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.

I prefer to seek solutions. Advertising is a great solution that works better than most other mediums. If you consider that nearly every communication is either advertising or marketing, it’s pretty easy to see which ones are the most effective in terms of improving sales or reaching an organization’s goals.

Advertising mediums include websites, microsites, blogs, videos, Twitter, print ads, direct mail, email, and a host of other methods. Is social media advertising? You bet it is. In the coming days, I’ll explore why all of these methods are considered advertising, as well as examining which methods work the best for increasing sales in the shortest time possible.

In the mean time, try thinking about advertising like you never have before. Toss out the idea that advertising is a waste of money, because that’s simply flawed thinking. Advertising works exceptionally well when it’s done right. And it isn’t too hard to get it right. The problem is most companies just do it wrong.

I just sent an email, having to do with some rewritten text, from my Gmail account. The word ‘copywriting’ was used only in the headline of the email. Upon viewing the sent mail, I could see that Gmail’s AdSense system had placed an ad on “Copywriting Secrets” at the top of the message browser, which was attempting to entice me to “Start a Lucrative New Career in Copywriting Today.” I’ve been a professional copywriter for over 20 years, thank you. The result of this misplaced ad? I now know that iGoogle is less personal than Google would have me believe.

This is exactly why corporations waste so much money on advertising. It boils down to irrelevance. Why waste marketing dollars creating irrelevant messages?

I’ve been watching Hulu in the evenings during the past month. There’s one commercial that gets more air time than any other. It’s a Chevron commercial that talks about how there are more cleaning agents in their gas. That’s all well and good, however, what that tells me is that there is less actual gasoline in Chevron gas, which means that if I buy Chevron gas, I have to buy more of it to go the same distance I could get with any other company’s gasoline. The spokesperson in the commercial is an animated car. At the end of the spot, the car cutely says that it broke part of itself, (while on Chevron gas). The result of me seeing their commercial? I now know to avoid Chevron stations.

It’s not all that difficult to create great advertising. It’s much harder to create irrelevant advertising. It’s more expensive too.

‘How the heck,’ you may be asking yourself, ‘does a blue jay hiding a durned nut relate to branding and marketing?’ Well, I’ll tell you.

Blue jays are all very similar looking to a non-Audubon Society onlooker like myself. Without some specific knowledge of the species, I doubt that I could distinguish one from another if my meal depended on it.

When I meet my clients for the first time, they are often a lot like that blue jay in the back yard. They are visually indistinguishable from their industry peers, and they are usually hiding their best treasures. Like the blue jay, the messaging in their marketing doesn’t speak to humans.

‘What do you mean by that, Hobkirk?’ you think as your forehead rumples.

I’ll spell it out:
• Companies often lack a distinguishing, clear, meaningful corporate identity.
• Their best qualities are usually not communicated to their ideal target market. (In fact, they often have not clearly defined their ideal target market.)
• The messages in their advertising and marketing typically do not speak to the people in their target market, and their tag lines are often meaningless.
• Their treasures have been buried so long that they no longer know what they are or where to find them.
• They often lack a clear understanding of how their identity, brand, branding, advertising, and marketing can converge to keep their peers from stealing the show.

Instead of leveraging their identity, values, and brand to make connections with their target markets, most businesses, large and small alike, leave (and sometimes create) stark disconnects at nearly every point of marketing communication. What happens when a disconnect occurs? Your prospective or existing customer moves on to someone else. That doesn’t sound very appealing, does it?

Every small business can and should employ the same tactics and tools that large businesses use to market themselves. Small businesses often rely on the time-honored excuse that they haven’t got the budget for professional branding and marketing. There are now plenty of options available for attaining affordable brand development and marketing planning, so let’s bury that excuse next to the nut. Or they whine, “I hate marketing.” If you hate marketing, hire someone you can trust to do it for you. Better yet, hire someone who can actually convince you that branding and marketing are fun. Or, close your doors and go look for a job.

How can you avoid having a squirrel steal your customers?! How can you make sure that you are connecting with your clients using compelling messages at every opportunity? Where are these opportunities?

Hint: Marketing opportunities are happening to you every single day. Ring me up. I love talking about this stuff. Meanwhile, I’ll be out back moving sticks around, while trying to figure out where the blue jay got a hazelnut this time of year.