Category Archives: Brand Building

Dove’s Takedown Of AI: Brilliant But Troubling Brand Marketing

The Dove brand has just placed a substantial stake in the battleground over the use of AI in media. In a campaign called “Keep Beauty Real”, the brand released a 2-minute video showing how AI can create an unattainable and highly biased (read “white”) view of what beauty is.

If we’re talking branding strategy, this campaign in a master class. It’s totally on-brand with Dove, who introduced its “Campaign for Real Beauty” 18 years ago. Since then, the company has consistently fought digital manipulation of advertising images, promoted positive body image and reminded us that beauty can come in all shapes, sizes and colors. The video itself is brilliant. You really should take a couple minutes to see it if you haven’t already.

But what I found just as interesting is that Dove chose to use AI as a brand differentiator. The video starts with by telling us, “By 2025, artificial intelligence is predicted to generate 90% of online content” It wraps up with a promise: “Dove will never use AI to create or distort women’s images.”

This makes complete sense for Dove. It aligns perfectly with its brand. But it can only work because AI now has what psychologists call emotional valency. And that has a number of interesting implications for our future relationship with AI.

“Hot Button” Branding

Emotional valency is just a fancy way of saying that a thing means something to someone. The valence can be positive or negative. The term valence comes from the German word valenz, which means to bind. So, if something has valency, it’s carrying emotional baggage, either good or bad.

This is important because emotions allow us to — in the words of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman — “think fast.” We make decisions without really thinking about them at all. It is the opposite of rational and objective thinking, or what Kahneman calls “thinking slow.”

Brands are all about emotional valency. The whole point of branding is to create a positive valence attached to a brand. Marketers don’t want consumers to think. They just want them to feel something positive when they hear or see the brand.

So for Dove to pick AI as an emotional hot button to attach to its brand, it must believe that the negative valence of AI will add to the positive valence of the Dove brand. That’s how branding mathematics sometimes work: a negative added to a positive may not equal zero, but may equal 2 — or more. Dove is gambling that with its target audience, the math will work as intended.

I have nothing against Dove, as I think the points it raises about AI are valid — but here’s the issue I have with using AI as a brand reference point: It reduces a very complex issue to a knee-jerk reaction. We need to be thinking more about AI, not less. The consumer marketplace is not the right place to have a debate on AI. It will become an emotional pissing match, not an intellectually informed analysis. And to explain why I feel this way, I’ll use another example: GMOs.

How Do You Feel About GMOs?

If you walk down the produce or meat aisle of any grocery store, I guarantee you’re going to see a “GMO-Free” label. You’ll probably see several. This is another example of squeezing a complex issue into an emotional hot button in order to sell more stuff.

As soon as I mentioned GMO, you had a reaction to it, and it was probably negative. But how much do you really know about GMO foods? Did you know that GMO stands for “genetically modified organisms”? I didn’t, until I just looked it up now. Did you know that you almost certainly eat foods that contain GMOs, even if you try to avoid them? If you eat anything with sugar harvested from sugar beets, you’re eating GMOs. And over 90% of all canola, corn and soybeans items are GMOs.

Further, did you know that genetic modifications make plants more resistance to disease, more stable for storage and more likely to grow in marginal agricultural areas? If it wasn’t for GMOs, a significant portion of the world’s population would have starved by now. A 2022 study suggests that GMO foods could even slow climate change by reducing greenhouse gases.

If you do your research on GMOs — if you “think slow’ about them — you’ll realize that there is a lot to think about, both good and bad. For all the positives I mentioned before, there are at least an equal number of troubling things about GMOs. There is no easy answer to the question, “Are GMOs good or bad?”

But by bringing GMOs into the consumer world, marketers have shut that down that debate. They are telling you, “GMOs are bad. And even though you consume GMOs by the shovelful without even realizing it, we’re going to slap some GMO-free labels on things so you will buy them and feel good about saving yourself and the planet.”

AI appears to be headed down the same path. And if GMOs are complex, AI is exponentially more so. Yes, there are things about AI we should be concerned about. But there are also things we should be excited about. AI will be instrumental in tackling the many issues we currently face.

I can’t help worrying when complex issues like AI and GMOs are broad-stroked by the same brush, especially when that brush is in the hands of a marketer.

Feature image: Body Scan 002 by Ignotus the Mage, used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 / Unmodified

A Column About Nothing

What do I have to say in my last post for 2023? Nothing.

Last week, I talked about the cost of building a brand. Then, this week, I (perhaps being the last person on earth to do so) heard about Nothing.  No – not small “n” nothing as in the absence of anything – Big “N” Nothing as in the London based tech start-up headed by Chinese born entrepreneur Carl Pei.

Nothing, according to their website, crafts “intuitive, flawlessly connected products that improve our lives without getting in the way. No confusing tech-speak. No silly product names. Just artistry, passion and trust. And products we’re proud to share with our friends and family. Simple.”

