They’rrre GR-R-REATLY Boring

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It’s 6:30am and my alarm goes off. By alarm, I mean my mother telling me to get up. “It’s time to get ready for school,” she says. “I laid out your favorite Zubaz pants.” (Kidding about that, kind of…) Then she’d leave my room to continue preparing breakfast, and probably hoping that I’m not going to snooze her for another 5 minutes. While lying in bed, teetering between dreams and reality, sometimes the only motivation I had for facing another day of Mrs. Hansen’s 3rd grade boot camp was the bowl of cereal waiting for me downstairs.

Cereal used to be much more of an experience than it is today, and of course much more of a sugar-infused experience as well. Whether it was puffed, frosted, looped or marshmallowed, it was all the same fuel of empty calories that prepared us kids for a long day at school. But there was more to kids cereal than just bright colors and a sugary taste, there was the enchanting “back of the box.”

I remember just getting lost in the back of the box. Oftentimes cereals would have an intricate, Where’s-Waldo-esque scene on the back, and I’d chomp away while admiring the cartoon fantasy land that I desperately wished I could visit in real life. The back of the box always coordinated with the cereal’s theme too.

In addition to your standard cereal mascots, there was a cereal for just about every lovable character in pop culture – E.T., Slimer, Gizmo, even Steve Urkel. And although it was clearly “evil” marketers just trying to get my mom to buy their brand, I didn’t care, and still don’t. I’d totally buy cereals based on some of my favorite things today – Frosted Beerios, Professor Blastoff’s Podcast Pops, Micachu and The Sugar Shapes, C3PO’s – wait, that actually existed…

Once the box started feeling light, you knew that any day a toy would pour out with the final bowl of cereal. Sometimes if you were too impatient, you might force-feed yourself just so you could get to that toy. And whether it was a little dinosaur, a toy car or one of those parachute guys you could throw out a window, a fight between my brothers and I over who gets the toy would inevitably ensue at the breakfast table, to the point where we had to take turns claiming ownership. (Josh always got the best ones, no fair…) Today it’s a lot harder to get away with throwing a toy in with food, because apparently kids will eat and choke on everything.

Walking down the cereal aisle now, there are few pop culture tie-ins, no fun fantasy lands and hardly any “FREE INSIDEs,” only “Whole Grains!,” “Zero Sugars!” and boxes with computer-generated graphics (which somehow removes the warmth), directing you to go online to join some lame cereal community or to play some mundane online game.

Of course we want our kids to eat healthy and to avoid choking-hazards, but nonetheless, cereal has lost its fun and pizazz. There is no flare, no spark, just a grocery aisle that is the result of years of regulations and consumer complaints. The cereal world that I once visited every day is long gone, and to me, it’s a tragedy.

- Andrew

The Lost Lesson Plan: Stuff They Don’t Teach You In Ad School Part I

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School can only prepare you for so much in advertising. Some things you just can’t teach, lessons better learned in the school of hard knocks. Since I graduated and entered the ad world, I’ve picked up on a lot of things they don’t tell you about in school, or things I wish I had known. Here are those observations.

1. The Creative Department Is Nothing Like Don Draper’s – Going into the creative side of advertising may seem like the most fun and glamorous choice. You stumble into work at 8:30 or 9 in the morning wearing jeans and a wrinkled t-shirt because you’re creative like that. Then you effortlessly spout out a few genius ideas with a Starbucks in one hand and an iPad in the other, clear a spot on your desk for your future ADDY awards, then spend the rest of the day tweeting and palling around with your fellow creatives, right?

Wrong. You come in on time, appropriately dressed, and you work hard. You have to. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you never stop working. The creative process is fickle. You can’t limit your thinking to Monday through Friday 8 to 5. And chances are you’ll have to weed through 100 ideas before finding one halfway worth presenting to your creative director. It’s a very rewarding and enjoyable career path indeed, but it’s not Mad Men.

2. Media Buying Is Totally Killer – You may be under the impression that media buying is the stuffy, quiet side of advertising, (“It’s something to do with numbers right?”), and it doesn’t offer the kind of glory that creative offers – couldn’t be farther from the truth.

First of all, elements of creativity definitely go into buying and planning. It would be hard to deliver higher GRPs on a smaller budget than the previous year without using a little creativity. Also, deciding on what mediums to place the advertising takes plenty of ingenuity.

Secondly, media buying is a HUGE part of an agency’s services. In school I didn’t realize how important it really is, not only to the agency but to the client. There is a substantial demand for media buying services too. We have 11 employees and three are media buyers.

