We in the ad industry have always professed that the more your advertising entertains, the more likely it will be watched and remembered.

We claimed that “creative” ads did a better job of selling because people were less likely to ignore the message that was being delivered.

We never had any concrete data to prove this. We went by the ratings of the television shows. We looked at quarterly sales and made some educated guesses as to which spots worked and which didn’t.

In today’s ROI-driven world, that ain’t good enough. And the idea that creativity and entertainment actually drives ROI is being challenged. But to understand the power of creativity and entertainment in advertising, to understand its effectiveness, you need only look to YouTube.

The other day, I searched for some spots that the advertising world  considers creatively excellent, and you know what I found? People want to watch good commercials.  They want to see them over and over again.

Don’t believe me? Just check out these data points.

The e*trade baby commercial? 750,000 views.

The Geico caveman at the airport spot? 1.1 million views.

The Apple PC commercial? 1.2 million views.

That’s the kind of exposure companies would pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to achieve. Yet, because their communication is worth watching, because it is rewarding in an emotional sense, they are getting that exposure for free.

I’m no accountant, but I’d say that’s pretty good ROI.

The lesson learned: Creativity matters. It matters to your audience. It matters to your exposure. It matters to your bottom line.

To learn more about how we can help improve your creative product, contact us today.

When you look at the rising cost of healthcare, there is a whole lot of blame to go around.

But one villain has gone unnoticed: The ad regulators.

I was recently watching television, when an ad for Cialis came on the air. It was probably the 1,000,000th pharmaceutical ad I had been exposed to, but it was the first time I was really struck by how much legal copy was being thrown at me. The disclaimers literally took up half of the 60-second spot, informing me of every possible side effect that might (but probably won’t) occur if I took the drug. After about 5 seconds, I just tuned out the announcer and watched the b-roll footage of a man and his partner sitting in two separate bathtubs in the woods.

Magazine ads are no different. For every one page of ‘advertising’ there are two pages of mice-type disclaimers.

The pharmaceutical industry  is the only industry that is this regulated in regards to full disclosure. Heck, even the warnings on cigarette packages aren’t that detailed.

Which got me to thinking. Is all that extra copy (and extra expense) really necessary? I understand that the government wants to protect its citizens. But if nobody is listening to the “disclaimers” on TV and nobody is reading the 4-point-type treatises in magazines, why have them?

Wouldn’t it be better to just say “serious side effects may occur” and lead them to a website that details them?

Just think what it would do to cut costs. TV buys would be cut in half. Print buys by two-thirds. And drug companies could save millions upon millions of dollars that could be earmarked for research or passed along to the customer. Either way, it’s a win.

And if we don’t have to watch two old folks in a bathtub? Well, that’s a win too.

If you would like to ask us about our healthcare marketing experience, contact us today.

This past weekend I had the honor and the pleasure of judging the Pittsburgh Addys. Besides the fact that my car broke down on the drive there, it was a truly delightful experience. The folks who run the Pittsburgh Ad Fed are some of the nicest people I’ve met in the business. And their organization is top-notch through and through.

Generally speaking, I like judging the Addys. It gives me a good sense of what is going on the advertising world as a whole. It allows me to see beyond my own agency and clients to get a true sense of our business. It’s really reinvigorating for a creative guy, like me.

Without giving away the winners, here are a few observations I came away with after a weekend immersed in creativity.

1.    If print is dead, someone needs to tell the folks in Pittsburgh. I was very surprised at the number of print entries at the show. I would say well over half of the submissions were still on old fashioned paper. And there was a lot of very good—even exceptional — print being done.

2.    Social media hasn’t been fully embraced by the creative community yet. This year, I was expecting to see a tidal wave of entries that had a social media component.  There weren’t many at all. Which was surprising considering the seismic shift our industry is experiencing in this area.

3.   “You can’t get creative in this category” is not an acceptable excuse for lame work. Pittsburghers proved it. Some truly outstanding work was done in categories that historically haven’t had a good track record for breakthrough messaging.

