PR 101

It came to me Wednesday morning why creative marketing scares many senior executives. In fact, the same fear factor holds true for any kind of marketing that is not conventional advertising or public relations.

It is the fear of the uncertainty of creativity. I think to the average CEO or CMO who came through a business school being creative is a foreign concept. Most of those people are left brain types. Their dominant personality traits are that they are logical, sequential, rational, analytical and objective. They are not used to operating in an arena where creativity is demanded. Those traits often lead to the creation of boringly beige ineffective marketing.

The idea of doing something where possible outcomes cannot not always be predicted makes them nervous. So when confronted with something such as social media that demands creativity and intuitive thinking, their brains lock. The simplest thing for them to then do is either reject or ignore the ideas. The idea of a truly out there campaign – no matter how effective it might be – scares them.

I realized this at the Milwaukee-based BizTimesMedia’s 2011 BizTech Conference-Expo. EPrize founder and Chairman Josh Linker was speaking at the conference’s opening breakfast about how to empower employees to be creative. A creative company can develop a strong competitive advantage over its competitors, he argued.

Linker should know. The entrepreneur is also a jazz musician. He explained that any jazz musician that sticks strictly to the score is soon asked to leave. “This fluid, improvisation art form is all about taking risks and trying new things,” Linker wrote in his blog. “Going out on limb can be scary, but it is where the magic happens. Extending yourself outside your comfort zone is where the best rewards will be discovered.”

He goes on to say that “Jazz is also about listening. Listening to your fellow musicians, the audience, and your own creative voice. In business, that means listening to your team, your customers, your competitors, your industry, your suppliers, the latest trends and best practice, and of course, your own creativity. Through focused listening comes adaptation. Allowing the environment and your collaborators to influence the outcome as a group. Seeking inspiration and creativity from others, and adapting in real-time to your own Creative Challenge.”

At the breakfast Linker explained jazz musicians expect creativity from those with whom they perform. The jazz band is a collective creative effort.

The problem for many executives is they run their businesses from the top down. The modern corporate structure is essentially based on a military model. Think about it – there’s the CEO or commanding general. Underneath him are the division leaders. Do you think that designation was an accident? There are senior officers and junior officers, enlisted men and non-commissioned officers. The titles are different, but the roles are the same.

Not an atmosphere that lends itself to nurturing creative impulses. What those companies like is an ad agency coming in and saying we are spending $10 million on this television commercial. We are doing 15 million direct mail pieces and placing ads in 15 national publications. The campaign will look like the campaigns of all their competitors. Cut and dried – and there’s the rub. The CEO and CMO approve it and off it goes. The problem it is formulaic. It is result of that almost always fatal directive “that’s the way we have always done it.”

Many executives live the “fire and forget” marketing campaign. They feel they should not have to be involved in selling their own company. That’s the job of the marketing department and the outside agency.

Think about beer marketing or local auto dealers – all boringly the same.

All good marketing has to be creative. It is like jazz. There are core elements, but each player bends those elements, improves on them, while at the same time staying with the group. It demands that the company executives and employees take any active role in the campaign. It is their company, they should part of the effort to market its products. They need to learn to play with the band. Nine times out of ten, it is really effective. Good marketing works the same way.

There is always element of uncertainty in that. I always tell client not everything we try is going to work. We won’t know what works until we try it. Any marketer who says she does is not telling the truth. You can do all the research possible – from focus groups to surveys – and there is still no predicting the outcome.

As an aside don’t confuse that with measuring return on investment. ROI is measurable. That measurement takes place on what does work.

So if a CEO or CMO is told that the marketing effort is going to more jazz than symphony, they get nervous. It is way outside any envelope in which they operate. Someone needs to take them to a jazz club.

My wife and I were watching television Sunday night when ABC broke in to announce Osama bin Laden’s death. I immediately grabbed the laptop to find out was happening. Twitter was burning up with information on the successful raid on the terrorist compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. I somehow stumbled into the Tweets of the guy who lived near the compound and was live tweeting the raid.

I also went to various news sites to see what they had to say. The only one that I could find that had anything was a three-paragraph story on the New York Times’ home page. It didn’t say much other than reporting that sources were saying Osama bin Laden was dead.

In the meantime, ABC news anchors were stretching, waiting for the President to make the official announcement. They kept showing the same stuff over and over again. My wife complained she was tired of looking at the same videos of the terrorist leader being constantly broadcast.

I spent 26 years as a print reporter. As I watched the bin Laden coverage, it help crystallize an idea I have been mulling – the way my generation of reporters and I learned to do journalism is obsolete.

The old rule was get it first, get it fast, and get it right. Well, traditional media ceded the first two as soon as Twitter and other social media sites grew up. There is no way that any traditional news site is going to beat someone on the scene of a news event who has a smart phone with a camera app. Remember the U.S. Airways flight that landed in the Hudson River a couple of year? Well, there were pictures of the plane floating in the icy water on the Net within about 60 seconds of it coming down.

Traditional media seems to have half-heartedly recognized this change. More and more news outlets are turning to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs for information. All four local stations in Milwaukee now constantly ask viewers to submit video of anything deemed newsworthy.

The problem is people are cutting out the middleman. Why wait to watch something on the 10 p.m. news when you can go to YouTube and find it right away? Why watch a news anchor flail while waiting for an official announcement when tweets about the event are flowing at rate of hundreds a minute?

Now, there is that third part – getting it right. My friends who are still in the news business pride themselves on that. They argue that while they might not be first anymore, the information they provide is more accurate and explains the nuances of a situation better than 140 character Tweets.

I have two related thoughts about. Let provide some background about the history of news gathering to explain my points.

