2/08/2010 / Labels: Creative, Strategy
Comparative Advertising: Marketing Jujitsu, Part 1
Funny thing was, it wasn't Hertz that Avis was going after. It was National and the rest of the large group of small companies that competed with Avis for the half of the rent a car market Hertz didn't control.
So why attack Hertz – albeit obliquely? Simple. That bedrock principle of advertising: people tend to think both parties in a comparative ad are equal. So when Avis attacked Hertz, the target audience didn't think Avis was better, They thought Avis and Hertz were about the same. That changed the entire rent a car decision-making process. Instead of "Hertz or one of the little guys?" it became "Hertz or Avis?"
That paradigm shift tripled Avis's market share without taking much of a bite out of Hertz. But it ravaged the share of the smaller companies.
It almost didn't happen. A lot of people at Avis thought positioning themselves as "Number 2" made them seem second rate. And a lot thought they would be crushed if Hertz decided to counterattack.
Actually, positioning themselves as number 2 was a promotion. Because up until them there was Hertz, a solid number 1, and Avis and all the rest nowhere.
The timid executives' fear of a counterattack was misplaced. If Hertz hit back, it would be the best thing that could have happened to Avis. Because no matter which company runs a comparative ad, the target audience tends to perceive both companies as comparable.
So if Hertz counterattacked their massive marketing budget – at the time orders of magnitude bigger than Avis's – would be persuading car renters that Hertz and Avis were the same, lifting Avis still farther out of the "all other" category and positioning them as on parity with Hertz.
One key factor in the success of the Avis ads was that they were extremely well written. And their attacks weren't head-on. They didn't say "Hertz has dirty ashtrays," they said "We just can't afford dirty ashtrays."
The focus was always on the fact that as the underdog Avis – as the campaign said – tried harder.
Eventually – and inexplicably – Avis dropped the "We're number 2." and kept only "We try harder." Fortunately for them, the much more memorable "Number 2" claim had been deeply engraved into the target audience's awareness by then. Because if Avis had originally gone with "We try harder" alone, the slogan would have sunk without a trace as just another piece of self-aggrandizing corporate bombast.
The unprecedented claim of the number 2 position was the key to the campaign's memorability and believability.
Eventually Hertz couldn't restrain the urge to rebuff Avis's challenge and ran an ad saying: "For years Avis has told you they're number 2. We'd like to tell you why." The ad didn't get a lot of media weight. It's easy to imagine that some Hertz executive simply couldn't resist hitting back – even though doing so helped Avis by adding credence to Avis's positioning as an equal competitor.
The discount brokerage segment is now a hotbed of generically-targeted comparative advertising.
For several years now Sam Waterston has compared TD Ameritrade to full-price brokers in a series of TV spots. Charles Schwab also attacks the full-price broker segment generically in a brilliant new animated spot from Euro RSCG. The premise is that the protagonist's broker has gotten more out of the protagonist's investment portfolio than the protagonist himself.
It's interesting that the discount brokers apparently believe that there is one large market for brokerage services, and that the full-price brokers are still the more powerful segment of it.
Their choice to compete against another segment of the overall category rather than for share within the discount niche says that they think the migration from full-service to discount has just begun, and there's more business to be gained by capitalizing on the shift than there would be by competing among each other for the investors who have already made the move.
If the competitor is big and well-known, name-no-names comparative advertising can be effective. But some advertisers who really want to capitalize on the competitor's brand power name their competitors' names.
Next week: Kicking brands and taking names.
1/24/2010 / Labels: Research, Strategy
Numbers don't lie--or do they?
Sometimes they can be misleading little rascals.
There are no shades of meaning with numbers. A 2 means 2, and that's it. Clear. Concrete. Not open to discussion or interpretation like "That depends on what the definition of 2 is." Two is this many: one, two.
So why can numbers be so misleading?
For decades companies measured every aspect of customer satisfaction. Image for advanced technology? Check. Friendly salespeople? Check. Like the color? Check. The only problem was these numbers don't happen to correlate to business success. One number – and apparently only one – does: the net promoter score.
A net promoter score is simply the percentage of people rating a company 1 through 6 subtracted from the percentage rating it 9 or 10 in response to the question: "On a scale of 1 to 10 how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or associate?" The only other question that matters is the follow-up: "Why?"
