This is the easiest possible post to write, at least until we start delving into non-advertising topics such as “sex feels good” and “natural disasters are bad”.

“Corporate communications” is the most laughably incorrect term in modern corporate communications usage. People who claim to work in, of or around corporate communications misuse their chosen phrase as often, if not more so, than people who say things like “the job opportunity literally fell in my lap.”

If you’re passionate enough about the English language, you’d figuratively want to pound an offending party into next week, or raw hamburger, for talking like that.

Prolixity is killing communication. It’s part of a relentless worldwide shift to professionalism, specialization and compartmentalization, with no visible respite.

Learning how to write for a mass audience of coworkers, employees, vendors or clients is far easier in theory than the self-styled experts make it out to be. Apparently, it’s also far harder in practice for some reason.

Being understood doesn’t necessarily mean eschewing uncommon words – at least a few of you had to look up “prolixity”. Rather, words should play, not spectate. If a word doesn’t serve any purpose, delete it. You can probably delete at least one of the adjacent words, too.

Logorrhea doesn’t make you sound smart. It makes you sound idiotic. Get to the freaking point.

Here’s a recent quote from some public relations meathead employed by the Canadian arm of Chrysler:

“We are hopeful that our discussions with the (Canadian Auto Workers union) will achieve the objective of closing the CAW labour-cost gap – and ensure our long-term viability,” the Detroit-based company said yesterday in a statement. “As a contingency measure, however, we are evaluating alternative solutions in the event these discussions are unsuccessful.”

Sir, or ma’am, probably sir: as humans we spend our lives evaluating alternative solutions. Heck, lots of mammals do it. And every time we do, it’s as a contingency measure. We do it because what worked previously, or what we hoped would work, didn’t. Also, we like to think that what we’re working on will last – or as you put it, “ensure our long-term viability.”

On what planet does the above quote read better than:

“We want the CAW to take a pay cut,” the Detroit-based company stated yesterday. “Otherwise, we’ll try something else”?

Come to think of it, they could even cut the second half of the quote.

Ahem. (clears throat)“As a contingency measure, however, we are evaluating alternative solutions in the event these discussions are unsuccessful.”

Who talks like this? And why?

The answer key to our brief quiz:
a) Idiots.
b) Because they think it masks the idiocy.

In coming posts, we’ll devote plenty of column inches to each of the verbal crutches that lazy writers are only too happy to latch onto rather than be direct. Your suggestions are welcome. Here’s the hugely incomplete list as it stands:

-going forward
-solutions
-visit our website at
-experience (both as a verb and a noun, but usually as a noun)

What does your company sell?
“We’re a solutions provider.”
No. DuPont has a right to call itself a “solutions provider”. You don’t.

McFarlane Media once sat in on an initial (and as it turned out, final) meeting with a potential client who kicked it off by spending >6 minutes attempting to explain what his company did, and failing. That’s a unit of time long enough in which to listen to Judas Priest’s “Painkiller” in its entirety, including the drum intro.

The rest of the meeting was more of the same. After repeated questioning, including 5 rephrasings of “yeah, but what exactly does your company do?”, the client’s most understandable response was “we’re a sales company.”

That was the extent of his precision – telling us that whatever his company did, it did not lease out its product.

After some independent research, and no help at all from the company itself, we determined that they made – or possibly they wholesold – industrial light bulbs. But the company’s CEO was so beholden to the human resources department/presidential press secretary/PR firm mode of communicating, that he kept referring to his company as a “provider of illumination solutions for the non-consumer market.”

If someone pitches his company that stiltedly in the private setting of an informal business meeting, what kind of advertising is he going to be satisfied with? If one day you’re representing an agency, and hear similar drivel spewing from the other side of the table, do yourself a favor and leave. If you’re feeling particularly eleemosynary, tell the non-client “If you can’t tell another person what your business does, then there’s no way I can.”

A qualification for the February post about the year’s best advertising campaign so far. The campaign’s effectiveness masks a minor but aggravating flaw – the unnecessary graphic that tells us who the celebrity pitchman is.

Though Guy Fieri isn’t as famous as Michael Jackson or Jackie Chan, the idea that an advertiser must introduce its pitchman to the audience insults that audience.

Presumably, the point of hiring a celebrity to hawk a product is that viewers would want to emulate the celebrity and his choice of restaurant, athletic shoe or auto insurance.

Subway recently used Lisa Leslie in its TV spots. In industry parlance, she was “matted” on the screen as follows:

Lisa Leslie
Basketball superstar

By virtue of being a world-class athlete with one of the most gorgeous bodies ever to grace a court (he said at his lecherous best), Lisa Leslie ostensibly has adopted a nutrition regimen that uncommitted sandwich shoppers would want to copy. Okay, fine.

