Almost normal. . .

While doing my normal daily internet research (I think "internet research" sounds much better than just saying "mindlessly surfing the internet") I found the ads below.







These ads, sponosored by the LGBT group In our voices, have been popping up in Schenectady, NY to the normal din of homophobic rhetoric. Pastors are, of course, up in arms because they fear the following nightmare scenario described by Rev. Alfred Thompkins of Calvary Tabernacle: “A thirteen-year-old looks at these billboards and says, ‘That must be it, I must be gay.'" (Much in the same way after I looked at a Baywatch billboard at the tender age of 13 and thought that I must be Pamela Anderson Lee.)

While I absolutely love the idea of showing more LGBT people of color, I'm not digging these ads. One, they're too hard to read. The color choices for the copy is some shitty neon color that gets totally washed out by the eye and the everything outside of "I am gay" is way to small to see, especially in a billboard. Two, the call to action is hard to read and not clear. Ok, there are gay black people and. . . . what. . am I supposed to call someone, read something, sign something? I have no idea what I'm supposed to do next and without some sort of follow up thing, there would be no way for IOOV to actually judge whether or not these ads are doing anything. Lastly, and probably most damningly, these ads do the opposite of what they are trying to do. These ads are seeking to normalize being gay (which I'm all for) but by placing the words "I am gay" (followed by some really pathetic rhyme) doesn't normalize, it accentuates, it makes them stand out. Imagine if in the family picture ad, the tag said something like "Families come in all varieties in Schenectady" or something like that. I know the lines not perfect but rather than forcing the issue, it allows the connections to be made in the viewers mind. It wouldn't say "I'm here, I'm queer, get used to it" but rather "all are apart of our community".

I long for the day when LGBTQ ads and media no longer exist, not because LGBTQ issues are squashed but because the community is integrated completely. I'd want to see an action movie where the lead just so happens to be gay, or a soda commercial where the lead just happens to be be trans. I think the key to normalization is not in saying "where all around you" but in saying "we are you".

Back from vacation

Wow, it's been so long since I've last posted. I have to admit, I haven't been out fighting the good fight, I've been on vacation, but the best thing about being on vacation, is that when you come back to the real world, there are a ton of interesting things to talk about. So I'm just going to make my return post a hodgepodge of interesting things I've seen over the past month.

1) The red scare


Over my career I've put together a political ad or two. I get the game. I understand that political advertising is about scaring people, but do we have to be racist while doing it? When it comes to evaluating this ad as a marketer, I have to admit that the ad is on point. Its shot beautifully, its focused, it gives a clear call to action (personally I'd recommend an easier to remember website name) and it screams republican without actually having to say the word (which would probably incur all sorts of rules and regulations if they did say the r word) but what I don't like is the fact that it capitalizes on xenophobic and racist fears of China taking over the US. This is one of those situations when advertisers have a great idea but have to ask themselves if this is something that they can ethically stand by doing. I guess they can look themselves in the mirror knowing that they added to closeminded fear of the Chinese and be ok with it, but I know I couldn't.


2) Don't Vote



Wow you gotta have huevos grande to actually put up an ad telling people not to vote at all. At least the first ad was well done, this ad is just long and un-American. Christ, I'm not even going to dignify this ad by talking bad about it.

(to be continued)

When your org needs money and your ads kinda funny . . .

I was looking over the past few blog postings and I noticed that most have been my random musings about events that I’ve participated in or navel gazing about the crazy universe that is nonprofit marketing and I’ve strayed pretty far afield from one of my main goals of this blog, namely critiquing cause marketing. I think that’s mostly because there is such a dearth of work that is either good enough to praise or terrible enough to ridicule, most of it is just a beige blah, but the other day I stumbled across a gem. This ad is either so good that it’s brilliant or so terrible that it is . . .well, terrible and the best part is I really can’t tell which one it is.
See for yourself:



WTF!
Seriously, wtf? I have so many contradictory feelings about this spot. After seeing this spot I definitely remember that diarrhea is serious as shit (forgive the pun, I couldn’t help myself) and that it something needs to be done about it, but at the same time I almost feel used. Like the ad agency pulled such a sharp 180 that I have whiplash. It’s almost too much of a jolt, so much so that I’m still in a lighthearted mood when the rug is yanked up from under me. It’s like the ad agency knows all of my buttons and then presses them without any subtly or finesse whatsoever.

Tactically speaking there are definitely a few things I’d suggest. 1) Cut down on the diarrhea joke time upfront. OK, I get that we treat diarrhea like a joke, when in reality it is deadly serious but you eat up precious seconds that you could be using to get the call to action across. 2) Increase the call to action. Send me to a website where I can do something about diarrhea, let me know that this isn’t just a death sentence on this poor little kid. At the end of the spot there is this lame ass wateraid lockup (if you can even call it that), send me to a website, let me know what I can do. 3) In my opinion they shouldn't have had the African child rhyming about his dead sister. He could have easily just said his sister died of diarrhea and the spot would have worked just as well (without the uncomfortable urge to laugh)

Beyond these points, there is a lot that this ad does right. For one it puts a face on a serious problem, it is disruptive enough to really make me think about the issue, it has kids in it (studies show people are automatically more interested when things have kids in it), and it's for a good cause.

So what’s the verdict? I like this ad. It’s shocking, it’s engaging, it’s not perfect but It gets the point across. I’ve been reading the posts and the reviews and lots of people don’t like this ad. Well screw those people, they can stick their opinions up their. . . well you get where this is going.



