Branding Strategy Insider

Time For Brand Marketers To Lead A Comeback

It’s a good thing the game between the NFL's New England Patriots and the New York Giants was exciting because this year’s Super Bowl commercials were dull, and what a weird thing to say about the Super Bowl. Generally, it’s the very opposite of that.

Perhaps it’s best not to read too much into Super Bowl ads vying for viral buzz (many of which adopted a new pre-game, social media preview approach to generate buzz, albeit some have argued it was poorly done). But there was one thing that stood out.

In a noticeable departure from the tradition of Super Bowl Sunday, this year’s crop of ads lacked courage. They took no risks. They pushed no boundaries. They defied no expectations. Truth be told, they were gutless.

These are harsh words, but others have expressed similar disappointment with this year’s Super Bowl ads, including Stuart Elliott, The New York Times’ trenchant observer of advertising, who wrote in his column the day after the game about the “dearth of originality” in this year’s assortment of ads.

Why so little daring and audacity? Now, rarely is looking from the outside in on the business motives and creative objectives of advertisers a useful way of dissecting advertising decisions. Yet, what was seen on air points unambiguously to the things that advertisers felt comfortable doing, things that hint at their intentions. More specifically, advertisers felt safest recycling the sorts of themes, humor, characters, plot twists and surprise endings that were inventive the first time out in years past. Some of these ads even made direct reference to past ads (or other past pop culture). It was a night of commercials that, in effect, imagined the future as a salvage project of things bygone.

Brand Marketing And The New Rules Of Engagement

For all the changes affecting media these days, the essential product of media, its content, is really no different. But consumers now consume media content in a wholly different context, one that is embedded with many new cues. What’s changed about media are the cues that surround content.

Old media were advertising vehicles, pure and simple. The cues were all commercial; they were all about advertising. Content was read and viewed in the context of ads. All the cues directed people to the advertising. Media delivered a content experience bejeweled with ads that were themselves a type of content. Not so for new media.

New media are social engagement vehicles. Advertising is often there but ads play second fiddle to the social cues that dominate what consumers encounter when they read or view the content. The very layout of content attunes consumers to social dynamics. Consumers see the best liked content, the comments left by other consumers, poll results of prior consumers, ratings by prior consumers, links to other sites or content, and more. Content is surrounded by all of this. The cues that dominate the terrain in which the content is delivered are not just ads; they are cues about social context.

Content is no longer consumed in an advertising context. Now it is consumed in a social context. This has three important implications for brands.

First, ads are competing for attention against more than other ads. Ads must shout above the din of content conversations. Ads not only have to be more interesting than other ads; they have to be more interesting than the social interaction about the content. What’s perhaps most interesting about this in terms of advertising to date is that ads have not yet dared to engage the content in which they are placed. Ads are more relevant to the context next to them, but they have nothing to say about it, whereas many of the social cues next to the content are saying something that is specifically about that content.

Targeting Consumers: A New Perspective

Direct marketers have long known something that brand marketers haven’t: responsiveness counts. And not much else.

Brand marketers have long focused on targeting their advertising to consumers based on various demographic and psychographic characteristics. Women 25-34, Male beer drinkers 21+, Early Adopters, and so on.

Increasingly though, targeting and media buys will move away from this kind of targeting to what I call “response based targeting” – even among brand marketers. Response based targeting is just that: targeting consumers who are proven to be most responsive to your advertising, regardless of what they look like.

How does it work? For starters, let’s assume that your brand historically targeted Women 25-34 years old. Naturally, your media plan targeted this group too, maximizing reach at 80% using traditional TV.

Along comes single-source. Long hailed as the “holy grail” of advertising, single source matches individual household viewing behavior with the same households buying behavior. Several firms now offer this capability in the consumer packaged goods sector, and it’s likely to come to other categories in the not too distant future.

What now? Using single source, you can analyze historical data to identify households with similar purchase behavior prior to your advertising campaign. Then, households are divided into exposed versus non-exposed households and, using smart statistics, identify the single variable sales impact of your advertising.

Ten Mandates Of Account Management

 

Guiding Principle:

Advertising Agencies win new business on creative -- ideas that build client businesses.

Advertising Agencies lose it on relationships.

Having shared that, account managers would be wise to consider these 10 mandates:

1. Select clients carefully.  Target list. 

2. Treat your client as your best new business prospect.  Walk the halls.

3. Take a proprietary interest in the health of your client’s business.

4. Get agreement on strategy. 

5. Give your clients ideas they didn’t ask for. Take initiative.

6. Build bridges at multiple levels.  Pay attention to juniors. 

7. LISTEN.  Take notes.  Confirm in writing.  Deliver!

8. Treat the client’s money as your own.  Put the client’s interest first. 

9. Deal with issues, not people.  Never badmouth a client. 

10.  Make friends with your clients.  Hard to fire a friend.

Contributed to BSI by: Kenneth Roman, former Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather and author of “The King of Madison Avenue:  David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

David Ogilvy On Creating The Ideal Agency Culture

Advertising legend David Ogilvy left us with more than what it takes to make great advertising. He also shared a clear direction on how his employees -- his people -- should be treated. Please take a moment today and think about the agency, consultancy -- corporate culture you are creating or influencing. Then read David Ogilvy's thoughts below on creating the ideal culture. Are his values alive where you work?

1) We treat our people like human beings. We help them when they are in trouble—with their jobs, with illnesses, with alcoholism, and so on.