Then why tell people who she is? The only reason to mat Ms. Leslie is because – and this is eminently reasonable – not everyone watching the spot can identify her.

But the viewers who don’t know who she is aren’t going to let an unfamiliar face tell them what to buy. Humans might be rash and impulsive, but not so much that they’re prepared to go from complete ignorance of a celebrity to devotees of her diet in 30 seconds. Lisa Leslie couldn’t persuade consumers that quickly were she selling 6-inch Veggie Delites® door-to-door and letting people sniff the goods.

So why does almost every advertiser do this? The first possibility is that agencies do so reflexively, because that’s how it was done 60 years ago and only Nike and a few others have bothered questioning the necessity of pitchman identification.

Either that, or the client insists upon it. So it shall be written, so it shall be done.

If it’s the latter, the agency needs to know that the axiom “the customer is always right” has practical limits that stop far short of saying something woeful in an ad. The customer is often if not usually wrong in other businesses, and that’s hardly a negative. Say you buy an airline ticket. Yes, technically the captain becomes the passengers’ employee for a few hours. But that doesn’t entitle them to tell him how to fly the plane. Passengers aren’t paying for the captain’s time so much as they’re paying for his expertise, just as an advertising client isn’t paying for square inches of newsprint or raw seconds of radio: she’s paying for a hopefully skillful execution.

It never stops. “Alice Cooper, Rock Star”. “Kelly Preston, Actress”. “Ed McMahon, television personality”. The most egregious example that comes to mind is that of Icy Hot, who use “Shaquille O’Neal, basketball superstar” to sell the Pro-Therapy brand of support braces.

So that’s who that is! You mean that isn’t some other 7-foot-tall, 350-pound charismatic black man smiling at me from inside the magic box and talking in his trademark subterranean basso profundo? One of the six most recognizable people on the planet*, but Icy Hot needs to remind us whom he is. Thanks for clarifying, because I thought that maybe Charlie Villanueva had put on a few pounds between stints at the tanning salon.

*The others, of course, are Queen Elizabeth, Abigail Hensel, Britney Hensel and these two guys.

Some agencies bill by the project, others by the hour.  McFarlane USA is considering a $500 surcharge for every instance in which the agency must restructure any sentence that uses “needs” as a noun.

NAAN isn’t just a dour flatbread.  It’s the single clearest indicator of an advertiser merely placing words, rather than writing them.

If illustrating the benefit of the product rather than the product itself is advertising’s first commandment, this is the zeroth:

Be clear.

There’s a reason English is the world’s most widely spoken tongue. With few tenses to memorize, little of the gender confusion that plagues so many of the other Indo-European languages, and a rich vocabulary estimated at half a million words,  English’s combination of simplicity and variety is untouched.

Our lingua franca affords the user the opportunity to clarify even the most complex of thoughts.  But for fear of sounding gauche, uncultured, or perhaps unduly blunt (as if there’s such a thing as undue bluntness), millions of advertisers and non-advertisers alike feel compelled to spew words in unnecessary and relentless volume.

To borrow a perfect phrase from some anonymous online wag,

Why merely build your company, when you can facilitate synergy and optimize the integration of your resources through empowering forward-looking paradigm management coupled with leveraging your best-practice driven client-centric developmental momentum initiative for growth-positive, revenue neutral outcome prioritization?

The writer left out “skill set”, “transparency” and “incentivize”, but the lack of meaning is still there.

Which returns us to the filthiest device in advertising: never invite people to buy floor wax  – that’s far too simplistic.  Instead, tell them they can see you for all their floor wax needs.

If you’re a copywriter, next time you have a few minutes to spare and a muse to tickle, try the following insipid game.  Google “for all your ________ needs” (with quotes), filling the blank with the most arcane noun/adjective/phrase that comes to mind.

Recently discovered favorites include:

for all your foreign and domestic automotive purchasing needs
for all your desert gardening needs
for all your orienteering needs
for all your ethnic cooking needs
for all your SQL server needs
for all your Arabic translation needs
for all your tactical breaching needs, etc.

For the love of God, nobody has “foreign (nor) domestic automotive purchasing needs”. They want to buy a freaking car.

Unless you’re selling raw meat, bearskin tunics and caves, don’t appeal to your customers’ “needs”. We’ve all got the requisite food, clothing and shelter, presumably. Anything beyond that is a want. More to the point, anything beyond that is a product or a service.  Say so.

The pervasion (and perversion) of NAAN isn’t restricted to entities with small advertising budgets, either:

Welcome to Bank of America, the nation’s leading financial institution and home for all of your personal financial needs.
and
When you apply for a mortgage with Bank of America, you’ll get expert advice and a mortgage that fits your needs.

