Smarter Ideas

Opportunity Finds Empowerment

2007-06-13T08:53:00.000-05:00

(continued from Ideas that Empower, see 5/31/07 below)

Okay, we’re ready to take a stab at refreshing our definition of advertising for the 21st century. Based on our discussion from previous posts, we’re beginning from a definition established in 1904 by John E. Kennedy when he said advertising is “salesmanship in print.” Kennedy’s definition superseded the idea that advertising was “keeping your name before the public” or that advertising was “news about a product”.

Let’s consider three things we’ve learned about advertising over the years related to timing, relationships with media, and empowering ideas.

Our new definition of advertising should capture the idea that advertising is effective when it is relevant to the consumer at a particular point in time. For advertising to work, there has to be opportunity. A consumer must have a need or a hope (although this could be latent or sub-conscious), and the means for fulfillment. The advertising message should be present when it is most relevant to the consumer.

Our new definition of advertising should also respect the “delivery” of the advertising message. “Delivery” is something of a misnomer. Advertising is discovered, rather than delivered. It is found because a consumer has a relationship with a particular media vehicle where the advertising also visits. For advertising to be welcome, it should respect the relationship between the consumer and the media.

Finally, our new definition of advertising should recognize that successful advertising motivates and empowers individuals. Empowering communications enable consumers to find what they need (rationally or emotionally) in the ad message.

Our new definition for advertising in the 21st century might begin as follows: Advertising is an empowering expression (an idea) in search of a hopeful prospect with the means for fulfillment. In other words, advertising is “Empowerment seeking Opportunity.”

“Empowerment seeking Opportunity” sounds a lot like “salesmanship in print,” doesn’t it? Only it’s not as pithy. “Empowerment seeking Opportunity” defines the challenge we face as planners and advertisers, but we’re not finished yet. Our definition needs to be turned around to more accurately portray the relatively weaker position of advertising to the stronger position of the consumer. We chase prospects until they catch us.

Success in advertising is the result of opportunity finding empowerment through relationships with media and the ideas expressed therein. We might better say that advertising is the catalyst for Opportunity finding Empowerment. “Opportunity finding Empowerment” frames our understanding of the challenges we face better than its opposite, “Empowerment seeking Opportunity” which is simply another way of saying “salesmanship in print.”

In 2001, Bob Brennan (then President of Leo Burnett Worldwide), made the following observation:

Until recently, our industry has been dominated by the creative function at the exclusion of all else. Creative is essential, but the leading marketing communications companies of the future will have three core competencies:

Fact-driven customer knowledge at the individual level derived from sophisticated database management tools;

Superior media capabilities that allow us to effectively make contact and interact with our target consumer across a variety of media disciplines;

Innovative, creative ideas, flawlessly executed, that inspire and motivate consumers to invite the brand into their lives.

In the 21st century, our success in advertising will depend on our ability to act as catalysts for enabling Opportunity to find Empowerment.

Ideas that Empower

2007-05-31T07:19:00.000-05:00

(continued from If You Tame Me…, see 5/9/07 below)

Over $100 billion is spent each year in advertising. In our industry, we use very sophisticated technology. We allocate hundreds of millions of dollars each year to research on all kinds of consumer behavior surveillance techniques ranging from simple diaries to brain scans and yet, surprisingly, after more than 160 years of the existence of the advertising industry, we still don’t know how advertising works. We only know that it does work.

For many years, an accepted model of how advertising works was a hierarchical model. We believed people moved through a series of events – Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action – which took us from advertising to sales. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, however, the research simply did not support this model. The research showed us we could have behavioral changes before attitudinal changes. We could have increases in sales before we had increases in awareness.

Maybe some day we’ll figure it out. But as we’re struggling now to update our definition of advertising, let’s take a different approach and consider the observations of some who were considered among the most successful in advertising.

As we’ve recounted in earlier posts, there was a period in time when some, at least, thought we understood advertising. In his famous book, Scientific Advertising, Claude Hopkins wrote, “The time has come when advertising has reached the status of a science. It is based on fixed principles, and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analyzed until they are well understood. The correct method of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic law.” Here are a couple of Hopkins’ “laws” of advertising:

– Ads are not written to entertain. When they do, those entertainment seekers are little likely to be the people whom you want. That is one of the greatest advertising faults. Ad writers… forget they are salesmen and try to be performers. Instead of sales, they seek applause.

– Any studied attempt to sell, if apparent, creates corresponding resistance.

Fast forward a number of years and consider Bill Bernbach. He rejected the idea of advertising as science and considered it more of an art:

- Advertising isn't a science, it's persuasion. And persuasion is an art.

- It’s not just what you say that stirs people, it’s the way that you say it.

But on some points, Bernbach and Hopkins would seem to agree. It’s hard to imagine Hopkins disagreeing with these observations by Bernbach:

- Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise...not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.

- Getting a product known isn’t the answer. Getting it wanted is the answer. Some of the best known product names have failed.

David Ogilvy, who came from a background in direct response, leaned more towards the “scientific” school of thought on advertising effectiveness. In a speech he gave to the advertising community, Ogilvy chastised “generalists” for putting creativity above the commercial goals of advertising:

You generalists pride yourselves on being creative, whatever that awful word means. You cultivate the mystique of creativity…. We directs do not regard advertising as an art form. Our clients don’t give a damn whether we win awards at Cannes. They pay us to sell their products. Nothing else….

When sales go up, you claim credit for it. When sales go down, you blame the product. We in direct response know exactly to the penny how many products we sell with each of our advertisements.

You generalists use short copy. We use long copy. Experience has taught us that short copy doesn’t sell. In our headlines, we promise the consumer a benefit. You generalists don’t think it is creative.

You have never had to live with the discipline of knowing the results of your advertising. We pack our advertisements and letters with information about the product. We have found out we have to if we want to sell anything.

And yet, Ogilvy had a great deal of respect for another successful ad man, Leo Burnett. Burnett created the advertising campaign that succeeded above all other campaigns: the Marlboro Man. The Marlboro Man campaign is credited with taking a cigarette brand that at one time had about a quarter of a share point in sales and drove it to become the top-ranked brand in the world. The Marlboro Man campaign had none of the fact-based, long copy which Ogilvy criticized the ad community for leaving out in its advertising. It was an image campaign.

So what does this all mean? What does it tell us about what advertising is or is not? For one thing, it suggests there is more than one path to advertising success. There are times when rational, information-based appeals can succeed, and there are times when emotional-based appeals can succeed. Through generation after generation, successful advertising practitioners have concluded that advertising may be entertaining, but it is not entertainment. As the saying goes, “it’s only creative if it sells.”

Here’s another saying that’s relevant: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Every year, it seems, we struggle with the same challenge – how to make advertising more effective – and in many cases we keep finding similar answers. Aren’t the views of Hopkins, Bernbach, Ogilvy, Burnett, and many other successful ad men as relevant today as they were in their own time? For instance, haven’t we learned that advertising is not a popularity contest? Don’t we discover time and time again that the most popular ads are not necessarily the most effective? And yet, what is it that we continue to strive for when we measure advertising recall, and now try to measure engagement? Recall and engagement are best suited as measures of entertainment value, are they not? There is no definitive correlation between recall and sales. Here’s a prediction, there won’t be a definitive correlation between engagement and sales either.

Let’s move beyond engagement and embrace empowerment. When advertising is successful, it empowers people to take action to satisfy some need, want, or desire. The goal of advertising is to create ideas that empower.

In our next post, we’ll try to take the ideas expressed in these last three posts and put them together to offer our new definition of advertising. Meanwhile, I’m curious, what’s your definition of advertising?

If You Tame Me....

2007-05-09T12:56:00.000-05:00

(continued from The Time is Now, see 5/1/07 below)

“If you tame me, then we shall need each other.
To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….”

The Little Prince
Antoine de St. Exupery

The Little Prince is a delightful book full of profound insights about life and love. Highly recommended, if you haven’t already read it.

There’s a chapter in the book where the little prince is learning about love and friendship from a fox. “What does that mean – ‘tame’?” asks the little prince. “It means to establish ties,” answers the fox.

We are all creatures of habit. Although each of our habits is unique, we all follow a regular routine.

we wake up at the same time every day, perhaps to a radio that’s tuned to the same station every day
we drive to work along the same route, passing the same signs
we read the same daily newspaper
we read the same business or personal magazines month in and month out
we watch our favorite TV programs every day
we sometimes surf the internet, but we return to our favorite sites regularly

We establish ties with the media that tame us; they become part of the fabric of our lives.

They are our friends, always welcome, comfortable to spend time with, and trusted. From childhood, we are taught to be wary of strangers. When a stranger tells us something, we listen with caution. We are trusting of our friends. When a friend tells us something, we are more receptive.

It should come as no surprise that advertising is more effective when it is communicated through a vehicle we trust. Studies confirm this. For example, a 2003 study by Knowledge Networks looked at “reader involvement” in relation to ad recall. Reader involvement was determined by such things as frequency of reading (e.g. read four out of four issues), reading time per issue, and preference (e.g. citing the magazine as “one of my favorites”). The study found that highly involved readers were three times more likely to recall ads than readers with average levels of involvement, and 10 times more likely to recall ads than readers with low levels of involvement. Other similar studies show similar results. In other words, readers are more responsive to advertising in their favorite publications.

It baffles me how often this insight into human behavior is ignored in advertising. How many times have you seen an advertiser or its agency painstakingly investigate and compare magazines to find the absolute best, top tier, ultimate magazines to reach a specific target audience with the right message in the right environment? Then, with hopeful ambitions to influence the attitudes and behavior of targeted prospects, they set as an objective or goal to maintain continuous advertising pressure against this target audience. And after all that, advertise in these paramount publications a total of…what…four times? Based on an informal survey among a few publishing friends of mine, it seems less than five percent of advertisers run continuously in all 12 issues of a monthly magazine. Twelve contacts in a year is apparently considered way too much exposure against the absolute best, top tier, ultimate targeted readers with the right message in the right environment for most advertisers. Go figure.

The average price of a :30 in the Super Bowl exceeds $2.5 million. Why do advertisers continue to pay top dollar for the Super Bowl and other media events?

In part, of course, it’s because of the opportunity to reach large numbers of people at one time. We know that’s true. But partly, too, it’s because advertisers believe higher levels of involvement (or engagement, if you prefer that term du jour) viewers have with these programs translates to higher levels of response, which justifies the premium cost.

Fortunately, consumers enjoy the relationships they have with their media every day, and advertisers do not have to pay premium prices to benefit from those relationships.

Relationships matter. We should consider that in our *new* definition of advertising. Better yet, we should consider that more in our practice of it.

(to be continued…)

The Time is Now

2007-05-01T07:14:00.000-05:00

(continued from What is Advertising? (Revisited), see 4/19/07 below)

We may not be certain how to define advertising, or how advertising works, but oddly enough we have accumulated some research over the years that tells us something about how much is needed to make it work. Here is a question that has challenged media planners and advertisers for decades: How much advertising exposure is enough?

With finite resources that must be allocated as optimally as we can conceive, this question gives us a strategic choice and puts us at risk. If we advertise with too little pressure, our efforts may not have enough impact to show measurable results. If we advertise too much, we squander precious resources where we have already done our job. We face the risk of too little advertising pressure versus the risk of too much.

When we distill this challenge down to its basic elements, the strategic decision we media planners make goes something like this: if we could only afford to send one advertising message to one person, we could probably identify who that message should go to. The strategic challenge of advertising pressure arises when we can afford to send out the next message. Do we repeat the message to the same person, or do we send it to a new person? When should we send it?

If we can afford to send a third message, the strategic choices increase to six. If we also have the option of sending different messages to each person each time, the choices increase exponentially. What can we use to guide our strategic decision?

What Shape Are You In?
Although we may not always think of it in these terms, the key to making strategic decisions about advertising pressure lies with our expectation of the shape of the advertising response curve.

S-Shaped Curve
The S-shaped advertising response curve was the dominant model for media planning from the 1970s, and it suggests that advertising must reach a threshold level before it becomes effective. This was typically expressed by setting a communication goal of achieving a “3+ reach” for the advertising to be deemed “effective” (i.e. to achieve a desired response).

