"Two thin layers of dry, rectangular pastry with a sweet filling and frosting" doesn't necessarily sound like something that would become a taste sensation. But William Post, who died from heart failure this week in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the age of 96, was able to sell the idea and turn it into the now-ubiquitous Pop-Tarts breakfast (or anytime) snack.
I have to admit these are one of my favorite things in the world to eat. They have 60 flavors now, after starting out with just four: strawberry, blueberry, brown sugar cinnamon, and apple-currant. Heat them up in the toaster oven and spread a little butter on top to make it even more disgustingly delicious. That said, I almost never eat them these days because, whenever I do, I get a brief and minor case of the queasies.
According to the New York Times, Post "led the bakery plant that developed the first Pop-Tarts for Kellogg’s in 1964." He developed the product in just two weeks, with the help of his own kids as taste testers. When they gave the experiment the thumb's up, Post ignored the advice of many others who said it was not a good idea.
Pop-Tarts were going to be called fruit scones but a Kellogg’s executive riffed off the Pop Art movement of the time to coin the related name. Post also had the idea later in the 1960s to brilliantly add frosting on top. There's nothing worse than a frosting-less Pop-Tart. Those should never be on store shelves! That said, there was some concern that the frosting would melt in the toaster. I've always wondered why that doesn't happen. Perhaps best not to know!
Pop-Tarts continues to sell in massive amounts and the product stays very relevant on the pop-culture landscape. Look out later this year for the movie called Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story, directed by Jerry Seinfeld, and this Saturday Night Live skit shows just how darn distracting it can be to have a box of Pop-Tarts in front of you:
As the Disney company celebrates its 100th birthday on the same day as I celebrate my own (my birthday, that is; not my 100th), I was thinking back a little on how many great films this company has made.
While I'm no diehard fan, I have a major fondness for its earliest works like Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi. After this flurry of impressive and massive hits, along with a few other features, between 1937 and 1942, it's curious that there was a break in Disney's filmography until 1946's controversial Song of the South.
That's because, during World War II, Disney shifted from major motion-picture entertainment to producing propaganda as its contribution to the war effort. "Der Fuehrer's Face" in 1943 had the look and feel of any other Looney Tunes-type cartoon short, featuring Donald Duck living under Nazi rule before realizing the endless Nazi feel-good tactics under very harsh rule in the name of national patriotism is actually a terrifying nightmare. He wakes up to thankfully find himself in his trusty American-flag pajamas.
It's pretty funny stuff and possibly the highlight of Disney's 1940s war activism.
Other really interesting Disney shorts from the time include "Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi," from 1943, which uses Disney cartoon magic to describe what was going on in world events and how German families and their very young children were put under Hitler's sway. "Reason and Emotion" is another one worth watching from 1943. Disney also spent these years creating instructional films for the military on basic combat training and other topics.
A brand is really only an idea. Strictly speaking, a brand doesn't even exist. That said, a brand is much more than just a logo or TV ads. If your airplanes fall out of the air all the time, that's what defines you, not your social media or those other things.
Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits is a book featuring conversations with marketing and communications leaders, and what it mostly boils down to is that brands exist in each person's mind whoninteracts with them.
The word brand originates from long, long ago. Ancient Egyptians branded their livestock with fire. But the phrase is much older than that even. The kind of mass-market branding we think of today really originated with the UK's trademark registration act in 1874 and now, a little more than a century later, there are more than 100 brands of bottle water alone.
Debbie Millman
While people like Naomi Klein in her legendary No Logo book may consider this a good or bad thing, Brand Thinking's interviewer/author Debbie Millman is most interested in asking why we behave this way, why we split into tribes who choose one water over another, and why we proclaim our various allegiances.
Conversations in the book include:
Design research and the inadequacies of branding consultancies
Procter & Gamble's move to purpose-driven brands
Why wit is crucial in branding
Smart Design's emphasis on creating cooking tools that work for all people, from experts to novices
The balance between enlightenment and commodity
How top brands embody archetypes
Whether we see ourselves as a Patagonia person or a Prada one is entwined in all sorts of cultural, economic, spiritual, and even mysterious processes. Stay tuned as I dig through this book and dig into some of the most interesting ideas.
Transit communications needs to catch up if transit ever hopes to catch on.
When it comes to communicating that people have transportation options besides their own drive-alone cars, the transit industry is getting its lunch handed to it, and has been for decades.
It must face that it’s a fringe player that wants to become mainstream. And it’s not getting any easier. While we hear so many great stories about options presented by bikeshare systems and technology and Uber, the fact remains that people are buying cars more than ever.
Take the people who attend TransportationCamps, for instance. They are clearly transportation experts, but then again, just about every single American is a transportation enthusiast by way of traveling every day. And 95 percent of U.S. households have cars. Most of us love our cars, or at least have been seriously duped into thinking we love our cars.
So communicating to people that we don’t truly love our cars is a tough path to take for transportation advocates. Where an opening may be is that so many people hate driving, especially for the purpose of commuting.
The fact that we’re a car country is stating the obvious. Fifty-three percent of Americans want more spending on roads and 40 percent want more spending on transit. That stat actually seems pretty generous to transit.
But I don’t think advocates should make this a road versus transit thing. It’s best to learn from cars and from the auto industry. The Super Bowl, for example, is filled with car ads (there were at least 14 during this month’s Super Bowl 50), but driving is rarely like the ways the auto industry represents it in the ads.
Do the car companies care about their misrepresentations? No, they’ve got a product, a lifestyle, to sell. And they sell that fantasy extremely well.
Putting obvious funding questions aside, where are the Super Bowl-esque ads about public transportation? Where are all the transit ads representing freedom to explore and observe, safety, good health, cost savings, sustainability, community, patriotism, and happiness? Transit communications needs to catch up if transit and alternate modes ever hope to catch on.
To get people to ride transit, the bus, rail, biking, walking, teleworking, and ride-hailing communities must catch up with the auto industry on communications and marketing. There needs to be simple, powerful, consistent, and, most importantly, positive messages about the experience.
We know transit can be productive, better for your health, and cleaner for the environment. We don’t seem to care about the endless benefits of active transportation because we don’t know about them. The messages that might get us to even contemplate these options aren’t being communicated widely enough, and they’re certainly not being repeatedly pounded into our heads like the entertaining and endless mental queues from car commercials.
We still think of trains and buses as dirty, disgusting, and communal in all the wrong ways. Bicycling and walking “aren’t for us” and often bring preconceived notions that there must be something wrong with people who do those weird, not-normal types of activities. While there are certainly problems with all these forms of travel, more needs to be done to accentuate the many positives.
I hate a message like this, probably the most well-known transit ad in existence: the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s “If You See Something, Say Something.”
Its take-home message for people is disproportionate to the rational facts, laid out in one study by Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute:
Commuter rail is about 20 times safer than driving
Metro or light rail is about 30 times safer
The bus is about 60 times safer, and
About 360 times more people are killed in auto collisions than in incidents of terrorism.
These points should be messaging gold for future non-car advertising. And when agencies and others must go down the safety road (which is, of course, important), they could follow the example of the Denver Regional Transportation District’s co-opting of the wildly popular Australian “Dumb Ways to Die” campaign:
This is another example of a transit ad, from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, that does better at potentially generating curiosity about trying transit.
I thought the Washington, D.C., Metro’s commercial showing a good-time party breaking out on the newly opened Silver Line was exactly the kind of thing that could inspire ridership.1
I have no doubt that journalistic storytelling and content marketing will be a long-term path to the better overall health of the non-auto transportation industry. Not only does the industry need to sell its services, but it must do something new: become hyper-focused on selling the lifestyle.
Organizations like the American Public Transportation Association, Amtrak, the Association for Commuter Transportation, the League of American Bicyclists, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, the Eno Center for Transportation, and Mobility Lab, to name a few, need to form a messaging and communications coalition with the goal of changing public opinion.
All kinds of tactics could be used. For example, FamiliesUSA built a story bank, where people can share their personal stories that relate to bigger societal issues sweeping the mainstream news. The organization then very successfully feeds those personal stories to the media, which is actually one of the reasons we see so many personal anecdotes within our national news stories.
Communicating outside of just the transportation arena is also crucial, and transit conversations need to somehow overlap into the tech, health, environment, business, city planning, and pop-culture worlds. It’s important to get others, not just the transportation experts, to spread the message about why support is needed for transportation options.
Industries, sectors, and businesses that get this storytelling strategy are winning. My favorite example is Red Bull, the energy drink company, which publishes the Red Bulletin Magazine. It has about the same amount of subscribers as Sports Illustrated.
Red Bulletin tells stories about the adventurous lifestyle. Maybe back at the very end, it might have a Red Bull energy drink ad. But the magazine is about telling the story of the lifestyle. The company knows that if you buy into that lifestyle, there’s a chance you’ll drink its product. It’s brilliant.
The list is quickly getting long of the industries that are doing content marketing and storytelling right, and their creativity is reflected in their profits and popularity: AirBnB has Pineapple, Uber has Momentum, Intel has IQ, Coca-Cola has Journey, American Express has Open Forum. You get the idea. Most of these organizations are pumping out more (and not just more, but also great) content than Time Magazine did in its heyday.
