#sareff

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A simple technique for writing punchy slogans

Yesterday, some friends circulated a new Hewlett-Packard ad.

With an amazing end line: ‘Accelerating next’.

I marvelled at this tightly written piece of communication.

I wondered if I could crack their secret and use it myself.

Now HP is a top company.

Really smart people who make great computers.

And then it struck me – one of their computers probably wrote this.

I wondered if I could get my hands on one of these wonderful ‘Accelerating next’ machines.

I started looking around.

Seems quite a few people have found the same computer already.

Hankook Tyres – who I’ve picked on before – ‘Driving Emotion’.

Or those wonderful, abstract Japanese T-shirts that have equally concise, witty creative collisions.

(I hadn’t realised HP was so big in Japan :)

You, too, can write material like this.

And you don’t need Copy School or even a computer.

Why not build your own slogan generator?:

1.Get a hat that’s deeper than it is wide (so you can’t peek inside). 2. Find pretentious words randomly in your dictionary. 3. Toss them in. Draw them out 2 at a time. 4. Hey Presto (no, that’s taken already) you’ll have instant punchy lines 5. Hold them up against the Japanese T-Shirts. If they pass the ‘sufficiently bizarre' test, you’re onto a winner. 6. Present it with conviction – Clive Pompous-arse style - and no one will argue lest it should appear they’re not as bright as you. Or…

You could find yourself a genuinely good writer. (They’re rare these days)

Someone who truly cares about communicating.

Someone like Paul or Sharon:

“Every generation should live better than the last” (Paul Fishlock for Westpac Bank)

“The simple things in life are often the best” (Sharon Howard for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes)

As much as Management-speak tries to infiltrate and mutilate our language, don’t let it invade your communication.

If in doubt, eavesdrop on normal people.

Listen to the way they speak.

I’m willing to bet – unless they’re poking fun at HP – you’re not going to hear anyone ‘Accelerating Next’ in my lifetime.

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John le Carré’s key lesson for Business

I had put on a fair bit of weight over the years.

I ran into a man I hadn’t seen for ages.

‘I can see they’ve been keeping you in the top paddock’, he said.

That’s the Australian way of speaking – and I love it.

Laid back. Open. Unpretentious. Gorgeous wit.

Spend time among people – at sporting grounds, in shopping malls, country towns, near worksites, in factories or supermarkets.

Anywhere real folk hang out.

Watch. Listen.

And you get the hang of it.

Fast.

But we get it wrong so often:

I was watching a Rugby League match on TV a few days ago.

In Australia, it’s the ‘working class’ game. (Saying that is not offensive).

I’m sorry to pick on Hankook – the tyre people. But painted slap, bang in the middle of the field for spectators and TV viewers was a Hankook Tyres ad.

It read: ‘Hankook. Driving Emotion.’

For tyres.

I ask you.

(With tears in my eyes.)

What on earth does that actually mean?

What does it mean to a Rugby League-watching audience?

A car or truck tyre ‘driving emotion’?

Are we hinting at carrying your loved ones safely?

The heart-in-your-throat rush of high speed?

No. I don’t think that’s the answer.

It could be one of a few things: defining too lofty a Brand Purpose, perhaps.

Trying to be too smart with copy. And ending up pretentious and meaningless.

Unforgivable when there’s been: ‘Stick with Dunlop’. Or the Michelin Man. (See, you can communicate benefits simply and successfully in tyre world.)

The insidious advance of bullshit language in meetings, maybe?

John le Carré said: "A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world."

Therein lies the truth, I suspect.

We would all do ourselves, and our employers a great favour if we spent more time away from our desks and more time simply observing and listening to real people.

You know – end users of your products and services.

My friend Ryan Wallman is a copywriter by trade and a psychiatrist by training. With a razor wit. And an eagle eye for nonsense that pretends, and fails, to communicate.

