Monday, April 30, 2012

Suicide Watch: Major Brand Determined to Off Itself



Pepsi's brand team evaluating the Pepsi Refresh campaign results
Credit & Copyright: Tony Rowell



In its quest to help boost Coke’s sales, Pepsi is embarking on another self-immolating social media venture.  Rising from the ashes of Pepsi Refresh comes a global campaign called Live for Now.  It plans to riff on the lyrics of Nicki Minaj’s song, Moments 4 Life, and update its Pepsi Pulse platform (a platform or scaffold?) to create an entertainment ‘dashboard of pop culture’ ranking tweets, pictures and news items from the world of entertainment by popularity.

People (Pepsi calls them consumers, but I highly doubt that) are then encouraged (bribed) to tweet “likes” and pin crap from the dashboard, as well as respond to celebrity challenges (Bono wants you to send him money).   It’s all about taking online conversations and doing something or other with them…. I’m not sure what and I don’t Pepsi does either.  Just for the record, the last time Pepsi did this kind of thing its sales dropped 5% and it fell to third place in overall soft drink sales. 

The kicker for me is what Brad Jakeman, president-global enjoyment and chief creative officer, said about the project.  While he wants the campaign idea and brand positioning to be consistent around the world, he’s not overly concerned about the need to run identical ads: The identical piece of advertising running everywhere, that's an old-fashioned way of global marketing. In global brand management, you get stars for efficacy, not consistency. I'm not going to comb the world checking to make sure everyone is using identical pieces of advertising.  Really?  The Old Timey global consistency of image and brand assets is not important?  Good luck with that Brad.  Write when you get work. 

The Ad Contrarian, the brilliant Bob Hoffman, has been hammering away with great delight at Pepsi’s screw-ups for a few years now (search "Pepsi" on his site for all the hilarity), and when Pepsi Refresh crashed and burned last year, he predicted what it would do next:

Concept: Happy, youthful people of every color from all over the global world are drinking Pepsi while the most expensive pop stars of every color in the global world are singing about Pepsi. This will all be tied into a mobile Facebook/Twitter/YouTube friend and download fest and will culminate in a worldwide pop concert streamed live all over the global, mobile world. The campaign theme will be "Planet Pepsi" or something else of equal globularity.

Pretty damn close, Bob.  Pretty damn close. 

Seriously, Joan Crawford needs to rise from the dead brandishing a huge cast-iron coat hanger and beat some sense into these guys.  Here's how she handled the Pepsi Board of Directors—she makes Steve Jobs look like Mr Rodgers.


Friday, April 27, 2012

UK Shocker: Four Found Dead



News from London of a shocking quadruple homicide has left the ad world stunned.  On April 25, Chief Inspector Kevin “I always wear black™” Roberts announced the deaths of Strategy, the Big Idea, Management and Marketing, to a hushed audience at the annual IoD convention.  Roberts said there were no witnesses as the crime likely took place in the middle of the night.  He added that while there are no suspects in custody, they would like to have a conversation with VUCA, an mysterious assailant who also goes by the name of the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous world.  “To us, this is a world that’s gone crazy.”

When asked whether he expected to see any results from his investment of time into solving the case, Chief Inspector Roberts replied, “Asking about Return on the Investment is the wrong question.  You should be asking about Return on Involvement.” A puzzled and speechless press corps had no further questions.

Kevin “I always wear black™” Roberts, who moonlights as the Uber-head of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide, also said that following these deaths, now is the time to move away from any form of accountability and concentrate on small ideas, create Chief Excitement Officers, and tell smelly, noisy and intimate brand stories to consumers. 

In a moment of delicious irony, shortly after Chief Inspector Roberts declared “I don’t buy into all this recession talk. I do not think we are in a recessionary environment,” came the official announcement that the UK slid back into recession.


