Why is so much TV advertising so forgettable?
The Economist reckons we are subjected to around 3,000 selling messages a day so you’d think advertisers would be putting the squeeze on their creative agencies to come up with campaigns that get noticed, wouldn’t you?
Well, I’ve scraped my brain but I can only recall one commercial I’ve seen in the last few days.
A hundred have made no impression whatsoever.
At a conservative estimate, that’s £15m in production costs down the swannee and ten times that in airtime.
It isn’t just me who thinks the ads have been getting worse. According to WPP research, the punter thinks so too.
The reason is, I think, that media agencies are now openly competing with creative agencies.
Their pitch is that it’s the media strategy that makes a campaign successful. Placement, that’s the secret. Keep the message simple and make sure it’s seen in as many places as possible on the customer journey.
Here’s Will Collin of Naked in the IPA book ‘Now That’s What I Call Advertising’:
“CIA MediaLab research (claims) that only 45% of message takeout is attributable to its content while context (i.e.the medium) accounts for the majority of the rest. The idea itself is no longer of prime importance…”
Gordon Bennett, where do they get numbers like that?
Now comes news of a TV channel that recognizes that the quality of the advertising is as important as the quality of their programming in attracting and retaining eyeballs.
Virgin Media are thinking about charging more for crap ads than for good ones.
They won’t, of course. The media agencies won’t let them. But it’s an enticing thought, a TV channel that plays only ads you want to see.
Talking of which, here is a commercial you may want to see. It won The Grand Prix at South Africa’s Loerie Awards two weeks ago.
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Title: “Beautiful”
Agency: King James
Client: Allan Gray Investments
Writer: Devin Kennedy
Art Director: Damian Bonse
Director: Keith Rose
Production: Velocity Films
video was streamed to you courtesy of Groovy Gecko.
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Will Andy Burnham, the Minister of Culture (really, we do have one), give the green light to product placement in UK television programming?
Only a few months ago he described it as “polluting” programming so it’s obvious someone has been leaning on him pretty hard because now he’s saying he’s open to persuasion.
Most production companies are desperate for funding and are all in favour of allowing commerce to interfere with art.
In the world beyond, product placement, or advertising by stealth, was a market worth nearly £2.5 billion in 2007.
In the UK, it’s thought it will be worth just £35m by 2013.
The fact is, as much as 50% of many newspapers and magazines are filled with stories that have been seeded by PR agencies.
This is the television industry looking for a similar lifeline.
Like all advertising, if it is done badly it will really piss people off but if the plug is written seamlessly into the action, then it will be regarded as acceptable.
Here’s a bit of West Wing, in which alcoholic Leo McGarry recalls drinking Johnnie Walker Blue Label.
It’s not too offensive, is it?
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If we think we’ve got problems in adland, pity the poor sods in the music industry.
Nine out of ten music lovers download their music free.
So, if your business model is based on the exchange of money for good old-fashioned vinyl, tape or disc, then the internet is your nemesis.
Unless you are Radiohead.
Everyone knows the band broke new ground when they released ‘In Rainbows’ last year. They offered it as an online download in return for whatever their fans thought was a fair price.
It turned out that most thought a fair price was absolutely bugger all so the band had to revert to traditional methods of sale and distribution.
But they’re nothing if not inventive, because next up they invited their fans to buy their song ‘Nude’ from iTunes in five separate bits. Bass, vocals, guitar, strings and drums, you could mix them any which way you fancy. (And if you do fancy, go to www. Radioheadremix.com/buy.)
A widget allows you to put your version up on your MySpace page, or any other page you run, for that matter, as well as uploading it to the radioheadremix site for others to vote for. Or not.
Now Radiohead’s most recent wheeze is to surrender all rights to the video for their latest single, ‘House of Cards’. 1.6 million people have had a butcher’s at it on Youtube alone and who knows how many have downloaded it for free from the band’s website, www.radiohead.com.
What they are encouraging everyone to do is not just download the vid but download the code behind it. Code because the whole thing’s digital. No camera, no lights, no bacon sarnie. All done on a desktop.
Once you’ve got the code, you can make your own mash-up. All a bit complicated for me but a few braver souls have gone to code.google.com/creative/radiohead and have had a stab at it. You can see some of the results at www.youtube.com/group/houseofcards.
The point is, Radiohead are shifting from band to brand simply by being interesting. And the relationships they are building with all those Radiohead heads out there will, one-day, be worth good money.
Marketers take note.
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Around the world anyone who claims to be remotely hip and cool has been devising his/her strategy for getting a hold on one of the new 3G iPhones.
In New Zealand, those clever little folk at Aim Proximity Auckland hit on the beezer wheeze of turning Apple’s hype into a bit of cheap PR for their own client, Yellow Pages.
What they did was to place their own man at the front of the queue outside the Vodafone store. Three days before the iPhone was made available to all those willing to sign up new, punishing contracts, smiling, friendly Jonny Gladwell established territorial rights to be the first Kiwi to get his mitts on one.