Concave downward
Another school of thought held that the advertising response curve was shaped concave downward, and suggests that the highest response rate occurs after the first exposure and diminishes thereafter. This also suggests that the most effective ad is the one closest to the purchase decision.

In a landmark 1995 study, John Philip Jones used single-source research to measure the short-term effects of advertising on sales. Single-source, unavailable prior to the Jones study, tracked both the media exposure and purchases of a single sample. Jones measured each household’s reception of advertising for specific advertised brands and related this to the purchasing of these same brands by the same household shortly after the advertising.

The analysis drew a startling conclusion: one exposure generates the highest proportion of sales, and additional exposures add very little to the effect of the first.

The Jones study gave support for the concave downward advertising response model and ushered in its practical application in “recency” planning. “Recency planning is based on the sensible idea that most advertising works by influencing the brand choice of consumers who are ready to buy,” noted Erwin Ephron in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1997.

Ironically, in 1972, researcher Herbert Krugman had advanced the idea that there are only three “psychological” exposures:

1. “What is it?” – the first response is to understand the nature of the stimulus.
2. “What of it?” – the second exposure elicits a more personal response of whether or not the message has personal relevance.
3. Reminder/Disengagement – the third exposure is a true reminder, but also the beginning of disengagement by the viewer.

Krugman suggests that most viewers stop at the first psychological exposure until they are in the market for the product advertised. He goes on to say, “the importance of this view of things is that it positions advertising as powerful only when the viewer, the consumer, or shopper is interested…” In the 1970s, Krugman’s thesis was used to support the theory that 3+ exposures were needed to be effective, although clearly it is more supportive of the Recency theory…proof that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Woody Allen said, “80 percent of success is showing up.” A key point from advertising response research is that timing impacts advertising effectiveness. In most cases, emphasis should be placed on continuity and reach. A brand that is out of sight is out of mind.

What this also tells us, however, is how important the consumer is to the advertising equation. A targeted prospect may meet all the demographic and psychographic profile characteristics we are looking for, yet can still be unmotivated by the advertising because the timing is not right. For advertising to be effective, there has to be opportunity. There has to be a need, hope, or desire and the means for fulfillment on the part of the targeted prospect. A prospect with all the other right characteristics may not be moved today if the timing is wrong, but can be moved tomorrow if the timing becomes right. Where there is no opportunity, there is no sale.

(to be continued)

What is Advertising? (Revisited)

2007-04-19T21:01:00.000-05:00

“Keeping Everlastingly at it Brings Success” was the motto of N.W. Ayer & Sons, one of the earliest advertising agencies, in the late 1800s. When Albert Lasker asked his contemporaries during that time, “What is Advertising?,” he was told it was “keeping your name before the public.” Lasker, who came from a background as a journalist, had himself noted the success of one of the agencies of his day which wrote advertising as if it were news about a product, and so he thought advertising must be news.

But in 1904, John Kennedy provided Lasker with a new definition of advertising. He defined advertising as “salesmanship in print.” Kennedy’s definition ignited a change in the advertising industry and stands out as perhaps the most succinct definition of advertising ever since. Yet so many things have changed. Kennedy, after all, pre-dated radio, TV, the internet, even the concept of a “brand” and the brand management organization structure. It’s more than 100 years since Kennedy defined advertising as salesmanship in print. Do we need a new definition of advertising?

“Keeping your name before the public” has long been abandoned as any kind of definition of advertising – you would never hear a marketer today say that his goal was to keep his brand’s name before the public. Or would you? As DVRs threaten the advertising model on TV, advertisers respond by increasing product placements. What are product placements if not simply keeping your name before the public? And what topics fill the pages of advertising trade magazines and are on the lips of marketers everywhere? Buzzmarketing, word-of-mouth, viral campaigns…. Is that salesmanship, or is it keeping your name before the public?

So, how do we define advertising? The 4As, formed in 1917, adopted an outline of agency service in 1918 that hasn’t changed much over the years. In it, they describe agency service as consisting of “interpreting to the public, or to that part of it which it is desired to reach, the advantages of a product or service.”

The ever-useful Wikipedia defines advertising as paid communication through a non-personal medium in which the sponsor is identified and the message is controlled. Variations, they note, include publicity, public relations, product placement, sponsorship, underwriting, and sales promotion. Every major medium is used to deliver these messages: television, radio, movies, magazines, newspapers, the internet, and billboards. Advertisements can also be seen on the seats of grocery carts, on the walls of an airport walkway, and on the sides of buses, or heard in telephone hold messages or in-store PA systems – nearly anywhere a visual or audible communication can be placed.

Good old Merriam-Webster provides the following definition:
1 : to make something known to : NOTIFY
2 a : to make publicly and generally known b : to announce publicly especially by a printed notice or a broadcast c : to call public attention to especially by emphasizing desirable qualities so as to arouse a desire to buy or patronize : PROMOTE

David Ogilvy comes at it from the Kennedy school of thought. Ogilvy said that “advertising is no more and no less than an efficient way to sell.” Whereas the hot shop du jour, Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, defines advertising as “anything that makes our clients famous.”

During Media Week last October, Joe Plummer of the Advertising Research Foundation discussed the ARF’s working definition of Engagement as “turning on a consumer to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding content”. But he also talked about this definition as not just about Engagement, but as a whole new construct of marketing communications. Is “turning on a consumer to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding content” a new definition of advertising?

It’s been over 165 years since the first advertising agency was founded. We may not have all the answers – we will probably never have all the answers as advertising continues to evolve with the times -- but we’ve certainly learned a few things along the way. Let’s take another look at how we might define advertising in the 21st century.

(to be continued)

Sales Genie

2007-02-28T09:13:00.000-05:00

Critiques of the ads for the Academy Awards, TV’s second biggest event, are coming out and they remind me of something interesting about the Super Bowl ads.

Do you remember the ad for Salesgenie.com? On February 6, MediaBuyerPlanner.com ran this headline: “Salesgenie.com Flubs Big Chance, Lands Worst Super Bowl Spot.” In its first outing as a Super Bowl advertiser, the article states, Salesgenie.com landed the unfortunate position as the most unpopular Super Bowl ad, according to a USA Today national poll.

The very next day, the headline read, “Salesgenie.com's Unpopular Ad Generates Mega Leads.” Surprise, surprise. The “worst Super Bowl ad” pulled in a boat load of registrations for new prospects, more than 10,000, or so the advertiser claimed.

“The success of the spot in terms of generating leads”, the article continues, “is perhaps a testament to the fact that what is ‘successful’ in the eyes of consumers is not necessarily the same for marketers.”

We’ve talked about how at the turn of the century – not this past one, but the one before it, i.e. 1900 -- the head of one of the largest ad agencies of the time, Albert Lasker, was eager to better understand advertising. What was it? What was the definition of advertising? He desperately wanted to know. His answer came in the Spring in 1904 when a man by the name of John E. Kennedy came and told him: Advertising was salesmanship in print.

This definition of advertising has stood the test of time, even though it predates radio and tv, not to mention the internet and everything else that’s coming into play. So, now it’s a new century and many things have changed. What about our understanding of the definition of advertising? Has that changed, too? Should it change?

Over the next few posts, I’d like to explore this topic with you. I have some ideas to share with you, of course, but I’m also interested in your ideas. So, please, drop me a line either here or directly to me and tell me: what is the definition of advertising in the 21st century?

BTW, in case you didn’t hear the news, I recently joined up with my former strategic partner, Media First International. You can reach me there at richard.miller@mediafirst.com.

Look forward to hearing from you soon!

Sources and additional reading:
MediaBuyerPlanner.com, 2/6/07 and 2/7/07

See the SalesGenie.com ad here.

The People Era

2007-01-30T12:25:00.000-05:00

(continued from Dawn of a New Era, see 12/22/06 below)

Picking up where we left off…. As we closed 2006 in our historical review, we introduced what I call the People Era, a new era in our advertising history. Time magazine’s crowning of “You” as Person of the Year, and Advertising Age’s anointing of “You” as Agency of the Year would seem to confirm that we are, indeed, now firmly in the People Era. Born from the internet, the People Era began (or so I peg it) with the commercialization of the world wide web in 1994.

The first web banner ads were introduced on HotWired in October, 1994. It was also at this time that the browser Netscape was launched. Netscape was originally the dominant web browser, and later had its successful initial public offering on August 9, 1995 which, it may be argued, triggered the dot.com bubble that became the “dot-bomb” bust. The stock was to be offered at $14 per share. Its value on the first day of trading reached $75. After Netscape, valuations of internet stocks that had no significant revenues, and sometimes no revenues at all, climbed off the charts. It wasn’t until the Spring of 2000 that reality overtook the hype, and the dot.com stock balloon came crashing down.

Yet among the high-flying circus-performing stocks were some real companies with real business models that would develop into real powerhouses. Ebay comes to mind. So, too, does Google.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly we adapted and how easily we now take for granted the powerful information at our fingertips, searched through millions of web pages, and brought to us in nanoseconds by Google. The Google search engine receives about a billion search requests per day. Incredible, isn’t it?

Google began as a research project in January, 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University. They hypothesized that a search engine which analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page). Their hypothesis worked, and Google became far and away the most popular search engine among internet users.

Google was incorporated on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. In 2000, Google began selling ads associated with search keywords. Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. The IPO gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. Many of Google's employees became instant paper millionaires.

On March 30, 2006 – 10 years from its inception as a research project – Google was added to the S&P 500 index. In a 2006 report of the richest people in the U.S., Forbes reported that Sergey Brin was #12 with a net worth of $14.1 billion, and Larry Page was #13 with a net worth of $14.0 billion. They’re companies like eBay and Google that brought us the People Era.

It’s been the purpose of this historical review to try to put our rapidly changing times in perspective. Advertising and media have continually evolved throughout the years, yet there have been only two major “eras” before this one. Let’s take a brief look back. We talked about the Media Era, a period of 62 years from 1841 to 1903. During the Media Era, the advertising business was a media buying business. Power resided with those agencies and entrepreneurs, such as J. Walter Thompson, who controlled advertising access to the media.

By 1903, however, access to the media alone was not sufficient for any agency to command a unique position in the market. It was in 1904, after a fateful meeting between Albert Lasker, head of Lord & Thomas (third largest agency of its day, and forerunner to Foote, Cone & Belding), and John E. Kennedy, a copywriter, that the creative message became the focus of attention and changed the industry forever. Lasker had wanted desperately to know the meaning of advertising; he was not satisfied with the answer his contemporaries gave of “keeping your name before the public.” Kennedy defined it for him. Advertising, Kennedy told Lasker, was “salesmanship in print”. And just that fast, the Creative Era began, lasting 90 years from 1904 to 1994. In the Creative Era, power resided with those agencies and entrepreneurs who could turn perception of a brand into real brand strength. Its leaders were men like Bill Bernbach, Leo Burnett, and David Ogilvy. The crowning achievement of the Creative Era was the Marlboro Man, the masculine image of the rugged, independent cowboy who turned a failing cigarette brand into the most powerful brand in world in a campaign that has lasted decades. No campaign before it or since has had such a demonstrable effect on a brand that can be tied solely to its advertising image.

But the Creative Era was also fueled by mass media. As mass media began to fragment in the 1980s, the Creative Era began to wane, too. Then came the internet.

In the People Era, power has shifted once again. It now resides with ordinary people. In the People Era, perception isn’t reality…reality is reality. Authenticity counts more than image. Information and technology have empowered ordinary people and put them in charge. Success will belong to those companies and entrepreneurs who can harness that power as, for example, American Idol has done.

This concludes our historical review. We hope you enjoyed our journey of highlights through the years. Now we turn to face the challenges in front of us, armed with the lessons of the past but knowing, too, that these are extraordinary times. If history is any guide, the People Era will prevail for many years to follow. It’s a rare and exciting opportunity to be a part of such an historic time in advertising. The rules are changing again and we have a real chance to shape the future of our industry.

So, let’s write some history together, shall we?

Sources and additional reading:
Doubleclick, The Decade in Online Advertising, 1994-2004, April 2005, www.doubleclick.com

Wikipedia, Google, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

Parallel Universe

2007-01-08T09:38:00.000-05:00

There’s a change in the air. Can you feel it?

