Hasta La Creative!

JPMorgan Chase & Co intended to use Twitter today for thought leadership purposes.

Using the hashtag #AskJPM, interested parties were invited to send questions in advance of the session set for Thursday at 1 p.m. in New York.

$JPM VC Jimmy Lee is taking over @JPMorgan on 11/14 at 1pm ET. Tweet Qs using #AskJPM & learn more about him here: http://t.co/eTDT8pJeq8

— J.P. Morgan (@jpmorgan) November 13, 2013

The bank was going to make one of its star bankers available for a live Q&A, but when negative Tweets starting rolling in like waves, the marketing team at the bank shut the event down.

Tomorrow's Q&A is cancelled. Bad Idea. Back to the drawing board.

— J.P. Morgan (@jpmorgan) November 14, 2013

This episode nicely illustrates the difference between what the people who work for the bank or its agencies think and feel about the brand, compared to what people on the street think and feel.

Given that a flare up like this is a rich educational experience for the brand, I would advise The House of Morgan to keep their scheduled Twitter chat and to carry on. It’s the difficult path for sure, but choosing to not engage sends the wrong message, making a bad situation worse.

In the face of a Tweet storm, you can run and hide or you can show some resolve, patience and balance.

The post #AskJPM Backfires, House of Morgan Cancels Tweet Chat appeared first on AdPulp.

Media is powerful. In fact, just one potent article in a trusted magazine or newspaper has the power to inspire us, shape us and lead us to new places. Take “The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters. The article first appeared in Fast Company on August 31, 1997.

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.

How many believers has Peters reached in the last 16 years? Millions. For the author pours a particularly seductive nectar into Fast Company’s crystal glass.

Naturally, there is truth in Peters words, but how much truth?

I read a great rebuttal this morning to the mountain of bullshit sometimes known as the literature of creativity. Let’s listen to wonderfully critical Thomas Frank on the topic:

Consider, then, the narrative daisy chain that makes up the literature of creativity. It is the story of brilliant people, often in the arts or humanities, who are studied by other brilliant people, often in the sciences, finance, or marketing. The readership is made up of us — members of the professional-managerial class — each of whom harbors a powerful suspicion that he or she is pretty brilliant as well… And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world.

Are you familiar with the self-satisfied “creative people” Frank describes? If you work in advertising, you are. Our profession is full of people who mindlessly spew their recipes for brand success, but sadly most of what the poseurs say (and do) is total garbage.

I’m not just pointing fingers here. If I were to open a deck of my own making from a few years ago, I would likely be appalled at the tortured logic and language of my arguments.

The reality is marketing isn’t all that complex. Are you creating compelling brand experiences for prospects and customers? Yes or no? This is how simple MarCom is at its core. The hard part for most practitioners is coming to this conclusion and then choosing to live by it. We want so badly to believe our ideas separate us from the pack. That our ideas above all else are the real difference maker. Yet, I think the evidence points to execution. The ability to make mundane things like advertising into something artful (that also builds the brand and moves product) — that’s the difference maker.

The post Come On Down, Everyone Is Welcome At The Altar of Creativity appeared first on AdPulp.

Robin Williams once said cocaine was God’s way of saying you make too much money. Something tells me he’d say the same about ad agencies’ current fascination with turning even the smallest task into a gigantic group project.

You’d think in these days of tight budgets, rapidly changing media and constant connectivity, agencies would not only be doing things faster but with fewer people. Especially after all the crazy mergers, consolidation and downsizing. Sadly though, in today’s ad world there’s just no project too small to involve way too many people.

Notice I used the word involve. That’s important because the number of people actually doing the work hasn’t really changed. Just the number of people involved. For example, if we were talking about a crew of city utility workers, these would be the six guys standing around the edge of the hole doing nothing but watching the two guys who are actually down in the hole digging. (And if they were agency-types, they’d be constantly emailing the poor saps while they dug.)

Naturally, these peripheral peeps insist their Too-Many-Meetings process be given a new name, so as to sound less stupid and more innovative I guess. Scrum seems to be the latest moniker they’ve latched onto, a surprisingly apt descriptor given the way workplace overthink can invade your personal space. As buzzwords go, scrum may soon prove to be the next crowdsourcing. And no wonder, considering it has a much better ring to it than the other name they were considering, Opening The Oven Door Every Other Minute To See If The Cookies Are Done.

I may be getting out of my element here, but I always thought one of the easiest ways for an agency to make money was to do more with less. Considering that people are an agency’s greatest expense, the fewer people you pay per task, the more money you have left over, no? Especially if your revenue comes from a fixed monthly fee.

