I have worked in both the US and Canada one thing I have found curious is that the markets have approached Diversity and Inclusion in two different ways.

First the US, when I worked there twenty five years ago, they had quotas for “minorities” to appear in commercials. Clients required these quotas to be met to qualify for government contracts. That is, if the client was selling direct to the US Government, which almost all were, they had to meet these quotas or lose the right to sell.

I was never sure what the quotas actually were, but when I was just starting in the business, I had to fill out the forms…which caused some embarrassment the first time. Newly hired I was asked to make a list of all the “minorities” in the brand’s commercials over the past year. I carefully examined the commercials, finding actors with red hair, actors who appeared to be left-handed and so on. My boss laughed at me and said “Minorities means African Americans… or Latinos – that’s it.”

I wasn’t sure how to tell which ones were Latinos without looking at the actors names but I did my best.

So the Affirmative Action thinking in the US meant that quotas were set to be achieved at the risk of losing a large chunk of government business.

In advertising in Canada I found a different dynamic. Canadian marketers were interested in showing diversity, which was not just people of African appearance. There were virtually no Latinos, and they certainly didn’t have any political clout. This was due to the changes in Canadian immigration.  Non-European people were becoming a larger number of the end consumers of products and so were desirable as customers. We included them to show that they would like the products being advertised, not because there was a quota.

In languages, the opposite is true.  Canada required French for advertising and product packaging. Virtually everything we do in Canada has to have a French version, especially if it is for government. Canada is officially and legally a bi-lingual country. That adds a huge burden on the cost of developing advertising because 20% of the market gets about 50% of the national production budget.

No such requirement in the United States.  In the U.S., advertisers sought out Spanish language media as their market grew and created separate Spanish advertising to get Latinos as customers.

See the parallels?

The irony here is that the percentage of the total population that are French speakers has been declining in Canada while the percentage of the total population that are Spanish speakers is growing in the United States.

Part of the blame for that has to fall on the Quebec Separatists who essentially declared English speakers persona non-grata in their enclave. That meant hundreds of thousands of Anglophones and Allophones (people with first languages other than English or French) high-tailed it down the road from Montreal to Toronto. So too did many ambitious Francophones who saw greater opportunity in the growing economies of English Canada.

So which works better? Forcing inclusion or letting the market take its course?

I guess it depends on whether your market needs a real kick to start the trend or not. If the opportunity is really there, the market will address it. If the requirement is to fix a perceived political wrong, then government seems to step in.  Advertising usually takes a pulse on social attitudes and reflects it.

Now if we could only do something about older white males who have been bashed in advertising directed at televisions primary audience, women.

Males are the butt of nearly every commercial joke on the air – from dropping apples, to not spilling coffee, to failing to hook up the TV set.

The Dumb Dad syndrome should be addressed. Let’s require at least one Moron Mom commercial for every Dumb Dad.

Is someone counting the quota?

In honour of Movember being Mustache Month for Prostate Cancer, here area two stories about how mustaches have screwed up commercial shoots for me.

First case was a Mr. Clean commercial we shot. It was a typical Procter & Gamble commercial. Lady of the house uses Mr. Clean to leave her house looking bright and shiny. It was in the days when we shot on film. We had a great deal of difficulty agreeing on the actress to play the lead.

Then the actress we had chosen had a particularly difficult time delivering the lines and action. It made the shoot very tedious.

The only problem was that when the film was developed, the film was mounted incorrectly and ended up with sprocket holes punched into the raw film stock, essentially ruining the footage. Today, we could easily fix it on a computer when transferring to video; today we would have shot on video anyway. However, in those days, destroyed film meant a re-shoot. We were insured for the cost, but getting everyone back together was a greater challenge.

Finally we got together for a re-shoot. Horrors, when our difficult actress showed up for the re-shoot she had decided her upper lip needed a bleaching treatment and she had a bright red “mustache.”

There we were with everyone assembled to shoot and a difficult actress we couldn’t use. Luckily our second choice was available and was able to show up with only a minor delay. She was also a better performer making the shoot easier to handle.

The second case was a commercial we shot for Wendy’s. I had led the new business pitch and this was one of the first commercials we shot for them. McDonalds had a big new product launch coming for the Mc D-L-T and we needed something to counter it. We decided to launch Hot Dogs.

