Category: advertising

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 – The best advertising is a great product

I wrote a post a few weeks back after the launch of the “new” ipad, where I bemoaned the fact that Apple seemed to have fallen in to a trap of marketing “more” rather than “new” or “different” – so the “new” iPad was just the old ipad but with more pixels and the faster processor required to cope with more pixels. I compared it to the Galaxy Note 10.1 which incorporated a digitizer and “smart” stylus that I really could see having a revolutionary role in work life.

The problem with the Galaxy Note 10.1 however is that they had forgotten the “more” part. So as Apple were redefining the standard of screen technology, Samsung’s 1280×800 screen seemed positively archaic – It is barely better than their new Galaxy s3 which is a quarter of the screen area. It is a similar mistake that Samsung have made with the Galaxy s3 – by all accounts a brilliant device, but the thing that has got the fanboys foaming is that they haven’t upgraded the camera beyond the original 8MP. The fact that improving the number of pixels beyond 8MP usually has a detrimental effect on picture quality is lost on most people – all they understand is “more”

So it is really interesting to see that Samsung have actually delayed the release of their new tablet in order to make it a truly competitive device and add “more” to “different”. Early rumours were that they were just delaying it in order to incorporate a faster quad core processor, but in the past 24 hours runours have emerged that they are also incorporating one of the fastest Graphics chips on the market, which would only be necessary if they were also significantly increasing the screen size. As a gadget geek who would really rather never buy an Apple product this is exciting as it sounds like this new tablet could be a product that I can buy without compromise, where no-one with an iPad can have any sense of superiority.

It’s a brave move, but given the success of the 10.1’s baby brother (the Confusingly named Galaxy Note) it suggests that there is a market for this product and it could finally bring some diversity could open up the market and challenge Apple’s dominance.

All that, and yet no advertising or promotions or any form of formal communications. Just a great product.

here’s hoping

Media or Creative first – are we really still having this debate?

When I started in the media industry 12 years ago, the talk at the time was about how media planning should come before creative thinking. It was common talk amongst all media agencies and it had a lot of resonance in a world where media opportunities were exploding with the mass take up of the internet, the proliferation of digital TV and the rise of digital radio (what happened there!?) The difficulty of wading through all the multitude of media options gave real momentum to the claim of the media strategy to be an integral part of the marketing strategy. Within a couple of years it was seen as pretty much conventional wisdom, although there was some reluctance on the part of other advertising services agencies, understandably. But it was pretty well accepted that the context of an advertising message could often be as important as the message itself.

So the article below from Antony Young, would be exactly the type of article I would expect to have been written 10-12 years ago. Except it wasn’t written at any point in the previous decade. It was written last week.

here is the article in full : Six Reasons Media Strategy Should Come Before Creative

I was really quite shocked to be reading something like this in a publication such as AdAge in today’s marketing environment.

Not only did I think that the value of “the medium” had already been well established in our industry, I also thought that we had grown up and moved well beyond any kind of debate which put media before creative or creative before media.

Surely there is general consensus in our industry that what is required is a collaboration between all the key disciplines to ensure that all elements of a marketing campaign work in an integrated and orchestrated way to deliver against marketing and business objectives.

Surely we have moved away from protectionist attitudes such as “my discipline is more important than your discipline” Putting it simply – placing an irrelevant message in perfectly targeted media environment will have no more success than placing a wonderfully crafted message in front of an audience who have no interest in the product. It’s daft to claim that the media is more important than the message, but equally the message shouldn’t ever be developed in isolation of the media options.

I believe (and I thought most of my peers also believed) that the creative approach and the media approach should stem from the same overall communications strategy and should feed and nuture each other in an ongoing, organic, iterative, real time process. Surely the concept of a linear process where you make an ad, you buy some media to distribute the ad and then walk away is something that our industry has walked away from long ago?

But maybe I’ve been deluding myself. If the article above is anything to go by the media industry hasn’t really gone anywhere in the past 12 years.

