Peter George

New York. Paris. Berlin. Winnipeg?

Below is a link to a Macleans article circulated around our office by Kiirsten, one of my colleagues at the agency. It seems that Winnipeg's art scene is second in Canada only to Vancouver's.

Click here to read the article

I find this ironic. Our community leaders continually extol the cultural prowess of Manitoba's capital, and took pride in the fact that Winnipeg was chosen as Canada's cultural capital for 2010. And I agree that from the perspective of having a community of great creators and artists, Winnipeg is indeed a thriving cultural hub. I can tell you though, that where it falls short is in the willingness of the people that live here to pay for or fund that art.

Truthfully, culture is close to the bottom of the list in terms of financial support from government, most citizens and private business. And while there are those that do support a great deal of art, no question, many of Winnipeg's population see art and culture as a luxury, and not nearly as important as other areas that require giving, or even buying a ticket. So in my view, the thriving art community is there as a result of the grit, determination and spirit of the artists themselves.

Nobody could compare the need for good healthcare with the need for a great work of art. But Winnipeg will only really be a cultural hot-spot when the community truly rallies around it's creative forces with more than just words of praise and encouragement.

 

 

The sweet science of (Pan Am) Boxing

In 1996 the offices of Taylor George Design were on the 7th floor of the Ryan Building on Princess Street in Winnipeg’s Exchange District. The 6^th floor was occupied by an accounting firm, owned and operated by one Harry Black. I’d see Harry occasionally coming in and out of the building. To be honest, I was a little frightened of him. He’s a bit shorter than me, but you could just tell – even in a business suit — he was built like a brick shithouse. If you gave him a flick on the shoulder you’d no doubt hear a metallic ktang.

One hot, July day, the small, ancient elevator in 100-year old Ryan Building broke down. It was about 40º C in the stairwell. As I was coming down to leave for lunch I ran into Harry running up the stairs two at a time. After six stories, he hadn’t even broken a sweat. And he was wearing a suit.

“Shitty day for the elevator to break down.” I wheezed as we passed each other.

“The elevator has broken down?” was Harry’s cheery reply. Turns out he had no idea because he took the stairs up six stories every day, every single time he went in and out of his office. That was my first clue that I was dealing with someone with extraordinary fitness and a degree of eccentricity.

Shortly after that encounter, we engaged Harry’s firm, F.H. Black and Co., to be our accountants. Not long after Harry returned the favour, and in June of 1998 Taylor George Design was engaged to work on some promotional material for a boxing event Harry was putting on with the boxing gym he ran (in his spare time), Pan Am Boxing. I’ve been a huge boxing fan since I was a teenager, so we took on this pro-bono project enthusiastically.

The creative work on the project was done by Brent Morrisseau, who at that time had just recently joined us. I’ve had the great pleasure of having Brent as my colleague for almost 12 years now. He’s one of the best graphic designers I know, and really great guy. His work on this project was fabulous. Brent even came up with the name for the event  Altercations between the Nations — and when he pitched me on the name he did a fantastic Mohamed Ali impression. It was perfect. I like this work so much I have one of these posters hanging in our hall at home. It’s a great work of art.

But back to boxing. Harry was eventually successful in getting me down to the gym once or twice in the early 2000s. Once a year (or so) I’d go down for a workout. Then, the next day, I’d be in so much pain I wouldn’t go back to the gym for another year. Or two. Lets face it — when you can’t lift your arms high enough to wash your own hair, you know you’ve had a humbling workout. Pan Am is famous for that.

Harry also got me involved in the boxing promotion business — for a time, anyway. I had a great time working with him and the volunteers at Pan Am in putting on amateur and professional bouts at the Convention Centre and then the baseball park here in Winnipeg. I bailed in 2003. It was just too risky for me, although I did love being involved in the business.

Several years later — just last May — I took up training at Pan Am boxing. Harry convinced me to sign up
for an intensive eight-week program they put on at the club called FIGHT CLUB. It was an amazing program — challenging and humbling but also inspiring and effective. The combination of leadership and support at Pan Am was something I had never experienced in this kind of context, and it turned out to be just the ticket. There is also something about the rhythm, movement and impact of boxing that make it fun and addictive. And the gym is filled with supportive people who want to see you succeed. As one leader said to me the other day, “boxing at Pan-Am is like doing an individual sport in a team environment.” Very true.

