Buddhist Marketer

Announcing Thinking Marketing on Adholes.com

Thinking Marketing is my new column on ad industry social network Adholes.com, authored by yours truly.  While the content will be cross-posted here, you either have to be a member of Adholes.com or a subscriber to my Thinking Marketing email newsletter list to receive the password.

Want to get a sneak peek at Adholes?  Here’s the logo:

When you log in, you’ll see a call-out box on the front page for the columnists.

If you click on my name, you’ll see a familiar mug!

Click on the top right to review my latest columns (the database calls them Weblog postings):

In the alternative, you can also subscribe to my Thinking Marketing newsletter.

Five questions; five answers: Marc Lefton

Lest there be any question regarding my anti-social skills, I’m now an official columnist at Adholes.com, the ad industry’s largest and oldest social network.  In celebration of this, the founder of Adholes.com, Marc Lefton, was kind enough to let me interview him.

1.  From your perspective, what is it that gets in the way of truly great marketing?

The consumer’s lack of education or ability to take a joke, and/or a client’s perception of said consumer to be even 200% more totally stupid, humorless and easily offended than they already are. Since I’ve entered the industry, ads have gotten worse and worse. It used to be a marketer was willing to take a risk and offend a few people to please many. Now you have the most loved brands admired more because of their products and customer service than anything advertising agencies are doing for them. All the great talent got sucked out of the industry in the last recession and now even more will leave or get booted in this one. And, add to that further cuts to the education and arts and we’re on a downward spiral to the dumb marketing to the dumber in the next 10 years.

2.  How do you define “truly great marketing”?

Truly great marketing fires on all cylinders. It starts with a great product. Without a great product, great marketing just makes people hate you faster. From there, God is in the details. It’s easy enough to write a great print spot or a TV commercial, but finding an idea with enough legs to make it through every channel there is - from your Twitter account to a matchbook cover to that “Sorry, we were unable to hold your reservation” letter has to have the same consistent tone, attitude, spark and zing. They all have to emanate from the same thought process. And finally, having the ability to listen and respond to consumers instead of just talking at people which is SO 1900’s.

I don’t think ZipCar makes great ads - I’ve honestly never seen one. But from the copy on the website to their emails to the fact that they responded to me on Twitter within an hour of complaining about them shows they are firing on all cylinders so well that traditional marketing may not even be necessary.

3. Let’s say America becomes communist. What career do you want the government to shove down your throat?

I’ve always been a fan of Russian propaganda posters. I don’t fear communism, I will gladly join our Dear Leaders in manipulating your dead-insect-filled brains to do our bidding.

4.  What do you think sets you apart from other folks in your line of work?

I’m not a clone. I never went to college. Which means as a creative person in the industry no one can say “Oh, your portfolio makes me think you went to SVA” which is what I can say about most others graduating today. Schools are churning out clones who all think creative in the same way. I’m a unique combination of being passionate, having high expectations and goals, and yet not really caring how far I go or if I fail. I was told by family and teachers growing up I was going to pump gas for a living. When you have that type of expectation it removes the fear from trying new things. If I always wanted to be a creative director, I might have stopped half way and said good enough. Or, I might have just joined an ad industry social network instead of asking myself “How can I make my own?” before anyone else did. I don’t know where I’m going so I guess I just keep going up. If I screw up and wind up pumping gas then so be it. It was my destiny! I’m going to keep trying to be different and do what I believe in, not what others insist I do.

5.  What do you think sets you apart from other humans?

True brilliance is not in being smart but in knowing how you are not smart. I know how to not only play my strengths but embrace and cover up my weaknesses. You need to be kind of zen about your ego to do this - because on one hand you want to be confident about yourself, yet at the same time be humble enough to know when you’re not good enough at something. I’ve found very few people who have this balance - most have a false ego and only concentrate on how good they are. I worry about how bad I am at things and how not to let those things undermine what I’m good at.

By now, you probably understand why Marc and I get along.

Click here to check out Marc’s blog.

Do as I say, not as I do

So I get an email from oDesk that tells me how I should elevate The Anittah Patrick Brand (step 1: simmer down on the snark) by intelligently leveraging five public relations tips:

So, hey, I like the idea of being a social expert who dominates conversations, has 70,000 websites, and a professional blog.  Thus, intrigued by the great “voice” of this article tease (it’s funny and non-moronic!  Plus, I like the colors in the pretty microphone picture), I click through to read the full article.

And I don’t know how you, personally, define “professional blog”, but the look and feel of that which I encounter upon clicking is … umm …

… amateur-hour.

