There’s a fundamental piece of Marketing Wisdom that relates as well to politics as it does in commercial marketing, and that is: The best campaigns don’t always succeed and the worst don’t always fail. Counterintuitive though this maxim may seem the reasons behind it read like the Seven Deadly Sins. By the way, if you can’t rattle off from the top of your at least some of those seven this message probably isn’t meant for you.

In my opinion, pride is the most insidious of the seven. In this case it’s the pride that the professionals who make a living designing marketing messages for politicians and less animate products have in their mighty intelligence. These pros are invariably smart, articulate, passionate and persuasive about what they do, and therein lies the challenge because – in commercial marketing as well as the political kind – there is no one so smart that he or she won’t inevitably outsmart him- or herself.

Granted it’s a scary thing to discover that your number one asset, your brain, can hurt you every bit as much as it can help you. However, in this as with many things fear is the beginning of wisdom. Fortunately, the average body is equipped with a variety of other useful tools to assist you when you suspect that your cerebral cortex has its own agenda. These loyal assets are your eyes, your ears, and your “gut.”

To use your eyes, you first have to learn how to see. Please bear with me. I promise that I’m not spinning off into Zen word games. What I’m talking about is akin to learning how to draw. When shown a can of soup and asked to draw it most beginning art students will draw what their experience tells them is a can soup is supposed to look like…two shallow ovals connected by two parallel lines. Then the art teacher begins the process of teaching them how to see with their eyes and not their mind.

In like fashion when looking at a marketing concepts, put any preconceived notions aside and ask yourself some basic questions like, “Do I understand this concept? Does it persuade me? Would I be proud to tell a stranger that I was responsible for it?” Never, under any circumstances, fall into the trap of thinking that, “…it doesn’t’ work for me but it will impress the people I’m trying to reach.”

Your ears can be a vigorous ally if you’ll let them, but you have to be willing to listen to what you’re hearing. Sometimes this means hearing things that aren’t being clearly articulated. This is especially true when it comes to employees and others beholden to you who may be too polite (or afraid) to tell you what they really think about your marketing brainstorm. So listen carefully for qualified endorsements, faint praise and other damning kinds of support.

Of the three, your best ally is your gut. And let me stress yet again, that listening to your gut is not the same as believing your own press releases. I know a well-seasoned political consultant who refers to politicians who live inside an echo chamber. As such, the only thing they hear is what they say. You can imagine how difficult it is to confront anyone who is besotted with his or her own greatness with any information that doesn’t corroborate their beliefs.

However, if you develop the ability to shut out all the voices – especially your own – you may well find an inner wisdom that will keep you from backing and/or funding all sorts of foolishness. Mind you, your guts aren’t always a perfect bellweather, but if you heed them you’ll never find yourself saying, “You know, I knew something wasn’t right, but I went along anyway.”

Marketing Wisdom must be in short supply up in Redmond, Washington as evidenced by the nature of the buzz about the new commercial with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld that presumably promotes Microsoft’s poorly received Vista operating system. Unfortunately for Gates and company, the virtually incomprehensible spot isn’t generating the topspin for Vista that they obviously hoped it would, nor is it an effective riposte to the successful and popular “Get a Mac” campaign.

In the off chance that you’ve been off planet for the last couple of years, the Apple campaign features two actors isolated in a white environment reminiscent of the prison in THX1138. Terminally hip actor Justin Long, as “MAC,” spars with actor John Hodgman, as “PC,” who acts dumpy, clueless but nonetheless slightly embarrassed about himself. It’s not much of a stretch to see the casting as a thinly veiled portrayal of Steve Jobs versus Bill Gates.

The “Get a Mac” campaign has no doubt boosted Mac sales, though the company these days makes more profit from iPods than PC’s. However, if the goal was to prod Microsoft into making an ever greater fool of itself than it did with the release of Vista, the “Get a Mac” campaign is a home run.

The new Microsoft commercial is reputedly part of $300 million advertising campaign to promote Vista in a doubtful public and restore face to Microsoft. The perception of Vista is now so bad that the techie blogosphere heaps Microsoft’s new OS with opprobrium…without even bothering to try it.

The commercial, however, is another matter. It is clearly a flop. And, as if to insure than anyone who is watching may still be giving it the benefit of the doubt, it finishes with Bill Gates shaking his butt at the camera.

It’s hard to know who’s responsible for this travesty, but I strongly suspect that Bill Gates had a hand in the creative process. Certainly the choice of a comedian who has been largely out of the public eye for a decade and the pairing of Seinfeld with a stiff and undeniably geeky Gates suggests that no one with an experienced, or objective eye, was allowed significant input in the effort.

Yep, it looks like a vanity project. And like virtually all vanity efforts it backfires. I suspect that his spot will go down at the 30-second equivalent of “Ishtar,” a $30 million dollar film flop that sold less than $15,000 in tickets in the US.

By the way, I’m a PC guy who never did drink the Mac Kool Aide. I think their computers are over-priced and over-hyped. But their commercials are great!

If you’ve happened to ready more than one of these Marketing Wisdom blogs, then you know that I’m constantly harping about the fallacy that advertisers save money with D-I-Y, or “free” media-produced marketing, for the reason that the results from these “money saving” measures are generally ineffective in communicating a motivating message to the customer while extremely effective in branding the sponsor as an amateur business.

But, like with most everything, some good can come from these ‘half-baked’ marketing efforts…at least it can for the competitors of D-I-Y marketers or those who trust their marketing message to the hack work that comes from the media who promise to design and produce your marketing message for “free.”

Simply put, when you do your own logo – as opposed to hiring someone who actually does logos for a living – or entrust your marketing message to the ad salesman rather than pay a professional writer and / or designer to develop compelling words and pictures, you are making it just that much easier for your competitor to connect with customers.

Of course, in a market where pretty much every business does their marketing “in house” or relies on the TV-radio-newspaper-magazine to punch out ads and spots there’s a remarkable homogeneity to what you see in the paper, hear on the radio, and see on the TV.

Seriously, how many spots do we need where the smart wife/girl friend trumps the doltish, clueless husband or boyfriend?

Haven’t we all heard enough radio spots featuring dialogue between the studio engineer correcting the guy reading the copy?

Are you encouraged to patronize a business whose owner murders the language while reading the copy in his radio spot?

Don’t all of the bank ads showing a line-up of well-fed bankers in shirts and ties start looking the same to you?

Just because the newspaper sells ad space by the inch, do advertisers really get their money’s worth by packing every single inch with words and pictures?

And one of my favorites…

Even though computer design programs allow access to a mind-boggling number of fonts, are readers impressed when an ad contains 6 different fonts – each in a different color?

Interestingly, I’ll venture that almost none of the business men and women who pride themselves on their DIY marketing or their frugality when the media produces their advertising, cuts their own hair or allows the house painter to pick the color to paint their house.

Back to the point I was making when I began: half-baked marketing makes it that much easier for your competitor to produce ads, spots, direct mail, whatever that “stands apart” from the rest.

And when you consider that between 70% and 90% of the cost of any mass marketing effort is the cost of the media, e.g., getting the word out, it would stand to reason that one would want to justify this expense by making sure that the message, was as good as it could be.

This is why, whenever I see or hear a good ad or spot, I don’t immediately credit the creative folks. Instead I’m impressed by the person who was smart enough to pay a professional to make him or her look good.