It’s been a busy week for the Media Guy!

I’m in Hollywood this week with what seems like LL Cool J Week. First, I run into him at the fabulous Redbury filming NCIS: Los Angeles and today I watched him get the 2571st star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Usually I only see LL Cool J at the Grammys, but twice in one week? With all the broo-ha-ha about diversity in Hollywood (well-deserved I might add), there was some front and present at the Hard Rock Cafe on Hollywood Boulevard with Diddy and Queen Latifah flanking him with his new star after the hour-long ceremony. At least this took my mind off the deaths of some the greats in entertainment, namely Alan Rickman, David Bowie and Glenn Frey.

I took the first two pretty hard. I mean who doesn’t get a chill when Hans Gruber implores his ballet terrorist buddy Alexander Godunov to “shoot, the glass” or when you hear the David Bowie and Freddy Mercury wax poetic about being under pressure?

But Glenn Frey? The Eagles? That’s another level of loss. That a loss of inspiration. Seriously, when I heard that he passed away, a tear crept down my face (much like the three that streamed down when I heard the Rocky theme crescendo in Creed). It wasn’t planned. It was just there. Like a stomach punch of epic proportions.

As an ad man you need inspiration. The Eagles provided that from when I was a just a kid and took me to a different place as the idea man working in New York. Don Draper had his old fashioneds and his women. I had the Eagles.

What was great about the Eagles is that, for me, it took me to a place I could not get by myself emotionally. Glenn Frey may have said it best when he reflected that “people do stuff to the Eagles.” They go on drives. They dance. They get intimate. A lot of music you just chill with and listen to at home. The Eagles were different altogether.

For me, I created. When I was a kid, I created stories that I hoped would be turned into movie and television scripts. As an adult I create commercials and ad campaigns. Some of my better work had the Eagles as a soundtrack in my head. Maybe everyone has that soundtrack where they find their spot. The Eagles were/are my road map to creative success.

I mean, this is the kind of ad you whip up when you don’t have a muse like the Eagles driving your creative energy:

The Bloomingdale’s holiday date rape print ad for the retailer shows an image of a woman and a man with a very questionable headline between them. The headline reads, “Spike your best friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking.” It was quickly followed with a pullback from corporate:

Like I said, this is what you get without the Eagles…yet I digress…

As America’s greatest band, they were a success outside of their Eagles work. Much like the Beatles (each of the Fab Four had success in music and business in addition to their Beatles’ work), the Eagles found greatness with their individual work as well. Don Henley and Joe Walsh found stardom on their own. But Frey was beyond that. Even his bit work on Miami Vice and Jerry McGuire stood out to me. I felt like his talent made my talent better. When therapy was needed, and it was (try working at an advertising agency for month with all of those insane client demands), the Eagles were always there driving me to a place to confront the demons.

Let’s just say that it there were a biopic of my life, the producers would have to pay a fortune in royalties to ensure the Eagles are playing in most scenes.

RIP Glenn Frey:

RIP Hans Gruber (aka Alan Rickman) … apologies to Harry Potter fans, but he will be forever Hans Gruber:

RIP David Bowie:

The post Everyone Needs a Muse – A Tribute to Glenn Frey appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

If Esquire says you are, you can bet that it’s true.

While Playboy scraped the bottom of the marketing barrel to find a way to be even less relevant, Esquire magazine named Emilia Clarke the “Sexiest Woman Alive”, because, well, you know, the Internet is fueled by nudity and hints of nudity and fake nudity.

You know what has a whole lot of nudity?

Game of Thrones. 

It’s the entire point of the show. On that note, it’s probably worth noting that Khaleesi no longer does nude scenes, instead handing the reins over to her almost twenty year old body double.

Yet I digress and I’m only a paragraph into this thing and I haven’t had my 4p hash browns from the new all-day breakfast menu at McDonald’s.

Okay, so where am I?

Before I get to where I am, I have to tell you that I am pretty relieved that I am not a narcissist; this according to Joseph Burgo, Ph.D., a psychologist and the author of “The Narcissist You Know.” He reports that common traits of narcissism include constantly feeling under appreciated, thinking everyone else is stupid, and feeling justified in acting mean to people.

If they only still had a McDanish!

But there’s one key trait that distinguishes narcissists from everyone else: an absence of interest in other people and the inability to feel for them.

So if you’re already disinterested with my ramblings, perhaps you have a bunch of narcissism running through your veins.

