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Bad Advertising Ideas as Illustrated by Broken Glass in a Parking Lot

Occasionally, I write about common bad ideas or decisions that seem to be epidemic in advertising.  When I do, I give them names: 10K t-shirt problem,  or, Blue Curtains. Here's another one: Glass in a Parking Lot. 

Near our office in DC, there’s a parking lot.  A big, wide, open parking lot, like what you might find outside of a mall, or near a new sports stadium in the suburbs.  It’s the site of the old DC convention center, and conventional wisdom says it probably won’t remain a big wide-open parking lot forever, or even for a whole lot longer.  Still, apparently the city, or whoever owns the lot, understood at some point that this would remain a parking lot for a reasonable amount of time, so they dressed it up.  How they chose to do this, I find inspirational.  Inasmuch as it’s inspired this post about bad ideas.  Because the mistakes made in the parking lot are the same basic mistakes lots of people make when they’re creating ideas that have to work well in multiple media.

First thing to dress up the parking lot is this, um….thing.  It’s a hump, really, that runs the width of the lot.  Right in the center.  It looks like a train platform for some futuristic tram, or maybe the waiting area for a really big rental car return facility.  There's an architectural shelter, and the comfort of artificial turf to invoke a peaceful, green, plastic-y feeling.  I can’t figure out why this is here.  It doesn’t look bad.  It doesn’t look great.  It doesn’t do anything, at all, really, except provide artistic/architectural input in the middle of a parking lot, where, actually, not many people park.  Sometimes art doesn't need an explanation, or even a practical use.  I accept that.  Sometimes there is some art displayed on this thing.  I’m not sure anyone goes to see the art up close.  I’m convinced this is the project of an environmental installation artist who, somehow, was able to convince some committee of city bureaucrats that this hump thing would make the parking lot look like, I dunno, a more artistic parking lot.  Maybe it succeeds.  Maybe I’m cynical.  Maybe not.

However, what’s nice about the ridge of the hump is that there’s a walkway set into the artificial turf.  This is good, assuming you have a need to walk where it’s going (note: almost no one has this need).  The walkway itself is made of tiles. The tiles are made of broken glass, firmly embedded in concrete. They’re nice looking.  They’re well constructed.  They’re artistic.  But they’re also the beginning of the downfall of this parking lot.

Because, you see, someone, somewhere, liked this broken glass idea enough that they thought it should be used, not only as a walkway – but as divider strips in the actual parking area of the parking lot.  Broken glass.  As decoration.  In a parking lot.  This is a bad idea.

As I've mentioned, few cars actually park in this parking lot.  That’s because there is broken glass, literally, everywhere.  Instead of embedding the stuff in tiles, away from tires, they sort of glued it to drainage depressions (ok, they're shallow gutters) that run the length of the lot.  The glue (or whatever) didn't hold.

This broken glass thing is an idea that comes from someone who has never changed a tire in the rain. Or at all, probably.  This is an idea that is based not in the least in functionality, or, really, in reality.  This is an idea that comes from thinking that says:  “It looks great in application A, so it’s bound to look great in application B!”    Broken glass tiles in a sidewalk are artistic.  Broken glass strips in a parking lot are moronic.  Here’s a city where traffic is hell, parking is at a super-premium, and there’s a GIGANTIC parking lot that nobody uses for parking -- because it’s littered with broken glass.

Which brings me to advertising, and the way some people try to shoehorn ideas for one thing into another thing.

Your 30 second spot was made for TV.  That doesn’t make it good for the web, too.  It might be great.  Or it might be broken glass.  I'm not saying it's one or the other.  I'm saying it’s not automatic, and you have to look at it critically, and with a detailed knowledge of both media, to know.  Ditto, your poster or your print ad.  Ditto, going the other way, your landing page, or your social network strategy.

The definition of a campaign is a group of messages, across several media, that work together.  It’s not just doing the same thing everywhere.  Sometimes it’s not appropriate to do the same thing in one media as another.  Billboards rarely make great TV spots.  Posters rarely make good sites.  Sites and banners are not just different sizes of the same thing.

Sometimes things translate directly.  But more often than not, ideas need the breadth to accommodate different executions for different media.  In turn, those executions must feed a larger whole.  Just looking the same isn’t enough – in fact, it isn’t actually required, in every case, or increasingly, in most cases.  The second requirement is that they work together.  The first is that they work, period.

Advice of the day: Don’t put broken glass in a parking lot.  Even if it looks great on the sidewalk.

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Advertising Lessons from a Heating Repair Place

Our house has a prehistoric radiant heat system, powered by a newish, electronically triggered, instant-on boiler. (As a side note, which has nothing to do with the forthcoming advertising point -- please avoid this type of system at all costs, if remotely possible. Trust me.)  This morning, the radiators were stone cold, and the spark on the boiler wouldn't spark.  Now, outside of advertising/marketing ideas or executions that need repair, I can fix (to a greater or lesser extent) a lot of things -- but they tend to fall into one or more of four distinct categories:  (1) they're powered by an internal combustion engine, (2) they're made of wood, (3) they float, (4) they run the Macintosh operating system.  Our boiler fits none of these.  Hence, I needed a heating repair guy.  On a Sunday.  The coldest day of the year, so far.  I didn't give my chances much chance.

To my short-lived relief, a web search turned up a cornucopia of heating and a/c repair places in the greater Alexandria area, almost all of which had, boldly displayed on the website, the phrase: 24-hour Emergency Service.  I called eight of them, specifically choosing the ones with the best looking sites.  I translated that to mean larger operations -- with actual marketing budgets, and probably more available techs, which theoretically meant, for me, a shorter wait for warmth.  As I called, though, my relief faded.  I became chillingly aware (pun intended) of the fine print attached to that 24-hour claim.  Interestingly, attached in different ways, but all to the same end.

"Only if you already have a service contract."

"The tech might call you back today, but service contracts come first, so probably not."

"Someone will call you within 24 hours to schedule something for later."

"I'll page someone.  They'll try to call you today."

"We can have someone there this evening.  It'll be $190 to come look at it.  Repairs, then, will be hourly, at time and a half for a Sunday."

Etc.

Then I called Thomas J. Fannon and Sons.  They had, by far, the worst website of the bunch, which I kind of expected, as I knew they were an old-school family business -- I've passed by the place many times, and over the door it says, "since 1885" (back when there was only heating to fix, as Mr. Carrier didn't invent modern electrical air conditioning until 1902.)  They didn't look like a fancy website kinda place.  Tell you the truth, I didn't have much hope of even an answering service.  To my surprise, someone who knows heating, and who sounded very much like his name could be (or should be) Fannon, answered the phone.  "I'll have someone there shortly."  And sure enough, shortly, a tech named Brandon came by and fixed the boiler in about 15 minutes.  The charge: $150, because it was a Sunday.  Any other day, it'd be the regular rate of $125.  They'll just send me the bill.

This brings me to the advertising point, which isn't necessarily just an advertising point, so much as it is a business point.  It's a point Seth makes a lot, and it's not a new concept at all, as illustrated by the Fannons, who have been operating on this point for over a hundred years. There are two ways to approach business:

(A) Give customers more than what they pay for. Exceed expectations.

(B)  Deliver only as much as you have to (less if you can get away with it), and charge as much as possible.

The first one is a good long-term strategy.  It's the way I've always operated, personally.  I find that, in addition to being the right and decent thing to do, it has benefits. People will say nice things about you to their friends.  And they'll keep coming back.

The second one is more common, though.  Because it looks really good in the short term.  Disturbingly, I find more and more agencies turning to this second approach (assuming they weren't there already,) because the pie's being sliced differently now, and it's harder to get the same bite you're used to having. People panic.  They look for short term solutions.  So, while this looks like a good way to boost near term profits, it's actually a great way to kill off long-term relationships.  And when the word gets out (and it does, instantly, now) it also kills off prospects. No matter how pretty your site looks when they first land.

If you want to know what customers and potential clients think about the different approaches, perform this simple test on yourself:  Which kind of business would you rather buy from?  Which kind of agency would you rather have creating your stuff?  Which kind of agency would you rather work for? 

And the most important question: Which kind are you?

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Advertising Formulas

A long time ago, a guy who wrote for Dick Orkin taught me the formula for good, funny radio.  (And yes, I know that unless you've been around a long time, you don't know who Dick Orkin is, but just go with me on this.)  It was a pretty good formula.  I used it, and I sold a lot of my clients' stuff on radio, and won a ton of awards.  Like, really - a ton. 

I taught the formula to Scott Sheinberg, who went on to win a ton more awards, and is now a bigwig.  The formula worked for him, too.  A lot of other things worked for him, yeah, but I know from Scott that the radio formula was one of the early ones.

In my directing career, I ran up against a lot of formula storyboards.  Anyone really familiar with my stuff knows I did a lot of stuff for kids -- and a lot of toy spots.  Toy spots are really, really, really formulaic.  Painfully formulaic.  If I took the 200 or so toy spots I have digitized on a hard drive somewhere (which isn't the entire library of spots, or even toy spots I've directed,) and laid them end to end, you could watch them all and see, in analysis, exactly one formula. (This, incidentally, was a big factor in driving me completely insane, so much so that I returned to the agency world, to hopefully, fight formulas.)  Except....

Agencies love formulas.  Just absolutely love them.  Because it's easy to build a business plan on a formula.  A website takes X design hours, Y development hours, Z client service hours, some seo and maintenance = here's your formula price.  TV?  Call design creative, development production, the other stuff traffic, and you pop out a different price. Formula.

But there's a problem with all that.   The web.  Not just the web, though, but what the web has done with/to the way people interact with the things they're interested in buying.  (Here, buy can also mean, "pay attention to.")  The web is a very personal experience.  Individual.  Custom.  For every single user.  It's not that consumers have control of their own experiences.  It's that Fred has control of his experience.  And Thelma has control of hers.  And they control them differently.  And they change what they do quickly, as soon as there's a new way to do it (which is pretty much every minute of every day.)  (Ok, realistically, the world isn't made up only of early-adopters, I know.  But what's slow change now is lightning fast by formulaic standards.)  Point is, people don't respond to formulas like they used to.  That goes for online -- and offline, too.

This is not news.  But agencies and clients persist in seeking the formula.  I've written about that.  More than once.  And to be honest, while my core beliefs about the idea being the only real formula are basically unchanged, they have grown.  Because I'm not so sure one idea is enough anymore.  And insight has to be a big driver of your ideas.  And insight isn't really enough, either, because there's psychographic understanding, and psychological (as well as sociological) factors to the way people respond.  And all that is about five or more blog posts, and we're talking about formulas here, so I'll finish up.

Seems to me, (and sometimes it seems, just to me) that the only formula that makes sense isn't a formula for the work, so much as it is a formula that makes an agency nimble, responsive, and pro-active. I used to think it had to do with size, but I've seen nimble big, and inflexible small.  It's about mindset, worldview, and  acceptance -- the ability to understand that everything (or a lot of what) you understood ten minutes ago has now changed, and you need to go with the change or get left behind.

I'd think up a name for this formula, but naming it seems so...formulaic.  Besides, it'll be easy, after awhile, to recognize the people who buy into it.  They'll be the ones left standing.

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Does it work? (and: Just because you can...)

Developers love to build stuff.  Stuff that does cool things.  Creatives love to come up with creative ideas. Creative, from their creative perspective.  This is all very good.

What's also good, though, is to, once in awhile, take a step back and make sure the thing you're making makes sense for the people who are going to see, use, read, watch, or otherwise interact with it.

I bank at Bank of America.  I love Bank of America.  Because they're so wired.  I almost never deal with them in a non-digital way.  One of the things that's really cool about Bank of America is their new ATM, with OCR check deposits.  No envelope.  Just slip in the check, and it reads it.  It displays the amount on the screen, you confirm, and your receipt has a picture of the check you deposited. Not only is it way cool from a tech point of view, but it's actually more reassuring than the old envelope system.  I now have proof the machine accepted my deposit.

Except...

Except when it doesn't.  Last week, I had two checks to deposit.  One, from my old partner, who was finishing up paying me out from Tangelo Ideas.  The other, a refund from LL Bean.  Now, Dave, my old partner, is a great guy, a great ad man, and he has horrendous handwriting.  Just awful.  And he hand-wrote my check.  I worried a bit that the machine wouldn't take the thing, and I'd spend my lunch waiting in a Disney-length line to get an audience with a teller.  But, lo and behold, the machine read Dave's scribble!  Got the amount right off the bat.  How cool.

Then came the machine-printed check from LL Bean.  Which, by the way, was drawn on Bank of America.  No go.  Six tries. Let me repeat: printer check.  On Bank of America.  They built an OCR machine that can read Dave's handwriting, but can't read printing on a check they issue.  That's a problem.  Too much attention to the "what if this obscure thing ever happens?" details, and not enough attention to the obvious.

Happens in advertising all the time.

Closely related is the: "hey, look what I can make this do!" syndrome.  I'm sure it probably happened long, long ago in the early days of printing.  For me, though, the earliest example of it is the flashing super on local tv spots.  One day, way back in the Before Time, a lonely editor was fiddling with his Grass Valley switcher when he realized he could make the words LOW PRICES flash like a strobe light. Used car commercials were never the same after that.

Now that we have new technology, and now that we make much more complicated stuff, from both a tech and a creative standpoint, there's lots and lots of opportunity to make the stuff we make -- do stuff.  Why?  Because we can.  Except, "because you can," has nothing whatsoever to do with making it better.  It gets better when you make it do stuff people want it to do.  It gets better when you anticipate what they might want, and do it just as they're thinking they might want it.  It doesn't get better just because it can.   It gets much much better when you think in terms of "should."

Motion has a preset to set your logo on fire.  Do not do this. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

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Web Design - the best thing I've read in a long time.

Click here.  Read this.  Jeffrey Zeldman knows more about great web design than probably anyone alive.  In this blog post he sums up, eloquently, many of the dragons we/I fight every day.  Important piece.

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Fast Company

I've been so insanely busy over the last year I haven't had as much time as I'd like to keep up with my personal brand.  Seth's post about the first thing you should do in the New Year (Google yourself) inspired me to do a little light honing on this, my last day before going back to work.  So I Googled, and found lots of stuff I expected, and some I didn't.

Here's a piece Nick Rice put up in November that republishes something I wrote a couple of years ago.  I'm just finding it now, but to me, it seems like a nice start for the new year when you find yourself on the Fast Company Blog.

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