This week, President Bush is expected to announce his new strategy to achieve success in Iraq. Most are expecting him to announce a surge of new troops. The new Democrat majority in Congress has already expressed their opposition to such a move. Meanwhile, Bush has already replaced his generals in the region.

What does any of this have to do with advertising, you wonder? I’d like to take a moment to explain.

History is strange and funny in the way seemingly unrelated subjects and events seem, nevertheless, to parallel each other. Marketing is often viewed as analogous to warfare, and we can look back in history and see parallels between the two.

For example, historians have compared the build-up and organization of the military prior to World War II with the build-up and organizational changes that took place in industry at that time and gave rise to our present system of brand management.

Massive bombing, called “carpet-bombing”, which occurred in Vietnam during the 1960s can be compared to the barrage of tv commercials in broadcast media that occurred during the same period. Carpet bombing as a military strategy gave way to “smart bombs” used during the Gulf War. (Remember those images on tv as you followed the path of a smart bomb right to the point of its impact with a targeted building?) Wasn’t it about this time that the term “narrowcasting” came to describe the strategy of targeting advertising more precisely through cable versus broadcast?

In the present war in Iraq, the military has embarked on new strategies. Smaller U.S. forces go in and train a proxy army, the Iraqis, to fight for them. As a result, U.S. casualties are much lower compared with previous wars, but there is also less control and slower-than-expected progress. Compare that military strategy with new marketing strategies using product placement, viral videos, and especially word-of-mouth, where marketers solicit brand ambassadors to spread their marketing message for them. Are you seeing the similarities?

Also, compare the partisanship between Democrat and Republican to the divide between supporters of “old” media and supporters of “new” media. Are these just coincidences, or are we captives of our Time?

What will be the new strategy for Iraq? How will Democrats and Republicans work together now that there is a Democrat majority in Congress? What will any of this foreshadow for the future of marketing? It will be interesting to watch as history unfolds.

Dawn of a New Era

2006-12-22T06:53:00.000-05:00

(continued from The Twilight Zone, see 12/4/06 below)

No technology in our lifetime (including television) has had a greater impact on us than the internet. The internet, and its chief consumer application, the World Wide Web, changes the way we communicate, the way we socialize, the way we work, the way we play, the way we shop, the way we sell, and now, too, the way we advertise. As has been said, the internet changes everything.

In August, 1962, J.C.R. “Lick” Licklider of MIT wrote a series of memos discussing his “Galactic Network” concept. He envisioned a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site.

In October of the same year, Licklider became head of the computer research program at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an agency of the U.S. Dept. of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for the military. (ARPA was later renamed DARPA, the D for Defense, then renamed back again to ARPA, then again, finally, we hope, to DARPA. It’s the government. Go figure.) Licklider convinced his successors, including MIT researcher Lawrence Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.

Meanwhile, Leonard Kleinrock, also of MIT, published the first paper on packet switching theory in 1961. Kleinrock convinced Roberts of the theoretical feasibility of communications using packets rather than circuits, which was a major step along the path towards computer networking.

In 1966, Roberts went to DARPA to develop the computer network concept. He published his plan for the “ARPANET”, which ultimately evolved into the internet, in 1967. In October of 1969, the first host-to-host message was sent successfully, and by the end of the year four host computers were connected together into the initial ARPANET, and the budding internet was off the ground.

In 1972, the ARPANET was introduced to the public at the International Computer Communication Conference. It was also in 1972 that electronic mail – email – was introduced.

The Internet as we now know it embodies a key underlying technical idea, namely that of open architecture networking. In an open-architecture network, the individual networks may be separately designed and developed and each may have its own unique interface which it may offer to users and/or other providers, but the networks can communicate with each other.

The idea of open-architecture networking was first introduced by Bob Kahn shortly after arriving at DARPA in 1972. In the Spring of 1973, after beginning his initial “internetting” effort, Kahn asked Vint Cerf (then at Stanford) to work with him on a detailed design of the new open-architecture protocol. They teamed up to spell out the details of what eventually became called the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). A key concept of the Internet is that it is not designed for just one application, but as a general infrastructure on which new applications could run, as, for example, the World Wide Web. It is the general purpose nature of the service provided by TCP/ IP that makes this possible.

Widespread development of Local Area Networks (LANS), PCs and workstations beginning in the 1980s allowed the Internet to flourish. The growth has been astounding:

Date Number of Hosts*

Dec, 1969: 4

Dec, 1979: 188

July, 1989: 130,000

July, 1994: 3,212,000

July, 1999: 56,218,000

July, 2004: 285,139,107

July, 2006: 439,286,364

*Hosts = a computer system with a registered ip address

Source: Hobbes’ Internet Timeline, v8.2, http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

With the communication infrastructure of the internet in place, and the application of the World Wide Web and search technology such as Google putting the power of the internet into the hands of ordinary people, our world became different. The changes brought us into a new era in advertising, too.

Oh, what timing. Here it is, the end of 2006, and a new year is about to begin, too. As 2007 begins, we will quickly wrap up our historical review and begin to discuss this new era. We’ll examine how the old merges with the new. No longer reviewing history, we will collectively take our place to participate in the writing of it. It’s an exciting time to be in advertising, don’t you think?

Welcome to….the People era.

Have a safe and happy New Year everyone!

(to be continued….)

Sources and additional reading:

Barry M. Leiner, Vinton G. Cerf, et al, “A Brief History of the Intenet”, Internet Society, http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml

Hobbes’ Internet Timeline, v8.2, http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

Walter Howe, “A Brief History of the Internet”, http://www.walthowe.com/navnet/history.html

Wikipedia, “History of the Internet”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

The Twilight Zone

2006-12-04T20:20:00.000-05:00

(continued from Media Fragmentation – First Crack, see 11/27/06 below)

We’ve been discussing a period of time I call The Creative Era, from 1904 leading up to about 1994. (As we get closer to the present, it gets harder to say when one period ends and another begins; we lack the distance of time for a truer perspective.)

Within The Creative Era, we’ve also talked about a period I call The Air Raid, from 1922-1975. This is a period that saw the birth and growth of broadcast media. Television especially helped fuel The Creative Era as the new technology proved a cultural phenomenon that quickly captivated the population as a whole.

Indeed, the period after World War II was the “perfect storm” for marketers. There was pent-up consumer demand, and there were wonderful, new creative advertising possibilities provided by television, along with tv’s huge audience numbers (and fewer means for commercial avoidance). Imagine the ROI then!

The sun began to set on broadcasters, however, in a period of time I call The Twilight Zone, from 1975 – 1994. This was a period in which cable and satellite grew and encroached on the broadcasters’ domain. The end result is the media fragmentation that continues today. (Of course, a similar proliferation of media occurred in other media types too, especially magazines and outdoor.)

As early as 1948, several cable tv pioneers set up transmission systems to relay broadcast television signals to homes that could not receive off-air signals.

One was John Walson, who pioneered a CATV system in Mahoney City, Pa., in June, 1948. Walson worked for Pennsylvania Power & Light (PP&L) and ran an appliance store. Residents of Mahoney City could not receive the Philadelphia stations off-air, and Walson had to drive prospective buyers to the top of a nearby mountain to demonstrate his tv sets. Tired of the trek and, by one newspaper account, embarrassed about taking women, on occasion, to the top of the mountain at night, Walson decided to bring the signal down from the mountain into town. He erected a pole and strung twin lead wire to his warehouse at the foot of the mountain. From there a line was strung on PP&L poles to his appliance store where he demonstrated the virtues of television. Along the way he "wired" eight homes for television. In 1950, PP&L gave Walson written permission to use its polls to string cable in town.

As cable operators set out to bring television to U.S. homes that by and large could not receive over-the-air signals, the mom-and-pop operations gradually gave way to corporations. The largest was Teleprompter, which became synonymous with cable in the 1960's. It was founded by Irving Kahn in 1951, who also developed the device for which the company was named.

In the 1970s, satellite technology opened the door to further expansion opportunities for cable. The period I call The Twilight Zone began on September 30, 1975. On that night, with its telecast of the Ali-Frazier fight via satellite, Time Inc.'s three year old HBO instantly transformed itself from a regional to national network and, by its example, launched cable from a retransmitter of broadcast signals into a provider of alternative programming services. The HBO-satellite mixture touched off a cable programming explosion. Any programmer could become a national network overnight. To reach the same cable systems as HBO, cable programmers had only to lease time on the same satellite, RCA Americom's Satcom I.

After reading about HBO's satellite plans, 38-year-old independent broadcaster and America's Cup defender Ted Turner decided he wanted to put his tv station WTCG Atlanta (now WTBS) on a satellite and turn it into a superstation - that is, a broadcast signal available to every cable system in the country. He would not receive direct revenues from cable systems that picked it up, but he would sell the national audience to advertisers.

Beginning in the late 70s and continuing to the present, cable networks proliferated. In 1978, Viacom began nationwide satellite distribution of Showtime, and WGN-TV Chicago followed Turner's model as a superstation, followed soon after by WOR-TV. Since then, network launches continued unabated and even accelerated in the 90s:

1979: CSPAN, ESPN, Galavision, Nickelodeon, USA, and WGN superstation

1980: BET, BRAVO, CNN, USA

1981: MTV

1982: CNN Headline News, Weather Channel

1983: CMT – Country Music Television, Spike TV (formerly TNN)

1984: A&E, AMC, Hallmark, Lifetime

1985: CNN International, Discovery, Nick-at-Nite, VH-1

1986: RSN

1987: Travel Channel

1988: TNT

1989: CNBC

1990: E!, INSP-Inspiration Network

1991: Comedy Central, Court TV, TLC (formerly The Learning Channel)

1992: Cartoon Network, Sci-Fi Channel

1993: ESPN2, Food Network

1994: Bloomberg TV, DIY: Do It Yourself Network, Fox Sports (relaunched 2005), Fuse, FX, GSN (formerly Game Show Network, relaunched 2004), HGTV, The Outdoor Channel

1995: GAC: Great American Country, History Channel, Golf Channel, Versus (formerly OLN)

1996: Animal Planet, BETJ, Discovery Home, Discovery Kids, Discovery Science, Discovery Times, ESPNEWS, Fox News Channel, Fox Sports en Espanol, Military Channel, MSNBC, The Science Channel, TV Land

1997: Casa Club TV, CNN en Espanol, ESPN Classic

1998: BBC America, Discovery Health Channel, History International, Lifetime Movie Channel, MTV2, Style Network, The Biography Channel, Toon Disney

1999: Black Family Channel, Noggin, Turner South, TV Guide Channel (formerly Prevue), Weatherscan

2000: The Oxygen Network

2001: Adult Swim, Colours TV, Lifetime Real Women, mun2, National Geographic Channel, SOAP Net, WE: Women’s Entertainment

2002: Discovery HD Theater, Fine Living, G4, Speed,

2003: Go!TV, The Tennis Channel

2004: Fit TV (The Health Network), Si TV, TV One, Universal HD

2005: AZN (formerly The International Channel), Fox Reality, Hallmark Movie Channel, Horse TV Channel, Logo, PBS KIDS Sprout, The Africa Channel

2006: Sleuth

Today, the share of cable tv viewing exceeds the share of broadcast viewing. Average network Primetime ratings now are about the level of Daytime ratings of the 1970s. More importantly, we don’t watch tv today the way we used to. Half of viewers today turn on their televisions without a specific destination in mind. Almost a quarter of viewers simply flip channels, while only 9% “just knew what was on”, according to a study by the Cable Ad Bureau and Knowledge Networks.

At the same time, viewers have more tools to help them avoid commercials. Perhaps the greatest of these is the remote control, which has been around for decades. Then came VCRs. Now we have Tivo and other DVRs, and video on-demand. The problem of consumers “zipping” through commercials or “zapping” them out is not new, it’s just more pervasive now.

Additionally, the clutter of non-program time has increased. And tv cpms have grown faster than the rate of inflation for many years. To stretch their dollars ever further, advertisers have gone from :60s to :30s to :15s to product placements. Levels of “effective reach” have gone from 3+ to 1+ to not-even-measured in some cases.

