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Tag: advertising

  • Ad Agencies Rethink How They Collect Data, Recruit Staff

    Ad Agencies Rethink How They Collect Data, Recruit Staff

    We’ve been using In-Depth or Personal Interview techniques to uncover customer insights and consumer behavior triggers for years with great success, using the outcomes to inform creative executions and boost effectiveness of marketing efforts – the big agencies have some catching up to do . . .

    Trump’s win spurs concerns that ad agencies are out of touch with consumers

    By
    Alexandra Bruell and
    Suzanne Vranica
    Advertisers are grappling with a stark realization: After spending years courting U.S. consumers with aspirational images of upscale urban living, they may have misjudged the yearnings of much of their audience.

    In the wake of Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president with a wave of support from middle American voters, advertisers are reflecting on whether they are out of touch with the same people—rural, economically frustrated, elite-distrusting, anti-globalization voters—who propelled the businessman into the White House. Mr. Trump’s rise has them rethinking the way they collect data about consumers, recruit staff and pitch products.

    A few days after the Nov. 8 election, the chief executive of the ad agency giant McCann Worldgroup summoned top executives to discuss what the company could learn from the surprising outcome. One takeaway for him and his staff was that too much advertising falsely assumes that all U.S. consumers desire to be like coastal elites.

    “Every so often you have to reset what is the aspirational goal the public has with regard to the products we sell,” said Harris Diamond, McCann’s CEO. “So many marketing programs are oriented toward metro elite imagery.” Marketing needs to reflect less of New York and Los Angeles culture, he said, and more of “Des Moines and Scranton.”

    Some marketers, concerned that data isn’t telling them everything they need to know, are considering increasing their use of personal interviews in research. Meanwhile, some ad agencies are looking to hire more people from rural areas as they rethink the popular use of aspirational messaging showcasing a ritzy life on the two metropolitan coasts. One company is also weighing whether to open more local offices around the world, where the people who create ads are closer to the people who see them.

    “This election is a seminal moment for marketers to step back and understand what is in people’s heads and what actually drives consumer choice,” said Joe Tripodi, chief marketing officer of the Subway sandwich chain.

    Even as many ad agencies try to improve their gender and racial diversity, industry executives say they also need to ensure their U.S. employees come from varied socioeconomic and geographic backgrounds.

    A diversity hire “can be a farm girl from Indiana as much as a Cuban immigrant who lives in Pensacola,” said John Boiler, chief executive of the agency 72andSunny, whose clients include General Mills Inc. and Coors Light. The agency plans to expand its university recruitment programs to include rural areas.

    ‘[A diversity hire] can be a farm girl from Indiana as much as a Cuban immigrant who lives in Pensacola.’

    —John Boiler, chief executive of the agency 72andSunny

    Given how polling underestimated Mr. Trump’s support, the election underscores the limitations of “research methodologies that even in the era of big data are subject to human bias,” said Antonio Lucio, the chief marketing officer of HP Inc.

    As a result HP, the personal computer and printer arm of the former Hewlett-Packard Co., is re-evaluating its reliance on research techniques like online polls and seeing if it needs to increase its use of personal interviews and ethnography, which is when researchers try to understand how people live by visiting them in their homes or work environments.

    David Sable, global chief executive of Y&R, a creative agency owned by WPP PLC, said the election is a lesson for marketers and agencies that have become too infatuated with big data. Mr. Sable said that Y&R will “double down” on its eXploring program, which involves spending time with consumers in their own habitats. For example, the agency has in the past done laundry with families in London as part of its research for a packaged-goods company.

    “If you want to understand how a lion hunts you don’t go to the zoo, you go to the jungle,” he said.

    David Droga, creative chairman and founder of Droga5, whose clients include Yum Brands Inc.’s Pizza Hut and J.P. Morgan Chase, said the election validated its immersive approach. The shop this year sent employees to Johnsonville headquarters in Wisconsin to interview many of the sausage company’s employees for an ad campaign. “We really want to make sure we not just understand our demo, but the mind-set of our demo right now,” Mr. Droga said. (Droga5 also did work for Hillary Clinton, including a TV spot that depicts her fighting for children throughout her public life.)