Some creative research measures ads' and commercials' likeability, although there would not seem to be a correlation between how much a commercial is liked and how effective it is at generating the intended behavior in the target audience. So why measure likeability? More to the point: Why make decisions based upon a factor which doesn't impact results?
A number used to measure one factor may be inappropriately applied to another:
Customer satisfaction scores – whether net promoter or any other type – measure customer satisfaction. Period. They do not measure what motivated customers to pick the company in the first place. A lot of research has shown that the factors that determine selection are often very different from those which determine satisfaction.
Marketers only see customers during the transaction, so they're inclined to overemphasize the importance of satisfaction drivers. But those marketers aren't able to observe while prospects are making their purchase decisions. So they're susceptible to confusing the factors that generate satisfaction with the ones that generate sales. When they advertise satisfaction drivers rather than the sales drivers, the results are often disappointing.
Another problem with focusing on satisfaction drivers is that that businesses only see the people who decided to buy from them, not all the ones who went elsewhere. So large areas of opportunity may go unrecognized.
There's occasionally confusion about what the numbers mean:
A recent study showed that only 2% of cars are sold on line. Quite true. But more than ten times that many are sold in dealerships when a customer walks in with a check in the amount previously negotiated on line. And many more sales are begun with on-line research into make, model, price and discounts. So the dealer who naively believes that only 2% of purchases come from the internet is competing at a serious disadvantage to those who know what the numbers really mean.
Often, a crucial number is missing:
A new television campaign has achieved a significant jump in awareness. A test panel found the commercial effective at communicating the intended benefit. (That can be determined in focus groups and one-on-one research.) The media plan delivers strong sustaining-weight reach and frequency. And sales are flat. Are the data flawed? Is the campaign a bust? Or did three new competitors come into the market with launch-weight reach and frequency? If so, the new campaign's share of voice is a small fraction of the company's former portion of media exposure in the category. If that's the case, just holding sales flat is a big win.
On a micro scale, we know an automotive dealership with a third of a competitor's media spending which has been duped into believing media weights are the same by the competitor's "friendly" data sharing. The dealer has never attempted a competitive media analysis, so he wonders why his sales are a fraction of his "friend's," and switches from agency to agency looking for a magic solution to a simple – but unrecognized – problem.
Numbers may not lie, but people sometimes do:
Ask an average group of people if advertising influences their purchase decisions and the answer is a resounding and unanimous "No!" With that sort of response, you'd expect the entire industry to close up shop immediately. Watch how those people behave, however, and it's a very different story.
The new – and excellent – book, What Sticks, makes the point that the only accurate way to measure advertising's impact on purchase decisions is by observation of the behavior. Decades earlier Rosser Reeves devised the Usage Pull methodology which measured open-ended purchase intent responses of people who had and had not been exposed to a brand's advertising. Both valid. But asking "Would that ad convince you to buy?" isn't.
And, of course, there's always misdirection:
Magicians use flamboyant gestures with one hand to divert attention from what the other hand is doing. Matadors dupe bulls into charging a cape rather than the person wielding it. It's called misdirection, and it's all too common in marketing communications.
Media salespeople, agencies and even internal teams sometimes say, in effect "Look over here!" to direct attention away from what really matters. Like the media rep who proves conclusively that her or his station is #1 in the market, while conveniently omitting the fact that it doesn't reach your company's target demographic. Or the agency which trumpets a commercial's Advertising Age "most liked" ratings while ignoring dismal awareness and preference numbers. Or even the sales manager whose PowerPoint focuses on increased sales while side-stepping the fact that all of those sales were made by offering such deep discounts that the company lost money on each and every one.
We love numbers:
Numbers are the heart and soul of marketing. At BrainPosse we love the little rascals. Everything we do is focused on our favorite: ROI. Like anything someone loves, numbers deserve understanding, respect and to be treated right.
1/18/2010 / Labels: Creative, Strategy
By the numbers.
More memorable and meaningful than puffery.
Headlines and sig lines (or strap lines) can be the most memorable part of ads. But all too often they're meaningless fluff. "Finest," "Best," "Most trusted," "Best value" and others of that vague ilk are verbal mush without any distinctive hook to aid recall. One tremendous mnemonic aid is to quantify the claim with a hard number. Consider these:
"This bread is very nutritious." or "Builds strong bodies 12 ways?" No contest which would be remembered. (The Wonder Bread slogan began as eight ways in the 1930s and grew to twelve ways in the 1950s.) As an aside, Wonder Bread built strong bodies by throwing a couple of vitamin enrichment tablets about the size of hockey pucks into the dough to replace nutrients removed in processing.
"This fine automobile is really quiet." or "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock," the 1958 Ogilvy classic.
How about: "We condense a lot of tomatoes to make our tomato paste," or "Who put eight, great tomatoes in that little bitty can?" Stan Freberg's wonderful radio jingle. The ending was a thing of beauty: "You know who. You know who. You know who." The jingle was followed with the spot's only spoken words: "In case you don't, it was Contadina." The final word was the only mention of the brand. That broke a lot of rules, but it got tremendous recall, and built the Contadina brand.
Orbachs, New York's recently closed bargain-priced department store, might have said "A tradition of bargain prices ever since our founding." Instead Doyle Dane Bernbach (now DDB) said "Our summer sale began Oct. 4, 1923."
When all Coca-Colas came is the distinctive six-ounce hour-glass shaped bottle, an upstart competitor came after them with a jingle built around a number:
Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,
Twelve full ounces, that's a lot.
Twice as much for a nickel, too.
Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.
How 'bout:
"15 minutes could save you 15% or more." Two numbers that say a little time could save you a lot of money with Geico.
"Twice as much of the pain reliever doctors recommend most" (Anacin).
"99 44/100% Pure?" The slogan worked for Ivory from its beginnings in 1882.
"Rolaids consumes 47 times its weight in excess stomach acid."
"In Soviet Georgia, where they eat a lot of yogurt, a lot of people live past 100." Marsteller's classic Dannon campaign was way more effective than simply saying "Yogurt is good for you." And the commercials featuring Georgian centenarians were wonderful.
"Four out of five doctors surveyed recommended Trident sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum." The beginning of a hoary tradition of four-out-of-five doctor commercials.
"How can one calorie taste so good?" helped build the Tab brand.
"Eight out of ten cats prefer Whiskas" (although they don't ask for it by name).
The specificity of a number makes the claim more believable. After all, numbers don't lie, do they? It also makes the claim more memorable. A number has sticking power that simply isn't there in pure puffery.
To learn more about the impact of numbers, contact us by clicking here or by calling (865) 330-0033.
1/12/2010 / Labels: Creative, Strategy
The fundamentals of motivation.
Why people do what they do.
In psych 101 we learned that motivation is the impetus behind actions or decisions. We also learned three basic ways in which motivations can be categorized. That information is more valuable to us now than at any time since the psych 101 final exam. Because understanding the structure of motivation helps us harness it in our marketing communications.
Approach/Avoidance
In 1947 Hans Eysenck began a half-century reign as the 600-pound gorilla of motivational studies by publishing his watershed paper on the biological basis for approach/avoidance behavior. His paper, the learned commentaries on it, and Eysenck's subsequent work are far beyond the comprehension of anyone at BrainPosse. Fortunately, there are still Cliffs Notes, just as there were for psych 101.
Approach/avoidance are very deep-seated, "old-brain" behaviors. Approach and avoidance have been observed in life forms as simple as amoebas. This is stuff our ancestors did long before we evolved into target audiences, prospects and consumers.
An approach reaction is triggered by the anticipation of a positive outcome. It is action oriented and activates behavior. It's going for the gusto. Approach motivations make people do things, so they're effective for new product launches. "Try it, you'll like it." is a classic "approach" appeal.
An avoidance reaction is triggered by fear of a negative outcome. It tends to inhibit action. Avoidance motivations keep people from doing things, so they're effective for market leaders, or to prevent people from changing an established habit. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was a classic avoidance appeal when IBM was the market leader. The message was don't take a risk and try something new.
Which is stronger? Most people are more strongly motivated by avoidance of a negative than attainment of a positive. But it depends on context. If you're marketing a strong brand with substantial share, an avoidance appeal is usually stronger. If you're launching a new product, an approach appeal almost always works best.
The Hierarchy of Needs
Abraham Maslow's paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" defined the categories of human needs in 1943, and sixty-four years later the definitions are still accepted. Essentially, Maslow established successive categories of needs. His concept was that people concern themselves with the more basic needs first, and only move on to other needs when those more basic needs have been satisfied. Maslow represented his hierarchy of needs as a pyramid, but it could have been a ladder, a stack, a straight line or any other sequential representation. The key is that one set of needs must be satisfied before the next set is pursued. The categories of needs:
Physiological: Air, water, food, sleep, warmth, excretion.