PS. This has nothing to do with this blog, but do you ever read the comments under ads like this? Here’s the link to the youtube page.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dNFmBCogeA

If you ever want to question your belief in the inherent goodness of humanity check out the comments. It’s amazing how anonymity gives people the courage to say the most fucked up things they can think of. I guess it’s great that there is a forum for people to share their true feelings but it’s kind of disheartening to think that those comments reflect some individuals true feelings.

Mr Lundy goes to the awards

So I just left the Glaad Media Awards (thanks to my friends at Glaad for the invite) and strangely enough, my first thoughts as I sat down to write about my experience was “I love for-profit companies”. Now let me back up, for those who don’t know, Glaad is the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (funny how all of the lgbt orgs have some happy name like Glaad or Gleam or Glsen and stuff like that. . . some would say they’re trying too hard) and every year they award companies that have had positive depictions of lgbt people. This year I was invited to attend and, like any hyper critical ad man, I was more than delighted to attend. But during the actual awards show, something interesting yet annoying happened. Whenever a representative from a company came up to accept an award they did the traditional “than you mom, God, and Elvis” thing but they ended with some sort of pitch i.e. “American airlines has always been devoted to queers” (of course said a bit more eloquently, but you get the point). At first I was annoyed, I mean I didn’t show up to go to a freaking infomercial, but then I thought “well, what else are they here for?”. I love for-profits because they never ever ever forget why they are here. This company representative sees a room full of affluent white men (yours truly being among the few exceptions) and they realize that their job is to sell. They aren’t here to pick up a nice shiny award, they are here to sell you on their business and convince you to give them your money. Of course their pitches were clumsy and clawing and obvious but at least they realized why they were there and they gave it a shot. I wish nonprofits could be as focused on their goals.

At the Glaad awards show there was food and liquor and silent auctions and live auctions but there was precious little about Glaad, what they have achieved, and why I should care enough to support them. I love it when nonprofits put on events and create experiences for their stakeholders but these events need to serve a purpose. Events need to have a clear audience, a clear message, and a clear goal. This event felt like it was trying to be everything to everyone. Half of the time I wasn’t sure if Glaad thought I was an advertising agency, a media company, a consumer product company, or a potential donor. Without a clear sense of the audience, it was totally impossible for them to make a coherent pitch. The for-profits, on the other hand, all seemed to decide we were all potential consumers and spoke to us like potential consumers. I may have been pissed that it felt like the awards show was being interrupted by commercial breaks but at least I knew where I stood.

If your media awards are going to be a fundraising event, then treat everyone like potential donors, tell your message, tell what you’ve done, tell why you’re important , and tell me how to help. If it is an awareness event, treat everyone like future evangelist, tell us the issue, tell us why it is important, tell us why what you are doing helps the issue, provide us with an easy message to share and a means to share it. If the awards are for partnership development, do all that other stuff and provide us with opportunities to partners. Don’t try to make one event that serves every population, it just doesn’t work. Pick a population, understand that population, decide on what you want from that population , and make a strategy to achieve those things that you want.

Simple right?

Why can't we all be like poptarts?

The other day, while meandering through the streets of New York, I stumbled across one of the newest-old fads in for-profit pr and marketing - the pop up store. For those of you not totally abreast of the various fads that permeate (or plague) the world of marketing, pop-up stores are like the gypsy carnivals of the retail world. They're stores that suddenly appear where once there was nothing, they're over the top, over-priced, and are gone the next day (before you have a chance to return the overpriced crap they convinced you to buy in a moment of impulse buying ecstasy). Normally these pop up stores are reserved for the fashion and are designed to create a feel of exclusivity but I found one that was decidedly not high fashion and not exclusive.



Yes, a pop up store dedicated to those sugary sweet pseudo-breakfast treats we (or at least I) grew up loving known as Poptarts.

Inside the store you could get a variety of hard to find Poptarts as well as make your own Poptart shirts, get specially made poptart desserts, and immerse yourself in poptart lore.



While I have to admit that my fondness of poptarts started to wane once I realized that my attractiveness was inversely proportional to my daily intake of poptarts (each 'tart' is like 300 calories!), I do admit that I actually like the store. It was bright and colorful and really immersed the visitors into the world of poptarts.

So, I began thinking: why don't non-profits do stuff like this? Why can't we create experiences that immerse people in our cause? Then it donned on me. We do! The only problem is that they suck. They suck like a hoover strapped to a black hole. The non-profit version of these pop-up stores is the pop-up tent, just like the one I saw later that day in Union Square:





This was an event put on through the Office of Emergency Management and the ASPCA to get people to register their pets and have a plan in case of emergencies. As a dog owner, I'm a big sucker for these types of things but I literally had to go out of my way to find someone and ask them "what's this all about?" to get any information at all. These tents and handout days are the go-to marketing/pr vehicle for so many nonprofit initiatives because they're cheap and easy, but the hard and fast truth is that you get what you pay for. Most of the time these are a total waste because they're boring for the people running them and boring for the people who happen to stop by. I'd bet my hat that they would get the same results by just having someone stand on the street and hand out fliers (since their metrics for success are almost always the number of fliers handed out) and that they'd get a much bigger bang for their buck by putting more money into the event, getting a space, and creating an experience.

Organizations need to ask themselves, "what am i really getting out of this?" I think if they asked themselves that, they would realize that they are often getting virtually nothing out of these half-assed events and either 1) more money should be spent, metrics for success should be made, and more excitement needs to be inserted into these events or 2) they don't need to waste time and money on this and a different vehicle should be used.

