Preaching authenticity to me is like preaching to the choir.
Viewing “Your Dealership is Not a Stock Photo – Joe Webb & Kate Frost,” an entertainingly mnemonic preview of an awesome upcoming session at Digital Dealer 21 (MGM Grand, Las Vegas, August 8-10, 2016), reminds me of the half-dozen or so takeaways so unforgettable, you don’t need a photographic memory like mine to keep them top-of-mind. These nuggets stick:
“You’re someone running a multi-million-dollar business, not somebody trying to get away with some shit.” — Joe Webb, Dealer Think Tank, 2014.
“Eating an apple at 11:00 a.m. regulates blood sugar and boosts energy, helping you past the 2:00 p.m. slump that most people encounter (where they usually reach for a coffee or a soda).” — Troy Spring, page 56, Turbo Charge Your Life, 2013.
“Don’t be doing the $10-per-hour jobs. Unless, of course, you want to be earning $10-per-hour.” Tracy Myers, every Automotive Mastermind session I attended, probably every single one.
“I’m a giver, not a caregiver.” Renee Stuart, Automotive Mastermind, January, 2015
“Everything changed for me when I discovered the law of reciprocity.” Amir Amirrezvani, Digital Summit Mountain View, 2012
Although we never met, I give Hal Riney full credit for getting me out of an ad agency and into the car business.
In 1989-90, I was learning the ad business as an audio producer and copywriter for a Harrisburg-based agency when the trade magazines noted that Hal Riney and Partners were picked to launch the new Saturn brand. His challenge was estimable, to tell the story of why an American car company could be different and build a small car people actually wanted.
In the eighties, Hal Riney had firmly established his agency as master storytellers, in evocative campaigns for Gallo, Perrier, the reelection of Ronald Reagan (“Morning in America,” “Bear in the Woods”) and many more blue-chip clients. Best of all, he had just what was Saturn was looking for: no automotive experience.
I liked everything I saw and heard about Saturn and its marketing. When the local dealership was under construction in Harrisburg, I checked it out for myself and it seemed to me it was all that. Real, no-pressure, no traditional automotive anything.
Riney’s warm, sincere narration spoke volumes about the product he pitched, and it’s important to note that he personally wrote most of what he voiced for Saturn Corp and so many others. Modest and confident in equal measure, underneath it all, the message of Saturn, as spoken by Hal, was direct: this is our last chance to save the American auto industry, and there’s one way to do it right.
Visually, Hal Riney and Partners’ message permeated the experience of working for the brand or its retailers, shopping for a car or owning one. The reality was more complicated, but everyone acted as if Saturn was created from the proverbial clean slate.
When the new Saturn of Harrisburg was ready to open, the radio commercials gave another dimension to Saturn’s (and Riney’s) authenticity with the singuarly unpretentious voice of its non-spokesperson “Bud.”
These radio spots had no music beds, no sound effects, no mellifluous announcing. Just a fact-based message from a plain-spoken guy, who wanted you to know that there was a new brand in town, called Saturn, and if you were going to have a brand, you ought to have a spokesperson — “Bud” was reluctantly offering that he could be that spokesperson if you wanted one, not that you needed one.
The voice belonged to Maxwell “Bud” Arnold, himself an advertising giant in San Francisco where Hal Riney and Partners made their home.
From his obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, published online August 28, 2013:
Maxwell ‘Bud’ Arnold, adman extraordinaire, dies By Joe Garofoli
Maxwell “Bud” Arnold was a different kind of advertising executive – a professionally trained writer equally comfortable creating campaigns for luxury brands like Domaine Chandon as he was crafting socially conscious campaigns opposing the Vietnam War or supporting Democrat John F. Kennedy for president or Republican Pete McCloskey for Congress…
He exuded an idealism that was born in his love for his country and expressed through a writer’s love of words and a social activist’s call for change. He was an engaging presence, whether he was sharing a glass of fine wine at his beloved French Club in San Francisco or creating goofy stories and cartoons for his grandchildren.