Is it any wonder advertisers throw up their hands in frustration? Television, although still very important – still the most dominant media for national advertisers by any reasonable measure – has lost a lot of power. TV advertising used to be a sure thing. It’s not anymore.

Along with the waning power of television has come the end of The Creative Era, and a new era has begun.

(to be continued….)

Sources and additional reading:

Ed Papazian, Medium Rare: The Evolution, Workings and Impact of Commercial Television, Media Dynamics, 1989

Cable Advertising Bureau and SRI/Knowledge Networks, “How People Use Television”, 5/2004, http://www.onetvworld.org/main/cab/whyCable/whyNationalCable/index.shtml

Cable Advertising Bureau, “Cable Networks Launch Dates”, http://www.onetvworld.org/main/cab/cablenetworks/NetworkLaunchDates/index.shtml

Media Fragmentation - First Crack

2006-11-27T17:47:00.000-05:00

One of the great challenges facing media planners today is media fragmentation; the ongoing proliferation of more and more media vehicles which results in carving up the audiences for them into smaller and smaller numbers. We live in a fragmented media world. For young planners in their 20’s, it may be difficult to truly understand what that fragmentation means. The media environment was already fragmented when they came into the business.

But that wasn’t always the case. Network tv ratings were very high in the early days of television. (Recall that Red Buttons was forced off the air because he got *only* a 40 rating compared to the 60 rating received by I Love Lucy, the show that preceded his.)

Within a few years after the introduction and explosive growth of television to the viewing public, the networks established a dominant position in the production and distribution of tv programs. Initially, individual sponsors funded most of the tv programs which consisted of inexpensive live variety, talk, quiz shows, and sitcoms. But as the public became tired of this fare, the networks turned to Hollywood to spice up the programming. The movie moguls decided to work with television rather than fight it, and in 1955 the first Hollywood-produced filmed Westerns aired on national tv.

The switch to filmed programs and the adoption of one-hour dramatic formats completely altered the relationship between advertisers and the networks. Filmed action-adventure productions required an expertise that only the Hollywood moviemakers seemed to possess. The new 60-minute dramas were vastly more expensive than the comedy, variety and quiz formats advertisers had bankrolled previously, and, as a rule, their producers insisted on firm commitments for a full season's supply of episodes. Such an investment was too big for most single sponsors. Figures for NBC were fairly typical of the total network experience. So, for example, during the 1955-56 season, 40% of NBC's regular primetime entries consisted of programs developed independently by advertisers and their agencies in conjunction with producers, packagers and agents. The remainder were split almost evenly between shows the network itself produced (28%) and programs it purchased from outside suppliers (32%). By the 1961-62 season, these ratios had changed completely. At this point, NBC obtained 68% of its regular series fare by dealing directly with studios, packagers and agents. As before, the network generated a sizable amount of its own programming (25%), but sponsor-supplied shows now filled only 7% of its schedule - down from 40% only six years earlier.

The networks, in fact, ended up wielding so much control over program development and distribution, both in domestic and foreign markets, and in syndication, that the FCC stepped in to reduce the networks’ monopoly position. In 1970, the FCC issued what came to be known as the “Prime Time Access Rule” which reduced the hold the networks had over program suppliers by banning the networks from involvement in the production of primetime entertainment shows and the acquisition of subsidiary rights in any program produced by independent suppliers for national television exposure. The amount of time the networks could program in the evening (i.e. Primetime) was also reduced from 3.5 hours to 3 hours.

As a result, Syndicators filled the new half-hour Prime Access daypart with a host of first-run game shows while independent stations reaped rating bonanzas with reruns of recent off-network fare.

This was only the beginning of an assault on the dominance of the networks. A bigger challenge would come soon from cable and satellite tv.

(to be continued….)

Sources and additional reading:

Ed Papazian, Medium Rare: The Evolution, Workings and Impact of Commercial Television, Media Dynamics, 1989

Renaissance Man

2006-11-07T20:01:00.000-05:00

(continued from Think Small, see 9/7/06 below)

Now, let’s see, where were we? Ah, yes….we were discussing the Creative era, and a few of the giants of that period. One of the truly great leaders was David Ogilvy.

I think of David Ogilvy as a modern Renaissance man. He was an adventurous, confident, self-starter with many talents, skills and interests who managed to bring together both the art and science of advertising like no one else.

David Ogilvy was born in the small town of West Horsley, England, on June 23, 1911 (sharing the same birthday as both his father and grandfather!) His father was a classics scholar and financial broker. The family suffered financially when England went to war with Germany, and they were forced to move to London where David grew up in the home of his grandmother. At the age of 20, Ogilvy dropped out of college and went to Paris where he apprenticed as a chef for a year. He decided against this as a career, however, and returned to England and sold cooking stoves door-to-door. He was very successful at it, and his employer asked him to write an instruction manual for the other salesmen. (Thirty years later, Fortune magazine reviewed it and called it one of the best sales manuals ever written.) His older brother, Francis, who was working at the ad agency of Mather & Crowther, showed the manual to agency management. The agency offered Ogilvy a position immediately as an account executive, where he stayed for three years.

Restless for adventure again, Ogilvy left England and came to America in 1938, and in 1939 began to work with the Gallup organization. After three years with Gallup, with World War II raging in Europe, he was invited to join British Intelligence. There he was put in charge of collecting economic data from agents in Latin America. “Our primary function was to ruin businessmen whom we knew to be working against the Allies, and to prevent Hitler from laying his hands on strategic materials,” he reported.

On his next adventure, Ogilvy spotted the Pennsylvania Amish land from the window of a train. Within weeks, he returned with his wife to learn more about the people and the land. Several years later, he purchased a home there and tried his hand at farming. After three years, and recognizing he could never earn a living as a farmer, Ogilvy gave it up and went to New York with a new idea. Why not start an advertising agency?

Ogilvy was 38 years old. He had no credentials, no clients, and only $6,000 in the bank. Yet, with the help of his brother Francis, he convinced his former employer, the London agency Mather & Crowther, to invest in the new firm. He also received an investment from S.H. Benson Ltd. Ogilvy hired Anderson Hewitt from J. Walter Thompson to serve as the President of the firm. He himself took the title of Senior Vice President of Research and handled all the creative work for the new firm. Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather (Crowther had retired) launched in 1948 with no clients and a staff of two. From these humble beginnings, David Ogilvy built one of the most successful advertising agencies in the world.

Ogilvy attributed at least part of his success to his skill as a direct marketer. “For all their research, most advertisers never know for sure whether their advertisements sell. Too many other factors cloud the equation. But direct response advertisers, who solicit orders by mail or telephone, know to a dollar how much each advertisement sells. So watch the kind of advertising they do….I am convinced that if all advertisers were to follow the example of their direct response brethren, they would get more sales per dollar” he said. Ogilvy elaborates further on this in a speech he once gave to the advertising community in Paris:

There is a yawning chasm between you generalists and we directs. We directs belong to a different world. Your gods are not our gods.

You generalists pride yourselves on being creative, whatever that awful word means. You cultivate the mystique of creativity. Some of you are pretentious poseurs. You are the glamour boys and girls of the advertising community. You regard advertising as an art form and expect your clients to finance expressions of your genius. We directs do not regard advertising as an art form. Our clients don’t give a damn whether we win awards at Cannes. They pay us to sell their products. Nothing else.

You must be the most seductive salesmen in the world if you can persuade hard headed clients to pay for your kind of advertising. When sales go up, you claim credit for it. When sales go down, you blame the product. We in direct response know exactly to the penny how many products we sell with each of our advertisements. Your favourite music is the applause of your fellow art directors and copywriters. Our favourite music is the ring of the cash register.

You generalists use short copy. We use long copy. Experience has taught us that short copy doesn’t sell. In our headlines, we promise the consumer a benefit. You generalists don’t think it is creative.

You have never had to live with the discipline of knowing the results of your advertising. We pack our advertisements and letters with information about the product. We have found out we have to if we want to sell anything.

Ogilvy retired happily to a castle in the south of France where he passed his time gardening, bicycling, and keeping correspondence with his offices around the world. He died at the age of 88 on July 21, 1999.

I think, if Ogilvy were alive today, he would be pleased about the renewed attention to ROI that advertisers have these days. He was, if nothing else, a man who was focused on results. Yet Ogilvy would have some words of caution worth heeding.

He would have a more humble perspective of advertising than many seem to have today. He would not view the role of advertising as creating “buzz”. He would view advertising more as a component or ingredient of a product.

I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea. I am supposed to be one of the more fertile inventors of big ideas, but in my long career as a copywriter I have not had more than 20, if that.

I have come to regard advertising as part of the product, to be treated as a production cost, not a selling cost.

A problem which confronts agencies is that so many products are no different from their competitors….When faced with selling “parity” products, all you can hope to do is explain their virtues more persuasively than your competitors, and to differentiate them by the style of your advertising. This is the “added value” which advertising contributes.

And he would offer some timeless advice about what makes great advertising…

Advertising which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell, yet the majority of campaigns contain no promises whatever.

When I advertised Rolls-Royce, I gave the facts – no hot air, no adjectives. Later, my partner Hank Bernhard used equally factual advertising for Mercedes. In every case sales went up dramatically – on peppercorn budgets.

I have written factual advertising for a bank, for gasoline, for a stockbroker, margarine, foreign travel, and many other products. It always sell better than empty advertising.

The majority of campaigns fail to give consumers enough information.

And how to measure it….

My most valuable source of information is the factor analyses I commission at regular intervals from Mapes & Ross. They measure changes in brand preference. People who register a change in brand preference after seeing a commercial subsequently buy the product three times more than people who don’t.

Research organizations also measure the recall of commercials, and this method finds favor with many advertisers. But some kinds of television commercials which get high recall scores get low scores on changing brand preference, and there appears to be no correlation between recall and purchasing.

As we continue to explore the past as prelude to the future, and to better understand the rapid changes occurring in the present, it pays to remember an old saying: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Sources and additional reading:

Danny Nathan, “David Ogilvy”, The Center for Interactive Advertising

http://www.ciadvertising.org/SA/fall_02/adv382j/dnathan/Project2/sitehtml.htm

David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, Vintage Books, Div. of Random House, New York, 1985

David Ogilvy – Biography, Ogilvy & Mather, 2000.

Rules of Engagement

2006-10-04T08:44:00.000-05:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program for this important message….

Last week, Advertising Week, there was a panel discussion hosted by Mediapost on the topic of Engagement. This has been a hot topic over the past few years, and now I feel compelled to weigh in on the subject. So, excuse me while I disengage from our ongoing review of the evolution of advertising, with the purpose of bringing historical perspective to the rapid changes occurring in our times, to address this important issue.

(Due to space limitations, this post is a condensed version of the point-of-view which came attached with the email announcement you received. If, for any reason, you did not receive the attachment, please feel welcome to email me and request another copy.)

What is Engagement? Joe Plummer, Chief Research Officer of the Advertising Research Foundation, put forward the ARF’s “working definition” of Engagement as follows: to turn on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.

Erwin Ephron, media consultant, criticizes this definition as having no operational construct from which to base rational decisions. “We have a traditional advertising model,” he states, “which says media attract audience which is delivered to advertising. In this model there is media engagement, which is people attracted by media, and there is advertising engagement, which is people effected by advertising. These are two different kinds of engagement, and we have many useful measures for each. There is no reason to throw those measurements away until we find something that is more useful. And that’s what we seem to be doing.”

There are qualitative differences in the advertising environment of every media vehicle and type. Media planners use various measures to help understand these qualitative distinctions among competing media vehicles. In print, the quality of the advertising environment might be inferred by looking at measures such as the percentage of relevant editorial, or time spent reading, or the degree to which readers clip articles or information, or to what extent readers describe a publication as “one of my favorites”, or one or more of many other such measures.

From a media planning perspective, when we talk about Engagement we’re talking about these kinds of qualitative considerations. Engagement is about how the quality of the environment in which the advertising is exposed enhances or detracts from the communication of the advertising message. When media sellers talk about how their readers/viewers are engaged, they are talking about the magnitude of interest and involvement their audience has with the media and the advertising. In this respect, Engagement is the new word for an old concept. It’s about how people relate to their media of choice.