    A scene from Droga5's Johnsonville ad campaign. Droga5 sent employees to Johnsonville headquarters in Wisconsin to interview many of the sausage company’s employees for the campaign.
    A scene from Droga5’s Johnsonville ad campaign. Droga5 sent employees to Johnsonville headquarters in Wisconsin to interview many of the sausage company’s employees for the campaign. Photo: Droga5

    Advertising executives also said the surprising outcome to the election would likely hamper advertising spending next year, as marketers try to figure out what implications the new administration’s decisions will have on businesses.

    “I believe there will be a slowdown” in the first quarter as marketers take a “wait and see” approach to Mr. Trump’s policies, said Maurice Lévy, chief executive officer of Publicis Groupe SA.

    WPP’s GroupM, the largest ad buying firm in the world, had been anticipating U.S. ad spending would grow 3% to $183.9 billion next year. Kelly Clark, global CEO of GroupM, now said he anticipates ad spending growth in the U.S. will likely decline a few percentage points over the next six months. “We do believe that investment decisions will be delayed,” said Mr. Clark.

    If agencies internalize the societal changes the election reflected, the content or tone of advertising could change, some ad executives predicted.

    “The election will have spooked the liberal elite away from high concept, ‘make the world a better place’” advertising to “a more down-to-earth ‘tell me what you will do for me’ approach” said Robert Senior, worldwide chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi, a creative firm owned by Publicis Groupe.

    Mr. Senior said the change will likely manifest itself in less use of fantastical imagery and escapism and more real world and real people in ads.

    Mr. Tripodi of Subway says marketers are too focused on aggregating people into broader groups and painting them with the same brush. He said global marketers such as Subway should try to do more local marketing and advertising that can better reflect the concerns of specific communities.

    Mr. Diamond of McCann says the ad industry’s move to have regional hubs servicing large patches of the world is now out of sync with movements in many countries—the U.S., U.K., and China, for example—where citizens seem frustrated with aspirational globalism. He said McCann, which has offices in about 90 countries, had been moving toward more regional hubs. It now wants to beef up its local creative teams.

    In a world “demanding local distinctiveness, you have to have creative that reflects that,” Mr. Diamond said.

    Some advertisers weren’t caught off guard. Susan Credle, global creative chief of ad agency FCB, relayed a conversation she had before the election with a marketer who felt that an aspirational message would hurt its business.

    “If we were having that conversation today, it would be an even stronger point,” she said.

    Write to Alexandra Bruell at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com and Suzanne Vranica at suzanne.vranica@wsj.com

  • 3 Ways NOT To Fall for a Clever Headline

    3 Ways NOT To Fall for a Clever Headline

    In a routine scan of my e-mail inbox, the discussion pages of my 40-some LinkedIn groups, various news sites and marketing sites, I counted over 100 headlines like the one above, promising everything from business lead generation to building up my profile, to keeping my windows from sticking, to where to go in Ocean City. All tempt the reader with a memorable number of simple solutions, neatly encapsulated in a short, easily digestible list, suggesting that if you compile enough lists about all the elements of your life, you’ll have all the answers and your life will run smoothly.

    Is this what content marketing practice has distilled itself down to, a clever headline offering quick easy solutions to life’s tough problems? I certainly hope not, because if your life is like mine and those of my colleagues here, it’s never that clean and neatly arranged – life is just plain messy!

    Marketing is a difficult, complex and widespread discipline, vastly misunderstood by the rank and file and by many of it’s practitioners. It takes YEARS of experience to master even the rudimentary elements in a coherent fashion, to be able to apply them in some fashion to a company or organization’s challenges, to identify and isolate the problem, and devise a strategy to combat it with well-thought-out tactics that do more good than harm, won’t break the budget and will return many times their cost. That’s a tall order for any single discipline, but marketing covers roughly 20 different disciplines within it, all of which can and should be considered when assessing and formulating a plan of action. If you can fit that in a list, I’d love to see it.

