The American Dream is riding low in one of the America’s wealthiest suburbs. The city budget is a mess. Gentle suburbanites are turning rabid anti-tax activists, denouncing neighbors as communists as they pass each other in the supermarket parking lot. Politics and culture rarely collide as hard as they did in 2011 in Troy, Michigan, where rival local ideologies warred over funding for the town’s library. But when the local office of one of the world’s best-known ad agencies decided to solve the problem (and use their media savvy to get all the credit), the situation got a lot stickier.

While this story initially came to me while I wore a Contagious hat, it branched into an area that was broader, so I put it forward here, on nickparish.net, as a product of my own pursuit and interest, not those of my employers.

 

 

It’s a not-too-uncommon scene these days in America: a cash-strapped municipality has to make a tough choice between taxes and services for citizens. In 2011, the Troy Public Library library had to ask for more funding. It had already lost one millage, a few months earlier. The town was divided.

But then a funny thing happened. An advertising agency best known to the public for creating the Marlboro Man and Tony the Tiger created a political committee and launched a campaign to encourage a No vote, suggesting when it passed the library books should be burned. The group put up lawn signs and tried to whip up a fury around burning the books on Facebook and Twitter. They called it the Book Burning Party, and thought, by creating a hyperbolic end-days situation, offending Troy citizens, they could have a big reveal and remind the town how important libraries are.

Fast-forward past the election, to the 2012 advertising award season.  The time of year when agencies parade their best and most effective work into awards shows to be judged by their peers. The agency has held up its effort as particularly effective, with a very slick video and special awards site, spending tens of thousands of dollars to show off its effort. And it’s won winning a lot of awards.1

Go ahead and watch it now. Almost half a million others have already, on YouTube alone.

But it didn’t go down quite like the agency says it did. The satire was lost on many, including the volunteers and Friends of the Library, who figured they were now besieged by another group of crackpots. And, to top it all off, the library never asked for the help. They never hired the ad agency.

The purpose of this article is to dig deeper into the events and the community and find the context for the action. This is harder to digest than a three-minute case study video. But watering down grown-folks issues to a least-common-denominator level for viral success doesn’t begin to address the complexity of the situation. And what does it mean about the ad industry?

There were multiple levels of deception at play in Troy: first, of the townspeople, preceding the vote. Then, of the ad industry, and the greater web, when the case was presented as client work with the Troy Public Library. Ultimately, the library was saved. The agency was celebrated. But did the ends justify the means?

 

 

Why do I care?

I love the library. It takes care of people who are the most vulnerable in our information society and stops them from falling through the cracks, teaching them to email or fill in public assistance forms on the web. It’s a place where anyone can better themselves. My values are the library’s values. My mom is the treasurer of a Friends of the Library, in a small Michigan town with a meager budget. I could see this happening to her.

I also care about reputation. It’s my job to tell others about great communication campaigns. And when a campaign comes along that isn’t really what it purports to be, it erodes my reputation, and my publication’s reputation, when we’ve relayed it to our readers. This has gotten increasingly complicated with the diffuse power of new media.

I also care about advertising. Not in the affectionate sense, the way I care about the library. I care about the misuse of the power of advertising. When does advertising become propaganda? What is the difference? How far are you willing to go to meet a goal, or bring yourself or your company plaudits? How does advertising exploit and abuse our attention, and even our own institutions?

The relationship between advertising and awards is fraught with conflict, too. Awards can swing massive amounts of money for agencies, and consume massive amounts of budget. Even at the periphery, we at Contagious are involved. Our coverage contributes to juries’ decisions. We sit on juries ourselves. Sometimes, our work is even entered. At the ANDYs, this year, a cover we collaborated with Leo Burnett Iberia to develop won in the illustration and graphic design categories.

But if we’re not asking questions about the whole process, we’re doing the people who work in it every day a disservice.

Does it matter if those  you intend to help, and claim to have helped, didn’t ask for it in the first place? What about when they consider it an active detriment to their efforts? I hadn’t thought about this before. But after hearing enough rumors about the origins of this campaign, I decided to do some looking around. I found while you can argue the ethics of the group’s tactics in the community of Troy, the agency has certainly been deceptive in how it’s presented the effort to the advertising community.

 

At the ANDYs: Something’s Fishy

As I mentioned, part of my job is to go to advertising awards shows. One of the highlights is to be able to see the year’s best work on display and connect with the people who made it. I was at the ANDYs, the bellwether first show on the circuit, watching the case studies, when a juror, one of the most respected creative directors in advertising, whispered something in my ear.

“Watch this one. I think it’s a scam. I went to the site, and the stats don’t check out. It looks like nobody really cared or reacted, but they’re making out like it’s the best thing in the world.” That was the first time I saw the Book Burning video.

The effort won a Gold that night, and the next day I began to compare the claims made in the case study video to the actual visible results on the web. I didn’t have to dig hard before I found a bigger problem than any exaggerated stats about the number of Twitter followers they’ve gained or Facebook Likes, or whatever social metric they could quote.

I found a blog comment from an employee of the library who was clearly upset about the claims in the video. “You did nothing to help support the Troy Public Library on August 2. All you did was cause confusion that Library supporters have been trying to avoid at all costs, as the previous elections were confused enough,” he wrote. “All you did was add more divisiveness and bickering in a community that should be united on its love and need for a library. All you did was violate election laws in pursuit of political satire. And all you did was add No signs on the streets and avenues in Troy where none existed.”