Yet it seems like the goal in most agencies today is to require more people than ever to hold as many meetings as possible to accomplish what could just as easily happen in about half the time with 1/3 of the manpower. (With that 1/3 feeling much happier and vital and empowered and other stuff the Human Resources Dept. says we should care about along the way, too.)

Of course, I can hear the scrum-mers now: It’s all about collaboration! The wisdom of the crowd! The hive! Great ideas can come from anywhere, etc, etc.

Fine, great ideas are everywhere. So is gold and oil technically, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize we’re not all equally adept at finding it. And sure, collaboration is important, but at a certain point we’re simply getting in each others’ way.

So what say we all pick up our Scrum Participation Trophies then go back to our desks and spend some of this precious meeting time actually thinking instead?

Who knows, maybe some of us will actually get some work done.

(Thanks to Brian Morrissey @bmorrissey for pointing out the rise of scrum. So many buzzwords, so little time.)

Prediction: the big agency buzzword of 2014 will be 'scrum.'

— Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) October 2, 2013

The post How Ad Agencies Do Less With More appeared first on AdPulp.

Thanks to the crazy number of hours I spend in front of a computer screen, I see a ton of questionable content. The content is suspect because it is overly promotional.

I expect brands to fall into this trap. Brands have more than a century of bad advertising to convince themselves of the rightness of their chest thumping. Where things go wrong for me is when well-meaning people become lifeless and shameless hucksters.

On Twitter, in particular, people with promotional objectives in mind often use automated software to deliver a stream of supposedly worthwhile updates.

Why would people use robots to keep their Tweet stream full and fresh? The short answer is they bought a bill of goods sold to them by everyone from FastCompany to the legions of self-help marketers trolling the ‘tubes. The idea being that more content brings more followers and more followers means more potential leads and greater social influence.

Buffer–a service with one million users broadcasting phantom Tweets–says it’s a “smarter way to share.”

Be awesome on social media. Easily add great articles, pictures and videos to your Buffer and we automagically share them for you through the day!

Did you think, like me, that Twitter and Facebook and the rest were conversational platforms? They can be used this way, just like they can be gamed by people with something to sell.

I know I can simply unfollow all the ritual self-promoters, and so can you, but they will continue to exist and continue to make lame attempts at growing their influence online. So, unfollowing does nothing to solve the problem, it just mutes the mess on an individual basis.

Allow me make this clearer: I can’t get to know you if you’re not present. And I can’t get to know you by the articles you link to.

Maybe you don’t want to be known. Maybe you prefer the idea that you’re a personal brand, rather than a human being with countless vulnerabilities. As we know, the real-world looks quite a bit different from the projections we see on in our social streams. In reality, people are afraid, alone, angry, confused and many other difficult things that rarely get communicated.

In other words, the complexity of human existence is not coming through loud and clear in social. From a business perspective, you may wonder why the complexity of human existence matters. It matters because business is personal. I don’t want to do business with an automaton. Do you?

The post Scheduling Your Tweets? Congratulations, You’re A Broadcaster appeared first on AdPulp.

Elmore Leonard’s recent passing prompted Bruce McCall to write a reflective piece for The New Yorker.

McCall worked on Chevy in Detroit at the same time Leonard was banging out Westerns on his typewriter and working as a copywriter. McCall notes how common it is for real writers to find “safe harbor” in the ad business.

A fat book could be assembled, just listing all the later-to-be-famous writers who stopped briefly in the cubicles of ad agencies: Dorothy L. Sayers and Salman Rushdie and F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Patterson and Joseph Heller, for starters. Advertising is a morally squalid racket that demands one make a Faustian bargain by manipulating truth for money. But I’ll say this much for the murky intersection of morality and commerce and guess-who-wins that is the ad biz: it has perennially provided a safe haven and a decent income for writers while they were working out their higher destinies.

“Manipulating truth for money” is some pretty tough language. Or is it tough love? After all, it’s common wisdom that advertising is all about the bullshit. The agency dreams up some bullshit to present to the client, who has a whole list of bullshit reasons about why people ought to care and buy the bullshit they’re selling. After several high-priced bullshit sessions, the client then buys the agency’s bullshit about the client’s own bullshit, at which point the agency goes off to spends millions of the client’s dollars justifying all this crazy bullshit.

Here’s what I think. Common sense trumps common wisdom. And in this case, common sense dictates that advertising is no longer about the bullshit. It’s not that marketers woke up one morning and realized the error of their ways and opted for higher ground. No, it’s more like the Internet was unleashed on society and its industry-crushing reach has had its way with marketing communications, just like it did with the news and music industries.

