Black Thursday: Forget the Turkey and Your Family and Go Buy More Stuff!!!

Will our ever-growing obsession with Buying More Stuff end up turning the entire 24-hour period now known as Thanksgiving Day into Black Thursday?

Probably. And how depressing. At least The Miami Herald’s brilliant political cartoonist, Jim Morin, managed to convey the craziness with a little humor.

Last year, major retailers including Walmart, Toys R’ US and Target threw their doors open on November 22^nd to throngs of holiday deal-hunters. Consumers by the millions shook off the post-turkey tryptophan lethargy and dashed away shortly after Thanksgiving dinner, afraid of missing bargains on the most in-demand gift items.

And that meant possibly hundreds of thousands of low-paid employees had to forsake their family celebration to be on retail sales floors, ready to smile and cheerfully risk a serious bodily injury to greet the oncoming stampede. Take a look at this disturbing video of a mob scene inside a Walmart store as crazed shoppers nearly climb over one another, screaming and having tugs-of-war over marked-down smartphones. 

Looks like a cattle round-up gone horribly awry, doesn’t it? Well, it also looks like this year a handful of sensible retailers are saying no to the insanity and keeping their stores closed until it’s actually Black Friday.

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently announced that, with the exception of three stores in New York City, Las Vegas and Hawaii, all Apple stores will be closed on Thanksgiving so employees can relax and spend the holiday with their families. Several other retailers, including Nordstrom, Costco, Marshall’s and Home Depot have also decided to buck the Black Thursday trend.

“Call me old-fashioned, but I feel that it’s an easy decision to make,” BJ’s Wholesale Club CEO Laura Sen told the Huffington Post, adding that workers deserve “a nice holiday with their families.”

Amen to that. How about just being thankful for what we already have?

Now, I can put on my marketing hat and acknowledge that yes, stores need to remain competitive and yes, the period between Black Friday and Christmas Eve is by far the most important of the year for retailers. In fact, for some, it represents between 20-40% of annual sales, according to the National Retail Federation.

Furthermore, putting in long, grueling work hours during the holiday shopping season has always been a fact of life for retail employees because that’s just the nature of the beast. And they know that.

But isn’t it enough that most big retailers already open at 12 a.m. on Black Friday? Giving employees those few extra hours to enjoy their Thanksgiving feast with loved ones doesn’t seem like too much to concede.

Last year Brendan O’Kane, CEO of OtherLevels (a ThinkInk client), mused in a guest post on Retail Merchandiser – after reading that Macy’s would be open around the clock the weekend before Christmas – about the possibility of a holiday shopping season where stores just don’t close at all.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this scenario actually becomes real within a few years.

And on that wildly cheerful note, I and the whole ThinkInk staff would like to wish our readers and clients a beautiful and peaceful Thanksgiving holiday close to their families and far from the madding crowd at the mall.

A David versus Goliath Battle Comes to Adland, But will Goliath Win?

Every high schooler can recite Newton’s third law of motion: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

But it’s a rule that applies far beyond physics classrooms. In the advertising world, an attempt at an equal and opposite reaction to this past summer’s mega-merger of Omnicom Group and Publicis Groupe, now Publicis-Omnicom and the world’s largest advertising agency, is already under way.

Like the Alliance of Small Island States or any “big guy versus little guy” organization, several small to mid-sized advertising agencies including Chi & Partners, its media operation M Six, customer relationship shop Rapier, PR agency Halpern and social shop The Social Practice have begun to push back by creating their own joint holding company called The & Partnership, according to AdAge.

Headed by Chi & Partners CEO Johnny Hornby with a North American arm run by Proximity CEO Andrew Bailey (formerly of Proximity Worldwide, an Omnicom company), the new conglomerate is a recognition that small and medium-sized advertising agencies risk losing clients and being squeezed out of the market as mega mergers like Publicis-Omnicom become more common. In reaction, small agencies are fighting fire with fire. 

But are mid-sized mergers really the right solution?

Media analyst and blogger Don Cole doesn’t think so and I agree to an extent. He fears that small to mid-sized agencies won’t have the staffing, creative talent and big data resources to be truly appealing to larger (and more profitable) clients. In the end, mid-sized mergers are like pooling the skills of several minor league baseball teams. More players don’t mean more capabilities. If anything, he cautions, cost cutting (read: layoffs) will be first on their agenda. In this scenario, the Goliath that Publicis-Omnicom has become (and the others that follow) wins out over the smaller Davids.

So if mini mergers aren’t the solution, what is? It’s not as black and white as Don Coles sees it. To return to my baseball analogy, not all minor league players stay minor league forever. Some do make it to the majors. And “making it to the majors” is what all advertising and PR agencies aspire to achieve. While one route to that success is, of course, growing large (and influential) enough to be bought by a conglomerate such as Publicis-Omnicom, another way is to continuously recruit new, young talent and also become expert in specific niche communication fields. That’s what we’re doing at ThinkInk.

It’s important to remember that smaller agencies aren’t devoid of assets. At smaller shops there is often less process, less bureaucracy and less confusion over who has the authority to do what. Small agencies are nimble and can better respond to client crises, when they inevitably occur.

As for The & Partnership, you can be bet adland will be watching its success or failure as closely as it’s watching Publicis-Omnicom. The David and Goliath ad agency battle is just heating up and it’s anyone’s guess which side will win.

Are Facebook’s Mobile Ads a Fad or will Successful Monetization Stick?

Whoever coined the phrase “it’s lonely at the top” forgot to mention that that loneliness is often short-lived.

That’s because, at best, aggressive competition means an eventual sharing of the summit (think iOS and Android). At worst, it means a complete dethroning. Remember when AOL was the most popular Web portal?