Also, buyers get majorly brown-nosed by their media reps. I’m talking lunches, gift baskets, snacks galore (especially during the Holidays), sometimes even free vacations. Lucky for us, our media buyers share their bounty. Well, just the goodies. It’d be weird if I went to lunch with Carol and one of her media reps, chomping away as they discuss business. “(Smack Smack) Can you pass the ketchup?”

3. Your Time Card Is Always Watching – Before going into advertising I had no idea that there was this thing called a time card. It keeps track of the billable hours you spend working on projects so your agency can make money so YOU can get paid, but indirectly it’s kind of a babysitter that makes sure you’re not misbehaving.

Every single day, by minimum increments of 15 minutes, you have to record the projects you worked on (using job numbers) along with the specific task you were performing with that project (copywriting, research, etc.) known as a function code. Since I work on a lot of different projects, I am constantly updating my time card throughout the day. And in a way, this ensures that I stay on task. I’m pretty sure there’s not a function code for “Fartin’ around on YouTube.”

By no means did these revelations affect my attitude about going into advertising; in fact, they’ve probably enhanced it. But they contribute to what I think is one of the most important lessons of all, and that is that you should never have expectations or pre-conceived notions in advertising. Chances are you’ll be disappointed. If advertising is anything, it’s unpredictable, and that’s what makes it so exciting.

- Andrew

My High School Failure

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When I was in high school way back in the turbulent 1980s, like most teenage boys I knew everything. Or at least I thought I did. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t a good student, it just means I was smart enough to know what I needed to study, and what I thought I could coast through.

Math, grammar, history and science all fell into my “I should learn that” category. Music, art, speech, French and theater fell into the “I want to know that” group. Then there were the things I thought “I don’t need to know that.” At the top of that list was typing class.

Here was my thinking, and I know it was chauvinist and misogynistic, but I was 15, so give me a little slack. I knew I was going to grow up and become an important business man; well-respected, highly paid, and most importantly, I would have a lovely secretary sitting just outside my office, ready to type up any letters I might need. Why would I need to know how to operate an IBM Selectric with a piece of paper over my hands? That was clearly a skill I would not need. Right there on the list with square-dancing and small engine repair, I would not need these skills later in life.

Jump ahead a few years and I found myself in college hunting and pecking my way through philosophy essays. Jump again to my first job out of college, I was writing letters and memos and client call reports with the hunt and peck method on, you guessed it, an IBM Selectric.

Within a few years I had a personal computer on my desk. Then add a laptop, a smartphone and an iPad and I spend eight, ten, maybe fourteen hours a day with some form of keyboard in front of me. I guess I should have listened to Mrs. Kincheloe and learned proper posture, where all of the keys are at and what a QWERTY is, but I didn’t. Damn hindsight!

Now I see these young people who can type without looking at their fingers and I am filled with envy. By the way, this post took me twenty minutes to write, but three and half hours to type. Thank God for spell check or I wouldn’t be done yet.

- Jim

134 Minutes as Jim Mathis

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Not often you can justify spending several hours on a Saturday staring listlessly at the SyFy channel watching alien movie marathons, but all that time watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers proved its worth in 134 minutes. My 134 minutes as Jim Mathis.

I headed off to the South Dakota AdFed Chili Cook Off Contest last Thursday. With my bald cap in place (I couldn’t summon the courage to Britney Spears it and just bic my hair), vogue sweater vest (several sizes too big, stolen from the bottom of my husband’s closet, but still as sartorial as Ric Santorum or Ryan Tysdal) and big bowl of chili, the pot brimming with pork perfection, I set out to be Jim’s culinary copy, his sarcastic sous chef stand-in sans several inches. And in that two and almost a quarter hours, I realized pitching Three LIttle Pigs chili should be served with the same zest you pitch a client. Not everyone likes pork, just like not every client likes the creative we may pitch. But sometimes it’s just a bad taste from a mom who over-peppered pork chops, so a nibble or new presentation, makes it palatable.

When it comes to the recipe, remember the rules but add your own spice. The chili I dished up took a twist on the traditional, not just using so much pork you needed to do some extra push ups to pull the spoon up, but putting in that little extra (and no, not love… in this case, bacon, which is probably about the same thing). When working on projects, time-tested ideas can always work, but when we remember to make it just a little different, those ideas stand out from the others.

Did we win? No, tied for second. But the biggest lesson is, in the end you just need to be you. So while I spent 134 minutes as Jim Mathis, that time quickly came to an end when I ran into the gas station, bald cap burgeoning from the top of my head, and scared a small child. Probably best to stick to being a blonde with mediocre kitchen skills.