He shared this gem. Written in a letter from a leading Department store to its customers:

'We are investing in New Myer over the next five years to deliver a fresh interpretation of our brand, a re-energised and relevant range, improved service and  in-store experiences complemented by a strong omni-channel offer. It brings the best of Myer to the customers who love us today, and to future generations'

What were they thinking?

Who did they imagine was going to read it?

I’m very sure they’ve worked hard at their transformation program. I’m sure there have been countless meetings. I know it will be good.

But they know - and I know - that their customers are after the magic of a great store, helpful advice, a great range etc.

Nobody will ever ask them for, or tell their friends about: ‘a fresh interpretation of our brand’.

What does a ‘re-energised range’ mean to people in Moonee Ponds?

Which customers in outer Western Sydney are hanging out for ‘a strong omni-channel offer’?

No.

Down to earth expressions like: ‘not the sharpest knife in the drawer’, ‘off with the Pixies’ come to mind.

That’s how customers might have responded – if they cared enough about the communication to read beyond the first handful of words which offered them precisely nothing.

Empathy.

That’s the name of the game.

And it’s not to be found at your desk. Or in your meeting room.

Get out there.

Use mouth and ears in the ratio the good Lord gave them to you.

Be more empathetic – if you don’t quite succeed in ‘Driving Emotion’, you might at least feel more likeable.

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Do you know the 2 fundamental laws of Marketing?

I’d imagine at least 50% of the world’s marketers were reared on Prof. Kotler’s books – prescribed reading at a huge number of Universities. The primary course text when I taught 2nd and 3rd year students.

I’m stunned when I talk about the 2 fundamental laws of Marketing – a Kotler idea – and get blank looks.

This post will necessarily be short - the concept is very tight and needs little expansion beyond reminding folk who’ve forgotten.

Here they are:

The law of slow learning: People take a while to learn a new concept. For it to become a part of System 1 (the brain’s autopilot) it may take a few uses of a product or service and perhaps a few exposures to communication.

If we layer the increased ‘noise’ people are trying to opt out of, and fragmentation, this law teaches us to persevere. At minimum a reminder that ideas wear out in our boardrooms way faster than in ‘consumer-land’.

The law of fast forgetting: Most people don’t give a damn – about your company, your brand, or your campaign. Most of the time they’re not trying to create a relationship with you or your products and services. In fact, most of the time, they’d prefer to opt out. Prefer not to think. Prefer not to have us trying to ‘engage’ them.

It follows in the case of the vast majority of brands, products, services and campaigns, that they are here today and forgotten tomorrow.

Consider what they’re up against. They’re competing for attention with life. Life in all its richness. With all its really important things. Against this, most brands and campaigns are trivial and not deserving of mental storage space.

The 2 laws, taken together, call for impactful ideas. Ideas that resonate strongly within the broader context of life and the culture. Reinforced - as good relationships are – by the right amount of relevant contact.

If there were a ‘Maslow’ hierarchy of Marketing thinking, these 2 laws would form the bottom layer, in my view.

All the tricks, techniques, nuances are for naught if you forget (or were never taught) these two fundamental and sobering guidelines.

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Truly amazing Innovation needs a Building 20

What kind of conversation do you imagine happens when Noam Chomsky (linguist) meets up with Amar Bose (acoustics/audio) and Paul Samuelson (economist) at morning tea?

This kind of gathering was a regular feature of Building 20 at MIT during and post WWII. Some of the most amazing breakthroughs – in wide-ranging, disparate fields of knowledge – occurred as a result.

It was partly due to the building. And partly due to the unusual diversity in the people it housed and the way they rubbed up against one another.

If you’re charged with fresh thinking, if you’re after real breakthrough, take some simple lessons from this humble building – described in this way by Prof Jerry Lettvin (Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering):

‘You might regard it as the womb of the Institute. It is kind of messy, but by God it is procreative!’

Lesson 1: Space for creativity

Building 20 was erected (constructed is too grand a term) and always meant to be temporary. It went up cheaply and in a hurry – mainly to house the guys of the Radiation Laboratory. (They perfected Radar in the early 1940s.) Soon Linguistics moved in. A Nuclear Science Lab. An Electronics Research Lab. The Educational Research Center. Missile Guidance specialists. And some world class Economists – among others.

