Ad Campaign Killed Following Feedback From CEO’s Wife’s Book Club.

Pictured above: Beth Clutterbuck’s Book Club eating chips, dip and passing judgement.

Production of a major advertising campaign was abruptly halted today following negative feedback from the CEO’s wife’s book club. Word came down at the start of day two of a three-day-shoot as the crew and ad agency gathered near the craft services truck to feast on breakfast burritos and kale smoothies.

The company’s CEO, Dwayne Clutterbuck, had just called with instructions to shut the commercial production down as a result of feedback he’d gotten from his wife Beth, and six others in her book club. Five of the six book club attendees had made negative comments about the advertising campaign after hearing it described by Ms. Clutterbuck while they were waiting for Margie and Dale to get back from the bathroom.

Clutterbuck’s company, Clean GreenTopia, had spent nearly four months, and invested more than $250,000 in consumer research for the ad campaign. But the random musings of six, mildly-intoxicated people who are not in the target market really made Clutterbuck rethink his marketing team’s approach.

“When you get a perspective of people that aren’t actually seeing the finished campaign but are reacting to one person’s third-party description of what she kind of remembers the campaign to be, you have to take it seriously,” said Clutterbuck. 

The book club attendees spent a full 15 minutes dissecting Tara Westover’s best selling memoir, Educated, before conversation veered in another direction. “We were talking about her family’s tincture business, and this lead into a discussion of alternative wellness products, which then dissolved into us tearing apart Gwyneth Paltrow’s company Goop,” says Beth Clutterbuck. 

Three of the dozens of titles kind of talked about, but mostly glossed over in Beth Clutterbuck’s book club.

“It really is a stupid name for a company. But it also lead us into a bigger discussion about corporate responsibility. And, well, that’s when I mentioned Dwayne’s new global ad campaign for organic bleach.” 

Ms. Clutterbuck, initially gave the ad campaign idea the thumbs up, lauding its light-hearted and whimsical approach to dirty laundry.  However, when she explained the premise to the book club, they weren’t having it. “There is no place for humor when you’re dealing with the destruction of the planet.” said Kathy Taylor who is currently unemployed but took some marketing classes in college. “Why would you make light of something as serious as global warming?” she asked seemingly unaware the advertising campaign has nothing to do with climate change.

After processing their feedback, Mr. Clutterbuck became concerned that the professionals he’d put on the project, who had nearly 500 years of marketing experience between them, just didn’t get it. “Sometimes you have to question people who do advertising and marketing campaigns for a living and go with the gut instincts of people who consistently offer opinions on things they know little about.”

The book club attendees, who meet quarterly, have two master's degrees in art history, a PHD in French cuisine and a certificate in canine grooming among them. Along with global marketing decisions, the group regularly advises the Clutterbucks on topics ranging from vacation destinations, gluten free restaurant options, or what to do when your child gets lice.

With regards to the latest digital marketing debacle, the group advised Clutterbuck to keep it simple. “Don’t waste time being clever or funny. When people want humor, they can watch a funny movie. When they want bleach, they just want to know how the manufacturing process affects our carbon footprint,” said Jill Friedlander, the one in the club that never bothers to read the book. 

Anita Milton also voiced concern. “There’s too much money influencing our kids today. Corporations need to do a better job of focusing on responsible practices,” she explained without offering details on what her gripe has to do with a bleach commercial. 

The one dissenter was Janelle Patterson. She actually thought the ad campaign was memorable and effective. “I thought it was hysterical,” says Patterson. “It made a boring product feel hip and cool.” 

At press time, there were unconfirmed reports that Patterson would not be invited back for next quarter’s book, Where the Crawdads Sing.

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The Small Agency Blog is produced by Division of Labor; a top San Francisco ad agency and digital marketing firm that’s been named Small Agency of the Year twice by Ad Age. The award-winning creative shop services clients on a retainer or project basis. They also offer brand consulting services and hourly engagements for startups and smaller brands. Click here for a free consultation.

Long before Nike, there was Krazy Kaplan

Division of Labor is closing up shop for the Fourth of July. Like most of you, we’re taking a break from brand launches, digital marketing campaigns, and media strategies to instead celebrate this country and our freedom.

And as I will be traveling to the Midwest to spend time with family, it got me thinking about the face of the Fourth of July in the Midwest. Not Uncle Sam. Not a Yankee Doodle Dandy. But a deranged looking cartoon character called, Krazy Kaplan.

