Do you feel a draft? Mitch Daniels for Prez?

The Christian Science Monitor (see link below) openly opined today that Mitch Daniels' superb State of the Union rebuttal (gotta love the bit about the light bulb) was possibly nothing but a litmus test for a real run (aka read "draft").

In reality, is history repeating itself or a forgotten page right out of L. Keith Bulen's election playbook? This seems very close to the 2003 quasi-strategy in the first part of the Bush the Second's administration, when Daniels publicly refused to return to Indiana (then holding the OMB director post) to run for Governor.

After a seemingly independent groundswell of prominent calls, letters and pledges, Daniels "reluctantly" returned to Hoosierland and captured the gubernatorial brass ring. Will we see a repeat on the federal level in 2012? It IS a great speech! http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2012/0125/Mitch-Daniels-State-of-the-Union-rebuttal-makes-GOP-wonder-What-if/(page)/2

Is Mitch Running for Veep or What?

The response to the opposition President's State of the Union Address is typically reserved for an up and comer in the opposition party. The Republican Congressional leadership announced Jan. 19 that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels -- who earlier withdrew from any possible presidential candidacy -- will deliver the Republican's response to President Obama.

The questions are: 1) Is Mitch now running for the Republican Vice Presidential Slot; or 2) Is Mitch running for either Secretary of the Treasury or Secretary of Commerce (in a newly revamped Commerce Department)?

Read the press release below from the Congressional Republications and decide for yourself:

Washington -- House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced today that Governor Mitch Daniels (R-IN) will deliver the Republican Address to the Nation following the President’s State of the Union address on January 24, 2012.

Governor Daniels, now in his eighth and final year as Indiana’s chief executive, has compiled a solid record of effective government and fiscal responsibility, making him well-suited to outline Republicans’ better solutions to the challenges Americans are facing in this struggling economy.

In his 2012 State of the State Address, Gov. Daniels touted a number of his administration’s accomplishments:

• Indiana has a balanced budget and now enjoys the first AAA credit rating in its history.
• According to CEO Magazine’s rankings of the best states to do business, “Indiana jumped to sixth place from 16th in 2010, giving Hoosiers the third-biggest advance in the rankings in a single year.”
• The magazine notes that “while at least 35 states raised taxes during the recession, Indiana cut them.”Indiana has the fewest state employees per capita in the country.
• In a national survey, 77 percent of Hoosiers described their state government as “efficient,” the second-highest rating in the nation.

“Mitch Daniels is a fierce advocate for smaller, less costly, and more accountable government, and has the record to prove it,” Speaker Boehner said. “As governor, he has turned deficits into surplus, reformed government from top to bottom, and created a better environment for private-sector job creation.

"For making tough choices and keeping his promises, Mitch Daniels is the right choice at the right time to deliver the Republican response to President Obama’s address.”

“As Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels helped improve his state’s economy by fostering an environment to create jobs. An eloquent spokesman for limited government, Gov. Daniels knows that President Obama’s three-year experiment in big government has made our economy worse and our future more uncertain, and he knows that Americans want a government that’s simpler, streamlined and secure,” said Leader McConnell. “He is a forceful advocate of pro-growth policies like fundamental tax reform, regulatory reform and energy security.

And he is the right choice to explain the challenges we face and to outline a hopeful, common-sense vision for moving America forward by growing the economy, not the national debt.”

“It’s an honor to be asked. I hope to do the assignment justice,” said Governor Daniels. Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. was elected as the 49th Governor of the State of Indiana in 2004, in his first bid for any elected office. He was re-elected in 2008 to a second and final term, receiving more votes than any candidate for any public office in the state’s history.

Daniels earned a bachelor's degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1971 and his law degree from Georgetown University in 1979. More information on Governor Daniels can be found at the following link: http://www.in.gov/gov/2635.htm.

