Grading Recent Commercials, Part IV: The Technology Edition

It's late March, and it's snowing in New Jersey.  This makes absolutely zero sense, so let's use "Chewbacca Theory" logic and rate a few commercials (some of which also make absolutely zero sense).

I've been thinking a lot about logic flaws lately, because I've been reading David Brooks' The Social Animal (review to come in a later blog post) and he makes some pretty excellent points about how each of us views the world in a fairly biased way.  As a marketing person, I believe that to the extent that a company has a structure, it also has a "personality," and these too can be fundamentally biased.

For instance, every company *thinks* they know who their customers are.  I recall being on a conference call with a client once (I never name names, but this client is very well-known and sells products that could be used by every American adult) to present research findings, and at one point toward the end of the presentation, the most senior-ranking client on the call said something along the lines of "Well, I guess it's just the psychology of the blue-collar American male" as a one-line summation of the research.

My personal dislike of one-liners and one-pagers aside, there's a larger problem with the above comment.  As an American male who is not blue-collar, but comes from a blue-collar town, and a blue-collar family, and knows lots of blue-collar people, I feel there is no single psychology of the blue-collar American male.

Most of the guys I know - regardless of the color of their collar - believe that Miller Lite commercials are stupid, for instance.  They may not think about them as much as I do (I, after all, write blog posts analyzing TV commercials), and it may not impact their purchasing decision as much, but they've at least given it enough thought to make the logical and accurate conclusion that they are fucking stupid.

I guarantee you Miller and Budweiser think they understand the psychology of the blue-collar American male (it only consists of boobs, jokes with xenophobic or sexist undertones, and sports), but they'd be wrong.  I blame buckets for this.

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Companies too often like to put their customers into buckets, which is a terrible idea for two reasons.  One, when you put people into buckets, because of the type of analysis you conduct to make this happen, you invariably leave some people out.  Segmenting your market is a concession; it basically says, "We don't care to lose customers, as long as we identify most of them."  This is bad, but it's not as bad as the other reason, which is that it's a lazy methodology.

This is because any decision the company makes after deciding to this is going to be biased toward the segments, which are themselves flawed.  Let's say you're a company, and you know you have four segments.  (You further know that you classify people into one of these four groups based on their responses to a series of attitudinal questions combined with a factor analysis, but this may be a bit too technical.)

Some people are very clearly in a segment; this is the easy stuff.  Many other people are defined as being in a particular segment, but based on their responses (and their underlying attitudes), they're very close to being in some other segment - it's like they're technically in New Jersey, but they're very close to being in Pennsylvania.  They might call "doing the wash" "doing the warsh," if you know what I mean.  But because of the limitations of your analysis, you are going to classify them as being in Segment 1 (let's say), and market to them as if they are Segment 1, but you'll be really inaccurate (on average) in doing this.

I'm not convinced that companies take the time to understand these caveats, and as a result I think that many companies treat flimsy research like it's sacrosanct.  And that's partly the reason why many companies make shitty commercials - they don't know who they are talking to, and they assume the people they are talking to are different than they really are.

On that note, let's get to the commercials...

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Commercial #1: Because Everyone Relates to Lazy, Rich Retards

I'm going to be quite cruel to DirecTV here, but later I'll be nicer (I promise).

This commercial bombs, primarily because it is obnoxious and not at all funny.  DirecTV may think that people are going to pay attention to ten seconds of yelling and screaming and whooping, but in reality, they're going to listen to it once, get annoyed, and then put the commercial on mute and resolve themselves never to buy DirecTV.  This commercial may be memorable, but it's not memorable in a good way.  You don't want to piss off your customers.

Being obnoxious and unfunny itself is not a death sentence for a commercial, but add a complete lack of being relate-able to the mixture and you're finished.  I can understand setting a commercial for items that are luxurious in nature in a mansion - in fact, it's the best place to set a commercial if you only care about selling your product to wealthy people.  But satellite TV is a middle-class product, and I'm convinced that below the surface, most of the people who watch this commercial tune out because they don't feel it applies to them.

This may require a leap of faith on your end, but there's research to support this point for certain.  People have a very good sense of who they are and how they stand in the world, and they are going to tune out to this commercial because it's set in an opulent setting. 

So, if DirecTV is looking for increased sales from wealthy people who are also stupid, congratulations on willing the Callahan Auto Parts account.  Otherwise, it fails completely.

