We wait to win the lottery. The screenplay that will make you a Hollywood star. The blog post that will lead to a book deal and speaking engagement. The woman of your dreams. The dream job. The end of the world.

We tend to waste a lot of time waiting.

Companies wait for the new product to turn everything around. The new marketing campaign will change everything.

It doesn’t work that way anymore.

Brands succeed one person at a time. You make one person happy, they will tell others. Rinse and repeat. If you disappoint your customers, they will leave one at a time. Drip, drip, drip.

One at a time is not as cool as the big bang. But it’s the way the world works now.

Social platforms are “one at a time tools”.

You show up every day. You tweet. You blog. You give to the world. Over time, you build a body of work, leading to trust.

Many marketers want to use these tools for breakthrough efforts. Let’s get a million followers and then convert them into a sale. They don’t understand that you have to build trust, one at a time, to earn the right to make a sale. You need to build that trust over time, tweet by tweet, post by post, interaction by interaction, one person at a time. Trying to build trust right before you want to make the sale is a foolish undertaking.

Build a foundation of trust now before you really need it.

Canada has to show us how to create impactful advertising: human, touching, insightful and a perfect match for the brand.

I’ve played soccer for 12 years, mostly in front of 10 fathers and the village drunk. One day, we played in the semi-final for the German Championship in my age group, right before a German Bundesliga game. 50,000 people in the stadium watching us. It was invigorating, amazing and life-changing. A dream came true. Most people playing sports never have that opportunity. They toil in obscurity until they retire. Budweiser changed that with this project and commercial.

It shows again that advertising shouldn’t be about celebrities, CGI or creative egos. Advertising should be about human insights come to life. It touched me deeply to see the players react and respond to this idea.

Congrats, Budweiser Canada, you made my day.

Below, the making of the commercial.

Twitter friend @bud_caddell let me know that the commercial is a creative copy of commercial below. He’s right. I still think Budweiser Canada made the initial concept better. Maybe it’s the human reaction of players toiling for decades in obscurity, just to be recognized for one day. Judge yourself.

On Monday somebody will ask: “Does any of these commercials sell product?” or “Did anyone rush out to buy this product when they saw the commercial?”

They are asking the wrong question

Super Bowl ads are not really about selling. They are about creating some funky creative that spreads. That people will talk about on Monday, that people will share through their networks. It’s the one time of the year where people are waiting for ads, asking for them. People want to be entertained, not to be sold to. We’re watching because these commercials are social objects, ideas we want to share with our world.

Does it work?

Depends on who you ask. Ask agencies and advertising pundits, they will tell you it works really well. Ask the CFO, you might get a different answer. I’m somewhere in the middle. I love some of the creativity that’s often missing the remaining 364 days. But I wonder if we don’t make too much out of it, and if all this effort is really worth it. The one thing I know is that Super Bowl ads show that storytelling works. It doesn’t say anything about the value of advertising.

P.S.: The agency of the Kia commercial shot five minutes of super-slo-mo reference footage of Adriana ima waving the flag. They slowed it down to 1/60 speed, creating a 5 hour movie. Brilliant. At least, that’s what more than 200,000 visitors thought.

It takes 3 years to become a hair dresser in Germany. The first year you spend most days sweeping the floor, cleaning tools and serving refreshments.

If the floor is filthy, it really doesn’t matter how good your haircuts are, nobody wants to come back and pay good money surrounded by hair on the floor.

When people write and speak about marketing and advertising, they assume you know how to sweep the floor. They assume you understand the impact of creative, the power of copywriting, have advanced knowledge of graphic design and UI as well as UX. They assume you understand the correlation between paid, earned and owned media, know how to measure the impact of any marketing effort and be able to distill that knowledge into a client presentation.

Too often, we fall in love with the new thing, jump ahead and embrace it.

Too often, we fail to be competent at the important thing.

Advertising Age posted this week an article “Aging in Adland: The gray-hair phobia that’s hindering older execs.” and it hit a nerve. My Twitter feed was bursting with comments about the article and the comments a the bottom of the post are worth your time.

Rupal Parekh writes:

“Most shops won’t admit it readily, but gray-hair phobia is a reality in the digital era. With agencies continually restructuring and changing models to keep pace with the public’s media consumption habits, adland is right to be digitally obsessed. But most in the industry wrongly assume that the only people who grasp digital are fresh out of college.

That presumption has spawned an undercurrent of resentment as agencies refit themselves for the digital world – a process that often entails stripping out layers of longtime employees in favor of a newer breed of creatives and strategists believed to better grasp the increasingly complex media environment.”

