The cost of creative - in dollars & sense

Great marketing is driven by great creative - the words and pictures that engage the consumer. It evokes emotion, whether good or bad. And emotion is the key driver in 90% of purchases in our modern times.

Before the 1970s, features and benefits helped the customer make the buying decision. Now the decision is based on how they feel about the product or service. Does it make them feel good? Is it easy to see "What's in it for me?"

Creative that doesn't engage the consumer or, heaven forbid, causes a negative reaction is, at best, a waste of time and money and at worst, damages the relationship between the company and their customer.

Great creative isn't cheap. It's a rare thing when the perfect creative answer happens in the first hour of work. But don't be fooled that you need to pay $250/hour or more for creative that really works for your customer.

Quick case in point - Microsoft (you knew I was going to there). The Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates partnership on what was supposed to be Microsoft's venture into being "cool" is a fiasco. And certainly didn't come cheap. Why would they even try to be cool? Well, because Apple looks cool, sounds cool and is slowly chipping away at the PC world. But Apple is cool without obviously trying. Microsoft is rather like your great uncle who wears plaid pants and sock with his sandels. You can give your uncle a great, funky haircut and new clothes - but he'll never be cool. He doesn't talk cool or walk cool.

Somewhere along the way, the creative team on the Microsoft fiasco forgot that the success of Seinfeld, the show, was based on the interaction of the characters not on the simple presence of Jerry Seinfeld. It was an ensemble success. If you change one element, it no longer has the appeal. Seinfeld himself was never the key element. He was simply the glue that held it all together. And worse news, Seinfeld is old news.

I have the utmost respect for Bill Gates, his philanthropic work and how he has taken Microsoft to the edges of world domination. But I simply have no respect for the idea that Bill Gates can act or even look comfortable on screen.

Big lesson here? Don't try to be something you're not, even if the highly paid creative team thinks they are on to a new direction. Use common sense. And no matter how you look at it, $10 million for an "old news" performer to kibbutz about everything except the product is bad, bad, bad.

But fortunately for Microsoft, all the brew-ha-ha over the Seinfeld fiasco allowed their Mojave Experiment campaign to basically fly under the radar. Whose brainchild is this? The creative team obviously recognized that Windows Vista is a behemoth of negativity. But trying to disguise it as a new operating system called Mojave is just emphasizing how really negatively consumers feel. If Microsoft accepts the consumer view that Vista is the devil in disguise, then seriously make headway in changing the consumer attitude. And not through an ill-conceived television campaign. Deal with the issues that make consumers angry. Deal with the megalomaniacal behaviour that made the decision to design Vista so you have to spend a ton of money replacing your older programs with new versions that work with Vista. And how about more testing before release so you don't fry people's brains with ridiculous errors and constant updates to the product? If you bought a refrigerator and then discovered you had to re-wire your house to use it and it only remembers how to stay cold with constant adjustment - well, you'd just return it and probably not buying anything from that company again. This concept isn't rocket science.

And contrary to what Apple would have you believe, their operating system is not without its own bugs. They may not have the blue screen of death, but they have the ever spinning wheel which, if you watch it long enough, probably hypnotizes you into believing they are a direct descent of the gods.

Enough with trashing poor, poor Microsoft. (Although if you folks at Microsoft can hear me, maybe next time hired folks who are a little less "cutting edge" and a little more "common sense")

To bring it all back into the world of small business, your creative should engage your customer in a positive way. Keep it neat and tidy (no over-designed grunge please). Catch their eye and give them a reason to spend a minute with your message. Don't embellish (you'll get caught), don't lie (you'll get fined), and don't think that amateur creative doesn't damage your brand. It does.