Creative Ridicule

Looking back, it was a revolution alright. Just not a transportation revolution.

Instead, as Atlanta Marketing Consultant Al Ries argues in his new book, "The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR," the Segway, and all the buzz and press attention that has gone with it, is evidence indeed that a revolution has transpired in advertising and marketing and hardly anybody has noticed.

The best way to launch a new product isn't with big budget, blockbuster ads anymore. It's with well orchestrated PR campaigns launched at a fraction of the cost and with more credibility. Nine months after the press unveiling of the Segway, the scooter has yet to roll into showrooms and the company has yet to run an ad campaign. But, is there a person in America who hasn't heard of the scooter that was ridden on "Good Morning America" by Diane Sawyer and has even been caricatured on the cover of the "New Yorker?" Segway estimates that in December alone the PR barrage generated 758 million impressions that translated into $80 million worth of "free" advertising. In January and February, the company said it got roughly another $160 million more in unpaid promotional ink and air.

"The launch of Segway re-enforced what I have known for a long time," says Ries, who 30 years ago co-authored the book, "Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind," the seminal marketing text that placed the theory of "positioning" in the lexicon of brand advertising. "You use public relations to launch a brand because it has more credibility," says Ries. "And you use advertising to defend it." Ries is not alone in this heresy.

Former Chief Marketing Officer of The Coca-Cola Company and Atlantan Sergio Zyman argues in his new book "The End of Advertising As We Know It" that advertising can and should be clever and compelling, but it's not art. It's a science, and creatives who believe otherwise are deluded, and, in the end, ineffectual. "Advertising is about selling more stuff more often to more people for more money," he writes. "Success is the result of a scientific, disciplined process and every single expenditure absolutely must generate a return."

The books are hardly the first time the ad industry has come under attack from within (Zyman and Ries both started in advertising, then gravitated to marketing). Ad giant David Ogilvy spent the last four decades of his long life lamenting and inveighing against creativity for creativity's sake. But the crash of dotcoms and the ensuing slump in the economy have reinvigorated the attacks at a time when the industry's reputation is still wounded by the excesses of famously feckless commercials for internet start up companies, many that went belly-up.

Remember the naked guy answering the door for a pizza delivery (beyond.com), the executive who dropped his cell phone in a urinal (AltaVista), the gerbils shot out of a cannon (Outpost.com) and the most famous of them all, the sock puppet (Pets.com), Ries and Zyman remember with great zeal.

They site the sock puppet, along with the Budweiser "Wassup," and Taco Bell Chihuahua campaigns as three examples of creative that won accolades, advertising awards, the attention, even the adoration, of the public, but did not sell product. Even the agency that created the campaign, TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco, concedes that its sock puppet character came to represent the general failures of the new economy and dotcom advertising the way the Hindenburg came to represent the failure of air travel by dirigible. "The Sock Puppet got them [Pets.com] more exposure than they could have ever imagined," says Ryan Fey, PR Manager for the agency. "As a result, it became the poster child for the internet economy."

The Sock Puppet character was used to illustrate the themeline "Because Pets Can't Drive" by showing the character in different scenarios (watching other dogs romp in the park, for instance) frustrated that he couldn't go out and buy the things he loved. Ries features the doll faced down, clutching his Pets.com microphone, on the cover of his book. The eye sees the puppet, the brain translates: Excess, failure, DUMB.

Yet, the Sock Puppet, for a time, was everywhere. He marched in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, appeared on CNN and Good Morning America and was profiled in "Entertainment Weekly," "Time," and "People." But, during the six months in which the company spent more than $60 million on the campaign, Pets.com generated only $22 million in revenues. Ninety-seven percent of consumers had seen the ad and said it was effective. Pets.com executives said they were delighted the puppet had become a "pop culture icon."

"Yeah, whatever," writes Zyman. "Icon or not, no one was buying Pets.com's products. It's one of the great ironies that even though the company is dead, the puppet is alive." Another irony, pointed out in Ries’ book, an original Sock Puppet was recently auctioned off to a San Francisco businessman for $20,100. Only in death, as it turned out, did the spokespuppet generate a profit.

The consultants argue that the "Wassup" and Chihuahua campaigns were equally indulgent, celebrated, and ultimately worthless. "The [Wassup] ads were incredibly popular and people were running around all over the place sticking out their tongues and asking each other "Wassup?" writes Zyman. But, here's a better question, he says. What WASN’T up? Brand Budweiser sales. While Budweiser's agency (DDB/Chicago) was off collecting the Grand Prix Cannes Lionnes, the 2000 Grand Clio, and top prize at the Best Commercial New York Festival, Bud was biting the suds: Its market share dropped 1.5-2.5 percentage points and sales of barrels fell by 8.3% – the largest share loss by Budweiser from 1994-2000.