Now, just like the football talents of David Beckham I explored in my last post, the tech Nothing produces is good – very good – but not uniquely good. The Nothing phone (1) and the just released Nothing Phone (2) are capable mid-range smart phones. Again, from the Nothing website, you are asked to “imagine a world where all your devices are seamlessly connected.”

It may just be me, but isn’t that what Apple has been promising (and occasionally delivering) for the better part of the last quarter century? Doesn’t Google make the same basic promise? Personally, I see nothing earth shaking in Nothing’s mission. It all feels very “been there, done that.” Or, if you’ll allow me – it all seems like much ado about Nothing (sorry). Yet people have paid thousands over the asking price when the 100 units of the first Nothing phone were put up for auction prior to its public launch.

Why?  Because of the value of the Nothing brand. And that value comes from one place. No, not the tech. The community. Pei may be a pretty good building of phones, but he’s an even better building of community. He has expertly built a fan base who love to rave about Nothing. On the “Community” section of the Nothing Website, you’re invited to “abandon the glorification of I and open up to the potential of We.”  I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it all sounds very cool and idealistic, if a little vague.

Another genius move by Pei was to open up to the potential of Nothing. In what is probably a latent (or perhaps not so latent) backlash against over advertising and in-your-face branding, we were eager to jump on the Nothing bandwagon. It seems like anti-branding, but it’s not. It’s actually expertly crafted, by-the-book branding. Just like Seinfeld, a show about nothing that became one of the most popular tv shows in history, it has been shown that there is some serious branding swagger to the concept of nothing. I can’t believe no one thought to stake a claim to this branding goldmine before now.

The Branding Case Study of David Beckham

I have to admit, I’m not a sports fan. And of the few sports I know a little about, European football is certainly not one of them. So my choice to watch the recent Beckham documentary on Netflix is certainly not typical. That said, I did find it a fascinating case study in something I was not expecting: the making and valuation of a personal brand.

First, a controversial question must be posed: was Beckham a good player? According to those that know much more about the sport than I do, the answer is definitely “Yes” – but he wasn’t the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) – he wasn’t even a GOHT (Greatest of His Time). The closest Beckham ever came to winning the Ballon d’Or, given to the best player  of the year,  was to place second behind Rivaldo Ferreira in 1999. During his time at Real Madrid CF, he wasn’t even the best player on the team. Granted, it was a stacked team and Beckham was one of the “galácticos” (superstars), along with Figo, Zidane and Ronaldo. But, unlike Beckham, all those other players have at least one Ballon d’Or in their trophy case (Note, fellow Mediapost Jon Last recently took an interesting look at this topic in his column – The Death of Meritocracy in Sports Pay).

But despite this, Beckham was certainly the highest paid player in the world when Timothy Leiweke lured him to LA Galaxy, where his contract also gave him a piece of the profits. So, if he wasn’t the greatest player, but he was the most valuable one, what created that value? Why was David Beckham worth hundreds of millions of dollars?

As the documentary showed, there was a dimension to Beckham’s signing to a team that went far beyond his ability to put a round ball in the net. He was a global brand – the most famous football player in the world. And that’s what Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez and Timothy Leiweke respectively bought when they signed Beckham.

As I said, the documentary revealed some interesting truths about branding. What creates brand value? Who owns that value? What is the price paid for the value of a personal brand?

What the Beckham documentary showed, more than anything, is that brand value is determined in a public market. Beckham certainly brought brand assets to the table: his own athletic ability, being exceedingly good looking, a kaleidoscope of hair styles, and a marriage to one of the most popular pop stars in the world, Victoria Adams – Posh Spice from the Spice Girls. Those were the table stakes for establishing his brand value, the price of entry.

But beyond that, the value of his brand was really whatever the public determined it to be. For example, after he was red-carded in a critical match against Argentina the 1998 World Cup, all of Britain decided that Beckham had cost them the championship. Whether that was true or not (there are a lorry-full of “ifs” in that opinion) it caused his brand value to plummet. There was really nothing Beckham could do. His brand was out of his control. It was owned by the media and public.

The documentary really highlights the viral and frenzied nature of the market that determines the value of a personal brand. And remember, this all took place in the days before social media and the very real impact of being publicly cancelled! Since Beckham’s prime in the 1990s and early 2000’s, the market effect of branding has since been amplified and compressed. The market of public opinion is now wired, meaning network effects happen on incredibly short timelines and without even the illusion of control.

Certainly the monetary benefits of brand usually accrue to the supposed owner of the brand. David and Victoria Beckham are reportedly worth a half billion dollars, making him one of the richest athletes in the world. But the documentary makes it clear that there was a price paid that was not monetary. Much of what we would all call “our lives” had to be traded by the Beckhams for a brand that was controlled by the public and the press. There were no boundaries, no privacy, no refuge from fame.

When we pull back from the story of David and Victoria Beckham, there are takeaways there for anyone attempting to build a brand, whether it be personal or corporate. You may be able to plant the seeds, but after that, everything else is going to be largely out of your control.

X Marks the Spot

Elon Musk has made his mark. Twitter and its cute little birdy logo are dead. Like Monty Python’s famous parrot, this bird has shuffled off its mortal coil.

