If You Can’t Explain Your Comms Plan on One Page, It’s Probably Not Worth a Darn

Once upon a time, each morning without fail, my 10-year-old self used to repeat a curious habit. In arranging my breakfast, I would position my cereal bowl on top of a plastic, super hero place mat. Perhaps in some way that padded picture of Batman, Fantastic Four or Mighty Mouse made the Corn Flakes experience all the more enjoyable.

I would never have guessed that years later, a place mat would come in handy as part of my then-agency’s new business presentation. You see, while our competitors undoubtedly walked their audience through pages and pages worth of plans, or flipped from one PowerPoint slide to another, my team took a simpler (and winning!) approach. At the start of the meeting, we handed out the same newly minted place mat in front of each prospective client, like you would a restaurant menu to a hungry patron.

In hindsight, the place mat approach proved effective for two reasons:

1. It served as an easy-to-follow discussion guide for the entire presentation. The talk began, as it always should, by describing in simple terms the program’s overall goal.  From there, top to bottom, it detailed the strategies to meet that goal, the tactics to support each strategy and finally, the timeline and budget. The entire recommendation, from soup to nuts, on one well diagrammed page.
2. Simplicity works. How many times have you sifted through proposals only to be left wondering… what’s the measurable goal being recommended here?  How do the strategies and tactics support that goal?  What are the milestones and costs involved along the way?

Some of the world’s best business plans have been drawn up on one side of a paper napkin… I believe that to be true. The hardest thing about explaining a complicated plan is to simplify it so that the dots connect on an object as small as napkin, or a place mat for that matter. The next time you’re building your plan — and editing it just to make sure it passes muster — you’d do well to remember the place mat test.  In a nutshell, if you can’t clearly explain that plan on one page, it’s probably not worth a darn.

 

 

 

 

Media Domination Mattered: This Time and Every Time

“The medium is the message” – Marshall McCluhan, Understanding Media, 1964.

By this, Canadian philosopher McCluhan meant that – over time– the consequences of, and structural changes caused by, the media platform (i.e., TV or Twitter) can prove just as important, if not more so, as the messages they contain. He used the light bulb as an example, describing it as a medium without content. But when the light bulb is turned on, McCluhan says, “it creates an environment (a social effect) by its mere presence.”

Fast forward to early morning this past week. I’m tossing and turning in bed on Election night, like a fool tuned in to in-depth radio analysis of Trump’s astounding victory. I don’t know who or what I was listening to, but, as a former journalist, one point really resonated with me as an important difference in the election result, namely, Trump’s unprecedented mastery of the media during his career but especially over the past 18 months.

The commentator tied together these U.S. presidents, who in their own ways, reached out directly to Americans and broke through the noise and clutter via media outlets that were relatively new to their own times.  Three obvious examples come to mind; lessons, really, now irrevocably linked in history:

RADIO:  Franklin Delano Roosevelt–His first national address, or “Fireside Chat,” occurred eight days after his 1933 inauguration. America was at its lowest point of the Great Depression and FDR understood this medium’s to connect directly to Americans (90 percent of households owned a radio) and to ease fears and inspire confidence in his leadership.  His first words in this address: “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.”

TELEVISION:  John F. Kennedy— The world of politics changed on September 26, 1960, when Sen. John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon took part in the first nationally televised presidential debate.  Eight years earlier, Nixon had demonstrated his mastery of TV with his 1952 “Checkers” speech, in which he tossed aside a funding controversy by talking about his pet dog, “Checkers.”  But it was Kennedy who ruled the day, accepting makeup for the event, whereas Nixon, who reinjured his knee on the way in to the studio, looked pale and tired with a 5 o’clock shadow beard. After the first debate, Nixon’s VP choice, Henry Cabot Lodge, reportedly said: “That son-of-a-bitch just lost us the election.”

TWITTER:  Donald Trump— Remember the adage: “any press is good press” or the oft-repeated myth, “there is no such thing as bad publicity?”  @realDonaldTrump, who seemingly never slept during the 2016 campaign, was the first candidate to understand that Twitter provided a free, entirely disruptive means to dominate the national conversation, usurp the 24-hour news cycle and shut out his political rivals in the process. Truth or lies didn’t matter.  The medium of Twitter — and the landmark cultural change it represented — was, as McCluhan rightly prognosticated, the message.

 

Dear 18-Year-Old Self…

“Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention” — Frank Sinatra, My Way

AEPi Mizzou 35-Year Pledge Class Reunion (standing group l to r) Brothers Steve Poisner, Jeff Moulton, Fred Sussman, Alan Cohen – St. Louis, Syd Gubin, Dan Wilinsky, Jeff Gasser, Steve Davis, Neal Peskind and Ben Rosenstein

“What advice do you have today for your 18-year-old self?” 

This past week I posed that thought-provoking question, among others, to my fraternity brothers as we gathered for the first time in 35-plus years. I called the questionnaire a “campfire survey,” and as intended, that first night on the Mizzou campus in Columbia, 10 friends who hadn’t seen each other in decades sat around a hotel lobby, picking up right where we left off, sharing stories — some forgotten, others that will live hysterically in infamy — getting current on our life stories, and answering questions, just like we would over a roaring bonfire with s’mores close at hand.

The wacky occasion when a hypnotist visited our frat house ranked high on the list of rib-tickling memories. So did the time when the most mischievous among us faked a letter on Med School letterhead to an older brother, convincing him he had a social disease. As did the one night during a particularly stressful finals week when we created a life-like dummy out of winter clothes and paper mache’, snuck it into the main library and threw it off the balcony yelling “I Can’t Take It Any More!!!” The dummy did a nose-dive on a study table and hilarity ensued.

