Branding Strategy Insider

'Ad-Blocker' Specs Will Kill Advertising Industry

You might not have heard of it yet, but Prail Technologies is set to become one of the most famous companies in marketing. The San Francisco-based operation is about to launch a digital filter which, when attached to a pair of spectacles or sunglasses, eradicates any and all advertising messages.

Yes, you read that right. Prail has produced a chip that can recognise advertising messages and then remove them from a person's line of sight using a patented procedure in which ads are digitally blocked from the user's view.

The processor that enables this incredible feat is called OLOF, short for the Optical Limitation Option Filter. Using smart recognition technology, the chip scans the user's line of sight 12 times a second and, when it recognises billboards or print advertising, creates a calming haze that blocks out the ad without disconcerting the viewer.

Chad Smith, chief executive of Prail, claims the device already filters out more than 90% of all encountered advertising with further improvements planned in 2010. 'We have taken advanced technology originally developed for missile defence, and applied it to one of man's biggest annoyances - advertising,' he said.

I was one of the first people to try out the technology last week and the results are extraordinary. Wearing lightweight OLOF sunglasses transformed a walk down Oxford Street from a cluttered, ad-heavy zoo into a relatively calming, enjoyable amble. The spectacles weigh little more than a regular pair and look no different from sports sunglasses. From Oxford Street, I took the Underground on a Tube devoid of commercial material. Piccadilly Circus station was transformed into a surprisingly calming white space, the escalators were free from invasive ads, and when I left and walked out past the statue of Eros, I was immediately struck by the calming effect of an ad-free Piccadilly Circus.

Accurate Ad Figures Require Openness

For a brief time in 2003 I ran away and joined a media circus. We had finally published the first results from a London Business School study on advertising viewing.

The study was based on eight different households that were videotaped for two weeks. We studied TV viewers' behaviour during every commercial break that occurred in the second week of the study in an attempt to understand what happens when programmes end and advertising begins.

With the analysis complete I wrote an article for the Financial Times. I explained that while many households did watch the ads, other activities such as social interaction, reading, flicking and advertising interaction often took precedence. I also described how the peoplemeter system was flawed because measuring the number of people in the room had a variable correlation with the number watching the ads. Indeed, in many instances, increasing numbers of people in the room led to significantly less people watching the ads.

I thought that this was the end of the story. But then all hell broke lose. After the space shuttle and Saddam it became the week's most downloaded article on the FT's web page. The story was then picked up by The Guardian, The Independent, and The Daily Mail. It was featured on Five News and, most importantly, on Richard and Judy. As the story went further afield, I even found myself in the rather bizarre position of doing a major Australian breakfast show live from my bed, drinking Horlicks.

This kind of media exposure created quite a response from the ad industry.

It seemed to revolve around two key methodological criticisms. The first was based on the sample size. Clearly eight households was inferior to BARB's 5000 or more. Well this depends. Eight households can never be representative, but it is better to have eight measurements of the phenomenon you are interested in (advertising viewing) than 5000 measurements of something you are not (people in a room when the ads are on). It seems that much of the ad industry has become obsessed with quantities rather than the qualitative nature of what is being measured. Good research always combines the qualitative 'what' with the quantitative 'how much'.

A Talk with Ogilvy, Bernbach, Burnett and Reeves

David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach, Leo Burnett and Rosser Reeves left indelible marks on the advertising landscape. Their works influenced generations of consumers and marketers. Today on BSI - a virtual interview constructed with some of their most significant thoughts on the business and where it is headed.

What is at the core of advertising?

Bill Bernbach: “The magic is in the product… No matter how skillful you are, you can’t invent a product advantage that doesn’t exist. And if you do, and it’s just a gimmick, it’s going to fall apart anyway.”

Rosser Reeves: “The writer must make the product itself interesting. Otherwise, a great part of his ingenuity and inventiveness will be used in devising tricks which lower the efficiency of advertising, rather than raising it.”

David Ogilvy: “If you spend your advertising budget entertaining the consumer, you’re a bloody fool. Housewives don’t buy a new detergent because the manufacturer told a joke on television...They buy the new detergent because it promises a benefit.”

