Seeking Truths in Marketing

Silicon Hutong Table, Peters Tex-Mex Grill

Experiencing Tryptophan Withdrawal

12:22 hrs.

Despite valiant efforts to convince ourselves otherwise, it is a truism that the marketing and communications crafts have lost their way after a decade-long deluge of online media. We put on a brave face in public, but in truth we have been attempting to deal with an entirely new phenomenon with old tools.

I am on the verge of taking a six-month semi-sabbatical in 2010 to read, write, and blog about this issue and what it means in the context of the rise of Asia generally and China specifically. Frustrated by the often soporific, wishful, It's Going to Be Okay As Long As We Buy 20% More Display Ads This Year thinking that passes for futurism in our business, I have started to prepare by going back to the seminal thinking that laid the groundwork for modern marketing and communications. I figure this is a safe bet, based in part on my status as an amateur historian, and in part on my wife's success as an Neo-Grahamian value investor.

My first three stops in the process are David Ogilvy's Ogilvy on Advertising, Claude Hawkins' Scientific Advertising, (Ogilvy based a lot of his approach on Hawkins' work), and, somewhat closer to home for a corporate communicator, Edward Bernays' superior Propaganda.

Full disclosure: I am an advertising skeptic (too much push in the way it is practiced today), and a public relations skeptic (too much spin, not enough conversation), but I think the issue is more in how these tools are practiced and the belief systems that have built up around them than in the crafts themselves. In Tim Burton's Batman, the Joker famously proclaims of Gotham "this town needs an enema." He could just as well been strolling up Madison Avenue.  

So I hunt for the grains of truth supporting the ziggurats of a decaying industry.

I've just finished Bernays for the second time (a simple feat - Bernays was so pithy that his work disappears on my bookshelf twixt weighter tomes), and I explained what I thought was one of his enduring truths in an OpEd in Media Asia: The public relations industry has become the captive of its tactics, bastions of execution that have either forgotten how to be counselors on business conduct or who have blown whatever credibility they may have once had in that role.

And China, where the industry has an opportunity to start with something of a blank slate, we are off to a tough start. Execution is wonderful, but we are all too often either swimming in a sea of spin or we are reduced to wrangling reporters.

The other two works are somewhat harder going, for me, anyway. David Ogilvy was the quintessential (M)Ad Man, and his prose carries the assurance of a man offering a service for which the need is a given. Hawkins is somewhat better, but the matter of advertising is a matter of "how" rather than "if."

Yet good things surface. Ogilvy assumed pandemic attention-deficit disorder in his audiences, and he built his craft firm in the conviction that people had to be convinced to care. This seems self-evident, but it is too often forgotten in China. How, after all, are we to convince anyone of anything with a commercial that lasts less time than it takes us to read a headline?

To me, banner ads, search ads, and meat-grinder public relations that counts clippings from China's content-xerox websites too often assume the audience cares. 

Something is wrong, and so many of us know it. If we are ever going to have the cojones to do something about it, we need to begin by calling bulls**t on ourselves.

Comments

[Adam Daniel Mezei]

Hi D,

As usual, you zero in on the target and ready, aim, fire. Well said.

During our recent trip to CN, we also (deliberately) spent a considerable number of nights sitting in front of the boobtube if only to get a sense of these mercurial commercials (spot on description of yours, by the way!). I admire this methodology you've proposed...of going back to the "classics" of the trade -- old school-like -- in order to suss out some sort of meaning for where we might have gone wrong.

In terms of present strategies, I think streaming video in China is so poorly utilized. With all of the competing video hosting sites in the PRC, you'd think there'd be more of this sort of activity, but alas no (not even going to delve into the GFW debate, but imagine if a global rollout strategy for MNC advertisers and the like could also include China?). "Chinese don't go online to buy," one Old Hand told us. "They use the net to be entertained." Thoughts?

And like one intrepid European SME investor I'd met recently in Shanghai told me: "If only someone could come up with a savvy app for micropayments." Continuing, he laid out his vision: imagine if $0.05 and $0.10 payments could be processed at the touch of a button (no registration, no lengthy approvals, no PayPal-esque oversight to gum up the works), and what this might entail for societies for which fractional amounts such as these made a difference? Think about it...

If you're planning on writing something with some serious cojones, count me in for a proofread. I'd be honored to.

Book Suggestion: Have you read Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel?" Now that's something I'd like your take on (guilty admission, I snagged my copy off a wickedly diverse Shanghai Subway shanzai dealer. What an assortment he had -- I end up coming back to Europe with more than a dozen books! What's my damage?)

[David]

Adam, you never seem to open a can of worms when you can open a case. Your comment will provoke a series of posts rather than an overlong comment, but a couple of things need immediate attention:

Be ever wary of blanket pronouncements about the Chinese by Old China Hands (this one included) and by Chinese "experts." If Chinese don't go online to buy, who is spending US$20 billion on AliPay? Foreign students? Horsefeathers: e-commerce in China lags the rest of the world for many reasons (and I've covered a few of them here), but to suggest that Chinese don't buy stuff online is both a canard today and a failure to read the signs of where things are headed.

As to the matter of micropayments, I think your investor friend is serving up a platter of red herring. The mechanisms to enable micropayments are in place, even in China (the mobile phone is a superb enabling device, for example.) But until consumers want or need micropayments for something they cannot get for free or as a part of a subscriptions service otherwise, micro-payments won't happen.

Thanks for the book suggestion: both of Diamond's recent works - "Guns, Germs, and Steel," and "Collapse" (legit copies) sit on my bookshelf demanding my attention, which they'll get soon. I am tempted, though, to read Alfred Crosby's "Ecological Imperialism" first, as there have been suggestions that Diamond derives much, er, inspiration from Crosby's writings.