- Jolene

The Elusive Perfect Ad

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Some say it doesn’t exist. Others blindly believe. Me? I was hopeful, but just didn’t know for sure, until I had a sighting the other day.

I was driving home from work one night, ear buds plugged in and listening to one of my favorite comedy podcasts Professor Blastoff, when all of a sudden an ad came on. It was a short, quirky-funny Old Spice ad, done in a style of humor that tickled me perfectly. Majestic and awe-inspiring, I literally laughed out loud (LLOL) then listened to it again. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the spot ever since; it just stuck with me. I guess that’s the power of the elusive perfect ad.

I’ve been a long-time fan of Professor Blastoff and have never heard any actual advertisements on the show, other than the hosts occasionally endorsing things like audible.com, but never anything product-related, nor anything that’s been professionally produced by brands, so I didn’t even expect it.

In my opinion, this was a perfect ad. The message was genuinely entertaining, and it reached me in a moment of zero clutter. Plus, after visiting the production company’s website (Earwolf) and looking at the “Advertise” section, I discovered that I fit into the surprisingly narrow demographic, so it was perfectly targeted. And most importantly, the ad led to a sale. After years of using the same deodorant, I finally upgraded.

Now the only problem is, I can hardly remember the spot anymore, and I don’t know what episode it was on. I have tons of Professor Blastoff episodes on my iPod; each is at least over an hour long. I fast-forwarded through a bunch of them but to no avail. I searched online and scoured the Old Spice website, nothing. I even tweeted @OldSpice and wrote on the Professor Blastoff Facebook page, no one answered.

In our world of ever-increasing media saturation and just plain bad advertising, this perfect ad is hard to come by. But it was refreshing to see that although elusive, it is still out there, that is, if my sighting was real. I’m halfway expecting Old Spice to respond to me with, “We don’t know what you’re talking about. We never ran an ad on Professor Blastoff.” And then creepy, mysterious music will play.

Maybe one day I’ll find this perfect ad again, but it really doesn’t matter, because now, I can say that I am a believer.

- Andrew

_ _ _R _ _ _ _ _ _

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The other night I was driving home on I-229, probably paying too much attention to the billboards, businesses and illuminated signs along the road. I couldn’t help but notice the number of businesses and buildings that had signs with burnt out letters. One in particular read “_ _ _R _ _   _ _ _ _” (or something like that; I just remember seeing a lonely lit “R”), on the side of a large building, probably retail of some sort.

If they just took care of their sign, I’d be able to tell you the name of their business, but instead, we’re left trying to play hangman. This is definitely one of the worst cases of sign-neglect I’ve seen.

They had one chance to tell me who they were as I zoomed by at 67 mph, and they screwed it up. And the neon red “R” sign immediately left me with all kinds of preconceptions about their company. Thoughts scrolled through my head as I continued home.

“Their merchandise is probably out-of-date and disorganized.” “Going inside would be like being in a Kmart. Eww.” “They definitely have a bunch of fax machines in there.” Then my imagination really started to run wild. “On the upside, maybe they sell fun obsolete technology that you can’t find anywhere else, like shoe phones or mini disc players, and not as a ‘retro’ gimmick, but because their building lies within a rip in space-time that has frozen them in a perpetual state of 1993.”

A consumer’s first impression of a business, whether it takes place online or on the street, is extremely important. Often-times signage is a part of that first impression. The sign can say a lot about a business, almost foreshadowing what kind of experience consumers may have if they come inside. So based on the sign “_ _ _R _ _   _ _ _ _,” what kind of shopping experience would you expect to have? It definitely would not be like a trip to the Mall of America; I can tell you that.

Letter burn-outs can also result in comical changes to the sign’s meaning. Here’s a bunch of unfortunately funny examples.

- Andrew

I Tried to Shop Local

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A few weeks ago I had decided to buy a new paella pan, thirteen inches of gleaming stainless steel. I had seen what I wanted at national kitchen stores like Sur La Table and Williams Sonoma in other cities, but since those stores don’t have outlets here in Sioux Falls I sought to find it locally.

My first stop was a downtown kitchen specialty store that sells the All-Clad brand I was looking for. They didn’t have it stock. No worries, if I can’t get it there, several national chains with stores here in town carry the brand, so I’ll try there. Alas, I struck out at Macy’s, Yonkers and Bed, Bath and Beyond.

