Wednesday, November 05, 2008

What can advertising learn from Obama's win?

So the result of the US election is known. Advertising and marketing has for many years played an influential role in elections, not just advertising the party or candidate, but advising. But in the spirit of keeping things simple (if not frankly superficial), what are the main learnings for me from the Obama campaign?

One word equity. OK it changed halfway through, but Change worked. Listen to the interviews on the news over the last few weeks and people play the word back, but framed in their interpretation of it. They ascribe their own meaning to it, which sort of makes it even more powerful.

Grassroots. Brands take note. Making something as big as winning the presidency rest on the shoulders of individuals, and giving them a role to play in the victory was crucial. If brands want to create a huge campaign, get everyone involved in creating it, in the community (Scorpion football, anyone?). This wasn't just the strategy for voting, it was also the strategy for campaign donations too.

Backstory. Both candidates had backstories but I think Obama's was more resonant to a modern generation. We talk about authenticity and provenance, or expertise (in the absence of authenticity). Maybe we should be looking more for their backstories and weaving them into the mainstream communications. How do we make brands (or campaigns) interesting and textural, in a way that creates empathy and depth.

Conceptual targeting. Joe the Plumber was the everyman around whom the campaign promises and policies centred. But the 'target audience' became the subject and focus of the campaign rather than just a background reference point. It served to remind everyone that the campaign was about, and for, them.

Semiotics and the power of art. I'm a big fan of using semiotics for branding and communication design. Obama seems to have been much more canny than McCain in terms of imagery (the 'hope' graphic portrait), use of colour and typography (although 'change we need' sounds like Yoda talking), and the psychological or cultural take-out from these things seems to be one of stature and scale, of seeing the big picture.

Messaging optimisation. Candidates are drilled to within an inch of their lives what to say and how to react. But seeing Mark Penn on Newsnight, and as part of Hillary's campaign earlier on, reminds me that PSB's methodology of optimising a message to an audience, from a given 'voice' is a useful tool more brands could take advantage of (plug over).

 

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Monday, October 20, 2008

Freelancer required

I'm after a mid-weight freelance planner for 3 months to work on new business and existing clients - booze and financial services. Get in touch if you're interested?

Friday, August 15, 2008

Mad inventor

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We had dinner the other night with a well known software entrepreneur (not Bill). Cryptic link to a shot of his house here. We were riffing around with the notion that hybrids, like Priuses, are dangerous in town centres as they're silent. People cross the roads with their ears not their eyes. So, apparently, hybrid manufacturers are to build in sound generators. This made me think it would be fun to download your own - 'rolltones'? - say to emulate a tank, or a jet, or a gas-guzzler (so you can at least pretend). Said entrepreneur took extensive notes and no doubt has the wherewithal to make such fancy a reality. But you heard it here first.

(thanks skinnydiver for the pic)

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

American Postcard


I was going to use a screen shot from the Olympics on TV here but apparently I can't as there is a disclaimer on all the coverage that unauthorised reproduction and distribution is prohibited. Nice. Why wouldn't they want their images distributed as much as possible? So here's an old picture of the fair.

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I'm writing from the home of the Staycation - holidays taken at home in the US rather than travelling to Europe. As a consequence the roads are crowded but the restaurants are half empty, as people make use of their holiday homes and friends' invitations.
One thing I've been most struck by is just how insanely eager the Americans (and I'm generalising massively here - I'm on an island the size of the Isle of Wight with the demographic profile of Belgravia)are for the Olympics. It's like they've been waiting for four years just to see how well (actually how badly) the US performed on the pommell horse. The bars are packed to the gills of young and old alike glued to the plasma at midnight. Maybe it's just patriotism, or something else in the psyche that compels us to watch.

