John Varvatos - Finally Someone Does It Right!!!

Okay, I'm not sure how many of you ever went to CBGB's when it was around. It wasn't a Danceteria or Area in the 80s, but let's just say from a marketing perspective, it definitely had a very strong brand and a well defined position in the market [read - more than just a few very late nights, and more than just a few very shaggy mornings at Burson Marsteller as a young AAE in the 80s]. In fact, CBGB's created such a strong brand for itself, that its cache remains to this day - call it Graceland for a non-Elvis crowd.

Which makes John Varvatos' move into the old space even more brilliant than just cool. You see, Varvatos did it for all the right reasons. He did it to preserve the space. He did it to keep the CBGB name alive. He did it for the same reason he had Alice Cooper appear in his print campaign. Because it was the physicalization of his brand image, and because it was real.

The only thing that is better than John Varvatos taking the old CBGB space, is the way he has kept it true to itself and true to himself. When I went in on a recent walk-by, I was greeted by this hip [read, not overly hip to be nauseating, nor some faux shop-person trying to appear hip], young, stylish guy that looked like he'll be rocking out in whatever club they go to these days. The guy was knowledgeable, got me to try on this leather and shearling jacket that was just the right blend of rocker, without being over board - call it the perfect edge for a 40 year old PR guy who's not into suits.

When I finally left, it dawned on me, from his product to his advertising, from this store design to his sales staff, it all says exactly the same thing - John Varvatos. There is no guessing as to what he's about. There is no question as to who he is or who his customer is. It is branding at its very best - clear, clean, consistent, and powerful.

John Varvatos does what so many people and companies try to do - communicate a consistent brand with one voice, one look and one feel - across every consumer touch-point in a way that feels so natural, you don't even know it's being done. Why? Because it's real!

So if you want to see killer branding. If you want to see a company who has truly taken their brand off the drawing board and brought it to life in a very real way - check out John Varvatos.

What's the worst that can happen? You walk away actually looking great?

CNN - The Un-News

Did I miss something? When did CNN change from reporting the news to thinking they are the news? While watching the Democratic Convention last night, I kept changing channels back and forth between CNN and the McNeil Leherer Report - that's right good old PBS. While PBS showed the entire convention and let us make our own decisions on how well or how badly it went, I noticed CNN avoided showing any of the speeches until Hillary came close to appearing that is.

While Wolf Blitzer was trying to stir up coverage for an alleged plot against Barack Obama - something that even the reporter on the ground sounded confused about - former Denver Mayor and Obama Campaign Co-Chair Federico Peña wasa giving one of the more insightful speeches about his energy policy. While CNN ran endless "what if" scenarios, Lilly Ledbetter gave a speech that was one of the most compelling insights into women's rights and inequal pay. While Governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, shared his American story to an astounded audience, CNN ran commercials.

Now, I'm not saying the Democrats know how to put on a great show, but shouldn't a new organization report the news? I mean, it was truly astounding to see how CNN failed to cover the speakers and the event, when they touted themselves as the "best coverage available." Instead, they opted to fill the screen with a badly operated red/blue map, and with endless scenarios of how the final election could go. So many in fact, that it became more confusing than insightful.

Which is where CNN's brand is beginning to suffer. It's a great brand if you only watch the placards that swing up between commercial breaks. But when it times to turn all that brand messaging into something real, they are failing miserably - Lou Dobbs excepting.

When will they realize, the more the reporters think that "they are the news," the less they will be viewed as reporters "of the news." There's nothing wrong with taking a network, or a brand, in this direction. But it's not the direction of a great news station. With Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper reporting, CNN might think about joining with E!. It would fit their format better, it would be far more entertaining, and at least their brand would be true to their reporting.

Paris - looking for your next new thing?

Crest Leads The Way In Integrated Brand Marketing

The big news isn’t that Crest is launching a new product. The news is how it is launching its new product.

Crest Weekly Clean Intensive Cleaning Paste – a new paste designed to give you that “just went to the dentist” feeling – will hit the shelves in September, but P&G has already started sending samples to bloggers and select online parental groups. Apparently they have decided to forgo a traditional launch campaign in favor of one that targets the more influential online community. Apparently, Crest sent a survey to more than 600,000 moms in late August through P&G’s Vocalpoint buzz-marketing program.

