No. 256: Man of the Woods

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Justin Timberlake for Pendleton

DNVB / Media / eCommerce: (1) Justin Timberlake is one of the most talented musicians on earth and he wants to perform well into his 40’s. (2) The music industry continues to evolve and only the savviest artists are appropriately navigating streaming’s economic limitations.

Consider these two assessments when framing what Man of The Woods is all about.

Timberlake is a savvy businessman. So when the initial imagery for his Man of The Woods album released, it was easy to joke a bit about how blatant the merchandising promotion appeared to be. The irony of my earlier tweet was that Timberlake’s evolution is unquestioned. He’s also capable of playing a longer game than most other artists because of his previous, outsized successes.

Web Smith on Twitter

Timberlake and Bruno Mars have identical skill sets. One figured out how to evolve and the other one is making native ads for Filson.

Here’s the Timberlake career arc in a nutshell. Mr. Biel has been that rare and consistent success over three decades of changing music, his outlandish pop-fashion, and mostly-poor haircare decisions. He’s traversed the impossible terrain of American musical evolution:

  • Mickey Mouse Club Member (Ages 12-15)
  • N’SYNC lead (Ages 15-22)
  • Hip hop-infused pop star (Ages 22-33)
  • Jay-Z approved R&B artist (Ages 33-36)
  • The beginning of his latest phase (Ages 37-on)

To better understand Timberlake’s newfound interest in American heritage brands, consider that he is proudly from Tennessee and he was always inspired by the music of the region.  Continue reading “No. 256: Man of the Woods” →

No. 255: The Drum Major Instinct

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Let’s save the outrage for a moment and look at Chrysler’s Ram ad for what it is, a valiant effort and a missed opportunity. Their ad utilized a speech on what MLK called the fall of the Roman empire. Chrysler and their ad agency deserve applause for being gutsy enough to use this as their source material.

Because nations are caught up on the ‘drum major instinct.’ I must be first, I must be supreme, our nation must rule the world. And I am going to continue to say it to America. Because I love this country too much to see the drift that it’s taken.

Martin Luther King, in the same speech.

In an NFL season that was heavy on the politics, Super Bowl advertisements generally held American politics at arm’s length. It’s clear that there has been social activism fatigue. But this Ram Trucks’ ad attempted to be all things to all people and frankly, only courage can convert a valiant effort into a meaningful outcome.

https://youtu.be/SlbY1tGARUA

There are levels to consider here and it begins with the framing of the advertisement:

  • Ram wants to sell trucks. This is the only reason that you pay $5M for an ad on the world’s biggest stage.
  • Chrysler outsourced this concept and direction to High Dive, a boutique agency in Chicago. Their attempt was likely well-meaning.
  • February is Black History Month.
  • Martin Luther King is a safe American hero.
  • Both the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots fielded activist players in the 2017-2018 season.
  • Chrysler is leaning on the President’s approval rating to make a statement that they felt most reasonable Americans agreed with.

This particular creative agency would likely identify as liberal. And it’s also likely that they felt that this advertisement was an opportunity to do more than move products. Ram’s agency has an interesting mantra on their homepage:

Screen Shot 2018-02-05 at 5.30.44 PM

This likely motivated their approach here. The juxtaposition of the famous MLK Drum Major Instinct speech, exactly fifty years prior to the biggest game of the year, was too much to pass up. This, even though the speech’s context makes little sense when you consider what they chose for the advertisement’s imagery.

The above agency requested permission from the King Family Estate to use his likeness in the ad. And upon receiving that permission, we can infer that there was a battle between the creative agency and the in-house marketing team at Chrysler.

Martin Luther King was obviously a great man but for context, by 1968 he had grown weary of the Vietnam War. He’d also taken up the mantle for America’s poor (of all ethnicities). He’d publicly called for an end to American corporate greed. His popularity was at an all-time low by then. With the “Drum Major” speech, he established a few basic tenets of the American far left platform that endured for decades. This ad was an attempt to juxtapose his words with our times.

ram-sb-team-mlk-PAGE-2018

I’d venture to guess that the creative agency wanted imagery of a player kneeling. Because, of course they did. The Ram team at Chrysler likely objected and compromised by allowing High Dive to include the 1.7 seconds of a team of African-American high school football players kneeling for their pre-game prayer. It’s imagery that’s vague enough to be a political non-issue in an ad about trucks that targets 25-35 year old men in towns like Cookeville, Tennessee.

The real appeal of using this MLK speech was his re-defining of the word “great” – an argument against the current administration’s “Make America Great Again” motto. With an approval rate in the 30’s, this was a safe calculation. The Chrysler team latched on to this politically-centrist approach because it is inoffensive to the right and (assumably) endearing to the left.

In so many words, the ad in a sentence was:

America is great already and it’s because we are a nation of servants who believe in helping our fellow man. Ram is the vehicle for those who serve.

I completely understand this collective thought process. If you don’t, consider that no sport delved deeper into the world of social activism than the NFL’s small band of players – one of whom was starting for the Philadelphia Eagles.  The other of whom was banned from playing the game. Neither of whom were involved in the advertisement and for obvious brand demographic reasons. The stage was set to execute one of the most meaningful ads of the past year.

