by Bruce Wiseman

It was the great American philosopher, Yogi Berra who said,

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

Of course, Yogi’s wisdom doesn’t end there. On matters of life and death, he said,

“Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”

Some people called him a mystic, others a futurist. You decide,

“It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

And

“The future ain’t what it used to be.”

We love you Yogi.

Then again, some might look to the orient for more practical wisdom. It was Confucius who said,

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

The C-man speaks sooth.

Many people believe it was also Confucius who said, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

But here they would have been caught in a little advertising deception, because that saying was the brainchild of Fred Barnard, an early 20th century ad man who was promoting the use of graphics in advertising.

He wrote the line in 1921 in an issue of Printer’s Ink (though the wording was slightly different) and then, in 1927, he restated it as a Chinese Proverb with the wording, “One picture is worth ten thousand words.”

When asked why he called it a Chinese proverb when it wasn’t, fast Fred said, “So people would take it seriously.”

Ever since then, however, the saying has been attributed to Confucius.

Whether Fred or Confucius, one thousand or ten thousand words, the datum is true – today more than ever.

In 2010, Mashable reported that YouTube was getting 2 billion views per day. Last year, the figure had increased to 3 billion views per day. In January 2012, PC World stated that YouTube was now receiving 4 billion views per day.

People like pictures.

Videos yes, but even ads with a great graphics and little or no text attract the most attention and viewership.

Most people would prefer to look at a picture than read a bunch of text. I’m not saying don’t tell your story, but more graphics can do it for you the better.

Case in point.

Over the years by trial and error, I have now found an email marketing company who has great lists and whose campaigns get the best results of any I have used.

During the Christmas holidays I used them to promote my books and articles (http://johntrumanwolfe.com/products-page/ if you want to look around).

I let their graphics people design the piece- which they do at no charge – the creative was a combination of graphics and text.

The piece went out to fiction book buyers.

There was a dramatic increase in people going to the website, signing up for my newsletter and book sales went up handsomely.

After the email blast and two rebroadcasts, the list company sent me the stats.

They send the number of emails deployed, the number and percentage of those people that opened the email and the number and percentage of those that then clicked on the opened emails to go the website.

Three percent (3%) of the people receiving the email clicked through to the website. This was about 25% of the people who had opened the email.

It was a nice result for my book sales, but these are pretty standard industry numbers.

Fast forward to March.

I created an email piece for On Target Research to be sent to a list of corporate marketing directors. The piece was a graphic that a friend, John Robbins, had drawn based on surveys we had done for ourselves.

I put this picture in the email to the corporate marketing directors. The piece was almost all graphic, a small bit of text.

The stats for this piece – just a bit of text added to this – tripled those of the earlier email blast to I’d sent to book readers.

Almost 10% of those that received the email clicked through to the site, compared to 3% for the book piece, and a jaw-dropping 76% of those that actually opened the email clicked through to the site.

The email company was stunned by the result, as was your truly. But then I shouldn’t have been because the ghost of Fred Barnard lives … A picture is worth a thousand words.

If you would like some help with your email marketing give us a call or shoot us an email.

We are doing some spectacular work for our client’s email campaigns. We can acquire great lists, help design the piece and write the copy.

Prices are reasonable, results are delicious.

Best,

Bruce

PS: I can also put you in touch with the fellow who handles these email blasts for us if you like. Very effective. Just let me know.

By Bruce Wiseman

You’ll excuse me if I make a racist observation.

Or maybe you won’t.

But a review of several top weekly magazines reveals an all too visible truth: the ads in Ebony Magazine communicate better, faster and with
more impact than those of several of its more well established competitors.

This doesn’t mean the magazine is better…or worse, just that, on the whole, their advertisements deliver their messages with more communication value.

The reason for this is not to be found in a Wharton MBA thesis on the successful strategies of ethnic advertising.

