communicating with an audience that doesn’t want to listen
I’ve blogged before about a well-meaning acquaintance who offers their unsolicited opinion a little too often. Since their most recent offering was effectively that I should hurry up and put my arthritic horse to sleep (fortunately neither I nor more importantly the Vet think it’s quite time for that yet) I spent a couple of days stomping around being cross.
Then I simmered down, my work head took over and I started thinking about public sector campaigns that ask us to give up smoking, drink less or otherwise do something we really don’t want to. And I realised that historically the intended target audience of those campaigns probably felt rather affronted (to put it politely) too.
You could say that a lot of the recent health campaigns like this one below addressed this mindset and used behavioural economics to get round the whole ‘outraged, fingers in ears, la la la not listening’ habitual response of the core target audience:
But then again, I think you could maybe simplify the secret to difficult communications challenges like this down to simply:
Tell. Don’t yell.
…or whatever it’s calling itself this week
I recently noticed that a Planner mate on LinkedIn had updated their entry to list them working at: [agency’s new name] (or whatever it’s calling itself this week).
Yes, their agency had just rebranded. Again. I had a think back and between them the three agencies I’ve worked for managed eight full rebrands and another seven specialism brands between them in the space of twelve years. Honestly, you’d think they didn’t have any client work to be getting on with.
From my perspective, there seemed to be two main trains of thought behind all this rebranding – either a ‘new broom’ MBO or merger team understandably wanting to announce and brand their ownership and fresh approach – or a re-arranging-deckchairs-on-the-titanic type reaction to less than brilliant financial results.
Surely rebranding must have an impact on the agency’s visibility and reputation? Apart from virtually having the start from scratch again on the social media and PR front and New Business having to explain to everyone they call that they’re from agency-B-that-used-to-be-agency-A I’m sure that clients must be just as confused and sometimes perplexed as the rest of us are.
I’ve no idea what the situation at my mate’s agency is as they’re discretion personified. But I do know that these days I regard agency rebrands with a healthy degree of scepticism.
what’s with all this obsession with cool (and by extension, youth)?
Sometimes, when I meet someone at a party and they find out I work in advertising (and especially once I explain what a Planner does) a flicker of surprise crosses their face. I suppose I don’t seem the type, perhaps like someone more likely to be a teacher or accountant.
You see, I’m not cool. I don’t have an edgy haircut or wear clothes that hover on the narrow line between ‘cutting edge fashion’ and ‘what the heck is she wearing’. I’m not into bands that haven’t signed a record deal yet, underground clubs, NHS glasses or Guatemalan street food and I can’t write code. In short, it’s a wonder they let me into the APG.
Ok, I might have made a few sweeping generalisations there but I think the outside world’s view of what AdLand and its people are like might have rubbed off on the industry itself in some kind of self-perpetuating cycle – I actually saw an agency MD wearing guyliner in the local regional newspaper recently.
And I’m not sure that all this Hipstering is actually a good thing. Hip and cool seems to be equated by this industry with youth, the general feeling seeming to be that if you’re over 45 you can’t possibly have anything of value to contribute. So for anyone middle aged who hasn’t made it far enough up the agency tree to have enough equity for age not to matter, the future looks pretty rubbish.
I’ve blogged about the age issue before, but it appears that the problem extends beyond agencies into the marketing departments of clients too. I recently caught up with an expert in marketing professional services brands who left their role with one of the big accountants after being “revered by the partners but dismissed by everyone under 30 who couldn’t understand why skills and experience might matter”.
I’m not saying that creativity and individualism don’t matter, of course they’re the lifeblood of any decent agency. But perhaps we need to get better at recognising that individuality and creativity comes in all shapes, sizes, clothing and age brackets. And that whatever challenges an agency might meet, someone who has been round the block a few times might well have met something similar before.
M&S and X Factor – which brand are they actually promoting?
So, I said I’d deal with the M&S X Factor Finalists Christmas Commercial in a separate post.
Now obviously, this is part of a much wider M&S / X Factor tie up that includes sponsored airtime competitions, behind the scenes films and so on.
I assume the brief was about repositioning M&S for a wider, younger audience, but with a touch of festive fuzziness thrown in.
God knows how much they’re spending on re-edits as finalists drop in and out of the competition like yo yos and heaven help the poor agency account managers if Clearcast have insisted on re-approving each version.
The behind-the-scenes film looks they filmed all the original finalists – including the four who were dropped prior to the public voting. Which ended up being rather handy when Amelia Lilly came back in following the Frankie Cocozza drugs malarkey. In fact, a cynical type might suggest that having an extra four ‘maybes’ known to the public but not in the final was designed to deal with just this kind of commercial problem.
exhibit A: the origional ad (I think):
exhibit B: the latest version (we’re due another one about now):
I did a side-by-side comparison and all the edit changes currently happen between 30 and 45 secs. It’s a cunning plan – put the good acts likely to stick around at the beginning and end and the ones likey to get voted off in the middle to simplify editing.
Anyway, is the ad actually any good? IMHO, not particularly. It doesn’t have enough warn and fuzzy family stuff to jerk the heartstrings a la John Lewis and the X Factor lot aren’t big enough yet (singly or together) to endorse as huge a brand as M&S. So it ends up as more of an ad for the TV show than the retailer.
I wonder if this December’s trading (and viewing) figures will bear me out?
xmas ads – Christmas Crackers and Festive Flops
There are some great Christmas ads already airing…and some not so great ones too.
Boots has continued the Here Come the Girls theme with a crack team of women getting Christmas sorted while everyone else is asleep. It’s engaging, funny, on brand and totally relatable. It also stands up to repeated viewing, which is a good job since it has been on air for several weeks already:
John Lewis has done it again with their ‘thoughtful kid’ ad, that judging by twitter seems to have reduced most Mums to tears on first viewing. I’m not sure how this one will stand up to weeks of airing though:
Waitrose’s School of Christmas Magic is great too – another double hander from Delia and Heston but interestingly focusing on semi-scratch solutions to Christmas catering:
There are, however, a few less impressive festive ads out there as well.
Argos use blue aliens to demonstrate why you should avoid stressmas shopping and ‘check and reserve online’ all your gifts and then pop down to Argos to pick them up. I’m not sure that slagging off high street shopping then suggesting you would be better off doing all your shopping by reserving online then shelpping down to the Argos store to pick it all up is actually a winning strategy:
I found the Argos ‘making of’ ad on youtube (why do so many brands feel the need to add a Making Of ad as if they’ve just made a major movie, complete with director, cast and client interviews?) and the client talks of how the campaign is brave, bold, arresting and “really bringing to life the dichotomy of the high street at Christmas”. I think you might be overthinking it a bit love – and that’s coming from a Planner…
I posted about the Littlewoods Christmas ad the other week (it seems to be to be rather heavily inspired by a scene in Love Actually), but even after having viewed the ad several times and written about it, talking to an agency bod this week I merrily misattributed the ad to Argos, which doesn’t say much for its memorability. I’m also not sure in Austerity Britain that ‘make your family happy by buying them lots of stuff’ is the way to go:
So some Christmas Crackers and a few Festive Flops. Let’s see what the next four weeks brings.
PS I know I haven’t mentioned the M&S X Factor ad, but I think it deserves a whole post to itself…
why clients and their agencies need to look back to the future
Apologies for the recent silence but I’ve been busy trying to get my head around a new client.
This particular organisation and it’s challenges has required speedy generation one of those Planner’s To Do lists where the short term and long term To Dos are very similar, but the urgent stuff will have to be done based on gut instinct, while the medium term stuff has the luxury of giving me enough time to do some research and base decisions on actual proper insight.
It’s going to be very interesting seeing if my gut instinct is anywhere close to what the research turns up.
And all this short term vs. long term malarkey has got me thinking a lot about testing. Russell wrote a lot in 2007/8ish (particularly here and here) about being always in beta, a habit he says brands (and their agencies) have to get into in order to operate in this blurry, unpredictable world.
picture nicked from Russell’s blog, when it was Howies t-shirt of the week
Russell’s thinking was mainly around agile brands that keep pushing lots of new ideas out there and turn any mistakes into opportunities. I suppose it’s the ‘let’s try something on a bit of a small scale test and see if it works’ approach. But I think more old school testing, i.e. ‘did what we just did actually work and how could we do it better next time?’ still has a massive place too.
The world of DM has been happily testing and reviewing/evaulating format, creative and messaging for years and years in order to find the most effective mailer. And the online media lot have been giving good spreadsheet about what did and didn’t and might and mightn’t work ever since someone invented display ads. You’d also hope that media planners would be just as interested in what was working / might work hardest as what the black box media planning software said would be most effective.
But I’m not sure that cross specialism, multi-agency teams servicing a brand have sat down together often enough and rationally discussed what has and hasn’t worked in the past – and what might be worth having a go at in the near future.
With several agencies and freelancers all working on his brand, Mr Head New Client has recognised my bossy streak and put me in charge of all multiple-agency-client meetings. Getting the client team and all their agencies to sit down and talk about what has and hasn’t worked and what might be most likely to work in the future has already produced a surprising amount of honesty – and some ideas that might not have made it onto a traditional marketing plan, however short term or long term it was.
But this approach has also required me to regularly chip in to remind everyone that just because it didn’t work last time, we shouldn’t entirely discount it. Because the problem with something not working is that it’s very rare you discover exactly which element didn’t work and why. The only thing worse than no data is misleading data – and misleading data means missed opportunities.
where has GAP gone wrong?
I used to love GAP. Mainly because their sales staff were always prepared to bring you dozens of different jeans to try on until you found one that fit. When your body shape is tricky (little waist but curvy hips), that kind of customer service makes a big difference and GAP became my first port of call for denim.
I’m 99% sure this exemplary customer service was because the staff were on some kind of a bonus scheme based on being name checked at checkout in answer to “has anyone helped you today?” It was certainly being logged on the tills.
