There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

A couple of weeks ago I had this great marketing idea.

My client, Sears, was looking for ways to drive traffic into their new Sears Home Appliance Showrooms.

My idea was to blitz the market with radio and TV commercials driving to a “street fair” in the parking lot of the store.

I contacted the local radio stations and had them come out to play music and do live hits from the parking lot. I brought “Mobile Mike“ to give away free shirts, hats, sports tickets and other swag. I even brought a gourmet food truck to give away free food.

About an hour into the event, the guy I hired to carry signs along the street came back to the store dejected. He said he wasn’t having any luck getting people to come in.

It didn’t make much sense to me – I knew what the sign said.

So I grabbed the sign and went to the street myself.

And there I stood – at the corner of Commercial Blvd and University Drive -- holding up a sign that read “FREE FOOD.”

“Go get lunch,” I yelled to passers by.

“Absolutely free,” I screamed to the cars at the light.

But guess what?

Nobody believed me.

Right behind me was Mobile Mike’s gourmet burgers, chicken and BBQ food truck.

Right behind me was a parking lot full of radio stations and tents.

But despite all of the evidence – including people mulling around the parking lot eating plates full of food – I had a hard time getting people to believe that me and my sign were telling the truth.

“Go get some free food,” I told a nice woman in a mini-van.

“How much does it cost?” She asked.

“Nothing,” I replied, “It’s free.”

“What do I have to buy?” she asked.

“Nothing, “ I replied again, “Really!! It’s free.

“What’s the catch?”

“Seriously!!! It’s totally free. No purchase, No catch, No cost. Sears is giving away free food -- Go get yourself some.”

“No thank you,” she eventually said as she turned into the parking lot of the Chic Filet across the street.

And that’s when I realized what a profound commentary this was on how skeptical people are of marketing.

They are so used to us marketers spinning, stretching the truth and outright lying to them that even when we are telling the truth about giving away free food many people simply will not believe us.

3.9 Trillion And Other Fun Numbers

There's another budget storm in Washington. Politicians are pointing fingers, pundits are claiming the end of the world is nigh and the 24/7 crisis media is winding itself into another frenzy.

In order to put things in perspective, I thought it might be time to have a little fun with numbers.

President Obama has proposed a 3.6 trillion dollar budget - that's $3,600,000,000,000.00

The United States is projected to bring in 2.4 trillion dollars in taxes

So we're talking about a $1.2 trillion dollar deficit.

1.2 trillion dollars is what we will add to the deficit this year - 1.2 trillion dollars is also about what the entire Federal budget was just two decades ago.

In order to bring in $3.6 trillion - every single one of the 307,006,550 people in America would need to be taxed $11,726

OR it means that every single one of the 114,825,428 households would need to be taxed $31,351.94.

But that's OK because median household income in the US is $46,326 - so the median US household will still have about $15,000 a year to live off.

In case you were wondering, the US Census Bureau defines "poverty" as anyone making less than $22,350 per year.

And that's why 47% of US households pay NO Federal taxes at all.

But there's no need to worry about the people who are currently poor. The President's proposed budget allots $888,000,000,000 for welfare - so the more than 8 million families living below the poverty level today can receive roughly $108,997 each in government pay and benefits.

Meanwhile the 53% of households that do pay taxes... well... they'll all need to pay $59,154.60 each in order to meet the President's proposed budget.

And that's rough because that's about $12,000 more than most of them bring in each year.

Boy - with weighty issues like this looming, it's a good thing we averted that government shutdown. After all, the Federal government is responsible for spending about $69 billion dollars a day.

And that means that if we shut it down for just three weeks, we'd save about a trillion dollars.

Now there's an idea.

How bad branding caused the Middle East crisis

Cities in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria, Sudan, Yemen and the Palestinian Territories are on fire. ­And the United States of America stroked the match that set the blaze.

If you’re following the news, you know that all of these countries have protestors flooding the streets calling for the ouster of their respective governments.

And I maintain that this region-wide crisis is, at least in in part, our fault.

Most political science and Mideast experts would agree with me at some level on this point – but not for the reason I am going to lay out for you.

You see, the problem in the Mideast is not the USA’s backing of Israel.

It's not our continued military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan or our drone bombings of Pakistan.

It's not even because of the fact that we are a licentious, covetous, gluttonous people who pollute the young of every other nation on the planet with our our egomaniacal pop-culture bile.

While each of these is certainly a contributing factor, they all can be overlooked -- even embraced - if not for the billions of dollars we spend every year on foreign aid in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. (FYI - this list does not include the billion-dollar-a-week plan that goes with our standing armies in Iraq and Afghanistan).

To be clear about the numbers, The United States sends $3.1 billion per year to Israel and another $5 billion per year to the countries listed above (again, not including our “investment” in Iraq and Afghanistan).

