Instead Of Sales, They Seek Applause

From a book about which David Ogilvy is quoted as saying: "Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times":

 "Advertising is salesmanship. Its principles are the principles of salesmanship. Successes and failures in both lines are due to like causes. Thus every advertising question should be answered by the salesman's standards.

Let us emphasize that point. The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales. It is not for general effect. It is not to keep your name before the people. It is not primarily to aid your other salesmen. Treat it as a salesman. Force it to justify itself. Compare it with other salesmen. Figure its cost and result. Accept no excuses which good salesmen do not make. Then you will not go far wrong. The difference is only in degree. Advertising is multiplied salesmanship. It may appeal to thousands while the salesman talks to one. It involves a corresponding cost. Some people spend $10 per word on an average advertisement. Therefore every ad should be a super-salesman.

A salesman's mistake may cost little. An advertisers mistake may cost a thousand times that much. Be more cautious, more exacting, therefore. A mediocre salesman may affect a small part of your trade. Mediocre advertising affects all of your trade.

Many think of advertising as ad-writing. Literary qualifications have no more to do with it than oratory has with salesmanship. One must be able to express himself briefly, clearly and convincingly, just as a salesman must. But fine writing is a distinct disadvantage. So is unique literary style. They take attention from the subject. They reveal the hook. Any studies done that attempt to sell, if apparent, creates corresponding resistance.

So with countless questions. Measure them by salesmen's standards, not by amusement standards. Ads are not written to entertain. When they do, those entertainment seekers are little likely to be the people whom you want. That is one of the greatest advertising faults. Ad writers abandon their parts. They forget they are salesmen and try to be performers. Instead of sales, they seek applause.

The reason for most of the non-successes in advertising is trying to sell people what they do not want. But next to that comes lack of true salesmanship. Ads are planned and written with some utterly wrong conception. They are written to please the seller. The interest of the buyer are forgotten. One can never sell goods profitably, in person or in print, when that attitude exists."

Claude C. Hopkins, Scientific Advertising, 1923 (pdf)

Why Facebook Will Do Search And Why Google Needs Social

Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself in front of his computer, and an eagle-eyed blogger noticed that his version of Facebook sports a larger-than-usual search box. An unintended leak or not, Facebook competing in search is only a matter of time just as, in retrospect, it was inevitable that Google would integrate social elements deeper into its main product.

This is why.

It wouldn't be a revelation to say that no large-scale ad delivery system is perfect.

Reason one is that, at any given moment, only a fraction of the exposed audience is actively on the market for the benefit that the advertised product delivers.  Yes, I actually might be interested in switching to your cell phone plan, but talk to me in 15 months when my contract is about to expire. This is the efficiency problem of advertising: in order to reach the few people who are interested right now, the delivery systems by necessity overshoot and spam the crap bejesus out of thousands who promptly tune out.

Reason two is that few would admit they believe advertising. People consider the source and recognize the nature of the claims as self-serving and discount them accordingly.  This is the effectiveness problem. The advertisers' typical recourse is to bypass rational thought altogether and to beat the claim into the audience's subconscious through incessant repetition.

(Now is a good time to note that we are are talking only about ad delivery here. Effectiveness of creative is a different topic.)

That's what the main media planning principles of "reach" and "frequency" are about -- solving for efficiency and effectiveness. In the picture above, this situation is illustrated by the undesirable lower-left quadrant that says "You Are Here." You are there because most of the existing large ad delivery systems are both inefficient and ineffective.

Except for two.

Google with all its imperfections is the most efficient way to deliver ads -- only people who need something now would actively look for something and see an ad for it.

And even though it took them awhile, Facebook is figuring out that they have this whole effectiveness thing down. According to many studies (the one below, and others, including my own), friends are the most trusted source of product information. Facebook has hundreds of millions of friends, and Facebook also sells advertising, and now Facebook is putting two and two together to make advertising that comes from friends.

But Google and Facebook each solve only half of the efficiency/effectiveness problem.  The impeccably timed search ads Google delivers are still self-serving. And the perfectly trustworthy social ads on Facebook still show up at the wrong time. In other words,  Facebook and Google each have what the other doesn't, and they are going to fight for it.

On Google's end, this is what the whole Search Plus Your World business is about -- fixing the source problem.  That's why the push to get people to +1 stuff, and then connect people into social graphs via Gmail and Google+, and then use +1ers as implicit endorsers. Not, you might notice, unlike Facebook.

And Facebook needs to fix its targeting. "Interests" have an expiry date and "likes" of pop-culture icons are only tangential indicators of predisposition towards, say, vacuum cleaners. Facebook does have several more precise mechanisms for intent targeting useful for certain categories (a recent change of status to "engaged" is a reliable signal for the wedding industry), but by and large nothing as precise of an intent indicator as search.

Hence the picture of Zuck in front of an extra-large search box.

Convert Your RSS Into Email Newsletters With Ads

This is a sponsored post.

RevResponse, a company that helps bloggers make money by selling and giving away white papers and magazine subscriptions, has a new nifty tool that converts a blog's RSS feed into an email with automatically inserted promo offers.

RevResponse's aptly named RSS to Email Tool is a welcome addition to the pretty small group of  RSS converters. A field once teeming with start-ups, it is now the domain of a few email newsletter providers, notably MailChimp,  and Feedburner,  a once innovative product that has become stale after its sale to Google and the departure of Dick Costolo to the greener pastures of Twitter.

Like other similar tools out there, RSS to Email takes your most recent posts and packages them into a template of your choice. The templates come in a range of colors, and while they are not likely to win any beauty pageants the tool does come with a fairly flexible scheduling system that allows you to send digests of your brilliance either once a month, once a week, or on any combination of days of your choice.

Importantly -- and uniquely -- the tool adds rather unobtrusive ads for contextually chosen whitepapers or other publications right into your blogomail: either a set of text links or an ad with a thumbnail of the publication's cover. If you run a marketing blog, advertised publications could range from HubSpot's white papers and something called Chief Social Marketer to the awesomely esoteric niche B2B pubs such as Perishables Buyer and Archery Business.

How To Remove Ads from YouTube Videos

Simple. Except for the pre-roll.

Future: The Pirate Bay Loads Up on Physical Goods

Not science fiction anymore, this: "Once chairs and other things become content, the prospect of rampant chair piracy turns from unimaginable into very real."  The Pirate Bay is opening a new category for the new kind of piratable stuff: "We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years."

In the world where all merchandise is either basic materials or data about how to arrange them, what is the role of brands?

In Memoriam: Kodak Scenic Spots

I took my first Kodak Photo Spot (wiki) pictures at my spring break trip to the Disney World in the mid-1990s, and through all these years I've never stopped admiring their genius. It's a marketing idea whose elegance has rarely been emulated. I love how organically spreadable the signs were, how they subtly nudged you to spend another scarce frame of  film, and how they made people's lives a little bit better by giving their memories just the right composition.

Of course today the Kodak Picture Spot is something that could probably be built straight into the digital camera wired to recognize the subject and to statistically analyze thousands of photos taken from the same spot to recommend the optimal composition and camera settings.

A Kodak photo spot, (K. Mikey M on Flickr / group)

Eastmanhouse.org:

"As photography became more engrossed in American culture in the early 20th century, The Eastman Kodak Company began to look for new ways to advertise photography and its cameras. With the rise of the automobile industry and the development of American highways, the company began a campaign called “Kodak Scenic Spots.” Starting in 1920, Kodak began to place signs throughout American highways that advertised both their name and the practice of photography by marking interesting and beautiful scenery. Initially, these signs appeared on the roads outside of Kodak’s hometown of Rochester, NY in order to test the effectiveness of the idea. Within a year, they began sending members of their advertising department across the country to select the most scenic views to be awarded signs. By 1939, Kodak had placed 6,000 scenic spot signs across the country.

The exact phrases used in these signs changed over time. When the company began the campaign, the signs read: “Picture Ahead! Kodak as you go.” Eventually, the use of the work “Kodak” as a verb was stopped and the signs were changed to read: “Kodak Scenic Spot.” After the initial campaign ended in 1939, Kodak continued to place these signs sporadically in theme parks and tourist locations until the late 1980s. These signs also carried a new label, which read: “Kodak Picture Moment.”

Map of Kodak Picture Spots at Magic Kingdom (source)

Spy Plane As Propaganda Tchotchke

An Iranian company Aaye Art Group ("designer and manufacturer of artistic and cultural goods") is making replicas of the American RQ-170 drone aircraft downed in Iran last month:  "Most of the toys, which come in several colors and are made of Iranian plastic, have already been snapped up by Iranian government organizations. [...] The firm is now making 2,000 of them a day. "  (Washington Post)

If you want to buy one but are affected by the embargo, you could pick up a similar one on eBay.

Augmented Reality Glasses from Lumus

Ever dreamed of watching a video or a favorite TV show on the go?  Well, aren't you lucky:

Daily Mail: "Translucent TV: Lumus' PD-18-2 is a set of spectacles that can beam high-quality images directly into your eyes but allows the user to see through the images too." (This is Lumus.)

Memorable Metal Plaques From Impact Signs

This is a sponsored post.

The many uses for fine metal plaques are as varied as those who commission them. Whether they're intended for individual recognition, as a treasured memorial, or to identify a landmark or location, customized plaques make noteworthy markers.

Impact Signs creates metal plaques with distinction. Shapes of any style are available, and in most cases, turnaround is complete within eight business days; no extra fees apply. With exacting standards and superior services, Impact Signs is a leading source for metal plaques.

Abundant choices make it easy to create a unique and unforgettable plaque. After selecting the shape, material choices continue the design. Cast metals, such as aluminum or bronze, may be plain or textured in leatherette, pebble, smooth sand or stipple. Etched finishes offer a different, glossier look in brass, bronze, copper or stainless steel.

Several background color choices add to the appearance of metal casts, and specialty finishes lend an impressive air. Specialty finishes for cast bronze include oxidized options as well as colorful patinas, while both aluminum and bronze casts are available with a polished finish.

There are also numerous border and edge choices for cast plaques. Beveled edges, no borders, and single or double-line borders are available for both aluminum and bronze casts. Etched finishes come with either beveled edges or no border.

The finishing touches on a metal plaque are no less important than the plaque shape, materials and finishes. A variety of installation methods suit different materials and can create unique appearances, especially with the addition of rosette details to conceal or enhance the mounts. Additionally, both etched and cast plaques offer photo options that are truly exceptional.

In business since 1989, Impact Signs uses ecologically friendly practices, including recycled signage materials, solar technology and recycling of waste products. All work comes with a lifetime guarantee.

Clotaire Rapaille Patents "Before And After" Ads

Clotaire Rapaille, the author of The Culture Code who was featured in the PBS documentary The Persuaders, is the inventor behind the patent for "Advertisement for Leather Clothing" granted in 2005. The patent references Rapaille's "imprinting sessions", "archetype discoveries" and the reptilian brain to conclude that "by emphasizing the transformative nature of leather clothing, it is possible to produce a useful, concrete and tangible result, namely, an effective advertisement for leather clothing. In particular it has been determined that such an advertisement can be made yet more effective when the transformations involved is from a person who is less sexual to a person who is more sexual."

In other words, show "before" and "after", with the "after" being  the sexier of the two.