The creativity train never stops at Bailey Gardiner, even when it has absolutely nothing to do with our present or future clients. It’s not like a faucet you can just turn off. So the other day when a bunch of us were ripping on the hideous ice skating outfits at the Vancouver Olympic Games, we started laughing about our stylish PR gals and their teetering 6-inch stiletto heels.  I think it was @lizzied that suggested we host our own Bailey Gardiner Olympics, and a silly idea was born.  The creatives took it from there, and the results are pretty hysterical:

Congrats to our gold medalist Katy Harrison, who I think could climb a ladder in her Mahnolos while sipping a Starbucks Fat-Free Latte, collating a client metrics spreadsheet and tweeting from her cell phone with a reporter from @nytimes. Rock on.

What is your hidden talent?  Nominate yourself to be included in our next BG Olympics video  — send us your concept, and you could win valuable prizes and widespread notoriety.  Plus a pat on the back.

Perhaps it’s not politically correct for the CEO of a digital marketing company to express his disgust with a strong new entry into the social media consciousness, and yet here I go.  I hate Foursquare.  OK, my kids tell me that “hate” is a really strong word, so let me rephrase – I strongly dislike Foursquare. And I don’t care who knows it.

Advocates of Foursquare say it’s the next big social media marketing platform.  They say that businesses small and large should try to attract members of Foursquare because it will help them promote their business online. Even the New York Times has picked up on the hub-bub, so it has officially entered the public lexicon.

Foursquare is basically a social media game, which requires players to “check in” at various locations they visit as they vie to become the Mayor of that location.  A dubious honor, this mayorship can sometimes lead to – are you ready for it? A free cup of coffee!  Coupons for dollars off a sandwich!  Maybe even a crown you can wear around town to let people know of your superior status.

So why do I hate Foursquare? Because its participants — many of whom reside in this very office and are people I trust and respect — continue to feel it necessary to share with me through their Twitter and Facebook streams exactly where they are at all times, and what they are buying/consuming/eating etc. Frankly, I do not care where you are.  I don’t care that you are bra shopping. And I don’t care that you just unlocked the super-sonic, gold-plated badge level like some Worlds of Warcraft fanboy.

And I certainly don’t care that you are the mayor of the Hillcrest Subway. Or the mayor of Bailey Gardiner for that matter.  What makes you think anyone actually does care, except for you and the owner of the business you are promoting by telling me where you are?

There are a lot of great online business models that already offer geolocation services and popularity ratings – and way better in my opinion. User generated content and public rating systems are not new, and there are great platforms like Yelp, Loopt, Chowhound, and even grand-daddies like TripAdvisor, that allow me to check people’s opinions about all sorts of things. But on my own time and according to my own set of search criteria.

Having people barge into my social media stream with updates about their current location is pretty much spam.  It’s uninvited information from people I actually like, making it really hard to just turn off their Facebook updates or unfollow them on Twitter.

So do us all a favor Foursquare junkies – disconnect your relentless updates from your social media streams so we don’t all have to witness your trips to Subway, Starbucks and Target. Then you can become the Mayor Of Wherever The Hell You Want, and I don’t need to know about it.

Because really, no one cares except for the brands you are helping by mentioning them.

There has been huge craziness in the San Diego radio industry lately, and I continue to be asked by our advertising clients and others exactly what this means in the marketing landscape. To each I answer, “I wish I knew.” But in reality, I can make a few predictions.

First of all, what the hell happened?

• It began in August, when San Diego beloved radio icons Jeff & Jer were suddenly off the air due to contract disputes with Clear Channel Radio, their station’s owner.  Clear Channel had been on a hell-bent buying frenzy, snapping up radio stations across the country and many in the San Diego market – all with investment capital they had over-leveraged.  (You know, those silly banks were lending tons of money to just about anybody with a business plan a few short years ago.)  When markets started tightening, so did Clear Channel, and they no longer wanted to pay for higher salary morning teams – regardless of their success or following.  Jeff & Jer were out, and Clear Channel shifted a less expensive, less experienced morning team to their former station and time slot. Thus, AJ in the Morning is the winner of that game of musical chairs.

• Around the same time, Monique & The Man on Jack FM was cut down to just the lovely and talented Monique Marvez. Evidently having The Man involved was too expensive for ownership at KFMB.  Then in a very odd move, station management decided to reduce Monique’s live on-air time slot to just 5 – 5:30 am, playing music the rest of the time.  And just recently, she is off the air altogether and her contract is not being renewed.  Ratings at Jack FM continue to plummet in her absence.

• In another Clear Channel debacle, radio icons Dave, Shelly & Chainsaw on KGB suddenly got the ax as well.  Again, those pesky contract negotiations were listed as the culprit, and once again it was really because Clear Channel could not swallow the show’s high salaries. DSC fans staged protests they were so upset and angered.