The ‘temporary’ mindset prevailed. People were assigned rooms in unconventional fashion – not clustered together by faculty as is typically the case. They congregated at the first ever vending machines. They met and formed friendships. Conversation and debate ensued. ‘Weird’ collaborations emerged.

Lesson 2: Complexity requires collaboration

The more specialised we become, the less likely it is that one person, acting alone, can make big breakthroughs. Building 20 formed the perfect platform for people who knew almost everything there was to know – albeit in a very specialised field - to rub together and open one another’s eyes to ideas, work-arounds, modifications and tensions that simply weren’t in their prior experience.

In a world where you collaborate and succeed, or fail alone, the most amazing collaborations ensued.

Lesson 3: Connected, but very different, participants

A while back, in conversation with a really smart colleague, I remarked that our game was becoming increasingly like an orchestra. Conducting lots of very different characters. He pushed it further. Jazz, he said. More improvisation. Fewer people. Connected by the music. But playing completely differently. Improvising much more.

Brian Uzzi, the sociologist, supports this. His research - looking at musicals - is pretty clear: he looked at hundreds of teams involving thousands of artists. He found that the relationship among collaborators was key: too close and they broke no new ground. If they didn’t know each other at all, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas.

Your Building 20

This chaos – induced mainly by a ‘temporary mindset’ – yielded countless mind-blowing breakthroughs. Nine Nobel laureates, too.

Pixar is simply a more modern version of Building 20. Steve Jobs’ design ensured that artists, computer boffins and writers would rub shoulders often.

You’d be surprised how much difference you can bring to your business simply by enabling your Chomskys, Boses and Samuelsons to collaborate.

It takes: The right physical Space. A celebration of Diversity. The Fusion of different skillsets. A common language to support collaboration. The Social connection that fosters trust.

There you have it – your own Building 20 – as permanent or temporary as you need.

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How messing with Brand Personality kills brands

Our family butcher developed a brain tumour when I was quite young.

In the process of removal, his brain was damaged. Irreversibly.

He was the same man – physically. But he suffered a major personality change.

The tragedy played out before us as if in slo-mo: the poor devil lost most of his friends. In the end, his long-suffering, loyal and devoted wife left him.

It wasn’t a matter of choice as much as this was no longer the man she’d married.

We attribute human-like properties to brands – anthropomorphising – as a way of explaining how best we think they work. As long as we recognise we’re using metaphor, we can proceed.

Here’s where there is huge potential to stuff up:

Picture the scenario - our brand is slowly losing relevance. Someone helpfully suggests it’s an issue of ‘tone of voice’ or ‘brand personality’. And we start tinkering.

It’s a bit like pre-Charlie Teo* brain surgery. Fiddle a bit and hope you get it right.

Here’s the thing. The brand is like poor old Mr Slabbert – the butcher. Muck with its personality without due care and you know the outcome.

It’s brutally swift. Our ‘System 1 brain’ is happy to admit or dismiss brands based on ‘I like it/I don’t’. No correspondence entered into. And it does this relatively easily. Without thinking. A brand goes from ‘feels right’ to ‘feels wrong’ pretty easily.

There is no question: we can run projective research and allow people to paint a very clear picture of a brand’s personality. We can show those who weren’t alive in its formative years various stimuli e.g. packaging, old ads etc. And they can form a perfect picture of the brand – who it is/was like, what it thought was important, etc. (Yes, we’re still talking in metaphor).

If needed we can express the brand’s personality as it was. Or we can dust it off and express it in more contemporary fashion. Taking great care to maintain the fidelity of its underlying personality.

These days I prefer building/explaining brands using Purpose and Values. (I find this to be more all-of-brand than mostly Marketing.)

For those who are more comfortable with Positioning and Personality please remember this: they are strategic. Both are core to a brand’s Identity.

