when the great terror lizards ruled the marketplace

Although this post will feel more like archaeology than up-to-the-minute marketing insight, there is in fact a valuable lesson to be learned from it...

Sometime in The Dark Ages, i.e., the early '90s, the (once) great department store known as Eaton's decided that it knew better than consumers.

Now, Eaton's had been around since 1869. In many ways it had invented the Canadian retail experience, what with its ground-breaking money back guarantee, its one price for everyone (no haggling, something of an innovation in 1870s Toronto), its catalogue ("right, Monsieur Eaton?"), and the Santa Claus parade. In fact, I remember a stat (which I could very well be remembering wrong) saying that, as late as 1950, Eaton's sold 50% of all retail goods in this country. That's pretty astounding. It was the Microsoft or eBay of its time.

By the time I worked there, however, it was like being a deckhand on the Titanic. Every January, like clockwork, there were layoffs. Sales numbers were never good, and neither was the attitude of management. (Or, um, employees.) Not only were we losing share against the Bay and Sears, not only was WalMart coming to Canada, but the consumer share of department stores as a whole was evaporating month by month, year after year.

Eaton's senior management (including various inheritors of Timothy Eaton's by now watered-down genes) decided that the real problem was Canadian consumers. Because consumers loved sales, and that was bad. Every other retailer seemed to have better sales. So Eaton's did away with sales.

Instead, Eaton's offered Everyday Value Pricing, or EVP. Why wait for sales? (Replacing the question mark with a company-directed exclamation mark, this is a line I typed hundreds of times.) You could come to Eaton's any old time to get a price that was only marginally higher than the sale price you could get somewhere else. The only problem with this pricing strategy is that there was always a sale somewhere else. Consumers loved (and still love) sales. Having a sale means you have low prices. Eaton's wasn't alone – every retailer hates their dependence on sales. 

So you might say that Eaton's took a bold step to educate consumers. Only they didn't actually educate consumers. They just thought they could pump out ads and flyers with "Why Wait for Sales!" at the top and rely on their logo at the bottom of the ads to change consumer's habits.

The result? Do I have to spell it out? Have you shopped at an Eaton's lately?

After two years of EVP, they quickly relented to reality and had sales all the time. But their market share had dropped even faster than before. By the time they changed tack, WalMart had landed in Canada and was stripping away shoppers. Eaton's was stuck with stores in malls that no one shopped in, stores they couldn't close fast enough, workers they couldn't lay off fast enough.

The dinosaurs were the first large animals to roam the earth, and they did so for a very long time. But when they couldn't adapt, they went away.

You can't change consumers because you want them to change. You can help their experience, add value to it, make it faster, and benefit as a company. But without a real sense of who the consumer is and what they want, you are doomed.

william of ockham would have been a damn good front-end developer

A front-end developer that used to work at MRM, Darrin, once said something in passing about a microsite we were trying to get live, one of those quick things that turns out to be lastingly profound:

I'm not trying to avoid work here, I'm just trying to find the simplest and most efficient solution.

Funny, yes. And since Darrin went to the proverbial wall for us repeatedly, I knew he wasn't being lazy. But tell me, what exactly is the difference between these two things? The more you think about it, the tougher it is to say. Isn't the quest for innovation and efficiency really another way of saying, "I don't feel like doing that," and then going out and creating that easier way?

Simple is good. Simple usually makes the most sense, and results in the best outcome for everyone. Something that William of Ockham figured out a long time ago. Just remember, Ockham's Razor is not electric, or multi-bladed, but it is still quite powerful. As Darrin knew.

edumacatin' that there ad thing

Was at York for the CSSA's professional evening last night, where students can hear from alleged professionals like me about their career of choice. There were many great questions, a lot of enthusiasm, and a lot of curiosity about how to build a book.

A few of them wanted to know what program I'd gone through. Knowing that some of them were now in hands-on college advertising programs, or applying for one after they graduated, I hope my answer was at least delivered gently. "Um, none."

I fell in to this thing. A lot of people I know got into it the same way.

I graduated, had no idea what to do. Heard about a job proofreading at Eaton's in-house marketing department, applied, got it, worked for 18 months at absurdly low pay. When a writing job came up, I applied, got it. I had a lot of exposure to retail writing before I was ever allowed to commit it myself. And I was already writing for myself.

I can't imagine a better training ground. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist any more.

Market pressure, competition and technology have combined to kill off the gradual introduction to working as a creative, under the auspices of a paid gig. So, much as I think school programs tend to produce a lot of conformity, these days they're the best way to build a book, and learn at least a little about the world you want to work in.