Today, thanks to radical transparency and the popularity of people-powered, mobile and always-on media networks, your brand is who and what you do everyday, for real. You are not who your ad campaigns say you are and this is great news, provided you know how to operate in this new media environment.

When I consider my own higher destinies as a writer, I allow dreams of a best seller or a successful screenplay. But for me, it makes perfect sense to infuse advertising with poetry and art. Also with meaning, soul and passion. Advertising is a storytelling platform, like films and theater are storytelling platforms. The job is to convey memorable information in a moving way, and it’s far from easy to do.

McCall notes that advertising’s real writers rarely have much success in advertising. Clearly, for many, advertising is a payday and nothing more. In the beginning, I wondered if it would be like that for me. It wasn’t and isn’t and I am grateful for this.

The post Are Copywriters Just Authors In Hiding? appeared first on AdPulp.

Wal-Mart want to clear some things up. Hence, the launch of a new PR-driven site, TheRealWalmart.com and new TV spots that began airing on Saturday during the Kentucky Derby.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the campaign is the company’s first purely image-based ad push in several years.

WSJ also reports that Wal-Mart’s “energized differentiation,” an advertising term for the direction a brand is going based on consumer interest, loyalty and momentum, dropped 50% between 2011 and 2012 among college-educated adults.

That’s what allegations of bribery, poor global sourcing practices and low wages brings.

Barbara Andridge, 38, who has been working at a Placerville, Calif., Wal-Mart for nearly eight years and makes $12.15 an hour. She said she had to drop its health plan this year because she couldn’t afford the $18 weekly cost.

“I don’t want to see ads,” she said. “I want to see Wal-Mart provide decent wages, affordable health care and enough hours to feed my children.”

The post Wal-Mart In A Battle To Redefine Its Brand appeared first on AdPulp.

Stephen Floyd practices an innocent form of culture jamming. Here’s an example of his work in Fairplay, CO.

[via The Moment]

Super sensitive conservatives are freaking out about Rachel Ray’s choice of neckwear in a Dunkin’ Donuts spot. Apparently, the scarf is like some kind of gang sign, except the gang in question is from Palestine.

I wonder if this means I need to boycott falafel to prove my loyalty to the USA. I hope not. I bet it’s okay, as long as I order a side of freedom fries.

[via Little Green Footballs]

Not to go all Adbusters on you or anything, but I like to see is people actively resisting advertising. I think it’s a healthy reaction to the onslaught of commercial messages.

Debranded Home is doing its part by offering a set of generic labels printed on high-quality waterproof vinyl.

Our objective is to provide you with the tools and information you need to debrand your home. We want to change the way people think about and buy products. Advertising is everywhere and, granted, does serve a purpose, but we want to show you how to can reclaim your space. Once a product has made it off the shelf, its label has served its purpose.

It’s freeing to not be pressured to dole out extra cash to buy that product with slightly nicer packaging. And you can feel good about recycling your bottles and either buying in bulk or learning to make things yourself.

The label sets are $9.00, plus $1.50 for shipping.

There does seem to be irony in the fact that Debranded Home is offering labels, that essentially act us an unbranded brand. It seems, one could take their advice but skip the labeling, or device a simpler labeling technique.

[via Quipsologies]

According to The Wall Street Journal, both activists and the corporations they rail against are moving at internet speed.

Just last week we took note of the Greenpeace campaign against Unilever, a company they accused of Indonesian deforestation.

Speaking at a climate change conference in London Thursday, Unilever Chief Executive Patrick Cescau said his firm will buy palm oil (an ingredient in Dove soap) only from suppliers who can demonstrate they haven’t cut down forests.

The speed of the campaign marks a big moment for activist groups. One Greenpeace ad has been watched more than 250,000 times in the week it has been on YouTube.com. Just as the world’s biggest marketers have used such Internet sites to get their video ads to consumers, pressure groups are now using the technique to cheaply and quickly spread their message.

A Unilever spokesman said the Greenpeace protests “had some bearing” but little influence on Unilever’s decision to source palm oil. He said the company’s policy has been in the works since November.

Palm oil is produced mainly in Indonesia and Malaysia by farmers who squeeze the oil from small flowers found on oil palms. Surging prices for the oil have contributed to deforestation, especially in Indonesia, where farmers have cut down rain forests for palm plantations.

Here’s an earlier video from Greenpeace on the same issue: