Alma Short Film
December 22, 2009 1 Comment
This is brilliant. A short film by Rodrigo Blaas at almashortfilm.com. And yet more proof that a very fine line separates cute from sinister.
Focus groups. Your neighbour’s opinion. And witches.
December 22, 2009 Leave a comment
I was sent this article from Advertising Age the other day. It revisits an issue everyone in our industry is painfully aware of – the puzzling tendency of clients to rely on focus groups to inform marketing decisions.
I sent the article to a friend (who happens to be a senior marketer) to see what she thought. Her response was interesting.
I asked her whether it might be a little artificial to ask people to explain the rational motivation for a purchase decisions when those decisions are made without any great rational thought. She said that I was trying to make the process more complicated than it actually is and that most people are quite good at explaining why they make decisions.
I questioned her as to whether asking people with no experience whatsoever in design or communication to comment intelligently on important issues of design or communication might not be a bit optimistic. She countered that ‘agency people’ only want to design stuff that other ‘agency people’ like and that talking to real people is a necessary reality check.
But the final comment she made was the most interesting.
She said ‘Marketers don’t buy shampoo. My neighbour does. So I thinks it’s useful to get my neighbour’s opinion’.
Which on the surface seems like a reasonable view to take. It’s ‘ordinary’ people who buy stuff, so the view of ‘ordinary’ people should be relevant.
But the argument falls over for a few reasons (the first two alluded to above).
Firstly, most purchase decisions are emotional. Research seeks to explain them rationally. Hasn’t neurological science established that the two processes are entirely different?
Secondly, people who buy soap aren’t qualified to design packaging or advertising for soap, in the same way that people who attend rugby matches aren’t qualified to coach players or design stadia.
But I think there’s a bigger issue that I’ve always struggled to articulate. I can’t understand why we put people we know nothing about in a room and unquestioningly give credence to their views on a very important subject (to us at least). These are often people who, if we met them outside the confines of a meeting room, we would possibly think were less than, shall we say, credible. The fact is we know nothing about their view of the world, but we put them in a research group and assume the capacity for sagacity.
Then I read this at the weekend. It’s a summary of what, according to recent research, Australians believe in.
Amongst other things, 51% of Australians believe in angels – winged messengers of God sent to earth to perform specific tasks at His behest. It also seems that 41% of Australians believe in astrology, maintaining that the position of various celestial bodies has a direct impact on your personality, the likely course of your life and, if you get right down to it, the entire future of humanity and our planet. But my personal favourite is that 22% if Australians believe in witches, shadowy figures using sorcery and magic to demonise the unsuspecting.
So next time you use a focus group to provide an informed and rational ‘voice of the consumer’ on a significant marketing issue, bear in mind that of the six people in the room, three very likely believe that angels walk among us, at least two are concerned with the detrimental impact of Saturn journeying through their sign (but comforted by the Sun’s imminent presence in their compassion zone) and one person believes that a shadowy figure in an unfortunate hat is galvanising dark forces to challenge the natural order through the casting of spells and placing of curses.
But don’t let that impact your view of their credibility. I’m sure their views on your advertising are completely logical and rational. They are, after all, your neighbours.
Aston Martin Cygnet
December 21, 2009 Leave a comment
By any measure, this is not an attractive car. It’s interesting, but I’d suggest it’s not attractive. What’s surprising is that it’s from the company renowned for making perhaps the most beautiful cars in the world. It’s intended to go into production next year.
My first reaction is to think that this is completely at odds with the Aston Martin the world knows, a brand that, since its recent resurgence, seems entirely about making cars that are defiantly big-engined, fast and expensive, in the process flipping the bird to environmentalists, speed-camera advocates and poor people. (In fact Aston Martin doesn’t flip people the bird. Aston Martin flips people the pheasant.)
Which makes we want to react badly to the Cygnet. It’s so resoundingly not Aston Martin. It’s small and responsible. But it is nicely designed, and not without a certain, ugly-duckling style (reflected in the nicely self-deprecating name for the model).
But I think it’s a brilliant idea. Because you can only buy a Cygnet if you already own an Aston Martin. It’s being sold on the basis that it’s what Aston drivers will use for short journeys, with their ‘real’ car only brought out when the trip justifies it.
Which I think is inspired on two levels.
