It's Alive!

Dear readers, today we offer you a special treat: a post not written by your Tio Tito.

The Mambo diaspora spreads far, and one can never be sure that there is not a Mambo next to you in a bar, at a fish fry, or at the library at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. You see we have a cousin in that snow-bound state, Davido, with whom we have often shaken both head and fist at the industry in which we once toiled. He is now preparing himself to teach the arts that he once practiced.

The business of advertising has fallen from the high perch it once occupied. Unfortunately few inside the industry ever realized or acknowledged how precarious that perch had been for the past two decades.

For those of you who don't follow these matters...lucky you...many advertising agencies spun off the media planning and buying discipline that once once part of the many services they offered their clients. The idea was to create larger media companies that could get better prices from newspapers and networks through their increased buying power. You see, ad agencies had always considered media the unskilled labor of the ad world, basically a commodity that could only be better by being cheaper. As the complexity of media has increased, so has the power of these new media giants, but at the expense of the ad agencies of which they were once a part.

But Davido never gave into this second-class thinking. He was brilliant because he combined human insight and a touch of creativity into his ideas. I was brilliant because I recognized this in Davido. We were brilliant together.

And Davido has recently written a post on his blog, Kerfuffle, about the role of media skills in the careers of today's advertising students and tomorrow's leaders. But what he has really written about is the recent past and immediate future of the advertising business. It's a story with underlying themes of money and arrogance, fate punishing vanity, and the ultimate triumph of the creation over the creator.

Please enjoy.

Don’t look now, but the media people are taking over the advertising business. (post link)

It would seem, based on popular culture, that the advertising business is all about the creative. Indeed, as noted in a post [on Mediated Communication, the J-school blog] earlier this week, over 100 million people tuned into the Super Bowl, as much for the ads as for the game. Consider one of the most-mentioned things about those Super Bowl ads: the price. Was it worth $3 million for one of those :30 ads? Hard to say; that would depend on the advertiser’s media strategy.

Three times in the past two weeks I have been approached by undergraduate students in the J-School who said they hoped to land a job as advertising media planners. As one who spent a few decades as a media planner, I couldn’t be happier. For too long, it seemed media was next to no one’s preferred ad agency job. For whatever reason, media planning — the mix of art and science that guides the strategic deployment of advertising dollars –still seems to be overlooked or flat out dismissed by young people looking to enter the advertising business. And yet, in the 21st Century advertising industry, it’s not the creative product that gets all the attention from clients.

Clients care most about making their money work as hard as possible. How hard that money works is closely tied to the media strategy, which is why these days the media strategy informs the creative strategy instead of the other way around. Broad-based, mass reach media is rapidly becoming a wasteful marketing luxury, and simply shoveling a budget in the direction of the television networks doesn’t cut it anymore. Media plans are far more targeted, measurable, transactional, experiential and flexible. Advertising is about changing behavior, and nearly all behavior is circumstantial to some degree. It’s the job of the media strategist to find the optimal circumstances to try to change that behavior. The best ad in the world won’t sell a damn thing if it isn’t exposed to the right person at the right time in the right circumstances, whatever those may be.

Given the increasing importance of media strategy and its precise execution, it’s no surprise that media agencies are growing and diversifying while traditional advertising agencies are withering. Client relationships with media agencies are more stable than relationships with their creative counterparts. Creative assignments may be divvied up among several shops, but media planning and buying tends to be consolidated with viable long term partners. To the entry-level advertising job seeker, this should make media strategy and execution a whole lot more appealing, especially since that’s also where the job growth seems to be.

Core media planning and buying functions — what the old agency model lumped into the “media department” — are only one part of the today’s media agency model. Specialty media agencies have emerged to handle a wide variety of client media needs, often at the expense of traditional creative agencies. A look at Omnicom’s OMD Media network provides a good example. Among OMD’s strategic business units are agencies that specialize in sports marketing, entertainment marketing, digital direct marketing, branded entertainment, programming and content creation, and search marketing to name a few. These are media agencies that lead the development and implementation of media-driven ideas, sourcing and managing ancillary support elements (like creative) along the way. Clients have come to realize that while it may be fun to make TV commercials, the vast majority of their marketing dollars are spent on media, not creative. Clients are focused on the money.

