Archive for August, 2011
Dear Spire: BIG mistake, huge, doubleDcup massive…
I was in Edinburgh with a group of friends last weekend and we were stopped in our tracks on the first day by this:
No, not an ad for a women’s mag, it’s an ad for breast augmentation. From the national, respectable chain of private hospitals Spire Healthcare (who used to be Bupa Hospitals). Who want to sell you BOOB JOBS, as ‘same day surgery’ that is ‘more affordable than you think’.
There is so much wrong here I hardly know where to start. Perhaps I should take my lead from the groups of women I saw throughout the weekend standing in front of these posters (about half a dozen around the city centre) with their mouths hanging open in disbelief.
You could argue that the kind of women who are in the market for an affordable boob job are probably going to be attracted rather than offended by this ad. But to my mind this is outweighed by the damage it inflicts on both the hospital and the wider Spire Healthcare brands.
I really struggled to believe that Spire’s marketing team would sign off on something so a) unprofessional and b) inappropriate (gold lame stripper boob tube, anyone?). So I rang their press office. Who admitted that they had no idea the posters existed and eventually redirected me to the head of media and marketing at the Edinburgh hospital.
I had a very interesting chat with her – the posters were a result of taking 7 or 8 concepts into focus groups with their (younger) target market and “this route came back by far as the favourite”.
I did ask her whether she was concerned about the effect on their wider brand but she said that they haven’t had any feedback that anyone had been “very offended” by it so far and they had been into town and hadn’t actually seen anyone looking shocked by the posters, but of course do take all feedback into consideration…
MORE words, more pictures please
I know I’ve been batting on for a while about why powerpoint presentations (and especially research debriefs) need to have less words and more pictures.
I’d actually like to amend that assertion. They should have more pictures – and more words.
I got handed an ethnographic research report last week, which had travelled from client A to client B to their agency to me. It had lots of lovely photos in it – but not a lot of text and crucially absolutely no methodology or general hint as to when, where or how the research had been carried out.
This has happened to me before and in the past I’ve even ended up on the phone to the research agency trying to get a quick debrief from whoever led the project, but they’ve inevitably left the agency, are on holiday, can’t remember anything or won’t help.
So even if you’ve just created the most visually arresting powerpoint debrief in history, would you mind popping a wordy slide on the front telling me how you got there?
How do clients do it?
After spending a couple of weeks working at the lass glamorous end of FMCG I’ve found myself wondering how the average client stays motivated when they spend their working week worrying about cat food, toothpaste or vacuum cleaners.
Having pretty much always worked in an agency environment (where you work on several different clients and rarely stay on the same brand for more than 18 months) I can’t imagine spending my days exclusively concentrating on a brand of orange juice.
Although you’d inevitably very quickly become an expert on the subject I think I’d go bananas. In fact a client of mine recently confessed that his most enjoyable role ever had been working on an innovation project where his team were given free rein to go off and find new products within (or even outside) the category to bring to market.
It’s also easy to forget that for most Brand Managers (and I imagine more than a few other clientside marketing roles), the actual marketing bit is a smallish part of their job. It’s often more about budget spreadsheets and agreeing to whatever Tesco want in order to keep the listing. So returning the umpteenth email from the agency that day might not be number one on their priority list.
The average client might not be an expert on TGI, a brilliant copywriter or techno-whizz – but that’s why they have an agency. Perhaps we should cut them a bit of slack as I certainly know that I couldn’t do their job.
Has anyone out there made the leap from agency to clientside or the other way round and wants to report back?
by The Marketoonist Tom Fishburnewith social media lowering the bar, are some businesses doing themselves more harm than good?
There are an awful lot of businesses and brands out there doing the whole Social Media thing rather badly.
Getting Marketing Wrong isn’t a new phenomenon, I only have to look at the dross which drops though my letterbox from Indian takeaways, landscape gardeners and cleaning services to see that there are a lot of smaller businesses out there Doing Their Own Marketing who need help (like that dress shop I blogged about before).
But social media is so accessible, affordable and easy to get started with that the entry requirements rule out almost no-one. Which means that the over-confident wade in without a clue of How To Do It.
Take my local horse rug washing company. They have a facebook page which I happily liked. Then the founder (met her once, spoke on the phone twice) sent me a friend request on facebook. She obviously hadn’t twigged the public/semi private differentiation between pages and people.
The fab transcription service I always use seems to see twitter as some kind of occasional use broadcast tool for sales messages and still has an egg as their avatar.