I got in touch with the author of the comment, Philip Kwick, and talked to him about what happened. (Here’s a long interview with Kwick I did with lots more backstory.) I talked to members of the community who had advocated on behalf of the library in this and previous instances, through all the ugly politics. And I found out a lot.

Most of what Kwick told me suggested Leo Burnett Detroit was actively working at cross-purposes to the Troy library, the organization it named as its client in the awards entries. According to Kwick, the library was not even legally allowed to hire an ad agency to promote the millage. And as volunteers for the library objected to the idea of burning books, the agency deleted librarians’ comments. To the librarians, the behavior, including posting a video “Scoping out the best place for the book burning party”, was insidious enough to prompt library employees to petition and receive extra police patrols. The agency may have even violated Michigan election law in creating the campaign, they say.

Just a few days earlier I had understood the work to have been a product of the Troy Public Library, and was shocked to learn all this went on against their wishes.

At the same time, though, it’s more complicated than just what the librarians thought. Sure, the agency was wrong in comandeering their name and using it to enter into awards shows when a client relationship never existed. But some in Troy credit the campaign with shaking up the community and helping it escape the apathy that’s come in a series of three millage votes. Another deep question is what that’s worth. Politics divided the town. It’s been besieged by Tea Party-affiliated anti-tax crusaders. Even the library supporters that seem tolerant of the Book Burning tactics aren’t over the moon about how it happened–mostly they’re pleased it all didn’t backfire. But we’ll have to dig deeper to get to these questions.

 

The Case Study Hustle: How Scam Works

Advertising has a history of work created solely for awards shows, oftentimes unauthorized, or unknown to the client. A recent case is this scam print ad, purportedly created on behalf of the World Wildlife Foundation by DDB Brazil which featured an insensitive depiction of 9/11 and a comparison to the environment.

Sadly, this isn’t a new thing. It’s gotten easier in a lot of instances, especially in print work, where an ad can easily be produced on the side by a Photoshop phenom and given a client nod for publication in an exceptionally limited run in a niche publication. Stuntish, patched-together campaigns that seem too good to be true are most common in undeveloped advertising markets, where there’s very little scrutiny.

Every show has dozens of print ads for highlighters or condoms or weird beer brands that ran once in an obscure periodical. Creative directors have built careers on scam, bending over for clients on difficult, real work, only to get stuff for awards shows produced and run. The client may reject the main creative work, but that’s not the end of the world: “Just let us run a few of these concepts for awards shows,” the eager creative director asks.

In the social media world, animation has gotten cheap enough that it’s easy to whip up a seamless case study video and give the illusion of mass participation. In the video above, commentary for actual grassroots efforts to save the library are presented as if they were part of the Book Burning group’s cause. Ambiguous language and the sizzle ad agencies are great at makes this easier. Throughout the industry, the animation of a Facebook Like counter rocketing upwards is well used.

But the sort of rogue approach embodied by the Book Burning Party campaign depends on a powerful, experienced media manipulator overwhelming the limited resources and figurative lung-power of a small community organization. In terms of budget, strategy and tactics, it’s the World Series champs versus the sandlot squad.

 

Troy’s Metamorphosis Through History of Library Activism

The community we’re talking about here is the Detroit suburb of Troy, in Oakland county. Troy citizens were facing a difficult choice in July 2011, a referendum: should the belt tightening (yes, even the wealthiest have budgets) force the library to lose part (or all?) of its budget?

The Tea Party had grown in Oakland County. As the county’s largesse diminished (a $42,000 decline in median household wealth in the 10 years to 2008, dropping from Forbes’ fourth-wealthiest county in America to unranked) people became unnerved. “As Detroit wobbles,” a Wall Street Journal headline said about neighboring Bloomfield Hills, “even its toniest suburbs feel ripples from the woes of GM and Ford.” Country clubs, private jets, lavish parties–all became less accessible.

“The whole library issue is a symptom of a much larger issue we’ve had in Troy for a number of years: this huge anti-tax, anti-government contingent that rolls up from the corners of the city and takes a stronghold,” says Troy resident Ellen Hodorek. Hodorek worked in community and government relations for General Motors and supplier Delphi for 17 years, helping coordinate things like corporations sponsoring the town’s fireworks and working alongside  the Chamber of Commerce. “[Troy city services] very much at risk from this political group.”

This isn’t the first recession, and the Friends of the Library responded the way they usually do: rallying support to keep the library open. In this case, groups like Save Troy, the Friends and others banded together, enlisting librarians from around the world. Support extended onto the web, reaching blogs like Boing Boing. Citizens gathered around community journalism hubs like Patch and activist blogs like Keep Troy Strong to share information and stay energized.

The Troy Library has a fantastic history, and as recently as 2010 it was ranked 10th best in the country. Funding has always been an issue, and leaders like Marguerite Hart, the first children’s librarian, came up with creative solutions. She petitioned dozens of celebrities in 1970, including Dr. Suess and Issac Asimov to write notes to the children of Troy to ask them to continue to love the library and tell them about the influence books had on their lives. Letters came from then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan, astronaut Neil Armstrong, Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan and authors like E.B. White, Dr. Ben Spock, Issac Asimov and Dr. Seuss.

