Let's talk yogurt.
Well, the advertising of yogurt at least.
Advertising is an intrigue for me and one of my many side-line interests. I like it because it is intangible, ephemeral, ethereal and almost unmeasurable. And yet companies will often spend as much money on advertising a product as they will on developing the product. A good product may very well sell itself, in which case how do you identify the difference in sales that an advert has created? It is often very difficult to identify a control point against which to measure it.
Some people, even within the industry, confuse the notions of advertising and branding. Branding is hugely wide. Branding is about advertising, but also about goodwill, culture, the product of itself, portfolio, strategy, history and much more. Branding is far more intangible, unidentifyable, precious and fragile. No-one can forget how Gerald Ratner managed to fatally damage the entire brand of his business with some often misquoted or decontextualise comments about the quality of his products. But some say the damage had already been done to the brand when he devalued his portfolio and ignored the history of the business by embarking on a lower-profit-per-item, higher-turnover strategy.
And then we have already seen how Apple has had incredibly successful brand-management with very little, or very simple advertising. It managed to create a cool brand seemingly effortlessly, and certainly far cheaper. These days it barely needs to advertise as its core of customers will do the product placement for it, whipping up their own cultish-frenzy when a simple press release anounces the release of a new product.
Advertising is much more direct. Advertising is the actual method used to get the brand or product name in front of the customer. It is the print article or the billboard poster, the radio jingle or the 30 seconds of television air. It is the clicklink at the side of your Facebook newsfeed, it is the website which that leads you to, and it is the press release which precurses all of this.
There was a very interesting interview with Rosie Arnold of Bartle Bogle and Hegarty on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live (listen again available here for UK readers) in which she discusses key advertising campaigns and general trends within the advertising industry. If you get the opportunity you really should give it a listen.
One of the mistakes made by rookie advertisers in recent years has been to concentrate solely on 'new media' and 'social media'. Their advertising campaign is purely about trying to get people to retweet a message, or get users to share a Youtube video. These campaigns usually have very limited success on their own, and one has to wonder how it is the advertising agency has convinced the client to drop traditional media. Afterall, if you have made a clip for Youtube, it isn't going to cost much more to put it on television. And if you do, not only have you immediately increased the number of people you are directly advertising to, you have a greater number of people who are likely to share on their Facebook or Twitter thereby cementing the social-stretegy too. Social media should be used to diversify your offering, rather than to concentrate it: to support the 'core' campaign, rather than be it. Spread the message over a number of channels, rather than shed the more traditional ones. Well, assuming it is a good enough video.
Another failure of the new-focused advertisers is the abuse of social media, rather than the use of it. Yes, use your website and a few Facebook posts to get your message out there, but if you are too forceful it can be counter-productive. By all means offer a discount to those who subscribe to your Twitter feed, but if you spam their wall with too many posts, not only will they quickly unfollow you, but your core brand will get hurt as desperate or ignorant of their customers. Yes, ask your followers to pass on information as to your brand, but do so too forcefully and people will write your brand off as a con, wanting more for itself than it is a benefit to its customers.
I recently had to 'unlike' an art gallery on my Facebook page. I still enjoy going to the art gallery, but over the course of an hour they posted seven different posts about upcoming events. Not only did I ignore the contents of the last four or five posts, but I now will not see any of their future posts. That shows how a social marketing strategy can fail, and fail badly. Had they been witty, intelligent, teaser feeds then I would probably have paid attention.
And that is a very key point: the message needs to be good enough in the first place. Those that have 'gone viral' have been excellent pieces of advertising which people have naturally wanted to share.
One of the brands which has done very well out of the broad-based approach is Yeo Valley: the organic yogurt and milk company. Their Boy-Band Farmer advert has gone viral with far more people seeing it online on Youtube, their own website, on Facebook or being sent by email than saw its first airing on the Saturday night. So how did they do it? It is a good, funny video that people can interact with and that they want to share. It, far over and above the acts on the X Factor was the gossip in the office kitchen on the Monday morning. The new media here complimented the primary, traditional strategy. It gave people further resources to interact with, rather than being the resource. They didn't over-concentrate on the new media aspect exclusively (or even too heavily) if you listen to Rosie Arnold you will see the primary benefit of the Youtube channel was to get a much more immediate idea as to how the traditional advert had been received, rather than waiting around for sales figures, reviews, reports and research. Yes, it made sharing easier, but if people were going to share the message they were going to do so regardless.