One is that in this day and age, even Aston’s core market must be starting to struggle a little with the enviro-carnage wreaked by cars of its ilk. While I’d imagine that most of that market doesn’t exactly find itself wracked with guilt, lying awake of a night on its 1000 thread count sheets, it does still feel the occasional pang. And using the Cygnet a couple of days a week assuages that guilt, but it does it, importantly, in a very public way. Because, at the risk of being more than a little cynical, the problem with so much ‘offset’ behaviour is that no one knows you’re doing a good thing. And while public approbation shouldn’t be a motivation, it resoundingly is, and driving a Cygnet makes the gesture public.
The other is that I bet the Cygnet will acquire a degree of snob value even greater than that of the ‘real’ Aston Martin. The Cygnet basically says that you are rich/successful enough to own an Aston Martin, but secure/unpretentious enough not to need to drive it. Which is a delightfully public display of understatement (like the deliberately frayed shirt collars that I’m told are very popular with the English aristocracy).
So the Cygnet is effectively Aston Martin’s offset programme – you offset your environmental impact, and your conspicuous consumption, in one very public gesture. Brilliant.
Another Mildly Amusing word
December 21, 2009 1 Comment
Another word to add to the list:
Clarety
As in ‘I left the office with absolutely no idea what to do next, but after a couple of glasses of red wine I began to see the situation with surprising clarety’.
Social Media might just save Marketing. But not for the reason we think. (Re-post)
December 15, 2009 Leave a comment
Lots of coverage in the last couple of days of the Toyota Yaris/Saatchi & Saatchi drama from Australia that I wrote about in my last post. Tim from Mumbrella does an excellent summary of the whole episode here.
So I re-read this old post. The events of the last couple of days certainly highlight the dangers alluded to pretty well.
All those who have bemoaned the status that Marketing is accorded in most large organisations should take heart. Our saviour might well be upon us.
It will be enormously ironic if it proves to be true, but my bet is that social media may yet see Marketing invited back to the boardroom table.
Why? Because the boardroom table respects those things that can either deliver great success or cause great harm. For years Marketing hasn’t seemed to deliver much potential for either. Most Boards were highly sceptical of what value marketing could deliver (certainly when compared to more operational functions). And, in a logical corollary, they didn’t really fear what damage could be done if Marketing got something wrong.
They also didn’t really buy the argument that Marketing ‘owned’ the consumer. Either because they didn’t see the need for the consumer to be at the heart of their business, or, more likely, because they felt that some combination of sales, retail, corporate affairs etc was just as capable of representing the consumer view.
We in the broader Marketing fraternity have found this frustrating and not a little insulting. We tried very hard to argue that we knew exactly what we were doing, ours being a professional, regimented discipline, with proven success factors delivering strong return. But (with apologies for being both simplistic and judgemental) we tended to fall down when called on to prove this, betrayed by our meaningless language and superficial analysis.
Our panic has increased as we’ve confronted a new digital world. We’ve seen our audience wrenched away, our traditional creative strengths made less relevant and, most frighteningly of all, the rise of social media with its democratisation of opinion, free sharing of points of view and returning of power to the people.
But this is actually what might save us. Because social media is dangerous. It has a power that every Board should be afraid of. Its ability to galvanise people is remarkable, and its ability to galvanise people around an issue that can threaten any business needs to be respected.
And at the same time social media represents enormous opportunity, for it galvanises people around a positive issue just as effectively as a negative one. It allows people to share in a great service initiative just as much as a botched one.
But while its unfortunate, the truth is that for most businesses fear dominates. Fear forces decisions much more readily than opportunity, and my suspicion is that most businesses fear social media. Which is where our opportunity lies.
Social media is Marketing’s responsibility (not entirely Marketing’s, obviously, but for the moment we’re the ones most likely to be taking the lead). And social media cements again the need for every businesses to have the consumer at its heart. Which is exactly where they, and we as Marketers, should be.
It will be ironic. Social media has been enormously unsettling for Marketers. We don’t understand it yet and, if you’re of my vintage, it challenges much of what you’ve spent a career advocating. But social media will revolutionise how businesses behave. And it’s very likely to be fear of social media, the thing we marketers don’t really understand, that will see Marketing invited back to the boardroom table.
Once we’re there, hopefully we can help people see the opportunity too.
Toyota Yaris. The ad’s almost as shocking as Toyota’s limited grasp of Social Media.
