Invective Is As American As Apple Pie

Invective is as American as apple pie.

Early in September, the Supreme Court looks to hear new arguments about its decision to overrule the 1990 decision of Austin vs. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, a decision which upheld corporate restrictions on corporate spending to support of oppose political candidates. The issue is how far campaign finance laws, including McCain-Feingold, can go in regulating campaign spending by corporations.

The current case involves a negative documentary about Hillary Clinton called: Hillary, the Movie. The movie was funded by a conservative group that lost a lawsuit with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) when it wanted to distribute the movie on video-on-demand. (The movie is available on the internet and on DVD.) A lower court supported by the FEC.

What’s the current tempest in this judicial teacup? Well, McCain-Feingold focused on broadcast transmissions and did not include “old media” such as books. If this movie is banned from the air, what’s to say that books can’t be banned as well – a logical extension, no?

Whether or not you agree with the points made in the movie about Hillary Clinton is not the issue. The issue remains the First Amendment right of Free Speech, a point that is as old as the US republic.

Thomas Jefferson, an eminent Federalist wrote, was “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, fathered by a Virginia mulatto father.” Of course, no one challenged Barack Obama’s lineage and birth place during his recent election campaign (as ridiculous as those charges may have been).

John Binns, a Philadelphia editor, published the “Coffin Bill” which accused Andrew Jackson, during his first presidential campaign, of having recklessly killed six soldiers who were supposedly deserting. The handbill featured six individual coffins. Nothing on the Swift Boat group that attacked John Kerry here.
And how did Andrew Jackson manage such situations. He brought Francis Blair in from Kentucky to edit the Washington Globe and support Jackson’s own policies.

If you want more fuel to add to the historical fire you can read Paul Boller Junior’s book on presidential campaigns. But the point is throughout American history, powerful well-monied groups have tried to influence politics by spending money in the media.

While it will be fascinating to see how the Supreme Court decides, the issue itself is chilling.

We continually advocate for free speech in our media and in our communications and in our advertising and in our efforts to understand and communicate with consumers and patients.

Any attempt to restrict absolute freedom of communications is an absolute restriction of a basic American freedom and infringement of an American right to access, knowledge, information and free decision-making.

Whether what was said was right or not, Jefferson did well, Jackson got elected, as did Obama and Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State. Democracy and freedom of information does win out in the end, whether it is new media or old.

Mad Men in the Caves of Lescaux

There are no fat people in Egyptian hieroglyphics making the walls of the Pyramids the first editions of Vanity Fair. The Caves of Lescaux feature 364 horses, a veritable car lot for prehistoric transportation.

So simple even a Caveman can buy Geico insurance. Or from a Gecko. Or from Kash, the googly-eyes sitting on a band of money.

Let’s hand it to the Mad Men at the Martin Agency.

And let’s remember Leo Burnett, at whose eponymous agency were developed the Jolly Green Giant, the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Marlboro Man and Tony the Tiger.

Visual icons have been compelling sales for centuries.

Like those three hung spheres of the pawn broker that originated from the Renaissance House of Lombard.

This then is the real legacy of Don Draper, not the haunted childhood of a Depression-era birth that led to the development of line extensions for London Fog given the saturated American market for rain coats.

Advertising symbols and iconography have been with us since the dawn of commerce.

A show like Mad Men taps into the modern sensibility of irony of both the commercial and home work place as well as the creation of advertising commerce. This sense of irony is centuries old. My former professor, Wayne Booth, at the University of Chicago, published A Rhetoric of Irony that illustrated this skein of observation and characterization, even those sometimes those ironies lack a stable referent.

However, for predecessors of the modern anguish and anxieties of Geico’s caveman, you don’t have to look any further than Tony the Tiger or the Jolly Green Giant.

In 1956, Burnett said that advertising did its best work by impression, and he encouraged his staff to identify those symbols, those visual archetypes, that would leave consumers with a "brand picture engraved on their consciousness."

Now, if we really want to go further back to when the Jolly Green Giants and Tigers roamed the earth, we can rest in the Caves of Lescaux, where like Plato’s Cave, horses were hawked like Fords on Friday Nights.

Le plsu c’est meme, le plus c’est change. The way in which you view the world may change, but the way of the world doesn’t. Let’s all enjoy a new season of Mad Men and pay tribute to a commercial nature that has never gone out of fashion.

A Text From Last Night.Com

I have received a lot of feedback on my post about monetizing my mother. People wrote asking if she was really on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Well, the answer is no. She is not. As I noted, it was just a dream. But the reality and the number of responses I received are not a dream.

