Protecting Your Brand Against Success

Sorry, or really sorry?

There was a small but telling moment of celebrity brand management last week, and it reminded me of some of the things that I have ran into at past start-ups. It also ran into one of my personal interests – stand-up comedy – and an increasingly common aspect of modern life. That would be the public celebrity apology, delivered under duress.

Anyway… the back story is that comedian Amy Schumer, who made her reputation with edgy work that played with race, sex and class, apologized after an initial spate of defiance for the following one liner.

“I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.”

For the record, here is Schumer’s apology.

“I wrote this joke 2 years ago. I used to do a lot of short dumb jokes like this. I played a dumb white girl character on stage. I still do sometimes. Once I realized I had more eyes and ears on me and had an influence I stopped telling jokes like that on stage. I am evolving as an artist. I am taking responsibility and hope I haven’t hurt anyone. And I apologize if I did.”

I have a few issues with this.

First, the joke in question? It does not strike me as the least bit dumb, and here’s why – it works with just about any noun you’d like to swap in. Schumer could have used it for local crowd work to call out a college. She could have gone for a political edge, made it absurdist with a non-human species, called out an entire gender, or even directed it at herself. She is on a national tour later this summer, and could just put in the name of a different comedian every night. It really is that versatile, and especially on stage, quick hitters are always welcome. Had Schumer simply not been a growing star, not used a racial term, or someone with, well, a lot of eyes on her, I doubt anyone tries to pressure her to move off this kind of material.

Secondly, we are in something like a golden age of comedy right now. Between podcasts, streaming channels, a growing number of outlets and paid options, there are literally dozens of extremely strong pros working right now… and good work does not come from telling these folks what they cannot joke about. Or, even worse, that we need to consider the demographic of the speaker before judgment can be made. If a Hispanic comic had used a variant of the joke, is there a hue and cry? And if we have to determine who the speaker is before we decide whether or not it is OK to laugh, are we simply making the act of edgy comedy more or less impossible?

Finally, what does the degree of your celebrity have to do with the relative taste and appropriateness of your joke? Schumer has been a stand-up for over a decade, and has clearly served up far redder meat than this. Should her work come with a date and a context as to where she was in her career before anyone gives her a Tweet?

My suspicion is that Schumer was particularly sensitive to her past in the lead-up to promoting “Trainwreck”, and simply worked up as sincere an apology as possible in the middle of a press run, so that the movie would not get co-opted by PR. I also suspect that as a successful stand-up in the midst of a booming career, she might be looking to expand her repertoire to prove her chops in being able to work up new material. By apologizing, she gives herself the most precious gift a creative person can give themself -- a deadline.

But on some level, I’m hoping that success in this field brings liberty, rather than restrictions. The best example to set for future generations is to stay as funny as possible, as long as possible. If the reward for many years of club work and a great writing and acting performance in your first starring movie is a correctness straitjacket, that seems like a terrible payoff.

Oh, and as to how this relates to past start ups? I've worked at places that have shut down lucrative consumer categories once we got to a certain revenue level, because it was The Wrong Kind Of Business. Never sat well in my stomach, because it seemed to be so very far afield from Real Capitalism and Business, but PR is its own world. And so are start ups.

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In the way of a better payoff, I’d love to continue the conversation with you. 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 Year Of The Internet Where You Live

Drive Carefully

A brief moment of storytelling. Indulge, if you will.

In January 2005, I was working at one of the world's most advanced online marketing companies. We served up behaviorally targeted work in a proprietary window, with fantastic targeting opportunities, cross-traffic analysis, and best-in-class reporting. I had the advantage of data driven insights in hundreds of properties and consumer categories, and it was incredibly fast-paced, with creative turns coming in a near real-time environment.

I was also in strong need of a vacation, especially at the end of the busy holiday season, and took one of the bigger ones of my life, a 2-week trip to New Zealand.

New Zealand in 2005 was, in terms of the Internet, about a decade behind the red-hot Silicon Valley scene that was my day to day. Wifi was in its infancy, cell phones (none all that smart) didn't work for much of the area, and connection speed was frequently open to question. I'd log in at cybercafes or in the evenings, clear my email, and took a couple of interviews with press and direct marketing companies while seeing the sights.

I also thought long and hard about emigrating. The country was (and presumably, is) incredibly beautiful, the food was great, and every time we went someplace new (we rented a car and went from the North Island to the South), it got even better. Professionally, I also knew that on some level, I had a tactical advantage of knowing what the future of the country would look like, and could use that to benefit clients. But in the talks that I had with many of the players there, it became clear that overcoming skepticism and conservatism would just be too frustrating, and starting over entirely new wasn't going to work on a personal level. If I had been 10 years younger, I probably would have decided otherwise, and my life would have been very different.

The broader point of bringing this up is the stark differences stayed with me as an opportunity not taken. Knowing when your industry, country or consumer category is, rather than just making the Naturalistic Fallacy of assuming that is what is true for you is true for all, is a strong consideration. And the relative when is only going to get more complicated with the advent of what's referred to as mobile today, and will be better understood later as the Internet of Things.

There are tactics (personalized recommendations, dynamic content, community and social media) that are done in, say, e-commerce... that have not come to pass in other categories or countries just yet. It's also possible that they might never; given the Web's downward pressure on profit margins for brick and mortar, you can see why some actors would prefer that this "progress" would not come their way.

But the same forces that made the lower fruit fall from the tree should, eventually, take care of most of the higher pieces. What happened to the music industry predicted, with cruel certainty, what happened to journalism. Connectivity across devices will speed things like showrooming, consumer reviews, social interaction into brand marketing, and so on, and so on. E-commerce efficiencies will start to intrude on last mile business where location has mattered more than connectivity. Targeting for lead generation and CRM was already used to great effect in the 2012 and 2014 political cycles, in ways that took many by surprise, but no one who works in high touch e-commerce.

So what does the savvy marketing and advertising pro do, to take advantage of this condition? Monitor not just your category, but others that match your demo -- especially if they are more technologically advanced or web-savvy. Consider how trends in the overall Web (social, mobile, changing browsers and platforms, wearable/IoT) might be used to impact your business, and lobby internally to have a proactive, rather than reactive, road map in development. Keep your eyes and ears open, because when the world changes, it doesn't do so with polite updates.

After all, we're thirty years and counting into an ever-widening role of connectivity changing our lives. If you can take advantage of being further along in the story, you've got a better chance of making that story work for you.

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Speaking of working for you, I'd be happy to. Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the quote 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.

Marketing By The Numbers

Negotiations

He say seven, I say eight. He say eight, I say nine. I got plenty numbers left. Huh! When I start, I no stop-a for nothing. I bid 'em up. I go higher, higher, higher, all the time is go higher.

Chico Marx in “Cocoanuts”, the first Marx Brothers movie, showing Essential Marketing Wisdom

In Start Up Land, it’s very important to be able to pivot for changing market currents. Especially in Ad Tech, what makes money this year might not make money next year, and when it comes to making quarterly projections, you need to be able to adjust on the fly.

Ad Tech also tends to create new and very interesting numbers, because that is the nature of Big Data. Cross-traffic analysis, lifetime value on a channel basis, performance lifts over the control. All of it seems very exciting and Web 3.0-ish, and helps point the way to a better world of targeted buying and lead generation.

That is the good part of the business. The bad is when you hit numbers that do not matter, because, well, they help to distract people from what is going on at higher levels.

This can really come into play at a lead quality level, when you get tasks like the direction of so many followers in social media, so many new addresses for the house list, and so on, and so on. What matters, from a measurable standard, can and should get granular, especially when you have a complicated and substantial marketing program in place.

However, the core of what matters has not changed with technology, because business is not like that. Number and cost per lead, conversion percentages, and lifetime value of said leads, all of which boils down to Return On Investment, or ROI.

At far too many start ups, middle management likes to get into the weeds of measurement… and it manifests mostly as a way to cover themselves in the case of a down cycle. Sure, the company revenue might be stagnant or in retreat, but look at how many times we rang a bell, fixed a problem, made some multiple of some past quarter, or hit the turn on a dev cycle.

Except that the bell ringing might have been for trivial contracts, the problems may have been internal and never affected revenue or turnover. Or that the multiples over quarter did not matter because, well, they did not track to revenue, and the dev work was, once again, not tied to revenue.

If you find yourself in the presence of management who likes to cite these additional numbers in the case of a weak quarter, or as a way to distract or tell the story of how the quarter was mixed instead of down…

Well, you are in the presence of people who are covering a real agenda.

They might be doing it for the best of reasons. Maybe they are trying to alleviate employee turnover or panic, to keep the stock price buoyant for a merger or additional funding, to create a more positive environment so that the venture capital does not turn tail and run.

Or maybe, and somewhat more realistically, they are lying for less noble reasons.

In any event… if and when this passes the smell test, you will get more of it. Then, it will perpetuate, and maybe even spawn additional pointless metrics.

Bovine Stuff tends to create more Bovine Stuff.

It does not, however, usually create a stable, profitable, and long-running business.

Or a place you will really want, or get to, spend too much of your career at…

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If you found this interesting, please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes 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.