It is simpler than that: their ads are more visual than those of the other weekly magazines we reviewed (Time, Forbes, Fortune). Most people think the familiar adage, “One picture is worth a thousand words,” is an old Chinese proverb. In fact, it is often attributed to that all time Oriental homeboy, Confucius. But alas, the C-man missed this one: the phrase was created by ad man Fred R. Barnard, for an advertisement he placed in the industry journal, Printer’s Ink in 1921.

And Fred’s observation was beyond prophetic, because today, almost a century later, we live in a culture so driven by image that cosmetic surgery is now a right of flesh such as piercing and tattoos.

But I digress. We are talking marketing here and the use of images to attract consumer attention has turned the world of commerce into an orgy of the visual. In case you died in the seventies and are just returning, it’s not just movies and television anymore. The arsenal in the assault on our senses – in what positioning gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout called The Battle for Your Mind – has exploded like the set of a Madonna concert. A stroll through Times Square in Manhattan or down Sunset Blvd in Hollywood with their towering, electronic advertisements seems more like a scene from Blade Runner than a walk in a modern American city. And YouTube has 100 million video views per day….

Yes. Per day. Think about it.

Five hundred channel cables, TiVo, DVDs, digital video, the Internet, email, cell phones, iPods and PDAs have been added to old line communication channels like magazines, newspapers, billboards, and that life blood of the US postal service, direct mail.

So why, as obvious as this seems, are untold millions spent every year on text only ads by corporations whose advertising budgets could retire the national debt of several third world countries? Or, if there are images, why do they do everything but communicate the message the advertiser should be seeking to convey?

It’s not just magazines. An all too telling example appeared in The Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago.

You may have stopped at Starbucks to grab a latte and missed it, but there are only three players still standing in the U.S Wireless wars: Verizon, Sprint (Nextel’s new dad) and Cingular (which, despite a bit of lingering indigestion, devoured AT&T wireless for breakfast a short while ago).

Sprint, for reasons we will leave to their strategic marketing people, has decided to go head to head with Cingular. They’ll get no gripe from me on this, as this kind of competition can drive pricing down and service up.

But if they are going to engage in marketing warfare, why in the name of Alexander Graham Bell would they print two ads in the nation’s leading business Journal with no visuals and text that reads like a petulant third-grader.

Speaking of the Cingular wireless product, Edge, one ad says, “If Cingular’s EDGE is ‘high-speed,’ then Sprint’s broadband is high-high-high-high speed.”

The other says, “Sprint mobile Broadband is 5x faster than Cingular’s EDGE.”

Oh Yeah? My dad’s stronger than your dad.

What a missed opportunity for some instant visual positioning.

We are not a design and graphics house – we do research and surveys that help create market positions – but Dude, they could have done, what?… A tie-in with the release of the new Batman movie – Sprint is the Batmobile, Cingular the hobbling penguin. Or any number of visual positionings, which would have shown the difference in speed at a glance, instead of trying to tell it in words – The Starship Enterprise and an old DC 10; a Daytona racing car and a Model T; one of those Miami Vice muscle boats and a row boat….

The great American author, editor and publisher, Sol Stein makes note of this change as it has affected the literary culture in the last half of the twentieth century in his superlative Stein on Writing. His comments here are for writers, who, incidentally, do not have the opportunity of showing a picture as an ad man does, but note the shift in importance to the visual he points out here:

“In the nineteenth century, novels and stories were filled with summations of offstage events, past or present, almost always told to the reader in summary form.

….

In the mid-century, the advent of television brought a visual medium into homes. Television and movies are full of immediate scenes, visible to the eye, ready to be experienced firsthand. This has influenced stories and novels more than we realize. Twentieth century audiences now insist on seeing what they are reading.”

Try to make him read it and you may lose him. If you attract him with a visual image then you may be able to tell your story. But the more communication in the image, the better.

The key word here, however, is communication. Just showing any old image is not the answer either. The image must tell the story. There are some skin care advertisements in the issue of Ebony mentioned above that communicate in a flash. It is not just that the women are beautiful. In the world of models, that is a given. No, there are pictures here of African American women with skin so lustrous you can feel it.

