Let me start by saying I don’t listen to podcasts.
Sure, sure, they’re hip, they’re cool and they fit nicely on my iPod. We have one. Hell, I’ve even been on a few of them.
The reason I don’t listen to them is pretty simple; when I plug in my iPod, I want music and, consequently, if I listen to podcasts, I listen to them on my desktop; if I’m listening to podcasts on my desktop, I’m listening to them at work; if I’m listening to podcasts at work, I’ve obviously lost my head (or at least my appointment calendar).
No, if I have twenty minutes to spare at work, I’ll spend it surfing porn dreaming up new Cannes-winning concepts, TYVM, or maybe even having, oh, lunch.
So I don’t listen to podcasts.
And, until today, that included the American Copywriter podcasts. What was so special about today?
They [the American Copywriter podcasters] remind you that making great communications is, above all, a craft. And that some skills - like getting a voiceover guy to deliver all the words he’s supposed to say in exactly 14.8 seconds - are not going to replaced by any amount of social media widgets or clever digital doodahs.
I won’t bore you with my thoughts on “Web 2.0″ (:cough:consultanthuksterhype:cough:), but this quote was enough to make me want to take a listen.
So this morning, around 10:30 or so, I carved out a half-hour from my schedule, and downloaded and listened to (on my desktop, of course), A.C. #40.
Roughly twenty-two minutes later I placed it on our server and sent a note to my agency’s owners and ECD, holding it up as a “best practices” example and urging them to listen and learn.
So, while I still don’t listen to podcasts, I have to say the American Copywriter’s is terrific.
Cadillac, after a long illness, finally shifted their $225 million account away from Publicis and over to Modernista!
George, over at AdHurl, wants to know where American car manufacturers’ senses of humor went.
Me? Well, I asked it back in March and I’ll ask it again: all I want to know is who, on Cadillac’s side, approved the fashion show crap and what happened to them?
Bah.
Well, at least it’s good news for Modernista! Maybe they’ll hire ad monkey Michel.
The band “The Residents” are engaged in an interesting idea: the sale of blank CDs.
On June 13, Cordless issued the Residents’ “River of Crime” — a 1940s-style radio serial with a band-composed musical score — in a cardboard double-CD package with artwork that reinforces the band’s trademark eyeball, all for $14.99.
The catch? It contains two blank CDs so that the five episodes, which will be released sequentially during a 10-week period, can be burned after the last one becomes available. A unique code for each package allows users to unlock the subscription at riverofcrime.com. (CNN)
Cool idea; their fans get the tracks plus the album art and liner note artifacts that are missing from iTunes purchases.
Bill, over at Make the Logo Bigger, is celebrating his blog’s first birthday which proves there’s at least one art director out there who can write really, really well.
Now if we could only find one who doesn’t move his lips when he reads…
Happy Birthday to MTLB. Pay ‘em a visit, why don’t ya!
This article originally appeared as a three-part installment on Adverb v1.0 and was retrieved from Internet archives. Only the hyperlinks have changed (which were unable to be recovered) and, where the hyperlinks helped to put a passage into context and where I couldn’t replicate the effort, a bare minimum of additional words have been added to fill their place.
~
Killing Phil Schieber A true story of theft, suicide and the death of an agency.
I remember I was at home, sick in bed, on the day Terky called. Terky, Chris ter Kuile, was a talented art director who I’d hired straight out of college. She wore her heart on her sleeve.
It was the middle of October 2000, and she was calling to tell me Phil, the CFO of the agency where we worked, Dallas’ Berry-Brown Advertising, was dead.
I remember she was crying. I remember I felt numb.
I hung up and immediately dialed Jim’s line.
Jim was the agency’s President and the reason I had spent the previous six years toiling in the salt mine. Jim’s a great guy and a terrific ad monkey, and he’d always been straight with me.
His line rang. No answer. Voicemail.
I left a message asking that he call me back and went upstairs to my computer.
Terky told me Phil’s body had been discovered on his ranch in southern Oklahoma (a two-hour drive from our offices) and I wanted to check the news reports.
I quickly learned you should forget about finding live, updated news emanating from southern Oklahoma on the web.
Left in an information vacuum, various scenarios began playing themselves out in my head.
