We look at the grinch who stole spreadsheets
Plus, don'cha hate interoffice envelopes?
Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going? I thought maybe we could use a wee bit of distraction (if possible) this week, which is why we’re going to talk first about photos of genitalia. (Don’t blame the messenger).
Those Old Ladies Talking about a Penis Definitely Makes Me Want to Buy Tickets
Many of us have worked for tech companies where maybe the product wasn’t particularly great, or it was basically the same as everything else in the market, or it was exactly the same as everything in the market, or it was worse than everything in the market, or it was indeed different from other products in the market but in a way that literally nobody cared about other than your founder.
And when you work at a company like that, you walk around all day thinking to yourself, “Wow, I can’t believe I have to try to do some marketing things for this product, because this product has nothing noteworthy to say about it. I sure wish I worked somewhere where there was something different about the product so I could tell people about that different thing.”
I mean, that’s something we tell ourselves, but not being differentiated isn’t the end of the world, marketing-wise. There are lots of ways to deal with this - you can suggest that there’s something unique about your product, even if that thing isn’t unique at all (You may remember the Mad Men episode about Lucky Strike cigarettes - “It’s toasted.”).
Or you avoid the product entirely and just talk about the feeling you get while using it (Dr. Pepper’s “Be a Pepper” campaign).
Or you make up a mascot who says something entirely uninteresting (“They’re great!”), but who says it enough that you don’t notice that “They’re great!” seems kinda bland when you just write it on paper.
(Fun fact: Actor Thurl Ravenscroft - who provided the voice of Tony the Tiger saying, “They’re great!,” is the same actor who sang “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” You’re welcome.)
Where was I?
Oh yes, having an actual differentiator is good from a marketing standpoint, as it allows you to tell people about the differentiator.
Like, for example, if you started a ticket re-sale company and every other ticket re-sale company added annoying stupid fees onto every ticket so you never knew how much the ticket would cost until you clicked 19 screens, but you had no added fees and were super-transparent about pricing, you might - I’m just throwing this out there as an idea - create campaigns that tell people that you have transparent pricing and no fees, while every other ticketing company out there has stupid fees and non-transparent pricing.
So maybe if you were - and this is just an example - the ticketing company TickPick, which has super-transparent pricing and no stupid fees, you might create a campaign where they make sure it’s very, very clear that they have super-transparent pricing and no stupid fees, unlike every other ticketing company.
Like, that’s one idea.
The other idea is that, if you were the ticketing company TickPick, you would create a campaign that tells viewers your name sounds like “dick pic.”
I mean, a couple of older folks suggesting that they’re looking at a photo of genitalia…that’s gold, Jerry! Gold!
I think we recently discussed this issue here - if you’re going to create an off-color campaign, it should (at a minimum) have the off-color part actually say something about the product.
The example we discussed with the Kmart “I just shipped my pants” campaign, which har har har, was about being able to ship your pants.
But this is just “hey, did you notice our name sounds like dick pic. And you’d never expect older female golfers to be talking about that. Hilarious!”
Also buy some tickets.
I’m Obsessed with Conference Booth Signs
We haven’t had shared a booth sign in a while. So here:
I guess that, unlike other companies, thrillworks solves the right problem. Also, they have some sort of obsessive disorder around value-based prioritization.
(When did “obsession” and “customer-obsessed” and “obsessive” become good things? Isn’t obsession a bad thing? Or obsessive is a good thing, but obsessive-compulsive is a bad thing? Is compulsive a good thing? I guess I’ll ask the folks at Tim Hortons.)
Old Ads, Part 2
I had two reasons I thought it was useful last week to take a look at some old tech advertising:
To share some good ideas you can actually use to improve your messaging.
All new technology - even if it’s commonplace today - needed to be explained to people at some point, and I think it’s helpful to see how people explained tech that we now take for granted.
Today I wanted to start with an example of #2.
I am of the age where when I entered college, I was not aware of the existence of “electronic mail” but that at the end of college, I did have an “electronic mail address.”
Somewhere during those 4 years I went from “what is that?” to “only nerds use that” to “Phil1, my only roommate who has a girlfriend, uses it to send notes to his girlfriend at college in Iowa, which then made me question my whole thing about nerds” to “nerds have girlfriends too, which is not a reflection on Phil at all, just a comment” to “oh, I can use this to send notes to my friends at other colleges, I can see why it’s useful.”
Honeywell (n.b. - my mother’s former employer) also had to convince people they needed this thing, so they created an ad to tell people about it:
Yes, I think that’s an ashtray on the guy’s desk.
They do a pretty good job of explaining the basics:
Your mailbox is the terminal on your desk. Punch a key and today’s correspondence and messages are displayed instantly.
For new tech, that’s actually a pretty succinct explanation.
But then they give a few of what we call today “use cases” (maybe that’s what they called them back then…I don’t know):
Need to notify people immediately of a fast-breaking development? Have your messages delivered to their terminal mailboxes electronically, across the hall or around the world…
Is it actually faster than going across the hall?
And then some generic benefits (“more up-to-date information…decision-making is easier”) that don’t really capture what’s unique about e-mail.
Very very obviously, e-mail is something we all use a zillion times a day and don’t really think about. But when I read that marketing copy, I wasn’t really sold on it. It’s not quite clear why I would use it. Was I struggling with my decision-making before getting e-mail?
It goes back to something we’ve talked about a bit - e-mail needed an enemy. When I started working, the enemy was interoffice envelopes.
“Electronic mail” replaced interoffice envelopes. It’s so clear, and you don’t need to pretend it helps with making decisions or some 4th-level benefit.
Every new tech product has a very clear enemy, and for whatever reason, either product marketing or the founder thinks that if you call out that clear enemy, it undersells what the new product can do. A clear enemy doesn’t undersell, it clarifies. Find your enemy. (I’m talking to you, interoffice envelope).
(Incidentally - did you ever work in a mailroom back in the day? You’d have to decipher the handwriting on the interoffice envelope to figure out where to send it. And there were shitheads - I have no better word for them - who would not just write the address on the next line down. No, they would write it in the next column, and they would not scratch out the previous address - yes, that was the protocol - and as a mailroom person you’d be confronted with 2 addresses where it could possibly go, and then you’d have to unwind the string and open the envelope and see if you could determine where it was supposed to be going. And if you couldn’t, you definitely left it for the other mailroom guy.)
Your Dream Has Come True - A (Brief) History of Spreadsheet Software
VisiCalc was introduced in 1979 as the first spreadsheet program designed for use on personal computers, and it was a near-instant hit, helping to boost the fortunes of the Apple II, the computer it was first designed for.
Accounting software existed before, but VisiCalc was the first to create an interface that actually looked like a spreadsheet, which made it easy-to-use.
The origin story of VisiCalc is that while the company founder was at Harvard Business School, they saw their finance professor writing a model on a blackboard that had ruled lines like a spreadsheet. Each time the professor would suggest they change an assumption in the model, he had to erase a bunch of other “cells” and write in new numbers.
He thought he could create a computer program that could allow you to build financial models where you could easily test assumptions, because by changing the numbers in one cell, VisiCalc would automatically re-calculate all the other cells (yes, I realize I’m explaining how a spreadsheet works to you in 2023…but people didn’t know that back in 1979).
If I asked you today to tell me why I should buy spreadsheet software, you’d say, “hey dumbass, Google Sheets is free, you don’t have to buy it.” And I would thank you for that.
But Airtable, for example, is a spreadsheet-like product (that’s also a database-like product), and they have to tell people why they should buy it. And this is what they came up with:
OK sure? I guess. I don’t really want to buy it, though.
VisiCalc could be used for lots of applications, but they actually hit on a marketing idea that went beyond a bunch of features (or a bunch of gobbledy):
The campaign was focused on the original reason the product was created - you can easily run different scenarios, because the software automatically re-calculates the results.
“What if…” is brilliant — VisiCalc didn’t make it easier add, subtract, multiply and divide your business data. It allowed you to, as it says in the ad, “analyze the impact of decisions before you make them.”
The messaging wasn’t about the re-calculating — that’s the “how.” It was about analyzing business decisions before you make them, something that was incredibly time-consuming before VisiCalc.
Compare that to the less-specific benefit Honeywell mentioned (“decision-making is easier” - it’s never clear why it’s easier. VisiCalc is clear - it’s easier because you can see outcomes before putting them into practice.
Try that next time you’re thinking about benefits…trying adding “because…” after the benefit - it’ll add specificity that will resonate.
…Up to a point - VisiCalc was bought and then shut down 5 years later after having its ass handed to it by Lotus 1-2-3…that story is for another newsletter (written by someone else).
As always, thank you for reading and sharing Gobbledy.
I’m always happy to chat - here’s my Calendly link. If you want some feedback on something you’re working on, or want to show me an ad for telephones or whatever, put some time on the calendar. The reader conversations I’ve had have been amazing.
And if you’re looking for someone to speak at an event, I’m someone - people love hearing examples of gobbledy.
To be clear, Phil is a really good guy and married the girlfriend he was emailing in Iowa. Also, he used to eat bread sandwiches. Which are exactly as they sound - a piece of white bread between two pieces of white bread.
Precious
1. Benefit is better than ease of smth - analyze the decision before you make it vs. make it easier to send information. Today - we need a way to make it easier not to get info
2. I worked at Intel in the late 80s and 90s. We had these manilla envelopes with mail stops - which I never understood what the term meant - and I once got the 486 chip allocation by mistake - hmm - that's interesting I thought - promptly fixed the mail stop and put it back into interoffice mail