Make sure someone double checks your photography...
Plus Nike knows what you hate, and it makes for good marketing
Hello Gobbledeers,
Hm. Well, it’s been a little eventful since we last spoke.
I wanted to share a tiny story:
I’ve mentioned here that our twin daughters left for college in September. It’s been very busy in our life doing God-knows-what in the two months since then, and whenever someone asks us how we’re doing since they’ve left for college, we say something like, “It’s just been so busy that we really only notice at night when it’s quiet.”
Which isn’t really true, but it’s probably the easiest way to respond. Also because I’m not really sure how it’s affected us, other than it has.
The family that lives next door to us in our building has a little boy who’s almost 3 years old and is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. Susan and I are slightly obsessed with him because of his adorableness and because he’s very sweet and also because he was terrified of us and would run to his mother every time he saw us.
That is, until the past couple of weeks, when suddenly he’s willing to chat with us. He said my name a little while ago, and I felt like a celebrity recognized me - I had no idea he knew my name.
Yesterday we got a text from our neighbor saying, “I’m really sorry if you heard someone banging on your door, but P came home and said he wanted to see Susan and Jared and started crying and ran out of the house and was banging on your door so you’d let him in.”
And that is all Susan and I have wanted since the girls left - for a little kid who knows our name to want to spend some time with us.
And no matter what happened yesterday, and no matter how we’ve been feeling about the result, it’s a good reminder that the things that really bring us joy are still there. Assuming they’re able to knock loud enough.
…
In today’s Gobbledy:
Some bawdy Shakespeare
Calm
Nike knows you hate running
Shakespeare Agreed Brand Guidelines Are Important
By my life, this is my lady’s hand: these be her very C’s,
her U’s, and her T’s; and thus makes she her great P’s.
-Malvolio, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night1
—
Even though folks on the brand side of marketing and those on the performance side of marketing have some disagreements from time to time (which is to say, from the beginning of time to the end of time), one thing we can all agree on is that brand guidelines are important.
That is not to say that everyone will follow the brand guidelines. When you’re producing thousands (tens of thousands?) of versions of ads to run on Instagram (or whatever), of course you’d like them all to adhere to those guidelines. Absolutely!
Good brand guidelines are scalable, of course. If a brand wants to say “Gobbledy is always written with a capital ‘G’ and the rest of the letters must be lowercase and it’s always dark on a light background and it can be used with or without the logo, and the font is Fonzie Bold, and the hex color is #4FDKJ3, but it should never be used next to a picture of an ostrich” well, those are good guidelines and they should be scalable such that if you’re creating 15,000 ads to bilk older Americans out of their money on Facebook (is there another reason Facebook exists?), there’s no reason you can’t follow all of those guidelines, down to the thing about the ostrich.
Well yeah, no reason you can’t, but maybe you won’t? Because you’re creating 15,000 ads and what’s the likelihood someone in your brand marketing department will see any one of those ads where you included an ostrich and put light text on a dark background? Those odds are pretty small, no? The guidelines are certainly important, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone, you can probably get away with something.
If, however, you’re running a campaign that only has a few pieces of creative, and it’s going to be used in a pretty public location, those brand guidelines are important.
Let’s say, for example, you’re working for a large public university system. And you want to create an advertising campaign reminding people that you exist. You have a bright idea - let’s have current students featured in the ads! That’s a good idea. Real students representing the university.
And maybe they’re wearing swag with the name of the school on it. Not all of them - that’d be a little on the nose. But like one or two in each group photo.
The one thing you, as the manager of this project, have to remember is to ensure that the brand guidelines are followed. Your university, for example, may have brand guidelines that allow you to use an acronym - UCLA, for example, doesn’t write out “The University of California, Los Angeles.” But I will hazard a guess that UCLA’s brand guidelines include mentioning that if you do use UCLA in materials, that none of those letters are cut off. Like if you use a photo of someone in a UCLA sweatshirt, you have to make sure that all 4 letters in U-C-L-A are showing. You shouldn’t use a photo that shows C-L-A with the U hidden under someone’s arm.
And you definitely need to make sure that the photo you use doesn’t cut off any part of any of those letters. Like in the UCLA example, if someone were holding a potted plant and it cut off the left part of the “U” so it looks like the letter is an “I,” that would be bad. ICLA is not the school that you are advertising.
Now let’s say that you work for the City University of New York, a group of 4-year and community colleges that has more than 200,000 enrolled students in New York City. And you’ve decided to create a campaign that you will run in the subway that features actual real-live students from CUNY (I should mention here that everyone refers to it as CUNY).
I would guess - though I am by no means certain - that the university’s brand guidelines would require you to show all four of the letters in the acronym if they’re being used in imagery. Like if you showed a student in a sweatshirt, they should have the C-U-N-Y all displayed, with each letter displayed in full. If, for example, it just has “U-N” showing, it would be confusing, because it’s not an ad for the United Nations.
It might also be confusing if the letters were partially covered up, maybe because that “C” might look like an “O” or something like that.
Or something:
I dunno - maybe you don’t see it? But I can’t not see it.
Key takeaway: always have someone from the outside make sure there’s nothing weird in your photography.
(“While humor was our intent, it was regrettably off the mark…we will try to do better in the future.”)
Sometimes You Gotta Zig When Others Zag
One of the fundamental reasons that gobbledy copy annoys me is that I think it insults the intelligence of people reading it in a very specific way - it assumes that the reader exists in a vacuum where they have never seen any other marketing. When I read gobbledy, I always think to myself, “Do they think I’m a moron?”
Here’s an example from “customer engagement platform” Braze:
“Absolutely none of them want to be sold to.” This is sales copy that they, Braze, have written to get prospects to buy from them. And that copy says, “nobody wants to be sold to” and they do not in any way acknowledge THEY ARE SELLING TO YOU!
That’s what I mean - gobbledy copy assumes you are an idiot.
Which is why I love marketing copy that acknowledges the reality of the buyer’s situation. Sometimes the reality is that buying software is difficult because everyone is trying to sell to you by writing nonsense. Marketers can use that fact to let their prospects know that THEY know buying software is difficult, rather than pretending everyone loves to try to decipher nonsense on a website.
I wanted to share a clever example of this from meditation app Calm, which was a 30 second TV spot that was just silence and ran in (I guess what we thought were) competitive states during the election, acknowledging that anyone watching TV has seen a lot of blabbering about candidates:
Acknowledging how your buyer is feeling can lead to some great creative.
A Quick Bit of Praise for Nike
Along the lines of acknowledging what your buyer is actually feeling (rather than yammering at them about what you can do for them)…
I ran the NYC marathon on Sunday (yay me), and along the way I saw this Nike billboard:
Apparently this is part of a campaign that I hadn’t seen before, but it’s really striking to me.
I was giving a presentation to a team at a marketing agency this week (I’m happy to talk to your team - just shoot me an email at jared@sagelett.com), and someone asked me: “Wait, is all marketing really about psychology?”
And sorta kinda, yes it is. But I’m mentioning that because it exposes what’s wrong with so much software marketing: it’s not about the company doing the selling. And it’s not really about the person and their job. It’s really about how your buyer thinks about the world.
Which, I know, sounds like blah blah blah.
Except remember when we just talked about “you won’t get fired” being the best marketing message? Why? Because fear is an incredibly powerful feeling, and people will do almost anything to combat it. I promise, it’s more powerful than, “oh good, now I can send emails a little bit faster.”
The brilliance of the Nike campaign is recognizing that misery is actually what runners feel. And creating a campaign that dismisses that by saying, “we have the world’s most comfortable shoes” is not nearly as powerful as a campaign acknowledging that some amount of the time, running kinda sucks. Even if you love it. Or especially when.
You know how sometimes you’re talking with your spouse or partner of some sort, and they’re complaining about something and you’re offering solutions to fix the problem and then the person says, “I really just need you to acknowledge that the situation I’m describing is a bummer.” If you’ve ever had someone respond to your complaints about a situation by saying, “I know how that feels” it’s far more powerful than, “you should talk to your boss about that.”
Nike knows how that feels. And I guess that’ll make you buy new sneakers.
As always, thanks for reading to the end. Like I mention each week, I get so much out of chatting with readers about marketing stuff. If you’d like to spend 25 minutes in marketing therapy (or political therapy), here’s my Calendly link. And for those of you new here, I help marketers create better messaging - shoot me an email or schedule time through that link so we can talk about how our 2-day workshop will transform how you talk about your company.
My 9th grade English teacher, Mrs. Paciorkowski, pointed this verse out to us. And she explained why it was bawdy. I was 14 in 9th grade, and it seems hard to imagine that she would say to a group of 9th graders, “get a load of what Shakespeare is doing here.” And that upon hearing it, that I did not completely lose my 14-year-old shit in class. But looking back I give her credit for treating us like adults, which I, at least, was not. Even so, nearly 40 years later, I still remember that Shakespeare was kinda funny if you knew where to look. Also, Mrs. Paciorkowski wasn’t lying to us.
You sent me on a real rollercoaster this week. I cried, I laughed, I felt seen. Congrats on your speedy Marathon!
When I was at Vassar, we had a similar problem with our spirit wear.