Phil was a pretty weird guy, and I’ll qualify that statement by noting I’ve spent eleven years in the ad jungle, so I know weird when I see it. My ‘weird’ credentials are many, varied and up to date, and if Phil was only one thing, he was weird.
He had a penchant for haberdashery ripped from the pages of Mary Shelley and a personality that ran alternately hot, cool, approachable and distant (often all within a single sentence).
He had his peccadilloes, too. Erotic art hung prominently in his home and he paid for (and attended) more than one lunch spent at local strip clubs.
Only a couple of days before he was found dead, he gave me a cigarette lighter in the shape of a naked woman whose right breast erupted in butane-blue flame after fondling her left.
It was the first and only thing he had ever given me.
He was known to have money (from sources unnamed and mysterious), horses, and an occasional altruistic streak that sometimes verged on being overly generous.
In the office, he was loved by a few, feared by some, liked by most and was just generally thought of as being, well, weird.
A mysteriously wealthy weird guy found dead on an isolated ranch in southern Oklahoma? The first thing my information-starved mind came up with was: drugs. Meth labs, pot farms, coke. Whatever. Phil must have been into it, I thought, and it didn’t work out very well for him.
The phone rang. It was Jim returning my call.
I remember him telling me that, to the person who had found him, it looked like Phil had died from a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head, but that the police had yet to confirm it.
His body had been found under a tree that morning and he said Phil had missed an important meeting the previous day. I asked if it might have anything to do with his role as Chief Financial Officer at the agency. He said he didn’t know but that was the first thought that had crossed his mind, too.
I didn’t tell him that my first thought had actually been a meth lab/pot farm/coke smuggling landing strip gone awry.
It just didn’t seem appropriate.
I remember him telling me he’d call if he heard anything else, and then I spent the next several hours waiting for the news to break in the press.
It never did, so I went back to bed.
~
Friday dawned and, sick or not, I had to go in to work. Officially, there was much left to do in prepping for a big California shoot I had on my schedule the next week. Unofficially it was all about Phil, and to be in the loop you had to be in the office.
I had missed the group emotional bombshell, dropped when Jim called the agency together to share the news the day before, and I felt a little out-of-place because of it.
I’m an information junkie and I wanted news. Everyone else, it seemed, was already in mourning. The office was filled with zombies. People talked in whispers. Passing glances that simultaneously said “it’s so sad” and “what the fuck” were exchanged in the hallways. Upper management stayed behind closed doors.
‘Surreal’ is too easy of a description, but that’s exactly what it was. There was to be no new news, so all we could do was zombie-walk through our day.
The weekend came and I flew out to the sunny wine country of California for the shoot. The client, David (who owns Daisy Sour Cream), had seen to it that I was able make a speedy journey home after my mother fell seriously ill while I was away on a previous shoot, and I wanted to give the project at hand my full concentration in order to do right by him.
You can imagine what that was like.
Still sick and not really up for extra-curricular activities anyway, I spent most of my free time locked in my room watching the Subway Series.
It was a very nice room.
It was on Tuesday or Wednesday that Jim told me the police had confirmed Phil had killed himself. He had taken his shotgun and a bottle of Crown Royal outside and sat under a tree where he snapped off and whittled a twig with his knife. The Crown Royal, he drank. The twig, he used to reach the shotgun’s trigger after placing its barrel between his eyes.
Yes, there was money missing from the agency. No, we don’t know how much yet.
The Daisy shoot was a blur. I remember that it rained and we had to make the grass, literally on the other side of a fence in one scene, green in post. It was a nice spot. Bright, sunny and cheerful, it was everything I wasn’t at the time.
On November the 15th, Jim once again called everyone in to the main conference room. This time, though, I was there for the group emotional bombshell.
He announced that Phil had indeed been siphoning off money from the agency’s accounts and that the amount he had taken, at that counting, over five million dollars, was “fatal” (a word choice I find interesting to this day).
The agency would be closing and that day marked the end of the final pay period for the 23-year-old shop.
He asked that a few of us remain on to close existing projects (my own included, which still required music production and final mixing) as a matter of professionalism, and a few others to do the physical work of closing down the agency.
I remember commenting that, if we were going to liquidate the agency’s assets, we might as well begin with the wet bar.
So we did.
