Advertising limited by fear bores people, possibly the most dangerous result in all marketing.

There are very few things a company could say in an advertisement that would offend those loyal to the brand so greatly that they will go away. Boring them, on the other hand, can result in customers jumping ship to someone more exciting. Being boring always yields the same result: bad advertising. Boring ads usually result from fear of risk.

Some companies kill their own advertising efforts by asphyxiating creative or completely forgoing real strategy. Others buy media “deals” which waste budgets on mediums that will never pan out. Some companies insist on writing their own headlines and text, resulting in ads that they can connect with but no one else can. Still others go for “wow factor,” forgoing (or forgetting) to make real, meaningful connections. It’s easier to undermine advertising efforts with fear-rooted action than to hold high ambitions for success.

When I hear a client say, ‘advertising doesn’t work,’ what they really mean is that their past advertising hasn’t worked. They rarely can show measured results, which means they often base advertising effectiveness on feeling rather than any sort of hard data. Sometimes they have data, but don’t understand what it means. In order for data to have any intrinsic value, the advertising effort must have meaningful, stated goals prior to the creation of the campaign. Without goals, success is virtually impossible. Not determining or stating goals up front is a fearful approach.

Among initial advertising goals, I’ve often heard little more than, “more sales.”

“More” is a hard goal to reach because it could mean literally anything, and does little to inspire people in marketing, creative or sales.

Setting goals is risky because someone has to raise their hand, stick their neck out, and take responsibility. If the company dynamic says sticking your neck out ends in it being chopped off should the effort fail, fear rules and no does what it takes to realize effective advertising efforts.

I suggest a different approach.

How about the people who stick their necks out get rewarded regardless of success? This may inspire a more constructive dialog, such as, ‘What a great failure that was! What did we learn? What’s next?’

Show me any other part of life where every single effort results in success. I think you will find that no arena offers guaranteed known success.

Activities as simple as walking present risk. You could trip and fall or step in a hole, but you don’t stop walking. You need to get where you are going, and walking forward is the most sure way to get there.

Similarly, an advertising effort might fail, but you keep taking risks and keep advertising because it’s the most sure way to succeed.

One of the first things you learn in the advertising profession is to avoid negative advertising. You don’t talk poorly about your competitors. In fact, you essentially pretend they do not exist, because when someone is reading your ad there is no competition. If you’ve done your ad right, all attention is on you.

When you mention your competitor in a negative light, you do two things, both bad. 1) You use your valuable ad space to bring your competitor to the awareness of your audience, and 2) You undermine the very trust your ad should be instilling by making yourself look petty and underhanded.

Comcast and Qwest/Century Link have been slinging mud at each other in print, direct mail, and online advertising for months now. Ever since Qwest announced it had sold to Century Link, Comcast started the mud-slinging. Their direct mail letter headlined with, “You shouldn’t be forced to switch to a phone company you didn’t even choose,” a statement which has no intrinsic meaning or value in the context of business since the customer would inherently choose Century Link if they, like Qwest, were the only land line phone company in town.

Qwest did the polar opposite of the right thing — which would have been to ignore the negativity — and began their own campaign of negative advertising. Their online ads now headline with, “Don’t put up with cable rate hikes,” an unnecessary jab at Comcast which is misleading if not totally incorrect. (Cable phone stays the same price, and cable internet bounces all over the board, lacking consistency in either direction. One month it’s $25, the next $65, the one after $35.)

Both Comcast and Qwest are doing nothing with these headlines but taking pot shots at each other. They are both known for their awful reputations (see the Comcast Must Die site), and these negative ads only serve to drag them down even further. The likely result: more people will switch to cell phones with 4G data plans. Neither Qwest nor Comcast win the war. They just look (even more) like losers.

Once a consumer knows that you’re willing to sling mud in the face of your competition, they can rightfully judge that you’ll do the same thing to them. It’s a character thing. If you treat a competitor with such disrespect, it is not a leap to realize that it’s even easier for you to treat individuals (a.k.a. customers) the same way.