For now Facebook, still the world’s dominant social media network, can bask in all the mountaintop sunlight it wants.

Not only has active membership continued to grow – it stands 1.2 billion or one-seventh of the world’s population – but desktop and mobile ad revenue is starting to add up. Fully 60% of the publicly-traded company’s third-quarter revenue came from advertising and nearly half of that ad revenue came from mobile devices.

This is especially impressive considering how fast Facebook’s mobile advertising ramp up has been, starting as recently as early 2012. In other words, Facebook has successfully monetized advertising in less than half the time it has taken digital media to achieve even modest advertising revenue results.

But how much longer will Facebook’s mobile advertising miracle continue? The company has already been extremely transparent regarding its own expectations. For starters, Facebook will not continue increasing the percentage of ads in users’ news feeds. With this growth capped, there’s only so many clever ways to incentivize higher click-through rates.

Then there’s the nagging concern that teens are beginning to tune Facebook out, switching to sites like Twitter or embracing a host of direct messaging apps. Some of the pullback is due to Facebook’s own success. What teen really wants to be “friends” with their parents on social media or have them or other authority figures poking around on what was once the equivalent of their digital bedrooms – places considered off limits? According to financial firm Piper Jaffray, only 23% of 8,650 recently surveyed teens preferred Facebook.

While the siphoning of younger support isn’t a big deal for Facebook yet, it underscores just how fleeting social media platform popularity can be and how ad revenues, like a seasonal stream, can dry up as fast as it floods. A decade ago Myspace was the leading social media network. Today, despite a flurry of recent positive news, the site has a very long way to go in its climb back toward greatness – if it ever gets there. Its base of 36 million users is similar in size to the population of the Greater Tokyo Area. One city.

How long Facebook remains on top is anyone’s guess. While I applaud the company’s mobile advertising monetization efforts and hope they continue, could it be a little too late as the next social media fad goes on the attack, chasing that summit?

Creativity: To Be or Not to Be?

Many of us in the marketing and PR worlds have fallen prey to second guessing our individual creative capacity.  Are we all inherently creative in some shape or form? Or are our creative genes shut down at an early age when a 5th grade art teacher sneers at a drawing or ‘artistic project’ we thought (and Mum and Dad told us!!) was a great piece of creative work?

Think about how you define yourself as the creative type before dismissing that ideal, picking something else to define you – like an analytical type, an Alpha type or even a diplomatic type and then moving on to fulfill that prophecy.

Our continual societal reinforcement that creativity is a special ‘gift’ that only some people are born with while others aren’t is what David Burkus, author of The Myths of Creativity says perpetuates these various myths.

“The truth is, we’re all born with the ability to think creatively,” says Burkus.

As we grow older, depending on our upbringing and experiences, we either go on to develop this ability or let it take a backseat.

My view on the “creativity myth” is this: Creativity is like a muscle that needs to be appropriately nourished, stimulated and exercised. In other words, creative people push past psychological barriers to act on their seemingly absurd ideas when noncreative people don’t.

Burkus shares the example of how Kodak invented the digital camera but rejected it because the executives didn’t think people would be willing to give up the quality produced by film pictures. Sony then went on to develop a different prototype and became the pioneers of digital photography… and the rest is history.

In disciplines like marketing, advertising and public relations, it’s very common to be pigeonholed into one of two broad categories, creative or noncreative. While a demarcation between the two categories is slowly becoming less rigid, it still exists.

Here’s another example that hits closer to home. Bill Bernbach, regarded as the father of the Creative Revolution (and Modern Advertising), was instrumental in transforming the advertising world with his campaigns for Volkswagen and Avis Car Rentals. He’s also credited with being the first to combine copywriters and art directors into two-person teams—they commonly had been in separate departments—a model that exists in advertising agencies today. In fact, that approach is now being applied across different types of business models, i.e., bringing design, marketing and engineering teams together (see this example in action at Electrolux).

What does all this mean for the enterprise of today? Can the knowledge that anyone is ‘creative’ change the way creativity is perceived and therefore cultivated? And how can this perpetuate the way ideas are accepted, critiqued and developed within these companies?

I’m constantly challenging my team to find solutions to any problems and challenges that we’re facing – and to think creatively about problem-solving.

What are some of the ways in which you apply creativity, beyond the obvious, to your business? Or are you still struggling with the “creativity myth” and putting people – and even your own creative capabilities – into a stifling box?

Beaming Mobile Messages To Your Brain

A couple of months ago some commuter trains in Germany made global headlines: a rail operator’s passengers were treated to a “marketing wonder” of windows beaming advertising messages directly into the brains of said passengers who’d happened to place their weary heads on the glass.

Called bone conduction and already used in military applications and hearing aids, early reviews of this new type of use have been mixed. Not surprisingly, the ad agency BBDO who produced the ad campaign for Sky Deutschland called it a success. Of course they would. But many responses from a Mashable article read more like: “Is this for real? Just stay out of my head. This kind of invention must be BANNED.”

I agree to a point. It is disturbing how technology this pervasive can be abused. Don’t we have enough bombardment of ads already across multiple screens and devices?

But less than two months later, there’s growing (indirect) evidence of a perceptual shift. A new Harris Interactive poll found that consumer interest in mobile advertising offers has increased sharply since 2009. Nearly half, (45%) of mobile phone owners said they were at least somewhat interested in receiving mobile alerts about new products, sales and/or promotions from preferred brands, compared with 26% of respondents who felt similarly in 2009. And of those more recent supporters, 78% said they found location-based advertising particularly useful.