But in the last few years the librarians have come up against even more than Hart could have anticipated. They were up against hardened political tactics the local alt weekly called “dirty tricks”. Misinformation is the name of the game. Multiple parties can create ballot measures that may not actually create the funding for the library the Friends and their allies are looking for, essentially clouding the ballot and making it difficult for people to decide who’s stands for what. And the Book Burning Party became another player in the swarm.

 

The Election: The Library Endures

As the campaign toward the library millage dragged on, the atmosphere among the library supporters was tense. A lot was at stake, and they hadn’t quite recovered from the earlier millage defeats. Then the Book Burning Party proposal arrived.

Emails I received from the librarians’ listserv show diligent researchers springing into action immediately, looking for facts. They pointed out the signage on public property was a violation of city code. They found out that the group had registered as a political committee, Safeguarding American Families.

Soon, the librarians linked Safeguarding American Families back to a realtor named Tom Ball who had registered the group to an address on Iroquois in Detroit. The lawn signs, placed around the library and other parts of the town, bore the address of a commercial mailbox unit on Woodward in Royal Oak, which the librarians quickly caught as a violation of election law.

But Ball’s name and address were hastily scrawled, possibly by a confused clerk, who had initially checked the box for “oppose” on the ballot proposal, but scrawled it out and changed to “support.” This got the librarians thinking, just hours after they found out about the group: is this a bad attempt at satire?

“The whole thing was very suspect to me,” says Kwick. “Nobody really understood it. We assumed it wasn’t an actual no campaign, it wasn’t an actual book burning campaign, but it was completely unclear what it was.”

Looking back, subtle Leo Burnett Detroit links aren’t hard to find: The bank that held its funding was the Fifth Third Bank on West Big Beaver, across the street from the agency. Leo’s Chicago office was pitching Cincinnatti-based Fifth Third at the time and would win the account later that summer.

It had nothing to do with the city. The city didn’t hire them. We had no knowledge of it, nor did the library, nor did the Friends of the Library

But whoever was funding the committee, or behind its organization, it had nothing to do with the library, or the City of Troy. “It had nothing to do with the city. The city didn’t hire them. We had no knowledge of it, nor did the library, nor did the Friends of the Library,” says Cynthia Stewart, community affairs director for the City of Troy, who runs all the city’s PR. “We didn’t hire them; we had no knowledge of it.” As for the cops’ involvement? “[Leo Burnett] put a video online that showed them videotaping through the windows at night. The police were made aware of this, and the police did check it out.”

Friends volunteers were shaken by the campaign as well. “The Friends and the library had absolutely nothing to do with Leo Burnett’s book burning thing,” says Rhonda Hendrickson, president of the group. “I was very upset by it. There was so much ugliness going on in Troy that I thought it was just one more really ugly move on someone’s part.”

Hendrickson estimates there were hundreds of volunteers involved, and she personally spent over fifteen hours a day working on the issue. Previous millages were defeated by very thin margins, so “the Friends had a boots-on-the-ground campaign in place for the second effort and the infrastructure for them to move forward. Plus, our separate PAC gave them money to get going.”

“I was in advertising for twenty-some years, and my husband is in advertising,” Hendrickson says. “We both were somewhat surprised about the revelation by the agency. It’s not surprising that they are trying to parlay it for some award or another.”

 

Did it work?

Despite deceiving the public, and, eventually, the industry, is there a real chance the campaign moved the needle, if a little bit? It depends who you ask. Certainly the agency thinks so. And some citizens agree.

“That book burning thing, as awful as it was, as troublesome as it was, it got everybody’s attention,” Hodorek says. “If it had failed, it could have been really bad for their agency. It worked tremendously well. But to the people that are really close to the library, the librarians, it was such a heinous idea.”

It’s very likely a last-minute ad push from Burnett actually did move the needle as well. The agency saturated the town with “Vote Yes” truck-mounted billboards with slogans like “Vote Yes or you’ll never know if Everyone Poops”, a reference to the children’s book. The trucks were noted by the Troy Patch blog, a good source of local information, for their visibility. The Detroit Free Press reported that, based on its campaign filing, Safeguarding American Families spent $70k on “advertising materials,” in addition to a cash donation to its pressure group, some of which likely influenced voters. But this last-ditch effort made little mention of the Book Burning Party.

 

Hodorek doesn’t think library supporters could have done it on their own. “Do I think that we could have won? I don’t think so. Do I mind that they did this on the side? Oh, heck no. They were a business that stepped up; they had an idea and thought, ‘Maybe we can help this community.’

“I know how dicey it was and how at risk the library was. I can’t believe the political realities I’ve come to know. It’s a very dirty business. I’m very disillusioned by it. We won that fight, and I’m still getting over how ugly it was. There was a tremendous sacrifice.”

Cynthia Stewart, inside the city government, emphasized the people of Troy’s role. “Maybe [Leo Burnett] played a part in the whole thing, but there was a huge portion of the city council that was behind it: the volunteers, the city staff, the residents that came out to vote,” Stewart says. “It was not the work of one PR company playing a prank.”

There’s dissension even among allies in Troy over who, exactly, deserves credit for influencing the vote. Clearly it takes a community effort to pass any political legislation. But how the Book Burning Party is talked about presents an interesting thought experiment.

