Pay a little expect a lot. Pat a lot get a lot.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Here's what happens:

Client wants to pay as little as possible for a service - let's say advertising or photography.

Provider decides to go along and give client a good price (pick one or more) 1 - to generate some needed cash, 2 - to make a good impressions and maybe get more business, 3 - to do a good turn for a good client, 4 - any one of a bunch of other good or bad reasons.


And usually the provider indicates on a proposal or invoice that a discount has been extended. Which client often promptly forgets . . .  as they start pushing the schedule and asking for more revisions, options or services (like retouching, for example) than the deal called for. Then they complain when they are charged for things that go beyond the original scope of work.

And everybody involved winds up in a bad mood.

Charge what's fair for a clearly laid-out scope of work.

And pay what's fair for a clearly laid-out scope of work.

It's really pretty simple.

Are you kidding me?

OK, you want a new logo for your fast-food chain.

Something that doesn't look so "old-fashioned". (Another voice might say it's a "classic" look, but let's not get off message here.)

Fine. Go ahead. Spend a few hundred thousand getting some design studio to study the hell out of it and then come up with some that's, well, OK.

Just say so. "We just kinda got tired of the old one and we like the new one better. It's kinda 'now', you know?"

Don't feel the need to try to bullshit us with a lot of gobbledygook. Don't (and I'm talking to you Craig Bahner, CMO of Wendy's) try to convince us that this beige approach above "signals the innovation and fresh thinking taking place at Wendy’s, while reinforcing that we are staying true to our values as a distinct and beloved brand.” 

What a load of crap.


Something tells me this guy is pals with the marketing genius at Avis who decided to drop their classic tag line for a bunch of words.

Probably also the guy behind their lame "now that's better" ad campaign.

Plumbers do it. Why shouldn't we?

Yeah, cheap joke in the image department here.

I know, I know.

But still, what do plumbers, auto mechanics, appliance repairmen and even dentists have in common?

They don't work for free. In fact, they won't even tell you what is wrong with your toilet, car, refrigerator or teeth unless you're going to pay them something.

Honest, since this popped into my head yesterday, I haven't been able to think of a single other line of work that is expected to give away its expertise in order to get hired.

Talk to us. Look at what we've done for others. Talk to our references. Ask questions.

But got God's sake stop asking us to "tell us what you'd do for us." And stop asking us if we have any "ideas".

We'd do for you what we've done for others, and if what we've done for them isn't good enough, move along. There's nothing to see here.

And of course we have ideas. Would you like to pay us for them?

Seriously, is there another business on earth that will invest as much time in the hope of new business as us?

Mime pizza

A cool spot by way of ace copywriter Larry No Relations Hinkle at Lunchbucket Creative and his Will Write For Beer blog.

It's nice to have non-relatives in the business.

The road to success is a toll road.

An inadequate ad budget is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.


I can't figure out if it's because people don't think advertising is worth spending anything on or if it's because they think it's such a powerful tool that they don't need to spend much on it to get a benefit.

Or if they think that simply throwing up a Facebook page or hopping on the Twitter Autobahn is enough. Or they are thrilled that social media seems to be free. Or that the PR folks are getting tons of "free" advertising.

I don't know. I really don't.

But I do know that when someone is investing several million dollars in a new business or in improvements to an existing one, it is the height of folly not to make an adequate investment in telling people about it.

And make no mistake about it, the whole arena of getting attention for your business is a big, nasty, wild-west gunfight. With some pretty smart, aggressive characters in it.

Back when I was a PR guy, I learned an expression that I think applies to marketing in general. Everything you need to know is in four words:

"Do good. Tell people."

It's not that hard. But time and again, you see someone put a lot of cash into the "doing good" part and then sort of letting the "tell people" part slide. Makes no sense.

Whether you do it on the web (in paid or social media), in a newspaper or a magazine or on a billboard, on the radio or the television, if you want people to know about whateverthehellitisyou'redoing, you going to have to freaking tell them.

I don't care how nice your hotel is, how great your restaurant will be, how wonderful your customer service will be, what sort of selection you have in the showroom or how low your prices are, it won't count for a hill of beans if nobody knows about it.

