Month: February 2016

Knowing our place

Posted on by Frankly Speaking

 

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2016 is an presidential election year, and that means candidate debates.  On the GOP side, I’ve been watching efforts to capture the coveted ‘Evangelical’ vote.  The debates provide a high-profile soapbox for Republican wannabees to profess their commitment to protecting the Christian values of our country and turn back the tide of cultural demons and religious infidels that threaten them.  To be a serious Republican candidate, you have to have a plan to restore God’s destiny for America in your platform if you expect to win. To show their Evangelical audience that they are in tune with the Lord’s will for our planet, we’ve heard candidates commit to carpet bombing Islamic infidels back to the Stone Age, and instituting (or removing) laws that will rebuild our lost Christian family values.

Thinking about this as I was flipping through TV channels one night, I landed on a documentary that was discussing the vastness of our universe. A scientist was providing an interesting perspective on how massive our universe is. He stated that our Milky Way galaxy has over 200 billion stars in it, and that astronomers have estimated at least 500 billion galaxies in the universe. Multiplying those together, that’s a whopping 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1 sixtillion stars like our sun in the universe. To picture this, he said to imagine standing on the beach with a single grain of sand on your fingertip. That’s our sun. Then imagine the grand total of every grain of sand on every coast around every continent around the world. That’s how many stars are out there in the universe, give or take a few billion. All of it God’s creation. All of it so much bigger than our little round rock sitting next to one of those grains of sand. I turned off the TV and just sat there, humbled.

As I thought about that over the next week, I also wondered about the other half of the time-space continuum. Where do we as humans sit in God’s concept of time? A little Google research revealed that most scientists believe the first signs of life, basic organisms called prokaryotes, appeared on our planet about 2 billion years ago (apologies to you creationists out there). Now, to follow my scientist friend’s attempt to simplify this, imagine a single calendar year where prokaryotes show up on Jan 1 at 00:01 and our current moment in time is December 31st at 12 midnight. This would put the first man (defined as the genus homo-) on the earth Dec 31st at around 6:15pm. Just in time to start celebrating New Year’s Eve.

Did you get that? We, as God’s crowning achievement, are just a blip in his universe and almost rounding error in the creation timeline.

Here’s my issue -When those of us on this little speck who just recently showed up to God’s party believe that we can take it upon ourselves to judge and interpret every perceived threat to God’s plan from our (relatively) small-minded perspective, I think we’re treading on ridiculous, and dangerous, territory.

As far as I know, we’re not told to fight the gay agenda, to curb the influence of Islam, or to restore prayer in schools. The mightiest force in an unfathomable universe can manage those things on His own in His time.

What am I told to do?

Love.

Love God with everything I have and love others as much as I do myself. That’s the only responsibility the creator of this vast cosmos felt I needed to follow. I wonder what our nation would truly be like if our evangelical leaders would focus just on that?

Storytelling done right

Posted on by Frankly Speaking

In a previous post, I talked about storytelling that is compelling, yet still ownable by the brand.  Always’ “Like a Girl” was an example of this well done.  Unfortunately, not every brand is in a position to own a cause like Always has.  Can parent brand advertising build equity for the overall line without product news when there is no cause-related message?

In general, brand equity advertising is tough.  I almost always lean towards the ‘hero and halo’ approach – hero product news that delivers against an unmet consumer need in a compelling way, and let it halo over the rest of the brand.  This is especially true with the use of TV, where you only have 15 or 30 seconds to get your message across.  Tough to tell a story in this short time frame, and longer spots are very expensive to air and rarely hold today’s short-focus consumers long enough to get through the ad in a commercial break.

The digital explosion has changed the game here, though.  Video for the internet is less expensive to air, and the integration across platforms allows marketers to lead target consumers to the message easily and effectively.  Now, brands have the capability to tell a longer more in-depth story that can develop the personality and equity of the brand.

That still leaves the issue of developing an engaging message.  Content is much more of a focus, and having the time doesn’t often translate to time well spent.  The time-tested measures of good copy still apply in this new space:

  1. Is the message compelling?  Is the communication mind- or heart-opening for the viewer?  Does it challenge assumptions or create an emotional attachment for the viewer?
  2. Does the message reward the viewer?  Was it done well enough to create a positive experience for the target that holds their attention through the entire message?
  3. Is the drama about the equity message?  Does the creative reflect the point of the advertising and highlight the benefit?
  4. Is the communication ownable?  I think this is the biggest gap in producing good copy.  I have delivered advertising that drove great interest, but no one could recall what is was for.  Does the message reflect directly back on the equity of the brand?

So, who’s doing this right?  Hershey has recently moved to a master brand vs. product approach.  I think that their first execution out of the gate does a good job of delivering against the above criteria, and the result is a great piece of storytelling that builds the Hershey equity: