Brand New Day

Reebok Pulls 50 Cent Ad. Spotlight Shines on the Difficulty of Aligning With Rappers.

I have been spending a lot of time with rappers lately. It's a long story. One thing I find fascinating about these performers is their quest for marketing deals. Remember when Paul Simon used to refuse to sell his music for advertising? No more. But the latest fracus over a 50 Cent Reebok ad in the U.K. spotlights the challenge marketers have when they want to tap into the most influential music genre in the world right now.

Reebok has pulled a 50 Cent TV commercial after complaints that it glamorized guns. Advertising Standards Authority spokeswoman Donna Mitchell said that over 50 viewers had complained about the commercial. As part of Reebok's "I Am What I Am" campaign, it features 50 Cent counting from one to nine in reference to having been shot nine times. Now, here's where it gets preposterous. A Reebok spokesperson said the ad was "intended to be a positive and empowering celebration of this right of freedom of self-expression, individuality and authenticity."

Oh Brother! Here's the deal. 50 Cent is a huge success, with four of the top ten songs on the chart right now. His Reebok line, I am told, is outselling Jay Z's Reeboks, which were already outselling Allen Iverson's. He is big money, because he's at the top of his game.

Rappers write about violence, poverty, women, sex, drugs, music, death, love, the food they eat, the cars they drive and the stuff they want. It's often not pretty. But it's honest. It's not "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" or "The Sounds of Silence." And it's not meant to be. You want to go through a truly comical exercise? Look up rap lyrics on the Internet, and size them up without hearing the performer sing them.

Here are some 50 Cent lyrics: "nigga that watch is nice/thats what you bought from me/that chain is nice/thats what you bought from me/them earrings is nice/Thats what you bought from me?/Take that shit off, move Ill break you off properly/I get mine the fast way, ski mask way/Make money/Make/money, money, money/nigga if you ask me/Its the only way/Take money/Take money/money, money/

One stat I came across from firm TMG is that 100 million people in America may be influenced these days by hip-hop. Advertisers have to decide of they are going to play in this space or not. If you want to leverage hip-hop, then there are no half-measures, because the lyrics above are pretty tame. And if Bill O'Reilly or Focus on the Family come knockin' at your door with boycotts, you are going to have to choose sides. Trying to play both the hip-hop street and the avenue of political correctness is not going to work.

GM Could End Up Looking Better Than Expected Over Flap With LA Times Over Tough Coverage

A few days ago in this space, I wrote on General Motors and its decision to punish the LA Times by canceling about $10 million in advertising for its harsh coverage of the automaker. I also said in that blog entry that I hadn't seen anything in the piece that looked, as GM asserted, as a "factual error" used to support author Dan Neil's bashing of the Pontiac G6 and GM management.

It's funny how a newspaper story can appear accurate even if its underlying facts are skewed. I didn't question items in the story drawn, as I often do, from third party data gatherers. Shame on me. [Disclosure: I am acquainted with Neil (though he hasn't answered e-mails from me since he won the Pulitzer last year)]. But Website editor/blogger Miro Pacic of Automobear.com dissected Neil's story and seems to have gotten to the bottom of what the LA Times' ombudsman is surely evaluating this week. Read Pacic's piece, but in short, the editor shows Neil's comparison between the sales of the new Pontiac G6 and the car it it replaced, the Grand Am, don't make sense as evidence that the car is selling poorly. So far, the G6 is just offered in a high end V6 four-door version, while the Grand Am was offered in a full range of four-cylinder and V6s, sedans and coupe. Also, Neil, Pacic's writes, confused the incentives offered today across all Pontiacs with an incentive offered just on the G6, as tracked by Edmunds.com. The low sales of the G6 and the high incentives reported by Neil are used to paint the car and GM management as failing.

While beat writers frequently criticize GM management and product, it's always important to have the facts lined up. Double that care when the piece calls for the CEO and product chief to be fired.

Directionally, Neil's criticisms of GM are defensible. But he may be guilty in this case of shaping certain data to back up a point he decided to make before getting the data. As a journalist, and certainly as a human being, I'm not free of mistakes. And as an editor, I know it's important not to give our subjects (who, let's be honest, are sometimes targets) easy ammunition to undercut our reporting, especially in a column. His subjective criticism of the car's interior and handling are legitimate, as they are based on his opinion as a product evaluator. Where he seems to have erred is in pulling in ill-reported data points to substantiate his opinion.

GM once expertly and impressively undressed NBC's Dateline for a report on side-saddle gas tanks on pickup trucks prone to catching fire when hit from the side by another vehicle or fixed object. GM found that Dateline had staged, and in fact had created, the explosions without disclosing that the video was a dramatization. The issue of whether GM's trucks were dangerous or not was mitigated by the wrong reporting.

