I Can't Believe We Have to Talk about Toilet Sponsorships Again

And Frank Sinatra did it his way...though it's not the "it" you think

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going?

Lotta stuff going on today. Let’s jump in - our topics today…

• Please watch Japanese commercials

• Please stop sponsoring toilets

• Please make more jingles about pharmaceuticals

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The Neigh-bahly Energy Drink

I wanted to share something that’s more of a palate-cleanser…a little bit of a lemon sorbet between the lamb chops and the cheesecake portions of this newsletter (huh?), and I know the palate-cleanser would usually go in the middle (to cleanse the palate), but I don’t care and it’s going up front.

A bit of background:

Have you seen the ancient Simpsons episode with the commercial for Japanese cleaning product Mr. Sparkle? If not, I’m jealous that you haven’t yet experienced it. I remember seeing this when it originally aired and laughing so hard I almost threw up. I think that says far more about me than it does about the clip:

So that’s a little background - if you were not aware, there’s a whole genre of absurdist Japanese commercials.

There’s lots of examples of these, but I recently came across this older ad for a Japanese energy drink featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger as some sort of demon that explodes from a woman’s head to demonstrate the high energy power of some sort of drink or whatever.

Yeah, man, I don’t know what that is. But I officially challenge any software company to use the absurdist Japanese commercial as a template for marketing your product. I’m sure there’s some generative AI tool that can help. It can’t be a worse idea than the example I’ll share in a moment…

Everyone Gets a Gift!

Hey guess what! I’ve swindled someone to be our first sponsor (that’s the gift for me). And that poor soul is a gifting platform called Postal (they get to glom off the Gobbledy branding halo - that’s the gift for them). And they want to send you a gift box (that’s the gift for you).

If this was 1955 and you wanted to make an impression on someone, you might show up with a tuna casserole or something. But, alas, it’s not! You can’t bring a tuna casserole - some people are vegan, or gluten-free and your secret topping contains Ritz crackers, or those tuna weren’t sustainably fished. There’s a bunch of reasons. This isn’t about those reasons, or whether those are reasonable reasons not to bring a tuna casserole to make an impression.

My point was there’s a way to avoid that whole conundrum - Postal helps modernize the old-school, effective art of making an impression through corporate gifts and experiences.

Postal wants to give you your “first taste of Postal” by sending you a fun gift box, no strings attached*.

*Well, actually there are a few strings. (Again, to paraphrase The Simpsons, “No! Strings attached!”) They want 30 minutes of your time to show you why Postal is better than whatever you’re using now to send things (think corporate gifts, wine, food, or any of those “cool” branded items your CEO wants you to make that are sitting in the back of your utility closet).

You know what to do - follow this link to request your demo and get your gift box.

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Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should

Longtime Gobbledy readers may remember that we once asked a question that I never thought I’d have to ask:

Why do software companies put their logo in urinals?

Meaning, why do software companies think that at conferences it’s a good idea to buy a sponsorship that puts their logos in urinals as some sort of awareness builder.

And because of laziness/lack-of-thoughtfulness I did not have a good answer to that question.

Well, I do have an answer, and the answer is that - and this is just a guess! I have no idea if I’m right - a dude is in charge of marketing, and he thought that putting the logo in urinals was funny. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe a woman thought to herself, “I bet those urinals are pretty awesome branding opportunities, and while I haven’t used one myself, I bet we’ll get more booth traffic if people relieve themselves on our logo. That’s how Goop built their brand.”

I’m bringing this up again because eagle-eyed Gobbledy reader Lynna R. shared a post from a copywriter talking about how his client - British packaging provider CCS McLays - sponsored the toilets (??) at a recent conference and then shared out some of the copy he had to write for that job:

I think it’s worth making a distinction between two things:

Thing 1: Clever copy.

Thing 2: Marketing that makes sense for your brand.

Clever copy is, er, clever. To wit - “Speaking directly to the c-suite while you’re sitting on the wee-seat” is well, I was going to say “clever” but maybe “copy that I can appreciate, given what the assignment was.” For toilet copy, that’s solid work. Or liquid (goddammit, I’m sorry).

But that doesn’t mean it makes sense for your brand.

If you’re a fancy brand, there’s really no world where adding yourself to a public bathroom will benefit you. The universe is filled with urinals that Mercedes has chosen not to plaster with their logo.

And while I’m sure I can come up with companies that should consider urinal advertising (a plumber, for example; or, uh, Axe Body Spray), there is no software being promoted at a retail conference that should be promoted in the bathroom. If you’re running marketing at a software company, and you have the opportunity to sponsor a toilet, please - I’m begging you - let me know and I’ll send you an insertion order for an ad in Gobbledy.

Friends don’t let friends sponsor toilets.

But what if you’re a brand that offers a product that’s pretty well associated with toilets…

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…You Sing about It, Of Course

In 1968 songwriter Paul Anka got a call from Frank Sinatra. Sinatra told him that he was considering retiring and he wanted Anka to write him a song for his final album.

Anka stays up all night thinking about how Sinatra would talk about leaving everything behind and just ending it. The next morning Anka records a demo of the song - set to the tune of a French pop song - and sends it to Sinatra.

A few days later, Anka says he gets a call from the singer:

“He says, ‘kid, listen to this,’ and puts the phone up to the speaker. I heard ‘My Way’ playing for the first time, and I started to cry.”

That was in 1968.

In 2023, the Exact Sciences Corporation adapts Anka’s song of wistful nostalgia, a song so beautiful it made its writer cry when he heard it, a song of living life the way you wanted to - without regret, of leaving it all out there, and uses it in a commercial for Cologuard, the box you poop in to be screened for colon cancer.

While it made no sense for the CCS Mclays people to put their product in a toilet, it’s very smart to take a toilet-related product and move it into a world outside of the commode.

We spoke a little while ago about the Jardiance diabetes medication ad that was also a shitty musical and I argued that it was actually a really smart idea because nobody else was making little musicals about lowering your glucose levels.

Pharma companies have often used a strategy of abstracting what’s happening in an advertisement from the product being advertised - like how it doesn’t matter what the drug is, someone is always arranging flowers, or making pottery, or doing yoga, or riding bikes very slowly, or at the January 6th riot, or at a cupcake baking class, or whatever.

If you need to make people aware of your product, but you don’t want to actually show the specifics of the product (say, if the product involved relieving yourself into a box, bringing it to the UPS store and mailing it somewhere), you need to create a world inhabited by the abstract idea of your product. Perhaps, for example, inhabited by this guy:

His name is not Sir P.F. Crappington, but I really wish it was.

Yes, I like talking about mascots. If I were starting a software company, I would create a mascot before we even launched. Look at Sir P.F. Crappington - here we are having a rather pleasant (one-way) conversation about Cologuard, and it’s not making me want to vomit, and I think that’s only possible because of ol’ P.F. That’s the power of a mascot. When people see it, they won’t throw up when they think about your AI merchandising tool.

You’re welcome.

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As always, thanks for reading to the end.

I really, really enjoy chatting with readers, which is why I include a link to sign up for a 25 minute chat: Here’s my Calendly link. We can talk about Japanese ads, or toilets, or whatever other songs can be used to advertise boxes of poop. It’s really up to you. Whatever you’d like. Or I can go over your website - it can be about work, really!

And lastly, I’ve been doing a bunch of 1-day workshops around messaging, and the outcome is that your homepage will be SO much clearer. If you want your homepage to be clearer, we should chat. You can reply to this newsletter, use that Calendly link, or email me at jared@sagelett.com.

And lastly lastly, if you want to reach an audience of marketing people, you can do no better than advertising in Gobbledy. That native ad above was pretty good, no? (Everyone loves humility.) Anyway, if you want to reach an engaged audience of marketing people, let’s chat about advertising opportunities. I’m still at jared@sagelett.com.