Adaptive Branding Hits The Road.

For some time now we have been offering to serve up an on-site brown bag seminar to spread the gospel about our newly minted Adaptive Branding methodologies to companies who have an interest in all things new in this chaos that is the Post-Advertising Era. Well, yesterday we finally had a chance to take our show on the road and evangelize the benefits of this new approach to marketing to a sector of the business community that is desperate for anything that might move the needle. A major automotive manufacturer.

We had been told that less than 20 people would be in attendance. We wound up changing conference rooms twice before the festivities began due to SRO crowds of unexpected viewers who had not bothered to RSVP to their respective bosses, but showed up anyway do to the cancellation of a big internal brand review that had been planned for visiting dignitaries but scrubbed at the last moment due to scheduling conflicts.

Anyway, we wound up with 162 marketing, promotion, product info and advertising execs in a good-sized auditorium with state of the art everything and no union multi-media technician to crank it up.  

"Did anybody let Leon know we were restaged in Jupiter?" was the whiplash from my embarrassed host. Silence.

"Anybody?" Crickets chirping.

Then four people from different parts of the room headed for the door at the same time. Four people who were never seen or heard from again.

"Well, I guess you're going to have to speak a little louder," said the host. This guy was all smooth and I knew that heads would be rolling if we didn't pull off a great show in spite of Leon's absence.

Whenever you get a hundred or so folks from the same company in a room at the same time, it seems that none of them has had a chance to speak with each other for at least a fortnight. And this was the occasion they had been waiting for to get everything possible off their collective chests. "Murmur, murmur, murmur." times a hundred sounds roughly like the F train blowing past
74 th Street at 80mph.  

So the first order of business was to get their attention. I picked up a copy of Wired that one of the Leon wranglers had left to hold his seat. I opened up the magazine, faced the pages toward the audience and started flipping through it from front to back. When I would get to a double page spread I would stop and pan the magazine from left to right in front of the audience. Nobody paid me the slightest bit of attention. I tossed the magazine on the floor, picked up the empty folding chair it was sitting in, folded it with a bang, lifted it over my head ( while giving a big wink to the guy sitting next to it) and started yelling at the top of my lungs. "That's it!!! I've had it with you people!!! You sold me a lemon and I'm gonna make you pay!!!!"

That's all it took, to get everybody's undivided attention. And I do mean everybody .

I put the chair down and proceed to tell the room that what they had just witnessed was a far better demonstration of Adaptive Branding then they would have seen on the PowerPoint if Leon had been in the house.

When I showed them the ad spread in Wired, nobody paid attention. Just like in the real world outside. Nobody pays attention to advertising. But when they thought some wild-eyed crazy person with a folding chair was there to wreck havoc on the entire marketing department for selling them a bum car, everybody was on point.

In an instant I went from a "nobody" to a person with a meaningful message to convey.

Understandably that was a hard act to follow. But that little piece of opening drama was a great way to warm-up the room. I asked how many people could remember at least two billboards they had seen driving in to work that morning. Nobody raised his or her hands. Then I asked how many could remember at least two songs they heard on drive time radio. Everybody's hand shot up.

Then I asked how many people in the room remembered one commercial they had seen the night before and could stand up and tell me the brand and the tag line. Nada. Then I asked how many people could remember being kissed good night, the night before. Every hand shot up.

Next, the big question, was big fun for me. How many of you believe that advertising is still able to attract and hold a person's attention for 30 seconds.

No response. And this from an entire room of marketing professionals. Then a throat clearing from the back of the room. Half the hands shot up in unison.

I continued with the presentation for another 45 minutes including a spirited Q & A session. At the end of the session my host confirmed that he thought we might be on to something with this Adaptive Branding "stuff" but he didn't think it would work for a high ticket item like a luxury sedan. "People want information when they're in the market for a car," he confided. "Advertising is the last place they go for information." I countered. "Where do you think they go first?" he responded. "To the person who drives one." I said knowingly. "Our research tells us otherwise." He said with an air of finality.

We have a long, long way to go. But thank you Leon, wherever you are. You gave us a great way to begin our journey.

Stay strong.

SUBVERTising:
Madison Avenue Goes StealthMode.

Part 3 of an upcoming book
by Harry Webber

President Giuliani had announced to the nation just two days before I arrived in New York that the recent anti-advertising demonstrations that were sweeping across Europe since January of 2009 would not be spreading to the United States.

"Advertising is as much a part of America's cultural heritage as baseball and apple pie" was the sound bite all the networks were pushing, through their video rss feeds."Prez Rudy G" as the media had taken to calling him as the result of his amazing popularity with Urban blacks at the polls, seemed to be everywhere at once.

Giuliani had become an overnight sensation in Urban America as a result of his taking the Democratic Party to task for dropping Obama in favor of John Edwards when Hillary Clinton went down in flames. Giuliani had even gone so far as to offer Obama a spot as his running mate if he would make the unprecedented step of switching parties in mid-campaign.

But then ever since Giuliani had fired his campaign advisers and retained Crispin, Porter and Bogusky to run his campaign, nothing was politics as usual for the former mayor of New York.

It was Crispin who convinced Giuliani to take any reference to 9/11 off the table as a campaign issue in respect for the victim's families who, as he put it "Deserved a chance to heal without politics prying open their wounds."  

It was a masterful campaign and now Rudi Giuliani , the "Goomba for President" was in the White House, and the Democratic Party was looking less and less viable every minute.