Giving the Finger to Rules of Thumb

I work in an industry where we seem to rely an awful lot on rules of thumb to make important and expensive decisions about how to spend marketing budgets. The next 1000 words are a bit of a rant about why I hate that, but also why it means I love my job! For those of you who don’t work in media or marketing this one might not be as fun as some of my other rants – don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Now rules of thumb are useful. They are useful so that you don’t have to start from scratch every time you look to make a budget decision. They are useful to spot something that is completely out of line with efficient and effective media principles. They are really useful when you are inevitably asked to pull together a recommendation by yesterday as they provide a shortcut to an answer which will probably be 70-80% correct (which is a damn sight better than if the client made it up themselves.)

Where they are really not useful, where they are in fact a hindrance, is when planners and marketers choose to abdicate their own intuitive sense and reasoning capabilities and instead use rules of thumb as planning LAW.

So some examples.

As a rule of thumb, IPA Datamine 2 (Marketing in an age of accountability) suggests that 3 media channels is the optimum number of channels to maximise the likelihood of delivering a positive business ROI for a campaign (This is also broadly supported in Datamine 3).

This is a useful rule. It tells me that if I spend a £20million budget exclusively on TV then I could probably improve my chances of success by diverting some of the budget into a different support medium. It also tells me that if my £10 million campaign has 8 different bought media channels on it then I should probably think about focusing or prioritising, ensuring that each of them is adding something new and valuable to the overall campaign. What it doesn’t mean is that a campaign which uses 5 different media is fundamentally wrong in all circumstances. From the graph we can obviously see that isn’t the case as over 50% of the case studies that used 5 media WERE successful, but it is just that the likelihood of success starts to decrease.

I was recently told that we shouldn’t add a “video marketing” strand to a TV campaign because we already were using press and radio in support of the TV campaign and so “online” would be an extra channel too far. This fundamentally misunderstood a) how the rule of thumb works and b) how people consume audio visual content in the 21st century. I’ve also been told variously that we shouldn’t include social media, PPC search and even SEO using the same rationale.

A number of things are to blame here

1) there is a mis-understanding by marketeers of the term “media channel” in the Datamine study. Media channels as defined in that context are traditional paid for advertising channels that allow you to broadcast a message to many people. Unfortunately “media channels” has been applied by the marketeers to anything that is managed for them by their Media Planning and Buying agency. In a world where the media agency remit is expanding far beyond the 5 traditional advertising media, this needs to change. Marketeers wouldn’t lump PR or sales promotions or CRM or any of the other core marketing functions into this “only 3 media” rule, so neither should they with social media or search

2) There is another form of siloing happening here as well – In this example, online video marketing is seen as a separate “channel” from television. However if all you are doing is ensuring that your TVC is discoverable in all places that people view AV content then it is clearly just an extension of “TV”. Unfortunately, fear of the unknown causes people to create false media segmentation and in doing so can miss out on a golden opportunity for cost effective amplification of their core advertising message.

The fundamental problem here is that people aren’t interrogating the rule. They aren’t asking “Why is 3 the optimum number” they are just accepting it as a shorcut and lazily using it as “the answer”. I’ve even heard of agencies where the mandate from the very top is “we do not use more than 3 media channels in any campaign” and they take great pride in their lazy inflexibility. I agree with the principle of “do fewer things, better” but to have such a coarse rule offends my natural tendency to question, explore and push the boundaries of what communications can do.

It isn’t just in broad planning that we see these “rules of thumb” being used badly.

