What Will It Take to Wake Up These Dogs?

Let’s look at some brands that are in dire need of freshening.

Let’s start with cars. Everyone loves to talk about cars. Is Bob Lutz really shaking up GM advertising? Not yet—but his team recently did put Modernista! on notice and put Cadillac in review. For some reason the trades don’t seem very excited about it.

Who’s going to win VW? We don’t know yet—but the list has narrowed. DDB/New York (my pick) and Wieden got tossed. That leaves Deutsch L.A. and Goodby Silverstein & Partners, S.F. I guess the smart money has moved to Deutsch. Both agencies in recent memory had Saturn as a client, both have had other car accounts. But their cultures are very different.

VW marketing is now helmed by an Italian, Luca De Meo, who for a time ran Fiat and then Alfa Romeo. The automotive press says he’s a bright young car executive with very good instincts and the ability to make up his mind quickly. Expect a decision in the next two to three weeks.

Well enough silly topicality. What about those dowdy matrons hiding in the back of the room, afraid that no one will ask them to dance?

Case No.1: Mitsubishi. When was the last time you saw a memorable TV spot for Mitsubishi? Remember the girl trying to herky jerky in the front seat to some interesting music? Well that was out of Deutsch L.A. 10 years ago. Traffic won the account, previously at BBDO West, a year ago, in a shoot-out with Wong Doody Ignited Minds and DDB. Traffic is a new agency backed by Tom Cordner, previously the creative leader of Team One (Lexus) and investor Bob Farina.

But what have they done? You can be sure that Traffic is frustrated that it hasn’t been able to give the brand a higher profile. If you go to YouTube there are plenty of highly-viewed videos of Mitsubishi’s EVO IX and EVO X. These are so-called drift cars that do zero to 60 in four seconds and are evenly weighted enough so that you can go into a 360 spin without losing control. In other words, an exciting car. Unfortunately, you can’t make TV commercials selling speed and the Mitsubishis for sale are much less exciting cars with names like Lancer and Galant. Anyway Traffic has yet to crack the brief.

Case No.2. Eddie Bauer. When last heard from (in 2008) Eddie Bauer Apparel Stores was a subsidiary of Eddie Bauer Holdings, Inc., a publicly traded company, with stores in North America, Germany and Japan. There were Eddie Bauer Signature Eyewear; Eddie Bauer sponsorships with National Geographic of “Radio Expeditions” on NPR; an Eddie Bauer line of home furnishings with everything you would need to be cozy in a winter cabin, right down to the thick blanket and wool rug; a line of Eddie Bauer mountain bikes launched with Giant Bicycle, Inc.; and the Eddie Bauer Edition line of S.U.V.s from Ford.

Then earlier this year, everything came crashing down when Eddie Bauer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It is currently waiting for court approval to sell itself to a private equity firm for $200 million. Meanwhile Publicis West in Seattle is no doubt waiting to hear if it’s still the brand’s agency.

If it is able to wiggle out of its financial problems, then much needs to be done before the brand attempts a return to its “adventure roots.” After all, this was the company which invented the quilted down jacket and military down sleeping bag but so what?

There are already plenty of outdoor and/or adventure apparel companies which own the space—many of them doing business either online and/or through a catalog with virtually no brick and mortar stores weighing down their balance sheet. What man or woman who enjoys the outdoors can’t find several L.L. Bean or REI catalogs stuck around on a back shelf somewhere? But of those, how many have ever been to an L.L. Bean or REI store? (If you are in California or Washington, substitute Orvis for REI).

It used to be that Patagonia was just a store for kayakers or mountain climbers. Today their stores are everywhere, selling t-shirts, fleece sweaters and vests, rain jackets and daypacks, all with a lifetime money-back guarantee.

So where will Eddie Bauer fit into this Gore-Tex landscape with a distinctive positioning that make their products stand out? If you could figure out a USP then you could fashion a memorable ad campaign—but it has to be long-running. And the owners will probably have to double their pre-2009 $10 million budget if they hope to make a dent.