Our concept was The Great Canadian Hot Dog with some “great Canadians” eating the product. We included Count Floyd, BJ Birdie, the Blue Jays mascot, Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. MacDonald, Rockin’ Ronnie Hawkins and Eddie Shack.  Curiously, Joe Flaherty and Ronnie Hawkins may have been great Canadian icons but both were Americans.

Shack, a wild hockey player, was known for his handle-bar mustache.

Shack was very pleased to be featured in a commercial as he had not done much TV work and this was a national commercial. He wanted to look his best. So he showed up to the shoot, cleaned up real good and well dressed. Problem was, he was also freshly shaven. No mustache. Now he just looked like a guy with a big nose.

We quickly decided we needed him with his mustache. So Shack was asked to wait for his section of the commercial while a makeup person set off to construct a mustache resembling Shack’s famous nose duster.

We were successful in recreating the ‘stash, and shot our vignette of him eating the hot dog. Then, on a whim, we asked for some footage of him ripping the mustache off to take a bite, thinking it might look funny. It was hilarious. So funny that we went with it in the final commercial.

Enter “The Law of Unintended Consequences.” No sooner had we gone on air when I got a call from our industry press questioning our use of look-alikes.

“Is it true that you used look-alikes instead of the real characters?” they asked. “We noticed that the Eddie Shack didn’t have a real mustache!”

“Well, you got us. We did use one look alike,” I agreed, thinking of the actor playing John A. Macdonald – our Prime Minister who had been dead for more than a hundred years. “But I am not at liberty to tell you which one it was.” I left it for them to find our Macdonald vs McDonald ploy. And at the end of the year, we won a Bessie (Canadian TV award) for our commercial.

And in celebration of Movember, we were contacted by the agent for Robert Goulet’s mustache asking if we were interested in featuring the mustache in a future commercial.

We are in a rapidly evolving time for language. There are so many new concepts entering our lives, mostly through technology, that we are having to come up with new words and sayings all the time – LOL.

When your BFF sends you text, there are whole new spelling protocols. U R on a new wave.

English is an excellent platform for this kind of rapid evolution. It is, after all, a trading language. A hodgepodge and accumulation of words from all kinds of different languages. My title today makes perfect sense to a select group of English speakers in an area around Vancouver where the collision of Indian and Indian cultures – one native Chinook and one Hindi – makes it understandable.

When English speakers in England talk of boffins and whiters, most of us in North America have no idea what they are talking about. Much less get offended.

It looks to me like English is taking the route of Latin. They both started out as single languages and then geographically started to evolve. In the Middle Ages everyone thought they were speaking Latin. Only when they travelled from Spain to Italy or Romania to France did they realize that people in the other lands had totally changed what they thought was pure Latin.

Over time, these Latin dialects became (and these are all legally recognized): French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Occitan, Sardinian, Arpitan, Norman, Corsican, Romansh, Mirandese, Asturian, Aragonese and Leonese.

And lest we think this is the end of the proliferation, ask anyone who speaks any of the larger ones of these languages about dialects. The Sicilians have a hard time understanding the Tuscans; the Madrileños have trouble with folks from Caracas; and don’t get Parisians started on whether Quebeckers speak French.  Quebeckers even cringe at New Brunswick Chiac.  All this happens even though they think they are speaking the same language.

English is the same. Few North Americans who watched Slumdog Millionaire understood the English well. I found myself explaining “tea-wallah” to my wife in the theatre (or should that be theater?)

Theories were that movies and music would create a consistency in English around the world as we were mass exposed to American and English English. But they haven’t.

On the contrary, local dialects and accents have added charm to media stories. I recall one Canadian commercial that was located in the province of Newfoundland and included English subtitles under the Newfie English dialogue so everyone could understand what the actors were saying.  I could use the same for some Australian, British or Southern US dialogue.

The internet and technology seems to have carved out its own dialect of English as a kind of tech speak. Morphing into a combination of phonemes short-spelled – U R so hot! C U later!   And so on. And new uses for old words. But it is ever changing. Understanding this evolution is part of the price for admission to popular culture.

That’s why I think that despite the mass, English will eventually break into various dialects and then languages. In the future, universities may offer courses in Strine, Canuckish, maybe even Y’all-ese. As one of my Southern friends explained, the plural of “Y’all” is not “youse all” but “all y’all,” eh!

So the language we speak, English, is kind of a “dakoit” in itself. Taking, opportunistically, words and sayings from the seas of verbiage – wherever and whatever – and incorporating them into its basic structure.

