Old-Time Charm at Christmas? Leave Out Radios, Telephones and Billboards.

Some of you may have noticed that Signalwrite Marketing sent out old-time, small-town Christmas scenes this year. There were several different cards with paintings by a Wisconsin artist, Mary Singleton. Her artworks are “filled with details and vivid colors of everyday life in simpler times and friendly old fashioned places.” Yet at the same time, her website admits:

Mary Singleton's paintings bring us into an idealistic vision of the world...how it could be…

These visions are popular today. Many of us remember growing up in just such idyllic towns and villages. (Me? No – I’m a city boy. Barbara Nytes-Baron was born and raised in New Prague, MN; she enjoyed Christmases much like this one…but with newer-model cars.)

In the painting there are no billboards and no telephone wires: the “good old days.” Still, Singleton envisioned this scene somewhere around 1925 or 1926, judging by the cars and trucks on her Main Street.

By 1925 there were millions of radio receivers in American homes, according to one source. The modern world had already arrived – just not washed into small-town America yet.

By 1925, radio programs had already become inextricably connected to major American companies; the first radio ad appearing in 1922 costs $100 for ten minutes of air time. By ‘23, brands like Eveready Batteries were sponsoring radio variety shows.

America, in its first giant step down the road to the future, became a consumer society even though you can’t see it here in Singleton’s “After Choir Practice.” Mid-1920s, Americans spent $430 million on radio products which was real money in 1925.

Telephones? The beginning of social interconnection? No sign of them in this little town. But in 1925, the telephone was already 50 years old. There were 12 million phones in American homes and business – one-and-a-half million of these were the new-fangled dial models. (The “First Internet,” the telegraph, was even more embedded in the US.)

How about billboards? One of the best known billboard companies, Foster, began in 1898. Lamar in 1908. In the case of this wistful wintry town, though, it’s more likely drivers would have seen the outdoor boards on the highways outside of it. Burma-Shave’s famous outdoor campaign started in…1925.

You can’t escape the people who send you collections of “the way it used to be” photos and gags on the Internet these days. Yet embedded in the nostalgia of Singleton’s paintings is today’s America, waiting to spread itself nationwide…even in the forms of advertising and social media.

Charles Kettering, inventor of the electric starter for automobiles, said, “You can't have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.” Whatever’s next after YouTube corporate videos and company Facebook pages and interactive billboards, I say bring it.

Painting: “After Choir Practice,” 16x20 inches. Copyright © Mary Singleton 2002-2010.

Even from 9,000 Miles Away, Benzer Billboards are Colorful and Clever.

Attention, shoppers: There are six bright new billboards for Indian retailer Benzer on the Advertising…Made Easy blog today – the rest are just as vivid as the one shown here. I got the word from the campaign’s copywriter, Sunil Shibad.

He wrote me, “Benzer is a high-end couture brand headquartered in Mumbai. Indian women by and large like to stick to traditional ethnic wear. The new collection had a Western touch to it and the brief was to position the Benzer women as a femme fatale.”

Shibad worked with Icecube Design and Film CD Rafeeq Ellias (who also photographed the campaign’s Spanish model) and Art Director Mangesh Rane to get these done.

I have enough fashion sense to thinly coat one side of a dry piece of toast, no one will be surprised to hear this. I do know eye-popping billboards when I see them, though. These outdoor executions qualify big-time: Bright colors, snappy headlines (way to go, Sunil) and very stylish outfits. Good international appeal, too, including the tagline.

It’s such an arresting campaign I wish Benzer applied the concept to its website. But I understand the retailer has to appeal to an immense range of consumers. Only a few customers would wear the high-end fashions but everyone can be influenced by the vivacious look-and-feel of a leading brand. Even at a distance of 9,000 miles.

Inflatable Gorillas?

I can hear Oz’s Wicked Witch now: Don’t make me send my inflatable gorillas. My outsized Elvises. My fat yellow duckies. Nevertheless, while we’re trying to recover from the effects of the Ike, so is Jim Purtee.

A Sandra Bretting article in today’s Houston Chronicle, identifies Purtee as the owner of Houston Balloons & Promotions LLC. And sure enough, there he is on the company website.

He’s the marketer who makes certain there’s an inflatable pink gorilla or an immense Yosemite Sam-like figure on top of every car dealership, tanning salon and independent insurance agency between Texas and Florida. (You can see the full line-up, gorillas, ducks and all, here – hurry before they’re gone.)

As the article points out, Purtee’s company earned some $1.2 million from 400 inflatable balloons and banners – all in support of small businesses. Purtee makes a good point about it: Small-business owners can’t afford to create and run radio or TV commercials. But for about $1,200 they can get four weeks’ worth of drive-by attention with, say, a 30-foot luchador complete with mask.