As a final word, my one year anniversary of joining Pan Am is approaching and I’m scheduled to have my first fight this coming Saturday, April 16th. Pan Am is putting on what they call a “White Collar Brawler.” White-collar boxers are fighters who are amateur, inexperienced, and hopefully over the age of 35.

I’m determined to get in at least one actual bout in my life, and experience the real thing. I’ve been in the ring sparring for several weeks now. I’m pretty fit and technically able to put a few punches together. So I feel ready. I’ve been sparring mostly guys who are 30 years younger than me, and I suffer no illusions that I’d be able to beat a guy whose record would indicate that he lost to a fifty year old man in his first or second bout. And strangely, as I’m writing this entry, I had a call from Harry, and apparently, there are a couple of technicalities with my boxing association registration, and a problem finding a suitable opponent nearer to my age and weight. So all that just might derail my amateur boxing debut.

We’ll see. If not now, then some other time, I’m sure. But after losing about 35 pounds in four months over last spring and summer at Pan Am — and keeping it off since — I’m definitely glad for the long-term nature of my association with the business and sweet science of Pan Am Boxing.

And I still get a kick out of seeing posters we designed in 1998 on the walls all over the gym.

Agency night at the opera

 

Tuesday, April 12th was agency night at the opera. During the intermission of the Manitoba Opera production of The Magic Flute we held a small reception  for clients, guests, family, staff and friends.

It’s always interesting to see how young people who have never been to the opera respond to it. They’re generally very enthusiastic. The Magic Flute is very accessible and has some great music. But it also has a very silly, arcane plot so it’s harder to relate to the story than it is to Mozart’s genius. Still, the younger MCG staff who attended seemed to really enjoy it, and it certainly adds prestige when your company has created many years of outstanding campaigns for this thriving Manitoba arts group.

Next season Manitoba Opera is doing three productions, and the agency once again has done some outstanding work on the visuals. The posters and brochures were on display in the foyer of the opera house last night, and I was literally overwhelmed with positive comments. People are very excited about the season.

We took a slightly different approach with the creative for the next season. It’s more modern, more sensuous, a little bit of a departure for the opera company. But it still focuses on the core of our agency approach: storytelling. Creative director Brent Morrisseau did an absolutely outstanding job of the concept and execution. The work is quite exquisite, and the stories really are told almost completely through the visuals.

Cultural-industry clients such as Manitoba Opera and the Winnipeg Folk Festival give our people a great creative outlet. They provide a unique way to entertain our clients, staff and friends. And they help our community by keeping cultural institutions strong.

 

University of Manitoba aims to conquer with recruitment campaign | Marketing Magazine

See Marketing Magazine's coverage of our latest campaign for the University of Manitoba.

University of Manitoba aims to conquer with recruitment campaign | Marketing Magazine.

Why can't life be more like television?

Today I'm working on some ideas for a presentation tomorrow. Not really ads, per se, but a campaign strategy. It's an important project, I've got nothing brilliant or even "interesting" yet, and I'm thinking I'll probably have to skip my workout, maybe supper, and work late to get it ready.

I'm wishing that life actually did imitate art the way we've been led to believe. Specifically, I'm remembering an episode of Mad Men where Don visited his girlfriend at noon, went out drinking at 3 in the afternoon, stayed out all night, got beaten up in a seedy motel room and then still came up with something brilliant and profound at 10 am on the spot in a meeting for which he was 15 minutes late. The thing that's missing, of course, is just how much hard work there is in this business.

Surprise: We're an ad focused ad shop

I spend some time every now and again looking at our competitors’ websites. I’ve seen where some of them say they’re a strategically focused ad shop. Others might say they are a research focused ad agency. Some are new media focused (or new media only) and some are strictly media planning and buying focused. Some don’t even call themselves advertising agencies.