And then there’s the frankly worrying number of marketing agencies (who really should know better) out there with a blog that hasn’t been updated in months – perhaps one of those cobbler’s-children-having-no-shoes situations?
It’s just so easy to set up a twitter account, blog or facebook page that I suspect some of those happily doing so are doing their brands or businesses more harm than good.
If your age/experience fits…
The agency world has always been a young man/woman’s game. At least Outside London, if you’re not a director (or equally senior) by your late 30s you might as well forget any plans for world domination and seeing your profile in Campaign.
Which is, obviously, a rather stupid situation. Yes, the work-hard-play-hard agency lifestyle demands youthful amounts of energy and yes, many agency types are burnt out / hacked off / opting out / busy bringing up a family by the time they hit their 40s. But thanks to a combination of AdLand’s worship at the fountain of youth and the current economic climate (younger often also meaning cheaper), the industry risks missing out on a deep talent pool.
Not only are talented 40plus individuals from other industries unlikely to move into ours (bringing their fresh perspectives with them), we’re excluding our own as well. I know a recently redundant Suit with a wealth of experience in almost every sector and media imaginable, loved equally by his clients and almost anyone he’s ever worked with who can’t so much as get an interview at the moment. The problem? He’s 50ish.
There seems to be a similar issue with the Cult of Digital. There are a lot of late adapter agency types out there diligently doing their day-to-day job who won’t be offered a better opportunity until they can show that they know their foursquare from their flickr.
Perhaps as an industry we need to be a little more open minded about who we employ and promote – after if we all looked the same, thought the same and had the same experience we’d all come up with similar ideas. Innovative thinking won’t come out of from habitual hiring policies. We may need to start recruiting more on attitude and aptitude than experience and date of birth.
when you can’t blow your own trumpet
The average agency website or creds presentation will always have a ‘client’ page where they boast about the brands and organisations they work with. It would be fair to say that some of these stretch the truth a bit, encompassing the FMCG brand the agency produced a one-off standee for and the Blue Chip firm they last worked for in 2005.
image by Graphic Design Communications 2009 students from Chelsea
But I’m increasingly coming across agencies that aren’t allowed to publically admit that they work with a particular client. I’m not just talking about awards entries or agency creds – they flat out mustn’t be linked with the brand in question in the media.
I once went for an interview at an agency I thought had a fairly uninspiring client list – only to discover that they also did a lot of work for a mega famous worldwide entertainment brand but weren’t allowed to talk about it.
It doesn’t really help any agency’s reputation or profile when they’re unable to talk about their biggest and/or coolest clients, and as a freelance I have a similar problem. The agencies I work with are reasonably OK with me discretely admitting that I work with them – but for obvious reasons don’t want the world to know which of their top clients are being Planned by a Planner who is technically not on staff.
The actual clients I do come into contact with don’t seem very bothered that I work with rather than for a particular agency, but it still means that I can’t really publicise my own work. My CV is full of vague references to ‘leading FMCG brands’ and ‘high profile retailers’ and my LinkedIn profile is even less specific. I suppose it’s a good job I’ve got an honest face and that other agencies seem to enjoy playing ‘guess the client’ when I show them my CV…
If it’s on a lorry, then it’s consumer communications
Driving back up the M1 after a horse show last weekend I saw the side of a lorry that proudly stated ‘for all your pizza needs’. Googling hasn’t thrown up a picture of the offending vehicle (and I was hardly going to snap away whilst driving), so I’ve lovingly mocked it up in powerpoint:
A little more googling reveals that the lorry almost certainly belonged to Schiimel Distribution who seem to be big players in the world of foodservice pizza toppings.
But really, for all whose pizza needs? Even if it isn’t very creative the line at least makes sense in the context of somewhere like a trade mag, but not to other motorway drivers.
Weetabix Big Day insight hits the spot
I rather like the new Weetabix ad (apparently BBH’s first work for the brand).
Not because it is hysterically funny or ground-breakingly creative, I just think the insight is spot on.
For the last couple of years I’ve always turned to a bowl of Weetabix when I’ve got a big day ahead of me or it’s going to be a very long time until lunch. Let’s face it, you don’t choose Weetabix for the taste or texture (which for my overseas readers most closely resembles baby food when you add milk). In fact, the last-but-one Weetabix campaign (from WCRS) pretty much focused on ways in which you could make the stuff actually taste of something.
So I think this benefits focused approach rather than ‘here’s how to make our product more interesting’ has got to be a Win – and handily it ties in rather nicely with their classic ‘have you had your Weetabix’ campaign.
