On Mending the Marketing and Tech Divide

Here's an article for marketers about learning how to relate to your tech team.

The chief operating officer of Watershed Publishing -- a big tech geek -- wrote the first draft. It was hilarious; I read it and thought, "This is a laundry list of things he hates about me!"

But the dude makes some solid points. I honestly think the fractured marketer/dev/designer relationship in most office settings is a topic that needs addressing, especially as sophisticated interactive technology has become a de facto expectation of brand websites and online campaigns.

There's a universe of (actively-maintained) difference in the spheres where marketing and tech work; from experience, it's hard finding people willing to breach the divide.

This is counterproductive hubris crap. When working with interactive media, marketers must make an effort to get geeky (read: more tech-savvy). This will make them better marketers. On the other hand, engineers should also feel compelled to nurture their own creativity. This makes them more competitive assets.

One day at DriversEd.com, after getting the usual pushback from the senior engineer, I spat out, "Why don't you ATTEND OUR MEETINGS so you can tell us what can't be done before we've laid out a game plan!"

He smiled, shuffled a deck of cards between his hands and answered, "Because I like the way it feels to say no after your hopes have been ignited."

Funny guy.

Marketers, devs and designers: we live in the same world now. Deal with it.

Contemplating the Starbucks Sebatacle

Yesterday all corporate-owned Starbucks shut doors from 5:30 to 9pm for emergency barista training.

During the 'bucks blackout, competitors leapfrogged each other to deliver discount specialty drinks. Some, like Dunkin' Donuts, went all $0.99. Others, like Biggby Coffee and Coffee Klatch, gave cups away.

I'm reminded of an ad icon who felt great brands were never built on the lean backs of discounts. It lends the sense that your only means of differentiation is your cost. Discerning users in your market -- and if they stick around long enough, they all become discerning -- might take advantage of your discount once or twice, but over time they'll start veering away from you.

Nobody professes loyalty to a five-and-dime.

I'm prattling on about this discount/differentiation thing because Ken Wheaton at Ad Age thinks the 'bucks blackout served two major purposes (neither of which had to do with turning baristas into sages):

• Proving Schultz means business about a dramatic company overhaul
• Generating serious press

And not just one-hit wonder press either. When all 7100 of the biggest coffee chain's stores close to "improve the quality of its baristas," guess what message reverberates across the pond?

Starbucks isn't about cost. It's about quality. It's about you.

I used to be a Starbucks barista, back before baristas talked crap about customers in front of you and stole merch after hours. Corporate was downright dramatic about instilling a sense of sanctity in what we do for people. I totally drank the Kool-Aid.

Sometimes I miss the days when I stank of Breakfast Blend but was able to sincerely call SBUX my "third place."

Schultz, if you bring your little green empire back to basics -- serving samples out of a French press, learning the names of regulars, and making even non-purchasing loiterers feel welcome -- I honestly think you guys can bring the fire back.

You've always had the magic formula. Surprise, surprise! It wasn't breakfast sandwiches or copies of The Kite Runner. Just stop with this too-big-for-the-little-things nonsense.

MarketingVOX: On Doing the Facebook Thing

Today MarketingVOX officially joined Facebook.

As a business, particularly one that disseminates marketing news (a totally hype-oriented industry), I don't generally like doing the bandwagon thing ("Friend me on MySpace, guys! And I will love you to DEATH if you stick me on TOP 8").

Unless there's good reason. And -- work with me here -- I think there are good reasons to cultivate an industry news presence on Facebook.

Consider the existing benefits of logging into Facebook:

• Finger-on-pulse access to a large, mostly university-educated demographic (Stalker Feed, anyone?)
  
• The cultivated inclusion of products in the Facebook business model. It's possible to maintain a general sense of what people are into (including their feelings about your brand) by observing what brands they connect with -- and finding out why.
  
• An insider's glance on stories and memes circling professional and university spheres. (It's always interesting to see where they intersect.)
  

As a college student I wasted a lot of time on Facebook. As a professional, I still waste a lot of time on Facebook. Cognizant of its creepy magnetism, I watched with sadistic glee when Facebook expanded its network to the common man. Marketers and ad executives poured in from the furthest reaches of the universe, eager to get a ground-floor clue on the coveted co-ed demo.

What actually happened? They friended every person they've ever met, uploaded a zillion photos of themselves sipping wine and walking their dogs, and update their status 20 times a day.

But this is good. We now have a one-stop professional diaspora of people actively sharing information, promoting their podcasts and bitin' chumps.

