby for my first interview, I became convinced I’d never get hired, as every single person who walked by appeared to be tall, thin, perfectly accessorized and effortlessly cosmopolitan.  

I, on the other hand, have a figure that could be charitably described as more ‘Nigella Lawson‘ than ‘Jennifer Aniston’, wear the same earrings almost every day because I’m always losing half a pair, and didn’t buy my first designer handbag until I was 25.  I wasn’t completely ignorant of fashion – I’d just lived in the suburbs my whole life, where the standards were lower, and I’d just moved to Toronto on an entry-level salary, so even outfitting myself with MAC cosmetics was a serious budgetary commitment.  And the truth is that I’m not naturally gifted with a genius for fashion.

My style soon underwent a transformation:  I found out where the other assistants went for jeans, waxing, haircuts, shoes, etc.  None of us were making much money, so they had good advice on how to look polished on a budget (protip: if you base all your outfits around black, you can make shoes, handbags and other items work with multiple outfits, while still looking sufficiently cool).  I learned a whole new lingo about brands and styles and haircare products, and had a lot of fun doing it.

(At Christmas I’d give my mother, a highschool teacher, a handbag or lipstick from some super-hip new brand, and she’d get a kick out of the fact that the teenaged girls in her class would be impressed with her coolness.)

What’s fun in your 20s can pall later on

It’s now been 10 years since I’ve worked in a big agency, but I’m still working in marketing, and as I get older I wonder:  Just how long can you continue to work in this industry if you look like you’re over 45?  And if you do look like you’re 45+, do you need to start investing in cosmetic surgery and more expensive clothing in order to proclaim your relevance?

The very fact that I’m reluctant to reveal my age (42) in this blog is perhaps a clue to the answer here.  Genetically I’ve been lucky so far: Neither of my parents look their age, so most of the time I’m still passing for under 40.  

I still worry.  Sure, I’ve got a couple of pairs of Louboutins, a few DVF dresses, and my figure hasn’t changed much since that first job (thanks to assiduous dog-walking and some yoga). I still base my outfits on black and I’ve been using a hard-core anti-wrinkle cream for years. But I have little interest in spending days at the anti-aging spa, and every time I have a spare $1000 kicking around, there always seems to be some more pressing priority than syringes of Botox and Restylane.  In my 20s and even my early 30s, it was really exciting to get a new Hermes scarf or Armani skirt…these days, not so much.  

I do take heart from the fact that the Canadian population – along with the populations of most of the developed world – is aging, and being over 40 isn’t the career-killer it used to be.  I also tend to think that if you stay technologically savvy, you maximize your experience while minimizing the negative effects of age.  But advertising has always been a young person’s game, and I wonder if the day will come when I’ll lose business to some hyper-branded 30-year-old.  

(Your insights are welcome!)

Knowing how you’re going to fit into the marketplace should happen even before you’ve picked a name.

I came across this image today, over at Brands for the People, a new online brand development company which is designed to help small business owners create new brand identities for reasonable prices. 

It’s an interesting concept – and one for which I think there is probably a pretty good market – but what really caught my attention was the order in which they’ve arranged their 6 steps to creating a brand identity.

You’ll see that ‘Naming Your Business’ is the last step in the process.

As someone who’s been helping clients create brand identities for 10 years now, I could not agree more.  Too many times, I’ve worked with organizations which have spent all their time and money on creating a product/service, getting an office, hiring staff – and only then start to think about how they’re going to go about marketing their wares.  And of course it’s hard to create a marketing strategy when you don’t know what ‘story’ you’re going to tell to potential customers, or where you’re going to fit in your competitive set.

I was going to write a long explanatory piece here, but the more I look at 6-step diagram, the more I think it speaks for itself.  (The only one which might need explanation is Step 3, because what they mean isn’t so much “how does your supply chain work” but “how will we approach the way we get things done”.)

The bottom line is that before you choose your name – or lease an office, or start hiring office managers – you need to know why you’re different, why you’re better, how you’ll stand out from the competition and why people will care about what you’re doing.  Knowing all that will determine whether you name your company “Clara’s Cakes” or “Baked Nirvana”, and whether your brand identity will be home-country-kitchen or super-modern-cult.  And knowing those things will determine where your office is and what it looks like, the type of staff you hire, and even your product offerings.