Which gets me back to my title – it can be translated into “Thieves (dakoits or dacoits) on the angry sea (skookumchuck).” Which is what English speakers are as they steal words from the sea of sounds around them.

But, I have to add, the words “dakoit” and “skookumchuck” are considered pure English by the folks who use them.

It was the middle of the summer of 1978, I had just taken a job working with Grey de Venezuela, an advertising agency in Caracas, Venezuela.

The appeal to me was for some control.  I had been working in massive agencies in New York City where I was just another brick in the wall.  In a smaller agency, I could exorcize my entrepreneurial demons.

My first full day in the agency, my new clients from General Foods came to visit and tell me that the agency would be fired in 90 days if things didn’t improve.  Great way to begin a new assignment in a country where I knew no one and didn’t speak the language.

Things would get worse.

I had to return to NYC to get married in August and the agency had to shoot a new commercial for GF while I was gone.

The day I got back, I went to see the commercial.  There was about 10 seconds of the 30 with blank footage.  “What’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, we didn’t shoot that part,” came the reply.  “We were having some troubles and the talent didn’t want to do those shots.”  And at that point our clients arrived to see their first television commercial.  Whoops.

I pointed out the problem.  They were upset but agreed to give me a week to see if we could solve the problem.  There was not option to go and shoot the missing scenes.  The budget was gone.

Having seen “Chess Fever” where Pudovkin made a movie by editing boring footage into a movie, I thought we could create a new spot from the footage that existed.  Off we went to the editors and worked like mavens to create a new commercial.  And we did.

While the client was surprised the commercial was different from what they had approved, they agreed that it was a very good commercial and so the brand went on TV for the first time.

You may have noticed that I haven’t revealed the brand name.  Because things were about to get even worse.

Venezuela is located next to Colombia on one side and Guyana on the other.  There are mountains on the Colombian border; jungle on the Guyana side.  There was a group of Americans in the Guyanese jungle near the Venezuelan border who set up a commune a year before.

Shortly after we got our commercial on the air in October, the headlines around the world focused on this commune, called Jonestown.  A total of 909 of the inhabitants committed suicide by drinking cyanide.

The headlines screamed “Cyanide Kool Aid!”

And if you haven’t guessed the brand our commercial was for yet – well, it was Kool Aid.

We did our best to deflect the behaviour of the crazy gringos and stayed the course with the advertising.  Our client appreciated our efforts as we hunkered down for sales to fall off the table.  They never did.  The crazy gringos were generally ignored.

Trial by fire is sometimes the best option, if you can make it through.

Three years later I left with Kool Aid spending 10 times the advertising budget we had went we began.

So never give up.  No matter how bad things may look, they can always get worse.  And if you persevere, they might get better.

When I started in the advertising industry in New York, there was some obsession with commercial wear-out.  That is, at what point does the effectiveness of a commercial decline and render it less and less worth the media investment.

In theory this makes a lot of sense if you buy into learning theory which holds that you need to be told something a few times to understand it.  Then you have diminished returns on your attention to the message until you get turned off over time.

There was a consensus in New York at the time that the heavy viewing quintile was where wearout risk was the greatest.  A frequency of four was supposed to be killer.  This would occur with a commercial that was in a decent rotation with a solid daytime/nighttime schedule in a couple weeks.

Then I moved to Canada.

Here wearout occurs when the budget can afford to either import another spot from the US or a new spot can be developed.  The wearout frequency at the heavy viewing quintile is nearing infinity.

I thought that this was because the relative cost of an announcement in Canada is a small fraction of a similar announcement in the U.S.  The cost of production in the US is more or less similar to the cost of a prime time announcement.  Sure some productions cost more and some cost less, And some announcements are cheaper than others.  But the costs on average are within range.

The cost of production in Canada is less than it is in the US.  The market just won’t bear the inflated costs of some of the talent in the US, after all we are a smaller market.

The media cost is about one tenth the cost of the US.  Because we are buying an English market that is less than one tenth the market in the US and we are paying for audience, not announcements.

Nevertheless, it is a stretch to believe that Canadians can tolerate more than ten times the exposure to a commercial than the US consumer can.  So why do Canadian advertisers keep wasting their media dollars running commercials that are no longer effective and only alienating their target?

Why haven’t more advertisers gone to low cost productions that can be renewed more quickly and can be less irritating?  The cost of the production is not a determinant of success – think The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity.  These low budget flicks, among many others, raked in huge box office.

