Three weeks after I first saw it I still smile at this. A lovely way of celebrating an achievement while casually rubbing salt in the wound of a less successful competitor.
Comparative advertising is so hard to do well. It’s just so easy to tip over the line into snark. But this does it with an admirable subtlety, delivering a nod and a wink to those car enthusiasts to whom the reference means something while making perfect sense to those to whom it doesn’t.
Very nice indeed.
Categories: Advertising
Tagged: Audi, Overjoyed
I’ve spent the last couple of months looking for a house. What a dispiriting experience. Not the house bit. I like houses. What’s dispiriting is having to deal with real estate agents. It’s bewildering how quickly and consistently they’re able to diminish what should be a great experience.
Because buying a house should be great. A bit nerve-wracking, yes, because there’s always an element of risk involved. But still great because it’s all about potential – something that should improve your life, the thrill of finding something perfect, or, for that matter, something completely unexpected.
Which makes it a lot like the process of buying advertising. It’s a similar experience, commonly laced with similar disappointment, because Suits seem to make exactly the same mistakes I see real estate agents making. Here are a few:
They don’t ask questions. And they don’t listen.
I’m amazed how often real estate agents open a conversation by talking about either themselves or the house I’ve just entered. I’d expect them to start by asking about me, for the rather obvious reason that they, and the house, can only be relevant when they understand what it is that I’m looking for.
I’m looking for a house to solve a specific problem – the problem of my family and its related schools, hobbies and unnaturally extensive wardrobes – and only when an agent understands the specifics of my problem can they usefully talk about the property. Which you’d really want to do because when referenced against my need it sounds less like a generic house I don’t know and more like a specific house I might want to buy.
The same thing is true of suits. Your job is to make clients feel understood, confident that their very specific problem is about to be solved by the combined intellectual and creative weight of your agency. Which means the client needs to feel like the focus of pretty much every conversation before, during and after. Because clients see what they expect to see. If they believe they’ve been understood, they’ll approach an idea on that basis, actively looking for the ways in which the idea demonstrates that understanding. But if they don’t feel they’ve been understood they’ll approach the idea on that basis, actively looking for reasons why the idea (or the agency) demonstrates a lack of understanding. And, not surprisingly, they’ll find what they expect to find.
Which means your job is to always be asking relevant questions, listening to the answers and demonstrating your agency’s understanding.. This also has the added benefit of making you seem smarter.
They don’t know the product.
When I talk to a real estate agent I know they didn’t design or build the house they’re selling. But I do expect that they know a lot about designing and building in general and have an excellent working knowledge of the specific house they’re selling – like when additions were made or insulation installed. Most don’t.
I also expect that they have a really good working knowledge of the suburb – its schools, bus routes and parks, its recent sale prices, its cycle tracks and creches. Most don’t.
If you’re a suit I expect you to know a lot about the job at hand. If we’re building a website, I expect you to know quite a lot about that process. And I also expect you to know a lot about my category, my competitors, my previous activity, my target audience and how hard my job is.
They compensate for this by pretending to know what they don’t know.
At the same time there are things that I don’t expect a real estate agent to know about. And it makes me nervous when they pretend they do. These are things that become really important if I’m seriously considering buying the house they’re selling, very specific issues requiring the expert knowledge of someone like an architect, a builder or a lawyer. I’d prefer an agent not try and bluff their way through those issues. But lots do.
If you’re a suit there are also questions clearly outside your remit. There are creative directors, agency producers, directors, photographers, programmers and all manner of very highly-skilled specialists who know more about elements of the project at hand than you do. And as a client I don’t think it’s weak that you need to consult them. In fact, I think that’s your job.
They don’t believe in what they’re selling.
It’s a real estate agent’s job to believe in the property they’re selling. (I realise sometimes this is hard and that not all houses are created equal.) But they’re selling the house on behalf of people to whom it’s the only house that matters. It’s alarming how easily you can tell when someone doesn’t believe in what they’re selling. It’s not clever to betray to a potential buyer that perhaps the sellers are a little misguided, a bit too ‘close’ to the property, maybe too emotionally attached. That’s a betrayal. But I saw several agents do exactly that.
I also get really annoyed with real estate agents who are more interested in working out whether they might have a shot at selling me a different house rather than focusing on what they should be selling. They’re the ones who can’t wait to tell you that they also have five other properties in the area. They’re focused on making a sale for themselves, not for the owner of the house. To a degree you see the same thing with suits who want to be seen as the solution. They’re not focused on selling the idea at hand, more on making sure that the client believes that they can find the answer. So at the first sign of a client reservation, they’ve abandoned the idea they should be selling and started thinking about what other idea might be easier to sell.
If you’re a suit, it’s your job to sell the idea you’ve been entrusted with. You need to believe in it. Again, not all ideas are created equal, but the one you’ve got right now is the idea that’s deemed right by your agency. It’s not clever to suggest that the creatives are a bit too attached to the idea, that the planner’s missed the point, or that it’s not quite the answer you would have come up with and that you’re the person who can make sure the clients gets the ‘right’ idea in the next round of creative. But I’ve also seen plenty of suits do this.