~
Over the next two weeks those of us who were left finished our projects, packed up our belongings and removed ourselves from 3100 McKinnon for good, at least physically.
Jim and Sharon, two-thirds of the Jim-Sharon-Phil management team who only recently had purchased the agency from its founder, Bob, were left with the unenviable task of sorting out the legal issues that remained.
Phil, no doubt, used some of his ill-gotten gains to purchase his share.
I’m not sure what Bob was left doing. Reflecting on opportunities for outside audits squandered, I hope.
Phil? Well, I have some ideas on what Phil was left doing (and none of them involve helping George Bailey learn it really is a Wonderful Life).
The final scorecard tally showed 6.25 million dollars stolen over the course of several years, 60 million dollars in accounts and client relationships up in smoke and 54 employees left unemployed and numb just days before the holidays.
There’s a decent D Magazine article on the subject and a couple of obituary notices still around on the net.
The obits both mention Phil was the agency’s CFO while neglecting to point out he was also its downfall.
The D Magazine article’s primary source was Melissa, a junior AE who joined the agency a scant twenty-five minutes before its closing (only a slight exaggeration).
No one with tenure wanted to talk about it.
I certainly didn’t and, to a certain degree, I still don’t.
The story doesn’t roll from my mind with the effortlessness of my other adventures. Even retelling my experience of surviving a very serious tornado with the she monkey (an event that had life-and-death consequences, killing six and blowing our home down around us) comes with greater ease.
I still receive the occasional legal update by mail.
I read them with stomach acid-inducing speed, wad them up and toss them into the trash. Then I daydream about unleashing a horde of rabid, ravenous monkeys on Phil, the weird guy we had been forced to trust because someone else said we had to.
Originally written May 1, 2003.
A couple of notes that, for one reason or another, didn’t make it into the original story:
Phil killed himself the night before Berry-Brown’s management team was to meet with an accounting team from Publicis, who was in negotiations to purchase the agency at the time. Berry-Brown held a large portion of the Quaker Oats account and Publicis saw our purchase as being entrée to the Gatorade business. Two weeks later, Quaker was purchased by PepsiCo, who then sent the account to Omnicom, effectively shutting the door– even after Phil’s actions came to light– on any sort of acquisition of Berry-Brown by Publicis.
Phil, it turns out, simply pissed away the money, spending it on his Oklahoma ranch, over-priced race horses, cars, and on alternative lifestyle excursions, such as flying in the reigning Mr. Hawaii of the time and escorting him to parties in Miami, New York and San Francisco.
In the end, less than $700,000 in recoverable assets remained and I now understand a great deal about the specialty known as “forensic accounting.”
I once again work on the Gatorade account, this time as a Creative Director for the financially healthy (and Omnicom-owned) Dieste Harmel & Partners.
I’ve added two new tracks from an artist named M.Craft to the Music For Monkeys playlist over in the right-hand column.
I sought him out after hearing one of the tracks, “Dragonfly,” in a VW Eos spot from DDB/London and promptly purchased his EP, “I Can See It All Tonight,” from iTunes. Good bossa nova-influenced trip-lounge.
“Dragonfly” can be found sitting at track #16 on the playlist and “Sweets” can be found at #58.
This Volkswagen spot, for the “Eos” (available in Europe), is notable for being the first VW spot I’ve liked in a while that isn’t from CP+B. It’s from DDB/London, instead. Good job, guys.
Just received word that we have three spots that have made the shortlist cut at Cannes:
The two Bud spots that were shortlisted at the CLIOs (and won at FIAP) and a spot called “Reality” that recently made it on to the AICP reel in the Public Service category (a tough one). I’ll see if I can dig up a .mpg of “Reality,” so check back in later on.
You can view the Bud spots by following the link, above, earlier in this post, but here’s the new AICP-winning and Cannes-shortlisted spot, “Reality.” It’s a 28 meg .mov file, so you may want to open it in another window and go about your business for a while (don’t worry about the bandwidth (I have plenty), but still, please don’t hotlink directly to it from elsewhere):
Credits on “Reality” include Patricia Martinez de Velasco/Roberto Sneider (directors, La Banda Films), Aldo Quevedo (ECD), Rose Gomez (AD/CD), Gabriel Gutierrez (CW) and Boris Nurko (producer). The spot was edited by Glenn Conte of Red Car/Dallas.
