PR 101

I handle the airline reservations for my in-laws. They are going on a trip soon so I printed out their itinerary for them for planning purposes. They are flying on two airlines – Delta and AirTran. The Delta itinerary was five pages long. Besides the basic information about flight times, it contained pages and pages of redundant information. In contrast, the AirTran itinerary was 1.5 pages long. It contained only the needed flight details.

Bloggers note: AirTran has been acquired by Southwest Airlines. It will soon be absorbed into the Southwest network.

As I watched the Delta and AirTran pages stream out of the printer, it made me think about marketing campaigns that do essentially the same thing the two airlines did.

A lot of campaigns are just too complicated, complex, and confusing. It’s the old saw about too many cooks. Too many executives, both at the client and the agency, with different views have had to sign off on the campaign. Before each of them gives their approval, they insist on adding in what they think is important. By trying to everything to everyone, the marketing campaign ends meaning nothing to anyone.

My question always is when I see one of these campaigns, wasn’t somebody paying attention. I always think back to what Kevin Brandt, a senior executive at a Milwaukee agency, said to a class I was taking: “the words I never want to hear from my team are ‘hey, you know what would be cool … ’”

Sometimes those campaigns end up just looking stupid. Other times, they are downright insulting.

Look at the recent Kenneth Cole Twitter campaign, which coincided with the uprising in Egypt: “Millions are in an uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring is online at (sorry, but I not dignifying that with the URL). So let me get this straight, people are risking their lives to free themselves from an oppressive, brutal dictatorship. Kenneth Cole sees this as a good platform to sell shoes.

When Groupon’s incredibly insensitive Tibet Super Bowl ad was roasted worldwide, one of the defenses was that people were now talking about the discount service. Yeah, there’s a client meeting I would like to attend. “Well, I have good news. We have raised awareness of Groupon to 87 percent of the targeted audience. Isn’t that great. Of course, they all hate us and are talking about organizing boycotts, but they know who were are.”

One of my “favorites” is the ad for the gout treatment Uloric. It shows some poor schlump hauling around a giant beaker of uric acid. He gets on a bus for goodness sakes. Would you want to sit next to somebody hauling around a container of sloshing disgusting liquid? He then takes the magic drug so the beaker shrinks down to a size small enough to fit into his fishing creel. Yeah, that’s what I take along when I go fishing – something guaranteed to scare away every aquatic animal for miles.

I am not trying to minimize gout. I know it is a serious, painful, often debilitating condition. But there was no way I could focus on that while watching this guy schlep around a couple of gallons of uric acid.

While I don’t know the insides of any of those campaigns, I have worked at a major agency where I have sat in on creative meetings. I have seen what happens to a campaign when too many people get involved. What should have been a simple message about a client’s product becomes a mishmash of bad ideas and bad execution.

That’s why there is an advertising slogan I keep in mind: “Know when to say no.”

So, I am watching television the other night. A commercial pops up for the Chrysler minivan. One of the lines the narrator says is that the van is “the mother of all minivans.” That makes me sit up and take notice.

I object to using that line for two reasons: the late Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein coined one the phrase. That’s like quoting Hitler in an ad. Two, it’s just lazy writing. Rather than come up with something original, the copywriter fell back on something easy. Of course, the client approved the script. But, that’s no excuse.

Using clichés is never acceptable in my book – except in an ad that is deliberate satire. On that matter, I beg you if you are creative not to try satire unless your name is John Stewart or Jonathan Swift. Most people are just not any good at it.