If a single Engagement metric is ever devised, designed to be used as a measure of qualitative differences among media vehicles, I believe it will fail. Beginning in the 1980s, a number of agencies experimented with just such a metric, called “Media Values”.

The concept of Media Values was based on the observed fact that “a grp is not a grp”. Qualitative differences among television dayparts, and across media types, strongly suggest that an exposure in one media vehicle has a different communication value than an exposure in another vehicle. The practical application of this concept was to arrive at a Media Value for each vehicle and apply it to the impressions delivery to come up with an adjusted, value-weighted media delivery. So, for example, a Prime :30 would have a Media Value index of 100, whereas a Daytime :30 might be assigned a media value of 50. Where did these media values come from? They were assigned arbitrarily based on judgmental considerations of qualitative factors, such as amount of clutter, measured attentiveness levels, and other factors. The value-weighted impressions resulted, of course, in value-weighted cpms both for individual media vehicles and total media plans. Thus, in theory, you could now compare a media plan that was more efficient but used media that were deemed to have lower quality communication value against a media plan that was less efficient but used media with higher quality communication values.

The purpose of Media Values was to be able to quantify our qualitative judgments. However, the experiment with Media Values was a failure. Rather than illuminate the differences among media plan options, Media Values tended to wash the differences away so that plans appeared minimally different from one another. Furthermore, estimating media audiences is a rough science at best. Our audience estimates do not carry the kind of precision that enable to us to put too fine a point on their accuracy, so it is wrong to base decisions on minimal differences between them. And value-weighted audience estimates are certainly even less precise.

Additionally, averages can be misleading. Media Values based on “averages” of attention levels across broad demographic groups and product users may hide the true nature of communication values for specific target segments and product users. What may be true for a daypart, for example, may not be true for specific programs within the daypart.

Finally, Media Values do not reflect the synergy of combinations of media. Studies show that the combination of media is generally more effective than any one media by itself, but Media Values have no way of reflecting this dynamic.

I fear we are heading down the same path with the concept of Engagement as we did with the concept of Media Values. And if that’s the case, I suspect it will meet with the same fatal result.

Instead, I would rather see greater attention paid to the more fundamental exercise of counting audiences. Nielsen has been measuring tv audiences for over 50 years, and we are only now beginning to get a glimpse at commercial ratings. As media fragmentation continues to erode audiences for all media, and technology enables viewers to shift time and place of viewing, our audience estimates are becoming more and more susceptible to error. How can we ever feel confident about a more abstract magnitude of qualitative factors that influence our media choices if we can’t even feel confident about a discrete, countable audience size? There is much room for improvement in our basic measures of audiences for all media.

Also, taking a page from the online world, we don’t have to select media simply on the basis of demographic target segments. There are many ways to select target segments, including by behavior. As behavioral and contextual targeting have proved very successful with online advertising, perhaps they should be applied more often to offline media as well.

We can also consider the monetary value of people we reach who are not in our selected target audience. Instead, we treat them as if they don’t exist and have no value at all when in fact they most certainly contribute to the bottom line.

Finally, we need to provide media planners with better feedback on how their media plans perform. Too often, planners never learn the detailed results and analysis of sales (and margins) as they are impacted by advertising, promotion, distribution, and other factors. How can planners learn and adjust their plans appropriately without such feedback?

Another View of Engagement

Why is Engagement an important issue now? Advertisers, planners, and researchers continually try to better understand how advertising works, and try to develop models or theoretical constructs to guide our decision-making. We have learned from our collective experiences, and our understanding of the forces of advertising continues to evolve.

Looking back in history, Albert Lasker, called the Father of Modern Advertising, was driven to understand the nature of advertising. He asked his contemporaries of the early 1900s, “What is advertising?” They said it was “keeping your name in front of the public”. Lasker was not satisfied with this answer. He looked at what other successful agencies were doing. He saw one agency wrote advertising as if it were news about a product. Lasker thought, that’s it, advertising must be news. But one day in the Spring of 1904, a man by the name of John E. Kennedy came and sent him a note. The note said, “I am downstairs in the saloon, and I can tell you what advertising is. I know you don’t know. It will mean much to me to have you know what it is and it will mean much to you. If you want to know what advertising is, send the word “yes” down by the bell boy.”

What Kennedy said to Lasker that day was that advertising was “salesmanship in print”. It’s been said there has never been a better definition of advertising. Yet here it is, more than a hundred years since that fateful meeting when the ad industry discarded the old definition of advertising as “keeping your name before the public” and adopted the notion that advertising was “salesmanship”. And what do we see growing in popularity? Product placement. What are the hot topics of the day? Consumer-generated media, word-of-mouth, and viral campaigns. Is that salesmanship?

As marketing communications moves from a monologue directed at the masses to a dialogue with individuals, is it time to revisit our definition of advertising? As technology enables us to go from talking at prospects to engaging in conversation with them, is our old definition in need of revision?

Is the definition of Engagement really about a new definition of advertising (or, more broadly, of marketing communications)? Is advertising, or marketing communications, now about “turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context?”

Keep reading our Smarter Ideas posts. As we continue to review the historical evolution of advertising, we will soon come to current times and will talk about the new era we are in. And we will address Lasker’s question anew. What have we learned in the last 165 years of the advertising industry? What remains the same, and what is different? What is Advertising in the 21^st century?

We will now return you to our regularly scheduled program….

Sources and additional reading:

Kenneth H. Myers, Jr., SRDS The National Authority Serving the Media-Buying Function, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1968.

Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1984

Mediapost, Media Daily News, 9/29/06, Video Coverage of Forecast 2007

Think Small

2006-09-07T09:54:00.000-05:00

(continued from The Marlboro Man, see 8/15 below)

Bill Bernbach, a Jewish kid from the Bronx, graduated with a B.A. in English at NYU and then jumped at the chance to work for Schenley Industries as a mail clerk making $16 a week. He spent his free time creating concepts for Schenley advertising (which was not part of his job) and sent one to the distillery’s ad agency, Lord & Thomas. Bernbach was later surprised to open a newspaper and find his concept fully executed in a Schenley ad. He subsequently managed to retrieve the evidence of his idea by romancing a female file clerk at Lord & Thomas, and was moved from the mail room to the marketing and advertising department. There, Bernbach was noticed by Grover Whalen, the Chairman of the Board. For the next two years, Bernbach served as Whalen’s head speech writer, and eventually went with him to work for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. And thus began the career of one of the most admired copywriters of all time.

How ironic it is that this nice Jewish boy -- who built his reputation at Jewish-owned Grey advertising, working on the Orbach’s department store business, then at Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB), the agency he co-founded with Mac Dane (also Jewish) and Ned Doyle (Irish) in 1949, on accounts such as Levy’s bread (“You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s”), and El Al Airlines – how ironic it is that he achieved his company’s greatest fame from a campaign for Volkswagon, a car developed by the Nazis! Life is just too strange. You can’t make this stuff up.

As early as 1947, Bill Bernbach realized that his love affair with advertising would center around the development and execution of creative ideas. While at Grey, he felt stifled by Grey's increasingly research-dictated campaigns. In a famous letter to Grey management he wrote, “I'm worried...that we're going to worship techniques instead of substance...I don't want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, good writing can be good selling.”

Bernbach’s entry into the advertising world came at a time when the industry was turning away from big agencies, full-service operations and scientific research in favor of smallness, creative focus and artful intuition. While previous advertising practitioners wrote largely to the mind, Bernbach and his contemporaries introduced personal expression into their advertising. Bill Bernbach, Leo Burnett, and David Ogilvy are largely responsible for ushering in a period during the 1950's and 1960's that came to be known as the Creative Revolution.

While this movement was characterized by an anti-research sentiment, Bernbach did not simply discard the importance of understanding the consumer. He believed that the act of making ads drew more on gifts of intuition and inspiration than on quantitative research. “I consider research the major culprit in the advertising picture. It has done more to perpetuate creative mediocrity than any other factor,” he once said.

Bernbach believed that ads should convey an impression of honesty, using everyday language to communicate simple messages.

The 1950's was a decade of vast prosperity and the automobile came to symbolize the fantasies of Americans. Auto ads during this period tended to feature the beauty and engineering strength of the vehicle. Unfortunately, Volkswagen was known neither for its looks nor its technology. It was this challenge that DDB faced when the auto maker brought their advertising to them in 1959. Rather than joining the rest of the auto industry, Bernbach decided to beat them by creating ads based upon the same principles that drew people to Volkswagens in the first place: simplicity, honesty, uniqueness and humor.

It can be argued that Volkswagon was already on an upward curve when DDB took on the account. Volkswagon was what Seth Godin would today call a “purple cow”. Introduced in 1949, it had many years of good press behind it and by 1959 was already the number one import. But DDB’s “Think Small” campaign, among others, took that curve and knocked it out of the park for a home run.

Along with David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett and George Gribbin, Bernbach was one of the first inductees to the Copywriters Hall of Fame in 1961.

Here are a few selections of his words of wisdom:

“Advertising isn't a science, it's persuasion. And persuasion is an art.”

“There is no such thing as a good or a bad ad in isolation. What is good at one moment is bad at another. Research can trap you into the past.”

“Logic and over-analysis can immobilize and sterilize an idea. It's like love -- the more you analyze it, the faster it disappears.”

“It’s not just what you say that stirs people, it’s the way that you say it.”

“To succeed, an ad (or a persona or product, for that matter) must establish it's own unique personality, or it will never be noticed.”

“A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.”

“Playing it safe can be the most dangerous thing in the world, because you’re presenting people with an idea they’ve seen before, and you won’t have impact.”

“It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator’s skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.”

“It took millions of years for man’s instincts to develop. It will take millions more for them to even vary. It is fashionable to talk about a changing man. A communicator must be concerned with obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of his own.”

“Word of mouth is the best medium of all.”

“The purpose of advertising is to sell. That is what the client is paying for and if that goal does not permeate every idea you get, every word you write, every picture you take, you are a phony and you ought to get out of the business.”

“Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise...not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.”

“Dullness won’t sell your product, but neither will irrelevant brilliance.”

“You cannot sell a man who isn’t listening.”

“Getting a product known isn’t the answer. Getting it wanted is the answer. Some of the best known product names have failed.”

“Most readers come away from their reading not with a clear, precise, detailed registration of its contents on their minds, but rather with a vague, misty idea which was formed as much by the pace, the proportions, the music of the writings as by the literal words themselves.”

“Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.”

(to be continued…)

Sources and additional reading:

Shannon Weirtz, A Life In Advertising, The University of Texas at Austin, October 1998

http://www.ciadvertising.org/studies/student/98_fall/theory/weirtz/william.htm

DDB Worldwide Communications Group, Bill Bernbach Said…, 2002

Al Ries and Laura Ries, First do some great publicity: Building a brand takes more than a big burst of advertising dollars, Advertising Age, 2/8/99.

The Marlboro Man

2006-08-15T10:08:00.000-05:00

(continued from And Now a Word from Our Sponsor, see 8/10 below)

Of all the thousands upon thousands of ad campaigns produced during the Creative Era, a period in time from 1904 leading up to the present, perhaps the most remarkable was the campaign created by Leo Burnett for Philip Morris: The Marlboro Man.

The Marlboro Man demonstrated the awesome power of advertising like no other ad campaign before it or since. Leo Burnett’s campaign took a brand of cigarette that had languished for years, repositioned it, changed the image of the brand through its advertising, and drove it to become the most valuable brand in the world.

Philip Morris introduced Marlboro – which was named after the street where its London factory was located – to the U.S. in 1924 as a women’s cigarette, based on the slogan “Mild as May.” During World War II, the brand faltered and was taken off the market.

In 1942, Reader's Digest published an article which claimed that all cigarettes, regardless of brand, were essentially the same, and equally deadly. Also, in 1957, Reader's Digest published another article that linked smoking with lung cancer. Philip Morris had seen its chance to reintroduce Marlboro and market it as the “safer” filtered brand. Unfortunately for Marlboro, formerly regarded as “Mild as May,” the new filters were considered an extension of its previous feminine image. Phillip Morris had to completely revise its advertising strategy in order to attract a new target market with a new concern: addicted male smokers who were afraid of acquiring lung cancer.