GM seems to be dug in to prove that some journalists are not reporting on the company accurately. Even if they prove it, I'm not sure it will help their image. But the real point of the exercise, I suspect, is to get writers and bloggers like me to write about GM perhaps making better products than is perceived in the mainstream media. If that's the case, I guess it's working.

McDonald's 50th Anniversary Invites Reflections on a Brand Icon

As McDonald's celebrates its 50th Anniversary this month, the mile-post in its history begs a few reflections and predictions.
McDonald's redefined eating in America. Bold statement, but true, I think. The company has succeeded largely by substituting convenience and price for quality. This was a sea-change in American eating habits. Before McDonald's came along, eating out was a real event at many suburban homes. Sure, there were car-hop joints and diners. But Moms would shake their fingers at their teens for eating junk at "joints." McDonald's brought aspirational national brand virtues to fairly low-quality (in terms of health benefits) food eaten out of home.
Some personal memories of McD's, which have all fed the brand icon: Staurday morning breakfast with my Dad oince in a while; McD's donated drink machines to schools and churches for functions and discounted beverages; Cub Scout tours of the operation behind the counter; Ronald McDonald House stays for parents with sick kids in the hospital; my Little League Baseball coach getting a big bag of burgers for us after a key win. These are all powerful brand feeders.
McDonald's also made eating out of home an aspiration of pre-schoolers through the Happy Meal, my vote for one of the top five marketing achievements of the 20th Century.
I was asked today by Reuters TV to speculate on whether McDonald's will be as successful in its next 50 years. My answer--yes. The company realizes that it has to walk a tightrope between serving the greasy stuff American--and increasingly Asian, European and Middle Eastern--consumers want to eat and indulge in, and dialing back its identity as the poster brand for childhood obesity. By proliferating salads, apples and other fruit, McDonald's is successfully creating an aura of reform in its restaurants that make them more palatable to parents. And a recent ad campaign that promotes healthier eating and physical activity is helping that aura along.
If anyone is wondering if McD's is serious about proliferating in China, remember that it signed China's top NBA export, Yao Ming, as a pitchman.
System-wide sales at McDoinald's are on the upswing after a period of decline and stagnation. The stock is up to almost $32.00 per share, about double it's two-year low of less than $16.00.

Carl's Jr. Fetus Ads Creepier Than a Jr. High School Health Film

I've never been quite sure when creepy works as a creative device in ads. But one thing I feel confident of...it doesn't work when the advertiser is selling me food.

Carl's Jr., the fast food chain, launched an ad featuring a fetus, yes a fetus, talking to his Mother about the Spicy BBQ Six Dollar hamburger with jalapenos she's been eating. At one point, the fetus yanks on his umbilical chord to get his Mother's attention like it was a butler's bell. The fetus warns his Mother to go easy on the spicy stuff or he'll come out early. "It Aint For Babies," the voiceover of the ad concludes.

I don't want to be a stick in the special sauce here. But a talking fetus creeps me out, especially for selling me lunch. The other problem here is association. The last time I recall seeing a fetus in an ad, it was created by a right-to-life organization. So, sorry Carl's Jr., but I can't help but associate your product in this case with an abortion. The ads are done by Mendelsohn/Zien, Los Angeles. This is an agency known for pushing the envelope when it comes to taste and appropriateness. I hate fast food joints anyway. But this ad is enough to make me drive into a Jack-In-The-Box.

Memo to GM Et Al: Public Relations Counts as Marketing, But Only If You Do It Right.

General Motors pulled its advertising schedule from the Los Angeles Times today, citing innacurate and overly critical reporting by the paper's auto writers. I'll be looking forward to seeing the automaker prove it.

The edict from Detroit came down after Pulitzer Prize winning auto writer Dan Neil wrote a negative review of the Pontiac G6 and at the same time called for the ouster of GM chairman Rick Wagoner and vice chairman/product chief Bob Lutz.

"The G6 is not an awful car. It's entirely adequate. But plainly, adequate is not nearly enough," writes Neil. " However, given recent events, I have to revise my story. To wit: Dump Wagoner," he wrote.

As the former Detroit Bureau chief of USA Today and the current President of the International Motor Press Association, I can attest that GM is often very critical of press coverage about the company. Bob Lutz has even given speeches in which he "calls out" publications like Car & Driver for unfair reviews of the company's cars, and accuses us of being biased against GM. I've been reading over the Times' recent coverage, and I'm struggling to find any factual errors. GM should list what they are.