At our agency we use lots of research. And strategy, media planning, new media…. they’re all components in making good advertising. But they're really not worth much if you don’t have a shop that can turn all those reports, insights and schedules into good advertising that gets noticed and makes people act.

To say you’re a research-focused agency is like saying you’re a muffler-focused car manufacturer; you’re focusing on a component, not on what you’re trying to do. 

 

Time for a new slogan....

It seems that the new tourism tag line for Manitoba — developed by DDB out of Vancouver — has been leaked to the media. I had a call yesterday from Martin Cash at the Winnipeg Free Press who wrote a very fair article about it in today’s edition, and also let the cat out of the bag on the new positioning.

Not surprisingly, the new tag line — “It’s Manitoba Time” — says nothing new, and on its own doesn’t really say much that’s very interesting or unique about Manitoba. In fact, we’d used the same concept of TIME as a value proposition for a branding campaign for the province several years ago, which you can see here.

The article discusses how a slogan or theme line needs to be evaluated in the broader context of the creative backdrop, meaning the campaign. That’s true, but to be totally truthful it’s also a bit of an excuse. Maybe the whole campaign is going to be mind-blowingly great, but I doubt that DDB was aiming for an ordinary tag line, or that the client was hoping for boring. Still, boring is what they’ve got, and it’s not unusual.

The world is filled with pretty good ad campaigns accompanied by really crappy tag lines. But when the tag line rings and stings, it cinches the deal. You not only remember the line, you remember what the product offers. The right slogan brings all kinds of clarity and understanding to mind. Think of “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” and you’ll get the picture.

Everyone working in advertising hopes to come up with the next great slogan, but it’s one of the toughest creative challenges in the business. It’s much easier to come up with a great ad than it is to come up with a great slogan.

The fact that DDB — one of the most successful creative agencies in the country and part of a massive network of agencies — could only come up with something ordinary speaks to the challenges of the craft. It also speaks to the difficulty in creating meaningful differentiation for tourism in a market that is unknown, unremarkable, and under-funded. And it shows that even the big guys are only human.

 

Story matters here

That’s the slogan for AMC, the cable channel that started out as a movie channel, then branched into original productions of extremely high caliber, such as Mad Men, Breaking Bad and now Rubicon.

But it could be our slogan here at the agency. Storytelling is the crux of our approach. It’s how we build brands. It’s how we make ads. It’s how we help our clients sell more stuff to more people so they can make more money.

Story matters in TV because it takes us to new places and makes us think about ourselves in new ways. Story matters in advertising for the same reasons. It connects, it resonates and it makes the audience envision them self in a new light — hopefully as a user of your product or service. A good story takes a crass commercial message and turns it into something personal, resonant and meaningful. That makes it memorable.

In a good story, you can’t wait to turn the page. You’re eager to find out what happens next. And once you’ve read/seen/heard a good story, you replay it in your mind, and it becomes part of you. Without a story, your message is simply information, and in a world of message bombardment, information is easy to forget. Put it in a story, you’ll stand out, be heard and get remembered

And that’s the real craft in making advertising; creating a story filled with meaning AND benefit in one picture, a seven-word headline or a 30-second script. It’s a deceptively challenging craft filled with all the nuances and the subtleties of short fiction writing. Many people think they can do it, but I've only met a few that actually can.

 

Social Media ROI

 I was at a conference on social media last week where the concept of ROI on interactive, viral and social media campaigns was bandied about. The gist of the conversation was that currently it’s virtually impossible to demonstrate predictive ROI to a client on such campaigns.

This follows on about ten years worth of buzz on accountability and return on investment in the ad industry. Agencies have been slow to follow what the rest of the business world has always taken for granted: if you want your company/client to spend money on something you hope will happen in the future, you have to be able to predict what returns they can expect. The question has become super-hot and hyper-critical now as advertisers leave behind measured, traditional media such as television and outdoor, and move into more and more unmeasured media — the Internet, mobile and now increasingly, social media.

For all intents and purposes, social media is pretty much unmeasured — you can’t really predict how many people will see your tweets, posts and viral videos based on case studies and past data. The context and quality of the interaction is so critical that predictive modeling based on statistics is virtually impossible. Yet clients ask and agencies strive to provide this kind of data. We’re all looking for the same kind of numbers we get when planning traditional media.

