"Let him that would move the world first move himself." Socrates

"To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand." Jose Ortega Y Gasset

"Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error." Goethe

Today's image: The Last Time by FotoRita. Great shot. Thanks for sharing.

"Branding is not complicated"

Late last year we lost one of the giants of advertising. The gentleman who first gave us the notion of a single football game, the Super Bowl, as the premiere ad vehicle of the year. At heart a writer, he took pen in hand to create memorable classic tag lines including "We bring good things to life," "It's not TV, it's HBO," and "Visa: It's everywhere you want to be."

Phil Dusenberry was a lion in advertising's forest. A former radio guy who done good. (NYT obit)

Let me take a moment, amid all the noise and, too often, pure nonsense being written about branding, and share the unvarnished Dusenberry take. From his wonderful book Then We Set His Hair on Fire...

"Branding is not complicated. A brand is nothing but an expression of the consumer's loyalty and trust. It's a bond, a covenant with the consumer. When you see the brand's name attached to a product, do you trust that the product will deliver a predictable level of satisfaction? If so, you will be loyal to that brand - so loyal that you will stick with it even when a better product comes along. (That loyalty explains why it takes so much time and so much money to steal customers away from a leader. Leaders generate trust and loyalty - in that order. And loyalty makes them hard to unseat at the top.) So loyal that you will not only stick with that product, but when the brand name is attached to a new product, you will buy that product too.

The amazing thing to me is that loyalty - even when it is attached to the vagaries of emotion - is not a vague, amorphous concept. It's hard, it's real, it can be quantified.

One of the main goals of advertising - and by extension, any branding strategy - is to create lifetime customers, not just a short-term spike in sales. And that cohort of loyal lifetime customers lets you protect your sales and revenues far into the future. The sales are ongoing and repeatable. They're the best thing in marketing - the guaranteed transaction. And you can attach a number to those transactions that defines the value of your company's name, what it stands for, what it means to the consumer."

Brilliant! Phil later goes on to say...

"Elevate the product by elevating the emotions attached to the product. You don't need to know much more than that."

One more insight from Phil...

"My earliest mentor, John Bergin, taught me that your reputation rests more on the work you reject than the work you approve. If you don't have a kill rate of 10 to 1, he said, you're standards are too low."

Which begs the question - what's your kill rate?

The following is one of Phil's eighteen guidelines (not rules) for creative directors. Pure gold...

"Be really tough on the work. With the accent on 'really'...the power to stop bad work was the only true power a creative director possessed. You can't predict when the great work appears or if the client will appreciate its greatness or, for that matter, how the public will respond, but you damn well can stop bad advertising from getting out the door...your 'no's' are far more decisive in setting your standards than your 'yes's'...Never let a due date or client meeting the next day convince you that something's ready when you know it isn't. Send it back. Make everybody stay at their desks all night if you have to. Cancel the meeting (as a last resort). And don't feel too bad about it. You'll feel a lot worse if you compromise and let something less than great get through."

Midtown buzz: Sumner Redstone will be honored tomorrow night at a Paley Center black-tie gala held in the city at the Waldorf. Jon Stewart booked as the evening's host has backed out due to a "busy schedule" - ouch! Hearing it will be Charlie Rose to the rescue. Congrats and cheers to Sumner!

Billionaire blogger: Carl Icahn starts blogging (soon) on corporate governance. No kidding, here.

They're back: The Industry Standard once the most important of all pubs to the dot com tribe is returning. This time around no glossy dead tree stuff, nothing but net. Derek Butcher signs on as general manager. Good luck guys.

Bonus: Kevin Kelly, Better Than Free. [via]

Congrats & cheers: Dan Kelley celebrated a year of blogging yesterday. Dan, a rock radio programmer, lost his job in 2007. He got right back to work launching his Classic Rock blog for radio programmers. During the last twelve months Dan posted almost 400 entries. More often than not his posts were a celebration of radio folks doing things right. Moreover, he caught station people (and others) doing the right things and shared his pov on issues of the day. Dan, not yet back in the radio programming ranks, continues doing his homework, a serious student of rock radio. Bravos and thank you for sharing, Dan. Rock on! Read his blog birthday post here.

"If you're building brands, go work for Procter & Gamble." Bob Lefsetz

Tom Teuber sent me an article from ENCORE Magazine. A writing by Bob Lefsetz titled Branding?!?. Today's quotation is taken from that writing. Here's more...

"Have you ever heard someone wax rhapsodic about TIDE? THAT'S a brand. The Beatles were a BAND! It's not about the peripheral chozzerai, but the MUSIC ITSELF!

The music is its OWN brand. The music should be able to speak IRRELEVANT of what the players look like, irrelevant of the sell.

The old executives knew this They searched for excellence. Look at A&M, they didn't sign the same vapid pop crap again and again just a wide variety of stuff that SOUNDED GOOD! Same deal with Bob Krasnow's Elektra."

