Bor-ing!

 

Let’s see,  how can I make this cover page enticing? Given that people hate reading cover pages. Almost as much as they hate stopping to read dull ads. Confess; you're not reading this, are you?

This gets to my core philosophy as a creative advertising professional: Nobody likes to read ads.  Or be sold to. Or marketed to.  These things are tedious. They're interruptions. They're annoying. They waste our time. So your pitch gets shut down as soon as you...

Well, I know how to get past the page flips or the "skip ad" button. I use empathy. I just imagine myself on the receiving end. I know I’d better make this good. It better be entertaining. That’s Step One in persuasion: Disarm.

In my career, at least, this technique has worked with spectacular results. Sure, I’ve won tons of creative awards, Clios, Communication Arts, Beldings, Best-in-the-West, Webbys. But more important, I’ve helped my clients jolt their sales by billions (over $70 billion, but who’s counting?). And I also had a small part in getting the International Space Station in orbit. See how I saved that for last?

But nobody likes long cover pages.  Sorry.

Now look at my work...

Health Republic

One of the provisions of the landmark Affordable Care Act of  2010 was to have each state establish a non-profit health insurance CO-OP (Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan) for its individual citizens and its small businesses (under 50 employees), who would otherwise not be eligible to join a group plan from the big insurance corporations.  Oregon's version of this co-op was called Health Republic, which was started in 2014. Funded by the then-Democratic controlled Congress with a five-year operating loan to help it get up and running (called rhe "risk corridor"), Health Republic grew to 14,000 members within the first year and was projected to start turning a profit by 2015. Individuals like me, who couldn't get health insurance under the pre-ACA (Obamacare) world, were now able to get covered. 

Along with Health Republic's marketing director, Cheryl Vandemore, I helped create an ad campaign to get the word out to small employers and individual Oregonians about this new insurance option. Our tagline: "People. Not Profits."

It went great for that first year of its operation, growing its member base rapidly (as I said, up to 14,000 members) and on schedule to regularly pay back its five-year operating loan to the Federal Government. Unfortunately, when in 2015 the new Republican-controlled Congress attempted unsuccessfully to repeal the ACA for the 67th time, they were able to cut funding for the loans to the startup-up insurance co-ops in the states and prematurely called back the startup operating loans. This forced Health Republic in Oregon and all those similar co-ops in the other states to shut down, leaving millions of Americans without health insurance again. Ah, democracy!

But we were all quite pleased with the ad campaign:  And enthused about the possible new world we thought we were entering.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thriftway Markets

Thiftway Markets is a franchise chain of small, family-owned grocery stores in the Pacific Northwest. I loved this company. Loved them as a client.  Loved shopping at their stores... before Whole Foods (a subsidiary of Amazon) bought out most of their locations and replaced them. When the agency I was creative director for had them as a client, my team  had a daunting task. They had almost no money for production. We needed to come up with a memorable but incredibly inexpensive way to make TV spots for them.

We used humor, as usual. And the result was these spots won Best-in-the-West and the Portland Ad Federation Rosey Awards.  As creative director, I also had one of the best creative teams in Karen Kemp, Linda Lawyer, Kathy Stipe, and incredibly resourceful young producer Jill Andresevic.

United Way

United Way in Portland, Oregon needed ads to really boost donations. As one of our pro-bono, public service clients we donated these campaigns. We appealed to the difference UW made in specific human lives. The words were those of the very people UW had helped, and how, and in their own handwriting. These made the campaign all the more human and relatable.  "All the difference" was the theme.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The radio campaign, on the other hand, used humor to "shame" people into giving; that you never know how a gift could make a difference...even in your own life.

 

 

Tektronix

 

Tektronix is a Portland, Oregon-based tech company specializing in test & measurement instruments--you know, sexy things like oscilloscopes, and emulators and signal analyzers and video editing machines, and...oh...oscilloscopes (I mentioned that already, didn't I?). 

As one of our newly-founded ad agency Elvis & Bonaparte's first accounts, we endeavored to show them that we could use humor and creativity to sell oscilloscopes and editing machines to end-users like video production companies. Our brand position was that Tektronix welcomed all challenges, hence our tagline, "Bring it on!" Cartoons done by our excessively talented art-director, Dave Helfrey.

 

 

Forest Lawn Mortuaries

Who would've thought you could employ humor in funeral services advertising? Nevertheless, my creative teammate and I went right at it in this campaign of two ten-second TV spots by addressing how uncomfortable even talking about it was. We identified with the audience, who...nope...didn't want to hear anything about it. But Forest Lawn, the largest mortuary company in California at the time, was able to get its low cost message across.

The result was the campaign made a huge impression. Forest Lawn's inquiries and new business grew dramatically that year. Fred Llewellyn, the CEO of FLM was very pleased, and pleased that we had found a way to make his uncomfortable-but-necessary business seem more sympathetic. 

And the campaign was featured in the next year's prestigious Communication Arts's Best-in-Advertising Annual. 

