An opinionated rant on the practice and malpractice of Business-to-Business Advertising

Business-to-business advertising isn't for everyone. It isn't Nike. It isn't Bud. It isn't two weeks in L.A. or five days in Cannes.

It isn't for account people who don't do their homework. Or copywriters who don't like to write. Or art directors who can't look outside the box for their visuals.

It's for people who like using smart advertising to reach smart audiences. Who aren't intimidated by dense material and arcane jargon. Who don't mind delving deeply into a complex subject. Who aren't put off by bright but cynical prospects.

Anyone can find the poetry in a luxury car. Few can find it in a municipal bond fund or a hydroelectric plant or a carrier-class non-blocking gigapacket IP switch.

Few, in fact, bother to look.

Which is too bad, because when you take the time to dig for it, the typical business product taps a far richer vein of poetry than the typical consumer product.

Our work lives, where we invest so much of our being -- our hopes, our fears, our very livelihoods -- contain deep pools of emotional resonance, just waiting to be exploited. A product that helps any business person do a job faster, cheaper, or better touches that person every bit as much as a running shoe or a beer or a designer pasta.

The trick, then, is to identify and exploit that emotional resonance, the same as you would with any product.

The difference is that in B2B advertising, you're dealing with products whose targets are more sophisticated, whose learning curves are longer, and whose benefits may be considerably more difficult to convey than any consumer product.

It seems obvious that most business people began life as just plain people, but you wouldn't know it from B2B advertising.

You would think that business people are another species altogether -- sober, stodgy, humorless, totally committed to three-piece suits and four-syllable words.

Does that sound like anyone you work with? Of course not. People at work are at least as human as they are at home. They're at least as funny, nervous, joyful, frenzied, proud, brash, foolish, and vain. Yet when it comes to B2B advertising, we insist that they be dull.

This should not be. Today's business person works in a fiercely Darwinian environment. The stakes are high. The pressure is intense. All human emotions come into play: fear of failure, joy in success, pride in one's performance, anger at the politics. And over it all, there's a layer of humor that both accentuates the positives and blunts the negatives.

As emotional climates go, this is pretty strong stuff. Creative people should be licking their chops.

We should be playing to these emotions, not denying them. We should be making our audiences laugh at themselves and their situation. We should be irreverent in tone and edgy in attitude. We should speak in a language as salty as they'd hear at the water cooler. We should address their fears, fuel their dreams, and applaud their courage.

Our advertising should say, in one way or another, "Hey, it's okay, we understand, you're under a lot of pressure, and we've got just the thing to get you out from under it."

When advertising any product, it's generally bad form to insult the intelligence of your audience. This is particularly true in B2B advertising, where there is both more intelligence to insult, and more opportunity to insult it.

But insult it we do, and on a regular basis. We insult it by not understanding that B2B targets are both more intelligent and more cynical than their consumer counterparts. And each of them comes with a finely-tuned, highly-refined BS Detector.

The typical B2B audience has been so overpromised and so under-serviced for so long, they recognize BS the minute they smell it. And when they smell it coming off a page of print -- or seeping out of a car radio -- the aroma becomes associated with our product.

We set off their BS Detectors with alarming regularity. Every time our ads are over-simplistic. Every time we speak in vague generalities. Every time we focus on the wrong benefits. Every time we underestimate the complexity of a problem and blithely claim that our product solves it. Every time we leave our prospects confused about what the hell we're selling and why we're taking up their time with it anyway.

The general business and trade magazines are all a-clutter with ads whose creators didn't bother with their homework -- ads that set off the detector every time.

In advertising, most learning curves are fairly short. If you're assigned to, say, the Cheerios account, there isn't that much to know. Sure, your account group could dutifully explore new strategies, new uses, and new targets, but for the most part there isn't much about the product itself that you didn't know when you were three years old.

Compare that to something like a computer, a product with a learning curve that started in the sixties and has no end in sight.

Generally speaking, the learning curves on B2B accounts are considerably longer than in other categories. We who spend our careers on B2B accounts spend most of our time moving from one learning curve to another.

We immerse ourselves in our products. We embrace the technical complexity that others find so daunting. We relate to, and empathize with, our target audiences. And we don't stop digging until we find the poetry.

If it takes a little longer to do that, so be it. The learning curve must be respected. Whenever we try to fake it, that damn detector goes off again.

Climb even the shortest of these B2B learning curves and you're sure to notice that everyone, but everyone, is selling a "total solution."

We've actually had, at times, three or four clients who have each simultaneously claimed that their unique position in the marketplace was "integrated blank solutions" -- where the "blank" is filled by the buzzword du jour.

(The notion even spilled over to our non-B2B work, when we half-seriously considered pitching a line of shoes as Integrated Walking Solutions.)

The so-called "solution sell," as it has evolved over the years, has become the B2B equivalent of "Tastes Great" in packaged goods. Which is to say that, even if it's true, it's not differentiating. In most cases, "total solutions" come under the heading of "table stakes" -- the bare minimum offering a company needs to compete in its chosen market.

It's our job to gently but firmly guide our clients to a higher level of benefit, to help them figure out just why their solution is better than anyone else's.

And if it's not better -- if it's just one more commoditized parity offering -- then we have to do what we've always done with parity offerings: we go executional. We build differentiation into the advertising itself, and we use any means at our disposal. We charm, cajole, tickle, shock -- anything to engage our prospects.

A so-called total solution doesn't engage anyone.

A business-to-business account is not to be taken lightly. There are simply too many mistakes to make, too many opportunities to miss, too many audiences to alienate. Without the right people in place, you will almost surely put out a message that is simplistic, irrelevant, boring, or downright insulting.

Don't even try it without at least one experienced B2B practitioner in each of the skill positions: account management, media, creative, and strategic planning. While you're at it, put an entire direct response staff on your wish-list as well, because a B2B assignment is rarely about branding alone, and B2B DR is not something you want to learn by trial and error.

A B2B account demands your best thinking. Don't try to fudge it. Do the homework. Hone the strategy. Talk the client out of that silly solution sell. Blow right past the Detector and charm the cynicism right out of your prospect.

The poetry is there. Either find it, or find somebody who can.