• Then The Mikey Show on Rock 105.3 was suddenly absent (again Clear Channel  – seeing a pattern?) and fans lamented yet another loss of morning show talent.  Mikey is the only one to have cut a new deal, showing up for mornings now at FM 94.9.

This whole mess has left audiences reeling, radio dials spinning, and listeners not clear on where to listen – or why.  What’s more, it’s left the advertising industry in a bit of a quandry.  Rating points that were already a bit sketchy (see my previous blog spot on Arbitron ratings) are now completely unproven and unreliable.  Advertisers that have been buying radio based purely on ratings points can no longer trust that process.  Long time advertisers that were buying ad libs from proven on-air talent – these are spots recorded or spoken live by the deejay to endorse a particular product – can no longer have access to those familiar voices.  These were enormously popular – when Monique Marvez spoke about her personal experience in buying a Sleep Train mattress, her listeners would take that endorsement to heart.

Advertisers are left trying to figure out how to spend their radio budgets, or if they even should. So then, what now?

Truth is, radio has been – and will continue to be – an important part of the advertising mix.  Its immediacy and frequency allow an advertiser to reach their audiences with a message aimed at getting consumers to take action – right now.  With most radio listening taking place in the car, the assumption is that people are captive audiences.  And in the case of morning shows, audiences are accustomed to being entertained by personalities beyond just playing music.

Sure, the face of radio advertising has changed. It’s not as lucrative as it once was, and there is competition from digital radio like Pandora, iTunes, satellite radio like Sirius and many other sources.  Yet, none of those provide the familiarity, the down-home comfort and the city-centric knowledge and access that local radio can provide.

This too shall pass.  These radio personalities will find new homes where they can broadcast their morning shticks.  Radio stations will find new owners that will invest what they can in perhaps a new model for radio that is both profitable AND entertaining.  And consumers will play spin the dial until they land on a few new choices, perhaps hearing some familiar old friends.

There will always be a need for the Jeff & Jers of the world, because we want to be entertained.  Even more important than that, these iconic morning teams have provided a common thread for our greater community that few other outlets can even come close to.  The familiarity of their voices, their jokes and their laser-sharp knowledge of San Diego represent a shared touchpoint for our city.

And that is worth money.  The question is, how much?

Every once in a while, a potential client – often one we would really like to work with — asks us to participate in an agency review. Initially we are thrilled to hear we are on their list, until the RFP arrives and we learn they want us to do spec creative as part of their process.  Groan. Deal killer.

Maybe at the big agencies where multi-million dollar brands are pursued by companies with inflated egos and gargantuan overhead expenses, this would be considered de rigueur.  In fact, according to AdWeek, 154 major accounts shifted agencies in 2009 to the tune of $20.6 billion in billings. Presumably, those big agencies have the resources to commit to a freebie speculative assignment from a potential new client.  And perhaps, they are willing to use their considerable creative talents, strategic brainpower and billable hours (or in this case non-billable hours) to devote on the “if-come.”

Smaller shops like Bailey Gardiner cannot afford to do that for a number of reasons. And actually, the cost issue is not the most important among them.  Here’s some reasons why we don’t think spec creative works for anybody:

• Unlike some of the bigger shops, boutique agencies do not have people sitting around waiting to be devoted to the latest new business effort.  We have to schedule it, just like any other job that gets trafficked through the system.  Since we try to employ the right amount of talent to match the current workload, the teams are usually pretty well booked with paying client work, so…. the result is added workload on already stressed team members.  This is not a recipe for top-quality creative results.
• Many creative ad agencies like ours believe in the strategic branding process, and this provides the basis for all creative assignments.  We spend untold hours researching, planning, meeting, planning and strategizing WITH THE CLIENT to reach a point where we are mutually clear on a marketing direction.  Only then can we embark on a well-informed creative process that will fulfill those goals.  How could we just pull all that out of the air in the spec creative process? To do all that in the dark, often with only a few weeks time, is not optimum.
• This business is not like you see on TV.  Mad Men and Bewitched are entertaining and amusing, but Larry Tate and Don Draper are not true depictions of how good creative ideas are hatched.  You do not get good creative work by staying up all night, sketching a concept at the last minute, presenting to the client the next morning all jacked up on coffee, and winning the account because the client loves your BIG IDEA. Oh wait, that sounds like a regular work day after all.  Never mind.
• In past negative experiences with spec creative, we have seen the potential client put all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. By this I mean that the client bases their agency decision solely on whether or not they like the creative idea they see – not the team, their expertise, their ability to deliver, their longevity, their smarts or anything else they like or hate about them.  This can be a dangerous road for a client, since there is no way of knowing whether the creative they have fallen in love with was a one-time stroke of luck.
• Some agencies (disclosure: we have done this, too) bring in outside talent to help with spec creative and new business assignments.  If the client chooses this work, the agency team they are ultimately working with may not be the team that originated the creative they chose.  In a classic bait and switch, the agency may have won the account but now must live up to creative their team may not be able to replicate.  Plus, you have an in-house team that resents having to work on a creative direction designed by freelance talent.  Creatives want to own their work, and this direction does not allow it. Bad internal juju ensues.
• Plus — and this is a big one — spec creative is actually kind of insulting. We get paid as professionals for the hard work it takes to create compelling, creative and most of all, successful, marketing campaigns.  It’s really not right to ask for that for free. It devalues the considerable talents of the entire team, and all the many hours/days/weeks/months/years/decades we have put into our craft to become among the best there is.  A client should hire us because they are convinced we are the right partner to lead them with creative and strategic solutions.  Not because we made a pretty picture and wrote a great headline on the fly.