What would be wrong with trying something clear and confident, e.g.:

“Welcome to Bank of America, the biggest financial firm in the world. People in 150 countries have trusted us to preserve and grow their wealth since 1904”?

That kind of mild braggadocio is better than obfuscation, but still worse than truthfulness:

“American taxpayers, thanks for the $45 billion (and counting) in bailout cash – er, ‘injections of capital’. Merrill Lynch and Countrywide looked like fantastic acquisitions at the time.”

(Consider the sarcastic reference to prolix euphemisms within a post about prolix euphemisms to be the blog’s first self-referential joke.)

Meditating on how the Treasury Department is taking management tips from Gosbank is both depressing and off-topic, so let’s return to the relative trivia of bad advertising copy. For an especially malevolent misuse of the language, preface “for all your _____needs” with “one-stop shop” for a Clydesdale dose of English rendered lifeless.

Regrettably, there really do exist several “one-stop shop(s) for all your stationery needs”.
Saying so must get customers in the door far faster than using some workaday line like:

“From heavy-duty printer stock to delicate calligraphy paper. Beautifully embossed signature cards and envelopes, too.”

The pedantic client moans that the improved phrase doesn’t say a word about pens, custom wedding invitations, or those new laminated report covers he fell in love with at the trade show and had to order 10,000 of.

The appropriate response to this is, “You’re a stationer.  People will figure it out.”

One company that shall remain unidentified actually has the spare syllables on hand to bill itself as the “one-stop shop for all your Motorola Razr accessories needs.”

If the word “needs” is serving any purpose in the above phrase, please let us know what it is at info@McFarlaneUSA.com.

Of the 8 posts so far, this the 2nd one that’s complimentary rather than critical.  Which is generous, seeing as far less than ¼ of advertising is good.

Vince Offer is the greatest thing to happen to advertising since Andre Citroën took an unfinished skeletal building and actually made it serve a purpose.

As TV spots get further detached from reality, it sometimes seems that the only way for an advertiser (or its agency) to differentiate is to add levels of abstraction. Of course that doesn’t differentiate the product, but rather the message, which is an enormous part of the problem.

Offer manages to cram more reasons to buy the Shamwow into 2 minutes than most companies can in an entire cross-platform campaign.

Every product or service should submit to the Offer Test, which asks:

“If you had to write a TV spot in which Vince Offer sells your product, what would it look/sound like?”

But, you contest, my product doesn’t lend itself to his style of loud and abrasive pitchmanship.
Nonsense. Offer only provides the form. You still provide the content. Here’s the script from the spot that made Offer a household name – in the kitchen, the bathroom, even the garage:

Hi, it’s Vince with Shamwow. You’ll be saying “wow” every time you use this towel. It’s like a chamois, it’s like a towel, it’s like a sponge. A regular towel doesn’t work wet; this works wet, or dry. This is for the house, the car, the boat, the RV. Shamwow holds 20 times its weight in liquid.

Look at this: it just does the work. Why do you want to work twice as hard? Doesn’t drip, doesn’t make a mess. Wring it out, you wash it in the washing machine. Made in Germany – you know the Germans always make good stuff. You can cut it in half – use one as a bath mat, drain your dishes with the other one.  Use one as a towel – Olympic divers, they use it as a towel. Look at that, completely dry.

Put a wet sweater, roll it up, it dries your sweaters.

Here’s some cola. Wine, coffee, cola, pet stains – not only is the damage going to be on top, there’s your mildew. That is going to smell – see that?

The most absorbe– we’re going to do this in real time. Look at this. Put it on a spill, turn it over, without even putting any pressure, 50% of the cola, right there. You following me, camera guy? The other 50%, the cola starts to come up. No other towel’s going to do that. It acts like a vacuum. And look at this, virtually dry on the bottom. See what I’m telling you? Shamwow, you’ll be saying “wow” every time.
(break)
You’re going to spend $20 every month on paper towels anyway. You’re throwing your money away. The Mini-Shamwows are for everything, for everyday use.
This lasts 10 years, this lasts a week. I don’t know, it sells itself.
The Shamwow sells for $19.95, but you get one for the house, one for the car, 2 for the kitchen and bathroom…but if you call now, within the next 20 minutes because we can’t do this all day, you’ll get a 2nd set absolutely free. So that’s 8 Shamwows for $19.95.

It comes with a 10-year warranty. Here’s how to order.

Every second of this commercial is devoted to one purpose – identifying the benefit of the product.

