Subliminal Lorre (and GE)

Back when you could pause the picture on a good six-head VCR and still be able to clearly see the picture (and read the text), I discovered Chuck Lorre’s Vanity Cards.

Chuck Lorre is a TV producer who’s known for Cybill, Grace Under Fire, Rosanne, Dharma & Greg, and Two And A Half Men.

Starting with Dharma & Greg, Lorre wrote stream-of-consciousness “Vanity Cards” and inserted them for two seconds into the closing credits of each show.


Two seconds.

Flashed on the screen, then "poof."

Gone.

Here’s a typical Chuck Lorre Vanity Card:

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS #50
February 8, 2000

"I was recently asked by a journalist why I write these vanity cards. It seemed like a simple enough question, but the truth is, I was stumped. Why do I write them? Not for money certainly, although I continue to hold out hope. Is it a creative exercise from which I derive great pleasure? Not really. I've always felt that the act of writing isn't nearly as enjoyable as the feeling that comes from "having written." So why do I do it? Well, after careful consideration I've come to believe that had I been even a moderately successful communicator in my formative years, I would feel little compulsion to communicate now. This leads me to wonder, would it have been appropriate to have told the journalist that I write these vanity cards because I was incapable of expressing myself as a youngster, a situation which caused me unbearable anguish and is only now beginning to dissipate? Maybe. But I didn't. I told him I write them because it's fun. And this leads me to a question: if he's writing about my writing, what kind of miserable childhood did he have?"

An interesting thing happened as fans of Dharma & Greg (and later Two And A Half Men) became aware of those cards. Fans of the shows fired up their VCRs and taped each episode just so they could freeze the frame at the end and read Lorre’s latest musings.


We all felt like part of a club.

“We” got it.

“They” didn’t.

Poor "they."

Of course, the advent of Tivo ^® made it much easier to freeze the screen and read the Vanity Card.

Tivo ^® is also how I found GE’s One Second Theatre.

Last May I was flipping my Tivo ^® from live TV to recorded programming I noticed a change in the menu. There was a new choice called One Second Theatre. Being perpetually curious I clicked.

"We" got it again. We even called a few friends and helped spread the word. (Viral? Word-of-Mouth?)

Then last Sunday morning, during one of the network talking heads programs, a sponsorship ID stated “Brought to you in part by GE’s One Second Theatre. Inside every GE commercial there’s another dying to get out.”

Here’s the link, if you’d like to read about One Second Theatre yourself.


This “hiding in plain sight” concept is a stunt.

Don’t confuse the technique for anything other than what it is, however. Chuck Lorre’s Vanity Card and GE’s One Second Theatre are stunts – done to attract the public's attention to the promoters or their causes.

Stunts to gain the attention of the media are at least as old as P.T. Barnum who hitched an elephant to a plow to announce the circus was in town.

Some stunts are expensive, like Oprah's Pontiac giveaway, or Howard Stern handing out 500 free satellite radios.

Others, like Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal taking jabs at each other through the media are relatively inexpensive.

Then there are the stunts that "go wrong." Oh, they got attention, but not the way the promoters intended.

Like the audio boxes attached to the distribution racks of the L.A. Times which were supposed to play the theme song from Mission Impossible III. The Times said the stunt was intended to transform the "everyday news rack experience" into an "extraordinary mission." People buying newspapers thought they'd spotted bombs. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department arson squad was called in to distroy the boxes.

There are those who will insist that there is no bad publicity, but c'mon. In today's culture, how could box office sales possibly be improved by associating threats to their lives with your movie in the minds of theatre patrons?

Stunts achieve publicity because they intrigue, delight, and surprise Broca. None of them are long-term marketing techniques (even though GE managed to get their copy points into my short-term memory).


Back to our original two examples.

Chuck Lorre is a writer and producer of comedy. His Vanity Cards have reinforced his image as a guy who writes and produces funny, entertaining material. Lorre is going to have to push the envelope soon to retain that image, though, since he’s been repeating the same stunt for nine years, now.

GE’s One Second Theatre reinforces GE’s ecomagination commitment to the ecology. Now to keep people talking GE needs new content. How many times will you watch the same two television advertisements? How many friends do you have left to tell?

As I said, a stunt isn't good long-term strategy, but it can have value if the central idea reinforces the image of the entity proforming the stunt.