Send me your nomination for brands—not dogs without a pulse, but brands which with a little prodding and some energy bars could get back in the game.

An Urgent Letter to Alex Taylor III

Fortune Magazine deserves an ASME elephant for the journalism of senior auto writer Alex Taylor III. He’s the only writer-reporter-analyst left, other than my good friend David Kiley at Business Week, who knows where the bodies are buried in Detroit.

So when Taylor writes a cover story, “It’s Clutch Time for Fritz Henderson and GM” (Oct. 12, 2009 issue), we all should sit up and take notice. The question is whether even Taylor has been in Detroit too long. His “Special Report” is balanced, well written and full of hope. Henderson is obviously a breath of fresh air in the executive suite. He can manage an online press conference, answering 30 reporter’s questions in 45 minutes. Wow!

But even though GM has slimmed down considerably through the last year, has lost many of its onerous structural and legacy costs, and has been able to cut back on brands, factories and non-performing dealers, the question still remains: is it capable of making great cars that Americans want to buy?

Sure, it’s clutch time. Certainly that isn’t news. It’s been clutch time at least from the day nine years ago when Rick Wagoner took over the company and began saying that, with just a little bit of this or that, GM would be just fine. (Remember when Wagoner had dinner with Carlos Ghosn of Renault-Nissan and said later that GM could snap back without foreign help?).

Meanwhile Henderson has surrounded himself almost entirely with GM old-timers. Sure he’s capable of saying no to them. I’m glad to hear that he turned vetoed Bob Lutz’s plan to rename a Pontiac G8 as a Chevrolet Caprice. But can he teach GM to tell the truth?

His first mistake may have been naming the charismatic, 77-year-old Lutz his chief of marketing. Lutz is the ultimate car guy; he was brought in several years ago with plenty of authority to put some pizzazz into GM’s styling, and, to my thinking, he failed. [The Malibu was a hit before he got there.] Lutz said he planned to shake up GM’s advertising—and last week he fired Modernista!, Boston, as Cadillac’s agency. But it will be another six months before we see what Lutz can do to give the Chevy, Buick, Cadillac and GMC brands better definition and punch.

Never mind doing great advertising. For starters, can Lutz just make GM’s marketing credible. But he is such a gung-ho type he may be able to take that first baby step. Take the latest campaign to be produced on Lutz’s watch: chairman Ed Whitacre’s money-back guarantee TV spot.

None of us had heard much about Whitacre before he came over last spring at the U.S. government’s invitation from AT&T to take command of the GM board.

In this spot, he strikes a Lee Iacocca-like pose, challenging people to buy GM cars and trucks for 60 days to see if they like them. “Like a lot of you I had misgivings about GM cars,” he says before assuring us that “car-for-car” they’re better than the competition.

Huh?

Such a statement isn’t even close to true. Alex Taylor, who strangely didn’t comment on the Whitacre ad, writes, even Korean-import Hyundai “outpaces ever GM brand in quality and outsells every GM brand except Chevy.”

I’m glad that Chairman Whitacre is offering to let us test drive a GM car and, if we’re not entirely satisfied, to return it for a full refund. What he fails to mention are the conditions—notably that you have to drive a GM car for a minimum 30 days before you are eligible for a buy-back.

Worse, isn’t it a little early to be challenging Americans to test drive GM cars? Aren’t there better reasons—like their price and value, warranty, some of their more competitive features—to consider buying a GM car? And what is GM doing wasting money on ads for GM anyway? No one drives a GM car. The closest you can get to that is a Jimmy—a GMC truck. So why isn’t GM spending its media dollars that on its individual car brands sitting on the dealers’ lots?

The point is that a company which can’t even get its communications right is unlikely to be trusted to get its design and manufacturing quality right. Even during the transition period from the Wagoner to the Henderson eras, there are a lot of GM cars to be sold. GM should start learning to tell the truth about them now and slowly, carefully rebuild its relationship with the American consumer.