We need to import a new coach; you can’t compete on the world stage with university-level tactics. And we need to field a team of eleven who knows what it means to leave everything on the field, every single minute of every single game.
The little hang tag goes on to explain why everybody might not go for Hendrick’s Gin. It’s made in Scotland with “hints of coriander, juniper, citrus peel, rose petals - and a curious but marvelous infusion of cucumber.” Yep. Cucumber. Standard on salad bars. In gin, not so much. And that’s why, the tag says, “the sophisticated yet odd Hendrick’s Martini is preferred by 1 out of 1,000 gin drinkers.”
I need to find some of that gin and hire a writer with a brogue.
Spent the morning in the audio suite hammering out a spot for 7-Eleven that will break in a few days.
Because time is serious money during production, I’m a taskmaster when recording or shooting and I like to be in and out (and not waste any time in between).
Fortunately the voice talent we’re using, Bill Vogel, is a machine and we were able to get exactly what we needed in six takes– or roughly 35 minutes, including time spent building a track.
It helps that we’d created a demo of the spot for sell-in purposes prior to recording, so all of the direction was already understood and we were ready to go from the patch-in, but still– six takes is pretty impressive.
Here’s the spot. It’s, um, not based on any sort of personal experience or anything:
While we were in the studio, the studio producer walked in with a recording of a speech John Wayne gave to a ROTC class at, I believe, Columbia University. “The Duke” was absolutely slobber-knocking drunk and the track makes for an interesting– and somewhat funny– listen.
Here’s the Drunk Duke:
Now I’m going to put my nose to the grindstone and crank out some overdue expense reports. We’re closing the books on the quarter, so it’s now or never.
Forget better client relations; if our industry could rid ourselves of timesheets and expense reports, we’d improve our professional lives 300%.
This is an entry I’ve been meaning to write for a few weeks. I’ve put it off not because I didn’t know what to say (that’s the easy part), but because there’s just been so much going on in the ad jungle of late.
Back in late May, some rather ingenious students at M.I.T. designed and built a raft made entirely of Gatorade bottles and duct tape. They published their picto-story on their Xanga page and, faster than you can sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” the story began spreading in typical viral fashion.
Rightfully proud of the fact they didn’t die a watery death in the middle of the Charles River, the students wrote to Gatorade and told their story.
By way of response, the kids received a personal letter from someone at Gatorade, some coupons and a few freebies, which is worth noting.
I’ll get back to that, but before I do it’s also worth noting that in the ensuing flurry of “oh, look at this” posts, one popped up taking Gatorade to task for not creating an ad around the students’ exploits and urging Gatorade to “get on board the cluetrain” and do so immediately.
Fine. This is the Democratic Internet (unless you’re logged in from China) and everyone’s entitled to their opinion. Whether or not it’s an informed, well-considered opinion is an entirely different matter altogether.
So here is mine: should Gatorade rush out and create a spot centered on these two hella-smart kids and their three-hour tour aboard the S.S. Is It In You? Nope.
Anyone who’s read this blog longer than a week or two knows I have some issues with consumer-generated content. Actually, I don’t have issues with consumer-generated content, I have issues with the people who profess to be thoughtful, cutting edge marketers who don’t think through the issues surrounding CGC and how it intersects with the brand before launching a smug tirade on how they are the ones who “get it” and how every brand should jump in with both feet and launch a CGC campaign now, damn the consequences (it’s all good) and damn the rationale for why (”come on, this is hot, you should do it”–or worse, “you should do it because it validates my consultancy“).
I’m absolutely certain there’s a way to do CGC right and do it in a way that deserves to be blown out into a full-fledged broadcast campaign. The Gatorade raft simply isn’t it for one very large reason: it’s off brand.
Before I go on, let’s pretend the world isn’t familiar with the product and consider for a moment what Gatorade represents as a brand and then look to see if two product-fanatical kids, floating on a raft made of bottles in the middle of the Charles River, are a good fit for a multi-million dollar ad campaign under its brand umbrella.