Mr. Arnold was born Feb. 18, 1919, in San Francisco, but grew up in Los Angeles and Minnesota. In 1942, he volunteered for the Navy, serving in North Africa and the Atlantic during World War II.
After the war, he returned to Stanford University where he studied under writer Wallace Stegner, who later became a lifelong friend. Mr. Arnold published short stories in Harper’s magazine and Stegner’s “Stanford Short Stories.”
By the early 1950s he had gravitated to advertising, beginning his career at Guild, Bascom and Bonfigli, a San Francisco firm. He became an early expert in the rapidly changing field of political advertising, becoming the firm’s principal scriptwriter for its handling of Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. His storyboards and some of the groundbreaking ads reside in the Stanford archives.
In 1970, Mr. Arnold opened his own firm, Maxwell Arnold Agency, announcing in its mission statement that it would devote 20 percent of its resources to fighting war, racism and poverty.
His Palo Alto Onlineobituary further elaborated on his distinguished life and work:
One of the original Mad Men, “Bud” Arnold began his half-century-long career in the early 1950s, joining San Francisco’s Guild, Bascom and Bonfigli as a copywriter and eventually becoming a vice president and creative director. The West Coast agency helped lead the move away from traditional ads solemnly praising the product, and Arnold’s work was especially noted for its irreverent wit, clever story lines, and striking visuals. Arnold also became known as an expert in the growing field of political advertising and headed the creative team that produced GB&B?s groundbreaking ads for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. The enormous impact these had on future political commercials was perhaps the most singular achievement of his long career. His papers on the campaign can be accessed at the Stanford University library.
In 1965, GB&B merged with Madison Avenue’s Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, and Mr. Arnold became vice president and creative director in charge of DFS’s West Coast operations. In 1970 he left DFS to open the Maxwell Arnold Agency, with a mission statement dedicating 20 percent of the agency’s time, talent, and resources to fighting war, racism, waste, and poverty. His new agency’s pro bono productions included two of the most famous anti-Vietnam War ads, “Our President was Angry, So the Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi was Destroyed” (print) and “Mother Bombs” (television). He helped beat Big Oil with his ads for California’s Proposition 20, the Coastal Zone Preservation Act, and did pro bono work for Ralph Nader’s consumer action movement and Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, among many others. His efforts for social justice earned him a lifetime achievement award from the NAACP.
He also ran campaigns for progressive candidates for national and California state offices, notably U.S. Representative Pete McCloskey, in McCloskey’s original bid for Congress in 1967 — he beat Shirley Temple Black in an upset — and his presidential primary challenge of Richard Nixon in 1972. In search of a voice-over appropriate to the gritty antiwar, liberal Republican, he decided to skip the professional actors and use his own. His gravelly, Midwestern-inflected tones proved so compelling that soon he was signed up for other agencies’ ads, becoming the voice for Bank of the West and Saturn, among others. For several years Macy’s broadcast his reading of “The Night Before Christmas” at their animal adoption displays.
I did meet Bud — in 1999, as the sales manager at Saturn of Richmond, I hired him to reprise his role as the get-right-to-the-point spokesperson for the Used Cars from Saturn branded used car center that we opened.
Somewhere, packed carefully, are the spots he recorded for us. I’d love to find those cassettes and hear his voice again.
I first saw Matthew Crawford speak before a small group assembled to hear his re-examination of skilled handiwork after channel surfing landed me on CSPAN/BookTV — his 2009 thought-provoking book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, is as riveting as his public speaking. That he operated a high-end motorcycle repair shop near me in Richmond, Virginia, was no point of reference. (Or for that matter, if he is still there). In his most recent book’s sleeve bio, the publisher notes, “Matthew B. Crawford is a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a fabricator of components for custom motorcycles.”
The capsule bio goes on to mention, “His bestselling book (Shopcraft as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, translated into nine languages, has prompted a wide rethinking of education and labor policies in the United States and Europe, leading the London Sunday Times to call him ‘one of the most influential thinkers of our time.’ ”
Lest you think it’s a dry, academic read, the page above, from this year’s The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction should put any such worries to rest.
