New rules for changing times

I found myself feeling nostalgic the other day; not for the time (long ago) when Spurs used to beat Arsenal, but the “golden age” of advertising. You know, the 70s and 80s when the ads were better than most of the programmes they interrupted.

This must have been triggered by Campaign’s recent feature “Ten ads that changed advertising”.[1] In particular the 1971 “Hilltop” ad for Coca-Cola (the one with all the kids singing “I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company”), which is just about the first ad I can remember seeing.

Perhaps I was having a bad day, but for one brief moment I wished we could un-invent the Internet, database marketing, mobile phones, multi-channel TV and all the other “advances” that seem to have made the advertising business so bloody complicated nowadays. It must have been great to have worked in the business 30 years ago when everyone knew what advertising was all about - i.e. coming up with great advertisements mainly for the press or TV.

It’s now virtually impossible to open a copy of any trade journal without some guru or another telling us that we’re in the middle of a fundamental revolution and that whatever advertising used to be, it isn’t anymore.

As the founder of a digital marketing agency, I suppose that I should enthusiastically endorse these sentiments. The trouble is, I just can’t get over-excited about being in a world where no-one knows what’s going on. It’s fun for awhile, but the novelty can wear off.

The serious point is that if as a profession we can’t even define what it is we do or how we do it, then no wonder we struggle sometimes to get clients to take us seriously (and pay us anything like what they pay their lawyers, accountants and management consultants).

So in the midst of this bout of yearning for a more simple age, I thought I’d set myself the challenge of bringing a bit of order to the current chaos where the only rule seems to be that there are no rules.

I'm afraid I can't promise to come up with some grand unifying theory of modern advertising; but if I can at least lower a few life rafts off the decks as the SS Advertising goes under, then I’ll be happy.

The interruptive model of advertising

I wasn’t there at the time, but I gather that September 22^nd 1955 was a pretty exciting moment to be alive if you were a forward thinking adman (not too many ad women back then). The reason? The launch of commercial television in the UK. At 8.12pm that evening the first ever TV ad for Gibbs SR toothpaste was broadcast on ITV. Not too many people knew it at the time, but this was the moment when the British advertising industry as we know it was truly born.

For the next three decades, being in advertising meant being involved in producing TV ads (or at least aspiring to produce TV ads once you’d served your apprenticeship writing press ads).

The model was pretty straightforward:

Commercial broadcasters would provide TV programmes that mass audiences of millions of people sat down to watch at a specific time every week. Roughly four times an hour these programmes would be interrupted by advertisements from brands (it was usually brands) who made a single promise encapsulated in a catchy slogan. The successful ads would then be repeated over and over again. Of course, the creative would change every now and again, but some campaigns (I immediately think of Hamlet and Heineken) would run for years with pretty much the same formula.

Easy. Agencies knew what they were doing and, more importantly, clients knew why they used agencies.

And then along came computers and things started to get a little bit more complicated.

The new landscape

The writing has been on the wall for some of the key assumptions in the traditional interruptive model that ruled for the last half of the 20^th century.

Narrowcast not broadcast

For a start, broadcasting as we once knew it is has been dead for some time. In 1980 there was a single commercial broadcaster in the UK (i.e. ITV). By 1997 there were 58 commercial TV channels and this year there are estimated to be almost 800 commercial stations available in the UK. Add in all the other media channels that have emerged since 1980 (the web, DVDs, mobile etc) and it becomes pretty obvious that the days of broadcasting to mass audiences with an "appointment to view" are, with the occasional exception, long gone.

Advertisers therefore have to think of “narrowcasting” rather than broadcasting. In other words, commercial messages need to target the wishes and/or interests of smaller and smaller audiences, even down to the individual viewer when the technology makes this possible.

Entice don’t interrupt

In the new fragmented media world we are all getting more and more adept at filtering out unwanted commercial interruptions. And the technology is making it more and more difficult for advertisers to break into our lives. Recent examples would include the Sky + box, Apple TV and the new BBC iPlayer...all ways of watching content at a time and on a device of our choosing and with the ability to flick through the ads.

Andrew Walmsley, co-founder of i-level argued recently[2] that “interruption and lack of value and relevance are met with rejection. Worse than being ignored, this behaviour is spurned. Because we are now in their space. This is their media, not ours, and the old contract has expired. Interruption fails not because people can avoid our messages, but because they now actively resent our presence.”

So basically advertisers need to get smarter. Instead of interrupting other people’s content with repetitive commercial messages, they’ve got to think about enticing viewers to interact with content they’ve created themselves, or even better, users have generated on their behalf.

Broadly speaking, brand content divides into four categories:

Informational or educational – produced by the brand. See Proctor & Gamble’s site at www.healthexpressions.com as an example of a site providing lots of content on healthy living, and oh, by the way P & G sell lots of products that (allegedly) improve your health!
Fun or entertainment – produced by the brand. For example, websites that give users something fun to do with their time (with nothing really to do with the product they are promoting). With the right design users will hopefully leave the site with a positive association between the time they’ve spent and the brand that created the experience. See 3Sixty’s work for Moo Milk at www.moomilk.co.uk as an example of what I mean.
Informational or educational – user generated. Brands can facilitate their customers providing product advice and tips to fellow customers. Forums and blogs are a great way to do this. Take a look at the forum on Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” website as an example.
Fun or entertainment – user generated. Brands are looking at the likes of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook and wondering how they can harness all that energy to their advantage. A good example is the YouTube style site Ribena has created for users to submit their own videos called Berry Splat TV

User generated content relies on the relatively small percentage of enthusiastic online users who have the time and technical knowhow to write blogs, post videos and participate in forums to publicise their content to their own networks (aka the viral effect). As recent data published by Business Week suggests, the number of users generating their own content is not as small as you might think. And it’s already deeply embedded in the generation under 25. As this age group matures it won’t just be the youth brands that have to get their heads around harnessing the power of online communities and social networks.

It’s not what you say, it’s what you do

Everyone in our industry has been schooled in the notion of the “single minded proposition” that help brands differentiate themselves. For many years translating the core proposition into a memorable advertising slogan was the pinnacle of creativity. And over the years there have been some great lines that became embedded in popular culture. If you are over 40 how could you forget campaigns such as:

Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet.
The ultimate driving machine.
Guinness is good for you.
No FT, no comment.
Finger lickin’ good.
Let your fingers do the walking.
And all because the lady loves Milk Tray.
For Mash get Smash.
Beanz Meanz Heinz.
A Mars a day helps you work rest and play

I don’t think it’s any co-incidence that I can hardly think of any 21^st century slogans that match the resonance of lines from the golden age of advertising in the 20^th century. The reason being that western customers have become more sophisticated, more cynical and more sceptical. Brands need to work a lot harder to persuade individuals to buy their products than simply coming up with a memorable slogan and a funny TV ad. If the “World’s Favourite Airline” leaves you stranded at Heathrow Terminal One for 48 hours, you will think more about the reality of your experience of BA’s service than the promise made by BA’s advertising agency.

So in the age of Google, sceptical consumers are turning in increasing numbers to the internet as a source of recommendation before making a purchase. This has been true of high ticket items like cars and electronic goods for some time. But in an age where people are more and more interested in what goes into the products they buy and how (and where) they were produced, this phenomenon will no doubt play its part in buying decisions across the price range.

In my view, the age of the empowered consumer means that brands are going to have to get out of their corporate ivory towers and engage with their customers in a far more meaningful, genuine and grown up fashion than they’ve ever been used to in the past.

Take Innocent Drinks as a positive example.. The company, renowned for its healthy smoothies, recently did a deal (some would call it a “Faustian Pact”) to sell its drinks at McDonalds restaurants. This decision, as you would expect, attracted a lot of flak from many of Innocent’s health-conscious customers. The interesting thing is that Innocent was prepared to publish some of this criticism on its corporate blog and put their side of the argument without the usual corporate hubris. Regardless of your opinion of Innocent’s commercial decision, this is an interesting pointer to way in which the “it’s not what you say, it’s what you do” trend is going to change the communications culture of big brands.

Lose the sledgehammer

Battering customers into submission through repeating the same message until they are sick of it must still work for some advertisers (although I personally have no intention of “challenging Churchill” and I normally want to throw things at the TV when Tesco tells me that “every little helps”); but this sledgehammer approach is fast losing its power.

Treating consumers as a mass who will all respond to the same message was the only realistic approach in the days of a single commercial broadcaster; it seems very anachronistic in today’s multimedia, interactive world. So rather than pumping out the same tune over and over again, brands need to develop nuanced communications that are more tailored to individual customers’ needs and desires.

All the technology is out there to allow companies to do this. The most obvious examples are Amazon and iTunes with their recommendations based on previous purchasing patterns. What’s often missing is the budgets. There’s a considerable amount of inertia and vested interest tied up in the old interruptive model, and the oil tanker isn’t going to change direction as quickly as the more forward-thinking among us would like.

So, to sum up . . .

In 1955 technology transformed brand building. 50 years later technology is once again heralding a new revolution.

As with all revolutions, there are going to be winners and losers. Those brands that see the opportunity (and not just the threat) need to take some risks and think about:

How to develop a new media strategy in world of media fragmentation and content on-demand.
How they are going to entice consumers to interact with brand content or even generate their own for them.
How the brand behaves when talking to consumers...and not just what it says.
How it is going to engage with individual consumers’ needs and desires.

The advent of commercial television led to the growth of those brands that embraced the new medium. The pioneers were the success stories of the 60s, 70s, 80s and into the 90s.

It’s my opinion that the brands that embrace the new broadband landscape will be the success stories of the next 20 years.

References

[1] Campaign 18 May 2007

[2] Marketing 4^th July 2007

Posted 12 October 2007 by Chris Thurling