4.   If you look hard enough, some advertisers actually have money. In this, the Great Recession, I was expecting to see a tremendous dearth of high-budget production. Yet, there were numerous television campaigns, corporate videos and print submissions that clearly had the bucks to do it right. I found that particularly encouraging.

Again, my thanks to the Pittsburgh Ad Fed for inviting me. It was a lot of fun.

According to the New York Times, in 2009, the majority of magazines lost ad pages. Leading the pack were Fortune (down 36 percent) and  Money (down 29.1 percent).

So why are advertisers running from the weeklies and monthlies in droves? Well, one reason is the economy. In this, The Great Recession, advertising budgets are getting cut, and much of what’s left is getting siphoned to other more lead-generating venues.

But the reasons for the exodus from print go much deeper.

Some might say that the death of magazines — in fact, all print — is inevitable. Newspapers, as we all know, are dying quickly because they are no longer able to deliver the news in the most timely and efficient way. Online news sources can do it fast and cheaper. And our daily rags are becoming obsolete.

But magazines are different. They’re less time-sensitive and more audience-centric. Yet, advertisers are seeing less and less value in these publications, too.

Why?

Because magazines are providing less and less value to the readers. Just look at your favorite pubs. They’re getting thinner and thinner. They’re stripping content, firing writers and cutting out features that readers want.

My two favorite magazines (Adweek and Sports Illustrated) are shells of their former selves. Adweek used to contain regional news, review of portfolio pieces, updates on accounts in review, a list of people who’ve found new jobs. It was the Bible of the ad industry. It was something I read cover to cover every week.

Now, when Adweek arrives, I throw it in the trash.

Some might say that because advertisers cut back, the magazine had to, too.

But what if magazines took a different approach? What if they upgraded their content, added new features and gave readers (and advertisers) more reasons to get involved?

What if, instead of giving in to the notion that they have to provide all their content online for free, they made their publication and their website work together?

By enriching your print content, you increase appeal. By increasing appeal, you increase readership. By increasing readership, you increase ad sales.

But it seems that most magazines don’t get this. They’re perfectly content to throw in the towel. Which is really sad. Because it’s a death that can be prevented.

Last year about this time, Point to Point’s owner Mark Goren, walked into our conference room and handed each of us in the company a fresh, crisp $20 bill.

His instructions: Change someone’s life with it. Take the money and stretch it as far as you possibly can.

And so, “Change for 20,” our homegrown, in-house charity, was born.

Everyone in the agency was pretty excited about the opportunity. And being the creative types that we are, we all found very special ways to spread $20 worth of good.

You can find those stories on our website, changefor20.com.

And now, as the holiday season approaches, we’re doing it again. But this year, we’d like to extend the effort beyond our own walls.

Which is where you come in.

Our goal is get 100 new stories on changefor20.com before New Year’s. That’s 100 stories of love and compassion and creativity.

So, grab a $20. Grab a friend. Grab a camera. And go. Buy a blanket for a homeless person. Donate $20 to your favorite charity. Break it up into $20 worth of quarters and give 80 kids a gumball. It doesn’t matter what you do. Just do good. Just spread joy. Just make someone’s day.

Then go to changefor20.com and upload your story to share with the world. The instructions are right there.  And just think: By inspiring others, you can make that $20 bill go on forever.

I’ve never been a big fan of using celebrities to endorse products.

From a purely creative standpoint, I think it’s a weak substitute for an actual idea, an easy alternative to rolling up your sleeves and developing communications that break through and convey a real point of differentiation.

But beyond creative laziness, using celebs, in my view, has a plethora of negatives.

For starters, there’s the erosion of the product’s own brand identity. As soon as you get LeBron James, for example, to sign on the dotted line, your product becomes LeBron James. Your identity becomes LeBron James. Your personality becomes LeBron James.

And when that relationship ends, for whatever reason, what have you got? Not much. Just ask all those companies who are still dealing with the untimely death of pitchman Billy Mays.

Even more risky is the control you lose. When you attach your brand to that of a celeb, the celebrity becomes the driver. And when that celeb decides to veer off course by doing something illegal or dangerous or just plain stupid, your brand winds up with the dents.