Are there stunts you should be planning?

What can you do to capture the imagination of the public?

What will people remember?

Will that memory reinforce the image you wish to plant in the minds of prospective shoppers?

What will you do if something goes wrong?

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In Their Own Best Interest

In the 1960s Country music was a true niche radio format, with only a few hundred radio stations in the U.S. playing the music.

Country radio managers and programmers claimed their listeners were “loyal.” They claimed it so loudly and so long that all through the 70s the loyalty of Country listeners to their favorite station was accepted as fact.

In the early 80s Country became mass appeal, and the number of radio stations broadcasting the music grew to the thousands. Care to speculate what happened to all of those loyal station listeners?

Like radio listeners of every other format, they migrated to other stations which played a better selection of the songs they wanted to hear, and had disc jockeys who spoke about things the listeners related to.

Perhaps you can relate to radio listeners. Perhaps not. The principle is the same whether we’re discussing radio listener loyalty or customer loyalty programs.

The principle hasn’t altered since Adam Smith first proposed it in his 1776 book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: When given a choice, people will always do what’s in their own best interest.

That means that customers are never truly loyal. Shall we look into your customer loyalty program?

• Will people truly be loyal to your store because you saved them seventeen cents on a can of tuna? Remove the incentive and see how many remain “loyal.”


• Will people keep buying CDs from your record club just to earn the membership points?


• Will they fly your airline exclusively because you made them members of your club? Or do they also have all of your competitors’ club cards?

So, it appears that you’re not buying loyalty with your customer loyalty program. You’re offering a discount to your regular customers. You think this is good business?

What’s that? I misunderstood? You’re using the program to attract new customers?

Cool. Will they stay after you remove the incentive?

It could happen. You stand a much better chance of them staying, though, if your customer service is spectacular. Of course, if your customer service was truly that impressive, you wouldn’t need the customer loyalty program. The resulting word-of-mouth would keep bringing in new shoppers.

Nope. You can never buy loyalty. It can only be earned.

What are you doing to earn it?

Please don’t tell me you’re discounting the tuna by seventeen cents.

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A $1.65 Billion Reason For Being Number One

In the business news last week the most popular Internet search engine has been paired with the leading video sharing site as Google purchased YouTube. In a conversation with a colleague, he noted that $1.65 billion is a lot of money to pay for any company. He wondered if, with all of Google’s brain power, they couldn’t have come up with their own service instead of buying one.

Probably they could, but should they have?

So far, there has been a fair amount of skepticism.

“After all, a lot can happen in online video over the next few years. Microsoft is beginning its own video sharing site, Soapbox. Meanwhile, MySpace still ranks higher than YouTube--at the time of this writing Alexa ranks MySpace as #6 on the web; and YouTube as #10 and MySpace offers video. It's even possible that the traditional television networks, which are starting to expand online (ABC.com now delivers complete episodes of "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost"), will also enter ithis newest medium of user-generated video. Think about it: reality TV and televised talent shows aren't all that different from the 15-seconds-of-fame world that YouTube has created on the Internet.”

Google's YouTube Blunder
Bill Wise, Media Post Publications
Monday, October 16, 2006

What’s MySpace known for? Video sharing? No? Then the fact that it “offers video” is irrelevant.

Truth is, YouTube is popular because it’s a video sharing site. It’s the video sharing site.

Then there’s all that television content that we know is going to migrate to the web. Care to bet who’s already positioned in the minds of viewers as the logical place to look for that new content?

What about the sum Google invested in purchasing a 67 employee Internet start up? I’m not quite sure that this is a valid concern.

Here’s a parallel: a friend of mine just purchased a home in Southern California. He’s got a fixed 30 year mortgage at an on roughly half a million dollars at an attractive rate. In other words, he can afford to live in the home he purchased.

Yet, it sounds so much more dramatic to point out that he’s just taken on $500,000 in debt.

The purchase price is less important than Google's ability to monetize their investment.

We’ve already discussed the biggest advantage of being first: people remember you. And since shoppers tend to buy brands in roughly the same proportion they remember those brands, being the first name consumers think of in a given business category creates a huge marketing advantage – a mental position that’s nearly impossible to transfer to another company.

The easiest way to create that top-of-mind position is to actually be first. In fact, to be so much the first that the company creates the category.