Krazy Kaplan Billboards line the highways of Illinois, Michigan and Indiana. And growing up, Krazy Kaplan got us kids all excited to blow our fingers off. Krazy Kaplan’s outdoor boards have endured for decades. Nothing clever. No smart writing or design and certainly Krazy Kaplan isn’t spending $700 per entry to try to win a Cannes Lion. But these sons of bitches have sure sold a lot of fireworks over the years. And while I can’t recall the names of any of my children’s grade school teachers, I sure as hell remember that Krazy Kaplans is conveniently located just across the Illinois border in Hammond, Indiana. And it’s the go-to store for all my fourth of July fireworks needs.

And it appears Krazy Kaplans has expanded their inventory since I was a kid. They now apply that same marketing strategy - buy one get six free - to their artillery shell selection. The maiming possibilities are endless. Happy Fourth of July to everyone. Take time off and savor the day.

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The Small Agency Blog is produced by Division of Labor; a top San Francisco ad agency and digital marketing firm that’s been named Small Agency of the Year twice by Ad Age. The award-winning creative shop services clients on a retainer or project basis. They also offers brand consulting services and hourly engagements for startups and smaller brands. Click here for a free consultation.

An All-In-One Marketing Kit For Startups

No one needs great branding more than a startup. But too often, startup companies have startup budgets. Since the day Division of Labor opened its doors, we’ve had a steady stream of requests from startups in this exact position. VC funding, but never enough.

So we got to thinking; we’re a boutique creative agency, designed to run lean and churn out the best advertising on the West Coast without sticking clients with huge markups to cover overhead. If we got even more efficient and had clients willing to do the same, we could serve startups in the early phases of funding, which is, in actuality, the ideal time to build a brand.

So, after numerous internal discussions and an equal amount of time spent crunching the numbers, Division of Labor developed a strategy which we believe can bridge the gap between the marketing needs of small companies and that irritant, reality.

We call it “The Start-Up Marketing Kit”. For a flat fee of $35,000 (a pittance compared with typical full-service agency fees)  Division of Labor now provides start-ups with the basic necessities of a successful brand launch without the commitment of a long-term agency contract.  

The Start-Up Marketing Kit includes the following:

1) A Brand Manifesto. We start by developing a strategic positioning. We determine what you stand for and what you stand against. Then we craft the story of why you exist. A Mission statement is a rational document. A manifesto is the emotional story that brings the mission to life.

2) A Clear target. Who are you talking to? Not a demographic, a personality type that will embrace why you exist and want what you’re selling. We use Simmons proprietary research and our strategy group to isolate the target audience.

3) Home Page Story and Design. We bring the mission and manifesto to life with a simple, singular statement and design that greets everyone who comes to your site. We write and design a home page and secondary pages.

4) Social Media Assets. This is the start of advertising and what takes your message to the world. At a minimum, you’ll do social media marketing. You need a simple campaign that gets your product and message out there. We create executions for LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

5) Video. People want video more than anything else. Your video should celebrate why you exist and introduce what your product does. It should live on your homepage and be sent out via social media platforms as a promotion. We write and storyboard a video and prepare it for production.

And, of course, clients always have the option of adding additional pieces, including logo design, digital advertising, integrated advertising, TV, Radio, outdoor, design, media planning, and video production. Division of Labor recognizes that the idea of a set price for engagement is a bit unconventional. But we see it as a long-term investment. We give clients everything they need to get started with the assumption that when they get that VC cash infusion, they’ll remember who helped them in the early days and will re-engage for the Super Bowl commercial. Click here to learn more.

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The Small Agency Blog is produced by Division of Labor; a top West Coast advertising agency and digital marketing firm that’s been named Small Agency of the Year twice by Ad Age. The award-winning creative shop services clients on a retainer or project basis. And also offers brand consulting services and hourly engagements for startups and brands interested in testing new ideas, but who aren’t quite ready to invest in an integrated campaign or media spend. We can assist with brand strategy, brand voice, early stage asset development, video creation and other communications to get things up and running without busting your budget. Click here for a free consultation.

Five Things Every Start-Up Marketing Campaign Must Do (But Often Don't)

Marketing blog posts usually talk about the importance of data, analytics, measurement and all the logical, basics that young MBAs focus on for a successful marketing campaign. But targeting, tracking, optimizing and measuring aren’t the differentiators. They’re the basic nuts and bolts of a marketing campaign that everyone should be doing. What most people, amazingly, ignore is the message.

What are you gonna do to make people pay attention? Why should anyone give a crap? How are you gonna make people have an emotional connection to your brand or product? If your campaign doesn’t have a strong point of view that makes people feel something, you’ll have to spend exponentially more money forcing a bland message down people’s throats. So use the data and analytics and optimize the hell out of your campaign. But make sure you do something that can’t be ignored. A few thoughts on how to go about that.

1. If You’re Not Offending Someone, You’re Boring Everyone

Muslims, Jews, Catholics, African Americans, Asians, Christians, Latinos, white people, homosexuals, heterosexuals, PETA, the elderly, conservatives, the NRA, the NAACP, smelly hippies, trailer-trash, the Amish, private militias, people with chronic foot odor—anyone on this list might be offended if they’re mentioned in an ad. Yet someone left off this list may be offended if they were omitted. Put a kid in a wheelchair in your ad and you’re pandering. Don’t show a kid in a wheelchair and you’re ignoring the handicapped. Use the word handicapped and you’re an insensitive boob. Use the term challenged and you’re insulting. That’s the way it is. If you have a point of view, and you get a lot of attention, you’re gonna offend someone.

We once did a radio commercial for a power company in Chicago about proper insulation to stay warm. And we made some joke about how heavy wool sweaters are itchy. Seemed innocuous enough. Until our client received a terse letter from the Wool Council suggesting our ad was misleading and offensive as only poor quality wool is itchy. They asked that we stop running it and blah blah blah. But if our radio commercial motivated a wool lobbyist to write a letter, I’ll tally that as a win for my client. It’s proof that our message is getting noticed. So don’t be so bland that no one even notices you. Also, when the wool lobbyist complains, post their comments proudly on your social media feed.

2.  Knock Off a Few Liquor Stores While Plotting the Perfect Diamond Heist

Like any smart entrepreneur knows, great is the enemy of good. Because if you wait for things to be perfect, you’ve waited too long. Same goes with marketing. Quit pondering and testing your way toward never actually doing anything. Who cares if you’re gonna change your brand colors in six months. Do something! Rather, than spending months and months on focus groups “testing” ideas, get things out into the ethos, monitor success, and tweak as necessary. Instead, combine research and instinct to choose a campaign most likely to resonate with your audience and roll the campaign out in a test market. Then use the feedback to plan next steps, knowing that the data you’ve gleaned is far more valuable than anything you’d extrapolate from a focus group.

3. Drop a Bomb in the Room and Then Throw in a Bunch of Leaflets

This is our somewhat politically incorrect philosophy: Drop a bomb, meaning do something big that gets a shit-ton of attention (yes, that’s a technical term) and then follow up with rational product messages after people are curious. Brands need both emotional and rational messages.

The job of your advertising is not just to explain how your product works. Saying a lot of things that matter to you will not make those things matter to others. Because no one makes rational purchase decisions. We all make emotional decisions and justify them with rational thinking.

Think of the two most important purchase decisions you’ve ever made: your house and your car. The average person looks at the house they buy 1.5 times and spends less than an hour there. There’s nothing rational about that. You fall in love with the view or the pizza oven and then you rationalize the purchase by saying, it’s in a good school district or the kids’ rooms are close to ours, or whatever.

Same with your car. If you were being rational when buying a car, you’d buy the most economical, safest vehicle to transport you from point A to point B. But you’ve convinced yourself that a BMW handles better and performs better. Even though if we took the badge off the front, you couldn’t tell the difference between a loaded Hyundai, Ford Fusion or a BMW. (And please don’t write me letters BMW fans. I know you could tell by the tight suspension and that BMW engine growl. Whatever.)

The point is, we fall in love with what the brand stands for and then we rationalize all the reasons it’s a “better” car for us. Same with every purchase we make. Emotions like love, envy, pride, and vanity are the driving forces of our existence. It’s what makes us human. So when it comes to vetting the perfect ad campaign, make sure people will fall in love with it or shed a tear or bust a gut laughing or say, “I totally do that!” Or, just make sure they want to wear your logo on a T-Shirt. Because, well,  there is nothing rational about wearing a logo on a T-Shirt, and yet it’s probably the most popular piece of clothing in the world today.

4. Quit Worrying So Much About Insulting the Customer

I hear this all the time from marketing people as if there’s a subsection of executives who actually want to insult their customers. Marketing people who overthink customer reactions operate from a position of fear. They think that if a person in their commercial or video is the butt of a joke or looks foolish, that equates to “making fun of our customers.” But, in actuality, people watching the commercial or video do not see themselves as the person in the commercial—unless they want to be that person. If the person is cool or smart or sexy or looks good in those jeans, they might picture themselves as that person. If it’s funny and the person in the commercial is made to look the fool, the viewer does not think, “That buffoon in the commercial is me and they’re making fun of me.” So, if you’re gonna make a joke, there has to be a butt of a joke. All your favorite commercials show people acting foolish, being made fun of and looking like buffoons. That’s why you like them. Because those people are NOT you.

