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Your art.

By
Steve Poppe
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A favorite question of mine when interviewing candidates is “What is your art?  I don’t use it all the time because candidates more often than not either give a blank stare or say “What do you mean?”  If faced with that bounce back I might suggest “Define it as you will.”

What is your art? 

It’s a personal assessment but I guess it’s also part public assessment. Interviewees might default to song, or drawing or writing, though since I’m often interviewing in a business setting, that tends to set the context.  Try it sometime.  And don’t lead the witness.  You know that look you get from a dog when you hide the ball behind your back – the quizzical look – you may get that.  However some people thrive.  The question is disarming yet alarming. It probes things that might be hidden. And if it doesn’t work and breaks the mood, you can always blame me. When it works though, it can be magical. Peace.

Journalism on the way back.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Warren Buffett just bought 63 newspapers, saying a tight community needs a good local newspaper. I can’t disagree; Warren knows a thing.  The proper presentation of news and analysis (content) is always in demand.  Journalists get this. Bloggers and media socialists have for a few years taken the spotlight off paid journalists but the successful ones are few and far between.  More importantly, bloggers have made journalists more focused, faster and hungry.

This is not to say you can’t get depth out of blogs, or news or analysis – you certainly can.  But sometime the writing gets on the way, and the fact checking. When I first started blogging somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 million blogs a day were coming online.  That’s a lot of words.  I assume that number has slackened, but with China’s growth, who knows?

As words on the web become as numerous as atoms, we only have time to read a scintilla. Finding the best words will often fall to the professionals. I think Mr. Buffett gets that. Peace!

 

Supersized Claims.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I was just watching a video from the recent PSFK Event in NY showing Graham Hill’s new project LifeEdited.com.  His interesting “life editing” concept fits nicely with the Craft Economy, me thinks.  Anyway, the opening for the video talks about how America has super-sized our culture over the last 50 years. Quite right. Mr. Hill’s suggestion is to downscale one’s physical footprint on earth, which is a savvy and necessary idea. 

You can find the video here.

In addition to our lives, though, we’ve spent years supersizing our advertising claims: most, best, largest, unparalleled, flah-flah-flah.  These words and their overuse have made advertising and marketing unreal. Who do we believe? Coors Light is the most refreshing beer in America? Are you kidding me?  What happened to standards and practices?

Marketers need to stop pizzling into the wind.  They need to find own-able territory, live it, mean it, and be it. It’s nice to aspire, but don’t aspire to the un-noble supersized claim. You wouldn’t brag at a keg or cocktail party, why spend millions on such boorish behavior in advertising?  Peace. 

 

Brand Strategy is Not Fluid.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

So my friend Mr. X, who is a great ad and idea guy, is telling me about a goob (short for goober) he worked for a few months ago. She had a presumably well-paying job at an ad agency  but he could tell she was an empty suit.  Said boss once mentioned to Mr. X, with whom I’ve had a strategic donnybrook or two, that strategy is not that important.  “Strategy is fluid, Mr. X” she said imperiously. Now Mr. X might stray from the brief every once in a while in an effort to perk up an idea – but he giggles over the fluid notion.

Strategy is not fluid.  But WTF, I don’t know everything – so I posted the question on the account planners group on LinkedIn.  The response seems to favor the fluidity side of the argument, though primarily in nuance and interpretation. It seems fluid is a pop marketing word these days.

Marilyn Laurie of AT&T marketing fame once talked about her brand as a bank.  You are either putting deposits in the brand bank or you’re making withdrawals. Well, here’s a fluidity question:  If you don’t have a brand strategy, clearly defined, how will you know what’s a deposit?  Riddle me that. Idea and planks.  Aka claim and proof. The organizing principle of brand strategy. Peace!   

Life and Story.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

Visiting Nurse Service of NY has a new program it is launching called Medicaid Managed Long Term Care (MLTC). It’s a great name, but they renamed it Choice Health Plans, an awful name.

The demand for this program is, and will be, great.  It allows the chronically ill to stay at home where the care will be much more agreeable to the family and to the pocketbook (hopefully).  Traditionally, home care is less expensive that hospital care.