Leo Burnett: "The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my opinion, is believability, and nothing is more believable than the product itself. We want consumers to say, 'That's a hell of a product' instead of, 'That's a hell of an ad.' "

But isn’t the most important thing to break through the clutter?

Ogilvy: “When you write an ad, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so persuasive that you buy the product.”

Burnett: "If you don't get noticed, you don't have anything. You just have to be noticed, but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming or without tricks."

Marketers Losing Ground in the Clutter War

Before we can sell, we must build the brand. Before we can build the brand, we must generate awareness. Before we can generate awareness, we must break through the increasingly impenetrable obstacle known as clutter.

Clutter is created by the number of brands multiplied by the number of messages competing for a customer's attention. The current estimate of the result of this multiplication is 1600 commercial messages a day. That's about 500,000 messages a year.

As clutter increases, the efficacy of marketing communications lessens.

The relative share of voice of any one message decreases as the number of competing messages increases. And as clutter increases consumers switch off from the message source.

Two billboards in a town square will result in half the amount of exposure per billboard than one would have gained. Put up four billboards in the square, so that the consumer is surrounded on all sides by promotion, and it's likely that none will be noticed.

Logically, therefore, one would expect the marketing industry to control clutter. Unfortunately, market forces do not always operate on a logical basis. The response from marketers to clutter has been to increase the amount of promotional materials. In recent years the number of commercial minutes per hour of television has increased. So too has the number of print ads carried by most magazines and newspapers. Worse still, advertisers have attempted to beat clutter by extending their promotional messages into ambient media. Now ads reach out to us from all directions: from the floor, from above the urinal, from someone's forehead, from wherever we least expect to encounter commercial messages (and therefore still pay attention).

The direct marketing industry tried to learn from the lessons of advertising.

Pre-testing Versus Marketing Instinct

Marketing's age of accountability began in the early-90s. Prior to this, marketing activities were widely seen as a cost and marketers were regarded as 'fluffy'.

These marketers espoused the idea that marketing was an art and an inherently creative endeavour. All a marketer needed to succeed was gut instinct, an extensive vocabulary and an unburdened imagination. They certainly did not need a qualification in marketing, because, hey, marketing is instinct.

With the age of accountability came a focus on metrics, measurement and evaluation. Leading marketers were told that if you cannot measure, you cannot manage, and they set about creating a more systematic and strategic approach.

It became relatively easy to identify whether a company had evolved or not. One classic means of identification was how a company approached its advertising planning. Marketers used to approach their advertising agency with a bundle of strategic goals - none of them derived from research - and then set about directing the agency to create an ad that they (rather than their target) perceived to be acceptable. Consequently, the first time a marketing manager found that their ad budget had been wasted was after it had been invested - sorry, spent.

Evolved marketers use their own research to brief their agency and then review its creative output using the voice of the customer. They do this through pre-testing. Pre-testing is a century-old tradition of taking a fraction of the total ad budget to test whether a campaign will actually work in its present form before that campaign is completed and aired.

In the US, pre-testing has effectively been the norm for decades. In the UK, it remains a contentious and much misunderstood activity.

The Unique Selling Proposition Defined

Possibly the three most famous letters in advertising, the USP made great ads and made Rosser Reeves famous.  In his book, Reality in Advertising, he laments that the popularity of the USP does not reflect a wide-spread understanding of the term.

He defines the USP in three parts:

    * Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer.  Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising.  Each advertisement must say to each reader:  ‘Buy this product and you will get this specific benefit.

    * The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer.  It must be unique -- either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.

    * The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions, i.e., pull over new customers to your product.

Reeves recommended thinking of the USP as something the consumer takes from the ad, rather than as something the copywriter puts into the ad.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

TV Ads and Viewers: Together at Last?

A study has shown that viewers enjoy TV shows more with ad breaks, but it's no cause for celebration.

One of the surest signals that advertising agencies are out of step with their target markets is their overall assessment of the popularity of advertising. Ask any one of the young and beautiful inhabitants of a major agency about advertising, and you will inevitably be introduced to a world in which the public loves ads, in which families discuss ads together and create long lists of their favourite campaigns.

