Starbucks recently initiated a viral social media campaign that flamed out immediately. Baristas were instructed to write “Race Together” on coffee cups to initiate a dialog about race and inequality with their customers.
First, the message didn’t fit the corporate culture. Starbucks tends to sell its expensive products in upscale neighborhoods to a non-diverse customer base. One critical tweet asked how many people of color work in Starbuck’s corporate office; another noted that all the hands holding cups in a SBUX promo were white.
Then, when outraged customers and employees began tweeting to Starbucks Sr. VP of Global Communications Corey duBrowa’s Twitter account, he responded by blocking them and freezing the account (it has since been reactivated).
An inauthentic campaign>handed down from on high>with backlash met with stonewalling instead of engagement and big time mea culpa=how not to go viral with a corporate social media campaign.
I’m summarizing here because I want you to go read Tai Tran’s full article. He describes himself as “ready to disrupt the tech industry with his infectious passion and energy for marketing!” Somebody, hire this guy.
During 2015 March Madness I’ve seen the Jason Wu Cadillac ad numerous times. Certainly it’s daring greatly to heavy up on a story about a guy whose mom gave him a sewing machine during the uber-macho celebration of NCAA basketball, and the ad is a great story. But what’s that vehicle rolling into frame at the end? Oh, wait, it’s a Cadillac… whaat?
I went googling and found Cadillac’s Dare Greatly page, which provides nice access to all the celebrity stories featured in the campaign. I watched the story of Jason Wu in full (that’s the video link above; the ad itself doesn’t seem to be available online) and also that of Anne Wojcicki, founder of 23andme. They’re well done. The overall impression is of somebody who was immensely talented to begin with, but then took a career path that took them out of their comfort zone. Obviously that’s a great metaphor for a once adulated, now staid luxury car brand that wants to reinvent itself.
But here’s the thing. I can’t imagine any of these people actually driving a Cadillac, other than maybe Steve Wosniak who’s a car collector and something of a schlub. (In fact, if you can prove to me Anne Wojcicki doesn’t drive a Tesla S, I’ll send you a free copy of my book right now.) So the ads, while celebrating the daring and talented, inadvertently separate the product from the celebrity endorser.
This campaign is often compared to the iconic Chrysler spots featuring Eminem and later Clint Eastwood. But those gentlemen weren’t endorsing a car. They were endorsing a spirit: Rocky, relocated from Philadelphia to Detroit, the downtrodden American underdog rising from the ashes of defeat. You buy a car from these guys not because they drive one, but because it’s the right thing to do.
When Chrysler next hired Bob Dylan and turned him into an Ed McMahon-type huckster, it was cringeworthy. A better use of the celebrity as pitchman was the Lincoln ad with Matthew McConnaghey where he comes right out and says “I’ve been driving a Lincoln since long before they paid me to do it.” Anyhow, what all these ads had in common was that they make a direct connection between the celebrity and the car—in most cases, the spokesperson is behind the wheel in at least one scene. (I think Eastwood may have stepped from the shadows behind a Chrysler.)
And that’s the disconnect with Cadillac’s Dare Greatly campaign and its celebrities. In order to convince them to participate, Cadillac obviously told them they did not have to mention Cadillac, appear with Cadillac, or drive a Cadillac. So we have the choice of questioning the credibility of the endorsement, or realizing it’s not an endorsement at all.
Celebrities are infinitely useful as metaphors, especially if they’re dead. (Think of the “Here’s to the…” images in the Apple “Think Different” campaign.) But if you’re interacting with live ones you can’t put up a firewall. You have to ask them about the car. That’s the lesson here.
A creative director recently shared with me the parable of the 100th light bulb. It goes like this:
When you turn on the first light bulb in a dark room, the effect is transformative. Where before there was only darkness, now there is light. But by the time you switch on the 100th light bulb, the incremental difference is so small that nobody notices. The lesson is that there’s a point of diminishing returns where it’s not worth the effort to keep exploring new ideas.
I disagree.
For one thing, if your project is a web page or an email, turning on the light bulb is so trivial a task you shouldn’t give it a second thought. Through multivariate testing, marketers can not only turn light bulbs on and off, but move them around at will to see if one arrangement is better than another.
But beyond that, turning on the 100th light bulb is what we as creatives are paid to do, assuming we charge more than the journeyman copywriter who can take a brochure and turn it into a sales letter.
In the heyday of subscription direct mail, the 1980s and early 1990s, writers like Bill Jayme and Linda Wells were paid tens of thousands of dollars (1980s dollars) to produce circulation promotions that, if they were successful, might increase response rate by a microscopic fraction of 1%. But because the numbers mailed were so large, it was a savvy investment by the publishers.
I myself once wrote an ad that appeared in Computerworld, for a long departed agency and software client. They marketed primarily through direct mail, but some targets just didn’t ever respond. This ad won a new account from one of those targets, and the value of the business was such that it paid for the entire cost of the ad, including media, for the life of the campaign.