You're More Likely To... Insult Our Intelligence

Feel Teh Dumb

While I've been in marketing and advertising for over a generation, I've been pontificating about it in public as a content marketer (shh! I'm doing content marketing, kind of, right now!) for less than six months.

What I've learned most in that time? That there are some breathtakingly dumb, or at the very least, willfully ignorant, people who are also publishing about these very same subjects. This was manifest most plain in this little snippet in a treasure trove of dumb, in a column that I am not going to cite or link to because rewarding the dumb is against my ethics. The money quote from that is one that you are likely to see, or may have already. It's so dumb that we need to beat it down with sticks, and set it on fire, and then get serious. Here it is: you are more likely to survive a plane crash than click on a banner ad.

Now, I could talk about the branding benefit of display ads. I could talk about how A/B studies show rises in purchasing for prospect groups that have seen relevant display ads, or increased search engine traffic and email and direct mail conversion, and so on, and so on. I could talk about determining true response rates when you factor out bot traffic, or other forms of page view busting malfeasance. I could talk about viewability and above the fold points, or how click traffic on mobile can be a complete whiff because of user error. All of which is so obvious to everyone who runs display campaigns, and why they care more about viewability than click rate, because only utter freaking idiots care only about click rates. I could also ask about what kind of planes, what defines a crash, and where you get these sentiments, but I'm pretty sure we all know the neighborhood, seeing as we've all got one, and tend to need to cater to its needs on a routine basis.

But as this has been a clear and obvious point that adtech pros have been trying to make for the better part of a decade, I'm going to try a different tactic. Did you also know that you are more likely to help a  narwhale give birth, than buy a car from a single 30-second automobile ad? Clearly, no one should ever buy or make one of those. The odds of shifting your business computing systems from exposure to sponsorship at a golf tournament is the same as gargling with motor oil by mistake, and the odds of shifting your prescription heartburn medication from an OTC ad is the same as discovering a cure for male pattern idiocy.

Clicks on banners are nice, if you are placing the ad campaign. Sales as part of a coordinated media campaign, with lifts in your other channels coming from the branding and awareness benefit that a viewed and relevant campaign can provide, is what you are actually trying to accomplish.

But so long as we are, you know, slandering a marketing and advertising channel for things that aren't very important, as if they were the be-all and end-all of their existence...

Well, why be so limited as to stick to tried and true nonsense, when there's a whole world of brand new nonsense to explore?

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Four Marketing and Advertising devices that are actually doomed

Buh Bye

One of the stocks in trade for the folks who work at M&AD is to make fun of clickbait columnists who want to declare a marketing or advertising medium to be Dead. Look around, and you can find people sticking a fork in just about anything that employs pros, from email to display to SEO to individual consumer categories, and so on, and so on. If you are first to declare something Dead, you win!

It's hackery, but it gets clicks and views, so the best you can do is make fun of them and move on.

However, there *are* business models that are closer to this mortal coil than others. And at the risk of belaboring the obvious, here's the ones that we see as not being around in another generation or less.

1) The (printed) Yellow Pages

If you are anything like me, you are kind of amazed this is still around in the first place, since the only thing you've done with it for 15 years is move the book from your doostep to your recycling bin, since there is this thing called the Internet, all while wondering why you haven't called to opt out of delivery in the first place. My children don't even know what this is, and in a world with ubiquitous communication via the Internet, a total market coverage device that's outdated the day its printed just doesn't make any sense.

I get that there are probably direct marketing pros with coupons and spreadsheets that show this is still a winning play and purchase. That math is getting worse every week and every month, and there's no reason to think that trend will stop.

2) Outbound Telemarketing

In retrospect, it's amazing that this ever was an industry, given how disruptive and disagreeable a cold-call can be. While the phone will still be a prime tool for reaching targeted lists and CRM work, the days of trying to reach new customers with little more than a number are going to be blocked and trucked out of existence, even to the point of robo-calling getting the heave ho. No one, other than the people who made a frightening amount of money on it over the years, will mourn its demise.

3) DRTV

This is one of those formats that may be hard for elites to imagine still exists, but remnant broadcast inventory is cheap, and it really does not take much in the way of conversions to make the math work. The problem is that broadcast viewership numbers are just crashing against the Web, especially for youth demographics that make up a sweet spot for many of the products offered. At some point, production costs have to make even the remnant buy a poor purchase, especially when the remnant audience is getting smaller and smaller.

4) TMC Mailers

Unlike many digital pros, I don't believe that all direct mail will go away; there's just too much value in print for establishing brand credibility and integrity. But I do believe that elements of direct mail are doomed, and the foremost among them is the most unwanted. That would be the Total Market Coverage piece, with bundled flyers from your local grocery stores and pharmacies, that's been littering your mail box since, well, forever.

The problem with the TMC is, like the other pieces on this list, is that there is little branding benefit, and spreadsheets that are just going to point in the wrong direction until there is just no reason for it to continue. Beyond the environmental issues, the plain and simple is that some people in a neighborhood are never going to become customers of the stores that have been hitting their mailboxes every week. If you can pull out those dead addresses -- and with the Internet of Things, you will -- there is no reason for these mailers to exist.

You'll still get flyers, but only for the places that make sense. And only the print shops and mail carriers that are going to see less billing will mind.

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Ads on Jerseys

Slightly more garish than usual Mets

Complaining about things like ads on sports jerseys is a great way to seem very old and crotchety... but there are moments when, well, the crotchety just overwhelms.

To wit, the notion that ads on sports jerseys are not just an atrocity, and an abomination, but also an inevitability.

What's the big deal, fans of the English Premier League might ask? After all, Arsenal makes over $46 million a year in a deal with Emirates, ad Manchester United makes $81.6 million a year from Chevrolet for their deal, which includes jersey-front sponsorship. People in the U.S. should just relax and accept the ads. You won't even notice them after a while.

And sure, the money is great, and they may be right. Heaven knows sports fans in the U.S. have gotten used to many terrible things. But there are a handful of critical differences that make all of the difference in the world. To wit:

1) Teams in leagues outside of the U.S. do not benefit from a closed market monopoly.

If your NFL, MLB, NHL or NBA team is just plain terrible, and doesn't even try very hard to get better, or pay to retain or attract the services of good players, they stay in the league. Forever and ever, really, and the level of derpery does not really matter. In fact, there's a very real chance that a team that does not try to win will make more profit than one that does, thanks to revenue sharing.

In other countries, the worst teams are relegated -- in other words, sent down to the minors. It makes for fantastic drama for a much wider number of clubs, and serious misery and joy for fans and haters of a specific laundry. But what it means, more than anything else, is that making hay while the sun shines is very, very important. As you might imagine, advertising revenue from jersey sales, not to mention tickets, TV ratings and all of the rest, is highly dependent on staying in the first division.

2) Teams in the U.S. benefit from corporate welfare around stadiums and broadcast rights.

Thanks to some highly questionable public service decisions based around the artificial monopoly of "major league" teams, local municipal governments in the U.S. are set up in a perennial game of chicken against other cities, especially when it comes to retaining at-risk franchises in stadiums that aren't quite as new and lucrative for corporate sponsors.

Other nations? Well, there's no artificial monopoly, thanks to relegation and promotion. So there are really no true "minor league" cities -- there are just ones that are at that status in the here and now. Once again, the sources of perpetual revenue just aren't as evergreen.

3) The non-viewing public does not, for the most part, subsidize sports outside of the U.S.

Everyone who pays a cable bill is, whether they ever watch the network or not, paying ESPN about $5 a month. Smaller, but still potent, amounts also apply to other networks that carry sports, including the ones that are actually ran by the leagues. If and when cable becomes unbundled, or enough of the paying public cuts the cord, maybe the math changes, but that's a great deal of inertia to overcome. Other countries, well, not so much.

So the plain and simple is that American leagues are literally awash in money, and simply have to decide whether if there is anything they can do that is so beyond the pale that it will kill the golden goose. Will it be ads on the front of jerseys?

Probably not.

But honestly, why risk it?

Especially when you've already got more money than you will probably ever be able to spend?

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The Internet of Cranks

A year ago, the Gartner Group predicted that an affluent family home might have, within seven years, hundreds of objects with connectivity to the Web. Which has, with the greatest of speed, provoked the backlash of all Old Man Yelling At Cloud backlashes, because back lashing about technology, especially technology that seems unnecessary or exploitative on cost, is like falling off a log. Without wi-fi.

And sure, there's some of that, and it seems like a far off thing to imagine that a connected oven is going to make a lot of sense, since the best it can do right now is just start the oven from an app, as if you've left dinner in the oven before leaving for work. Security issues are also a concern, and a reason why bleeding edge is never fun.

But that dramatically misses the point. The reason why you connect dumb items to the IoT isn't for what they'll do on version 1; it's for the possibility of a version one in the first place, and the much greater potential of a version five. Starting your oven with an app is pointless, but having an oven that never burns the meal, because it's got sensors that prevents that kind of thing? Or coordinates with a future IoT robot? Well, that's handy, and wins on energy and safety, and you can't get to that point without the early stuff that seems pointless.

This also works for just about every other device that seems silly now. The IoT toothbrush? Well, on version one you get kids brushing more and better, because it's an app on their always-on phone that shows all of the places that they are missing. On version two, maybe you've got an early decay diagnostic that will make your dentist trip happen sooner and with less drama, or maybe inspire the flossing that you haven't been getting to.

An IoT mattress pad? I'm getting spam from my bed! Ridiculous, except when it's a potential life-saver if it gets to a strong enough diagnostic level, and part and parcel of a more efficient exit patient strategy for post-op. The IoT toilet? Gross! But the same diagnostic abilities (not pleasant to think about, sure, but true) and I, for one, would be happy to pay for a plumbing situation that alerts me as early as possible when there is a stoppage, so I never have to clean up that job again. The IoT Basketball? Keeps score for you, and gives you the true shooting percentage. (Personally, I'm looking forward to IoT golf balls, because losing golf balls is my personal hate moment.) And so on, and so on.

Will there be abuses? Of course; no progress is ever perfectly smooth or sensible. But there's no chance of progress without the connectivity in the first place, and the price of adding the connection is so borderline trivial, especially as more and more connection points and devices hit the market, because, well, Scale.

So lighten up, IoT Scolds. The future is coming no matter how snarky you get about it, and some of these executions are going to be great. (And others, we'll just giggle at later. Much later.)

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Fighting The Good Fight

The Only Option, Really

This weekend was filled with strong Guy Fun for me, with three events that I enjoy a lot, but are in no way guaranteed to bring satisfaction. The first was hosting my poker game, which went well, with a mild cash in the tournament, and break even in the later cash game. The second was a round of golf at one of my favorite courses, with great weather and good play (had a tap in birdie at a picturesque hole, which is a very rare event for me) making up for slow pace. Today was watching my pro football team (never mind which one; it's not germane to the conversation) and tracking my fantasy football team.

Well, two out of three isn't bad, right?

My teams, both real and fake, lost handily, and both defeats were utterly maddening, in that they didn't play well, but were in contests where just giving up and not watching would have been giving up before the loss was assured. So it was bad time after good, and a situation where I didn't just feel bad about my teams losing, but worse for wasting the time to watch in the first place. (I've also gone on record as not believing in my real team this year, even back in pre-season, and feeling that they were doomed so long as they had the current management... but, well, being right is of no comfort, really.)

Logically, it's a pretty simple solution -- just stop watching the games. I've honestly got enough to do without this amount of timesuck, and my other hobbies are far more participatory. But I've had bad times playing poker and golf as well, and if you give up every hobby that doesn't work out for you every time you do it, you'll be out of hobbies very soon. Besides, I'm a creature of habit, and just losing one isn't very likely, no matter how exasperating my team is. (And yes, they are powerfully exasperating.)

We pivot, as always, to insights about our chosen field. There's been any number of times in my career when, in the back of my mind, I pretty much knew the project was doomed (just like my football team, really)... but had to put my whole heart into it anyway, and find reasons to convince myself to become a fan of it. It's not as if you get into a level of true self-delusion, but without some measure of hope, creative execution of a marketing or advertising program will fall into the dread valley of going through the motions. And no one ever made a good ad or marketing piece that way.

But in the back of my mind, if you had asked me off the record which approaches were going to tank? I almost always knew. And tried like mad to forget while doing the job.

Not every project is going to be a winner. Same as any poker tournament, golf round, sports game, and so on, and so on. But self-sabotaging the process with negativity before hand doesn't make the struggle any easier, or give you any points when it goes off the rails. The only thing it will do for you is give more time to prepare your excuse. And who, really, needs that?

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Stop Saying Ads Must Get Better

Fighting Dirty

In one of the best moments of "Inside Amy Schumer" this past season, there's a skit where a self-defense class is taught, but instead of physical combat, it's emotional combat as part of a male-female romantic relationship. In the middle of many solid laugh lines, a male student tries to get a word in edgewise, and is told that he can never raise his voice... with the joke being that, well, he hadn't raised his voice.

But there it is, the perfect way to escalate an argument into nuclear warfare: tell someone they are doing something when they aren't. (Oh, and if you want a bonus one on this, feel free to accuse someone of always thinking they are right. Well, um, does anyone really argue for things that they think are wrong, without being, well, psychopaths? But I digress.)

We now turn to the reason you read these little musings: the point in re marketing and advertising.

The purveyors of ad blocking software, in a remarkable bit of conflation, seem to believe that blocking ads will (magically?) make advertising better. The argument is that native is great (um, sure, if you've got great content producers who don't mind working in the gray area), and the current ad situation, especially vis a vis mobile, is so bad that you are going to have to burn the village down to save it.

There's some merits to these arguments. No one can, with good conscience, argue that the mobile Web and advertising experience is what it should be. Defending the status quo is borderline impossible, especially when you consider how viewing ads has recently put people at risk from malvertising, let alone data plan costs. Like file sharing before it, the existence of the technology seems to argue for the use of the technology.

But, well, lots of technologies exist that you just can't use any way that you like. Plenty of markets are nearly as messed up as online advertising, not the least of which is healthcare. But pointing a gun at a doctor and demanding service, or bringing a bazooka into your local pharmacy to debate per pill costs, is not going to work. That would just be obvious theft, and result in either incarceration or societal chaos... and asking doctors or pharmacists to fix the healthcare market, since they now have this new stress to make it better, would be insanity. Online advertising will get better when it is properly priced, and when we stop making it dance on the heads of pins (I'm talking about clicks here) that other ad channels don't have to do.

Also, well, how exactly should ads get better? No one wants to give up more of their information to make them better targeted. No one wants to give them more time and space to tell a story. And truth be told, the vast majority of ads aren't supposed to be Great; they are supposed to make you more likely to buy something. Great ads are mostly great for the people who make them, not the companies that run them.

Finally, this. I've worked on more ads than, likely, anyone you have ever met. (Thousands of clients, 15 years in online. It's been fun.) The number of ads that were not the best we could do, given the size of the contract and the need to make a deadline? Damned near none, really. It's what professionals do; you work to the best of your ability, even if the client has challenges (maybe especially if they have challenges). We didn't shortchange anyone. We made the best ads we could. So does, well, just about every ad pro in the business.

So stop saying ads have got to get better, because they are already just about as good as they can be. What needs to improve is the technology and bandwidth around the online experience, the pricing for viewable impressions for branding value, and the understanding from consumers that without some form of value exchange, most professional and quality amateur content will have to go behind pay firewalls, and the Web as we knew it, where traffic meritocracies could spring up based around a roughly fair system of monetization, will end.

With the same quality of ads as any other medium has.

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The Five Impressions Rule

Classic marketing -- and by classic, I mean the stuff we learned when everything wasn't through our own very personal screens -- held that if a marketer was going to have any chance of making the case to sell to a new prospect, they needed to reach that prospect in a wide variety of ways to establish branding and legitimacy. While there were always a few people who had an immediate need, or might buy just on impulse or price, most consumers went with a trusted brand, and that level of trust was achieved through a long tail of broadcast, radio, print and more.

Now, those factors are still important, but they seem increasingly subservient to just in time marketing impressions through digital modes. Word of mouth still matters, but it might come from social media or a blog, rather than a moment in the market.

Where the rubber hits the road, however, is building a brand. Even for online-first brands, broadcast is where the story is told, because that 30 to 60 second spot is so ingrained in the story format that's expected... even if it's not needed. And perhaps those just get ported into online video, with ad-blocking being the only issue to overcome.

Well, that and the fact that public acceptance of ads, especially in the mobile platform, is so low that the blocking software is getting pushed as a performance, bandwidth and security saving measure. Rather than just, well, simple theft.

My belief is that despite the commonality of everything still coming through that single screen, different channels make your look and feel of that screen very different. If something's in your social media feed, that's a different place in your consideration set and mental acuity than an email, native ad, interstitial, audio ad in a podcast, and so on. Daypart might also make for a very different brand impression, on a very different platform, with more or less time on their hands.