While the Ike cost Purtee about a million bucks worth of business, the City of Houston would like to cost him his entire livelihood. It wants to ban the entire category of cold air inflatables from our highways and byways. So this is a billboard controversy…only with really strikingly ugly (or charming) balloons.

It’s no secret how Houston feels about large-scale outdoor advertising: Utterly indecisive.

No matter what side you take – beautification of our city’s highways or freedom for free enterprise – someone’s going to be upset. Is the government right to ban this form of outdoor?

Professionally, I wonder about the medium’s effectiveness. According to the only US trade group, the Inflatable Advertising Dealers Association, “The products of IADA members command attention, standing out in the crowd of other advertising messages. They increase the visibility of your business, promote name recognition and aid in brand awareness.”

Absent real metrics (documented increases in walk-in traffic, for example), I take the IADA claims with a pound of air. Furthermore, most of the inflatables are so…banal. (That’s one of Purtee’s appeals, I think: Generic inflatables that are cost-effectively repurposed from real estate agent to discount furniture store.)

While seeing a big blue elephant on an NTB store is whimsical, I confess to being puzzled by the large purple coyote (I think) appearing for CITGO. Appearances by a random selection of generic critters, all 20-30 feet tall, is silly.

When an inflatable is strikingly designed or fits an unusual purpose, I know it can have a heck of an effect. Swiss ad agency ET&H created a giant, three-dimensional inflatable of its client Tilsiter Cheese’s logo years ago: Two dairy cows side-by-side. Quite striking and much used throughout Europe. it rightfully generated a huge amount of attention. (The cheese company has since turned to an ordinary hot air balloon, something of a letdown.)

Since Purtee is litigating with the City, I wonder how the courts will rule. Purtee maintains that it’s his right to deliver an advertising tool like his giant inflatables “as long as it’s not vulgar or untrue.” I suspect – no, I damn well know – that we’re into the realm of the subjective. As the article inquires, how will the green gorilla atop a cellular telephone store be perceived?

Is beauty, or cleverness, in the eye of the beholder? Or the inflator?

Deconstruction – Good

Deconstruction is not automatically bad (he said, continuing the thought experiment from yesterday’s post).

When should you deconstruct? How about when the brand (or the entire system) has become so unbelievably complex that it’s way past time the brand returned to its basics.

You know what I’m talking about. Think about the brand-name string that sounds like a trunk falling down the stairs. Car-makers are notorious for this; e.g., the Audi A6 Avant Quattro SE Sport 2.5 Tdi.

Talk a walk down the grocery aisles and take a look at the brand extensions…messages growing ever more crowded. Drug stores exhibit the same aggressive shouting matches among shelves full of products. Then, consider that I couldn’t create a better post than Creativity magazine (May 2008, Page 32) has already been written about Help Remedies:

Help Remedies, a refreshingly pared down new line of acetaminophen pills and adhesive bandages, provides a lesson for even the most established marketers: Reimagine what you’re selling, not just how you’re selling it.

A former brand development strategist from London, Richard Fine, came to the US from London and brought a hell of a headache with him. According to Creativity, he was:

…scared off by the chaotic, screaming products….He envisioned a softer, calm-looking option sans abrasive color schemes and shocking copy.

His vision, with help from packaging and graphic design firms (ChappsMalina and Little Fury, respectively), resulted in a new brand by deconstructing old-fashioned ones. The result is simplicity itself, and help I have a headacheTM is one of the brand’s products.

In fact, the entire company – and you can browse the website to your heart’s content – is constructed with this simplicity in mind. Another product: help I’ve cut myselfTM contains two sizes of bandages (and advanced eye relief) for the weary shopper who may have just suffered an injury.

I’d certainly highlight the new brand’s Web 2.0 features, like the simple approach to the Help company blog and the online store.

What Creativity called reimaging I would call deconstruction. True, in the case of Help Remedies, Fine and his colleagues have deconstructed an entire category (over- the-counter healthcare products). When your brand is heavy-laden, when it’s dragging its entire history of massive product/service slates and M&As through the first decade of the 21st Century, this is a good time to return to basics.

Deconstruct what the brand is all about and reimagine it in a simpler, more meaningful form.

Can you do that for your stakeholders? Would you make their lives and their connections to your brand cleaner and more direct? Among the benefits could be a clear, clean view of your business model as well as your brand – supposing, of course, that your company’s business model needs…help.