Safety: Physical safety, safety of family and loved ones, health, protection of property, job security.
Love/belonging: friends, family, sexual intimacy, community.
Esteem: Self esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, recognition, admiration.
Cognitive: Learn, explore, discover, understand.
Aesthetic: Beauty in imagery, harmony, poetry, nature.
Self actualization: Make the most of ones abilities and potential and be the most that one can be.
Spiritual: Experiences which transcend the self, a sense of purpose, a feeling of integration with society
In simplest terms, Maslow's hierarchy means that the most powerful persuasion is at the most basic level of unfulfilled need.
Direct and Indirect Motivation
Direct motivation is simple. Perform the behavior, get the reward. Go to the gym, get into shape. Indirect motivation takes an interim step: Go to the gym and get into shape so you'll be attractive to a potential mating partner.
Which is stronger? Depends. The advantages of the simplicity of a direct claim are powerful. But so is the potential of an ultimate indirect benefit.
The whole point of marketing communications is to motivate people to act, think or feel in a way that will build companies' bottom lines. Remembering the fundamentals of motivation will help do that. It's a Vince Lombardi approach to the craft of persuasion. And like his maxim on blocking and tackling, it gets the job done.
1/05/2010 / Labels: Creative, Social media
Connecting online
Are you really worth the energy it takes to click?
We have plenty of art director friends who strongly encourage us to limit copy in print ads. And they have a legitimate reason:
“You don’t have to tell everything in the ad. Just direct the reader to the website,” they tell us soothingly, often in a tone reserved for hard-to-train puppies. “Your job is now easier.”
Hmm.
But what happens when the ad readers do go to the website? Is there content available there that completes the interaction started by the ad? Is it truly worth the reader’s time to visit the website, and does the website lead the reader onward to a relationship or sale?
That’s where the job of copywriting (and art direction) hasn’t gotten easier. The website is now an extra step in the communications process. And boy, is it hungry.
As communications professionals, we used to feel that much of our job was done once a prospect had made the decision to contact a company. After all, the goal of the ad, news story, or other communications piece was to generate interest, and once the prospect was in the hands of the sales force, it was up to the sales staff to complete the transaction.
Now, research shows that over 70% of initial meaningful contacts with an organization or product come through its website. Before prospects will make direct contact with your people, they’ll see what you have to say online.
The remarkably good thing about this is that we no longer have the sick feeling in our stomachs that occurred when clients proudly would take us into back rooms and show us the boxes and boxes of leads that our ads had created--leads that just sat in the boxes and were never followed up.
The bad thing about this is that we now have the ongoing challenge of making sure that when website visitors come, we have the right content in place—and more than enough of it—so that they’ll take the next step of contacting the organization or making the decision to buy.
The copywriting thing hasn’t gotten easier. We’re not just writing the ad anymore.
We’re writing for two.
And web visitors know that they should expect more than just an electronic form of a brochure once they get to your site. After all, the rest of the web is giving them forums, studies, entertainment, and many other ways to gather, interact, and converse.
Jakob Nielsen, a web designer/consultant, summed things up nicely in an Ad Age article by Matthew Creamer: “The web is not an advertising medium. It is not a selling medium; it is a buying medium. It is user controlled.”
That’s one of the reasons why Facebook fell on its face when it implemented its Beacon social ads and overstepped perceived privacy bounds. Users felt control had been taken away from them. The same is true when a website offers information that is irrelevant or incomplete. The user doesn’t feel as if he or she is being taken seriously.
But user control is a tremendous opportunity as well: How much stronger is the connection with your brand when people feel they’re choosing to interact with it, rather than having you force it upon them.
Creating a website that offers the proper user experience requires work, interaction, listening—and, typically, plenty of adjustment and fine-tuning. The user experience changes with site visits. The first-time visitor is looking for something very different than an ongoing visitor. Here are a few observations.
A website is not always about entertainment.
Budweiser discovered this with the failure of budtv.com. People didn’t necessarily want to have a new TV channel based around a brewer. But Johnson and Johnson is doing pretty well with babycenter.com, a website sponsored by a number of J&J brands that provides detailed information about child care.
