Be Very Very Quiet, I'm Selling FUD

Our Hero

In some of my past gigs, I've led creative efforts for low brands -- lead generation white labels that transferred the prospects to a third party -- in various fields. With nothing unique to pitch and no differentiating positive traits, these campaigns were an interesting creative challenge, especially when you had no real brand marketing concerns to address.

Fortunately in these roles, I had access to great data, an in-house and vendor creative team that were very skilled and quick at their jobs, and analytic insights that gave us what we needed to iterate for future turns. We made a lot of money on these projects, but that's kind of besides the point. Instead, what I want to discuss today is something that we referred to internally as FUD -- fear, uncertainty, and doubt -- and what we learned from executing these campaigns.

FUD campaigns can work when (a) the campaign is in a consumer category where the consequence of a poor choice was substantial, and (b) you had a prospect list that, well, responded to fear without just associating your brand with the negative stimulus. But keep in mind these five points. .

1) You have a very small window of time to sell the fear. Visually, your piece has to communicate the value proposition in a glimpse, preferably with a headline that doesn't waste a single character. Copy can (and should) go long after that glimpse, but if the ad looks like work, and negative work at that, it's not going to perform well. (Pro tip: when you are doing FUD work, make sure to have just text versions in your creative mix. They work more often than you might think.)

2) It burns out creative personnel. As a manager, I had to be careful not to give too many of these approaches to the same copy and design teams, or risk turnover. Creative pros don't always need the piece to go into a lead position in their portfolio, but too much of this mechanical work can make even the most productive teams lag and look elsewhere.

3) Innovative players in a space can move the ground out from under you -- especially if consumer satisfaction from presumed premium brands isn't that high to begin with. Consider how an ever-growing number of consumers are willing to accept rides and lodging from strangers, albeit ones with qualified feedback and presumed vetting from the innovators in the space. So we have two major pillars of the travel sector that are under attack at all levels of price, because the FUD of a poor ride or lacking stay just isn't all that much higher than, well, the FUD of the same thing from a brand.

4) Brands that go for FUD usually don't have anything else going for them. There's a reason why most of the FUD work we did was for our own white labels, with the small aside for comedic executions that target other players.

5) Winning campaigns will get duplicated by shrewd competitors. After all, there's no barrier to entry here.

As a creative pro, I hope you don't have too much FUD in your professional life. Or, for that matter, your personal one.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The Worst Hours

Sing It, Zoidberg

This is going to be brief and perhaps a little too combative for some, but I've had this happen often enough to risk offending someone. And, well, it should never happen. So here goes.

If you are interviewing for a job position, and decide that, for whatever reason, you are going to spend your time with a candidate to deepen your knowledge about optimal practices, while never really considering them for the role...

You are, basically, stealing time and money, and you deserve all of the misery and suffering that a karmic universe will (hopefully) bestow upon you. Especially if the person you are interviewing is between gigs, and could be spending their time and energies trying to chase down a real opportunity, rather than the cruel tease you are offering.

(And yes, this happened to me recently. An hour on the phone, ninety minutes in the office, then the "interviewer" not even acknowledging follow ups. I guess I've met worse people in my life, but I can't think of any right now.)

I get why you might be tempted to do this, honestly, I do. A good hour with a consultant might help to jump start your creative efforts, answer some vexing questions in a field where you don't have experience, or keep you from making a bad mistake.

But what it really shows is a crippling lack of integrity that your own people will eventually recognize and use as fuel to move along in their own careers. After all, using these vulnerable people in this way shows your true (single-minded, machiavellian, ruthless, abusive) nature, and that nature isn't conducive to sustainable businesses.

Turnover will rise, along with theft, and a drop in morale...

And you will own all of it, and deserve it, because you are a terrible human being.

What would be better?

Honesty with the consultant. An honorarium for the time spent. A pitch for a consultant relationship. Or just end the interview before it gets abusive, and steer out of the ethical skid.

End the unpaid consultant hour!

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The United Debacle: Winners, Not Volunteers

Seems Like An Easy Choice

By now, if you haven't heard of the PR nightmare that hit United this last week, you are probably making a concerted effort to avoid broadcast news and social media. From the initial burst of the story, to the next stage of disastrous CEO non-apology, to the truly detestable blaming the victim background work done to the passenger by his hometown media, we've all become experts in public relations, social media and airline ticketing policies. Along with having a new corporate villain to boycott, we've been soaking in this for quite some time, and the fact that it made international coverage means it's probably got a second life overseas, too.

But I want to take it back to the actual moment of the negotiation between the crew and the passengers, and show how the failure started a long time before four crew members for another plane had to displace passengers from a full cabin. Remember, the crew originally offers one price for those willing to give up their seat, then a second price, before going to the forced removal.

Which leads to the following groups of unhappy people, and it doesn't take a genius to see how, well, everyone in the cabin winds up fairly unhappy at the close of the exercise. And that's even if it goes well.

1) Those who take offer 1, and feel bad about not holding out for offer 2. These folks will, in all likelihood, never take offer 1 again.

2) Those who take offer 2, and feel good about not taking offer 1, but also wonder if there would be offer 3. They are also never taking offer 1 again.

3) Those who took neither offer, and now have heard that the allotment has gone up. Again, no one here is taking offer 1. And many of them are going to have to have a significant cost savings or other enticement to risk flying United again. (Keep in mind that from the airline's point of view, what you really want is a near-immediate acceptance of offer 1, so you can stay as close to on time as possible.)

So instead of all that, let's imagine how this looks and feels if, at that moment of negotiation, there had been some planning, not towards creating a real-time unwelcome reverse auction, but towards the fast and easy resolution of the problem. Beyond an inhuman level of personal economics that doesn't take into account, well, how humans treat risk and reward.

Imagine the flight attendants pulling out a sweepstakes style wheel, and then playing a game of Big Seat Winner. They spin a wheel with every seat location; if your seat comes up, you get a replacement ticket and ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS. In cash, in hundreds, paid out with happy counting. The next winner gets 2 grand, 4 grand, and so on. Honestly, once you start peeling off hundred dollar bills, the amounts are manageable. Instead of some nebulous check amount later.

And yes, I know, there's some tiresome income tax and security and sweepstake issues that you have to deal with, but you have everyone's address from the flight manifest, and you are a massive corporation. You can work out a lockbox in the cockpit with hundreds and a legal team sending a tax statement later.

Now, we've taken the entire chance of feeling bad about making the wrong auction choice out of the equation. We also go to a game show style interaction that has been proven to work for the better part of a century, and create winners, where we previously had volunteers to a corporation's profit margin. We also create a viral video moment of (maybe) someone celebrating their big payday, and the fun image of the fan of hundred dollar bills. At the very least, if someone is still bent out of shape about having to leave the plane, we make it more about their ingratitude, and less about the thuggery of the security force.

You could also give this real production values, the way that some airlines do with their pre-flight instructions. You could make it a part of every flight and turn your airline into the one where, every time out, whether there are displacements or not, someone's walking out with cash. And how much would United like to be known, today, as the Win Cash Airline, as opposed to You May Get Hurt Air?

The problem, as I see it, isn't that a single passenger got beaten, as hateful as that is. The bigger issue is that an entire industry has become so oblivious to anything but a spreadsheet that no one seems to be thinking about things from the perspective of the customer. Which led to dehumanization, and, well, beatings.

You really shouldn't have to have terrible things happen to adjust your mindset. But now that the crisis has happened, it's even worse if it goes to waste.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.