After harping on how bad commercials have gotten over the years I came across this beauty by Cartier. Obviously it wouldn’t work well for television because it is over three minutes long, but who said that television is still the best medium for commercials? How many people shared the Old Spice commercials on YouTube vs those who just happened to be sitting down watching TV and caught them?
Commercials give you the chance to tell the story of your brand, instead of just being a fact sheet about your product. Don’t pretend to know what the customer wants by telling them. Let them get engaged with your brand and they will understand why they fit your brand. No brand works for everyone so stop with the generic advertising and create memorable advertising that everyone will love and the ones that get attached to your brand stay there for a while.
Companies still think that we take them seriously. They stick a ton of facts in their commercials that are supposed to make them sound different than the competition. Unfortunately they sound exactly like the competition. Old Spice commercials are different. They make you feel like you can hang with Old Spice. People want to be able to relate to a company and a product. It isn’t about celebrity endorsements are saying you have the exact same ingredients as the competition. It is about showing some personality. Not taking yourself so seriously that you seem distant.
We know you are a business out there trying to make money and that you are serious about your product, but that doesn’t mean you should bore us.
Dollar Shave Club nails this commercial on every level. They got a new member here.
When a company starts to lose its major battles, the truth often becomes the first casualty. CEOs and employees work tirelessly to develop creative narratives that help them avoid dealing with the obvious facts. Despite their intense creativity, many companies often end up with the exact same false explanations.
I’ve dealt with a lot of companies and this always seems to be a problem. I come in and see what is broken and what can be improved and when I bring these things to light, I get told about all the positives and that I need to focus on those. However, if something is broken then focusing in the other direction won’t make it better.
I understand when you are the owner of a business you want to focus on the positives and those should definitely be highlighted, but that doesn’t mean the positives shouldn’t shine brighter. Made $40 million last year? That’s great, but why didn’t you make $100 million? Finally launched your new product after 18 months of development? That’s great, but why didn’t you launch it in 6 months?
Maybe the problem is that we like to focus on the competition without realizing that the greatest competition should be against ourselves. If your company isn’t challenging itself to better and likes to only look at small little wins then it will continue to fall apart till eventually there is nothing left.
Don’t mistake negativity for reality. There are definitely some bad eggs in a company that only wish to focus on the negative without offering any solutions, but those that are able to highlight the areas that can be fixed shouldn’t be ignored.
When Square launched there was always a feeling that it was going to revolutionize the payment processing industry. Living in Los Angeles it is amazing to see how many small businesses use Square to accept payments and it makes perfect sense. It is easy to setup and you know exactly how much they are taking.
Not wanting to simply rest on their laurels, Square came out with Card Case. However, I always felt this could never take off until Square itself became ubiquitous. That might finally happen now with Square Register.
I love the fact that Square is starting with a core principle and every product they release follows that principle. Instead of going after every type of business they understand their market and are providing it with the tools necessary to succeed.
The worst thing that could happen to Square at this point is to get acquired.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers” and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t ow them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
I have been making money from advertising on the web for over eight years. I’ve always hated it. This year I have decided to stop. Drawar is the last place that will have advertising. Advertising doesn’t do much for the sites that I produce and I’m fairly certain it doesn’t do much for the advertisers on the site. It definitely doesn’t add much to the content of a site. It is just a lose-lose situation for everyone involved.
(If someone wants to throw their money away and give me a great sum of money for a tiny little ad space I would definitely think about it, but it wouldn’t ruin the experience on one of my sites.)
On other content sites advertisers have won. They control the content, they control the design and they control the experience. I wish it wasn’t like that, but people have to make a living and that is how they have decided to go about it. There is nothing wrong with that, but how does it help your business when you no longer control the experience?
Is your brand the brand that is known for doing great things or is it the brand that functions more like the classifieds? The companies that do 100% advertising haven’t really caught on either. There are better ways of pushing your brand out into the world. Advertising is a small part of it, but look at what Red Bull does. You wouldn’t even know they sell energy drinks if you looked at their website. It is all about a lifestyle that includes sports, music and entertainment. Red Bull has transformed itself into a lifestyle brand and people love it.
Advertising should only play a small part in getting your brand out into the world. Stop thinking that you have to advertise to be successful. If you are in charge of advertising think about how much you ignore advertising everyday and then put yourself in the shoes of the people you hope will click on one of your random ads on a site where they are just going to read.
This is what the President of Dell’s enterprise solution group recently said (excuse the link to a craptastic website with a craptastic popup ad and no way to copy & paste text without getting some other crappy content you weren’t trying to receive). What a shame. Not because the are out of the PC business, but a change to send a real message to your company about the future. Who wants to work for a company where their core message is ‘we are an IT company’? It happens every year. A company has to turn itself around and realign with the future, but instead of trying to shape its core, they reshape the easy superficial stuff.
What if he had said that they are no longer a PC company, but a company that is making business technology invisible? A company that makes it so technology doesn’t get in the way of doing business. A company that creates technology that allows you to get back to enjoying your work instead of dreading having to configure a new network router? This kind of message can last forever and set the tone for the future. Once you have that core purpose you never have to change it again. You simply have to make sure that you never veer far from it.