It’s a bigger problem than just the digital revolution

When I started as a copywriter in advertising, people suddenly looked at me differently. Behind that cheap haircut and the non-cool clothes and appearance, there must be something cool about me, right? I didn’t know bands that were playing in a garage, ready to become underground hits. I didn’t go to hidden bars, I didn’t eat in a North Korean restaurant and I didn’t care about that cool movie from Sri Lanka. That average guy, how could he work in advertising?

Once you start working in the advertising industry, it looses its perceived coolness very quickly and turns into a grind of long hours, lost weekends and  endless defeats. (Still, the best profession on earth.) Advertising professionals should know about the lack of coolness in our profession but, somehow, the outside view of our industry has rubbed off on the industry itself in some kind of self-perpetuating cycle.

Focusing on coolness is a sure loser

Being hip and cool seems to be equated by our industry with youth, the general feeling seeming to be that if you’re over 39 years you can’t possible contribute anything valuable. Translated: If you’re not in an executive position by 39 and 364 days, you better look for a new job. You’ll never make it.

This makes no sense. Or to say it in a more diplomatic way: It’s beyond stupid.

The long hours, the lost weekends and overall lifestyle demands youthful amounts of energy and, sure, some agency types are done by the time they start a family, opting for 9-5 lifestyle. This is not a golden rule but agencies love to worship the fountain of youth (the current economic climate doesn’t help) and forget that they are missing out on a deep talent pool.

The industry not only misses out on 39+ executives from other industries who would be suicidal to make the jump into advertising, we’re also losing a lot of talented people inside our industry. Especially bewildering when you have to listen to endless complaints about the “lack of talent” in our industry. I have friends in the industry who were loved by all their clients and co-workers, who can talk more intelligently about emerging technologies than any SXSW attendee and who have an amazing track record of brilliant work who can’t get an interview. Why? Because they were born before 1973.

The industry should take a long, hard look in the mirror: We seem to hire the same cool folks, the same hip people, the same way of thinking. And we end up with similar ideas. Innovative thinking won’t happen when we habitualize our hiring policies.

We need to start recruiting more on attitude and aptitude and less on date of birth.

When I grew up, my favorite brand was Coca-Cola. I also loved McDonald’s and any cereal brand. The unhealthier sweeter, the better. Over time, I learned that Coke was nothing more than sugared water and McDonald’s peddled really crappy food by sourcing through really terrible methods. Well, and cereal was nothing more than sugar in milk. My love for these brands turned into cynicism. They still created great advertising but it’s hard to enjoy any commercial or online game when you have these videos of tortured chicken in your head.

Branding used to involve big budgets, flashy advertising, a lot of good looking people and promises that were never kept.

This branding era is about to end.

We are about to experience a branding renaissance

Branding doesn’t happen in brainstorming sessions, on TV screens or through false, beautiful worlds anymore.

Branding today entails:

- Focusing more on stakeholder value, less on shareholder value

- Social Currency is more important than immediate profitability

- Innovation more important than messages

- Customer experience is almost everything

- Delivering constant customer value is everything.

Advertising noise will continue to be part of branding. Over time, that noise will just lead to tone deafness and the return will be minimal. Companies that are doing it right will succeed over time. The others will fade away.

Your digital campaign represents your company, it’s the public face of your company. Just like your website, your store, your packaging, your employees, your phone tree (Let’s hope you have none.) Your digital campaign might be the first encounter of a prospect with your brand. Or it might be a visit with an old friend. Have you ever looked at the personality of your digital campaign?

All brands and their agencies design campaigns with best intentions. Sometimes they succeed. Often they fail and end up where they never wanted to go. I’ve been part of those and I’m not proud of my personal train wrecks. Advertising intends to motivate behavior change. Can you be motivated by an unlikeable person to change behavior? Shouldn’t we all try to be more likeable to customers?

Well, let me introduce you to a few of these people brands create every day.

The cheesy salesman

His perfume is cheap and strong, his clothes outdated and loud, and his pitch is annoying and even louder. Whenever you see him, you try to run away as fast as you can. He tries to sell and upsell anything, as long he profits from it: He doesn’t care.

That’s the digital campaign with huge “Buy” or “Click” buttons, takeovers, pop-unders, scams to make you”like” the brand: Any trick in the book is good to make you buy. Or at least to make you show some interest. That’s the least you can do to keep the cheesy salesman employed.

The creepy guy

You meet him at a party, have a brief chat with him and he believes you want to get married to him. Wherever you go, he’s there: At the gym, at work, in your home. He continues to ask the same question: “Why don’t we close the deal?” He’s the guy that makes you feel uncomfortable, a Big Brother always watching. If you could, you would punch him in the face but he might take that as a sign that you want to close the deal.

As a digital campaign, these are the re-targeting slaves. Yes, I showed interest in your airline 1 week ago but that doesn’t mean you need to remind me on every page I visit, thanks to your massive ad network/retargeting buy. A friend might have sent me a link to your offer, I checked it out and didn’t care. Make me care even less by retargeting me 5,012 times. Maybe it works at the 5,013th impression. Who knows?