Contrast this with the new Muller yogurt advert. I don't get what message they are trying to get over (and apparently quite a number of the comments on the Youtube page agree with comments such as 'pointless' and 'What is this commercial for'). There doesn't seem to be a story to the advert, or if it does it neither comes over nor resolves. It seems to be very formulaic. Someone has sat at the agency and simply gone "retro is cool, kids stuff is cool, animation over live-action is very 'now', lets throw it all together and we must have a hit." And so they don't. Whilst their previous adverts were very slick and smooth, simply using dreamy pictures of nice people enjoying life or the yogurts accompanied by Nina Simone's immediately infectious and enthusing I Got Life, their current advert doesn't actually say what their product is supposed to do.
And part of the reason they missed the message is that they missed the market. They didn't know who they were marketing to. That or they thought they were marketing to everybody. Yeo Valley identified very specifically one single advertising slot that they wanted, they identified very carefully what demographic would be watching at that time and they identified what that demographic wanted: entertainment and light relief. Humour. They didn't just want yogurt forcing down their throats.
Now there is a risk with that strategy: get the message slightly wrong; mis-identify the demographic or their needs and you may have missed entirely and spent thousands of pounds wastefully.
However, the Muller advert trys to spray far too widely and ends up missing all of its targets (if it actually had any). The 'kids is cool' idea works very well if you actually know to whom you are trying to retro. But they don't, and so they include as many different references as they can do, further confusing things. So we have Kit from Knight Rider, Transformers, Mr Men, Yogi Bear, Wacky Races and others. The cost of the IP rights alone must have been astronomical. And going for retro of itself has many risks amongst which are the chances that it could appear dated; and there is always a potential backlash of people feeling Yogi bear as sold-out or the cherished memories of Transformers has been denigrated for a bit of mouldy milk. For such a huge campaign (at 1m31s the advert is practically epic compared to usual 30-60s ads) this is a terrible miss.
Now, where did I put that yogurt...
Well, the advertising of yogurt at least.
Advertising is an intrigue for me and one of my many side-line interests. I like it because it is intangible, ephemeral, ethereal and almost unmeasurable. And yet companies will often spend as much money on advertising a product as they will on developing the product. A good product may very well sell itself, in which case how do you identify the difference in sales that an advert has created? It is often very difficult to identify a control point against which to measure it.
Some people, even within the industry, confuse the notions of advertising and branding. Branding is hugely wide. Branding is about advertising, but also about goodwill, culture, the product of itself, portfolio, strategy, history and much more. Branding is far more intangible, unidentifyable, precious and fragile. No-one can forget how Gerald Ratner managed to fatally damage the entire brand of his business with some often misquoted or decontextualise comments about the quality of his products. But some say the damage had already been done to the brand when he devalued his portfolio and ignored the history of the business by embarking on a lower-profit-per-item, higher-turnover strategy.
And then we have already seen how Apple has had incredibly successful brand-management with very little, or very simple advertising. It managed to create a cool brand seemingly effortlessly, and certainly far cheaper. These days it barely needs to advertise as its core of customers will do the product placement for it, whipping up their own cultish-frenzy when a simple press release anounces the release of a new product.
Advertising is much more direct. Advertising is the actual method used to get the brand or product name in front of the customer. It is the print article or the billboard poster, the radio jingle or the 30 seconds of television air. It is the clicklink at the side of your Facebook newsfeed, it is the website which that leads you to, and it is the press release which precurses all of this.
There was a very interesting interview with Rosie Arnold of Bartle Bogle and Hegarty on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live (listen again available here for UK readers) in which she discusses key advertising campaigns and general trends within the advertising industry. If you get the opportunity you really should give it a listen.
