It’s a long listen, and without the slides- if you aren’t a bit familiar with the B Cycle project, the later part will get a little slow.
And while the B Cycle is sexy and intriguing- the beginning of the podcast has some insight that hint at what makes Crispin Porter + Bogusky the hot agency: hint, it’s not about being an agency.
Alex claims to hate advertising and that he reads AdBusters- and not Ad Age. They don’t hire people for jobs, they hire smart people and let them figure out what to do- he calls CP+B a “Holding company for smart people.”
They don’t worry about deliverables- but more about “Business momentum”- and if you understand that business runs on cash flow- the idea of momentum makes perfect sense. Now that the agency numbers 900 people and has 1.5B in billings, things are a lot different from when he worked at what he considered the “third best agency in Miami” and was employee number 16.
For one thing, they no longer feel limited to doing “advertising” and claims that anything good that he’s been a part of, comes from sticking his nose where they don’t belong. This includes doing things like telling Mini that putting mileage restrictions on the sub-compact, while encouraging people to “Let’s Motor” didn’t make sense. This is marketing thinking, practiced at the highest level.
Just as accountants originally were part of assessing and evaluating business processes for profitability- instead of just how to account for taxes(and how to avoid them)- advertising is just one subset of the marketing process- not the end all and be all.
If your agency isn’t giving you insight on the complete customer connection experience, you don’t really have an agency- just an ad vendor.
In it’s early ads, Apple claimed the personal computer was the “bicycle for your mind”- and now, we have great minds rethinking bicycles. Spend some time with both the podcast- and thinking about the B Cycle concept- and how an ad agency can be a thought leader on solving the worlds problems, instead of being blamed for creating so many of them.
I saw a tweet from Jason Calacanis before the e-mail hit my inbox. Netflix was raising rates for a second time in 5 months on blu-ray disc access. If you are in marketing at Netflix, please note, he has 64,188 followers. Take that- and retweets- and you see the exponential nature of Twitter- instantly.
His original tweet:
NetFlix Blu-Ray bait and switch FAIL! Jump from $1 a month to $4 a month automatically?!!? http://post.ly/CYQ
Then, follow over to a twitter search on “Netflix” and you see the effect- instantly- the twitterverse is alive- with cancellations, downgrades and unhappieness. This is an opportunity for Blockbuster- but, they probably don’t know how to take advantage of it.
Over on Engadget- it’s breaking news:
Ruh roh. In a move that will undoubtedly cause an incredibly raucous stir, only to fade away as movie renters realize that Netflix is still the best deal going, America’s most adored by-mail rental service is hiking the price of Blu-ray rentals once again.
The comments are flowing- who knows how many people will be blogging about this, and what kind of damage will be done. The pricing increases are heavy handed to begin with- but the automatic “Opt-in” to a price increase is a brand suicide move. Never, ever, force an automatic price increase without some kind of action by the customer.
Either way- be careful how you treat your customers these days, they have the tools to talk amongst themselves and plot your downfall. Both Netflix and Twitter are populated by opinion leaders- who are very tech savvy. Your brand is only as good as your community around it. Netflix’s brand value is totally connected to the way their customers feel about them (as well it should be).
Sure, Burger King has seen 20 consecutive quarters of same-store-sales-growth since it finally hired an ad agency that “gets it” (Crispin Porter + Bogusky) and then let them do their thing.
Of course for that to happen, you also need a Chief Marketing Officer who “gets it” and it seems Russ Klein has some pretty good insight on what to green light:
Mr. Klein: “Whopper Freakout” was a great example of tension and the way deprivation affects the way someone who is a loyal Whopper fan. We try to make all of our briefs hinge on some sort of social or anthropological insight that’s charged up with tension. It’s not like we’re trying to set our hair on fire to get tension.
The line that we put in bold italics should be on a big sign above any marketers desk. It’s much easier to get an emotional response to something that’s already got emotions attached.
No one cares about your nifty new twist on your features, advantages or benefits- no, they want to know what’s in it for them- in a way that makes them lust for your product and trust your company.
Interestingly enough, the article on the other side of the spread was “Why emotional messages beat rational ones.” This quote sums it up nicely:
What the data show us is that emotional campaigns are almost twice as likely to generate large profit gains than rational ones, with campaigns that use facts as well as emotions in equal measure fall somewhere between the two.
It turns out that emotional campaigns in general generate a wider range of desirable business effects, each of which plays its part in improving profitability. But they excel in one noteworthy area: reducing price sensitivity, and hence strengthening the ability of brands to secure a premium in the marketplace (or, in the current economic climate, to hold firm on pricing).
To create messages with meaning, start looking at what decisions a buyer has to make to choose your product, and think of how it fits into the rest of their life- then find what makes them uncomfortable and make it engaging or funny- be it the complexity of a car- broken down into the parts that go together like the Honda Cog ad they point to in the second article or the “Whopper Freakout” campaign. Either way- you’ll get more interest, which should translate into more sales.
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