Trends That Bite

1. Procter & Gamble has announced that it will begin paying its advertising agency and other vendor invoices 120 days out from invoice date. You may say, “So what?” I say: De.spic.a.ble. Increasingly, service companies working with major corporations are being bent and twisted by reduced fees and transmogrified arrangements. Ad agencies, which have long enjoyed remarkably hefty fees for creating clever messaging, are being slammed to the mat of late, as ROI has become every CMO’s Holy Grail. But there are right and wrong ways to squeeze blood from the proverbial turnip, and late payment isn’t one of them. P&G justifies its new policy by insisting that it can’t measure ROI on campaigns until an adequate amount of time has passed, which may be true. So calculate payments on fees (now) plus achievement of goals (later) and pay on time, net 30. The only time 120-day payments could possibly be justified is when declining profits and thin cash flows require it. Vendors get that and are always willing to accommodate. P&G’s first-quarter profits this year were up $160 million to $2.7 billion. Not exactly a cash-flow crunch. This is simply a ball squeeze by folks holding the money and power. And it’s wrong.

2. Speaking of advertising, I saw a television ad the other night, not at all sure who it was for. It was a product-placement parade, including, among others, Pandora. Makes one wonder if a new genre in advertising is on the horizon, turning ads into Seinfeld episodes, i.e., about nothing. Imagine watching a 60-second spot with products appearing in moments of pure happenstance. Could be the next wave of ambient marketing. In a way, it smacks of the latest trend in digital advertising, native ads, i.e., embedded commercial messaging among what my former partner and editor Brian Anderson used to refer to as “real edit.” Should it really be the responsibility of consumers to use every discernment mechanism at their disposal to separate the wheat from the chaff in the fields of content they’re wandering through? Marketers seem lost, or at the very least obsessed, with expectations from distracted consumers that are unrealistic and unattainable.

3. A recent court case in New York brings to light an interesting trend in the world of words. When does a colloquialism become an officially recognized word? It used to be easy to identify slang from proper English. Noah Webster had all the answers. This particular court case revolved around the verbiage of an accused criminal where the term “jack” was used to describe the offense. The courts sourced the widely-used (110 million visits per month) Urban Dictionary to properly define the slang term, jack: to steal or take from an unsuspecting person or store. Nowhere in Webster’s or Oxford will one find that definition. Webster’s goes so far as to provide several definitions: a familiar term of address to a social inferior, a device for turning a spit, a portable mechanism for lifting a heavy object, a female fitting in an electrical circuit, money, etc. Everything but thievery. The Urban Dictionary is just one of many examples where our formal world is being blown to bits and once-sacred norms are crumbling before our eyes.

4. David Brooks’ column in the New York Times, “What Our Words Tell Us,” referenced a recent book and study that identified a fascinating data set derived from Google’s cataloguing of all books written since 1500. The data exposes a trend over the past 50 years indicating a tectonic shift in our cultural and moral priorities based upon the frequency of words appearing in published texts. It’s an unscientific but telling prism into how varying concentrations in our language are directly related to changes in our moral frames and cultural values. As an example, one aspect of the study found that words and phrases referring to individual traits, e.g., self, standout, personalized, come first, unique, etc., were far more common in recent years than those referencing community, e.g., collectives, united, common good, or share—a trend that only began to appear since 1930. It’s yet another new and innovative means of understanding ourselves, this time by chronicling history in data points versus the written word.

Comments

[loose]

Ron,

Thanks for your always insightful and well composed responses. You're ready for your own blog!

[Ron in Alexandria]

L.C., great job in developing this listing of Trends that Bite - the output is interesting food for thought. Extreme extended payment terms are a terrible and destructive concept. I've come to realize that a growing number of commercials are specifically not targeting me. From my perspective (probably Noah Webster's as well), the meaning of the word "marriage" has been “jacked”. Finally, I guess George Harrison was right; "All through the day I me mine, I me mine, I me mine." Take care.