You may read the entire article here. My thanks to Tom for sharing the article. Bravos to Bob for his writing and for raising an important issue. Seems to me that we have a leadership problem combined with a massive failure of imagination. The brilliant David Mamet said it best when he suggested everyone working in Hollywood is a bit of a fraud, they were all making it up, no one really knows how to make a hit, no one honestly understands the secret to box office gold. The truth be told there is only one rule in the performing arts - there are no rules. There is no magic formula. American Idol, CSI, Lost and Desperate Housewives each got on the air by mistake. Each was a surprise hit. Turns out few besides the viewers liked those shows until they became hits. The folks leading the TV industry go to work everyday and make it up. The same holds true in the music business, the publishing business, the radio business, any and all of the hit driven enterprises. 146 MP3 players on the market yet only one captures significant share. Hundreds of search engines yet only one is consistently favored. Lots of browsers are available to you yet the odds are you are reading this using some release of IE. The market is beautifully irrational.

We need more Clive Davis, less six sigma.

Clive Davis has the golden ear. He is the legendary gentleman with a rare gift. He understands potential, he is sensitive to the possible. "The plays the thing" said Shakespeare and Clive Davis gets that. He gets that it's in the grooves or not. It's binary. It's off or it's on. You need to first have a show before you can have a show business. This is more art than science. What drives the accountants mad is the inability to reduce hit making to a science. Their goal is to structure hit making in a way that is economically efficient removing the mess, waste and chaos from the process. Entire industries suit up daily and spend millions to crack the code. The soup of the day is branding. The popular wisdom holds that one can use the tenets and disciplines of successful package goods marketing to sell anything including music. What gets lost in this approach is the obvious. Before you can sell something you have to create something. Investing focus and resources on building demand sounds reasonable, using the fast moving consumer goods playbook seems logical. Thinking one can just manufacture buzz is kinda cool. Only the facts get in the way of this elegant simple logic. The reality is P&G fails. Not every sku is a winner. They're making it up.

A great product creates its own demand.

The silver bullet is the silver bullet itself not some process. The "process" of music happens in your head. In his excellent book This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel Levitin writes...

"...as in visual art, music plays on not just what notes are sounded, but which ones are not. Miles Davis famously described his improvisational technique as parallel to the way that Picasso described his use of a canvas: The most critical aspect of the work, both artists said, was not the objects themselves, but the space between the objects. In Miles's case, he described the most important part of his solos as the empty space between the notes, the 'air' that he placed between one note and the next. Knowing precisely when to hit the next note, and allowing the listener time to anticipate it, is a hallmark of Davis's genius."

Want to watch an MBA meltdown? Tell them the secret sauce is what you don't put in. Brandon Tartakoff knew how to watch for what was not on and, in a manner similar, Kevin Weatherly, Jack Swanson and Brian Kelly understand how to listen for what's not there. One can certainly argue that what makes Tide successful is what they leave out, what is not in the soap, what is not a part of the look, feel and smell of the soap itself and what is not found on the package. You can say that Tide buyers are emotional about the product, you can go so far as to say that some love Tide more than any other soap. However as Bob Lefsetz has said Tide is an inanimate object. Music, entertainment, the performing arts involve our emotions at levels higher than package goods. I will stipulate that emotions are involved in the purchase of soap but in the majority of cases the relative intensity of those emotions involved in music are far greater, deeper, more complex. This is not to suggest that selling soap is easy, it's not. My thought is hit making is exceedingly difficult. Understanding why one track is a hit and another is not remains elusive. Why the majority of new stuff fails to connect, fails to become a popular hit is still a mystery. Don't tell the accountants but we really are making this stuff up, all of us. Honest.

At the beginning and the end of the day the best marketing is the product itself. We live in a cool new world of permanent beta. Before you believe that accountants and bankers have all the answers you may wish to remember those are the same folks who extended loans to guys with guns in South America. Guys that said "covenants, we don't need no stinking covenants." The bankers wrote off hundreds of millions. Same can be said for the bankers and their VC pals on another big occasion. They actually bought into the now clearly goofy and silly notions of NASDAQ 5,000...all the way to the bank (OPM, some of mine and perhaps some of yours). Bankers and the various players in the professional investment communities should not be viewed as being especially smart. One need only to look at their record.

I am reminded of something Dwight Case once told the RKO program directors. We were all geeking out on music research during one of our annual meetings and Dwight stood before us and said "Every once in a while I want you guys to tell me that you put a song on the radio just because it sounds great. I want you to remember that the turntable is one of your best research tools." Of course, Dwight was right. To succeed sooner one must learn and appreciate how to fail faster. The plays the thing not the marketing, not the branding.

Bonus: Zany Brit fresh from sxsw goes off. Our A-list blogger who draws cartoons on the back of business cards (mine included) has taken to full rant. A wonderful thing to behold. Highly recommended. Check out Hugh here. Closed circuit to Hugh - bravo! More sugar!