Equally fascinating is just how bad the ads are right now. You can see the scene: pick any main channel (CNBC, CCNBC, CBNC, CNNBCC, CBNNCCBBCC, etc) and visualise a random picture of an athlete you've never heard of, scrubbed to within an inch of their lives, and insert-packshot-here of haemmorhoid cream/4x4/insurance/anti-depressants. Where have all the ideas gone? Coke came reasonably close with a computer animated spot featuring two NBA basketball players from different nationalities being united through their love of Coke. Ahh (ugh). But at least there was an idea. Brands that co-opt sporting events and simply stick a random athlete in or logo on mere product information quickly becomes wallpaper. It's offensive to watch actually. I mean these people have had four years to think about it, to find an idea and make it look majestic and brilliant.

London take note.

Right, I'm off to the pool.

Friday, August 01, 2008

Agent of the evil empire

sweet

I worked on the launch of Halo 2 so I thought this was fun, if not slightly nerdy and obsessive. BTW, 'agent' was my tag. Thanks to Craig for the excellent image.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Geo-tagging to hit the mainstream?



I've always loved the idea of geo-tagging photographs. I used to travel maybe 120 times a year and took photographs as a way of documenting my trips (on film too - I'm that old). Then, I played around with Google Earth, dropping holiday photos onto maps of the planet. And sharing them with friends around the world. All good fun but it always felt at the edge of nerd-dom.
Now I have a BlackBerry (they're a client, hence the correct spelling). As do many many other people. Now, Nokia have had gps in the n95 for a while, but BlackBerry have a huge installed base and repurchase rate. That makes me think it's *just* the device to get geo-tagging to take off, big-styley. I don't quite know - apart from ego (showing off) or keeping track of close friends and relatives, what the real application of geo-tagging is - but I can't wait to find out (thoughts please!!!)
I just wish these BlackBerrys had a decent damn camera.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I set up a little Flickr group to this end, and let's see who comes to play.

Monday, June 09, 2008

Renaissance and the slowdown

Adage have a little article about what 'renaissance marketers' need to do to develop integrated marketing campaigns (actually, IMC's - I love the way people can turn everything into a Three Letter Acronym, or TLA).  In a nutshell, it precis how agencies do it:

- strategic consistency (I'd call it coherence; slight difference)

- common measurement framework

- break down functional silos

- ensure you have the functional and technical skills to deliver.

But they seem to have missed out the bit where they have to buy some creative work. What is the renaissance work they should be looking for, what characteristics should it have?

I found an old book on the shelves at home which might provide the answer. Early renaissance art was categorised by naive wonder. Middle renaissance by intellectual idealisation. The high renaissance by scale, energy and high art.

Perhaps BMW films were a good example of exploring and surprising people about the possibilities of integration with digital at the core. Perhaps I Love Bees was a neat example of creating a very deliberate programme of experience orchestrating different channels through the web. Has anyone done the latter? Are there high renaissance integrated creative campaigns yet? Are there any agencies producing them (the scramble for digital agencies to become ad agencies, and vice versa, suggests not). Are there any clients - renaissance marketers, in fact - putting briefs out for this sort of work?

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Positioning for an economic downturn? Or, of baby birds and octopi.


So it's pretty clear the industry is in for a bit of a rough spell. There usual summer lull in new business and softening budgets may not come back in the autumn. The IPA has been talking for a while now about the importance of brands advertising during a recession to strengthen your market position when it's hard for your competitors to respond.

But, how do agencies position themselves for this downturn?

Networks have greater flex than smaller agencies. They can move people around the network, compensate for downturns in one market through network revenues, and downsize more easily. I was in a network during and after the last recession, so I can remember how they consolidate and adapt.

Smaller, independent agencies have less elasticity of resources and cashflow. Less 'fat'. The danger is they strip out a lot of the cost which makes them less able to add value and slower to respond to an upturn (and therefore vulnerable to sale).

I suppose my answer is that smaller agencies have to try and sell an integrated offer based on a value (not low cost) basis. They can save the client money by not having to maintain a lot of separate contracts with different agencies (a network to a client must look like a nest with loads of constantly demanding baby birds competing for scraps of worms from the parent). Integration can mean keeping the brains trust together and coordinating an integrated structure (and therefore campaign design) around the clients' business. More like an octopus, then.

And I wonder how many agencies have been bold enough to start talking about the R word in their creds yet?