What will your $20 get you?
-evaporation of inevitable spills with minimal effort
-cash in your pocket, as the warranty lasts long enough to save $2400 in paper towel expenses (according to Vince’s liberal math.)

Think about your product. What would you fill a 2-minute spot with? Do you even know enough features about your product to do so?

Contrast the Shamwow spot with a recent offering from CapitalOne, America’s least inspiring national marketer.

CapitalOne has enlisted the talent of some of the most prominent agencies in the world – DDBO, McCann-Erickson – to produce dozens of spots, each one unwatchable.

Take the latest in the CapitalOne cavalcade of self-conscious hilarity.

Never mind that the spot barely mentions how to buy the product. (You’ll probably have to watch it again, but the website appears at the end. You almost certainly didn’t notice it because there are 4 typefaces on the page and the URL appears at the bottom of the screen, in the smallest of the 4 typefaces, and has to compete for your attention with the incongruous sight of a guy in angel wings on a beach and another guy dancing around in a Speedo while covered in stinging jellyfish.)

Not until the second half of the spot are we finally informed of the product’s benefits – unquantifiable “low rates” coupled with “great rewards”. Contrast that with Vince Offer, who starts demonstrating the benefits of the Shamwow the moment his spot begins.

Were Vince to demean himself by going into business with CapitalOne, the spot would/should sound something like this (leaving the visual to your imagination):

Hi, it’s Vince with Capital One.

You might never buy anything with cash again after you use this card. It’s quick, it’s convenient, you just whip it out and show it to the clerk behind the counter, boom.

Use it at the supermarket, use it at the gas station, use it online to buy plane tickets with. Try doing that with a wad of bills.

You’ll save money compared to using other credit cards. Get the CapitalOne card now, and you won’t pay interest for the first 6 months. And 6 months from now, you’re still only going to pay 10.9%. That’s nothing.

Transfer your balances, too. You got a big balance on another card, eating away at your savings every month? Transfer it to your CapitalOne card, you pay that same rate – just 10.9%.

Other credit card companies charge 15, 18, 20%. Why do you want to pay twice as much in interest charges?

The CapitalOne card comes from a big, successful bank – a Fortune 500 company. They’ve been around for 20 years, so you know they’re not going to disappear anytime soon.

You like rewards? Listen to these rewards. You can get travel rewards, earn miles every time you buy something, earn enough to take a trip to Australia. You can earn points, too. Get points every time you buy something, build up enough of them and redeem them when you shop.
Or cash back. 1% cash back on everything you buy, plus a bonus at the end of the year.

You get all that just for shopping.

Make your own card. Choose from dozens of designs at our Card Lab. Or do it yourself. Upload a picture of your kids, your dog, the Grand Canyon. Go to the Card Lab and make it happen. There it is, right there on the card. You’ll see it every time you use it, a design no one else has.

The CapitalOne card starts at just $19. You might even be able to get it free.

Call 800-251-5745 right now. Better yet, visit Capital One.com.

The Offer Test. Either pass it, or expect people to pass on your product.

https://www.mcfarlaneusa.com/73/

On February 27, a small-to-medium business in the Denver area ceased operations. Or to hear the outcry from the employees, the very foundation of the Republic has been torn asunder.

In its day, the Rocky Mountain News was an adept vehicle to carry advertising. Circulation peaked at 400,000, and fell 38% before the paper inhaled a market-administered dose of Prussic acid. 200 editorial employees lost their jobs, many of whom quickly found work across the street at the still-functional Denver Post. The newly leisured represent .01% of the metropolitan Denver workforce.

On RockyMountainNews.com, a sidebar reads “Best of the Rocky”. Underneath it are links to the following historic stories:

Oglala Sioux bestow a tribute to the first tribal fatality in Iraq
Colorado’s deadliest traffic accident killed 20 children on Dec. 14, 1961
A five-part series that examines one tragic day on Mount Rainier
Coverage of the state’s worst wildfires

And finally,

Coverage of the April 20, 1999, shootings at Littleton’s Columbine High School

One half-expects to read “Our only regrets are that there was never a local naval base the Japanese could have attacked, and that the 9/11 terrorists didn’t fly planes into Republic Plaza and the Wells Fargo Center.”

If you graphed “modesty” on a line, with Marines and soldiers holding down one end, journalists would be so far over on the other end that the line would collapse. Every single RockyMountainNews.com column on the day the paper ceased publication was a variation on how great we are and what a valuable service we provide:

To readers, it wasn’t just a newspaper
Rocky kept swinging until the very end
When a paper dies, there are no winners
We’ll lose more than a paper
Rocky and I made it our business to be useful,
et al.

