Early on in my marketing career, right about college, I discovered advertising and marketing giants that literally influenced the way I thought about all creative communication until present day.  Whenever I think about a new project or marketing initiative, one of the first things that comes’ to mind is; “What would Bernbach, Ogilvy, or Burnett do?”  Let me tell you right now, that if you don’t know these names, it would do you a world of good to find out.

Before the Cluetrain Manifesto, before Seth Godin and Viral Marketing, and before Mike Moran and Do It Wrong Quickly, there where these three.  They shaped advertising in their day, and the days to follow, and set a standard that knowing it or not, if you’re a good marketer, you already set yourself to follow.

What these three did and how they did it, in a time when the modern age of US consumerism was evolving in response to a more sophisticated consumer, was to explore advertising, and in relation, marketing, and created a new philosophy that mixed art and science to come up with some of the most successful campaigns anyone had or has seen since.

Just to clarify, I’m talking about Bill Bernbach, David Ogilvy, and Leo Burnett.  Ad men par excellence.  Go ahead and click on the links so you can learn yourself a little something.

And what do these three men have to do with today’s internet/ digital media world?  Simply this, “What’s true today was true yesterday” or my favorite, “All that’s old is new again.” These guys just didn’t change the ad and marketing space, the created new and exciting ways to explore it.  Just reading up on some of their campaigns will seem like complete déjà vu.

Bill Bernbach had an artistic and poetic bent the created a new way of thinking about advertising.  He was the mind that came up with the “Think Small” campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle, which is still recognized as the best advertising campaign of the 20th century. He just didn’t make some pretty pictures and some copy, he created concepts about the products he was trying to sell.  He made his campaigns exciting in a way that that very few had seen before.  He believed the good communication and good art would convey how good a product is.  He set out to prove that advertising and marketing was an art form, and those that did not treat it as such would fall by the wayside.    How many times have you seen bad marketing tank a product or service?

“Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art,  and good writing can be good selling.”

David Ogilvy was the quintessential advertising logician.  To hear him talk, you would think that creativity was a four letter word and should be burned out of the brain with acid.    He was into meticulous research and staying close to reality.  When he did a campaign, the first thing he did was learn everything, and I mean absolutely everything, he could about the product he was creating a campaign for.  When he created one of the best taglines for an automobile…ever, it was all research that led him to it.  “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock”  This after he spent hours combing through the actual car, driving it, sitting in it, and generally bugging the shit out of the engineers.  So, putting both the product and the consumer in his mind, he found that one detail which made the difference.  The Ogilvy Method was used to completely know the product and the products clients.

“We in direct response know exactly to the penny how many products we sell with each of our advertisements. Your favorite music is the applause of your fellow art directors and copywriters. Our favorite music is the ring of the cash register.”

Leo Burnett was a branding animal.  There’s just no other way to say it.  He believed in creating an image around a product was recognizable and communicated the meaning of the product.  This is the man who created The Green Giant, Toucan Sam, Charlie the Tuna, and Tony the Tiger, just to name a few.  He concentrated on style and symbolism, creating what he called the “inherent drama” of a product.  Leo created a brand culture within his own company as well, using a big, black pencil throughout his career to symbolize the warmth and humanity of the people behind ideas.  Burnett was in all things very human and down to earth in his approach.  He believed in ideas, and the culture of ideas born from human imagination. And believed in having fun in what you create, and being bold and honest.

“Creative ideas flourish best in a shop which preserves some spirit of fun. Nobody is in business for fun, but that does not mean there cannot be fun in business.”

Three big names and three big ideas; the vision, the research and the brand are three of the most important concepts in any campaign.  If you’re not using these, then you’re not doing a good job at promoting your product.  It’s not just text links and traffic, but believability and communication.  In this internet age where we judge things by traffic, clicks and conversions, I often wonder what these three would have done.

Between you and me, I think they would have kicked our collective asses.