But remember, no matter what your profs say – yes, the concepts in your book are the key; they'd better be interesting and engaging, across several media, and spelled right. But almost as much as your work, there's one thing the schools don't seem to teach: talking about your work, sharing your thinking, can go a long way toward impressing a CD. Because talking about our work (with clients, suits and each other) is after all what we do for a living.

It's what you could be doing for a living.

because he's not afraid to let the world know that Toshiro Mifune could kick his ass

All day today and this evening, I have to rethink my deep-set hatred of Ted Turner. Because a channel he created, TCM, is demonstrating why it might be the best television channel ever allowed to grace our flatscreens.

In honour of the 100th anniversary of Akira Kurosawa's birth, all this month on consecutive Tuesdays TCM is running Kurosawa movies for the entire day, back to back to back to... well, you get the idea. I think this is astonishing. Right and correct, since Kurosawa is one the world's greatest directors, but astonishing nonetheless.

Last week, they showed High and Low, Kurosawa's take on an Ed McBain novel. A big-shot capitalist's son gets kidnapped for ransom... only the kidnapper has grabbed the chauffeur's son by mistake. And that's only the first 15 minutes. There's no Mel Gibson kind of revenge action, just incredibly human confusion and doubt. Sure it's Japan in the early '60s but it feels incredibly contemporary.

Rashomon has become cultural shorthand for conveying the idea that different people will have different stories to tell about exactly the same event; perspective is everything. It may not be the first movie to ever contain that premise, but it's maybe the most powerful. It's been a while since I've seen it, so I may well be forgetting about work tonight and sitting down in front of a TV.

Then Seven Samurai – yes, I know, it starts at 9:30 and runs until 1 in the morning, but it's worth staying up. It's mesmerizing. The Magnificent Seven was a nice little Western rip-off, but Seven Samurai is one of the great movies ever made. Not in the way that, "like, Die Hard is, dude, like a classic." I mean that Seven Samurai is a terrific action movie full of duels, sword fights and battles, that also happens to give us a real, human sense of who its characters actually are, as well as boring down to some of the basic human truths we don't often like to face. It's one of the few movies that will be still be watched 100 years from now.

Next week, Kurosawa's later movies are featured. Unfortunately Ran will be on the overnight slot; it's King Lear meets a little bit of Macbeth, crossed with an un-hip level of theatricality. But it is epic tragedy, hideous and inevitable to watch, and because it's Kurosawa it also has some of the greatest battles scenes ever filmed.

I've never seen Dersu Uzala or Kagemusha, but next Tuesday I know what I'm doing.

Hating Ted Turner. And loving TCM.

"I know it when I see it"

So I'm looking at creative tonight, a revision to some outdoor. The art director has incorporated a bunch of feedback and done a great job. Except there's something that's not quite working right.

Something indefinable.

Unfortunately, that's not a phrase you get to use in this end of the business. Unlike, say, Supreme Court justices dealing with pornography, it's our job to define this kind of stuff in an actionable way.

Clients get to say, "I don't know why, but I don't like it." Sure, we don't want them to say such things, but it's been known to happen; and because they pay the bills, there's not too much we can do about it.

Account people don't really get to say it, but it's also been known to happen. They often don't have the vocabulary to discuss pictures and words, but good suits will get their point across, even without the right technical terms.

Creatives have to be able to say why. They have to be able to put real, articulate sentences together in a way that others in our peculiar profession can understand and respond to. You have to know why this collection of words and pictures work together better than that very similar collection of words and pictures. If you can't do that, you're not going to be much good in the natural back and forth that making creative takes. And chances are, you won't be much good at selling stuff to clients, either.

So I had to spend a fair amount of time tonight figuring out why my gut was telling me whatever it was telling me, then coming up with words that made sense of that. Sure, sometimes it sounds like you're making excuses for whatever goofy biases you're prone to. But you're often smartest when you listen to your gut, because in the long run it seems to have sensory apparatus that aren't hard-wired to your brain.

a chicken salad sandwich, hold the chicken...

Order Takers. Sigh.

The bane of any agency. The reason why a lot of good work becomes, well, less good. The reason why a lot of agency-client relationships become, over time, much less good.

You know who Order Takers are, or at least you've dealt with them. They're the people who don't think; the people who participate in this thing of our ours often with a smile, with enthusiasm, without hesitating – and without thinking. There are several key traits of the Order Taker, but you only need to possess one to become one.