No question of what the product is or what it does, or that it is desirable.

Compare that to a full-page ad in a recent issue of Forbes. On a dark gray back ground are written the words:

WE’RE WITHIN
THE THINGS
YOU CAN’T
DO WITHOUT

At the bottom of the page there is some fine print that I assumed was mandated by the firm’s legal department. Maybe it’s a drug ad, I think, and they are listing the ubiquitous litany of side effects. But because I was writing this newsletter, I squinted mightily and read it.

Surprise. Here we get the actual message (that I would never have bothered to even try to read under ordinary circumstances) that,

“…we provide the software that enables designers to create the electronics inside your PDA and mobile phone.”

Off in the bottom right hand corner of the page, in a box that makes me think of a child playing hooky from school and hiding from the truant officer, is the company’s name: the brand, which happens to be Cadence.

Later, looking again at the ad, I see a foggedover image in the middle of the page behind the words above. I hadn’t actually seen it on first glance. It’s like an apparition.

I look at it for some time before I realize that it is a hazy picture of a cell phone— at least I think that’s what it is.

I checked the company out on the Internet. They are apparently a very successful software firm. Kudos. But guys, come on… you’re intelligent engineers. Why would you spend the money for a full page ad in a national magazine and not SHOW what you do rather than running a page of copy which seems to have as its main purpose making the reader guess at it.

Do the people who created this ad really think that the busy business executives that thumb through Forbes are going to grok the message on this page, or that they are actually going to read the fine print at the bottom?

Here’s another.

There is a full-page ad in Time by one of the drug company behemoths (aren’t they all). At the top of the page is a headline: “If you have COPD associated with chronic bronchitis, ADVAIR ® helps you breathe easier.*”

Below that is a picture of an older woman and a child. The woman appears to be singing to the little boy who is smiling. But at first glance, it is a little confusing as to exactly what they are doing.

A closer look gives you the idea that the older woman is breathing on the glass and the child is playing tic tac toe on the frosted pane. But you have to study it for a few moments to figure this out. Besides the lack of clarity in the visuals, I want everyone in the room who has ever heard of COPD or has any idea what COPD is, to raise your hand.

I thought so.

Unbelievably, nowhere on the page – nowhere – does it explain or even define what COPD is. (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease)

Compare this to another ad in the health care category in Forbes. The first thing that attracts your attention is a large, very detailed four-color picture of a heart on a visual screen. You can clearly see the many veins and arteries running through the heart. There are two doctors looking at the picture of the heart on the screen talking.

The headline?

“Who is accelerating the diagnosis of HEART DISEASE?”
“WE ARE.”

A bit of text is followed by “SIEMENS” in large bold print.

A quick glance at the heart, the doctors and the brand and…boom, you got it: Siemens makes equipment that provides clear, detailed pictures of the human heart so that diagnoses can be rapid and accurate.

So where does this leave us?

It leaves us raising our glasses in toast to the simple wisdom of Fred Barnes, because a picture is worth a thousand words.

But it also leaves us with the understanding that it must be the right picture that communicates the right message.

And that – determining the right image to communicate your message – is a unique survey service we have been providing to our clients for many years. Because at On Target Research, we conduct surveys that drive sales.

It started as a search for a little kindness.

It ended with a kid taking a pee in a pool at $116,666 per second.

Sound bizarre? Stay with me.

After writing the article about the Chevy Super Bowl commercial last week (thanks for all the nice feedback) I decided to find a commercial that I could say good things about.

So I went to the advertising world’s bible, Ad Age – www.adage.com –to review all the Super Bowl commercials.

My intent was pure.

But what do I find as the first commercial to review?

It’s a little boy of maybe 8 in a swimming pool. He emerges from under the water, looks at a stone statue of a child peeing, then at his father holding a hose spewing water. It becomes obvious that the kid has to pee.

He runs into the house and is confronted by running water at every turn. He makes for the bathroom, but his sister beats him to it and slams the door in his face. He’s jumping up and down now, really has to pee.

