February 6, 2008
leo burnett and microsoft
My old advertising buddy, Dave Everitt-Carlson, who started working at Leo Burnett in Chicago the very same day as me, countless years ago, just wrote a book about his expat adventures in Asia. One passage really got my attention:
During my time in Korea it was relayed to me that Burnett Chicago had a shot at the Microsoft advertising account. Having created icons for some of the most prominent brands in history, Marlborough, Kellogg’s, McDonald’s and the Keebler Brands to name a few, it seemed only natural that Burnett would desire the Microsoft name in their stables, not to mention the billings.
As the story goes, Bill Gates visited the agency and was treated to a pitch owing to the spirit of P.T. Barnum. Creative teams showed storyboards, sang songs and put on a show extraordinaire, in keeping with the finest Burnett traditions. After the pitch Mr. Gates was reportedly treated to the customary agency tour, replete with aisle upon aisle of pristine offices looking more like those of a Japanese bank than an American creative powerhouse.
At the end of his tour I was told he exclaimed, “Excellent presentation gentlemen, but as I see it, you don’t use computers and that would make it impossible for you to understand my business.”
I wasn’t at that presentation, nor can I testify to the veracity of what Mr. Gates said, but it would’ve been would’ve been early 1990s [My office still boasted a working IBM typewriter back then]. One world ending, a new world just beginning, and the people caught in the middle not liking either side of the deal, much.
And now many I’ve spoken to are wondering if Microsoft is having the same problem I saw Leo Burnett having all those years ago. As fond as I am of the groovy cats in Redmond, hey, I was also fond of Leo Burnett once, and still am. Apparently Burnett has done very well these last few years by finally understanding that their business, like their clients, was now global, not American Midwestern. Rock on.
It’s easy to say in a meeting, “The world is changing, and we need to change with it”. And just as easy to get everybody in the meeting to agree with it. What’s harder is what happens after everyone has left the room. When everyone has to worry about keeping their jobs.
Personally I am hoping Microsoft carries on happily for the next thirty years. Two things have to happen, as far as I can see:
1. Like the Blue Monster says, Microsoft has to get better at telling their story. In the grand scheme of things, that’s actually not difficult, once you’ve REALLY decided to do that.
2. Microsoft’s current schtick is, “Unless we can get 75% plus of the world’s computer users buying our product, we’re not interested.” I think if they could change their schtick to, “Unless we can get 75% of the world’s computer users LOVING our product, we’re not interested,” I think they will do just fine.
I know, I know, if the latter were easy…
This is why I’m watching the recent Microsoft offer to buy Yahoo with great interest. To me, this is not just about “Search” and “Taking on Google”. Like I told Dave Winer after reading his wonderful post on the subject, “The thing that might save MSFT long-term is a massive infusion of Silicon Valley DNA. That’s why I think they’re offering Yahoo the $40billion.“
All companies, no matter what the size, have a their own, unique cocktail of four different forms of capital– Financial, Intellectual, Technical and Cultural. Microsoft is relatively fine with the first three. But in the next few years, it’s with Number Four that the really BIG problems AND BIG opportunities will show themselves.
[Update:] Another Burnetter I knew back then just e-mailed me: “I wasn’t at the meeting either, but the story you reference is the story I heard.”]
[Disclosure: I consult occasionally for Microsoft, like I am for this upcoming Office Developer’s Conference next week.]
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To paraphrase Ogilvy (again) “Use the products you intend to advertise”. Apparently that’s how he arrived at the copy for his Rolls Royce ad .….
Yeah, I wasn’t at the meeting either. Maybe it never happened but it was told to me as a story by I don’t remember who.
I bought my own Powerbook in 1990 and had that until I went to Korea in 95, at which point I hoodwinked the tech people into giving me a company loaner for a business trip. (They didn’t know I was being transferred!) I kept that for the next two years, the only way I could get the company to support the cost! Oh, dear…
Bravo for this bit …
’It’s easy to say in a meeting, “The world is changing, and we need to change with it”. And just as easy to get everybody in the meeting to agree with it. What’s harder is what happens after everyone has left the room. When everyone has to worry about keeping their jobs.‘
… which could stand as the Grand Unified Theory of why it’s hard to get things done in a corporate setting. It’s hard enough to get *ourselves* to follow through on purely personal desires to change. (E.g. losing weight, getting out more, reading more books, whatever.) Translate it to a collective setting, and it gets much harder.
