Category: marketing

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?

Sustainable Communications vs Media Exploitation – a Manifesto

I’ve been working in media and communications strategy for over 11 years now and I’ve been writing this blog for about 3 or 4 years on and off and I’ve never thought to write a manifesto; Something that puts in writing the basic principles of what I believe to be best practice in our industry and the fundamentals against which I hope to measure my own actions.

There are a few reasons why I haven’t done this:

1) It never occured to me before

2) Even if it had I wouldn’t have expected anyone to have any desire to read it

3) I didn’t really ever consolidate these “basic principles” in any way that didn’t involve a beer fuelled chat with media buddies in the pub.

Well that’s changed recently and here I am trying to set out my manifesto because:

1) It’s occured to me to do so

2) It doesn’t matter how many people read it, but many thanks if you are

3) I think that our industry really needs to start looking at the consequences of our behaviour and start to invest in the future.

The source of this manifesto (well it’s more of a mission statement really) came from a conversation with the Chief Architect of Bing in the UK, Dave Coplin. We were discussing recent developments with Bing’s equivalent of Streetview and he was outlining his strategy for ensuring that the privacy of individuals was protected as far as possible, whilst maintaining maximum utility for users (which could potentially invade their privacy.) What became clear is that he considered ” a right to privacy” (in the digital media world) to be an implied contract between individual and service provider. People actually give up their right to privacy all the time as long as they are getting clear value in return and they are in control of what happens to the information they divulge. What became clear in our conversation was the care and attention that Microsoft were investing in ensuring that the “contract” with consumers was always preserved -that they always knew what they were giving up and what value they were receiving in return.

The words “value exchange” are bandied around an awful lot, but in Dave’s eyes it was fundamental to Microsoft’s entire relationship as a media owner with consumers.

This formed the spark for the philosophy and manifesto that I’m about to deliver so here goes:

Here’s what I believe:

1) Human attention is a valuable natural resource, allowing us to learn about the world around us, adapt our behaviour for optimal utility of that world and to evolve our attitudes for maximum enjoyment of the world

2) Human attention is NOT an infinite resource, there is only so much new information we can take in at any time and only so many things that we can be persuaded to care about

3) All marketing and communications require that we capture that human attention

4) Human attention naturally concentrates and clusters around certain content and media because of the value it contributes to their lives, NOT because of the amount of advertising they find there

5) Just like any natural resource, over-exploitation of the human attention to media will inevitably lead to the dilution and eventual destruction of that attention and make it impossible for us to harness it any way, positive or negative.

(Yeah I love that pic!)

6) It should therefore be the responsibility of advertisers to not just exploit a medium for the audience that it attracts, but to invest in that medium with sustainable communications to ensure that it continues to deliver value to consumers and in turn provide a continuing resource for brands to communicate to those audiences.

Some advertisers might claim that they already do this – by paying to advertise in a medium they say they are investing in the quality of content that medium can provide.  And maybe that used to be true. Maybe some consumers do watch advertising in the knowledge that they are entering into a contract with the media channel to “pay” for the content they choose to watch by also watching content that they would rather not. However I think we are deluding ourselves if we think this is true of most advertising messages.

As advertisers we “buy” an audience that media owners “sell” to us. Because of that we think we have a right to put pretty much anything we can get away with in front of that audience and we approach every consumer contact with the question  “what can my brand get out of this?”.

A perfect example of this is the recent news story that Ford had “secured” a corporate page on Google+. What I found remarkable about this was that a) Ford had ignored Google’s request for advertisers to back off until they had worked out how to showcase corporate accounts and b) No-one seems to have a clue what Ford are doing there and what they hope to get out of it. All that they seem interested in is the fact that there are 10 million+ people already signed up and that it is currently unexploited so they get to be first. No-one knows how people are using Google+, what it is all about and what they can get out of it, but Ford are happy to steam in and plant their corporate size 9 footprints over everything.

This shouldn’t be surprising. As soon as an emerging technology develops into something that looks a bit like a “medium” then every client I have wants to know “How should I be using it?” There is an assumption that if there is an audience then we should be exploiting it. The same happened with Twitter and I can’t even think about doing a campaign without being asked “what will my facebook page look like”.