Most people don’t realize that all media plans are pretty much speculative — traditional or otherwise. Media planners use past data on audience figures and then figure out what’s likely to happen in the future. It’s exactly the same as looking at past returns on the stock market and trying to predict where the markets will be in the future. You research, you invest, you hope for the returns to roll in someday soon.

There are risks, and even with the most well-planned media buy there is no guarantee that you’ll get the returns you’re looking for. If there were, then ad campaigns would always overachieve and ad agencies would never lose their clients. Simple truth is, just because someone sees your TV ad doesn’t mean they’ll respond. Despite the best-laid plans, your investment could tank, despite the science of where it was placed. Sound familiar? 2008 anybody? You’re beginning to see the similarities, I’m sure.

Advertising trade press is full of case study after case study of successful social media campaigns that have created huge returns for their investors (i.e. the advertiser). Yet many CEOs and CFOs are wary of investing big money in these potentially lucrative tactics, mostly because the ROI has not been evaluated or explained in terms that make sense. To advertisers, proving ROI seems to be about predicting how much of your target audience will see your message on a cost per thousand basis. To business people — to the CFO in particular — that’s not ROI. ROI is all about potential cash returns on money invested. Viewed from that context, traditional media is just as risky as new media, despite the mountains of data we can provide to verify our assumptions and guesses in predicting the audience delivery of the latter. There are so many other variables involved in all marketing that nobody can guarantee a campaign’s effectiveness simply through media numbers.

So what’s an ambitious marketer to do? Use business tools when planning advertising campaigns. Evaluate the comparative risks in investing in either traditional or new media, and do scenario planning to understand the risk and potential returns of each. Make sure that a creative pitch is always accompanied by a campaign business plan that evaluates risk and return. How many advertisers have received something like that from their agency or marketing department? 

Advertising that's worked for more than a century

 

I came across this list of the top ten outdoor advertisers in Canada and the U.S.. It appeared today in an article on outdoor advertising in the Globe and Mail, which you can find by clicking here.

Outdoor advertising dates back more than a hundred years, yet it's still one of the best ways to create buzz and awareness, and to get a target audience's attention. Nothing breaks through like a 40 foot sign on the side of a building with high visibility. You don't have to find these ads, they find you — if the advertiser is sophisticated, knows where you live (they do), what route you take to work (they do) and to what kind of messages you're likely to respond (yep... they know that too). 

Outdoor can be very broad or very precise in its targeting, and agencies love it for both those reasons. Not to mention it gives you a great opportunity to make a unique, powerful and compelling brand statement. That's verified by the fact that these major Canadian and U.S. advertisers sink significant portions of their advertising investment into out of home media. It's proven. It works.

 Top 10 out-of-home advertisers in Canada in 2009

1. Telus Corp.
2. BCE Corp.
3. McDonald's Corp.
4. Molson Coors Brewing Co.
5. Tim Hortons Inc.
6. Rogers Communications Inc.
7. Government of Canada
8. Provincial government lotteries
9. Labatt Breweries of Canada
10. Astral Media Inc.

Top 10 in the U.S.:

1. Verizon
2. McDonald's Corp.
3. AT&T Corp.
4. Geico
5. Warner Bros Pictures
6. Coca-Cola Co.
7. PepsiCo. Inc.
8. State Farm Life Insurance Co.
9. Apple Inc.
10. MetroPCS Wireless Inc.

Sources: Nielsen Media Research, Outdoor Advertising Association of America

On another note, it's interesting to see that government takes two spots in the Canadian top ten and none in the U.S. Election advertising and political messaging seem much more pervasive in the U.S. than in Canada, but obviously our government has lots to say to us. Wish I could remember what.

Of particular note is that Provincial lotteries are number 8 on the list! Honestly, wherever you go in Canada you see outdoor ads for casinos and lotteries. It's as much a part of our culture as the double/double, so I'm surprised it's not already a little higher on the list. With all the coming growth in government-controlled gaming in Canada — online and offline — I'm sure we'll see that ranking move up on the 2010 list.