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Fame Networks

The excellent Adverlab has run a post about Bill Gates' profile on LinkedIn, with the interesting suggestion that celebrity endorsements through social networking sites would be nice. Back in January, I posted about Linking to Fame in my 2008 Predictions - that the degrees of seperation from the famous are plummeting, from the 19 in Barabasi's Linked, to 6 or less in the age of social networks. I'm waiting for brands to do something than just putting the 'whoever' star of their ads on MySpace or facebook, and doing something really interesting with celebrity.

As William Gibson put it in an interview: “the experience of celebrity is gradually being democratised. It seems as though everyone is going to the currency of celebrity. Everyone's getting their own account of whatever that currency is. That's something neat. It used to be only the elect had any manna in the information society and everyone else was a consumer. I was exposed to people who had the disease of celebrity … It's a great anthropological privilege to be there."

And, somewhat disappointingly, Bill Gates and I have no one in common on LinkedIn.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Reach and Frequency, be damned

I used to work with Microsoft and sometimes joked that they didn't actually need to advertise at all. They just needed to do lots and lots of focus groups with the media budget. They could talk to the same number of people, it might cost a bit more but the behavioural shifts would win me an Effie before you could say boo.

Anyway, that's one alternative media strategy.

Another is to stick your ads on YouTube and hope that vast droves come and watch.



This is a little video of some peoples' stick puppets singing a song about Harry Potter. Juan Cabral is nowhere to be found. Just look at the number of views. 37 million and counting.

Why? Perhaps because the subject matter is close to the hearts of the audience. Perhaps because its not branded. Perhaps because its genuine and not slick. Brands take note. If you stick stuff on YouTube to get the audience hyped before the ad airs, make sure it's more interesting than a sock puppet in someone's bedroom.

Are Penguin the new Innocent?


OK I must be the last one in the world to put all the pieces together.

We've all been blogging and writing presentations and brand models that unpack, deconstruct and reassemble Innocent in the minutest detail.

But I think there's a new kid on the block. One that doesn't have a planning guru (that I know of) at the helm, but a brand that really gets the new world of marketing.

And it's Penguin.

I've just received the Clay Shirky book to review and blog - (thanks Rachelc for the image) and in so doing, the distributed web presence created by this marketing tactic becomes a living case study for the book's main tenets.


But it's all the other stuff, separate but coherent that makes it pure planning gold. They just do all the stuff we spend our lives trying to persuade 'brand' marketers to do.

I think all my digital strategies are going to look a little bit like this in future.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Times for a new brief?


Somewhat in response to Richard's essay on the Naked Brief, I do think it's funny that we all defer to pretty much the old standard creative brief. I think your basic brief is very good at leading us to a focused, simple advertising idea. Usually really nice on telly.

But we also wax lyrical about the need for advertising that is interesting, that is 'worth' people's time and attention, that is truly useful, and is the latest part of a brnad story (or narrative).

I'm guilty of both of these things, by and by.

But do we need a brief that places 'this' piece of advertising in the overall story arc of the brand, that understands what people will find useful, and where the output is likely to be a behavioural construct rather than an ad? A brief where the proposition is a value exchange?

Wouldn't ad agencies trying to be digital agencies need something like this to break down their traditional (or schizophrenic) view of how comms work these days?

By the way, the image is from my flickr set, and has about 700 views - it's of a brief from the US that formed the basis of our brief at work. It's pretty traditional.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Branded content and the consumer experience

Tomorrow evening I'm doing a little talk to branded content producers here. It's free to come, but you just have to register. Here's the script, but I promise there'll be pictures.

I’m a consumer planner – which means I sell guns and drugs to minors. Or that's what I tell my mum.

Really though, I’m supposed to know everything there is to know about a brand’s consumers and turn that insight into the basis of a great creative idea.

In other words, I should just know how you should sell guns and drugs to minors, rather than actually do it myself.

So I’d like to talk about the consumer perspective a little bit, and how it’s often at odds with that of the brand.

Let’s start with the brand managers’ view of the world.