Tone of voice may change – on sale/not on sale etc. But the core tenets of positioning and personality remain unchanging. For one simple reason, they exist in consumers’ memory. Not actually in the brand itself. They’re a consumer response to what the brand does/ doesn’t do over time.

When you set out to ‘change personality’, this necessarily leads to behaviour change – a bit like Mr Slabbert.

Any time someone feels tempted, please tell them the story of the simple butcher whose personality and behaviours changed – through no fault of his own.

The man who lost his loose acquaintances first, and his most loyal fans soon after.

In marketing terms: first light users, then loyalists.

If you’re still intent on modifying personality be very, very careful.

Or ask the last person to turn off the lights on the way out, please.

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Any doubt that you’re Emotionally driven? Better read this.

Did you know that a child can be born with memories of, say, a grandparent they never knew? Someone, perhaps, who died even before the child was conceived?

I was helping a PhD student a number of years ago. She was studying pregnant Mums’ emotional responses. And how they might affect their unborn babies.

She explained it this way: Memory is stored in proteins.

Those same proteins can cross the placenta.

So it is possible, she explained, for a child to be born remembering events they could not possibly have experienced.

I found that unbelievably spooky. Although, you have to admit, it does make sense.

Now, many Mums have played music to their unborn babies. It’s well known that the foetus hears these sounds while in the uterus. And it is able to recognise them – indeed be calmed by the same sounds - after birth. Many Mums use this knowledge deliberately – often sitting with headphones hugging their pregnant tummies. I’ve heard it said that at the height of ‘Neighbours’ popularity, a raft of babies was born who readily recognised and responded to the theme music.

What this student was studying, however, went way beyond that (at this point I go all layman and probably let her down with my explanation).

She set out to prove that a Mum’s emotional reactions create chemical responses in her. Those chemicals cross the placenta. Mum’s emotions, therefore, have an effect on her unborn infant. Without the infant being exposed to the original stimulus at all.

My role in all of this was negligible, really. I was charged with assembling a reel of ads. Each ad had to have the capacity to elicit an intense emotional response. Sheer, unadulterated joy. Deep sadness. Great fear. And so forth.

Mums viewed the ads wearing headphones. This time so the unborn child couldn’t possibly hear the audio.

The PhD candidate was able to measure the foetal response through changes in heartbeat etc.

Mum’s psychological reaction produced chemicals. Which crossed the placenta. And caused a reaction in the unborn child.

A remote control emotional response, if you like.

That goes way beyond spooky. In fact, as a parent myself, it makes me question what I may have done – unknowingly – to my kids.

So whenever I hear people questioning whether humans respond emotionally or rationally; when I listen in focus groups to folk pretending all their decisions are well thought through and perfectly logical/rational, I want to laugh out loud.

Not only are they driven almost entirely by their emotions, as adults.

They always have been.

Way back before they first drew breath on their own.

So…

Knowing that, how do you feel?

For Rob, Otis, Jill: in memory of Nonna C 

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5 of the greatest lessons about advertising

Many years ago a young colleague – with the best will in the world – terrified me.

Here’s how:

One of our highest rating TV programs was called (something like) ‘The world’s best advertising”. And that’s what it was. One of the TV networks was simply cobbling together compilations of great television ads – from either the ‘Shots’ reel or from award shows around the world. And showing it weekly.

Now there is a lesson in itself – people do love to watch great advertising.

The scary idea was this: seeing as the program rates so well i.e. plenty of eyeballs watching, let’s place our clients’ ads in this program’s ad breaks.

Let’s be honest. We were what you’d call a solid agency – large stretches of workman-like stuff punctuated ever so occasionally by a piece of genius. In truth, more by sheer luck than design. 

I was genuinely worried that in the company of the world’s best ads ours – and by extension, the reputation of our clients – would not do so well.

Thankfully, good sense prevailed. We gave some thought not just Reach and Frequency but to the relationship between Content and Context – something you dare not forget.