That’s $8billion per year (or just about 8 x the annual budget for the International Red Cross).

What do we get for our money?

Well… in many cases we get brutal, totalitarian governments that only masquerade as democracies (Mubarak {Egypt}, Ben Ali {Tunesia}, Abdullah Salah {Yemen}, Khaled Mashaal {Palestinian Hamas} Qaddafi {Libya} and more.

We’ve spent decades (Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama) sending bags of blood money to scumbags just because they will, at times, play nice with us.

Moral and ethical problems aside – the bigger issue, the issue that we see exploding in the streets right now, is the brand issue.

Let's face it - We're Mel Gibson. Fans of Lethal Weapon, Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ love us. Our ex-girlfriend, on the other hand...

What I'm saying is this: You can’t be a country that says it stands for freedom while, at the same time, funding torturous regimes. You can’t go to war to oust one repressive dictator while you spend billions to support other repressive dictators.

Now all of these countries – and their leaders that America has spent billions on propping up - are crumbling under the anger of people who are marching for reforms.

These people are taking their respective governments into their own hands – tossing their proverbial tea overboard.

And they are not just rejecting their own leaders but they’re also rejecting the people who helped keep those leaders in power – namely us.

In other words, these Middle Eastern countries want what America was supposed to represent (government for the people by the people) but they reject what America has stood for to them (the sugar-daddy for totalitarian regimes).

Can you blame these people if, after the dust settles, they insert aggressively anti-American governments?

The question now is this: Is it possible to repair our brand?

And the answer – as is so often the case for this question - is simple: We must first repair our truth.

I received an email a short time ago from a very dear friend. I wouldn't normally use this space to post someone else's opinions but I found this so powerful and profound that I simply had to post it somewhere. Here it is in its entirety - please feel free to link to this or post this wherever you'd like.

Subject: article

Date: January 20, 2011 12:32:54 PM EST

To: Thom Mozloom

Hey, can you post this for me somewhere? It can’t be under my name because of my position here but I want someone to think about this. Thanks.

THE QUESTIONS NOT ASKED

Several days ago an abortion doctor in Philadelphia was charged with having murdered seven babies. He induced their mothers into labor, delivered the babies and then plunged into their necks a scissors.

Seven babies dead, nameless, unwanted, unloved. Delivered by their mothers to a beast, whom they paid, and then thrown away with the rubber gloves and the cotton swabs and the rest of the medical waste. Not forgotten, but erased as though they had never lived at all, never cried or yawned or wriggled their toes. No one wants to remember.

Pinned up on refrigerators across the country are the ultrasound images of babies younger than these. They were loved before they were held. But inPhiladelphia there are no pictures. No mourners. There is no public vigil. The national editorial pages are quiet. They can find no one to scold this week. There will be no televised tribute to the babies. President Obama will not come.

Is this not a national tragedy in the same dimension as the Tucson massacre? The doctor is said to have killed many more than seven babies in the course of his gruesome career. Is there nothing here on which the media nags would like our political leaders to reflect? There are no policy implications? There is no need, then, for a national dialogue on the condition of our culture? Shouldn’t someone apologize for this?

They’ve all been bickering for two weeks over whether Republicans and Democrats should be nicer to each other, a question that is invisibly distant from what happened in Tucson. But in Philadelphia there are questions splashed in the blood of seven babies that not a single national figure cares to discuss.

I supposed that it may be the only kindness available to the babies now that they are not being used by politicians and pundits as mere opportunities for moral exhibitionism. On the other hand, if it is suddenly necessary that the nation debates whether larger ammunition clips make murder easier, then why is it not urgent as well for us to question whether partial birth abortion is as dangerous to the innocent?

No one is asking because the answers are more threatening to everyone: to the Democrats who would sooner ban crosshairs than partial-birth abortions, and to the Republicans who want not to be in the media’s crosshairs again.

Branding Can't Save the Democrats

There is an article in the Huffington Post at which I literally laughed out loud.

It's titled New Year's Resolution for Democrats: Stop Being Out-Branded by Republicans and it's written by Zach Friend.

This is the basic thinking among my political clients (both Right and Left) -- that the success of their specific agendas will boil down to how they "brand" them.

The problem with this thinking is that the the owner of a brand doesn't actually create the brand.

The consumer of the brand creates the brand.

Most people think that high impact messaging delivered through powerful marketing and advertising create a good brand.

All of that, however, is a support structure.

The thing that creates and maintains a brand better than anything is THE TRUTH.

Conversely, the single biggest reason brands fail is because their marketing and their reality are different.

THIS is the lesson of November --

In 2008 the country rallied around a guy who said that he would change the tone in Washington -- that it's not about "... red states or blue states but about the United States." He built a movement around the idea that we can work together. Many politicians stayed in office or were elected to office based on the long coattails of this brand promise.