2) We help our people make the best of their talents. We invest an awful lot of time and money in training—perhaps more than any of our competitors.

3) Our system of management is singularly democratic. We don’t like hierarchical bureaucracy or rigid pecking orders.

4) We abhor ruthlessness.

5) We like people with gentle manners. Our New York office goes so far as to give an annual award for what they call “professionalism combined with civility.”

Slicing Advertising Spending Myths

 
Marketing is a complex blend of art and science, and if you talk with anyone in the profession today, they’ll tell you it’s only getting more so. Audience fragmentation, new media form factors, the rise of social media, etc. is making life more complex, not simpler for CMO’s.

Enter Occam’s Razor.  Occam’s Razor is usually attributed to the 14th-century English logician Father William of Ockham. Simply stated, it says that:

“simpler theories are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones”

Simplifying Rules of Thumb

Thus, it’s natural to use simplifying “rules of thumb” to reduce complexity to manageable simplicity.

Two of my favorite rules of thumb, which both happen to be true, are:

Double Jeopardy – Big brands are big because they have more users and those users are more loyal to the brand. Small brands are small because they have fewer and less loyal users. Said differently, in CPG there’s no such thing as small, niche brands.

Heavy Users – Across categories and brands, about ½ of a brand’s heavy users are not heavy users in the subsequent year. This is partly because some heavy category users become light or non-users (diapering parents whose kid graduates from diapers), but also because some brand heavy users become are not heavy users in the subsequent year. This means that Marketers can’t simply assume that heavy users will stay heavy and need to work to keep them so.

Principals like these are powerful because they have both great explanatory power and also greatly simplify how to think about an important Marketing issue — a classic Occam’s Razor.

Brand Packaging: 3 Things A CEO/CMO Must Understand

As principal of a brand identity firm for 15+ years, I have too often seen how brand-packaging redesigns fail due to inherent client subjectivity. And, unlike brand advertising, which is readily malleable, “brand dress,” the most long lasting of all marketing media, must remain competitive and relevant for on average three years.

Still brand packaging is the most potent weapon in the CMO’s arsenal in the battle for the hearts and minds of consumers on the actual playing field - the retail shelf; the last moment of truth where ROI is tracked daily!

But by following three steps, your brand packaging will be seen (visual), felt (emotional) and understood (rational) in the five seconds or less that your consumer takes to select your brand...or to pass it over.

1. Get The Right Resource Onboard

Ensure that your RFQ process removes politics and potential favoritism to actually uncover the firm most appropriate for the project. Then ask for proof of trademark/infringement insurance, while inquiring that a trademark/trade dress attorney is connected to your firm of choice. Only in this manner can you trademark newly developed brand assets and protect them from private label copycat activity.

Agency Decisions: Good Morale Or Bad Clients?

Bad clients can try your soul. Ever had one? Have one now? There are times when you must persevere for the health of the company. And times when you must resign the account for the health of the company.

In the early 1930's Ray Rubicam found himself at these crossroads. Young & Rubicam served the extremely large Pall Mall account of the American Tobacco Company. The owner of American Tobacco, George Washington Hill (Pictured), was notorious for badgering those who were unfortunate enough to do his advertising. The relationship between George Hill and Young & Rubicam grew so strained that Rubicam decided it would be in the best interest of the agency to forfeit the $3 million account. (Hill wanted Rubicam to replace his creative team) Rarely has the news of a large business loss met with such a sigh of relief at an advertising firm. The $3 million loss was seen as well worth the boost in morale.

While much in advertising is hard to measure, the emotions of your people are quite telling. Is sacrificing morale for business good business?

No.

Put your people first.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Advertising: Lead With Facts Not Opinions

Do you ever find yourself confused by a TV commercial? We don't mean you watched and didn't understand what they were saying. And we don't mean that it was advertising something in which you had no interest, or that you found the commercial mindboggelingly awful.

No, we mean that the commercial was telling you a "fact" that seemed suspect, where the advertiser seemed to expect you to throw out your belief system and cede all truth to the pretty spokeswoman in the clingy, wraparound dress.

Tech Ads Lack Facts
This seems especially true in technology areas, where a good deal of what brands discuss are things about which consumers probably have opinions, but almost certainly don't have the facts at hand, which is a problem if you want your advertising to engage and be believable. Take the wireless category, for example. Statements like "we have more coverage" or "we have fewer dropped calls" or "they have more dropped calls." You know the kind. How does one discern opinion from fact?

Celebrities In Advertising: A Marketing Mistake?

Popular wisdom asserts that getting a celebrity endorsement is a tried-and-true, simple-to-implement way to maximize advertising effectiveness. Sure, it's expensive, but celebrities always yield stronger ties with viewers and, ultimately, greater sales, right?

Wrong. Over the course of last year, time and time again we observed incredibly low effectiveness scores of TV ads starring celebrities. From Tiger Woods to Donald Trump, we found that with rare exception, celebrity endorsements were largely ineffective and failed to yield the benefits popular wisdom promises.

We set out to understand whether celebrities today are really worth the significant investment that brands were making. We studied every nationally televised ad for the first 11 months of 2010 and found that celebrity ads performed either below average or merely equaled it. Specifically, our study, 2010 Celebrity Advertisements: Exposing a Myth of Advertising Effectiveness, 2010, showed that fewer than 12% of ads using celebrities exceeded a 10% lift, and one-fifth of celebrity ads had a negative impact on advertising effectiveness.

Why was this?