I’ve recently heard them used to justify quite specific media implementation. The product was an NPD for an FMCG brand that a colleague of mine works on and specifically it had a brand spanking new innovation which needed a bit of explanation. The team rightly identified that part of the role for communications was to demonstrate this functionality and so they allocated a portion of the budget for “demonstration” media. Where this fell down was by using rules of thumb badly. The logic went something like this

1) Digital media is good at “demonstration” because it can be animated (TV wasn’t an option due to budget constraints),
2) Women spend a lot of time shopping

ergo: We should do digital 6-sheet posters in Malls – obviously

To have gone ahead with this would have been completely wrong for a number of reasons: 1)the 5 seconds of animation on the poster simply wouldn’t have been adequate for the message; 2) the attention of the average Mall shopper is being demanded constantly by hundreds of more interesting items – primarily the shop windows that they are gazing into – they aren’t going to spend any time watching a reel of posters in case something relevant pops up; 3)this audience is in “fun” shopping mode, they are thinking about buying the stuff that makes them feel sexy/cool/young etc – what they aren’t thinking about is what they are going to feed their kids that evening. I could go on.

The point is that the “rules of thumb” suggested that this was a relevant media, but intuitively it is really clear that it would be a inappropriate use of marketing money against those comms objectives. The problem is that some people had just stopped at the answer that the rule of thumb delivered, without really applying any understanding of why the rule of thumb existed and whether or not it truly applied to the human behaviour in question.

And this in turn brings me to my final conclusion – Why I love my job. Yes I hate the way that too many marketing services professionals use lazy rules of thumb to make their media decisions for them, but the nature of the media industry means that there will always be a place for people to question received wisdom as we work in an industry that is constantly evolving and changing. Since I started in media 12 years ago, the media opportunities are virtually unrecognisable in so many ways. As new media channels constantly come to the fore, any “rule of thumb” inevitably has to be re-evaluated and there will always be a place for people who understand not just the basic rules about what works in communications, but for people who always ask why it works so that they can intuitively understand whether the latest greatest media phenomenon is actually relevant or a big noisy red herring. No computer or “Black Box” planning tool is ever going to be able to do that, well not in my lifetime anyway!

Bring on the next 12 years.

The shame, a John Lewis TV advert made me cry!

I just saw the new John Lewis ad and I was all ready to be cynical and sarcastic about it, but I just can’t. It is truly lovely work and it got me all choked up – at my desk dammit! A first class representation of the industry I work in, thankyou Adam and Eve for restoring my faith a little bit.

I’m not going to say much more about it, just watch.

This is a lovely film, beautifully acted, scripted and shot, with a twist that tugs at the heartstrings and defeats all cynicism. John Lewis have lived up to their recent reputation of making excellent Christmas ads and are really standing apart from the crowd – particularly the god-awful Marks and Spencers X-factor spot.

Cringe-worthy boy-band actually makes for a half decent ad!

I’m a little bit late with this post, but I wanted to comment briefly on the recent Yeo Valley Campaign that launched a couple of weeks back.

For the second year in a row Yeo Valley “released” an epic musical number in the first break of the first live X-factor. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it featured a group of slightly too attractive “farmers” singing a Westlife style boy-band (the Churned) ballad (Forever) with a West-Country backdrop. This is the sequel to last year’s “rapping farmers” and whilst personally I don’t love it quite as much, I do think that this is a great example of sustainable advertising (see a couple of posts ago for more on this)

As an example of “sustainable communications” it is particularly nice in that it demonstrates that you can invest in and improve a consumer’s experience of their media without having to sponsor or ad-fund content.

I believe that this advert augments the enjoyment of people watching the X-factor because it clearly understands and plays to the specific frame of mind that those viewers find themselves in at that point. Cheesy manufactured boy-bands are the essence of X-factor and are the guilty pleasure of all who watch, so spending 2 minutes watching some bare chested boys do a tribute/parody to that is exactly what the doctor ordered for the commercial break. This relevant, informative and entertaining content delivered in such a timely fashion is a perfect example of the sustainable communications that I long to see more of.