I mean really, if you can make an engaging store around poptarts (which people like but don't really care about) imagine what you could do with people and their pets?

Back to basics (part 1)

I took a break from writing last week, partly because of Labor day and partially because I've just been so uninspired by a lot of the stuff I've seen. I wasn't really sure what was driving my boredom, and the seeming deluge of uninteresting work, but a new acquaintance of mine at NYCON, pointed me in an interesting direction. While we were talking about the communication and marketing needs of the sector, he pointed out that often Nonprofits don't really know the difference between marketing and communications, the role of strategy, and a ton of other things that I take for granted. This confusion of terms and lack of knowledge allows people who are just graphic designers to claim that they're marketing strategist (and making executions that totally miss the mark) or for strategist to claim that they are graphic designers (and making executions that are boring and uninteresting) or all sorts of people doing all sorts of things that they frankly stink at.

With this in mind, I've attempted to put a little order to this madness by creating a framework (I know, a consultant making a framework, big surprise) but trust me, this is good:



Ok, so what are you looking at? This is essentially a virtuous cycle of marketing with 4 key phases. First there is market research, then there is strategy and tactical development, then there is material development, then constituent relationship management, and finally back to market research (which starts the whole cycle over again). The line on the bottom (the X-Axis) means that the boxes on the left tend to be more quantitative and the boxes on the right tend to be more qualitative. The line on the side (the Y-axis) means that the boxes on the top tend to need more sector specific knowledge and the boxes on the bottom use more general knowledge. Now these rules and segmentation's aren't hard and fast (life is complex and you gotta stay flexible) but they are a great way to get you lined up in the right direction. Generally you need someone with deep knowledge in strategy for market research and strategy/tactial development, you need someone who is a great designer/writer/programmer etc for material development and a great data-miner for constituent relationship management/monitoring.

I think that each of these boxes deserves talking about but I also believe that no one reads long posts, so I'm going to explain the chart in installments. This week I'm starting with the top right box: Market Research

Essentially this is about learning about your various stakeholder groups. At the beginning of this process is where you need to understand who your various stakeholders are, what they want, what they do, and why they're doing it. Knowledge about the workings of the nonprofit sector is great here because nonprofits, unlike many for-profits, often have all sorts of stakeholders (government, community members, clients, donors, relatives of clients, staff, board members, etc) and a keen understanding of the nonprofit sector is key. In this area you gotta think about not only what stakeholders you want to research but how you plan on researching them. Often since money is a factor people tend to subjectively pick important stakeholders (usually donors or clients) and then use an assortment of traditionally quantitative research tools (surveys) and qualitative tools (focus groups)* to get a sense of how their organization and their mission exists in the minds of those people that matter most to the organization. This is a key stage that often gets the short end of the stick because nonprofit-eers (even more so than those that work in for-profit) often feel that they already know their constituents inside and out (which they very often don't). It's important for people to check their egos at the door and to realize that they don't know everything (if they did they wouldn't be struggling so hard to achieve their mission and meet their goals).


In the next few installments I'll take you through the other boxes but in the mean time please feel free to post comments or send thoughts on how to make this framework better (I'm always open to new ideas).


Thinking through this framework made me think about one of my very favorite quotes and so I'm going to end with it:

“It is not enough to do your best. First you must know what to do and then do your best."- W. Edwards Deming



* on a quick side note, I actually consider focus groups fairly quantitative, despite the fact that they're normally called qualitative. As someone who has sat through hundreds of focus groups in all sorts of categories, I can say without a doubt that the vast majority of usable insights come from things that people say over and over in different groups. The thing that make insights pop in groups is the number of times you hear that insight arise. It is true that sometimes a participant in the final group will say something brilliant and the strategist behind the glass will pick it up and run with it, but those times and few and far between.

By the Grace of god

One of the organizations I've recently encountered is the Grace institute (http://www.graceinstitute.org/). It's a really interesting organization that's located in the upper east side and I've been chatting with some of the people who are running the place. The mission of Grace is to provide training to women looking to get jobs in the corporate sector (mostly around administrative assistance and office help). In the constant serendipity that is my life, I just so happened to walk onto a train this morning where I encountered the following ad:



So I figured, I'm brave enough to talk about all sorts of other ads, why not talk about this ad? I mean after all, it's easy to say stuff about orgs that you'll never talk to but you gotta believe in what you say to write about an ad when the people who made the ad have your telephone number!

So what do I think? Well the ads not terrible (does no harm) but there's plenty of places to improve. So what's good: 1) It has a clear sense of the target is (clearly focusing on women) 2) I know who made the ad - Grace institute - and clear how to contact them 3) Easy, meaningful tagline - Educate.Empower.Employ.

How to make it better? Overall it's just too flat. It's hard to tell where I should look and what I should take away from this. I have some ideas (as always) to make it better 1) Put the contact information at the bottom - people read from top to bottom and left to right - people won't want to contact you for no reason, so putting the contact info at the top, before your pitch, doesn't do any good - also do you need the address? website and phone number seems like plenty 2) too much text - I like the idea of having a quote but who's going to read all of that? 3) I like the image of the woman but I'd rather have her in a more aspirational background (and office or something) not just on a white void. 4) add a logo - I think it's an easy way to remind people of your org and who it's for.