The Taco Bell talking Chihuahua was another high flown and amusing disaster. The dog first appeared in 1997 campaign, created by the Los Angeles office of TBWA/Chiat/Day. At first, the ads boosted sales as well as Americans' understanding of Spanish as the pooch mouthed the "Yo Quiero Taco Bell" ("I Want Some Taco Bell") tagline. Then sales began to slip. The campaign, says Ries, committed the fatal flaw of "fishing without a hook." There was no motivation to buy. Even worse, writes Zyman, after the initial humor of the first spot, the dog's appearance and association began to cost the chain. "Can you tell me what kind of a talking dog that looks more like a long-legged rat could have for a restaurant?" he writes. " I don't think the connection could possibly do any restaurant any good."

Finally, Taco Bell dumped the dog, the agency, and the CEO who signed off on the campaign. "It's ok to have something entertaining," says Zyman. "It's even ok to have a Chihuahua in your commercial. But, when we start selling dogs instead of selling tacos, we are in trouble."

In a large, and increasing measure, advertisers have been selling dogs instead of tacos for three decades, argue the consultants. During that time consumers have been saturated with commercial messages – the average American sees 237 television commercials a day – and companies have been soaked by the rising per capita cost of advertising. In 1972, companies spent $110 per capita on advertising in this county. Today that's up to $865. The annual informal measure of how much it costs to advertise is the Super Bowl game. In 1972, a :30 spot on the game cost $86,000. Last year, the same spot cost $2.1 million. "If you think your company has been spending more on advertising and enjoying it less, you're probably right," says Ries.

The stage for this excess was set in the 1960s, and the so called Golden Era of advertising when BBDO created the first "lifestyle" advertising for Pepsi-Cola and Doyle Dane Bernbach created its still famous Volkswagen campaign. The Clio's became the ad industry's equivalent of the Academy Awards, and that was fitting, writes Zyman, because agencies began to think they were in Hollywood, creating entertainment and art.

"Advertising agencies fell in love with themselves," says Zyman. "Instead of trying to help their clients increase sales, they hid behind their creativity, shrouding themselves in mystery and concentrating on coming up with award-winning, or simply spectacular ads that didn't communicate."

Sure, there were campaigns that did both.

Backer & Spielvogel's funny "Everything You Always Wanted In A Beer and Less" Miller Lite ads launched a brand and created the category of low-cal beer by calling it everything but low-cal beer. Ally & Gargano's creative, and Director Joe Sedelmaier's casting of quirky characters, built Federal Express over 12 years and more than 80 commercials into a household name and created the overnight delivery industry.

Zyman and Ries acknowledge that, out of the creative firmament of ad agencies has come a fair sized universe of successes. Among them: Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy's, cast in his own commercials (Ted Bates, New York); the AFLAC duck (The Kaplan Thaler Group, New York), which increased sales of the insurance carrier by 25 percent; the American Express commercials (Ogilvy & Mather, New York) with comedian Jerry Seinfeld that successfully repositioned the card against Visa. But the failures of advertising have outnumbered the successes as the world where the messages are being delivered has changed. In the last two decades three major mediums have emerged that didn't exist in Madison Avenue's guilded age: cable TV, the internet, and so-called "infotainment."

Advertising, as a result, and no matter how stunning it might be, is more easily buried. Ries illustrates the point with the Sunday edition of the "New York Times." The average Sunday edition has 190 pages of ads, equivalent to 400 square feet of wallpaper. "And who notices wallpaper?" he says. "In general, what's happened is people have trained themselves not to notice, and perhaps even to avoid."

On the other hand, the shifting of mass media into softer and more publicity driven news, with shows such as "Entertainment Tonight," magazines such as "Vanity Fair" and "Premier," and the recasting of many of the nation's newspapers in the mold of the bright, brief, and pop culture driven "USA Today" has made the environment more amenable to PR pitches.

Madison, Wisconsin based "PR Watch" estimates that between 40 percent and 60 percent of stories in newspapers in America are initiated by public relations. When "Rolling Stone" named a new editor in May, he remarked it would be a challenge because the magazine had become so entertainment driven "we haven't done journalism in a long time." The advent of "news you can use," has given rise to service journalism. Stories have contact numbers and information on where you can buy this or go do that. Lifestyle stories are more often about buying than they are about living. For companies and consumers, says Ries, that’s great.

"Newspapers are writing what people are interested in," he says. "People are intensely interested in certain products. They're intensely interested in Viagra, Botox, and they are even intensely interested in Vanilla Coke. That product was first launched with PR."

Whether over time the rising tide of news initiated by PR firms will undercut the third-party endorsement value of the press that gives a news story more credibility than an advertisement is another question, too early to answer. "But I think it's already starting to have an effect," says Sheldon Rampton, Editor of "PR Watch" magazine. "When you consider that 40 or 60 percent of stories are PR driven, and another 20 percent are about O.J. or Princess Di, there's not much room left for real news, is there?"