    Don’t get me wrong, lists of reminders can be very helpful and useful as a memory joggers of the various rough spots and pitfalls that can befall the forgetful. But I think the use (and overuse) of the catchy tip-laden headline is the lazy way to go. If our business attention span, our ability to learn new concepts, to absorb data and information, has sunk to the level where lists of tips guide your operative day, we are truly in a crisis. From the outreach side, they are a crutch for the lazy man, a cry for attention in the digital wilderness, where solid, impactful and dense information are traded away for quick thrills and easy clicks, screaming “Hey, look at my stuff, not that guy from the learned institute over there, I’m faster and easier.” They are the cliff -notes of a practice and a discipline that takes time and effort to learn, trial and error to master, and guts and determination and discipline to apply.

    Next time you see a list headline with 10 tips on anything, see if you can guess what at least five of them are before you open it. If you’re right, skip the list and it’s author and move on. I’m off to write the next entry, “10 Ways to Be Labeled an Old Curmudgeon Without Really Trying.”

  • Is Advertising Dead?

    Is Advertising Dead?

    Marketers, retailers and their agencies have been relying on advertising and it’s relatively high cost and low return to drive revenue for 75 years or more. Is the time of the ad behind us? Will banner ads and social media posts fill the void? Somehow, I think not . . .

    When we approach small businesses about increasing or even originating their marketing budget, their first thing they tend to think of is “Are we doing new ads, they didn’t work too well the last time” and the ears turn off and the eyes glaze over and the rest of the conversation is spent educating them on the value of other forms of marketing. Marketing and advertising have become so irretrievably intertwined in the minds of small business executives, that any conversation about one inevitably drives toward the other. While frustrating to our consultants, it tells us something about the perception that “only big companies can afford advertising,” which seems to pervade the landscape. With 500 cable TV channels, unending YouTube channels, and enough niche and general interest blogs and print publications to choose from, anyone can advertise. But can they afford to advertise in enough places enough times to break through the clutter and actually reach a select audience often enough and well enough to effect sales? That’s the real question.

    One element that will forever dog traditional advertising is accountability. No agency exec actually went into a meeting with a client and honestly said, “These ads that ran 60 times last week on all three networks and the Superstations, gave you directly a 5% uptick in product sales” – doesn’t happen, no matter how much they try. They talk around the results, talk about branding support, about number of impressions, audience reach and Q score of the spokesmen in the ad, but direct, 1-to-1 sales accountability ascribed to specific ads is the white Rhino of the advertising establishment – it’s been bandied about, but no validated sightings can be found in the literature.

    So with no direct accountability, why is something you can’t accurately measure, that costs a fortune, that can’t be tied back to the top or bottom lines, so hard to let go of? Perhaps because nothing else has come along that gives retail products the visibility, the bragging rights – “did you see our new spot on American Idol last night?” – and the complicit permission from the media outlets and media industries to charge based on demand, like a bushel of corn, driving both media and agency revenue ever skyward, that can replace TV ads. Social Media doesn’t do that, Search Engines don’t do that, E-mail campaigns don’t do that. Nobody ever turned to their neighbor at a barbeque and said “Hey, Bill, did you see that great e-mail from Purel yesterday?”

    Until something highly visible, ubiquitous to each household, device agnostic, easily monetized and publicly recognized comes along to replace it, advertising is here to stay. It’s utility may shift, it’s usage wax and wane with budgetary support and be temporarily dampened by the next shiny new thing that comes along, but I dont’ think it will disappear altogether any time soon, no matter what the digital pundits say . . .

  • Ten Tips & Truths For Marketers

    Ten Tips & Truths For Marketers

    For those of you who are marketers, or if you’re a business owner or solo practitioner who acts in a marketing capacity (and who doesn’t), here’s a few things I’ve picked up over the years – they don’t have anything to do with social media, channel support, SEO or anything to do with a particular media.