According to the product’s spokeswoman – Allison Yang – television will be relatively light, consisting of five second tags on ads for other crest products. Instead, their research told them it’s a product “people talk about.” And what better way to get people talking than online – right?

So read between the lines. Crest – one of P&G’s biggest media spenders with almost $237 million in ’07 media spend, is backing away from expensive television in favor of creating a consumer-driven online platform for Weekly Clean. If this doesn’t tell you how important it is to create an integrated communications program online, before using more traditional media – nothing will…..

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Green Ideas That Make Business Sense

Every once in a while you come across a company that is shifting their brand in very real ways. It's often the simplest things that make the biggest difference in how a company and a brand is perceived. It's what I call taking the brand off the drawing board and bringing it to life.

For all those people who look at outdoor advertising as a blight on America, I ask you to check out what Fuel Outdoor in Miami has done. It's created a deal with the city of Miami to build 600 solar powered bus shelters. Yes, it gets to sell the advertising space on these locations, but hey, that's 600 bus shelters for people to hide from the sun and rain. Better still, they're solar powered, so the cost of keeping them lit at night is nothing.

So who says creating a green initiative has to cost? Who says it has to be painful for the company? It can be a win for the company [Fuel gets more ad space to sell], a win for the community [Miami gets 600 bus shelters for free], and for the planet [solar, solar, solar which will prevent an estimated 2 tons of carbon emissions from being expelled into the air].

Miami Mayor Manny Diaz explained, “Thanks to a successful public-private partnership, what we have with Fuel Miami is a revolutionary model at work – corporate advertising dollars are being used to clean the environment.”

“As outdoor advertisers, we are sensitive to the quality and appearance of the city’s environment,” Freedman said. “In the case of our Miami bus shelters, we felt it was necessary to ensure that our advertisements could provide benefits to not only our clients, but also the city.”

Not a bad thing for everyone involved....

Cyberattacks - Warfare's New Militia

Well before a shot was ever fired, and as early as July 20, 2008, the republic of Georgia was under attack. It's government’s websites were under a constant barrage of attacks by a network of hackers that some have called the new militia.

"They mobilize themselves without a need for a central location to do so, distribute the targets, discuss the attack approaches, come up with a plan on the coordination, and you have everyone participating," Bulgarian security researcher Dancho Danchev said in an instant messaging interview. Danchev and others have found evidence that points to a self-starting militia composed of volunteer hackers and cyber criminals who control large-scale bots, or collections of previously-compromised computers. While the forces may appear to be uncoordinated to the untrained eye, they are in fact very coordinated, both researchers argued. In a lengthy post on ZDNet, Danchev spelled out the coordinated steps that someone — or some group — took to rally the hacker troops and turn them against specific targets. And yes, there is evidence that the coordination comes from mother Russia.

For everyone in the military or the civilian world, the lesson is that any modern conflict will include some type of a cyberwarfare component. Why? Because it is simply too cheap and inexpensive not to. While countries like the United States spend billions on missle shields and fire rates, we’ve left our back door wide open to attacks that could cripple our efforts on the world stage.

So how does this apply to brands? Well, take note. Some simple hacker can have fun with your message through spam, illicit postings, or with DOS [Denial of Service] games. It may seem funny at first, but when your customers start screaming, you’ll have wished you spent a little bit more time listening to your IT people.

Apple 3G iPhone - Next Gen's Product To Avoid?

When a 14 year old knows more about the iPhone than your CMO does, you have a problem.

That dawned on me when I spoke with one of my nieces who swore she’d never buy a new iPhone – and yes, with her fledgling baby sitting empire, she could easily afford one. What she doesn’t do is visit CNet.com or read product reviews. What she does do is IM her friends incessantly, trade products back and forth, and talk, talk, talk. What she also does is influence her mom, her dad and their friends about new products, cool brands and hot items of the moment.

So my question is this – if a 14 year old is commenting on slow downloads, the need to constantly shutdown and restart, and how un-cool the product is turning out to be, why didn’t Apple’s CMO?

Hey, it’s a great brand. It’s the only company that’s been able to turn a tech product into a consumer brand. It could also get crushed under the weight of the new products it’s rushing to market. It would be a shame if the Apple of the future was the next gen’s product too avoid.

Think it can’t happen? Think about GAP in the early 90s – it was the cool thing to wear. Think about how kids look at it like mom and dad's brand to avoid…

Flip Flop - Meaningless Phrases & Meaningful Networks

“Flip Flop.”