It's an open question as to whether the market will support this supposition, because it's all new, and the screen is personal enough to make some think of stalking. But it won't be an open question for long. (Yes, that's a bit of a tell.)

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Putting Numbers To Nonsense

Ever run into a situation where your client is just insisting on what you know is a poor practice?

It happens a lot, especially in digital, where metrics can be learned pretty quickly. At some of my gigs, I've been front line with clients who just had to do things in a certain way, even when it meant they were leaving money on the table.

(A small aside: of all the places to leave money, isn't the table one of your better choices? At least there, you'd think you'd be able to get to it pretty quickly. Moving on.)

You'd be surprised, honestly, by just how hard it is to change some processes, especially in more conservative verticals. Bringing in more aggressive e-commerce practices and design work can seem like you are downgrading the brand or threatening the margins.

In moments like this, your only real course of action as a marketing and advertising change agent is to try to put numbers to the practice. Ideally, this is done in a test cell, but if you aren't getting enough traction to change the poor practice in the first place, maybe a test is also asking too much.

Here's the process that I usually take.

1) Defuse the situation. Often, changes can be seen as a threat to outside creatives, or a situation where you can come off as insensitive or threatening. So what you need to do is point out that your motives in making this recommendation are for the long-term success of your client. It seems like something that's so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but believe me -- it needs to be said.

2) Clothe it in a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) moment. If a competitor is doing better because of the practice, if you feel like you've established a little bit of rapport, then show the better practice in question. While you should never quote a performance boost in a way that seems promissory for obvious liability issues, quoting a general "up to" number can be effective. 

3) Don't get doctrinaire. You don't need to make this a my way or the highway kind of approach. If your new way of doing things inspires a test because it speaks to a new thought process, that may be a bigger win that what you were recommending. Remember, the point isn't to just improve performance; it's also to learn something significant.

4) Make it seem like their idea. If you can tie the thought process from your clients's supplied materials, it's a spoonful of sugar. Again, it's all about where you get to, not who will get credit for the direction.

5) Identify the blocking agent, and if necessary, set yourself a reminder. Every meaningful change tends to come all of a sudden in most testing situations, so if you do find yourself blocked, keep in mind the name of the person performing the block, and a 3 to 6 month window where you ask again. Persistence pays, especially if you work in a restrictive environment.

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Persistence can also pay off when you like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit our RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Intrigue In The Inbox

Must... Look...

In the Gartner Group's most recent Hype Cycle Research Report, published about a month ago, there were literally thousands of technologies discussed. On the left side of the axis is all of the stuff that gets venture capital dollars, where the hype starts to build around advancements that will either change the world or just waste a lot of money. Bioacoustic computing, smart dust, human augmentation, 3D bioprinting systems for organ transplant, and so on, and so on. There's no difficulty in getting excited about what these might do, if only they, well, work.

As we move deeper, and the tech becomes more and more real, the slate of development becomes known as the Peak of Inflated Expectations. Here, we've got stuff like self-driving cars, the Internet of Things, wearables, and so on. Stuff that's real, but where all of the kinks haven't been worked out, or how it's supposed to make money.

The next stage is the Trough of Disillusionment, where the hype burns off and we're just left with the realization that while the product might be real, it's also no longer owning a limitless field of potential as to how it's going to change the world. Gartner puts cryptocurrency (aka, bitcoins) here, along with augmented reality and hybrid cloud computing. This is the state where start ups shake out to just the survivors, where the venture capital gets antsy and starts to look for the next new thing, and folks in the space are just getting irritated that what might be an actual business is just getting nicked for a lack of sex appeal. Survive that, and you get to the Slope of Enlightenment, ending in the Plateau of Productivity.

Email, as you might guess, doesn't appear anywhere in this graph. People have been making money in email for so long, you are much more likely to hear how the channel is Dead, rather than anything with any kind of monetization and appeal.

The truly funny thing? There may have never been a better time for the channel.

Why? Well, the obvious point is mobile, which means that the daypart to get emails in front of the audience you need to reach just became, well, damned near 24/7. The average person checks their smartphone over 100 times a day, and so long as the device is latching up to email -- more on that later -- it's just an always-on channel. Send at a time when no one else is sending, and you might get full attention and unmatched consideration.

The next part is, well, the comparative misery of so many other channels. TV has a massive demographic problem, plus ad skipping for additional monetization misery, for anything but DVR-proof live events. Online ads are getting blocked with a vengeance, and have viewability and maladvertising problems to boot. Print and outdoor and radio -- it's not as if any channel, other than email, has actually had life get better recently.

There are, however, problems, and they are major ones. Young people don't read email. They live in social networks, IM and chat... and while they might eventually graduate into email, they also, well, might not. Reading isn't exactly on the rise compared to image-based work, and the channel is under constant stress from overuse, filtering, deliverability, and all of the other challenges that pros have worked on for, well, decades.

But there's still that device in your hands, and the plain and simple fact that when you read an email, there is nothing else on your screen, or in your mind. HTML5 will let you incorporate video and conversions without a landing page visit, and reaching an affluent audience is entirely possible. There are major tactical advantages here that no other channel can match.

Email doesn't sizzle. It just works. And might for decades, or a lot less.

More intriguing than you realized, no?

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Feel free to like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

How Fast It Goes

Timeless?

This last weekend for Labor Day, I took the family to our favorite amusement park for our annual holiday tradition.  As I rode down the modified ski lift that the kids insist on taking as a low-energy palate cleanser between thrill rides, and saw the whole of the valley and park before me, the kids lazily kicked their heels up with their cousin on the bench ahead of us. It was all very serene, and more than a little wistful. My wife took out her cell phone and took a minute-long movie for her Facebook feed. I just looked, becoming very aware of the cinematic nature before us, as more and more of the park revealed itself from the trees.

While the view seemed timeless, it really was anything but. There were new rides that we had never seen, an ever-growing mix of people, changing lights and so on, and so on. As usually happens around this time of year, the trees are just starting to turn, and the mix of smells from the forest and the food is never quite the same twice. Change is the only constant.

Changing even faster than the park were the passengers in the car ahead of us. My kids are 10 and 15, and while they both still love the place, things change, and at some point, maybe vacations together might seem more like an obligation than a treat. Also, well, my eldest keeps getting attention in ways that haven't happened before. There may come a day when she decides she has more interesting things to do than hang out in the same old park with the same old parents.

Life Is Changing. It's changing really, really fast.

From a marketing and advertising standpoint, I'm well over halfway done on the legal limits of parenting, with changes to my demographic class coming up quick. And the need to keep in touch with new technology, thoughts and and ideas has never been greater, really.

But the funny thing about those changes? The kids are going through them with speed, too. We were in a hotel room for a couple of days, and the TV screen never went on. That wouldn't have happened just two years ago, when we took our last vacation. It's also not because my kids are that virtuous and active, but because they'd much rather spend time with their personal screens (phones and tablets), where the content is more under their control, and they have more privacy and interaction.

Media buyers will note that their business is just fine, really. They sound a lot like record labels a couple of decades ago, or travel agents, and so on. That's just how fast it goes, and nothing is slowing down. Or probably ever will.

Even in the most timeless of places.

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Feel free to like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Of Clipboards and (Future) Convicts

The killer as a young genius

My first job in marketing was at an independent music trade show. The show in question was started by my housemate, who saw an opportunity based on an underserved region, and his friendships with a great number of hustling indie musicians. That number included me, but I also held a couple of degrees, and the aggression taught to those who study journalism.

The show needed a lot of everything, and the job was different just about every day, because most of the work was done by volunteers. Organization was haphazard at best. Either I was listening to showcase submission tapes, arranging sessions, selling advertising and sponsorship slots, writing the directory, and so on, and so on. There was always something to do, always a fire to put out, and, well, I've got a motor. I wound up doing so much for the show that it led to my second job in marketing, because the lead sponsor of the show was impressed, and hired me away from it.

Anyway, my all-around fireman duties included talent relations, because music industry celebrities would much rather talk to each other than the public, and need a gentle amount of rousting to get them to conform to a schedule and get to their various rooms. At an event such as this, where the fans aren't just fans but incredibly desperate creatives who are trying to secure fame and fortune by impressing industry, getting them to and from various rooms is pretty much a nightmare. Which is why this advice is absolutely golden: carry a clipboard.

Why a clipboard? Because when you have one, along with the studied air of blue collar indifference and/or annoyance, you seem like someone who has Some Official Duty, and that's all you really need for a lot of real-world situations. I've walked past an inordinate number of security guards with nothing but a clipboard and a desire to not spend time explaining why there was nothing but blank paper on it. It doesn't work nearly as well as it used to, but it still works a lot. People think you are there to check on the electrical or plumbing. Anyway, back to the main story.