When you plan your next ad campaign, don’t do what Comcast and Qwest did. Create a positive advertising campaign that touts your merits, keeps it real, and shows how you respect people. Keep your ad messaging positive, and you can win respect, trust and the all-important business without ever having to get your hands dirty.

Some people didn’t really see it that way, which is really just another way of saying they didn’t really see it all. Outraged critics said the ad celebrated transgendered children, as if that was a bad thing. Is it better to hide them all away in locked chests, and pretend they don’t exist? The critics seem to forget they are talking about living, breathing human beings, with parents and siblings, eyes, ears, and — I don’t know — feelings and choices of their own.

“This is a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity,” psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow wrote in a FoxNews.com Health column about the ad. The key word in that sentence being “trappings.” Gender rules exist primarily to trap consumers into thought patterns that encourage more spending. People can figure out their own leanings without a bunch of arbitrary societal gender rules.

We are now beginning to see, at last, that gender rules are no longer all that relevant. Authenticity is relevant, and J.Crew seems to get that, at least with this ad.

Why there was any debate at all about it, be it on Fox News, Sodahead (40 pages of comments? Come on!), in the social media world (a 500 tweet blip on Twitter), or wherever, suggests simply that people have too much time on their hands. Who cares if a boy likes neon pink toenails? Maybe he’s color blind. Maybe he just likes pink. Who cares? Jenna Lyons has at least one value — that of open-mindedness — that I’d like to see in the future mother of my children, or at least in society at large.

If we took gender rules completely out of the social picture, what would happen? Would it render utter mayhem in the streets? Would the sky crack open and acid-baked space lizards rain down upon us? Would all men’s wives paint their power tools the colors of the rainbow? And all women’s husbands paint their toenails dark blue? Kinda’ doubt it! We don’t need no stinking gender rules. We need an open dialog, open minds.

Since this is a marketing blog…
It is almost always a good idea to break social norms and take calculated risks in marketing. The appropriateness debate has less to do with guidelines and more to do with being honest and authentic, and discarding any false sense of how things are “supposed to be.” If someone disagrees, so what? Let them eat toenails. Keep the customer in mind, be true to your brand, create and spread authenticity, and you will inevitably connect.

An open letter to Starbucks’ marketing department:

Your latest ad headline reads, “Thanks to everyone who helped make us the country’s #1 best coffee, which includes our great baristas.” Could you possibly have worded that any worse? What exactly does that headline mean? What is a “#1 best coffee”? Why would someone in New York care if someone in Wyoming favors Starbucks coffee? I mean, really?

I should admit, I am opposed to chest-beating, ‘We’re #1 statements.’ They have no meaning, and they’re simply in poor taste, harkening back to apes proclaiming their dominance after battle.

I see Zagat did the rating. (They’re the #1 best business ratings company.) Funny, they never contacted me. Did anyone you know get a call from the folks at Zagat wondering about your favorite coffee? My informal survey revealed that fully no one I know got the ring up from the Zagat survery folks. Yet, Starbucks is the country’s #1 best coffee. Oh, I see the survey included just 6,000 respondents. That seems like a small minority to represent 305 million Americans.

It seems as if Starbucks is really saying thanks to all the folks at Zagat for designating you “the country’s #1 best coffee.” And the #1 best coffee includes the baristas. Or are the baristas in the coffee? Did I get that right? Will anyone else? Or are you saying thanks to your employees for being the country’s #1 best baristas? Does the whole country think that too? Does it sell Starbucks coffee?

Not on Zagat’s own site, it doesn’t. A search for ‘coffee’ on the Zagat home page will net you eight coffee shop results, none of which are Starbucks. So, Zagat awarded you with the ranking as the country’s #1 best coffee, but that doesn’t get you a listing in their top eight places for coffee.

Oh, wait! Zagat must be talking about rural America! The country! I love the country. It’s the #1 best place.

Really, what it does is get you a whole bunch of free news clippings that no one cares about. There are much more compelling ways to start a visible conversation about Starbucks.

Why spend valuable marketing dollars putting a poorly-worded, completely meaningless message out to the masses?