He runs to a bathroom upstairs, but its locked. He runs back down the stairs, outside and jumps back into the pool, where he finally let’s lose. He smiles in relief. In the background his sister jumps into the pool and he gets a devilish grin on his face.

What are they selling? Gotta be some kind of pool disinfectant, I think. Maybe it’s organic, or non toxic or…

The over-voice message at the end says the kid is totally free (to pee). “Feels good,” it says.

And then it promotes… free tax software and gives a website.

Get it? The kid is free to pee and their tax software is free.

Are these people out of their ever-loving minds!!??

Hard to believe that a company would spend $116,666 per second – $3,500,000 for a 30 second commercial on the Super Bowl, positioning tax software with a kid who pees in a pool and then grins when his sister jumps in.

But take a look.

http://adage.com/article/special-report-super-bowl/instant-replay-super-bowl-spots/232530/

Bends my marketing mind into pretzels that I can’t unwind.

Think about it. Not only did someone produce the commercial, someone actually wrote a check for $3.5 million to put it on the air.

There are a number of things they could have used for positioning.

One positioning approach could have been to position the product against the top selling brand.

Avis rent-a-car lost money 13 years in a row, until they positioned their brand against Hertz- They didn’t even have to mention the name as Hertz continually promoted that they were #1.

This simple, but brilliant, “against” positioning turned Avis profitable immediately. Avis Is Only No. 2, We Try Harder.

Applied to this product: “Tax season is tough enough without having to pay for your income tax software. Others charge $19.95 for theirs. Ours is free. Download it now – www.taxact.com.”

(You wouldn’t have to mention TurboTax, the #1 best selling tax software or H&R Block #2. They are both well known brands and both charge for their basic software where Tax Act does not).

One could position it with other digital products:

Video footage plays along with each….“Mailing a letter costs $.44. Email is free.

“The World Wide Web is the biggest shopping mall in the universe with over 100 million websites. Access is free.

“Calling friends and family on your cell phone uses minutes on your plan, but Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin are free.

“And here’s another great Freebie- our new user-friendly tax software for 2012– it’s absolutely free. www.Taxact.com.

Maybe something more aesthetic:

Commercial opens with that spectacular sunset and video footage for each example.

“A summer sunset is free…

“So is the laughter of a child at play.

“A snowfall on Christmas Eve is free, and body-surfing The Wedge at Newport Beach costs nothing but courage.

“But you don’t need to ride any 20 footers to catch this free ride – the all new, user-friendly tax software from Tax Act. www.Taxact.com.”

This later isn’t really the right classification of things with which to position this product but these are just off the top of the head musings.

Still, any of these would have been better positioning for tax software than a kid urinating in a swimming pool, which, to my mind, is a marketing acid trip.

Look at Best Buy’s 30-second Super Bowl spot. Clever, great positioning with digital geniuses and a clear message: if you are going to buy a smart phone, we’ve got ‘em all.

http://adage.com/article/special-report-super-bowl/instant-replay-super-bowl-spots/232530/#innovators

Great ad. Clean, clear message, and positions the store with some of the greatest digital innovators in the world.

To hit it out of the park, you must consult your prospects – you survey them. Because a guess might not find the mental sweet spot. And if you miss it, even by a bit, it could cost you thousands in wasted advertising dollars.

Positioning in advertising has to do with making your product well liked or desired by associating it with something already in the mind of your public.

Here’s the drill.

First, you survey your public to see what they consider valuable about your product or service. What’s already in their mind about what you sell?

Say you’re going to launch a new brand of bottled water (good luck; hugely competitive). You survey your prospects. You ask, among other things, “What’s the most important benefit you get from drinking bottled water?”

The majority answer, is, let’s say, “It quenches my thirst.”

This, then, is an agreed upon benefit in the mind of your public about bottled water.

Now, to position, we want to know what represents “quenches my thirst.” What does your public associate with having their thirst quenched?

