By Mike Kennedy, Captains of Industry

I recently finished reading Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” book trilogy, a wonderful dystopian vision of a future post-America with strong characters and twisty plots mixed into an emotional roller coaster.

And I could not not not wait for the movie adaptations. Perfect cast. Good writer-director. I thought, “This is going to be awesome.” Then, I saw the teaser trailer.

The shot selection, voice over, and editing were just okay. Just a girl running in the woods. Plus some fireballs. You would think this is a run-of-the-mill teen action fantasy. But it is not.

Give me some shots of the reaping event where families gather to hear whose child is selected by the government to fight to the death on TV. Or, show us the cornucopia with its amassed weaponry surrounded by children anxiously waiting to battle.

In contrast, watch the Batman teaser.

Better shots, better pace, better voice over, more emotional, more suspenseful, more dramatic, more cinematic, and more of a tease.

Because I loved the books and I am a fan of the writer-director and the actors, I am still ridiculously psyched to see the “The Hunger Games” movie. But the teaser could have been so much better.

By Ted Page, Captains of Industry

How do you launch a movie called “Contagion”? You could run an ad campaign with TV, in-theater spots, online banners, and some catchy billboards. Or you could do what agency Lowe Roche did and make a billboard that’s really catching, as in catching a bacterial infection. These brilliant knuckleheads actually created billboards that were basically large Petri dishes, and implanted bacterial cultures into them that grew into their headline. People kept coming back to see what was happening. The genius of it is that the concept grew out of what they were selling, something that’s too often missing from 99% of the ads we see. As it says in the Captains Manifesto, great work comes from understanding. Our colleagues at Lowe Roche nailed it. Well done.

By Jean Levasseur, Captains of Industry

When you’re working with creative people, if you want to get results that you’re happy with, you have to give them good feedback. Unfortunately, that can be a very difficult thing to do. After all, a lot of why we like or dislike something is completely subjective.

Here are a few tips to help you offer better feedback to your creative teams, so you can reach a final version faster:

1. Use words that mean something
Recently, I was told that something I wrote lacked “umph.” While the term sounds impressive and creative at first glance, it’s not really an actionable word. Is the information not persuasive enough? Does it lack humor? Is it simply uninteresting? Come to find out, they just wanted something that was a bit funnier – no problem! When you use words that are meaningless, the creative can only guess about what to change and hope for the best. Help them remove the guesswork.

2. Be specific
How many times have creatives shown layouts to people and heard “I don’t know – something on the page just doesn’t work for me”? This dreaded phrase basically means start over again because we don’t know what doesn’t work on the page. As much as possible, hone in on what you don’t like about a layout. Is it the header? The font? Do you feel like it doesn’t match your brand?

3. Don’t confuse personal preference with bad design
Just because you don’t like that shade of green doesn’t mean that it’s a bad design choice. Believe it or not, most designers have a reason for everything they put in a layout, even if that reason sounds like “because it looks good that way”. You hire a designer because of their taste – trust that their design tastes are more refined than yours. Before you reject something because you simply don’t like it, consider the strong experience and knowledge of the designer.
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Happy Friday! Enjoy the first weekend of NFL!

By Ted Page, Captains of Industry

There’s a new expression that keeps popping up at Captains of Industry whenever we’re choosing photographs for our work: “That photo feels too stocky.” Meaning the photo looks overtly staged – conveying a sense of falseness. Using stock photos has been common practice for years, but it’s only been in the last five years or so that I’ve experienced a greater rejection of anything that looks posed, with models or actors and their shiny white smiles. While I don’t have a research study to prove it, I think this change has occurred because of YouTube (in combination with reality TV shows). We’re exposed to much more real people than ever before, and this has increased our collective awareness of things that are fake in all media – print, web, you name it. Of course, if we’re watching a TV comedy or drama, we expect actors performing from scripts. It’s pure entertainment. But for marketing videos on the web, and TV commercials, the trend these days is towards the unscripted, with real people telling real stories. After all, if you have to hire people to express your view or opinion, or the selling points of a product, how true can it all be? You can hire them to say Cadillac is the coolest luxury car brand, or burning coal is great for America, or our candidate is the one you should trust. But the first thing your audience will think is, “Really?”