Now watch, a great opportunity will come through for a new  client I’ve been dying to work with, and I will end up approving a spec assignment and win the business.  Maybe then I will get off my soapbox on this topic, but right now I still say it’s not worth it for either side.  Done deal.

For decades, advertising agencies and the media industry have measured radio listenership based on Arbitron ratings. That rating system utilized diaries, or a paper based system that required a group of chosen listeners to manually record what stations they listened to, relying on their honesty to report where and when they were actually tuned in.  Many suspected that this was not the most statistically accurate or accountable process, and now their suspicions are proving true.

I laughed out loud when I read a recent New York Times story about the new and improved “Portable People Meters“, because this true measurement tactic calls out those fakers that say they never listen to soft rock by Celine Dion.  I personally HATE Celine Dion and her “vocal accomplishments” so my report would be true, but I guess there are a lot of people that say they don’t listen to that kind of music – and actually do.

See, Arbitron’s new People Meters are devices that record what a radio listener is actually listening to, in real time – warts and all.  And they have the radio industry’s panties in a bunch, because the numbers are coming in very differently than what had been reported the old way.  Imagine that – people were not being completely honest about what they tuned in to, and instead recorded in their old diaries what they thought people would expect them to write.  So Joe Six-Pack, who wants everyone to think he’s super tough and macho, is actually listening to my friend Celine Dion warble and butcher love songs instead of the sport talk station he said was his favorite.

I know this to be true, because last year I was tagged to participate in Arbitron’s ratings program, and was excited to see how it worked from the inside. I was literally mailed a “diary”, divided by dayparts and calendar dates, and asked to write in what radio stations I listened to, and when.  Knowing my good friend Monique Marvez was doing her morning show at San Diego’s Jack FM, I naturally “listened” to her.  A lot. Now a people meter might have proven otherwise.

This has huge implications for our industry, and for media buyers across the country.  Radio stations that had enjoyed market domination and high ratings, with the advertising rates that went with that position, are dropping dramatically in the new ratings world, while others are rising.  Some can no longer charge the big bucks, because their accurate listener numbers are far lower than previously reported.  In this topsy turvy new world, soft rock is showing stronger listenership, talk radio is dropping, and unfortunately we are witnessing the death knell for classical music on radio because no one is apparently listening to that at all.

Good thing advertising agencies like ours have savvy media buyers who can navigate these new waters and plan an effective media buy.  It will be interesting to see which radio stations come out on top, and which scramble to adopt more competitive new formats as these numbers continue to unfold…

Each year it gets better. The Annual Bailey Gardiner White Elephant/Yankee Swap/Santa-Gone-Bad gift exchange has become the thing of legends, and 2009 was a year to be remembered.

Last Friday night, we gathered at my home for our company holiday party, and as tradition holds, the evening topper was the gift exchange.  This is the type of gift swap where you draw numbers, choose a wrapped gift from under the tree, and then spend the rest of the evening trying to either protect it or get someone to steal it.  Mind you, the price limit on these gifts is always $20 and being the creative folks that we are, our team makes that twenty bucks go a looooonng way.  A few favorites from this year’s sampling:

• Liter of Jagermeister (actually there were MANY bottle of booze exchanged)
• Yodeling Pickle (yes, really)
• Selection of Disneyland lollipops
• A mini fridge that holds one can and plugs in via USB
• An automated reindeer that does sit ups to workout music
• An Air Supply cassette tape (who has a tape player anymore?)
• A DVD of The Golden Girls greatest moments
• At least three Snuggies
• A beach trash pick-up grabber thingy
• And my personal fave, a live beta fish in a bowl

So if you see any of these items under your tree this year, you can probably guess they have been regifted by one of us.  Or perhaps you were inspired by our creativity and followed our lead to purchase for yourself!

Happy Holidays!