So Twitter is dead, Long live X?

I know — that seems weird to me, too.

Musk clearly has a thing for the letter X. He founded a company called X.com that merged with PayPal in 2000. In his portfolio of companies, you’ll find SpaceX, xAI, X Corp. Its seldom you see so much devotion to 1/26th of the Latin alphabet.

It’s not unprecedented to pick a letter and turn it into a brand. Steve Jobs managed to make the letter “i” the symbol for everything Apple. Mind you, he also tacked on helpful product descriptors to keep us from getting confused. If he had changed the name of Apple to “I” and just left it at that, it might not have worked so well.

At their best, brands should immediately bridge the gap between the DNA of a company and a long-term niche in the brains of those of us in the marketplace. Twitter did that. When you saw the iconic bird logo or hear the word Twitter, you know exactly what it referred to.

This is easier when the company is known for a handful of products. But when companies stretch into multiple areas, it’s tough to make one brand synonymous with hundreds or thousands of products. 

This brand diffusion is common with the hyper-accelerated world of tech. You launch a product and it’s so successful, it becomes a mega-corporation. At some point you’re stuck with an awkward transition: You leave the original brand associated with that product and create an umbrella brand that is vague enough to shelter a diverse and expanding portfolio of businesses. That’s why Google created the generic Alpha brand, and why Facebook became Meta.

But Musk didn’t create an umbrella to shelter Twitter and its brand. He used it to beat the brand to death. Maybe he just doesn’t like blue birds.

When a brand does its job well, we feel a personal relationship with it. Twitter’s brand did this. It was unique in tech branding, primarily because it was cute and organic. It was an accessible brand, a breath of fresh air in a world of cryptic acronyms and made-up terms with weird spellings. It made sense to us. And we are sorry to see it go.

In fact, some of us are flat-out refusing to admit the bird is dead. One programmer has already whipped together a Chrome extension that strips out the X branding and brings our favorite little Tweeter back from the beyond. Much as I admire this denial, I suspect this is only delaying the inevitable. It’s time to say bye-bye birdy. 

This current backlash against Musk’s rebranding could be a natural outcome of his effort to move from being one tied to a product to one that creates a bigger tent for multiple products. He has been pretty vocal about X becoming an “everything” app, a la China’s WeChat.

I suspect the road to making X a viable brand is going to be a rocky one. First of all, if you were going to pick the most generic symbol imaginable, X would be your choice. It literally has been a stand in for pretty much everything you could think of for centuries now. Even my great, great grandfather signed his name with an “X.”

We Hotchkisses have always been ahead of our time.

But the ubiquity of “X” brings up another problem, this time on the legal front. According to a lengthy analysis of Twitter’s rebranding by Emma Roth, you can trademark a single letter, but trying to make X your brand will come with some potentially litigious baggage. Microsoft has a trademark on X. So does Meta.

As long at Musk’s X sticks to its knitting, that might not be a problem. Microsoft registered X for its Xbox gaming console. Meta’s trademark also has to do with gaming. Apparently, as long as you don’t cross industries and confuse customers, having the same trademark shouldn’t be an issue.

But the chances of Elon Musk playing nice and following the rules of trademark law while pursuing his plan for world domination are somewhat less than zero. In this case, I think it’s fair to speculate that the formula for the future will be: X = a shitload of lawyer fees. 

Also, even if you succeed in making X a recognized and unique brand, protecting that brand will be a nightmare. How do you build a legal fence around X when the choice of it as a brand was literally to tear down fences?

But maybe Musk has already foreseen all this. Maybe he has some kind of superpower to see things we can’t.

Kind of like Superman’s X-Ray vision.

The Spark in the Jar: Jon Ive and Steve Jobs

I sold all my Apple stock shortly after Steve Jobs passed away. It was premature (which is another word for stupid). Apple stock is today worth about 10 times what I sold it for.

My reasoning was thus: Apple couldn’t function without Steve Jobs – not for long, anyway.

Well, 12 years later, it’s doing quite well, thank you. It has a stock price of almost $200 per share (as of the writing of this). Sales have never been stronger. While replacement CEO Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs, financially he has grown Apple into a monolithic force with a market capitalization of almost 3 trillion dollars. There is no other company even close to that.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I realize I underestimated Tim Cook. But I stand with my original instinct: whatever Apple was under Steve Jobs, it couldn’t survive without him. And to understand why, let’s take a quick look back.

Jobs was infamously ousted from Apple in 1985. He remained in “NeXTile” for 12 years, coming back in 1997 to lead Apple into what many believe was its Golden Era. He passed away in 2011.

In the 14 years Jobs led Apple in his second run, the stock price went from about 20 cents to about 12 dollars. That’s growth of about 6000%.  Steve Jobs brought Apple back from the brink of death. If it wasn’t for a lifeline thrown to it by its number one competitor, Microsoft, in 1997, Apple would be no more. As Jobs himself said, “Apple was in very serious trouble,” said Jobs. “And what was really clear was that if the game was a zero-sum game where for Apple to win, Microsoft had to lose, then Apple was going to lose.