Because if you want someone to buy your product or buy into your lifestyle, you don’t immediately start screaming at them to buy, buy, buy the moment they approach you. You try to nurture them and build a long-lasting relationship. You do that by telling them great stories and then telling them more great stories.
Finally, here is my advice for agencies, organizations, and even individuals, on how to tell better stories. This stuff won’t break the bank, and anyone involved in non-car transportation should find the money to incorporate most or all of these elements into your strategies.
Build compelling websites that go beyond selling customer fares and sell a lifestyle.
Pick your social networks and devote yourselves to them, and remember, they might not be around tomorrow or might change their rules, so have a backup plan.
Engage with the public, there are free contributors who would love to get published or promoted through your channels.
Hold hackathons or regular events, like Mobility Lab’s Transportation Techies, to turn your big data into stories or ideas that your public agency can consider.
Engage thought leaders to trumpet your cause. Once they get it, others will start to.
Leverage research from other places if you can’t do your own.
Create messages and talking points that are relevant to your community.People in Alameda, Calif. are particularly interested in environmental and green causes, so the city created transportation messages that paved the way to policies that reduce carbon pollution.
In my hometown of Edwardsville, Ill., there are amazing trails to every corner of town and beyond. But it seems to me very few people ever ride bikes or walk to get to work or to go out and socialize. The trails are often busy, but almost entirely with people seeking recreation. There is a huge opportunity to educate people and improve traffic, which can be pretty rough there even in a 30,000-person St. Louis suburb.
It can be really difficult to find photos of people happy on transit. That’s the first problem to take care of in every city. Work diligently to find great photos of people using public transportation.
Calls to action. People must be inspired to get involved.
Hire a journalist or two, because their passion and perspective might actually be the brand journalism that puts your organization and the industry over the top.
Communicate how you’re disrupting mobility in real time right now.
At the Disrupting Mobility 2015 Summit, Paul DeLong of car2go said he’s sick of fighting with wife about missing his kids grow up because of the horrendous traffic between work in downtown Austin and his home 17 miles north of the city.
“The more people talk about this and the more we can tell this story [and demand our leaders do something about traffic], then we can do the disrupting you all are talking about,” DeLong said.
Not only is his message about storytelling powerful, but it’s crucial for all of us to step back and consider how we all are not just talking about disrupting mobility in the future, but how we are disrupting mobility already.
An example of DeLong’s belief in storytelling being the real deal is, well, Mobility Lab. It is really one of our three pillars: research, collaboration, and communications (which is just another word for what we’re trying to do really well: storytelling).
Most people think Mobility Lab is one of those “silly little companies doing start-up apps,” as Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Lab described those business types at the summit. And it kind of is that, but most people don’t know that Mobility Lab was started by and is mostly funded by Arlington County, Virginia’s government?
We have been “disrupting mobility” from within the government for about four years now. It’s truly forward thinking that the county lets us do this. But the transportation leaders there know Mobility Lab is one of the big reasons Arlington is considered a national leader in transit-oriented development. Sometimes we trumpet the innovations happening at home, but mostly we bring the best practices from around the world back to Arlington so the locals can constantly learn.
Arlington was great long before Mobility Lab came around. But before the Orange Line of Washington, D.C.’s Metro opening in the late 1970s, Arlington was little more than an interstate buzzing into the District. It took a long time, but now the Orange Line contributes to a pleasant walkable and bikeable three-mile stretch between the Potomac River and the Ballston neighborhood. This area is why Arlington was recently named the top location in the country for millennials: it has a bustling business climate, and there is rarely bad traffic – even though the area is dense with housing and offices.
Nearly 20 years ago, the county’s transportation department began researching its results for the TOD and transportation-demand planning. And eventually it was decided that research needed a home, which was originally going to be used a background information for something called TDM University that would help other regions learn how Arlington had transformed so they could do so as well.
There are TDM (transportation demand management) agencies and TMAs (transportation management associations) all over the country, but they are underfunded and little known. Arlington has the largest TDM organization in the country, and it is part of the transportation department.
So building on the years of research that the new Mobility Lab began housing, it was wisely decided that the research needed to be unwrapped. Its stories needed to be told not only to Arlington but to the entire TDM industry.
Mobility Lab has recognized over the past three-plus years that we have an opportunity to reframe this TDM concept by communicating it in ways that people care about. We needed to connect this obscure TDM ideas to their lives by making it relevant to the issues that connect with their lives beyond transportation: economics, tech, sustainability, education, planning, policy, and many others.