If I had my way — which I don’t… yet — I would like to see our J447 course, Strategic Media Planning, be required of all students who wish to major in advertising. Since it’s not, I can only suggest most enthusiastically that if you are an undergraduate, and you think you want to work in the advertising business, be sure to take J447 and learn as much as you can about media strategy. Don’t stop there. Read the media trade publications and web sites. Develop opinions about media campaigns you admire. Know what goes into a good media plan, and be able to identify media strategies that miss the mark. Recognize that nearly anything can be a media opportunity… and not just by slapping an unsightly ad on it. Be knowledgeable about industry leaders and innovators.

In today’s world of rapidly converging media channels, user-generated content, and multi-platform entertainment options, creative is no longer the undisputed king of the advertising hill. Clients have limited marketing resources and great expectations. They place a very high value on feeling confident they are spending their advertising money wisely and effectively. And that money is entrusted to the media strategists.

[Originally posted on Mediated Communication, the blog of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.]

Slam dunk squeeze play

The banishment of the brands

I, Tito Mambo, have a problem. I often find myself fixated on subjects of little obvious consequence, and this affliction resurfaced last week on the topic...of all things!...of food storage bags. You see last week Walmart announced that it will no longer carry either the Glad or Hefty brands of storage bags. As you most likely know, Walmart has been recently pursuing a strategy of brand consolidation, and in this case, will consolidate their shelves around Ziploc and Great Value, the Walmart store brand. The goal of Walmart’s strategy is to reduce supply costs and at the same time increase sales margins. And Walmart is not alone. Both CVS and Walgreens are pursuing similar strategies. Anticipating this decision, Glad, Hefty and Ziploc increased their advertising spending about 67% in 2009 versus 2008. Hefty alone increased their spending by 500%. Little good did it do them.

We are not sure why this news caught and held our attention. We don’t shop at Walmart, we don’t know anyone who works at any of these manufacturers, we couldn't tell you which brand of storage bag sits in the Mambo-family pantry. But what we do know is that increasingly the marketplace punishes the idle. Yes, such cruel justice was dispensed in the past, but is now more quick and unforgiving in its workings.

Playing ketchup

And today we again became fixated on yet another news story. Heinz has revolutionized the ketchup package. Okay, perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but we felt the need to get your attention. It seems that the ketchup package, born in 1968, is no longer serving our needs. The ketchup package was originally created for use in the situation in which food was eaten at a restaurant table, where your brains and hands could focus on the tearing of the package, the squeezing of the ketchup, the repetition of the process until enough ketchup was dispensed. And of course, the ketchup had to be made suitable for your specific use. If you dunked your fries you needed to prepare your ketchup in a different and incompatible way to someone who squeezed the ketchup directly on to their fries.

But the world has changed. Most of the foods that demand the companionship of ketchup are now eaten in cars, and the on-road manipulation of the ketchup pack threatens your shirt if you're a passenger and much more if you're the driver.

So the product development people at Heinz bought themselves a used mini-van on the company dime and drove around eating fast food. They were looking for what we at marketmambo like to call an “empathetic” understanding of their consumer. The fruits of their effort is a new ketchup pack which holds three times the amount of the traditional pack and can be peeled open for dunking or torn open at one end for squeezing. It will rest nicely on the dashboard or console of most major brands of minivan.

Yes, dear readers, it is Monday, but I was not so desperately in need of mental stimulation that I would declare genius in a new ketchup package design. But here’s the thing. We as marketers are everyday challenged to add to or at least demonstrate the value of our products, and as we've said, when we fail in this task we are likely to be punished quickly. And yet we are given stewardship of products that long ago converged on category parity. So we paint our plow horses to look like thoroughbreds. Is that what the brand managers at Hefty did when they were invited to the shootout at the Walmart corral? Perhaps.

A banana will lead you

In the untidy brain of your Tio Tito, the stories of Hefty and Heinz have been circling each other like playful dogs, and we turn to this post in search of peace. In the eden of their dreams, marketers find an improvement in their product that vanquishes the competitors. In the nightmares that inhabit their waking hours, they desperately bet their careers on price cuts and none-too-clever promotions. But a few find success not through some tedious chemist or tiresome creative director but through the simple insight of a package designer. Most packaging decisions are made to reduce product damage, to improve display, or discourage theft. But for many products packaging is some part of the "user experience". For some products its a significant part. In a commodity category, let's use ketchup as an example, small packaging improvements to the packaging can create a better user experience and become a clear advantage versus the competition.

But the world is still changing. As retailing moves from the store to the internet, the importance of display and security in packaging are reduced. The Walmart of the internet, Amazon, has asked its suppliers to join its "frustration free" packaging initiative and reduce the burden placed on consumers by clamshells and twist-ties.

