Beers for Fears

Paul Riss kindly passed along a link in response to my post about epilepsy-inducing beer bottles.  It is about the Buddy Cup, an invention from Budweiser Brazil than connects people via Facebook whenever they clink their Buddy Cups together.  You clink, you link. To convince you just how cool the Buddy Cup is the video shows lots of good looking Brazilian women and men enjoying themselves supposedly because they drink Bud.  I suspect, however, they are actually professional models and are blasted on some sort of pharmaceutical. 

It only took a few minutes after watching the video to see a couple of drawbacks.  For example, imagine the ladies get up from their table and flock off to the washroom to do whatever ladies do in groups in washrooms.  While they are gone a guy across the bar who has been eyeing them for a couple of hours approaches their now vacant table.  Guys like this:

Mr. Right

As he passes their table he clinks their glasses with his and BOOM!, they're friends!  Yea!!  Now he knows who they are, who their friends are, and has access to lots and lots of photos.  Just imagine what he has on his Facebook page.

And knowing what happens to guys who spend all night in the bar wearing beer goggles, chances are you may end up becoming friends with some of the really swell women who now post on your page about all the fun you two had the night before.

The Ladies!

I'm sure the inventors had every good intention when they came up with this, BUT, I don't think enabling stalkers to prey on drunk women is what it had in mind.  Then again, Bud does funny things to a man when he's had more than his fill.

A Sucker Born Every Minute

With any scheme, wherever there is a crowd of people willing to throw huge amounts of cash around with little oversight, criminals are sure to gather.  And so it goes that just like they have done with carbon trading systems governments, bankers and big business want to impose on the world, crooks have infiltrated the ad network business and, according to Adweek, are skimming $400 million per year.  Bob Hoffman goes to town on these scammers and the gullible marketers and agencies who fall over each other to buy audiences and clicks and is worth a read.

What the crooks have set up, and the industry has only begin to expose, are ghost sites:

Increasingly, digital agencies and buy-side technology firms are seeing massive traffic and audience spikes from groups of Web publishers few people have ever heard of. These sites—billed as legitimate media properties—are built to look authentic on the surface, with generic, nonalarm-sounding content. But after digging deeper, it becomes evident that very little of these sites' audiences are real people. Yet big name advertisers are spending millions trying to reach engaged users on these properties.

Well, so much for buying audiences.

How sophisticated these operations are was revealed by Business Insider.  It was told by spider.io, a Web analytics company, that it detected a malware-controlled computer network that has:

120,000 host machines on what it has dubbed the "Chameleon" botnet. It says these machines are driving traffic to a cluster of at least 202 websites, resulting in a minimum of 9 billion monthly ad impressions served.

This traffic often appears human, suggesting a high level of sophistication. Chameleon machines click on ads at a rate consistent with the general population – about 0.02% – and they even generate rollovers on 11% of impressions.

Spider.io estimates that the botnet is defrauding advertisers — who end up paying for clicks that don't really really exist — of about $6 million a month.

It remains to be seen what effect the botnets and ghost sites will have on online ad numbers once they are winnowed out (it could be up to 50% of Web traffic), but, hopefully, it will finally crush the myth of the success of online advertising/brand building once and for all.  Then another minute will pass…

Too much $$ + too much weed = Seriously?

In the town where every day is 4/20, comes an idea that can only have sprung from smoking too many blunts at Amsterdam's Tribal DDB office.  It's the Heineken Ignite interactive bottle.  I can just see the "ideation" process… "Dude, pass the Doritos… you know what would be really cool?  A flashing beer bottle."  After a five second delay, there's a collective gasp followed by the unanimous "Duuude, that totally rocks."

Here's how it works:

The bottle is activated by two people ‘cheersing’, sending a bright flash of light up through the green glass. When you drink, the LEDs spin faster and faster and when you put the bottle down on a surface it goes to ‘sleep’ and ‘breathe’. But best of all, at certain moments during the night we can communicate with the bottles and sync the LEDs to the beat, so we can create epic Heineken moments when the DJ, laser show, club lights and bottles all come together to form a club experience that people are part of.  With the Heineken Ignite bottle, we have created the first social bottle, which blends human behavior and communication, club environment and interaction together with the iconic green Heineken bottle for a unique experience.

Me, I couldn't care less that my beer bottle has lights on it—especially if I have to pay more for it.  Sure, it might be kinda' cool after three or four, and the club scene hipsters will all want to be the first to get one, but it seems likely that all it will do is goose in sales for a few weeks. 