The part of me that likes to rationalize time-wasting has convinced me Facebook is useful, and will only become more useful as the userbase grows and people share more information. John Battelle once said Google contains the database of our intentions. In a way, Facebook does too.

We put MarketingVOX on Facebook because we think it will give marketing professionals one more positive incentive to log in and connect with each other. In addition to marketing news, industry stats and that thing called "marketing culture" (stories about how marketing affects real people), we'll update the site with useful charts and spiffy apps (some of which we're now developing, most of which we're still thinking up).

I look forward to seeing what headlines catch the viral bug.

If any of this is useful to you, check out the page and become a fan. Questions? Comments? Input? I'm listening (obsessively).

On Driving an Axe Through 'the Next Step'

We learned in college that the "teenager" is an invention of the early 20th century -- the Hallmark holiday of social development, if you will.

Considering teenhood is something we take for granted and chock off to biology, wrapping my mind around its artifice is an amazing mental leap. And yet in the the last handful of years, we actually got to witness the process by which marketers do, in fact, create, label and adorn a proud new developmental segment: the tween (formerly known as the pre-teen).

The other night I was having this moody quarterlife funk and it occurred to me that "adulthood" is probably as much a construction as teen and tweenhood.

It's more opaque, granted, because you can't really give it a beginning and end (13-19 or 8-12). And because of that, I have this abiding worry that unless we realize there's no placeholder for "adulthood" because there is no adulthood, most of us are going to be groping blindly for it for a very long time.

That's too bad, because so many of us need adulthood to exist so badly: Once you've taken all the prescribed steps -- pre-school, gradeschool, puberty, college -- and are launched out into that wide, wide world, onto what safe ground can you measure your next move?

We fall back on marketing, media and pop culture, which generously distributes guidelines grafted onto us in part by our institutions.

College taught us how to watch the news, question religion, suspect authority figures and have existential conversation. But jobs teach you that's kid shit. Life's about being jaded.

With time, and in the exact same way you and your ilk learned how to smoke pot, date and fuck, you will learn how to hate your inevitable office life, that you'll eventually lose count of your sexual partners (and it will be okay!), that you'll get cheated on or will cheat. You'll get married, have kids, suffer from a midlife crisis and buy too many cars. You'll divorce and go on some tortured quest for your high school sweetheart.

Maybe you'll find religion again. Or better yet, go to grad school.

Bills are inevitable, friends are few, and to unwind, everybody goes drinking on Friday. You'll make cliched statements: I've never felt this way in my life. I want to have your baby. Please love me.

And amidst all of this, every once in awhile, that question without an answer will surface in your mind: Is this adulthood?

Sometimes it'll come out as a statement: Behave like an adult!

Inanely: I'm a grown-ass man.

Or in a more childlike way, amid defeat: Grown-ups don't do this to each other.

On a quest for secure ground where there really isn't any, my generation has found a convenient shelf, courtesy of your local marketer: We're Quarterlifers. And we're having a crisis. Our debts are high, we're going home to mom and dad, no job is good enough for us, and we've been victimized by the murky indefiniteness of "adulthood."

According to the associated data, we'll be here from age 21 to age 29 -- after which we can coast safely into mid-life, a world we understand because, like teenhood, it has been so lovingly documented for us.

How hard would it be to say fuck all of this?

It is surprisingly much harder to leave a world safely accorded us by pop culture than any of us is willing to believe. And that's too bad. Maybe if we admitted we're addicted to a constellation of spoonfed -- occasionally bleak or beautiful -- images, we could learn to pick and choose which ones we actually want to live out and which ones to relegate to the heap.

And amidst all that personal sifting, perhaps then we could do the truly impossible -- indeed, that very antithesis of early adulthood: locate what makes us happy, and do it bravely, and do it now instead of seeking a prescribed "next step" that will earn nods of approval all around. (Granted, playing the martyr is also something we've learned along the way.)

But oh, many of us won't allow ourselves to shake all this off until after the long struggle toward retirement. Sagacity is part of the blueprint, but only near the end.

Get Down with the Homies with the ad:tech NY Ad-Jive Dictionary

You can't call yourself a new media advertiser if you're not hip to the jive, and ad:tech is a great place to brush up on this crucial skill-set.

But it can be tough to keep up. With that, I give you the 2007 edition of the Official ad:tech New York Ad-Jive Dictionary. Use this knowledge well, and you're sure to be the life of the break room.

Better still, you'll confirm your CEO's conviction that burning $5K to send you to an ad conference was a very intelligent idea.

Agnostic. adj. Connotation: positive. Used in reference to an application that plays nicely on any OS or browser, or in reference to a marketing campaign theme flexible enough to perform on any media platform. The Hulu video player is browser agnostic, and thank heavens, because I will kill somebody if I have to download IE7.

Ajax. n. Connotation: positive. An acronym that stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, "Ajax" is now a parlor term for a site that updates content without a user having to "refresh" the page. If we add Ajax to the site, our pageviews will get all screwed up!

It can also be used as a verb, allowing for some mental play between Ajax as it is referred to here, and Ajax the household cleaning product. We need to Ajax the forums. Nobody's going to stick around if they have to refresh during a burn war.

CGA. n. "Consumer-generated advertising." See CGM.

CGM. n. Connotation: hysterical, particularly at ad:tech. "Consumer-generated marketing." Refers to "amateurs" (read: non-advertisers) building brand messages, for subversive, evangelical or monetary reasons. Dude, forget about hiring the agency. Why don't we just launch a CGM contest and give away an iPod? I think my cousin has a camera at home.

Collaboration. n. Connotation: euphemistic. The dreamy thing vendors say will happen between marketers and consumers, or between IT and upper management, when their "online solution" includes a messaging feature, a Twitter function or a news feed. State-of-the-art digital technology encourages seamless real-time collaboration between the enterprise and the end user.

Dovetail. v. Connotation: euphemistic. Used when small companies get absorbed or otherwise hopelessly eclipsed by a larger entity. Paths between Wee Guppie, LLC and Big-Ass Sharks, Conglomerated began to dovetail in '03; a collaboration was the next logical step.

Iconistan. n. Connotation: negative. Coined by Sphere CEO Tony Conrad, it refers to the untidy collection of icons, usually found at the bottom of a blog post or article, that enable readers to disseminate the post on a social news medium like Digg or Newsvine.

We see less of this clutter now because social news leaders, such as Digg and Reddit, have emerged in the field. As a result, "Iconistan" has fallen into antiquity -- which is too bad, because it was strangely charming. Dude, your blog looks like a virtual Iconistan. Why don't you delete all that crap? Nobody ever Diggs you anyway.

Intermediate marketers. n. Connotation: nebulous - probably negative. Hails from the dust jacket of a marketing strategy book called The Eyes Have It: How to Market in an Age of Divergent Consumers, Media Chaos and Advertising Anarchy.

The precise meaning of the label remains unclear. Based on its original context, where it was paired with a less nebulous demo, "Advanced digital marketers in the C-level suite," we can assume it is at least slightly pejorative. That shit looks like Crayon on cardboard. Clearly it was disseminated by an intermediate marketer.

Meatball sundae. n. Connotation: negative, but using the expression will reflect positively on the user because it is still fresh. Coined by Seth Godin for his heavily-promoted publication of the same name. Refers to what happens when you put together two great ideas (like meatballs and ice cream) that produce something unfortunate. Rich media ads on a widget? I don't know, Rick. We don't want a meatball sundae on our hands.

The expression may unseat last year's book-title-cum-buzzword, "the tipping point."

New media. n. Connotation: positive. Refers to any number of the socially "democratizing" applications or services -- usually ad-supported or AJAX-heavy -- that have appeared on old media (the online and mobile platforms) over the last several years, bringing said media back into vogue.

Platform. n. Connotation: neutral. May refer to the means by which content is delivered (e.g. the mobile platform), the technology on which applications are built (Google's open source mobile platform), or any other foundation -- figurative or literal -- upon which something else can be built. The platform of Lisa's sanity was piled high with new jargon.

In the tech realm, "solution" and "offering" can be used interchangeably with "platform" when referring to a new means by which advertising or other content can be conveyed. Jerry thinks Facebook's Social Ads solution is the ultimate collaborative platform for advertisers and consumers.

Social advertising, Social seeding, user marketing. n. Connotation: positive or used in jest, depending on who you're talking to (a client versus a colleague, respectively). Refers to astroturf WOM: When advertisers and marketers attempt to harness word of mouth as an ad campaign in and of itself. Attempts to generate inorganic WOM have very rarely worked, and backlash can be uncomfortable. Jesus created a resonant dialogue after implementing an aggressive social seeding approach.

UGC. n. "User-generated content." See CGA.

UGR. n. "User-generated revolution." See UGC.

Viral. adj. Connotation: positive. Refers to when an effort, usually online video-based, gets passed from user to user until the offering becomes part of a larger cultural discourse.

A unit cannot "go viral" until after this has occurred. Marketers that call freshly-released efforts "viral" commit a serious faux-pas in this regard. Did you see that Hitler viral where he's all pissed-off about his Xbox gaming score? You have to. I'll send it to you.

Wikinomicon (not to be confused with HP Lovecraft's The Necronomicon). n. Connotation: expected to weigh in as "positive" when more people know what it means. Refers to the mindset that new communications technologies are democratizing the creation of value. I'm just here to brush up on my intermediate understanding of the wikinomicon. What? You haven't heard of it? Here, take my card.

The working affluent. n. Connotation: neutral. Refers to members of the labor force bearing a net worth between one million and 9.9 million dollars. It is unclear why there is a cap. One may surmise that if you still come to work after breaching the $10 million mark, you likely suffer from Marie Antoinette syndrome -- which, while admirable to the subject, is loathsome to observers. It has not been determined what percentage of Nalts watchers consist of the working affluent, but a fair estimate is anywhere between five and 90.

How Many Ads Can Talk You into Eating Chocolate Plastic?

In the press room at ad:tech I met a guy called Frank Nein of OrionsWave, who observed the ad and marketing sectors are falling into turmoil -- spinning uncontrollably into hell, sifting through the din in search of equilibrium in a world gone self-publish and multi-platform.

And I can't stop thinking about Chris Franklin of Big Sky Editorial, who laughed at the idea of a viral ad. "All ads are viral!" he'd said. The point he made was that in order for an ad to succeed, it should be watchable again and again.

How many of our frenetic new manifestos are ideas that have always been there, or at least should have been?

With that, and as a kind of tribute to the future, I give you the Tootsie Roll ad. I couldn't count on my fingers and toes how often in childhood I saw this spot.

What's awesome about it is, most everyone I've met who's roughly my age still knows all the words to the song. We enjoyed watching it then; a lot of us still do.

And in our lifetimes, we ate a hell of a lot of Tootsie Rolls.

What Does it Take to Define 'Just Do It'?

The answer: Five execs, a poetic moderator, and two hours.

I'm sitting at a panel called Want to start an AD Agency?!. To my right sits a dude whose name I shall not mention. He expresses sincere, almost meddling interest in the GelaSkin on my MacBook. So I ask why he's here and he says, "Technically I represent BBDO, but really I am here for my own self-interest."

Tell it like it is, yo. "Lots of self-interest stewing around," I say vaguely.

The BBDO guy agrees. "I'm guessing that's why everybody's here," he observes.

This is a covert little world.

Onto the session (streamed on AEF.com*, for your reference). It's an atmosphere in which you expect the moderator - in this case, Jerry Shereshewsky of grandparents.com - to cite Leo Burnett's "When to Take My Name Off the Door." And he actually does.

"My name is Jerry and I've been an ad-aholic for 38 years," Shereshewsky begins. (Laughter.) "There is no business more amazing than this." Way to start a conversation - deprecation followed by zeal. I'm on an emotional roller coaster, man.

He notes how personal the business is, calls companies "families," and channels visions of your burgeoning agency sitting around you on the floor of your living room. You know, like Josephine Baker's rainbow tribe.

How The Execs Got Where They Are

"I was 26 years old..." begins the first panelist, Richard Kirshenbaum of kirshenbaum bond + partners. He recounts the tale of a younger, more naive Richard, comfy-cozy at JWT, preparing to leap into the Great Beyond.

One day he nailed the Kenneth Cole account and produced a great print. The head of JWT said, "Why can't you produce ads like that?"

"I did," Kirshenbaum said, then he quit.

Zan Ng of Admerasia describes his dire American beginning: No money, no English skills. He started out a commercial photographer with little technical understanding. Every morning he woke up and said, "What's the next thing I want to do?"

Now, imagine the sound of string chords as Asian landscapes flit by. This moment represents how, on the backburner, Ng witnessed opportunities bloom for the Asian-American population - not just in terms of hireability, but in terms of their attractiveness as a target market. This could only culminate in one result.

"Nobody was going to hire me - no education, no experience - so I started my own agency," he said simply.

Linda Kaplan Thaler of The Kaplan Thaler Group hails, like Kirshenbaum, from JWT. She took the jump for independence, earned Herbal Essences (the orgasmic-tastic "Yes! Yes!" campaign was her work), and actually commented to the client that "only an orgasm could save this brand."

Michael Gray of G&G Advertising said he was hanging out with David Kennedy of W+K, expressing righteous indignation about the portrayal of Indian-American products in advertising, when David (of course) asked, "So what do you want to do?"

"Change this," Gray decided. So he pursued the creation of an Indian-American ad agency.

Misc. Observations

The room is infested with pipe dreams and romanticized war tales. It's like Ad Land or Mad Men in the flesh. And I think somebody spat out "Just do it!" at least six times.

To fully grasp the inescapability of Nike's marketing-savvy, an audience member mentioned he wants to bring his London-based firm JDI to New York. "[The firm's name] stands for 'Just do it'," he added happily.

The only thing used more than "Just do it" is the word "passion."

On Financing

Thaler admits that early on, clients would book shoots and not pay. When they pitched AFLAC - which thought using a duck to sell insurance was horribly tasteless - her agency shelled out $35,000 to support the research (funded by Clairol, which "finally paid their bill," Thaler quips).

"It was really scary in the beginning," admits the exec.

Kirshenbaum admits it took 10 years to get "competent" help in billing. He wrote his first invoice and said it was "like magic" when it was sent out and money came back.

Ng describes dealing with creditors. "There's no perfect picture. When you do well," put money away, he says.

Aside from that there are lots of sad stories about bootstrapping and more talk about passion which leads to "winning more accounts" - you are left to do the math.

On Hiring the "Right" People

Gray: "I had the only one-story building in Albuquerque with a revolving door." He realized in the first handful of years that you can't just have a dream; you had to share the dream with your team and keep them informed. (Helps with the passion, I guess.)

Thaler says the little things count. She also notes, "A village stops being a village after about 200 people." She bemoans not knowing everybody by name anymore at her agency, but adds that a resilient business has to keep standing without you.

Kirshenbaum**, referring to the personalities of hirees: "I'll take 'smart and mean' or 'dumb and nice' but I won't take 'dumb and mean.'" He also observes that there aren't enough personalities in the business anymore.

McGarry: "In this land of magic, the people you surround yourself with - advisors, banks, talent - is the holding. You could be at the top of the world but go right out of business." This guy needs to write a book. He says similarly Earl Nightengalish stuff like this all afternoon.

Some time later he adds, "Environment is really critical in the world of creativity."

Don't I know it. That's why I do all my work from a yacht, baby.

The Takeaway

Ogilvy got into the agency game at the age of 38. The people at this panel are proof that anybody can be Ogilvy, or Leo Burnett, or half of Saatchi & Saatchi.

I'll try derailing the cliche train in my head (there's one in particular that comes to mind) with a frank appeal. Got a dream? Got big ideas?

Want to start an AD Agency?!

Just leap. To consider: the uglier the situation looks, the better your romantic war story will be when you're a raging exec.

I'll conclude with a flashback to the audience member with the agency called JDI. "How should I start [building a brand in New York]?" he asked the panelists.

(Long pause, awkward hesitation, furtive giggling.)

Ng finally takes the torch: "Don't rent space," he says. "The rent will kill you."

--

* Worth the listen.
** Korshenbaum makes me laugh. He's like David Spade, except with flair.

Addressing One versus Many

For the cinematic adaptation of his novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote balked at the notion of Audrey playing Holly. He wanted Marilyn Monroe.

Paramount clearly had something else in mind.

Side-by-side, it's only fair to say the film is, at best, only loosely based on the Capote book. Capote's Golightly is completely different from the one we encounter on the big screen - similarly frothy, granted, but by no means was she planning to forsake her own ideas to go running into Paul's arms in the rain.

In the book, she doesn't even go back for the cat she deserted.

Nonetheless, the book and the movie gleaned acclaim in their own circles, and even drew audiences to one another - the book to the film, the film to the book.

Capote was a writer appealing to the individual. He knew what he was doing. An individual has opinions. For him or her, Holly is less a woman than an allegory. On print, her betrayals make sense.

Paramount baked visual and auditory hits for hundreds at a time. They knew what they were doing. In a theatre, individual opinion is largely dependent on the sentiment of others. And Holly isn't just an empty vessel open to interpretation - she's living, breathing skin, a woman with a fashion sense and a personality that reminds people of themselves or their aunts or their mothers.

Decades after Audrey Hepburn's star hit its peak, women are still fashioning themselves after the charmed Holly Golightly. The "little black dress" is standard issue for any self-respecting New York female.

It would be unreasonable, I think, to call one more or less authentic than the other.

With Breakfast at Tiffany's in mind, consider a marketer's attempt to shove a TV ad campaign onto YouTube or some kind of microsite.

These efforts largely fail. Unless an ad is particularly conversation-worthy, what in hell makes you think people are trawling YouTube for it? They're too busy spoofing Miss South Carolina and gawking at the miracle that is Sonic Speed Run. (Seriously, how does he do that? I could never get past Chemical Plant Zone 2.)

You cannot separate the medium from the message. A person is not a passive receptor for any piece of data we choose to spoon-feed it. When I watch television, I have completely different expectations, and a completely different mindset, from when I am sitting in front of my computer.

Paramount understood there's a difference between the individual experience and the group encounter. Paramount also knew it had a limited amount of time to turn a flighty hooker into a social icon. The individual can be forgiving; the group, less so.

These are things that architects of the individual experience alone don't always understand. That's why Capote was so good at addressing the one, while Paramount turned addressing the crowd into a multi-million-dollar business.

The challenge lies in that, these days, a marketer must try to accomplish both: addressing one, touching many.

We're Consumers Before Marketers; We're Self-Seekers Before Sympathizers

From Adrants:

After attending the Ypulse conference in San Francisco earlier this week, I've come to realize a few things about teens, tweens and the marketers who want them in their back pocket.

It seems like today's marketers are falling into the same potholes our predecessors did: trying to deconstruct cool, relying too heavily on surveys, and forgetting that before we're marketers, we're consumers.

We've been consumers all our lives. That experience is our biggest trump card.

Another thing we don't realize is that generations of kids, teens and adults also fall for the same potholes their predecessors did. What we need to remember is, no matter what age we are, we all suffer from a bit of age elitism.

Generally speaking, today:

• Tweens, that precious window between 9 and 12, are probably the only individuals that will ever fully buy into our manufactured teen shit. And that's because they're young and want to be teens so badly, they'll swallow anything that looks remotely teen-like.

The problem is, this age window is small. And with the internet changing the way people consume knowledge, it's only going to get smaller as new generations of tweens get savvier.

• Teens have always tried to skew slightly older than their actual age. Fifteen-year-old girls don't read Teen; they read Seventeen, Cosmo and even Maxim - mags that skew more closely to college-level demographic, or so they think.The good thing about teens is, generally speaking, they still follow mainstream music and trends.

Just don't overthink your pitch!

• In a quest to solidify their identities once and for all, college co-eds shed their mainstream media love affairs and start dipping into indie films and music.

But mere love of foreign fare does not a worldly student make. College kids also love - love - their parents' and grandparents' pop music hits. I don't know if this is just an Echo Boomer thing or if it has always been the case.

I think if we can bear in mind that we all share a similar superiority complex (and perhaps that's too strong of a term), maybe it'll help us better address one another. This is something that transcends technology and trends.

The Medium is (Integral to) the Message

I hit NYC for the first time last weekend. Once I got over the elaborate spiderweb that passes for a subway (definitely a far cry from beloved BART), I fell all over myself.

New York is the living, breathing witness to America's industrialized history, stuffed to overflowing with contradictory messages and too many dreams. And like a splatter in the concrete, every once in awhile you find beauty again.

I'm accosted by ads I've reviewed, come to vivid life. It's like they were lying in wait and have leaped out to confront me, pulsing with energy and so much force. The press releases that tried to contain them simply never had a chance.

Since the awakening, so to speak, I've developed an almost superstitious aversion to PDFs. Generally speaking I don't mind them, but in the strange universe of ad critique I find them deceptive for two reasons:

1. Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. Can you divorce the medium from the message? No. In PDF form, the ad lacks the impact and gravity its creators had in mind.
   
2. Press releases, which also come in PDFs, are like cheat-sheets. PR execs and agencies love to wax creative about ad particulars on a release. The problem is, your consumer doesn't get one. He or she has no chance of knowing why you picked that color, or why the giant talking tooth made a great inside joke. Fuck poetic license in a PR; it's supposed to be in your AD! (Have I mentioned I also hate reading them?)

I'd like to gauge the quality of an advertisement in almost the same way an art critic appraises some ancient or contemporary oeuvre.

It needs to be in front of me, larger than life, involved in my world. If it's a billboard, I want to be standing under it with my neck craned as far as it will go, trying to decide if it "pops."

If it's a print ad, I want to encounter it in a magazine or discover it hanging above me one drowsy day on the train. If it's a :30 spot, I want to find it appropriately adorning some TV show while I sit fooling with a Rubik's cube on the couch.

A version of an ad in a PDF, versus the one you come across on the street, is like the difference between a 20-foot Picasso and a JPEG, or the Louvre's Mona Lisa and a postcard.

You can never learn how your advertising moves a person - provided it does at all - until you can experience it in the intended format, whether it's hundreds of feet above you on a billboard, or posing as a coquettish interactive Flash corner on the digital edition of BusinessWeek.

There's simply no comparison.

Prelude to the Diversity Conference

So, the Advertising Industry Diversity Job Fair and Leadership Conference (we need a clever acronym for that) hits SF. Adrants, a sponsor, conveyed me out yonder to represent in the flesh, though the snark ain't out to play. (I'm really sort of shy.)