But those growth numbers are a little misleading. For you to be one of the fastest growing companies in history, it helps when you start with a very, very small number. A share price of $0.20 is a very, very small number.

Much as everyone lauds Steve Jobs for the turnaround of Apple, I would argue that Tim Cooks performance is even more impressive. To say that Apple was already on a roll when Cook took over is an understatement. In 2011, Apple was going from success to success and could seem to do no wrong. That was one of the reasons I was pessimistic about its future. I thought it couldn’t sustain its run, especially when it came to introducing new products. How many Jobs inspired home runs could it possibly have in its pipeline?

But what Tim Cook was great at was logistics. He took that pipeline and managed to squeeze out another decade plus of value building thanks to what may be the best supply chain strategy in the world. Analysts have said that half of Apple’s 3 trillion dollars in value is directly attributable to that supply chain.

But when you squeeze every last inch of efficiency out of a supply chain, something has to give. And in this case, it may have been creativity.

The Job’s era Apple was a very rare and delicate thing in the corporate world: a leader who was uncompromising on user experience and a design team able to rise and meet the challenge. Was it dictorial? Absolutely. Was it magical? Almost always. It was like catching a spark in a jar.

That design team was headed by Jonathon Ive. And when you have a team that’s the absolute best in the world, you can put up with an asshole here and there, especially when that asshole keeps challenging you to be better.  And when you keep delivering.

The alchemy that made Apple spectacularly successful from 1996 to 2011 was a fragile thing. It wouldn’t take much to change the formula forever. For example, if you removed the catalyst – which was Steve Jobs – it couldn’t survive. But equally important to that formula was Jon Ive.

As David Price, the editor of Macworld said,

“What Ive brought to Apple was a coherent personal vision. That doesn’t mean Apple’s designs on his watch were always perfect, of course; there were plenty of missteps. In broader terms, his arch-minimalism could be frustrating for those who wanted more physical controls”

David Price, Macworld

Ive and Jobs were, by all accounts, inseparable. In a heartfelt tribute to Jobs published shortly after his passing, Ive remembered,

“We worked together for nearly 15 years. We had lunch together most days and spent our afternoons in the sanctuary of the design studio. Those were some of the happiest, most creative and joyful times of my life,” Ive wrote. “I loved how he saw the world. The way he thought was profoundly beautiful.”

Jon Ive

For Jobs and Ive – “Think Different” was both a manifesto and a mantra. That philosophy started a not-so-slow death the minute Jobs passed from this earth. Finally, in June 2019, Ive announced his departure “after years of frustration, seeing the company migrate from a design-centric entity to one that was more utilitarian.”

It seems that companies can excel at either creativity or execution. It’s very difficult – perhaps impossible – to do both. The Apple of Steve Jobs was the world’s most creative corporation. The Apple of Tim Cook is a world leader in execution. But for one to happen, the other had to make room. Today, Apple is trying to be creative by committee. Macworld’s David Price mourns the Apple that was, “Maybe Apple is no longer a company that focuses on individual personality, or indeed on thinking different. This week we also got the news that Ive’s replacement will not be replaced, with a core group of 20 designers instead reporting directly to the chief operating officer, who is no stranger to design and likely has his own ideas. If design by committee has been the de facto approach for the past four years, it’s now been made official.”

And committees always suck all the oxygen from the room. In that atmosphere, the spark that once was Apple inevitably had to go out.

The Seedy, Seedy World of Keto Gummies

OK, admit it. I play games on my phone.

Also, I’m cheap, so I play the free, ad-supported versions.

You might call this a brain-dead waste of time, but I prefer to think of it as diligent and brave investigative journalism.  The time I spend playing Bricks Ball Crusher or Toy Blast is, in actuality, my research into the dark recesses of advertising on behalf of you, the more cerebral and discerning readers of this blog. I bravely sacrifice my own self-esteem so that I might tread the paths of questionable commerce and save you the trip.

You see, it was because of my game playing that I was introduced to the seediest of seedy slums in the ad world, the underbelly known as the in-game ad. One ad, in particular, reached new levels of low.

If you haven’t heard of the Keto Gummies Scam, allow me to share my experience.

This ad hawked miracle gummies that “burn the fat off you” with no dieting or exercising. Several before and after photos show the results of these amazing little miracle drops of gelatin. They had an impressive supporting cast. The stars of the TV pitchfest “Shark Tank” had invested in them. Both Rebel Wilson and Adele had used them to shed pounds. And then — the coup de grace — Oprah (yes, the Oprah!) endorsed them.

The Gummy Guys went right the top of the celebrity endorsement hierarchy when they targeted the big O.

As an ex ad guy, I couldn’t ignore this ad. It was like watching a malvertising train wreck. There was so much here that screamed of scam, I couldn’t believe it. The celebrity pics used were painfully obvious in their use of photoshopping. The claims were about as solid as a toilet paper Taj Mahal. The entire premise reeked of snake oil.

I admit, I was morbidly fascinated.