They liken themselves to media owners – they pay for someone’s time and attention and fill that time and attention with content. Traditionally that content has been advertising.

I think traditional brands operate in an Attention Economy.

What is that, then?

Wikipedia defines it like this: Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity

And … "Attention economics today is primarily concerned with the problem of getting consumers to consume advertising. Traditional media advertisers followed a model that suggested consumers went through a linear process they called AIDA - Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Attention is therefore a crucial and the first stage in the process of converting non-consumers. Since the cost to transmit advertising to consumers is now sufficiently low that more ads can be transmitted to a consumer than the consumer can process, the consumer's attention becomes the scarce resource to be allocated”.

There are advertising memes floating around regarding the attention economy, that consumers sell the right of brands to invade their privacy, based on how ‘important’ they are as consumers, and the amount of time they’re willing to give up to advertisers. How many of you would you be prepared to do that?

Here are some stats about the attention economy.

James Gleick says that each generation of consumers has 8000 times the amount of information available to them than the previous generation.

The Henley Centre says that 63% of us don’t have enough time to get things done in their daily lives – yet consumers in Western Europe are expected to see and somehow process 3500 ads a day.

The ad agency Leo Burnett have a study that people are only likely to engage with 3 of those 3500 messages a day.

So brands are obsessed with cutting through the clutter – and think that by re-forming content (ads) into new emerging media opportunities – like Advertiser Funded Programming – that they will be able to bypass the traditional channels and get their brand in front of people in new and exciting ways.

Audi set up the Audi TV channel to avoid clutter, and create advocacy (and presumably repeat purchase) among brand obsessives. It cost them £8m a year to run.

Land Rover do a similar thing on internet TV to the tune of £400,000 a year.

BBH, Audi’s ad agency, say that “Success won’t be defined by viewing figures or the number of sales generated, it will come down to how effectively the channel impacts on consumers’ perceptions of the Audi brand." But, just as a theoretical exercise, for a positive return on investment, Audi have to be sure to sell about 2100 extra cars because of Audi TV. I don’t know what their viewing figures are like but 2100 cars is about 4% of their total sales. Hmmm.

Here’s another stat from the attention economy. 92% of all email traffic is spam and open rates are plummeting. So, before you design another email campaign for your brand, think: does anyone care?

And another: only 1 in 10 people believe the ads on ITV are truthful

Another – and a media observation this time, so I defer to Jo to confirm or otherwise. But I was told recently by a media agency that we’ve reached a tipping point – the majority of terrestrial TV ads are now no longer seen, because of filters – such as timeshifting, view-on-demand, and ad-zapping on PVRs.

The advertising industry is at a crossroads of consumer confidence and trust

So I have a theory that branded content isn’t the new delivery mechanism of choice for media-savvy brand marketers, it’s just another form of invidious spam. It’s Ad-Voided by the consumer.

The consumer’s economy isn’t one of selling their attention to advertisers.

Here’s a ‘day-in-the-life’ of a medium web-savvy housewife, which I found on the web. The schedule, not the wife, that is. It’s from the US but I think it still holds true.

Morning:

Check e-mail on Hotmail

Searches on Google

Spend time responding to and e-mailing friends + family

Checks out links from friends (recommendations)

Browses real estate sites (it's a hobby)

Afternoon

Checks e-mail

Searches on Google

Watches a video on YouTube

Browses Ebay

Browses travel deals on Expedia

Checks Facebook

Browses Craigslist

Late Afternoon

Plays with kids on Webkinz, Noggin etc.

Checks e-mail

Searches on Google

Browses real-estate sites

Evening

Checks e-mail

Checks status on Facebook

Watches TV on DVR


Not one banner is clicked, or pop-up reacted to. People are using applications not branded content.

So I have a theory that the consumer’s economy is an Application Economy.

In an application economy, there are 3 key rules.

And my argument this evening is that by applying these 3 rules to Branded Content projects, you can create truly meaningful, original, and relevant solutions.

