PR 101

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.

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.”

Clients often ask what it is going to take to successfully market their company or product. Well, to paraphrase that old saw about real estate, the primary rule for a successful marketing campaign is “branding, branding, branding.” In other words, the first thing that has to be done is create an image or identity for whatever is being sold.

That is something that often trips a client up. To someone who has been working at a company, or created a product, the brand is fixed and immutable. After all they reason, they know what they created. That’s well and good for them, but to the ultimate consumer that brand doesn’t exist.

While a product is a physical thing, its brand is not. As a speaker in class I am taking said the other night: “a brand doesn’t exist until it is fixed in a customer’s mind.”

A question I have started asking clients after hearing several speakers make this point is: “why would a customer want to buy your product?” Not why you want them to buy it, but why they should want it?

What a marketing agency has to do is create a consistent message about the product. The message helps a company create its image, its brand. It is that branding that lures a customer into making a purchase.

An important point to this is that after that the initial shot, the message and the image always have to be in sync. If there is any kind of disconnect, consumers will notice and turn to another brand. Companies often destroy their brands when they stray from their core message.

Here are the test questions every marketing person should be asking about their brand messaging: “is it true, is it believable, is it unique?” I didn’t invent that test, but I like it so I am using it. What the marketing plan should is make a product something people want to talk about.

As Milwaukee marketing executive Kevin Brandt said: “if you say something entirely new, entirely different, people will pay money to listen.”

Here’s an example that illustrates the point. I grew up near Troy, N.Y., which when I was young was the home of Arrow shirts. The shirt manufacturer, Cluett Peabody & Company, Inc. was an independent company until the 1980s.

In the early part of the 20^th century, a very strong brand was created around “The Arrow Collar Man.” According to Wikipedia “the Arrow Collar ads were a collaborative production of New York ad agency Calkins and Holden; Cluett, Peabody advertising director Charles Connolly; and commercial illustrator J. C. Leyendecker. Leyendecker’s model was his live-in companion, a Canadian named Charles Beach.

“Hundreds of printed advertisements were produced from 1907 to 1931 featuring the Arrow Collar Man. The fictional Arrow collar man became an icon and by 1920 received fan mail. President Theodore Roosevelt referred to him as a “superb portrait of the common man.” He inspired a Broadway musical Helen of Troy in 1923.” The message kept resonating long after the actual campaign stopped.

The Arrow Collar Man

Skip forward about 35 years. When I was about five or six, my parents bought me my first suit. To go with it, we drove over to Cluett, Peabody’s headquarters in Troy to buy an Arrow shirt from their outlet store. It seems to me they had children’s sizes. That first dress shirt instilled in me a strong love of button-down shirts that continues to this day, but I digress.

That was the first of many trips to Troy for dress shirts. I must have been about 16 or so when I first noticed that Arrow wasn’t the only shirt label being sold at the outlet. Along one wall were shirts with labels that included such names Marshall Fields, Filenes, Woodward & Lothrop, Abraham & Strauss. I knew those were department store names. There were many other such labels.

I asked one of the workers there what the difference was between those shirts and the ones with the Arrow labels. If memory serves, he told he there wasn’t much. Maybe a slightly bigger or smaller collar, or a different shade of blue, but essentially the shirts were the same.

Yet, I couldn’t buy one. I had to have an Arrow shirt. There was something about that label, about that Arrow image, that I wanted and had to have. That brand spoke to me. The idea that I would ever look anything like the idealized Arrow man is laughable. Yet, I would only wear those shirts because they bestowed the image of a self-confident, successful man.

That image created at the beginning of the 20^th Century had carried through to the late 1960s. It made myself and thousands of other men want that shirt because of that brand image.

That’s the definition of brand positioning. A good marketing agency will work hard to establish a brand such as the Arrow shirt. Next week I will take you behind the curtains to show how its done. Although be warned, creating a brand is more of an art than a science.