Twenty odd years ago, Phil Spector was universally regarded as a producing genius, as close to famous as any rock producer had ever been. We also knew he wasn't a very nice person, not at all, and that he liked to carry a gun to places where he probably should not. He was also one of the biggest names to show up for our show, and knew it. So he came late, with the limo dropping him right at the front entrance of the hotel, with the driver storming off because he had clearly offended someone in the process of getting there.

No security. No entourage. Just a famous and very scary recluse, in front of hundreds of people with demo tapes in their pockets and dreams in their hearts, and no one is particularly interested in having him get to his panel. We also know he's armed and Not Right. (Spector turned out to be all kinds of not right later, and was convicted of murder. He'll be behind bars for the rest of his life. Having met the man, color me not surprised.)

So I whipped out the clipboard, pretended I was at least a foot taller than I am, and decisively cut through the crowd, and shepherded Spector. We got through the crowd, with an awkward pit stop at the restroom (I got lucky and guessed the best right direction to get to one), and the panel proceeded without incident. Spector's limo came back some hours later, and he left without rancor. The trade show's attendees got the access they paid for, and not more.

A bluff, strongly presented, took down the hand and saved the day. Nothing went wrong, when so much could have.

Which, when you are doing event marketing, is about all you can hope for, really.

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To pay for my clipboards, please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

The Worst Thing That Can Happen

One of the best creative pieces that I've ever done was never used, and until you've had this experience, I don't think you've actually worked in marketing and advertising. I'll share it here, because someone really should get something out of this idea, before it completely passes from the culture.

Four years ago, I was part of an on-site team that was presenting at a major client, with lots of seasonal business around the Halloween season. (Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can guess who they were, too.) The team is trying to secure the business for a client that's pretty much uncontrollable, because my company really isn't up to providing the constant care and service required to satisfy their needs, but they are a whale, and we won't know any of the fail stuff until later. There's no saying no to them, unless you had a half dozen other major clients ready to sign IOs in your back pocket to cover the revenue shortfall.

Anyway, they are unhappy and making all kinds of threatening noises. As the tone of the meeting goes from bad to worse, my sales VP makes eye contact with me, and puts his Hail Mary pass in motion. On no spec, with no branding documents, on overnight turn, my team and I have made an ad for them. I've presented to less interested and colder rooms, but it's hard to remember when, really.

The ad is dynamic, so it pulls in recommendations based on the individual profile, with product photography and selling copy pulled from the client's site. It's on their brand, and it conforms to IAB standards. It could run on thousands of sites overnight, as part of our RTB solution. It toggles through a feed of items that match the buying pattern of the individual user. But one thing more.

Most of the banners in this world are to template, and use the list and offer, along with the strong recommendations, to pop on the user's screen. But this set goes one further. It uses the space to show the items on the backdrop of a Polaroid picture.

The room goes silent, then with wild praise for what the team has done. It's encapsulated the magic point of Halloween for parents; the photo moment, the knowledge that you'll be saving this memory and showing them to adult children and grandchildren so much later. It's as close as a formulaic and heavily automated ad solution can get to a Don Draper moment.

The mood in the room changes dramatically. The client apologizes for their overwhelming needs, and tries to scale back the ask to more in line with what we can deliver, with more advance notice for turn, especially over nights and weekends. We wound up keeping them for the better part of a year, and a strong amount of billing, before they moved on to other, better, vendors. My VP thanks me, profusely, later, for saving the meeting. It was one of my best days at that gig.

Oh, and they never used the ad.

Why? To this day, I have no idea. It wouldn't have cost them anything. It's not as if the ads came with bylines, or that it looked so different from everything else they wound up running. In the end analysis, I just think they didn't want to use any idea that wasn't theirs. And hey, they've got the market cap and the runaway success, so I guess that's all well and good...

But there it is, the great work I just had to kill, just about the worst thing that can happen to you as a creative, and something that happens, on average, just about once every two years.

Oh, and it just happened again, a couple of months ago.

Can't tell you about the client on that one yet, though. I haven't gotten their check yet.

Which is, actually, an even worse thing that can happen...

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If you like or share this column, it's a fine end to the pitch meeting. Feel free to also connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or visit our agency. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.