We recognized that fewer transportation reporters existed in the mainstream media, so there was an information gap we could help fill. We are now a media company, of which there are far too few in the transportation space. We take all we are learning and put it out in front of large audiences because, for far too long, we’ve all been talking amongst ourselves, and the car companies and car-only roads have been winning.
Think about the beautiful cars on beautiful open roads you see again and again in Super Bowl commercials. Contrast that to any Super Bowl commercials you see about people happy on public transportation.
Every organization at Disrupting Mobility, and all the other groups working on transportation and urban planning, need to go out and hire journalists and strategic communicators to tell their stories. And to tell the very simple story that our cities need fixing and we will have to look for low-cost yet effective ways to connect people that are popular, fast, and affordable. We need to shape the mainstream media conversations or our ideas will continue to exist in our inner sanctum of experts.
As part of our goal of collaboration, we work closely with Arlington Transportation Partners, which helps about 700 employers, 300 residential communities, and 80 commercial properties learn about commuting tax benefits and how they can install bike parking and showers, among other issues that make it easier to stop driving so much. We also are housed with the county’s educational organizations BikeArlington and WalkArlington, as well as goDCgo and Capital Bikeshare.
We run TransportationCamp, an unconference paired with the annual January Transportation Research Board meeting in Washington, D.C., that gets people excited about transportation and is now being replicated in many cities throughout the U.S. and world.
Our Transportation Techies has grown to about 1,200 members over the course of its 23 monthly gatherings, the last of which was featured in a major Washington Post article. Who knew there were so many transportation hackers and geeks in D.C. alone? They are starting to create really compelling products out of the open data that many transportation agencies and companies provide, yet there is still room for much more of this data to be turned into stories that will captivate people who could potentially change their travelling habits.
We have also provided a space for products like TransitScreen and CarFreeAtoZ to be tested before hitting the market.
All of our endeavors are designed to make planners, policymakers, and other important people sit up and take notice that the status quo has got to stop. Citizens are thinking creatively in ways that many planning and transportation-industry lifers are not. We don’t have space for more roads and we don’t have money for major new public projects, but if we think creatively, we can make a myriad of improvements.
The public sector has a chance to create pop ups and pilots that better connect existing transit systems. If they prove popular, some of those will turn into full projects and programs. The private sector can keep doing what it’s doing and hopefully governments will loosen up and play nice.
Mobility Lab couldn’t be more excited to be thinking about Uber, Lyft, Zipcar, car2go, Bridj, Split, Capital Bikeshare, and all the other companies operating in D.C. and beyond. We plan to continue finding ways to better integrate these systems into transit and to continue educating everyone about their transportation options.
Photos: Top, pedestrians in Crystal City, Arlington (Sam Kittner/kittner.com for Mobility Lab). Middle, left to right: Panel at Disrupting Mobility 2016 (Philipp Rode, via Twitter).
This article was originally published by Mobility Lab.
An excellent first day at the Vocus PR conference at National Harbor in Washington D.C. culminated in a meet-and-greet with keynote speaker Elisabeth Moss. It was pretty fun for colleague Mike Smith and I to meet the famed "Peggy Olson" of Mad Men.
Moss, incidentally a Scientologist, has appeared in Girl, Interrupted with Winona Ryder and 25 episodes of The West Wing. But nothing prepared her for what may be the best drama in TV history (and, if not, Jon Hamm as Don Draper is at least the greatest dramatic character, with Moss's Peggy not too far behind in the mix).
Other highlights of the impressive conference were Arianna Huffington and Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute. Legendary journalism professor Jay Rosen also gave a solid presentation on the shifting nature of the expertise.
When Canadian musician Dave Carroll looked out the window of his United jet to see the workers flinging his guitar across the tarmac, he knew there was going to be some damage. Sure enough there was. But after months of being given the runaround, he realized his only weapon would be to write a song about it.
"United Breaks Guitars" was the result and, even better, the video went viral on You Tube. But even that wasn't enough to get the lumbering behemoth of United's PR department moving into action.
The excellent book, Real-Time Marketing and PR, details Dave's situation, commending him for his PR knack. He eventually got real-world results when United changed its customer-service policies, but not before the company's stock fell 10 percent in the week after the song was released.
Further, Carroll owned a Taylor Guitar, and the owner of that company gave Carroll two new guitars. The company was adept at jumping in when the iron was hot to get a little positive PR of its own.
The song hit number 1 in the iTunes store. Carroll went on to become a hot item on the public-speaking circuit about customer service. (On one of his trips, United lost his luggage.)
The whole point of the book, by David Meerman Scott, is that, in today's world, companies need to be ready at any moment to seize positive PR opportunities. Crisis communications can truly be the difference between a relevant operation, like Dave Carroll himself and Taylor Guitars, and one that seems to be fading, like United.