I also look  at the dead and dying media brands that have failed to keep up with the ever increasing demands of advertisers and investors and so have been abandoned by the wayside. Internet brands such as Myspace that has effectively been ditched – at a loss of half a billion dollars –  because no-one could work out how to make it work for advertisers.

I start to feel an element of responsibility for this. If every  new medium is disected and assessed solely based on it’s ability to generate advertising income then potentially viable media products and businesses that could have had another business model are simply allowed to fade away.

Now maybe this isn’t a problem whilst there is a steady flow of sacrificial lambs for us to exploit, plunder and destroy, and maybe it is fine when consumers don’t have a choice whether or not we target them, but I believe the days of being able to exploit media with impunity are numbered. Consumers have more and more tools that enable them to choose whether to engage with advertisers or not and the longer we abuse their good will and force interruption to their media consumption with unwelcome messages, the quicker they will learn how to switch us off. Indeed there is legislation coming which will force consumers to make that choice (see anti-cookie European legislation)

So here’s where I start my campaign for sustainable communication (I got here eventually!).

I believe that the most successful advertisers in the next 20 years will be those that understand that we have a duty to respect the contract between advertisers and consumers and deliver true value in our communications.

We need to ensure that we are investing in successful media, not just by buying media space, but by delivering content and messages that in and of themselves increase the value that consumers take out of that media space. Rather than saying “what’s the next big thing” all the time, we should be saying “how do we make the current big thing work better for consumers” so that we don’t have to start all over again when we have bullied them out of the media that they used to love.

For my part, whenever I am asked to consider a new media opportunity, I am going to endeavour to start with the question “How can I make that media better for the consumers who are consuming it” rather than “How can I make a quick buck here”. And let me be clear – another generic TV ad with animated animals or a beautiful woman selling perfume does not make my experience of that medium better. Most ads that your average advertiser likes are frankly wallpaper for your average consumer.

Over the next few weeks and months I will be adding examples of campaigns that are either examples of great sustainable communications or worrying examples of media exploitation.

Please feel free to send me any good examples of either.

As a starter for 10, please check out the mediaweek award shortlisted Panasonic Advertiser funded programme “How to take stunning pictures”. This was a piece of TV content on channel 5 that out-performed it’s alloted programming slot and was hugely popular with consumers and client alike. In addition Panasonic were able to clearly convey their commitment to helping the average photography enthusiasts get the most out of amateur photography. And it sold Panasonic Lumix cameras – lots of them.

In #myextrahour I’ll disect this new twitter campaign

I returned from new York last Sunday to discover this campaign from Europcar had cropped up all over London.

For those of you not in London, the basic premise is that Europcar’s new service “FreeDeliver” will save you time, essentially giving you an extra hour in your day to do with as you will. I first saw this campaign on a fairly standard panel on a train and noticed at the bottom it suggested that I should twitter what I would do with #myextrahour.

My initial reaction was somewhat cynical “Really? People are going to bother tweating about Europcar? and are Europcar’s audience really on Twitter anyway?”. I believe that social media can be a powerful force in the right campaigns, but it has to be an organic process. Surely the UK public aren’t going to fall for this are they?

But the general commentary amongst my peer-group was pretty positive and when I looked into it, this was a well structured media campaign. The static posters drove people to twitter, but in turn their tweets were being displayed on Digital 6 sheets and billboards across London allowing consumers to broadcast their ideas for how to spend their spare time. I also thought that this was a pretty brave approach and at least they are trying to do something a bit different. It definitely stands them apart from their competitors.

But then my cynicism kicked back in and I decided to follow #myextrahour to find out what people were saying. I discovered that people tweeting it divided up into 5 groups

1) People who work for Ogilvy (the creative agency running the campaign) complying with the spirit of the campaign and suggesting activities for the extra hour that ranged from the banal to the inane
2) People who work in social media and web marketing hooking up with Ogilvy in a mutual love-in and orgy of self congratulation
3) People who suggested defacing the campaign in their extra hour
4) People trying to get past the moderator and get profanity onto a London Billboard
5) One guy who was using it to send people to a competitor site (enterprise) and lots of people re-tweeting the “Corporate Twitterbot FAIL” that ensued.

oh and 6) Europcar

In total since Saturday there have been about 60 tweets, and I can’t find one that is from an actual member of the public who has engaged with this campaign in a non-cynical and genuine way.