Does this mean brain beaming advertising glass has silenced its detractors? Um, no. But in light of this new data, it’s not that hard to envision a future where location-aware smartphones (or wearable gadgets) will work together with personalized advertising delivered on glass in trains, buses, planes and on walls in airports, incentivizing even more purchases and “brand/brain engagement.” That includes physical purchases as well as in-app buys. In other words, “mobile” advertising doesn’t always require a mobile phone. And as smartphone adoption rates rise, consumers will grow increasingly comfortable with seeing advertisements everywhere they look.

Is there a safeguard against the world becoming one giant digital billboard?  Permission-based advertising – a point the Harris study was quick to address. Consumers must have the ability to opt out of these types of marketer outreach.

Replacing my marketing hat with that of a PR professional’s for a moment, talking glass and mobile advertising appreciation also underscores another need.

PR agencies must make mobile the connective communications tissue of their client engagement and media messaging. Considering mobile devices’ reduced screen sizes, that means thinking smaller; telling client stories in bite-sized nuggets. It also means stepping up the ways in which we promote the importance of mobile messaging and mobile advertisements to clients from the start of our relationships.

“Smart” glass may have yet to hit its stride. But Harris Interactive data confirms that mobile really is everywhere and the pushback from round-the-clock advertising is eroding faster than many communication professionals originally thought. 

Will Publiomnicomis Take Over AdLand and the Media Universe?

It’s been a couple of weeks since we last posted on the ThinkInk blog, not because we’ve had nothing to say but because we’ve been crazy busy.  Summer is usually a time when a lot of businesses wind down, but it’s been the opposite around here.

New people, new clients and lots of new ideas...stay tuned for more on that but, in the meantime, we have a lot to say about last weekend’s announcement of the Omnicom-Publicis merger.

You know corporate news is serious when two things happen: the story breaks sometime between 5pm on Friday and 7am on Monday (slowing down media response and giving in-house spin doctors time to go into information-management mode) OR if said news is lampooned by comedians.

In the case of advertising agencies Omnicom Group, based in Manhattan, and Publicis Groupe SA, based in Paris, both have occurred. Last Sunday, in a lovely photo-op embrace, the agencies’ head chiefs announced the intended merger, valued at $35 billion. Meanwhile, a July 29 headline in The Onion read: “Merger of Advertising Giants Brings Together Largest Collection Of People With No Discernible Skills.”

Gibe aside, a merger of this magnitude is no laughing matter. If approved, it will have a profound impact on the advertising industry – and far beyond. Whether the fallout is “good” or “bad,” however, is up for debate.

Camp A: Spooked

On one side is the “spooked” camp, with words like “monopoly,” ”behemoth,” and “stifled competition” on the tips of its members’ tongues. Considering that the new company (will it be called Publiomnicomis?!) will have spent a combined $3.31 billion in media placements during 2012 accounting for nearly half of the world’s top 10 media agencies’ efforts, it’s more than a fair concern and one that I appreciate.

Camp B: Rosy-Eyed

Then there’s the other camp, those who see opportunity – an opportunity for smaller firms to capture new business as some disgruntled clients flee, industry pricing/digital ad value and KPI standardization, as well as increased resources to acquire, manipulate and act on big data. The latter point will help adland better compete against Silicon Valley natives like Google, Facebook, Salesforce and Adobe, among many others.

Camp C: Vanessa

My camp falls somewhere in the middle. If the proposed mega-company survives the scrutiny of both US and French regulators, the bigger question becomes “what type of precedent does Publicis Omnicom’s soon-to-be-existence establish?” Just as the airline, automobile, entertainment and pharmaceutical industries have endured mergers and acquisitions for decades, what will the advertising landscape look like in five or ten years? Will there be room for corporate and creative independence or will the specialized firms of today, like ThinkInk, be relics of a bygone era?

I really don’t know. Some 46 countries must ultimately give their blessing and the final merger may not be complete until early 2014. So there is lots of time for positing and pontification.

But don’t let your head and screen be your own echo chambers. Share your views with the ThinkInk community: do you think the advertising world will embrace this new corporate marriage or will it leave executives across the media landscape po’d and just plain scared?

Troubled Times in AdLand: Do Agency Layoffs Signal Industry Turbulence or Opportunity?

Less than a month after FleishmanHillard’s well-publicized (and pricey) rebranding –

an effort to preempt massive changes in the communications industry by demonstrating transparency, nimbleness and multichannel marketing – it looks as if at least one canary in the proverbial coal mine has become woozy.

Actually, make that two or three, depending on your math.

In what seems to be a very prominent and permanent trend (just read this Harvard Business Review article about the demise of the traditional ad agency if you don’t believe me), Omnicom Group, the world’s top media holding company, has faced a challenging few weeks as two of its subsidiary agencies announced widespread layoffs following the loss of major client accounts. P&G’s Gillette products division ended its 80-year relationship with BBDO and General Motors Chevy business severed ties with Goodby Silverstein & Partners. GSP also lost its Nintendo account amid additional client spending cuts. According to at least one person, BBDO could ax up to 10% of its US workforce.

Not good news for ad land.

While details of the brands’ cutbacks are not entirely clear, what little has been said speaks volumes about where the communications industry is heading. Think about it: P&G didn’t come to this decision lightly – severing an 80-year partnership doesn’t happen overnight. And it took 7 months for the brand to switch over to arch-enemy agency Grey, part of the Grey Group division of WPP.  An ambiguous statement from P&G released in April summarized their reasoning for the review was: “to generate fresh thinking and uncover new approaches to connecting with men.” Of course it was.

Fresh thinking and uncovering new approaches is what agencies get paid for. If your agency of record can’t deliver on those two points then any partnership will falter. Although it lacks details, the P&G statement is a damning indictment of a $1.47 billion communications agency that was once the creative engine behind Gillette’s 1989 slogan: “the best a man can get.”

GSP’s situation isn’t any better except to say that the company’s founder, Jeff Goodby, sympathetically addressed the human side of layoffs in an internal memo obtained by AdAge.