    10) If you’ve worked hard to evoke an emotional response to your product in an ad or direct mail piece, for goodness sake give people a way to actually buy it! Make the response mechanism obvious, it avoids delay in responding.

    9) Put your address and phone number on your website, in an obvious place – not everybody trusts everything they see on the internet, and sometimes you just want to send somebody something or talk to an actual person. Why make me work at it?

    8) ASK for the order. Don’t assume that the audience will understand what you want them to do, no matter how obvious you think it is.

    7) Take the offer seriously in your ads and direct marketing communications – the audience will, and they will hold your feet to the fire for every possible interpretation you can imagine. The more transparent and clear you make the offer, the less confusion you’ll receive from the audience, and confused audiences tend not to buy things.

    6) Treat your house list like the gold that it is – you’ll never find a more receptive set of eyes and ears for your message than someone who is already predisposed to hear it. Respect the power it represents, and the people behind it.

    5) You can never know too much about the people you’re trying to reach – but you can interpret data incorrectly. Trust but verify, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, and vet your data with real people and anecdotes – you’ll be glad you did.

    4) Make your copy simple enough that your 80-year-old grandmother can understand it. People’s attention spans are increasingly short, and they don’t have time to analyze your obtuse copy to extract your message.

    3) Sales letters should be long enough to compellingly tell the story, and not a word longer.

    2) Lists, design, artifice and devices don’t sell products and services, feelings do. Evoke an emotional response in your audience and you’ll move the needle.

    1) A target audience never bought anything – PEOPLE buy goods and services – whether it’s online, through the mail, over the phone or from a billboard. Reach out in an accessible, human way, meet a need or solve a problem, and the sales will follow.

    Seems like basic common sense, but ignore such simplicity at your own peril. You’d be amazed how many top flight professionals can’t apply these basic tenets to their everyday work and score a good number.

    If you found this helpful and would like to read more like this, subscribe to this blog above, and be sure to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Fundamentals Can Save Your Advertising Program

    Fundamentals Can Save Your Advertising Program

    As a consultant, I read – a lot – every day, about different marketing approaches, different angles and aspects of marketing, from social media trends to mobile, to automated e-mail, to article marketing, and a huge variety of other things that bombard my in-box every day, both electronically and in the snail mail and online. With all that reading and absorbing comes some inherent sense of how current corporate professionals in the marketing field are going about their work, what they focus on, what they feel is important, what’s hot and what’s out of fashion.

    In all that absorption, I get to analyze how those marketers work, and how effective their efforts are. I also get called upon to critique their work from time to time, and let them know how a “knowledgeable” audience might view their performances. I was judging a series of ads the other day for a survey of magazine ads and their effectiveness, and I was amazed at how many of the B2B ads didn’t incorporate even the most fundamental, basic elements that should be in all advertising. Top professionals at high-priced agencies were creating ads read by, and hopefully responded to, by other professionals – and there were lousy headlines that were far from compelling if there was one at all, lists of product features with no associated benefits, copy that was difficult to decipher, let alone read and be persuaded by, and a host of other ills that most college-trained marketers have a good handle on by year two. I was amazed and astounded that large, profitable companies with marketing departments staffed with educated, qualified professionals were paying for this level of performance from their agencies, or worse, producing this kind of product themselves!

    Sure, it’s easy to rely on others to cover the basics, and you hope that the high-paid pros know better and they shouldn’t need much supervision. And it’s easier still to simply look at last year’s or last week’s effort and say, “yeah, good enough, run that one again” and perpetuate the poor construction, bad design, lousy and ineffective headlines, poorly-written copy that is neither persuasive or compelling. If it wasn’t, we’d be out of business. But the truth is, if these pros had simply focused on the fundamentals, their work would improve in both effectiveness and creativity.

