Out of the Mouths of Ghouls

Frightfully Good Times Take Time & Talent

While I was working on yesterday’s blog about Old Pasadena’s Halloween celebration, I happened to run across a volunteer from the Old Town Haunt, which has been a tradition of Halloween for years. I love giving people credit for what they do, and certainly the staff at Old Pasadena Management District play a huge role in the success of our district. But so do the merchants, and the guides, and the police, and our loyal customers. However, when I spoke to this volunteer, I remembered that one of the most essential elements in the success of Old Pasadena over the years has been its volunteers.

Volunteers sit on the board. They sit on our committees. They appear before city council. They take time out of their days, away from their businesses, to help improve the quality of life in Old Pasadena. Obviously, they don’t do it for the money, so why? Certainly donating their time is an investment in the success of the district, so you could call that self serving and all, but why do retirees volunteer their time? And teenagers? The answer is certainly more complex than any kind of profit motive, no matter how far removed. But allow me to introduce you to a young lady who began to volunteer her time to the Halloween Haunt three years ago, when she was only fourteen.

 Ghoul-age zombies. Why do they do it?

"I was first introduced to the Old Town Haunt in Old Town Pasadena by a close friend named Micheal when I was 14 years old. He had already been a volunteer for several years himself. I am currently 17, and have committed myself to volunteering at the Haunt for the past three years. I don't plan on leaving this anytime soon.

I am thrilled whenever the month of September rolls in, because that is when we all get together with Ron Rogge (Owner) and Mark (Ron's Partner) and begin to set up the Haunt.  We change it up every year, and we all work together on such things as repainting certain areas. It is such an adrenaline rush as every September day goes by, because we all know that October is just around the corner. We can't wait to scare the people who walk through and feel the excitement that comes with it.

I have tons of fun at the Old Town Haunt for various reasons, the first is that I have made some close friends there. In fact, most of the people there have known each other for years. Then of course, after we are done scaring, we are taken to either eat at Bella's Pizza, or at Barney's Beanery. Finally, we love the excitement and fear that we put into the people who come down.  We love the screams. What could be more beautiful than a whole month spent at a haunted house where every square inch is stuffed with props and people ready to inject a little fright and feat into these people's experience.

When I first started here, I didn't have many friends at all, but once I started volunteering, I scared up a whole bunch of friends and I became a more social person. I gained a lot more self esteem which was another great benefit of being in an atmosphere filled with young people who just wanted to have fun.

If the Old Town Haunt ever disappeared for whatever reason, we would all be devastated! Nothing could compare to lying in wait, ready to pounce and scare up a terrified screech. Adrenaline just rushes through our bodies because we know these people are about to scream their heads off.

We are all thankful to Ron and Mark, because they put in a lot of hard work into the Haunt, and they have shared this experience with me, and with all of us. October Old Town Haunt is a labor of love that they work practically every day of the year to make a success. I am so grateful that they have allowed me to be a part of it."

– Sandy, the eloquent Ghoul

Not for the faint of heart, but for the rest of us...  =)

From the Old Town Haunt to the Tournament of Roses. From the Old Pasadena Management District, to the Playhouse and South Lake districts, the unique character of the City of Pasadena rests in large part on the generosity and dedication of its volunteers. It starts early and lasts a lifetime. I am proud to be even a small part of this community, and prouder still of the youth already donating their time and talents to keep up the tradition.
Happy Halloween everyone, and
BOO!

Can Old Pasadena Handle Halloween? And Howl!

Yes, this year Old Pasadena is not just out to celebrate Halloween, but to make this year’s Halloween celebration the best ever. For kids of course, that’s a simple task indeed. It’s one of the highest of the high holy days in kid-dom: The day of candyCandyCANDYCANDY CANDY! But for parents, especially in this economy, it can be a bit of a trial. Especially this year when Halloween falls on a weekend. How do you handle keeping the kids entertained, for two days, on a budget? That’s where Old Pasadena comes in. First create an event that makes both days really special, then let everyone know about it – with an advertising budget that is tiny at best.

Old Pasadena Home Page featuring the Halloween Celebration

First, and most important, to make any event work you have to make it special.