Then they spent two years proving we actually can't work together.

Obviously, the Republicans had as much to do with the lack of unity as the Democrats did -- but the Republicans were not the brand promise makers -- and therefore, they didn't suffer at all (in fact, it was proved that they actually benefited a great deal) when the brand promise was not delivered on.

So the real lesson is this -- good branding -- built only on messaging and marketing -- can get someone to try a product... once. If the reality doesn't match the branding, however, it will be twice as hard to get them to try that same product a second time.

The pithy version of this says -- Nothing will kill a mediocre product quicker than great marketing.

The Right To Lie

I've recently received a slew of emails in response to one of the statements I've made while doing political commentary on Sirius/XM radio P.O.T.U.S. channel (channel 110/130)

Here's one of the emails:

Sir,
This week on POTUS I heard you make a comment in passing that intrigued me. You said some thing like..
"Congress has already said that forcing candidates too tell the truth is an infringement on their right too free speech."

Please take a moment too let me know too what you were referring. I would like very much to know more.

This was my response to that email:

Here's the deal on the Truth in Advertising laws that my industry is subject to:

When my company creates a campaign for a corporate client, the stuff that we say in that campaign has to be true. If it's not, both my company and my client's company can be sued.

A real world example of this happened in 2004. KFC tried to claim that fried chicken could be part of an effective diet program. The Federal Trade Commission fined the company, required it to pull the commercials AND required KFC to submit all advertising for FTC review for the next 5 years.

Now that's a pretty stiff penalty.

But these laws DO NOT apply to politicians.

Our government has consistently upheld the notion that political ads are a form of "political speech" which fall under the protection of the First Amendment.

Lawyers and politicos will tell you that this is important because voters have the right to uncensored information so that they can better decide for whom to cast their vote.

This "right to lie" that politicians seem to enjoy is further complicated by the Federal Communications Act which dictates that the media MUST run these spots uncensored -- even if they believe the ads to be false or offensive. And not only must TV, Radio and Print outlets run the political ads -- they are obligated by law to sell the air time or ad space to the politicians at the lowest advertising rate.

Here's another real world example of this

In 1972 there was a guy named J.B. Stoner from Georgia ran for US Senate. He called himself a "white racist" and he created an ad that said this: "The main reason why niggers want integration is because niggers want our white women."

Obviously this is type of statement is both false and offensive -- in every sense of the words -- but because of the Federal Communications Act, the FCC forced stations in Atlanta - despite their complaints - to accept and run the ad. The reason, of course, is the "freedom of speech protections"

So the big question is why hasn't congress - a body made up of politicians who continue to get elected in part because they can lie in their political ads - why haven't these guys addressed the issue of truth in political advertising?

hmm...

I hope that is helpful in understanding where I'm coming from on this.

Thanks everyone for listening and for taking the time to write me with your questions and comments.

Negative Impact

There were a number of recent media surveys released this week that reveal 2 very important statistics

1. 20% more money has been spent at this point in the political races nationwide than was spent at this point in the 2006 mid-term elections (and that's in a significantly worse economy to boot)

2. 80% of all political advertising on the air right now is NEGATIVE.

This means that more people are hearing more negative messaging about politicians than ever before.

Also interesting to this dynamic is the fact that much of the negative campaigning energy across the nation is unifying into only two consistent messages:

1. Democrats are out of touch with the American people - just look at the socialist agenda the Obama/Pelosi reign has brought.

2. Republicans are too radical and/or extreme in their views to appropriately represent the American people - just look at these Tea Party radicals.

If you take the branding view that I do -- that all of these political ads actually work together as a single campaign about the products "politicians" and "government" --- then 80% of all advertised messages about these products are saying that "candidates" are not normal people, cannot make decisions for normal people and are, in general, not fit to lead.

Again, if we look at all of this advertising as a single campaign operating at a multi-local level throughout the country, and we look at the amount of money being spent to execute this campaign, then it is hard not to be impressed (and perhaps startled) at the reach and frequency this campaign is garnering.

The ramifications of this thought should not be underestimated.

We all know that advertising works. This is why big companies advertise a lot -- delivering the same message over and over to through mass media in order to create "top of mind" thinking in all those who see the ads repeatedly.

We know from research that this type of consistent and persistent messaging is effective in shaping people's attitudes about specific products. Even if a person does not believe the message the first time they hear it, ongoing repetition of the same message through a variety of channels eventually shifts that opinion.

Americans are being bombarded with the message that there is nobody fit to represent them in government of any level.

They are being told this at a frequency rate that is difficult to ignore and impossible to calculate.

There are many people who might already be saying that this message is "100% true."

But I say that the more people begin to truly believe that there is nobody fit to lead, the closer our form of Democracy is to collapse.

Don't underestimate the power of branding.