A great moment in boob-centric advertising

I don’t know did this ad for the Woolly Mammoth Theater, but I think it’s pretty smart. Great, in fact. I love it.

It's simple.

It’s an easily recognizable design.

It’s pretty clear that it’s about a somewhat ribald play.

Elements of the design ― the name of the play across the breasts ― work great as small as 1 x 1.

It’s only spot color, which makes it affordable to run.

The copy is a bit too long, but whoever it was who dreamed this up did a bang-up job, I think.

You didn't hear it from me, but it's a pack of lies anyway.

It looks as if, perhaps, possibly, maybe we have our two Presidential candidates and what has been a 16-month nightmare is finally over. At least the primary nightmare is. The general election nightmare begins presently.

As we watched all three speeches last night, it occurred to Karen and me that in politics today the campaigns are more about what a bum The Other Guy is rather than what a perfect leader Our Guy would be.

I have nothing to base this on, but I’ll bet that an awful lot of people tend to vote against a candidate rather than for one. And with the kind of campaigns that are run, who could blame them?

But what if we in the ad world took the same approach with our work that politicians take with their advertising?

That would mean that instead of looking for an essential truth as the core of our ads, we’d be focused on telling the world how bad the competition is. Rather than sell the positive experience at our hotel client, for example, we’d level some sort of charge against the competition. (“Bedbugs the size of horses! No clean sheets anywhere!”) Or we’d suggest some sort of scurrilous behavior by a key player there. Or better yet, we’d make sure some third-party group not associated with our client took out an ad to throw the mud ― keeping our good name out of it, but slyly making the point anyway.

Think a minute. Doesn’t political advertising kind of make you want to take a shower? Aren’t you glad the rest of the ad world doesn’t work the way the political wing does?

(By the way, somebody told me that a certain hotel in Key West that happens to compete with a client of ours has at least one employee with an extortionist, contortionist, cartoonist or habitual jaywalker in the family somewhere. I'm not saying it's true, but I think the American people have a right to know.)

And once again, something that has nothing to do with advertising

Last night we saw Bonerama live at the Ram's Head in Annapolis.

Jeeze, what a show.

Four trombones, guitar, Sousaphone and drums. New Orleans jazz/fun/rock. An incredible sound. Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash and classic New Orleans jazz all in the same set.

Look for them on YouTube or check out their web site.

Some of my favorite words

It's Friday, I'm tired and I want to go home.

So in lieu of a post of any real substance, here are a few words that I like a lot. I don't know why I like them. I just do.

I'm not saying I get to USE them a lot. Just that I like them.

chimp

monkey

hillbilly

duck

swell

Lois

heebee-jeebies

jeepers

Mack Daddy

ratamacue

paradiddle

caddy-wompus

squeewaw

Rastafarian

Made you look! Made you look!

“How a University Embraced Social Marketing and Scored Millions in YouTube Views” is the title of a self-promotion case study someone forwarded me yesterday. It’s the story of a social media campaign conducted for Carnegie Mellon University.

Right about now, I guess I need to point out that I’m not some sort of old-school luddite who doesn’t understand things like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and the rest. What I am is someone who tries very hard not to confuse activity with accomplishment.

Like in this case. Their social media campaign goals included securing 10,000 video views for each of their three YouTube videos, getting 500 subscribers to the school’s YouTube channel within a year, getting 1,000 Facebook fans and (I love this bit of baroque writing) “engendering viral forwarding of the campaigns videos and having them picked up by large blog sites.”

The challenge was to reach potential students. So they moved “beyond hard-sell marketing and instead turned to social media.” A lot of it seems to have been built around three clever “RoboU videos” on YouTube. The whole thing, according to the case study, was a smashing success.

More than 2,000 subscribers signed up for the school’s YouTube channel, the number of views of the YouTube videos surpassed the goals and “Carnegie Mellon students continue to ‘blog forward’ the school’s online initiatives”, whatever the hell that is. Says Carnegie Mellon Associate Director of Marketing for Web Communications, "the effort to increase brand awareness and affinity has been a great success.”

Here’s the problem I have with calling this a success. For one thing, I looked at all of the videos and still don’t have much of an idea of what the Carnegie Mellon brand is ― at least not in what I understand the definition of a brand to be. Which is: “a unique claim of distinction supported by evidence of performance.” Nothing really tells me why I should be interested in going there or, if I’m an alum, why I should support it.

Also, so 22,000 people watched the “Keepon Auditioning” episode for example. So what? Especially when you consider that the 24 comments posted (out of 22,000 viewers) were along the lines of “haha”, “cute brick shirt!” and “LOL”. Did they do anything useful as a result of seeing the video?