Not a terrible ad, not a great ad, could be made more aesthetically pleasing but you don't want to sacrifice the message and the mission for a pretty image. As Emerson said "Beauty without Grace is the hook without the bait".

PS: Check out my new site on the interweb www.Seamnyc.com - tell me what you think (as long as what you think is that my site rocks)

I'm taking a 360 degree turn

So I've been doing a lot of reading lately, and one thing I've been seeing unanimously is that it's best not to be critical (Sadly, being critical is my specialty). With that in mind, I decided that today's blog post would focus on an ad or a campaign that I liked (or, if not actually liked, something I could see the positives in). So without further ado, here's an ad I came across while perusing one of my favorite sites: www.adsoftheworld.com.





These are anti drinking and driving ads that are running in Sao Paulo Brazil. These ads have a bunch of positives: 1) Big clear copy and a big clear logo 2) simple message 3) Tone is right in line with classic MTV ads. In the "area's for improvement" side of things, is really only one thing, namely the fact that, as pieces of cause marketing, these ads fucking suck and that's not me being critical, that's a fact. Just like water is wet or deserts are dry or "George Bush doesn't care about black people" (thank you kanye), these ads fucking sucking as cause marketing is an objective fact. Why do they suck? Simple, these have nothing to do with drunk driving at all. These are MTV music ads with some copy just slapped on them.

Golden rule of cause marketing: The images should tie into the copy to create a cohesive story. These images are just of people having fun with no link to the dangers of drunk driving and no real explanation of why MTV has decided to make this a cause of theirs. At the end of the day there is no message, no cohesion, and no cause marketing. It's just another boring, lazy mtv ad, in a sea of boring, lazy MTV ads (just this one is poorly disguised as promotion a socially positive cause). . . . hey, I guess this not being critical thing is easier than I thought.

I was born free

That's the video from M.I.A.'s song born free. . . I love that video and song (if you haven't seen it yet and just skipped over it to read what I'm writing, take this chance to go back and watch the entire thing. . . it's worth it. . . I'll wait)

I have been thinking about the concept of freedom lately, mostly because of what's going on in my life, specifically the fact that I'm leaving my current position as a management consultant with a big organization and putting my full efforts towards servicing the marketing and communications needs of nonprofits under my own banner (Seam). The freedom of being my own boss and being in total control of how I spend my time is great, but also scary. Scary because it comes with risk. What if no one hires me? What if I look back and I regret this decision? The price I pay for gaining this freedom is the loss of safety. That's a price I am willing to pay and a price I believe all those who cherish freedom should pay.

It is for that reason that I believe that the below ad is so disturbing

This is the ad that's been making its way around NYC as a protest to the Muslim community center that is going to go up near ground zero. People all over the country are complaining about this center and thankfully some of our politicians have grown enough of a back bone to stand up and say that this center needs to go up. I'm not taking a stand either way about whether it's good or bad for the center to go up so near ground zero, what I am taking a stand for is the rights of Muslims all over the world to practice their religion wherever they choose (I also don't mind in taking a stand in saying that this is just an ugly ad: hard to read, hard to tell what I'm supposed to look at, if I didn't know that this was the anti-muslim center ad already I would have never been able to tell - sometimes I thank the heavens that so many ads for these quack orgs are done by shitty marketers).

This ad is disturbing because by asking a seemingly innocuous question like "why there" as a means of obfuscating the fact that it is essentially asking you to add your voice to the voices of tons of people all over the country that automatically say that Islam is bad and needs to be contained. By saying that it shouldn't be there, people are essentially saying that the Muslims of NYC don't have the right congregate and worship wherever they want. That's not a sentiment I can get behind. To me the answer to "why there?" is simple. "Why there? Because I, you, they, and we were all born free"

"Those who give up essential liberty to gain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" - B. Franklin

Sometimes reality is the best marketing

I have to admit that (shockingly) I'm not a huge fan of MTV. While watching the occasional Jersey shore-er fist pump the night away isn't exactly my cup of tea, I try to stay up on "what the kids are up to now-a-day". One of the shows that caught my eye the other day was "16 and pregnant"

What I find really interesting about the show (and its sister show 'teen mom') is that in its own weird - slightly exploitative - sort of way it's a form of cause marketing. So much so, that some organizations have taken to actively encouraging teens to watch it and have created discussion guides around it (http://www.thenationalcampaign.org/resources/pdf/16-and-preg-discussion-guide.pdf)

In a way, it's almost as if nonprofits have co-opted something that clearly was only designed to make money and capitalize on our societal voyeurism (I choose to believe it is voyeurism and not schadenfreude) and instead use it as high quality marketing for their cause. I personally think that that's the essence of good cause marketing. It should first look at the population you are trying to change, think about their interest, and then authentically match your cause to their interests.

I wonder what other materials are out there are just waiting for co-opting? Does the apprentice teach the value of education? Does inception teach the virtues of science and math? probably not, but could it? Probably so. Maybe there's a space for cause placement in movies and TV shows the same way that there is product placement? I mean, nonprofits copy other ideas from the for-profit sector. Why not this one?

It aint easy being black

If Kermit the frog, thought it was hard being green, he should have spent some time being black. It seems like every time I turn around I'm hearing more and more about how blacks have higher rates of sickness, higher incarceration rates, lower educational achievement, lower salaries, on and on and on. As a black man myself, for me it always felt like there was a huge bifurcation in the community, on one hand you have the blacks who are driving those statistics and on the other hand you have blacks like me who are well educated, have fancy jobs, probably aren't going to go to jail (I hope!) and exist as the perpetual counterpoint to those aforementioned underachievers.

