Self indulgent personal statements are not marketing.

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People ask me all the time why I think marketing should be invisible. Here's one of those examples.

Did you see the 2008 Microsoft/Seinfeld ads? (If not, time for a quick trip to youtube.)

This campaign illustrates why many innocent young creatives go into advertising: to get their personal creative statements funded.

Now, the agency sounds reasonably intelligent and businesslike when talking ABOUT the campaign.

But just look at the ads. Pick someone who you think represents their target audience for those ads (say, a colleague in your office or a friend's college-age kid). Ponder the actions the company probably wants the audience to take. Contemplate what Microsoft wants us to believe about their company and products.

After seeing the ads, what do you think Microsoft achieved?

If you answered, "Awareness," who discovered Microsoft's existence through this campaign?

Here's what I think. Either Microsoft has nothing interesting to reveal, which I doubt, or Bogusky (the agency's creative leader) failed to understand Microsoft and their mojo, which I suspect. Perhaps Microsoft could not get behind a clear message strategy. Perhaps Bogusky's people failed to execute.

But I think the agency's responsibility to make the value of a company more visible through the marketing it creates. Or to bow out.

If Microsoft had spent the $30 million on direct response ad testing with niche markets, niche messages, and niche media where they think they have growth potential, would they have come out ahead? Maybe.

Respectfully disagreeing with Seth Godin on equity

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Seth Godin just gave some really out of the box advice on how to structure equity in a new company.

It's actually great advice, but I disagree with his claim that his method offers a better way to value the company.

Here's why: just as Seth points out that we don't know what the company's going to be worth in 18 months, we probably don't know what it's going to do, how it's going to make money, what market forces we're going to have to address, nor how we'll address them during the next 18 months.

We have a plan. If we're really smart and sophisticated, we have a Plan B and a Plan C and so on.

But it's even harder to say "here's what this task list will be worth in 18 months" than it is to say "here's what this company is going to be worth in 18 months." Both are equally dependent on the same unknown variables in an uncertain future.

What's really valuable about Seth's advice is the brass-tacks conversations you have to have about expectations and the implementation roadmap if you take his advice. It's a lot easier to dream together than to figure out how to work together. Better to figure that out now, not months from now.

Spending lots of upfront time hashing out the roadmap should make the equity conversation a lot simpler. We should come away from that conversation with a clearer sense of shared vision, what everyone's got to do toward it, and to what extent we trust each other to do what we say.

But I don't think that actually structuring the equity in the manner Seth suggests has any more value than 50/50, 49/51, the % of startup capital each put in, the % of decision responsibility you expect to share, whatever motivates and satisfies your partners and stakeholders.