Deconstruction – Bad

Join me in a weekend thought experiment. Here’s a fairly notorious Nike outdoor board. Note the slogan, lower right: JUST DO IT – now 20 years old. Dan Wieden of Wieden + Kennedy is widely credited with creating this famous theme line, which Advertising Age chose as one of the 20th century’s Top Five ad slogans.

Next, let’s presume that your team is assigned to construct a new Nike corporate brochure. In a creative session, one of the top designers says something like: Why don’t we do a separate two-page spread for each of the words? We could explain each word and detail what it really means. We’d carefully explain ‘JUST,’ then on the next spread we’d say what ‘DO’ really means. And we’d finished up with ‘IT’ as the final piece – then, when you see all three spreads, you’d actually see JUST DO IT.

Would you say – Yes! That’s a great idea. Or would you gently suggest that perhaps this process would destroy the intrinsic integrity of one of the Nike brand’s most critical components?

Deconstructing a slogan or a brand statement that has this much accrued meaning would, IMHO, be quite a Bad Thing. You’d spoil the mystique that the slogan has gained over the years, you’d take away all of the visualized meanings that Nike and its agencies have put into building a crucial brand element. In fact, one of the beauties of a slogan such as this is that it is never deconstructed.

Really, the designer’s suggestion is one legitimate approach to creating new concepts. I propose it’s just not a good idea in the case of a strong brand line that resonates deeply with stakeholders.

Deconstruction – as a tool for literary analysis – has caused much more harm than good since the concept was invented by Jacques Derrida back in the early ‘60s. It has destroyed professors’ careers and been the “philosophy of the moment” on far too many college campuses.

In marketing, I urge caution when you try to extend explanations of your brand elements in public media.

Treat your theme line as a unity, whether you’ve got a 20-year-old stunner like JUST DO IT or a more recent slogan such as KEEP ON TURNING (shown here and my thanks again to Wood Group for maintaining its currency). By deconstructing such a strap line, you could confuse rather than enlighten. When you’ve built a slogan that “works,” let your stakeholders envision what it means for themselves. Let them help you create your brand image and meaning – it’s part of the marketing conversation. No deconstructing here, please.

Above: 2006 Nike outdoor ad featuring England player Wayne Rooney. Everything related to Nike, the “swoosh” and the slogan belongum Nike – no poaching.

Billboards, Farewell

I suppose it is official, now that it’s been announced: the City of Houston has struck a deal with Clear Channel Outdoor to make 831 outdoor boards “disappear” before the end of 2008. Another source indicates that Clear Channel Outdoor has 4,500 facings in Houston, so it’ll lose 18% or so of its displays. (Is my math right?)

Everyone that could be reached before press time is elated: Mayor Bill White, Ed Wulfe of Scenic Houston, Mack Fowler of the Quality of Life Coalition. Clear Channel Outdoor lawyers, however, could not be reached for comment. Clearing out the “visual pollution” of billboards is part of a renewed national trend.

Elation is no doubt a relative thing. Clear Channel Outdoor is the world’s largest outdoor advertising company: “In the United States, the company operates just under 200,000 advertising displays.” This makes the boards it will remove from the Houston area a drop in its national bucket. In any case, there’s been a deal cut and the company gets some profitable arrangements for its trouble, as you can read from the article.

The deal just affects the Clear Channel Outdoor boards – don’t you be thinking that outdoor advertising’s going to vanish from the city. There are other owners and operators like CBS Outdoor, SignAd, Reliant Media…the deal doesn’t have anything to say about these hoardings.

If you’re a true believer in the evils of outdoor signage, history is against you. Billboards (UK: hoardings) have been around for centuries. There’s a marvelous engraving of “Modern Advertising: A Railways Station” in A History of Advertising that shows outdoor ads for everything from sherry to insurance policies of Ede’s Patent American Eye Liquid – “Every Disease of the Eye Cured.”

That same book indicated that the growth of advertising in general “has been attended by an almost entire revulsion of mode.” That’s in 1874, mind you. I suppose the anti-billboard crowd is filled with such revulsion.

Now I am against your general overall ugly city look. As Houston (especially under Mayor White) becomes greener and more attractive, taking down 800 or so billboards may be a help.

However, here’s my self-confessed that’s-how-I-make-my-living aspect.

A great billboard is a thing of beauty – often a visual delight, like the one above created for Adidas for the 2006 World Cup. Anita Bath blogged last year, “Due to the abundance of bad roadside ads, I typically admire cool, funny, or just amazingly creative billboards while driving.”

Me, too. Because, in print, you just don’t get many opportunities to make people laugh or cry or buy when they’re driving past your message at 60 miles per hour.

Bye-bye, billboards.