What you’re supposed to be selling is the idea your agency’s recommending. You’re part of the agency, so that makes it your idea too.
So that’s my experience over the last couple of months, one I would bet is shared by the majority of people who have ever bought a house. It’s not one I’ll look back on with great fondness. It’s a process that should have been enjoyable let down by basic stuff done badly.
And I dread to think of the number of times I’ve had a variation on this conversation with agency clients, people who went into the creative development process optimistic that not only would they make an ad they could be proud of, but that they’d enjoy the process of doing so. Instead they found the process dispiriting and got an answer they begrudged. Which only reduces the chances of getting a great ad made next time.
(I’m feeling a bit depressed now. But this is cheering me up.)
Categories: Advertising
Tagged: Old Spice, Real Estate Agents, Suits
This animation is three minutes of joy for advertising enthusiasts. It was produced by Coy! for Creative Circle.
Categories: Advertising
Tagged: Coy!, Creative Circle
Near the top of a list of my favourite things you would find advertising, Tom Ford and smoking jackets. Which explains my enthusiasm for this – an advertisement for Tom Ford Eyewear, featuring a man wearing a smoking jacket (and, the more keenly observant of you will have noted, Carolyn Murphy sporting some very fetching spectacles).
Categories: Advertising
Tagged: Carolyn Murphy, Smoking Jackets, Tom Ford
My wife and I are in the process of buying a house. Which keeps presenting unexpected parallels with the process of making advertising.
We first started looking for a house a few months ago. We established a brief and set ourselves a timeline. This process established the three drivers of the process.
So pretty quickly we fell into a pattern. We’d spend a bit of time researching (or, rather more honestly, my wife would spend a bit of time researching while I watched golf on TV). We’d look at Property Press, a couple of websites, occasionally field a call from a proactive agent and maybe have three or four potential properties come our way each week.
And then we’d eliminate. We’d look for reasons why a potential house was wrong. Most commonly this would be the absence of lawn. Sometimes a slightly unexpected location. Or a potentially dubious construction technique. But our goal was to say no to anything that didn’t obviously meet the brief. And we found we were very good at saying no. Because we had a brief that set out what we should say no to.
But then something interesting happened. The timeframe contracted.
We now have a degree of urgency. Not a blind panic, just a desire to get into our own house sooner. And with it, something fundamental changed.
Our process is still the same – the same publications, same websites, same agents, same potential pool of houses. But now we’ve started looking for reasons to include options rather than excluding them.
And so we saw two houses on the weekend that could be great. Neither meet the original brief we set in exactly the way we imagined it. But they do both meet it. We just had to see them, and seriously consider them, in order to appreciate that. We haven’t changed our brief. We’ve just had our eyes opened to how it might be met.
One of the houses has almost no lawn. So it doesn’t meet the brief as written. But when you visit the house you appreciate that our brief is actually for a house where kids can gambol and be kids. Which isn’t the same thing as having lawn.
Neither of the houses is in a location we anticipated. But they both have a manageable proximity to school. Manageable because there are other great things about them that reposition the importance of location.
So what changed is that our focus shifted from eliminating ‘what’s obviously wrong’ to investigating ‘what might be right’.
And I think there are two interesting parallels for the creative development process in this. One is the importance of timeframe in how you see an issue. The second is how you define the role of the brief.
The timeframe dictates the mindset
As when buying a house, an extended timeframe encourages clients to hold out for something better, or ‘more right’. It just seems obvious. They’ve got the time and it would be irresponsible not to use it. So they look at options and keep wanting to explore. But to do this they have to focus on what’s wrong with each idea.
So I’m wondering whether there’s some science to planning when an idea gets presented?
I’m sure you could plot it on a bell curve. At the start of the process there’s a generous amount of time so a client has the luxury of rejection. So they’ll eliminate anything that doesn’t absolutely meet the brief. At the end of the process there’s so little time that they’re panicked and so seeking/dictating an idea that’s inarguably ‘right’. So is there a sweetspot in the middle when a client is relaxed enough with the timeframe to be open to a new idea, but not so relaxed that their inclination is just to keep looking at more ideas?
What is the brief really for?
My brief said that lawn and location were paramount, but when tested it was a variation on those concepts that mattered. The important shift occurred when I stopped looking for reasons to exclude options and starting finding reasons to include them.
Which reinforces my belief that clients and agencies often still don’t agree on the role of the brief. Is it, as I suspect clients often view it, a document that defines what the right answer looks like? Or is it, as I suspect agencies more often view it, a document that asks a question that needs to be answered in the most interesting way? The former’s about eliminating wrong answers. The latter’s about embracing interesting answers.
So anyway, I’m pretty excited about potentially buying a house. Perhaps moreso because it isn’t exactly what I had in mind – it’s actually better than the house my brief might have dictated.