Recently I came across a collection of ads from the now-defunct ‘The Campaign Palace’ - Australia’s greatest agency by a country mile for a couple of decades. A place that was wonderful to me.

The ads are arranged in such a way as to ‘prove’ a bunch of key points that endure to this day.

The first point was:

1. “Great advertising knows that nobody wants to watch an ad. Nobody likes ads. Except for great ads; people love great ads”.

There are quite a number of other significant points. I chose 4 others to share with you:

2. “Great advertising doesn’t need a media barrage to cut through. It is finesse, not force. It’s a knock-out punch, not 15 rounds of bombardment. It’s brains, not muscle” 

3. “Great advertising knows nobody counts the number of ads you run. They just remember the impression you make.”

4. “Great advertising can change attitudes…instantly.”

And – dedicated to a certain large Australian retailer who should know better: 

5. “Great advertising knows the future is not about brand competitiveness. It’s about brand distancing; brand separation. It’s about creating space around a brand. Lots of space.”

Give me an indication, if you will, whether you’d be interested in seeing 30 years worth of Australia’s best advertising – The Palace’ 30 year reel. In turn, I’ll find a way to share the hour-long collection and all it’s lessons with you. Tweet me, txt me, email me or get me via LinkedIn.

I am proud to have been in such a good school and would be equally proud to share its work with you. 

Twitter: @MarkSareff

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Advertising that makes you hate brands

Are you anything like me? Do you get really irritated when a YouTube ad gets in the way of what you really want to see?

Like me, do you transfer that dislike to the brand?

Go on. Re-live the last time that happened. How did you really feel? On a scale from: ‘that’s just the way it is’ to ‘get out of my way you f**king parasite’.

Not only when you’re forced to watch an entire ad. Even those you can click to banish. Come on. Be honest. Do you see any of the ad or just focus intently on the countdown? Finger poised, ready to send it to oblivion?

Well it’s a funny thing.

I polled around 20 folk – some in advertising; some not. Seems we have a similar thing going on. Being reared on commercial TV, most are resigned to ads interrupting their viewing. On TV, that is. Let’s face it most of us are ‘zapping’ ads. If not with technology, then simply the old-fashioned way – zoning out or using the ad as a cue to go and wash their hands.

But the feeling towards a TV ad, I found, is far less intense.

Seems like TV is such a ‘lean back’, chill-out medium, that the resentment is far less pronounced. Besides, few can remember a time when TV didn’t interrupt our viewing with Ads. It’s our normal.

But when you’re really ‘leaning in’. Hunting for information. Looking for help. Searching for something very specific on your second/third screen and up pops something that gets in your way, much stronger emotions are aroused.  And they’re not positive, not even just neutral…

Which is high risk for a brand in an era when Indifference is our biggest enemy. At a time when more than ever before, it seems, people are trying to avoid hearing from us - we are misusing our ability to reach people.

Our task is to court, seduce and entice people to Opt In. When they’d prefer to Opt Out.

To produce ideas people are interested in instead of crudely and coarsely interrupting what they’re interested in.

Reach that repels – I’d argue - is far more damaging than not talking to (at?) people, at all. And that goes for TV too, just in case you thought I was endorsing bad behaviour anywhere at all.

Rather bank the money. Do no harm to your brand.

So here’s the challenge. (Let’s acknowledge there are a handful of advertisers & agencies out there who are starting to get it right. Green shoots, as it were.) How about we set out to make that type of communication work well? Make it likeable. Entertaining. Designed for the medium.

Not simply the TV ad running as a pre-roll.

(That would be as daft as running a magazine ad on a poster site or on a bus side. Come to think of that, in the name of economy, I remember advertisers doing just that).

This is worse. Inexcusable, really. Because we’re repeating a prang that’s already been had.

Back to basics, please: Consumer journey. Role for channel. Audience Insight. Desired response. Then design your YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc. communication.

Not hard really, is it.

Just needs fresh thinking. Or really old thinking.

In fact, just some thinking. Oh.. and a little empathy, please.