Category Archives: advertising

advertising, branding, engaging, planning

Why Great Ads Are Great, But Not Great Enough

a strange thing has started happenning.  I’ve started watching ads.  Sky+ no longer gets to do it’s thing…  it started a few weeks ago, with THAT gorilla ad.  we wanted to know what all the fuss was about, so we re-wound and watch it.  then we watched it again.  thats what seems to have started it all. then last Friday Ugly Bettty was interrupted by the spanking new effort from Fallon for Bravia…  if you haven’t seen it, watch it now…

Play-Doh is a pleasure to watch.  repeatedly.  and thats a heck of a lot more important that how it compares to it’s predecessors.  an argument was made to me yesterday that viewer expectations of the series are now so high that Bravia / Fallon can’t hope to meet them.  that’s unfair; I can’t imagine a level on which Play-Doh doesn’t engage and entertain the viewer.  this emerging trend of me watching ads continued more recently with eBay’s effort.

knowingly retro, clean and fresh, and containing a wonderfully insightful moment where one of the characters looses a bid, this marks a strong start for what is hopefully set to become a long-running platform for the brand…  eBay has a world to play with, ads created in isolation should only be the first and shallowest expression of that world…  this is begging to be transmedia-planned.

another new effort comes from the Post-Office.  the ants – thank God – have gone and been replaced by a sitcom assortment of characters.  again there’s knowingness in the derogatory reference to sub-standard carpets, and then Joan Collins crops up.  all very random but it works…  but it could be argued just making an ad is a very shallow window on this world and brand.  I would love to see what could be done with this concept extended into 5-8 min sitcom-style shorts online…  a Victoria Wood meets Gervais / Merchant approach could create some genuinely entertaining content (above and beyond which the ads could reference, again a nod to transmedia-ness)…

but the trend isn’t restricted to TV.  a lovely press ad for the Peugeot 407 caught my eye recently too…

Peugeot_dps_2the flowchart on the left is genuinely fun and invites you – by playing thru a decision-making tree – to think about what’s important when buying a car.  a simple idea that’s entertaining whilst remaining embedded in the product…  and there’s an intriguing url – http://www.407trustyourinstinct.co.uk/ – which depressingly is not a smarter deeper reflection of the ad but lots of pictures of cars, a product not a brand experience.

and I suppose that this is the nub of all this…  brands are ideas.  and ads are the multitudes of individual expressions of those ideas.  but to end there, with a great ad, is simply no longer enough.  media offers more, and brands deserve more.  the opportunity is not just to make great ads like the above, but to do the smart interesting stuff with and behind them that a 21st Century media landscape permits…

whether it’s communicating the mythology of making the ad a la Play-Doh, or creating and bringing a world to life like eBay (storybooks, documentaries anyone?); or potentially making entertaining content (Post-Office sitcom please), or something as simple as taking that Gorilla ad that sparked this bout of ad-watching, and changing the smallest thing to make the biggest difference…  the below played out just before 8pm on Saturday 13th October, a few minutes before England played France.  if you didn’t catch this watch the ad again – the gem crops up just at the end.  enjoy.

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advertising, planning, regulating

Childsplay

Zipngeorge “the only consequence of the regulations will be a hit on the commercial incomes of channels targeting young people. the only consequence of that will be a decline in the quality of the content on those channels. which is in no one’s interest.”
Posted by chris stephenson on Sunday, 19 November 2006 at 23:18

More hours + less investment = lower quality.  Should have been an easy equation to forecast.  Not so for Ofcom, who last week published a report into the state of children’s TV.  Apparently it’s bleak.  Whilst the hours of dedicated kids TV have trebled over recent years (with the emergence of dedicated children’s channels), investment across the public service broadcasting channels, has – according to Ofcom – declined somewhere in the region of 20%.

Channels create programmes that people want to watch.  They can then charge advertisers to reach those audiences.  This funds programme making.  And round we go. It should be so easy, Childsplay even.  But no.  By pandering to the notion that advertising has the ability to magically make kids – or anyone for that matter – buy things (if only it were that easy!), and by therefore barring a significant proportion of advertisers from investing in the kids TV market, Ofcom has by its own actions significantly reduced the amount of investment commercial channels can obtain from advertisers.

