Are advertising agencies innovators?

They should be but more often they aren't. It doesn't matter what their size, all too often advertising agencies fall into the money trap: they produce work that's only good enough to move the money from their client's bank account into their own. Work that's just there to please the client and not consumers.

A recent case in point is the newest BNZ advertising campaign, which was produced by Colenso BBDO New Zealand. It's 90 seconds of big wank and you can see it here. A pointless, futile exercise in trying to get consumers to move to BNZ. The claim is that money is neither good nor bad, but what you do with it that counts. Very deep. And vomit-inducing. 

So after discussing this with friends in both the advertising agency and banking world, I was told that I needed to wait and see what BNZ planned to unveil and that this was just the start.

So I waited. And I can confirm it's more than a big wank. It's pointless beyond belief. The big idea behind this big ad is that BNZ offers three innovative things for you to do with your money: 

1. Get the same thing every other bank offers in the form of a way to save money on your mortgage

2. Get the same thing that every supermarket offers in the form of Fly Buys

3. Get the same thing every other bank offers in the form of email and text alerts

Whoop De Do! What's next? Fuel discount coupons?

Where's the big idea? Where's anything to convince consumers that BNZ is the bank for them?

It doesn't exist and no matter how many times you watch the ad nothing will make you think otherwise. All BNZ have to differentiate them is their colour. And BBDO knows this but simply decided to hide their client's lack of ideas and differentiation behind a huge 90-second ad campaign. Which in itself is crazy (but brilliant work from the agency - reminds me of the tale of King Midas). Once you've seen this gargantuan presentation of theirs it's all over. You know the story, you know what's going to happen and if the agency thinks otherwise they need their heads examined. Who reads War and Peace or Moby Dick a second time in the hope that the ending will be different? Who sits through adverts these days without jumping for the remote the second they start? Who watches 90-second ads?

But that's the money trap at work. Well done to all those advertising agencies that have perfected it.

David Ogilvy knew all about permission.

David Ogilvy was an advertising legend. He understood that to be truly effective at what he did, he first needed permission from his audience before he could make a sale. He learnt this from his days as a door-to-door salesman, selling AGA cooking stoves in Scotland during the early 1930s. Quite simply, if he didn’t get permission to sell to his audience within seconds of them opening their doors, he would never sell them anything. He understood perfectly that he had the privilege, not the right, to sell to them, and that they held all the power.

Imagine if Ogilvy had arrived at those doors anything less than the perfect salesman. What would have happened if he had spoken to his prospects, in the same way, today’s retail advertisers, like Harvey Norman, Bond and Bond, Briscoes and Rebel Sports, speak to theirs? What would have happened if Ogilvy had shouted his way into homes and invaded people’s privacy without their permission?

Besides not making a sale, I’m sure he would have been on the receiving end of many beatings. And the last thing any salesman or advertiser wants is to take a beating. So why then do retail advertisers have this fascination with screaming at everybody? Is it just because that's the way everyone else does it? Or are they just not brave enough to try something else?

Grudge Purchases – Value, Discount, and Experience

It’s hard to get consumers fired up about products that are grudge purchases. There may well be a momentary flash of enthusiasm around buying a gym membership or an exercise machine but that vanishes once the cold reality of the situation sets in.

Things like power and water, insurance, petrol, tyres, bus tickets and the like generate no enthusiasm whatsoever, which means they generate zero brand loyalty and the cheapest option on the day will usually be the one chosen. There are websites specifically designed to tell consumers which power company will give them the best rates, and any real cost reduction is enough to promote a switch because electricity is electricity. Petrol also happens to be petrol, no matter who sells it, and the price is the driver, not the brand.

A tyre company may well be the choice of the Formula One world champion, or might even supply the only tyre in the entire field but only fans of the sport will notice or care, the rest will phone around and put on the cheapest tyre in the specific product segment they need for their car. A twenty-five-year-old runabout may well get off-brand Chinese rubber but the driver of a five-year-old Audi will likely be happy with whatever he gets from the name brands, after all, can anyone really pick the differences between a Bridgestone, Pirelli, Dunlop or Yokohama tyre at similar price points?

