The Ad Industry Discovers the Importance of Living a Brand

Adweek reports (hat tip to Steve Cody's RepMan blog ) on an "innovative" idea: selling the new brand or ad campaign internally before taking it out the rest of the world.

That this is considered interesting enough to be worth writing about is surely a stinging indictment of the short-sightedness and narrow vision of the advertising industry.

For the past four or five years I've been giving a speech on the subject of authenticity that emphasizes the need for companies to actually live up to their advertising. "If the brand is a promise," I tell people--and by now their eyes have begun to glaze over, I've been saying it so long--"then your employees are your promise keepers."

I use the old McDonald's "we love to see you smile" campaign as an example, because if any of you ever got a smile out of a McDonald's employee you did a lot better than I ever could.

I say this not as proof of my own prescience--because this seems to me to be so obvious that my mother, sister, or dog could have come up with it--but as evidence of the ad industry's inability to see beyond the 30-second spot, the jingle and the tagline. (For your additional amusement, I point out that the article in question appears under the "non-traditional" and "incentive marketing" banners in the magazine.)

So congratulations, I guess, to Bill Wyman, senior marketing manager at Pepsi, for the campaign profiled in Adweek. "If we were going to be successful in the marketplace, we were going to have to live and breathe the Pepsi brand with all of our employees," Wyman says. "We set out to find every opportunity to communicate what we are doing, and why and how we are doing it."