Sir John Hegarty says the ad industry has lost its nerve.

Advertising Hall of Fame member Sir John Hegarty got into the ad business in 1965. He says his was the first generation of advertising people who got into the business because they wanted to. Until then, he said in an interview with Ad Age publisher Rance Crain, people got into the business to pay the bills, but they really wanted to do something else – painting, writing screenplays, etc.

Along the way, Sir John learned that advertising is not a science; it is an art. Period. I share his observation that clients very badly want advertising to be a science. Of course their reason for this longing is so they can measure it in every way possible, satisfying the bean counters and non-marketing, non-creatives who make most of the decisions that control their destiny.

Another thing he said was pretty gutsy – while preoccupied with chasing the dollar, the advertising industry has lost its courage, and CMOs are not being taken seriously because the accountants set up the figures and don’t understand “the soft stuff” where all the value is. Amen, Sir John. Think about a brand from the consumer’s point of view – the “soft stuff” that you can’t measure very accurately is what matters when you talk about the value of a brand.

 Look back at the breakthrough advertising of the modern era. How much of it was produced in the last decade or so? Can you name a great campaign – a truly great campaign that breaks new ground – produced in the last decade? Maybe he’s damn right.

Men Define Loyalty Programs Through Honor, Women See Trust

It seems you can't venture anywhere in the retail environment without being offered enrollment in a loyalty program. According to the new Living Loyal study from customer engagement agency The Marketing Store, shoppers, on average, have 10 loyalty cards in their wallet. But although they may be called loyalty programs, two in three customers don't think being loyal to a brand is important. 

"There’s an opportunity to maximize marketers’ investments in established loyalty programs by using data they likely already have about their customers’ preferences," says Jeremy Ages, director of strategy and planning, The Marketing Store.

Ages says men and women define loyalty from very different perspectives. Oh yeah, he also says 'storytelling' is important to engage the consumer and enhance their experience with your brand. No, that's not me pitching content marketing; he really did say it.

"While it may seem obvious, men and women approach loyalty differently and marketers should take this into consideration when crafting the language of their messaging," says Ages.

Read Larissa Faw's story in MediaPost

‘Daisy' at 50: A Look at America's Most-Influential Political Ad

LBJ's Attack on Barry Goldwater Changed the Game

In 1964, political advertising on TV was still in its infancy. What Americans had seen of national political spots in the previous presidential runs was rudimentary, lacked sophistication and failed to harness the full potential the medium had to offer. A spot called "Daisy," crafted by DDB, would change all of that in 60 seconds.

Today we take many things for granted, media-wise. This includes nasty attack ads from political campaigns that are full of half-truths or don’t even bother with the truth at all, and feature video or still images that make the opposition candidate look weak, crazy, or worse. As we head into the fall campaign season, Ad Age took a look back at this groundbreaking ad from LBJ’s 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater. Like Apple’s masterpiece “1984” spot, this one only aired as a paid spot once, but it reaped the campaign millions more in unpaid exposure by making itself a news item.

Hershey unwraps new corporate logo, unloads the “apostrophe.”

The Hershey Co. is showing off a redesigned corporate logo that "underscores the company's evolution from a predominately U.S. chocolate maker to a global confection and snack company." Whew, that's some fancy corporate marketing lingo. In plain English, it's a good logo, and it makes sense. 
 As reported in Ad Age, the new logo still includes an image of a Hershey's Kiss, but the new mark shows the tiny candy in silhouette form, stripping off the shiny foil wrapper shown in the old logo. The new image also looks a bit less like the logo shown on a Hershey bar, making use of updated typography and removing the apostrophe 's,' going with "Hershey" rather than "Hershey's."

I’ve always felt using a possessive with your brand name dilutes the power of the statement you make with your brand. So dropping the "apostrophe, s" was a good move that was long overdue. This presentation really does make a more sophisticated corporate statement.In addition to the new logo, Hershey stated that it is "implementing a new, disciplined visual identity system. 

Coming to a college campus near you: the Starbucks coffee truck

"Am I crazy, or is that Starbucks truck following me?" might be something overheard on college campuses soon.

College campuses might be among the few remaining places to escape the shadow of Starbucks. There are roughly 11,500 Starbucks outlets in the U.S., but only about 300 of them are on U.S. campuses. That means most students of the country’s 4,700 colleges are buying their coffee somewhere else.

As Venessa Wong writes in Bloomberg Business Week – that is about to change at three schools. Starbucks will peddle caffeine from food trucks at Arizona State University, James Madison University and Coastal Carolina University.

Why trucks? Starbucks says the trucks can travel around with students throughout the day, literally following them to meet their caffeine needs wherever they pop up, according to a Starbucks spokeswoman. Presumably that means parking outside dorms in the morning and by the quad in the afternoon.

The trucks, operated by food service company Aramark, will help Starbucks reach a coveted demographic and continue their quest for total brand domination. College-age students love coffee. More young adults are “turning to coffee, rather than caffeinated sodas, as their pick-me-up of choice,” reported NPR. Not just any coffee—they want the fancy stuff. 

Just an aside here – does anybody remember when coffee was THE pick-me-up of choice, before the Diet Coke craze, and way before the “energy drink” phase? Admittedly, it was in our college days when many of us began our special relationship with "the bean."

Is bad grammar killing your brand?

Siting our increasingly abbreviated writing styles, Forbes contributor Jayson DeMers poses this very interesting question.

Dramatic, you say? Maybe not so much.

My fellow storytellers at CCM know that I have a love-hate relationship with grammar, a condition that I often blame on the New Jersey public school system. So who am I to write anything about grammar? Seriously, random typos, acronyms, and memes prevail across online and social platforms, and brands are increasingly engaged in a two-way conversation with their communities. I’m not being a 'meme-o-phoebe' here. This is a good thing. But if you begin to sound too much like your audience, overusing acronyms and Internet speak, and losing focus on maintaining a strong brand voice, how can that be anything but detrimental in the long run?

Is your brand cool but authoritative? Hip, but also smart? It better be, or risk being like the parent who, preoccupied with being “the cool mom,” allows her children to make all sorts of bad choices, loses their respect and ultimately drives them away.

DeMers asks, “Is grammar dead, or just changing?” Read thefull story in Forbes.

The oldest company logos in the world

I’m often asked about logos – which do I like best, who designed them and, occasionally, how long they’ve been in use.

Even before Sherwin-Williams began to “cover the earth” and a certain insurance company used the rock of Gibraltar to suggest its sturdiness, their was Stella. The origins of Stella Artois can be traced to 1366 when the Den Hoorn brewery was established in Leuven, Belgium. Despite numerous shifts in management over hundreds of years, the original horn logo has not changed.

In a fast-paced world where clients and marketing consultants seem to share a serious attention deficit, it is truly amazing that so many of the logos we recognize today have been in continuous use, largely unchanged, for so many years.

To learn more about the world's oldest logos, go to the 24/7 Wall Street story by Thomas C. Frohlich.