The other day I saw an ad that really spoke directly to this sense of a split community
















That's an ad by 100 Black men's Baton Rouge chapter (if you don't know about 100 black men you should definitely check out the website. They are a national nonprofit that provides services to black men to help them stay on the right track). Technically speaking I don't hate this ad. I'm not in love with it but it's simple, big, has an interesting image, clear next steps, all in all not a bad execution of a billboard ad. The thing that really struck me about the ad was that it set up a false choice that I think often makes things so difficult for so many black men.

I was fortunate enough to be raised in a home where "pinstripes" was a perfectly achievable goal, and therefore, I did the things I had to do to make sure that I'm able to afford my fancy suits, but for many of my peers, pinstripes is an unattainable goal. Many black men couldn't imagine themselves in corporate settings (and the homogeneity of the corporate world and the potentially discriminatory hiring practices isn't exactly helping) so the only other option that they see is the 'prison stripes'.

I always say, as marketers for causes, we have to do better, and I believe this was a case of a marketer sacrificing the message for a pithy line. Am I being nit picky? Yes. Do I think that this is important? Yes. If you set up an argument in the viewers mind that has a foregone conclusion ("I'm never going to get to pinstripes, so it's prison stripes for me") the viewer won't follow up on your call to action. Rather than being a provocative question that deserves investigation by going to your website, you end up with a statement that may end up actually playing against your mission. There are plenty of alternatives to prison stripes and you've got to make your destination a place for people to go to learn what those alternatives are.

We've got to do better.

Data Fetish

da·ta  –noun
1. a pl. of datum.
2. ( used with a plural verb ) individual facts, statistics, or items of information: These data represent the results of our analyses. Data are entered by terminal for immediate processing by the computer.
3. ( used with a singular verb ) a body of facts; information: Additional data is available from the president of the firm.

fet·ish  –noun
1. an object regarded with awe as being the embodiment or habitation of a potent spirit or as having magical potency.
2. any object, idea, etc., eliciting unquestioning reverence, respect, or devotion: to make a fetish of high grades.

The other day I was sitting in a conference about something or other (most likely about consulting or marketing) and after about an hour of patiently waiting for knowledge to come pouring down from my orators mouth into my open mind, I looked down at my paper and realized that the only thing I had written was 'Data Fetish'. Reviewing the presentation in my mind I could only recall a dizzying flurry of numbers and statistics and thinking 'So what's the point?' To quote Marshal McLuhan the medium has for many organizations become the message and in this case the medium is numbers. I think in the nonprofit space there is an interesting bifurcation into two camps, one camp of people running the mom and pop nonprofits with no data tracking systems at all and no idea of what to do with the data once it was tracked and then another camp of people (probably mostly at foundations) with a full fledged Data Fetish, who simply can't make a decision without looking at a complex excel model.

Frankly I don't think either end of the spectrum is particularly right. Those data agnostic are often operating with either a total ignorance of the power of data (and as such wasting precious resources) or operating with a fear of what the numbers will tell them (and as such wasting precious resources). The data fetishist are convinced that their numbers are the god's own truth (totally forgetting that the numbers could be wrong or were derived from completely bat shit wild guesses and baseless assumptions) or are so fixated with getting the data that important decisions are tabled until this magic-cure-all data can be found (and as such, wasting precious resources).

I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Don't get me wrong, I'm as evidence driven as the next fancy pants management consultant but I never forget that data is just a tool that informs one's judgement - it is NOT the judgement - and I also remember that judgement without a base of information is just some crazy bat shit guess.

So what's the answer? Well it lies somewhere between my two favorite quotes:

"It is not enough to do your best. First you must know what to do, and then do your best"

&

"A good plan in time is better than a great plan too late"

-C

On foxes, scorpions, and black babies

Once there was a fox about to cross a river. On the banks of the river sat a scorpion. Doing it’s best to avoid scorpion, the fox prepared to make his crossing, when, surprisingly the scorpion called out to the fox. “Mr Fox,” the scorpion said, “would you please carry me across the water? I desperately need to get to the other side and I can not swim.” The fox crinkled its orange brow and shrewdly said, “But I am a fox, and you are a scorpion!Were I to allow you on my back, you’d simply sting me”. “Not true,” the scorpion replied, “for I will only climb upon you once you get into the water, and were I to sting you once we're in the water we would both drown. Frankly, I have no desire to drown.” The scorpions logic seemed sound and the fox agreed to give him a ride. The fox entered the water, the scorpion climbed upon the foxes back, and the fox began to swim. When the fox made it about half way across the water, the scorpion strung the fox and injected him with poison. The fox, dumbfounded, looked back to the scorpion and asked “Why? Why would you sting me and doom us both?”. As the fox began to drown (along with the scorpion) the scorpion replied “because I am a scorpion”.

I saw an ad the other day that made me think of that ancient fable.

This is one of the 65 ads that went up in Georgia last February (Black History month). It’s an ad by the Radiance Foundation (an organization that is being funded by ‘Georgia right to life’) and the campaign is based around the idea that that abortion clinics like planned parenthood have an agenda to exterminate black babies. Normally ads just piss me off because they suck so much, this ad (and campaign) is different, this ad offends me, deeply. I make no effort to be bipartisan nor do I pretend to be objective in my views on this blog. I think women should have the right to have abortions, I think people are equal even though situations are unequal, I think watching someone fall and injure themselves on youtube is funny and, while this campaign assails two of those beliefs, that is not the main reason this campaign offends me.

