Appreciation and Two Diatribes

AN APPRECIATION AND TWO DIATRIBES

James R. Rosenfield

August 2003

Marketers are skeptical about "loyalty" programs and Customer Relationship Management. Spam is a terrible problem. Agencies hoodwink their clients. It's difficult to get a good mailing list. Consumers are barraged by too many messages.

This sounds like the U.S. or Australia or England.

But I'm talking about Poland, where I just spent almost two weeks.

Talk about globalization! Talk about velocity!

I was expecting naiveté, and instead found sophistication. I was expecting businesspeople with post-Communist hangovers, and instead found eager post-industrial capitalists.

My host Mariusz Rolka, a larger than life gentleman of multiple abilities, knows more about direct marketing than 95% of the direct marketers in the U.S.

The people I met at the Polish Direct Marketing Conference, where I spoke, were switched-on, bright-eyed, alert, and young.

Poland has numerous problems, among them a 20% unemployment rate. But that this historically tragic country has been able to shrug off its past (while retaining a keen memory of atrocities including the Holocaust itself) and come up swinging is a testimony to the human spirit.

I had the honor and pleasure of spending an hour with Lech Walesa, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former President of Poland. Seldom does one meet a person who has changed the course of history. The Solidarity Movement Walesa led in the early 1980s was instrumental in the demise of the Soviet bloc. At its peak, membership reached 10 million, more than 25% of the total population!

Walesa was an electrician in the shipyards in Gdansk, a city on the Baltic. How ironic that a worker helped bring down the "workers' paradise!"

Walesa was interested in discussing technology and globalization, the latter of great moment since Poland is about to join the European Union.

"I love the Internet and I hate the Internet," he said. And don't we all, at least to some extent? If you are not ambivalent about technology, you haven't paid much attention to history.

"Anyone who is anti-globalization and uses a mobile phone is a hypocrite" was another comment.

I asked him if being about to turn 60 has affected him (a question with a personal agenda, as I enter my late 50s). "Less impulsive, but I'm not sure about being any wiser…"

I don't know, I think that's pretty wise.

A DIATRIBE AGAINST AWARDS

Another similarity between Poland and so-called developed countries is the marketing conference gala.

The Polish Direct Marketing Association threw a marvelous party, marred only by the presentation of awards.

Whether it's above-the-line or below-the-line, awards are a corrupting force. Agencies will hornswoggle their clients into accepting ridiculous advertising because they think they'll win something.

I first became jaundiced about awards decades ago, when I learned that a mailing that had won an American DMA prize had never actually been produced.

Most of the award winners in Warsaw that night were ridiculous. Many of them were dimensional mailings, in boxes or other containers, always a sure-fire path to victory.

Awards should be given, if at all, for only one thing: Results. That makes it tough for above-the-liners, since they don't deal with results. And it creates major authenticity and competitive problems for direct marketers. To be legitimate you would have to 1) Tell the truth 2) Bring the results down to the bottom-line, i.e. response rate isn't enough, which means you have to divulge the company's profitability, information unlikely to be shared with the agency anyway.

The great American direct marketing agency of the 1990s was Bronner/Slosberg. Mike Slosberg, a smart guy, forbade the agency from entering awards competitions. As well as seeing through the integrity issues, Mike probably realized that if the creative folks were interested in winning prizes, they'd adjust their work accordingly, plus spend time working on their awards submissions rather than clients.

Having said this, let me be the first to admit that human nature craves recognition and that every endeavor, from pest control to paleontology, undoubtedly has its own awards dinners.

The agency that won the most in Warsaw calls itself Tequila, of all unlikely things. They primarily create boxes, it seems. The creative director wore leather and slouched. You could have been in New York.

A DIATRIBE AGAINST AD AGENCY NAMES

What's the deal with agency names these days?

It's not so much that I mind the dumb names (well, I guess I do), but rather the underlying obtuseness.

Advertising agencies in the 21st Century are not in the advertising business. They are in the global cash management business. The logic of all major agencies merging into a mere handful of multi-national networks only secondarily relates to servicing their ostensible masters, the multi-national mega-corporations. It has primarily to do with generating enough cash so that the various dynamics of big-time capital expansion can kick in. You can't do this with a mere $100 million or billion-dollar entity. You need big bucks flowing in and out.

Enter the cute names. Philosopher Herbert Marcuse once came up with the useful idea of "repressive tolerance." He was referring to late capitalism's ability to assimilate and neutralize dissent. Rather than being directly repressed, dissent gets its rough edges smoothed down and ends up joining the club, willy-nilly. If you're old enough, you'll remember that moment in the early 1970s when young insurance agents began growing long hair and smoking marijuana. Long hair and marijuana didn't change the world, as we foolishly thought in the '60s. The world changed them.

The cute names are an example of repressive tolerance on the part of the mega-agencies, which of course are the most dour money managers in the world. Do you think Martin Sorrell is turned on by winsomeness? He's turned on by getting every ounce of flesh out of the pony-tailed creative directors working for his cute-named subsidiaries.

What are some cute names?

Mind4, Lounge Lizard Worldwide, Outta-Sites, Dweck!, Imagewerks, Merge right, G&M Plumbing, Barber shop, Big Black Hat, You, Me, & Him, Black Sheep Marketing, SHARK, and of course Tequila.

What's interesting about these names, taken at random from the Internet, is how many are negative. Who would want to do business with a SHARK, a black sheep, a big black hat, a barber shop, a plumbing company, a lounge lizard, or dweck?

Yes, I know we are awash in a sea of irony, but I'm as hip as you are, and I just think all this stuff is worse than nonsense. It's telling a sad psychological truth about the self-esteem of folks in the ad game, enabled by the repressive tolerance of their present or future mega-agency masters.