Never underestimate the power of self-importance. It’s the easiest conceit in the world, to think that the skill you’ve developed is therefore the most valuable one. Ted Williams, who hit baseballs for a living, said that hitting a baseball is “the hardest thing to do in sports”. Maybe he was right about the relative difficulty of his craft, or maybe he wasn’t. Peyton Manning would likely offer a dissenting opinion, the next time half a ton of linemen move at the speed of horses toward him as the pocket collapses and he’s left with 1.5 seconds to throw a prolate spheroid 40 yards downfield and have it gently land in the hands of a receiver who’s running a pattern that Manning himself had to memorize, all the while attempting to evade capture and almost certain excruciating pain.

This blog refuses to indulge the guilty scribes by naming them, but here are some excerpts from the above stories from the paper’s final issue:

“Newspapers don’t simply close. They die. The world goes on without them, but it’s not the same world.”

Even a child presumably understands that observing something is less worthy than actually doing it, but it takes more than juvenility to be a journalist.

Here are three more, from a different keystroker/failed novelist:

“…this curious, compelling life of the mind.”
“this experience is like having a death in the family while at the same time dying yourself. “
and
“we have so much to be proud of.”

et al.

Chemical engineers and software developers live lives of the mind. Assembling a properly punctuated 800-word screed shows that the assembler successfully completed the 4th grade.

And finally, from another of the above columns:

“Could someone tell me, please, why today feels little different from the two separate days when my parents died?”

He follows with:

“A city loses so much of its soul when a newspaper dies.”

and closes with a sentence that causes the reader to wonder when the F5 tornado ripped through the newsroom:

“I am going to go home tonight and, like so many of my co-workers, hug my loved ones.”

Had the paper’s editorial management spent more time submitting to the inevitability of technology, and less time simultaneously sticking out its chest and patting itself on the back, perhaps the Rocky Mountain News might have outlasted the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and whichever other broadsheets are today feeling the cold tip of the scythe on their backs.

The Rocky Mountain News lost $16 million in its final year, barely enough to pay the interest on the $67 million press the publisher invested in in 2007.

The editor defended the relevance of his paper’s ghost by saying, “The Rocky Mountain News was a pioneer in citizen journalism . . . and is an award-winning Internet newspaper.”

You’d think that a professional journalist would be more judicious in his application of the present tense. The above comments countered those made by a United States congressman who merely acknowledged the obvious by saying the paper’s cession was “mostly for better,” continuing, “Media is dead, and long live new media.”

However, the same industry that loves to attack sacred cows turns out to be clad in remarkably translucent leather when on the defensive. Merely sharing a universe with the legacy press means having to respect its sacrosanct status. After the editor had hurled enough brickbats, the congressman contradicted himself, stating, “I did not mean to offend nor to show anything less than a strong sense of remorse for the loss of the Rocky…its demise and the loss of over 200 jobs is a major blow to our community, especially in these troubled times…The rise of new media and citizen journalism has hastened the demise of many newspapers, and we, unfortunately, all share in the blame.”

The archaic banality of having to print, ship and manually distribute ephemera still has its defenders, for some reason. Maybe they’ll eventually notice that instantaneous, updatable, transportable information is not exactly news, so to speak.

Why do people buy? Take Bud Light, for instance. The “Drinkability” campaign is the brand’s latest. It’s also either its most or 2nd-most memorable* since the early-‘80s “Gimme a light. No, Bud Light” campaign, in which bar patrons were routinely served everything from incandescent bulbs to Papua New Guinean fire dancers.

Each “Drinkability” spot follows the same theme. The on-camera narrator is partaking in a social scene. Every other character in the scene freezes, at which point the narrator tells us that Bud Light is so distinguished from its light contemporaries that it requires the coining of the campaign’s namesake word. To illustrate how difficult it is for an ad campaign to resonate, cursory exposure to pro football over the past few weeks resulted in at least 40 exposures to variants of the “Drinkability” campaign. These included the spot with the hot redheaded tomboy walking through a tailgate party, the one with the guy from the cellphone commercial at a backyard barbecue, the one with the guy who looks like he listens to Phish at another backyard barbecue, and the campaign’s latest manifestation, where one guy takes over a casual conversation by turning the TV screen into a telestrator. Yet before researching, the writer honestly thought “Drinkability” is a Miller campaign.

How can a TV viewer – one who works in advertising, no less – can see a beer commercial or a car commercial or a cellphone commercial dozens of times yet not remember exactly what’s being pitched?