One of the mistakes made by rookie advertisers in recent years has been to concentrate solely on 'new media' and 'social media'. Their advertising campaign is purely about trying to get people to retweet a message, or get users to share a Youtube video. These campaigns usually have very limited success on their own, and one has to wonder how it is the advertising agency has convinced the client to drop traditional media. Afterall, if you have made a clip for Youtube, it isn't going to cost much more to put it on television. And if you do, not only have you immediately increased the number of people you are directly advertising to, you have a greater number of people who are likely to share on their Facebook or Twitter thereby cementing the social-stretegy too. Social media should be used to diversify your offering, rather than to concentrate it: to support the 'core' campaign, rather than be it. Spread the message over a number of channels, rather than shed the more traditional ones. Well, assuming it is a good enough video.
Another failure of the new-focused advertisers is the abuse of social media, rather than the use of it. Yes, use your website and a few Facebook posts to get your message out there, but if you are too forceful it can be counter-productive. By all means offer a discount to those who subscribe to your Twitter feed, but if you spam their wall with too many posts, not only will they quickly unfollow you, but your core brand will get hurt as desperate or ignorant of their customers. Yes, ask your followers to pass on information as to your brand, but do so too forcefully and people will write your brand off as a con, wanting more for itself than it is a benefit to its customers.
I recently had to 'unlike' an art gallery on my Facebook page. I still enjoy going to the art gallery, but over the course of an hour they posted seven different posts about upcoming events. Not only did I ignore the contents of the last four or five posts, but I now will not see any of their future posts. That shows how a social marketing strategy can fail, and fail badly. Had they been witty, intelligent, teaser feeds then I would probably have paid attention.
And that is a very key point: the message needs to be good enough in the first place. Those that have 'gone viral' have been excellent pieces of advertising which people have naturally wanted to share.
One of the brands which has done very well out of the broad-based approach is Yeo Valley: the organic yogurt and milk company. Their Boy-Band Farmer advert has gone viral with far more people seeing it online on Youtube, their own website, on Facebook or being sent by email than saw its first airing on the Saturday night. So how did they do it? It is a good, funny video that people can interact with and that they want to share. It, far over and above the acts on the X Factor was the gossip in the office kitchen on the Monday morning. The new media here complimented the primary, traditional strategy. It gave people further resources to interact with, rather than being the resource. They didn't over-concentrate on the new media aspect exclusively (or even too heavily) if you listen to Rosie Arnold you will see the primary benefit of the Youtube channel was to get a much more immediate idea as to how the traditional advert had been received, rather than waiting around for sales figures, reviews, reports and research. Yes, it made sharing easier, but if people were going to share the message they were going to do so regardless.
Contrast this with the new Muller yogurt advert. I don't get what message they are trying to get over (and apparently quite a number of the comments on the Youtube page agree with comments such as 'pointless' and 'What is this commercial for'). There doesn't seem to be a story to the advert, or if it does it neither comes over nor resolves. It seems to be very formulaic. Someone has sat at the agency and simply gone "retro is cool, kids stuff is cool, animation over live-action is very 'now', lets throw it all together and we must have a hit." And so they don't. Whilst their previous adverts were very slick and smooth, simply using dreamy pictures of nice people enjoying life or the yogurts accompanied by Nina Simone's immediately infectious and enthusing I Got Life, their current advert doesn't actually say what their product is supposed to do.
And part of the reason they missed the message is that they missed the market. They didn't know who they were marketing to. That or they thought they were marketing to everybody. Yeo Valley identified very specifically one single advertising slot that they wanted, they identified very carefully what demographic would be watching at that time and they identified what that demographic wanted: entertainment and light relief. Humour. They didn't just want yogurt forcing down their throats.
Now there is a risk with that strategy: get the message slightly wrong; mis-identify the demographic or their needs and you may have missed entirely and spent thousands of pounds wastefully.
However, the Muller advert trys to spray far too widely and ends up missing all of its targets (if it actually had any). The 'kids is cool' idea works very well if you actually know to whom you are trying to retro. But they don't, and so they include as many different references as they can do, further confusing things. So we have Kit from Knight Rider, Transformers, Mr Men, Yogi Bear, Wacky Races and others. The cost of the IP rights alone must have been astronomical. And going for retro of itself has many risks amongst which are the chances that it could appear dated; and there is always a potential backlash of people feeling Yogi bear as sold-out or the cherished memories of Transformers has been denigrated for a bit of mouldy milk. For such a huge campaign (at 1m31s the advert is practically epic compared to usual 30-60s ads) this is a terrible miss.
Now, where did I put that yogurt...
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