This campaign uses the veneer of nonprofit marketing, marketing that is essentially there to “do good”, to pass on a poisonous lie. One that strives to make African American women more fearful of getting the help that they need, one that tries to position well respected organization like Planned Parenthood as a white conspiracy to exterminate black babies, and one that racistly depicts black women as dupes and black babies as animals (endangered species?!?!). I believe that people have the freedom to say what they want, and while I disagree with some messages and with standpoints, I want them to say it well. I feel that advertising and marketing have the obligation to tell the truth, ads that blatantly sell lies and encourage dangerous behaviors do not have the right to life and should be aborted while still in their creators minds. Mass marketing, like journalism, is too powerful a tool to be infused with lies and it is up to responsible professionals to fight back. To steal the motto from McCann Erickson, advertising should be “truth well told”, not fearmongering well funded.

I’ll end with an ad I like.

The format is clean, the headline is an easy and quick read, the call-to-action stands out, and most importantly, it's 'Truth well told'.

Finally an ad I don't hate

As I've begun to write this blog and actively critique the things around me (not that I don't always critique the things around me, I'm just normally keep them down to 3 word summaries like "That fucking sucks" or "God that's terrible") I've noticed that, for the most part, I think most ads suck. It is for that reason that I'm tickled pink (or as pink as a black man gets) when I see an ad for a good cause that doesn't suck. Case in point:








































This ad doesn't suck. . . . thank god, something that doesn't suck.

Why doesn't it suck? Simple, because it's simple. Without going the gross out route and showing some poor bikers head splattered across the car (I'm talking to you "anti smoking" and "anti sugary drinks" ads) they get across the point that cars smash up bikers. Furthermore they give the viewer a simple, achievable action to do, to prevent smashing up a biker "look". Of course there are things to improve upon. The name of the org is blending into the background and it's hard to see the website, but come on, who goes to the website anyway? Do I really want to learn more about how not to smash a biker while I'm driving? No not really. It's a minor technical point and certainly not enough to make the ad suck.

Good job whoever made this ad, you reminded me of the one key truth of advertising: Ads don't have to suck, it's just that most of the time ads are made by people that suck.

In celebration of Pride Month

As some of you may or may not know, this month is pride month and, while I was too busy moving and painting my new office to go out and enjoy the festivities last Sunday at NYC pride, I've decided to celebrate pride by featuring the latest ad by SAGE




















This is really a god awful ad. God awful.

Firstly the art direction is terrible. I don't know where to look or what to look at. Are there three vertical stories or am I supposed to read it like a cartoon strip? Also why are those people in those retarded positions? Who stands like that? Furthermore, for the images at the bottom, why are the faces so close? It looks like that first bald guy is going to try to eat that other guys brains or like that lady in the last frame is pondering that old guys nose hairs. It's just terrible. Even if you can move past the terrible art, the copy is horrendous. It's like they're trying to trick me into reading a tiny confusing book. I can't tell where to start or where to end. The call to action is crazy small (yeah, it's there all the way at the end) and then you have those two huge logo's taking up 20% of the image. Once again I'm confused. I can't tell if this is a Sage ad or a SageCap ad, or even how they interplay.

This is what the ad needs to do 1) Pick one of those six images and stick with it, before and after only works with weight loss ads - and they especially don't work when the 'before' picture is the same as the 'after' picture 2) Cut down the copy - nonprofits are always trying to do a million things at once, just do one thing really well 3) Come up with some kind of a headline (duh) 4) stop making the logo's compete - pick one 5) bump up the call to action and 6) cut down on the copy - I'm not here to read your brochure, even if you disguise it as an ad (I know I said that earlier but it should be repeated).

This is a classic example of one ad trying to do too much and ending up failing miserably. As always K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple Stupid.

Who uses direct mail anyway?

As you could probably imagine. I'm a big fan of social media. I think it's one of the great equalizers and allows even the most meager budgets to extend far into the donor/consumer market. That being said, I also love seeing new uses of old media. So show me a creative use of a billboard or a great TV spot (like the Nike one that has all of the soccer players imagining what happens if they screw up the next play) and I'm in love. That being said, last week I got this in the mail.


It's a piece of mail soliciting a donation but what's interesting about it is that it has a nickel in it. Maybe I'm a sucker for cheap gimicks but I opened it and learned, much to my surprise, that a nickle was more money than the government now gives per patient to fund cancer research (thanks for the info Memorial Sloan Kettering). I get a ton of junk mail and even more spam, and frankly, I never, ever open them but low and behold, I opened this piece of mail. I opened it because it did something very simple: it triggered my curiosity. Now I'd be lying if it compelled me to give (I didn't) but it did get me to open it, and that's a lot. I think the question we need to ask ourselves as marketers is, how can I trigger my donors/consumers curiosity? Everything now is all about how marketing is dead and the world is totally driven by consumers going out and finding specific pieces of information but what gets them to find these specific pieces of information? Curiosity.

How can we make people curious? What blocks their curiosity? And then, once they've given into their curiosity, how can we inspire them to act? That needs to be our driving mantra, our reason to exist. The media doesn't matter, at the end of the day, it's all the same.

(shit, I went though an entire post without cursing once. I must be getting old.)