FINALLY - Authoritative -- and Believable Economic Good News

A few years ago, economist Alan Beaulieu stood in front of a packed Indianapolis crowd at Butler University and blithely predicted that the whole economic world was going to go to hell in a hand basket. A lot of very intelligent people were in that crowd. Most, like me, didn't do what he said. Way in advance he predicted what we now call the "Great Recession" would be The Perfect Storm. It was going to be exceptionally ugly.

Of course, it was.

At the time, I wrote a Chicago-based business column called the Hoosier Coefficient. So I interviewed Beaulieu and wrote a column about his predictions.

They. All. Came. True.

Every last ugly one of them.

Since I didn't do what he said, the economic maelstrom blew out the windows of my little business. We hung on by our fingernails. When he made his prediction, banks were throwing money at me. When he said that in a few months nobody would be loaning anybody anything, some thought him mad. He said cash would be king, and now I know what that means. I REALLY know what that means. In fact, my business became a little bank, as some client invoices started going 30, 60 and in some cases 180 days, before they were paid.

Just like Beaulieu said they would.

Now, in the past year or so, I -- like you -- have heard it all about our economic "recovery." Off and on, double dip or no double dip. It wakes me up at night and sends me to my knees.
Until now.

Wait for it.

Beaulieu's company, The Institute for Trend Research, has made it OFFICIAL. ITR has a 96% accuracy rate. Here it is:

The year 2012 will be the first real year of expansion and recovery.
The recovery and expansion will continue right through the first half of 2013, and then perhaps get a little bumpy.
ITR says we may have a little bump of a recession beginning in the latter half of 2013, but the economy will pick back up and then expand again from 2015 to 2017.
Now, according to ITR, is the time to market, position and SELL. Time to build up cash reserves, leverage favorable interest rates and GROW.

Did I say that I believe this forecast?

How can I not, especially when he was right down the line, point by excruciatingly painful point, when everyone else was saying "Oh, the housing marketing will rebound, we'll be okay" just a few years ago.

I'm ready to believe. And act!

Poignant irony headed for Indy Super Bowl?

With the San Francisco 49ers and New York Giants set to square off for the NFC champsionship on January 22, at least one item of irony is guaranteed for the Indy Super Bowl spotlight. If the 49ers win this coming weekend, the Colts former QB "Captain Comeback" in the form of now-49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh with return to Naptown, together with former Colts defensive coordinator Vic Fangio. Fangio, of course, was trashed by former Colts GM Bill Polian in 2001, and went on to build a number of top defensive units, including the current 49ers, whose defense is No. 1 in the NFL. Also of course, Polian's Colts defense struggled basically every year after Fangio. A bittersweet homecoming?

And if the NY Giants win, brother Eli gets to play in brother Peyton's house for the NFL uber-brass ring, while the older brother sits this one out in his NFL home town.

Stop Commoditizing Communication – Capture the Strategic Creative Advantage

This column by creative director Tim Meyers has developed a virtual life of its own, so if you have not already seen it, enjoy!

Stop Commoditizing Communication – Capture the Strategic Creative Advantage

By Tim Meyers, Creative Director, The MEK Group

Is automation driving your marketing? Is your advertising and creative work dependent on templates and populated by clip art? Does your social media messaging automatically appear on Facebook, then on Twitter, then on your Web site – popping up over and over again until it’s digital tapioca?

What ever happened to the all-compelling “big idea” that drove brand messaging home, regardless of the channel or the platform?

This type of high-octane creative – which still exists today – represents a Big Idea that re-positions an entire company for success. It represents what companies used to go to advertising agencies for: a hot, creative idea that drove the business. An idea that transformed. These transformational ideas create strong, believable brands that literally became part of our culture.

Today, with all of the advances in communication, one might think that this principal is even more true. Ironically, the opposite has manifested itself in many instances, blurred strong communication elements down to meaningless blobs of redundant obviousness. Differentiation in an automated world is the next best thing to an oxymoron.

Advances in communication technology, in desktop publishing, in video production and in portable mobile devices should have created communication excellence. Instead, it’s created a new level of communication clutter that is nearly incomprehensible. Much of what passes for communication today is simply awful.