So we do a second survey to find a position for your water that will communicate to your prospects instantly. You ask, “What image instantly flashes to mind when I say “quenches my thirst?”

Let’s say the answer is, “An oasis.”

The company names its water Oasis and designs a logo to match. The tag line under the logo, “Quenches your thirst.”

The video-commercial possibilities are endless.

This is what we have been doing for 25 years. You can see a couple of real examples of positioning that we have done right here: www.ontargetresearch.com.

Take a look. 2 minutes plus.

Cool, eh?

Call or email if we can be of service.

Best,

Bruce

Bruce Wiseman

President & CEO

On Target Research

www.ontargetresearch.com

Bruce@brucewiseman.net

1-818-397-1401

Another war has started.

Not in Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, or Somalia. This one is on U.S. soil.

The opening salvo was fired a little over a week ago.

It was… a whiny letter from the legal department of the Ford Motor Company directed at General Motors and the National Broadcasting Company.

Except the letter backfired, as if the lawyer that wrote it had pulled the pin on a PR grenade, threw it at GM and NBC, and then watched it boomerang back to the corporate offices at Ford where it exploded all over their brand.

The incident that prompted the attack? A Super Bowl commercial.

Let me explain.

Chevy produced a $7 million dollar Super Bowl commercial promoting their Silverado brand of pickup trucks. The commercial shows a Silverado pickup, coming to life after the 2012 Mayan predicted Apocalypse and driving through the rubble of the “End of the World.”

The driver of the Silverado winds his way through the devastation with Barry Manilow’s, Looks Like We Made It, playing in the background. He meets up with some other guys with pickups – all Silverados – where our protagonist asks the other guys, “Where’s Dave?”

To which one of the other survivors lowers his eyes and says, “Dave didn’t make it…. Dave drove a Ford.” (Not the exact dialogue, but watch the commercial for yourself – 60 seconds).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxFYYP8040A

Turns out, the people at Ford got a look at the commercial two days before the Super Bowl and on Saturday, 24 hours before game time, an attorney for the Ford Motor Company, who is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, wrote a letter to NBC and GM, calling on them to pull the ad.

The attorney’s letter reads in part,

“However, the commercial, from its use of ‘Looks Like We Made It’ to its reference to Dave’s tragic demise, communicates… that the Sliverado is safer and more durable than any Ford pickup. These two messages are entirely unsupported.

….

“…Chevrolet’s commercial also unfairly denigrates Ford’s pickup trucks.”

Awww.

The letter goes on citing a bunch of data about how Ford pickups are more durable, yada, yada, yada.

The letter is full of controversy – the soul food of modern media – and of course is leaked. Now, everyone from Fox to the New York Times is running with the story, while the “dispute” roars across the Internet like a California forest fire in August.

It is hard to believe that executives at Ford are actually that PR dense. I mean… really.

Did they honestly think GM was going to pull the ad? Are they deaf? Dumb? Blind?

Or maybe they thought they were being cagey, knowing the letter would hit the press, they filled the missive with a bunch of research data about how durable Ford trucks are.

Yawn.

But people don’t read that kind of minutia in a letter like this. All they know is that Ford is mad at GM for running the commercial. Food fight! Yeah Baby!

With this stroke of PR brilliance, Ford, which has the #1 selling pickup in the country, just increased the Chevy Silverado brand awareness dramatically.

Whatever number of people that saw the commercial during the Super Bowl, that number is now increasing daily due to the PR flap.

You can just see the GM execs in Detroit high-fiving up and down the halls while the Ford letter helps them rack up branding impressions by the zillions.

GM’s Global Chief Marketing Officer wiped the tears of laughter from his cheeks and responded to the letter saying that they stood by their claim that the Silverado is “the most dependable, longest lasting full size pickup on the road,” and that “…people who are really worried about the Mayan calendar coming true should buy a Silverado right away.”

When contacted for a comment, the lead spokesperson for Ford Trucks, Mike Levine, said in part;

“We’ve made our point and we’ll always defend our products.

