Gentlemen, this is vodka

The Ketel One ad campaign of a few years ago was a quiet triumph for copywriters everywhere. The first time I saw one of their billboards in Soho, it stopped me in my tracks. Just a few words in the corner of a big white billboard. No photos. No drawings. Not even any color.

Plus, the ad made the brave assumption that it was addressed to the single, solitary drinker of this particular Dutch vodka. It picked one of the seven classic emotional motivators*—exclusivity—and ran with it.

The writers behind this campaign must have had nerve—and so did the executives who approved it. (It couldn’t have been a committee.) The campaign had its critics, but I’ll bet it worked.

Maybe the old campaign had run its course, but it’s now been replaced by one that could be for almost any liquor. I don’t hate it as much as some do, but in trying to target its audience, it starts by excluding all women and apparently focuses on young white guys with creative-type office jobs (in an ad agency?) who feel some nostalgia for the Mad Men days. Not a big group.

*The seven are Flattery, Fear, Greed, Anger, Guilt, Exclusivity, and Salvation.

You can’t keep hiding, dog

The New Yorker‘s famous “Nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon appeared in 1993.

Things have changed.

Today, anyone who can type your name into Google can quickly find out that you’re a dog.

You can try to cover your tracks (sorry) so well that you have little or no online profile, but it’s a losing game. Whether you’re promoting yourself or your company, the key to success in the early 21st century is to build communities online. You need to get more visitors to your website, more friends on Facebook, more followers on Twitter.

The key to doing that successfully is to allow your authentic self to show through. In a time where customers can look you up on Yelp and comment on your product, where they can peek at your office building with Google Earth, and where they can look up your CEO, it’s impossible to hide.

Today, everyone knows you’re a dog—or can easily find out. You can’t bury your past and identity like a bone in the backyard. So the challenge is to be your own dog, be the best dog you can be, and communicate who you are as authentically as you can. 

Beware of Dog

I spotted this sign on a junkyard on the West Side. It’s so much more effective than the usual “Beware of Dog,” don’t you think?

First, it doesn’t even use the word “dog,” which has positive connotations: man’s best friend, and so on. It shows a picture of a vicious beast with fangs. It addresses you in the voice of that beast, which is startling, and it grabs the reader’s attention with a question, and the word “you.”

But most important, it sets a scene and tells a little story. It invites you to imagine yourself inside the junkyard around dusk. You hear a low growl and this thing emerges from behind a heap of auto parts. It can make it to the fence in three seconds. Can you?

Secret weapon for marketers

One advantage of starting a new job is that you get exposed to new points of view. I’ve enjoyed sharing ideas with the new marketing director, who started the same day I did. Last week he lent me The Creative Companion by David Fowler.

Printed in 2003 by Ogilvy & Mather as a small red spiral notebook (I’m not sure you could say that it was published) it was apparently intended for in-house use, as a kind of secret weapon for marketers. It contains a one-page foreword, a two-page afterword, and 30 miniature essays. Many of these are pure gold. Two of them appear below.

The Same Old Story, But New.

Advertising, like literature and cinema, operates on a mere handful of story lines, retold in hundreds of new ways. Which one will you use? Well, how about “conflict”? A problem occurs, your product solves it.

Aren’t the classic Volkswagen ads really about “the underdog”? What about “using product changes world”? “Cute town where the thing is made”? “Using product changes person’s life”? “Founder as goofball/regular guy/earnest guy”? “Factory tour”? “Quirky roots of product”? “Employees”? “Title cards”? “"Talking heads”?

Instead of just writing ads, stop and think about the story you want to tell. Consider how others have told it before you. Then tell it once more, new.

Don’t Create, Uncover.

Stop trying to create a brand. Instead, simply reveal an appropriate portion of the brand. The brand already exists. It’s already at work in the minds and hearts of people. Maybe they’re just overlooked an aspect of it.

Unless it’s a new product, don’t go off and create anything. Just illuminate a corner of the brand that has been in the dark. Then your message will feel appropriate, like it comes from the brand.

Unless you know somebody at Ogilvy, I’m not sure how you can get hold of this book. There’s a copy in Katoomba, Australia, you could get for $37.40 plus $19.95 shipping. (It may be worth it.) Otherwise you could be out of luck.

Crazy, Stupid, Title

Am I the only one who is bothered by this? (Well, no, as it turns out.)

A poster recently appeared at the Clinton-Washington stop on the C line, informing me that Steve Carell is starring in a movie called Crazy Stupid Love.

So far so good. I like Steve Carell well enough, and the movie is getting good reviews.

Then I learn that the actual title of the movie (despite the lack of commas on the poster) is Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Why? Why? Why? Why is it that a studio can spend millions of dollars making a movie and not spare a few bucks to hire a reasonably bright middle-school student to check that the title doesn’t violate basic rules of American punctuation?

It occurred to me, as the article linked above suggests, that some might say that “crazy” and “stupid” are not actually adjectives modifying “love” but that all three words are just jumbled together because of their associations. It’s possible, but it would be weird. And I doubt it.

I have not been this annoyed by a movie title since Jacknife with Robert DeNiro.