I am sure we all have commercials that we have seen so many times we are detest them.  Awake, agencies and advertisers!  Get to work on ideas that don’t cost so much to produce, yet still bring in the customers.

Some commercials do wear well.  Especially those with songs, warm feelings, and clear logical arguments.  The worst commercials for wear out are those with punch line jokes.  I mean who thinks “Why did the chicken cross the road?” is still funny?

There are quite a few legal restrictions on comparative advertising where names are named and products/services are compared with their competitors. But there are not nearly as many on competitive advertising.

Here are some of the techniques we use to develop very competitive advertising, while still complying with legal and industry guidelines.

1. Comparison Against a Known Standard – Known standards are usually not precise, so this is a great technique. For years food products compared themselves to “homemade” which was perceived to be a gold standard. The beauty of this that there is no such standard but in the mind of the consumer.
2. Comparison to Yourself – Using your product as a standard can be done in two ways: a Before and after which makes the comparison by showing the difference product use makes. Simple and effective. Another way to compare to yourself is when you compare current product to your old product. Any improvement benefits from this comparison. The critical part of the demonstration is selecting the attribute/benefit that proves the product is great.  We can also imply overall superiority.  Calexis has done this with “Equal has no Equal” and with “Chubb Defines Insurance.” both suggest a product or service that is without peer.
3. Comparison through a Torture Test – Even if your product is only a parity product, you can make it seem exceptional by putting it through what seems to consumers to be a torture test. The old Timex commercials were legendary examples of this: strapping a watch to an outdoor motor and showing afterwards that it kept on ticking. Whether this really showed the watch was sturdy or not didn’t matter – to viewers it did. Even though this situation would never happen in real life.
4. Create a Problem on Your Brand Can Solve – One way to create a problem is to name it. This is how Listerine cured “halotosis” or Viagra cured “Erectile Dysfunction.” No one had heard of these “diseases” until the product addressed them. Even if the disease wasn’t present, the products became desirable to consumers who wanted what advertising showed or implied as the benefit of the “cure.”
5. Implicit Comparison Through Unique Reasons Why – This is often done through naming ingredients as a proprietary reason why. Contains: Resveritrol, Retsin, Stannous Fluoride, the list goes on. If you name your active ingredient your competitor can’t own it and can’t contain it – even if they have the exact same active ingredient. Another approach is a claim that hadn’t been used, such as Cheerios claiming low sugar content when consumers started being concerned about their sugar intake.
6. Implicit Comparisons Made Through Consumer Loyalty – There are at least three ways to create product superiority through consumer loyalty:
   a. Real people claiming preference is a strong way. Non actors look, act and sound different and provide credibility thought third party endorsement.
   b. Celebrities and well known people have a certain credibility. The more relevant the celebrity is to the product or its benefit the better. If the celebrity isn’t relevant, then forget it. People know that the celebrity is doing it for the money and all you get is awareness, not a convincing story.
   c. Experts, either real or invented, add credibility to an endorsement. Continuing invented characters can also add character to the brand over time.  Real people with a relevant occupation or relationship to the product can he great authorities.  A friend of mine once used the line “those who like it, like it a lot!”
   d. Choose a group as your authority – Starbucks is now doing with their new coffee by using silly groups, but it can be serious as well.  Or one can use statistical groups, such as “73% of dentists agree.”
7. A Stronger Selling Idea Can Create More Competitive Advertising – We helped Subway succeed against Mr. Sub by maintaining a focus of “Freshness.” Both sandwich makers had almost identical products, but “freshness” advertising made consumers feel Subway had a better tasting and more nutritious sandwich – despite the fact a sandwich was identical to competitor Mr. Sub.
8. Change of Positioning – Consumer attitudes change over time. Addressing such a change can benefit a brand without making a change in the brand itself. It can be done with advertising.
9. Product Improvement – New! Improved! Better than ever before! A change gives consumers a chance to try a product even if they are lapsed users or have tried the product and rejected it. Curiosity is piqued. Permission is given.
10. Transfer Product Excellence to a New Area – A new use or application can work for a product. Baking Soda is hardly used for baking anymore. A brand can also endorse itself by line extension. The excellence of the brand provides its own credibility to support a new use, new service or product extension. Procter & Gamble have discovered this in spades with gazillions of line extensions for Tide, Ivory, Mr. Clean, Swiffer, you name it. And virtually every evil snack product now comes in 100 calories packaging.