Alex Taylor – you’re our last best hope. Don’t let Fritz take you on any more test drives. Don’t spend too much time in the GM executive lunchroom being amazed by the change in the hidebound customs of its Renaissance Plaza headquarters. GM under Fritz has a chance to get it right. But it’s a long odds game. And we’re counting on you, Alex, to make sure to keep honest book on the lot of them. Especially because, as taxpayers, we own a huge piece of GM and want our money back.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ADVERTISING AGENCY (AS WE’VE KNOWN IT)

I’ve spent the last week worrying about the affairs of the industry I love—and to which I’ve devoted the last 25 years of my working life.

As we enter budget-planning season, management of some mid-sized and some very large agencies are currently going through the excruciating exercise of trying to envision what 2010 will look like. Just about everyone in this business knows how to get through a bad year. What they are not trained to do is to hang on for four or five years, waiting for the Great Ship to right itself.

I was moved by what General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt had to say, in a recent issue of Fortune (Aug. 31), about what he’s doing to drag his brand out of the muck. Immelt has put out the word to managers, when they come in to forecast 2010, not to start by explaining what caused the decline in 2009. He said he wanted the presentations to go from “The market’s slow” to “There’s an 80-locomotive order in Egypt—let’s go get it.”

I think we have to be quite brutal about continuing to pare down costs and jettison slow-moving efforts. There may not be a great demand in the near- to middle distant-future for copywriters who know how to construct a great magazine ad. But there is no doubt a continuing demand for creatives who understand the new world of fragmented media and who enjoy doing something unusual in the digital space. I’m thinking about the Toy’s “Elf Yourself” work for Office Max (now getting ready to go into its third year), and Pereira & O’Dell’s “Go Miniman Go” blog for Lego.

But the larger issue continues to be the koan sent me last week by “Hal” about how our great creative agencies should re-engineer themselves to deal with this ever-changing, media- and brand-reality. It’s going to take some very brave, deep-pocketed managers to plan and fund such a transformation.

Essentially agency owners are going to have to forego profit participation for a year or two, while they rebuild their agencies from the ground up. Either that or go out and acquire a strong, young digital partner and then quickly meld the two cultures in an agnostic way that does not force the digital agency into a submissive, inferior role that snuffs out its value. The last time we re-engineered like this was back in 1991 to 1992. I know because Stuart Sanders and I ran conferences on the subject—and we were always sold out. But it’s painful and scary.

Can mid-sized creative agencies muddle through? Perhaps, at least for a while.

I’ve been reading about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Rome reached its zenith, Wikipedia tells us, in the second century. Then its fortunes slowly declined for another 200 years, ending on September 4, 476 when Romulus Augustus was deposed by Odacer, the Visigoth king, who led a band of German mercenaries into Rome and sacked the city. (Others would quibble that this is only the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the so-called Eastern Empire didn’t collapse until the fall of Constantinople in 1453). Was that how sausages made their way into Italian cooking? I wonder.

I remember in 1990 when Ken Fadner took me to breakfast to tell me that he and his partners had sold Adweek to something called Boston Ventures, later to become BPI, then VNU and now Nielsen. I was pretty bummed out. “This is the end of the dream, Ken,” I told him. “No, not necessarily,” said Fadner. “Maybe the conquered will conquer the conquerors.”

Hey, I love contrarian theories. And, sure, it’s always possible that a company like Citibank would acquire or merge with a company like Travelers Group and that Sandy Weill of Travelers would work gradually, as a “co-CEO” with Citibank’s John Reed to reform Citibank and turn it into Citigroup. But that isn’t what happened. After an interim period, Sandy Weill overthrew John Reed and pushed him into retirement.

You get bought, you’re toast.

So we’re all going to have to tread lightly here. This, by my reckoning, is the fourth inning of at least a nine inning game. I would say the Romans are losing to the Goths right now. And a lot of great agency brands are going to disappear in the next two years. But it’s not all bad. We’re going to see some exciting new agencies –- call them strategists, widget makers, creative planners, or what you will—take their place.

“Hey, waiter! Bring me an 80-locomotive order.”