So deep is the general affection for advertising that, when offered a chance to skip through ads while watching pre-recorded programmes on Sky+ or another PVR (DVR), households will opt to watch (and enjoy) the ads, rather than zip through them.

Alas, such thoughts are total fantasy. Enter the living room of any British or American family and ask them about TV ads. In every house (with the exception of those that have spawned a member of the advertising industry) you will be met by dark recriminations and foul language. TV advertising is, from a consumer's perspective, a pointless annoyance which spoils Britain's favourite activity of TV viewing.

Actually that last bit may not be true. According to some findings about to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research, advertising does not necessarily have a negative impact on TV viewing. In a paper titled 'Enhancing television-viewing experience through commercial interruptions', four US professors claim that ads may actually serve to improve the TV-viewing experience.

The paper analyses a study in which 87 undergraduate students were divided into two treatment groups. One group was shown an episode of Taxi, complete with the 30-second TV spots originally included in a syndicated 2005 broadcast. The other group viewed the show with no ad breaks.

The students then ranked how much they had enjoyed the show and also indicated whether they preferred it to an episode of Happy Days that they had also watched.

The sample that watched the show without ads did not enjoy Taxi as much as Happy Days. Remarkably, however, the students who had watched Taxi with ads rated it higher than did the other sample, and better than the episode of Happy Days.

The result, which was statistically significant, suggests that advertising might improve the perceived quality of television shows.

Beware Of Creating The Wrong Brand Impression

Semiotics is the study of signs and as we are all directly involved in the business of creating and communicating signs, a semiotic analysis can shed light on the troubling experience I had earlier in my career while walking through Waterloo station.

There was an arresting outdoor ad for the Land Rover Freelander Masai.

The poster ad was actually a sign and like every sign it consisted of two halves: a signifier (the thing being represented) and a signified (the thing being communicated).

In this case the signifier was a photograph of men and women from an African tribe, and their children, standing in a line. The corresponding signified meaning of this photograph was that these are people from a Masai tribe in Africa. With both signifier and signified identified, we can now understand the relationship between the two - the denotation. The poster ad denoted members of the Masai tribe.

But advertisements are complex signs. They rarely end with simple denotation.

To understand them we must understand a second level of significance known as connotation. The purpose of the first sign is to become part of a bigger, more subtle sign: the Masai must be linked in some way to Land Rover.

A second glance revealed that the tribe was actually standing in the shape of a Freelander. The apparently natural line-up, the presence of shields, even the position of the small child on the end, were an attempt to link the Masai and the Freelander within the same signifier.

Seen this way, the true intention of Land Rover's ad was revealed. It was designed to connote that the meanings signified by the Masai (noble, African, free, rugged) are also signified by the Freelander. Hey presto!

A commodity sign had been created and now consumers seeking nobility, ruggedness and freedom from their next four-wheel drive will be attracted semiotically to the latest Land Rover.

Not so fast. Semiotics teaches us that connotation is a much more slippery concept than straightforward denotation. Connotation is open to innumerable different interpretations.

Bill Bernbach on Creativity and Success

“Merely to let your imagination run riot, to dream unrelated dreams, to indulge in graphic acrobatics and verbal gymnastics is NOT being creative. The creative person has harnessed his imagination. He has disciplined it so that every thought, every idea, every word he puts down, every line he draws, every light and shadow in every photograph he takes, makes more vivid, more believable, more persuasive the original theme or product advantage he has decided he must convey.”

                             - Bill Bernbach, Advertising Legend

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

David Ogilvy On 'A Good Advertisement'

“What is a good advertisement? There are three schools of thought. The cynics hold that a good advertisement is an advertisement with a client’s OK on it. Another school accepts Raymond Rubicam’s definition, ‘The best identification of a great advertisement is that its public is not only strongly sold by it, but that both the public and the advertising world remember it for a long time as an admirable piece of work … ‘ I have produced my share of advertisements which have been remembered by the advertising world as “admirable pieces of work,” but I belong to the third school, which holds that a good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself. It should rivet the reader’s attention on the product. Instead of saying, ‘What a clever advertisement,” the reader says, ‘I never knew that before. I must try this product.’

- David Ogilvy in Confessions of an Advertising Man

Sponsored By: Brand Aid