We at marketmambo propose a test. Call it the banana test. It goes like this: If the packaging of a product is a greater portion of the user experience than the peel is part of the banana experience, whether a source of pleasure, entertainment or frustration, then the packaging for that product has the potential to be a source of competitive advantage. Certainly ketchup passes this test, and we suspect that many other products will pass this test as well.

Apropos of nothing

If you missed the pop culture reference above, let me point it out to you. The banana graphic above was created by Andy Warhol for the 1966 album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. This was one of those rare albums which had more to do with the next ten years of music than the previous ten.

It's appearance on the cover is shown to the right.

This has nothing to do with the post except that we'd like to offer our readers a treat in return for their time. We've embedded a video below of a rehearsal of the Velvet Underground set to our favorite song from the album, Waiting for the Man. Please enjoy.

Death of a Firefighter

We have again become distracted by affairs that boil the pot. So must we all at some time. And speaking of fire...maybe our lack of practice has made that the best segue we can offer...what brings us back to our post is the recent passing of Earl Cooley, a firefighter we have never personally met, though circumstances have allowed us to meet many firefighters.

Yes, several of our recent posts have been at least partly obituaries: John Hughes, Billy Mays, were there others? We offer no explanations, excuses or rationalizations.

This post is not about Earl Cooley. Its more about Wag Dodge, though ultimately its not about him either. But to get to Dodge we must go through Cooley, and once through Cooley we'll see where we end up.

On the Wings of Hubris

Cooley passed in November, at the age of 98, and that gives you a hint about where our story begins. In July of 1940, Cooley and his partner stepped out of an airplane and into the Montana sky. Their job was to confront a forest fire and quickly bring it under control while it could still be brought under control. They were the first smoke jumpers, poorly trained, poorly equipped, yet confident past the edge of hubris. Cooley described his training as "This is a parachute. You know what a fire is. You jump tomorrow." His chute didnt open properly that day, and he survived by crashing through the branches of a quick-thinking spruce. But within four hours, he and his partner had won the smoke jumpers' first battle.

On August 5, 1949 Cooley was once again in a plane over Montana heading to a fire, this time as a spotter. Crouched down in the open doorway of the plane, his job was to find the best place to drop the crew of smoke jumpers, and as they lined up at the door, to then tap each man on his left leg as a signal that it was his turn to step into the sky. The first leg he tapped that afternoon was that of Wag Dodge, the foreman of the crew that was jumping into Mann Gulch.

In the Face of Fickled Winds

You may be familiar with the story of Mann Gulch. Perhaps not. In Montana it is passed down as oral tradition. For smoke jumpers, the tragedy is the painful spasm that defines the birth of the profession. Most never heard of the story until Norman Maclean's brilliant treatment, Young Men and Fire, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

Thirteen men burned to death that day. Cooley had done his job well, safely setting the crew on the north slope of the gulch, opposite the fire burning on the southern ridge. But it is here that in our story that we bid farewell and peace to Earl Cooley and move our attention to Wag Dodge.

After inspecting the fire, Dodge became concerned about the situation and began walking his men to the safety of the Missouri River which lay at one end of the gulch. Before they could make much progress the winds switched direction and carried the fire from the forest on the southern slope to the waist-high grass of the northern slope on which the men stood.

We learn many things from Maclean's story, and one thing in particular which is relevant to this moment in Mann Gulch. Fire, it seems, loves running through waist-high grass up a 76% grade. Men are different. The race to the northern ridge lasted about ten minutes. Two men made it over the top with the fire at their backs. Thirteen lay where their legs gave out or the fire out ran them.

Thank you Tio Tito, we hear you say. It is a compelling story, as tragedies so often are, and we're sure that Maclean's version is even better. But you haven't yet made the connection to marketing and we are beginning to fear that you never will.

Unfortunately you are correct dear readers. Maclean's telling of the story is greatly superior. Those who read it never forget it. And yes, we haven't connected the story to marketing, and we're not sure that we can, at least not to anyones satisfaction other than our own. But what we never expected, and you may not have either, is that the story of the race up the northern slope of Mann Gulch has inspired many to contemplations and explorations of insight and creativity.