Instead, their core purpose is that they are an IT company. Tomorrow they can say they are a tire company and it wouldn’t change much of anything.
To understand the core of a company you usually don’t have to look any further than the person who started it. The company takes on the traits that they most admire and it grows from there. With Microsoft the core was building software and development tools. That is what Bill Gates loved to do and so the core of the company started around that base. Bill Gates didn’t have a deep interest in aesthetics and how great design goes beyond just how something works and because of this we got the Microsoft software that we have all become accustomed to over the decades.
While each new version of Windows (with the exception of Bob) brought on new UI improvements, they were usually incremental and didn’t really mean that Microsoft had taken design seriously. Apple changed that game for a lot of companies who now wanted to make products that offered great designs, but didn’t necessarily think that they needed to infuse design into the core of their companies.
This video showcases the new Windows Phone 7.5 UI. There are some great things happening with this OS, but people already have the Windows brand associated with bloated software that they use at work. Simply releasing a phone with a new OS doesn’t change the public’s perspective or more importantly the perspective of individuals inside the company. If you can’t convince the people in a company about how design should run through everything that they do, then it won’t matter much with the products that you release to the public.
When the competition starts to outperform you, then often you find ways you can copy them. Apple copies just as much as other companies, but they are able to put their own spin on things and frame it as their innovation. Some people hate it, while others don’t really care as long as they get to use the innovation on an Apple product. When Microsoft has to copy though, you rarely feel that they put their own spin on things. Same goes with Samsung. The problem is that you can’t just copy another product and spin it off as your own and consider a success, your company has to change as well and that isn’t easy.
Google seems to be going through the same design challenges as well with all of their software, but it is apparent that design still isn’t king there. Instead, the people understand that great design can go a long way and having a unified design language makes it easier on the people that have to use your software, but the designs at Google are only meant to look better. They certainly don’t work better.
When you place design at the core of a company you will find that products marry design and engineering in perfect harmony. Steve Jobs famously said that design is “how something works”, and that is true. What people often forget is that how something looks plays a huge role in how people use it and great designs that can make something look great and easy to use only happen when design is at the core of the decision-making.
The Uglies
Craigslist. eBay. The local deli and their ugly sign. These are examples that people like to bring up all the time about companies that didn’t put design at their core and still succeeded. Craigslist and eBay occurred before design was really brought into the public conscience and the local deli is trusted as a purveyor of fine meats. Start these companies today and give them their current looks and I doubt their success would go very far.
You can build short term success without having design at your core, but for longevity design is needed. We live in a design culture now, one where people expect their technology to work the way Apple makes it work for them. We want our apps to look and function like Instagram, Path, and Clear.
We want great design in every experience with a company that we have, whether it is opening a package, dealing with customer service or having to recycle the old product. This means that design needs to get a seat a the big table and be allowed to make some of the key decisions. There are deep costs associated with having to make the changes necessary to get design at the core of a company and to get everyone understanding its importance, but if you care more about the longevity of a company than the short term profits then you should have no problem making the move.
I came across this video today and didn’t even notice the Dell logo on the page until about a minute in. I found it curious that Dell was taking a stab at the creative realm, one that many people feel Apple owns. If there is a #1 there should be a #2 though right, so why shouldn’t it be Dell (hold your answers till after class)?
Towards the end when I finally realized this was a Dell spoof ad I figured the Dell brand would take a major hint. Then I thought about it over a tunafish sandwich and realized that it didn’t hurt the Dell brand at all. I didn’t think any worse of Dell than I do already and if anything the video made me think of Dell again which I haven’t in a very long time.
What does that say about your brand when a video that shows a fat guy farting particles of dust in the air doesn’t do any damage to it?
Some companies spend millions trying to develop a “brand”. Although this is almost impossible because the brand has already been established by that point, they will still keep on pushing. Once you are making millions you are spending money to maintain the brand and keep it out there in front of the public.
What if you are just starting off though? This is a great time because you can dictate how you think you want people to perceive your company. Tim Rogers loves video games. He loves them so much he writes a column on Kotaku about them. He decided to develop a game of his own and this video was the first chance I got to not only see the game, but also his personal brand and the brand of his company.
What a great video, right? I bought the game immediately after viewing it because I connected with the message and the brand. This video though set the tone for the brand of his company. The website for the game backs up the brand even more with just a crazy design. It isn’t the greatest design, but it enhances the brand that was created by the video. This consistency in branding will go a long way if Rogers decides to develop more games.
This hits home because there were many projects in the past that I wanted to get off the ground, but didn’t. When I tried to justify why things were happening I would come up with nothing, but excuses. When you want to do something there is usually very little to stop you. If you have five kids and a wife to take care of, then that might mean you give up an hour’s sleep in the morning to wake up and get something done.
You will find a way. Don’t think about how you can get it done in X amount of time, just think about how you can get it done at all. Time is not always something we can control, but we can control what we do. If you want it bad enough you will find a way.
