The Lester Chronicles

(A blog recently published in Washington, D.C.)


So What’s a Blog Anyway?

I don’t know anything about Senator Obama’s secret service protection but I do know that the blog about him was written up as a strong example of the use of blogging.

Blogs and blogging have become a significant part of our information repertoire but many of us, like me, create them without knowing exactly what the structure and definition of a blog really is. So I did some research.

In the New York Review of Books, Sarah Boxer, author of “Ultimate Blogs; Masterworks from the Wild Web”, wrote a definitive article under the simple title, “Blogs”.

She defines a blog as follows, “A blog, for those who don’t know, is a journal or log that appears on a web site. It is written on line, read on line, and updated on line…..The word “blog” is a portmanteau term for Web log or Weblog.”

“ In 1997 Jorn Barger, the keeper of Robot Wisdom a Web site ……coined the word “Weblog”. In 1999 Peter Merholz, the author of a Weblog called Peterme, split it in two like this-“We blog”---creating a word that could serve as either noun or verb. “Blog was born.”

“Today there are, by one count, more than 100 million blogs in the world with about 15 million of them active…..There are political blogs, confessional blogs, gossip blogs, sex blogs, mommy blogs, science blogs, soldier blogs, gadget blogs, fiction blogs, video blogs, photo blogs and cartoon blogs, to name a few….”

“With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links---those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another web site. (“Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source….”)

“Although blogging has precedents going back to the early 1980’s, on-line news groups, on-line diaries, “We’ve Got Blog” began gathering steam about 1998.  That was when a number of people began using their web sites to record and to link to the new sites they had discovered.”

“When the blog book came, the tone of the blogosphere began to shift. A lot of the new blogs, though certainly not all of them—weren’t so much filters for the web as vents for opinion and self-revelation. Instead of figuring out ways to serve up good fresh finds many of the new bloggers were fixated on getting found. So the very significance of linking began to change….”

“Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, and free associative, infantile, sexy, petty dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter…. They are what they write and you can’t fake that.”

And so I thank Sarah Boxer for helping me define and describe blogging. But let’s go on.

What fascinates me is the function of today’s blogging. It is today’s street talk, and vox populi; casual, personal, and revealing.

So what does this mean to the marketer?

It rests in the influence that blogs, buzz, word of mouth, etc. have on consumer purchase decisions. Technology affords us a glimpse of the conversations of influencers who are shaping those consumer perceptions. The result is that we have unfettered, unadulterated access to the real thoughts customers in their own voices. Now is the time for marketers to perk up and listen to what they are saying and thinking. What we’ll hear will foster the creation of relationships between marketers, and then customers and ultimately prospects. That is, provided we take the time to hear them and have the proper analytical tools to do so quickly and effectively. This may be difficult, but we will do so because we value relevance and information.

It reminds me of something Ginger Rogers said of her dancing with Fred Astaire. She said, “I have to do everything he does, backwards and in high heels.”

Let us, for the purposes of this blog, begin by looking upward.

The heavens, as we know them, are populated by the stars and planets that encircle the earth. Many of the stars have been organized into recognizable constellations. But they are vulnerable. Stars are on fire, they flash, burn and sometimes explode and fall from the heavens, planets move serenely in their timeless, pre-ordained heavenly orbits.  And, that’s the way it was.

But now the industrial sky above us has changed once again. New to our solar system is the concept of rocket-driven spaceships, which can penetrate and probe the heavens and return to earth or be placed in long-term orbits.

Coming back to earth, we find that most advertising agencies have become stable planets, circling in serene orbits or meteors that flash and burn out.

Each agency makes a strategic choice—either to be aflame and as combustible as a star or find its place in the more stable solar system of our industry.

When I founded the company that bears my name, I set our orbital sights higher than those of the existing agencies. We launched, defined, and explored a completely new dimension that we named “Direct Marketing.”

I like to think of this agency as a cutting-edge probe that located and continues to explore a new constellation. But to my dismay, we soon found that many others began to settle in our new neighborhood. So we fired up again to explore the new and the as yet unknown.

Coming back down to earth, and our industry, the question arises, at some point or other, for each advertising agency as to whether they want to be stars or planets or probes? Are they aflame with talent, imagination and innovation or are they mired in a stagnant immutable orbit.  We have the choice of what we want to be…..Star, Planet, Probe or a combination of all of those.

I made my choice half a century ago and I have not changed my mind. Each generation at Wunderman has a choice. What’s yours?

I am sure that many of you wonder what executives such as myself do when we are elsewhere and you see our offices empty.

Let me give you a recent example:

Last June, I received an invitation from the head of the Effie Awards, Poland that they and the Harvard Business Review, Poland were planning a Marketing Forum on October 22, and they asked if I would address the conference. The audience would be Marketing Directors and CEO’s of major companies in Poland.