Yahoo Giants Of Advertising.  I suggest it highly.

Bill Bernach on GOA.

David Ogilvy on GOA

Leo Burnett on GOA

*Warning – much introspective commentary will ensue.

I recently faced a daunting period in my search optimization experience.  I’ve never considered myself as an SEO expert per se, but I did consider myself an excellent online entrepreneur and marketer, learning over the years the subtleties of conversion rates, the way sales cycles fluctuate and how to determine what they mean, or the correlation between search engine result location and traffic.  I’ve measured performance based on cost analysis of CPC programs, aggregate traffic, and cost per acquisition.  I’ve measured quality of conversions based on general terms against long tail terms, and I’ve tracked quality of traffic from all the major search engines.

I’ve designed and engineered award winning sites, and took those same sites from last to first page with pretty satisfying degrees of success.  I’ve created marketing plans and branding programs that create enough buzz to attract the national media, and conceptualized commerce programs that I eventually delivered to the thankful hands of business owners.

To “break it down” I considered myself to be a competent and successful web professional.  I could sit and discuss my theories of keyword relevance and cascading keyword authority with the “SEO Rockstars” of the world, and have walked away from those conversations with the knowledge that I can play in the same sandbox.  Along the way I met and even interviewed some of the most impressive online marketers and search engine experts there are in the industry, and found them to be the kind of quality individuals I wished I had met earlier in life. They became my friends and confidants, and I considered myself blessed to know them.

That’s why, when one of my sites started to fail, loose search engine position, and perform way under the expectations and the planned successes I had for it, I began to not only question my own skills, but my whole place in this crazy internet world.  I began spiraling into an abyss of self loathing and finger pointing, looking at my plummeting search results and traffic and wondering how these new sites that suddenly showed up in the search results, replacing my site, even got there in the first place.  I pointed out to anyone who would hear my rantings all of the shortcomings of every site on the first page..  I pulled out links from my site, and added “nofollow” to almost anything that I could find that would seem even slightly PR draining.  I joined forum threads to complain about the audacity of Google to perform an algorithmic shift during this period, and was even considering joining the ranks of the SEO naysayers who consistently and unapologetically ranted against SEO in general.  I wondered where the knowledge I had so painstakingly gathered over the years had gone, and was beginning to wonder if I really had a place in this crazy world we call the World Wide Web.

Everybody was spamming…

I repeated to myself again and again.

Everybody was spamming…

I’ve always consciously tried to never “bug” my friends with my own web problems.  They have their own very busy schedules and businesses to run, and I just couldn’t face up to them since I felt like this was the most embarrassing period in my life.  I mean, the business wasn’t failing, not by a long shot, but my own sense of belonging in this group of serious professionals was tested.  I felt like a fake whenever I talked to them, and consciously avoided lamenting about my site.  I mean, who wants to be friends with someone who always begging for  help?  And I didn’t want to be “that” kind of friend, the one that makes you say “Oh, sssshhh, shut up, here he comes now.”  I can’t say that I never complained about my site, I did, but I tried with everything I could to keep it to a minimum.  Switch topics, talk about something else.

But one day I just broke down.  Maybe it’s me.  Maybe those other sites aren’t the problem here.  So I asked the strongest seo in the world (old joke, but still painful to think of), David Brown, to take a look.  “Just a quick look man,” I ask him, “I just don’t know anymore.”  I had a sinking feeling I might have done something, but I couldn’t face the fact that I, the rumblepup, actually could have done something wrong.  David came back to me with a very straight answer and slapped me upside the head.  He even called me to yell in my ear. “Those other sites weren’t spamming Google, you are.”

…

I have to admit, the shock of this made me defensive.  “But they, and I, and they…”

“Just stop” David says to me.

“I thought you wanted to be the best site on the web?  I thought you want to service the customer, and do things right. Why would you do the same thing those other sites are doing?”