They're people who are in over their heads; without understanding or confidence, they have no choice but to parrot things they've been told to say. They're people who have no sense of perspective, and who are never going to grow one. They're people that do the minimum asked, without regard for consequences. Or, not trivially, they're people with no sense of humour.

Emphasizing that the people I currently work with are not Order Takers (we've built an exceptionally good team) here are a few actual examples, with the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

On the client side: We once got feedback from an assistant marketing manager that her boss, the relationship marketing director whom I'll call J, wanted the piece we'd presented to be yellow. Now, yellow wasn't a brand colour. It had no relationship to the concept, or to the consumer. We just couldn't understand it. We politely tried to dissuade the junior client during the call, then after the call we becme slightly more vocal. Tired of our swearing, our account team tried again, but there was no appeal. J was now out of town/in all-day meetings/whatever, and this Order Taker was standing firm on J's final word.

Now, J was (and is) a smart guy. He's consistently been a champion of good creative. And as we have several friends in common, we have also become friendly outside of work. Weeks later, I was able to ask him point blank: J, what the hell was up with the yellow?

"Oh my god," he said. "I was joking." And because he was being a good manager, giving input but letting his people run with their projects with a high degree of autonomy, he had no idea that his minion had mindlessly executed his joke. Autonomy is useful only for those who are autonomous.

On the agency side, there's the irritating account Order Taker: The person like A, a junior suit, who emails you the client feedback as a fait accompli. There is no discussion; his tone is simply, "You will do this." Except that, for me, there's always discussion if I don't agree or see issues. Questions to A about this feedback get the response, "I don't know, I'll have to ask the client."

Now, A should know. But he has simply taken the client's order, without asking questions, without being curious about the client's business, or even other projects within the agency.

When you say, great, if you have to call him/her to ask, why don't I come to your office and we can chat to him/her together, it turns out that before you were able to send that email, A has already managed to call the client and gotten an answer to your question. Except it isn't actually an answer to your question, it's an answer to what he thought was your question, which actually isn't right.

So, apart from cursing A's basic level of intelligence, you have the choice of: a) just doing the damn feedback; or b) involving A's boss and calling the client and finding out what the real situation is and what you can do about it. Unfortunately, you have to judge for yourself whether the feedback warrants this kind of intervention. You can't piss everyone off on every single one of A's projects, or suddenly A isn't the problem, you are.

However, also agency side, there is the even more irritating creative Order Taker: A good writer, X, brought me a deck of hers that had been marked up by client with their first round of feedback. She was cranky. The client feedback was stupid. Did she really have to deal with this? Couldn't I do something about it?

I went through the changes and, while more extensive than any creative might ideally like, found that they were actually workable. I went through them with X, telling her that I was confident in her ability to handle it. I got her attempt back 24 hours later; she had done all the changes literally, and had killed off the spirit of her concept. I gave it back to her with lots of suggestions about how to bridge the gap, as they say. At the end of that day, with the account team clamouring for the now late revision, I took a look at her second attempt. It managed, somehow, to be equally pathetic.

With a view to the timeline, I had her send me her Word doc and quickly did what I could to keep her concept alive, and shipped it off to the account team. Inevitably, more changes came back a few days later, from more senior managers and lawyers. X continued to flail away with growing hostility. Any time I tried not to intercede, the account team found her work impossible to pass on to client, not because she couldn't keep the concept alive in her copy, but because the sentences were disjointed. Feedback was inserted as asked, without thinking if it made any sense.

X didn't last much longer.

As much as you'd like to say that Order Takers can still have a role in marketing (as, say, project managers, editors or accountants, because those are more detail-oriented roles), there's just no room for people who don't understand marketing or their part in it. Those detailed jobs like project management and the others all require thinking and judgement. There should be no room for people who, really, just can't do their jobs.

time's a wastin'

I know that the plague of wasted minutes affects most folks in your average modern workplace. What that means is that you never get enough time to do the one thing that we're all being told we have to do: think.

Crises, planning meetings, resourcing, presentations, admin, general people management, travel time to and from clients, all get in the way. And while we are all encouraged to send each other links to cool links and articles and shit, and all want to show off great stuff we've found, I don't know about you, but these days I'm bombarded by these kinds of things. I don't have time to look at half of them, let alone digest them and think about how these new, cool things can impact my work for my client.

There's just no time for kicking back and letting your imagination roam, which is the only ways new ideas happen.

(David Mamet has a great line, somewhere in Writing in Restaurants, to the effect of:

People ask me where I get my ideas.

I tell them, I think of them.