This a) makes me happy because I was right and b) makes me sad because I was right.

I just don’t think that a brand like Europcar which has no defined brand identity or personality (or none that exists outside of their own marketing team) can drive a social media movement in this way and expect people to actually bother engaging. We are a cynical bunch, particularly in London and we won’t be told what to think, what to share or how. Fundamentally people don’t have an overwhelming urge to engage with advertising campaigns and to get them to do so you need to deliver a great deal more value to them than this campaign does.

Whenever I look at campaigns like this I revert to my standard motto which is “what does the consumer actually get out of this”, and in this case, I really have no answer.

I also think that if you insist on trying something like this you need a much clearer call to action and use a media that can really bring “an extra hour” to life in an emotionally engaging way. This seems to be crying out for a full-on “Bisto” style emotional TV treatment that might just cut through our cynicism, bring a moment of laughter, joy, nostalgia, etc into people’s lives and maybe, just maybe get people to share some truly inspirational and worthwhile thoughts.

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!

Introducing the very aptly named HTC Sense

So the follow up to the HTC Desire is nearly upon us – the HTC Desire HD. Not very imaginatively named I know, and you could be mistaken for thinking that this was just another iterative update, but I think that this new phone actually represents a landmark in the smartphone market, a quiet changing of the guard even.

HTC have been around for a while making loads of different smartphones of consistently high quality, but they’ve never really managed to get people excited about them as a brand.

The first HTC Desire started to change all that. It was the first phone that really started to compete with and even outdo the iPhone. One of HTCs biggest problems however was one of branding. HTC isn’t a brand it’s an acronym – the High Tech Company. And each phone they brought out tried so hard to sound exciting, but just ended up sounding a bit naff – the Hero, the Magic, the Legend, Nexus One, the Desire.

None of these phones quite lived up to their names, none of them was the giant killer that they were supposed to be (even the Desire) and none of them managed to become a brand in their own right. There’s nothing that was able to compete on a brand level with “iPhone”

So what is different now?

1) The first thing that has gone right for them is that they managed to land during a lull in the Apple marketing machine and indeed when Apple did come back into the frame it was a with a bit of a mixed bag. Bias aside, the iphone 4 is a admittedlygreat bit of kit, but not without it’s highly publicised technical flaws, and the iPad, though a joy to use is always going to have the “It’s just a big iPhone” type comparison. In this context, HTC and the Desire have managed to compete on a more level PR playing field with Apple, which would just have been unheard of 18 months ago

2) They’ve stuck with the Desire name and turned it into a franchise – the Desire HD and the Desire Z both come out in the next few weeks and their respective marketing campaigns will start to generate significant recognition for the name. This might not seem significant, but when you look at all the different names they and their competitors are using, it’s probably the first non-apple phone since the Motorola RAZR to achieve such a thing.

3) They are bringing out different models for different consumers – the Desire HD is clearly aimed at the entertainment focused user, the Desire Z (with a slide out Qwerty keyboard) is aimed at the business user and frankly I’m surprised they didn’t call the Wildfire a Desire Mini to appeal to the financially challenged teen market. This enables consumers to buy into a successful franchise without having to make compromises and represents a significant departure from the iPhone way of doing things.

These are all interesting developments and important for establishing HTC as a brand, but I think the most exciting thing they’ve done is not to do with the actual phone but instead is a piece of news that I just found out about

With the launch of the two new Desire models they are also launching a website called http://www.HTCSense.com . This website, (named after the highly acclaimed “Sense” user interface that HTC have created for their windows and android phones) will provide some really compelling functionality for all users of HTC phones. Examples of this functionality include:

– The ability to make your phone ring loudly if you have lost it – even if you have it on silent.

– The ability to find your phone on Google Maps if you have lost it further afield

– The ability to post a “REWARD” message onto the screen of a lost phone for anyone who finds it

– Not just limited to finding lost phones, if you leave your phone at home, you will also be able to send and receive text messages and see any missed calls that you have

As people become more and more dependent on their phones these are all highly valuable functions and services that will really start to make the HTC brand really sticky. I assume that the services will also include an automatic syncing of their contacts with their online account.