™ George Parker, adscam.typepad.com

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Reading Week

 The First Fast Food OOH, ca. 30,000 BCE

Browsing through the digital edition of Advertising Age this morning—which is far cheaper than the obscene subscription price it charges to send the print version to Canada—I came across two interesting articles.  The first was entitled, Click-ThroughRates May Matter Even Less Than We Thought, and it’s about the results of a study done by Pretarget and ComScore.  After the obvious “Duh” reaction to the headline came my WTF moments.  

To learn more about the findings—the article was a bit skimpy on details—I checked out the press release.  In it, was a quote by Pretarget’s founder Keith Pieper (get a pen: you’ll want to write this down so you don’t forget): “Your ad being seen matters more than your ad being clicked – if you have a back-end conversion metric...  After all, what good is an ad that can’t be seen? It’s intuitive that an ad must be seen to make an impact, and it’s even more intuitive than someone hovering and engaging with an ad might convert, even absent a click.” 

So the big thing they learned is that ad placement is important, and that being above the fold is better than being below the fold.  Huh.  Guess these guys have never placed ads in old timey dead newspapers.  Yes, placement is important, but ads don’t always need to make an impact (I hate that word) to be effective or noticed.  Some are seen and understood in the blink of an eye without any hovering, clicking, or “engagement.” 

The second thing these guys learned was, now that even the thickest of clients have caught on the fact that CTR is a pathetic metric and that the correlation between clicks and conversion is pretty much statistically zero, a new metric is needed.  And they have it figured out.  It’s called “ad hover/interaction.”  This happens when a user moves his cursor over an ad.  So I guess when I visit a site and a humongous banner takes over my screen and I move my curser over it just to get rid of the damned thing, or when I move through a page and accidentally pass over or click on an ad, these are my moments of “engagement” Lord, take me now.  

To be fair, I haven’t seen the research report and can’t find it on either company’s sites, but if the press release is any indication, we’re still in trouble.  Of a personal note, whenever people in our business mention “engagement,” I feel like Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”  Please stop using it, OK? 

The second article was titled, Why Digital Ad Forecasts Are Irrelevant: TheFuture Is Not Display Ads.  Written by James Gross, it was, for the most part, a sensible piece, until he drifted into the touchy-feely, brands have to act more human and social ecosystem stuff.  Anyway, Gross writes that with the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest et al, there is no room for display advertising on these platforms. A valid point.  His “duh" moment came when he states that whatever form the new ads take, they will need to be more interesting. The one thing Gross missed, however, is how the growth of Mobile threatens ad placement and revenue in general, and it’s a warning Facebook put in its recent SEC filing:

Increasing Mobile Usage. Increasing use of Facebook on mobile devices will also affect our performance, particularly if mobile use substitutes for use on personal computers. Historically, we have not shown ads to users accessing Facebook through mobile apps or our mobile website and we cannot be certain that our mobile monetization approaches will be successful in generating meaningful revenue. We cannot quantify the extent to which mobile usage of Facebook is substituting for, rather than incremental to, usage of Facebook through personal computers, but we generally expect mobile usage to increase at a faster rate than usage through personal computers for the foreseeable future.

I figure Zuckerberg will find a way to buy a solution to this problem before he goes public.  Then again, in future he may find he can make more money packaging and selling user data than from ad placements—it’s the same cash flow generator that keeps big loyalty programmes operating.   
 

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

How to become unpopular in 492 words

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What light through yonder tunnel shaft breaks?

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This is interesting.  In an article on Social Media advertising in this week’s Ad Age, Adam Kmiec who is head of Social Media for Walgreens is quoted as saying, "We have allowed social media to become SEO industry; a collection pseudo experts all promising a solution without the talent to deliver. Frankly, it's depressing. I hope for better." 

Well, one can always hope.  But as long as our industry is dominated by conglomerates run by accountants, MBAs, and lawyers whose sole function is to separate every dime from every client and every employee I don’t see much changing.  Besides, Social Media (and brand building) are perfect shakedowns: immeasurable or meaningless metrics, cliché-ridden promises that can never be realized, and no accountability.  