In 1954, Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett created the first Marlboro Man, and Marlboro was reintroduced to the nation in 1955 with the Tattooed Man campaign. At the time, Marlboro had one quarter of 1% share of the American market.

After its introduction in 1955, Marlboro became the top selling filtered cigarette in New York. Eight months after the campaign opened -- it was a newspaper campaign -- sales had increased 5,000 percent.

The early campaign showed a variety of Marlboro men. The Marlboro Man could be a Navy Officer, a Flyer, or a Cowboy, and he had a tattooed wrist which, Esquire reported in 1960, “suggested a romantic past, a man who had once worked with his hands, who knew the score, who merited respect.” In the first years of the ad campaign, public responses to the different Marlboro Man personalities were monitored. The cowboy emerged as the most popular character. By 1963, the tattooed sailors and other characters were retired, and the cowboy became the sole representative of the Marlboro Man. In 1964, the Marlboro Country campaign was launched: “Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country.” Marlboro sales began growing at 10% per year. In 1971, cigarette ads were banned from tv, yet even that didn’t unsaddle the Marlboro Man, and in 1972 Marlboro became the best-selling cigarette in the world. (Winston was the best-selling cigarette in the U.S., but Marlboro overtook Winston in 1975 in the U.S., too.)

By 1992, Financial World ranked Marlboro the world's No. 1 most valuable brand, with a market worth of over $31 billion. In 1995, Marlboro peaked at a 29% share of the U.S. market.

Success on a level achieved by the Marlboro Man remains the Holy Grail in advertising. Yet the Marlboro Man belongs to an Era whose time has past. He now rides off slowly into the sunset.

(to be continued….)

Sources and additional reading:

Shumon Sharif, Advertising Marlboro, Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Cigarette Consumption,
http://www.courses.rochester.edu/foster/ANT226/Spring01/history.html

Adage.com, “The Advertising Century”, http://www.adage.com/century/icon01.html

And Now a Word from Our Sponsor....

2006-08-10T19:55:00.000-05:00

(continued from What’s Up, Doc?, see 8/8 below)

For those who have just joined us, we’ve been discussing the history of the advertising business in order to gain a historical perspective that will help us better understand the significant changes that are taking place in advertising today. Let’s pause a moment for a brief recap:

We discussed the “Media Era”, a period from 1841-1903 which saw the birth of the advertising industry from its roots as a media buying business (see posts dated 5/19, 5/24).

Then we talked about the start of the “Creative Era”, when the advertising industry quickly turned its attention from media buying to creative and defined advertising as “salesmanship in print” (see posts dated 6/5, 6/15).

We covered the “Space Age”, from 1841-1921, a period in time when the basic institutions, policies, procedures, and practices of the advertising business were formed. The Space Age is so-named because it was a time in the ad business when space-based (i.e. print) media -- newspapers, magazines, outdoor -- were the exclusive media of the day (see post 6/26)

More recently, we’ve been discussing a period I call the “Air Raid”, from 1922-1975, which saw the introduction and growth of new media -- radio and television -- which brought a whole new dimension to advertising, a dimension of Time (see posts dated 6/29, 7/7, 7/19, 8/2, and 8/8).

The period leading up to World War II saw some important changes in the practice of marketing and media. It became more scientific. Advertising practitioners wanted to understand what made advertising work. In the world at large, this was a period in time that brought forward men like Albert Einstein, who changed people's perspective of space and time with his new theories about our physical world, and Sigmund Freud who revealed astounding insights into the workings of the mind. It was a time of introspection and learning.

It was a time when business practices changed, too. Maybe it was the curiosity of the times, or maybe it was the necessities of war that brought about the change in the way business was conducted. The wartime crash program of weapons research and development; the planning necessitated by the large-scale mobilization of resources; the acute problems connected with the allocation of scarce facilities, manpower, and materials in both the military establishment and in industry; the broadened use of sampling procedures and operations research techniques -- all these were steps toward a more rational, more orderly, and better informed process of decision-making in all phases of economic activity.

The Space Age ended at about the time Claude Hopkins published his famous book, Scientific Advertising, wherein Hopkins argued that advertising had reached that status of a science. “It is based on fixed principles,” he said, “and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analyzed until they are well understood. The correct method of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic law.”

Marketing skills and the media planning and buying side of the advertising business continued to develop along these more “scientific” lines. Marketing and Media research became more sophisticated. In larger advertising agencies, media planning developed as a separate function from media buying, at least for broadcast media.

Ironically, however, many copywriters and art directors rejected the so-called “science” of advertising, and the Great Debate began. Was advertising Science or Art?

And now a word from our sponsor…This history is brought to you by Smarter Media. We remind you that you can get better results from advertising through smarter media placement. For more information, please contact Rich Miller at rich.miller@smartermedia.net.

We’ll turn back now to the creative part of the Creative Era.

(to be continued….)

Sources and additional reading:

Kenneth H. Myers Jr., SRDS, The National Authority Serving the Media-Buying Function, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1968

Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1984

What's Up, Doc?

2006-08-08T21:32:00.000-05:00

(continued from Marketing 101, see 8/2 below)

Neil McElroy's formula for P&G's success was find out what the consumers want and give it to them. Proctor & Gamble went to extreme lengths to do both. It hired hundreds of women to bake, wash dishes, and do laundry in their own homes, and then report the results. This kind of market research became the hallmark of P&G's approach to the development of new products and the continuous effort to improve existing ones.

For many years, the leader of the market-research effort was D. Paul "Doc" Smelser, a small, feisty, serious man who often came to work dressed in sporty suits and ties. The cerebral Smelser had earned a Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins (hence the nickname "Doc"). He started at P&G in a new unit that had been organized in 1923 for the purpose of analyzing the markets for cottonseed oil and other commodities. Doc was fond of walking up to senior executives and asking them, out of the blue, questions such as "What percentage of Ivory soap is used for face and hands and what percentage for dishwashing?" Often nobody knew the answer. Thus Smelser was able to conclude that P&G, as a company, remained ignorant of some basic elements of how its products were being used, and therefore how they should be marketed.

Doc Smelser's embarrassing questions raised big issues, and the company responded quickly. In 1925 it created a formal Market Research Department and put Doc himself in charge of it. For the next 34 years, until his retirement in 1959, Doc built this group into perhaps the most sophisticated unit of its kind in the world. He and his staff of researchers (ultimately several hundred strong) asked a variety of audiences a series of detailed questions. In tabulating the answers, they discovered almost everything that could be learned about how the company's products and competing items were being used, how they might be used, and what consumers liked or disliked about them. Doc was especially well informed about the reach of advertising media. He liked to surprise managers of radio stations by giving them precise statistics about the size of their audience, statistics they themselves did not possess.

One of Doc's best-known innovations was Procter & Gamble's corps of door-to-door interviewers. This group consisted mostly of young women who had graduated from college and therefore possessed "the maturity to travel alone," as one of their supervisors put it. A criterion for the successful applicant was that she be attractive but not inordinately so. Doc wanted members of his force to project a wholesome and nonthreatening image, so as to inspire confidence and elicit candid answers.

Doc's interviewers infiltrated neighborhoods all over the country, going from house to house armed with an imposing array of questions: about laundry, cooking, dishwashing, and every other activity for which P&G marketed a product or was thinking of introducing one. Female interviewers were instructed to wear a conservative dress, high heels, gloves, and a hat. As they knocked on doors and talked with consumers, they were to carry no lists, forms, or writing materials. The visits could then seem more casual, even though all conversations were designed to extract copious and specific data. Interviewers were expected to have total recall, and often would hurry back to their cars to record what they had learned.

In the 1960s, the company began to phase out this group. Cheap long-distance telephone rates had made it possible to conduct mass surveys more cost efficiently. By the 1970s, Market Research at P&G was doing about a million and a half telephone or mail-in interviews each year. When the company became a heavy television advertiser, it instituted its "DAR" (Day after Recall) method for measuring the impact and memorability of TV commercials. With the help of its many advertising agencies, P&G used focus groups and many other kinds of opinion-sampling techniques to adapt its products to changing needs and tastes and sharpen its commercial messages.

In time, nearly every consumer-products company had to conduct market research in order to prosper. But Procter & Gamble was the leader, and it remained so into the twenty-first century. The biggest changes at P&G after Doc Smelser's time were in the growing number of the company's brands and the broadening of its markets.

In 2002, P&G celebrated its 165th anniversary. It had 12 billion-dollar brands in its portfolio. These brands included Pampers, Tide, Ariel, Always, Pantene, Charmin, Bounty, Iams, Crest, Folgers, Pringles, and Downy. In 2004, Actonel became another billion-dollar brand, and the first pharmaceutical brand to reach this important milestone. And in 2005, P&G and Gillette merged into one company and added five more billion-dollar brands to their product portfolio, including Gillette and Braun's shaving and grooming products, the Oral-B dental care line and Duracell batteries.

Today, Procter & Gamble operates in five segments: P&G Beauty, Health Care, Baby Care and Family Care, Fabric Care and Home Care, and Snacks and Coffee. The P&G Beauty segment offers antiperspirants or deodorants, colognes, cosmetics, feminine protection, hair care, hair color, personal cleansing, and skin care. The Health Care segment offers health care, oral care, and various drugs. The Baby Care and Family Care segment offers kids' personal care products, diapers, pampers, detergents, toilet tissues, paper towels, and tissues. The Fabric Care and Home Care segment offers dish care, laundry, and special fabric care products, as well as household cleaners. The Snacks and Coffee segment offers snacks and beverages. The Company markets approximately 300 branded products in approximately 160 countries.

Now, what do you think Doc Smelser would say of Agency.com’s approach to research?

(to be continued….)

Sources and additional reading:

Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge for Business Leaders, “American Business, 1920-2000: How It Worked - P&G: Changing the Face of Consumer Marketing”

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/1476.html

PG.com, “Our History”
http://www.pg.com/company/who_we_are/ourhistory.jhtml

Yahoo Finance, “Profile”
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=PG

Marketing 101

2006-08-02T10:26:00.000-05:00

(continued from The Ratings Game, see 7/19 below)

Other innovations during the “Air Raid” period we’ve been discussing (the period between 1922 and 1975) were the development of the brand management system and the practice of market research. Indeed, companies made the transition from being sellers of products to being disciplined marketers of products. Procter & Gamble led the way.

William Procter, who emigrated from England, was heading West when he stopped at Cincinnati to take care of his ailing wife, who soon died. James Gamble, who emigrated from Ireland, was also heading West when he, too, stopped at Cincinnati for medical care for himself. Both men ended up settling there.

William Procter established himself as a candlemaker, while James Gamble apprenticed himself to a soapmaker. The two might never have met had they not married sisters, Olivia and Elizabeth Norris, whose father convinced his new sons-in-law to become business partners. In 1837, as a result of Alexander Norris' suggestion, a bold new enterprise was born: Procter & Gamble.

Their business of selling soap and candles prospered, and by 1859, 22 years after they formed their partnership, the company’s sales reached $1 million and they employed 80 people.

During the Civil War, Procter & Gamble was awarded several contracts to supply soap and candles to the Union armies. These orders kept the factory busy day and night, building the Company's reputation as soldiers returned home with their P&G products.

In 1879, James Norris Gamble, son of the founder and a trained chemist, developed an inexpensive, high quality white soap. Inspiration for the soap's name—Ivory—came to Harley Procter, the founder's son, as he read the words "out of ivory palaces" in the Bible one Sunday in church. The name seemed a perfect match for the white soap's purity, mildness, and long-lasting qualities.

By 1890, P&G was selling more than 30 different types of soap, including Ivory. In that same year, after running the Company as a partnership for 53 years, the partners incorporated to raise additional capital for expansion. William Alexander Procter, son of the founder, was named first President. P&G set up an analytical lab at Ivorydale to study and improve the soap-making process. It was one of the earliest product research labs in American industry.

P&G continued to grow and prosper, expanding its manufacturing facilities outside of Cincinnati which increased capacity and improved distribution of products to its customers. In 1911, P&G introduced Crisco, the first all-vegetable shortening. Crisco provided a healthier alternative to cooking with animal fats and was more economical than butter.