The template for modern journalism – both print and broadcast – evolved shortly after World War II. That model includes the three ideals I mentioned above, plus accuracy, neutrality, and objectivity.

Neutrality and objectivity are fairly recent additions to the journalism canon. I think those two words would have made the press barons of the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century laugh. William Randolph Hearst used his papers to help start the Spanish-American war. If you want to get a better idea of what most newspapers were like prior to World War II, picture the National Enquirer marrying USA Today and spawning a newspaper.

For those papers, getting it first was always the first thing on an editor’s list. Accuracy was important, but not paramount. You have seen movies where newsboys would scream “Extra, Extra. Read All About It” at the top of their lungs. That happened a lot. As soon as something big broke, newspapers would rush to get the information out. If a regular edition was already off the presses, than an Extra was printed and rushed out. People really did shout “stop the presses” so information could be added.

Now, the first reports might not have been as accurate was we would expect today. As the events unfold, papers would keep rushing out Extras to update and clarify what was happening. Nobody excoriated a newspaper if those early stories had incorrect information. People knew more was coming.

If traditional media wants to stay relevant, that’s the model I think they need to adopt. I think they need to get it first and get it fast. As the events unfold, they can keep updating and correcting. If they make a mistake, say so and move on. These days people have short memories anyway.

There is one more thing about newspapers a century or so ago. They weren’t boring. They fairly screamed at you.

I think that colored weather maps and giggling anchors not withstanding, a lot television, radio, and newspapers are often just plain boring. Whether you think of that, most under 35-year-olds will not hang around anything that bores them.

Oh, I almost forgot something – the whole nuance thing. I don’t want that. As Sgt. Joe Friday used to say, “just the facts, ma’am.” I will rely on editorial writers and columnist to provide their take on the events. And then I will make my own decisions.

A couple of weeks ago, ABC announced it was canceling the soap operas All My Children and One Life to Live. Both had been on the air for more than 40 years.

The cancellation of both shows marks the continuing decline of a once powerful marketing machine. I think social media is doing the same thing to conventional marketing. It won’t happen overnight – and traditional marketing and public relations should still be part of any marketing plan. However, it is going to happen.

What many people don’t know anymore is that soap operas were started in the 1930s on radio by Proctor & Gamble to sell soap and other products – hence the name. According to P&G’s corporate history in 1933 “‘Ma Perkins,’ a radio serial program sponsored by P&G’s Oxydol soap powder, aired nationally. Its popularity leads P&G brands to sponsor numerous new ‘soap operas.’ Faithful listeners become loyal buyers of P&G brands at the grocery.’” The soaps helped P&G get through the Great Depression. When radio gave way to television, the soaps easily made the jump.

The soap operas came to dominate daytime television. Soaps were “once considered the stable revenue generator of the broadcast television model: the consistently popular daytime staples that helped fund primetime experimentation,” Fast Company Expert Blogger Sam Ford said. But not anymore.

There were once a dozen soaps on the air. There are now just four. Ford wrote that many in the television industry feel those four on their last legs. I think the demise is inevitable.

Like medicine shows and Burma Shave Road Signs, soaps apparently just don’t move product anymore. And that is the ultimate aim of most television shows and other marketing mediums. If it doesn’t sell something, it isn’t going to stay around. The audiences went elsewhere for any number of reasons and the advertisers saw that.

In the case of soap operas, “Many may say it’s because the fans abandoned the genre,” Ford wrote. “The story you often hear from fans is that it’s because the shows lost their way and their interest. As soaps tried to battle over the dwindling daytime audience as if ‘soap opera fans’ were all fans of the genre more than fans of the show, little thought was put into a sustained effort to bring lapsed fans back.”

Does this sound familiar? Let’s look at what’s happening to some other mass media.

“The Audit Bureau showed that average weekday circulation at 635 newspapers declined 5 percent compared with the same six months last year,” the New York Times reported last October. “The decline last year was more than twice that, 10.6 percent, as newspapers struggled through the recession and more readers abandoned print copies for the Internet.” (emphasis mine.)

Just like in soap operas, the advertisers are going away. “Newspaper publishers are still laboring to reverse a massive decline in advertising revenue – the Newspaper Association of America reported that total industry ad revenue fell 6% in Q2,” the Reuters blog MediaFile reported in September.

The same thing is happening in television advertising. “Advertisers are losing confidence in the medium,” respondents to the Association of National Advertisers/Forrester study of national advertisers said. The survey respondents said they have “a lack of confidence in TV ad effectiveness. Sixty-two percent of respondents think that TV ads have become less effective in the past two years.”

So, where are these advertisers going? You know the answer – they are heading to the Internet, of which social media is a part. I could fill this blog with the statistics – 740 million Facebook users, 100 million-plus Linkedin members, Flickr now hosts more than five million images and so on.

Mashable predicts that in 2011, $3.08 billion will be spent on social media in the United States.

“That’s a 55% increase over the $1.99 billion U.S. advertisers reportedly spent on social networking sites in 2010, and nearly 11% of what they are expected to spend on all online advertising in the U.S. in 2011, eMarketer says,” Mashable reported. “Worldwide spending on social networks is expected to rise 71.6% to $5.97 billion, approximately 8.7% of the total amount advertisers are predicted to spend online in 2011.”

Online advertising, which includes social media, is starting to snowball, the Economist reported. “Global spending on advertising will grow by 4.5% in 2011, double the rate of the previous year, according to ZenithOptima, an ad agency,” the Economist said. “This will be led by online advertising which will increase by 16%.”

Look at the Economist chart below. Online advertising is the largest, but it’s the fastest growing.

Chart courtesy of The Economist

So like medicine shows, Burma Shave Road Signs and now soap operas, conventional marketing is slowly going away. It will take some time, but just like those other things, it will happen.