Please don't use rap in your marketing, except for these 2 times
How do you take the guesswork out of prospecting?
Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going? I hope you enjoyed the long weekend.
A quick bit of self-advertising (selfvertising?): Are you holding an offsite or an onsite or a site or a conference and want a speaker who can amuse and inform and also yak about marketing, but in a super fun way that will hold the attention of some of your younger employees for almost 7 minutes before they pull out their phone? Yes? I’m your guy! Someone who recently brought me in to chat about gobbledy and positioning for their 250-person event said they received “Glowing reviews for your presentation.” Glowing! You want glowing reviews for your event, right? Probably. If so, let’s chat - I’m at jared@sagelett.com.
OK, enough of that. Today we’ve got:
Taking the guesswork out of prospecting
Please don’t use bad rap to market your product
Take (and Leave) the Guesswork
If you run marketing for a software company whose product takes the guesswork out of prospecting, you have lots of ways of telling people that.
Except that if you run marketing for a software company whose product takes the guesswork out of prospecting, you are only going to choose one way to tell people that:
They took the guesswork out of writing original copy.
Canva: The Musical
I’m going to welcome you back from your Memorial Day (US) holiday by ruining your week.
And for that I am incredibly sorry.
I will ruin your week with a video of some marketing, because you can get your week ruined with non-marketing things in lots of places. But Gobbledy is where you go to have your week ruined with marketing.
But first, a little background.
If you haven’t seen the documentary Bathtubs Over Broadway (available online), I give it the Gobbledy Seal of Non-Disapproval (tm). It’s by a Letterman Late Show writer who becomes fascinated by Industrial Musicals, which were musicals written for companies and performed at company meetings or trade shows, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, though some continued to be performed through the 1990s (apparently).
If there’s only one thing you take from reading this newsletter, it’s that pretty much every product can be marketed with a musical.
Longtime readers may remember the Gobbledy classic where we discussed the musical ad for diabetes drug Jardiance, which I described thusly:
“It’s like if you watched the musical Hairspray, then you had some bad oysters at dinner, became deathly ill, and had a fever dream where there was a song & dance number from Hairspray, only it was about a drug for type 2 diabetes. Also, it’s performed by the theater group at the local senior center.”
I mention that because you may think that certainly there are products that cannot be marketed via a musical.
Well, no. All products can be marketed via musical.
Those industrial musicals, which admittedly were intended for internal consumption and not for public distribution, were still marketing - marketing to your sales team is marketing. Really. I promise.
This was a real thing. Want a sample? No? I don’t care.
Maybe you were wondering how someone could sit down and write a musical about the appliances in your kitchen. Someone working for Westinghouse did!
The new cold-injector sends a jet-stream of air -
To bring colder temperatures to all the foods there!
The cheese server, butter server, meat-keeper too -
Makes sure your food stays fresh, and stays in view -
And here on the front is a magnetic door!
But don't run away 'cause there's plenty more
This is the shape of tomorrow, that we've got right here for you today!
Those lyrics are from “Tomorrow - Today,” one of the hits from Westinghouse’s 1958 musical, The Shape of Tomorrow. Say what you will about the song, it is nice to know that the food stays fresh and stays in view.
What? You were wondering if someone wrote a musical about a bathroom? Glad you asked!
Toilet purveyor American Standard wrote the musical The Bathrooms Are Coming in 1969, and it featured this duet about your bathroom called, fittingly, “My Bathroom”:
If you watch that (and please, please, watch it…I don’t care if you watch the other one…but this one is something), note that for whatever reason we don’t hear the other singer’s part of the duet (which explains the awkward silences).
But we do hear these lyrics:
My bathroom is a private kinda place…
Very special kinda place…
and then:
I’m free, I’m free, I closed out the world, I’m free…
Now at last, I can really be me…in my bathroom…
A special place where I can stay and cream and dream and cream.
I’ve gone back and listened to that maybe, six, seven hundred times. And she is definitely singing that it’s a private place where she can stay and cream and dream and cream.
Don’t shoot the messenger.
Credit where it’s due for the hard work that went into creating the idea that the bathroom is where a woman can go to hide from her husband and children.
Maybe you’re thinking, that was a different time. Maybe in 1969 somehow the world was simultaneously ready both for Woodstock and a woman singing about her private place where she creams and dreams. I dunno, it was before my time.
I do think that that was a time where people accepted information at face value. If the American Standard corporation wanted to sell more toilets by having a woman sing about her private place, I would imagine the employees and salespeople and retailers for whom that ditty was written would just hum along and sell toilets.
But we live in a world where people will, in fact, question one’s motives behind dreamin’ ‘n’ creamin’ and, as a matter of fact, not take it at face value.
Which is to say that we live in a more cynical world, an idea that I assumed was widely accepted as true, but apparently somehow was missed by the marketing department at the otherwise-brilliantly-marketed creative technology platform Canva.
And here’s where I plan to ruin your week:
At their user event in Los Angeles a few days ago, they presented this Hamilton-ish (very, very “ish”) number about the quality of their design software. Please do yourself a favor and watch.
Trigger warning: I had to stop watching when the gentleman who was rapping (it would be a disservice to all rappers everywhere to call him a “rapper”) pronounced “everything” as “errrrthing.”
OK, I just watched more. So I guess the story is that Errrrrthing Guy is rapping (“rapping”) about how great all your projects will look when you use Canva. Then a woman comes on stage and also starts rapping/“rapping”:
Woman: But what about me?
“Rapper”: Who is you? (sic)
Woman: A CIO from an enterprise, see?
And then she raps/“raps” about the things a CIO from an enterprise (?) might want (“security”) from a tool like this…
…And then I couldn’t watch anymore.
But YOU have to watch it.
OK, I went and peaked at the next part. They’re rapping about APIs.
(BTW - the only acceptable response to this is for Adobe to call Kendrick to make a diss track responding to all the crap in there.)
One of my rules for this newsletter is that I should not dump on anything without offering constructive ideas.
Here’s my constructive idea for brands:
No rapping.
If you think you’re speaking to the young folk (like Liberace did in the newsletter a couple of weeks ago), I have a secret: you’re not.
There have been 2 successful uses of rap to sell products, and I will list them now:
In 2016 Hamburger Helper (????) released a mixtape that was - and somehow still is - an absolute banger that sounded modern and yet was entirely about making stuff with Hamburger Helper.
In 2018 Wendy’s dropped a 5-song EP called We Beefin that, again, is absolutely legit and also just rips into McDonald’s in the track “Clownin.”
That’s how you use rap to sell product.
If my first rule of marketing is to create the positioning before you create the marketing (stolen from David Ogilvy), my second rule of marketing is don’t insult your audience’s intelligence.
Though if you’re going to make it terrible, please make it terrible enough for me to share here.
(Thanks to this page for some of those old musical lyrics.)
As always, thanks for reading to the bottom.
I say every week - and I actually mean it - Here’s my Calendly link. I’m always happy to chat for 25 minutes about whatever you’re working on. And if you want to advertise with Gobbledy (our last advertiser got a bunch of actual, genuine leads - for real!), or learn more about my 2-day messaging workshop, I’m at jared@sagelett.com.
Damn, that Hamburger Helper album is fire. I want to put it on at my next party and see how long it takes people to notice.
In all fairness to Westinghouse, in the 1950s, many people communicated with each other in song form.
But yeah, the Canva rap is bad. It’s like they thought they’d get some accolades just for trying hard. But then, at the last minute, they decided not to try at all. It’s also the sort of rap my parents would listen to and then say: “You know what? I think I kind of like hip-hop. But I’m not so keen on this Canva thing.”