Grade: F

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Commercial #2: I Am Epic Win

Now let me take a right turn and explain to you how the very same company could use a very similar framework and end up with a much better commercial.  It's called humor and execution.

The above commercial is the second in a series involving a hilariously-rich Russian dude with a pet miniature giraffe.  (The first one, if you recall, begins with the grammatically incorrect yet memorable line: "Opulence. I has it.")  This commercial is better for the following reasons:

• It's actually funny.  I know, I know, this is just my opinion, and other people might completely disagree.  But I believe that some people are naturally inclined toward having a quality sense of humor in general, and I further believe I am one of those people.  This commercial is actually funny; between the muscle-bound guy on the left and the pygmy giraffe working out alongside the woman on the right, it's hard not to chuckle at all this.
• The giraffe.  Clearly the giraffe tested well, because they show it again in this commercial - and even more prominently than in the first.  The first scene with the giraffe is so short you might miss it; but you'll see the second one, because it's so weird, and then you'll want to watch the commercial again to figure out what it all means. 
• It has a clear and simple message that is easy to remember (especially with Charlie Sheen in the news).  DirecTV = winning.  Don Draper would appreciate such a simple message.

The commercial isn't without flaws; the Russian accent on the main dude is way too thick (even if you're familiar with thick Russian accents, it takes a few views to understand it).  Some people might also complain that it's too "busy," visually speaking - I think there's some merit to that as well, but I also think it's part of the commercial's intent.

Grade: B

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Commercial #3: Sprint's Wireless Service is for Assholes

Earlier, I mentioned that every company has a "personality."  What I mean by this is that it's possible if you pay close enough attention to make fairly accurate statements like "Wow, I bet the management team for that company are all huge douchebags" (e.g., Cablevision) or "Holy shit, what a bunch of fucking hipster shillers" (e.g., Apple).

Relatedly, it always baffles me why a commercial would ever show someone using their product and being a huge dick at the same time.  Are you trying to sell your product to massive dicks?  Have all the decent people already gone to your competitor?  And most importantly, why didn't anyone at the company take the time to vet this and say "Wait.  We are trying to sell a decent product to decent people.  This doesn't accomplish this at all."

The one memorable aspect of the above commercial is that the doctor is being a huge, insensitive dick to the football player.  This is a bad idea in general because, as I just mentioned, you don't want people to associate your product with assholery.  More specifically, you're selling a smart phone here, and most people who do not own a smart phone are worried about becoming huge insensitive dicks who only pay attention to their smart phone.  (That's more or less why they haven't bought a smart phone yet.)  Maybe if you convinced them that by buying a smart phone, they would be able to do things better, and then they'd actually buy one.  But that's clearly not the case in this commercial.

This brings me to the most general point of my post.  There are very few psychological truths, but one that I feel actually exists is that everyone - regardless of whether they are a saint or a serial killer - wants to believe that they're a good person.  If a commercial makes a genuine connection to this, then people start to pay attention.  And every commercial that takes the opposite tack, by showing insensitivity or meanness to others, is less successful than it could be.  So Sprint fails.

Grade: D

Buying a First Home, An Update: Not Knowing About Things

See that picture, to the right?  In about two months, that's gonna be my kitchen.  When I wake up on a Sunday morning craving a Western omelet, I am going to make a Western omelet on that stove.  When I need to wash dishes, I'll wash dishes in that sink; when I make meat loaf, it'll be in that oven; and when I want to have a cold beer after a hard day's work, I'll grab one out of that stainless steel fridge*, sit in one of those chairs* on that center island, and sip it slowly.

*NOTE: The stainless steel fridge and chairs are not included in sale.

Earlier this week, our home buying finished attorney review, which essentially means that - barring a rare, unforeseen circumstance - we'll be able to move into our first "adult" home some time around mid-May.  Of course, when I use terms like "rare" and "unforeseen," I don't quite know what I'm talking about, because I am a first-time home buyer, and my role is to get f**ked over completely unawares to how, why, and with what instrument.

As far as I can tell, here are the steps in the home buying process (h/t to The Oatmeal for graphical analogy):

Step 1: Decide to buy a home.
 