Because production capacity has become cheap, communication has lurched toward commoditization. A great idea, a great brand, a great campaign – these all take time to nurture, develop, produce and execute. Instead, it is far easier to cut budgets, slam together template ads, spots or PowerPoint presentations and then call it “communication,” even though few are certain to what it’s communicating or even whether it’s communicating. It’s incredibly – and unfortunately – easy to think that one is communication, when in reality all that is happening is the creation of more and more confusing and brand-busting clutter.

With clutter comes anxiety, so bad communication bruises brands – some fatally – even though people may not be aware of it.

At MEK we’ve found three things that will help change the world and get us back to real communication.

1) Automation is not a bad thing, as long as it adds real value to all points of a transaction. Quantity is not necessarily quality, and in an era where plenty of alternatives exist, you want to ensure that you are tantalizing and delighting your customers with real authentic messages.

2) A strong creative idea, fueled by relevant and strong content, can change the world. Or it can at least change the world that you and your customers are used to. Communication platforms like Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist a few years ago. Their replacements – or the platforms that will enhance them – are probably already in development.

3) Accordingly, it’s not about the platform or the technology. It’s about the idea, the content and the message.

Industry labels like advertising, PR and media buying are changing right in front us. What many PR people do today – compared to a decade ago – is in most cases dramatically different. And there’s a reason for that change.

Want to be successful in the second decade of the 21st century? Resist the ease and the siren call of commoditization. There used to be a popular saying in advertising that went something like this: cheap, fast, effective – pick two. In today’s incredibly cluttered communication environment, the saying should perhaps go like this: savvy, simple, relevant – pick three.

Strategic marketing is not a commodity. It doesn’t come in a ready-to-use box. So, fight back and champion the big idea, the big brand, and cheerfully reject those efforts to commoditize real excellence in communication.

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Has Your Marketing Become Digital Tapioca? Try the Big Idea!

The following great column by MEK's creative director appeared recently in Inside Indiana Business. If you work in any aspect of communications today, it's definitely worth a read!

Stop Commoditizing Communication – Capture the Strategic Creative Advantage

By Tim Meyers, Creative Director, The MEK Group

Is automation driving your marketing? Is your advertising and creative work dependent on templates and populated by clip art? Does your social media messaging automatically appear on Facebook, then on Twitter, then on your Web site – popping up over and over again until it’s digital tapioca?

What ever happened to the all-compelling “big idea” that drove brand messaging home, regardless of the channel or the platform?

This type of high-octane creative – which still exists today – represents a Big Idea that re-positions an entire company for success. It represents what companies used to go to advertising agencies for: a hot, creative idea that drove the business, an idea that transformed. These transformational ideas create strong, believable brands that literally became part of our culture.

Today, with all of the advances in communication, one might think that this principle is even more true. Ironically, the opposite has manifested itself in many instances, blurring strong communication elements down to meaningless blobs of redundant obviousness. Differentiation in an automated world is the next best thing to an oxymoron.

Advances in communication technology, in desktop publishing, in video production and in portable mobile devices should have created communication excellence. Instead, it’s created a new level of communication clutter that is nearly incomprehensible. Much of what passes for communication today is simply awful.

Because production capacity has become cheap, communication has lurched toward commoditization. A great idea, a great brand, a great campaign – these all take time to nurture, develop, produce and execute. Instead, it is far easier to cut budgets, slam together template ads, spots or PowerPoint presentations and then call it “communication,” even though few are certain to what it’s communicating or even whether it’s communicating. It’s incredibly – and unfortunately – easy to think that one is communicating, when in reality all that is happening is the creation of more and more confusing and brand-busting clutter.

With clutter comes anxiety, so bad communication bruises brands – some fatally – even though people may not be aware of it.

At MEK we’ve found three things that will help change the world and get us back to real communication.

