Mark Vandegrift
Welcome to the latest episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me is the queen of quips, Lorraine Kessler. Lorraine, how are things? We're a week after our special Super Bowl commercial discussion. So, all the height of the Super Bowl has passed. What's going on?

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I hope we still have an audience... 

Mark Vandegrift
That's the fun of the Super Bowl. We get to talk about it and it's all opinion anyhow. So, everyone gets to have his or her own opinion and then we move on.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, you know, we did an episode, I think, where we talked about New Year's resolutions and...

Mark Vandegrift
Oh, yeah. Our first season.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I confess that I have sworn off, but I haven't really because my New Year's resolution this year was cleaning out, decluttering, right, closets. And look what I found in one of my closets. We should give a prize to anyone listening who knows the name of this particular character and where he comes from.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, I know one person that will win that right away. So, we are going to disqualify Dick Maggiore right off the bat.

Lorraine Kessler
We should disqualify him anyway for mending his. That's just what. Yeah, no, this is the Naugi, which was used by George Lois to introduce Naugahyde, the first vinyl upholstery, which took the market by storm. What was that, the early, late 60s? Or was it even?

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, late 60s.
 

Lorraine Kessler
And a curious little tidbit related to Innis Maggiore is that the CMO, I don't know if his title was literally CMO, but he was in charge of marketing at the time, for Uniroyal, who created Naugahyde, because it was from Nauga, Rhode Island or something, was Jack Trout. He went on to join the agency of Al Reese and together create what we practice the principles of positioning. So, this was his most famous campaign for Uniroyal. And we met with him in Sarasota, I want to say around 2005/2007 timeframe to kind of bring back Naugahyde if possible. And all he cared about, my husband's whole career was being number two to the number one Naugahyde for General Tire. And all Jack cared about was talking to John. He didn't care about Dick or me or position. He just wanted to feel the fabric and talk about old times. So, I thought that was pretty interesting.

Mark Vandegrift 
That's awesome. Well, I got to ask, did you achieve your decluttering resolution? Because you kind of just found something and you're keeping it. Did you get rid of anything?

Lorraine Kessler
I'm keeping this for advertising sentimentality, but yes, I'm really good at this but I threatened my husband that I would put Visine in his cocktails if he didn't clean his closet out. And anybody who knows I follow true crime, there's a woman who killed the woman she cared for by putting Visine in her drinks. Who knew Visine's a poison? You can put it in your eye, which is...

Mark Vandegrift
And you put it in your eyes. Yeah, it's really good, right? Can you imagine someone that uses it every day? That's a little scary. Geez. Well.

Lorraine Kessler
I know. So, he did a very good job.

Mark Vandegrift
So that was your single resolution this year was to declutter? Excellent. Well, I'm glad you didn't go after two because I know the last time you did that, at least from my awareness, you failed miserably all within a matter of two minutes.

Lorraine Kessler
Declutter every closet. Yeah.

Yeah, anything that involves a change in behavior is not going to happen.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, for me, all this Super Bowl talk, it kind of, I don't know, I get into it a little bit. And I went to back to see some commercials from the last couple of years, just to see how the company's performed in the long-term. And I kind of threw out all the ones that you can't, there's not a lot of proof around it. You know, if Doritos does an ad, Pepsi does an ad, Coke does an ad, car commercials do an ad, like those are hard to prove, but one jumped out at me because it was considered the number one performer for the 2022 Super Bowl.  

So just two years ago. Do you remember the ad that had the QR code? And that was it. It was the QR code was bouncing around on the screen. And well, it had such a strong response that it caused their servers to crash because they did not anticipate 20 million app downloads.

Okay, so that gives you a clue as to who it was, but not many people remember this and the original commercial, like I said, resulted in 20 million app downloads, but since then, revenue declined 59% and the business posted a net loss of 2 .7 billion, yes with a B, dollars that same year. Its shares decreased 86%.

So, is the name coming back, the brand name for that commercial?

Lorraine Kessler
Uh, no, but I think you're going to tell me.