Brand Vampires and BP

Thursday I came back from some training in LA, and I pleasantly got a chance to meet up with one of my friends I met a while back. His name is Jay and he's in charge of marketing at Toms' Shoes (http://www.toms.com/). It's actually a really amazing org, that's built around the notion that whenever you buy a pair of their shoes, they donate a pair of shoes to someone in need. So while knocking back a beer or two, he told me how companies will call him up looking to partner with Toms without having any real sense of what the partnership should be about or how it should work. During our chat, I mentioned that sometimes companies are really just brand vampires looking to suck good halo from socially conscious organizations, while others are a really good fit. So after we parted I began to think about it a little more and figured that there has to be an easy way to quickly separate these brand vampires from other brands that were just brothers from other mothers.

To that end, I've created the matrix below, to help nonprofits and socially conscious organizations to evaluate how to handle a potential partnership with another brand.














Along the bottom is the estimation of how aligned the value and personality of the brands, along the side is how aligned the mission and the product are. If your mission fits with their product then you're in the high mission and product alignment zone, if your values and personality matches with their values and personality you're in the high value and personality alignment zone, and so on. In each box I put a little phrase to capture the essence of the relationship and in parentheses I put how the two org brands should interact ( either equal partners, endorsers, invisible)

1)High mission and product alignment and high value and personality alignment: These are the matches made in heaven, not only should you team up, you should say it "loud and proud". Think when about Feeding America (used to be called America's Second Harvest) and General Mills teamed up to donate a pound of food to each pound the viewers of The Biggest Loser pledge to loose. These brothers from different mothers should team up in an equal partnership.

2) High mission and product and low value and personality alignment: These also normally pretty good matches. An easy example I can think of is when Tom's shoes teamed up with the Red Cross to get shoes to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. Both brands are there to help those in need and by teaming up they were able to provide a bundle of good to those that need it. Often one brand acting as the endorser of another brand is the best way to go (i.e. "The Red Cross with the support of Tom's shoes has delivered. . ." ). Both brands can, and should, be out front.

3) Low mission and product alignment and high value and personality alignment. These can be pretty complex since, the products are so different but as we can see from Product Red, it's very doable. Since the products and the missions are so divergent the best way to tackle these are with a new initiative (like Red) where a bunch of diverse entities come together for a worthy cause to make a change. Anything outside of a new initiative will come off as pretty artificial but the brands should still exist as proud endorsers of this new entity.

4) Low mission and product alignment and low value and personality alignment. Ugh. . . this is like Transylvania, where all the brand vampires live. 9 times out of 10 this is a bad idea, but sometime vampires have deep pockets and the good you can do with that money is worth the risk or outside forces demand the partnership. The thing that pops into my mind for this case is the truth campaign (which is funded by the cigarette industry). The partnership should be a new initiative (with a new brand) and both the nonprofit and the for-profit should remain as invisible as possible. The for-profit would do it for the good of internal moral (or because they are forced to) and the nonprofit should do it because of the impact that can be created. In the perfect world, the viewer would never know who pays the bills (which is part of what made it so hard for me to come up with a good example).

These aren't hard and fast rules but they'll definitely help you navigate some complex situations.



Also, I guess I should talk about BP since I promised in the headline I would. I actually find it really interesting that I'm hearing a lot of talk about the BP ads and how messed up it is that BP made those ads. Something that I'm actually not hearing a lot of is what people think they would have done if they were BP's head of marketing. So, being the forthright kind of guy that I am, I figured I'd stick my neck out and say what I'd do if I were in charge of BP's marketing. So what would I do? I'd quit. That guy (or gal) is fucked six ways to Sunday. Any ads that you put out will be construed as a waste of money and an attempt at spin, if you don't put out ads, you'll be seen as not communicating. So you, Mr or Ms Marketing exec, are up shits' creek (as my pappy used to say). Get a new job. In a few years, everyone will be back to their sweet, sweet oil dependency and BP will have rebranded itself and all will go back to normal, but you, Mr/Ms CMO, are screwed. Get over it. your company screwed the pooch and you're going to get boned. that's life sometimes. BP should keep making ads, should give constant and eternal 'mia culpas' and spend as much dough as possible to clean up this mess, but this is too big even for smart marketing to smooth over.

My own raven paradox.

Today's post is slightly different than more normal. Normally I like to review some ad I've seen or go on a tirade about something that I've seen/heard/did-to-an-innocent-bystander, but not today. Today is a bit of a stream of thought. It gets down to marketing towards the end but the trip is a little "over the river and through the bend" (nice rhyme).

Today was my second day of experienced consultant training with Bain and Co and, frankly, I've been out of the loop. I haven't really been checking my email, I've barely tweeted, and I've been doing my best to be present in the training (I mean, this stuff isn't cheap), but I, of course, can't stop daydreaming. So today, while I was supposed to be reviewing the best way to create a work plan (yeah, thrilling stuff, I know), I happened to look over and saw this bird standing on the ground.



I looked at it, it looked at me and suddenly I thought: "what the fuck is that?" Firstly on the more obvious level, is it a raven? is it a crow? A blackbird? I have no idea. But on a more fundamental level, why is it black? I mean most birds I know are bright and colorful and are chirpring. From my High School biology, as far as I know the colors help the birds stand out for mates, blend in to hide from predators or attack prey. Clearly since all the birds of this type are black it's not a sex thing, so is it a hide from predators/attack prey thing? Maybe, but if that was the case, why is it out in broad daylight? Wouldn't it make more sense for this bird to be hunting at night, in total blackness?


