We also know of a number of technical websites that are required bookmarks for engineers, because they provide the “heads up-heads down” info that is required to get work done (“heads up” information is news about new ideas and products; “heads down” information are the charts, tables, and details needed to write the spec.)
A website has to be refreshed.
One critical sin is not offering new content if you expect visitors to come more than once. And it’s difficult to do properly. We see lots of sites with great intentions—special news sections and highlight boxes that never get updated. One of our favorites is the site for Web Content Awareness Day (February 9, in case you don’t have it on your calendar), which hadn't been updated since 2007, and, last we checked, had been taken down.
If you’re going to treat the website as an extension of the ad, then there has to be a connection.
Again, the information superhighway to hell is paved with good electronic intentions. We’ve followed numerous ads to websites, looking for the ideas or solutions offered and found (at least at first glance) dead ends. There was not online reference to the ad content or message. And if we did find the information we were looking for buried in the website, we found it only because of our morbid curiosity. Most visitors won’t take the time.
We’re strong believers in the concept that ads, news releases, and other communications now are intertwined with website content. And in one sense, it does make the job easier. Communications can be simpler, cleaner, and focused on a single message (which is all you can ever hope to get across in an ad).
But that just means that there’s more pressure than ever on your online content. Is your website really worth it to the people who take the time to click?
To find out how BrainPosse can help you keep the fires of good web content stoked, click here or call (865) 330-0033.
12/14/2009 / Labels: Creative, Media
Low confidence = low recall.
People pay less attention to TV spots in a recession. Here's how to get them to notice yours.
Ad spending is down, agencies are cutting staff, revenues for most media are shrinking. And ad recall is also down.
One especially noteworthy example comes from a Gallup & Robinson study of Super Bowl ads over the last twelve years. The study found these extra-pricy ads had day-after commercial recall 11% lower than normal when consumer confidence is weak. And right now consumer confidence, though rising, is still down (the index was 49.5 in November). The January 2009 Consumer Confidence Index was 37.7, an all-time low.
Great. So not only are times tough, but now it's tougher than ever to get target audiences to remember our paeans to the brands we're advertising.
What should an advertiser do?
Does this mean marketers should abandon TV when times get tough? Emphatically: No! See our white paper "Good Marketing for Bad Times" for more on the perils of cutting media presence during a recession. And take some of these common-sense steps to reinforce your commercials' recall and effectiveness:
First, don't panic.
Recall is just part of the process of turning someone watching your commercial into a customer buying your product. The sequence is still: awareness, persuasion, recall, purchase intent. It's important to balance the sometimes conflicting factors which influence each of those four parts of the process to get an optimum overall outcome.
Remember that the drop in recall is across the board. It's not just impacting your brand, but all the brands that compete with it, too. So although it's not good news, at least it's just as bad for everyone. Which means the playing field is level.
Next step is to tilt the playing field in your brand's favor. You can do that by avoiding things that reduce recall and doing the things that increase it.
Avoid reducing recall:
Don't get stuck in the middle. According to a Burke study more than 20 years ago, and a great deal of confirming data since, spots in the middle of a commercial cluster have 14% less recall than those in the first position.
Stay away from sex and violence. Commercials on programs with sexual or violent content get 19% less recall than those on mainstream shows according to a University of Michigan study.
Don't be bland. Nancy Fritz's article in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Sciences notes that bland, neutral commercials get lower recall than either irritating or pleasant ones.
Don't be obtuse. A clearly stated functional benefit and brand association increases recall from 1% to 8% (depending on the category of benefit) according to a Journal of Advertising study on the effects of executional elements on TV recall.
Don't be shy. Reinforce the brand name in audio and video. The previously quoted Journal of Advertising study found that audio brand name and video brand identification increased recall 8%.
Don't hit the mute button on your own spot. Media multitasking is the norm today. A Peanut Labs survey of Gen Y media use found that 57% use the internet while watching TV, and 10% read while the set is on. So if you run tastefully minimalist soundtrack and limit the product identification to a silent logo, you're losing a big slice of your potential audience and recall.
Don't multitask. David Stewart and Scott Koslow's "Executional Factors in Advertising Effectiveness" study, adding another brand (such as a corporate brand, like Tide, from Procter & Gamble) to a spot reduces recall 2%. (We think the number is way low. We've seen data indicating the loss may be ten times that amount or more.)
