Media Don’t Give a Hoot About Your “Message”
Posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009
Child star Anna Paquin spins ’round in the Mohave sands as the camera zooms in for the ad’s tagline: “There will be no more there — We will all only be here.” My voice booms over the studio intercom: “Uh. . .where am I?”
December 1993. The scene: MCI’s studio, mixing ads for a new campaign debuting the company’s commitment to an all-digital comms infrastructure dubbed “networkMCI.”
In reality, MCI wasn’t investing in anything new. They were spending $600 million to put their network on par with competitors’. But they couldn’t say that, of course. So the ad agency suggested a way to blow by this minor detail: a fancy moniker, “networkMCI,” and the ingeniously obtuse message that our new network would obliterate “there” and bring us all “here.” Very cutting edge and cool. I know this because MCI’s president told me so, and the ad agency president said I was “totally in the dark and behind the times” when I foolishly opined at a meeting of top brass that this was the most peculiar ad I’d ever seen.
January 2: TV ads hit the airwaves on all major broadcast networks, and everywhere the delightful Ms. Paquin can be heard proclaiming we no are longer there, but here. Press releases on “networkMCI” flood the wire services, incisively making the same argument. Senior executives take to the podium to convince audiences they aren’t really there.
January 3. Press coverage comes out. The Wall Street Journal writes about MCI’s $600 million investment to catch up the network. Not a single mention of “networkMCI.” Net net, nobody was fooled.
Not that a lame press reception deterred executives. Months later, still loyal to their message, they flew in Ms. Paquin for the Annual Shareholders Meeting. She walked on stage. She opened her mouth to proclaim the now famous line. The house lights failed. We couldn’t see her — anywhere.
The point of this silly story: Don’t be so in love with your advertising message that you delude yourself into believing it will translate well with all audiences. To press in particular, the almighty message is “neither here nor there.” They just want the news, thanks.
MCI’s long gone. As for Anna Paquin — she moved on to much bigger and better things.
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Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.
Allen Taylor
Thanks, Allen — I appreciate your kind words and will do my best to live up to them.
Jim Crawford