But now I’m kicking myself that I may have overlooked a potentially great house because I came across it at the wrong time. I’m also kicking myself when I think about the potentially great creative ideas that died because I presented them at a time when the client had the luxury of looking for reasons why they could be judged wrong, not yet the imperative of looking for reasons why they might be judged right.
Categories: Advertising · Marketing
This is what I saw as I was boarding a Jetstar flight last week. There’s the pilot, perched in the window ledge, cleaning his windscreen with a cloth.
I’ve shown this photo to a few people and it’s interesting what people see.
I see a pilot who doesn’t take himself too seriously, making sure that nothing gets in the way of a good (by which I mean, safe) flight.
My friend sees an example of a shoddily prepared plane and a pilot having to perform embarrassing DIY maintenance just to get it off the ground.
Why do we see it so differently? Very simply because we each see what we expect to see.
I like Jetstar. I’ve flown with them a few times and been impressed each time. So I see the relaxed, down-to-earth attitude I expect to see.
My friend had flown with them once before, in Jetstar’s first couple of days as a fledgling airline experiencing more than its fair share of teething problems. So she sees the slip-shod performance of a second-rate airline that she expects to see.
Which is all very obvious but it does remind me of the conversation I’ve had with clients many times.
As an advertiser, you never start with a clean slate. People always have a view of your brand. And they interpret whatever you do based on that existing view. Even if you’re a new brand people have a view of your category. And they interpret whatever you do based on their expectations of the category.
Which demonstrates what a difficult job being a Marketer really is.
Because those perspectives are so individual and people cling to them so tightly. No one likes to be wrong, so we look for what proves us right. Which makes it perfectly reasonable that a pilot cleaning a windscreen can be both a positive and negative reinforcement for the same brand.
And it also does a pretty good job of demonstrating how hard it is for marketers (and marketing) to change people’s perceptions.
Categories: Advertising · Marketing
Tagged: Jetstar
I bought a new TV over the break.
I’d been thinking about it for ages but had caught myself in that trap of not being able to commit knowing that something thinner and more attractive would come along as soon as I did. And while I was certainly looking forward to owning a new TV, I wasn’t really looking forward to the process to be endured in order to get one. (Vaughn Davis wrote about his recent experience here, and I was expecting much the same.)
So I ventured into Noel Leeming in Newmarket with due sense of dread and trepidation. But what a pleasant experience it was. A smart, helpful, young man answered some questions, made some suggestions, sold some accessories and dispatched me with a lovely new TV. All in all, an enjoyable experience with an excellent outcome.
And then I opened the paper the following day and got hit by the barrage of advertising from Noel Leeming/Harvey Norman/Dick Smith et al. All of it was entirely focused on telling me what I already know. Because I know that they are all cheap. I know that they will all price match. And I know (or at least I believe) that they all sell much the same stuff from much the same brands.
Which got me wondering about why every one of those retailers is putting so much focus on the area of the market where there’s no meaningful differentiation to be found. There must have been $100k spent by the main players in the Saturday paper. All to say the same thing. In the same way.
Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but it does seem like one of those self-reinforcing arguments that marketers create. We believe that price is the primary driver (and I’m not for a moment suggesting it’s not very important) so we focus all our marketing on price. Then we ask people what matters to them, they say price, partly because it’s true but partly because it’s what all the marketing focuses on so it seems like it must be what matters. Which means we then focus all our marketing on price…..
But it’s ultimately undifferentiated. If they’re all about price, and they’re all about price, then aren’t they all just spending a lot of money to create a very expensive ground zero?
In contrast, the experience I had was quite differentiated. The guy who sold me my TV had a great manner (which I know you can’t teach) and excellent product knowledge and sales skills (which I know you can).
So why wouldn’t they take some of the money they spend on non-differentiating retail advertising and spend it on a lot more very-differentiating staff training? No all of it, obviously, but they could then spend some of what’s left on advertising that tells people about their focus on staff training, which would also be differentiating (bearing in mind that that advertising is likely be as effective as the retail advertising in keeping their store top-of-mind). And they could spend a decent chunk of it on Search.
So they’d still be in the ‘price’ game, but they’d be carving out a new service/experience game? Maybe?
I’m certainly not trotting out an argument for more ‘brand’ advertising here. That’s the last thing I believe is needed. And I’m not arguing for no retail advertising, as clearly it has a big role to play. It’s just that it can’t be the only thing that matters, and from the outside it looks like all the effort, and money, is going into a territory that’s ultimately a bit fruitless.
Categories: Advertising · Marketing
Tagged: Bond & Bond, Harvey Norman, Noel Leeming, Vaughn Davis
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 bestow 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.
Categories: Advertising · Marketing · Research
Tagged: Advertising Age, Focus Groups
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.
Categories: Advertising · Marketing · Media
Tagged: Mumbrella, Saatchi, Toyota Yaris
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.
Categories: Advertising · Marketing
Tagged: Clean Getaways, Todd Connolly, Toyota Yaris
A day in the life of Harvey & Gilmot