Ofcom are ignoring the fundamental commerciality of the market.  Worse, they seem to be implying that they should be able to re-engineer the situation with further legislation:

Mr Thickett, who is overseeing the report, points out that "Ofcom has powers to make recommendations but our power is only to look at the market as a whole … we have no powers to prevent them [broadcasters] doing what they feel they need to do."

Broadcasters feel they need to reduce investment not despite, but because of Ofcom’s actions.  Broadcasters are reducing the investment in kids TV precisely because of the pressures of the commercial marketplace, pressures that have been exacerbated by the junk food ban.

Advertisers still target kids via media investment.  But the marketplace has forced advertisers to divert investment away from TV into other media channels – channels that have no PSB remit in delivering quality educational kids television.

Are kids getting thinner?  I doubt it!  Will the government – thru Ofcom – continue to pander to the needs of a nanny state and target advertising?  Very possibly.  Alcohol advertising ban anyone?

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advertising, branding

Strong brand. Stretched. Better for it.

so you’re Harvey Nichols and you want to communicate your food hall credentials.  tough one; you’re known for fashionable garms, so just putting the HN badge on some nice food may just look bland – or worse, a flagrant imitation of the M&S food campaign.  what to do?

remember who you are is what!

apply the Harvey Nichols brand engram to food…  fabulous, fashionable, glamourous, elaborate, indulgent, self-aware…  and get a solution thats obvious once you’ve seen the punchline but surely required the neatest of thinking to get there as part of the planning process.

a nod too to the production values.  this is a concept that could have failed in execution.  it doesn’t.  it’s a knowing, elegant, high-value piece (implicitly – of course – affirming the existing HN brand engram).  this ad is everything good brand communications should be.  lovely.

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advertising, branding, engaging, internet, user-generating

Making Up Your Own Foreign Melodrama

Bb_virgin_subtitle_superstar_2 one of the highlights in what has been a pretty gloomy year for Virgin Media has surely to be their sponsorship of BB, which has consistently outdone the programme it sponsors in terms of entertaining content.

but those clever people at GoodStuff communications haven’t let Virgin stop there.  they’ve persuaded the sponsor (and the creative agency) to let consumers subtitle their own bumpers – the best ones will be played out in the BB final.

to take part you simply go to the Subtitle Superstar website where you can choose a clip and subtitle to your hearts content.

getting consumers to create their content is nothing new, but this has the double winner of 1. demanding creativity within the context of (in BB) a very highly-valued piece of scheduling real-estate, and 2. rewarding the best creations by showing it to an audience of millions during one of the few truly event TV occasions remaining in the TV calendar.

what makes this stand out isn’t that it’s asking consumers to create content; the sorely-missed Tony Hart’s Gallery did that a long time ago, and the age of the internet has made this a staple of the comms planner’s tool-kit.  what makes it stand out is the access it gives consumers to a highly-valued media brand.  like it or loathe it, BB retains a very high stock with 16-34s, and this kind of access isn’t easily come by.  the fact that the access comes courtesy of Virgin Media can only do good stuff for the brand.

as an aside, it’s worth noting that it comes in the wake of a pretty bad week for the BBC, GMTV and their bedfellows who were less than honest with viewings during TV competitions.  failing standards, plummeting levels of trust, a fundamental betrayal (if reports are to be believed) of the nation – and that’s just page 2 of a full-colour supplement on the issue courtesy of the Mail!

…despite the fact that it’s been massively over reported, the fact remains that the TV stations have genuinely been caught with the pants down.  why?  because they were so keen to give viewers the perception that they were involved in the programme, they forgot to make sure they were actually genuinely involved in the programme.  could they really have been surprised when viewers reacted not too happily about it not all being as it seemed.

and herein lies the rub…  the reaction of viewers and the media told us not about the lack of trust between consumers and brands, but about the absolute existence of trust between consumers and brands.  the extent of the reaction bears testimony to the high levels of trust that brands (the BBC it must be said in particular) have engendered.

because engaging with consumers and co-creating content with them has become such a staple of many brands’ activities, consumers are spending more time than ever before engaging with them.  and when any brand asks consumers to engage with them, to spend precious time with them, to commit energy and creativity to them, they can’t be surprised if – when this relationship is undermined – consumers get more pissed off than they would if they didn’t particularly  like a 25×4 colour.

engaging with consumers is two-way relationship.  and if the comms planning and marketing community wants to continue to evolve the nature of brand communications, they better make sure that they live up to their end of the bargain.