So here I was, with Rudy G's words ringing in my ears about advertising and saying, of course "America's Mayor" would feel that way. Right before Crispin, Bogusky took charge Rudy was catching hell from critics who charged that Rudy's failure to resolve the feuding between NYC's police and fire departments prior to 9/11 led to widespread deaths in both contingents.

The tragic truth was that firemen could not hear warnings from police helicopters about the impending collapse of the South Tower. The 9/11 Commission concluded that greater coordination would have spared many lives.

Then there was the series of articles in Rolling Stone calling Rudy "Bush III" and claiming that the mastermind behind his campaign was none other than Bush uberstrategist Carl Rove. Well Bogusky's "Goomba for President" campaign leading off with Rudy in a limo under the Jersey Turnpike offering the job of Secretary of Defense to Tony Soprano, washed all of that bothersome dirty laundry away. Bogusky even had me wanting to vote for Rudy by the time Election Day rolled around.

So here I was, taking a 7am stroll up Madison Avenue, ever the happy wanderer, with the newly elected President assuring me that my livelihood was safe and I had nothing to fear.

Certainly not the two gigundous oil tankers that rumbled to a stop on 41 St and Madison as I walked past my old alma mater at 285.

I didn't think anything of the two drivers bailing out of the cabs until they ducked under the tankers and I heard the hiss of high-pressure valves being twirled open. It wasn't until two other guys crawled up on the catwalk and began spray painting in red, "T.O.A.S.T ("Tyranny of Advertising Stops Thought") that it hit me that something might be amiss.

.

What Matters To Me:

My Agenda.

Back in 1965 Hugh Heffner sat down to write what he believed would be a single page, double spaced internal memorandum about why he started Playboy Magazine on the kitchen table of his mother's Chicago walk-up apartment some 12 years earlier. Well six years later the "Playboy Philosophy" had filled some 238 pages across 72 issues of his highly successful magazine. Thankfully, I just don't have that much to say.

I started MadisonAveNew.com for one reason only. To make myself as famous as the campaigns I was responsible for. I wanted to package myself as a knowledge brand in a very narrow field of endeavor. In doing so I was hopeful that I would raise the value of my opinions and insights in the global consulting marketplace as more than just the guy who created two of the longest running campaigns in advertising.

Of course, like every other brand that I've had the responsibility for launching or repositioning, my first step was to see what was out there and then use that gathered intelligence to create a product that filled a specific need.

What I found in my due diligence process was that the blogs, eMagazines and digital newsletters that served the advertising industry were generally written by self-styled "experts" with scant industry experience or absolute outsiders with time on their hands and a burning desire to make their half-baked opinions heard by readers a lot like themselves. It was painfully obvious that those thought leaders and opinion makers who were actually working in advertising had little time or inclination to write about it or read about it on the web.

With this discovery process came an understanding of why traditional advertising practitioners were so unenlightened about the emergence of digital media and why interactive advertising practitioners were so ill informed about what makes advertising work. So with that observation as a starting point, I staked out a spot in the desert between the two camps and proceeded to make my presence known to both.

Through an active campaign to reach the online readers of AdRants and the traditional readers of Advertising Age, AdWeek and the New York Times Advertising Column I set about building my readership. My strategy was simple. Find a target. Throw a well-placed rock. Identify myself as the vandal. Invite the onlookers to witness more of the same at MadisonAveNew.com

Of course an important part of this strategy was conceiving a great online URL/Trademark that would inspire interest by virtue of it's own creativity. The misspelling of a street name that symbolized the advertising industry on a global scale and also identified the problems that beset that industry (nothing new) provided me with a means of attracting the attention I was looking for. And so it was that this venue was established. But now what? What is our reason for being now that thousands of you from all over the globe show up like clockwork to watch me throw said rocks at said targets?

Of course by the time I reached the tanker trucks, I could see exactly what that something was. On every other block as far as the eye could see there were tanker trucks blocking the intersections and pumping their cargo into the street,

Madison Avenue was being flooded with crude oil and since it is somewhat of a valley from 40th St. to 59th St, that oil was moving in torrents to cover the 19 block stretch that was home to the worlds largest advertising firms.

The oil hit just as the thousands upon thousands of workers and executives of those firms were emerging from their subway stations and commuter terminals and slip-sliding on their collective asses to work.

Madison Avenue was a monumental mess. A land-locked oil spill that flooded marble lobbies and carpeted elevators and turned every single building on both sides of the street into a grease pit within moments.

Of course the mobs of agency employees had to get to their desks and their phones and so millions upon millions of dollars in plush carpeting was ruined in an instant. The oil ran into the building lobbies and flooded the elevator shafts making them instant firetraps and causing them to be shut down.

The slick-footed die hards who took to the stairwells found themselves toppling head over heels down several flights of stairs and waiting in agonizing pain for the ambulances that were being barred from Madison Avenue by duly concerned firefighters who were worried that some careless smoker would set the whole sticky, stinky mess aflame.

An entire industry ground to a halt. Closing dates were blown. Shoots were scrubbed. Insertion orders languished undelivered in their out boxes. Emails went unanswered or unsent.

Initial estimates set the losses at higher than $50 million. Yet not one word from T.O.A.S.T, claiming credit for the demonstration.

In a hastily thrown together press conference the heads of the agency holding companies issued a statement that no expense would be spared to bring the terrorists to justice.

But the damage was done. The news media wasted no time tying the greasing of Madison Avenue to the tagging of posters in the Paris Metro. By the next morning tagger gangs had taken up the cause and sprayed TOAST on every transit poster in the IRT, BMT, PATH and Metro Rail networks.

America's youth had a new found enemy. And it was us.

Next Week: "The Empire Strikes Out.