I immediately contacted Christina Fritz, Deputy Managing Director of our office in Warsaw to determine whether or not this would be a useful exposure for Wunderman, Poland.  She and her colleagues thought that my participation would be a major benefit for the agency and so I agreed to attend and to speak.

That part of it was easy. All done by email and phone. The first issue always to be solved is: What should the content of my talk be. What would this audience want to be informed about? How best could I make a meaningful contribution to their knowledge? What could I say that would differentiate us from all of the other agencies that would be presenting?  I was assigned a subject which was; “The alchemy of direct marketing success. New tools for using direct marketing to build effective customer relations and to enhance customer loyalty."

And so I began to think about the subject. I made notes, I talked to myself, I put some trial thoughts into my computer. Early in my career when I attended classes on creativity and imagination, I was taught that if you consciously pose yourself a problem, your subconscious mind immediately begins to work on the solution. As a famous author once said, “I put all the ingredients in my head before I go to sleep and when I wake up the bread is baked.” And so after days of false starts and frustration the “bread” indeed began to bake. I wrote the headline for the talk as if it were an ad although speeches have themes not headlines. It was, “The Customer and The Relationship as Hero” and once having the subject in focus the rest was relatively simple.  The audience responded enthusiastically to my talk and as a result, I was asked to appear on the leading television talk show in Poland and be interviewed by a well-known TV anchor.

So what happens on a day that my office is empty? Plenty!!
When you pass my office and see me there, you’ll know I am not In Warsaw or any of the other 108 offices in 55 countries that now comprise the Wunderman network

Agenda Warsaw, Poland (as provided by our Warsaw office)

October 21
1:40 Arrival in Warsaw

October 22
9:00 A meeting in the lobby of the Bristol Hotel with Cristina Fritz.
Three press interviews.

Transport to the agency

9.30 Interview at agency with press

9:45 Interview with press

10.45 – 11.45 Meeting with the agency people

11.45 – 12.30 Interview with press

12.30 – 13.30 Lunch with agency personnel at Venti-Tre Restaurant

After lunch meeting with journalist

3:00 Speech to Marketing Forum

4:30 Return to hotel

7:00 Attend Effie Gala at National Theater

9:30 Return to Bristol Hotel


October 23
9:15 Transport to Wunderman Poland office

9:30 Press interview

10:00 Press interview

10:45 – 11:45 Meeting with agency personnel

11:45 – 12:30 Interviews with press

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch with agency personnel (Restaurant Biblioteka)

13:30 – 14:10 Interviews with press

14:10 Go to TV station for a live interview

15:00 – 15:30 Interview at TV station

16:00 – 16:45 Interview with press

16:45 – 17:45 Return to the hotel

17:45 Pick up at the hotel

18:00 Cocktails with clients and press

21:30 Return to the Bristol hotel


10/24/07
Free day


10/25/07 
15:15 Pick up at hotel

17:15 Flight back to New York


And so four action-filled days were over, but as always the memories of such a trip continue to echo in my mind. What's important to know is that I enjoyed every minute of it as I always have and I believe that I always will.

This is my first blog after a long and exciting summer at my home in the small village of Mougins, France.

One morning last month I began to think about what’s next.  What will follow from the current information age, data collection and all the new communication devices and channels?  And then in a “Eureka”-like moment I knew the next step had to be the idea I have long cherished as “Personal Advertising.”

We know that the age of mass media is over and we see signs that mass production is becoming more personalized.  The keystone of mass production was the automobile.  Henry Ford had one model in one color.  Today the variations of cars that factories and their assemblers produce are infinite.  And so we begin to enter the age of more Personal Production and more Personal Advertising.  My executive assistant, Carolyn Tousius, led me to a Website for Clarins, a cosmetic company that offers different products to woman of different ages.  And then, I recalled how impressed I was when I visited Fresh Direct, a company that delivers personalized food baskets to individual customers based on data and computer interaction.  What we know is increasingly being translated into what we do and what we say and to whom.

And so I am beginning another book called Personal Advertising, with a potential subtitle:  Advertising, Marketing and Manufacturing in a Consumer-Driven Society.

I'm energized by the subject and eager to hear what my readers think.  Let me know.

We have just experienced Memorial Day, that has become a kind of signal that summer, in America, and some personal time is just ahead for many of us. For some of us it is family time, or a time for relaxation, for me, it always has been time off for growth.

As many of you know, I have a house in the South of France in the village of Mougins. A place where everything grows, trees, grapes, olives, and the very special local lemons, mandarin oranges and kumquats.