Geez, invest, like, five hours (I prefer 10 p.m. - 3 a.m. for activities of this sort) to install a template other than the default WordPress template, already.  I mean, it’s okay to have your pants down around your ankles every now and again (I’ve got more than one unfinished blog lying around that are no better if not worse than an animated .gif of a guy in a yellow hard hat digging a hole of medium-resolution pixel dirt) but you don’t need to put the spotlights on it.

I mean, geez.  Have some respect!  Don’t start driving traffic until after you’re dressed.

Click here to assess the current state of the oDesk PR article.

Awesome email from The Westin

Just opened a great email from The Westin Philadelphia.

Aside from not having any noticeable errors in it, it wins for the following reasons:

• I stayed at The Westin Philadelphia on New Year’s Day, so this offer is targeted (”Return to …”)
• The header tells me exactly what the offer is:  I know what I have to do (”Reserve now”), and what it’s gonna cost me (as little as $199)
• The email uses bullet points and sparingly uses boldface text
• The email also provides suggested dates — and there are only four of them (less than seven and thus, easy to wrap brain around)
• Above-the-fold call-to-action; only one column of content

The only thing I wish they would’ve done is added a reminder along the lines of

• Your current Starpoints account balance is X
• You could earn up to N Starpoints with a last-minute weekend getaway
• If you use your Starwood AmEx, you can earn up to an additional M points

Plus, I wish they had placed a “-” between “last” and “minute” but that might be entirely grammatically inappropriate.  I defer to actual grammarians on this matter.

I will say this:  The Westin Philly is quite nice, well-located, and has a pretty tasty breakfast to boot.  Also, the toiletries are worth pocketing.  :P

Click here to review the landing page.

(Situational) condescension is a moral obligation

The bubble might not have gotten so big in the first place if corporate cultures didn’t discourage the public denouncement of bad ideas

I don’t place a premium on blowing sunshine up people’s hindparts.

At my high school, a math/science magnet, you came strong or not at all, an intellectual style that suits me, but generally pisses most people off. Even some circles at Yale felt the dismissive, condescending tone that my skewering of poorly-considered arguments generally took was inappropriate for the cashmere-sweater and pearl-necklace set. Whatevs. I was trained in a school of thought that assumes we’re all intelligent people, and none of us are going to cry to our mommies if someone rips our moronic ideas a new orifice. Au contraire: we’ll become stronger people for having endured the thrashing. (Cue Nietzsche.)

This is not an approach that lubricates one’s path to a corner office at a large corporation. (Cue Kafka.) Playing nice with others is paramount, is more than half of your annual evaluation come bonus-time. As someone put it this weekend, “Do you want to show the other person that they’re wrong and you’re right, or do you want to persuade them?” In corporate America you need to persuade 25/8/366; it’s more difficult to do this when your emails are laced with vitriol and your presentations rife with eye-rolling.

The Bell curve makes it clear that the vast majority of humans are, well, average. It follows from this that the insights of the vast majority of humans will also be average, and the length of time that it will take them to appreciate the brilliance of your insights will be longer than it took you to architect them. So, in opposition to that which is generally celebrated in the places I feel most at home (think: a room full of people who prefer quad-ruled paper), in corporate America you must place a high premium on making others feel good about themselves. Or, at the very least, you must be considerate of how what you’re saying and doing might make other people feel like idiots. (Whether they are, in fact, idiots is not relevant. Remember: do you want to be right, or do you want to persuade?)

Now, let’s think about this: yes, I oftentimes “skewer” other marketers’ fumbles. I’m not trying to shame anyone (anymore) but at the same time, as I informed a waiter at a restaurant in Santa Monica last month, “I’m allergic to mediocre food.” If you know me, you know this about me. As one of my dear friends Chris Sandeman, the CEO of Sandeman’s New Europe, has put it, “Anittah’s only draw-back is the occasional allergic reaction to stupidity and mediocrity in co-workers.”

I’m not happy when I find out that someone has taken deep offense at me taking the red laser pointer to their public boo-boos. I mean, I’m not out to hurt anyone’s feelings. If you know me, you know this too. But certainly the language I speak is often at odds with the language spoken by the dominant status quo — and by definition, the middle chunk of the Bell curve is the dominant status quo. And the dominant language is one that makes others feel good about themselves, gently persuades them to agree that 1+1=2, and blows sunshine up their grade-inflated, “Hooray For Everything”, if-it-weren’t-for-Spanx-it-would-occupy-four-zip-codes backsides.

Feel-good group-think. A Ponzi scheme of back-patting. A lemmingistic, no-whistle-blowing, now-is-the-perfect-time-to-buy we-are-all-bobblehead-dolls chorus of conformity. I mean, how could the clowns be anything but wise when wisdom is, definitionally, whatever the clown-crowd comes up with?!

