Reality On Reality's Terms

A Concerning Sign

There's a school of thought in many corporate situations right now, and it goes something like this.

People have short attention spans and very little time to get what you are trying to do.

So you need to get to the point as soon as possible.

(In fact, faster than that. Say ASAP instead.)

So if you are answering a question or trying to solve a problem, you have to keep it simple.

Which is fine for many situations, but others? Not so much.

Let's take email, a subject that has been the full-time occupation for me at several different start ups. It's also a marketing channel that has undergone more changes in the last two years than the last two decades. Which means many of the rules have changed. (Why? Smartphones. But I digress.)

If you are running an email campaign, there are three basic metrics that your client always wants you to raise. Those would be inboxing/deliverability, open and click.

There are plenty of ways to increase all of these metrics... in the short term. Many of which are, if not full on black hat coding, at least gray, and far from a good moment for your branding. These practices can include using images instead of live text to thwart filtering on words that would activate spam triggers, salacious or misleading subject lines or sender names, highly aggressive creative practices to inspire click responses, and so on.

You can, of course, do all of this stuff: it's a free Internet, none of it is going to send you to jail, and plenty of consumer categories recognize these practices as, if not completely legitimate, at least expected. In some campaigns where the entire enterprise is a little shaky, running without these aids would more or less identify you as painfully naive. (Which categories in particular? Well, let's just say that one of my past gigs included work for a for-profit online education enterprise that you've probably heard of, especially in relation to the fact that it settled out of court on a fraud charge in the midst of the election campaign last year. Let's just say it's a piece in my portfolio that I don't always show to new prospects.)

But if your brands are, well, built for the long haul, you know not to propose anything in this vein, because it would be wrong for the client. And if you are skilled in the way of the work, you also know that secondary email performance metrics (unsubscribe rate, spam complaints by readers, multiple use, attributable sales, forwards and so on), and deviations from normal rates, can tell you a lot more than just a brute and simple number.

By the way, if you are blessed enough to work for a client or employer that gets all of that, or allows you to explain the complexity...

Who also understands that the occasional poorly performing campaign, so long as they drive lessons that you can use to improve in the future, are more valuable than just universal high rates...

And this is actually the way the world works, and just saying More Open / More Click / More Inbox isn't the best way to get any of that?

Well, treasure them. Honestly. Thank your maker or your stars or your manager or your board of directors for being smart enough to deal with reality on reality's terms.

And if not?

Find your next gig before that one goes away. Because people who do not live in reality are capable of, well, anything...

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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.

Don't Hug Me I'm Genius

Green Is Not A Creative Color

This last week, I was told about a dark and brilliant piece of subversive UK film via a social media message from a respected friend in the business of creative work. It was about the web series "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" (aka, DHMIS). You can see (and should!) the six episodes on YouTube in less than half an hour. Here's the link to do that.

I also highly recommend the Film Theory recap and possible explanation of all of the hidden messages in the work, which are just legion, really. The makers of the show have axes to grind on some social issues, and a tireless skill in doing just that. with Easter eggs all over the place.

But as this is a marketing and advertising column, let's keep it to the subject at hand, rather than a free ad for something cool.

For reasons best understood by people who have watched the clips and/or the explanation, DHMIS can only really exist on the Internet, AKA a popularly distributed medium with no central owner... or room or role for a direct and controlling commercial sponsor. Not only is the subject matter and treatment just not something that would ever lend itself to, say, cereal ads in between the clips, it's also something that works best as a one to one recommendation for viewing, since it's not something where you can say, "If you like X, you'll like Y..." because, honestly, there's nothing like this, at least not in my experience or memory.

It's also something that needed the Internet in its current incarnation, where crowdfunding through Kickstarter isn't just known, but accepted and encouraged. With no real owner except the fans, DHMIS can keep this as weird and uncompromising as they like, without fear of notes, standards and practices or focus groups tamping down the vision. And for something like this, keeping the vision of the makers with no compromises is the entire game, really.

So in the final analysis we have a runaway viral hit, with tens of millions of views. It's also a financial slam dunk, and something that can't really be exploited for further monetization because, well, it's already achieved everything it needed to, from a creative and distribution standpoint. The famed "Butterfly Effect" of '90s cause theories was always accurate; it just needed an online boost to truly make the phenomenon real.

And with that, I encourage you all to go watch this and see if there's anything I'm missing, and to also try not to think too hard about great content operating outside of traditional media channels, which is to say, the meat and potatoes of what we do on a daily basis.

Because if great stuff is increasingly outside of advertiser influence, doesn't that say something terrible about the impact that marketing and advertising is having on the creative process?

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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.

LEGO Batman, Or Product Placement To Art

Capes Are Impractical

Last Saturday morning, fulfilling a six-month promise to my youngest daughter (age 11), we went to the LEGO Batman Movie... and man alive, is this one *spectacular* piece of marketing. Wrapped in 104 minutes of in-jokes for comic book nerds, cultural references that span five decades, and a great voice acting performance by lead Will Arnett (full disclosure: I am a complete Arnett mark, going back to his work in "Arrested Development", but also "Bojack Horseman"), there's one overwhelming and fairly unrelenting message.

Buy your kids some LEGO.

Or, at the very least, some LEGO video games.

Hell, take them to LEGOland, too. There's probably some cool stuff there. (Confession: I've done this. A long time ago, but it was done. And there is cool stuff there. But let's move on from the free ad.)

Now, this isn't exactly news or surprising, given that the name of the toy is right in the title of the film. The sheer brazenness of the pitch made me completely OK with it, as a marketer, and even as a parent. My 11-year-old isn't quite immune to these pitches, but she's certainly very aware of them, and hasn't asked for more or less Lego in her life than what was there before.

However, just because the toothpaste is out of the tube, but it's good toothpaste and the counter was clean, doesn't exactly make this a wonderful development.

It's not exactly news that the movies are a very compromised art form, with a well-worn mix of casting in four key demographics to pack the house. There's also foreign sensibilities that have to come into play to make back the development and advertising costs, which tends to push things down into the non-verbal stage. With costs in the nine figure range, sequels and transfers from other art forms are rife. If you want to watch something truly ground-breaking or innovative, you are much better off with something on a streaming service or cable provider, where the story telling has more time to establish itself, and there's no need to please more than a niche audience.

The trouble is that just because LEGO does this well, directly and fairly above board, that doesn't mean that every one else in the kid movie market will behave the same, or will do so for work that is of excellent quality. There's something more than a little unseemly about how a movie for kids *has* to have jokes for the parents now, because when you make work for all audiences, you are compromising your effectivenes to some degree, and also your art.

Which seems to not be a big deal when you are dealing with something like an animated movie, and it doesn't all have to be Shakespeare, yes.

But the plain and simple is that there are only so many movies that I'm going to be able to take the kid to, and only so many moments in her childhood that you get to share. And while we had a great time today, I'm not sure how much long-term impact this movie is going to have on her.

Unlike, well, some animated movies that I've taken my kids to. Like "Spirited Away", a legitimately amazing piece of art, or "Iron Giant", or "Up", or "Inside Out"...

All of which, I think, would stay in the mind of the viewer a lot longer than "LEGO Batman."

And probably not make as much money, and certainly won't inspire sequels.

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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.