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advertising, converging, internet, planning

When Words Collide – a perpective from DDB

thanks to John V Willshire who pointed me in the direction of this video featuring Matt Dyke, Worldwide Planning Director DDB and Jeroen Matser, Senior Planner DDB, discussing the new landscape of digital innovations converging with the physical world.

much is said about convergence but this take on how the internet is colliding and interacting with the too-often-overlooked offline world is timely and refreshing.
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advertising, engaging

When your product is this good, don’t let advertising get in the way

Titian_oneI had a little look Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne this morning.  not in a gallery.  in St Anne’s Court.  on the way back from a meeting.

I was able to do so courtesy of a piece of communication from The National Gallery called The Grand Tour – whereby;

"…over the next twelve weeks [The National Gallery is] turning the West End into a giant gallery by lining the streets of Soho, Piccadilly, and Covent Garden with some of the world’s most famous paintings"

(source: Grand Tour Website)

which is great; when your product is as good as the creations of Europe’s greatest painters, don’t formulate an advertising intermediary – get it out there and let people experience your product on their own terms.  it’s like 50 little pop-up galleries, I hope they become permanent sites, rotating the image every month.

Grand_tour_web

but if that wasn’t a nice enough idea in itself, if you go to The Grand Tour website you can not only view an interactive map of where the images are and find out more about the artist and piece, you can also download a range of audio tours for your MP3 player…

do an hour’s tour over a lunch-break, or take a romantic stroll on summer evening – the route and commentary courtesy of The Lovers’ Tour – all from the web.

a great, neat, joined up piece of communications which utilises digital capabilities not as a bolt-on, but as an inherent part of the idea, genuinely and relevantly adding to the enjoyment of the product.

and I got to view a Titian on a rainy Monday morning, which was more than enough to brighten up the day.

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advertising, engaging, internet, social networking, user-generating

From ‘send’ to ‘recieve’ mode; lessons for politicians and advertisers

Houses_of_parliamentpic from solarnavigator.net

There’s been a lot of media-orientated political comment about over the last week.  Firstly Whitehall last Thursday published a report by Ed Mayo, Chief Executive of the national consumer council and Tom Steinberg, founder and director of mySociety, recommending that the Government acknowledges the importance of, and utilises, existing internet-based communities.

The three specific recommendations were that the Government:

  • welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives;
  • supplies innovators that are re-using government-held information with the information they need, when they need it, in a way that maximises the long-term benefits for all citizens; and
  • protects the public interest by preparing citizens for a world of plentiful (and sometimes unavailable) information, and helps excluded groups take advantage

These sentiments were echoed by Tim Montgomerie – editor of ConservativeHome.com – in The Spectator’s Politics column last week where he suggested that the next general election will be remembered as “Britain’s first internet election”.  He notes that “in this new world [of internet communities] the campaign staff of political parties and traditional media will have a much smaller share of power”; and points to the fact that “more Americans have watched Mr de Vellis’s advert [below] than have watched any official commercial”.

Such is the power of a searchable internet, populated by aggregations of communities with their own opinions, wants and behaviours.  It’s a force that both politicians and brands must understand and engage with on the communities’ terms; Montgomerie notes that politicians “still see the web as a way of providing superior distribution channels for unchanged messages.  They are in ‘send mode’ … the political parties that prosper in the internet age will embrace ‘receive mode’.

Try reading that last quote again replacing politicians with the word brands.  There are parallels indeed.

The third element in all of this is the broadcast media; Montgomerie – in citing predictions that “most print newspapers will have closed by 2025” – takes a different position to Tony Blair, who waded in to the debate this week in a polemic against the print media.  Blair believes that “there is a market in providing serous, balanced, news.  There is a desire for impartiality.  The way that people get their news may be changing; but the thirst for news being real is not”.

But deciding ‘what is real’ will no longer be the preserve of politicians and brands communicating through broadcast media.  In both the advertising and political arenas, that will be for us all – as co-creators and consumers – to decide.  There will be – as there has always been – two key questions; who owns the message and who owns the media?  In creating content we all have the potential to own the message, something politicians and advertisers will have to come to terms with.