On the other hand—and this is important for agencies—Kmiec is a client and if he is speaking out, how many other clients feel the same way right now but are too afraid of missing out on the next big thing?  I’d reckon quite a few, and soon Kmiec will find that he is not alone.  They will begin to realize that just because a new communication platform is evolving it doesn't mean that human behaviour is evolving, too. It is just another medium and people (consumers, customers, "engagees," we) will still process visual and aural information from it the same way they have from cave walls and books, billboards and television.  We constantly will filter messages and stimuli, ignore or discard almost all of the irrelevant ones and register then decide to act on those few of immediate importance or interest, usually in seconds.  

Only when clients start asking their agencies tough questions about the effectiveness and the rationale of their strategies will the hucksters flee and social media can live up to its strength:  where companies/brands can listen to what a small segment of its potential customer base ("likes" do not represent loyalty) are saying, especially when things go wrong.  Keep in mind that what many advertisers and agencies think is important content or brand knowledge, the consumer thinks otherwise and could not care less.  The lesson: lurk and let the users decide and act on what is relevant, just be sure to take notes and don’t be a defensive tool if things go south.

In the meantime at your holding company agency, while you’re sitting at your broken-down '80s desk waiting for your shared five year-old computer to render a tiff, or walking on threadbare carpeting in your agency’s dingy hallways past holes in the drywall hoping to scrounge up some Sharpie markers or a pad of tracing paper to sketch out some ideas, know that the senior management at HQ shares your pain.  Seriously, here’s what the captains of our industry get paid in these belt-tightening times:
 
WPP
           
Publicis Group

Interpublic

Omnicom

MDC (US)


Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Hyperbole in Copywriting

What exactly is Restaurant-Grade Grilling Oil?

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

On the Road to Damascus: Science breaks down the myths of marketing

Social Media, ca. 30,000 BCE
European Lion Safari
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Come on, come on down, you’ve got it in you
Got to scrape that shit right off your shoes
Sweet Virgina, Jagger/Richards

(Articles by Andrew Ehrenberg, Byron Sharp's book How Brands Grow, and two posts by Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam’s Head Planner Martin Weigle on his Canalsideview blog, have changed my way of thinking about brands and creative.  These explain and quantify decades of research into what works and doesn’t work in advertising.  These are not marketing fads or hot trends, just science evaluating and recording human behavior and how people view brands.  This research has, as Weigle says, “a very direct impact on the work. On how we expect marketing communications to work. On the creative content of what we produce. On our inputs into getting to that work. And how we measure and evaluate its success.”)

In DM, we live and die by measurable results.  Hundreds of books have been written about it.  Mathematical and statistical techniques have been developed to determine it. And yet, despite this raison d’etre, we continue to believe in “facts” that are only assumptions to create our work.  Facts without proof or are not empirically verifiable, such as:  Price promotions boost overall sales (Not over the long term they don’t.  In fact they can have the reverse effect and can put enormous pressure on margins), Loyalty programmes are an effective way to increase the number loyal customers (No, they are not, at least not to a statistically significant degree.  They are, however, expensive to run and usually they reward customers for doing what they would normally do.  To be profitable, these programmes must use and market their customer’s purchasing behaviour data).  Then, there’s the biggest, most persistent and blindly accepted fact: to position a brand, it needs a personality, preferably with a catchy single word description (like friendly, engaging, tough or social) that creates a unique point of difference.

This all-important point of differentiation is neatly summed up in a Unique Selling Proposition. And it is the USP that drives the creative direction of the project. The problem is that the assumption is bullshit; decades of research refute it.  This isn’t news to many creatives with efficient bullshit detectors—USPs are the most frequent trigger of our BS alarms. We know in our gut that there is hardly any difference between, for example, window cleaning brands or soaps or computers.  And if there is, it is almost meaningless.  But, we are expected to use flimsy weak-ass USPs to come up with kick-ass persuasive creative. 

