I was irrationally exuberant about the Robert California character on the revamped The Office, replacing Steve Carell as the office manager (OK, technically he’s now the CEO of the company, Linda Hunt apparently having bailed on that role). Played by the great James Spader, California first showed up as an interviewee for the job last spring. He seemed like a cube-dweller’s existential nightmare, somebody who had no idea who he was or why he was there but was designed to unsettle the person he was talking to in a very laid back, California way.
The first couple of shows this season were some of my all time favorites on The Office… including a Halloween episode in which he prowled the office gathering each employee’s worst fears, then told a horror story that incorporated all those fears. But that was also the show where he brought his kid to work, and now he’s taken to attending employee off-duty parties and making self aware statements like “you don’t know me at all, do you?” Robert California has jumped the shark.
There’s a lesson in this for marketers. The producers didn’t just decide out of the blue to emasculate the character. They must have done lots of audience testing that told them viewers were confused by “the boss” (and everybody knows that stereotype) behaving in such an unpredictable way. It made them nervous so it had to be changed. Similarly, sometimes our best copy and creative ideas are just too weird for our prospects and we have to bite our tongues and pull back to the tried and true.
But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Maybe James Spader can be persuaded to do a one man show based on the “real” Robert California.
Rabbi David Toledano is a family and marriage counselor with a big heart. He loves his work and he loves the people he comes into contact both in person and through his website, The Toledano Method. This love, combined with his uncanny powers of perception, make him a superb practitioner of his profession.
I had the pleasure to work with David on building his website and other promotional materials and I can tell you that he is the genuine article. (And yes, I picked up advice from him that was of value in my own marriage.) If you heard about a previous post from me on David that appeared to be not so positive, it’s important to realize that was tongue in cheek and written precisely because David is so wonderful, but it seems that the search engines do not have a sense of humor.
You put your heart and soul and best marketing smarts into a YouTube video campaign expecting it will go viral and quickly spread across the globe. And… not all that much happens. That’s disheartening but a useful object lesson.
In my little town of Saratoga Springs, NY, the Chamber of Commerce decided to make a promotional video in which thousands of local citizens are captured by a roving camera as they lip sync to a medley of songs from the pop group Train. (Local connection: Train’s drummer hails from Saratoga.) The C of C was up front about the fact that they wanted to emulate the success of a similar video from the city of Grand Rapids, MI which has gotten over 10 million hits.
The Saratoga video is now live, and in the first week, it’s gotten about 36,000 hits. That’s about what you might expect if each of the people in the video sent the link to a few of their friends. By comparison, surveillance videos of a couple of drunks knocking over a statue of a horse (Saratoga is a horse racing town) have gotten over 100,000 hits. Of course, things could change but as local blog All Over Albany points out, most of the traffic to the horse video happened in the first few days after the video went live.
A comparison of the Saratoga and Grand Rapids videos yields some ideas of what works in viral and what may not so work so well.
First of all, the Saratoga piece is obviously a promotional effort. It opens with the producer’s logo, and the first few seconds are archival footage of a thoroughbred race. Many of the participants throughout are waving signs or wearing logos to promote their own organizations. That’s fine for civic pride, but maybe less so for attracting interest from those who don’t already know you. Second, the Train music is just not that good or that catchy; critics have complained that many participants don’t appear to be lip syncing but the songs aren’t really sync-able.
By comparison, the Grand Rapids video has a “wow” factor both in the choice of scenes (including pillow fighters, zombies, an outrageously hamming mayor and a quick pan to what looks like the entire police and fire departments driving down the street waving in unison) and the “how did they do that?” production which looks like a single take. (It isn’t; you can get details in “The Making of the Grand Rapids Lip Dub” which itself has over 112,000 hits.)
It also has great music which ties into a heart-tugging storyline. The video was made to dispel the image of Grand Rapids as just another dying smokestack city, and the music fits in perfectly: a 10 minute concert version of Don McLean’s elegiac “Bye Bye Miss American Pie.” Which, ironically, was penned as McLean was sitting in a bar right here in Saratoga.