    1) Get me involved. Write a real headline, one that compels me to read further, that poses a problem a challenge, asks a question, declares a position or benefit.

    2) Write and design it so even I can read it. Real type fonts, in a decent size, in a contrasting color, either in columns, wrapped around an image, bannered at the top or bottom, somewhere that my eye can track it and make sense of it. Make it compelling, readable, persuasive, tell me how it will make my life easier, faster, better, lighten my workload, solve a problem, keep me sane, let me sleep at night, beef up my paycheck, cut my expenses. Tell me the benefits of the product or service, not just what it includes or is comprised of. Tell me something to make me feel I “need” what you’re selling, hopefully leading me to . . .

    3) Include a call to action I can respond to. I get through the headline, it drives me to read the copy to learn more, it ends, and . . . nothing! Give me a phone number, a specific web address, an e-mail or physical address, an offer of some kind, a place to go to learn more, see the product, make a purchase, someone to call to order one, something!

    4) Lay it all out so it naturally drives me to that offer. Americans read left to right, to to bottom, its deeply ingrained in our psyche to do so, so that we may all absorb information in uniform fashion. Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken, start at the top, (it’s called a headline for a reason) and work your way down. Leave the collages for grade school, keep the fancy special effects for the YouTube video – just design it in a way that is pleasing to the eye and supports the other elements.

    5) Make the images and the text support each other and work TOGETHER to get your point across. I can’t tell you how many ads I reviewed that contained an image that had virtually no bearing on what was being sold or discussed. It was either a product shot with no identification or name, no branding, or known function or relevance to the headline or offer, or a shot of some landscape or character that had no real bearing on what was being discussed. You’ve spent a lot of time and money finding, modifying or creating that image, make it work to your advantage to help sell the concept or idea you’re conveying.

    Just following these five guidelines will improve your publication and print advertising immeasurably, and put you ahead of 70% of the highly paid agency professionals that crank out B2B ads on their lunch hour . . . you might even make a sale!

    If you found these helpful, or disagreed with these insights and would like to let me know . . . subscribe to this weekly blog above. And, don’t forget to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • When It Comes To Ads, Trust . . . But Verify

    When It Comes To Ads, Trust . . . But Verify

    One of a marketer’s biggest challenges is creating trust with a new audience. If a sector of your potential customer base has never heard of you, or you’re breaking into a new market in which you have no previous exposure or installed base, you need to create trust with that new audience immediately.

    Unfortunately, some more unscrupulous marketers using techniques that one could call questionably ethical at best, have raised the trust bar for consumers, making our job more difficult. The days when you could say practically anything on TV or radio or in print, and as long as you said it often enough, people would come to believe it, are long gone. The buying public has many more sources of information available to them, and many more ways to verify the information you’re presenting, including speedier access to friends and advisers, websites with reviews, and more.

    That makes it more difficult to present information in anything but an accurate light. It also means that if you do succeed in bamboozling the public with less than honest information or product claims, that fact, once revealed, will travel faster than ever before, and word will spread at a phenomenal rate about the deceptive practices.

    This means that as marketers we have to dig deeper into the creativity well, work harder at crafting that real offer, work smarter at getting people’s attention, draw down on more ways to present different benefits in an appealing way to a more wary consumer. It’s not enough to just say it’s “better”, you have to explain why . . .

    For successful marketers, that means a high level of speed and adaptability, a higher level of selectivity in media choices, and a better understanding of the chosen audience, both psychologically and transactionally. And, now more than ever, reputation is your most valuable asset.

    Advertisers go to great lengths to make their offers sound as appealing as possible, to show their products in their most flattering light – and sometimes they go too far. If you hear a claim regarding a product or company that sounds too good to be true, it’s still a good bet that it shouldn’t be trusted. As our once-fearless leader Ronald Reagan noted, when dealing with the unknown, “Trust . . . but verify”!

    If you found this informational or inspirational, subscribe to this blog and receive more in your inbox weekly. Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”