The real role of advertising?

Measuring the success of advertising is not easy. It really isn't. We sometimes overly focus on the measures we have, even if they are not the best ones. For example, we can measure clicks on banner ads, so we judge success by click-through rates or cost per click. This information is useful, but is only part of the picture.

When I ask students (and colleagues) what is the purpose of advertising, they generally end up with "sales" as an answer. I think it was Hopkins that said the only objective for advertising is to sell. Or was it Ogilvy? Correct of course. But as Paul Feldwick said, that is like saying the objective for a football team is to score goals. It is - but we know the game is not as simple as that. Neither is advertising.

The complexity of measuring advertising is a problem - as it can lead to poor business decisions. If we do not see immediate increase in sales, we may jump to the conclusion that the advertising is not working. Worse, we may decide that 'advertising' itself doesn't work and we may decide to not reinvest in any more advertising.

This is dangerous.

Bryon Sharp has some interesting research showing that the effect of not-investing in advertising can be a slow burn for brands. While not obvious or immediate, over time we can see the negative impact on sales.

Often, advertising is a defensive play, protecting market share by keeping your brand top of mind. Legendary planner Stephen King once wrote that the effect of a lot of advertising is on profits rather than sales - "through making consumers disinclined to try lessor brands for the sake of 2p off."

How to write an (inspiring) creative brief

How to write an (inspiring) creative brief. This is really good. Trust me on this one. Created by Nick Emmel.

Website for finding vintage ads

Anybody pursuing a career in marketing should know their advertising history, so you know what worked in the past, why it worked and if it could work now. If this is your thing, you'll like this - a search engine dedicated to vintage ads. Lot of VW ads from Bill Bernbach's time. And beer ads, coke ads etc.

Found via Drayton Bird's site.

Only 3 reasons why advertising is not working.

Often when sales are not coming as planned, the first impulse is to advertise more. While this may be the correct action, it may not always be.

As a rule of thumb - there are generally only three reasons (in my mind anyway) why advertising is not driving demand. The action required is different for each.

1. Your consumers don't know about your product / offer / solution. This is an awareness play. The action here is actually to advertise more.
2. They may be aware but don't understand your advertising. This is not about doing more advertising. In fact more of the same will do little for you. You need to tweak or change your advertising, as they don't get it. The benefit (rational or emotional) may be hidden or badly explained.
3. They don't care. In this situation, they are aware and they understand, but couldn't care less. There can be lots of reasons here - wrong audience, wrong insight, wrong product, wrong timing, no clear reason to buy, no differentiation. Your job here is to find out what will make them care. Whatever the problem is, one thing you know is that doing more advertising here won't help you much.
   

If you don't know the problem, you can't really fix it.

Advertising works best when you have a specific challenge.

Advertising works best when you have a specific challenge.

While brand 'awareness' as a measure is sometimes legit, it can also be lazy as a strategy. Before deciding that advertising is the answer, spend more time on the question. What exactly is the communication challenge? Try to get beyond "We want more sales". For example, do you want new customers? Or do you want existing customers to buy more of your current product? Or buy something else? Or, as in the Campbell Soup example, do you want them to use more of what they already have? Or use it at a different time?

The 'Got Milk?' campaign is a wonderful example of advertising strategy.

Faced with a steady decline in milk sales over many years, the Californian Milk Processor Board and their agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, devised a very insightful campaign, targeting teenagers and young people.

They realised that milk was boring. Everybody knew milk. Making people more aware of milk would hardly drive sales. What could they possibly say that was new or interesting?

Their used this insight - teenagers often have milk with particular food types, such as chocolate brownies, cookies and peanut butter sandwiches.

So, instead of promoting milk itself - they decided to market milk as a necessity for these other very desirable foods. They now had a very specific communication challenge - to remind their audience how delicious this combination of milk and cookies was. Remind them to have milk with their peanut and butter sandwiches. Get them to want a chocolate brownie. And make sure they have milk on hand so they enjoy it more. Above is one of their original series of ads. They went on to make a lot more.

The result? They stopped the decline. Milk consumption in California increased for the first time in over 10 years.

See full case study here and read more about it in Jon Steel's book.

Want to get into marketing? Read everything.

Image courtesy of Olivander

This post is aimed at anybody trying to get into a marketing communications career.

When starting out 11 years ago in marketing, I got an initial surprise. I realised that many of the marketers I met didn't seem interested in studying the past. In learning more.

For example, I met people that considered themselves direct marketing professionals - yet had not read the books by John Caples, Claude Hopkins or even David Ogilvy. There were people responsible for online marketing who gave me blank looks when I mentioned Jakob Nielsen. I bet there are people today responsible for email marketing who had never read Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus or anything by Seth Godin.

I was surprised but pretty happy. This was a real opportunity for me. So I studied everything I could find.

Direct marketing and online marketing were the areas I was working in. So I started there. I read every book or article I could find by these guys - John Caples, Claude Hopkins, Drayton Bird, Denny Hatch, Bob Stone, Graeme McCorkell, Jay Abraham, Seth Godin, David Ogilvy, Julian L. Simon as well as others somewhat connected to the discipline like Richard Koch and Ries & Trout.