This could be motivated by a number of reasons, be they financial, emotional, or some combination of the two. For us, we were tired of apartment living because (a) we wanted "our own" space; (b) we didn't want to be transient and shiftless any more; and (c) we were tired of having a washer and dryer in our kitchen. (No, seriously, we have a washer and dryer in our kitchen in our current apartment.)

So in this phase, you align yourself with a realtor and look at houses.  Some realtors tell you that you only need to look at a small number of houses; thankfully, ours let us look at about thirty-five of them before we found "the one."  Perhaps this was just a function of the buyer's market, or perhaps she found our quirkiness endearing, but regardless, we did find "the one" - eventually.  It took two months.

Step 2: Create a short list, call in reinforcements... err, your parents.

Our "the one" was a throw in.  We had an original short list, and when you have a short list, you should look for a second opinion.  We brought in our parents that weekend, and we threw "the one" onto our list of houses to look at at the very last minute, because it just came on the market and the pictures looked cool.

After a rather up-and-down experience with our original short list, we walked into "the one" and we immediately flipped out.  No, actually, our parents flipped out.  At one point, my mother was gushing so effusively about the home (the owners were still there) that I had to take her aside and say "Mom, you might be costing us a lot of money right now!".

This was on a Saturday, and it was our first look.  We came back the very next day, and the next day after that, we met at our realtor's office and made an offer.

Step 3: Make an offer.

If you've ever seen one of those HGTV "First-time Homebuyer" shows (and, sadly, I have), you think that making an offer on a house is a dramatic process.  You'd think that you make your offer, your realtor leaves the room and calls the selling realtor, and within thirty minutes or maybe an hour you'd have a deal.  And for all I know, back in 2006 when real estate was a hot commodity, it was indeed a process just like this.

But if your experience was anything like ours, it was the most anticlimactic thing ever.  You'll sign a shit-ton of paperwork - all of which will eventually get amended, revised, or completely canceled - you'll leave, and you'll wait.  In our case, we waited about a week for our contract to be accepted.  Our sellers took their time (for good reason, actually), and were honest (we believe) throughout the entire process.  You need to have that trust, and to obtain that trust, you need a realtor who's willing to ask the tough questions.  Thankfully, ours was/remains very tough.

Step 4: Offer accepted (conditionally); time to bring in the lawyers and learn why everyone hates attorneys.

Once our offer was signed, it goes into attorney review.  In New Jersey, that's a mandated time period consisting of at least three business days (ours took ten) where your lawyer and the seller's lawyer work out the minutia and negotiate in order to facilitate what, in theory, should be a fairly seamless transaction.

I'll admit here that although I am not a lawyer, I find the law quite fascinating and I saw this as a unique opportunity to understand an aspect of the law I had never been exposed to.  I ended up so disillusioned with the very idea of real estate law that I never want to work with an attorney again, under any set of circumstances, ever.  And, we're two months ahead of closing.  Woohoo!

Here's what you can expect from your attorney:

• You'll hear one price, and then be charged another, and the second price will be higher.  (In fact, this is fairly common around all aspects of real estate; we learned a valuable, $100 lesson here - ALWAYS get an estimate in writing ahead of time.)
• Responses to your queries that serve his/her best interests in getting the deal done; not your best interests as the client.  The lesson here: always ask for the documentation supporting their decision.  You may find that you don't agree with their conclusion, at which point you should speak up.
• No straight answers (which is related to the bullet point immediately above).  In grad school, you learn to respond to things as succinctly and directly as possible.  At times, I am too direct.  But had I gone to law school instead, I would have learned to be evasive and to use such ambiguous, non-committal language that no real conclusion could be drawn from the words I chose.  It really upsets me that this skill is considered two times (at least) more valuable by the economic marketplace, vs. my own.  Mine is more challenging!

Next Steps: Applying for a mortgage; home inspection.

We haven't done these yet, but this is what's next.  Soon, we'll learn what it's like to be screwed over by a lending institution, which should be fun.

Realize that I'm not yet jaded about owning a home; simply the process involved in buying one.  I can't wait to sit on my patio, smoke a cigar and drink a beer on the night that I move in.  Having said that, it's an exhausting amount of back and forth, and what I think we didn't realize when we got started was just how much effort it takes to keep all of these vendors talking to one another.  Combining this with wedding planning, it's a lot.  But we'll pull through.

Updates to come in the weeks ahead...