Influencer Marketing: Cooking with Gas

“Influencer marketing presents a glaring opportunity for brands to leverage the power of word-of-mouth at scale through personalities that consumers already follow and admire,” says Misha Talavera in Adweek.

Influencer marketing may in fact be “the next big thing,” as Talavera says; but it isn’t new.

In 1939, build-up boy Deke Houlgate worked for American Gas Association when he cooked up the tagline, "Now you're cooking with gas!"

Electric and natural gas stoves were in hot competition at the time. 

The association hoped to persuade homeowners cooking with gas was the best way to get hot meals on the table.

Without funds for ads, Houlgate called Bob Hope's scriptwriters and convinced them to insert his line into Hope's radio show.

It became one of Hope's signature lines, and soon spread in use by other comics, jazz musicians and cartoon characters.

American Gas Association was hardly Houlgate's last hurrah.

During World War II, from inside the Pentagon, he used his magic to popularize the unpopular B-26, a bomber so crash-prone it was nicknamed by fliers "The Widowmaker." 

Houlgate also helped glamorize WACs, to encourage enlistments.

Words and Pictures

“The effect in sickness of beautiful objects, of variety of objects, and especially of brilliancy of color is hardly at all appreciated.”

— Florence Nightingale

After a five-year effort, the Susan Sebastian Foundation has just completed the permanent installation of original artworks in every inpatient room in Vermont's 14 hospitals.

The project resulted from ideas expressed in Dr. Esther Sternberg's Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being.

Citing research, the book argues that art activates endorphin-rich parts of patients' brains, speeding their recovery.

The nonprofit's founders read Sternberg's book and tackled the project in memory of a long-suffering patient, Susan Sebastian, whose last wish was, “When I get out of here, I am going to sell my house to buy art for hospital patient rooms.”

Sternberg, a pioneer in the science of the mind-body connection, is floored.

"When you write a book, you never know the impact it will have, and to see my words made into reality on this scale is tremendously fulfilling," she says.

Esther Sternberg is a friend of mine, and I can recall vividly the manuscript pages of Healing Spaces stacked on her writing desk. Who knew all those words would matter six years later?

Pictures have power; words do, too.

We're so awash in both, that's easy to forget.

It takes activists like the folks at the Susan Sebastian Foundation to remind us.

HAT TIP: Edward Segal pointed me to this story.

Only the Lonely

A new study published in the Academy of Management Journal says creative workers ignore their spouses.

Two management professors interviewed 108 workers and their spouses every day for 10 days. The workers held jobs in a variety of industries that included finance, healthcare, government, education, transportation and construction.

Workers were asked about the tasks they performed during the day; spouses, about the time spent with their husbands.

The findings: the more the worker was busy with idea-generation on the job, the less time he spent at home.

To remedy "the relational aftereffects of creative behaviors at work on relationships at home," the professors say, bosses should critique creative workers' results at the end of each day.

By providing an immediate critique, bosses, in effect, reboot creative workers' brains before they head home.

"Validating ideas at work may liberate an employee’s cognitive resources in a way that allows them to provide more effective support to their spouse after work," the professors say.

Of course, downloads of domestic devices also work.

Bravado

My bravado is foolish; yours is funny.

Chaplin exploited that fact with The Tramp.

Funnier than the fool "is the man who, having had something funny happen to him, refuses to admit that anything out of the way has happened, and attempts to maintain his dignity," Chaplin once said.

He forever put his hapless character in jams, just so The Tramp could show his longing to be "a normal little gentleman."

"That is why, no matter how desperate the predicament is, I am always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat, and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head."

My Chakra is Ferkakta

Fans of Mindfulness-Based-Stress Reduction (MBSR), which finds rays of Western science in Eastern meditation, have become saintly inside many Fortune 100s.

They've set up MBSR programs for employees of Aetna, Intel, Target and, naturellement, Google.

With all our Internet-induced stress, it's little wonder.

"We need this stuff right now," says New York Times reporter David Gelles, author of Mindful Work, "Mindfulness is an effective way to get off the hamster wheel of our minds."

But if your māyā detector just buzzed, I'm with you.

I've tried mindfulness meditation, sitting with a great teacher.

I learned enough to know it's hard work.

People peddling MBSR as an easy remedy to stress are selling snake oil.

There ain't no cure for work-life imbalance in one-minute meditations and cutesy memes.

After all, it took Siddhârtha seven weeks to work it out.

And he had a fig tree.