Does advertising without clients mean anything in the broader sense? To the community it would seem yes. And it affected the community, much like the way the Great Schelp helped raise awareness for young people to pressure their grandparents in Florida to vote for Barack Obama. But the main difference is this: The Great Schlep did not purport to have originated from the Obama campaign as it was presented to its peers for evaluation. It was entered into awards shows as the work of a political action committee, the Jewish Council for Education and Research. When Hal Riney wrote the famous “Morning in America” ad for Ronald Reagan, he was actually working for Reagan. He didn’t just come up with a script, shoot it, then unleash it on the airwaves in the President’s name.

 

 

The Awards Circuit: How Adland Bought In

When the librarians first saw the case study, they tried to react but were silenced. “I don’t think we pieced it all together until we saw the video, a while after the campaign, and thought, ‘These people are taking credit for this,’” Kwick says. “People were, after the fact, angry about it. I posted some comments on the Leo Burnett YouTube page. ‘This didn’t save the library. This caused more harm than good. This potentially jeopardized the library.’

“And the city manager’s office here got a call from Leo Burnett saying, ‘We’re really a good corporate citizen here, you should probably take down those comments.’” So Kwick says he removed his comments.

But the ad industry lapped up the well-crafted case study. It won multiple gold awards and many special mentions. Press releases crowed: Leo Burnett Detroit’s Book Burning Party to save Troy Library won Gold in Social Media for its unique ability to create action among a community. The Facebook Integrated Media Award, intended to “recognize innovative campaigns that incorporate the social networking site with traditional media,” was even presented onstage to Leo Burnett Detroit at one show “for their work with the Troy Public Library.”

In May, at the Effie awards, I sat at a table with the Grand Effie jury at Cipriani in Midtown. The Effies celebrate real, verified effectiveness of marketing. The Grand Effie jury consisted of some of the most powerful people in media and marketing. I was surprised to hear the members at my table had been a coin toss away from awarding the campaign the Grand Effie, the measure of the most effective campaign of the year. This didn’t seem possible, as the Effies are notorious for requiring detailed entries exhibiting just how the marketing accomplished its objective.

The jurors I spoke to couldn’t believe the work wasn’t authorized–and wasn’t legally able to have been created–by the client it purported to belong to. The Book Burning case had been seen by multiple rounds of judging, passing in front of the eyes of dozens of judges before it even got to the Grand jury. It never would have reached them, they said, had this been known. They were relieved they hadn’t awarded it the top spot (which went to the Chrysler “Made in Detroit” work, featuring millions of dollars spent for a real client, with real, tangible car sales based on a partnership between creative companies). Later in the evening my previous employer, industry trade bible Advertising Age presented the Book Burning campaign its Goodworks award, the highest honor for a nonprofit. Not even Ad Age had bothered to do the cursory internet research to vet it.

Later, when I asked Rick Bennington, the director of operations at Leo Burnett Detroit, how the agency got to entering the case with the Tory Public Library as a client, he dismissed it as a semantics issue. “The benefactor, the recipient of the benevolence, in terms of the good intentions of saving the institution, was the Troy Library,” Bennington says, saying, in the case of the Cannes Lions festival, he got a call from France asking for an explanation, but they had entered the work with Safeguarding American Families as the client. “That happened with a few of the awards shows, where we explained it to them that we were representing a political action committee in saving the Troy Library. So we had a discussion with them, and they didn’t want them entered as Safeguarding American Families. They wanted it entered as the Troy Library, because that’s what the story was.” (You can find the entire transcript of my talk with Rick here.)

My research doesn’t square with this. A list of Cannes entries obtained May 15, over a month before the show, lists the Troy Public Library as the client on that entry. The One Show information is the same.2

Bennington was proud of the work and how it saved the library, but I asked him, why the didn’t the agency just work with the Friends of the Library in the first place? He didn’t know.

“I can understand why the library people might be upset, if they feel like we’re taking all the credit, and I don’t agree with that view,” he says. “At the end of the day, we saved the institution, or, I should say, we contributed to saving the institution. So overall, I don’t know why there could be a lot of contention. We’re arguing over how we saved it, or who’s getting credit for that. The best credit is that it’s still there, and these people still have their jobs, and it’s a vibrant part of the community.”

Many of the facts and figures in awards entries wouldn’t stand up to rigorous fact checking. Fuzzy math rules the day. And the Book Burning Party is no exception. But a few elements in the campaign’s Cannes Lions entry stood out, especially in the setion called Results and Effectiveness:

“In a city of just 80,000 residents, we ignited a social media conversation that generated over 650,000 impressions on Facebook and Twitter alone, and over one million impressions worldwide.”

As of July 2012, the campaign had 568 Likes on Facebook, 1 person “talking about this” and 63 followers on Twitter. It’s hard to imagine how the message was amplified enough to make those numbers during the election, and managed to fade so far so quickly afterward.

“Voters flocked to the polls at numbers 342% greater than projected and the library won the election by a landslide.”

It’s unclear who made this projection, but looking at previous election turnout numbers can put this into context. Millage proposals in November 2010 failed, one by a margin of only 600 votes, 15,061 voters for, 15,736 against, a difference of fewer than 700 votes. Over 10,000 fewer voters participated in this election, which passed 12,246 – 8,799.

If that turnout–21,000–was 340% higher than expected, then the projected turnout was only 4,750 people compared to the over 30,000 who voted the previous November.