Zyman is less bitten by the PR bug, perhaps because he, as much as any top company executives in the country, has been on both sides of the spin. He was publicly praised for his role in rolling out Diet Coke. A few years later, he was bashed for coming up with New Coke. "Free media is rarely free," says Zyman. "Just ask all those dotcoms who used 'free' media to get themselves on the map and raise money and then stood by helpless as that same media uncovered the weaknesses of their business model."

When TBWA/Chiat/Day launched the Sock Puppet campaign, it generated $11 worth of publicity in addition to the paid advertising. Awareness of the campaign hit 97 percent in one week. Sales increased 35 times. But all that is forgotten because the company failed, in part because the attention brought on scrutiny of Pets.com's business plan. Customers discovered that it was a lot cheaper to go down the street and buy a 50 pound bag of dog food and lug it home than it was to go to the internet, order online, pay to have it shipped, then wait for it to arrive. The agency and company rediscovered the wisdom of the adage that "the quickest way to kill a bad product is with great advertising."

Zyman argues that there's a difference between publicity and PR, and that difference is a function of how the public accepts the publicity. When New Coke was launched it was with a well orchestrated publicity campaign. But, when the public and the press rejected the soda, the publicity became a "PR crisis." He likened it to actor Paul Reuben, who played Pee Wee Herman. "One day he's publicizing a new children's television show, the next day he's caught masturbating in the back of a Florida porn theater," writes Zyman. "A real public relations disaster."

Ries argues that an advertising campaign, such as Budweiser's "Wassup" spots, can generate great publicity for the ad agencies that create them. And sometimes that appears to be the entire point of a campaign. Bud's agency, DDB/Chicago, sells clients on the idea that the way to make a brand famous is to make its advertising famous. The ad campaign was just that, winning top awards at the Cannes film festival, but sales continued to sink. Meanwhile, sales for sister brand Bud Light rose as its advertising went unheralded.

"So why didn't Bud Light’s advertising win at Cannes?" asks Ries. "You may not understand the psychology of the creative community. Advertising is art. It has no connection to sales. You contaminate the creative process by introducing commercial considerations."

If Zyman and Ries' sharp attacks sound long winded and repetitive they can be. Zyman's book is 238 pages. Ries' is 280. And the titles oversell the point. What they are really is not about the death of an industry but the need to revive it. "Advertising isn't dead," says Ries. "You can still fan the flames with it. You just can't start the fire." Zyman only faults the genius of creative when it's unfocused, or passe: "Too much advertising has lost its relevancy."

A way for both disciplines, PR and advertising, to retain and build vitality is to work in tandem. A PR plan, says Zyman, should address the same issues a brand plan addresses, and vice versa. And both begin with the same two questions: What do you want to say, and to whom? What do you want people to believe about you?

Ries says the economy and years of flighty, often unaccountable advertising have taken a grave toll on the reputation of advertising agencies. The industry already ranks just a notch above car salesman, which are at the bottom of the public's perception of honesty (Car salesmen get a score of 9, advertising practitioners 10. Who's No. 1? Nurses, with a score of 79). "I talk to a lot of chief executives at companies, and I have to tell you they have a feeling, an unhealthy attitude towards advertising in general," says Ries. "They spend the money on advertising because they think that have to, because everybody else is spending money on advertising, and they think, if we don't advertise, people will blame us if sales go down. But they don't see many results from the advertising they do run. It's crazy."

Eric Webber, head of marketing for Austin based advertising agency GSD&M, argues that Ries and Zyman aren't giving the industry a fair shake. His agency has always assumed consumer reluctance to believe advertising. "We look at ourselves as the 'uninvited guest," he says. "It's not like people wake up in the morning and say: 'I'll have a glass of orange juice and a Taco Bell commercial.” The agencies’ philosophy is that an ad must first grab attention, then entertain to hold attention, then offer a call to action, reason to buy. "There are an enormous amounts of advertising that do No. 1 and No. 2, but not number three," Webber says.

Ries rattles off the number of brands launched virtually without ads: Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Microsoft, Body Works, Segway, Viagra, Botox. The brands' formula for success is simple and predicable. "Nine out of ten products fail because they are me-too products," he says. "If they are not me-too products, then they have news or publicity potential. If what you're selling doesn't have news or publicity potential, the people probably won't buy it."

That doesn't mean advertising, in Ries' view, now takes a back seat to PR. It comes in second only chronologically. "Advertising will always have its place because consumers have to be constantly reminded. They'll always have to be told the Coca-Cola is the ‘Real Thing’ and Budweiser is the ‘King of Beers.’”