I’m a member of the Saratoga Springs Chamber of Commerce myself and would like this video to become successful. My first suggestion is to remove the producer credit and stock footage and to start with Sam the Bugler strutting toward us. Second, now that everybody’s had their moment in the sun try some creative editing of some “best of” clips like local celebrity Garland Nelson in the park, really selling it. Third, sponsor a competition for local citizens (or anyone who wants to try their hand on YouTube) to remix or even parody the original… some very interesting things can happen when you do that.
Researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison reviewed publicly-available Facebook profiles of 224 students for references to being drunk or problems related to drinking. All profiled students were then invited to take a 10-question quiz. Researchers found that 6 of 10 who mentioned excessive drinking symptoms on Facebook (as opposed to just saying “I had a glass of wine”) showed other signs of problems with alcohol, such as the fact nearly 1 in 5 risky drinkers admitted an alcohol-related accident in the past year.
That’s good if it helps head off risky behavior before somebody gets hurt, but bad from a privacy standpoint. Or is it? All these students had freely posted and their profiles could be accessed by anyone who took the time to look for them. This study was not conducted by the university itself but by independent researchers. But what’s to keep the Dean of Students from doing the same digging?
Or, for that matter, what’s to keep marketers from using the same sources to do similar research? Establish a cohort by the way participants have identified themselves, set up rules for doing a query, push the button, do your analysis. The difference from other research being that the participants are anything but anonymous.
DMA2011, the annual conference of the Direct Marketing Association, starts in Boston the first weekend in October… that’s soon! I am on a panel with colleagues Nancy Wahl, Alan Rosenspan and Carol Worthington Levy at 3 pm Monday afternoon, October 4. The topic is “Mundane, Inane and Boring Creative” and evidently we are going to try and outdo one another by seeing who can put the audience to sleep fastest with campaigns that never should have seen the light of day or, if they did, succeeded in spite of themselves.
I just got a preview of my fellow panelists’ slide decks and there is some pretty outrageous stuff there. At the end of the hour the audience will be invited to vote on who was the most mundane, inane or boring and the winner will be doused in the chill waters of Boston Harbor just outside the convention center. It’s an experience not to be missed!
If you haven’t yet registered for the DMA, you can still do so here. Try entering “friends and family” code AN614 which will hopefully give you a discount on your conference price. See you there.
Our main house runs on natural gas but we have a small outbuilding (my office) which did not have gas service and ran on propane. When we bought the place we did some upgrades to the outbuilding and told the contractor we wanted to convert to natural gas eventually so he should do plumbing and buy appliances with this in mind. This year we finally got around to the conversion and found it a very expensive proposition.
First, the plumbing requirements for natural gas and propane are completely different. It’s not just the different diameter connectors. Propane uses copper, which isn’t legal for natural gas. So if you do the conversion, expect to replumb your entire gas service.
In addition, don’t assume all gas appliances are convertible. We were able to convert our stove and heater with a kit, but the most expensive item, a Navian on-demand hot water heater, isn’t convertible. Now we are stuck with a $1700 bill for a new Navian and the old one goes on Craigslist.
To sum up, don’t expect your propane to natural gas conversion to be cheap or convenient. It will be many years, if ever, before we get back in lower utility bills what we’ve spent on this conversion. Best thing to do is decide what your permanent needs are when you do the original gas plumbing, then stick to it.
P.S. If you’re a regular reader, you may be wondering why I am telling you this in the otisregrets blog. I apologize for the diversion, but it’s in a good cause. Do a search for “propane to natural gas conversion” and there’s not much out there except this post. By sharing my experience, maybe we can save someone a buck or two.
Longtime readers may recall that I started my career as a writer, but not a seller, of screenplays. A special frustration of this status is that a screenplay is not a freestanding creative work. It’s not “done” until somebody makes it into a movie.
It used to be the same with the vast majority of book manuscripts which were lovingly and carefully written and then launched into an unappreciative world. If a publisher turned you down you could print it yourself at a vanity press but the distribution list was limited to friends and relations.
The phenomenon of epublishing has changed this scenario in a major way. Now anyone writing a book can indeed expect that it will be published and distributed if you’re willing to pay the modest sum to register it on Kindle, Nook and similar channels. The market may or may not love you, but you can now say to anyone who crosses your path, “I’ve got a book!”