“All with a budget of only $3500 (US).”

The Detroit Free Press‘ Bill Laitner reported:3 “Leo Burnett Detroit in Troy funded $3,476.44 in cash and $69,120.31 in advertising material to Safeguarding American Families, according to an Oct. 3 document from Oakland County. The documents also show the secretive group owes a $500 fine for filing campaign finance forms late.” More semantics, according to Bennington. That $70k was employee wages, in-kind time or time donated, cash or cash equivalent.

 

 

What is To Be Done?

What does this all mean? Certainly more than just semantics.

Advertising agencies do tons of legitimate work, some of which deserves to be awarded. But in the quest for awards, they’re not unlike marauding banks. Unless constantly checked, they’ll continue to evolve their habits of deception. The most farcical campaigns can deceive juries–as long as they have well-crafted case study video. And it means legitimate work misses out on its chance in the spotlight.

Juries see hundreds of cases in each show. I haven’t seen all of the Book Burning Party’s entry forms, but it’s likely “Tom Ball” could have been the contact point, and vouched for the campaign in whatever, if any, cursory phone call checked up on the campaign.

I believe the ad industry needs results to be vetted in a better way than the easily-comped social media quotes that fly by, and the Facebook Like numbers that ramp up, animated to the stratosphere in the latest video montage. It’s just too easy to fake quality.

Additionally, having an ombudsperson on a jury, someone who can dig on anything fishy and report back, should be obligatory. I was on the One Show Interactive jury this year, and we were able to quickly discredit work which made similar oversized claims, but that seemed like a new concept to many jury members.

“Our advertising changed the world” is a claim we see more and more. The world is changing, but it’s very unlikely to have hinged on a campaign.

The groups that sought to see the library de-funded aren’t going away. This was the third time recently a vote on the library’s fate has happened. If I were writing the Tea Party script next time, I’d talk about how, even with the massive image-makers that created the Marlboro Man and Tony the Tiger in their court, the library was only able to earn their budget by a margin of 3,500 votes. That’s just about $21 contributed by the agency to Safeguarding American Families per vote.

According to Laitner’s report, the agency connection has already come up in the Troy City Council: “Troy anti-tax protester Debbie DeBacker spoke … to the City Council about Leo Burnett Detroit’s funding. ‘Why would an international company care about a library millage in Troy? There is no way to know who really funded the burning-books campaign,’ DeBacker said.”

I have many colleagues and friends in the Leo Burnett network which is, by and large, made up of honest, hard-working people who take pride in what they do. My boss worked there, and loved the place. It’s not on Leo Burnett, it’s on the whole industry. The nature of migration in advertising means the people at Leo Burnett who worked on the Book Burning Party campaign and fattened their portfolios with awards will eventually be on to other jobs in other towns and are unlikely to come to Troy’s aid in a real, meaningful way–and the deception will have a secondary effect.

 

On June 18, the Friends of the Troy Public Library received an award from the Association of Library Trustees, Advocates, Friends and Foundations at the Troy City Council for their efforts. Each winner of the award received a $1,000 check and a plaque. In July, Rhonda Henderson went to California to accept an award from the American Library Association for outstanding Friends group. Only three were given out, nationwide. “Our peers nationwide are very aware of our efforts to save our library,” she told me.

 

 Read the full interviews with Philip Kwick and Rick Bennington.

 

1. Awards the campaign has won (incomplete)

   Andy Awards
   Gold, Social Marketing

   Clio Awards
   Gold, Facebook Integrated Media
   Gold, Interactive
   Silver, Integrated Campaign
   Silver, Innovative Media
   Silver, Content & Contact

   One Show
   Silver, Entertainment
   Silver, One Show

   Effies
   Gold, Goodworks – Non-profit
   Gold, Government / Institutional / Recruitment
   Gold, Small Budgets – Product & Service

   Cannes
   Gold, PR, Public Affairs
   Silver, PR, Best Use of Social Media [↩]

2. Here’s the whole text of that entry: “Due to a struggling economy, Troy, Michigan could no longer afford its nationally recognized library, so it scheduled a vote for a 0.7% tax increase. With no organized support for the library, a vocal and well-funded anti-tax group was waging a dominating campaign against it. In order to win the vote, we knew we had to get voters to stop talking about the impact of paying a tax increase, and start talking about the impact of losing their library.

   With little money and only weeks until the vote, we knew we had to do something extreme to disrupt the conversation and change the topic from ‘taxes’ to ‘library’. Posing as a clandestine political group, we posted signs around Troy that said, “Vote to close Troy Library Aug 2, Book Burning Party Aug 5.” Along with Twitter, Foursquare, flyers and more to help drive engagement, our signs invited a shocked and infuriated public to our Facebook page where a lively conversation about libraries and books ensued.