There were obvious links between direct and online marketing. Online was getting bigger, so I decided to upskill myself more. I bought some books on webdesign and usability (Steve Krug, Jakob Nielsen) and taught myself how to build and design websites using the Macromedia products Dreamweaver and Flash. And I started reading Danny Sullivan's newsletters about search engine optimisation.

Later on, I read everything I could find on advertising and brand management, from the likes of Jon Steel and John Grant to Alan Cooper and David A. Aaker.

Third hand knowledge is not a substitute for experience. But even with experience, having knowledge from others will vastly improve your decisions. And if you don't have the experience, and really want to become an expert in an area, start reading everything you can about it.

If you really want to get into marketing communication - start with the authors above. But don't limit yourself to books. Blogs, email newsletters, articles, forums. There is so much information available. Much of it is free. Email me if you want names of other good books.

Have a read of Outliers too - Malcolm Gladwell's explanation on what is required to master any given area.

When I grow up, I want to work in Advertising

The best presentation I saw in 2008

Adrian Ho-Zeus Jones-Beyond Advertising

View SlideShare document or Upload your own.

I wondered recently if advertising was enough to build a brand. Adrian's slides above provide the answer. This could possibly be the best presentation I've seen.

Thanks Una for sending on.

Place ads in your homemade videos

Thought this was interesting.

Found via iFoods.tv

Ads on my blog. Do I share the money with you, my readers?

Need your help here.

Last week, I was offered a few quid for some advertising on my blog. I came clean and explained this might not be the best use of his cash. I'm usually on the buying side of advertising, so see lots of proposals and can honestly say that I'd have real difficulty justifying spending any ad money on my blog. I even offered to help find him more appropriate sites if he could explain his goals in more detail.

Despite all this, he still offered me money. For some text link advertising on selected pages here.

Should I take the money?

I know the reasons for not taking it. It might compromise the site design. It might compromise my views on the brand doing the advertising. Could I no longer be trusted to be honest? Am I selling out? Would it piss off readers and drive them away?

I was going to decline. But it does give me an opportunity to put a theory of mine into practice. So here goes.

What if bloggers were to share ad revenue with their readers? Without readers, no advertiser would be interested in my blog or any other. Unlike traditional media, readers contribute much more than passive reading. Wouldn't it be nice to share some of the financial reward with them?

If I took the money and shared it with you, how does this affect our blogger/reader relationship? Do we all profit from this? (With the exception of the advertiser in this occasion but I've been completely upfront and honest. But there are lots of blogs where an advertiser could get a high return on his investment). Or are we all worse off?

So this is my choice today. Do I...

1. Decline the advertiser's offer?
   
2. Take the money and share with you, my readers?
   
3. Are there other / better options?
   

If we go with Option 2, I'll divide the money by the number of people who leave a comment or drop me a mail. It's probably fair to say that I put more effort into this blog than you, so the split should not be even. But since it is almost Christmas, and as it's not a huge amount of cash, I'm happy to split the money evenly this time. If you read regularly, speak up.

Also, it's worth noting that the advertiser may pull out after reading this, so this might fall through.

Love to hear your thoughts on this. If you know anybody with strong view or experience on this, please let me know.

Image via Riverwatcher09

But can great advertising be a substitute for a great product?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: eco advertising)

I wondered recently if it is possible to build a brand using advertising alone. I'm not sure. One reader suggested that it is possible, but it takes time and is expensive.

But can great advertising be a substitute for a great product? Can average products be successful if their communications are world class? In the long term? I don't actually know. What about this powerful ad for Nike? Not suggesting they are average at all but are Nike runners better than Asics or New Balance? If they are all the same, (and if design is the same) does it come down to better communications or distribution to drive brand affinity?

What about bottled water?

David Taylor blogs at length accusing marketers of focusing too much on the 'sizzle' and not the 'sausage'. He wrote a book last year titled "Never mind the sizzle. Where's the sausage? Branding based on substance. Not spin."

Hamel and Prahalad cite Porsche's dramatic US sales decline in the early 1990s as an example of this. Porsche were living off their famous brand name but were not investing in their cars. Their sales bombed from over 30,000 cars in 1986 to under 4,000 in 1993.

John Grant predicted the demise of image advertising in his 2003 book - 'After Image'. He pointed to examples of brands whose premium advertising no longer worked. For example, Inbev positioned their Stella Artois as 'Reassuringly Expensive', using very visual european cinematic advertising. The reality was it was brewed in northern England and was known widely as 'wife beater'. See 'Where did it all go wrong with the beer they call wife beater?'

In his book, Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin makes the point that 'big ideas' worked when advertising was in charge. But he believes advertising is no longer in charge.

I found this presentation (via Helge Tenno) on an interesting blog called fckie.com. This is really good and worth flicking through more than once. Some nice examples here of where the product is the marketing.

Tom makes an interesting point that remarkable products use advertising as a window display, while unremarkable products use advertising as a smokescreen. Take Apple for example. Their iphone ads are demonstrations - done very stylishly.

Back to Nike for a moment. Clearly their Nikeplus is a perfect example of where the marketing is the product - and is in the product. I've used it and it really is good stuff.

And true to Tom's point, their 'I'm addicted' tv ad for Nike Plus, while truly stunning, is quite transparent and simple.