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PUBLICATIONS FINANCIAL FIRMS GOVERNMENT/NGO
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AUTOMOTIVE Chrysler Motors Corp. General Motors Mercedes-Benz NA Mercedes-Benz USA Mitsubishi Motor Sales Nissan North America Volkswagen of America Harley-Davidson TECHNOLOGY ENTERTAINMENT CONSUMER PRODUCTS
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When I was a young boy I spent some time in the small mountain town of Altoona, Pennsylvania. Nestled at the base of the Alleghany mountains, Altoona was a railroad town. A company town. Meandering along the banks of the Juniata River, the town of Altoona traced the four tracks of the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad and depended upon its cavernous car and locomotive shops and foundries for its day-to-day existence. If there had been no PRR there would have been no Altoona. The keystone logotype of the PRR was emblazoned across every wall, bridge, boxcar, locomotive, structure and crossing in town. It was worn proudly on lapel pins and displayed reverently on tombstones. "Pennsy born. Pennsy bred. When I die I'll be Pennsy dead," was the way I saw it expressed across the stainless steel overnight cases of the mountain engineers who took streamliners like the Broadway Limited up and over the 13 percent ruling grade, around the world famous Horseshoe Curve and on into the perpetually crimson haze that hung over the Steel City of Pittsburgh like a swirling shroud. For more than 100 years the Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest corporation in America and the first to reach a billion dollars a year in revenue. It was among the first of the great American brands. Today it is no more. Gone the way of TWA, Oldsmobile, Univac, and Bell Telephone. Gone because it ceased to matter. Today more and more brands cease to matter. Not because they have been passed by on our march to progress. They don't matter because the Audience has chosen to ignore their existence. These brands have become meaningless in the minds of those who once depended upon them to define their very existence. AT&T, which used to invite us to "Reach Out And Touch Someone, " Is now promising "The World. Delivered." Are they a phone company or a package expediter ? Ford Motor Company, who convinced us that "Quality Is Job 1, " is now touting "Bold Moves, " which gives us absolutely nothing to believe in. Of course Madison Avenue is to blame for this creative bankruptcy of brand equity. But it has gone way beyond the finger pointing stage. How many automotive nameplates do we need? Ask Hundai. They are on the verge of introducing a new luxury line of automobiles to compete with Lexus and Infinity. A luxury Hundai. What is wrong with this picture, boys and girls? Perhaps they can get Rodney King to be their spokesman. A true icon of opulence if ever there was one. Well, who else's name comes to mind when you say Hundai? We are on the edge of one of the greatest slides in shareholder value ever seen in this country, yet nothing is being done by our image makers to address the issue. A man in a red pigtail wig has an epiphany while kicking a tree with a bunch of other men in a forest and I am supposed to get appetite appeal out of that and run right down to, "Where was that again?" How embarrassing does it have to get before the wholesale firings start to sweep through the creative departments of Madison Avenue? Where are the Stockholder Action Committees and their disruption of the annual stockholder's meetings demanding the heads of the CMO's on a pike for their brand erosive management practices? Where is the moral outrage from the Wall Street Journal and Business Week? Where are the alternatives to the full-nervous advertising agency business model that everybody says is broken? Where are the industry pundits? Joe Jaffee is busy touting his new kickback from Nikon, his back-sliding diet and some worthless blog poll and Scott Donaton is spouting platitudes about the decline and fall of BudTV . Where are the best minds of our time? Certainly not in the schools. I had some wannabe art director whose work was featured in the One Show Student Competition blow off a job interview TWICE without so much as a phone call. What did they teach her at her so-called institution of higher learning ? If our salvation is not at hand from the new generation, then where? I'll tell you where. From the clients, that's where. It all started when Roger Enrico sat down with Don King, who went to dinner with Joe and Katherine Jackson to get Michael and his brothers to reunite for the Victory Tour. For one bright and shining moment Pepsi pulled ahead of Coke and the die was cast. Of course BBDO was nowhere in the deal until they set Mike's hair on fire, but that's par for the course. Ever since, clients have been taking creative matters into their own hands, with mixed results. Mike worked wonders for Pepsi, Bono, not so much for the sponsors of "Red." "True" worked for Bud, but BudTV was stillborn. It's not easy for clients to take matters into their own hands, but the advertising industry is giving them little alternative. For every victory like the Guy Richie films for BMW there is a disaster like the Guy Richie commercial of a nine year old kid joy-riding a Corvette down Park Avenue South. For every fifty incidents of million dollar fees a client throws away paying a talent agency to make the deal of a lifetime for their brand, there is only one Tom Hanks delivering his FedEx package after being marooned on a deserted island for years. There are a great many clients reading this article right now. Don't give up the fight for the New Creativity. It really is in your hands. And don't wait for your agency to show up with the big idea. They wouldn't know a big idea if it served them with an eviction notice. And now a word from our sponsor. For the past few weeks we have been outlining a process we call Adaptive Branding. We have been exposing this process to a representitive sample of the Audience in group discussions and online forums for several months now. As mentioned last week, we also ran a few computerization models to examine Adaptive Branding theories for scalability . So far the results, though far from conclusive, have been extremely encouraging. Our next step is to inject our GASP New Creative component of the Adaptive Branding System into our audience equations. The GASP New Creative components are about as far removed from traditional advertising executions as you can get. Once our testing is completed, we will post a demonstration for those of you who have an interest in what may come next. Until then, keep up the good fight. Reinforcements are on the way.
Stay tuned. |
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