(picture of that same bird at night)

My consultant's soul screams out to me that this doesn't make sense!! It says, Cerrone, you hate things that don't make sense and this needs to be fixed. That bird needs to be brighter and green so it blends into the trees or grass or whatever.

So is a black bird in the middle of the day a paradox? I may not know a ton about nature but I do know that mother nature doesn't tolerate waste. So if this bird does fly and hunt and do its thing during the day, there has gotta be a reason and just because that reason isn't immediatily apparent to me, doesn't mean it's not a good reason. Maybe if I was whatever creature eats this bird or whatever creature this bird eats, the reason it's black and diurnal would be painfully obvious.

So how does this tie into marketing and nonprofits? easy. Nonprofits, marketers, business people, nearly everyone who looks at a problem and wants to solve it, wants to make a seemingly senseless situation make more sense, but we need to remember that just because it doesn't make sense to us, doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. We need to study the situation, put ourselves fully and totally into the scene, allow ourselves to see how it does make sense and then solve the problem that we feel as a member of the scene, and not the problem we felt as an outsider looking in. Maybe then we'd see that the raven doesn't have a problem at all or that the real problem the raven has isn't its color but the fact thats claws are too tiny?

So, I ask you this: are you solving your clients problems or are you solving the problem of the person watching your client?

Are we really that far behind? (AKA design has killed the branding star)

The other day I was listening to a pretty interesting call with Sarah Durham and Nancy Schwartz. Both of them are fairly well known in nonprofit marketing circles (not sure how much that is worth) and they were giving a talk on the power of brands for nonprofits and how brands are more than just a logo. While listening to them chat about it, i couldn't help but wonder one thing (well two things if you include my thoughts about how antiquated call in meetings are, I mean christ, is a webcast so hard to set up?) are nonprofits really so in the dark about their brands and how important it is to maintain? True, I'd never assert that every nonprofit leaders has some fancy business marketing degree and some rarefied understanding of "branding" but is the majority as in the dark as we'd like to believe?
I dunno, I'm a numbers guy and before I can make an assertion I like to do research, but even without research one can see why it's in people like Sarah and Nancy's interest (and frankly mine) to maintain the belief that people are in the dark, that's how we keep food in our bellies. The problem is that the big push towards branding has come and past (that was really the business zeitgiest of the late 80's and 90's), now we're in the age of design. There is the chance that everyone may understand the importance of branding already and has moved on. Every third book is now about design, the army is using design to figure out how to win wars, and apple has a permanent lock on all our dreams. Design is the new placebo, the panacea to cure every business problem, and nonprofits are still worrying about branding.
Do I think branding is important? yes. Do I think design thinking is important? yes. Will I think that the next big business concept (i.e. fad) will be important? yes. Do I think that these are new ideas that successful people haven't ever thought of before? No. Frank Perdue knew about the power of branding back in the 20's (or something like that), IDEO has been using design thinking forever and ever. Successful nonprofits have understood how important it is to stand for one thing (the mission), stay true to the mission in all communications and actions (the brand), and to think innovatively about delivering the mission (design thinking) since the dawn of time.
I'm not entirely sure of where I'm going with this but it seems like we are eternally trying to label and formulate (and capitalize) on processes in the hope of being able to sell success.
Are nonprofits as far behind the current curve as these marketers think or are they just pandering to the easiest prey because they haven't developed the skills needed to go after the nonprofits that have already mastered branding?

Mission drifting into a brick wall

Funder "So what does your organization do?"
Executive Director "Well we teach kids to cook, while using the food from a local farm, which uses seed from a coalition of restaurants, which get their power from a series of windmills, which were assembled by the kids we taught to cook, and then those kids use their windmill building and cooking skills to set up new windmill building cooking schools throughout the pacific north west and then they . . ."

Today I was thinking about the importance of strategic focus. When I look around at organizations, it seems like half of the time nonprofits are so desperate to pry dollars out of the hands of foundations and donors that they are willing to try to stretch their mission to cover everything under the sun. I mean, I can totally understand the logic behind that (go to where the fish are) but the problem is that they end up trying to be everything to everyone, and end up being nothing to everyone. Think about it, if you've got 5 seconds to pitch your nonprofit to some fancy pants grant manager or cause marketing director, you've got to have a crisp clear message about what your nonprofit does, why it does it, and why they care about that thing that you do. No one cares about (or believes) that one nonprofit is solving each and every problem in the world, but they can believe that your putting all of your energy into doing one thing very well. Further more, nothing is going to make you look worse that saying that you really care about X to one funder and that you care about Y to another funder and then for the funders to find out that you've been bullshitting them both just to get your hands in their wallets.

I believe that real power comes from doing one thing really well. Most of the famous stars and masters of industry aren't jack of all trades, they just have the ability to do one things way better than anyone else. That should be the goal of nonprofits (and forprofits for that matter). Rather than attempting to make your mission touch as many points as possible, you can really gain traction by being able to say "we do this one thing better than anyone else and if you want this one thing to happen, you gotta fund us." By doing that you can be unique, you can concentrate your efforts and you can stay true to your funders and, most importantly you can stay true to your mission (and fend out mission drift). When you look at the most successful nonprofits out there like the american red cross or Harlem children's Zone or Big Brothers Big Sisters, you'll see orgs with clear missions and a dedication to achieving that mission at all costs. If you're going to have a nonprofit that survives, you're going to have to have the courage to say that you do one thing really well and then convince others of your ability and the importance of your mission. Donors don't expect you to save the entire world by yourself, they just expect you to stay true to your mission.