OKAY, ENOUGH WITH THE DIGRESSIONS.

So, I was in Austin, Texas at the American Marketing Association where the highlight of the conference was the amazing presentation by Guy Kawasaki outlining his ten tips for innovative marketing and soon you’ll see why I brought up Playboy, Game of Thrones and McDonald’s.

Turn on the television, pick up a newspaper or visit the Internet and you will be inundated with messages about brand products.

Tide is a brand. Pepsi is a brand. Nike is a brand.

And so are you – or at least you should be.

Speak with Marsha Friedman, a public relations expert with 25 years’ experience developing publicity strategies for celebrities, corporations and media newcomers alike, and she will tell you, “If you open a dictionary, the word ‘brand’ is defined as a type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name. These days you need to be that product. Keeping your personal brand alive is a must for success in today’s marketplace.”

Personal branding has gotten a lot more buzz in recent times and has become an important tool for everyone who wants to improve their career or business opportunities. Touting the need for personal branding is the essence of her new book, Celebritize Yourself. (Fifteen smacks on Amazon.)

When you think about it, though, personal branding is not new. It’s just that more people have the means to do it today and, fortunately, the Internet has provided us with numerous ways to create and maintain a personal brand.

The former king of personal branding

But many entertainers and athletes thrived at it long ago. Many of us remember the song “Happy Trails” from our childhood.  Roy Rogers was the movie and TV cowboy who made this song popular and whose name and image appeared on toy holsters, lunch boxes, comic books, puzzles, coloring books and other merchandise in the 1940s and 1950s.

Roy is a great example of someone who was ahead of his time with personal branding although he stumbled into it unintentionally. The story goes, he wanted a raise from his movie studio, but the boss balked. Bummed out by the response, Roy asked for what he considered a consolation prize – all rights to his name and likeness.

As it turned out, that was no consolation prize. Roy soon figured out that he – not the studio – was the big winner in the negotiations. Any raise would have been paltry next to the money he raked in from Roy Rogers brand merchandise.

Here’s an additional lesson about personal branding that Roy Rogers provides us. Younger people don’t know who Roy Rogers is today. When you mention his name you typically get a puzzled expression. Even the best personal branding, you see, doesn’t last forever. It has to be nurtured continually. (Roy, of course, nurtured his brand his entire life, and it was only the passage of time after his death that caused it to fade, so we’ll give him a break.) I mean even the greatest Christmas movie of all time, Die Hard, had a special tribute to the great cowboy:

The rest of us get no break and the message is clear: Don’t rest on your laurels, or in your saddle, whichever is appropriate.

So what can you do to get your personal brand launched and keep it alive? Here are a few suggestions.

•  Make sure your website represents you exactly the way you want to be seen. This is one of the best places to control your image. That could mean you want to be viewed as witty, intellectual or physically fit. It could mean you want the world to see you as an expert in a particular field. Maybe you want to convey an image of trust. Roy Rogers was the clean-cut hero wearing a smile and a cowboy hat. What’s your image?

• •Maintain a strong social media presence. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites are invaluable tools for networking or getting your message out quickly under your personal brand. Also, make sure you have a unified message that weaves through your website, your social media sites and anything else you use to promote yourself. Design elements should be consistent from one platform to the next as well.
• Keep your presence alive in traditional media, too, making yourself available for interviews. Media appearances act as a third-party endorsement, casting you as an authority in your field. This also needs constant cultivation. If you were quoted in a newspaper article last year, then you’re last year’s news. Even worse, if your competitor is quoted in an article today, they’ve become more relevant than you and are winning the personal-branding war.
• Branding yourself is not a one-shot deal. One of the biggest misconceptions about branding is that people expect to do one or two things to promote themselves and then figure they are done. Nothing could be further from the truth. Your branding effort never stops. It’s like trying to become physically fit. You don’t go to the gym for one week to get your dream body – nor would you expect that a good workout three years ago would leave you set for life. Your personal branding effort is the same way. It’s ongoing.

The bottom line is that creating a personal brand is one of the keys to success in today’s world. By branding yourself – making sure the world knows who you are and the expertise you have to offer – you not only set yourself apart from your competitors but you also open the door to new opportunities.

AD OF THE WEEK/MONTH/WHATEVER

Bonds Underwear

The new Bonds Underwear ad has balls! Talking ball where the family jewels banter about life down under. Their lives are improved dramatically with the arrival of a new pair of undies:

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