Underground Blog

Not long ago, my fine alma mater, Drake University, decided to hire an outside advertising agency to brand itself. The campaign was called “The Drake Advantage” and officials from the school wanted the campaign to be edgy, out-of-the-box, you get the picture…different. The University and the agency put a “D+” on direct mail pieces to illustrate the relationship between the university and its opportunities. There were phrases such as “Your Passion + Our Experience” and “Your Potential + Our Opportunities.” But the logo to capture it all was a “D+.”

In retrospect, choosing a D+ to brand an institution of higher learning probably wasn’t the best idea ever. Which Drake officials quickly realized and modified.

The point is not to make my school look dumb. The point is that if trained professionals hired from the outside can make blunders — and we ALL do — then we can gain by letting marketing students have a greater role than classroom exercises on fake client accounts. Let’s allow these students to have a true voice in creating brand strategy while their agency counterparts act in a more mentoring role. If I can assume that the class is divided into small agency-like account teams to work on the school’s brand, I think we can get better results everyone will be happy with. Here are some suggestions.

Step 1: Agencies, stop being judges and get in there with the students in the trenches.

This isn’t Project Runway, Top Chef or another reality show. I think we can do better than have three agency staffers sit there at the end of a classroom project, judge which campaign is the finest and throw comments at a fresh-faced student in between sips of our Starbucks coffee. Instead, if you’re going to help kids develop a brand that’s reflective of their University, they need your help from the very beginning. Whether in an Instructor role or simply being accessible throughout the week, your time and input is needed to kick off the brand development of the University in the best possible way. You have the expertise. You have the resources in-house. Guide them as you would your own team. In doing so, you will give them a tiny taste of what agency life is like when small teams collaborate to create a brand that not only “looks cool,” but is strategically sound. These students need to appreciate the concept of the target audience(s) they are speaking to. What drives these audiences? What shapes their behaviors? One of the major audiences they will speak to is a potential incoming student, not unlike they once were. Other audiences will be alumni. The faculty. Parents of existing students. Parents of potential students. How will each of these audiences be addressed under one brand umbrella and which distinctive media will be used to address them? There’s nothing more rewarding to me than mentoring someone who can’t wait to be a part of our industry for real. So don’t just be a judge on the sidelines at the end. Be a mentor at the beginning and all the way through.

Step 2: Students, you’re about to step up to the plate and have some awesome responsibility. Understand what you’re being entrusted with.

Namely, the brand development of your own school. Obviously I believe you deserve this opportunity. Understand that with that responsibility comes dedication. This is a real, living brand with many vested interests in it. The agency mentors will guide you as will your professors. But remember, before you think about clever headlines and compelling visuals, you need an insight of what makes your school different. You won’t find it overnight. You may have to speak with those audiences I mentioned above to get their input and look for common patterns. You’ll have to think about what makes your school great while being honest about what its most glaring weaknesses are. Because if you’re not being truthful with a target audience that looks a lot like you, they’ll cut through the you-know-what faster than you can blink. And don’t forget to listen to the other members of your team. Don’t shoot them down in your brainstorms with “no, that won’t work.” Finally, if the agency members are involved more intensively the way I suggest, see it for the opportunity that it is. Take advantage of their knowledge and don’t be intimidated to ask questions. They aren’t rock stars. They’re people just like you and me. Like you, they were students once. Students who might not have even thought to go into this field at the time.

Step 3: Professors, you’re the glue.

What I mean by that is that you’re not only the teachers in this process but the coordinators between students and agency. Like the agency folks, you have to be abundantly accessible outside of classroom hours. If you spent any time in an agency, you know that this isn’t a 9-to-5 industry. If you want to simulate it for your students, you have to be a constant advisor to the agency “mini-teams.” All the while, you have to make sure the agency people who are co-advisors do their job and maintain their involvement. This may not be their primary job but it does require a commitment. No matter what pitches they have to put together in their own world, they need to spend time in yours as well. The more they do, the more they can help prepare your students for the potential requirements they’re about to encounter when they graduate. There was a time when I was a student that I couldn’t fathom writing an ad in just one day. Now, of course, I know better. But your students can’t comprehend that yet. The more “real” to the real world you can make the brand development experience in tandem with the people who are still in that world (the agency people), the more your students will benefit in their preparation. And after all, isn’t that what you want for them?

When students can have a greater role in their own institution’s brand development and agency people can have greater involvement from the beginning and professors live in a very real world beyond textbooks teaching advertising history, the results are wonderful all around for everyone who is a part of it. I see collaborations that benefit advertising and marketing programs, which in turn helps the institution live up to the promise of being very much in touch with the times. These closer relationships make it all the more likely that the brand being developed is one that is more reflective of everyone who comes into contact with it — not a brand that is primarily created in an agency conference room far away from campus.

Another election season has passed. From an advertising perspective, I say that’s not a moment too soon.

In the home stretch, in the span of one half-hour newscast at 11pm, almost entirely all of the commercials were related to politics. Back-to-back-to-back-to back ads of politicians who were yammering away not so much about their own positions but about why their opponent just didn’t “get it.”

When you have such a lineup, all people can really hear is noise.

Which got me thinking about what does and doesn’t work in political advertising. Try as they might, most of these politicians from both sides of the aisle don’t know how to brand themselves very well at all. Which is ironic because if they’re supposed to serve the people, why aren’t many of them addressing those issues in their personal brand?

Yes, somebody has to win. But that may just mean the other guy or gal was an uninspiring dope. Heck, the electorate may have chosen the lesser of two evils. Hardly means that’s the ringing sound of a crystallized message.

To think of how badly many politicians position themselves – or should I say, a strategy of “the other guy sucks,” imagine them as a product instead of a person. Let’s say that product they represent is a mop and they said in an ad – “I’ll tell you what the Do-Everything Mop is not going to do. It’s not going to act like other mops you’ve had. If you take a look at these competing mops, you see those mops don’t pick up dirt and grime. They’re lousy. They’re weak. They’re old. They’re useless.”

Tearing down your opponent without a compelling reason for why people should choose you contributes to garbage. It doesn’t respect your audience’s time.

OK, so what does your mop do? Most of the time, we don’t get that other side of the story and when we do, rarely is it told well.

So here’s an idea for those of you running in 2012: Don’t give your opponent more air time than they deserve by attacking them. Give yourself all the air time to state your position.

For example, let’s take a fake candidate’s position:

“GETTING REAL INSIGHT #3: Unemployment”

“It’s time to get real about jobs in this state. Research from the (respected newspaper) tells us that unemployment in our area is approaching drastically high levels. I’m not here to tell you something you already know or rip on my opponent because your time is valuable. We can complain or we can talk actions. So let me tell you what I’m going to do about it. I believe that there are three steps we can take in the state Senate that can put us back on the right path: (A, B and C). If you want to hear more, go to my website at (address).”

Media planning? Let’s not just buy up all the TV and radio spots we can muster and depend on them to sell the whole message. Media habits have shifted. Let’s use traditional advertising to drive people to the web, where communities form. I’m talking traditional advertising combined with social media, which by now, I think we can take a legitimate avenue for results since they played a strong part in getting a President of the United States elected.

Sure, Facebook and Twitter have their place at the table. But let’s also use video chats and Skype connections to campaign staffers. E-cards. Flickr pages. Interactive polls and surveys. Mobile.

If you’re going to use e-mail, use it to constantly educate people on candidate positions instead of constantly asking for dollars. You’ve got to earn that support, not beg for it endlessly through an “in” box.

Most are still going to do politics as usual, which means trashing the opponent and injecting fear more than telling their own story. I expect that to some degree until the end of time. Yet, if the goal is to stand out in a way that’s compelling to the undecided voters and motivating already strong supporters to mobilize, savvy candidates have no choice but to consider fresh ways to make information more accessible than ever to those who crave it. In other words, inbound marketing has never been more important.

Now that’s change I can believe in.

For many years in the advertising industry, people like to jab those of us from a copywriting background by taking a look at an ad and saying, “Great ad. The design looks terrific. Not a lot of copy to it, but then again, nobody reads the copy.”

Hilarious. As I smiled whenever I heard this, inside I winced with pain. Because underneath it all was the false notion that if a picture says a thousand words, then an explanation in the form of copy must not be necessary. True, many an ad can work on little or even no copy. But never? Oh no. I couldn’t face that. I didn’t want to face that.

Then one day, copy mattered more than it ever did before. These are such days. Because, although it is not the same exact animal as advertising, social media has brought the importance of compelling content to the forefront. Of course, I’m not suggesting great copy is all it takes to build a Fan/Follower/Connection base. There are other ingredients necessary for success, like identifying the niche you’re trying to tell your story to (and in return, listen to) and figuring out if the timing is right to talk to that niche of people. Just for starters.

But just because you offer e-mail subscriptions and RSS Feeds doesn’t mean the sign-ups will happen. People aren’t going to opt in to everything just because they can. And that’s where if you can write the copy in a way that speaks to the issues/challenges/pains of those people and not just to yourself, they’ll read the copy. And continue to read the copy over and over again. Every last word.

Yes, I know the difference between advertising and social media. The dialogue is different and of course, one is more one-way selling while the other is more two-way conversing. But in the right circumstances, the two different worlds can “live together” in harmony for a brand. And that harmony can’t happen without – you guessed it – the copy.

Last year, brothers Jarred and Adam Mait received the heart-wrenching news that their father had been in a fatal car accident. Incredibly, the shock didn’t end there. Forced to settle the affairs of their father over the course of a year, while trying to mourn him at the same time, the brothers learned they were not alone in their predicament.

“Others complained to us that there had to be a much easier and efficient way to settle an estate,” says Adam Mait. “That’s when the concept of Knowtification.com was really born.”

From a family tragedy came a new company with a purpose – to locate assets owned by the deceased, such as bank accounts and life insurance policies. Knowtification does this by sending correspondence to hundreds of financial institutions and instructing them to contact the account beneficiaries directly if there is account information in the name of the deceased.

With the full disclosure that Knowtification is a client of mine, what makes me admire companies like these is that they are so much more than “products and services.” They are born with a much larger picture in mind of leaving others in a better place than where they were. For the Mait brothers, the purpose for forming their own company grew out of making the lives of others smoother in the face of a tragedy because they knew exactly how challenging and frustrating that experience could be themselves. They do not merely help in locating assets – the bigger picture is that they help in healing.

This may seem like I’m about to veer into heady “Why are we here/what’s the meaning of life” territory, but this is more down-to-Earth than you think.

The fact is, beyond moving product or selling a service, I believe we have to have a larger reason for doing what we do. To leave others in a better place than where they were. Some people don’t care about this perhaps, but lately and more than ever, it’s become a big deal to me.

What about marketers? Agency folk have it burned into our brains that it’s all about the work, the work, the work. And I completely agree that we have to make our end result as creatively stimulating as we can from a writing and design standpoint. But dare I say it, there’s something deeper than that for me. I believe the larger purpose for me begins long before an ad is created. It occurs at the first stage of a client relationship when I’m helping them formulate a brand strategy. Because at that point, I’m giving businesses the ability to crystallize a thousand different thoughts within their own walls into a direction that makes sense and what I believe makes them unique. There’s something extraordinary about seeing the look on a person’s face when they realize how their dreams and goals can transition into tangible steps. This moment helps them cross the bridge and they’re pumped more than ever. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it just means that at that specific moment, hopefully, they’ve gained a new and unprecedented level of clarity.

Of course, that’s just my purpose and everybody is different. But my point is that even businesses that seem like they are providing “ordinary” products and services can view themselves as doing much more. One of my new favorite shows is “Undercover Boss,” in which a CEO disguises himself or herself to look like a company employee and perform a variety of tasks. The goal of the experience is to see what it’s like when the executive steps out of the boardroom and into the trenches with the rest of their staff that help make their company go on a day-to-day basis. But the end result is so much more emotional than the CEO ever dreamed, realizing that there are real people with real challenges behind the company, not mere employees. Buttoned-up C-level executives break down and cry when they come to discover about how much heart their people have. The CEO is, many times, forever changed to the point of where they implement new company initiatives framed not in driving higher sales but in making the culture so much greater and inviting than it was before. They find new purpose in what they do. And I’ll wager that it inspires them like nothing else.

What do you feel about this concept? When you dig deeper, beyond simply “what you do,” what do you see your company’s reason for being…to be?

I noticed the other day that Twitter is now suggesting people that I might enjoy following based on the people I already do follow. So far, I really enjoy it because it’s a good time saver for identifying how to expand my following base. I use Twellow.com as well for more detailed category searching and geo-targeting. Side note: For all the people predicting the demise of Twitter by now, it’s proving to be the little engine that could.

Yet, it’s occurred to me that there’s still ample room for a tool that really, really just gets me. It can see what I like, such as the articles I click on or download. And from there, it can pinpoint – not suggest – websites and articles that I find interesting.

That’s the next challenge I see right now for social media tools – there’s a lot of guessing and suggesting of things I might like, but it’s only so accurate. It’s just putting a lot of stuff out there that I can like and a lot of stuff that I don’t. That’s OK. But it’s kind of like tossing 300 kids in a pool and trying to find yours instantly. You can’t do it that quickly. Little Billy’s in there, but it’s going to take some time to find him among the other kids.

What I’m getting at is there’s still an opportunity for a social media tool to be so much more customized and actually “learn” what people like and get “smarter” about those choices. Yes, there are some nominees here, but they aren’t there yet. For example, StumbleUpon can allow you to indicate your preferences, but it’s also influenced by friends and fellow “stumblers.” Maybe this is a very un-social thing of me to say, but sometimes I don’t want or care about that. I want my preferences to appear first and foremost.

Let me here you naysayers: “But what about our privacy?”

Rest assured, I don’t want other people to know my preferences or yours without our consent. Those preferences are private, mine alone and should be my choice to share with the rest of the world. Not Google’s choice, Facebook’s choice or anybody else’s. That said, I don’t mind if a tool that keeps my preferences private can be remarkably customized to my tastes and only becomes more customized to those tastes with each day.

The next great opportunity isn’t in giving me a stream of endless options but in supplying me with the laser-focused paths that otherwise save me the time of searching.

There’s always going to be room for improvement. And when we cross over from suggestions to really intelligent recommendations, well, that’s a tool I’d like to try out and provided it’s easy to use, one I’d like to incorporate into what I do daily.

How about you? Are there any tools you’ve used in the online world that match your preferences amazingly well in recommending accurate content? I’d love to hear about them.