In 1924, a market research department was created to study consumer preferences and buying habits—one of the first such organizations in history. And in 1926, in response to the growing popularity of perfumed beauty soaps, P&G introduced Camay.

Neil H. McElroy came to Procter & Gamble in 1925 after graduating from Harvard College. McElroy changed marketing forever when he wrote the classic “McElroy memo” on May 31, 1931, which lead to the creation of the discipline of brand management.

While working on the advertising campaign for Camay soap, McElroy became frustrated with having to compete not only with soaps from Lever and Palmolive, but also with Ivory, P&G's own flagship product. In his now-famous memo, he argued that more concentrated attention should be paid to Camay, and by extension to other P&G brands as well. In addition to having a person in charge of each brand, there should be a substantial team of people devoted to thinking about every aspect of marketing it. This dedicated group should attend to one brand and it alone. The new unit should include a brand assistant, several "check-up people," and others with very specific tasks.

The concern of these managers would be the brand, which would be marketed as if it were a separate business. In this way the qualities of every brand would be distinguished from those of every other. In ad campaigns, Camay and Ivory would be targeted to different consumer markets, and therefore would become less competitive with each other.

Thus was born the modern system of brand management.

(to be continued….)

Sources and additional reading:

PG.com, Our History

http://www.pg.com/company/who_we_are/ourhistory.jhtml

Wikipedia, Neil H. McElroy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_H._McElroy

The Ratings Game

2006-07-19T10:29:00.000-05:00

(continued from The Father of Television, see 7/7 below)

Along with the new media of radio and tv came new methods of measuring their audiences.

Archibald Crossley was asked by the Association of National Advertisers to organize the first national rating service. Crossley was an innovative market researcher. He had won a prize from Harvard for his pioneering garbage studies. He recruited households to supply him with their household waste, which was then carefully sorted for evidence of consumption patterns. (And in case you’re wondering, no, I don’t think that’s where the saying “garbage in, garbage out” comes from).

Crossley used telephone surveys, asking respondents what they listened to the day before. The Crossley “rating” (a term he is credited with coining) soon became an important factor in program decisions. The Crossley system was replaced in 1935 by C.E. Hooper ratings. The Hooper ratings were considered superior because they used telephone coincidentals – measuring what listeners were listening to at that moment – which eliminated the problem of errors associated with recall.

In 1946, A.C. Nielsen developed a meter method for measuring radio tune-in levels. The Nielsen ratings quickly became the standard of the industry. Meanwhile, radio’s penetration had grown from 40% U.S. homes in 1930 to more than 80% in 1940. By 1950, radio penetration had reached 95% U.S. homes. Soon, however, the impact of tv had a staggering effect on radio. Advertisers and listeners began abandoning radio in favor of tv. Nielsen reported steady declines in radio listening as more homes purchased their first tv sets. Low ratings were a problem for Nielsen, which had trouble measuring the declining audiences with a 1,000 home sample. Out-of-home audiences were another problem. Car manufacturers began adding radios after the war, and meters could not measure this increasingly important element of radio's audience. Later, Nielsen dropped out of the radio ratings business, succeeded by Arbitron which used a personal diary method. Also, the radio industry fought back against the onslaught of tv. Many stations added Top 40, Talk, and other formats which drew back listeners and advertisers. Radio advertising revenues began climbing again after 1956, with the biggest gains coming from retail advertisers.

A.C. Nielsen, of course, dominated in tv ratings. At first, there were several companies providing ratings data for radio and tv, each using their own methodology. Discrepancies in audience estimates among the competing firms frustrated both broadcasters and advertisers. In 1950, radio station KJBS in San Francisco became so incensed over contradictory ratings estimates by two firms that it ran a full-page ad in the trade magazine Broadcasting-Telecasting, headed, “Two Umpires Behind the Plate Isn’t Any Good in Broadcasting, Either.”

A committee was formed to investigate the radio station’s charges and quickly expanded the scope of its inquiry to take in the entire ratings field. Its report criticized the rating services so sharply that when the Advertising Research Foundation polled its members in 1952, asking them what they most wanted the foundation to do, there was an overwhelming vote in favor of “ending confusion in radio and TV audience ratings.” In the end, A.C. Nielsen, with its Audimeter technology came out on top for television.

TV programs, as comedian Sid Caesar remarked, “lived or died” by the ratings. Red Buttons, who passed away just a few days ago, was one of the first to experience this. He was an obscure young night-club comedian when he was discovered by a CBS vice-president who gave him a chance to do his own program on TV. At the end of his first year, Buttons had a comfortable position among the first five in the Nielsen ratings. But in his second year his ratings began to slip. They didn’t slip far, but Red’s show followed I Love Lucy, and his sponsors couldn’t understand why Lucy’s 60 rating fell off to Buttons ’40. Buttons says, “Imagine anyone complaining about a 40 rating? That’s better than some of the most successful shows on the air.”

His protest was to no avail, and the format-changers got to work. Instead of Buttons’ freewheeling style of comedy, they pinned him down to situation comedy, although he objected that there were too many sitcoms on the air already. His rating continued to drop.

Finally, in desperation, Buttons went back to his original format. By that time, it was too late. The sponsor canceled the show, and CBS, which could have renewed Buttons’ contract for another year, decided to let him go. Almost immediately, the young comedian was signed by NBC, which had analyzed the composition of Buttons’ audience and decided that he’d have great appeal for children in an early evening show. After reverting to his original format, Buttons climbed into a tie for the No. 7 spot in the Nielsen ratings with The Ed Sullivan Show.

Fast forward to the present and the challenge of measuring audiences continues.

Not long ago, radio ratings company Arbitron planned to team up with Nielsen Media Research to develop a multi-media Portable People Meter (PPM), a device designed to provide a comprehensive portrait of individual media consumption. Nielsen backed out of the Arbitron deal, but has since announced its own consumer total-information-awareness campaign, dubbed "Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement" (or A2/M2). The campaign relies on the willingness of participants to carry monitoring devices with them wherever they go.

Ratings researchers are also considering ways of integrating PPMs with GPS devices and radio-frequency ID chips. Down the road, the idea is to develop a convergent, multi-media ad-exposure detector that would be able to capture information not just about the music users listen to and the TV they watch, but the billboards they are exposed to throughout the course of their day and even the magazine and newspaper ads they are near enough to see (thanks to RFID chips embedded in the articles and ads). The result would be as comprehensive a portrait of individual advertising exposure as possible.

In the near future, the goal is to create a fully monitored media enclosure by matching up this information with consumption behavior, as measured by consumers who scan their purchases at home. When products are equipped with RFID chips, the PPM could double as a consumer meter, gathering information about purchasing behavior as well as advertising exposure.

In the future, it's likely that the devices we use to consume media products will become self-monitoring. Cell phones are already being developed that can be used as electronic credit cards, as well as to download, store, view, and listen to media, and to keep track of our locations. With just a few more tweaks we may find that we're carrying around an all-purpose monitoring tool.

(to be continued…)

Sources and additional reading:

Andrejevic, Mark, “Total Information Awareness - The Media Version”, Flow, Vol. 4 Issue 8, http://jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/

History of Radio 1929-1931, Trivia-Library.com,

http://www.trivia-library.com/b/history-of-radio-1929-to-1931.htm

The Rating Game: Broadcasters Rely on Poll Numbers They Don’t Trust, History Matters, The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6266/

The Father of Television

2006-07-07T10:16:00.000-05:00

(continued from The Air Raid, see 6/29 below)

I learned about Vladimir Zworykin, known as “The Father of Television”, from my son, Joshua, who wrote an elementary school paper on the man.

Zworykin had two very important inventions that work together to make television possible, the iconoscope and the kinescope (cathode ray tube). One is a transmitter (iconoscope) and the other is a receiver (kinescope). Zworykin invented the iconoscope in 1923 while the kinescope was invented in 1929. It would be a full 10 years later before the television system was introduced to the public at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

TV grew slowly, at first. NBC began regular commercial broadcasts in 1939. Then television was suspended during World War II. In 1948, the FCC refused to license any new stations until problems of signal interference were worked out. But once the freeze was lifted in 1952, television became a cultural phenomenon and rocketed to the top of the advertising world. New television retail stores opened at the rate of 1,000 a month. CBS made its first profit in 1953. A year later, CBS was the largest advertising medium in the world with a monopoly of the top-rated shows.

At its start in the 1950's, television consisted predominantly of live programming, such as variety, talk, quiz, situation comedies, mystery/suspense dramas, and boxing. Whereas the leading primetime radio show had reached one-third of the nation's homes per broadcast, Milton Berle's Texaco Star Theatre was seen by 62% of all tv homes on an average minute basis during the 1950/51 season, and many other shows achieved or exceeded the 35% mark. The average minute rating for all sponsored primetime television entries was 17% - or about twice the norm that radio had established in the late 1940's with comparable Nielsen measurements.

And what did Vladimir Zworykin think of all this? Strangely, it surprised him that television was used for entertainment, while he thought it would be used for science. “I hate what they’ve done to my child…I would never let my own children watch it”, said the Father of Television.

(to be continued…)

Sources and additional reading:

Special thanks to Joshua Miller for his report, Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, The Father of Television, 2005

Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1984

Ed Papazian, Medium Rare: The Evolution, Workings and Impact of Commercial Television, Media Dynamics, 1989

Eugenii Katz, Vladimir Kosma Zworykin,

http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/~eugeniik/history/zworykin.htm

Mary Bellis, Vladimir Zworykin, http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/b/zworykin.htm

Steve Restelli, History TV dot Net, http://historytv.net/

Stephen M.Tomecek, What a Great Idea, 1^st Edition. Scholastic, 557 Broadway, NY; 2003.

The Air Raid

2006-06-29T16:29:00.000-05:00

(continued from The Space Age, see 6/26 below)

Very near the time Lasker and Kennedy got together and revolutionized the advertising industry, two other men got together and created a revolution of their own. Wilbur and Orville Wright lifted their flying machine off the ground at Kitty Hawk in December of 1903 and launched the Aerial Age in America.

There was a long period of time between that first flight in 1903 and the commercialization of flying. Commercial aviation didn’t really grow until after Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight to Paris in 1927. The number of airline passengers in the United States grew from less than 6,000 in 1926 to approximately 173,000 in 1929.

Similarly, commercial radio had a long development period. The invention of the vacuum tube by Ambrose Fleming in 1904 and the invention of the triode vacuum tube amplifier by Lee DeForest in 1906 made radio as we know it possible. Coupled together, these inventions enabled the transmission of voice and music. But the technology wasn’t commercialized as an advertising vehicle until 1922 when AT&T, owner of station WEAF, one of the first few radio stations to come into existence, offered to sell 10 minutes of advertising time on its station to anyone willing to pay $100 for it. A Long Island real estate company bought the advertising time and sold apartments with it.

Thus was launched a period I call “The Air Raid”, from 1922 - 1975. This was a period that saw the introduction and dominance of new media which came to us over the airwaves. It added a whole new dimension, literally, to advertising and media planning; a dimension of Time.

Have a great holiday weekend everyone!!

(to be continued….)

Sources and Additional Reading:

U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission, The Pioneering Years: Commercial Aviation 1920-1930,

http://www.centennialofflight.gov/

Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1984

The Space Age

2006-06-26T08:08:00.000-05:00

In case you’re just joining us, we’ve been discussing the history of the advertising business in order to gain a historical perspective that will help us better understand the significant changes that are taking place in advertising today. We’ve discussed the “Media Era”, a period from 1841-1903 which saw the birth of the advertising industry from its startup by an entrepreneur, Volney B. Palmer, who saw an opportunity to profit in an expanding market by selling advertising space in newspapers. The first 60 years of advertising, the Media Era, was a period when the advertising business was a media buying business.

Then, in 1904, Albert Lasker met John E. Kennedy who told him that advertising was “salesmanship in print”. Before Kennedy, the consensus viewpoint was that advertising was about “keeping your name before the public”. Lasker seized upon this new definition of advertising and hired Kennedy on the spot for an astronomical amount of money. The advertising industry changed rapidly from a focus on media buying to a focus on advertising creative. The “Creative Era” of advertising was launched.