The clever part was, to help him get through his three days and three nights outside the store, Yellow Pages put him in touch with everyone who could supply him with what he needed.
From his fluffy jacket (from Kathmandu) to his food (Pizza Hut), the heater (First Party Hire) to the exercise cycle (Fitness Works), not forgetting his earplugs (Radius Pharmacy) when he wanted to sleep and caffeine (Esquires Coffee) when he wanted to keep awake, Yellow Pages were there to to make queuing comfy if not exactly fun.
The idea got huge PR and drove the punters to a website where they could win the ‘phone that Jonny bought –eventually.
Is it a media stunt? Is it a PR idea? Is it direct marketing? Is it just bloody great? The answer is yes.
Have a peep at the site at http://jonny.yellowpagesgroup.co.nz/
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For years P&G relentlessly applied their formula of advertising to each and all their brands.
They found a benefit, turned it into a message and repeated it endlessly. The phrase ‘interruption advertising’ was coined to describe how Ariel, Lenor, Tide, Head and Shoulders and scores more all ran TV commercials that were witless, irritating and which worked.
Why, then, five years ago, did P&G decide to take creativity seriously? The answer is in the speech P.G.Lafley gave to his assembled marketers in 2006 when he said, “We must learn to let go.” The dilemma for the modern marketer, he observed, is that the more in touch you are with your customers, the less control you actually have over your brands.
In urging his people to get in touch, he went on to say that P&G must also learn to apply the same principles of R&D to its communications as it does to improving the performance of its products.
“We must experiment”, he said.
The result of all this is that in all the awards shows we monitor at The Big Won, agencies are winning prizes with P&G. So many prizes, in fact, that P&G was Advertiser of the Year at Cannes.
This would have been inconceivable not long ago. It is further evidence that in the new order of media, you have to do more than give people good reasons for buying your products, you have to get them to like what you do as well.
One day Reckitt Benckiser will learn this lesson. But after another year of record sales driven by advertising modelled on the P&G methods of the 1960’s, their top brass will pooh-pooh the notion. The first downturn in their sales figures may see a change of heart.
Inconceivable as it may seem now, perhaps Reckitt’s Cillit Bang will be winning Golds as P&G’s Crest is.
P&G say thank-you to their agencies
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Crest Gold teeth (30 second)
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video was streamed to you courtesy of Groovy Gecko.
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One question which came up constantly when The Big Won was interviewing various luminaries down in Cannes was, what exactly is direct marketing?
‘Vertical line’ theory (see below) is just one attempt at an answer.
Increasingly DM awards are being won by brand ads that have some sort of a response mechanism. Take BMF’s “Ducks” idea for Wonder Performance bread. Not what a purist would call direct, as Dylan Taylor, ECD of Direct at BMF Sydney concedes in our film here.
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The call to action in the Times of India’s launch ad to find the country’s leaders of tomorrow is in 10-point type at the very bottom, the compulsory add-on rather than the heart of the message.
This is something Philip Greenfield notes. As CEO of RMG Worldwide he was in Cannes to see what is happening in the name of direct. Not that any of the award winners were of any relevance to his, or his clients’, businesses. ‘Real’ direct marketing, he believes,is to be found at The ECHOs and The Caples.
As ad agencies move into the space marked ‘Direct’, pity the poor creatives in every direct marketing agency. They see the brand-building work that wins big and want a piece of the action themselves. Only they don’t get those mass-market opportunities when you can be all things to all men. Instead they are tormented daily with briefs targeted at very specific audiences and are given absolutely no budget to do anything other than fold paper.
Jury-member Emma de la Fosse of OgilvyOne remarks that Cannes reminds DM creatives what they could and should be doing, although, with the sheer volume of work they have to get through, it’s easy for them to forget.
Duncan Gray, Worldwide Creative panjandrum of Proximity, notes that nearly 50% of all the direct awards this year went to public-service campaigns of one sort or another. “Only a handful were actually trying to sell something.”
Very possibly, for direct bunnies anyway, Cannes may soon be less a source of inspiration than a source of frustration.
video was streamed to you courtesy of Groovy Gecko.
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Predictions schmedictions! I would never have guessed in a million years that UNIQLOCK would win the Titanium Lion this year.
The digerati have explained to me what is so brilliant about it, the way it knits bloggers together but, sorry, it still leaves me cold.
I’m a lot warmer about Halo3 and the “Believe” campaign, which started out as a model, a diorama, which became a museum, which became a documentary, which fed a series of commercials for both TV and the web.
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The idea was simply to celebrate the heroes of the battle. It was an idea worth £84m to Microsoft in just 24 hours from launch.
So, a worthy Integrated Grand Prix.
Cadbury’s “Gorilla” deserved to win a big ‘un, and it did. And, by and large, the punters didn’t feel cheated on Saturday night after the last ceremony of the week at the Palais.
Let’s hope that the same campaigns don’t win everything at the big shows that are looming up over the horizon. We’d like a few surprises.
