Archive for March, 2009

I’m a huge Bob Newart fan. Loved his TV shows. Love his stand-up comedy. In fact, I was lucky enough to play his show, years ago, in Shreveport. Not that he needed a band, but I was part of the house band at the old Le Bossiér Celebrity Dinner Theatre across the river in Bossier City, and we opened and closed his act, playing the theme from The Bob Newhart Show. One of his big bits in his stand-up act involves acting out one end of a phone conversation, where the audience infers and implies the other side of the conversation via their imaginations. One of Bob’s most famous bits is called Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue, where he imagines what it might have been like if Lincoln had the services of both the telephone and a modern advertising agency. The results were both absurd and hilarious. It was simultaneously funny, yet oddly respectful of one of our most beloved Presidents.

That brings us to the latest offering from the folks at Mountain Dew. Dew’s ads have long been edgy and almost too hip for the room – their Super Bowl riff on the Bohemian Rhapsody is a classic. Their latest ad features a send-up of the Lincoln-Douglass debates – a pivital moment in American History. In the Dew version, Lincoln (who was in reality a fan of Greco-Roman wrestling – NOT the stuff that passes for “wrestling” on WWE), strips to the waste and proceeds to go Medieval, waging Civil War on Douglass and others on the dias.

Color me unimpressed.

I just don’t see the humor, past the shock value of seeing an American icon strip to the waist and sport an American eagle tattoo. Newhart’s comedy was funny. This spot? Flat. Which is not a good thing for a soda ad to be.

Hopefully, the Dew ad pulls well with the 15 to 24 crowd, which I suspect is their target market. (I’m not a Mountain Dew fan – never have been, and likely never will be.) If, on the other hand, they want to reach a wider demographic, they might want to look at creating ads with a humor level somewhere above that of Jackass The Movie.

My kid loves BAND-AIDs. She believes that, any time she’s wounded, a BAND-AID strip will make it better. I’m not talking about bleeding, here – I mean, if she sprains her finger, the dog steps on her foot, or if she has a stiff neck – a BAND-AID will fix her right up. My apologies to the fine folks at Johnson & Johnson, but that ain’t necessisarily so. Don’t get me wrong…adhesive bandages serve a useful purpose in the healing process, but they are not the one-size-fits-all, universal cure that my daughter would have me believe. (If they were, I wouldn’t mind our anual expenditures for BAND-AIDs, which seems to be a significant portion of the family debt, since she’s taken to putting them on EVERYTHING…)

But this is not a post about medicine, except as it relates to marketing. Too many people look at marketing as a kind of BAND-AID for their branding, their advertising, and their sales. And far too many take a BAND-AID approach to marketing itself. Read the rest of this entry »

all things come to them's that wait.

I love Jack in the Box. Seriously. I love their food (the cheddar potato wedges are to die for). I love their commercials. I love their whole attitude and persona. I’m a huge fan. I think the entire “Jack” character is simply brilliant. Which is why I’m nothing short of stunned regarding the recent remake of the jackinthebox.com corporate website. Don’t get me wrong. It’s attractive. It’s cool. It’s got the content (the commercials) everyone wants to see. But you’d think it was designed by someone mainlining Heinz ketchup. Slow doesn’t begin to describe it. And slow = death on the web.

Now understand that I’ve got a lot of experience building rich media websites. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m writing this from a hotel room in the bustling burg of Henrietta, Texas. Henrietta, for those of you without access to Google Maps, is just SE of Wichita Falls, which is an hour or so NW of Dallas. I’m on a combination Spring Break trip and business trip for my Guitar Furniture venture. I’d be in Dallas tonight, but for what appears to be a broken fuel pump. Inconvenient, but it’s not a show-stopper. However it did throw a sizable monkey wrench into the works, at least for a day.

The reason I mention this, is that I realized that a lot of what happened today makes for some pretty good fodder for marketing discussions. Read the rest of this entry »

NOTE: This is – ordinarily – a marketing blog. I try (sort of) to keep politics out of it. But today, I believe we are faced with something that is too important to ignore, for it trumps marketing, along with everything else. I am speaking of the imminent threat of Socialism in America. Therefore, I am temporarily suspending my moratorium on political topics to bring you the following editorial.

