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a kid about Sears or Kmart.
Ask your spouse, lover, friend, or the
dweeb in the next cube about insurance companies or long
distance providers (satan's imps, IOW). The Army. Marlboro.
Camel. Ask an investor about Waste Management before it was bought
out by a second-tier Texas outfit. Do you care if it's NutraSweet
in your diet soda? What are your attitudes toward Levis? Levis,
for god's sake!
The response will be: They are not cool.
These companies all spent money on branding
faster than an addict spends cash on crack, and with just about
the same disastrous effect on their social appeal. Companies that
spend big bucks on brand building advertising are more often than
not firms that people disdain, avoid, or even actively despise!
This is not a secret. All big ad agencies
realize that what's popular today will soon be as popular as older
men hitting on your teenage daughter. After all, times change.
What's cool today is crud tomorrow.
Big agencies also realize that advertising
is not a particularly effective method to build brand awareness.
(Yes, they do.)
Ad agencies once considered the fleeting
popularity of a brand to be a problem.
They have concluded this problem is an opportunity.
Once an expensive brand campaign becomes
as embarrassing as a disco-era haircut -- and it will -- the client
will need to spend even more money to make consumers forget the
old image and embrace a shiny new one.
Uh-huh. We can see what kind of opportunity
this is. It's an opportunity for ad agencies to make a ton more
money.
This isn't just our opinion. We can
prove it.
 Plug
Close friends and mentors Scott Champion
& Sarah Mayer have opened a wonderful online store featuring
all-natural, no-commercial tie-in toys. Since it's time to celebrate
the birth of Santa Claus with a torrent of presents -- check
it out!
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