The campaign launched this week and is couple of notches better than typical healthcare stuff.  Nice warm color photos of interesting patients, heartfelt selling copy, a basic description of services and couple of calls-to-action.  Going through the copy, though, I found an idea that could make the work great. “Decisions about member care are made by clinicians, not by clerks.”  This is the idea that should drive the campaign. It has dimension.  It’s real. It’s an idea with life and story. 

To life. L’chaim. Peace.

Yahoo needs a tandem hire.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

The two most important titles at any large public company are CEO and CMO.  The former is the owner of “now” and all business metrics.  The latter owns the future and the money making machinery. When these two positions are in alignment and share a challenge, things should work wonderfully.  When at odds or working cross purposes, things become interesting, exciting and pregnant with possibility. If there is respect, this is a good situation. But when the two titles are ships passing in the night, the company is either lazy, lopsided or in danger.

Operations, HR, finance, customer, sales are all vital to a company success, but they feed at the trough of leadership and product strategy.  That comes from the CEO and the CMO.  In my mind, Yahoo’s problem in the C-level suite is tied to a weakness in the marketing area.  Yahoo doesn’t have an Is-Does. Yahoo is a company of lots of Ises and lots of Doeses. The way out of the problem at this point is to find two people who can work together to solve this thing.  A tandem hire is needed. Peace!

 

Marko-babble.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

“Words are important” is something I have been saying a lot lately.  Misuse of words. Random use of words.  Repetitive use of words — all minimize the promise.  What we do in the marketing business and the advertising business is attempt to find a creative use of words.  Words marketing thought leader Bob Gilbreath might call meaningful.

Nine tenths of marketing is words, so you’d better get them right.  One of my colleagues read me an email he received yesterday from an unknown spamming technology company. The email explained they offered the lowest price and custom solutions, they cared about what he cared about (if they did, they wouldn’t have spammed him), and listed every other marketing promise in the book.  And for good measure they repeated one or two.  We both giggled. A colossal waste of time. It was customer benefits-palooza.  “How could anyone not want our product/service” a would-be marketing director might ask?

The answer is — no one would care.  Because the email was written in the contemporary foreign language called marko-babble.  You can’t connect with buyers by using words strung together in marko-babble. It’s not a language.

Now I’m going out to look for some authentic friends. Hee hee.

Peace.

A Man and His Garden.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

James Dolan should remove himself from Cablevision and focus on Madison Square Garden, Inc.  For my friend Mac who jeers Mr. Dolan after every Knick home game as he passes into the tunnel this idea won’t find favor. But it is the right thing to do.  Mr Dolan’s heart is not in Cablevision and Newsday and telephony and financials the way his head in into sports and entertainment.  And face it, Mr. Dolan has goobed it up a little bit with the Isiah Thomas fiasco, but he still has time to play guitar, smile, and hit the Garden with love in his heart. Did I mention the NY Rangers are killing it?  And NYC has become a mecca of hoops once again.

Mr. Dolan is not the boss’s son at MSG; he is a man learning a business. Every day.  He’s sticking to it and earning stripes by surrounding himself with different kinds of people – some smart, some not so.  (I don’t know Mr. Dolan from Adam, though we made a TV spot together as 20-sometings.) Life it too short, sir.  Give Cablevision to some cable/telco/media nerds and get back to Broadway.  Where else are you going to find Kate Upton, Melo and some crazy happy kids from the Bronx screeching on a Thursday night?  Peace. 

Positivity.

By
Steve Poppe
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0

I think positivity is a word…it’s just hard to use in a sentence.  As a principle for brand planning though, it’s a good word and should be used more often. 

There are lots of different kinds of people in the world — and many greys.  But it’s a universal truth that people who share the positive are more enjoyable.  It’s hard to enjoy negative.  As we search for brand planks for our brands – the supports and proof(s) that create brand allegiance and value – it is a good idea to focus on the positive.  Some might look to create a positive that fills the void of a competitors negative, and that’s not an ineffective approach, but it may relate to a non-endemic value of your brand; a second language as it were.

Don’t sell against other’s weaknesses, sell your strengths.

Social commentators are important. Improvement is important.  That said, it’s very mother-in-law like to focus on making things better. Positivity is worthy.  Peace. 

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