As for Microsoft, they have the luxury of ignoring (some of) your wisdom about cultural transfusion. But for the little folks … it’s simply not optional.
Interesting, but even if the agency had used computers back then, they still wouldn’t have been able to run Microsoft apps. Microsoft didn’t have any graphics or pagination offerings at the time.
Would it have been better had Gates walked around and everyone had Apples on their desks?
Ahh! I love the Apple comment! Let me relay another story, of which I was a party to:
“In frustration to an employee demanding computer support for graphics in the early 90s, the CIO exclaimed ‘Apples? The only godamn apples we need around here are the ones in the lobby!’” (The Leo Burnett Company’s trademark is an apple, and apples sit in a bowl at the reception desk on every floor in every office of every branch around the world)
I would say yes to Douglas’s final question. In 1990 Apple was the shape of the future but proved incapable of taking their potential and conquering the world. It was MS that made the mass adoption of the PC as an essential utilitarian business tool possible. I worked with agencies in the early 90s that used their early adoption of technology as a selling point. They stood out from the crowd at the time as weird and geeky. So I hired them every time I had the power to make a decision.
But lets not forget the world runs on MS not OSX (?) not Google not Yahoo not Linux. 90% of Google searches are made on a computer running Windows and IE. Terry Leahy (CEO of Tesco) says he is always paranoid about the future and his competition. I sense MS are paranoid as well. Good. I suspect this will serve them well.
This isn’t just, or only, about coping with change and DNA changes. It’s about re-thinking both businesses on multiple levels. What is MS & Yhoo business models & strategies — are they aligned with the world they want to go to ? Are their messages compelling, authentic (in Seth Godin’s sense),do they support their customers ? On a operational level are the platforms and multiple product lines reconcilable ? Can the cultures, which are wildly divergent, be integrated ? Finally is the leadership in place ? Neither company has shown much strategic vision nor operational capability in adopting and adapting to these spaces yet both have great strengths. If they’d focus more on making what they have work then you’d have something as it is this strikes me as a recipe for multiple parallel, not serial, disasters. And nobody seems to be asking these fundamental business questions. FWIW I took these themes and broke them down as well as included comparisons of AOL and Google here: http://tinyurl.com/yotu2l
Now here’s a thing. Years ago I had a Mac, and learned to “compute” in Macworld. Self taught and all that. Then I switched to PCs because the ad agency I worked at put them on one’s desk, although most people at the time were worried about “losing everything” if they touched the keyboard at all. See hilarious Norwegian comedy sketch about IT support in the middle ages
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX0-nqRmtos which just about summed it up. That would have been about the time of the Leo Burnett pitch to Microsoft, so it would be fair to say no agency anywhere ‘got computers’ back then. Recently I’ve got a Macbook again (now it’s got Intel C2D and runs Windows Parallels, declaring my own interest in advertiser for both those clients). I do miss the keyboard shortcuts and silly quirks (like click start to stop). Everyone tells me they LOVE their Macs. No wonder Microsoft wants some of that.
“It’s easy to say in a meeting…“
With repsect to meetings. If you want to get something done stop having them and stop getting everyone to agree with you. Consensus doesnt always lead to productivity. Thanks. Great post. Jonathan at http://www.theproblemwithreligion.com
And did it work? Did Mr. G. find an agency that understood his business because they used computers? Is that what made MS successful? Did he also find a ride to the airport with a taxi company that used computers because only a taxi company that used computers could understand his taxi needs? Did he eat only at restaurants that used computers? Did he buy his suits from a tailor who used computers?
Isn’t it funny how often such decisions are made based on the whim of a chief executive? My advice would be to find an agency that understands marketing, a taxi company that understands taxi rides and a tailor who understands tailoring, but that’s just me.
i’d gladly pay money to hear the MP3 of the tune that Cheryl B. no doubt cooked up specially for Bill Gates.
Vinny, I don’t know you but I’d pay MORE money for THAT tune! I remember ole’ Ms. “B” to have been quite the canary. Ha! (did she really? how embarassing)
“When you need to go soft
cause hard won’t go
MicroSOFT does it
and it does it real slow”