Many people were struck by the idea of using social networking to build their business. Well, yes, of course, that is the point.

Social networking, all the online points of contact available, are ways of making mass marketing even more one-on-one communications. The best point is that these are true conversations.

Your customers can twitter you their ideas (and their complaints) and you can twitter them back your acknowledgment of their issue. You can even follow-up with them. Test new ideas and products with them and receive immediate feedback.

There used to a truism that for every complaint letter you got about your product, there were seven other unsatisfied people. With all the tools at our disposal now, you can talk to all eight.

If the humorous x-rated reality of textsfromlastnight.com is the zeitgeist of the 17-29 year old demographic, marketers still have a lot of catching up to do in terms of developing "real" dialogues. I won't tell you what Windex is really good at cleaning, but the product placement is priceless.

All this back and forth is so much more intimate and immediate than focus groups, snail mail and even web sites.

The challenge, as always, is in building the tools and the tonality. Here, tonality is critical because the conversation is so immediate. So it is the marriage of voice and insight. It was the same creative challenge as presented in the sixties (viz. Mad Men). But I don't think marketers have fully recognized the opportunity yet.

And oh, by the way, my Mom does have a cell phone. Need I say more?

Lessons of The Dormouse, Tide Detergent and Grace Slick

Unilever's second quarter earnings report shows volumes up and profits down due to a reported combination of lower margins, higher finance and tax costs and an increase in pension costs.

New CEO Paul Polman (formerly of P&G) has reversed the former strategy of raising prices of former old Unilever CEO Patrick Cescau. Good move just in advance of a recession. I wonder if Pat also goes surfing just before the tsunami comes in.

So what are we doing here? Buying share? Fighting private label?

Unilever's brands are Ben & Jerry's ice cream, Dove soap, Lipton tea and Hellman's mayonnaise (all staples in my house). These brands are quality stuff and Polman's move marks a return to getting these well-branded goods back into the global pantry.

When I was at Unilever we always sold things a little cheaper because they weren't quite as good performance-wise as P&G's products (with the exception of Wisk and Dove), but they were certainly better than Private Label. Hopefully, these moves by Polman and his team only mark a short-term move to get momentum back into the business because those power brands now form the foundation of the Unilever business are The Goods.

(I should also note that all those brands I mentioned, except for Lipton Tea, were acquisitions. What happened to the Unilever detergent business? Sold.)

The Wall Street Journal notes that, in South Africa (a critical revenue-generating country for Unilever), the local company launched a lower-priced version of Surf laundry detergent to compete against a low-priced local competitor.

Meanwhile, in the US, P&G has rolled out Tide Basic, a lower performing version of Tide that costs 20% less.

Ouch. Those actions are two moves guaranteed to make your Brand Equity look dingier.

Over the long run, the best way to compete with Private Label is to keep innovating on performance, ensuring that consumers really understand the value proposition of what they are buying. At SmartAnalyst, we are in the process of conducting a series of consumer surveys on attitudes toward Private Label and, guess what, people like brands.

Let's hope that, for P&G and Unilever, the Innovation Cupboard isn't bare. In Lynne Banks The Indian in the Cupboard, there was always a new magic trick to save the day until the Indian and the Cowboy had to go back in time.

Maybe those two great companies can still pull a white (not a dingy) rabbit out of their respective hats. Otherwise, they may be joining Grace Slick in a chorus of

When logic and proportion are sloppy dead,
and the white knight is talking backwards
and the red queen's off her head,
Remember what the dormouse said,
Feed your head, Feed your head.

That is where insight yields innovation.

Will Someone Please Monetize My Mother

Will someone please monetize my mother?

Now here's the dream: My mother is on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, iGoogle, telling everyone where she is going, who she is seeing, what is wrong with Obama and figuring how much she will really save by splitting her pills to stretch the bucks and to still get some medical benefit.

What a goldmine she is.

If Medtronic or somebody else would just insert a GPS in her neural network in addition to her insulin pump, they would receive such a wealth of information: Not just her glucose levels and A1Cs, but what she is doing, where she is going and how it is affecting her.

We could sensor her life.

The future of understanding our patients/consumers belongs to both the physical sensors of the home (what cabinets are being opened, what doors are being closed and what pills are being taken) and the communication tools available for talking with and to those same people.

If all of my mom's health suppliers, from the pharmaceutical manufacturers to the device suppliers to the media tunnels, banded together, they could all more efficiently monetize my mother's needs and give her a healthy, preventative, treated life.

Now that is evidence-based medicine.