Then maybe two years ago something changed. Getting any kind of assistance on the shop floor or in the changing room suddenly required an eagle eye and determination not to be fobbed off, ignored or redirected. Except at the tills, where the staff were now concentrating all their smiliest efforts on getting customers signed up to their email database, giving me a fair idea of exactly where the staff bonus scheme had been redirected.
It looks like Gap’s recent instore marketing materials haven’t been thought through either. I’ve tweeted several examples of not-great GAP signage I’ve spotted recently, including this one which obviously hadn’t been tweaked for the UK market:
either GAP’s underwear has become very pricey or they need country specific messaging…
I now darken GAP’s doors a couple of times a year to stock up on their black work trousers that miraculously seem to fit me, while playing the exciting game ‘how many staff members can fail to make eye contact while you try to buy something’. So bar a couple of pairs of essential oh-my-god-they-actually-fit trousers a year, sorry GAP, but I’m out.
A store can only get it so wrong, for so long before the target audience walks away. The brand reported last month that sales across its international markets fell 13 per cent year-on-year in the five week period ending October 1st 2011.
inspiration or plagiarism?
Thanks to the lovely t’interweb, I probably see cool viral-type stuff around the same time that Creatives are, erm, inspired by it.
So when an ad pops up a few months later that causes déjà vu I only have to think back to what I was enjoying on youtube to get an idea of where the inspiration (or sometimes, let’s be honest, plagiarism) might have come from.
The most well-known and probably worst offender is Berocca :
which even the agency admit was inspired by OK Go’s video for Here It Goes Again:
This Nutella ad (and variations on it) has been around for quite a while:
but the other day the penny dropped. It’s really quite similar in terms of direction (start at 50 secs in to get an idea) to this video by Japanese band Sour for their track “Hibi no Neiro” (Tone of everyday) that went viral last year:
Has anyone else got good examples of ads that took a bit too much inspiration from youtube?
update, 14/11/11 – I’ve thought of another one…
The new Littlewoods Christmas ad:
rather reminds me of this scene from Love Actually (pics only I’m afraid, I can’t find a vid with both the comedy nativity and the lads dancing that followed it in):
OK, so it’s not an actual viral, but it’s also not the first ad to be ‘inspired’ by Love Actually either.
the perfect workshop venue?
I spent yesterday morning in the very picturesque surroundings of Carlshead Farm near Wetherby with Learning to Listen, a leadership, teambuilding and coaching organisation.
I was there for an open morning/taster session, checking out their approach to see if it might suit my sort of clients. The fact that Learning to Listen do a lot of their training using horses (explanation here) was merely a plus :)
On a guided tour of the site, we came across this little barn:
It’s fairly basic, with a wood burning stove, hot and cold water and a couple of compost toilets. It’s also incredibly peaceful – and the only way to get mobile reception is to stand in the middle of a nearby field.
In short, it’s the perfect place for facilitating an away-day or workshop.
No-one can ‘forget’ you banned powerpoint and try to share their fifty page presentation because there’s nowhere to plug the laptop in. No-one can keep checking their email on their Blackberry all day because there’s no signal. And no-one’s going to disappear off at lunchtime as all they’ll have to look at are a few sheep.
To top it all off, your usual warmup/teambuilding exercise could be replaced with pony wrangling, fire lighting or shelter building.
If you’re sick of rip-off venues, soggy sandwiches, wi-fi that won’t, windowless rooms, wobbly flip charts, blu-tac bans, awol attendees and snarky hotel staff, then I suggest you get in touch with them here.
since when did clicking ‘like’ become the price of beginning a conversation?
I got a press release from Lemsip’s digital agency the other day, rather belatedly letting me know about their ‘It’s a Man’s Flu’ facebook campaign. I dutifully headed over there to have a look…but you couldn’t have a play with it unless you ‘liked’ the page first
It’s not just Lemsip, they’re all at it. The new Justin Timberlake film In Time, Yeo Valley, Heinz baked beans, Innocent Drinks, BMW and so on all require a Like for access.
Brand manager’s (and sometimes their digital agency’s) obsession with racking up as many Likes as possible doesn’t seem to be abating, but now they’re increasingly using clicking Like as the price of entry to interact with their content or receive special offers.
But I thought social media was all about having conversations? And the last time I checked, I didn’t have to offer a public endorsement of someone I’d recently met before we could start having a chat. After all, I might need the chat to know if they’re the kind of person I’d like to be friends with anyway.
It feels like brands want consumers to pay for access with Likes. Which means that there will be higher expectations of this ‘paid’ content and a relationship that has been wrong footed from the start.
In fact recent research suggests that over half of US facebook users expect to gain access to exclusive content, events or sales after “liking” a company, while a similar amount also expect to receive discounts or promotions. In the same piece of data, a quarter of users disagreed that marketers should interpret “like” to even mean they are a fan or advocate of the company.
As I’ve posted before, I only feel a real connection with maybe a dozen or so brands – and therefore don’t feel the need to Like everything in my wardrobe, kitchen and medicine cupboard.
You could of course argue that putting this content behind a wall is a way of rewarding brand advocates. But it doesn’t do much for those other consumers that the brand should really be wooing to eventually perhaps win a coveted space in their list of Likes.