If “disruption” is the overused buzz-word of 2015, let “distraction” be that for 2016. Indeed, the likely overuse of smartphone integration (in vehicles) worried me long before the overuse of self-driving technology ever occured to me.
Matthew B. Crawford is your favorite author, whether you know it or not. Mine, too.
“Idealists.” I return to Dischord founder and Fugazi member Ian MacKaye, in a short passage I dig, in The Idealist, Glen E. Friedman’s enduring monograph chock-filled with images of, and essays by, a rogues gallery of principled and uncompromising icons. “Sometimes we may fool ourselves,” he writes, “but at least we’re not in the business of fooling other people.”
Last month, I dug a live talk by Glen E. Friedman, moderated by Alec MacKaye (Untouchables, Faith) at the D.C. Public Library. Which is partially why I’m so jazzed up.
Not to equate art with work, but at the Driving Sales Executive Summit 2015, I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation of Alan H. Bird, President and Chief Executive Leader of SCI Marketview, operators of General Motors’ lead-distribution engine, on a study of email responses to online inquiries in my industry (retail automotive): statistical proof that the success of replies had more to do with the quality of their content than the speed of response. In a field where everything is measurable, it wasn’t too long ago that one took as gospel that speed was everything, and “stopping the clock” was the benchmark of all things awesome. Yes, some individual thought leaders saw through such simplistic notions early on. Joe Webb understood that the emperor had no clothes.
But back in the fall of 2009, SCI Marketview themselves built the clock that we were all hellbound to stop. From October, 2009, through April, 2010, I slept in four-hours-or-less shifts each and every night, so that no less than 95% of leads were responded to in less than five hours, and all leads were responded to in an average of less than two hours. Yes, 24/7, days nights holidays and weekends. A great deal of money was at stake. Eventually, that work was allowed to be outsourced, and soon after, when it became obvious that stopping the clock was simply bought and paid for, the time measurements no longer had big money riding on it. So, what else is state of the art, 2015, in the world of digital marketing? Healthy concepts, like emotional intelligence, trust, and employee retention. And common sense, I think.
A tip of the hat to Scott Stratten and Alison Kramer, authors of Unselling (buy it here at Amazon). Living and working in the new economy is a 24/7 job. In the automotive space, internet sales managers work store hours and spend evenings, weekends and overnights writing and editing content, trouble-shooting digital assets and keeping up with customers who, likewise, live, work and shop in this 24/7 world.
The best online sales professionals are their own brand, with all of the content creation that implies.
Many companies adopt an “opinions are my own” social media policy for employees to abide by. But employers and employees blurred that arcane line between home and work long ago.
If — as clients — everything we think we know about advertising we’ve learned from episodic tv at 11 years of age, then we’ve come to expect that the sales rep at the ad agency is also the guy or gal who comes up with the whole creative campaign. Usually, in an eleventh-hour panic. The only other ad creatives who lived in pre-digital tv land, Thirtysomething‘sMichael Steadman and Elliot Weston, were cut from a similar cloth.
As clients of digital marketing companies, local marketing agreement agencies, search engine marketers, social marketing experts, broadcast sales reps and newspaper sales reps, don’t we deserve the real thing?
There’s a lot of retail advertising made on the cheap by the media sales departments. And marketing gurus who know better.
A 1981 release, Neighbors, starred John Belushi and Dan Akroyd. While Roger Ebert dug it, it was more flop than hit in its first run, but what’s not to like? One particularly memorable image still hits home as an apt metaphor for lazy marketing today. The bit of funny business when the Akroyd shady-new-neighbor character cons the Belushi neighbor character out of his cash and into a so-called fancy Italian restaurant take-out that’s really Ragu and store-bought spaghetti boiled at home. Do you ever think your ad agency is like that, steaming off the Chef Boyardee labels and serving it up like it was made artisanal, and all that?