This is HTC really planning for the long term. When consumers come to upgrade their current HTC Sense driven phones, they will be incredibly reluctant to have to leave all of those services behind and have to install them in a new device. The HTCSense.com can expect to generate a powerful sense of loyalty and stickiness that only Apple has come close to so far

This is the first time since the launch of the first iPhone that I’ve seen a mobile technology provider really start to do something different for it’s consumers. I for one really hope it works

Reach for the Sky


So Halo Reach came out today at midnight – the final episode in the Halo Franchise to be made by Bungie (the original game’s creators). Now (a) I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that before – about 3 times since Halo 3 was launched and (b) Microsoft will be still making Halo games, so fans of the series don’t have to stress too much, but nonetheless, this is a pretty huge game launch and by all accounts the game lives up to the hype.

The hype has been pretty standard fare, lots of online trailers and screenshots in the gaming press and websites, the trailer hit TV about 2-3 weeks ago (in the UK at least) and they’ve had the now obligatory midnight launch with people queueing around the block to be one of the first to own it. It’s a marketing strategy that I would have written as fast as you could say “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2”

This piece of publicity however was a bit different. This Halo game is supposed to be great but essentially the same as all the other Halo games, so they are making a big deal out of the fact that the Spartan soldiers now have JETPACKS!! Yes you heard me correctly JET….. PACKS…… The only thing cooler than games about futuristic 7 foot tall space warriors to a teenage boy is a game about a futuristic 7 foot tall space warrior that wears a fricking jet pack. Frankly I don’t know what took them so long.

The one thing that every kid wants is a jet pack – well actually we just wanted to be able to fly, but when we realised that we weren’t going to magically develop superpowers a jet pack was the next best thing. Even though (and maybe because) they are a basically pointless and incredibly hazardous form of transport, we want them. And just because I’m now 33 doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t sell my grandmother into slavery to get one (a bargain frankly).

So this stunt in Trafalgar square was the perfect stunt to launch the game

A great idea for a stunt until you realise 2 things

1) Westminster Council aren’t going to be overly happy about you launching a highly dangerous jetpack into the busiest square in London – so if they give permission it will be for you to have a 7 am launch

2) If you do it at 7am about 3 people will actually see it.

Oh well, maybe 3 more people will see it now if they read my blog.

I still want one. And I’m buying Halo: Reach tonight! Not sure I’ll bother with the “Legendary Edition” though

Reasons why videogames are always going to struggle as an advertising medium

I just stumbled upon this brilliant blog piece by Michael Drucker Why Your Loved Ones Hate Videogames and I realised that nearly all of his reasons why my wife/mum/boss doesn’t understand why I play videogames are the exact same reasons that most of my colleagues/clients will struggle to understand how to use it as an advertising medium

Please do read the original article if you are a gamer – it will help you understand the attitude of your partner. In this piece however I want to examine these reasons and what they mean for clients/colleagues and how we can help present gaming as a medium they can understand

Reason 1: The Media

If you are not a gamer then the majority of your opinion on gaming is formed by the media, and the media need newsworthy dramatic stories. If you look in the right places then gaming can provide that in spades. Look at Manhunt – a game about making Snuff movies, or Grand Theft Auto – a game about running over prostitutes isn’t it? And didn’t those kids somewhere in America go on a rampage after playing Call of Duty? These things do exist, and they make for sensationalist news stories and you never hear the other side of the story, so it is natural to believe that gaming is all about that, just like Daily Mail readers believe that all Asylum seekers are bogus job stealers and every Big Issue seller makes £3000 a month.

Understandably, clients don’t want to associate themselves those kind of themes and those kind of news stories and so their natural instinct is to reject the idea of advertising in games.

What can we do about this?

In an ideal world we’d find a way to get our media to run positive news stories about gaming, but truly newsworthy positive news-stories about games are no more common than the equivalent story about TV programmes or the positive power of radio on people’s lives. The simple fact is that most gaming is just good entertainment and there’s not much news in that. One possible approach is to find a celebrity angle – Nintendo have created an entire marketing campaign around the idea that Ant and Dec, Nicole Kidman and all of Girls Allowed all happily play Wii together. The problem here is (a) people don’t think of Nintendo Wii when they think of gaming and (b) those ads are so nauseatingly fake that not even your gran believes it.