In the case of beer, the problem is that it’s an inherently static product with little difference among brands. Anheuser-Busch may have its Budweiser devotees who won’t drink anything else, and Coors its fans of toxins dissolved in pure Rocky Mountain spring water, but no one sufficiently parched or alcoholic is going to forgo his second choice if his first choice is unavailable. Exposure to countless beer commercials over the years has educated us on heat pasteurization, cold filtering, Bavarian purity laws, top-fermenting yeast, strategic hop content and more minutiae than someone simply looking to have his thirst slaked would ever want to process. The beer species classified as “American-style pale lager” is easily the most popular variety in North America. But the resounding truth is that there isn’t a whole lot you can do to an American-style pale lager to make it interesting or distinctive. 30 years ago you could create a new drink category by brewing a light version, but that’s about it.
That isn’t technically true – some enterprising brewer could add orange pulp at the source, or go for the English expat market by selling a non-carbonated version and recommending it be drunk at room temperature. While gimmick beers do exist, funny labels and fruity undertones are hardly the way to gain fat market share. At least in the United States, beer isn’t defined by its taste, nor its retail displays, nor its “drinkability”; not beyond a certain threshold, at any rate.
Beer is Clydesdales. It’s a CEO in jeans espousing the virtues of postcard scenes in his picturesque home state. It’s retired athletes cracking jokes. It’s mantric slogans. It’s an animated train rushing by while the O’Jays sing. Maybe in the case of an Iron City or an Anchor Steam, it’s a statement about the drinker’s hipness or local pride. But among the market leaders, selling a ubiquitous product, it’s endless repetition.

Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors have reached the point of saturation – where advertising morphs from an investment into a fixed expense. For instance, Coors has – must have – a new campaign under wraps. No one outside the circle of relevance knows what the campaign will entail, or even needs to. But we do know that the campaign’s purpose will not be to avail people of Coors’ existence. Nor will it be to gain a significantly larger piece of the beer-drinking pie. Rather, the campaign will run simply because all the competitors will be running their own campaigns. And as anyone who played intramural college sports knows, failing to suit up for the game is worse than losing.

If Coors doesn’t advertise, the implicit message will be that the company’s cash position is so weak that the company can’t afford to run ads anymore. Or perhaps that Coors reached an impasse with its ad agency (the fortuitously named Draft FCB) and is now a bad business partner. Or it could mean that Coors somehow thinks that it simply doesn’t need to spend millions of dollars best spent somewhere else, a proposition that makes sense yet is so far removed from the 21st century megacorporate business model that the company might as well be paying its employees in scrip.

* Either that, or the “Real American Heroes/Real Men of Genius” ** campaign. RAH/RMoG’s spots consist of parody songs performed by a ‘70s-era yacht rocker, in the form of paeans to heretofore underappreciated everyday members of society (“Mr. Giant Taco Salad Inventor”, “Mr. Overzealous Foul Ball Catcher”). Again, before researching this hilarious campaign, our experts couldn’t remember exactly which beer it sold.

**Started in 1999, the campaign originally used the phrase “Real American Heroes”. After September 11, 2001, Anheuser-Busch changed to the less emotionally charged “Real Men of Genius”.

A certain Las Vegas hotel/casino hosted an Aerosmith concert a couple of years back.  The task of publicizing the show fell on the shoulders of a future McFarlane Media writer.  The effort included creating and producing a 45-second “phone hold”, which is one of those messages you listen to when waiting for the hotel operator to finish speaking with the previous caller who wants to know what time the 24-hour coffee shop closes and if Las Vegas has a supermarket and if they sell Diet Coke.

The construction of a phone hold for a musical performance is fairly rudimentary. 3 or 4 song snippets, a voiceover talent telling you who, when, and how much, and that’s about it.  There isn’t even a time constraint, such as with a radio spot that must run between 29.4 and 30.6 seconds.

A few months before the concert, Aerosmith released Rockin’ The Joint, which enjoyed far too brief a stint as the most expositorily titled album in music history (Neil Diamond’s 12 Songs, which sounds like a greatest hits package but isn’t, came out 2 weeks later.)  Rockin’ The Joint is a live album recorded during a show at Las Vegas’ Hard Rock Hotel, less than a mile away from the hotel/casino in question. The album opens with a caterwauling Steven Tyler addressing the crowd with the line “Goooood evening, Las Vegas!”

Seeing as context is everything, that line seemed like a natural prologue to the phone hold. Follow it with a medley of “Sweet Emotion”, “Walk This Way”, and “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)”, give the phone number, and there’s your phone hold.  Simple, no?

The spot is recorded, emailed to the client, everyone’s happy.

Until a few days later, when the account executive explains that the phone hold must be recut, and fast.  Why?

“Because the client said, ‘What if people call in the morning? Or the afternoon?’”

This is not an apocryphal story.  This is first-person testimony.