Kershona Mayo, our Director of Event Marketing & Production, worked hard to organize a district wide, Halloween celebration filled with treats on both Saturday and Sunday. And it’s Free! The focus is on fun and safe, with the emphasis on fun, encompassing activities throughout Old Pasadena.

On Saturday, October 30, Old Pasadena takes over Central Park, 260 S. Raymond Avenue. There’ll be Free caramel apples for the first 200 people to arrive, then a pumpkin hunt (little pumpkins filled with candy) from 1:00-2:00 pm, and from 1:00-5:00– There’s a Halloween moon bounce accompanied by live “ghoulish” music. At the Armory Center for the Arts, just a few blocks north, they’re holding a Halloween crafts center from 1:00-5:00 pm complete with a scary animal-and-bug show and tell.

The Old Town Haunt joins in the fun with a little kid-friendly tour.

On Sunday, October 31, Old Pasadena partners with One Colorado for free store-to-store trick-or-treating along with a special Meet-and-Greet with favorite Halloween characters from 4:00-9:00 pm.  There will be free haunted photos of the kids and free screenings of Halloween cartoons in the Courtyard from 5:00-9:00. And to make even the littlest kids feel big, there will be a special youngster-friendly tour of the popular Old Town Haunt, with all the lights on and no scary screaming from12:00-4:00pm.
Pretty impressive, huh? But now that the event is in place, how do you promote it?

First of all, it’s newsworthy. So Kershona, even with limited print and absolutely no broadcast budget whatsoever, can generate millions of dollars in free airtime on TV and radio. She also fully exploits an array of social network sites from Twitter and Facebook to Yelp to generate buzz. Partnerships with our local Pasadena City College radio station KPCC, an NPR affiliate, further magnify the reach to parents.

Every participating merchant received a poster and matching postcards to hand out to customers.

Add to that select local newspaper advertising, posters all over town and free postcards for our merchants to hand out, and you have a powerful campaign indeed. Reinforcing that effort is the OPMD website. Janet Schwartz, OMPD’s Director of PR & Destination Marketing, has put not only the Old Pasadena website to work, she follows up with regular email blasts to merchants, visitors and friends of Old Pasadena. Last year, the Halloween celebration marketing effort resulted in an additional 2000 page views in the days leading up to the event.

So that’s the secret. A great event. Enthusiastic social marketing promotion. Partnerships with merchants and media outlets. And an audience of parents hungry for fun, free and safe entertainment, and of course, kids just hungry for candyCandyCANDYCANDY CANDY!

Happy Halloween everyone.

Never use Translations in Your Advertising

And, on the other hand, ALWAYS translate your advertising.
Lemme splain.
The most effective kind of communication is idiomatic. Hence, the most effective advertising is idiomatic. Idioms are the connections that link a culture together, and they don't translate between cultures well. If you have a message that works well in English, you have to remember that it is working well in American English, not British English, Australian English or even Canadian English, eh? Or as George Bernhard Shaw so eloquently put it, "The English and the Americans are two peoples separated by a common language." What that means to an advertiser is: If you want to reach an new audience that speaks a different language, it is not enough to just translate the words of your message.  Even if you get all the words right, the message itself will suffer mightily.

A couple of idioms from another culture, Max and Moritz. Read more and see original image: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Max_und_Moritz.JPG