Increase recall:
Advertise on captivating shows. A Millward Brown study found that shows which engage viewers tend to hold the audience – and audience interest – through commercial clusters. Predictably, commercial recall is increased.
Use Mnemonics. Mnemonics are, literally, "devices used to aid recall." Five of the most familiar types include:
1. Music: Most people can think of a song from long in their past and replay the music and lyrics in their heads. Jingles have fallen into creative disrepute, but they ditties stick in people's heads like Crazy Glue.
2. Rhyme: "Takes a licking and keeps on ticking." has been recalled for more than half a century.
3. Poetic Foot: This is the spoken equivalent of music's beat, the sequence of syllables which are accented and unaccented. (The number of feet per line is the meter. Phrases with regular accent schemes are significantly more memorable than those which are randomly-accented. You may vaguely remember the primary types of poetic foot from tenth-grade English:
• Iambic (unaccented/accented), as in: "We bring good things to life."
• Trochaic (accented/unaccented), as in: "Have it your way."
• Anapestic (unaccented/unaccented/accented), as in: "Have a Coke and a Smile."
• Dactylic (accented/unaccented/unaccented), as in: "Reach out and touch someone."
4. Alliteration: A series of words beginning with the same sound (not necessarily the same letter). It worked for years with "Greyhound going great." Sometimes the alliteration can be on alternate words, as it is on the country song that also features the bus line, "Thank God and Greyhound She's Gone."
5. Repetition: Repetition is one of the most important tools in marketing communications. Repetition is one of the most important tools in marketing communications. Repetition is one of the most important tools in marketing communications.
For more on mnemonics see our earlier article "Don't forget the mnemonic."
Build recall into your spots. Some production techniques increase recall.
Sylvia White's paper presented to the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Media highlights four:
1. Normal (eye level) or extremely high camera angles generate greater recall than other shots.
2. Medium shots have better recall than long shots.
3. A moderate editing pace builds higher recall the=an either extremely slow or extremely fast editing.
4. Moderate subject movement is more effective at building recall than either a static subject or extreme subject motion.
Among the 139 production factors studied in the Stewart and Koslow paper noted previously, these eleven produced double-digit increases in recall:
1. A setting directly related to the product and/or message increased recall 12%.
2. A cute or adorable tone or atmosphere increased recall 17%.
3. Humorous commercials have 13% higher recall than average.
4. Opening a commercial with surprise or suspense increases recall 10%.
5. A product demonstration gains a phenomenal 25% more recall. (Ad aesthetes will gnash their teeth over this one. But a product demo doesn't have to be clunky.)
6. Animation increases recall 15%.
7. A child or infant as the principal character boosts recall 10%. (We suspect the e-Trade baby does much better than that.)
8. An animated principal character adds 16% to recall. (We can't get that wretched bee with Antonio Banderas' voice in the Nasonex spot out of our heads.)
9. An emotional appeal gets 18% more recall than a rational approach.
10. Brand differentiation (rather than vapid puffery) nets a 15% recall increase.
11. Having the product on screen for 5.1 seconds or longer increases recall 13%.
Don't just build recall. Build your bottom line. Recall is just one of the factors that contribute to a successful marketing communications program. It matters, but only because it can help build a brand's bottom line.
12/07/2009 / Labels: Demographics, Strategy
Defining target audiences
Just as important as what you say is whom you say it to.
Direct mail marketers have always known that their success depends as much on list to which they mail as on their offer and creative. Lists with identical demographic and geographic selects and equivalent non-deliverable percentages can generate response rates that vary by 300% or more.
Obviously target audience selection is just as important in traditional mass and digital media.
Consider the Super Bowl as a case in point. At the 2008 event (before the wheels came off the economy), the cost of reaching 97.5 million viewers was $2.7 million, a CPM of $27.69. A bit high, but not off the chart. Especially when you consider that commercials in the Super Bowl are virtually TiVo proof.
But... that's $27.69 for every man, woman and child in the audience. Budweiser bought seven of those $2.7 million spots (hopefully a volume discount reduced the $18.9 million list price a bit) to reach male beer drinkers. The CPM versus males –all males – was $46.15. Which is getting pricy. And not all males are beer drinkers. And not all beer drinkers drink a lot of beer. The true CPM(t) – that is, cost per thousand members of their target audience – was probably on the order of $400 for each one of Bud's seven spots.
