First let us concede that we think the piece is quite beautifully designed – particularly given the circa-1983 aesthetics of the Spanish Lottery’s corporate identity.

Next, forgive us our elementary Catalan and allow us to offer a translation of the ad:

CONFIDENCE, PROFITABILITY AND STABILITY. A 250-YEAR TRACK RECORD.

Very soon you will be able to invest in the National Lottery.

If one thing’s for certain, it’s that people will never stop dreaming.

*We didn’t bother with the fine print, but we wonder if it includes the usual disclaimers about the value of stocks moving up and down?

The copy’s so compelling that it even holds up in English, and we love to dream as much as the next gal or guy. But if you deconstruct it just a little bit, isn’t it basically encouraging financial speculation on an addictive habit? After all, statistically speaking, YOU WILL NEVER WIN the lottery. And if we’ve learned nothing else from the last few years it’s that stocks are far from a sure path to riches–even if you’re talking in 20-year terms.

Okay, okay, we don’t mean to moralize too much. We’ve been known to buy the occasional ticket and scratch card. But something about the retail advertising of equities doesn’t feel quite right, and in support of a business that depends on what is, in some instances, a regressive tax? That’s not work we dream about doing.

LET’S SEE…WE’LL TRY… HOW ABOUT THE 2007 FOGHAT

AC/DC aren’t the first musicians to make their band name a brand name in wine – check out a few vintages from The Rolling Stones, KISS, Madonna, Barbara Streisand and Foghat(?!) here.

Not long ago we excoriated Cosmo for trying to stretch its brand to a male-oriented publication. So what do we have to say about AC/DC as a wine brand?

GOOD ON YA, MATES!

Pretend we said like that Paul Hogan, and hear us out. Of course someone looking for a nice wine is unlikely to choose the Highway to Hell Cab for their next dinner party. But aging AC/DC fans might. And in a licensing agreement like this one, there’s no downside to the band. Even if the wine is swill, their fan base is rabid enough that it would have to be lethally poisonous to diminish their fervor. Actually, their fans might even prefer if it was moderately toxic.

Whether or not Warburn Estate has made a good decision producing AC/DC wines is another question. But given that the company exports about $15,000,000 of private label wine annually, we’d guess they have a pretty good system for designing and producing labels and packaging cheaply, deep relationships with distributors who can secure some decent shelf space and a set of protocols to make sure that failures are fast rather than expensive.

IT’S A BUSINESS DECISION

Loyal readers of this humble blog will recognize that we think of brand strategy as a set of business decisions. In the case of AC/DC wine, it’s one that has potential upside and manageable downside. You Shook Me All Night Long Muscat, you say? What the hell – we’ll drink to that!

Yes, our mouths are hanging wide open as well, and not because of the exquisite subtlety with which they’re promoting the new publication…

Is there any brand that is more unequivocally identified with the female gender than Cosmopolitan? Doesn’t the mental image of a man buying a Cosmo-branded product or service look a little bit like this?

Cosmo: Clever Like a Fox?

Maybe Cosmo thinks that women who appreciate the periodical’s redoubtable reputation for salacious sagacity will do the buying, gifting the app to the men in their lives? Except that the data we’ve seen indicates twice as many men as women use iPads, and women prefer to purchase magazines on e-readers than tablets.

Or maybe they’re trying to create confusion between CFG and similarly-named, similarly understated lad’s mag FHM?

Not a Fatal Mistake, but a Missed Opportunity

Here’s our beef with CFG. It’s not that it’s going to ruin the Cosmopolitan brand – no matter how many or how few men start reading the publication, Cosmopolitan’s reputation as a recycler publisher of sex “secrets” is impregnable.

Our problem is that it’s a business mistake, because while you’re busy trying to convince men that Cosmo isn’t just something to read while they’re in their sister’s/girlfriend’s/friend’s mom’s bathroom, it gives both current and new competitors more time to capture a greater share of the market.

It’s also a misunderstanding of the target’s mindset. When men do read Cosmopolitan, they do so precisely because it’s intended for women. They’re getting a glimpse behind the curtain, which means the chance to learn something secret and valuable. When the magazine is intended for men – even when the content is written by women – that sense of exclusivity is gone.