You can hear his frustration in the emphasis of his response. How the hell else do you get an idea? Only these days, he'd add an additional frustrated, "Which I don't get enough goddamned time to do.")

My basic time control tool is booking myself for large blocks of hours. Anyone trying to book me into a meeting at such a time has to ask me if I can manage it; I feel free to ignore anyone who doesn't check my availability.

I'm also getting pickier about the presentations I need to be in. My overpowering need for time to think has begun to win the arm wrastlin' contest with my basic urge to be a control freak. Not the best reason, but a good outcome for everyone involved.

As indispensable as those two techniques are, they aren't enough. In today's combustible business environment, despite the vast forests of advice from time management gurus, there's always another fire to put out.

the shock of the shock of the new

As a follow-up to my last post, I admit to being, well, shocked by the fact that our clients have been even more forward thinking than us. They've chosen a concept and quickly gotten us feedback, slight revisions which made the creative even more standout. During the call there were a couple of moments where I literally didn't know what to say; I realized that, out of habit, I was getting ready to counter feedback that in this case I actually agreed with – and which liberated us – and I had to stifle myself. It was a great moment for the team, and for the client.

All of which goes to show that you should never lower your expectations of the client. It may be challenging to be shot down over and over again; it may feel like banging your head against a wall sometimes. But you never know when your real, high expectations will be met, and when you can together achieve something impressive.

the shock of the new

In 1982 Robert Hughes, the art critic for Time Magazine, did a TV series called The Shock of The New, about the birth of modern art. I remember it as an incredibly insightful look at how each successive movement, from Impressionism, to Fauvism, to Cubism, to Futurism, was a new way of looking at what art was, what it could do, and what effect it should have on the viewer and on society. Each one was a reaction to what came before, attempting to overcome its perceived limitations. Each one in its turn outraged the people who saw it, until, one day, it magically became the standard and accepted way of looking at things.

By coincidence, we're showing our client something new tomorrow, something they've never seen before. And there's sure to be resistance, confusion and doubt. But it is the way forward; everyone in the room will on some level feel that, at the very least because they've asked for us to do this.

All we can do is build our case (not as indifferently as Marcel Duchamp, needless to say) and overcome the limits of the existing perceptions, until it's (hopefully) clear that what we're showing is, in fact, the way forward.

an undercurrent of fear

A long time ago, at WCJ, we went to a meeting and were told that the agency had agreed to let in CBC's media show Undercurrents, hosted by Wendy Mesley, so they could show Canada what the people who made "junk mail" were really like. None of our clients would agree to this, of course, so it had been determined that, in order to demonstrate our process, the agency would come up with a DM package for the show itself.

And by agency, they meant Kimberley (art directrix supreme) and I. We'd been chosen as the creative team to be put on display for the cameras, which was at once very flattering and enormously terrifying. Knowing that the crew were kicking around language like "junk mail" for what we did, we were sure it was going to be a hatchet job, against the agency and quite possibly us.

Now, as you'll see from the video, it didn't turn out that badly of course. What did turn out badly was my wardrobe (what the hell was it with vests?) and our ability to look like idiots while we did our jobs.

It's impossible to have a camera hovering over you while you try to do something as freeform and personal as writing. Knowing that the camera would not approve of me sitting and silently typing with headphones on, I began trying to perform the act of writing, which had the result of making me look like a babbling idiot. And believe me, there was worse left on the editing room floor.

But the most terrifying thing, a couple of days before the presentation, was the realization that we had some okay concepts, but nothing that was going to show what we were really capable of. Nothing that, if the show's producers really were out to nail us, would be so smart and self-aware that it might just save us on national TV.

I'd had an idea that I'd shared with Kimberley, but as we talked about it we were both sure it would get us fired – because it would be all about deconstructing how DM manipulates you, the target reader. Not exactly the message I thought WCJ would want to tell the world about our work.

And yet, showing the concepts to Trish the president and Michael the creative director a few days before the on-camera presentation, I knew that they too thought what we'd done was ho-hum. I knew I had to go for the Hail Mary, even if it cost me my job. I gulped and told them about a concept using "This is a blatant attempt to manipulate you" as the OE teaser.

And they loved it. (You never know.)

The rest, as they say, is TV and DM history. Or rather, a very small and very forgotten part of it.

Still, this is one DM package I wish we'd been able to produce; I love it.

NOTE: Watching this, I'm reminded that WCJ had a real Murderer's Row of talent at that time: pretty much everyone in the room is insanely talented and has had a lot of success here in Toronto, in the U.S., or globally. Pretty remarkable.