 

It’s trite, it’s predictable, and it’ll be indistinguishable from next year’s. Presenting our annual Super Bowl ad review.

 

Actually, this year’s review goes 3 sentences. It’s the epilogue that’s the money shot, as it were. 29% of the spots took place in office settings. White-collar workplaces are to modern commercials what the Old West was to 1950s TV series. And approximately 31% of the spots involved broken glass.

A special congratulations to the unflappable Bob Parsons, CEO/founder/head copywriter at Go Daddy and a man with a historic capacity for shamelessness. The original Bob Parsons, who punted for the Bears in the ’80s, really needs to insist that his namesake use an identifying middle initial.

It’s only with the greatest of reservations that one can criticize the Go Daddy Parsons, who grew up poor, joined the Marines at 18, was wounded and earned three combat medals in Vietnam, created multiple successful businesses, and in 2005 was one of the few people with a podium who had enough common sense to publicly dismiss the “torture” of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay for the harmless series of frat pranks it was.

This is not a criticism of Parsons’ seemingly unimpeachable character. But for the love of God, the man is the worst thing to happen to advertising since this slogan.

In 1997, Parsons had enough foresight to found a business in the one corner of the internet that would always remain bubbleproof – domain registration. In fact, the greater the bubble, the stronger Go Daddy seemed to get, as aspiring companies rushed to fill the void left by their overly ambitious predecessors.

Somewhere along the way, in his capacity as corporate advertising maven, Parsons evidently got wind of the axiom “sex sells”. Unfortunately, he never bothered to learn even a third word related to advertising. Five years into an experiment that shows no sign of abating, Go Daddy’s formula of buxom women and playground entendres can make even the most insatiably heterosexual of male viewers want to change the channel.

Parsons isn’t Go Daddy’s chief creative director merely by default. The company’s sole shareholder is also convinced that he’s the conceptual heir to David Ogilvy. Visit Parsons’ eponymous blog or even Go Daddy’s own site, and you’d think the company’s domain registration service is just an appendage to the primary business of creating landmark TV spots.

The frustrating thing is that Go Daddy actually managed to devise a clever online tagline once, only to inexplicably weaken it. Go Daddy augmented the pithy “Make a name for yourself” into the more blatant and less nuanced “Make a dot-com name for yourself”, as if the latter were a longstanding English idiom that could harbor a second meaning.

In its most recent manifestation, GoDaddy’s TV campaign featured a hackneyed business setting full of easily offended superannuated men, IndyCar pixie and perennial 8th-place finisher Danica Patrick, the visual foil of another shapely woman in progressing stages of undress, and perhaps some theme underlying the spot.

Notwithstanding Patrick’s giant leap forward for sexual equality, this spot actually represented a zenith of refinement and taste for Go Daddy. The company had reached its nadir in Super Bowl XLII, with another spot featuring Patrick executing her now-trademark move of the sultry unzip. In this spot a socialite emerges from the backseat of a limo, besieged by paparazzi. The camera travels up her legs to her lap, as she invites the audience to see her

The cardinal rule of working with words effectively is to write boldly. But the only way to complete that sentence with the requisite word “beaver” is to do so with a shake of the head and a squint. Yes, Parsons unloaded the same joke that an 8-year old boy would have used, putting an actual aquatic rodent in the spot. A year later, it’s painful to even find this clip on YouTube to confirm the details.

This complaint is not coming from prudishness. It’s coming from a disdain for all things juvenile. It would benefit the NFL’s image even more if Roger Goodell spent less time vacillating about running Pacman Jones and Michael Vick out of the league, and more on ensuring that Parsons and his annual $3 million checks never see another Super Bowl.

 

There’s a difference between performing a spectacular act, and doing a job effectively.  Yet in advertising, like almost everywhere else in the real world, the latter is indisputably more valuable.  Here’s the early favorite for the most effective campaign of the year.

 

Wait. You’re praising a retail ad for a chain of casual-dining watering holes?

Where’s the ripoff of allegorical reference to George Orwell – the individual reclaiming authority from the totalitarian leadership?  Whither the understated font, minimalist music, small logo and patent appeal to my sense of frugality? What, no Hall of Fame football player feeling and returning the love from a tousle-haired youth?

This commercial doesn’t even contain a catchphrase. It’s laughable to consider the spot anything but workmanlike. 

“Workmanlike” is about the highest compliment you can pay an ad, at least at McFarlane Media.

The purpose of the T.G.I. Friday’s spots isn’t to win awards, to get America’s break rooms abuzz, nor even to make the cover of AdAge.  It’s to sell parmesan-crusted chicken and half-rack baby back ribs.  A campaign’s function should never be to indulge the creative team’s masturbatory fantasies about what constitutes remarkable advertising. A campaign should exist solely – and this is so obvious that it’s easy to overthink and miss – to help the client sell his wares.  Nothing could be simpler to execute, yet harder for writers and art directors confident of their own brilliance to deign to do.