Paris Hilton

Ok, she looks good. But, ask her what time it is and she needs an assistant because her brain is permanently turned off. Ask her to do anything and she’ll answer with a frozen smile. She’s stupid, she can’t do anything, the world adored her at one point. Oh, did I mention she’s pretty?

As a digital marketing campaign, that’s the flashturbation campaign. So much Rich Media, you can pay the global debt with it. Too bad it doesn’t work on all devices, crashes your computer and serves no conversion purpose. Oh, did I mention it looks pretty?

The cheerleader

Who doesn’t love cheerleaders? Your team sucks, no one in the stands, it’s raining, they ran out of beer and the cheerleader is still smiling, yelling: Go team. They don’t understand why you don’t like their team, why you don’t share the same level of enthusiasm. No matter, in their mind the own team will always be the best. Even though they haven’t won a game in 10 years.

As a digital campaign, this is the campaign that doesn’t get why you wouldn’t “like” their Facebook page even though there’s no reason for you to like it. No value proposition. Why wouldn’t you follow a Twitter stream brimming with promotional messages? Why do you need motivation to change your behavior? Isn’t our presence  motivation enough?

The cheapskate

He’s the guy occupying the parking lot of Best Buy the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. He’s the guy that occupies the coffee shop for hours with an order of a miniature coffee. He’s the guy sitting next to toilet, the guy that gets the worst seat in the bar. He doesn’t care. As long as it’s cheap, he’s happy.

The digital campaign you don’t see. Cheap inventory equals invisibility. Banner ads below the fold on sites you don’t dare visiting because they look like malware-infested 1990 designs. The cheapskate loves the cheesy sales guy on the publisher site. It’s a mutual feeling: the sales guy sells garbage and the cheapskate sifts through it, filled with happiness.

I get this junk every day. ( I spared you the enlargement ads. I hope you don’t mind.) While I ignore this junk and all the dying people that send me millions of dollar, I think it represents fairly well what many clients expect from their agencies.

Brainwashing and hard-core selling.

Now, when you ask clients, they will talk about ‘emotional selling” and “branding experience”. But when procurement knocks on the door and the sales spread sheets show a lot of red, they want the sell: benefits, discounts, knock down the competition, buy now.

Don’t get me wrong: Advertising should be about sales. Period. Good advertising motivates people, encourages them to take action and take out their wallet. But it doesn’t put a gun to their head, screaming: “Hurry. Try now.” Good advertising is not a bully. Good advertising is a charming servant.

Everybody is selfish.

We all want things that are in our best interest. Good advertising connects the emotional desires/needs of people with the commercial desire/needs of brands. It shouldn’t be that hard to understand but more and more brands are pushing into the bullying mode, trying to force people to action.

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WOMAN’S BREASTS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ASSETS BECAUSE THEY BOOST-UP OUR CONFIDENCE.

OUR BREAST ENLARGEMENT PRODUCT IS THE BEST ANSWER TO YOUR BREASTS PROBLEM.

HURRY!
TRY NOW!

Oh, ok. Since breasts are the important assets of a woman, once she enlarges them, her life will be like a dream. Happiness all around. Joy to the world. Take some pills and you’ll be happy.

Oh, ok. Who believes that garbage?

I’m sure this product doesn’t work but I know for sure the advertising achieves the opposite what the brand wants to happen.

You can’t force people to react. People will turn away. Run away.

Clients usually ask for the hard sell, the in-your-solution because they are afraid to risk anything. In reality, they’re risking everything by cramming 3 product benefits in one banner ad.

The word “effectiveness” is thrown around in Adland all day long. That’s fine as long as people would use the word correctly.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

When things go well, all of us take credit for the success. When things go wrong, we tend to assign blame to anyone in sight: product, economy, sales process, packaging, your mother.

Just look at the list of 2011 Effie awards winners: MINI Cooper, Toyota, Nissan, Old Spice, V8, Gatorade, Old Spice, Sony PlayStation, etc. Some of them had good sales in 2011, others declining sales. How can you win an Effie when your sales are declining? And why are you claiming credit for sales increases when advertising is just part of the solution? When an agency holds up that award, shouldn’t they share the stage with R&D, Product Planning, Customer Service and your mother?

Marketing and advertising do have a very important role to play in a brands success. But the way it talks itself up and the way awards and recognition in the industry only focus on  advertising’s contribution to success is a good explanation why advertising often doesn’t get the respect it should deserve.

Effectiveness is built on collaboration while we reward individualism. A good start to change this false obsession with effectiveness would be to approach this topic with an open mind rather than a delusional one. To regain the respect of brands and business partners, we need to focus more on tackling real business problems. Advertising rarely helps solving them.