It is also the place where many artists, writers and photographers have lived, worked and grown. The villages around Mougins were the workplaces of Picasso, Dufy, Van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir, Bonnard, etc.. My next door neighbor and friend is Roger Muhl, one of today’s painters of choice. The air is so clear and the colors so vivid that photographers such as David Douglas Duncan, Andre Villers have lived and worked there. The region attracted writers as well. Authors such as Marcel Pagnol, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene.  We are also surrounded by galleries and museums that feature local creative work.

And it is there, in my French home office, that I too work every day from 9:00am until 1:00 lunch time. My current projects are a book of my photographs of Africa and sculpture of the Dogon tribe of Mali, that are on exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum here and The Louvre in Paris.  The sequel to “Being Direct”, to be published next year, tentatively titled “Being More Direct”. A novel I have been thinking about that has as its subject my life in advertising and the thinking that has accompanied it.  Then too, I have begun a book of stories that illustrate and describe life in a small French village that includes some local murders, thefts, love affairs, etc.

So for me “Time Off” has been and remains “Time In.” It is during summers that I studied philosophy at Columbia, acting and public speaking at The American Theater Wing, Photography at the International Center of Photography, visited with Jacqueline Kennedy, Jiang Zemin, and the great French poet Leopold Senghor, then President of Senegal and enjoyed long walks and conversations with my good friend Leonard Bernstein here and in Mexico.

So my best wishes to all of you for a happy and productive summer. Someone once said of roses “if you plant them well, they will grow beautifully.” So it can be with ideas, people, and life or so I believe.

Last week, I was the keynote speaker at the Forrester Marketing Forum in Miami. Forrester is the very prestigious marketing consulting firm and think-tank headquartered in Cambridge, Mass.  The subject of the conference was "Reinventing Marketing for Customer Centricity." As they said in their program guide, "customer centricity isn't a new idea—we've all been talking about it for a long time. The reality is that few firms have figured out the recipe for successfully transforming their business."

The subject of the conference was very relevant to our practice and that is probably why I was chosen to be the keynote speaker. We, for years, have been expert at the idea of customer centricity. It’s a basic part of our global discipline. My talk was titled "The Customer and Customer Relationships as Heroes."   I worked hard on getting it right because Forrester not only consults but rates and ranks agencies and all of us are eager to have them raise our rating.

The opening lines of my talk were: "David Ogilvy was famous for creating his agency's slogan: "we sell or else."  I went on to say that, in this customer-centric era, we here at Wunderman have moved further ahead by recognizing and proving that "we create relationships or else."

I also said "successful consumer-centric companies now know that to engage in relevant dialogues with their customers and prospects, they must have in place state-of-the-art, digital direct marketing technologies and highly trained personnel.  Digital technology has changed the content and the context of advertising."

I also explained that marketing online is not the same as mass advertising.  We know that what happens "After The Click" is critical and we have become expert at analyzing critical data and converting prospects into profitable ongoing customers.  Creating relationships and customers is almost like converting water into wine—part magic, part talent, and all part of the "Relationship Marketing" discipline that we have successfully introduced to every part of the economically developed world. The foundation of our practice is that data creates relevance, relevance and interactivity create relationships.  This is never more true, or immediate, than online. 

Just north of our headquarters building on Madison Ave. are several small shops. A take-out lunch place, and a small Italian men’s clothing shop named Riflessi that sells suits, shirts, ties, mufflers. They are all well known brands made in Italy by a variety of manufacturers.

Daily, each time I pass the shop, the manager, Aldo Truscello, a slim balding man with an attractive Italian accent, waves to me in greeting.  Whenever I have a need for anything the shop sells, I am greeted with an exuberant “Hallo Mr. Lester” accompanied by a strong Italian “abraccio.”

On one freezing cold winter afternoon, I passed the shop and Aldo’s wave had become a beckoning invitation to drop in.  I entered the shop and he said, “it’s cold outside and you are not even wearing a warm muffler”.  He dashed over to one of the many drawers in the shop and took out a brown wool muffler that matched the suit I was wearing. “It’s 100% cashmere,” he said putting it around my neck.

He then spent some quiet minutes studying the rest of the clothing I was wearing and commented favorably on my suit.  But, after some time, he remarked that he didn’t think the tie I was wearing did justice to my suit.

He went rummaging through another drawer and after careful examination he came out with a tie and declared: “this one is right.” And so, with no further ado, I was wearing a handsome new Italian silk tie.  “Now” he said, “you are well dressed, just like my other favorite customer Regis Philbin.”  

I knew who Regis Philbin was because my wife, Sue, and I sometimes watched his television show while we had breakfast. I had always noted how well dressed Mr. Philbin was and now I knew who provided his clothes, the same Aldo Truscello who was now dressing me.