First, of all the celebrities in all the world, why would you misappropriate Oprah’s brand? She is famously protective of it. If you’re messing with Oprah, you’ve either got to be incredibly stupid or have some serious stones. So which was it?

I started digging.

First of all, this isn’t new. The Keto Gummy Scam has been around for at least a year. In addition to Oprah, they have also targeted Kevin Costner, Rhianna, Trisha Yearwood, Tom Selleck, Kelly Clarkson, Melissa McCarthy — even Wayne Gretzky.

Last Fall, Oprah shared a video on Instagram warning people that she had nothing to do with the gummies and asking people not to fall for the scam. Other celebrities have fallen suit and issued their own warnings.

Snopes.com has dug into the Keto Gummy Scam a couple of times.  One exposé focused on the false claims that the gummies were featured on “Shark Tank.” The first report focused just on the supposed Oprah Winfrey endorsement. That one was from a year ago. That means these fraudulent ads have been associated with Oprah for at least a year and legally, she has been unable to stop them.

To me, that rules out my first supposition. These people aren’t stupid.

This becomes apparent when you start trying to pick your way through the maze of misinformation they have built to support these ads. If you click on the ad you’re taken to a webpage that looks like it’s from a reliable news source. The one I found looked like it was Time’s website. There you’ll find a “one-on-one interview” with Oprah about how she launched a partnership with Weight Watchers to create the Max Science Keto gummies. According to the interview, she “called the CEO of Weight Watchers and said ‘if you can’t create a product that helps people lose weight faster without diet and exercise, then I’m backing out of my investment and moving on.”

This is all complete bullshit. But it’s convincing bullshit.

It doesn’t stop there. Clickbait texts with outrageous claims, including the supposed death of Oprah, get clicks through to more bogus sites with more outrageous claims about gummies. While the sites mimic legitimate news organizations like Time, they reside on bogus domains such as genuinesmother.com and newsurvey22offer.com. Or, if you go to them through an in-app link, the URLs are cloaked and remain invisible.

If you turn to a search engine to do some due diligence, the scammers will be waiting for you. If you search for “keto gummies scam” the results page is stuffed with both sponsored and organic spam that appear to support the outrageous claims made in the ads. Paid content outlets like Outlook India have articles placed that offer reviews of the “best keto gummies,” fake reviews, and articles assuring potential victims that the gummies are not a scam but are a proven way to lose weight.

As the Snopes investigators found, it’s almost impossible to track these gummies to any company. Even if you get gummies shipped to you, there’s no return address or phone number. Orders came from a shadowy “Fulfillment Center” in places like Smyrna, Tennessee. Once they get your credit card, the unauthorized charges start.

Even the name of the product seems to be hard to nail down. The scammers seem to keep cycling through a roster of names.

This is, by every definition, predatory advertising. It is the worst example of what we as marketers do. But, like all predators, it can only exist because an ecosystem allows it to exist. It’s something we have to think about.

I certainly will. More on that soon.

The Comedic Comeback

Public confessions are a funny thing.

No, seriously. They’re funny. At least, John Mulaney hopes they’re funny.

His latest Netflix special, Baby J, which just dropped two weeks ago is all about coming back from having his reputation hammered on social media.

John has had a tough time of late. He filled his “Covid Years” with getting divorced from his wife, Anna Marie Tendler, stumbling into an intervention, going to rehab, relapsing, going back to rehab, dating Olivia Munn – and – oh yeah – announcing he’s having a baby with Munn. All of that happening not necessarily in that order.

Mulaney opens his Neflix show with a little song and dance:

“You know what I mean!
We all quarantined!
We all went to rehab and we all got divorced,
and now our rep-u-ta-tion is different!”
“No one knows what to think! 
Hey ya! 
All the kids like Bo Burnham more!
Because he’s currently less problematic.…

Likability is a jail.”


“Likability is a jail.” Mulaney sang that with a smile on his face, but there is some grit in that line. You can almost feel it grinding in the gears of his career.

To be fair, when you build a career on likability in the era of social media, you have to accept that it’s a pretty tenuous foundation for fame. It leaves you extremely vulnerable to being publicly called out for anything that might rub against the grain of your carefully constructed brand.  And, if you are called out – or, in extreme cases – completely cancelled, you have to somehow make it all the way back from simply being accepted to being liked again.

When you think about it, it’s probably a lot easier to build your brand on being an asshole. It’s a lot lower bar to get over. I don’t think Donald Trump loses a lot of sleep over being cancelled. And – just last week –  people gathered at the Met in New York for their Gala honoring fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld, who has never apologized for being one of the biggest and most outspoken assholes in history.  

Mulaney is the latest of a long line of comedian come backs who have been hammered by the fickle fist of being “social media famous.” He is gingerly treading in the footsteps of Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari – even Chris Rock took a stab at it, and he wasn’t the one that got cancelled. That would be Will Smith, who is still trying to pick up the pieces of his career after an ill-considered incident of physical assault in front of a worldwide audience.