Oh sure, there’s a revolution out there somewhere, a battle between the old world of work and the new ways — authenticity, transparency — helpful information and useful content triumphing over empty promises and unbelievable exaggerations that are easily recognized as “advertising” and tuned out.
Only, I don’t think it can be easily packaged or delivered by push-button. The revolution will not be merchandised.
Hey, wait a minute. Don’t we know advertising is a falsehood and a complicated dialog between our need for truth and our need to present a fictionalized persona of ourselves to the outside world? Didn’t we all watch the final episode of Mad Men?
“We live in a world of radical transparency. There is nothing that’s really truly private long-term in the world we live in today. And while there’s something lost from that, there’s something gained. And the gain is an incredible priority on the truth. And in business, I believe truth is the ultimate advantage. I mean, it’s truth, and it’s trust. You can’t separate those two. Truth is the ultimate advantage because, if you have the truth, you can win out because— in a world where we’re all connected with social media and every other form through the web—we now live in a world where the truth will eventually get out. Now, if you go on the web, you can get every lie known to man as well. So the technology that empowers also can confuse. But I think there’s a resonance to the truth, as corny as it may sound, that every human being feels. You know when somebody’s bullshitting you. You know at some level it’s not the whole story. There’s something being held back. It’s instinctive in human beings. And not only do you take that and you magnify that with the interconnected world that we live in today in social media, now you’re at a place where if you don’t tell the truth, the consequences are just horrific.”
Today, May 10, was the 130th day of the year. Naturally, I did the required 130 push-ups. Tomorrow, I’ll do 131.
And so on.
Team Adrenaline’s push-up challenge started live on New Year’s Day; the awesome fitness coach, Paul Caminiti, had come up with the idea some time in December, and participants like me committed to start at 55 push-ups each day, until day 56, February 25, when the daily allotment went up. Then 57, on day 57, and so on.
The end game, in all of this, will be on New Year’s Eve Day, December 31, 2015, when each one of us will accomplish 365 push-ups in the course of the day.
Someone in the group figured out that, today, we crossed over the 10,000 push-up count, year-to-date.
When I started working out with Team Adrenaline, push-ups of all kinds were integral, as were sprints, hill climbs, backward runs and other attributes of well-rounded fitness: balance, dexterity, speed, power and endurance. Organic, in that no equipment or machines are used, in a group rather than individual workouts, and the activity is outdoors, year-round. Exercise benefits from a group setting. Counting a two-minute plank hold is more easily achievable by breaking it into manageable 10 or 15 second mental intervals. Running 13.1 miles is manageable by thinking about it a mile at a time.
Similary, the push-ups are more manageable for me in sets of 20 or 30 or 45. But as the year goes on, it’s getting harder to fit those push-ups into morning before work and night time before bed.
I’m already getting sets of 40+ at a time done at the gas station while filling the tank. And in the parking lot, waiting for restaurant take-out. Eventually, they’ll spill into my work day.
The group Facebook page is full of photos and videos of push-up sets done creatively and in creative locations. That will only increase as the job gets harder. And the virtual group, it’s good for motivation.
I normally hate detailed, repetitive tasks. In Adrenaline classes, being part of a group is a great source of positivism. The social media aspect of what has been an otherwise solitary activity is a good substitute.
At work, online merchandising is a similarly detailed, repetitive task, and I approach it with the same dread as I do 130 push-ups. But it has to be done. Every individual vehicle deserves to have an accurate description, down to the factory color (is it Daytona orange, sunset orange or sunburst orange?), equipment and interior. The photos have to be equally detailed. and all of the elements have to be syndicated to all inventory sites without loss of details. Photo files, similarly, cannot be overly compressed to conserve server space, because picture quality suffers. My own vendors have compatibility issues, and I typically end up doing multiple entries to get transmission and interior colors correct. I haven’t figured out what to do about the loss of photo details and the rise of compression artifacts, but I will.