This buyer apathy makes it tough to market grudge purchases or to get them to stand out from the competition in any meaningful way but it can be done. Discounting isn’t really the answer because having the lowest price is only a matter of willpower – if a competitor is willing to haemorrhage more margin than you are, well then you’ll be hard-pressed to sustain a price war. Adding value is one key concept, improving the shopper experience is another, and if these approaches work in the grudge world, they’ll work in the ‘normal’ world too. 

Take five tyre brands, each with family car offerings at a similar price point. The tyres are all much of a muchness and they’re priced within $20 of each other. However one offers a warranty that replaces the tyre in the event of damage – hitting a pothole, smacking the pavement, or a rogue bit of metal on the motorway are all covered. I know which one I’m grabbing, even if it is at the higher end of that narrow price band because I’m buying peace of mind that might just make future dealings with this grudge purchase less onerous. Yes, I'm getting a free grudge (insurance) with my grudge (tyres) but it's better than the poke in the eye with a sharp stick that I'm getting from the rest of the usual suspects.

Consider five car insurance policies. Anyone who’s called around to get quotes on car insurance knows that the rates are often pretty darn close to each other and the call centre experience is exactly the same regardless of which company you call. However, let’s say one insurer offers free roadside rescue to policyholders. That’s compelling. Or a ten percent cash-back offer at the end of the year if you don’t make a claim – not as compelling perhaps, but still a step up from the three-eighths of nothing you get from the others. 

There are problems with value-added solutions though – first, they cost money, which has to come from somewhere and second, they’re easily copied by the competition. As soon as one insurer offers a cash-back scheme, the rest follow with a similar deal. Offer a free 20-liter chilly bin with your product or service and your opposition might well up the ante with a 36-litre model. This is where improving the customer’s experience makes more sense. 

For example, an insurer who guarantees to answer all inbound calls about claims in under three rings would stand out more than either of the two previous examples because they’re promising to reduce the pain their customers feel when dealing with the stress of a claim. No more “your call matters to us so please continue to hold while we show you how little it actually matters to us” on-hold marathons. That would definitely work for me and even though this option would be pricey and hard to implement, it would be both effective and tough for the competition to replicate in a hurry.

How about a tyre store that offers a premium service with a classy lounge, tasty coffee, piles of good magazines and even a plate of fresh pastries? That would attract a snobby Audi or Volvo driver’s attention in the same way that friends of mine won’t shop at “Pak and Scrap” because it’s just not as good an experience for them compared to their nearby local flash New World. Again, this type of premium service wouldn’t come cheap but it would be perfect for a select market, especially if the high-end tyres they were after cost the same as they do at the opposition down the road.

I find buying casual clothes to be something of a grudge purchase – it’s tough to find stuff that fits well and I’m not a brand junky at all. So why do I shop for casual gear at Farmers? It’s not because of the wide range of products, or the sale prices (although the latter surely has a lot to do with it). It’s because Farmers behaves more like an American company than any other in NZ when it comes to returns. Swapping items, exchanging gifts or getting credit notes is as easy as pie and this enhanced part of the customer experience makes me inclined to keep shopping there because it reduces my potential stress (again, I’m buying peace of mind).

Take any product that doesn’t genuinely have the marketing built into it. Picture it as a grudge purchase and imagine that you have to sell it to people who don’t want to buy it. Then find ways to sell it that don’t rely on the lowest price or the biggest advertising budget – ramp up the value in an innovative way or even better, improve the customer experience and you’ll sell more than the competition who’re just doing the same things they always did. 

That’s bloody obvious I hear you say, surely everyone in marketing looks beyond the basics? Well no, because this approach relies on an awareness of the big picture starting from the time the product and packaging are designed, and running right through to the way the consumer buys and uses the product. Many agencies can’t see the wood for the trees in this regard.

In the next post in this series, I’ll go back to the gym example and look at how that game has changed over the years, and what we as marketers can learn from it.

When will advertising lead by example?

Part one in a series of four blogs, written by Miriam Indries, a young, upcoming Auckland writer with a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology. In this series, