alexbogusky's posterous: The first Cannes Lion for not advertising at all

We love awards in advertising and awards motivate agency behavior and recommendations. Perhaps it is time for Cannes to have a new award. An award for the most accurate, careful and ethical use of advertising. Not PSA's, but an award for consumer brands that have decided to take into consideration all the potential effects of their marketing and have built a plan that carefully avoids abusing the power of advertising. This would need to be the pinnacle of achievement. So what is nicer than titanium? Unobtainium? Kryptonite? Crystal? I sort of like that. Crystal clear. No blemishes. And here is what I’d like to see entered next year.

Advertising to adults is not without controversy. And although I’m concerned about consuming for consumption’s sake, I am able to see the role advertising plays in moving our economy forward and the benefit to society that can be created. However, when it comes to advertising to children, it’s much more difficult to find any redeeming value created by the activity. In fact, to the contrary, it is easy to see how destructive the process is to most of us.

First, let’s take a few words to get into the brain of a child. As we all know from experience, children are not small grownups. Their brains are fundamentally different, the big difference being that right hemisphere brain development doesn’t really kick in until the age of twelve. This is important because without the right hemisphere involved, all decisions and concepts are very black and white. If you have kids, you’ve experienced this: The child that learns at school that drinking can be dangerous and suddenly thinks that glass of wine is going to kill dad. All things go into a category of good or bad; there are no grey areas for children. And this leaves them fundamentally and developmentally unequipped to deal with advertising in the way an adult can. If you sit with a child and watch TV commercials, you will notice how vigorously effective the messages are. “I want that.” “Can I have that?" “I need that.” These words come out of their mouths with seemingly every message, and they mean it and they believe it and they are defenseless against it. And that is the issue.

So what if we stopped it? What if we decided that advertising to children was something none of would engage in anymore? Perhaps because we legislate it, or perhaps because we just decide to police ourselves. We can get into the how a bit later. But what if we stopped? What would happen? A lot of things would happen and almost all seem to be for the good of society.

Let’s start with mom and dad and the relationship with their kids. Without the messages suggesting to kids that they eat differently than how mom and dad would like them to eat, trips to the grocery store and meals at home would almost certainly contain dramatically less complete and total meltdowns. Imagine a relationship with kids where moms and dads aren’t caving in to the constant pressure their kids apply to get what they want. Helping to create this pressure is why companies advertise to a group of people who have neither jobs nor income. And it is working. More than 10 percent of 12 to 13-year-olds admitted to asking their parents more than 50 times for products they have seen advertised. That fact alone should get every parent to sign a petition. For the potential to have a little quiet time, if nothing else. But the statistics go beyond bugging mom and dad and into a much sadder place. More than half of children surveyed (53%) said that buying certain products makes them feel better about themselves. This is a pattern we all need less of, not more. So a ban on advertising to kids would improve the child-parent dynamic, as well as improve our kids' self-esteem. So far, so good.

But without all this ad-supported revenue there would be much less programming developed and broadcast for children. Whole networks like Nick might cease to exist. Horror of horrors! Children would be forced off the couch and made to think of new ways to entertain themselves. Some of those games might include moving the body. These days they would probably just go online or play video games but at least that takes a bit of interaction. Kids would mourn the demise of the Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, but they’d get over it. So I guess I can live with that, too.

But a ban would mean less dollars for the advertising industry. Oh, lord we can’t have that! Well, in my experience this isn’t really what happens. The dollars get moved; they don’t go away. Now, if you specialize in advertising to kids then, yes, your business would be a casualty. My bet is, those people would find their talents put to use in ways they would actually prefer in the end. The advertising industry as a whole doesn’t all agree and in fact, get quite excited, about doing even more adverting to children. Chinese children.

In his book, Kids as Customers, James McNeal estimates that there are about three quarters of a billion children in other industrialized countries: "Letting one's marketing imagination run wild for a moment, if these children spend only half of what U.S. children spend, their market potential would be equal to around $86.5 billion." When this kind of money is involved ethics and morality often become more difficult to measure.

Sweden, Ireland, Greece, Italy, Denmark and Belgium all have bans on advertising to children under 12. It is interesting to note that in Sweden, the reason given is the way a child’s brain works, it is “not fair play.” I agree. But even in Europe where bans do exist, the amount of money involved has made progress slow and sometimes nonexistent. A proposed ban in the UK was blocked as recently as ‘08. The actual dollars spent advertising to children is difficult to come by and the figures I’ve been able to find vary, but a little over $15 billion annually is a moderate estimate. It is shocking to realize that is about 250% more than it was as recently as 1992. To me these numbers seem scary.

So, what about the companies that rely on advertising to kids as a way to drive sales? What happens to them? My sense is that they will be fine, too. They’ll probably sell a little less and they’ll probably have to make the products a bit healthier since it will be mom and dad that they’re trying to convince. But they will be fine. In fact, I think they’ll feel better. My old client at Burger King used to talk about pulling all the kids' advertising as a way to garner some positive press and put pressure on McDonald’s to do the same, knowing that it was a much, much bigger part of McDonald’s business. My guess would be they debate this at McDonald’s, too, but I have no way of knowing that. The trouble that arises when ethics and money place pressure in opposite directions is that no company feels it can afford to go first. The loss of competitive advantage would be too much.

Then the question is one of adding a bit more pressure to the ethical side of the scale. I’ve been scratching my head for some potential solutions and it’s a sticky problem, but I’m not completely convinced it is hopeless just because market forces have proven that there is big money to be made by spending billions to influence our innocent and defenseless offspring. The first and most obvious solution is a ban not unlike other developed European nations. Our heavily lobbied politics makes this seem an unlikely scenario, at first glance. Unless the lobbyists were for some reason asked to do the opposite of what we might expect. It is actually beginning to make more sense for fast food lobbyists to actually ask for the ban. They need the publicity that puts them on the right side of these issues and, if legislation is created, it makes a new and even playing field where there is no disadvantage created.

Perhaps our own industry could lobby to stop the behavior. God knows advertising people need the good press.

Another potential bit of leverage might be for ethical and fair use of advertising to become a common way companies are rated. Today we see more and more data made available in the areas of a company's impact on health, sustainability and the ethical treatment of workers and even animals. How about ethical treatment of our most precious resource? Our children. What is your score on fair and ethical use of advertising? This can be measured and quantified and it can become part of the buying decision. Not just for people with children, but for all consumers. Advertisers would reconsider quickly if they noticed that people we’re buying their product as adults because they advertised to kids.

So my hope for the 2011 Cannes Crystal award is some brilliant agency works with their client to pull all the advertising to children and takes home the Cannes Crystal Grand Prix Lion in the inaugural year. And that would be the end of that. Because as soon as you can win an award for it, we ad folk are all over that shit.

Most people in advertising have a list of categories they will and will not work on, and it evolves. My list has evolved and probably will continue to. At the beginning of my career, I wouldn’t work on any pharma. I probably would have worked on tobacco given the opportunity but luckily for me I got the opportunity to work against tobacco and I got one hell of an education in the process. My time working on TRUTH, the youth anti-tobacco campaign, taught me a lot about early brain development and soon I added to my personal list that I wouldn’t do any advertising that targeted kids (defined by most brain scientists as under 12). As we took on the BK account, we politely offered that we could not work on that part of their marketing. And in subsequent years declined multiple invitations to work on the kids business. Once one of our adult spots for Sponge Bob Squarepants (hard to believe, but young adults love Sponge Bob) was repurposed and re-edited by another agency to add toy footage and aired on Nick. I was livid and we got it pulled. The client owns the work, but pulled it out of respect for the relationship. We all work to bring our personal values in line with our professional life and there are shades of grey to these decisions. But shades of grey don’t exist in our society’s decision to allow millions to be spent targeting an audience that is literally and physiologically incapable of protecting and defending themselves from a message probably doesn’t have their very best interest at heart. It’s not a matter of the rightness or wrongness of the products being advertised. That is a grey area. But there are children and there are adults. And the duty of adults in society is to protect it’s children. And that is black and white...alexbogusky's posterous

alexbogusky's posterous: Why are our cars so dumb?

My wife has a very nice car. The kind of car that has simulated walnut dash panels and leather seats. The kind of car with a carefully engineered driving experience. The kind of car that has a meticulously crafted brand that says something about who she is. The kind of car that uses tremendous amounts processing power to deliver hands-free dialing GPS maps and the ability to warn her when the tire pressure gets low. Yet she seems completely oblivious and immune to it all as she ignores the experience of driving, only attempting to end it all as quickly as possible so she can get herself home and on her personal computer.

And she is not alone. The American romance with the motorcar is slipping. Recently, when polled, Americans said their computer ranked several places ahead of their car on the list of things they could not live without. This probably isn’t accurate. Most of us would have a more difficult time getting by if somebody took our car than our computer. But it is clearly an indication of where our emotional connection is. So why is it that for millions and millions of us including my wife, who could not care less about technology, is it that the computer has subplanted this former relationship with her vehicle? It can’t be technology. Because the fact is her car probably has as much or more processing power as her laptop. But her car and her laptop aren’t processing the same things. Her computer has evolved to become all about her. While her car selfishly insists on being all about itself.

Sites like Facebook, twitter and others have allowed for the creation of what we call a Digital Super Me. A highly-sharable and incredibly robust digital version of our selves that only drinks the best wine, vacations in the finest locales and has the best and brightest children. We have created these alter egos and now we not only refuse to live without them but we have a new expectation for the contribution that other products and services should make to our lives. So for essentially an investment of zero it delivers the most powerful way to say who you are and share it with the entire world, if you like. And for 40,000 dollars the car is supposed to say something about who you are and share it with the people who see you drive it and park it. No wonder the love is slipping.

Now the car could actually be a powerful tool in this creation of the Digital Super Me and we’ll get to that but first, the car companies would have to realize what business they’re in. Henry Ford was famous for saying, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." But he realized he wasn’t in the horse business or even mechanized horse business. He was in the personal transportation business and he was out to make the best solution to get lots of people personal transportation. I’m looking forward to the car companies making that same realization soon. Because even if my car gets 200mpg, chances are for many of us it will still mean we’re ultimately stuck in a hour-plus commute in gridlocked traffic. What has worked for a very long time is no longer the perfect and singular solution it once was.

So let’s have some fun with personal transportation and build the Digital Super Me and better more holistic solutions to getting around at the same time. There are incredible assets that are captured by the driving experience and they can offer both value and fun to the consumer. The rear-view camera that is in many cars, why can’t I take a picture with it? Technically there is no reason why not. So let’s start there. And then when I park let’s sync up and allow me to download this and other assets. Soon somebody will start a website called assholeswhotailgate.com where we can post our pictures. Then why not add some other cameras? We all go interesting places and see interesting things. And often we’re taking pictures from the car. Let’s just put that feature in with front and side cameras. When we get home our vehicle syncs up and asks if we’d like to save or post our drive to our MyGM.com site or others like Facebook. The post would be a google map with photo assets and perhaps movies embedded. Simple stuff. Now my wife is interested again. Actually, she might like a camera that captures what’s going on inside the car with the kids. Something to share with the grandparents when they get home.

But what about the car itself? Many of us drive huge thirsty cars solo Monday-Friday because we hope to pile the whole family in on the weekend and do something fun. So we select a car based on 20 percent of the usage. The other 80 percent of the time it’s too big, too hard to park and thirstier than we’d like. What we need is a different model. Instead of buying your car from one of the car companies you could buy a package for your transportation. So in my case, I would get something small and economical during the week and swap it out for an SUV come the weekend. Somebody with a business that required the SUV during the week might want something small and sporty on the weekend. I’d happily pay more than a traditional lease for a package that included this kind of flexibility. This solution could come from places like Zipcar or the rental car companies but I’d like to see it come from Detroit. And while we’re creating more flexible options for the kind of car that’s most appropriate to the job, perhaps we can go further. I’ve been intimately involved in bike-sharing systems so I know a bit about the potential. 80% of the trips we make are less than 5 miles and 60% of the co2 cars produce is created in the first few minutes of operation. This is the sweet spot for bikes. Any of the big auto makers could actually install a major bike-sharing system into five US cites for about 10 million bucks. This is less money than GM spends on Howie Long commercials in a single weekend of football. No offense to Howie but imagine the impact they could make on their brand and on the customer relationship if every new GM also came with free bike-sharing? The same key that unlocks the car could unlock a bike. Just wave it over the kiosk and an RFID reader would know that GM owner John Smith has checked out a bike. Now bring all that potential data capture back into the picture and John can post his commute along with pictures and calories burned on his bike ride to his MyGM.com or Facebook page. This is something theoretical. Nothing needs to be invented. This could literally all be done in a couple of months.

The challenge in all of this isn’t a technical one. The challenge is in moving from a mission of making cars to a mission of moving people. And then to harness all the embedded intelligence and processing power already available in service of that mission. A mission that will move beyond hands-free dialing and voice-activated stereo controls and go to work to serve the basic human needs to move, connect and share.

Designing a car has become a job of designing systems. I’m sure the designers are ready and it’s obvious that the customers are ready. Now we just need the next Henry Ford to show us the way...alexbogusky's posterous

alexbogusky's posterous: Remember when plastic bottles were against the law?

I was recently having breakfast with a friend. He advises one of the soft drink companies, and was very excited about some of their new work in the area of recycling. Although it was good news and a progressive step, I had a hard time getting excited about it. Maybe one of the reasons was that I had just returned from a conference at the Golden Gate Institute, where much of the focus was on all the plastic poisoning our oceans. Basically, all the plastic we’ve created is now in our oceans. Several speakers were focused on this problem and had images of the Pacific Plastic Garbage Patch. Not surprisingly, a large percentage of this patch is made up of plastic bottles and, even more troubling for sea life, the caps of these bottles. This patch, roughly the size of Texas, is dramatic but the problem is not limited to the patch. It’s closer to home on the shores of every beach in the world, no matter how remote. Perhaps most troubling, plastic has seeped into our food supply. Broken-down bits of plastic (and their poisonous compounds) exist within in every fish in the sea. Every single fish. Consequently, that same poisonous plastic is now inside us. We are essentially eating and drinking all the plastic we’ve created.

Recycling is a good start. We gather as much of the plastic bottles as we can, grind them up into a raw material and make more. It should be noted that the caps are not usually recyclable. So they, at best, wind up in a landfill. But the essential limitation of recycling is that it is not a closed-loop. A closed loop being when 100% of the material is captured and reused to make the next generation. No matter how good we are at recycling, it is an open-loop; a system which allows a large percentage of whatever materials you’re dealing with to escape into the environment. A very large percentage. So although any progress in recycling is worth applauding, I find that in the area of soft drink packaging, it’s far less impressive given the fact that a closed-loop system already existed and could be easily recreated.

I like to fantasize about my grandfather suddenly coming down from heaven to have a look around. Not just because he was such a warm and amazing man, but because it helps me gain the perspective and wisdom of former generations. If he did show up tomorrow and we had the time to have a look around at many of the problems that exist today, I think he would blow a gasket. And I don’t think he would be impressed with our plans to address obesity and childhood diabetes and the pollution of our planet and its oceans. I think all our grandparents and great grandparents would basically say the same thing: “Full-fucking stop. Full stop. We are gonna figure this shit out this weekend and start again on Monday.” Although in some cases it might take a little longer, in the case of the billions of pounds of toxic beverage packaging, the elders would simply do one thing. Bring back glass bottles and the bottle law.

Some of you are old enough to remember the cradle-to-cradle system of deposit bottles. As a kid, it was how I got candy money. We would go around finding as many bottles as we could and take them to the grocery to exchange them for cash. Those bottles were part of a closed-loop where bottlers cleaned and reused the bottle. Sometimes, you could tell a bottle had been through the system many, many times from the wear marks from the bottling machinery or a chipped logo. It was sort of cool. Sometimes you might even get a sprite with an older logo on it. Sort of a soda treasure.

What I never understood was that this wasn’t a function of just good bottler behavior but it was a function of law. A law which my friend, Catherine Greener of Clear Green Advisors, taught me about last week. A law that said if you put a bottle into the system, you were responsible for that bottle. Whoa. Responsible. That is what every corporation wants to be. They talk about it all the time and here is an ironclad way to achieve responsibility for your waste stream so it doesn’t become somebody else’s problem. Like the fishes’ problem or moms’ problem because she’s feeding plastic-contaminated tuna to her kids.

Glass bottles have one drawback and we should talk about it. Weight. The weight causes higher shipping cost and that can lead to more fossil fuels burned. Not good. But everybody already accepts more localized bottling is better. Coke suggests that shipping is a small part of their footprint specifically because they already have 600 bottlers worldwide.
So we’re good there.

Now here’s the trick: we need to bring back the bottle law. And when the idea of the bottle law get’s suggested, which it is from time to time, I bet you can imagine who is lobbying to stop it. Bringing back the bottle law should be the number one mission of every sustainability officer in every beverage company. When they start telling us about other initiatives they’ve got going, we should just answer, “BOTTLE LAW! What? I can’t hear you. BOTTLE LAW!” alexbogusky's posterous