Besides, how many of those 43,000 are in the target or can influence the target? YouTube is a worldwide phenomenon, viewed by people of all ages. I don’t believe there is any way to tell through analytics who these folks are or what relevant action they took, if any. Sure, you can tell who came to your site from YouTube and who “continued to blog forward the school’s online initiatives” I guess, but still, I’m just saying.

Believe me, I understand that YouTube/Facebook/MySpace is a totally different sort of animal than traditional advertising. And I believe that it’s an animal that has a valuable place in many marketing campaigns. But if you define “success” simply as having oopty-number of people see your message, that’s pretty much like saying you were successful in your marketing campaign because you bought an ad in the Post and the Post has a circulation of 631,000, so 631,000 people saw your message, so it was a success. High-fives all around!

YouTube, Facebook and MySpace ― like web sites, e-mails, guerilla tactics, collateral and (gasp) print and broadcast advertising ― are tactics. And more often than not, these specific tactics are promoted to clients by specific companies that traffic in those specific tactics and therefore have a vested interest in seeing those specific tactics employed by their specific clients. Personally, I'd rather get advice from someone who is a bit more media agnostic. As opposed to throwing everything onto what my partner and Reason For Living Karen calls “the tactic du jour”.

Look, I really don’t care what medium you employ as long as it’s effective. Geeze, hire those guys with the big arrows to stand on a street corner. Just first make sure you’re saying something of substance, something that does you some good and something that compels your target to do something relevant. I’m not convinced Carnegie Mellon did that.

If you want to do a cool video on YouTube, go ahead. Hell, if it’s cool, I’ll look at it and pass it on. But don’t congratulate yourself simply because people look at it.

Years ago, I saw a study that showed that print ads with attractive, busty women in them attracted more attention than other ads. People didn’t necessarily respond in any fashion that was meaningful for the advertiser, but they did notice the ads.

My point is, don’t confuse a cool YouTube video with a strategic marketing effort. Because it might be nothing more than a good-looking girl in a tight sweater.

Stupid customers and word of mouth.

Google “word of mouth advertising” and you’ll get 322,000 hits. Word of mouth can be a powerful tool. But too often, companies forget that employees are some of the mouths.

The other day I was in a Barnes and Noble store in Rockville, Maryland, buying some books. There were two check-out clerks, and one was busy regaling the other with a story of just how stupid a customer was because he wanted “a gift receipt for a gift card!” The second clerk laughed and joined in the “dumb customer” commentary. While us customers listened.

I don’t how Barnes and Noble defines touchpoints for delivery of their brand ― but if they include employees, at least two of them didn’t get the memo.

Here’s another example. Giant Food here in the D.C. area. It’s a 50-50 chance that your checker will be talking to a co-worker about what time they get off, when their next break is and when they came in that morning. Which usually means they can’t be bothered to connect with the customer in any way.

And another. About 20 years ago, I worked for an aluminum company and our agency ― specifically, a brilliant CD named John Corey ― proposed that our “ad campaign” one year consist of commissioning a limited-edition series of photographs, each of which illustrated “The Competitive Edge”, which was our theme. The idea was that we would give each of our top 200 customers and prospects a framed photo each quarter ― a photo of high enough quality that they would put it on the wall. And every time they looked at it, they’d remember us and our message.

We did an exhaustive search, settled on photographer Larry Fink, got four photographs, had them framed and signed and sent the first batch out to the sales force to distribute. About halfway through, I was travelling with one of our sales guys and he handed the picture to his customer. “I don’t know for sure why we’re doing this,” he said. “It’s a nice picture though. And an aluminum frame.”

I’d missed the whole boat by not involving the sales force at the very beginning. Later I heard that some customers were keeping the frame and throwing away the pictures. I hadn’t drawn our sales force ― the direct customer connection ― into the idea and the message. A good idea very nearly went to waste because all of the employees weren’t bought in.

Any branding or advertising effort ought to involve the HR department in some way shape or form. After all, employees will be delivering your brand essence to customers. That includes, sales clerks, front-desk clerks, service techs, receptionists, CSRs, supervisors, phone support, bellmen, bartenders ― and those two clerks at Barnes and Noble.

Everybody.

Holy %&@*!!

This is an awesome spot for the American Asthma Foundation, by way of Adfreak.

Simple. Powerful. Compelling.

If you never really understood what it is to have asthma, you do now. And who among us could resist an appeal to help stop this kind of suffering?