Free – vertical thinking
If anyone wants a copy of the presentation I gave on behalf of FEDMA on the first Sunday of Cannes, ‘At last DM gets sexy’, you can download it by right clicking your mouse on the link here and selecting ’save as’. Then get the latest version of Quicktime to view. It’s an exploration of the vertical-line theory I developed in Directory magazine (www.directnewideas.com).
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Rounding off on the Cyber Lions:
It seems a lot of people are disappointed with the 2008 winners.
Here’s a short interview with Daniele Fiandaca, COO of Profero and one of the co-founders of Creative Social, the mafia of digital creative directors, saying pretty much that.
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Not that Lean Mean Fighting Machine will care much. Two Golds is two golds!
Elsewhere in the Palais des Festivals, they handed out the Press Grand Prix to DDB South Africa for their Energiser campaign.
The inaugural Design Grand Prix went to Turner Duckworth for its work for Coca-Cola while HBO picked up yet another Gold.
For me, one of the most interesting Golds was the Medal of Honor campaign from FP7 Doha.
This is an agency in Qatar. In the Middle East, the economy is booming and judging by the Dubai Lynx Awards earlier this year, the advertising scene is prospering too. By comparison, UK agencies won a big zippo in press this year. Nothing. Not one gong.
Isn’t it great to see the world order changing? Bahrein, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, these are the countries to watch in the year ahead.
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It was the Cyber Lions last night. Three Grand Prix were handed out.
One went to Mediafront, Oslo, for a nifty bit of work you can see at www.solcomments.com
I have a feeling I would think this was brilliant if I could read/speak Norwegian. I get the idea but the way the story of the campaign has been presented doesn’t give you much help.
Best viral went to the US shop 42 Entertainment for a campaign they put together for Trent Reznor and the band Nine Inch Nails.
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(http://alternaterealitybranding.com/cannes2008yearzero)
Hmmm.
Yesterday, Paul Kemp-Robinson, editor of Contagious magazine, gave a great talk in the Palais des Festivals about new ways brands are having conversations with people. He talked about ‘astroturfing’, when brands create grass-roots movements which are total bollocks. Nothing grass-roots about them. Just marketing.
And guess what? People know bollocks when they see it.
Even though Year Zero is definitely not art, as they claim, it probably doesn’t piss people off as if it was, say, marketing Black and Decker products. So it’s not exactly bollocks and gets away with it. Actually, it is pretty interesting and beautifully crafted. So, well done to the guys in Pasadena.
Bad luck to Fallon, London, who may well have expected to get something for Cadbury’s Gorilla, one of the most viewed online films of all time. I guess it has become too ubiquitous for the jury, who are bored with it.
Personally, I think it’s a Grand Prix. It got advertising onto the front pages of newspapers and into the Financial Times as well when the CEO of Cadbury, Todd Stitzer, described his company’s amazing turnaround in 2007 to the ape on drums.
Then the third Lion went to Projector, Tokyo, for their Uniqlock site. Have a look at http://www.projector.jp/awards/uniqlock/everlasting/
The digital community has been raving about this work since it started picking up gongs at D&AD and elsewhere around the world.
But, sorry, it leaves me cold.
I can see that it’s technically terrific, but it reminds me of a Chinese meal. Afterwards you still feel hungry. Unsatisfied.
For me it’s design-driven and idea-lite.
But Cannes wouldn’t be Cannes without a few controversies. It’s a festival of opinions and it’s amazing that overall so many opinions do converge and the best work does get the recognition it deserves.
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I have just been talking to Joathan Harries, Chief Creative Officer for DraftFCB Worldwide.
For him, the single most remarkable piece of work at the festival is BBDO New York’s “Voyeur” campaign for HBO. And he is not alone.
Not only did this win the Grand Prix in the Promo Lions but last night it won the Grand Prix in Outdoor as well.
A five-minute film winning Best Poster award.
It tells you something about how all the boundaries are coming down between different advertising disciplines and it is no surprise that the man behind the campaign is David Lubars.
This was the man who changed advertising forever when, at Fallon Minneapolis, he created BMWFilms.com and who, since Andrew Robertson persuaded him to move to the Big Golden Delicious, has been transforming a stodgy multinational agency into a creative hotshop.
HBO started out as a film projected onto the wall of a building creating the trompe l’oeil effect of eight apartments revealed, with a dozen stories unfolding in each.
Most lesser talents would have set out to tell you what great stories you can find on HBO. This campaign allows you to come to that view yourself.
This is going to win in the Cyber Lions category and must, surely, be the front-runner for the biggest prize here, the Titanium Award, at the end of the week.
Sadly, after that breathless enthusiasm for an innovative creative director bending the envelope of creativity, it’s hard to get excited over the radio winners.
A fairly pleasant Grand Prix from Japan for the Canon Eos Kiss camera.
Canon Eos Kiss Camera (40 second)
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And yet more Golds for Bud’s Real Men of Genius.
Real Men of Genius (1 minute)
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Spare us. This series began in 1999 and while I’m sure the campaign has plenty more mileage with consumers, juries cannot continue to keep throwing gold at it. It’s old hat. Whereas HBO is very new hat indeed.
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