This evening I attended the networking reception at the Academy of Art student gallery. To start with, I was just blown away by a lot of the work the students in the advertising school are doing. The focus of the exhibit sought to define humanity, a broad and esoteric cat-chase that is really what advertising is all about. While the point of advertising is to sell, great ad people manage that by telling a story about society or the person encountering the product.

In many ways advertising helps relate our values to us, tells us what we want and lends a glimpse of who we want to be. Just ask an Apple fanatic or a Google employee. That's not to say there aren't two edges to that sword.

This networking event notably marks my first group encounter with other members of the marketing and ad community. I started to get pretty stoked about the panel I'll be moderating tomorrow, a dialogue between professionals on what it's like to work in the ad and marketing industry. I got to speak with the panelists beforehand and a lot of hot topics promise to rise to the forefront. A few button-pushers include the issue of diversity and the upsurge of women, who are shaping the industry as both consumers and advertising entities.

I have to say there's probably never been a more exciting time to get involved in this industry. It literally seems to be rebuilding itself: conversing more with consumers instead of at them, and marrying the technical with the creative. It's like the wild wild west all over again, except with no horses and better media.

I'm also inclined to think people smell better now too, not that I'm all leaning in and checking or anything.

The job fair is free for students or people looking for work. If you're in town, drop in.

Kaiser is the Devil, Ads are His Bait

Contrary to popular conception, I'm not the super-sexy, hyper-awesome, ad-livid hard-ass I make myself out to be. (I'm sure this goes against everything you've seen and heard.)

At heart I'm an impressionable consumer. A consistent campaign, or a sense of shared values, makes a big impact on how I feel about brands in the arena.

Ever since I was a kid I've had negative feelings about Kaiser. My parents plainly avoided them. And while their preferences about healthcare providers aren't topics one cares much about as a kid, one does inherit the prejudices. I admit I brought the bad vibes with me in my journey through time.

In the last year I began to re-examine those feelings. While I'd like to say it's because I've grown more mature and reflective about everything around me, that simply wouldn't be true.

The reason is its "Thrive" campaign, whose billboards are everywhere I go - mostly on BART, greeting me at the very beginning and end of my workday.

I like it. As a Responsible Adult In-the-Make, I feel it reflects many core values. Sweetness, purity and an underlying promotion of inner well-being just oozes out of the simple-things imagery.

So when I found out my company chose Kaiser as our healthcare provider, I was stoked. I felt I was embarking on an adventure. KAISER! I'm ready to fall into your clean clinical arms, nodding vigorously at any concerned assessments you'll (doubtless, thoughtfully) make.

Recently my whole body rebelled. I thought it was the flu but my parents, deathly concerned, conveyed me to the big pretty medical center Kaiser keeps near my home.

The first thing Kaiser did was hit me with a massive co-pay. That was cool, I could roll, the big guys cost more, I get it. Some girls brought me into the doctor's office and took my temperature.

"You're at 108," one said, tsk-tsking. I could believe it, I was not feeling cool.

After a few moments I heard jokes and loud laughter outside my door, then the doctor walked in. She couldn't have been much older than me. She looked at me, grinned, asked what my symptoms were, and feigned concern at my response. She seemed to be on the verge of giggles the whole time.

Finally she said, "I doubt you have it but I'm going to have you X-rayed for pneumonia. Head down to the basement."

I was appalled. I could hardly stand! Worse still, the basement was in another building on the other side of campus, where I was hit with another co-pay. And when I returned from the X-ray (all stumbly and shit), I was locked out.

This sucked.

A janitor eventually walked by and let me in with her spare keys. By then I was exhausted. I stumbled into the doctor's office, panting dramatically, world spinning, and collapsed across the counter. She walked in, burst out laughing and cried, "What's wrong with you?" Then she prescribed drugs for sinusitis and sent me on my way.

My parents, tight-lipped, spoonfed me back to life over the next few days. "We told you," they said about 67,000 times, shaking their heads and glaring. "We told you about Kaiser. Didn't we? Ever since you were small."

Ugh.

Great marketing that belies a horrible product or service is just as bad as lazy marketing. In fact, one could argue it probably hurts a company more over the long-term.

An awesome prospective ad for Kaiser:

A tower of made of splintered toothpicks, shooting high into the sky with the tagline: "We may not do our job, but we're pretty damn big, yo. Kaiser Permanente. Even inexpicably, thrive."

You Want Me to Do What?

Dude: "Why don't you do marketing for our band?"