“Please be assured: No one takes this process lightly… We will do everything to find [those who have been let go] new situations. And if history is any indication, we will find ourselves welcoming some of them back in the future,” Goodby wrote.

Thanks for the encouraging words but none of that will come to pass if agencies of all sizes (ours included) don’t take a very long, hard look at their client relationships and determine whether they are healthy and spry or if they’re functioning on inertia and complacency – not a winning combination.

The lines between earned media, paid media and the marketing channels they’re promoted on continue to blur. In 5 years time I predict that there’ll be no delineation between digital, social or PR agency – if we aren’t able to provide these services to our clients, we’ll be toast.

So it’s incumbent on all of us as public relations and marcomm professionals to keep the client-agency dialogue fresh, insightful and current. That means staying up on the latest social media trends, voraciously consuming industry and client-specific news, spotting new movements and being ready to adjust marketing tactics once old leanings shift course. It means helping guide our clients through new territories and murky waters. And it means taking bold risks and telling them how it is, not how they want to hear it. It means being honest and offering solutions to problems they may not see coming – but we do.

Omnicom’s brand wounds aren’t fatal. As of this writing, OMC’s stock is up 24.1% for the year and US advertising agency revenue was up 5.6% in 2012. But all it takes is the slightest drop in fresh air before a real coal-mine canary becomes ill.

Will BBDO, GSP and other agencies appreciate these layoff warning signs for what they are and take corrective steps? In this business an 80-year relationship is unheard of – a guarantor of rock-solid success. If those professional bonds can be broken, then really, anything is up for grabs. 

AIG: Mensch, Schmendrick or Something in Between?

As a PR professional, someone who’s familiar with language, words, wordsmithery, and the subtleties of word meaning, Yiddish is one of the more fascinating tongue twisters. Many languages possess words that are hard to translate into others, but Yiddish earns high marks. Somehow emotion, more than literal translation, is bottled up in those strangely-lettered words.

“Mensch” and “schmendrick” were the two Yiddish terms floating around in my head after reading the latest AIG developments and the insurance giant’s 11^th- hour decision not to sue the federal government.

Dictionary.com defines mensch as: “a decent, upright, mature, and responsible person.” For the purposes of this blog post, we’ll expand that meaning to include companies.

Last week, after mounting concern that AIG would in fact join a lawsuit filed by its former CEO Hank Greenberg over the allegedly “unfair” terms of Uncle Sam’s $182 billion 2008 bailout loan decision, the company’s reverse course – and the motivations behind it – are again getting mixed reviews. 

For a refresher, this was the loan that ultimately saved the company from collapse and what supporters say helped soften the resulting US recession.

The PR industry news source, Bulldog Reporter also raised the question in one of its articles, “Did Insurance Giant Forsake Shareholders To Protect Its Own Reputation?” If so, the article says, it would mark a “PR-affirming” break with the tradition of putting shareholders’ interests ahead of the company.

I, however, don’t think AIG’s decision requires much over thought. A public company’s first duty is toward its shareholders, true, but there are times when a “greater good” must be sought above all. 

Forget shareholders for a moment, if AIG were to throw its support behind the lawsuit, their “Thank You America” advertising campaign would be shot to hell. More than that, the company’s credibility, their “menschyness” (menschy is actually a real word) would be non-existent.

It also shouldn’t require a PR team to advise AIG that biting the hand that fed them would be a PR disaster of bailout proportions. The fuming reactions of millions of Americans should have been enough.

AIG probably doesn’t deserve mensch status for its late-in-the-game wise decision. But nor should it be considered a corporate schmendrick, which dictionary.com defines this Yiddish winner as “a stupid and ineffectual nobody.”

So go on AIG, give yourself a big pat on the back for repaying the money you borrowed, thanking 

America publicly, and ultimately making the right PR decision. 

If you’re still hungry for more on AIG, I suggest reading a rather aggressive post on Gawker, by Hamilton Nolan called It’s All Just a PR Calculation for A.I.G.

Oh, and Happy Monday!

Groupon’s Dodgy Deal: Can a PR Blitz and Site Overhaul Save the Company From Itself?

When it comes to Groupon, the daily deals digital Mecca, my, my, how the dot com angels have fallen.

Even as a public relations professional who’s seen and navigated her fair share of client missteps, I’m a bit gobsmacked by how a company that less than two years ago snagged the front cover of Forbes magazine with the eye-catching title “Meet The Fastest Growing Company Ever,” has managed to have its PR rug so skillfully pulled out from under them. What’s especially noteworthy is that Groupon’s recent rotten deal has been entirely self-made.

For readers who aren’t up on the latest Groupon happenings, the company has for the past several months, endured a barrage of PR setbacks, helping re-write the company’s until-now spotless public narrative. Here’s the errrr…..deal: In 2011 the Chicago-based company was roundly sacked following a Super Bowl XLV (45) ad that appeared to mock the decades’ long Tibet-China conflict. A few months later, and just ahead of Groupon’s November initial public offering (IPO), the company that had since its founding been branded based on its hyperactive growth, had to slice its reported revenue in half due to questionable accounting practices. Tsk tsk tsk.

Even the company’s opening stock price, fittingly perhaps, came in at a bargain $20 compared to an earlier valuation that said the couponing site was worth $30 billion. Re-tweaked fuzzy math brought that value down to $12 billion.

And while the company’s NASDAQ stock as of this writing is hovering near its opening price, only down .2 percent, and they’ve managed to start the new year with no additional public relations faux pas – that is if you exclude their announcement last week of a 2011 fourth quarter loss of $9.8 million – a sense of Wild West mentality combined with deck-of-cards-like fragility (some would say Ponzi scheme) continues to deal the company a PR blow.