It's a phrase that came into being in the 2008 elections to discredit John Kerry for changing his mind on issues. I have to admit to the people who created it – it was shear genius.

The fact that there is not a candidate alive – republican or democrat – who has not changed their position, or their mind, on an important subject at one point in their career, let alone their candidacy, is absurd. Yet, with the right network of media relationships, this term helped turn an election.

In the 2008 election, the term “flip flop” is still being bantered around from time to time. It seems like an effort to ill-brand a candidate, but it hasn’t stuck yet. Perhaps even the media has begun to realize it is a meaningless term - something that cannot be a defining label to any campaign because every candidate has “flip flopped” at one time or another. Or perhaps it’s because nobody has been able to energize a network like the inventors of “flip flop” were able to do in the 2004 elections.

And maybe that’s the key. Maybe what you say is not as important as how you say it or who it’s said to.

Think about that the next time you spend hours perfecting your message before you figure out how you're getting it out to the audience you want to reach...

The Integrated Battlefield - PR Included

Regardless of who fired the first shot, who crossed over the line, or who hurled the first insult, the conflict between the Republic of Georgia and Russia shows that the 21st Century battlefield extends well beyond the trenches where the ground forces live and fight.

With the public’s thirst for 24 hour as it happens, and the media’s desire to feed the ratings an inside look at the latest and greatest news story [it is entertainment after all], they have created a platform where a savvy media group can help to define the line between the good guys and the bad guys like never before - often before all the facts are in.

This is something political leaders, and yes, the military now leverages as an integrated part of the wars they wage. Witness how Georgian president - Saakashvili – leveraged the media to support his ground troops, even though his own tactics were later found suspect.

With his public relations firm, Aspect Consulting, in place [a firm that also works with such companies as Exxon Mobil, Kellogg's and Procter and Gamble], Mr. Saakashvili, began an hourly barrage of media releases that followed the action on the ground, sometimes even leading it.

With carefully planned headlines, like "Russia continues to attack civilian populations," and stories describing how the capital Tblisi was “intensively bombed," or how a downed Russian plane was in fact "nuclear", Georgia quickly positioned itself in the hearts and minds of the world as the underdog. The press, in their efforts to take the lead and put out the story first, took a big bite and chewed away.

With the media quickly jumping on the bandwagon, releases were given greater credence than they should have been. Some implied greater threats to the world at large. Others implied threats to European energy supplies as "Russia dropped bombs near oil pipelines.” Even "humanitarian wheat shipments" were apparently blocked. The resulting terminology early in the conflict complained of "invading Russian forces" and "the occupation of Georgia." The best move, was when Saakashvili's government filed allegations of ethnic cleansing to The Hague, using keywords and terms designed to trigger media interest, such as civilian victims, nuclear arms, humanitarian disaster, occupation, and yes ethnic cleansing.

In the initial days of the battle, Mr. Saakashvili held international media phone conferences, got himself on TV news channels and even found time, within hours of war breaking out, to write for the Wall Street Journal. In contrasting style, Russia, allowed little access to South Ossetia – adding to the evil empire image the West enjoys painting it as.

With most reporters at the Olympics, television stations and newspapers lacked sufficient resources to find out what was actually occurring. Which is why the Public Relations efforts by President Saakashvili were accepted so readily. While journalists may have treated it with at least some skepticism, the media campaign had an effect; and while the ground war may have been a disaster, the information war gave Georgia a crushing success. At least initially. It wasn't until much later, that the media found balance, noting that they were unsure of exactly what has gone on behind the borders, even portraying Saakashvili as a leader who made a major strategic error and blundered into a war he was bound to lose.

Again, this is not a comment on who is right or wrong in this conflict, but an effort to look at who managed to direct the press and media coverage better and how that helped their cause. It is also an effort to show how war is no longer just about the directing troops, but directing an integrated campaign, that yes includes the world’s media.

For additional information, please see the following sources:


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4518254.ece
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080810/ap_on_re_eu/georgia_south_ossetia
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/aug/18/pressandpublishing.georgia
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Russia-Georgia-Conflict-Countries-Play-Out-Propaganda-Battle-Amidst-War/Article/200808215076440?lpos=World%2BNews_2&lid=ARTICLE_15076440_Russia%2BGeorgia%2BConflict%253A%2BCountries%2BPlay%2BOut%2BPropaganda%2BBattle%2BAmidst%2BWar