Just ask the gaggle of companies who have hitched their trailers to Tiger Woods. I’ll admit it, Tiger Woods seemed like the safest endorsement bet in the history of advertising. He’s good looking. Smart. Articulate. A family man.

What’s not to love about Tiger, right?

Then came the news of his infidelity and his violent confrontation with his wife. And overnight, his popularity plummeted. In fact, a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll shows Wood’s favorable rating among the public has dropped 24 percentage points since June.

That’s a big hit. And as a result, companies like Nike, Gillette to AT&T are scrambling, trying to decide whether to stick with their tarnished spokesperson or to cut bait.

The lesson we can learn from this is there are no perfectly safe celebrity endorsers. There are no sure things. So my advice: Instead of tying your product to a personality, do the work it takes to give your product a personality of its own. At least you can control that.

You’ve got to hand it to Miracle Whip. They recently launched an ad campaign that is 180 degrees from anything that’s ever been done in the mayonnaise category.

No moms in the kitchen exchanging recipes. No blind taste tests. Instead they show energetic 20-somethings partying it up with their favorite mayo, under the battle cry, “We will not tone it down.”

The campaign is clearly attempting to make Miracle Whip “cool.” And that’s where I think these ads fail miserably.

If you look at it from a marketing standpoint, every product category has a coolness continuum that it can reside in. For some, there is a lot of cool that can be created.  Just ask the teenagers who buy Abercrombie clothing. Or the guys who buy Corvettes.

By the same token, there are products that have no coolness factor whatsoever. They’re never cool. They’re never uncool. They just, well, are. And along with lug nuts and pipe cleaners, mayo is right at the top of the “Can’t be Cool” list.

Mayo can be “delicious.” It can be “versatile.” It can be “helpful.” But it can never, ever, ever, ever be cool.  It’s just not in its DNA. Which is why this campaign is so perplexing.  I get that Miracle Whip is trying to reach a new, younger audience.  But there are ways to do it without pandering to them.

The biggest mistake a marketer can make is to try to make their cool-neutral products seem trendy.  By attempting to give it an aura of hipness (that’s a pretty uncool word, I know), they convey the opposite to their audience. They come off as marketing suits who truly don’t get the audience they’re trying to appeal to. They sound insincere. And they set themselves up for ridicule in the marketplace.  Which is precisely what happened to Miracle Whip.

Have you seen the Walmart advertising that’s been running the past year or so to rebrand the retailer and make people think more positively about the store?

The ads feature well-groomed families enjoying life thanks to the money they’ve saved at their favorite shopping place. One spot shows a happy family taking a vacation. Another features a mom helping her son move into his college dorm. They’re pictures of upper-middle-class America.  And they’re intended to improve our notion of who actually shops at Walmart.

The spots are heart-warming.

The print is pretty endearing, too.

And then there’s the website. The website that takes all that expensive perception-changing messaging and changes it back again. It’s called People of Walmart. And its sole purpose is to make fun of Walmart shoppers. You won’t find the perfect mom and her perfect son on the site. You won’t find The World’s Greatest Dad with the kids on the beach, either.

What you’ll see is hundreds of pictures of shoppers that Walmart is telling you don’t shop there.

The site, as you might have guessed, wasn’t created by the retailer. It was created by some bloggers looking to have a little fun. And, to say it’s a hit would be an understatement. Already, People of Walmart has 214,000 Facebook fans. It has 26,000 followers on Twitter. And it gets submission pictures from people all over the country.

But, if you think about it, this blog is doing more than entertaining the masses, it’s building a brand.  It’s reinforcing brand perceptions. And, much to Walmart’s chagrin,  the content is completely out of their control.

It’s no secret that as technology grows so does the voice of the consumer. And People of Walmart takes it to a whole new level.  Every day, they are giving their audience new validation of the Walmart experience. It’s as if they are putting out a new “ad” for the company hourly. And their message is one that millions of dollars of advertising can’t undo.