Mark Vandegrift
Yes, it's Coinbase. So, oh great one, oh great marketer one, tell us a lesson that comes from... 

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, is this is this a crypto? Is that a crypto cryptocurrency?

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, Coinbase is crypto. Yeah, it's like Bitcoin. So what lesson, let's hear from the guru, what lesson does this teach us, if any? Because there's certainly other factors beyond advertising that cause a company to go bad. But do you think that short-term, big investment on the QR code commercial was worth it?

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, I think it was because you had 10 % of what I imagined to be the viewing audience. What did you say? 2022? Yeah. Yeah, 10 % of the viewing audience downloaded your app. Now it's unfortunate, you know, that it crashed, but that actually extended word of mouth. And, you know, there's that old saying that even bad PR is good PR. And I think in this case it could be.

It certainly is gimmicky and sometimes gimmicks are very effective. Unfortunately, based on what you just shared, this failure seemed to be a portend for what was to happen to the company that I doubt that their demise has that much to do with the commercial as it does with probably bad decisions from a management standpoint. And then of course you have the what happened to the crypto market too. So, my sense is, and I don't know, is that there was probably some bad management decisions. And like a lot of these cryptocurrency or new age kinds of companies, they're headed by kind of egocentric people who make often mistakes and blunders. 

So, I don't know, but I doubt it was just because of that ad. So yeah, I mean, gimmicks can pay off, but they're risky. I mean, that's the thing with a gimmick, right? It's risky.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, I think what I would have done if I were the CMO, which I was not, but I would have taken advantage of that and started a branding campaign. I mean, you now have 20 million app users. Yes, you can interact with them, but why not gain the momentum and quickly come back with a branded ad instead of just the QR code. You can include that. Um, but goodness gracious, you could have done that for very little. You wouldn't even have had to do a big splash, just a little splash dripping over the course of time. I think that might have helped build on that momentum that they started out, because a gimmick can kickstart something, but it's not going to have a long-term effect.

Lorraine Kessler
No, that's not its intent. And it is intent is to kickstand. You better have something behind it. It's like a trick play in football since we're in the Super Bowl series, right? You can do a flea-flicker, but you better be able to run the ball and have a lot more of your arsenal than trick plays.

Mark Vandegrift
Okay. Well, we'll get off the Superbowl. It's been a week now. And let's get back to our 50 years of advertising changes. I'll throw up on the screen here, our categories. I'll read them here. Media proliferation, technological changes, targeting and personalization, transactional media, which we covered two weeks ago. And today we're going to tackle B2B advertising and the rise of that. 

I have a neat little graphic to show you Lorraine. I don't know that you've maybe never seen this because it was in a storage unit for a long time. And then the last two, the growing importance of branding, which I think next week will be, boy, that'll be an all-encompassing topic there. That's pretty critical. And then experiential marketing. And some of our listeners may not even understand what that is or how it plays out in the market, but that'll be a fun topic as well.

But let's get back to our topic for today, B2B marketing. And this shot that I'm going to put on the screen is of our founder, Dick Maggiore, on the cover of the 1995 Small Business News. And the inset text reads this, this is funny. “Innis Maggiore trades its consumer accounts for the risky world of business to business advertising.”

Isn't that funny, Lorraine? We have so many B2C clients still, but at that time, moving to B2B was considered risky. Isn't that awesome?

Lorraine Kessler
That's funny. Well, it's funny because Dick and I started about the same time, and I was in Toledo and our agency was heavily B2B. And we found B2B much more secure and predictable than B2C.

Mark Vandegrift 
Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, and really, it's funny because we've now seen the shift the other way, which we probably haven't seen in all of our topics we've been discussing. Change happens and it kind of, the change keeps going. So, technology, right? That just keeps increasing. Or transactional media, we have MarTech 10,000 and it's just increasing. Well, this with B2B advertising, it feels like that was a thing and now it's crested and maybe it's turning back the other way a little bit. And what I mean by that is maybe something you can touch on, which is at the end of the day, we're all consumers, we're all human beings. We all need convinced of buying something. So, share with us, maybe how we thought differently about B2B advertising and maybe why it's coming back closer to B2C.