There is no generalizable evidence of any lasting persuasive effects of advertising—at least not to justify a global spend of billions Andrew Ehrenberg, 2002

We apply our best techniques to describe the product’s attributes to get Brand B users to change their attitudes and switch to Brand A.  Research is showing, though, that loyal Brand B users are just as loyal to their brand as Brand A users are to theirs.  What’s more, their attitudes are stable over time and no amount of persuasive advertising will shift it.  Go figure.  (Listen to Mac and Windows users try to convince the other why their OS is better.  It usually ends with ad hominems and questions of the other’s mental aptitude.)

An important study (Romaniuk and Ehrenberg, 2003) used 28 brand attributes Y&R developed years ago, and found that 9 out of 10 brand buyers did not associate a particular personality to a brand. Other have shown that when a group of consumers is interviewed again several weeks after the original survey, only 40% to 60% of respondents repeated the same personality attribute to the same brand—the remaining 50% associated it with another brand.  What does this tell us? Brand personality attributes are fleeting; they represent only a moment in time. 

There are also problems with how we view customers of a brand and how we attract new ones.  The bulk of any brand’s sales come from light/occasional buyers—loyal diehard customers are no more than 20%—and the Pareto Principle (80% of your sales comes from 20% of your customers) is actually about 50/20.  Loyal customers always buy the brand and, whether it’s mayonnaise or laundry detergent, these customers don’t need, nor can they use, any more.  That leaves 50% of total sales coming from 80% of your customer base, the light or occasional buyers.  They display no apparent brand loyalty but have bought the product.  They question is why do they buy it occasionally. 

Because we look at consumers and the buying process as rational, we look for rational explanations for their actions.  What researchers are starting to see, however, is that buying behavior is anything but rational.  They have found that, regardless of what a person thinks about a particular brand, it has little effect on buying behavior.  When shopping, people do not consider all the brands in a category; they choose the familiar or popular one, usually within seconds, without ever thinking about it.  It is spontaneous, not the result of deliberation.  And it is a decision that appears to be based on brand salience. 

We are bombarded with hundreds of ads every day, most of which we ignore, tune out, or click past.  There are some, the salient ones, however, that we do notice—we may not read or listen to them but we are aware of them.  They aren’t the hard sell persuasive ads but instead are those that re-enforce familiar memories or experiences of the brand usually within seconds, through well-established brand assets: Coke = the swirl and red, McDonald’s = yellow arches, Ford = blue oval, etc. Alan Hedges in his book, Testing to Destruction, gives an analogy:

People can receive and process vast masses of signals at any one moment. It would take several pages of words to give even a brief outline of a small number of the more important communications received and acted on by the driver of a car approaching a busy junction, even within a few seconds. In fact, quite clearly people can take in a vast amount of information, screen out what is irrelevant for the purpose in hand, and process the remainder as a basis for action in a very short space of time indeed. But very little of this information needs to be consciously received or handled.
If the driver had to work out ab initio what each signal meant and what he should do about it he would quickly become paralysed with information overload and consequent indecision. This is incidentally one of the main problems facing people first learning to drive when coming into heavy traffic. They have not learnt to recognise broad patterns of signals and to habituate their responses to them.

Brand salience is about getting the consumer think of a brand—to make it an option in the future—not change what he or she feels about it.  It’s about ads akin to creative publicity of a brand’s distinctiveness not its differentiation.  It’s making ads that are memorable not persuasive.  Subtle not overwhelming—they should communicate at a lower level of attention. 

With science starting to explain the working of marketing, many of the entrenched truths and facts are becoming indefensible.  Only good comes from this.  A refreshed approach to advertising based on observations and reams of data will free creatives from rules that stifled creativity and open creative avenues that had been closed off for generations.  Think of it as targeted mass advertising.