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there’s a playbook for coming back after being eviscerated in the public arena of social media. According to Lori Levine, CEO of the PR firm Flying Television, it requires something called an “Apology Tour.”

The timing of this is critical. According to Levine, you first have to fly under the radar for a bit, “take a certain amount of time to stay quiet, stay off social media, not engage in any press interviews.” After a period of being suitably and silently contrite, you then move to Stage Two, “Slowly return explaining that they have ‘done the work’ [and] are feeling remorseful.”

This was pretty much the playbook that Mulaney followed. The advantage, if you’re a comedian, is that the stand-up stage is the perfect platform for the “apology tour.” It has the built in advantage of being an entertainment form that thrives on making fun of yourself. That’s probably why a good portion of Netflix’s programming calendar consists of comedians lining up for their respective “apology tours.”

Comedians on the social media comeback tour are also given a helping hand in this by the emergence of the “uneasy laughter” of dark comedy over the past decade or so. While dark – or black – humor has been around decades in the form of novels or movies, it has only been in the last decade or so that stand-up comedians combined dark humor with an unflinchingly intimate look into their own personal struggles. Since the unapologetically brilliant live performance of Tig Notaro in 2012 where she talked about her recent diagnosis of breast cancer, stand-up has dared to go to places never imagined just a few years ago.

This creates the perfect environment for the “apology tour.” The whole point is to have a no holds barred discussion of where the comedian erred in judgement. Mulaney navigated this potential minefield with surefooted grace. Probably the funniest and most authentic bit was when he started riffing with a 5th grader up in the balcony at the start of the show, warning him not to “do any of the things I’m about to talk about.”  Somehow – to me – that felt more real than everything that was to follow.

If anything, Mulaney’s recent performance was a sign of our times. It was a necessary step back from public humiliation. I’m not sure it was that funny. But it was John Mulaney reclaiming some control over his public persona. He was telling us we can’t possibly do anything worst to him than he’s done to himself…

“What, are you gonna cancel John Mulaney? I’ll kill him. I almost did.”

Why Infuriating Your Customers May Not Be a Great Business Strategy

“Online, brand value is built through experience, not exposure”

First, a confession. I didn’t say this. I wish I’d said it, but it was actually said by usability legend Jakob Nielsen at a workshop he did way back in 2006. I was in the audience, and I was listening.  Intently.

But now, some 17 years later, I have to wonder if anyone else was. According to a new study from Yext that Mediapost’s Laurie Sullivan looked at, many companies are still struggling with the concept. Here’s just a few tidbits from her report:

“47% (of leads) in a Yext survey saying they were unable to make an online purchase because the website’s help section did not provide the information needed.”

“On average respondents said it takes nearly 9 hours for a typical customer service issue to be resolved. Respondents said resolution should take about 14.5 minutes.”

“42% of respondents say that help sites do not often provide the answers they look for with a first search.”

“The biggest challenge, cited by 61%, is that the help site does not understand their question.”

This isn’t rocket science, people. If you piss your customers and prospects off, they will go find one of your competitors that doesn’t piss them off. And they won’t come back.

Perhaps the issue is that businesses doing business online have a bad case of the Lake Wobegon effect. This, according to Wikipedia, is a “a natural human tendency to overestimate one’s capabilities.” It came from Garrison Keillor’s description of his fictional town in Minnesota where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average”

When applied to businesses, it means that they think they’re much better at customer service than they actually are. In a 2005 study titled “Closing the delivery gap”, Global consulting firm Bain & Company found that 80% of companies believe they are delivering a superior service. And yet, only 8% of customers believe that they are receiving excellent service.

I couldn’t find an update to this study but I suspect this is probably still true. It’s also true that when it comes to judging the quality of your customer service, your customer is the only one that can do it. So you should listen to them.

If you don’t listen, the price you’re paying is huge. In yet another study, Call Centre Platform Provider TCN’s second annual “Consumer Insights about Customer Service,” 66% of Americans are likely to abandon a brand after a poor customer service experience.

Yet, for many companies, customer service is at the top of their cost-cutting hit list. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the projected average growth rate for all occupations from 2020 – 2030 is 8%, but when looking at customer service specifically, the estimated growth is actually -4%. In many cases, this reduced head count is due to companies either outsourcing their customer service or swapping people for technology.

This is probably not a great move.

Again, according to the TCN study, when asked what their preferred method of communication with a company’s customer service department was, number one was “talking to a live agent by phone” with 49 % choosing it. Just behind was 45% choosing an “online chat with a live agent.”

Now, granted, this is coming from a company that just happens to provide these solutions, so take it with a grain of salt, but still, this is probably not the place you should be reducing your head count.

One final example of the importance customer service, not from a study but from my own circle of influencers. My wife and I recently booked a trip with my daughter and her husband and, like everyone else in the last few years, we found we had to cancel the trip. The trip was booked through Expedia so the credits, while issued by the carrier, had to be rebooked through Expedia.