Lockheed

 

I was hired by the McCann Erickson office in Los Angeles to write for their client, who was notoriously demanding and hard to please, evidently going through copywriters and art directors like Kleenex. But  I had a background in aerospace and defense, something I could never seem to get away from from the moment I joined the Navy until I started my first job in advertising. So McCann thought I could fit.

But this account rather than being hard, turned out to be one of the most rewarding in my career. They loved my work, particularly my employment of humor in an industry that wasn't known for it. And I, in turn, loved the work I did for them. And I also found one of the best partners in advertising, Dave McAuliffe, the Account Director on the account, who proved to be the best advocate and ally, and fearless in standing up to both the people on the client side and McCann's own management.  In fact, once we started producing work together, Lockheed was so pleased that they quadrupled their media budget, turning it from the goat of McCann/LA's accounts to the GOAT. And Dave and I shared McCann's annual "Truth Well Told" Award that year (with a nice little bonus).

Click to look in detail at the campaigns I developed for them.

Historical Advocacy Campaign

 

 

 

Trade Ads

Agilent Technologies

 Trade Ads

 

 

 

 

 

 

WiMax Campaign

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nanotechnology Campaign

Digimarc

Invisible copyright. Invisible barcodes. Invisible QR codes. Invisible product authenticity verification. Invisible watermarks.  Now Digimarc engineers would correct me for calling them "invisible". They are only invisible to the wavelengths human brains can decipher. So, they're technically not invisible. Technically, they're in the realm of steganographics, embedded information that is hidden from human perception but readable by scanners. But "Now with steganography!" is not a very marketable handle.

This new technology is revolutionizing the retail industry by making UPCs and OR codes virtually obsolete, since packages can now be printed over the whole surface with Digimarc watermarks. A conventional UPC scanner can pick these up, and from any angle. So retailers and wholesalers don't need to invest in new scanners. You can even download a Digimarc reading app onto your smartphone or computer.

Digimarc codes can also be embedded in the packaging of products to defend against .

It also enables the verification of digital copyrights and patent, whether it's visual or audio media. This first ad in this post, in fact, is embedded with a digital copyright watermark.  n fact, all of the original, hi-res maps of one of my blogs (Obscure Battles) are protected by Digimarc watermarks, so they can't be used or republished without my permission (and you can't Photoshop them out, in case you were wondering).

My task in helping them with their advertising was to simply explain the advantages of this technology to retailers, artists, and product manufacturers. Without using technical language.

Catlin Gable School Rummage Sale

Catlin Gable School, my daughter's school at the time, was one of my pro-bono clients.. Each year they had put on the largest Rummage Sale west of the Mississippi, raising money to supplement the school and provide financial for those whose parents weren't wealthy enough to afford it.  It was so well attended that, on average, they raised a quarter of a million dollars each year (in a four day event!)

Outdoor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Web Ad

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Print Ads

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bus Tails

 

Support Materials

SSI Shredding Systems

SSI was another one of my satisfying clients. I love finding creative, entertaining, and, above all, persuasive solutions to what others might consider boring B2B accounts. 

SSI makes shredders. Not wussy little paper shredders, huge machines that tear up entire cars, torpedoes, concrete blocks, refrigerators, truck tires, even office paper shredders. In fact, the company takes it as a creative challenge themselves to devise specific machines that can shred anything. This is how I came up with their brand message. While I was spending time at their corporate offices doing my research on them and their industry, I kept over-hearing sales reps in neighboring cubicles on their phones ask the same question of their prospective customers, "What needs shredding?"  

So this was what I came up with as their natural tagline.

 

While I worked for them, SSI's marketing director, Cathey Armillas, and I developed an endless campaign of ads to demonstrate that virtually nothing was beyond the teeth of their monster machines. 

Over the course of just a few years, SSI went from being this small, obscure Oregon-based company to the largest industrial shredding manufacturer in the world.

 

I'm not saying that the advertising had anything to do with it...noooo, of course not.

 

"Watch it Shred" Videos

 

But wait! There's more! Cathey pointed out that they whenever the company would build a custom shredder for a client, they'd always make a proof-of-performance video. She had hundreds of these on file. So together we also came up with the idea to start posting them as a regular feature on the company website, just for entertainment value. We titled it "Watch it Shred". One of the first videos on the site was the shredding of a vintage VW Beetle.  And each print ad would be linked to the latest video.

 

SSI was very quickly getting over a million views per month of Watch it Shred and had to up their server capacity considerably to handle the traffic.At first the CEO was resistant to this because 99.99% of the views were just for entertainment of non-customers ("you know, for kids!"), which he didn't want to pay for.  But the upshot was that this massive audience pulled with it a significant number of new business prospects, pushing SSI's Page Rank for the search term "shredding" to first place. Such is the power of entertainment in advertising. This Watch it Shred feature, I'm happy to say, is still up and running running. It's hypnotic to watch things shred in these machines.

 

Just a few of the trade ads...

 

 

 

And on and on...