Who's their true target audience? Heavy beer drinkers. Back in the 1960s the marketers at Schaeffer Beer, a Northeast regional brand, and their agency, BBDO, figured out that the 80/20 rule worked big time in the beer market. Heavy beer drinkers – those who drink six or more 12-oz. beers a day – accounted for more than 80% of total beer sales. BBDO's Jim Jordan created the first beer campaign focused on consumers' need states with the classic "Schaeffer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one." The two-beat structure and a simple jingle made the positioning unforgettable – and highly successful – for years.
Later, Miller went Schaeffer one better with their classic Miller Time campaign. McCann-Erickson strategist, Van vanBortel, did some research to determine exactly who the heavy beer drinkers were.
His answer: the reparative personality type. The group was defined as blue-collar males, aged 35+, in first-level management jobs. A steel-mill foreman, for example. But vanBortel went a crucial step farther, with insight into the psychographics of the reparative personality group. These men felt that their work kept the economy moving, supported their families and was underappreciated. Their daily half-dozen or more beers were their self-bestowed recognition and reward for their otherwise unrecognized contributions.
Van's portrait of the heavy beer drinker was the raw material from which Bill Backer and Billy Davis crafted the great Miller Time campaign. It's been a while, so here's a reminder of the kind of copy used to open the spots: "Today you poured enough steel to build a bridge across the Mississippi. But the five o'clock whistle just blew, and now it's Miller Time."
The campaign talked to the target audience in their terms and about their feelings. And it was a phenomenal success. In fact, it was so much of a success that it was copied by Budweiser's "For all you do, this Bud's for you."
There are many examples of target audience selection impacting marketing success. A few we've taken part in include:
- Forms automation software developer CLR Sprinter had been targeting IT departments. After all, they were selling software. But a BrainPosse principal realized that their software offered no perceptible advantage to the IT group, but had significant sales and operational benefits. Switching the target audience to top management and marketing management increased qualified leads by a factor of nine, and reduced the sales cycle from a year to three months.
- Employer group health insurer Cariten had been running a television campaign target to the general public when a BrainPosse principal was asked to develop a new strategy and creative. It became apparent that while an organization's employees were the ones covered by health insurance, they had virtually no say in the choice of insurance provider selected for coverage. Redefining the target audience as top management, financial executives and human resources department personnel helped multiply Cariten's sales, and took them from a $14.7 million loss to a $10.6 profit.
- The Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau targeted its campaign to individual travelers within a day's drive of the city. A BrainPosse principal realized that the available budget would not be able to reach and attract a significant number of individual visitors, and re-focused the effort on package tour operators and convention and meeting planners. In the first year of the new campaign more than 300,000 additional room nights were booked.
- Most hospitals get a substantial percentage of their admissions through emergency department visits. However, a disproportionate number of emergency department patients are uninsured. A BrainPosse client hospital is about to experiment with a direct mail effort targeted to ZIP+4 carrier routes which have demographics consistent with high levels of private insurance and Medicare coverage, to attract paying emergency room patients without attracting increased numbers of non-paying patients. In many markets, addressable cable is another practical alternative to reach demographically/geographically targeted audiences.
The targeting capabilities of the internet offer tremendous opportunities to marketers. There is still a lot of disagreement about preferred vehicles, metrics and even pricing. But as Lord Leverhume or John Wannamaker (depending on whether you're a Brit or an American) famously said: "I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is, I don't know which half." There's enough potential in the net to make it worth wasting half an internet budget to take advantage of what the other half will bring in.
We happen to believe in search, both organic and paid. Being at or near the top of the list when someone Googles "refrigerators" will, of course, mean paying to reach a very few kids doing a report on the history of refrigeration. But an investment in either search engine optimization or paid search will get a lot more people who are in the market for a new side-by-side.
A lot of industry data seems to indicate that banners and pop-ups get less viewership with each passing day but, on a pay-per-click basis, contextual or behavioral ads obviously deliver a well-targeted audience that has at least seen the advertiser's message. If the product or service lends itself to cost-per-action pricing, it's a no-lose proposition for the advertiser.
As with traditional media, the key to effective targeting online is in well-thought-out audience definition. Who are the key purchase decision makers for the bulk of sales in the product category? How many of them do you need to reach? And in what environment will you find them most receptive to your message?