My daughter tried to rebook online and soon found that she had to talk to an Expedia Customer Service Agent. We happened to be with her when she did this. It turned out she talked to not one, but three different agents. The first flatly refused to rebook and seemed to have no idea how the system worked. The second was slightly more helpful but suggested a way to rebook that my daughter wasn’t comfortable with. The third finally got the job done. This took about 3 hours on the phone, all to do something that should have taken 2 minutes online.

I haven’t mustered up the courage to attempt to rebook my credits yet. One thing I do know – it will involve whiskey.

What are the chances that we will book another flight on Expedia?    About the same as me making the 2024 Olympic Chinese Gymnastic Team.

Actually, that might have the edge.

Looking at Life through Ad-Coloured Glasses

Love em or hate em – you have to admit that ads are a fascinating creative form. They are – more perhaps than any other form of creative expression – a message with a mission.

Orson Welles once said, “The Enemy of Art Is the Absence of Limitations.”

Lorne Michaels – Executive Producer of Saturday Night Live, agreed, “To me there’s no creativity without boundaries. If you’re gonna write a sonnet, it’s 14 lines, so it’s solving the problem within the container.”

I do agree with both Mr. Michaels and Mr. Welles, so let’s strip down advertising to the 4 bare walls that make up the boundaries of a commercial message:

  • It has to get your attention when you may not want to give it
  • It has to get you to think about something you’re not currently thinking about
  • It has to persuade you to buy something or do something you probably don’t absolutely need to have or do
  • It needs to get its message across in an incredibly short span of time

Given these limitations, a successful ad gives us a fascinating glimpse into the context of the culture it was created within. In order to successfully tick all the boxes above, it can’t be subtle. It has to prick our consciousness, piercing through the fog of the cloud of cultural content we exist within. And, in doing all that, it then has to leave us feeling somewhere north of ambivalent about the product or brand that the ad is about.

For this reason, ads have to be unapologetically commercial, often blunt and sometimes push against the edge of what’s acceptable to us. They have to arouse our brains without triggering outrage. The boundaries of an ad help define the form of creativity that goes into the creation of an effective ad. This creativity, in turn, becomes an interesting reflection of the culture in which that ad has to perform.

I’ve talked before about the psychological concept called “leveling and sharpening” – where our brains repackage our experiences to make them easier to remember and retell as stories. Unnecessary detail is “leveled” out and certain outstanding details are “sharpened” to add interest. I suspect ads may represent an intentional leveling and sharpening that make them caricatures of the culture they come from.

I have a friend who’s a history professor. Some years ago, he oversaw an archeological dig at a site that had been a railway laborer camp 100 years before. He told me that for an archeologist, the most interesting area to dig was where they had the latrines, because that’s where you threw everything you didn’t want people to find. It was there that you found out what life was really like in the camps. In this way, maybe ads are a kind of metaphorical outhouse for our culture.

This all came to mind when I happened across an online post that featured ads from the past that would be unacceptable to us now, but as a relic of the culture they came from, gives us a fascinating and often uncomfortable glimpse of what was acceptable in a different time and place.

Looking Kellogg’s ad from the early 1900s. Source: Veronica Costa / Flickr / The Commons)

Take an ad for Kellogg’s Pep Cereal, circa 1940s. The ad’s headline is, “So The Harder a Wife Works, The Cuter She Looks” The ad features a picture of a couple, wife in front wearing a dress and apron while holding a feather duster, while the husband hugs her from behind with an admiring look in his eye. This messaging is not so far removed from the cultural context that would have surrounded it. Women were meant to be at home, making the house tidy and cooking dinner for her husband. Her only other worth is hinted at in the headline.

At least that ad is a little more subtle than the one for Pitney Bowes Postage Meters from 1947. The headline here is “Is It Always Illegal to Kill a Woman?” The premise – wait for it – is that the postage meter makes life so easy for a secretary that she has more time to gossip and slack off at work, driving her boss to justifiable homicide.

(Image Source: Monolith68 / Flickr / The Commons)

This ad, in particular, makes my point. Obviously, the supposed humor in the situation has been grossly exaggerated to get your attention. But even with this, there had to be a culture that saw this as being within the bounds of the acceptable, resulting in a “wink-wink” type of bemusement rather than moral outrage.

You also have to wonder about the targeting strategies of these ads. In the case of Kellogg’s Pep, it would have been assumed that women did the grocery shopping, so the ad would have been targeted with this unspoken message: “Women, throw some Kellogg’s Pep in your grocery cart and you’ll be the perfect wife.”

In the case of the Pitney Bowes ad, men would buy postage machines for an office (no women should have that much power) and so the ad played on what an “unsufferable pain in the ass female employees were.”

It’s in these ads where you see how misogynistic the culture truly was. These attitudes towards the place of women in society were more muted and often glamorized in other longer-form media, such as movies. Consider the bluntness of the chauvinism found in these ads compared to the more subtle forms found in popular movies of the time – such as the loyalty of Donna Reed to James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life or Ingrid Bergman’s “Ilsa” in Casablanca. All views came from the same culture, but through a different lens.

Ads didn’t have the luxury of being subtle. When you only have a few seconds to get your message across, there is no room for nuance. The boundaries defined the form of the message, and the message was that culturally, women were still considered chattel.

