[Bosh]

Hi id:

Honestly, my first step would be to listen to them myself.  Alone and for a reasonable period.  I can't really think about products I've never used (I was a dismal failure on the Tampax account).

Then I'd pull together some one-on-ones (interviews with individual users), followed by focus groups (several users in a group discussion).  I refer back to the one-on's to sift out any bullshit from the groups (people act differently in the group dynamic).

Next, probably armed with backing input from the user groups, I'd probably try to talk you out of that "Zonko" name...unless it had been around long enough to build up any equity in the marketplace (in this case, I'd hope not).

Then the Head of Zonko and I would sit down and discuss where he wanted to take the product.  We know what it IS.  What do we want it to BE?  To whom?  

From there we build a Brand map.  Where we are, want to go, why we can, what might get in the way, etc (etc etc etc).

By this point we've figured a lot of stuff out.  So much the Mr. Zonko's of this world are usually quite giddy.

Now comes the communications strategy (we will do posters above urinals at the next CES, for example).

Now the creative brief (what is the 'tone and manner' of the Brand?  What is the ONE THING we want the peeing reader to come away with about Zonko Loudspeakers?  What, if anything, is to be considered mandatory?  What, if anything, should be avoided?).

Then you wait.  Then I call you to push the next meeting, the creative presentation, back.  Then I start ducking your calls.  And then, just when you're thinking "Where's my ****ing agency!" I'm knocking on your door with a thick "pizza case" filled with rough layouts representing various possible advertising campaings for Zonko.

With great difficulty, you select one and get on with producing it "full up", or for real.  OR you decide you just can't decide so we help you pick two, which we then pretty up to the point where the laymen will know what he's supposed to be looking at and we do some more focus groups or "comm checks".  THEN we make a choice based not on which one the target audience "liked" (a terrible trap, that is), but based on which one best communicated, clearly, what it is we want to say about the Brand.

Now into production.  You get to meet groovy photographers and/or illustrators and type designers and get way too wasted we when take out to the clubs in South Beach/New York/LA on the final night of the shoot.

The media company, cash, cheque or money order in hand, now gets a big stack of beautiful urinal posters to put up at the Hilton in time for the Show.

Opening night, and while some big retailers and reviewers find it a little off-putting when you keep asking if they need to use the bathroom, all goes well.  A good buzz about your product is in the air.

Cut to a few years later and you're dating Mark Levinson's (the Man) old girlfriend from Sex In The City.

It's that easy.

Okay.  Some fun.  But I'm serious about 86.99% of above.  

And it's pretty much what I'd do.  If I were doing this sort f thing.  Which I'm not.

[infiniti driver]

Sounds great but damn...how much would all that cost?

Just from this vantage point over the entire course (looks like 16 weeks or so) somewhere in the neighborhood of 35G's plus expenses of another 20 or so K.

So with this 55K invested, would I be able to afford to even take orders?

It looks like your model would work well for an A-ok 400K start-up (after product development and packaging, product ready to ship) but what about someone who blew their wad making the zonko's and really is simply stuck with an oppurtunity to start really small?

See, this is where the situation lies with many a start-up venture.

Lets look at bottleheads for example. Totally web based. Sold several hundred if not well over 2 thousand kits by now...and growing. I don't even thing Doc B can afford anywhere near what you have going on.

Now your real focus seems to be to grab a-hold of a company that actually has a few hundred thousand in fluid cash to use purposely. You and I know, banks don't loan strickly on intangables. So...would your marketing firm also have a credit line available to prospects brokered through a finacial agency? This seems to be the only route to use your sevices in a perdicament that I describe.

I do appreciate your writings and wisdom but I am talking of how it can be practical for the start-up company to induldge in your services and come out with their head on their shoulders instead of their ass in a sling and the bank with the sharpest blades on the fastest lawnmower in town!?


Now, lets look this way...

