Mad Men - Don's Still Out of Time

SPOILER ALERT

Mad Men ended with a reshowing of the Coke “I’d like to teach the world to sing” also known as “Hilltop” commercial. And while the reason is ambiguous many people including my wife read it as Don, inspired by his experience in Big Sur, has been reinspired and gone back to McCann Erickson and written that ad.

Don, a man of the 50s, had been struggling to come to terms with the 60s but it seems he has now got his mojo back and has produced one of the seminal ads of its time. Ad Age rate it as #53 in its best ads of the century. But has he?

As my wife also reminded me, we never liked that ad. It was cheesy and completely out of tune with 1971.

The ad is really a hangover from the Summer of Love in 1967.  That was when eastern religions, love and peace were at their height; when living in perfect harmony and peace throughout the land was a believable ideal.

In the four years since then a lot happened. There were the Vietnam War protests. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s assassinations (1968), The Chicago Democratic Convention (1968),the election of Nixon (1969), the Rolling Stones Altamont concert (1969), Charles Manson and the Sharon Tate murders (1969) the Kent State massacre that inspired Neil Young to write Ohio.(1970).

The truth is the ideals of the Hilltop commercial were long gone. There was a new grittiness and reality in the air. 1971 was a big year. All in the Family debuted.  Big Movies included “A Clockwork Orange” and “Dirty Harry”. The music we listened to included Led Zeppelin IV (“Stairway to heaven”, Who’s Next (“Won’t get fooled again”), Marvin Gaye's "What’s Going On" and David Bowie’s Hunky Dory (“Life on Mars”).  The themes were alienation and rebellion, cynicism and dystopias. Woodstock, which was the last gasp of hippie culture, was in 1969 and even there the star was Jimi Hendrix, who later that year penned the incredible "Machine Gun". His hard-edged brand matched the new reality rather than the Summer of Love influenced Jefferson Airplane.

Even Coke had a hard time. It’s ideals of happiness and innocence were out of touch with the 70s. Pepsi discovered the 60s well before Coke with its “Choice of New Generation” in 1965 and with the Pepsi Taste Challenge became a real competitor in the 70s.  Coke and McCann struggled through this period.

If Don did write ‘Hilltop’ he had certainly moved on from the suits and cigarettes of the 50s. And he has created a great piece of storytelling and television. But sadly for him, just as he comes to terms with the 60s the rest of the world has moved into the 70s. His theme soing is not "I'd like to teach the world to sing" but the Rolling Stones  'Out of time'.

You don't know what's going on
You've been away for far too long
You can't come back and think you are still mine
You're out of touch, my baby

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MAD MEN SEASON FINALE – WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN

SPOILER ALERT

 

My wife and I were watching the finale of Mad Men earlier this week.

When it ended I felt very depressed. I felt the ending was cynical and contrived and a betrayal of what went before.

The way the main characters’ plots were tied up was a bit pat, but who doesn’t like happy endings.  I was OK with Joan setting up her own business, Roger disappearing with Megan’s Mom, and Pete becoming a client seemed natural.

But Peggy and Stan ending up together was a Harlequin ending that didn’t have any kind of ring of truth about it. But I bit my tongue – after all Don was in an existential crisis that wouldn’t end in a pat way. But no. He has a Kumbaya moment and ends up smiling and chanting mantras.

And then there was that cut to the Coke “I’d like to teach the world to sing” commercial; one of the most famous commercials ever made. Now whether the intent is to say Don went on and wrote it is beside the point at this stage. It acts as an epitaph for the program as a whole. 

It seemed like Matt Weiner was cynically playing with reality.

The endings he created were all unrealistic happy endings that were a betrayal of the reality of the characterization he had taken years to project. And then as a symbol of this he chose Coke to make a mockery of that artificiality. Coke was, of course, “the real thing” and promised happiness and that we could live in “perfect harmony”.  The very fantasy the characters were now living. 
 
It is as if they all moved from the real world to that of advertising.

And to rub salt in, the only major character to have a bad ending was Don’s wife Betty, the one main character no longer part of the world of advertising. She is terminally ill with lung cancer, no doubt brought on by smoking cigarettes, the very product Don starts out advertising in Episode 1, Season 1. (“Smoke gets in your eyes”). 

Although others don’t read it as cynically as this, others have some similar views. 1.2.3.

So I’m pretty depressed seeing my whole life as a career advertising person mocked in this way.

But then my wife speaks. She's always been smarter than me. “I never liked that ad” she says, “too cheesy, especially that song.”

Now we were both ending high school in 1971 when that ad came out and I realize she’s right. I never liked the ad either. So why should I care about Mad Men mocking it and the fantasy it portrayed.  Heck. I mocked it as well.

We never bought into the utopia offered by Coke. The bubblegum song in the ad that became a hit for the New Seekers was not what we listened to.  We knew then that all that glitters is not gold and that you can’t buy a stairway to heaven.  Well Matt Weiner – We won’t get fooled again

The World's Most Succesful Tweet?

The other day I was telling my wife about the Oreo Superbowl tweet. You remember my wife. She doesn't work in advertising, and though she is incredibly supportive she often doesn't understand what the fuss is about. 

But back to the Oreo tweet. You know the one. It happened last year with the blackout half way through the Superbowl game and Oreo, quick as a flash, tweeted “You can still dunk in the dark”.

I asked her what she thought. She said she thought it was sweet but sounded like something unnecessary I’d said when we had the blackout because of the storm, though I hadn’t been talking about dunking cookies.

I asked if she’d seen it before.

 “Don’t be silly. I’m not on Twitter. You know that. Is anyone apart from that Matt Galloway?” (She likes Metro Morning).

“Well actually 19.7% of Canadians are on Twitter.”

"And how many follow Oreo?" (She knows more than she lets on).

"About 5000 at the time."

“Doesn’t sound that much to me.”

“Well the big thing is the number of people who shared it with their friends.”

“Well how many?”

“Over 15,000.”

“So how many people saw this ad?”

“Around 3 million.”

“And how many people saw the Superbowl?”

“About 108 million in the US plus another 7 in Canada .”

“So nearly 40 times more people saw that nice Budweiser ad with the horses than your silly tweet. Am I supposed to be impressed?”

I decided more wine was needed.

Go Canada Go!

My wife is amazing. She doesn’t work in advertising but she is completely supportive of me – the late nights, stress, job insecurity and everything. Of course she doesn’t actually understand the business. She thinks it’s crazy. I try to explain but with limited success.

It happened recently while we watching the TV around the time of the Olympics. This Audi ad came on said Canada was “Land of Quattro”. This is the sort of thing that gets my wife riled up.

“But Audi’s a German car. Why are they saying they're Canadian? Is that allowed?”

Before she got on her phone to email the ASC I explained that the ad wasn’t saying it was Canadian just that it was built for Canadian conditions. She looked dubious but I might have got away with it if I hadn’t decided to try to push my point home.

“Besides it’s part of a worldwide campaign. They’re running similar ads in Britain and other countries”. And I pulled up the UK version on my iPad to show her. It was a mistake. (By the way there’s also Jamaica, Italy, Germany, china, Finland etc.)

“So it’s not even made for Canada. It’s made for everywhere. It’s worse than I thought. I hate it when foreign companies pretend to be Canadian. Take Target for example. I love Target. You know I insist we go to one when we visit the US. So why do they want to wrap themselves in Canadian imagery in their ads. I just reminds me I can’t get the same choice and the same prices here. And then there’s that Samsung ad….”

I admit I started to tune out here.  I did catch a something about how it was OK for Tim Horton’s. I was going to mention that Timmies Canadianness wasn’t quite that straightforward but decided I’d leave that to another day.

“Oh look the match is about to start”. It was Canada – USA in women’s hockey. At least that turned out OK.

Anti-Social Advertisers

Why aren’t advertisers spending money on Social Media?

They know it’s popular. People now spend an average of around 7 hours a month on Social Networks with key target groups like young people using Social Media a lot more. And yet worldwide advertisers only spend just over 1% of their budgets on Social Media. They spend 50 times as much on TV.

Other research quoted by Scott Monty shows that marketers rate Social Media #4 in terms of ROI as a marketing channel but #6 in terms of budget allocation. Mass media is #7 in ROI but #4 in budget allocation.

Part of it is the newness of the medium. It took TV 26 years and a world war to overtake radio as a medium in terms of ad expenditure. And Social Networks only started 11 years ago with Friendster in 2002. But I don’t think that is all.

It is to do with the nature of the medium. Newspapers are primarily about information. Ads are a natural fit. They tell you something about the brand. Radio and TV’s role is entertainment. It took advertisers a while to realize this. Early ads were essential print ads brought to life. It was only when brands like Kodak and Timex discovered the power of narrative to entertain that the medium took off. Now all the best TV ads convey a message while entertaining you.

Social Media is essentially social (Duh!). It is about connecting with other people, being part of a community and sharing things. It is about conversations between people with shared interests. Advertisers find it hard to contribute to this.

We say that brands are like people but this is just a conceit. I don’t want to be friends or have a relationship with a brand in the way I do my human friends. So brands can rarely be a member of my Social Network. That doesn’t mean they can’t have a role. The best brands do. Red Bull is a curator for what I care about, providing material for my social group to form around. Oreo provides a forum for me to connect with other Oreo lovers in a lighthearted way.Converse allows me to show my creative counter-culture side. Starbucks continues its passion for coffee. As such they act more like they do as brands rather than using Social Media as a communications medium.

But the fact is that it is not an easy fit and we as advertisers are still finding our way. Until we do Social Media will stay the poor relation and not get its fair share of advertisers’ spending.

Why don't we ask more questions?

Nowadays in advertising we are exhort to engage our target in a conversation. For example Nick Moore from Wunderman gave a great talk at Cannes saying just this. Simlilarly Seth Godin exhorts us, “Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.”

But how?

Our creative briefs are based on single-minded propositions. Our creative brings these alive and gets a message across. We measure the impact our message has in terms of reach and message recall.

Our aim is to tell people something about ourselves in the most creative and engaging way we can.

But is that how you’d start a conversation in real life?

No. You’d start by asking questions.

How are you doing?

How’s the new job going?

Did you see what Jennifer Lopez was wearing at the Oscars?

What about them Leafs?

Or as a particularly ineffective friend of mine used to say to girls in bars ‘What’s the word?’

So why don’t we ask more questions in advertising?

We know it works. Here are some great examples to inspire us. But we need more.

Wendy’s famously asked ‘Where’s the beef?’

Shirley Polykoff asked ‘Does she or doesn’t she?

Caramilk challenged us with “How do they get the caramel in the Caramilk bar?’

And Dove has asked us ‘ Grey or Gorgeous?’ and most recently – ‘Does retouching distrort your perception of beauty?’

Great examples. But there must be more out there. Please send me some and I’ll post them.

TV Advertising is Dead

Seems a lot of people are saying this 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 

But as an old school ad guy I'm been resisting the idea that TV is dead. And of course at one level it isn’t true. TV advertising is still over 40% of all ad spending and is projected to remain so. Young people still spend four times as much time watching TV as they do on Social Media. There'll be a need for mass advertising for some time yet.

But what interests me is the complete change in balance of interest creative teams have in it and other channels. A few years ago online advertising, events and social media were the poor cousins creatively. They were done by the promotional agency, the direct response agency or the PR agency. The creative teams at the ad agency would look down their noses at it. And I was with them. We threw in an ambient ad or an event but our heart was in the TV. But that has all changed. Creative teams at 'traditional' agencies are clamouring to do viral videos, events and other non-traditional approaches.

And I've had a change of heart too.

I recently asked my students (I teach creative advertising) to find ‘cool’ advertising ideas. Less than a quarter were regular TV ads. There are still some great TV ads out there they found – Direct TV and Honda CRV for example. But more, though still video in format, were viral or interactive videos e.g. the Guardian's 3 Little Pigs ad, Smart's Water's use of Jennifer Aniston (though I don't know who got the better deal) the UK’s anti-knife campaign or Skittles “Touch the Rainbow”.  

But the really interesting ones were not even lead by video.

Take NAB’s Canned Grand Prix winning campaign from Australia. People believed the banks there were all in a cosy relationship so NAB publicly broke up with them using advertising, social media, PR. It actually broke through Twitter.

And promotions and events are now cool. Take this Cannes award winner for Bing and Jay-Z which uses every channel possible to engage people. Or these variations on the flash mob idea: the Budweiser Flash Fans and the Nike Catch the Flash.

Or this ad which uses You Tube perfectly. I won’t give away the brand as that will give away the ending but check it out.

And Facebook doesn’t have to be sad ads about finding a mate near where you live as this campaign for Mix FM shows.

And as they say on Creativity.com ‘then there’s this’. Is it advertising? I don't know but I don't care either.

Why are my students impressed?

Simple.

Firstly they are great ideas whatever the channel.

Secondly they are winning awards. Many of the campaigns mentioned above are Cannes award winners. And some of the most interesting winning camapigns are interactive. Take Tribal’s Carousel ad for Philips. Or Dove’s Evolution.

And Canadian agencies are doing well in this area. Many of the above examples are Canadian. BBDO won Strategy’s agency of the year lead by non-traditional campaigns. A good friend of mine Siobhan McCarthy presented some BBDO ads to my students. The four campaigns she chose were all non-traditional: the Cannes winning Rotisserie Channel they developed for Swiss Chalet , as well as the Skittles campaign already mentioned, Tropicana Arctic Sun and BBDO Proximity’s M&M’s Find Red.  She could also have mentioned Gillette’s Personal Grooming campaign (also here).

A few years ago I could never have created a list like this of non-traditional ads I admire. Now its easy. And I've undoubtedly missed out some great examples - if I've missed your favourite let me know.

The truth is that the exciting creative opportunities exist in non-traditional media nowadays. And to that extent TV advertising is dead.