   In the first two weeks, with less than $100 in paid media to assist, we generated almost 50,000 visits to our Facebook page. For an audience of 80,000 Troy residents, the campaign generated over 650,000 impressions from Facebook and Twitter alone, not to mention impressions generated by other campaign touch points such as Flickr, Youtube and blogs as the campaign went from local to international news. In the end, not only did we get Yes voters out of their pools and in to the polls, they turned out at levels 342% greater than projected. The library won by a landslide.” [↩]

3. “A secretive political action committee that incensed Troy residents by calling for a “book-burning party” before the city’s Aug. 2 library millage vote submitted documents to county election officials showing a major Detroit advertising agency funded the group.
   Leo Burnett Detroit in Troy funded $3,476.44 in cash and $69,120.31 in advertising material to Safeguarding American Families, according to an Oct. 3 document from Oakland County. The documents also show the secretive group owes a $500 fine for filing campaign finance forms late.
   Safeguarding American Families put out scores of yard signs on public property that said, “Vote to Close Troy Library — Book Burning Party, Aug. 5″ — the date the library was scheduled to close if the millage failed. The group drew international attention with inflammatory Facebook and Twitter postings, including a tweet just before the Fourth of July that said, “When you’re lighting fireworks, think how much more fun it will be to light all those books! Book Burning Party — Troy library!”
   The anonymous organizers later said that the campaign was satire, meant only to spur “passionate discussions … to save our precious library.” Troy voters passed the millage.
   Leo Burnett Detroit is known for high-profile ad campaigns, including the “I’m In” ads for Detroit Public Schools and Buick and GMC advertising. An agency employee named on campaign documents said she merely faxed materials to Oakland County.
   “I was helping a friend — a friend of a friend. I’m just a secretary,” Judy Meissen said. “But Leo Burnett did donate. We did make a donation,” Meissen said. Only agency managers could say why the agency funded the library campaign, she said. Calls to the agency’s Detroit office and Chicago headquarters weren’t returned.
   Safeguarding American Families has no listed phone. Its address on public documents is a Royal Oak post office box, and the only listed official lives in Detroit.
   The incident shows how secretive organizations can influence even local elections.
   In Rochester Hills, a group based in Auburn Hills spent thousands of dollars on campaign literature for a 2009 city election and has since fought disclosure demanded by the Michigan Secretary of State. In the campaign for Royal Oak’s November election, a Lansing-based committee, the Committee for a Better Tomorrow, paid for flyers for three candidates after getting donations from West Bloomfield, Washington, D.C., and Flint, but none shown for Royal Oak, state election documents show.
   Troy anti-tax protester Debbie DeBacker spoke last week to the City Council about Leo Burnett Detroit’s funding.
   “Why would an international company care about a library millage in Troy? There is no way to know who really funded the burning-books campaign,” DeBacker said.” [↩]

This interview is a companion to Behind the Book Burning, a closer look at the public affairs marketing around the 2011 Troy Library Millage. For the whole story, check out the main post.

Very soon after I began looking for the facts behind the Book Burning Party awards case study, Phillip Kwick‘s name stood out. Kwick was one of the loudest voices speaking about the library’s role in the Book Burning campaign, and has been an active participant in community issues in Troy, where he works as the library’s assistant director. When library advocacy blog Books for Walls Project posted about the campaign, Kwick’s comment cut to the heart of the matter:

You, the Book Burners, claim you wanted to ”turn the rational conversation into an emotional one.” Clearly, you have not followed this issue as closely as you claim. This is not an emotional issue?

Then you have never spoken to one member of the Friends of the Troy Library who poured heart, soul, and donations into trying to win the November millage. Nor to the current Save Troy organizers, who have gone door-to-door with tireless zeal, explaining to their neighbors the importance of a library to the community.

You have never read the Books for Walls Project blog, whose writers – though they live 250 miles away – have championed the cause of the Troy Library, not only to the State but in Europe and beyond. You have never read any of the posts on the Letters to the Children of Troy on blogs around the world. You have never read one of the hundreds of comments on the Library’s website.

You have never stepped foot into the Troy Library to see children streaming in, with their parents unable to catch up. Or the lines of unemployed waiting to register for computer classes.

And certainly, you have never talked to a Library staff member who has spent the past two years listening to this outpouring of emotion for the Library from the public, while riding her own emotional roller coaster.

And now your comment seems to be taking credit for some “new” emotional response you have imagined you created: “Today, people are talking. They’re talking online, talking on the phone, and talking over their fence. They’re talking about books and what it means to lose a library.” And you think this is because of you?

I am appalled.

You did nothing to help support the Troy Public Library on August 2. All you did was cause confusion that Library supporters have been trying to avoid at all costs, as the previous elections were confused enough. All you did was add more divisiveness and bickering in a community that should be united on its love and need for a library. All you did was violate election laws in pursuit of political satire. And all you did was add no signs on the streets and avenues in Troy where none existed.

You have done nothing to help support the Troy Library. Do not take any credit from the hardworking women and men who have.

Next time, I would suggest you try your political theatre in Royal Oak, where your signs claim your office is. Or in Livonia, where your treasurer works. Or in Detroit, where your committee is registered. That would help support the Troy Public Library more.

Phillip Kwik

P.S. While I am employed by the Troy Library, these comments reflect my own views.

 

Clearly, someone with a bone to pick with the campaign. But it was perplexing to me at the time–wasn’t the library the one who set up this campaign?

So I tracked Kwick down, and he gave me the lowdown on how everything appeared to have happened from where he sat inside the library.

 

How long have you been working with the Troy library?

PK: I’ve been here since January of ’98, this is my 15th year. I grew up in Hamtramck, I still live there.

I started digging around, and found some of your commentary, and it seems like this thing didn’t go down as it’s purported to have. So I’m trying to dig around and see if this was sanctioned by the library.