To be sure, Andrew Mason, Groupon’s 31-year-old CEO, isn’t going down without a fight. In the effort to build back its image as a leader in the online deal-a-day world where coupons attract customers to once-hidden brick and mortar establishments and where everyone wins, the company announced this week major revisions to its website. Among the changes includes adding “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” capabilities so that Groupon users can help the site be more selective when doling out its latest offerings. And in another striking move, Groupon announced the hiring of public relations veteran Paul Taaffe to better manage the company’s image. His arrival comes after only a two-month stewardship by Brad Williams, formerly of EBay Inc.

Whether or not Taaffe, 50, paired with Mason,31, is the right combination of relative youth and relative years remains to be seen. But the fact that his arrival comes after his predecessor barely had time to break in his desk chair’s seat cushion, more than even erroneous math or disgruntled business owners crying foul over the supposed Groupon “deal,” is the best indication yet, that Groupon might be sick. Very sick.

As PR professionals we are tasked with helping keep our client’s message on track, being consistent and accurate with the media, and when calamity strikes, honest and up front about our mistakes. But that hard work should always be predicated on a company that gets its facts and its story straight –before it goes public. To do anything less is like having one hand tied behind your back during a boxing match. Or if you’re a lawyer, having your client reveal a critical detail that could alter a defense only moments before opening arguments. That type of handicap serves no one.

There’s no denying Groupon’s had a tough year. And while it may be easy to say “what’s 365 days in the course of a life?” Groupon, much like its leader, is still very young, having just celebrated its third birthday. But if you’re three years old and already a third of your life has been troubled with a mixed marketing message, what does that suggest going forward?

Taaffe’s got a rocky road ahead of him, for sure.

Good press or bad press aside, Groupon and its thousands of employees and millions of dedicated users aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. But taming the daily deal beast just doesn’t seem like a job anyone should embrace and revamping a website is just not enough. Public Relations leaders can only craft a message so far. Too much spin and a message – and a company – can spin out of control.

Let’s see what happens next.

Shame on Lowes for Pandering to Special Interests: When a Home Improvement Giant Could Use a Fixer-Up All its Own

“Never stop improving.”

Well, at least for Lowes, the above slogan parked in bold blue all caps on the top left corner of the home improvement giant’s webpage, it’s an appropriate start.

The question is how will the company’s recent public relations snafu ultimately pan out as their corporate brass has plenty to improve on now. (And we’re not talking basic roof repair) Earlier this week, the shopping behemoth that only days ago was about as far removed from politics as one of its featured bathroom redesigns, has landed itself in quite the brouhaha.

In yielding to mounting pressure from a variety of sources, including our very own Florida Family Association, (more on that later) the company pulled an ad it was running on commercial breaks for The Learning Channel’s All-American Muslim, a new reality TV show that purportedly shows real Muslims going about their daily lives – you know exactly like the rest of us. I don’t know about you, but the very fact that we need a program such as this to allay our tired and torturous fears of the proverbial “other” – in today’s day and age is frightening. But I digress.

As we enter the peak shopping days and weeks of the increasingly secular holiday season, you can bet this communications bombshell was not what Lowes was expecting. Already Google is working its magic. Google “Lowes” and the fallout from the pullout is the fourth hit. And with the decision making front pages news on CNN.com on Tuesday and Connecticut congressman Chris Murphy addressing the matter on the House floor, calling Lowes’s decision a rubber stamp on “basic foundational bigotry against a major American religious group,” you can bet their troubles are only beginning.

From a public relations perspective, this is the kind of textbook nightmare we dread: an apolitical company becoming unintentionally embroiled in a very politicizing and polarizing mess. So all this begs the question, where did Lowes go wrong?

Lowes went wrong by not following the advice I wrote about in my recent Blagojevich blunder post. Louder voices aren’t more credible voices. And while the company continues to say that its ad pulling had nothing to do specifically with the Florida Family Association, a nonprofit whose web “About Us” description says the group aims to, “educate people on what they can do to defend, protect and promote traditional, biblical values,” it seems VERY likely that it was at least a contributing factor to a collection of below-the-radar narrow-minded people and groups.

Shame on Lowes for pandering toward groups that mask McCarthy-style witch-hunting in the guise of religious enlightenment –whether they’re a 501C3 or not.

There’s comes a point in any communications campaign where all the writers, all the support staff, all the leaflet designers, and press release pitchers, must step aside and let the company speak for itself – without the buffer PR teams necessarily provide. While Lowes has been diligently responding via Tweet and in the press, perhaps a more transparent apology would be in order –without our help. Until now Lowes CEO Robert Niblock, 48, has been mum on the controversy.

As Lowes closes out 2011 and opens 2012 searching for repair and replacement parts in its “corporate improvement” aisle, we can all rest comfortably knowing that the modern social media landscape and blogosphere won’t let red meat like this out from under its digital jaw grip easily. And if there’s a communications upside to any of this, All-American Muslim, which has enjoyed modest success with 908,000 to 1.7 million viewers since its November 13 launch, stands to gain at least something of a ratings bump following the buzz.

Then again, the show’s producers probably wished Lowes would never have gotten involved in the first place and “never stopped improving” their advertising campaigns somewhere else.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving: To Yourself

Leave it to marketing professionals to come up with this one. Buying yourself that little “I’ve earned it” pick-me-up has a new name: self-gifting.

Just in time for the peak of holiday season giving and receiving, evidence suggests that 60 percent of all shoppers will add themselves to their holiday lists, spending an average of $130, a 16 percent increase from last year. In the short term, many are quick to call this yet another strong indication that the still-weak US and global economy is taking its vitamins and getting stronger all the time. Deep discounts and the relaxing of recession-era belt tightening seems to have left customers in the buying mood.