1. Stuff has to be USEFUL

2. Stuff has to be INTERESTING (and sometimes that means it shouldn’t try to have the brand all over it)

3. Stuff has to be UBIQUITOUS

1. USEFULNESS

As Darmano.typepad.com puts it: “Any experience is useful when it's meaningful and serves a purpose. Currently much of marketing still breaks down into self-serving gimmicks and interruptions that offer little value.”

Here’s a nice quote on the same theme: "For the same budget and energy as we expend on current forms of advertising, we could be making something more tangible, useful and reusable that plays a more integral part in the consumer's life.” Benjamin Palmer, Barbarian Productions (US)

So Usefulness means “Brand[-ed communications] being genuinely useful to their customers, employees, suppliers and the people they touch” Jonny Vulkan, Anomaly.

Rule 1 is Usefulness, and understanding what the brand’s consumers would find truly useful, not junky or poor quality.

2. INTERESTINGNESS

The challenge laid down by the Henley Centre, from the consumer perspective, is that consumers don’t put those 3500 ads in a box marked ‘advertising’.

Ads are competing against culture – movies, theatre, music and so on, and they’re competing with other things that demand our attention, like our work email and powerpoint.

So ads - branded content - has to be ‘worth’ people’s time and attention; worth reading, watching or interacting with. It has to be more interesting than the TV that surrounds it.

The problem is that brand marketers and their agencies see something interesting, like this and they think wow, that would be cool to recreate, but in a branded context, and then they have to film it and stick it on YouTube and behind the Red Button and do a microsite.

But being interesting might mean shutting up - being less branded, being intruiging, and letting the consumer work things out for themselves.

So, my 2nd Rule is to make things Interesting, and to really understand, better than anyone else, what interesting means to the consumer in relation to the brand and the proposed form of content.

3. UBIQUITOUS

We live in a hugely fragmented media world. We’re consuming more media, but less of each, than ever before.

So advertisers have many more consumer touchpoints available to them, and the temptation is to fill those touchpoints, and with integrated or ‘matching luggage’ ads across all those touchpoints

This is like pushing messages at people in the vague hope that they’ll stick.

The consumer experience is one of pull, not push. That consumers will assemble their preferred view of a brand based on the experiences they want of it, that they find interesting and useful. They will seek out the building blocks – what Jeremy Bullmore called in the 1960’s the ‘sticks and straws of experience’ – they want, not the ones the advertiser wants.

The agency – and content producers’ – challenge is to divide up everything they want to say and distribute it in independent, bite sized nuggets across the available touchpoints. The media agency Naked call this transmedia planning.

The art of this approach lies in being able to let the consumer create a meaningful story, over a sustained period of time. This requires skills of narrative and storytelling – of plotting out consumer experiences and how to keep them gripped to your message. I think content producers will be better skilled than many ad agencies in this sort of area – in terms of plotline and serialisation. For instance When Shell wanted to create a 9 minute TV ad, their agency, JWT turned to film directors and producers to create an extended narrative that could be run in different timelengths and formats across a variety of screen based media.

And this narrative ability isn’t exclusive to film based media – BMW successfully ported their Films branded content campaign to iPods via audiobooks.

So my 3rd Rule is Ubiquity – creating a story for the brand that unfolds over time and across different media, on the consumer’s terms, that harnesses the skills of programme and film makers.

Summing up then

I think the brand’s view of the world is usually one of competing for paid-for attention through new channels like branded content, AFP and sponsorship idents, but is often at odds with the consumers’ desire for branded content which is 1. useful, 2. interesting (that is, worth it), and 3. unfolds over time.

As the research and analyst company Forrester put it – “Marketers need to partner with agencies [and content producers] that listen instead of shout. It's about shifting from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating [stories]”

So when we’re presented with a brand challenge how would these rules apply, or work from your perspective?

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Unpimp


She voted for the war
Originally uploaded by seanbonner
Here's a nice example of radically simplified messaging. I think Leo Burnett once said that print ads had 4 main elements: a picture, a headline, a logo and some copy, and the more elements you can take off, the more powerful the creative idea becomes. I guess you need a little context to help such highly 'unpimped' design, but he's not wrong.