Other things that they have done right –

1) there are not too many ratings behind this spot – they are primarily focusing on the X-factor and similar programming to ensure a tight fit with and maximum relevance for their core audience. This means they don’t have to worry about out-staying their welcome and starting to irritate and can focus on entertaining the audience that will appreciate it the most

2)They have made sure that a tangible product message is still core to the idea – (that Yeo Valley is made from milk that is sustainably farmed by West Country farmers who care about the countryside) – They have even included the lyrics in a karaoke style version of the ad that has followed more recently to make the message unmissable – Basically they have given me an actual reason to choose the product rather than to just “like” the TV ad

On an aside, I find it interesting that Yeo Valley have managed to create more noise than even Muller’s epic “Wunderful stuff” campaign that launched on the same day, in the same show and with a much more expensive ad and vastly larger advertising budget. The Muller stuff just seems to fall flat for me. It has all the theoretical ingredients for a viral hit, but viewers haven’t really fallen in love with it in the same way.

I think the difference is that Muller looks like it was made for the maximum entertainment of people who work in advertising, they’ve ticked lots of boxes of perceived retro cultural icons that are “cool” whereas the Yeo Valley work is all about appealing to my Mum (and is most definitely not cool.)

Yeo Valley have always made sure that even if their ad isn’t a massive cultural phenomenon it still communicates a reason to buy. Muller’s £20m campaign relies wholly on capturing our imagination and consumers “loving” the ad (and therefore by implication Muller) in the way that Cadburys managed with “Gorilla”, but if that fails, then what is my reason to buy their yoghurt?

Marketing Assumptions – making an ass of you and mption.

I was involved in a discussion today about a client of mine that shall remain nameless, but has caused me to think about some of the basic assumptions that we tend to make in the marketing and particularly advertising industries and whether or not they are still (or were ever) true.

I was told today in a fairly categorical way that there are 3 basic things that every brand needs to do

1) It needs to make itself visible
2) It needs to make itself findable
3) It needs to stand for something

The assertion was that if a brand was not delivering on one of these areas then it would be fundamentally failing. This point was particularly being used to push home point 3) i.e. that we needed to do some Brand led advertising to establish the “positioning” of our brand in the category.

Initially it was quite easy just to go along with this as it supports pretty much all of the campaigns I have ever worked on, but then I started to ask the simple question “Why?”

Once I started to do that I realised that there were very successful and growing brands that “failed” on one, two or even all three counts.

I considered the energy category in the UK (I happen to work on one of the leading brands) and realised that the number 2 brand which has come out of nowhere in the past 5 years is Scottish and Southern. Scottish and Southern have virtually no brand advertising, well certainly none that I’ve ever seen, they don’t sponsor anything that I’m aware of either. And they don’t “stand for” anything that is differentiated in any way, their product is identical to everyone elses, Yet by simply focusing on getting their costs down and taking advantage of the online brokers, they have managed to steal a huge amount of market share. So of the 3 “must-do’s” they actually only do one and are very successful in doing so.

I then thought of a brand that actually has managed to be incredibly successful without making any effort to succeed at any of the 3. You all wear it and Bloomberg rated it as one of the top 30 most influential companies in the world a couple of years ago, you’ve even seen it on this page, yet there is a significant chance that you’ve never heard of it – YKK (stands for Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha) are the initials that adorn most of the zippers in the world, but as far as I’m aware, they’ve never had a brand advertising campaign, they don’t have a brand positioning and I can’t even see a search strategy when I type zippers into Google, but I believe that they are one of the most prolific brands in the world.

And before you say “they aren’t a brand, they are just a product” then why are they now facing a counterfeiting problem with people making fake YKK zips.

Now you could argue that YKK stands for quality and Scottish and Southern stand for cheapness, but that could be just our marketing heads trying to force these brands into the models that we understand. I’m pretty sure that YKK never sat down and created a brand “onion” or compared themselves to a famous personality, they just got on with making good zips and getting clothing companies to put them on their products (Oh and a bit of illegal price fixing along the way leading to a €150million fine from the European courts!)

Anyway, the point is that we so quickly jump to answers in our industry that we simply don’t stop and ask “Why?” enough. Sometimes it is because we think that the client doesn’t know the answer and sometimes it is because we know that they do and we won’t like it. I don’t think that’s good enough. If we really want to make a difference for our clients and the brands we work on we have to start to challenge the fundamental assumptions sometimes and it just takes one word.

It’s Easy!