In our current reality of cancel culture, these ads are in a category of poor taste that can only be described as jaw dropping. But they do act as a lens through which to look at another place and time. They are cultural caricatures that – hopefully – point out that we have made some progress and perhaps, the past wasn’t as golden and innocent as some would have us believe.

The Joe Rogan Experiment in Ethical Consumerism

We are watching an experiment in ethical consumerism take place in real time. I’m speaking of the Joe Rogan/Neil Young controversy that’s happening on Spotify. I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but if not, Canadian musical legend Neil Young had finally had enough of Joe Rogan’s spreading of COVID misinformation on his podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience.” He gave Spotify an ultimatum: “You can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Spotify chose Rogan. Young pulled his library. Since then, a handful of other artists have followed Young, including former band mates David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, along with fellow Canuck Hall of Famer Joni Mitchell.

But it has hardly been a stampede. One of the reasons is that — if you’re an artist — leaving Spotify is easier said than done. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Rosanne Cash said most artists don’t have the luxury of jilting Spotify: 

“It’s not viable for most artists. The public doesn’t understand the complexities. I’m not the sole rights holder to my work… It’s not only that a lot of people who aren’t rights holders can’t remove their work. A lot of people don’t want to. These are the digital platforms where they make a living, as paltry as it is. That’s the game. These platforms own, what, 40 percent of the market share?”

Cash also brings up a fundamental issue with capitalism: it follows profit, and it’s consumers who determine what’s profitable. Consumers make decisions based on self-interest: what’s in it for them. Corporations use that predictable behavior to make the biggest profit possible. That behavior has been perfectly predictable for hundreds of years. It’s the driving force behind Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. It was also succinctly laid out by economist Milton Friedman in 1970:

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

We all want corporations to be warm and fuzzy — but it’s like wishing a shark were a teddy bear. It just ain’t gonna happen.

One who indulged in this wishful thinking was a little less well-known Canadian artist who also pulled his music  from Spotify, Ontario singer/songwriter Danny Michel. He told the CBC:

“But for me, what it was was seeing how Spotify chose to react to Neil Young’s request, which was, you know: You can have my music or Joe. And it seems like they just, you know, got out a calculator, did some math, and chose to let Neil Young go. And they said, clear and loud: We don’t need you. We don’t need your music.”

Well, yes, Danny, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what Spotify did. It made a decision based on profit. For one thing, Joe Rogan is exclusive to Spotify. Neil Young isn’t. And Rogan produces a podcast, which can have sponsors. Neil Young’s catalog of songs can’t be brought to you by anyone.

That makes Rogan a much better bet for revenue generation. That’s why Spotify paid Rogan $100 million. Music journalist Ted Gioia made the business case for the Rogan deal pretty clear in a tweet

“A musician would need to generate 23 billion streams on Spotify to earn what they’re paying Joe Rogan for his podcast rights (assuming a typical $.00437 payout per stream). In other words, Spotify values Rogan more than any musician in the history of the world.”

I hate to admit that Milton Friedman is right, but he is. I’ve said it time and time before, to expect corporations to put ethics ahead of profits is to ignore the DNA of a corporation. Spotify is doing what corporations will always do, strive to be profitable. The decision between Rogan and Young was done with a calculator. And for Danny Michel to expect anything else from Spotify is simply naïve. If we’re going to play this ethical capitalism game, we must realize what the rules of engagement are.

But what about us? Are we any better that the corporations we keep putting our faith in?

We have talked about how we consumers want to trust the brands we deal with, but when a corporation drops the ethics ball, do we really care? We have been gnashing our teeth about Facebook’s many, many indiscretions for years now, but how many of us have quite Facebook? I know I haven’t.

I’ve seen some social media buzz about migrating from Spotify to another service. I personally have started down this road. Part of it is because I agree with Young’s stand. But I’ll be brutally honest here. The bigger reason is that I’m old and I want to be able to continue to listen to the Young, Mitchell and CSNY catalogs. As one of my contemporaries said in a recent post, “Neil Young and Joni Mitchell? Wish it were artists who are _younger_ than me.”

A lot of pressure is put on companies to be ethical, with no real monetary reasons why they should be. If we want ethics from our corporations, we have to make it important enough to us to impact our own buying decisions. And we aren’t doing that — not in any meaningful way.

I’ve used this example before, but it bears repeating. We all know how truly awful and unethical caged egg production is. The birds are kept in what is known as a battery cage holding 5 to 10 birds and each is confined to a space of about 67 square inches. To help you visualize that, it’s just a bit bigger than a standard piece of paper folded in half. This is the hell we inflict on other animals solely for our own gain. No one can be for this. Yet 97% of us buy these eggs, just because they’re cheaper.

If we’re looking for ethics, we have to look in other places than brands. And — much as I wish it were different — we have to look beyond consumers as well. We have proven time and again that our convenience and our own self-interest will always come ahead of ethics. We might wish that were different, but our spending patterns say otherwise.