By Sarah Lombardi, Captains of Industry

Mind-blower of the day: there is an awesome new technology that you’ve likely heard about, but probably didn’t think would actually be put into use in your lifetime. Sorry, I’m not talking about personal jetpacks as viable method of transportation (yet). I’m talking about facial recognition software in digital displays. In other words, displays, i.e. LCDs or OLEDs, that are capable of reading your face, assessing your relative age and sex, and presenting you with an ad that is relevant to your demographic. This is one of those technological advances I hear about and I think, “I am living in the future.” But to be fair, choose your own adventure books or gum that changes flavor also make me feel like I am living in the future.

As cool as this concept sounds, I can’t wait to try it out by bringing my trusty bag of costume hats and facial hair (I always have a bag like this handy), and doing my best to fool the software, much like John Cleese did in the episode on computer facial recognition in The Human Face. Also, I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before someone brings a lawsuit against Intel for creating this software, and I can think of a few reasons why such a suit might actually make it to court.

But in all seriousness, I appreciate when ads are targeted to me and not, say, anyone who’s watching the Super Bowl. Hulu and Google, sites that I use regularly, both make an effort to suggest tv shows and websites, respectively, that are relevant to me based on my site searches, and it sure beats the alternative. Then again, they don’t need to scan my face to personalize my ads. Of course this software will raise the inevitable privacy concerns, and it does make me question just how personal an ad can be when it’s only based on age and sex. For the time being I’m content to see the innovative (excuse my buzzword) ways companies will start using this stuff.

By Ted Page, Captains of Industry

It’s a common concern. You want to show that your company is a thought leader, but you don’t want to give away the candy store. Or, do you? Recently, Captains of Industry gave a presentation on Web Video Storytelling as part of a MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Seminar – 25 years of our video wisdom and how-to’s that we provided for free. The vast majority of the hundreds of marketers who participated in the seminar will never hire us, and that’s just fine. Here’s why:

1. Even if you explain in great detail how to do something (like make a great corporate video), it’s still a lot easier to hire the experts to get it done. So a small percentage of the audience will hire us.

2. Being featured in MarketingProfs as content development experts, with back-links to Captainsofindustry.com, will help us rise higher in the search engines organically for the right terms – like “web video”. This has a cumulative effect over time as our company name and URL are featured on more and more sites and blogs.

3. Times have changed. The days of holding onto all your knowledge and asking for a check up front before you share any secrets is over. You can put a wall up around your expertise. But if you do, these days there’s likely to be a competitor that’s more forthcoming with their knowledge, and they’ll attract more clients than you will.

4. You have to be patient. It can be nine months or more before your content leads to a sale. An ad placement might make your phone right faster – but you have to pay a lot for media placement costs. Once your content is published, it typically stays on the web indefinitely – at no cost to you.

All that said, you don’t have to share ALL your secrets. Keep a few stored in your company treasure chest and take them out when you win the client. But you at least have to provide a glimpse of the treasure so clients know you have the goods. It works.

Happy Friday and enjoy the long weekend!

By Ted Page, Captains of Industry


We’ve all seen our share of whacky late night TV commercials, sometimes (I’ll freely admit) in a self-induced stupor surrounded by empty bags of Cheetos. Some of the commercials are just plain bad. Others take their badness to a new level that’s hilarious and inspiring. That’s why I was happy to learn about Commercial Kings, a company started by two guys who loved to make their own strange brand of late night TV spots, traveling the country to make commercials for off-beat stuff like pet hotels. Their spot for Presidential Car Wash is solid gold.