As for who owns the media – that remains to be seen…  Different strategies will emerge.  This week HMV appointed digital agency LBi to create a new social networking site to take on rivals facebook and YouTube.  Good luck with that!  Gideon Lask, e-commerce director of HMV said “The HMV social networking site will be an important element in our customer engagement strategy”.  All admirable, but what’s wrong with utilising the networks already out there?  His brand – like politics – is still in ‘send mode’, I’d suggest that the sooner ‘receive mode’ is engaged, the better.

Sources:

‘The Power of Information’ – a review by Mayo and Steinberg

‘The next general election will be won and lost on the internet’, a Spectator column by Tim Montgomerie

Blair’s Feral Media speech – full text as reported by the BBC here

‘HMV appoints LBi to create facebook rival’ as reported in Campaign

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advertising, broadcasting, internet, planning, social networking

The Transmedia Tardis

the above video is from a MySpace page I came across with some clients whilst browsing some social networking sites last week.  it didn’t make much sense till Saturday, when during Doctor Who there was a reference to Mr Saxon’s election win.  the name rang a bell.  a few minutes digging this morning revealed the reason for the MySpace page, and also the suggestion of which character is due to make an appearance later this season.

it’s not only a great bit of marketing from the BBC – one that logged the existence of a character in my head long before any reference in the programme – but a piece of marketing that says much about the nature of the Doctor Who brand.  it follows on from a great bit of semiotic play from the first (contemporary) series in the form of Bad Wolf – references scattered across the series which pointed towards and larger more malevolent threat than any dealt with in individual episodes.

but above all this is a great bit of Transmedia storytelling.  TV does one job in broadcasting the crafted programme, the internet is doing another – inviting and encouraging the audience to explore the world behind the programme.  more than anything else this makes the world of Doctor Who seem bigger than it otherwise would on one media channel alone – something older as well as more contemporary audiences will have come to love and expect from the franchise…

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advertising, planning

Mediation’s (Completly Unproven) Rank of Media Channel Carbon Badness

Green_normal …is how John Grant described how best to approach the communication of greenness at an event hosted this week by the account planning group.

the ascent of greenness on the public agenda has been swift and universal; Grant quoted Phil Gandy from research company Landor who described it as "One of the most complete and speedy revolutions in consumer attitudes ever seen" (click here for press release).

Grant was discussing what advertising account planners can bring to the table in combating climate change, with specific reference to how brands successfully communicate and capitalise on – genuine – green credentials.

he’s blogging about his upcoming book – The Green Marketing Manifesto – at greenormal, from where you can link to his presentation (alternatively click here).

Grant outlined five principles when communicating a brand’s greenness:

  1. green is a principle, not a proposition
  2. be certain that your business and the green marketing itself will live up to  the standards which you set for yourself
  3. it’s a complex moving target
  4. it’s barely started
  5. there’s not one green marketing strategy, there’s many

but there was one particular aspect of marking green credentials that wasn’t discussed, one that’s already caused more than one of my clients to reconsider their own marketing activities; that of the media with which you communicate your greenness.

it’s one thing to be able to say that you’re a carbon-neutral brand, but to what extent can you say the same for your media schedule?  I’m planning on getting round to some more thorough investigation into this, but here’s my hunch for the run down of how media channels perform – from best to worst…

RADIO you’d have thought is the best performing channel.  the only product is radio waves.  so carbon release is restricted to content production and broadcast, and the electricity required by radio receivers.  that said the channel’s expansion into TV and online distribution could see this change significantly…

ONLINE intuitively ranks well.  no paper; just the electricity to run the machine and the servers to hold the content.  but what a lot of servers there are… a quick search led me to Martin Stable’s blog where he discusses this topic; he quotes an article in Wired Magazine entitled The Information Factories;

"Ask.com operations VP Dayne Sampson estimates that the five leading search companies together have some 2 million servers, each shedding 300 watts of heat annually, a total of 600 megawatts. These are linked to hard drives that dissipate perhaps another gigawatt. Fifty percent again as much power is required to cool this searing heat, for a total of 2.4 gigawatts. With a third of the incoming power already lost to the grid’s inefficiencies, and half of what’s left lost to power supplies, transformers, and converters, the total of electricity consumed by major search engines in 2006 approaches 5 gigawatts.