Me: "You guys do fine with word of mouth; you're overcommitted."

Dude: "But you could help."

Me: "What do you want?"

Dude: "Just get us on the front page of the internets."

Cryptic Marketing Advice

Emotions are only one part of the equation. If you really want to stick, compel your audience to do research, turn over stones, unearth myths. Make them think about you at night.

Is There a Reason to Surrender the Foosball Table?

Hot off the heels of Time naming YOU its Man of the Year, Advertising Age crowns The Consumer Agency of the Year. Looks like we've got a new rock star.

You're hot. You're blowing up. Bask in those rays, then record your acceptance speech on YouTube. We won't just listen in total adoration; we'll even take notes.

It's really great that the mistakenly-named Little Guy is finally getting kudos for being an assertive customer who wants to one-up Ad Man and Big Business, but now that consumers are doing all the work, what are advertisers doing?

Handing over their jobs, that's what.

Everybody from the NFL to Dove is conducting send-us-anything consumer ad contests, presenting their "win a :30 spot!" pitches in a way that's stripped itself of any professional or creative guise in order to pander. It's safe to say marketers are responding to the consumer-is-king backlash by fanning the flames, happily handing over the rights to their mini b-ball courts, paycheques and ... jobs.

You've heard me mention before that you can really only be a great marketer if you know (or for those most lofty, remember) what it's like to be a consumer. I stand by that. I also maintain it's not news that the consumer has power - the consumer has always had power. From the beginning of the value dialogue, when mercantilism created scalable variety in the marketplace, people had the power to choose where to spend their money, and to relate feedback about the quality of our products and services to their friends.

Web 2.0 merely enables today's consumer to wield these same powers in a way that finally shakes businesses so significantly they have to listen. And that's good, because these days some businesses can get so big they forget that they have customers to answer to, with specific needs and opinions of their own.

Today a customer doesn't merely vote with financial capital; they can vote in critique, parody and even their own brand of investigative journalism, then reach an audience of thousands of sympathizers. That's incredible.

And now they want to talk to marketers about marketing. In fact, some marketers appear to think they want to take marketing on completely. That's a dangerous line of thought, and it doesn't necessarily yield the best results. Even the NFL's sad plea for consumer-generated ads ultimately ended with an ad guy winning the pie.

Big shocker? No, not really. The best marketers, like the best anything, have fallen in love with their profession. They can listen to the word on the street and engage it proactively without losing their own identities - and the identities of their brands - in the process. That's what makes them the best.

We're creative professionals. We spent years studying demographic trends and trying to wield emotions with one line, one graphic, one life-changing product. It's our job to generate great ideas of our own that engenders feedback and incorporates it in some way. We're trying to have a conversation with a society, not a master/slave dynamic. That turns our brands into faceless entities with OBO written across their logos.

Our customers, the people with whom we should have the most intimate relationship, are finally able to engage us in a two-way dialogue on a more even playing field - that's cause for celebration. But we've still got our own contributions to make to the big picture. We must still create work and generate interactivity in a way that's provocative and well-executed, because that is our job.

Our customers aren't trying to replace us - they've got their own dreams to follow. They're asking us to tell a story we might be missing, one that might add value to the images of the products and services we represent. Marketing needs collaboration between creative professionals and the people they're trying to talk to. Because marketing is, at its lowest common denominator, a conversation about the customer and about the immediate world. It's a running dialogue about us.

Don't trash your responsibility to your brands and society at large, letting whosoever wishes run the circus. We're trying to establish relationships here, not hand over the keys and the pink slip to the livelihoods we love. There's nothing lamer than trying to hold up a one-way conversation.

One of Those Humiliating Cool-Hunter Moments.

So this morning my employer's son GT walks up to me and goes, "Angela. Is there an urban slang term for talking on your cell phone?"

I consider. "Not that I know of," I reply. "But if one exists, I can find it."

"No." He swirls his hands around. "I want one that's ... common. Used."

"Then no, there isn't one that comes to mind."

GT looks at me a moment longer, then resolves, "I'm going to ask someone younger." And walks off.

"Thanks!" I shout, and he laughs.

Moments later he returns, smug: "Do you know what urban slang is for your cell phone?"

"What?"

"People say celly." He repeats it for good measure: "Celly."

I can't help but be nasty: "Oh, that's been around forever, plus it's bopper," I snarl. "You don't really ever say that unless you're, like, eleven."

Perhaps encouraged by my surprising exhibition of rage, GT again experiences a moment of resolution: "I'm going to use it." And walks away. I can hear him typing with quiet glee as we speak.