But is it me, or does anyone else see a bit of a problem with this “I, Me, Mine” relapse? I remember reading somewhere that Americans’ gluttonous consumerism and anemic savings rate was supposedly at the root of our current economic troubles?

Ellen Davis, Vice President of the National Retail Federation, who was quoted in an Advertising Age post that addressed the phenomenon, rightly points out the pragmatic downside to such an aggressive self-indulgent holiday marketing campaign. If the holiday season becomes overly connected with adding oneself to their annual guest list, as people patiently wait for the end-of-year price slashing, how will retailers attract business during the other 10 months of the calendar, she asks?

Davis’ concerns, however, aren’t even number one on my list, shopping or otherwise.

The bigger question is this: what happens when the over-terming of trends and excessive labeling, waters down the meaning behind such actions? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with an occasional spur-of-the-moment purchase. Such actions send your brain’s pleasure center into the stratosphere, washed over with the neurotransmitter dopamine. And like that coveted end-of-day piece of chocolate, provides your body with warm and fuzzy feel good feelings. But when impulse buys are turned into a self-promoting season of “You’ve Earned It” and “Gift Yourself” tag lines, as is being done by J. Crew, hasn’t the meaning behind the purchases been lost?

Instead, what once felt good has morphed into another transparent attempt to get consumers to open their wallets?

As a public relations professional, and one who is keenly aware of properly calibrating messages for clients, marketers this holiday season would be wise to consider the pitfalls of overly promoting the self-gifting fad. Otherwise self-gifts could rapidly become self-returns.

Singing The Blues For Pink

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of Thinkink, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 10/25/11.

For a color whose name doesn’t even get top billing on the visible spectrum of light, pink has certainly developed potent staying power. From the Pink Panther to pink Cadillacs, and everything in between, this dainty mixture of red and white has also come to symbolize a less benign issue: the hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-a-year-fight against breast cancer – the third deadliest cancer in America today and No. 2 killer of women.

Are you surprised I didn’t say it was the No. 1 killer of women and the second deadliest cancer in the United States? You can thank the power of marketing for shifting those perceptions.

Not only has breast cancer taken more than 240,000 lives since 2005, according to Cancer.org, it has also commandeered an entire month through powerful -- some would even say extreme, marketing influence. For the past 25 years, October’s ghosts and goblins have had to share the stage with the specter of breast cancer and its increasingly corporate-like kissing cousins – Breast Cancer Awareness Month and the inexorably linked Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation.

While no one can deny the impressive global awareness and funding these organizations have brought to the breast cancer cause – Susan G. Komen alone raised about $420 million in 2010 – am I the only one who thinks that all the merchandising: the pink ribbons, the pink-clad NFL teams, the Bank of America pink checking accounts, the pink armbands, pink lunchboxes, pink Kitchen Aid food processors and whatever else has been Pink'd for October is diluting both the issue at hand and, in reality, siphoning more money toward profits than for research for an actual cure, and skewing public attention away from other serious cancers -- or other causes, period?

When was the last time you paid attention to cervical cancer, or colorectal cancer? Why don’t any NLF teams wear ribbons to support Male Breast Cancer – something that kills, on average, 450 men per year?

Pinkwashing: Where Does All the Money Go?

In 2002, Breast Cancer Action launched a side project called “Think Before You Pink,” whose goal was to raise awareness over the types of companies that chose to go pink, and “encourages consumers to ask critical questions about pink-ribbon promotions.” Doing battle with so-called “pinkwashing,” their motto is “raise a stink.” Here, too, donations go to cancer research. The organization asks consumers to do some research before a pink product is purchased, for example:

• How much money from your purchase actually goes toward breast cancer? Does it say so plainly on the box or packaging?
• Does the company you’re purchasing from have a cap on the amount it sends in donations regardless of the number of pink-related sales?
• Are funds being raised through direct purchase, or is a clever marketing scheme disguising the fact that you need to purchase additional merchandise from the company in order to make a donation?
• How, specifically, is your money being spent?

I was reminded of the need to research when I received an email from Etsy (a site for artisanal wares), promoting all things pink but without any visible endorsements. Showcased vendors were promoting their wares with descriptions such as, “This apron knot dress is a great way to show support for all those around us touched by Breast Cancer and a fashionable and fun way to show your support for the fight for a cure.”

I don’t know about you but I don’t that think fun and breast cancer belong in the same sentence, and it’s precisely this sort of overreach that at first confuses consumers (who exactly am I giving to?), then moves onto cause fatigue (not another pink promotion!!), and finally cause alienation (what a sell-out; I want nothing to do with that brand).

Have Sponsorship Dollars, Will Go Pink

Susan G’s overreach, too, seems to have gotten the organization into several snafus, the most notable when it partnered with Kentucky Fried Chicken to sell pink buckets of chicken to franchise operators, where 50 cents of every purchase went to the “For the Cure” campaign. Seriously, KFC?

Needless to say, the public and media backlash was acute, and the partnership short-lived. Is a pinkwashed KFC really going to unclog all those red blood vessels? Fried chicken is a well-known contributor to obesity, critics said, and obesity is also linked to cancer. How can a campaign be genuine if, on one hand, money goes to a worthy cause and, on the other hand, unnecessarily shines the spotlight on a fast food chain driving its sales and profits?

The truth is, it can’t.

Then there was the perfume brouhaha where independent testing of the chemicals in Susan G.'s Promise Me perfume revealed that some of them might be linked to cancer. For its part, the foundation released a statement saying that the levels of questionable ingredients fell “well within the guidelines of the International Fragrance Association,” but that out of an abundance of caution, the perfume’s formula was being tweaked.

