And how was your weekend? Ours was fine. We’re doing just fine. We hope you are, too.
We’ve gotten settled in to the new routine, hoping it is temporary, trying to think and plan as though it may not be. We went out for a brief time on Saturday, probably the last time in a while.
Loved the sign:
There just aren’t enough marquees with attitude anymore, and we should remedy that problem. I’m sure that’s a corporate concern for corporate types, but a good local sign adds a great deal to a place, if you ask me. And in a social media world, you’d think there’s an unending vein of material from which to draw.
Things are changing at restaurants. This is just the beginning:
People suddenly have a lot of toilet needs:
I hope you have your groceries in order. We did pretty well this weekend. The Yankee made us pie for Pi Day Saturday night. It was as tasty as it looks:
Our relationship really started with pie. OK, it actually started with a bad professor, but the second step was pie and that’s a much better story. I invited her to a barbecue place while we’d been carpooling an errand or two and said we should go try the pie. She said nah. I said, “Come on, it’s Friday. Friday’s Pie Day.” That worked. We shared a slice of lemon ice box.
A server at another barbecue joint had said the same thing to me the week before, trying to upsell the dessert. She did. I got the pie that day and a week later I used her line.
To great success, I must say. That was 15-plus years ago. For the next 11 years, until we moved where there is no pie, apparently, every Friday was pie day.
We had a beautiful day for our run on Sunday afternoon:
Happily everyone was off doing something else:
The regular Monday checkin with cats? They’re doing great, too. Poseidon is eager to see all the new things that the coming spring has to offer him:
And I caught Phoebe as she was getting ready for an office nap:
And that was the weekend. Hope yours was equally fine, and brought you some peace and cheer and rest and lovely memories. Take it slow. Be safe and well. Have a little grace and patience.
We are traveling this weekend, to Georgia. For a wedding. A wedding in the Deep South in the fall on a Saturday. Georgia and Tennessee are playing in a rivalry game. I don’t care about either team, of course, but given the locale of the wedding, it might come up among the many lovely guests.
Here’s my rule: If you think enough of me to invite me to your wedding, and it is on a fall Saturday, I will attend if I can. No football game would get in the way of that. I will also make fun of you about it throughout your wedded bliss.
So that’s what we’ll be doing tomorrow, which meant traveling today. Which meant the road, which meant dinner on the road which meant, in Nashville, Tennessee:
And today is Friday which means Friday is Pie Day:
Interesting tidbit, meanwhile, about Bloomington: You can’t get pie anywhere.
Today we met with Marshall Manson of Ogilvy and Mather. He’s a Virginia boy who cut his teeth in political campaigns and working at Edelman. He now oversees social media and communication across the Ogilvy and Mather family of 38 companies, particularly in the European Union, the Middle East and Africa. That’s covering 44 offices and 350 people.
They represent companies like Coca-Cola, British Airways and Puma. Where would you even start with any given task when you’re dealing in that sort of geographic and corporate scope?
“We try to root the thinking in the same way we think of politics. You’re going to win or lose.”
OK. How does one win?
Manson, you learn pretty quickly, is that refreshing sort of person who gets right to it.
“PR people suck at getting results. Really bad,” he said.
So we’re talking about ad value and opportunities to see. Ultimately, then, there’s some return on investment in there, but he didn’t get into that.
Point being: “We need proper metrics.”
“The public relations industry is moving much more into the direction of being data driven,” Manson said.
We’ve heard that over and over lately. Focus like a laser through the metrics. And Manson showed us a few glimpses of the data they’re using.
Here are a few Coke ads OM has placed in the Middle East during Ramadan. Because of the requirements of the season, this is viewed as a huge marketing opportunity for companies. Many organizations spend 20 percent of their marketing budget during that period because they know people will be home. Think of it as an extended Super Bowl.
We’re talking about this concept of “touched the hearts of” people as a media metric.
But Coca-Cola, Manson says, only uses one metric: the brand love score. That Ramadan spot above saw Coke’s brand love score increase by 42 percent. That, Manson said, is the largest increase in 30 years of surveying. It aired only 10 times on television. He said the bulk of the penetration was found almost exclusively online, via social media.
Here’s a British Airways campaign. Actually, this is an incredible description of an impressive ad campaign. Watch this all the way through:
Manson said this ad started with one of the OM creative people playing outside with his son. A plane went overhead, the kid looked up and pointed to the sky. A few computers, some programs and transponders later, that campaign ran in Leicester Square and other key spots. The campaign won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. More importantly, British Airways saw key route sales increase by 70 percent. They figure that kid on the screen pointing at the plane going overhead led to $16.5 million. (That’s American. I did the math for you.)
I wonder what the creative designer’s kid got for Christmas that year.
He also discussed the ads that they produced for IBM to run during the Masters. Instead of running the same spot over and over and over, they told dozens of stories:
It took 29 clients, nine crews, more than 100 interviews and 20 editors. The takeaway quote: “We meet an explosion of possibility with an explosion of content.”
Manson said one of the innovations that needs to occur in public relations is “breaking down speciality barriers within PR. A good idea is a good idea. It can come from anywhere.”
And he likes his ideas simple.
“If you can’t get it on a napkin, phrase or sentence then its probably not an idea yet.”
Personally, he said, discovery is what motivates his work. Manson feels that you’re often making up your job as you go along in public relations, particularly in the creative side. He uses words like ‘reinvention’ and ‘world changers.’ And he says you have to love that.
You have to have curiosity, as well. Ask why, he says.
“If you’re intellectually curious this is a bottomless pit of discovery,” Manson said.
Ultimately, it remains a persuasion business. The client thinks they’re right. The boss thinks she’s right. Stakeholders feel they are right. And so, he tells students, you should get used to arguing for something that you dislike. He says he likes to ask his interns to specifically describe something they are passionate about. And then he makes them argue the opposite point of view.
I love that exercise.
And finally, his tips for crisis communication:
Have friends before you need them.
Always be listening.
Don’t be an idiot.
Avoid the self-inflicted errors.
This is on a giant wall on the ground floor of the OM building:
We saw some other great stuff today. We changed trains at Baker Street. Yes, they play up Sherlock in the station a fair amount:
Somewhere in the Underground we saw this ad, which I thought was curious. I wonder what the American Dream means outside of the country? This would be an interesting thing for someone to spend way too much time on:
My first quess is that it would have something to do with the grass-is-always-greener phenomena of human nature.
And, finally, our neighbors were ready to welcome us back home this evening:
I talked about online journalism in class today. I tried to distill the history of the thing into 40 minutes. So I only covered 20 years. My favorite slides included a picture of Kenneth Starr and the text “Starr bypasses the press & distributes a major political document online first — A new relationship between politicians & the public.”
Ahh, the Starr report.
Here’s your trivia for next year. The word hypertext turns 50 next February. Fifty!
There’s another slide that says something like ““Journalism is now a smaller part of the information mix. Advertising works differently online and advertisers may not need journalism as they once did.”
There’s a lot to unpack there. I can’t get to all of that in one class.
Got home to see the in-laws, which was expected. They’ve come to visit for the weekend. This is not a bad thing. They are lovely people. He’s retired and working and she’s an RN. Their daughter took them out to a program about town this afternoon, so I was actually there when they got back in.
We set out for dinner, had barbecue and learned the local high school team found themselves with a 4th and goal from way back. Two incompletions, a 12-yard sack and three penalties for 32 yards forced a punt from their own 46-yard line with 45 seconds remaining. The home team lost by four points in the first round of the playoffs.
A kid who is a junior cried on one team and kids who are seniors on the other team are very happy. We drove by the stadium to see the crowd, but it wasn’t that big, considering. We also let the folks listen to the accents on the high school football broadcasts. We could hear at least four games — down from the regular season numbers. Some of those accents are thicker than others, probably owing to how far in the woods someone is. Sometimes, apparently, you have to be from around here to pick up what was just said. It is pretty amusing.
Things to read … because one of these things will be amusing.
Perhaps you’ve read the resignation email sent this week by a photographer at West Palm Beach CBS affiliate WPEC. Vince Norman didn’t last three months on the job, informing the bosses that “I have reached the limit of what I’m willing to put up with.” My word. What did they do to him?
Here are the inhumane conditions this poor kid was subjected to, as he described in his email.
Robert Frank is 90 years old on Sunday. The great pioneer and iconoclast has become a survivor, celebrated and revered, but still resolutely an outsider. One thing we can be sure of: he won’t be looking back.
“The kind of photography I did is gone. It’s old,” he told me without a trace of regret in 2004, when I visited him at his spartan apartment in Bleecker Street, New York, where a single bread roll and a mobile phone the size of a brick sat forlornly on the kitchen table. “There’s no point in it any more for me, and I get no satisfaction from trying to do it. There are too many pictures now. It’s overwhelming. A flood of images that passes by, and says, ‘why should we remember anything?’ There is too much to remember now, too much to take in.”
The average person now consumes twelve hours of media, checks their phone close to 110 times and sees an estimated 5,000 marketing messages each day. When most of us also regularly put in 8+ hours on the job, it’s no wonder our collective attention span is more taxed than ever.
[…]
As a marketer or advertiser, all this is also a reality check and constant reminder about how precious attention has become. If you’re thinking about what this means for your marketing efforts, or you’re producing a lot of quality content but struggling to get noticed, here are four principles you can apply to win anyone’s attention.
To be sure, the notion that the television may go the way of the Sony Walkman may sound like hyperbole. Some 34.5 million flat-screen televisions were shipped in the United States last year alone, according to figures compiled by IHS Technology, a global market research company — a substantial number, even if sales are down 13.75 percent, from 40 million, since 2010.
Yet by another, more geek-futurist view, it seems easy to start their obituary, even as manufacturers race to keep up to speed by churning out web-enabled smart TVs. The smartphone age has been cruel to devices that perform only one function.
I’m thinking I should perhaps rename things around here “Multiple.” The other day I pointed to a story that hints at the need to consider your multiple audiences on multiple platforms with a unified theme. A week before I offered you an essay with this basic premise: In many companies, smart, connected products will force the fundamental question, “What business am I in?” The answer seemed obvious to me, you’re in multiple businesses. That is the adaptation that technology is offering you — pretty much in every field.
In different ways and for different reasons, those are all big deals.
Finally, a slideshow. I link to Mobile is eating the world because I think Benedict Evans is saying something I’m saying, only more eloquently. He’s arguing that, essentially, you don’t need to define the future of technology and the future of mobile, because they are the same. Technology, he says, is now outgrowing the tech industry.
The first inkling of that I got was when we saw the mobile data outpacing the adaptable — and amazingly fast, rapid-fire — world wide web on growth and standards. To Evans, a strategic consumer technology analyst, this comes down to the availability of tech. (If I understand him correctly, that is.) Those are issues of supply and logistics and resources and global wealth — in the macro sense. This is not, then, the technological singularity. That comes later.
I wonder if that happens on a Friday.
It might. The odds aren’t terrible — one in seven, I’d say — but it isn’t happening tonight.