That’s an impressive quantity of electricity. Five gigawatts is almost enough to power the Las Vegas metropolitan area – with all its hotels, casinos, restaurants, and convention centers – on the hottest day of the year. So the annual operation of the world’s petascale search machines constitutes a Vegas-sized power sump. In the next year or so, it could add a dog-day Atlantic City. Air-conditioning will be the prime cost and conundrum of the petascale era. As energy analysts Peter Huber and Mark Mills projected in 1999, the planetary machine is on track to be consuming half of all the world’s output of electricity by the end of this decade."

Wired Magazine, October 2006

I’m ranking CINEMA next.  big screen so lots of power but usually lots of people so – applying the same logic as car-sharing – the ability of cinemas to people-share see’s them rank above…

…TV.  according to the Carbon Trust the average UK individual, in watching the average TV set, contributes 35kg of CO2 per year to the atmosphere.  nice to know but not sure how it compares to other media.  watch this space.

Paper_dumpI’m ranking PRESS next.  lots of recycling but still lots of paper used and not necessarily recycled.  I may be misjudging the medium as the electricity use is restricted to the point of creation, although this may be balanced by the carbon output of distributing millions upon millions of newspapers and magazines each year.  Images of London freesheets being dumped in bins (above) don’t help the medium’s case too much either.

which brings me to my – unproven – biggest schedule culprit; posters.  according to Postar there are 123,949 poster sites in the UK.  thats a lot of paper being printed on every two weeks.  82,054 of those posters are illuminated – so thats a shedload of electricity keeping them alight.  despite some panels using solar power to illuminate them, I still doubt the capacity of posters to defend themselves in the court of carbon emissions.

Scrolling_backlight So there it is.  my unproven ranking of media channels.  the upshot?  if you have a carefully and elegantly crafted green message, think twice before you book that press and scrolling backlight schedule!

Disclaimer: this could be completely wrong  …but I’m on the case re constructing a more thoroughly research ranking.  promise.

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advertising, engaging

Advertising Isn’t to Blame for Commercial Radio’s Woes

Radio_mast_3 Fru Hazlitt, the new MD of GCap last week gave a keynote speech at the Media 360 event to assert that bad ads were causing listeners to abandon commercial radio.

whilst Hazlitt stopped short of threatening to pull ‘poor’ ads from schedules, plans were announced to set up a listener poll to rate the quality of ads.

there’s a big assumption here – that bad ads = disgruntled listeners = defection = strong BBC.  and thats a big assumption to make.

whilst it’s true that commercial radio is suffering against a consistently strong BBC, and that the lack of ads on the latter certainly plays a part in it’s success; what this assertion ignores are other potentially strong factors that have combined to produce a strong BBC…

no channel is feeling the effects of a changing media landscape more than radio.  the combination of the i-pod generation carrying their music libraries wherever they go along with the wide and often free access to music offered by the internet has left some stations struggling to maintain their relevance.

it was this aspect that the speech last week ignored.  in a world where music is available on demand, three things become key to a radio station staying relevant

  • unique content (stuff that you can’t listen to or get from elsewhere else eg talk radio)
  • newness (eg tracks or bands you may not have heard before)
  • great packaging (eg respected DJs, innovative formats)

it is across these aspects that the BBC has arguably out-performed commercial radio.  from the strength and breadth of non-music offerings (Five Live being a case in point), to innovative and less-mainstream stations (of which 6 music is arguably the strongest), the BBC is doing more than capitalizing on listeners frustrations with advertising.  commercial radio on the other hand – in the main – continues to peddle mainstream music music without the necessary investment in either innovative formats or value-adding presenters.

there are exceptions, GCap’s Xfm continues to outperform rivals with a combination of credible new music and innovative formats (see X-posure for evidence), recently winning the last FM analogue license in South Wales.  but this week will see GCap ‘overhaul’ the brand, with changes expected in DJ line-up and music formats.  perhaps it will also introduce viewer ad-polling as part of the review.

advertising may be part of commercial radio’s woes, but it’s far from the only one.  and there’s a lot radio station owners could do to help their cause before alienating and then potentially culling their biggest source of income.

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