I've said it before and will no doubt say it again, "If you build it they will come" only works in the movies.

And only in one movie at that.

I'm not with stupid.

If you're like me, you're probably pretty sick of political advertising.

Here in the DC suburbs, we're getting it heavy. Of course, there's a national election on. But Virginia next door is not only a "battleground" state, but also is electing a Senator. *

It's exhausting.

But it's also somewhere between disgusting and embarrassing. Full of half-truth, shades of the truth, misrepresented truths, quotes and comments out of context, personal attacks, name-calling and often - let's just say it - outright lies.

If I was stuck working for one of the agencies that produces that crap, I'd probably take a hot shower every day after work - and still feel kind of dirty. Maybe this is how political advertising has always been, throwing mud at the Other Guy rather than applause at Your Guy. I don't know.

But I do know that few of us in commercial advertising practice the same sort of approach that people who do political ads do. Here's an example:

Capella Georgetown is a new client of ours that is opening a luxury hotel in Georgetown. It's going to be quite a place. Real nice. On the Canal, a block off M Street, just 48 rooms. And on and on. For example, every guest is assigned a Personal Assistant who will Make the Magic Happen - almost regardless of what you might want.

OK, now the most similar competitor hotel to us is The Jefferson. The Jefferson is a small, very, very, very nice place where guests enjoy privacy and discretion. It's also the hotel where, at least 10 years ago, political goombah Dick Morris took hookers. That was a long time ago and had more to do with Dick Morris and his own morals than The Jefferson.

But if we approached advertising for Capella the way Political Ad Agency XYZ approaches advertising for their guy Candidate Bob, we'd be running ads with headlines like: "Hookers prefer the Jefferson." Or "The Jefferson - haven for hookers." Or even "The Jefferson. Got ho's?"

My point is that advertising is an incredibly cost-effective tool you can use to tell your potential customers why the hell they ought to care about you. If all a product carried in its ads was distortions about its competitors, wouldn't you walk away wondering why they can't think of anything better to say about themselves than that the other stuff is worse?

Most of the people I know in this business - probably everybody I know in this business - is focused on finding what is good and unique about our clients and developing creative ways to tell the public about it. That's not what the charlatans at political advertising agencies are about.

And the fact that the DC Ad Club wants to embrace these guys in order to pump up the perceived size of the DC ad market is disappointing at best.

OK, fact: Nasuti & Hinkle does not do the kind of dishonest, misleading advertising that characterizes most of what we see today from candidates for political office. Neither does August, Lang Husak. Or RP3. Or Lunchbucket Creative, LM&O, SmithGifford, Adworks, Arnold, Pappas, Exit 10 or anybody the hell else I can think of that I admire. Period.

One time, when I was the advertising and PR manager for part of a Fortune 500 company a co-worker introduced me to her husband at a company party. "So you're the paid liar, huh?" he said.

When I look at political commercials today, I guess I have to understand why he felt that way.


*As usual, please note the correct use of "not only" and "but also". I'm fairly certain no political advertising agency could do that . . .

Monkey-see, monkey-do. Or something like that.

 

OK, some of these people really should know better.

All four of these ads were taken from a single issue of Travel & Leisure. Karen looked up the rate card and the open rate for a national run is $124,000. The 18x rate of $113,000.

WTF? Do Intercontinental, Sheraton, Oceania Cruises and Virtuoso all subscribe to some sort of stock ad service? Not only is the art direction on all four of these boring, but they all look a-freaking-like. 

I don't know much about Oceania Cruises and Virtuoso in terms of who does their advertising, but my guess is that Sheraton and Intercontinental both have agencies who damn well ought to be able to do better work than this.

This crap is just sad. The fact that all four of them look so much alike tells you something. I'm not 100% sure what, but I can tell you that if my agency did any one of these, I'd be embarrassed. And if I saw that three other agencies did the same thing, I'd want to crawl under a rock.

For God's sake, it you're going to spend more than 100 G's on an ad at least get your agency to make some kind of effort to do something worthwhile.

Here's an open offer to Sheraton AND Intercontinental. We can do better than this. At half the price, I'm sure.

Then again, better than this crap is a mighty low bar.