It isn’t too far from this line of thinking to suppose that the mandate of playing nice and being nice if you want your bonus is an incentive to not announce, “The Emperor has no clothes!” It isn’t too far from supposing that throughout organizations across the world, there were individuals who smelled what the securitizing of debts was cookin’, but knew better than to circulate memos to this effect. It isn’t a huge stretch to imagine that maybe if there were a diversity of workstyles — which is to say, well-socialized people who go to work for a fashion show alongside poorly-socialized people who stockpile notebooks of graph paper — incented in corporate America, rather than the simple celebration of the uncritical, perhaps the amplitude of the markets would be dampened.

All of this is to say that even on my most Buddhist of days, I’m still likely going to be perceived as a jerk amongst those who take analysis of their work product personally. It’s not like I’m trying to personally attack the people who slap together shoddy PowerPoints; they, too, have a right to intake oxygen (just, perhaps, at a reduced paygrade ;). But if we’re going to

• Elevate the level of discourse about marketing
• Discourage a culture of conformity within the world of generally-unrepentant capitalists
• Minimize the incentive to simply nod our heads and do what our boss or policy dictates simply because it pays the mortgage

then suit-wearing punks like myself practically have a moral obligation to audibly slap their foreheads when a marketer engages in the mediocre.

I mean, if I sat here and simply accepted a continuous stream of poorly designed emails and abhorrently executed social media campaigns, wouldn’t my silence practically make me an accomplice? (Cue Zizek.)

Benevolent evil-doing on marketing’s landscape is evil-doing just the same. It’s an assault on excellence. I can’t take it. I won’t stomach it. It gives me hives.

Maybe I’m being a complete Adhole, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask to require that marketing — and marketers — do a bit of thinking.  And so, this blog exists to inject the thinking back into marketing.

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Not sure if you have a moral obligation to condescend?  Here’s a handy chart!

* Either in the form of lowering the bar of others (who will think that misplaced apostrophes and its ilk are okay) or not discouraging continued sup-optimal-ness on the part of the actor)?

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This blog post was created for Adholes.com, the largest and oldest ad-industry social network. Adholes.com members and Thinking Marketing newsletter subscribers enjoy VIP access to my morally obligated Thinking Marketing blog posts.  I think you deserve VIP status, don’t you?

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When atavism strikes email marketers

In August I bemoaned the use of two full content columns (not to be confused with one content column plus one call-out or nav column) by effective, efficient international NFP (and past recipient of my donation money) Room to Read.

Unfortunately it seems they’ve taken a step backwards, as an email I received from them this week contained three full content columns.

Helloooooo Room to Read!  Please!  Chill it out!

When you jam your emails with three columns of content, your recipients don’t have any room to read.

Emailers: please make landing pages relevant

Unless you’re using email click-throughs to test lead messages for products that n’existe pas, please please please drive email clickers to the most relevant landing page possible.  You’ve done the work, you’ve built the email, you’ve routed it through the five day legal review, you’ve pulled the list …

… so please, American Express Platinum Card, send me an email that allows me to click directly to the Tribeca Film Festival 2009 event page.  I shouldn’t have to hit the generic Invitation Only page and then try and figure out where to find TFF 2009.

I have the attention span of a gnat, and instead of trying to sniff around this suboptimal landing page for anything related to what I clicked on, I’m going to surf on over to my WordPress administration page and write a cranky blog post …

Fresh Air Fund taps bloggers to spread the word

The Fresh Air Fund has apparently gotten wind that social media is the way to go when it comes to social justice concerns.  I recently received an email, as a blogger, imploring me to help spread the word about their efforts:

Hi

I would like to ask for your help with getting the word out on Grrl ISO with an issue I thought you and your readers care about. The Fresh Air Fund is in need of hosts for this summer. Host families are volunteers who open their hearts and home to a child from the city to give a fresh air experience that disadvantaged children never forget. I’ve set up a social media news release which explains everything, so please feel free to use any of the images, logos, videos, banners, buttons, etc:

http://freshair.smnr.us

Please let me know if you are able to post and send me the link. Your effort can help make sure inner-city children have everything they need!

While I applaud any attempt to harness new channels towards the achievement business goals, I’m also a big believer in excellence in execution.  The circles below must intersect:

• Leveraging relatively innovative methods (social media) for achieving business goals (find hosts for The Fresh Air Fund)
• Leveraging them in a manner consistent with both the business’ vector path (insert internal mission and vision of The Fresh Air Fund here) and the vector path of said innovative method [more]
• Executing at a level of quality consistent with the manner in which the (Fresh Air Fund) business is executed

I suspect the circle representing the final bullet point above is a free-floater that doesn’t intersect with the two bullets that precede it.