Pulling ads in a fit of pique, though, to send a message to a newspaper that it better back off chills me to the bone as a reporter. Car dealers, not an insignificant contributor to a paper's ad pages, are playing a role in this GM action as well. Big surprise. Since I worked at a daily newspaper in suburban New Jersey in the late 1980s, dealers have used their ad buying clout to muscle newspapers into writing more positively about the cars they sell.

2001 named Ron Zarella. Zarella was a hire from Bausch & Lomb. On Zarella's last day, he said the only smart thing I ever heard from him. I'm paraphrasing, but he said: The biggest thing I learned about the auto industry is that what you guys (the media) say about GM is far more influential than what we say about ourselves or buy through advertising. In the world of packaged goods, he said, the media didn't care about contact-lens solution, so all the consumer knows is what we advertise.

GM is going through a rough patch. As I and other reporters have said, the company is supporting too many brands for the dwindling market share it has. And as Neil points out in his review of the G6, GM far too often produces perfectly adequate vehicles rather than vehicles that truly excite and inspire people. The current Buick LaCrosse simply doesn't handle as well or feel as good as the Honda Accord or Nissan Altima, and no amount of strong-arming is going to make a reporter say otherwise.

No matter the motivation of GM and its dealers for yanking ads from the LA Times, the effect is to communicate to the legion of reporters covering GM that the automaker is far more desperate than any of us thought. Is that really the message GM wants to communicate?

It Just Gets Better and Better With McDonald's and The Rappers

As Adweek's AdFreak blog reports, a group called Gatbustaz has released a hip-hop song, McGangsta, that's as laden with Big Mac references, sex, violence and profanity as the fries are with saturated fat. Some of the lyrics to McGangsta: "Kinda feel like a sesame seed bun/Dont we all/Wait, let me get my gun/Lets make a McDonalds run. They also mention Escalade, as in Cadillac Escalade. No word yet as to whether McGansta is going to get any moolah from Mickey D's. General Motors' Cadillac is reviewing.

We are all having fun with a deal McDonald's has been pursuing with hip hop acts to write songs about the Big Mac. Under the arrangement, McD's would get to approve lyrics, and then the artist/shill would get paid per radio play.

Jermaine Dupri, artist, songwriter and president of Urban Music for Virgin Records, speaking Thursday, called the McDonald's deal and others like it "cheesy" unless the rapper was totally inspired to croon about the Big Mac from his or her soul...snd stomach. Dupri also said that he wrote a song a few months before McDonald's started pursuing its deal. His song was "Meet Me in the McDonald's Parking Lot." Despite some history with McDonald's and scoring a commercial for Sprite, Dupri said he was asked by McDonald's to drop the song. he says, he wrote it out of inspiration, not for McD's pay package. A month later, he said, they were asking to see it again to see if they could get behind it.

Extreme Makeover: A Product Placement Dream

ABC's Extreme Makeover sucked me in for two or three episodes. The drama of down and out or otherwise victimized families getting a real house to live in makes for good story telling. But beyond that, it's probably the best example of appropriate product placement on the air today.

Product placement will reach about $4.25 billion this year, according to PQ Media. That's a 23% surge from a year earlier. As more and more consumers, like me, skip more and and more ads via a DVR, the 30-second commercial is going the way of the nightly network newscast.

Many product placement deals are obnoxious and ham-fisted. The Apprentice comes to mind. Extreme Makeover has several sponsors with prominent placement deals: Sears, Ford and Pella Windows to name three. Seeing the designers go off to Sears every episode and deck out the house with Kenmore appliances, is not just a sponsorship, it's integral to the subject family getting their lives back. The best looking Sears products are featured, so the whole deal is far better than any 30-second ad the department store's ad agencies have created in 20 years. Pella windows, likewise, is nicely showcased in the show without being obnoxious about it. And, of course, Ford, is the one providing vehicles to the family. What's a new garage without new sheetmetal in it?

Here is one caveat on the reality show as product-placement canvas: how many of these can people watch before it gets old. I've seen three episodes, and I feel like I have seen all the ones I missed and all the shows they'll ever do. Down and out family, war widow or handicapped person lives in a shack. Ty Pennington arrives and builds a showplace in a week with round-the-clock crews. The crews don't think they will make the deadline. They miraculously do. Family comes back to showplace. Everybody cries. This show faces the same problem Pennington's old show, Trading Spaces, has faced. It all gets old, fast! Unlike the long running Law & Order, whose story format doesn't change, the writing and acting isn't good enough on reality shows to sustain itself for very long.

And here's a pet peeve. In one of the shows I saw, one of the kids was given something like five electric guitars. The show has a tendency to drift to excess. I wonder about what happens in some of these neighborhoods full of tumble-down houses that suddenly has a house worth seven times as much or more than any other house on the block and the family got it all for free. Envy can be an ugly thing. What's that dynamic like after a while?

But, hey. That's me. Some fifteen million people are watching Extreme Makeover, about twice the number that reads this blog every day (I wish). And it's the best ad buy Sears has made in a long time.

Hip Hop Two-Step Over Product Placement

Russell Simmons, co-founder of Def Jam, is the unofficial Dean of hip-hop. But in a chat I had with him the other day, his attitude about product placement makes me seriously wonder about this music form and what it stands for. Or, maybe I just don't get it.

We talked about the McDonald's offer to hip-hop artists to write songs that the fast food company would approve, featuring Big Mac in the lyrics. McDonald's then pays the artist and his or her company some amount of money--$1-$2 perhaps--per radio play. Simmons told me the deal was "all good." But, he added, that the deal may not get off the ground because the firm handling it leaked the story to Advertising Age. Simmons says the deal was okay when people didn't know how it worked. Now that they do, it probably won't work. Huh? This sounds like, "It's not a crime unless you get caught" thinking.

I don't pretend to know a lot about hip-hop and rap. I'm more of a Van Morrison/Eric Clapton fan. But what I do know is that there is a lot of lyrics about bling and money in hip hop. Simmons had a curious idea about how to save the deal. He says rappers could write lyrics about how they are getting all this money from McDonald's for writing a song about Big Mac. It will be funny and tie into a theme of African Americans being exploited by white corporate America, but getting rich at the same time. The, the theme is about young African Americans exploiting McDonald's desire to exploit hip-hop. Okay. But how many will be able to do that.

I spoke with McDonald's too, of course. Turns out they had no intention of the details of the deal leaking out. I called the firm who did the leaking, Maven of Lanham, Md., and was told the executives were traveling and couldn't get back to me. What, no cell phones?

Brand placement is no stranger to rap and hip hop. P. Diddy wrote and recorded a song called "Pass The Courvoisier" after Simmons cut a deal with the cognac's marketer to reposition the brand in the hip hop community. Simmons said no money changed hands in order to get P. Diddy to write that song. Okay. But given that Simmons said the McDonald's deal would have been fine if the details hadn't leaked, his insistence that no money changed hands to get that brand placement is hard to swallow. I'm not calling Simmons a fabricator. It's just that there is a credibility problem and plenty of room for doubt because of the way these product placement deals are being cut.

GM Can At Least Start With Its Advertising

General Motors is going to make some changes in its advertising. Not that advertising is the biggest source of blame for the automaker's woes. But it's a category of problems that can be fixed the fastest.

Pontiac: This is a brand that has some potential to be a "blue-collar" success brand like DaimlerChrysler's Dodge brand is becoming. The product is starting to show promise. The G6 is a pretty interesting car, and the Solstice roadster looks like a screamer. The GTO doesn't look like much, but it drives like the GTO to which it pays homage. The ads have long been dreadful, lurching from one idiotic, vague positioning to another for years. Chemistri, a Publicis Groupe agency, handles it. The agency, which also handles Cadillac advertising, should lose it immediately and probably will.

Buick: I stopped leaving the porchlight on for a coherent ad campaign for Buick during the Clinton Administration. Interpublic Group's McCann-Erickson has done Buick work for decades. Some Tiger Woods-focused ads have been okay, but the rest has been consistently awful. If GM has a genuine thought of saving this brand, get it out of McCann and into an agency that has no history with the brand. The last effort to save this brand demands new blood. Get some.

Advertising Age reports that a survey of GM's own ad executives rated Buick and Pontiac ads a "3" out of a possible "10."

Saturn: I saw a Saturn TV ad last night. Bleeech! This brand was once the best defined in the auto sector. Today, it has one of the best ad agencies in the business working on it, Goodby Silverstein & Partners. But it doesn't show. I vote the problem here must be at the client. Why can this agency do great work for other brands and not Saturn?

Saab: I have seen the new work, some of which the public hasn't, and it is terrible. Here is a niche brand with some quirks. The ads I saw might as well have been for Buick. The executive who guided the work just left to run liquor marketing at Diageo. Look for Smirnoff ads to take a nose-dive now. Interpublic's Lowe & Partners, which also handles very good GMC ads, does the Saab work. [disclaimer: I once worked for Lowe & Partners as a vice president]. I think the agency can do better work for a smarter client.

Cadillac and Hummer ads are fine. Chevrolet ads, "An American Revolution" are on the right track, but need better executions from IPG's Campbell-Ewald.

GM needs to seed its brands with more exciting product. But that takes years to get right. In the meantime, new ad positionings and agency assignments to help things along can be done within a few months. Get cracking.