It’s similar to our questions about Dove’s Dove Men+Care line:

We don’t doubt Unilever’s claim that 51% of men use women’s skin care products. But, again, we think they do so because they are women’s products. How could a product intended for a man ever get his skin as soft as a product intended for someone who actually cares about how soft her skin is?

We get that Cosmo and Dove are strong brands, and we know that it’s less expensive to extend a brand than to create a new one from scratch. But if it’s not the right way to position and sell your product, it might be a very costly error.

P.S. Here’s the video that’s being used to promote CFG. Judging by the amount of coverage the video’s getting despite how boring it is, we’re guessing Hearst Magazines is pulling in favors left, right and center.

Yeah, yeah, but what does this mean for our BRAND?!

A Brief History of  ”Climate Change”

First, a little background. When scientists started to conclude that human activity was impacting climate, they called it “inadvertent climate modification” (sexy, right?) because they didn’t know how things would be affected. In the mid 70′s, that was shortened to Climate Change, and the concept of ‘Global Warming’ was coined to refer specifically to “the average global surface temperature increase from human emissions of greenhouse gases.” Later, scientists introduced the term “Global Change” as an omnibus term that includes factors not related to climate.

That’s the jargon in the scientific community. In the real world, we’re hearing Climate Change more often than Global Warming, but laypersons often use the two interchangeably. By using either of these terms as their rallying cry, people trying to draw attention to the issue are making a big branding mistake.

Global Warming? What Global Warming?

Newark Airport, December 2010

You see – here’s the thing about global warming and climate change (other than fact that it was a cold, snowy winter for many people last year): they’re big, they’re complicated, they’re hard to observe, they seem to be happening somewhere other than here and they’re measured in decades if not centuries.

In their book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reference a study in which participants asked to donate to a charitable cause were twice as likely to give if the appeal focused on a single child rather than on the entire problem (a phenomenon called The Mother Theresa effect). The terms Climate Change and Global Warming may capture the scope of the problem, but they aren’t as effective calls to action as a more specific term or phrase might be.

Don’t Bury the Lead

The same book cites another instructive anecdote, which we’ll quote from this website:

“The first day of class, Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment: to write the lead to a newspaper story.

The teacher reeled off the facts:”Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.

Ephron and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence: “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills faculty Thursday in Sacramento…blah, blah, blah.

The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment.Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’”

Ah.

He translated the dry facts into a relevant concept for readers — the essence of the story they would truly care about.

Putting aside for a moment the debate over what’s causing it and how quickly it may or may not be happening, Climate Change and Global Warming are the dry facts (no pun intended). But are they the relevant concept that audiences will truly care about, or is there an opportunity to strike a more visceral cord?

Bringing it Back to Brands: Think Smaller, Think More Specific

Brands have had to deal with issues just like these for decades. Every business leader worth her or his salt knows that you can’t be all things to all people. In order to build a strong brand, you have to define the right audience for your products and services and then use your brand to communicate a value proposition that is compelling, credible and differentiated. Think of your brand as “the lead”  for your organization’s or businesses’s story. It doesn’t say everything, but it says the most important thing.

BMW positions its brand on performance	Volvo built its brand on safety

BMW and Volvo provide great examples of good branding at work. They each chose a very specific value proposition on which to build their brands. It doesn’t mean that BMW never talks about safety, that Volvo never mentions performance, or that they both didn’t talk about price, comfort, options, fuel efficiency or all of the other things that people care about when it comes to choosing a car. But it does mean that they chose a lead, and they didn’t bury it. Nearly all of their communications start with or strongly link back to that core brand value proposition.

What’s a Brand (or Climate) Warrior to Do?

It’s not an easy choice for a business or organization to make.

For the committed advocate who is equally worried about weather patterns, biodiversity, natural resources and more, even Climate Change and Global Warming may not be expansive enough to capture the issue. But if that advocate’s goal is to convince and even recruit fence-sitters and skeptics, it’s time to think smaller and more relevant, not bigger and less concrete.