Lorraine Kessler
Well, I've always thought, and I've always contended there's really no difference. There's no difference in how you should approach B2B than B2C. You still have to appeal to romance, tease, tickle, engage, use your word, motivate a human to think something positive about your product, service, company or brand amidst competitors and to be able to make a decision that fits their decision profile.

If they're – you've heard me say this in in the Appreciative Discoveries™ – I've never met an engineer out of the womb. I mean before were engineers or were doctors or were physicists or psychologists or whatever the heck we are We're people and we think like people and the psychology. Immutables are pretty much what they are. They're immutable, right? So, we're going to make decisions based on our own self-interest our emotions what we need whether that's security, whether that's happiness, whether that's treating ourselves because we think we deserve something. So, the difference in B2B is simply that the B2B buyer, for example, they have the same emotions, but they're attached to their job and their respect, their self-esteem, or within their job, what their boss will value.

So, within that context, they always know, what will this company value? What will my boss value in my buying decision? Is it going to be a functional thing of either paying less, saving more, buying something that actually allows us to sell more? What is the value system? Is it the secure idea, something that is reliable and doesn't break down, that my boss will appreciate because they have that brand image?

You know, we always said, you know, people chose Xerox because, you know, [they knew they wouldn't get fired]. So, it's still emotional. I don't care what anybody says. It still comes down to some amount of emotion plays out. And it's our job as advertisers to understand that buyer, whether they're, you know, whether it's a secretary or administrator or someone buying equipment, manufacturing equipment to make things, an engineer… we need to understand that person really well to understand what's going to motivate the purchase. 

And also, within the context of that company and what that company values, because you can approach a buyer within a company and say, I notice that your company, its brand stands for reliability. Therefore, you'll want the most reliable supplier for X. And that's us. We've won more awards than any of the competitors in reliability. So, you know, that's going to be my pitch or my angle. And all of advertising is really angling the message to what really piques the interest of that buyer.

Mark Vandegrift
Let me ask you this question. This is a little bit of a curve ball, and it might date you a little bit, but we've already discussed that in our previous episodes. Did you see a shift in early in your career where businesses realized that they needed to do marketing? 

Because I think that's what we're really talking about here when we say the rise of B2B marketing is that businesses at some point realized, just like the consumer side, the B2C advertisers, that they needed to advertise to other businesses to stay in business. Did you see a shift in that? Like more and more businesses started to do advertising that you hadn't seen prior to that? Because I guess I haven't witnessed that. It's always… B2B was always a thing in my advertising.

Lorraine Kessler
I would say the 80s when I joined, the late 70s, early 80s. And I think, you know, what are the reasons for that? I'd have to think about it. But I do think what happened is, there just was more competition, you know, and too much supply. It's kind of that Keynesian kind of thinking of law of supply and demand, less, demand, more supply, and we need to now take market share out of someone else's hide to survive. And I think business leaders became very aware of that. And that was the day too, in the 80s, when, in my opinion, the B2B accounts we had were more run by sales and marketing than what we have today, which are financial people.

And so, these were people who really felt the need to make sure that cash register, you know, was churning. And they just had a different mindset and were more open to marketing.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, that's interesting. That kind of corresponds… we've always talked about the difference between the show Mad Men and the Martini lunches and all that… that almost corresponds to that same time period where you're talking, you saw a lot more businesses start advertising. Not that there's any correlation, but that's kind of, you saw a radical shift, I guess, of some sort.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, I mean, it really started post-World War II. And it started in, actually, in sectors which I touched. Ironically, what was the biggest thing that was selling in volume? GM cars, or the big three out of Detroit. So, you had some powerhouse agencies in Detroit who wrote the script, literally a lot of that, for supply chain B2B. Supply chain… selling to GM, selling to Ford.