December 13, 2009 10 Comments
The slightly bizarre ‘pitch’ being conducted in Australia for Toyota has come to an end. A pretty bewildering exercise has been brought to an almost perfect conclusion. Perfect, because it’s so spectacularly flawed.
Most of the discussion will focus on a genuinely offensive ad that was produced as part of the obligatory ‘create your own ad’ promo, the latest in a long line of similar user-generated content efforts. (Charlie Brooker wrote a particularly apt piece about loser-generated here, but given the bizarre incestuous overtones in this particular example, I’m coining the phrase abuser-generated content.)
But the bigger issue here isn’t the ad itself. It’s the considerable lack of understanding of Social Media exhibited by Toyota.
Anyway, it started with the announcement that a public pitch for Social Media activity for the Yaris brand would take place between five agencies. Each agency would produce a campaign. All would go live, and then Toyota would choose two agencies to produce more work in the New Year, presumably based on some measure of the effectiveness of the campaign they produced. After the work in the New Year has run, Toyota will then decide whether it is in a position to appoint a retained agency for Social Media.
The process began with eight agencies making presentations. Toyota intended to choose four to go to the second stage, each producing the campaign they had presented. Toyota then announced that five finalists had been chosen and that each would be given two weeks, and $15,000 to produce their campaign.
Todd Connolly, Toyota’s Manager – New Media and Direct Marketing, announced that “We have taken the ideas from everyone involved, both from traditional above-the-line agencies and boutique agencies. All eight were of a high calibre, all were very fresh ideas.” He explained that “the competition will run for approximately six weeks, but if any of the campaigns create “groundswell”, Toyota will continue the conversation with those customers”.
A few things about this puzzled me. (Let’s put aside why a group of agencies would choose to take part in a public beauty parade, with what seems a pretty vague promise that even a single agency will benefit from an ongoing relationship.) What I was really puzzled by were the comments in relation to Social Media. Now let me be clear. I am but a humble blogger. I’m not a social media expert. I don’t work for a social media agency. But I am an enthusiastic amateur, so don’t feel entirely unqualified to make some personal comments. Let’s look at a few of the observations from Toyota:
“All were very fresh ideas.” Really? What constitutes fresh in your world? Ooh look, this campaign consists of two Facebook fan pages. Hang on, this campaign’s a promotion inviting you to submit your own idea for an ad. No wait, this one’s got a stop-motion video featuring lego characters. I could be being unkind, they might be brilliantly executed, but they’re not particularly fresh are they? Not on account of all being commonly used mechanics and an already well-trodden video technique.
“The competition would run for approximately six weeks, but if any of the campaigns create “groundswell”, Toyota will continue the conversation with those customers”. If it creates groundswell, you’ll continue the conversation? What about those people who signed up for your fresh, new Facebook pages? Planning to abandon them? Or all those people who submit ideas for ads, or respond to your videos? Non-commital about whether to continue those conversations? You’re basically just not all that interested in doing anything with the people who make the effort to engage with Toyota as a result of any of the campaigns you’re planning to run unless a ‘groundswell’ justifies it? What do you think social media’s for?
But here is the shining conclusion to the make your own ad competition. By some margin the most sexist, offensive nonsense I’ve ever seen a mainstream brand put its name to. I’m getting old, I take offence too easily, it’s been said that I’m a little too inclined to pull myself up to my full height, but this is pretty disgraceful. Seriously.
Mumbrella wrote a piece about the film and the backlash to it. Todd Connolly, again, responded with “We wouldn’t distance ourselves from it by any means. It’s not an ad that we are putting to air. It’s user-generated content. I don’t really see it as an issue. The people on the jury who saw it thought it was funny and well made.”
I’ll bet you any sum of money you like you will distance yourself from it. You’ll do it as soon as the complaints start flooding in. You’ll do it as soon as the first staff member with a family and a spine tells you he’s ashamed to work for Toyota. And you’ll most certainly do it when the first women’s group calls for a boycott of Toyota. Perhaps they’ll set up a Facebook page, one I would wager will enlist a few more fans than the number your Yaris efforts managed.
How ignorant of Social Media can you possibly be? “It’s not an ad that we’re putting to air”. It’s on YouTube for Christ’s sake (or at least it was, before you removed it, hence the big, blank space above). I think we can safely consider YouTube to be ‘air’. Really popular, 340 million visitors a day, air.
