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newsletter | april 2012
news, not noise
The Madwoman’s Tale: Life on Madison Ave. in the 60s and Beyond
Long before Peggy Olson made her first entrance on the “Madmen” soundstage, there were the real-life women copywriters, account executives and market researchers, making a name for themselves and changing the world of work as they—and their male bosses—knew it. Advertising copywriter, creative director and ad agency principal, Jane Maas, brings them to life as she tells their stories—and her own—in her just-published memoir, Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the 60s and Beyond.
I met with Jane the other week in her apartment overlooking the East River--about two miles from the center of the Madison Avenue/ad agency universe. (Full disclosure: she has been my mentor since we worked together at the now defunct Muller Jordan Weiss.) Tearing myself away from the captivating view, I asked her if life was truly as depicted on the show. “Yes. And no,” she said. “Mad Men gets a lot of things right—three-martini lunches, rampant sex and sexual harassment—although that term hadn’t been invented yet.” (The excessive smoking on the show, which I had always dismissed as a stylistic conceit, was in fact a fact of life.) “But,” she added, “it gets some things wrong, too.” Hence, this book.
Maas came to advertising via an unusual route. A scriptwriter and contestant interviewer on “Name That Tune” (which gave her a unique perspective on how men and women really think), she suddenly found herself out of a job when it, like many game shows at the time, was exposed as a fraud. “I knew there was such a thing as advertising because there were advertisers on the show. So I prepared a book of spec ads, took it to Ogilvy & Mather and was hired that very day.” The rest is history. She began in the industry equivalent of the mailroom—not as a secretary, but as a copywriter confined to the gender ghetto of women’s products. Packaged-good brands like Dove for Dishes, Maxim Coffee, Good Seasons Salad Dressings. Ironically, two of her campaigns, for Dove and Maxim, won the National Organization of Women’s “Most Demeaning to Women” prize two year’s running. “A record!” she laughed. Happily, she is now best known for the “I Love New York” campaign and outsmarting the “Queen of Mean,” Leona Helmsley.
Rich with behind-the-scenes anecdotes, “Madwomen” has been described by Jane’s good friend, author Philip Roth, as a sociological study of a time that was at once medieval (in attitudes about women) and contemporary (tracing the evolution of an art form). The one constant? Women, now as then, are still conflicted when it comes to careers and children. This is a story Jane knows well and unflinchingly describes the roads not taken when it came to her family.
Mostly, the book is great fun. Gossipy and insightful, it captures the glamour of another time and the passion that still infuses every great campaign. I’m no fan of “Mad Men” (heretical, I know) but I loved “Madwomen.” Hear Jane in her own words on Studio360.
Search terms and naming rights
SEO is the GPS of the Internet. Without the right keywords driving search, your brand can literally get lost in cyberspace. But when the most critical keyword is your name and a deep-pockets challenger is threatening to take it away, more than search—or shelf space at the grocery store—is at stake. That’s what Pretzel Crisps, a snack food produced by family-owned Princeton Vanguard, contends as it seeks to protect its trademark and over $100 million in sales against Frito Lay, which is contesting the name and the right to use it. Pepsi (Frito Lay’s parent company) argues that “Pretzel Crisp” is a generic and therefore not subject to protection. The controversy has now landed before the US Patent and Trademark Office but it’s clear that whatever the decision, naming rights are more important than ever in connecting the brand to the consumer’s brain and marketer’s bottom line. More on the Pretzel Crisp case.
5 tips to better content
 Want more effective content? Start with a stronger foundation: a “creative brief” that outlines the five basic questions every piece of marketing communications must answer—whether your messages are limited to 140-character tweets or crafted for long-form collateral.
1. Who’s your target? Hint: it’s not you. It’s your consumers/users/supporters. What are their demographics, attitudes, habits, cultural affinities? What keeps them up at night? What are their needs (known and unknown) and what can you do to satisfy them? Create a persona. Give him or her a name, a look, a life. (If you’re so inclined, Pinterest can offer a useful platform for organizing visual information like this.) The more intimately you know your prospects, the more effectively you can craft the messages that resonate and compel them to act.
2. What do you want them to do? Buy, subscribe, donate, refer, support, post to Facebook, re-tweet, click, sign up? This is your objective, your communications end-game. Make it clear and easily measurable so that you can refine your messaging accordingly if you find you’re not meeting what you define as success.
3. Who is your competition? Who else is in your space? Not just other entities, but attitudes and perceptions that might get in the way of supporting your brand. How are you better/different? A competitive audit is the first step toward understanding the perceptual landscape and creating your own unique and distinct positioning.
4. What are your brand characteristics? Why do they matter? It’s not enough to promote the attributes of your brand. What matters is why they are important to your users and the benefits they confer. (See #1.)
5. What is your brand promise? This is the hardest question to answer. It is the benefit of greatest interest to your consumers—the one thing that will motivate your target to choose you versus Brand X.
In a complex and crowded media environment where everything from the latest app to the newest news headline is competing with your communications for attention, these are questions you can’t afford to ignore. See how we’ve put the creative brief to work for our clients here.
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