So what does this tell us? Your product is what your product is. And if your advertising tries to pretend it’s something else, consumers will call you on it. In a mighty big way.

Back in the day, an aspiring ad copywriter (like myself) needed to show two things in his book: An ability to concept campaigns and an ability to write headlines.
A typical portfolio consisted of five or six print campaigns and maybe a storyboard or two.  That’s all I had in my book, and I got a job. Lots of them, in fact.

Today, as a creative director, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t hire myself.

“A bunch of print campaigns? That’s all you got, Mike? Next!”

With the explosion of new media venues, the writers in my agency (and many others, I imagine) have to provide a whole lot more than a few snappy headlines. Here are three key areas where skill sets have to evolve.

Writer as Journalist. With the emergence of blogs and other social media outlets, marketing firms, like ours, are expected to provide more and more content. For writers, this means they’ll have to act less like ad guys, and more like journalists. They’ll have to be more investigative, more objective, and they’ll have to write in a style that doesn’t sound like marketing.

Writer as Editorialist. In the social media world, opinions are flying at cyberspeed. And as marketers, we are finding ourselves relaying the points of view of our clients in new and different ways. We’re getting in on blogs. We’re posting on twitter. And we’re conveying the brand message in much more personal and relevant ways. It’s not canned advertising speak. It’s on-the-fly engagement.

Writer as Search Engine Optimizer. Let’s not kid ourselves, we’re not just writing to attract our customers, we’re writing to attract Google too. And Search Engine Optimization is the key to earning their love. Key words, as we all know, are a major component to jumping our competition. The more times we use the key words on a site, the better. The trick, however, is to make sure that the sprinkling of those words isn’t obvious, doesn’t sound redundant, and still maintains the brand personality. These are things we didn’t even have to consider a few short years ago.

In many larger agencies, I imagine, these writing duties would be split between the advertising and PR departments. But in smaller to midsize agencies, where those walls don’t exist, PR and advertising have to become one.

And it’s not just the writers who will be expected to know more and do more. Every single person in the agency will.

As I eagerly await the premier of Mad Men on AMC this Sunday, I got to thinking: How different would the plot lines be if the story were told in the 21st century advertising world?  Here are a few thoughts I had. I’d love to hear yours in the comments.

1. Sterling Cooper. In the upcoming season, it looks like SC is going to get bought out by a British holding company. Today, there would have already been 12 episodes covering 12 different mergers and buyouts.  And the name of the firm would now be Sterling Cooper Smith & Jones/Euro/Draft/LMNOP.

2. Peggy the copywriter. Unfortunately for Peggy, the copywriter job wouldn’t have fallen into her lap so quickly. Instead, she would have gone to college, then to the Miami Ad School, then on three unpaid internships and then on a hundred interviews competing with a hundred different portfolio school grads with killer books. And with all that, she would have lost the job to a fellow student who had a great guerrilla idea for Lucky Strikes. The episode about Peggy waiting tables, would have been riveting, though.

3. Don Draper’s affairs. In the very first episode, we see Don with his mistress, Midge. It’s an affair that lasted most of the season. Today, that plot line would have ended after the first commercial break, as his wife Betty finds him tagged in a Facebook photo where he’s kissing Midge. Episode 2? Don and Betty spend a spell-binding hour dividing up the silverware and china.

4. Don’s inspiring pitches. Picture the Kodak presentation. Don is in a darkened conference room, as slides of his family click by. He tells the story of the Carousel of Life. His clients, sitting next to him in tears, buy the campaign before he even gets to finish. Today, with technology, a pdf of the script would have been sent to the client. And everyone would have enjoyed the presentation on Skype. Fade to black on glowing MacBook screen.

5. Betty. I don’t know. But Betty, Don’s wife, just looks like a Twitter addict. She’s the kind of person with enough time to amass Ashton Kutcher-type followers. So instead of seeing her horseback riding or discovering Don’s deep, dark secrets, we see her sitting with her laptop or her iPhone, tweeting about the weird kid next door and cooking recipes. Yawn.