And they started, a large amount of them started with PR first to those automakers and then piled on advertising. So, I was in a sector of the country which was catching that wind. And that continued from the 60s to the 70s and then late 70s, like we said, building products, supply chains. And as supply, as these advertisers grew with their consumer markets… Owens Corning is a great example, right?

They only sold the builders and professionals and they shifted all of a sudden with the insulation with the Pink Panther, which really opened up the whole company to more marketing across the board, whether B2B or B2C. It's just like one of those evolutions, as you said, it just keeps going like this unless acted upon by something else.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, and in talking now about this, I would say turn back to your original point, which is we're all consumers, whether we're buying for ourselves or for a business, we're consumers. The other thing that we're seeing is because of the adoption of some of the transactional media and also the fact that programmatic has made some of the more broad-based advertising available to businesses. I think that's changed it. So, you know, TV and radio used to be out of the toolset for a B2B marketer. Okay, because they were simply there were just too many wasted impressions. 

Imagine, you know, someone that's selling a widget that goes inside of a car doing an ad on WKYC in Cleveland on Channel 3. Well, how many of that audience actually is interested in buying that widget that they're going to put in their car? Not too many. .001% maybe is going to make that buying decision. But as we talked a few weeks ago, targeting has changed things and now you have streaming platforms that allow for ConnectedTV and audio advertising. Our B2B clients can now leverage platforms like TV, audio and video advertising because of the fact that they can find that .001% that wasn't available to them before without doing the mass network TV buy. 

So now through programmatic, I can go find the CEOs or the procurement specialists of that car manufacturer, both by industry and title. And it makes sense now to do a branded TV spot to them because they're the only ones that are going to see it. Combine that with a very low cost to entry because you can set the budget. If you want to spend a thousand bucks a month doing ConnectedTV and you limit that target, all of a sudden it allows you to do that. And I think that's the other reason that the notion that there's a set of B2B tactics and a set of B2C tactics… those are merging and I think maybe that's why it's coming back a little bit. 

So, you know, typically use a lot of trade channels like trade pub ads, trade PR, you know, a lot of mix of transactional media like Google ads and SEO. But now, when a prospect sees an ad in a trade pub or attends a trade show, there are media available that can reach these prospects with a long-form advertising brand awareness message.

Do you see this addition of - let's go back to our last episode or two weeks ago - of brand awareness media as a benefit to B2B advertising?

Lorraine Kessler
Well, yeah, I mean, anytime you can use picture and sound and motion to engage an audience that's likely to be in your set, that to me is great. And we do know that trade pubs and trade shows have gone this way. So, we need to fill the gap. And this is a better way to fill the gap. And plus, the digital media, whether it's your website or blogs or videos on your site or videos, as you said, CTV, targeted through television mediums that are now streaming. These all fill in that gap very nicely in a way that's very engaging to the audience and a little more acceptable. I mean, it's great. But I think there's a huge opportunity being missed when we only, again, you and I with this targeting stuff, talk about, let's just say that's rifle fire versus blanket, air cover, right? Parachutes everywhere. And I think that B2B is missing, depending on the client, depending on the company… if you're a company that has global presence and you make a ton of stuff, whether it's ingredients or pieces, parts that go into many different markets, right? It could be metals like titanium that go into all sorts of things from buildings to airplanes to military defense to cars. And you have that kind of market. There's an opportunity to use regular mass TV, that we don't normally think about, intelligently. And I feel like there's been some missed opportunities. So, because people might not know what I'm talking about.

I'll give you an example and you might remember this one and it was in the 80s. BASF. Right? Right. Was that targeted to just buyers of their products, of the ingredients? That's an ingredient company, right? A chemistry and ingredient company. Their narrow target, which could be served very well today and probably is, were buyers and investors, right? Not the consumer. And yet they arguably have one of the best consumer mass media TV campaigns that I can recall. And do you remember what the tagline was? [We don’t make the products you buy, we make the products you buy, better.] 

That's right. And they had various specifics. They might do a paint commercial and within the narrative, they would say something like, we don't make the paint you use, we make the paint brighter. All right. So, this was catchy, right? And they were ubiquitous. 