1) Automation is not a bad thing, as long as it adds real value to all points of a transaction. Quantity is not necessarily quality, and in an era where plenty of alternatives exist, you want to ensure that you are tantalizing and delighting your customers with real authentic messages.

2) A strong creative idea, fueled by relevant and strong content, can change the world. Or it can at least change the world that you and your customers are used to.

3) Communication platforms like Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist a few years ago. Their replacements – or the platforms that will enhance them – are probably already in development. Accordingly, it’s not about the platform or the technology. It’s about the idea, the content, and the message.

Industry labels like advertising, PR and media buying are changing right in front us. What many PR, marketing and creative people do today – compared to a decade ago – is in most cases dramatically different. And there’s a reason for that change, due to the changing playing field. However, the Big Idea and how to make it strategically happen has always been a major key.

Want to be successful in the second decade of the 21st century? Resist the ease and the siren call of commoditization. There used to be a popular saying in advertising that went something like this: cheap, fast, effective – pick two. In today’s incredibly cluttered communication environment, the saying should perhaps go like this: savvy, simple, relevant – pick three.

Strategic marketing is not a commodity. It doesn’t come in a ready-to-use box. So, fight back and champion the big idea, the big brand, and cheerfully reject those efforts to commoditize real excellence in communication.

Stagflation - a look back or forward?

Back before the Great Recession, I put together the following blog about fears of stagflation and thoughts about when it first appeared. This was written pre-Stimulus and pre-quasi-recovery (the latter of course is expected to kick inflation into high gear). Now, with stagflation fears freshly appearing, I thought it appropriate to revisit this.

With economists presently nearly evenly divided [in 2008] on whether the U.S. economy is headed toward/already in a recession, the Associated Press weighed in Feb. 27 [2008] with an opine that the dreaded "stagflation" appears to be re-emerging. It didn't take a Nobel Prize-winning economist to predict that inflation would jump up, what with double- and triple-digit increases in gas, rising food prices because corn and other commodity food stuffs are being used for gas, and higher medical costs because (in part) Boomers are getting older and not dying off. So what does this mean?

Stagflation, of course, represents an unsavory economic condition where prices skyrocket while the national (these days, global) economy sputters. Kind of hard to manage if you happen to be President, given that economic incentives can ignite even further inflationary responses.

With the "me first" recession and stagflation predictions swirling around, this takes one back to the Nixon era, where the Administration was then battling the chaos fomented by the 1960s "guns and butter" economic policies of then-abhorred deficit federal spending (sound familiar in 2008 with Katrina and Iraq?). In the unstable summer of 1971, the British Ambassador to the U.S. showed up at the U.S. Treasury with an uncomfortable question: "I have $3 billion in American dollars here," he purred. "Would it be too much trouble to convert that into gold?"

With more than three decades between us and the summer of 1971, not too many probably remember top-of-mind that the United States used to be on the Gold Standard, with U.S. gold trading at the now-incomprehensible price of $45 or so an ounce. Lots of Treasury folks at that time probably grabbed their bottles of Rolaids in response to the English request. The United Kingdom at the time had yet to be bailed out from the discovery and subsequent pumping of lucrative North Sea oil, and her Majesty's former empire was then well on its way to collapsing into Second World economic and political status.

As Nixon wrote later in his Autobiography, "Whether we honored or denied this [British] request, the consequences of our action would be fraught with danger: if we gave the British the gold they wanted, then other countries might rush to get theirs. If we refused, then that would be an admission of our concern that we could not meet every potential demand for conversion into gold."

So Nixon not only left the Gold standard and floated the dollar in August of 1971, he - in his words - "proposed a series of economic controls and reforms that left even long-time wage and price control advocates breathless."

The long-time Adam Smith-thumping Conservative President apparently had an near-instantaneous conversion into a disciple of John Maynard Keynes. Nixon lamented that Eisenhower handed the country over to Kennedy in 1960 with an annual rate of inflation around an unbelievable 1.5%, but that it had ballooned up to 4.7% - a then-unthinkable level.