I have now built out and edited much of the content in the “Copywriting 101” category to create an ebook called “Copywriting that Gets Results”. Initially I planned to use Amazon’s Kindle platform but after reading some reviews I chose to go with FastPencil.com. They made it especially easy for me to import blog posts as a working manuscript and they offer a choice where I can publish on their site for $9.99, or get wide distribution (a number of ebook sites, including Kindle, Nook and others) as well as the setup for a physical book (to be printed on a per-copy basis as required) for an all-inclusive fee of $199.
I chose the latter, and the finished product is now available on FastPencil and will propagate to other epublishing sites over the next few weeks. I was originally going to sell it for $9.99 and then offer a $3 discount to Otisregrets readers, but FastPencil doesn’t allow couponing. So I am publishing the ebook at $6.99 and offering a preview for free; you can also order a hard copy for $14.95 plus shipping.
FastPencil is by no means perfect. Their free publishing format has limited flexibility because they would like you to pay extra for “Silver” or “Gold” level services which come with more design choices and some consultation. And there were some technical glitches along the way which were quickly handled by their support team. But I was determined to make the free tool work in the same way I was determined to make the Copyblogger WordPress style work when I stared my blog. Free is good.
I’ve previously written on the topic of lying with statistics, an easy though dishonest way to manipulate your marketing message because consumers assume if it has lots of specific numbers attached to it, it must be true.
This week we had a great example of statistical manipulation in the new report “F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2011” which was jointly issued by the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the noble-sounding Trust for America’s Health. Here’s the meat of it:
“Twenty years ago, no state had an obesity rate above 15 percent. Today, more than two out of three states, 38 total, have obesity rates over 25 percent, and just one has a rate lower than 20 percent. “
My god, that’s shocking. No wonder newspapers and TV reporters coast to coast have picked it up more or less verbatim. But stop and think about it.
Suppose we went from zero obese states (which we’ll define as a state with an obesity rate over 20%) to 10 or 15 in that twenty-year period. That would be front page news. But this report said we went from zero to 49 states. From not a single state having a high obesity rate, to every state except one in this category.
Or, let’s look at super-obesity states (which we’ll define as a state with an obesity rate over 25%). Twenty years ago that definition would not have even registered, since every state but one was under 15%. Now two out of three states are in the mega-colossal, super-obese category.
Sure there are a bunch of fatties around. But don’t these statements seem simply incredible on the face of it? Could it be that in those 20 years…..
…. Somebody had changed the definition of obesity?
I’m not saying obesity is not a problem. Of course it is. But look how easily the statistics can be manipulated and how hungrily the mass media will gobble them up.
I’ve been writing a complex series of emails for a client. I finished one series, then had to modify them for a new audience. The right way to do this would be to save each of the emails with a different name, then do the versioning. But I was distracted so I saved the new email over the old one without changing the name. I did this twice. It then took me about two hours to go back and recreate the original emails and fix my boneheaded mistake.
This is a retainer client: we agree to a certain number of hours each month, and I account for how I spend my time. So do I include these hours in my billing? I say no. It would be different if I were billing at minimum wage in which case I’d expect to get paid just for showing up. But my client is paying for a certain level of professionalism, and this ain’t it.
Back in my suit days, I’d have to account for every hour of agency time. There was an “administrative” bucket where non-billable time would go but I better not use it too often. I’ve occasionally seen (not participated in) systems with no such catchall which means that inevitably every minute gets billed back to somebody.
If you’re hiring an agency or a freelancer by the hour, it’s fair to ask how they keep track of their time and if they have an accounting category where they put non-billable time. If they don’t, then you may end up paying for mistakes.
A number of folks have asked me to share the talk I did for the DMA in San Francisco in October, “How Twitter Killed Direct Marketing Copywriting (Just Kidding)”. I now have an MP3 of the audio which I will be happy to email you… just use the “contact” links on this site to get in touch.
I can also give you access to a private site where you can watch my Powerpoint slides with audio (which is same as the MP3) but it won’t add a whole lot because the DMA techs did not capture any of the videos. It’s a lot simpler to just listen to the MP3. Let me know if you want a copy (it’s a 13 MB file).