5. Know Your Bedfellows

Analytics and data do a great job of tracking your target around the web. Retargeting allows us to follow people where they go and get our message in front of them. But that’s a big problem. The data doesn’t think or feel. It just follows. So if your target goes to an extreme political website or porn site or another site whose values are inconsistent with that of your brand, your ad goes there too.  So talk to your media company to target safe sites, generally denoted as whitelist sites. And follow @sleepinggiants. They follow extremist websites and let brands know when they’re appearing on the sites without their knowledge. Full disclosure: @sleepinggiants targets Breitbart and helped reduce their ad revenue by nearly 90%. So if you’re a Breitbart fan, this is probably where we part ways.

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The Small Agency Blog is produced by Division of Labor; a top West Coast advertising agency and digital marketing firm that’s been named Small Agency of the Year twice by Ad Age. The award-winning creative shop services clients on a retainer or project basis. And also offers brand consulting services and hourly engagements for startups and brands interested in testing new ideas, but who aren’t quite ready to invest in an integrated campaign or media spend. We can assist with brand strategy, brand voice, early stage asset development, video creation and other communications to get things up and running without busting your budget. Click here for a free consultation.

Brand Loyalty: a Marketing Case Study.

Marketing agencies are always trying to encourage brand loyalty. But the smart ones are also thinking about reciprocating brand loyalty. In other words, if you want people to love and embrace your brand, how do you give away and engrain your brand into people’s lives?  

The San Jose Sharks have some of the most loyal fans in the NHL. They love the players and the organization and the passion the Sharks have brought to San Jose since 1991. So as the San Jose Sharks marketing agency, we at Division of Labor thought about how we could be even more loyal to those most loyal to us.

Fans already spend a lot of money on tickets and jerseys and swag. But there’s an even more passionate group of fans that have taken our Sharks for Life mantra to the literal level. The number of fans with Sharks tattoos is amazing and humbling and a beautiful sign of loyalty. It’s the kind of thing that makes the players want to win it all for this town more than anything.

So earlier in the season, we came up with the idea to give away free Sharks tattoos to fans. We’d already encouraged fans to paint their houses teal (Teal Houses of Sharks Territory) and we expanded that to create the Teal Cars of Sharks Territory. But giving away free tattoos? We weren’t sure how that would go over.

But the Sharks loved the idea. They embraced it immediately and knew they had to make it happen, the question was how and when? We wanted to bring artists into a suite and have them ink fans while they were watching a game. But that proved logistically difficult. So we developed a digital marketing plan around the playoffs.

The plan: We partnered with three local San Jose Tattoo Shops to give away free sharks tattoos during each away game of the Western Conference Finals. The first 40 fans to show up at the designated shop will get to choose one of six sharks designs. Of course, we couldn’t execute the idea until we made it past the second round. But we still had to prepare.

So we created social marketing assets that encouraged fans to gather at a pre-game street rally before game five of the second round. We brought a crew down to film fans already inked with Sharks tattoos who wanted to tell their stories. The response was incredible. In less than 2 hours, we rounded up 22 fans willing to share their Sharks ink with the world. And after Joe Pavelski’s triumphant game 7 against the Avalanche, we were off. The digital video went out onto Sharks social channels along with some digital display network ads and, as expected, the press got hold of it.

We are still 48 hours away from the first tattoo shop giveaway and already garnering lots of free, positive publicity for the team, including this story by Kron News.

Certainly, not every brand has the kind of fans as loyal as the Sharks organizations. But, no matter the product, thinking about how you can give loyalty while you get loyalty is a worthwhile, but shockingly underutilized marketing strategy.

If you’d like to talk about more advertising stuff, contact us here. If you’re a rabid Sharks fan ready to get inked, click here.

The Small Agency Blog is produced by Division of Labor; a top West Coast advertising agency and digital marketing firm that’s been named Small Agency of the Year twice by Ad Age. The award-winning creative shop services clients on a retainer or project basis. And also offers brand consulting services and hourly engagements for startups and brands interested in testing new ideas, but who aren’t quite ready to invest in an integrated campaign or media spend. We can assist with brand strategy, brand voice, early stage asset development, video creation and other communications to get things up and running without busting your budget. Click here for a free consultation.