Now with Live, Active Cultures.

I was into live, active cultures before live, active cultures were cool. Back then, nobody even heard of Bifidus Regularus (and isn't that name a little ridiculous? It's one step beneath "poopest nowest"). Whatever, I knew all about the bowel healing power of yogurt far before people in spandex started talking about it on TV.

It was Easter and I headed to my Dad's house for dinner. One thing you should probably know about my family is that we are food centric. My step-mom likes to celebrate God's most wonderful gift by cooking many of his other gifts and serving them with horseradish or mint jelly. She's also from Pittsburg, which means she even fries the butter. The meal is big enough and greasy enough to make you want to funnel Maalox.

This particular year, my beloved nephew got sick in a way not to be discussed around food. He had the Norwalk virus (which was a hip illness back then, like Hypoglycemia) and the result required a bath. After his bath we assumed he was clean and so, like with most babies, we all played with the little bio terror. About 11 p.m. that night I threw up from the toilet into the tub. Even in such discomfort I had to pause and laud this achievement because I am male. It was impressive.

If you are not familiar with the Norwalk virus (now officially known as norovirus), go rent that terrible movie Dream Catcher. That part where the guy poops out the alien that looks like a three foot long barracuda? It's a lot like that. Plus you vomit and your head might spin around.

My Cirque dus O'toilet exercise was enough to give my roommates the virus (three guys in a 1950s house. Lysol? Yeah right.). The next two days we all sat in bathrobes chasing chicken soup with orange juice watching that movie with Clint Eastwood and the sassy monkey that wears a T-shirt. (Editor's note: the two films are 1978's Every Which Way But Loose and its 1980 sequel Any Which Way You Can, starring Clint Eastwood and an orangutan named Clyde.)

In time, the virus passed and I began to feel a little bit more normal. But a problem loomed. My appetite waned and I still got nauseous when I ate. I called mom, who knows all about viruses and puking since she raised four boys. Mom said the key to getting your stomach back to normal is to eat yogurt. And not that whipped chocolate moose junk. Real yogurt with live cultures. Now, when I hear someone complain about their stomach, I interrupt them and say, "Oh, you need yogurt. And not that whipped moose junk. You need active cultures. Give me five dollars".

Your stomach has to have some bacteria to break down all that junk food you eat. Doritos and Ding Dongs don't digest themselves. Well, most of the time, anyway. Live cultures help build the right environment for your digestive tract.

Richard probably knows better than most about cultures and the often resulting poop. He worked for a cheesy dot com that never had an actual useable product and touted their success in how much venture capital money they could obtain and spend. It was the nineties and the "look how cool we are" culture craze was in full effect. I visited Richard at work and he gave me the tour. "Here is our pool table that nobody uses. One guy used it once but the VP of Development of something glared at him. Now the only time it gets used is when we give tours to investors and prospective employees to show them how hip we are". How sad.

But it was not rare. All round the ATL and in every tech city, mountains of ping-pong tables, bean bag chairs, razor scooters, hacky sacks and hockey sticks just sat around for show. The old, stiff investors were so impressed with this youthful thing we call the Internet that they encouraged everyone to pretend to be wacky.

This notion of the live, active culture persists today. Marketing service firms not only encourage their employees to be fun and vivacious, they whore them out for it. On more then a few websites of marketing firms have I seen pictures of some staff person kayaking or running a marathon or playing guitar at a local Earth Day celebration.

Listen, I'm not trying to Norwalk all over fun cultures. I mean, Richard has a collection of different canned and packaged meats on a shelf in his office. When it comes to being zany, we run with the best. But why should companies care about the culture of their marketing people? Like with so many other things, we feel we should care, but don't really know why or how we even started caring in the first place.

You shouldn't have to catch Norwalk to learn about active cultures. I've had it a few times and you can learn from my disgusting experience.


Fun is creativity, right?

Nope. Fun is a bottle of whisky, a minigun and a chandelier store. Of course, that's just my opinion. You can substitute whatever you might find fun in that section. But fun is often mistaken for creativity. You walk into your ad agency and you see a group of people sitting on the floor yelling about headlines or photos or whatever. Later you see them throwing pumpkins off the parking garage roof and you say, "What fun, creative people!" But what you are mistaking for creativity is what people will do when the rules are relaxed and creative's trying to blow off steam so they can stop your tagline about "single source solutions" from ringing in their heads.

Fun, right? But does it increase creativity? Our gut says maybe, but I think that's just indigestion. Honestly, people may have an active brainstorming session and still be terrible at brainstorming. And creative people will blow off steam even if the concepts are a joke. What's worse is that agencies have been trained to appear fun and zany even if their work is sub-par. Clients delight in the off-the-wall approach and mistake it for something innovative.