Getting back to clichés, there are so many phrases that shouldn’t be used; yet they are. Let’s run down a few:

• “To be perfectly honest – so you have perfected honesty. What imperfect honesty, lying?
• Pushing the envelope – that phrase originally came from test pilots, who were pushing the limits of their planes. It meant they could die if something went wrong. That is not how that phrase is used now. You really thinking you are going to die with the new campaign?
• For the record – a legal phrase that originally meant something to be entered into the court record. I have heard and read this in too many campaigns. Is this campaign meeting some kind of legal requirement?
• World famous – I see this on restaurants a lot. So, the next time I am in Dublin, can I ask what they think of Joe’s Hot Dogs?
• Fantastic and amazing – Usually used when describing some new product, such as a cleaning soap. I got news for all of you, chemically all soap is exactly the same. I am rarely amazed by ketchup or beer bottles.
• Prices will never be this low again – yeah, until the next sale. That one is a favorite of car dealers. While I am the subject of car dealers, why do they always shout? Why would I buy anything from anyone who shouts at me?
• We always give 110 percent – mathematically impossible.

I could go on, but I am curious what clichés you crazy. If I get enough responses, I will publish them.

A.C. Neilsen has discovered that marketers are not going after we Boomers. Apparently, those marketing types assume we’re just quietly strolling around on our walkers from the shuffleboard court to a pinochle game. They apparently think the only products in which we are interested are Fixodent and erectile dysfunction medicine.

Well, them whippersnappers couldn’t be more wrong. The New York City-based Nielsen found that boomers dominate 1,023 of the 1,083 consumer packaged goods categories. We watch 9.34 hours of video per day, which beats out any other age group. We also compromise a third of all television viewers, Web users, social media users and Twitter users. We are also significantly more likely to have broadband Internet.

“Marketers have this tendency to think the Baby Boom — getting closer to retirement — will just be calm and peaceful as they move ahead, and that’s not true. Everything we see with our behavioral data says these people are going to be active consumers for much longer. They are going to be in better health, and despite the ugliness around the retirement stuff now, they are still going to be more affluent,” Doug Anderson, SVP/research & development for Nielsen, told Marketing Daily. They are going to be an important segment for a long time.”

The Nielsen research found that while we Boomers spend 38.5 percent of all money spent on consumer priced good, only five percent of advertising dollars are spent trying to attract us.

For those of you keeping score at home, the Baby Boom began in 1946. Beginning in second of half of 1945 millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines came home from World War II. Those men had built of lot of um, energy, during the war. You can do the math on what happened when they got home.

By the time the Boom ended in 1964, there had been 75.8 million Americans born, according to the U.S. Census bureau. It stopped because of the introduction of the birth control pill.

I am a Boomer – I was born in 1954. I am often ticked off when I see marketing campaigns for products I am clearly interested directed at 25-year-olds. However, I sympathize with marketers trying to figure out how to reach us. Why?

Well, most marketing campaigns are designed to reach the widest possible audience. The strategies and tactics used in the campaign are created to reach the entire audience. You cannot do that with Baby Boomers. We are just too diverse.

Let me explain. Boomers range in age from 64- to 46-years-old. That’s a huge swing. Let’s look at three groups of Boomers.

A Boomer born in 1946 – the first wave – came of age during the 1950s and early 1960s. This was the time of sock hops, malt shops, Rebel Without A Cause, cheap energy and a pretty good lifestyle. This was the group who both became hippies and fought in Vietnam. They are now either retired or are thinking about. A lot of them are grandparents.

Someone like me who came of age in the middle-to-late ‘60s remembers the summer of 1968, with its race riots, anti-war protests, and assassinations. Vietnam had turned into a quagmire. The Cold War was raging. I remember being taught to hide under my school desk during the Cuban missile crisis. It was a dark, cynical time for the most part. We are struggling with the economy, although our children are now mostly on their own.

Someone born in 1964 came of age in the late ‘70s and early 1980s. I went to Woodstock – they went to discos. Theirs was the era Ronald Reagan’s morning in America, CD players, Jane Fonda’s workouts, and Yuppies. It was a much more optimistic time. They are probably trying to figure out how to pay for their kid’s college education.

So there you have it. How do you market to those three groups, even if they are lumped together under one name? It cannot be easy.