Target audience selection alone won't do the job, of course. But without good target audience selection even the most insightful strategy and the most effectively communicating creative won't deliver bottom-line results.
Want to re-examine who you need to reach and how you need to reach them? Contact us by clicking here or by calling (865) 330-0033.
11/09/2009 / Labels: Reviews, Strategy
Do The Classic Ad Books Still Matter?
Confessions of An Advertising Man by David Ogilvy.
Even though David Ogilvy worked as a researcher before founding his agency, Confessions of an Advertising Man, relies much more on his opinions than on observable data. Of course Ogilvy, not a person hobbled by excessive modesty, thought his opinion was far more authoritative than mere facts.
Like Claude Hopkins and Rosser Reeves, Ogilvy was a copywriter (and, like Reeves, an agency head). And also like Hopkins and Reeves, he wrote his book as a publicity and sales tool for his agency and himself. Like them, he included long lists of rules for effective advertising. Some are wonderfully self-serving--such as advising clients to "Make sure your agency makes a profit."
But, self-serving or not, Ogilvy's rules for being a good client and for creating a great campaign are as valid today as they were when Confessions of an Advertising Man was published in 1963. Here are the lists without the pages of explanation each got in the book (with a little amplification when the meaning isn't immediately clear):
How To Be A Good Client:
2. Select the right agency in the first place.
3. Brief your agency very thoroughly indeed.
4. Do not compete with your agency in the creative area.
5. Coddle the goose who lays the golden egg. (provide enough time and resources to do the job well.)
6. Don't strain your advertising through too many layers.
7. Make sure your agency makes a profit.
8. Don't haggle with your agency.
9. Be candid and encourage candor.
10. Set high standards.
11. Test everything.
12. Hurry. (Profit is a function of time.)
13. Don't waste time on problem babies (Back your successes and abandon your losses.)
14. Tolerate genius.
15. Don't under spend. (The surest way to overspend on advertising is not to spend enough to do the job properly.)
How To Build Great Campaigns:
1. What you say is more important than how you say it.
2. Unless your campaign is built around a great idea, it will flop.
3. Give the facts. (The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything.)
4. You cannot bore people into buying.
5. Be well-mannered, but don't clown. (You should try to charm the consumer into buying.)
6. Make your advertising contemporary.
7. Committees can criticize advertisements, but they cannot write them.
8. If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops pulling.
9. Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your own family to read.
10. The image and the brand. (Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image.)
11. Don't be a copy-cat.
Ogilvy's rules on specific techniques for crafting ads and commercials have had mixed success at surviving the passage of the forty-six years since Confessions of an Advertising Man was published.
Some still work:
1, Every headline should appeal to the reader's self-interest.
2. Five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.
3. Don't be a bore. Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating.
4, Readership falls off rapidly up to fifty words of copy, but drops off very little between fifty and 500 words.
5. Twice as many people read captions as read body copy.
6. If you start your body copy with a large initial letter [Note: what we call a drop cap today] you will increase your readership by an average of 13%.
7. Photographs sell more than drawings.
Some don't:
1. When you advertise in magazines and newspapers, you must start by attracting the reader's attention. But in television the viewer is already attending [paying attention]. (We wish.)
2. Always try to inject news into your headlines, because the consumer is always on the lookout for new products, or new ways to use an old product, or new improvements in an old product. (Not is this era of information overload and surfeit of choices.)
3. Resist the temptation to write the kind of copy which wins awards. (Bob Isherwood, worldwide creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi, commissioned research which showed that award-winning advertising is significantly more effective than the dull stuff.)
4. Good copywriters have always resisted the temptation to entertain. (One look at the awareness numbers of Super Bowl commercials makes it clear that entertainment value and awareness/preference track very closely today.)
5. [In television advertising] Words and pictures must march together, reinforcing each other. (Today pictures are frequently used to make an emotional connection while words carry a simple sales message.)
6. Don't sing your selling message. (We did a health insurance campaign that increased awareness 600% and revenues 44% by singing the main message.)
All in all, a much more than respectable percentage of the maxims in Confessions of an Advertising Man are still good guides for agencies and clients. And the book is still a good read.
10/26/2009 / Labels: Strategy
The Four Powerful Words
A simple phrase that gets attention. Even after all these years.
10/19/2009 / Labels: Public relations, Social media
The Schadenfreude of Social Media
What to do when the mob turns on you.
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