Diverse interests means that you bring a broad perspective?

I love seeing firms pitch how vivacious and interesting their people are. I'm always amazed to see so many people into running and scuba. Here's the problem: most of this country does not compete in triathlons or cook gourmet food. Have you ever noticed how much media and advertising seem obsessed with a lifestyle that the rest of the country does not live or even want to live? When 95% of the people who work on your marketing are into emo rock and sushi, how representative of the do-it-yourself mechanic market do you think that will be?

I have an easy recommendation. Instead of getting people who are supposedly interesting, get people who are interested to handle the marketing of your product. When you are working on marketing a product or service the most important thing in the room should be that offering and not the account executive's surfboard collection. I like interesting people, but when it comes to working on a marketing issue I like interested people more.


Yogurt. Now with new made-up cultures!

What's the difference between real, active cultures and cultures that are invented for marketing purposes? Well, a few things, first of which is respect. Strong cultures foster real, mutual respect. They respect and have empathy for each other. They respect the client. Respect that can only cite the chain of command is not a strong culture.

Next is confidence. Strong cultures empower their teams. They do not need constant oversight. Conversely, lack of confidence in people leads to a firm throwing its own people under the bus. And if an agency will throw its people, their careers, their ideas, their reputations all under the bus for a check, you better think twice about believing what's written beneath their logo in the lobby.

Put simply, they have a house of cards based on a fake culture. They play creative company, but you'll get your hand slapped if you actually ride the razor scooter. It is a culture celebrating the illusion of creativity rather than celebrating and encouraging actual creativity. The problem is many clients cannot discern between the two.

Third is diversity, but maybe not in the way you think. Some cultures look like they picked through the box of crayons on purpose. The result looks like a college brochure. This is neither empowering nor productive. There is a humongous difference in empowering/engaging diversity and the more common promotion of diversity. I believe diversity should be embraced because of the value it brings to solving a problem fully rather than using it for promotional use only. If we use diversity as a way to broaden the scope of how we see an issue, that's a good thing. Otherwise, it's an pool table that no one ever uses.


Feeling a bit irregular.

I realize I may be irritating the colon of the organizations who believe in leveraging their culture. Please don't misunderstand me, I believe in strong, active cultures. I just believe in real ones rather than fake ones. I believe in actually living out those statements of "what we believe" that so many marketing services tattoo on their websites. I believe in real, active cultures and not that whipped chocolate moose junk.

A great culture can be the perfect environment for creativity and problem solving. A great culture can reduce the stress in the normally high stakes part of business. And perhaps the best thing about a great culture is that it is infectious and when you catch it, you can't help but spread it so everyone has it.

The dog and phony show

This is a true story. Sink, Matt and I hauled up across state lines for a competitive pitch on a nice piece of business. We had a good feeling about the account and had done some preliminary work that was pretty great. Anyways, they stuffed us into a boardroom while they went out to round up the attendees who had run off to play with their Blackberries between meetings.

On the client side, I’ve always hated these meeting. Agencies and consultant always seem to present a gumbo of campy clichés and talk to PowerPoint presentations for thirty minutes about creating a “winning mindset.” When I pitch these days, I think back to those horrid presentations and try to make mine a bit more interesting.

Back to that day in the pitch, I saw a small black box. Sink, who can get all clandestine on command, snagged the box and opened it. It was a cell phone with some stupid card that said something to the effect of “Make the call! Choose Purple Llama Advertising!” (name slightly changed). We studied the bribe and noticed a stand where a projector had just been. Right there, we completely changed the presentation. No slides, no sound effects. No bribes. Straight talk and straight answers.

I was told later that we butchered the competition from a strategic capability standpoint but that some of the members of the voting body were just enamored with the cell phones, gifts and other little gimmicks.

I have a confession to make: our industry does this. We offer bribes, and lavish dinners and outings to tattletales. We promise connections, influence and activities that could be accurately classified as kickbacks. I have seen agencies whore out employees, take clients to Vegas and/or suggest better access to high ranking state officials. It is important to note that not a single part of this has anything to do with ability or prowess in helping the client reach strategic goals.

What are marketers to do? On one side you have consultants and agencies sending you champagne and taking you on “media tours” that include $700 dinners they will eventually charge to your company along with the customary 20% markup. On the other side are actual capabilities. The answer looks easy, but the result anything but.

So what allows the substitution of food, embroidery or a cell phone for real ability? It has to do with marketing team construction, commitment and liability. The team is often the root of whether the right group of outside marketers or a group of dopes who gave away watches will be selected. Here a few tips to avoid making this dumb mistake.

The person in charge should be in charge.