As a Board Member and Treasurer of the San Diego AdClub, I’m proud when our industry gathers together to give back and do something good in the community.  Sometimes us folks in marketing and advertising get a bad rap for being brown-nosing yes men and women; shills for any product willing to pay us; shameless whores of creativity.  But not us at Bailey Gardiner — and not the fine folks at the San Diego AdClub.

The AdClub’s new Reach2 Program is a Media Assistance Program for San Diego non-profits, designed to help organizations achieve more from their advertising programs than they could have gotten on their own.  Simply put, AdClub will adopt a few select non-profit groups as partners, helping them to expand their media presence exponentially by using our resources on their behalf.

Using the selected non-profit’s media budget, AdClub will work with major media companies in San Diego to gather donated media space in the form of print, television, radio, online and other forms of advertising.  AdClub’s commitment is that they will deliver substantially more — double or perhaps triple the value in media exposure.  It’s a pretty innovative partnership opportunity, and a win/win for all involved.

For more details or to receive an RFP as a qualifying non-profit, contact San Diego AdClub at 619.255.2281 or view the specifics on the Reach2 Program here.

So who says ad people are just a bunch of mercenaries, anyway?

It’s been a great couple of weeks for Bailey Gardiner, and we’re pleased to announce another new client. Aladdin Bail Bonds has chosen our San Diego marketing agency to represent them nationwide – we’ll be managing advertising, public relations and social media. Who knew the agency that represents Tiffany & Co., The San Diego Museum of Art and the Se San Diego Hotel would also count a bail bonds company among our clients.  Well, come to find out it’s a pretty amazing company.

Aladdin is the largest bail bonds company in the US and is by far the industry leader, with nearly 100 offices across California, Washington and Idaho — and growing. They have literally revolutionized the bail experience for countless people. And although no one ever wants to find themselves in the position of needing Aladdin, you sure do want to know if you ever need them, they will be there to treat you, your family and friends with respect, courtesy and  professionalism.  That’s why they also refer to it as “retail pre-trial release services” – sounds a lot different than “bail bonds” huh?

It makes sense that their tagline is We’ll Get You Out. We’ll Get You Through It.

So we are very excited to begin creating a new advertising campaign for Aladdin including TV spots, online and print ads, outdoor/out-of-home and other cool stuff such as in-store retail signage and more.  Plus we’ll be launching new social media programs, reorganizing their website  and strategizing their digital presence.

Check back now and then, because we’ll be blogging about the process and campaigns as they develop in real time.  Plus, we’re volunteering one of our creative team members to get arrested so he can learn about the experience firsthand (he just doesn’t know it yet!)

OR YOU COULD USE THESE GUYS INSTEAD. Hmmm...

It’s already been a big week for Bailey Gardiner. Our PR team won a prestigious new national public relations account – Hero Nutritionals, the originators of the gummy vitamin category that has become somewhat of a phenomenon in the nutrition and natural foods industries. We’ll be managing national public relations and social media programs, focusing on new product introductions, product reviews and company features for the privately-held business based in San Clemente, CA.

We’ve wanted this client for a long time, as evidenced by their prominent position on our agency website’s Love List of clients we would love to work for.

What’s cool about Hero is that their vitamin and supplement products are allergen, gluten and cassein (whatever that means) free, with 100% natural flavors and colors.  Okay, so we’re just learning that cassein is kind of like a milk protein. But most of all, their gummy vitamins for kids and adults are fun and tasty – who wouldn’t want that?

This client will allow Bailey Gardiner to work our magic on a brand that deserves the attention, and already is part of a growing conversation online.

As part of our winning presentation to the leaders at Hero, we showed them an analysis of their brand in online social media forums.  I even conducted an informal poll through Twitter to find out how many people would buy and consumer gummy vitamins if they knew such a thing exists for adults.  The results were overwhelmingly positive – and a great outpouring of interest to show our potential client during the pitch.

Work begins immediately, so be on the lookout for press and social media impressions on their way to a computer or mobile device near you.  Oh, and I guess the occasional traditional print and broadcast news delivery system as well. (Wait, what’s that?)

A while ago, I blogged about how DVR is my best friend, and my addiction to only watching TV when I can control the pace.  Well, it seems I am not alone.  Recent Neilsen statistics  indicate that DVRs/TIVOs may not have the dire effect on television programming (and we are really talking about TV advertising here) as was once believed.  In fact, as statisticians uncover ways to measure viewership on recorded programming, the numbers show that remarkably people are still watching the commercials.

Good news for us in advertising land, since we like hearing that our work is actually being seen by TV viewers — and more importantly, that they are receiving our advertising messages.

And here’s a cool website that tracks TV viewership for all your favorite shows, with a section devoted to DVR numbers and how they predict whether your top shows will be renewed or cancelled.

Or perhaps Apple will be successful in launching it’s iTunes TV programming for $30/month.