Wag Dodge never made it to the top, and realizing the futility of the effort, gave up on his attempt. Let's bring some numbers into this story. When Dodge stopped he was about 200 yards short of the ridge, the wall of fire was about fifty feet high, about 250 feet deep, traveling about 700 feet per minute, and about 30 seconds behind him and the rest of the crew. As he stopped Dodge pulled a match out of his pocket, faced the fire and lit the grass at his feet. His fire grew quickly into an expanding ring. Dodge stepped into the burned-out center and called for his crew to follow him. No one had ever seen this tactic before, no one understood, and no one joined him. While we can't be sure what the other men were thinking, or if they were thinking at all, we can imagine that at some point in the previous few minutes, some ancient brain mechanism located just above the spinal cord had settled on "run" and "ridge" as the two words to govern all their decisions.

Robert Salley, seventeen years old at the time and the only member of the crew alive today, tells of his reaction to Dodge's actions:

"I saw him bend over and light a fire with a match. I thought, With the fire almost on our back, what the hell is the boss doing lighting another fire in front of us? We thought he must have gone nuts."

But as Sallee made it to the top of the ridge he turned back, and through the smoke saw Dodge lay face-down in the charred circle of the little fire he created. Dodge later estimated that the fire took about five minutes to pass over him, several times lifting him off the ground with its updraft.

What Happens in Montana...

As we wrote this post we were surprised to learn that the passing of Earl Cooley was picked up by the Economist and The Telegraph, both UK publications, one ridge, one ocean and 60 years from Mann Gulch, Montana. We credit the writing of Norman Maclean who, as we have said, has the ability to make the story part of your story.

But for Maclean, Mann Gulch was part of his story also. During World War I Maclean, then fifteen, worked for the Forest Service, and ran his own race with a fire up another Montana slope, winning by just enough to save his life but not his boots, which smoldered on his feet. And in August of 1949 Maclean was once again in Montana, and visited the site of the fire while it still smoked.

Ultimately the thirteen who died and even the three who survived became ghosts that Maclean couldn't escape. Maclean began writing Young Men and Fire at the age of 78, hoping to give the men of Mann Gulch a completed story to sum up their lives, as he put it, to make their story "not just a catastrophe, but a tragedy". And as he came to terms with his own mortality, the book is also an attempt by Maclean to find a story that helped him understand his life. We at marketmambo feel confident that we could recommend Young Men and Fire to our readers with little concern of disappointment.

And as we've already mentioned, we were surprised to discover that the story of Wag Dodge has captured the imagination of those interested in insight and creativity. While fifteen other men ran for their lives up a ridge, driven by the instinct inherent of flesh to preserve itself, Dodge stopped and did the unexplainable. He realized that the driving muscle of their legs would not save them. This was not a reasoned decision. Dodge did not stop and consider his options. He did not conduct a meeting or an idea generation session. Furthermore, and dear reader please keep this in mind, he was never trained to start an "escape fire", and in fact, no one in the Forest Service had ever heard of such a thing. Dodge had a moment of insight while all others were driven, and perhaps blinded, by instinct. At the inquiry established to investigate the event, Dodges only explanation was "it just seemed the right thing to do".

As those of you who have previously joined us at this post know, marketmambo is a place where I, Tito Mambo, work through the puzzles that rest uneasily in my mind. And here is why we have been called back to the post by the death of a firefighter, Earl Cooley, and have taken our readers inexplicably up the slope of a Montana gulch. In the most unlikely, yet the most dramatic, of situations, insight occurred, stripped of all fancy words and deep thinking, and revealed its most basic biological, primitive potential in all of us.

On the marketing dance floor, it is truly creativity and insight that drive the tune. Yet we cannot summon it on demand nor avoid it once it starts. We promise insight and creativity to others, and expect payment in return, but cannot explain it any better than the Greeks who, almost 3000 years ago, believed that insight came from a god singing into their ear.

We know that we rarely offer answers to the questions we raise and have made no attempt at an answer here. Perhaps this post is meant to help clarify the questions. What is insight? What is creativity? Where do they come from? And most importantly, what can we do to encourage the gods to sing in our ear. We hope to take on these questions in upcoming posts, and maybe a few more we couldn't anticipate. We have no plan, only inclination, which seems to be how we start most ventures in our life.

Mann Gulch is still today remote and inaccessible, and still littered with rattle snakes and still able to rise to over 100 degrees on an August afternoon. Some are drawn to the site by the ghosts and the story, some make it. If you ever make it to the north slope of Mann Gulch you'll find thirteen concrete crosses, each marking the spot where a man fell. These crosses were made and erected by Earl Cooley, who climbed the steep grade to maintain them until a few years before his death.

The Shitake Hits the Fan

We must admit that we enjoy browsing the aisles of Whole Foods. The service is great, the products are high quality, and the variety...where else can you find a jar of Punjabi dipping sauce? But as much as we browse, as much as the dipping sauce may be the closest we could ever get to the Punjab, we have never purchased anything at Whole Foods. Never spent a penny.

Along with the great service, which is truly great, and the high quality, which is undoubtedly high, come high prices. The job of a curmudgeon has never been lucrative, and in this economy, there are many curmudgeons whose forums are facing foreclosure. Your Tio Tito shakes his fist only for the love of fist shaking. Ranting at the wind brings us no financial gain. And we understand and accept that service, quality and variety aren't free.

But we suspect that at Whole Foods you get, and pay for, more than this. As we pass the other customers, the ones actually putting food in their carts with the full intention of purchasing it, we get the sense that shopping at Whole Foods is more than shopping, more than filling the pantry. When a Whole Foods customer buys locally/organically grown broccoli at $2.19 per pound, they want to feel that they're the kind of people who buy locally/organically grown broccoli for $2.19 per pound. They want to know that the beans that they brew for their coffee are sourced from farmer cooperatives in Guatemala. When you're a customer of Whole Foods, your cash buys cachet. For los Mambos, when broccoli hits 99 cents per pound, we don't eat broccolli.

Now John Mackey, the CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods is facing a backlash from his customers who have a bent to blog. In a piece in last week's Wall Street Journal (here) Mackey shared his opinions on health care reform. Risking over-simplification, we will summarize that Mr. Mackey believes the federal government should play a secondary role to the choice and responsibilty of the health-care consumer.


Mackey provides the following preface before offering eight suggestions of his own for health-care reform:

"While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone."

The spirit of his piece and his specific suggestions seem reasonable to us. In the long run, they may not be correct, may not be feasible, but they fall within the range that fits the space of adult political discussion. At least to us they do.

Mr. Mackey's piece has ignited an internet inferno. A Facebook page called "Boycott Whole Foods" (here) has gone up and as of this morning has nearly 25,000 fans, and so many postings that the moderators shut down the discussion last night so they could catch up. Whole Foods own public forum has a section dedicated to the debate. The chart below, courtesy of Technorati, shows the increase in blog activity on John Mackey over the past few weeks.


There are many things of which we are uncertain. First, we are uncertain of the proportion of this internet activity that is opposed to Mackey's comments, and that which supports them. There are just too many comments to count and no one has yet been kind enough to do that for us.

Our suspicion is that there are more comments against Mackey than for him. Even the other Whole Foods co-founder, Renee Lawson Hardy has posted a letter on the company forum disagreeing with Mackey and encouraging others to read the source texts of ObamaCare with an open mind "free from ideological clinging". (more here)

We are uncertain as to which of Mr. Mackey's points are the cause of the offense. Posts mention frustration with the Iraq War, the financial bailout, Whole Foods relationship with unions, and Mr. Mackey's contributions to Tom DeLay. We have been unable to find one critic that directly takes on a point in his opinion piece related to health care. We suspect they may be out there, but there's so little time. All posts end by vowing to find alternative sources for their groceries. Here is an excerpt from a writer at the Daily Kos, known as "DarkSyde":

"Mr. Mackey, you just shat all over your best customers. Given the years of pseudonymous postings on Yahoo finance slamming a competitor you were quietly trying to acquire at the time, double talk and unethical behavior arguably seems to be becoming a habit for you. So I will never, ever, shop at your stores again, unless you retract that op-ed, apologize for stabbing us in the back, or resign." (more here)

Mr. DarkSyde seems to express as best as possible the opposition's specific criticisms against Mackey's health care suggestions.

Dear readers, let us assure you that we make no attempt to judge Mr. Mackey's critics or his supporters. We are confused by much of the debate and issues of health care reform. Perhaps if we knew more, we too would be outraged.

We are also uncertain as to what the message is for corporate leaders who are inclined to share their point of view with the public. Blogging and twittering by executives has been encouraged in recent years. Tony Hsieh of Zappos is the poster boy. But those in the public who yesterday applauded openness from the exec suite are today's Jacobins who will terrorize those they disagree with. At least the guillotine was quick compared to the blogotine. We expect that there will be an increasing reluctance to openness by exec's who are unsure of the value of social media but quite sure of it's dangers.

But let's return to the beginning and something of which we're reasonably certain. Whole Foods is more than a grocery store, it's a place at which many people who share a relatively common outlook gather to express their faith through the sacrament of shopping. Sometimes we only see the power of a brand and the source of its power when the shared but unspoken assumptions of the relationship are violated.