• The hot sauce category didn’t exist until 1868 when McIlhenny began selling red pepper based Tabasco Sauce. What’s the leading hot sauce today?
  
• There was no demand for condensed milk until Carnation brought it to market in 1899.
  
• Until the famous Kitty Hawk flight in 1903 there were no airplanes. By 1909 the Wright Company was manufacturing them for the U.S. Army, and by 1910 for the American public. Most people have never heard of Leroy Grumman or Allan Loughead, but every kid knows the names of Orville and Wilbur Wright.
  
• Until Otis Corporation developed and started marketing a moving staircase, only a few people had seen one a novelty ride at Coney Island. Otis’ name for the new people conveyor? Escalator, from the Latin scala (step) and elevator. What is every such device called today?
  
• The Personal Data Assistant market was created by Jeff Hawkins who founded Palm Computing and introduced the PalmPilot in 1994.
  
• Google was started in 1997 and used a totally new search algorithm: ranking of inbound links. Microsoft started its own search site in 1998. With all of Microsoft’s resources they never caught up.
  
• Until 1999 when Research In Motion marketed the first wireless handheld computer which supported e-mail, mobile telephone, text messaging, internet faxing, web browsing, address book, calendar, and to do lists, had anyone ever heard of a Blackberry?

When a new product creates a whole new category in the minds of shoppers it gives that product the advantage of being the name associated with the category. “Would you pass the Kleenex before you Xerox this page?”

A company is more than its products. Ask any shopper. A company is also corporate culture, history, image, and interaction with its customers. So, while it’s possible to duplicate the product, it’s nearly impossible to replicate the customer experience.

It only took ten weeks for Wal-Mart to shut down “The Hub,” its own version of MySpace. You can probably imagine the planning meetings in which someone in corporate marketing (someone who didn’t have a clue as to what motivated MySpace traffic) decided it would be simple to create a social networking site, and then to convince the sites users to create shopping lists of their most desired Wal-Mart items.

But, our question was should Google have purchased YouTube, or created their own service? Truthfully, Google had already created their own service with Google Videos, but they’ve now managed to secure the better-known competitor, too. The merger of YouTube and Google Video will undoubtedly make them the most recognized brand in downloadable video.

Was it worth $1.65 billion? History will show the rate of return on investment, but Google can afford the risk, and in my opinion, should be taking it.

What are you doing to be number one in your market?

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There'll Be A Test On Tuesday

Pretend with me you’ve been conducting a direct mail campaign. In testing your headline you’ve discovered that changing its focus from greed to fear increases the response rate from 1.5% to 1.85%.

Not bad. Three-tenths of a percent. That’s enough to get marketers excited.

“You’re kidding,” I can almost hear you say. “People get excited about a tiny fraction of better response?”

Well, yes. Yes, they do. You see, that tiny fraction amounts to a 23.3% improvement in top line sales. It has an even bigger impact on the bottom line.

For the sake of this example, let’s assume the following:

Your selling price is $74.95, and your gross margin is 65%.

The cost of printing your single-page, one color letter and its envelope, folding, stuffing, and addressing is $0.33 per piece.
The cost of postage (bulk mail) is $0.21 per letter.
You’re paying a list broker $40 per 1,000 names (4 cents each).

Add these individual sums, and the cost of promotion becomes $0.58 per lead.

You mailed 10,000 pieces with the first headline.

1.5% of the recipients of the letter purchased: a total of 150 sales. Each sale produced revenue of $74.95, for a total of $11,243.

You’re working with a 65% margin. Therefore, your gross profit is $7,308.

It cost $5,800 ($0.58 per lead times 10,000 leads) to make those 150 sales, which makes your net profit on this mailing $1,508.

Then you tested your new headline.

You mailed 10,000 more pieces with the second headline.

1.85% of the recipients of your letter bought: a total of 185 sales. Each sale produced revenue of $74.95, for a total of $13,866.

You’re still working with a 65% margin, which makes your gross profit is $9,013.

The cost of promotion is again $5,800.

Your net profit with the second headline is now $3,213.

When you run the numbers, this new headline has more than doubled your profit.

Wow.

This is why you must test at every stage of the persuasion process. (It's also why you must keep detailed records of your results).

Test your headline, test your offer, test the medium, test the frequency of repetition of your message. Test every variable.

When you find a way that works better than what you’re doing, make the new way your new standard and start testing against it.

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