There are a few drawbacks I can think of with this novelty item.  The article mentions that the guts of the thing need be installed just before serving because the fridge plays havoc with the battery. This means that bartenders across the world will now not only have to serve beer, but they will have to assemble them, too.  Yup, that will be popular after a month.  I also like the use of the word "havoc."  If by havoc you mean it kills the battery, OK, that would be havoc.  It's the same kind of "havoc" that plagues the idiots who own electric cars when the temperatures drops below 50 degrees.

Aside from the awesomeness of the blending of "human behavior and communication, club environment and interaction together with the iconic green Heineken bottle for a unique experience," I can imagine the dance floor when the DJ sets all the Heineken bottles to flashing and it triggers photosensitive epilepsy in a number of patrons.  Probably not the epic Heineken moment it was after. 

BREAKING: Teens use smart phone. A lot!

This just in from The Department of Blatantly Obvious: teen usage of smartphones is increasing.  Yes, I know, you had to sit down after learning this, but it's true, at least according to Ad Weak anyway.  It cites a Pew Centre study called  Teens and Technology 2013,  that "found that while cellphone ownership has held steady, 37 percent of kids 12-17 owned a smartphone in 2012, up from 23 percent the year before. Moreover, one fourth of teens use the cell as their primary way of accessing the Internet, and among smartphone owners, that figure rises to 50 percent. (Only 15 percent of adults can say the same.) No wonder that, with smartphones allowing Internet access along with talking and texting, kids more than ever always seem to be on the phone."

Now I can see all the CMOs calling their AORs and demanding they hone in on this emerging mobile market.  Too bad that this particular demographic is poor.  No, beyond poor: they are poh.  They have no real discretionary funds other than what their parents give them.  I know because I've had three of them.  What's more, anything targeted at them is viewed, screened analyzed and ultimately judged by their financiers. Such as the achingly hip Rogers ad a few years back that was touting text plans to teens.  Rogers' mistake was it targeted it AT teens, not parents.  The head was a text message that basically said, "Hey guys, parents are out of town for the weekend so there's a party at my house." Needless to say, I never got my kids a text plan until they turned 18 and I treated them like my AMEX card—I never left town without them.
 
 If CMO's were smart (just a supposition) and wanted to tap into an underutilized market with the most disposable income of any group, they should look at parents with kids in their mid-'20s—early '30s.  Adults over 50 control 75%+ of financial assets, dominate 94% of CPG categories and purchase 40% of CPGs and yet under 5% of ad spend is direct to them.  But again, it's just a supposition...

How to Handle Creatives—written by a possible substance abuser

Here's a fine example of why an education does not make one smart, and that a degree usually makes it official:

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/seven_rules_for_managing_creat.html

Technological Limbo

Image from Illuminating the End of Time, Getty Museum Pub. 2012

A couple of weeks ago, a project landed in my lap unrelated to the ad business.  I was asked by a woman to sort through and catalogue boxes of letters, photos, and recordings to create a permanent family history for her children and grandchildren.  Most of the documents date from 1778 to 1900 and, being that I can read handwriting from the 18^th and 19^th century with ease (hey, it's a gift), I soon discovered just how deep and rich my client's family history was. 

In the tranche of documents were business contracts, Wills, and receipts, but more important were the dozens of letters written to and by family members.  The earliest is a portion of a military pass authorized on 30 May 1778 by Nicholas Gilman, an officer of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and subordinate to George Washington.  There was also a pass signed by Ben Franklin's son. 

Most fascinating to me were the letters written by my client's great, great, grandmother, Emma.  In these letters to her mother, and two surviving diaries, is the story of Emma's grand European tour in 1867-68, a daily account of her adventure crossing the prairie of Kansas into Colorado by wagon with her husband and 6 year-old daughter Virginia, in 1871, and her return to the Mediterranean and Paris at the height of the Belle Époque in 1887-88. Virginia, at age 21, also contributes to the historical record with letters home to her mother Emma while she studied at The Sorbonne in 1888-89. 

As I catalogued and scanned these letters I was struck by how fortunate my client was to have such an extensive record from her ancestors.  And the reason why it survived is because it was written on paper—a technology that only requires eyes or fingertips to get at its content.  It was only in the late 1800s that inventions were needed to access stored information.

In my lifetime, information storage has evolved from punch cards to magnetic storage to optical devices to electronic devices.  I have dozens of microfloppies from the '80s and '90s and CDs and DVDs from '90s and the Naughts that hold files, letters and articles that I can't read because I have no way to access them—floppy drives disappeared in the late '90s and CDs and DVDs are fast becoming useless as they are replaced with electronic storage.

Digital technologies give us the capability to store an increasing amount of information on ever-shrinking devices, but there is a trade-off.  Besides being fragile and totally dependent on power sources, each advancement in capacity and convenience makes our written past increasingly transient. 

For my client's convenience I scanned each letter so it can be shared electronically, but I also preserved each one in an acid-free folder and stored them in an archival quality boxes.  I made sure that whatever happens to the electronic files, the originals will survive another 200 years (stored in a cool and dry place, of course). 

I cannot imagine what kind of storage will be around 50 years from now when my children and grandchildren (I have two right now) try to assemble a family history.  One fact is clear, though: if I don't reproduce electronic files on paper now, it is unlikely they will ever see them then.

Now what?

When I heard of Gary Prouk's death on March 7, I knew an era in Canadian advertising had come to an end.   And while I never worked with or for him, I certainly worked in his shadow.  Thinking about what his death means for the industry, Paddy Chayefsky came to mind and what he said through Howard Beale during the monologue about the death of Edward Ruddy in the film Network:  

And woe is us!  We're in a lot of trouble!  

Had he tried to break into the industry now, he'd never get past HR.  It's because he wouldn't meet the standardized, sanitized, and sanctified description of the ideal creative's qualifications that the advertising holding companies use.  And among today's creatives, he likely would be mocked because he didn't look like what a creative is supposed to look like: he was not a hipster, he never wore a wool cap in summer, sported a soul patch or a multitude of tattoos. He was someone you could pass on the street without noticing.  No, Gary would be a member of faceless crowd who would never be one of the "qualified candidates" called back.  Collaborative and a team player?  Yeah, right.  Provide clear and objective critiques of creative work?  Um, no... unless setting linears on fire meets the definition of objective criticism. Expert in SEO and Social Media?  I imagine his response would be:

Gary Prouk would likely end up at one of the small agencies: the risk-takers, places that push the boundaries of what's been done before.  Well, at least he'd be there until the Four Horsemen of the Advertising Apocalypse (Omnicom, WPP, Publicis and Interpublic) swooped in with bushels of cash.  Chayefsky and Beale again:  

It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some two hundred odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods.

Another genius who recently departed—but thankfully he left standing up—is Bob Hoffman.  Bob is my version of Kalliope, and I admire his way of speaking without fear.  On 29 March, Bob called it quits with the agency business.  What he had to say on his blog about his last day is suitable for framing:

 

Graduation Day

Today is my last official day in the agency business.

I'll sign some papers, de-commission my laptop (whatever the hell that means) and say goodbye to the agency I helped found over 20 years ago.

It's supposed to be a bittersweet occasion. But it's not. It's easy. The art of advertising is still interesting, but the agency business has lost its appeal.

While I do a lot of railing about brand babble and digital stupidity, they are not the big problem. The big problem is consolidation.

Like so much of life in America these days, what used to be an industry lead by craftspeople is now something very different. Much of the industry is in the hands of a few investors and financiers who know nothing about making ads. They know about making money.

Sadly, their influence is felt everywhere. Like them, we have become obsessed with numbers and desensitized to artistry. As a former science teacher, I understand the appeal of data. But I've exhausted my energy for explaining to people who don't understand science how misleading most of the data we collect are and how often that data is misinterpreted.

Advertising has become tough for the craftspeople. They have no ammunition in the face of the onslaught of the philistines. There is a lot of frustration and dissatisfaction. There have always been unhappy ad people, but today discontent among our most important element is dangerously pervasive.

I am not foolish enough to fight the march of "progress." I know reality when I see it, and I understand that objects in motion tend to stay in motion. But that doesn't mean I have to like it or approve of it.

Personally, I'm not complaining. The ad business owes me nothing. I've had a very satisfying and rewarding career. I've gone way further than a C student has any right to go.

I've had the great good fortune to help create two successful independent agencies and, most importantly, I've had a hand in providing a livelihood for a few hundred good people and their families. I'm proud of this.

I'm not through with advertising yet. But I have had enough of the agency business.

 As these creative leaders head for the exits, voluntarily or otherwise, megacorp HR departments replace them with piston rods.  And woe is us! We're in a lot of trouble!