Gatorade, the product, promotes a very well defined proposition: it contains the fuel athletes need to perform at their peak performance potential. The brand, and the imagery associated with it, easily falls out of this rather simple proposition: athletes (and, often specifically, athletes known for delivering outstanding peak performances); high-intensity, hard-core physical exertion; force of will under difficult and trying situations; blood, sweat and tears; and, finally, triumph in the face of impossible circumstances.
If you’re following along you can probably already see how the story of a lazy sunny day’s float on a raft and the story of Gatorade’s brand don’t intersect. If you can’t and you’re in marketing, you should probably reconsider your choice of careers (if only for the sake of your clients).
Now the question might come up, “but why doesn’t Gatorade just create an ad about it, anyway? They have the money.”
First, they might have a lot of money, but they don’t have unlimited resources and, even if they did, you wouldn’t want to split your brand message into a million tiny voices showing each and every possible way the product can and might be used (no matter how off-brand the usage might be). Brands are built through consistency of messaging.
I come from the advertising camp that says “consumers are intelligent people,” and I know they will get to other usage occasions on their own with no reason to roll out a million dollar production defining each and every possible way to interact with the product (no matter how fanatical that interaction might be).
Let’s take Nike as an only slightly tangential example. Like Gatorade, their brand proposition is fairly simple to discern: they produce the equipment athletes need in order to get the most out of their physical activity.
Let me ask you this question: throughout the world’s population, where are Nike products used most frequently? On the playing field by a sweaty athlete or as everyday wear by people going about their daily business?
Points to you if you said everyday wear. Hell, I’m wearing a Nike soccer dry-weave shirt and Converse high-tops as I write this and I don’t intend to drop in to a half-pipe on my board, float a three pointer in from long range or head a ball into the net at the World Cup anytime soon.
Now, when was the last time you saw an ad campaign from Nike that showed their products in use by people sitting behind a desk, pecking away at their keyboard? You haven’t because it would be off brand and consumers are perfectly able to “get it” on their own. The lack of a million dollar ad campaign (or even an on-the-cheap, online CGC campaign) hasn’t prevented consumers from rightfully reaching the conclusion that, “Hey! I can use this product for something other than what they advertise!”
There is absolutely no reason to show each and every usage occasion for your product in an ad campaign and, in fact, it can be quite detrimental to do so. A large piece of the pie-of-reasoning why someone would choose Nike over Adidas is, in large part, due to how well they relate to the brand on a personal level and how much of that brand image they see reflected in themselves (or how much they wish to see).
And just because you’re a fan of the product and do fanatical things with it in your life, it doesn’t mean what you’re doing is of any benefit to the brand image, either.
I don’t care how fanatical he might be, seeing a hairy, overweight, translucently white bald man running naked down the street, showing off the Nike “swoosh” tattooed on his chest will do nothing but make me wince. Repeat that experience over and over again and I’ll eventually come to the conclusion that Nike’s not a brand “for me.”
This isn’t to knock what the M.I.T. students did; it’s just to say that, in order for it to make enough sense to warrant an ad campaign built around it, the raft simply doesn’t float. Had they used Jones Soda bottles, a brand built on its consumers’ fanatical (to the extreme) use of the product, sure, I can see that.
But Gatorade? Nope.
Now back to Gatorade’s response to the kids that I mentioned earlier. In the end, they received a couple of coupons, some freebies and a nice letter from Gatorade. While there’s no way I’d build a campaign around their rafting experience, Gatorade could have sweetened the pot a little and generated goodwill of a magnitude or two greater than what they did. As a brand, you reward loyal users (just not always with their own ad campaign).
But don’t tell me Gatorade needs to get on the cluetrain. They’re one of the few brands out there who consistently get it right when it comes to speaking to their core consumer (those athletes I mentioned earlier) in a voice that rings perfect-pitch true. And their ever-expanding penetration, share and frequency of use speaks volumes about the fact I’m not the only one who understands who the brand is, what they represent and whether or not they speak to me in an engaging way.
They do.
And if you’re a marketer or consultant scorning Gatorade’s hesitation at boarding the raft, you need to step back and reconsider your position.
EMT-Man: makethelogobigger isn't really correct. The protocol changes every year based on your level of certification, and whether you are working on...
michel: Glad to hear you, know you have been busy!!! Enjoy the Pubs and see ya when you get back!!!
