November, 1994: The entire NAB contingent was on the return flight from Amsterdam to Washington. I had planned to get some work done on my Macintosh Powerbook as we crossed the Atlantic.
Spotting the NAB’s John Abel a couple of rows behind me, I decided first to show him the nifty condenser microphone built into the Powerbook. John uses a PC, but he expressed interest in seeing what my Macintosh could do.
Mac PowerBook 180
Like most Macintosh owners, I’m always eager to evangelize on behalf of a computer that you can use intuitively. So I happily went to launch a particular application…and it crashed.
No problem, I told John, sheepishly. I’ll just restart, and everything will be fine.
It wouldn’t restart.
I tried again. Nothing.
And again. Nothing.
Only a Macintosh user can appreciate how frustrating this was.
So I took the computer back to my seat, promising to return. Finally I managed to get the thing started, and I returned to the empty seat next to John.
I demonstrated various nifty features of the computer, and after a couple of minutes another passenger leaned over us to look. And then another. Now I had an audience of three, as I demonstrated a silly program that creates anagrams out of people’s names (or out of any words). Naturally, we had to feed each person’s name into the program.
Finally everyone got tired of my bragging about my Mac, and I returned to my seat. I settled down to get some work done — pleased that my travel time would be used productively — and discovered that all of my showing off had used up the computer battery. (And I wonder why I never seem to get any work done while “on the road.”)
A Reader Asks:
It’s a constant challenge for us to write copy for car dealers and come up with something new and different. The usual approach these days is for a screaming guy to tell you all the reasons why people with bad credit should shop at a particular place. They all sound the same… and are obnoxious.
We have a client called “Courtesy Ford” that wants a new approach. The ideas that immediately came to mind were playing off the word “Courtesy.” We thought about using the “Politeness Police” going around to other fictitious car dealers and busting them for being rude, and then coming back to Courtesy and saying we couldn’t find any infractions there.
We also got out the thesaurus and came up with a bunch of phrases like agreeable, thoughtful, respectful… maybe offering a “politeness guarantee.” But we’re stuck as to how to proceed.
They’d like an ad with a :15 second donut to talk about specific deals. Any ideas you could throw my way would be much appreciated.
My Reply:
Although I’m sure you could come up with a series of cute commercials centered on “Courtesy,” you wouldn’t be doing the dealership a favor by airing them unless they truly are more courteous than the competition…which I doubt.
In reality, they’re probably no more courteous than other car dealers. So every time a potential customer experiences a less than courteous encounter with this dealer, they will remember this ad campaign and think, “Yeah, right.”
And even if they are more courteous than the competition, I have never heard of a customer who chose one car dealership over another because of the politeness factor. Customers choose car dealerships on the basis of price and trust.
Rather than base an entire campaign around a word in the client’s name, I would go back to the client and ask a series of questions designed to uncover a demonstrable advantage of buying a car from Courtesy Ford… their Unique Selling Proposition.
I’m going to give you a link to a page that contains 5 brief videos of 5 different guest speakers at this year’s PD Grad School.
Click on the link below, indicate the part of the world you’re from (you’ll see what I mean), and you’ll be taken directly to the Web page. Once you’re there, be sure to scroll down to the first video.
1. You’ll see a prominent radio researcher describing the most remarkable comment he’s heard from a radio programmer in his entire career. He’s being charitable; in my opinion, it’s an incredibly foolish comment.
2. The page itself describes PD Grad School 2009: The Complete Audio Record. In other words, it’s a page from which people can order the 10-CD package. I’m telling you this now, so you won’t feel that I “tricked” you.
3. Among the descriptions of the various sessions, there are five different video clips. Feel free to watch the videos without buying the CDs. (But in my completely unbiased opinion, if you’re a radio programmer than you definitely should buy the CDs.)
Oh, yeah, the link: Check out the videos here.