PK: I think your initial sense is correct, from my point of view. It’s a weird situation in Michigan. We are actually prohibited from taking an official position, yes or no, on the millage. So that’s why there’s no official position, because technically we didn’t play a role in the millage. It was run by the Friends of the Library, a political action committee set up specifically to pass the millage, so the city has to be hands-off and our role is to only to be putting out the information on the millage. “This is what would happen if there was a yes vote, this is what would happen if there was a no vote.” But not any advocacy. So any role that I played, I played as an individual, not on work time, as a supporter of the groups that were doing the millage.

Now, again, I’m an interested party because I work in Troy, but I don’t live in Troy so it didn’t impact me as a member of the public. So in that case I was very aware of my role as a library staff member, but not as somebody who would have to pay the millage.

The City of Troy and the Troy Public Library is listed as the client of the campaign. It implies the ad agency was employed and engaged, on however small a budget, by the city of Troy to develop this Book Burning Campaign. You’re listed as the client in all this work.

PK: That’s absolutely false. We became aware of it because we were driving down the street and the signs appeared in the middle of the boulevard in Troy. It happened fairly late in the game. The first we caught wind of it was July 6th, less than a month before the millage. It was almost two months after the millage date was set, so it was fairly late in the campaign. The millage went on the ballot in mid-May, because we thought we were going to shut down May 1st. The council gave us some reprieve, gave us some bridge funding, and put it on the ballot. That was all wrapped up before May 15. This campaign actually came pretty late in the game, in terms of organizing for the millage.

We had no knowledge of it. I used to be on city council in my community, so I’m pretty familiar with local election laws, and I tried to find out exactly who was behind it. The paperwork they filed with the county, their election paperwork, and the disclaimer on the material they were putting out had different addresses on it, which is a violation of campaign law. I tried to investigate some of the addresses that were on there, and the treasurer, who’s the only person you need to have on your campaign finance documents, had a Detroit address, so I had several people try to call him, to figure out who he was. He was listed as a realtor, not as a member of this ad agency. I drove by the Detroit house [the group was registered to], it looked like it was unoccupied, it could very well have been a house he was prepping for sale. The address that was actually on the printed material was a Royal Oak address, again, odd because it’s a Troy campaign. I drove by it, it’s a Mailboxes, Etc. type thing, they were renting a box.

The whole thing was very suspect to me. And I couldn’t understand why. Nobody really understood it. We assumed it wasn’t an actual no campaign, it wasn’t an actual book burning campaign, but it was completely unclear what it was. It caused mass confusion. They were filming, they were going outside the library after the library was closed, filming the books, posting them on YouTube, saying things like “These look like a good place to start the fires,” so much so that the police got involved in it, and were investigating, and looking at it, because it was unclear what was going on.

What were initial reactions around the library when they saw this Book Burning Party stuff? What were your peers saying?

PK: Mostly it was confusion. There was some outrage, by the people working on the campaign. The initial reaction by people who were working on the campaign was “Is this another No campaign?” I think the initial language was “Vote No on August 5th, then join the Book Burning Party” or something, so any appearance of a No sign created initial anger on the part of people working on the campaign. Within the library, and people I talked to a little more closely, there was a lot of confusion.

We couldn’t believe that somebody on the No side would actually undertake a campaign like this, although it’s been a vicious couple of years here. There was a lot of Tea Party involvement. We didn’t believe it could actually be a campaign like that, and that it must have been some kind of bizarre psychological thing that was completely unclear. There was either anger or confusion about it. And that persisted for a long time. We tried to contact those people, we tried to figure out who it was, but every time we did it seemed like there was some kind of a front thrown up. The treasurer wouldn’t return our calls.

So we started to go onto this guys website, post comments, things like that, trying to “out” him. This is the treasurer of the committee, we had his name, so we’d go on the Book Burning Facebook page, and on the Book Burning Twitter feed, and we’d try and ask these guys questions, and name him by name, and all of our comments were being taken down. Whenever we said “is this real? What’s your point? What are you doing with this?” They’d take them down, they’d remove our comments immediately from the social media pages.

 

From reading the Facebook comments, it sounded like a college sociology experiment.

 

My initial thoughts, from reading the Facebook comments, it sounded like a college sociology experiment. Because lots of the comments were coming from younger people who did not live in the city, so I’m thinking maybe these people used to live here, and maybe they went to school, and this is a fun experiment, or something. But it caused a ton of confusion.

The worst part was that the previous two campaigns on the library millage were very dirty, and full of dirty tricks, basically, on the part of the No vote. It was really very nasty. They put competing ballots on the ballot to cause confusion. It was just a mess. In fact, in the previous election, in July of ’10, the Friends put a ballot issue on, and then those voting No put on four different ballot issues, with all slightly different millage amounts. And you only need 50 signatures, so they all got on the ballot. And so it caused a ton of confusion. That millage only lost by 300 votes, out of 18,000.

So you guys were already running uphill essentially at this point, against actual political operatives.

PK: There was already confusion, the previous year and a half had been very nasty, the library had taken a lot of shots, the city manager had taken a lot of shots, the Tea Party folk, the No folk, were very aggressive. So when this campaign popped on the scene, the Yes people started blaming the Tea Partiers, saying “Look how nutty the Tea Partiers are.” The Tea Partiers were saying “we had nothing to do with this, this is the Yes people trying to drum up support.” It even muddied the waters further, it created a more negative campaign in an environment where the Yes vote was trying to create a positive one. I think that was the most damaging part.