One of the more amusing ways to demonstrate this is to take a common expression such as, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." and use Bablefish to translate that into say German, which translates to: "Sie können einem alten Hund neue Tricks nicht unterrichten." Those words are basically correct, "hund" is dog, "underrichten" is teach, and "Tricks" is tricks. However if you try to translate that "German expression" back into English, you get, "They can an old dog new cheat not to inform." Um Gotteswillen! In fact, if you wanted to express that concept idiomatically to a German audience that grew up on Max and Moritz, you would say, "Was Hänschen nicht lernt, lernt Hans nimmermehr," which means, "What little Hans doesn't learn, grown up Hans will never learn." That might have absolutely nothing to do with dogs, but the idiom carries the same exact meaning to an entirely different culture. It is reminiscent of a tale told in intelligence circles about early attempts to use the super computers of the cold-war 60’s to translate Russian into English. When they put in “Out of sight, out of mind” using their algorithm, what they got back was: “invisible idiot.”
That said.
Always translate your product essentials (such as the NAME) into the language of your target audience to avoid embarrassment. If for instance you want to introduce your automobile into a new country south of our border, it would be instructive to know that the name NOVA is a colloquialism for “doesn’t run.” Then there’s Vicks cough drops which became popular in Germany, but before introducing them there, they had to change the name to “Wicks,” because they discovered that “vicks” is a rude name for a sex act. Much more recently Osco Drug Stores bought out Sav-On drugs in the predominantly Hispanic Southern California market. They were so proud of the name they had created for themselves over the decades, that they changed their store names, stationary, and advertising from Sav-On to Osco and watched their sales plummet, especially in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods. Osco, it turned out, was an idiom usually associated with vomiting. When you’re sick, the last place anyone wants to go is Vomit Drugs.
After all is said and done, no matter what language it is said and done in, the most basic tenant of advertising applies. Know your audience. Speak their language.  Whether your audience are juniors looking for fashion or governments looking for engineers, learn their jargon, their idioms and you can talk to them in their language, no matter what language they speak.

The Dangers of "Brilliants" in Advertising

I remember the day like it was yesterday. My client abruptly overruled every marketing strategy, product name, logo design, identity package and ad campaign concept that he had approved only a few days before. He had decided to do his ad campaign himself. He knew the product better than anyone, and he was the smartest person he knew.
Both of those statements were true by the way. He had single handedly come up with an invention that had revolutionized his industry. He was a brilliant chemist and practitioner, and had built up a million dollar company that he had started in his garage. The only thing wrong was his reasoning. He decided to undo an entire campaign and design strategy, because his "daughter didn’t like it." She was eighteen at the time.
In his defense, she was the one who had come up with the name for his company when she was twelve. My client therefore reasoned that advertising was so easy even a child could do it.  That said, however, she had not shown any inclination for marketing and advertising since that day. And for all his brilliance in his chosen fields, he himself had no concept of advertising, marketing, design, research, or packaging. And after all was said and done, to become known as the leader in his field, he needed to accomplish all of those in the worst way possible. By doing it himself that’s exactly what he got.
Within a few short years, every mistake he made was manipulated to its fullest by the competition. Soon he was just another player in an industry that he had almost single-handedly invented himself. And he is not alone by any stretch of the imagination.

Elisha Graves Otis, brilliant engineer, innovator and inventor. (image from biografiasyvidas.com)

Such is often the fate of "brilliants." Elisha Graves Otis, the father of the modern elevator, was a brilliant engineer and visionary. Unfortunately he neglected to trademark the name “elevator” leaving the door wide open to every competitor with a pulley system and wires, and they used it freely to take his business away. The landscape is littered with brilliant people who failed to achieve preeminence, because they tried to to something so easy a child could do it.
Advertising is in every respect like any other art form: painting, singing or playing a harmonica. If it's not easy, you can't do it. And if it's too easy, you're not doing it well enough. The Peter Principle, as first defined, is that employees will inevitably rise to their level of incompetence.  The problem for any agencies working with people who are outstanding in their field is that those people tend to believe they are outstanding in every field. And they all too often find their level of incompetence in advertising.
Advertising, in every respect, is like any other art form: painting, singing or playing a harmonica: If it's not easy, you can't do it. And if it's too easy, you're not doing it well enough. The Peter Principle, as originally defined, is that in any hierarchy, employees will inevitably rise to their level of incompetence.  The problem is Peter was an optimist. Any agency working with clients who are outstanding in their fields faces the possibility that those brilliant people will believe they are outstanding in every field. All to often, they attain their level of incompetence in advertising.
The truth is that the statement “I don’t know anything about advertising, but I know what I like,” is exactly six words too long. If you don’t know anything about advertising, then you need professional help.  The same is true for plumbing, stone masonry, brain surgery and programming your DVR. If it’s not easy, you can’t do it. Call on professional help. Save time.  Save money. Save your sanity and your business.
Or as David Ogilvy once wrote, “Why buy a dog and bark yourself,” or as it was first written by Brian Melbancke in 1583, "It is smal reason you should kepe a dog, and barke your selfe."
Apparently old David wasn't the first to say that; he was just right.