In every environment I have worked in there are always those folks determined to milk the job for anything they can get. They bring in all their personal mail and use the company stamps. They ship their Christmas gifts with the company shipping account. They make their long distance calls from the office so they don’t have to pay for them. To them, this job is about what they get out of it. Never put this person in a position to extract perks from a vendor. I have seen brand managers use the relationship to subsidize travel, pay for vacations and even secure other employment. It’s sickening.

When a person has more at stake than the ability to get free junk, the truth of the situation becomes clear. Is this consultant going to mesh with the corporate culture? What will be the outcome and have we identified the desired outcome in the first place? And the easy tip is to never let a person be involved in the decision unless their neck or their reputation is on the line.

Tell the agency to stop kissing your assets.

Agencies have a knack for getting in the marketing budget and spreading it out until all marketing activities are conducted by and paid directly to them. Endless attempts to encumber more parts of the marketing budget are par for the course, and this is the strategic aim of most conglomerate agencies. Here’s the rub: an agency that oozes over into the area of what your company supposedly needs is never as potent as one who specializes in it already. I would never have an agency handle an important PR project when I know there are people who specialize in PR. I don’t care if the agency just hired two yahoos to write releases. There are people with real track records and abilities in the various subsets of marketing consultation. If you want good work, be willing to look for it.

I already have a cell phone. Give me a strategy.

An interesting fact about the groups I have seen using bribes and junk to peddle their trash is that not one ever had a decent command of the business problem. Instead of salient strategy, they offered logo emblazoned folding camp chairs. Instead of insight, they had an offer to have the next meeting in Bermuda.

Whether or not an agency or consultant can or does have a mental hold on the concept and business problem at hand is extremely relevant. I remember sitting in a meeting with a hack arguing because he could not understand the difference between an American pub and an English pub. Sure, he was more than willing to send our president on a lavish media tour of magazines in Chicago and New York, but ultimately it was worthless because he simply could not understand the strategy.

Put your strategy out there. Give the prospect a chance to reflect it back and comment on it. See if they can really let it soak in. Do they get it? If they don’t, show them the door. Free cell phone or not, your company’s well being is not worth including a dud on the marketing team.

A partnership is two sided.

The last and perhaps most important quip I can offer about the client/consultant interaction concerns the nature of the relationship. The agency is going to need to work from the inside if the results are going to be a real connection between the product and the consumer. Clients who treat their agencies like partners instead of vendors will far exceed the result of those that see the agency like the coffee service company.

So the goal is clear. Getting an agency that can partner with your company, understand your strategy and be a true contribution to the team is not hard to ascertain with a few questions. Ask prospects to explain the strategy and approach on other pieces of business. Ask them how they might approach your business. If they can clearly reflect back to you strategic ability and insight in addressing the business, tell them to keep the free phones and you’ll send them a contract.

PETA hates the dog and pony show.

In recent times, more companies are nixing the big production of agency pitches in favor or more personal interviews. After all, when you ask a person to join your team (which is what the hiring of agency should be), you sit and talk with the person to get to know him or her. You don’t ask the candidate to bake you cookies or make a video about how fun they are. Marketing is serious business and when the result of a marketing effort might have your job in its jaws, you might take the selection of teammates a little more seriously.

So what will it be? Embroidered blankets and promises of connections or strategy and ability? Will you be the one who knows there’s no “I” in team or the one who points out that there is a “me” in team? (There is also a “meat.)” Real business is counting on you to pick strategy over pomp. To pick ability over self interest. And, if after all this you have to have a dog and pony show, well …

http://www.hsus.org/

Presenting the Soulamites

I’m not bragging, but I play a mean rendition of James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing.” Our band, called the Soulamites after 1970’s poet and action star Dolemite, was a collection of suburban miscreants and band kids. We connected with the band kids because none of us could play a horn, and what is a soul band without horns? We played a set of clubs on Marietta Street in downtown Atlanta in an area that looked like the industrial parks in Robocop. In about 1/8 mile increments from the Georgia Tech campus lay the three spots: The Wreck Room, the Somber Reptile and PJ’s Nest. These were the places where I spent many of my teenage weekends playing “It’s Too Funky in Here” and “Soul Kitchen.”

It was one afternoon in late spring that I found myself in PJ’s Nest setting up for the four or five people who came to see us play when the opening act blared to full volume. It needs to be said that when it come to music, I have a high tolerance for cheesy. (Remember, I was a white kid from suburban Atlanta playing James Brown covers in a band named after a man also known as The Human Tornado.) I have played Montly Crüe songs without a hint of irony. I was a one man act in college playing filthy renditions of country songs under the name Rusty Bones. I am all about cheesy. But this particular opening act needed to be spread on a pita wafer topped with lemon honey and served with a fine Moscato D’Asti.