Now the duo has a new show on IFC comprised of their best spots, or hopefully their worst. If you haven’t seen their work, be sure to stock up on beer and junk food and let your mind go to a wonderful new place full of delicious badness. Sure, we’ve done our share of so-bad-it’s-great here at Captains, but these guys take the cake. Click the link on your screen RIGHT NOW and I’ll throw in the bamboo steamer.*

* Offer void in every state. Do not watch while using heavy machinery. May cause hysteria if combined with other drugs.

By Sarah Lombardi, Captains of Industry

Caught your eye when I used the word “secret,” didn’t I? It works on me every time. The mere mention of “Secret things you don’t know about mortgages but should” and I’m clicking all over the place, devouring these promised secrets left and right. I’m not even in the market to buy a house but I do like to be in the know about, well, pretty much whatever you can throw at me, as long as you tout it as privileged information.

Food trucks capitalize on this eagerness to be in on the secret. Grant McCracken’s article on food trucks and marketing points out that “the thrill of the chase” can cause people to actively track down food trucks:

“Food trucks are good at managing scarcity. Kogi Korean BBQ makes itself hard to find. There is the delicious sense that the meal we are eating is just possibly a meal we might never have a chance to eat again…Treasure this meal because you may never see this truck again!”

Twitter pages help, and they also contribute to the sense of mystery that comes with being on a scavenger hunt—”Where can I find my favorite truck today?” The concept of scarcity as a selling tool is not new, but food trucks use the intriguing method of creating their own scarcity. It is worth noting that the food actually has to be decent in order to cause a demand which exceeds the supply, but the challenge of pursuing a meal on wheels is half the fun. It’s certainly more fun than sitting in a restaurant waiting for the coaster to light up after half an hour, but the end result is the same—a feeling of triumph when you are next in line.

If you are suffering from the same old marketing tactics and could use a change of pace, try the food truck method of marketing by adding a little mystery—and, if possible, a little scarcity—to your product. Oh, and it might not hurt to play “Pop Goes the Weasel” over a small PA, but I’ll leave that decision up to you.

Happy Friday, stay out of the hurricane!

By Ted Page, Captains of Industry

I recently had a very interesting conversation with someone outside the ad industry about the show Mad Men, who thought the characters on the show were “slick” – and not in a nice way, and that this womanizing, slimy, heavy-drinking persona was a reflection of the ad world today. Basically ad men and women are perceived as professional liars. Pay us enough money, and we’ll craft a campaign that can sell snow to an Eskimo. After all, in one Mad Men episode the lead character, Creative Director Don Draper, turned against the cigarette companies, but only after they fired him. I was reminded of the time when I was a young copywriter with a big New York agency and the Creative Director forced everyone in the agency to work on a cigarette account over the weekend. I was anti-smoking, but my immediate boss, an Associate Creative Director, was a former smoker who HATED cigarettes and nearly quit that weekend. He told me I could come up with any cigarette ad I wanted. So I did layouts featuring Fred Astaire in a tux, smoking a cigarette. The headline read, “You’re going to die anyway. Why not have some fun?” The concept was thrown into the mix to show the creative director, and somehow I stayed employed.

What isn’t well-known outside our industry is that outright lying is typically forbidden. So a range of techniques are used by the big ad shops to convey a perception without stating an untruth. For example, a headline for a brand of soap reads, “The soap for women who are sensitive about their skin.” The soap may offer absolutely no extra benefits for skin that’s sensitive. But if you are sensitive about your skin, you’ll want to buy it. No wonder our industry has a bad rap. For the most part, it’s deserved. And it’s one of the reasons I’m thrilled, and very lucky, to have my own agency, a company that’s smaller than the huge shops on purpose, allowing us to only take on clients we really believe in – whether they’re in renewable energy like First Wind, or sexy hybrid electric sports cars like the Fisker Karma. And here’s the best part: when you’re always telling the whole truth about a product that’s actually good for the world, the work is better. And it feels good to come into the office every day. Although, in truth, there are days I wish I had Don Draper’s hair.