What we actually need is more real quotes from normal, well adjusted role models talking about their love of Guitar Hero or Splinter Cell. Those people are definitely out there, we just need to get them to admit it. If you find a quote or a story, capture it, compile it and send it to your clients. Eventually they will get the point.

Reason 2: Games are about killing people.

This point is obviously related to Reason 1, but as an advocate of gaming we have to be honest with ourselves. There are an awful lot of games that involve significant amounts of violence. “First Person Shooters” ” Hack and Slash” “Beat ’em ups” are just a few of the most popular genres of videogame that focus on violence. Non-gamers therefore think that people who enjoy such games must harbour some deep seated desire to enact those murderous activities for themselves – and to be honest, when you hear some of the kids on xbox live I sometimes wonder myself.

Michael Drucker (the inspiration for this piece) makes two strong analogies. When a gamer “shoots” another gamer or computer controlled character it is like playing “tag”. It is about testing your skills and reactions against those of another player. Kids in a playground don’t wish that the other kids died when they tagged them and neither do Call of Duty afficionados. To a gamer this is obvious, but to someone who hasn’t played these games then you can understand their discomfort at seeing people re-enact episodes of extreme violence.

What can we do about it?

We need to demonstrate the wide range of motivations that people have for playing games which include

Competitiveness
Structure for success
Expressing Individuality/Creativity
Buzz – Adrenalin
Relaxation
Escape
Entertainment
Exploration/discovery
Social currency

These motivations are incredibly useful for many of our clients brand campaigns and something we would want to harness. If we can demonstrate that these motivations are central to videogaming and that it is not just about killing people then we will be a long way towards getting mainstream acceptance for the medium.

Reason 3: Games are for kids

a) Yes some games are for kids – see Mario, Sonic, Wii Sports etc
b) Some games really are not for kids and if parents are letting them play them they are bad parents – see Gears of War, GTA IV, Bioshock, Limbo etc.
c) Sometimes grown ups play the games that are meant for kids, just like grown-ups enjoy watching anything by Pixar – because they are just great and have been created by visionaries

The fact is that games are no more “just for kids” than TV is just for grown-ups. The medium is incredibly diverse with an audience to match. Just like we wouldn’t recommend advertising beer in Ben10, so you probably don’t want to advertise Cheesestrings in Medal of Honour 12.

What can we do?

Firstly we need to be vigilant in recommending the right vehicle for the right product. If you mismatch the audience for the product you are trying to sell and the audience for the game then you won’t generate the response you are looking for and your client will consider the campaign a failure.

Secondly we need to keep rolling out the ever increasing number of statistics that show the rapid growth of videogames amongst non-traditional audiences. Farmville is played by your mum, Angry Birds is played by everyone.

Reason 4: Games are complicated to play.

I’m stealing directly from Michael here

This is how gamers see game controllers

This is how your clients see game controllers

A gamer finds interacting with a gaming world to be second nature. They are usually able to play a brand new game within seconds of picking it up – usually without even looking at instructions. In this mental state they have plenty of time to immerse themselves in the gaming world and enjoy everything that they are seeing and anything that is new. If a non-gamer however spends all their time trying to remember which button to press to stop looking at their toes or is struggling to drive in a straight line, then they can’t possibly appreciate what else is going on in the game and so the idea of absorbing an advertising message seems ridiculous to them.

What can we do?

This is the hard one. How do you explain to someone what the mental state of a gamer is to someone who has no hope of ever entering that state themselves? The closest that I can come is to compare it to something like driving. To a non-driver the idea of controlling pedals, gear sticks, steering wheels, indicators at the same time as orienting yourself with 3 different mirrors seems incredible, but to the experienced driver it is so natural that they can move between cars with virtually no trouble whatsoever. We don’t express surprise that drivers can notice road-side advertising whilst they are driving or that they can listen to and enjoy the radio, so we just need to persuade our clients that playing games is just like this.