Your tag line is much stronger: “It’s not just coffee. It’s Starbucks.” Exactly! There’s thought-provoking power in that. People go to Starbucks for the ‘Starbucks experience.’

Since the ad headline has no real meaning, it creates confusion, which greatly reduces the likelihood that ad viewers will scroll down to see the much stronger tag line.

When you ask folks in Starbucks’ hometown of Seattle, many people say Starbucks coffee tastes burned, but the shops here are always packed anyway. That speaks to the quality of the experience, not the #1 best coffee.

What I’ve come to know about Starbucks is that I can stop into nearly any one of them, sit comfortably and work while a stream of interesting people pass through the door. I can get a decent beverage and some reasonably healthy food to boot. Starbucks ubiquity means that I can set up meetings in far-away towns with a setting that is familiar to both me and the client. These things are all about value and experience, not some arbitrary “country’s #1 best coffee” rating.

Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not beating up Starbucks, just their advertising, which could easily be a whole lot better.

Thing is, advertising is not manipulative in the least. In fact, people actually value advertising as part of their daily lives, more so now than ever before.

All advertising mediums are completely optional. Without the branding and adverts that people love to complain about, none of the mediums would exist. Advertising pays for the entertainment we treasure and learn from. Advertising is a win-win for everyone. You get your entertainment, the advertiser gets a great response (when they do it right), and the medium – be it a tv program, magazine, website, or whateva’ – continues. Win-win-win, in fact.

Do you watch movie previews? They’re adverts. Do you ever see a movie preview that entices you to go see another movie? That’s an advert that worked the moment you paid for the next ticket. If the movie previews annoy you, you are free to look away or come in just in time for the feature. I usually see a packed theater during the previews.

The same choice to look away or simply not engage applies to every other advertising medium that exists. Try thinking about advertising like this: Advertising pays for the entertainment you love. Which forms of entertainment do you love? What types of advertising are bringing that value to you?

Advertising is not slow.

Advertising is not wasteful.

Advertising is not wow.

Advertising is not interruption.

Advertising is not necessarily big, nor is it necessarily expensive.

Advertising is not outside of most companies’ budgets.

Advertising is not a waste.

Advertising is not a bad investment.

Advertising is not one-way.

Advertising is not manipulative.

Advertising is not a place to tell lies or make empty promises.

Advertising is not optional in most effective marketing plans.

Advertising is not fully understood by most small businesses.

Advertising is not well-executed by many large companies.

Advertising is not remotely as slow as social media.

Advertising is not shunned.

IBM is now running an advertisement with the headline, “Green business is good business.” This is a smart redux because it is saying exactly the same thing as the original, yet it is updated for the current times.

Good design is nowadays green. Green business is good design.

1. One Laptop Per Child – From what I have read about this cause, it’s a great one. A true humanitarian effort to bring education and awareness of the bigger world to countries where laptops are not on every desk, much less in every school; where education is needed and power is hard to come by. The logo is pretty good too. The spot? A waste of marketing dollars.

As much as I love the cause, the spot does nothing to explain what it is, to convince us that it is money well-spent, nor that the child recipient of the laptop has learned anything at all by gaining access to technology. I found myself actually less convinced of the merits of the cause after seeing the commercial.

The child says, “Thank you for this laptop. You have changed my world.” How?? How did this laptop change your world? I want to know! I want to see what you’ve learned, what you’ve gained access to, how it’s helping to open up your future, or help your family or community. Give me something to believe in!

You can learn more about the good of this organization on the Wiki page, in about the same amount of time as the spot.

Verdict: A total waste.

2. Adidas Originals – Adidas current tv advertisement is a big, fat, loser. The spot shows a party with people suggestively jumping up and down, laughing, thumping to the beat, good times. Every single person at this packed party is wearing Adidas shoes. It closes with the fade-in: Adidas : Originals

It’s as if we were watching a very well-shot video of an Adidas let your hair down corporate party. If everyone is wearing the same shoes and doing the same thing, it should say Adidas : Conformity

This could have been a great ad, if only the brand messaging was aligned.