With this campaign, agency McCann-Erickson does just about everything right.   The writer of this spot, to the extent that it required writing, likely won’t make it a permanent part of his reel.  The spot doesn’t contain any clever wordplay, any inspiring language to lead men into battle, nor even a simple joke.  Here’s what it does have:

A likable pitchman.  Maybe a boisterous, husky guy with contemporary facial hair and the scalp to match doesn’t fit your definition of “likable”, but talent Guy Fieri’s enthusiasm and easygoing demeanor are both palpable and infectious.

Fieri got famous in 2006 as a television contest winner. By that time, seemingly every sitcom and drama on TV had been replaced by shows in which non-actors compete for a prize – e.g. eating bugs to win $1 million, being publicly criticized to secure a recording contract, or being publicly criticized for the right to work the 3 a.m. shift in a suit & tie and sit next to Chris McKendry’s subcutaneous disdain for the male half of the species in bucolic Bristol, Connecticut.

By 2006 this curious phenomenon of the proletariat as TV stars (or at least, TV star prospects) had trickled down from CBS and Fox all the way to The Food Network. Fieri competed on a show* on which aspiring chefs sought to demonstrate sufficient culinary prowess and charisma to host a new TV series. It’s hard to imagine a more suitable résumé for a restaurant pitchman – an everyday guy with a penchant for creating food and a presence not so pretty that viewers find him intimidating.

Volume. Clearing your throat and speaking up works in social settings, and it continues to work in the quasi-social milieu of a living room wall. Colorful photography, uptempo music, and a concise message told once in exactly the time allotted work to command the viewer’s attention and leave a lasting stamp.

Reverberation.  T.G.I. Friday’s took its restaurants’ distinctive red-and-white color scheme and plastered it to the spots.  After just one or two viewings, the visual resonance is unmistakable. There’s little danger of the viewer having the worst reaction possible – mistaking the spot for something from Chili’s or Applebee’s.  

A price. If after 27 seconds of the spot, the viewer was only somewhat motivated to visit T.G.I. Friday’s, the “$8.99” can turn lukewarm interest into the hot action of gathering the kids and driving to the restaurant. 

This obviously doesn’t work for every product. Breitling didn’t make its watches into status symbols by telling buyers that the new Navitimer is “priced to move at $5,000!”  But a T.G.I. Friday’s entrée, even in a proto-recession, isn’t a luxury item. It’s in competition with the minimal financial outlay and slightly less minimal preparation that goes into a homemade meal. T.G.I. Friday’s target is a person who could theoretically pay an 8-minute visit to her microwave (pausing halfway through to peel back the plastic film, stir, then return the film to its original position, after having first poked the film with a fork.) For a few bucks more, she can let a line cook do the work, meet up with a friend or two, let an unseen employee do the dishes, maybe even throw down an appetizer and a cocktail. (Most people don’t have Jack Daniel’s® sampler plates and ready-made lime margaritas at home, regrettably.)

Even if it fit with their marketing schedule, T.G.I. Friday’s likely wouldn’t have chosen the Super Bowl to debut this spot.  It’d get laughed out of any award show. Yet the gestalt here fulfills the one requirement of effective advertising.  In fact, if there’s a Fundamental Theorem of Advertising, it’s this:

“People don’t want soap. They want clean hands.”**

The benefit supersedes the product.  In the example of Breitling, the benefit is materialism: the satisfaction of displaying to the world that you can spend the equivalent of a couple semesters of state-school education on a trinket that tells the time no better than your cell phone does.

In the case of T.G.I. Friday’s, if you buy, you’re getting

-a full belly, like the company’s well-fed gourmand spokesman enjoys;
-enthralled taste buds, should the food be as appetizing as it appears;
-camaraderie, like that the spot’s happy secondary players seem to be enjoying.

Almost all car spots and beer spots are forgettable.  Financial services, telephone directories (the definitive down-and-going industry), pills that ease urination – often the only distinguishing trait of these products’ commercials is their relentless sameness.  

Meanwhile, one of T.G.I. Friday’s slogans is “Everything you want, nothing you don’t,” making the company one of the few whose advertising shares a philosophy with its core business.

 *Spending a few seconds researching and bringing you the titles of these shows would defeat the purpose of demonstrating what resounds in the critical brain and what’s ignored.  

**Believed to have originated with Luke Sullivan. Yes, it took 4 whole posts for this blog to crib from the finest copywriting maven of the day.