“But this type of a request happens from time-to-time, and now we’ll just let our legal team handle it.”

Mike, newsflash, never defend.

News flash #2, your “legal team” is driving you into a PR ditch. This strategy is a no win for you. Don’t let lawyers drive your branding, they’ll muck it up.

Newsflash #3. Instead of “defending” your brand (something the top selling brand should never do), why don’t you go on the attack – produce a clever ad positioning the Ford pick up above the Silverado.

I’m going to let you in on how to do that, Mike by making some comments about the Silverado commercial. No charge, Buddy. Read on, and if you need more positioning consulting call me.

THE COMMERCIAL

My opinion, overall, the commercial was…okay. Seven point nine (7.9) on a scale of 10.

I could expound, but the main point here is this: positioning communicates better, faster and – importantly – lasts longer, if it’s visual. It can be supported by text, or dialogue, but it should, on its face, be visual.

Example: same ad. The guy is driving his Silverado through the end-of-the-world rubble and glances off to the side where someone in a Ford pick up is trying to start the engine, but it just sputters and dies.
Or maybe as he is driving along he sees a Ford pickup that just didn’t make it, and then another – the crumbled Ford brand visible on the tailgates.

You wouldn’t have to say a word; the communication would be instant. It could be reinforced when he arrives at the intersection and meets his friends and finds out (verbally) that Dave was driving a Ford.

He could just nod sadly and… fade to an image of the Silverado brand and a voiceover of their current tag line – Chevy Runs Deep.

End of commercial. No Twinkies, no frogs.

I mean what’s with the black guy and the Twinkies? Did GM buy Hostess? I presume they are trying to make the point that everything is okay, or…? Whatever the purpose, this little vignette does nothing but distort and dilute the message.

And finally, let me make a confession: I had no idea that falling frogs are referenced in the Book of Revelations and are associated with Armageddon (I had to look it up). Maybe everyone in the country knows this but me. But even if that is true, frogs falling on the pickups as the commercial fades to black is off-putting and diminishes the message.

Here’s an alternative ending. The one guy says, “I don’t think Dave made it. He was driving a Ford, you know.”

They all nod knowingly and then it cuts to this beaten down guy staggering toward the group. One of them looks up and sees him…”Hey, it’s Dave!” They all look and shout out as he approaches. “Dave, good to see you, Man!”

Dave reaches them.

“Can I get a ride with one of you guys? My truck…” he looks toward the ground and slowly shakes his head.

The protagonist says, “Sure, Dave! Jump in, Buddy.”

And they all jump in their Silverados and head off into the sunset to start a new world.

Alright. Maybe not James Cameron, but it beats the Twinkies and frogs, drives home the positioning a final time, and ends on an upbeat note.

It may be that, despite my gracious invitation, Ford’s PR guy, Mike Levine, won’t call.

But we can provide marketing and PR counsel to you any time you’d like.

Marketing, advertising, public relations and branding (promoting your brand) should all be based on a “Position”. For a quarter of a century, we have been helping our clients develop positions that cause them to stand out from the crowd.

If you would like a quick explanation of positioning: what it is and how it works, there is a 2+ minute video on our website, www.ontargetresearch.com

It takes a critical and experienced eye.

Modesty aside, I have consulted countless corporate executives and government leaders on the subject of positioning, have written on the subject for publications such as Government Technology and Hotel and Motel Management, have spoken on the use of market research, surveys and positioning around the world, and Al Ries (the “Godfather” of positioning and the co-author of several classic books on the subject www.alries.com) has referred to On Target’s marketing newsletter, Response, as “Brilliant.” Thanks, Al.)

We can help you with your marketing in so many ways:

Market and Competitor research,

Surveys,

Positioning,

Branding,

Tag lines,

Copywriting

We can also refer you to other industry professionals: web designers, SEO specialists, social media pros, and Internet marketing specialists.

We can help you with whatever it takes to drive your sales.

Best,

Bruce