The singer was a man with long teased curly hair, a sleeveless shirt and bright white jeans. I also think he had some sort of chain link belt. The guitarist looked like Howard Stern on a crack binge and wore jeans so tight that he must have put them on wet and closed the zipper with pliers. The rest of the band looked like the cast of The Lost Boys, complete with leather trench coats, renaissance boots and trashy girlfriends. What this fashion club did have, however, was some of the best equipment we had even seen. The drummer had a full rail system with new Tama drums and every cymbal created since the Bronze Age. The guitarist played some sort of Ibanez with a handle on it (presumably for some sort of mid-solo acrobatic routine) popularized by 80’s axe hero Steve Vai. And when he went for a solo, we realized his guitar had a wireless connection which allowed him to rock his way through the crowd of eleven people to the back of the room and return with a pause to make some sort of tongue wag at his girlfriend. These guys’ music was so bad that the idea of hanging out in the toxic waste dump site across the street until our set didn’t seem like such a bad idea. They didn’t have talent.

What they had was production value.

Most advertising copywriters get their start in print where they don’t initially learn the amazing powers of production value. In print, you cannot hide. People are expecting words and while you can try to distract them with an appetizing, appealing or nearly pornographic picture, you most likely have to have some words or, at the very least, a concept. Sometimes you can pair a pretty picture with some obscurity like Viva La Product Name, but such flashy absconding of any real idea rarely happens outside of the worlds of fashion, clothing, automobile, liquors, restaurants, condo developments or consumer and household packaged goods.

It’s not until one enters the realm beyond print that the true idea-avoidance power of broadcast and web are realized. Don’t have anything useful to say about that new car you’re marketing? Don’t worry, you can just make it fly or turn into a cartoon or morph into a transformer. Got nothing to say on the radio? Well don’t let that stop you from radio advertising. You can just mix a bunch of faux celebrity voices making campy commentary with a few sound effects. You could also have a techno power track accompanying the echoing voice of a guy yelling that even if you don’t have a job, you too can have a Mitsubishi from their sales manager, Mr. Value.

Thanks to the special effects gleaned from Michael Jackson’s music videos and The Matrix, you no longer need to have an idea to advertise on broadcast. You simply dress up a non-idea with an explosion of production parlor tricks.

Overproduction does not simply dwell with those who create the broadcast or web content. Often we advertisers take a non-selling point and produce it into interesting but useless content. For example, a recently viewed commercial for Subway restaurants has a laudable plot of a person who walks to the counter and orders a number six value meal. When she changes her mind and orders a number nine, the server simply turns the box around apparently in a little jab about how competitors don’t offer variety. Ha ha. But folks, seriously, out of McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Quizno’s, Arby’s and Subway, which do you feel has the least amount of distinctly different choices on the menu? Your funny joke’s on you, Subway. The spot is funny but remarkably untrue, useless and potentially counterproductive. Convince enough consumers that they deserve more choices, and they might agree.

You all know how much I love Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Their amazing crash spots for VW make you want to call your chiropractor. However, I have to disagree with the premise. VW has always been a quirky little car for individualists. The overwhelming majority of the new spots focus on safety. When consumers lashed out against VW some years back, it was not about safety, it was about quality. And while the new spots dramatically show that a VW is nearly as safe as a Volvo, nowhere is it mentioned that they improved the quality of the cars, which has made V-dub owners curse their vehicles for years. CP+B, great spots. V-dub, wrong pitch. Promise us the handle will never again break off in our hand.

So get up offa that thing and let’s talk about production value. Here some things to think about.

Does the creative work have an easily discernable premise which is not overrun by the production value?
Is the premise (or sales pitch) firmly rooted in a competitive strategy based on offering attribute and consumer perception?
Is the production congruent with the premise? In other word, does the car really need to fly to make the point?
Is the production value really a “value”? Does the benefit of the added production value justify the expense?

It’s not easy being cheesy.

It is not always easy for clients to see the blurred line between production value which is needed and production value which is a bunch of production engineers playing with their toys while you pay for it. Clients are not immersed in the business of producing television, so they must often depend on people to give unfettered advice about what is needed, what is not needed, what is a good idea and what is a non-idea wrapped up in flashy dissolves. I hope you have that trusted confidant already and if you, don’t call me, and for the price of lunch, I’ll tell the truth about production value. If you’re in the A-T-L, maybe we can go to lunch down on Marietta Street at the Somber Reptile Cajun Café. I hear they serve a mean crawfish étouffée.



Snowden Tatarski is a brand consultancy based in Athens, Georgia that focuses on the development and implementation of the whole brand experience. The agency offers marketing research, marketing strategies, advertising creative development, media strategy and planning, sales consultation and the production of advertising, sales collateral, broadcast and interactive systems and materials. Information online at www.sn-ta.com