So I went back to that small local retailer and asked if they could order it for me. I explained that I knew I could get it online but if I could support a local small business I would. They were my first choice. The woman at the counter took all of my contact information and carefully wrote down what I wanted and promised to pass it on to the store owner.

Two weeks passed and I hadn’t heard anything, so I stopped in the store again. The woman working knew who I was and she had heard them talking about my order but didn’t know the details. She again wrote down my contact info and promised to call me when the store owner arrived, which should only be a few minutes. About 4 hours later she called to tell me that they could order the pan, but it would take at least 3 to 6 weeks to arrive and they couldn’t really promise if I would get it even then. No thanks. I’ll get it somewhere else. So much for trying to shop local.

That afternoon I logged into the Zappo’s app on my iPad, typed a few words and a 13 inch All-Clad Stainless Steel Paella Pan was on its way to me.  That was on a Saturday afternoon. The product arrived at my office Monday afternoon. No charge for the shipping and I actually saved about 10% off the retail price.

So here’s my question, if you were that small retailer and you knew a good customer wanted something, and they preferred to buy it from you, why wouldn’t you do everything you could to get it for them? I think if I owned that little shop, I would have ordered it from Zappo’s, marked it up 10% (back to the regular retail price) and sold it the customer. But that’s just me. Trying to keep the customer satisfied.

If she had done that, this post would have been about how great her service was and I would have named her and her store. As it is, I’ll give the glory to Zappo’s.

- Jim

New ADwërker On the Block

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If you were to walk into ADwërks today, you’d be greeted by a new face at the front desk, and no, it’s not Andrew playing dress-up. The face’s name is LeAnn Erickson, and she’s our new Playground Monitor.

Playground Monitor is code for handling all those things we tend to think just magically happens, e.g. expense reports, filing, payroll, billing, and most importantly, keeping our snacks and beverages well-stocked! You don’t want to see Jim when he runs out of Diet Coke. So essentially, she’ll be making sure the office gears are turning in harmony.

LeAnn graduated from Augustana College with a BA in Communications, and brings a plethora of work experience to ADwërks including accounting, trafficking (at KSFY), and she even used to own and run a video production company with her husband. But perhaps the most interesting is LeAnn’s experience acting in CarHop commercials. About 12 years ago LeAnn’s husband produced a CarHop spot for ADwërks, and LeAnn and her daughter actually starred in the commercial!

LeAnn and her family (comprised of herself plus one husband and two daughters) live in Brandon, so she gets to commute to Sioux Falls every day. As a family, the Ericksons just like to spend quality time together, from shooting hoops, to baking cupcakes and cookies, to volunteering for their church.

We’re happy to call LeAnn an ADwërker; feel free to join us in welcoming her to the crew!

- ADwërks

Sticks and stones can’t break their bones, but words can hurt brands.

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In the past, if someone had a beef with a business, the worst they could do was to tell their friends and family about the horrible service at “Al’s Diner,” and maybe send a spiteful letter to Al. But now they can unleash their opinions and words of venom to the world through a never-ending list of business review sites, social media channels, forums etc., for all fellow consumers to read.

A major part of a brand’s identity comes from the way its consumers perceive it. And a part of the consumer’s perception of a brand is influenced by what other people are saying about it. In this Digital Age in which we are all connected, the modern consumer is capable of reaching a lot of people, potentially affecting their opinions, perspectives and feelings about a business.

When you think about it, that’s a lot of power, much more than consumers have ever had in the past, and both good and evil can come from that. As the old adage goes, with great power comes great responsibility.

I completely support the consumer’s right to be heard, as long as they’re honest and fair. The consumer voice of reason keeps businesses in line and helps them improve. It’s the unreasonable people that I have a problem with. It’s way too easy to turn on the laptop and rip a business a new one just because the cashier “looked at you wrong.”

We may assume that our lone little rants, out there amongst thousands of others, don’t have an impact, but they do. They’re out there for the world to see. Whether just one reader or 1,000 readers stumble across the consumer review, it has the potential to affect people’s perception of the brand. And if the review is unfair, irrational, unnecessarily mean, or a flat out lie, then that’s not fair to the business (no matter how big or small it is), nor the  bystander who now has the wrong impression.

The Digital Age has connected businesses and consumers in an unprecedented way. Both are now on an even playing field. And just as we expect integrity and fairness from brands, we are responsible for reciprocating. If we as consumers aren’t fair and judicious with our comments, reviews and complaints, then we’re just as bad as the allegedly loathsome businesses we’re complaining about.

- Andrew