If we were in charge of drawing attention to the climate issue, we’d focus on air quality and pollution. 250 million of the 311 million people living in the United States live in cities, where smog, smokestacks, smelly exhaust and asthma detract from personal quality of life on a daily basis. Convincing people that clean air is better than dirty air doesn’t take a whole lot of confusing scientific backup. Air quality and pollution don’t capture the totality of the problem, but they just might strike the chord that makes people care enough to demand action from those in charge, or even take action themselves.

Businesses have to make the same difficult choices in order to build strong brands. You have to think hard about the aspect of your business, your products and your services that most effectively connects with your target.

• What keeps them up at night?
• What is your competition offering them?
• What is it that only you can do for them?

If you can find the idea at the intersection of the answers to these three questions, then you’ll have found your lead. If you communicate it effectively and consistently, it will tell your stakeholders not just what you do, but whey they should care. And that’s what great brands and worthy causes are built on.

DOES 10% OF 200 MILLION REALLY EQUAL 20 MILLION?

Scanning the headlines this morning we noticed what is actually quite an outrageous claim about Twitter. One of the teasers for an article about the death of Amy Winehouse (RIP and all, but what about the famine in Somalia?!) said that within minutes of her demise 20 million people were discussing it on Twitter. Upon further investigation, here’s a call-out in the article that provides further explanation:

You don’t have to be a statistician to see the errors in logic here. Leaving aside the questions of which hashtags they counted as part of the discussion, how many tweets might have been part of the discussion but not used one of those hashtags, and whether a retweet really counts as active ‘discussion’, anyone on Twitter knows that a minute percentage of users make up the vast majority of the traffic. While it may be true that 20 million tweets included the hashtags that this publication (or its source) considered having to do with Ms. Winehouse’s death, it does not follow that each of those tweets came from a unique user. Not only doesn’t it follow, it defies belief.

OKAY MATH NERDS, SO WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL?

This isn’t about mathematical purism – it’s about the misleading effect of the call-out above. Unless you stop and think about it, the takeaway is a grossly exaggerated sense of the importance of Twitter.

And the problem doesn’t exist only in tabloids whose job is it to sensationalize. We’re seeing a general lack of context and even accuracy in the numbers that get reported on social media. And don’t get us started on the debate over which are the “right” metrics to be looking at: Cost per Click? Viral Coefficients? Engagement? (however it is that you measure that…) There’s a general morass of omissions, errors and unanswered questions that makes it difficult for marketers to figure who is using social media for what, how much of it they’re doing, and what that might mean to an organization’s marketing strategies and tactics.

CASE IN POINT: CLICK THROUGH RATES

“Mobile Ad Optimizer” Smaato publishes regular updates on all manner of mobile metrics, numbers that are picked up and reported in trade verticals and mainstream business press. We recently started looking at their updates in an effort to figure out what click through rates (CTR) look like on mobile devices. Here’s an example of their reporting:

It’s a good chart and in this case our questions aren’t about the math, but about the context. Report after report measures, tracks and compares the relative CTR on different OS’s by plotting their distance from an average measure of 100, but what exactly does this tell marketers about the usefulness of mobile advertising?

Not much.

It turns out that, at least according to AdMob, the average CTR for a mobile campaign varies between .5% and 1%. Presumably those numbers include accidental clicks (which in our case make up 100% of the clicks we’ve made so far on mobile device ads), which leads us to think that maybe if Smaato chose 0 as their average rather than 100 they would provide a more realistic picture of what’s actually happening with mobile ad clicks? We’re not accusing Smaato of deliberately misleading, but why not publish actual CTR’s in addition to the relative figures?

WE’RE NOT HATERS, WE JUST WANT THE TRUTH

We’re not technology or social media naysayers. We tweet, we’re on Quora and we love KISSmetrics as much as the next gal or guy. But we’re asked to help our clients put limited marketing resources to maximum effect, and we’re not willing to accept some of the “facts” we see published without a little grain of salt and a whole lot more rigor.