And who cares that it’s user-generated content. It was generated by users in response to your promotion. And you rewarded them for it. That’s your logo at the end. What possible difference could it make who put the logo there? You judged it a winner and in doing so deemed it appropriate for your brand.
And I bet you’ll be running a mile from that decision when Monday morning rolls around.
Digital vs Analog? It’s a case-by-cache decision
December 9, 2009 1 Comment
Lately I keep getting asked about the Kindle. These conversations generally start with people wanting to know how the Kindle works, how popular they are and, ultimately, do I prefer them to ‘real’ books. It’s this last question that I find interesting.
I like both. I’d love a Kindle. I also love real books. I think they serve slightly different purposes and to that extent they don’t really replace each other. But this answer doesn’t often satisfy people. They want a definitive decision, one over the other, a victor.
Which is something I’m starting to notice a lot, this feeling that you’re either a digital person or an analog person, either all for the bright, new, ephemeral digital world, or the solid, traditional, substantial analog one. In a quite wonderfully appropriate way, it’s a binary decision – you’re a zero or a one, digital or analog.
Which I do find slightly odd because the reality is that there are some things that just work better in a specific form. It’s not a universal. Digital’s not better. Nor is analog. It’s a case-by-case (or, if you’ll forgive me, cache-by-cache) decision.
I think one of the interesting issues is how quality is signaled in the different forms. Because you pretty quickly get to quality of experience, rather than quality of content. If you look at the example of a book in analog, printed form versus in electronic, digital form the content’s the same. But the experience is different. And there are clearly instances when a chunky hardcover with beautifully reproduced imagery is a wonderful thing, just as there are times when a portable collection, at your fingertips, of every book you own by favourite author is delightful to have.
And how we gauge the quality of the experience is actually quite different. Much of how we are used to determining quality is tactile – signaled by weight of paper, feeling of fabric, accuracy of finish – and that’s really hard to translate into a digital environment. On the one hand that’s great because it democratises – all books start life equal when they can’t be judged by their cover. But it’s also a challenge for a lot of digital enterprises because delivering the usual indicators of quality often actually make a digital experience less satisfying. It’s simplistic, but as an example, the extensive use of flash, video and sound design, which in theory approximate the analog indicators of quality, in practice often end up delivering exactly the opposite. They make something look great, but in reality just get in the way and confuse the experience. (This site for Campari is a perfect example of how it goes wrong.) So the language of quality in the digital realm is more about utility and usability.
Which is an entirely different concept, and partly explains the obvious reticence of people schooled in the analog when they first start to build digital experience. Part of what’s so attractive in the analog is the comfort of knowing what something is and how it works. And, to state the obvious, for many people, in most instances, comfort and familiarity are desirable.
And in contrast there’s a novelty value to so much that’s digital. Things exist that are entirely new, possible only because they’re digital, along with things that are familiar but take on an entirely new form. That newness is intriguing and a little intoxicating, and one that people like me get quite caught up in. And it doesn’t take long before everything new is good and everything old is bad, and utility stops being about things that are actually useful and becomes about things that are deemed useful simply because they are different.
Which I guess means it’s just a market maturity issue. You’ve got battle lines drawn between the comfort of the familiar and the novelty of the new. And hopefully, quite quickly, the need to defend a position recedes, and we are left with lots of different ways to enjoy things, not because they’re comfortable, or because they’re novel, but simply because they’re good.
(Within a couple of hours of posting this I visited Russell Davies’ blog and saw something he’d written on a very similar subject. He talked about us reaching the point where people are finally ready to ‘move past digital infatuation and analog nostalgia’, which in seven words summed up what I stumbled through in 600. Damn you, Russell Davies, and your clarity of thought.)
Instapaper. One of the best things ever.
December 8, 2009 Leave a comment
If you spend any time online and haven’t been using Instapaper you really should. I can’t think of any single thing that’s improved my web experience more than this.
It’s a really simple bookmarking tool. Like digital post-it-notes.
Email Subscription #fail
December 7, 2009 Leave a comment
Sorry. I don’t know why but all email subscriptions for this site seem to have been lost. Doubtless I clicked, dragged, or dropped something I oughtn’t.
So if you had a subscription, would you mind please signing up again? (The button’s over there on the right.) If you’ve never had a subscription, try it now. (That’s the button, just there, on the right.)
Thanks.
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