I don’t remember laughing this hard, at least not for a long while. It’s what happens when brothers connect after so many years, we’re back to being 18 once more. Which leads me to the answer that proved most consistent among those questions I posed: what’s your best advice to that college freshman who was you? A majority had the same reply, just expressed a little differently:

• “Spend more time having fun… doing fun things: MUCH less time studying”
• “Sleep less”
• “Don’t take all of this too seriously… everything will be OK in the end.”

And these words of wisdom, perhaps more inspiring:

• “Always shoot high and pursue your dreams.  Even if you fall short, the peaks are magnificent.”

Moral of this reunion story: looking back, it’s the fun times, the lifelong friendships and the shared memories that we cherish.  Harder to recognize in the blur of youth; much easier to see in the wisdom of middle age.

Rewind to 1978: right after dinner every weeknight as freshmen, our pledge class would gather like clockwork at a street corner outside our frat house, wait for the last brother to arrive, and then march en masse to the main library.  And every night, we sang the same tune that went something like this:

“Pi Men.  We’re AEPi Men. Marching Along with Colors Flying. We Stand Together.                             Yes, We’re Together. Our Gold and Blue Waves On High.”

Some memories can’t be shaken. And as proven out this past week, the stories become most remarkable — and sometimes legendary — when, like fine wine, they’re fondly stored in the corners of our mind, only to be uncorked and then cherished on a special occasion. Among brothers.

 

For Dad & Fishing, Today with Love

“My father was a fisherman. My mama was the fisherman’s friend.” — Duncan, Paul Simon

Think about this: have you had many experiences as a child that you positively detested at the time, but that you’ve since grown to love?  Yes, I’ve always hated Brussels sprouts and, without a doubt, always will.  In my adolescence, rising early was abhorrent to every bone in my body.  Now, truth be told, I really look forward to that early-morning workout.

But certainly the most memorable weekends in my life were the times I woke up in the wee hours and took off for regular fishing trips with dad, whose enthusiasm for angling knew no limits. Now 85 years old in south Florida, he’s no longer able to take those three-day jaunts to upstate New York or Canada in the hopes of reeling in a prized bass or Northern pike. Yet, for a half century, with me by his side in the boat, those magical days consumed him like nothing else. For me, my love-hate relationship with fishing is best captured by a poem I wrote back in college… it went like this:

During Another Seneca Lake Thunderstorm, July 1969

A shivering, wormy ten-year-old
squatting with yellow rain suit
oversized black rubber boots
and a tremendously long fishing pole
When the sky was dark
and it was only sprinkling
I marveled at Chub, the wrinkled skipper
his gravel voice and arm tattoos
and how he could burn apart the nylon line
with the tip of his smelly cigar
I watched the small gray clouds
of tiny minnows
survivors swimming in a dirty pail
But now it was pouring
our ice chest was empty
and I soaked in my underwear
insides twisting
just like when I hear the soft hum
of the dentist’s water drill
I wanted to go home
gave you a moping face
but then I started to look behind your glasses
dotted with wet
behind your grim silence
And I thought I saw a little boy in you
distant eyes fixed on the lake
waiting for something
one magic catch
to send you home smiling

KEEP SMILING! EXCEPT FOR THAT GOVERNMENT PHOTO I.D.

“She’d be a whole lot prettier if she smiled once in a while” — Lullabye, Shawn Mullin

Thinking back to my ad agency days in Kansas City, I constantly heard the same refrain from that a-bit-too-cheerful supervisor as he sauntered by my cube. “Keep Smiling!” he would implore, with a Cheshire cat grin and just a hint of sarcasm.

Why did he constantly remind me to look happier, I’ve often wondered? Did I appear so miserable and mopey around the office, broadcasting a perpetual scowl for all to see? A little too serious and focused or, as wife Betsy would call it, lost somewhere in “Dan Land”?

Ever since that humbling experience, and possibly because of it, I’ve made it a point, even on my worst days, to lighten up. To wear a genuine smile as comfortably as my favorite pair of jeans.

Fast forward to yesterday. I’m standing at a FedEx, getting my U.S. Passport renewed in advance of a trip planned for next spring. The man there takes my $15, grabs a camera, pulls down the backdrop screen on a store wall and positions me for my Cecile B. DeMille moment.

“Don’t smile,” he says, at which point I crack up and beam from ear to ear. Funny man, right? Nope. “Are you kidding?” I ask. “Actually, I’m dead serious. Security reasons,” he says. “You can smile, but don’t show any teeth.” I obliged, of course, and left the store with a black-and-white 2×2 in hand, showing off my all-time best half-hearted grin.

Frowning… the new government policy? My expiring Passport photo, taken back in 2007, shows more teeth than a pack of hyenas. I couldn’t wait to ask Siri.

The answer, of course, not a new policy. Try, 15 years old and, of course, for security reasons. Of the sobering rule, that apparently everyone has heard of except for me, CBS quoted a State Department muckety-muck to explain: smiling “distorts other facial features, for example your eyes, so you’re supposed to have a neutral expression. The most neutral face is the most desirable standard for any type of identification.” Apparently, the story goes, ID photos are being rejected because of a toothy smile.

I understand the logic and appreciate that Uncle Sam is watching out for our safety. Anything to give us an edge against all those homegrown terrorists, you know. But isn’t it a tad ironic that in order to guard against the bad guys, we need to do our best impression of a prison lineup baddie for the camera?

Actually, I’m most annoyed about the fact that I didn’t have a great comeback to use before the dawn of the Frown Era.

Boss: “Keep Smiling”

Me: “Actually, I’m on my way to get my Passport photo taken and I’m practicing my best pose.”