When did you realize a big ad agency was behind this?

PK: It was near the end. I was watching the financial reports very closely. In Michigan you have to file a campaign committee report ten days before the election. I think at that point they filed one that said there was a donation from Leo Burnett, like $7,500, a ton of money for a one-person donation. At that point we realized ‘This is an ad agency, what’s going on?’ It was quite late in the game, and it was about that time that they came clean, through a letter posted on a website called Books Without Walls.

But at that point, they guy sort of came clean, he said “Oh, we’re running this campaign to show how absurd it is to close the library,” but at that point they never mentioned  mentioned they were from Leo Burnett. So it was very late in coming out.

The Books for Walls project, booksforwallsproject.org, these were supporters of the library, that’s the first place where they sort of came clean, and at that point it was “Well, we’re just library supporters who want to make sure this passed.” They said nothing about a tie to an ad agency.

So what was the reaction then?

PK: Well, again, I think it was really late in the game. When people felt they were duped was a couple of months later was when we saw the YouTube video they put up. The case study.

On July 14th, the millage was August 5th, they posted on this website, basically, coming clean, and at that point they signed themselves Safeguarding American Families, which was the name of their committee. They didn’t say anything about it being an ad-funded campaign, nor funded by the city, certainly, because that’s not true. They basically said it would lead you to believe it was a group of people who put this together thinking that this was  a cool thing, they were just well-meaning. That was the way it came out. There was no mention of them being tied to Leo Burnett. Then we found that out within a week, six or eight days before the election, when they had to file their first report. We thought, “Wait a minute, what’s going on here?”

I don’t think we pieced it all together until we saw the video, a while after the campaign, and thought “these people are taking credit for this.” It came out quite a bit, several months afterwards.

 

They were taking credit for saving the library.

 

They were taking credit for saving the library. People then had a level of annoyance, the campaign was over, and people weren’t quite as angry as they might have been if it failed, or if it was still in the middle of it. People were, after the fact, angry about it. I posted some comments on the Leo Burnett YouTube page, basically, what I’m telling you. This didn’t save the library. This caused more harm than good. This potentially jeopardized the library.

And the city manager’s office here got a call from Leo Burnett, saying “we’re really a good corporate citizen here, you should probably take down those comments.” I’ll say I was asked to take those down. When your boss asks you to do something, you do it. So those comments lasted about a day on their site, and then I was asked to take them down, so I removed them from the YouTube site. They didn’t want anyone to have a negative opinion of this campaign. I didn’t realize at that point they were going after awards, that pissed me off even more.

So that was the only time the agency tried to contact you, was to ask you to take down negative comments?

PK: Yep. The tie to Leo Burnett didn’t make a lot of sense to any of us. Why did they fund this? What happened to these individuals who seemed to be taking credit for this? Why was it funded by this agency? It was only after the fact that we started to piece things together.

Not only was it impossible for them to be Troy Library’s ad agency…

PK: Legally, it was not possible.

Not only that, but also they didn’t even consult you, they didn’t say “Hey, we want to do this thing,” they didn’t ask for permission?

PK: As a local community activist in my own community, aside from the confusion that the campaign created, and the bad feelings it created, and the negative vibe, my personal feeling when it was going on, especially when I realized one address was Detroit and one address was Royal Oak in a campaign that has to deal with Troy, my personal reaction was “this is a lousy way to do politics…”

You don’t just move in and think that you know better than a community does in how to run a campaign, and move in without asking anybody, and working with the players. Even if you want to be anonymous and do a cute idea, you come in and you work with people, you don’t come in and try to take over a campaign. That’s what I felt. Why is this group coming in, and pretending to know better than us, and running this campaign that may or may not be helping the issue itself. What arrogance, what chutzpah, what bad politics, to think you know better than the community does in how to reach its members, how to reach the community.

What arrogance, what chutzpah, what bad politics, to think you know better than the community does in how to reach its members, how to reach the community.

 

So, what happens now? When will the next millage take place?

PK: Our millage is for five years. City government thought that they couldn’t sell anything longer than five years. So we’re going to be gearing up for it soon, it’s been a year, so we’re going to be gearing up for it in another three years. So we have a bit of a reprieve, but unfortunately we thought some of the nuttiness was going to die down, but the council has a majority-Tea Party presence over the last few years, and it’s gotten even crazier. Even though the library has not been the focus of the attack over the last year, the public workers and city services have been.

We have a bit of a respite, but if the political situation doesn’t change with the next election or two, who knows what it’s going to be like in the next few years before we have to go back before the voters.

Every one of these advertising awards shows is listing the Troy Public Library for the client of this work, and based on what you’ve told me that seems patently false.

PK: It is. There may very well be some library supporters who are kinder to them, because it’s after the fact, who will say “Well, they tried to help out, they were well-meaning,”1 but what I can definitively say is that this hit us out of the blue, and unless someone did it very secretly, nobody authorized it, not the city, not the Friends, not the Yes voters. I can say that very definitively, because nobody knew what was going on.

1. This was a sentiment several library supporters shared, almost glad that the whole thing was over, noting how especially irritated Kwick was over the whole thing. They all kind of echoed the ironically frequently misquoted aphorism “It’s amazing what you can get done if you don’t care who gets the credit.” [↩]