Of course, the plot thickens when you consider the driver behind this story was cancer charity rival Breast Cancer Action. Is it possible their constant nitpicking is also part of their own marketing campaign called "my charity is better than/more deserving than yours?"

For consumers, it becomes very tiresome and, if that example raises questions of agenda bias on Breast Cancer Action’s part, this one won’t. Earlier this year, Stephen Colbert took Susan G. Komen to the court of public opinion when he teased the group’s million-dollar-plus effort to squash nonprofits that allegedly appropriated the “For the Cure” slogan. Who can blame these smaller nonprofits wanting to cash in on what's become a multimillion-dollar marketing machine.

To Komen’s credit, the organization makes no bones about its size, its influence or the way it does business.

“It’s a democratization of a disease,” said Komen CEO Nancy G. Brinker, in a recent New York Timesarticle about the pinking of professional football. “It’s drilling down into the deepest pockets of America. …America is built on consumerism. To say we shouldn’t use it to solve the social ills that confront us doesn’t make sense to me.”

Raising awareness is all well and good, and Americans have huge hearts and pocketbooks when it comes to giving, but why must that awareness come with a pair of New Balance sneakers or a Kitchen Aid blender?

The truth is that it shouldn’t. Since when did we start needing to get something in order to give?

Let’s Reconsider Our Disease Consumerism

Pink’s 2011 October reign is almost complete. Soon we’ll be on to November, which is officially recognized as Lung Cancer Awareness Month. You remember lung cancer, don’t you, the No. 1 American cancer killer that took nearly a million lives in fours years? It’s got a color and a ribbon, too, though it shares its pearl-colored badge of honor with multiple sclerosis. Only its marketing budget can't compete with pink.

As we close out the final months of 2011, why don't we leave the color spectrum and our "disease consumerism" aside? Perhaps my singing the blues over pink may convince others to think about the effect that one cause's marketing efforts have had on so many others.

From breast to colorectal to pancreatic and prostate to ovarian, esophageal and all the insidious rest -- cancer kills indiscriminately. Choose whichever form of runaway cell growth you want and re-focus on the color of money instead: donate all that you can directly to treatment and screening sources of these other unadvertised cancers – having done your research first, of course.

Trust me. That blender – pink or otherwise – can wait. Because all cancers and life-threatening diseases are equal-opportunity killers, even if the marketing budgets of the nonprofits that support them aren't.

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of Thinkink, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 10/25/11.

Message Not Sent: Public Eager to Adopt Mobile Buying; Businesses Not So Much

For a three-word sentence, “Message not sent,” does a pretty good job at frustrating text messagers from completing and sending their digital thoughts. And when it comes to m-commerce, ‘M’ for mobile, businesses it seems, haven’t gotten the message either.

A new survey compiled by Empirix reveals a mixed message: 91 percent of American shoppers believed mobile buying for anything from airline tickets, to department store purchases, to all items in between by text message, email or smart phone app, will generally benefit their shopping experience, while nearly two-thirds of respondents expected an improvement in customer service via their mobile outlet.

But like a garbled message trapped in the Internet ether, fewer than half of businesses surveyed in several countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, said they’d be investing money toward establishing m-commerce networks. The US, which often plays second fiddle (or third, or fourth) to tech-savvy Europe, was a relative “winner,” with 41 percent of businesses saying they would. Better still; more than half of US businesses said they at least had a mobile strategy in place. By contrast only 14 percent of UK businesses were game for upgrading from ‘E’ to m-commerce.

Dealing with the digital disconnect

That’s where PR companies come into play. Playing the watchdog role for our clients means it’s our job to inform them when it’s time to enhance their business and marketing models, offering concrete mobile marketing suggestions and strategy. In short, just having a web page is so last decade. As seen on airlines, mobile onboard buying campaigns have really taken off. (Pardon the pun)

If airlines can be persuaded to the see the benefits of turning a jumbo jet’s cabin into a touch and click sky mall, then why not other businesses?

To be sure, an m-commerce-embracing public and a plugged in communications industry are only the first steps toward success. But they’re not bad starts. In Empirix’s press release on the study, Tim Moynihan, VP of Marketing cautioned companies against quantity of mobile initiative versus quality of effort.

“As more businesses deliver m-commerce applications to an increasing number of consumers, the risk of poor service increases dramatically,” he said. “Investing in an end-to-end service assurance program at the start of this journey will separate the winners from the losers.”

An “end to end service assurance program,” huh.

Sounds like the perfect job for us.

A Life Before Email? Does Not Compute

Our tablets, phones, and laptops of 2011 chug away in harmony, not unlike J.C.R. Licklider’s 1960 vision of human-computer symbiosis. Licklider—a veteran of Harvard and MIT computing-based endeavors—maintained that the human-computer connection would allow machines to address mundane, time-consuming tasks in a highly efficient manner. For the field, his work was outstanding; for a trained psychologist, his contributions were absolutely incredible.

Licklider saw computers as tools with tremendous capability, even convincing his employers to purchase a $25,000 computer in 1957. Imagine? He imagined future work desks as command stations tethered to the wall, with the essential “umbilical cords” completing a “telecommunication-telecomputation system.” Much like his conceptual sketches of electronic libraries and information retrieval (hello eBooks!), Licklider was years ahead of his time.

In fact, Licklider's ideas were accurate enough that they seem basic to us today. Using a computer for essential tasks? Sure. Plugging in at work for the ultimate human-machine team? Done. We use our “machines” to handle the mundane and necessary, and that includes email, which originated with two geeks leaving “Read Me” notes on disk files in the '60s. They wanted electronic mail for practicality's sake, and we still do today – despite the naysaysers who claim that email is dead. But were we productive back when we weren't answering emails every few minutes? We were, but just not as concerned with hearing back from someone a few seconds later. Others argue that we're getting worse in the productivity department: according to a recent study, American office workers spend up to three hours daily on tasks that aren't work-related (44 percent of that time “playing” on the internet), with lost productivity cost employers an estimate of $750 billion last year.