They did target, but not by audience. They only ran on Sundays when they started. Why Sundays? Well, back in the 80s, that was family time watching TV. So, and there's no better example I have of using TV super effectively because it really is again, Roy Williams talks about the Wizard of ads, right? You have all these inside champions, but in that household is someone who's likely working for a company that's going to buy that product or someone who's interested in investing. 

So, it was just genius. And the big thing that I think, that this commercial did. One, it broke an orthodoxy. And anytime, this is one of the biggest problems with advertisers and categories. They don't even know that they subliminally adopt an orthodoxy, that all financial ads should sound like this and look like this, and we should be serious, right? And all healthcare ads should look like this and be like this. That is death. That is death, right? Because you are now not differentiating.

So, what you want to do is to look for ways to break the orthodoxy intelligently. And I think BASF did that. They broke the orthodoxy. Yeah. And single-handedly, they wrote the script for other ingredient marketers. I mean, I don't recall until this, campaigns for Kevlar or GoreTex or Intel, for example. They actually opened up the script for people who are kind of supply chain suppliers of whatever it is they do. So, I think it was genius and it's certainly memorable.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, and I think you touched on one there, or maybe two actually, Kevlar and Intel, where their advertising, in essence, made the manufacturer of the product better. So, Intel inside was, you know, Microsoft used that for a long time for their PCs and things. And so having that confidence in the brand then elevated the brand that they were in, even more. I never heard BASF, I never heard of a product that said we have BASF inside. They did and I think the investor audience was really key. It would be interesting from a numbers standpoint to see when they ran that, like what their stock price did.

Lorraine Kessler
They did in their ads, as I recall, they would feature things like Huffy bikes. The problem with the difference between BASF is their chemistry company makes lots of stuff. Whereas Kevlar is one product and Intel one microprocessor. So, it was a little easier for them. But I'm sure if you were to get collateral from Huffy to their bike dealers, you would see made with BASF, blah, blah, blah. You know, there was probably some cross-merchandising.  

But you make a really good point. It's this, the value, there's this reciprocal value now, because I'm a Goodyear tire made with Kevlar now stands higher than a Goodyear tire made with what? Right? Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, yeah, I don't know what the ingredient is. And they did a great job because Kevlar started out, if I recall, with the bulletproof vest. So, at that point in time, tell me what's better than protecting the body than Kevlar. And so, anything made with Kevlar automatically gave you that bump in, oh, this stuff's solid.

Lorraine Kessler
Yeah, this is really solid. So, all of which is to say, I would love to see a B2B company that you would unexpectedly use a mass media and TV commercial, not worried about so much targeting, but as creating value that becomes universal and ubiquitous. I mean, that's what BASF did. They became ubiquitous. Yeah.

Mark Vandegrift
Yep. Very good. Well, let's close out our discussion for the day. I think we've covered this, and this is always exciting for us because we do a lot of B2B, but those two are marrying up and a lot of the tactics we use on both sides of the aisle. 

This look back on the development of advertising over the years, I think it makes me not only nostalgic a little bit, but excited for the continued development of the science and art of marketing. You know, it's always been art, but there's a science that works into it. And you know, I get as excited about the science of it as I do the art of it. So, but any final words, Lorraine, before we close out today.

Lorraine Kessler
No, I just think that you and I both have enjoyed some really interesting years in the evolution of advertising and how technology has opened up new opportunities for us. And I think what's important is to blend what's changed with what hasn't changed. To not throw out the baby with the bathwater, you still need to have a message. It needs to be… the advertiser's job is to convey the distinctive and differentiated benefit of that company product or service and do it in a way that really captures the heart and the mind will follow. And that doesn't change. So, you got to have the goods. But now technology has opened up a whole bunch of other ways for us to engage and convert audiences.

Mark Vandegrift
Well said, well said. Well, thank you to our listeners for joining us. If you haven't liked, shared, subscribed, told it to your friends from a mountaintop, please do. And until next time, have an amazing day.