A company has 5 patents on a new technology and wants to "sell" the technology to a major company. Would you entertain that form of inter-corporate advertising instead of consumer advertising?

Personally, If I were in your game, I would seek inter-sell situations where someones idea can be advertised and promoted to sell an idea, rather than to do commercial retail commerce...but we all have our lives and what to do with them is always changing.


Doing internal corporate advertising is where the big bucks are.

[Bosh]

I know what corporate advertising is; and B2B advertising (business-to-business), but I'm not sure what you mean by "internal corporate".  I'm will to learn, tho.

And no, of course a unfunded startup can't be laying down that kind of money (and that 30-40k was a damn good guess, BTW).  But who's to say it has to cost that much?

The agreement really young companies make with advertising creatives goes something like this:  you work together with the advertising people to put together a strategy/creative brief.  This costs you $0., plus the cost of shipping the product for the team to experience, photograph, etc.(return ship is your dime, too). The creative team does your ads for free.  Why? The client (you) pledge to approve and run the advertising--no consumer groups--no telling us that the product/logo should be bigger and we have to include a picture of your wife etc.  How?  We pull in favors and/or do as much of the production work as possible ourselves.You pay to run the ads, posters or etc (cost of media).

You get free stuff, we get cool ads we can be proud of and submit to award shows.

Now the rubber, as they say, meets the road.  Either you see a return on your investment (so far some postage and the price of the pages in the books) or you don't.

If you do, you want to keep running.  Well no self respecting creative team is going to "sell" you one ad.  It takes three just to prove the idea is a campaign idea (has legs, will last).  You've already got two more ads, so you start running them in rotation.  If it's working out, if the phone is ringing and the website active, etc, then you might call those ad guys back for more.  At that point you have become a real "client" and you work out a compensation plan with the freelancers who are now on the verge of becoming a "real" agency.

At the very least you end up with three, professional ads that you can turn into posters and hang in your workshop.  But let me stress, you HAVE to run it in real consumer media, at least once.  That's always a critical part of deals like the one above.  Because unless it runs it can't be submitted to award shows and it's considered spec work, which is useless to experienced advertising people.

So, you may be able to get some damn nice advertising done for the price of two-way shipment of the product (and not even that if you can find a top-notch creative team in your area) and a page in a national magazine.  But that last part's not cheap.

Keep in mind that even this is only of you intend to come on strong.  If you just want to move some product you can buy smaller spaces in the mags and they'll be happy to "design" the ads for you, but this is really just classified advertising with a picture and (maybe) a logo in it.  Which is fine, too.  It all depends on your personal ambitions.  And amusingly enough, that all goes right back to the real meaning of my original post:  which I now wish I had worded:

To those of you who advertise:  Why does your advertising suck when it doesn't have to?

Well, at least I had put in the first part.  Because I fear this thread has attracted at least a couple fourteen year olds with soldering irons.

You can pm me if you like.

[infiniti driver]

Definitly I would like to speak further with you...and in the PM..

The Inter-corporate advertising is what goes on outside the public eye. Simalar to a large drug company advertising in Doctors publications or better yet, a large corporation advertising their "new services" to their own clients or something as simple as the invertor of a chip technology advertising their skills to Texas Instruments to see if the patent could be sold and a deal struck. This all takes more than just consultants to pull off. Teams of marketeers are assembled not only to "sell corporate stratigies" but to sell to Universitiys in recruting and advertising campagines are definitly waged and earned. Another example would be any form of design or manufacturing that is strickly outside the public eye and done so at any scale needed to get the job done. Even the several branches of the US military have their advertising to other corporations. Eglin AFB in FT Walton Beach Florida "rents" time in their climatic hanger (200F down to -65F) for industries such as Goodyear tire and rubber or any design team that needs climatic testing in a large space. This "behind the scenes advertising" is super big business.

Just thought I would see if you have explored that area at all. During this week coming up, I would like to bounce a couple things off of you for the near future...I got a few things happening and they are not Zonkos (LOL)