The floating and subsequent devaluing of the dollar was met with considerable scorn: the venerable economist Arthur Burns, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, argued that "Pravda [the then-influential Soviet newspaper] would write that this was a sign of the collapse of capitalism."

It all seems silly today, but back then it was real stuff. I was an 18-year-old traveling in Japan at the time Nixon devalued the dollar, and I remember wondering how my hard-earned U.S. greenbacks could drop 20% in value overnight!

But it got worse. When I returned from Japan, I found that Nixon - against all odds -had triggered the legislation the Democratic Congress had handed him, and instituted real-time wage and price controls. It took two whole years for the U.S. economy to completely return to private control and market trends.

Today, it's not just about the U.S., as The Economist magazine points out this week. Japan's "Lost Decade" of financial travesty in the late 1980s and early 1990s transformed that nation into something-less-than-happy. Virtually every sector - minus the oil-rich nations armed with Sovereign Wealth - has its own set of challenges. Given the productivity numbers and even with the greed-fueled losses in the U.S. housing market, it seems odd that the American economy would at this point choose to collectively jump off a cliff. If you can completely explain the complexity of today's global economy, I'd like to hear it. Meanwhile, we don't have wage and price controls yet, and we do have an unemployment rate in Indiana (slightly over 4%) that many Hoosier politicians would have killed for a few years ago [Within a few months of this first publishing of this blog, Indiana's unemployment rate jumped to more than 10%, as of this writing it's still around 9%]. The point? Let's go compete.

Reversing the Destruction of Trust

Our society lives on trust. We do business by trust.
When we read that multi-million-dollar PR firms like Burson-Marstellar took their 30 pieces of silver from current Internet giant Facebook to wrongly bad-mouth rival giant Google, it rends the very fabric by which our society holds together.
Without trust, one ultimately has anarchy. A growing lack of trust means things cost more. Low trust leads to greed.
What is even more sad and disheartening is the fact that Burson is widely credited with the classic and highly praised trust-building strategy that saved Tylenol (and Johnson & Johnson) way back in 1982.
Apparently both Johnson & Johnson and Burson have both misplaced their moral compass.
The PR giant, one of the largest in the industry, makes matters worse by serving up weak blame, pointing the finger towards its client, Facebook: "
"[T]his was not at all standard operating procedure [for Burson] and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined."
What "nice" words, the phrase: "Should have been declined." Unfortunately, such a mea culpa doesn't work.
This is a classic "dirty tricks" campaign, and one in an unbroken line as long as recorded human history. However, that does not make it right. In fact, in this post Great Recession time of shaky trust, it comes at a very bad time. It's bad for the PR profession, it's bad for Burson (and Facebook) and it's bad for society.
When people start tossing around words like "integrity," they better be prepared to show that their motives are a little more pure than power-grabbing and profit-taking.
Fast Company magazine asserts that the Burson/Facebook dirty tricks tactic is simply the first round in "an epic, escalating war" between Facebook and Google. I sincerely and feverently hope that FC is totally wrong on that one.
The antidote to this collapse of trust is actually fairly simple. Paraphrasing the famous line from Robin Williams in the Disney movie Aladdin, all one really has to do to be successful here is "tell the truth." Further, when companies like Facebook and Burson are openly caught in such matters, justice is required. If no legal recourse is available, then people should make their displeasure known in the marketplace. If not, bad things happen. As one ancient source says: "Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil" (Ecclesiastes 8:11).

Let us reverse this. Among other bits, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) needs to do its bit and condemn Burson for its breach of ethics. Facebook should be sanctioned by the marketplace. And we all need to agreed that going forward, the restoration of trust is critical. No lying. No cheating. No accepting 30 pieces of silver to wrongly bad-mouth anyone.

We need to change, and we don't need a presidential administration to do it for us. We need fundamental change inside of us -- accompanying by an open change in behavior -- to truly reverse the destruction of trust.