I call the 80-year period from 1841 – 1921, which crosses from the Media Era into the Creative Era, the “Space Age” of advertising, referring to the fact that it was a period of exclusively space-based media (i.e. print: newspapers, magazines, and outdoor).

The Space Age encompassed the formative years of advertising. It began chaotic and uncontrolled, and ended with organized practices, policies, procedures, and institutions that formed the bedrock of the advertising business, including among them:

-- establishment of the 15% commission

-- first media research: Rowell’s American Newspaper Directory

-- 1913, founding of Audit Bureau of Circulation

-- 1915, founding of Association of National Advertisers

-- 1917, founding of Amer. Assoc. of Advertising Agencies

-- 1919, founding of Standard Rate & Data Service (SRDS)

Claude Hopkins

In 1908, Albert Lasker hired Claude C. Hopkins who became one of the great copywriters of his time.

Hopkins shared Lasker's views of what advertising should be. In 1923, he wrote his famous book, Scientific Advertising, a publication which outlined the “laws of advertising” and explained how they were derived from countless testing, mostly by direct response advertising.

Here are some of Hopkins’ views on advertising:

-- the only purpose of advertising is to make sales….it is not for general effect. It is not to keep your name before the people.

-- Ads are not written to entertain. When they do, those entertainment seekers are little likely to be the people whom you want. That is one of the greatest advertising faults. Ad writers… forget they are salesmen and try to be performers. Instead of sales, they seek applause.

-- Any studied attempt to sell, if apparent, creates corresponding resistance.

Aren’t the views of Claude Hopkins as relevant today as they were then?

Hopkins wrote Scientific Advertising from the standpoint that advertising was conquered. “The time has come,” he said, “when advertising has reached the status of a science. It is based on fixed principles, and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analyzed until they are well understood. The correct method of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic law.”

How ironic it is that Hopkins wrote his masterpiece on the science of advertising at the conclusion of the Space Age, just as the advertising business was about to enter into a new dimension.

(to be continued….)

Additional reading:

Claude C. Hopkins, Scientific Advertising

Send me an email if you would like to receive a free copy of this classic book, Scientific Advertising, in a pdf format.

What is Advertising?

2006-06-15T17:41:00.000-05:00

(continued from The Father of Modern Advertising, see 6/5/06 below)

In his early years, Albert Lasker was driven to understand advertising better. He wanted to know, “What is advertising?” He asked his contemporaries of the period. They said it was “keeping your name before the public”. N.W. Ayer & Son had the motto, “Keeping Everlastingly at it Brings Success.” Lasker was troubled by this definition.

One afternoon in 1904, Lasker received a note. The note said, "I am in the saloon downstairs. I can tell you what advertising is. I know you don't know. It will mean much to me to have you know what it is and it will mean much to you. If you wish to know what advertising is, send the word 'yes' down by the bell boy." It was signed by a John E. Kennedy.

What followed was arguably the most important meeting in advertising history.

Now, at the time, Lord & Thomas, the third largest agency of the period, had only a part-time copywriter who was paid $15 per week. What Kennedy said to Lasker that day resulted in his being hired on the spot for the unheard-of salary of $28,000 a year. Within two years, he was making $75,000. What did he say to Lasker? Simply this: "Advertising is salesmanship in print.”

Kennedy insisted that an ad should say in print precisely what a good salesman would say face-to- face with a customer. Also, instead of general claims, pretty pictures, or jingles, he asserted that an ad should provide a concrete "reason why" the product was worth buying. In essence, advertising should explain why the product being advertised was a better buy than competing products or alternative uses of the consumer's limited budget.

Soon Lord & Thomas became the training center for the advertising world. Their copywriters were being paid $4000/year, a fantastic salary for the time. Yet, other agencies were hiring them away by offering salaries up to $15000/year-just to get the magic of “Reason Why” copy into their agencies. And many Lord & Thomas people left to form their own agencies. John Orr Young, co-founder of Young & Rubicam was one.

When John E. Kennedy met Albert Lasker on a Spring day in 1904, the Media era of advertising ended, and the Creative era began.

(to be continued…)

Sources and additional reading:

John O'Toole, The Trouble with Advertising, Times Books, div. of Random House, Toronto, Canada, 1985

David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, Vintage Books, div. of Random House, New York, 1985

Albert D. Lasker, The Lasker Story. As He Told It, Advertising Publications, Chicago, 1963

The Father of Modern Advertising

2006-06-05T19:42:00.000-05:00

(continued from The Media Era, see 5/24 below)

Media placement was so important in the early years of advertising probably, in part, because the advertising landscape was so untamed. It took many years for advertising business practices to become standardized. Once the business practices of advertising stabilized, Creative took over as a way for agencies to set themselves apart. The switch occurred rapidly.

(I wonder if perhaps the reason media gets so much attention these days is partly for the same reason. There has been a general breakdown of old, established practices in recent years, which has been replaced by the entrepreneurial fervor of the digital revolution. Creative seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. Will stability ever return to media planning and buying? And if it does, will there then be a Creative renaissance?)

Albert Lasker, known as the “Father of Modern Advertising”, was the son of a wealthy Texas banker who got him a job at the Chicago agency of Lord & Thomas in 1898 when he was 18 years old. Lasker started out by sweeping floors and emptying spittoons as an office clerk.

After a year, Lasker asked for and was granted a chance to try his luck as a salesman. He was an immediate success. Before the next year was over, he asked Mr. Thomas to put him in charge of a few accounts that were not making any money so he could practice copy writing. Within a year, he achieved a dramatic success with a hearing aid company. Both Lord and Thomas were impressed with Lasker's ingenuity, which in turn caused a fond rapport to develop among the three men. In 1903, when Lord retired, Lasker purchased his share of the business and became a partner in Lord and Thomas. And in 1912, he purchased the remainder of the company and became its sole owner. Lasker retired in 1938, and in 1942 he sold the ownership of the Agency to his three leading regional managers, Emerson Foote in New York, Farifax Cone in Chicago, and Don Belding in California for a nominal amount of $100,000 with the condition that they retire the name of Lord & Thomas. Thus, the agency became known as Foote, Cone & Belding.

As you probably know, FCB – now a part of Interpublic - was just merged with direct-marketer Draft, and Howard Draft will head the new combined entity to be known as the Draft FCB Group.

But in 1904, Albert Lasker changed the course of the advertising industry.

(to be continued….)

Additional reading:
see American National Business Hall of Fame, www.anbhf.org/laureates/lasker.html

The Media Era

2006-05-24T20:00:00.000-05:00

(continued from In the beginning..., see 5/19/06 below)

In case you just joined us, we’ve been reflecting on the history of the advertising business in order to gain a historical perspective to better understand the significant changes that are taking place in advertising today. In every period, there are leaders, entrepreneurs, who “think different”, who see opportunities and capitalize on them or find a better way of doing business. When others see the value of what they’ve done, they copy it. And that’s how business practices change.

We’re talking about an era in advertising that I call the Media Era, from 1841 to 1903. It was a time when media buying was the advertising business. Creative services, if provided at all, were provided as added value. No agency saw the need to have a full-time Creative person on staff.

Three important media entrepreneurs of the period were Francis W. Ayer, George P. Rowell, and J. Walter Thompson.

Francis Wayland Ayer founded N.W. Ayer and Son in 1868 (he named the agency after his father). Ayer pioneered the concept of the “open contract” which made the commission rate that agencies earned a set standard, at first 12.5 percent, then later 15 percent of the publishers’ rates. The 15 percent commission stayed the norm for the advertising business for many years to follow and provided stability in what was until then an untamed business environment.

George P. Rowell, mentioned in our post of 5/19 as the originator of the “space wholesaler” agency, also became the first media researcher. In 1869, he introduced Rowell's American Newspaper Directory, the first annual guide to over 5,000 American and Canadian newspapers. It later merged with a directory published by N.W. Ayer, and became known as Ayer’s Directory of Publications, which was published until 1982 when it became the Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media which, to my knowledge, is still published to this day.

Then there was J. Walter Thompson. When we think of the founders of agencies today, they’re usually Creative Directors. Thompson, of course, was not. The role of Creative Director hadn’t been invented yet. In the same year that N.W. Ayer was founded, Thompson (then 20 years old) was hired as a young bookkeeper and assistant of the small agency of Carlton & Smith, which bought and sold space in popular religious journals. Thompson’s innovation was that he recognized the potential for advertising in the high class magazines of the period. At the time, these magazines took no advertising; they considered advertising offensive to their affluent readers.

Thompson managed to get two of the leading women’s magazines, Godey's and Peterson's, to take ads for asbestos roofing. These women's journals seemed an unlikely medium for a product bought, presumably, by men. Yet the ads sold more roofing than any promotion in the company's history. He repeated this success with advertising in Peterson’s for a game called “jackstraws”. Within 20 days, the merchant received over $3,000 worth of orders in sums no larger than 35 cents. Following these successes, Thompson eventually acquired a monopoly over advertising in the leading magazines of the period. In 1878 he bought out his employer, paying $500 for the business and $800 for the office furniture, and renamed the agency after himself.

And the rest, as they say, is history….

(to be continued....)

Sources and additional reading:
Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1984
John O'Toole, The Trouble with Advertising, Times Books, div. of Random House, Toronto, Canada, 1985

In the beginning....

2006-05-19T20:34:00.000-05:00

(continued from The Times They Are A-Changin', see 5/18/06 below)

Advertising has been around for hundreds of years, of course, but as an industry it’s not that old. It started in 1841 when a man named Volney B. Palmer opened the first agency in Philadelphia. Palmer did not create advertising. He was an independent newspaper sales rep. He represented a list of newspapers and sold space in them to advertisers, earning commissions of about 25% from the newspapers for the extra business he brought in.

Before Palmer came along, newspapers sold space directly to advertisers. But this was a period of expansion and growth, and as the landscape became more crowded with potential advertisers, newspapers found they needed to expand their sales efforts. Entrepreneurs like Palmer stepped in to fill the void.

The “sales rep agency” started by Palmer evolved into “space jobbing”, whereby agencies sold space to advertisers first, then turned around and bought space from the newspapers to fill their orders. The important change is that now the agency represented its own interests and not the interests of the newspapers.

Immediately after the Civil War a new type of agent appeared called a "space wholesaler". The space wholesaler purchased space in bulk from publishers, as cheaply as possible, and resold it to advertisers and other agents in small lots for more money. A man named George P. Rowell initiated this plan in 1865 and was the most influential advertising agent for many years. Space wholesalers could earn commissions sometimes as high as 50%. They dominated the period between 1865 and 1880.

The practice of space wholesaling eventually disappeared. Publishers today won’t let you buy space and resell it…that is, until just recently (August 2005) when Google purchased ad pages in PC Magazine and Maximum PC and resold them as classified ads to smaller advertisers. They did it again in November with Budget Living magazine, buying a page of advertising and reselling it in smaller units to seven other advertisers.

So, you see, history does repeat itself…. And now, a group of advertisers led by Wal-Mart's Julie Roehm seeks to build and test a new online auction platform for buying and selling tv advertising. If successful, what new form of media buying agency will come out of that?

(to be continued....)

Sources and additional reading:

Dorothy Cohen, Advertising, Scott, Foresman & Company, 1988

Kenneth H. Myers Jr., SRDS, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1968

The Times They Are A-Changin'

2006-05-18T20:00:00.000-05:00

Media placement, i.e. media planning and buying, gets a lot of attention these days, and having been in media for many years, I’m happy to see that. For most of my career, media planning and buying was an afterthought. Creative was everything. What’s changed? What’s brought media to the forefront again? I say “again” because, believe it or not, there was a time when media placement– not creative – was the main business of advertising agencies.

The ad business is going through some wrenching changes, but it’s not the first time that major change has occurred. To better understand the present and future of advertising, it pays to take a good look at its past. To that end, I’d like to share with you a few stories of the people and events that helped shape the advertising business, and highlight some of the significant changes that occurred over the years as a prelude to our ongoing examination of where we are now and where we are headed.

(to be continued....)

Welcome

2006-05-11T22:56:00.000-05:00

Welcome to "Smarter Ideas", a new blog for the exchange of information and ideas about the advertising business with an emphasis on media planning and buying.