I grudgingly admitted that I would go over my content again. I felt like a little kid who didn’t want to do his homework.  In fact, the conversation made me step out of myself for a moment.  it was like a splash of cold water.  We all have a project that is very personal, that we are passionate about, and this one was mine.  Failure is just isn’t an option. However, David made me realize that I should be applying the same rules I do to this site that I do to all the other sites I’ve made good on.

I rolled back the content to a previous version, with some slight modifications.  I removed all of the text I had on it.  When seriously looking at the site through a marketer’s eyes, I noticed something that had escaped me.  Actually, that’s not right.  It never did escape me; I knew it the whole time.  In my passion for this site, and in my stubborn complacency, I wrote what I thought would be this great keyword rich text thinking I could capture a whole bunch of keyword searches.  I keyword stuffed my text. I just plain over did it.  Once the changes where in, I guess Google had a regular crawl, the next day the site was back up to where it should have been, on the first page of the Google SERP’s.

How embarrassing is that?   Here I am, Mr. Bigshot internet expert, breaking a very basic rule of search engine optimization.  I plead guilty.  There is no excuse, but there is a reason.  My passion for this site ran away with me.  My mistake was to think that being an authority website allowed me to do whatever I wanted, to attract any keyword I wanted and I could just write “keyword rich” text an there you go, traffic.  I didn’t think objectively, and if the lesson I learned was not to let my passions run rampant, then a painful lesson it is.  Don’t let your passion about a site get in the way of your professionalism.  You can’t just do whatever you want and expect to be anywhere else than on the second page.  The search engines do have a basic standard of what they have programmed their algorithms to see as quality content.  For instance, Google;  The quality guidelines are not there to be ignored just because you have link juice.  There are plethoras of PR5, 6, even 7 sites that show up nowhere near the first page.  Why?  All the link juice in the world won’t decide what Google sees as the authority website, or any other search engine.

Now, that’s not to say that passion is not without its rewards.  I’m passionate about this site, which means I work even harder for the success of being on the first page.  It’s not just business savvy, it’s the time and love you put into a site that can change things.  Without that, I would have been content with the long-tail keywords traffic and then just sold the site.  That’s not what I’m about, so I didn’t.  Without an personal interest in the topic of a website, you’re doomed for mediocrity and failure.  It’s that simple.  I don’t know any website that is successful that the owners or webmaster’s are not personally driven individuals who invest their heart and soul into a project.

So I guess I’ve learned many lessons for the second page, lessons that will make me a better professional web entrepreneur, and give me a much more rounded knowledge of the web.  Lessons that I’d like to share with you.

1. Temper your passion with professionalism.  Either one alone is not enough, together they make the best combination.
2. Have good friends that help you, and allow you to help them.
3. There is no goal post, no winning touch down, no end of movie credits.  Everyday is a new day to learn something, and a new day to achieve something.
4. Listen to your wife. (the beautiful Mrs. Rumblepup told me exactly the same thing David did)
5. It’s okay to look at what your competitors are doing.  But the most important thing is to look at what YOU are doing.
6. Freaking out will only leave you tired.   Go ahead and freak out, but don’t expect to get answers from your screaming session.
7. Have humility to realize where your weaknesses are.  I’m a badass, yes, but there are other badasses out there coming up.
8. Always listen to whatever Brian Mark has to say.
9. Listen to cshel as well.
10. Sometimes there are no answers.  A good shoulder might not help you with your problem, but will always calm you down to let you think.
11. Don’t stop thinking.  Your rage might be Hulk-like, but don’t let it shut off your brain.
12. Read your website as if your reading a book.  If the writing sucks, so does the website.
13. Don’t drink Tequila after eating a tuna melt.  Just trust me on this one.
14. When all else fails, let it fail.  Drop everything and return to the beginning.  There is nothing like rebooting your thinking machine and starting from scratch.
15. Be strong enough to see the truth, even if the truth is not what you wanted it to be.