1. I clicked on the link provided
2. I noted yet did not judge the divergence between the look and feel of this splash page vs. the look and feel of the core Fresh Air Fund page

3.  I scrolled down and noted some copy-and-paste .html code for bloggers to easily add banners to their own social media empires.  Innovative!

4.  But then I looked at the banners that would be served off of this code.  The creative messaging on the banner says nothing about becoming a host.  P.S. the title tag has a word that’s spelled incorrectly.

Wow, it looks even worse once its actually implemented!  Did anyone even QA this?!  Does this banner say “click” to you?  Eeekers!

5.  And plus, the landing page off a click-through on this banner is not a “become a host” landing page; it’s a “donate” page!!  Okay, let’s pretend that the campaign’s goals were to drive donations (which it isn’t, but I’m being generous): the donation page has no clear “call to action”.  Give us a form, people!  Create a stand-alone splash page!   Too!  Many!  Places!  To!  Click!

Sure, they’re a not-for-profit, but if you’ve engaged someone to help with social media, you need to make sure you’ve picked the right team.  I have no idea who was advising FAF on this effort, but the amount of thought given to the donation conversion funnel is best illustrated by the quality of the banner above.

So I give a nod to The Fresh Air Fund, but recommend that in their next go-round, they invest a bit more and hire a smarter partner.  Great job in including easy-to-copy-and-paste .html code on their splash page for bloggers, but more work is needed in the quality of the entire campaign.  Why go to all this effort if you’re just going to ask people to put up ads that are the equivalent of public access cable TV (with all due respect to the entertaining low-budget NYC show I’ve Got Munchies) asking them to donate when what you really need are hosts?

I’ve donated to FAF in the past, and I think it’s important that any online campaign to encourage donations to this organization — particularly as government-funded social services hit the chopping block — be designed and executed by someone at least as good as yours truly.  So, great effort Fresh Air Fund, but feel free to give me a ring if you want the next iteration of this campaign to be executed at a level of quality consistent with the manner in which the rest of your business is run.

Don’t just market; market smarter!

Unsubscribe Rights Campaign

Dear Human Rights Campaign,

I gave you money and let you send me text messages and email messages because I support equality for all people, regardless of the sex and gender of the people with whom they fall in love.  Successful societies are those that allow even the folks at the endpoints of the normal distribution an opportunity to live, work, and play within its borders.

But I have asked you several times to remove me from your email message list.  You were nice and easily removed me from your text blasts (thank you).  But despite following your instructions and clicking all the right subscription management buttons, you still send me email messages.  And it’s been going on for much longer than a reasonable “gotta scrub the database” grace period.

So from now on, I’m marking your messages as spam.  It’s not like I want you to be blacklisted, but I’ve got to treat all emailers with equality.  After all, it would be untoward for me to treat your violation of CAN-SPAM any differently than the violations of heteronormatively “appropriate” CAN-SPAM violators, n’est-ce pas?

No zits R us

Ever since an aging dermatologist in a South Bend high-rise (8 stories, baby!) made no good, very bad decisions regarding the condition of my older sister’s skin (circa 1982), I have been very wary of skin doctors.  When I lived in Port Chester, I tried working with one whose office was clearly outfitted for the “I used to be a French-manicured hottie and I want to keep my youthful face so give me some Botox” set.  Once I moved to Brooklyn, I tried working with one whose SoHo waiting room played double-duty as an art gallery.  He was openly gay, which gave him bonus points, and he worked with at least one quasi-celeb, whose chart I spied as I got comfy on the vinyl-covered patient seat.  But he was moody as all get out and wanted to put me on Accutane despite the deep reservations that I expressed.  FAIL!

Enter Dr. Jay Dennett, who is possibly not only the best dermatologist I’ve ever worked with but also a contender for the best doctor I’ve ever had, period (this excludes Personal Coaches and Doctor-Friends Who Call In Scrips For Me).  He’s down-to-earth, friendly, listens, and tries his best to design a plan that works.  He also knows I have no health insurance and has factored that into his recommendations.  At long last, under his care I’m actually beginning to see improvement in my adult onset acne.

So, if you’re looking for the best dermatologist in New York City, specifically Midtown Manhattan, specifically Murray Hill, for anything related to acne, adult onset acne, skin problems, back-ne, or zits, and have tried everything, you should definitely look up Dr. Jay Dennett.  And if the previous sentence isn’t enough to prove my friend Bree’s point regarding keyword-rich copy murdering decent writing, then perhaps a sentence like “Help with acne scarring” or “best NYC dermatologist” or “adult onset acne cure not Accutane” or “need help zits” will.