Now that I was properly dressed, Signor Truscello said, “It’s time for an espresso.”  So there I was on this freezing cold winter’s day, wearing no coat, just my suit and my new tie and muffler being marched outside to Madison Ave.  From there, my arm was taken and at a fast pace I was led to a small Italian coffee shop on Fifth Ave., across from the New York Public Library. We were joined by a third man who had been sitting in M. Reflessi’s shop.  He joined us in our espresso adventure and told me that he was Regis Philbin’s best friend and shopping companion.

After our coffee, which we drank standing at the espresso bar, Italian style, we returned to 285 Madison Ave.  Aldo Truscello and Regis Philbin’s friend to his shop and me to my office.  And with a wave and a “molto grazie” it was done.

Our agency specializes in advertising that creates buyer-seller relationships.  But sadly, I recognized the limitations of media, you can’t share a hot espresso, “abraccios,” or the touch of real human contact over the Web or even through the mail. 

And so I conclude, with some regret, that we are right when we express our company’s mantra that all relationships are local.  If they are not yet so, technology, time, our vision and human warmth will make them so.

Recently an issue of The Wall Street Journal contained a multi-page article by Michael Totty with a banner headline: How To Protect Your Private Information. I read it with great interest since privacy is certainly one of the key communication issues we face in The Information Age.

The article began: “On the Internet” as a New Yorker cartoon famously observed, “no one knows you’re a dog. Thanks to the ease of finding personal information online, that may be the only thing they don’t know…… It’s enough to make anyone feel…exposed. Do we really want our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues—or any stranger, for that matter—knowing so much about us? Do we want them to know even the small stuff: where we’ve lived, how much we paid for our house, how old we are, how they can reach us?”

Well that worried me? Was I that exposed? Have I been getting email that invades my privacy? So I did something about it. I decided to read and copy all the email I received this morning fearing the worst. Let me share it with you without embarrassment.

email: 9:30 am January 31, 2007.

   Mohammedobe……………strangulate subbtrahend

   Sylvia Roberts…………….Request an appointment

   N.Y. Times .com………..Today’s Headlines: In The Senate

   Mable…………………Hot shot stock Info pitilessly

   Lori Ann Pope……..On-Line Pre-Registration closes

   Inter-America………Inter-American Dialogue World

   Inter-America……...Latin America’s Wireless Sector

   Susanne Sicilli…..Signing now for the Best of B-to-B

   auto-confirm………..You’re order with Amazon.com

   Celeste……………………..Hot Shot Stock Info Call

I love the Web, but I hate irrelevance.

Nobody knows I’m a dog!   Need I say more?

Lester Wunderman

As we look forward to the upcoming holiday season, we must be careful that in using the Internet and other of today's automated ways of buying, selling and communicating, we do not lose the human touch that converts transactions into services.

Service is that unique value that only one human being can offer to another. What makes something memorable isn't just its quality or value but the human experience and satisfaction that goes with it.

As professionals, we give our best effort to the work at hand.  To do less would be to deprive ourselves and our clients of the quality of imagination, invention and service that is our heritage.

In thinking of the essence of the forthcoming holidays, I was reminded of a poem, a copy of which I always keep near at hand because it defines what we must always resist.

It is by William Wordsworth who, even in his time, rejected the philosophy of pure materialism.  He wrote:

I would like to thank my readers and bloggers for their thoughts and comments to my inaugural blog.  My hope is that I will address them in future blogs, so keep reading.

However, I do want to address one point on the importance of the information as our current and future hero.  Information is about someone or something.  It helps create relevant messages to individual consumers and their respective needs.  In today’s marketing world, we must be mindful that information and the customer are inextricably linked.

Now, let’s move on to this week’s topic.

We are in the business of using language persuasively. We use language to arouse curiosity, capture attention, impart information, explain ideas, create recall, generate emotion, enhance persuasion, and stimulate action.

We constantly search for those appropriate and explicit words and phrases that will arouse interest and trigger action.

When we do that, we are not just another part of our industry but of a special and unique group of imaginative and sensitive individuals who constantly strive to create effective, persuasive and even, on occasion, beautiful prose and poetry.

We all have our favorite authors. Their letters, speeches, essays, novels, plays or poems, enrich our lives and our thoughts.

One of my favorites is the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, whose Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs I read again and again. There is one of his poems called: FOR THE SAKE OF A SINGLE VERSE, that I find unforgettable. It always moves and inspires me to try to think and write better.

Let me share a bit of it with you.

For The Sake Of A Single Verse

“For verses are not, as people imagine simply feelings (those one has early enough,)—they are experiences.  For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning”

I hope that you too find these few lines from Rilke as moving as I do.  I believe the sensitive and precise use of thoughtful language can enrich our clients dialogues with consumers? Why shouldn’t we aspire to think about the ads we create and the lines we write with Rilke’s passion and sensitivity. Why can’t our creative mantra become: “For The Sake Of A Single Ad or Commercial One Must etc”?

Lester