Another guy who "got it."

There’s something happening here. You can feel it in the air. You can see it on people’s faces, hear it in their voices. Change. And I don’t mean the kind of B.S. “Change” that we saw on Obama’s campaign posters. I mean the kind of change that changes the course of a nation. And the tipping point is this afternoon.

I’m a conservative. A proud conservative. And I believe this country is, frankly, going to Hell in a hand-basket. Sadly, this started long before Obama took office. While I believe that George Bush the Younger is a principled, Godly man, too many things that happened on his watch ran contrary to my conservative principles. That was bad. This is worse: since Obama took office, the country is on a toboggan ride, downhill towards Socialism. Spending like drunken sailors (no offense to our Navy, guys – it’s just an expression), Congress seems content to fiddle while the U.S.A. burns. No program is stupid enough, wacky enough, or costly enough to deny it funding, while even the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office warns that most of the “stimulus” they’ve passed will not only fail to stimulate the economy, but will in fact prolong the recession. Obama has acknowledged as such, even back as far as the campaign days. When asked about his plan to tax capital gains even when it’s been proven, time and time again, that this will have a detrimental effect on the economy, he replied, “But it’s the right thing to do.”

The right thing to do. Interesting turn of phrase. Read the rest of this entry »

The following is a true story. The names have been changed, not to protect the innocent, but because the guilty are litigeous weasels that would like nothing better than to sue me for telling the truth.

Some time ago, I was the Creative Director of an in-house agency for a software publisher. We’ll call them…um…”MacroGraphics.” I ran a group of creatives known internally as the Creative Services Group.  As the company grew, internal politics reared it’s ugly head. As in many companies, when sales don’t meet projections or expectations, the first people to get blamed are the marketing guys. At MacroGraphics, this took the form of certain people in the sales department suggesting that the company hire an external agency. (I say this with absolute certainty, because one of the directors of sales was a golfing buddy of Stan Richards – head of the Richards Group – and had them come in to do a dog and pony show for the company…without giving me any advanced warning.)  After the Richards Group pitched us, I suggested that if we were really interested in outside help for Creative Services, that we shop around for the best shop to work with. I brought in Seth Werner (the guy that came up with the California Raisins Claymation spots) who was running the Dallas office of Bloom. (Might as well start at the top, right?) While I was busy setting up other meetings, the CEO of MacroGraphics asked me to interview a guy they’d worked with before, who ran a very small Dallas agency. We’ll call him “Jonathan Ricotta.” Read the rest of this entry »

As a marketing guy, I believe the smartest thing I can do to stay sharp is to spend a part of each day keeping up with what others are doing – and saying – in the world of marketing. In particular, I like to look at TV ads (go figure), listen to commercial radio, flip through magazines, and read the trades. I also enjoy reading marketing blogs, especially those written by people whose opinions I respect and value. Exhibit A: Ries’ Pieces, a marketing blog penned by Laura Ries. Laura is a crack marketer in her own right (you’ve likely seen her on one of the cable news channels) and author, and is the daughter of Al Ries, for my money, one of the living ‘gods of marketing.’ The senior Ries, along with his then-partner, Jack Trout, wrote a couple of the most influential books on marketing ever, including Positioning, the bible for how to view your brand within your marketspace.

I was reading Laura’s blog the other day, and noted her comments on the re-packaging/re-branding of Tropicana orange juice. I hadn’t noticed that Tropicana had changed their packaging prior to this, so I made it a point to visit the refrigerated section of my local grocery emporium, just to see what all the hubbub was about.What I found was…interesting. My conclusion was that, while Ms. Ries makes some incredibly valid and insightful points, there were a couple of things she missed. To wit… Read the rest of this entry »

…THAT is the question. I live Amarillo, Texas (Centrally Located Between Two Oceans!™). We are served by AT&T, Altel (now owned by Verison), Sprint, and…that’s about it. No T-Mobile. No other choices. That wouldn’t be so bad, but of all the cell phone vendors we have here in the Panhandle, how many offer 3G service? None. Nada. Zip. Bupkiss. Nyet. Zero.

Color me frustrated. Read the rest of this entry »