It's also about expectations—and memory retention. Once we know what our machines can do, it's easy to decrease acceptable communication waiting time, permanently. But while Grandma still says that handwritten thank-you notes are more considerate (and, of course, human), there's another reason to turn to paper occasionally: permanence. If you don't want your words to be edited, muddled, or misconstrued in the digital age, making hard copies wouldn't be the worst idea—this New York Times piece says it all. Plus, with new studies showing a 15 percent to 20 percent increase of memory retention in 3D digital media, we're in for a wild ride in advertising.

And I don’t care what anyone says, email is definitely not dead.

Your Brain on Ads

Hello!

Vanessa is taking a break this week, so the following post comes to you courtesy of me – Katie Norwood. Nice to meet you all!

Vanessa and I were exchanging thoughts last week about a New York Times article that looks at “neuromarketing,” a new science that uses neuroscience to analyze people’s responses to advertisements, products and promotions. Neuromarketing testing techniques are poised to mine the untapped resources of the unconscious to help marketers understand more of what makes consumers tick. Perhaps predictably, marketers have embraced the science, the idea being that by learning how advertisements effect consumers’ brains, they will be able to tap into consumer’s subconscious in order to market more effectively, and sell more products.

Angling to maintain a competitive edge, a number of major corporations including Google, CBS, Disney, Frito-Lay and A&E Television have already embraced the neuromarketing techniques to test consumer impressions and responses. And they’re not alone in their support of the science. Proponents of neuromarketing contend that traditional market research methods are less effective because they are only measure participants’ opinions and impressions on a conscious level; and considering only 2% of the brain’s energy is expended on conscious activity and the rest is mainly devoted to unconscious activity, the importance of exploring the untapped unconscious is certainly significant.

A Controversial Approach

Technologically innovative though it may be, neuromarketing has been met with opposition from some consumer advocate groups, who have been quick to term the technique “brandwashing” – a clever combination of branding and brainwashing. Consumer groups have expressed concerned that the technique could be used to exert excessive influence over the subconscious mind, shaping consumers into robots without their consent and without any regard to the ethical implications of such action. However, as Singer’s article notes, scientists have expressed doubt that neuromarketing can trigger brain activity that can directly influence consumers’ buying behavior. The human brain, it seems, is much too complicated for such trickery.

But if neuromarketing could directly influence consumers’ buying behavior – what would happen then? Perhaps corporations would embrace neuromarketing wholeheartedly. Perhaps, over time, traditional advertising would be deemed outdated and obsolete.

On the other hand, if neuromarketing was able to successfully circumvent adults’ rational mental defenses, it might not be legally protected in the same way that traditional advertising is protected. And it might not be ethical.

What do you think? I’d love to hear what you think – you can reach me here or directly at knorwood@thinkinkpr.com.

Focus on the Family Bring messing with The Super Bowl? Sacrilegious!!!

I read an article by Jim Edwards on BNET today, which really got me worked up

It seems the social conservative group Focus on the Family, headed by the always-entertaining “9/11-was-God’s-punishment” James Dobson, has bought itself a 30 second spot during the Super Bowl. For their millions, FOF joins an elite fraternity of deep-pocketed advertisers that includes GoDaddy.com, Anheuser-Busch and Cash4Gold… all like-minded institutions with a similar political agenda.

Wait, let me get my facts straight. It’s Anheuser-Busch that has a petition out to stop the passage of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Hate Crimes Bill, which increases the penalties on those who commit hate crimes, right? No? Then it must be GoDaddy.com leading the charge to deny same-sex couples the right to marry. That’s not right either, is it? I got it: Cash4Gold is the company that advocates treating homosexuality as a disease.

No, it’s Focus on the Family that holds all of these positions, but you can bet they won’t be prominently featured during the spot. Instead they’re trotting out All-American Good Guy Tim Tebow to talk about values, family, puppy dogs and ice cream. Awwwww. If you want to get the full quotient of hate, you’ll have to visit their website for that.

So why is FOF joining all of these consumer products and services companies and dropping the gross domestic product of Guam on half a minute’s worth of airtime during the Super Bowl? I’m sure they think their message of intolerance and fundamentalist Christianity should be viewed by the widest audience possible, and since they have the resources, they have every right to secure that viewing. Right?

But honestly, does that message belong there? After all, CBS, which is broadcasting the big game this year, denied an ad by MoveOn.org in 2004 critical of then-president George W Bush. (That liberal media bias really is daunting, isn’t it?) Will it eventually become commonplace for organizations with political agendas to save the resources they might put into more constructive pursuits for an advertising nuclear option that, it should be noted, is entirely contingent upon football fans not getting up to get a beer at that exact moment?

Maybe FOF thinks it’s rallying its base, that Joe Sixpack is more likely to be watching the game on Sunday Feb. 7 than shopping at the Berkeley Co-Op. Maybe it’s some of the timely context they’ve been presented with, considering the ongoing challenge to Proposition 8 in California and today’s Supreme Court ruling that legitimizes corporate-funded political messages as free speech. But whatever their internal rationale may be, that message has no place on broadcast television.

Because of their intolerant, abhorrent agenda - and regardless of the actual content of the spot - FOF’s Super Bowl ad is more like one of the hate crimes they seem to want legalized and less like an expression of first amendment rights.

The best way to discourage groups like this, speaking as a viewer, is to make sure that their ad dollars go wasted. If they’re betting on a big audience for their message of intolerance, then don’t give it to them.

I imagine I’ll be up getting a drink when it airs, and I encourage everyone else to do the same.