But the ad fell flat. And this is where a diversity of opinion and background is handy in creative environments.

Throughout 2017, there was quite a bit of cognitive dissonance. Many NFL fans, commentators, politicians, and our President damned those men who took part in peaceful protest. This while uplifting and honoring the man who originated it. In this way, Ram inadvertently highlighted that cognitive dissonance and set off quite a nerve on social media and beyond.

ESPN’s Darren Rovell in a message to 2PM:

A company really cant use that speech to sell something. It just feels dirty. I at least had that reaction and everyone on Twitter seemed to have as well. Just like the Prince projection, when we bring back the dead, we have to be so careful. I think Dodge got caught up on the 50 years idea. But didn’t fully think through how the crass commercialism make it hard to use the speech as a device to better sell.

I am not upset by the advertisement, itself. The King family’s estate approved it and the creative agency likely did the best that they could with some mighty restraints.

I am upset that the opportunity was wasted and even the smallest tweak to the visuals could have eased the uproar.

There was no stock footage of Ram trucks serving others in times of need. There was no archival footage of peaceful protestors jumping out of the bed of a truck to meet their friends at the front line. There wasn’t even that reconciliatory visual of a service member (who serves) and the athlete / political activist (who serves) both coming to terms with each other’s efforts.

MLK’s sermons were so powerful because they made us think about our own human flaws.

But perhaps next time, agencies and in-house corporate teams can possess the courage to take a step out of their comfort zones, leaning in to authentic messaging. Even if it’s not tidy or politically correct. This, too, is a form of service. 

This is the opinion of  the editor. The 2PM Parse pod is devoted to breaking down advertisements like these – the good and the bad. 

Read more of the issue here.

Listen to the entire MLK speech here. At the time of publishing, this ad was viewed 14x more than Ram’s lauded viking ad.

No. 254: An Open Letter to DNVB CEOs

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Pictured: Outdoor Voices, led by Founder Tyler Haney

Dear DNVB CEO,

You deserve more praise. I worked alongside one of your kind for a time. I learned a lot about the personal costs of building a product and then a brand from scratch. Frankly, the costs are high.

By the time that people know who you are and what you’ve accomplished, demand is probably already there. That $3-5M in revenue is as close to automatic as it gets. In fact, that accomplishment has lost its luster. Now it’s on to $15-25M. But people rarely see what you had to go through to get to that $1M mark.

What people don’t know is that DNVB executive teams build two products from scratch, supply and demand:

  1. The product: the shirt, or the luggage, the pants, the shades, the coats, or whatever it is that people know you for.
  2. The brand: the aura of that product, the name recognition, the association, the behind-the-scenes partners, the spokeswomen, the ambassadors, the inevitability of success.

You stressed over supply chain woes. You cried some nights. Your cofounder or your creative director drove you nuts because they didn’t realize how close the company was to crumbling.

You stressed over cash flow problems. You cried some more. Your job was equal parts: (1) innovating and (2) just figuring it out.

You stressed over the difficulties of getting Trent, the very normal VC, to see your vision early. Some DNVB’s paths were easier than others. But yours was not easy at all. Absolutely nothing was given. And still, you held it together.

And after all that, you managed your minimum viable product. You were in possession of 10,000 units that people didn’t really want because those units weren’t close to the fifth-generation products that are on the market today. That first-generation of leggings just weren’t that great. So you relied upon the brand to get you through those days. You managed to convince consumers, retail / tech media, and investors that your success would be inevitable. And that your brand will be around for 100 years. They felt the impact of those statements and they agreed with you. But everyone that reads this knows that the mirage was hard to keep it up in the beginning.

“We may not be great today but we will be. Buy in early.”

Turning a logo into a greater meaning takes a decade and you had to do it before those 10,000 units of first-gen mediocrity bled you dry.

So here we are, years later and it’s still hard – but it’s not as hard as it was. There are dozens of DNVB CEO’s, just like yourself, who understand the toils of creating supply and demand for your company. And then stressing over the balance between the both of those products.

DNVB CEO’s run brands that are relatively lean and almost always running at a deficit. You don’t have the ad budgets and marketing forces like the legacy companies or the software platform. But you survive. And once you make enough noise, retail pundits will call you on your inefficiencies and inexperience. They’ll actually root against you. That’s what retail ‘experts’ do. But please know that many of us praise what you’ve accomplished in such a short period of time.

You started your company in an age that required your retail independence. On day one, your brand couldn’t depend on wholesale purchases from Nordstrom or Target or Whole Foods or Walmart. And that independence made you more viable in the long run. And now, those retail powerhouses are now knocking at your headquarters’ door.

So please, continue to innovate. And when you’re emotionally or mentally maxed out, remember that your companies will be the foundation upon which the future of retail is built. People will wear you, consumers will shop you, and malls will bend over backwards to work with you.

And then, the retail experts will reluctantly write that your brand successes were inevitable all along.

See more of the issue here.