Verdict: Good concept, good cinematography, good energy, horrible close kills the whole effort.

3. Speak-Up Against Reckless Driving – Ad Council does some outstanding advertising (“Welcome Back Veterans” comes to mind), but this reckless driving campaign is out of touch. With the high quantity of campaigns Ad Council puts out, it’s easy to see how this one might have fallen through the cracks at the concept stage, but the script and art direction also miss.

You feel almost sorry for the whiner characters in these spots. Like, “Hey man, slow down” is sure to be heeded by any distracted or out of control young driver. No one would want that role in reality. The spots in this campaign present a cast of characters so devoid of likable personality that were it not for our instinctual value of the sanctity of human life, we could care less about their well-being. Note the missing rear-view mirror in the car, leaving the vehicle itself not even street-legal.

Missing mirror aside, the production itself is ok, though as the viewer, I am at a loss in discerning what the spots are attempting to achieve.

Verdict: Poor concept killed this before it was filmed.

Advertising has two big problems, both of which are actually caused by companies, not by the marketing method. The first problem is overspending. Advertising generally works best on a frugal budget. The less you spend, the better. Guerrilla advertising works best, even on a large scale. Think like a guerrilla marketer, and you won’t lose your shirt with each campaign. Instead, you will make your money back faster than you can with nearly any other medium. A couple of converted sales will quickly put you in the black with your campaign.

What happens when a company has a great success in advertising? They often lose perspective and go bigger. They buy more expensive media, try to reach a larger audience or market, and switch from practical, effective marketing to wow marketing. This is usually fueled by investment in ego, but it’s misguided and generally leads to disappointment, wasted marketing funds, and low response rates. There is rarely a practical reason to go bigger with ad campaigns.

Keeping your campaigns small allows you to target better, keep your creative more relevant and focused, more easily track results, and adequately handle the response. Importantly, it also helps keep your campaigns more agile.

Poor creative is the other big problem in advertising. Most advertising today is focused on making people look. That’s called wow marketing, and it doesn’t work. Making people look doesn’t do anything for sales. They may talk about the ad, sure, but it doesn’t change the way they think about anything. Engaging people on a wow level generates wow talk, but it doesn’t drive sales.

Good creative changes the way people think. It provides suggestions and new pathways. Good creative stimulates thought and action. It surprises people and literally changes minds. Good creative is relevant and truthful. It instills trust and helps people make decisions. Good creative changes inner dialog, which effects buying choices.

Is your advertising generating wow or effecting people’s train of thought?

Twitter is an advertising medium. It is very similar in nature to a magazine or blog.

It would be a stretch to call all tweets advertisements because advertising usually has a specific purpose, whereas a huge percentage of tweets serve no purpose whatsoever. Savvy Twitterers tweet with strategy and purpose, looking for a specific outcome.

Twitter purpose usually revolves initially around gaining more followers, much like a magazine attracts subscribers. Useful tweets help with that, much like great writing helps a magazine gain regular readers. After a user has amassed a large following, tweets become more focused on advertising a product, blog, site or other business.

Twitter’s problem as an advertising medium is that it usually provides a relatively small (less than 250,000), unfocused audience. You get what you pay for, which brings us to Twitter’s advertising advantage: it’s free. And that’s a large part of what makes it so popular.

People have been looking for the holy grail of cheap or free advertising for years. Sadly, it doesn’t exist. Even with all of today’s great social media tools, there is still no free shortcut to massive wealth. Twitter, although free in theory, is not a medium that typically generates direct sales. And the amount of time you spend on it compared to that of traditional advertising is enormous. Inevitably, that means the return has to be smaller than any other media with a larger, more focused audience, of which there are many.

You really have to be careful to limit your time on Twitter because you can waste a huge amount of time. It adds up fast. I recommend my clients spend a maximum of 20-30 minutes per day total on Twitter unless you are a social media consultant. If you spend 30 minutes on it, consider that your news-reading time for the day.

If you go into your Twitter time with realistic expectations, it can be a great advertising medium. Of course, Twitter is much more than an advertising medium.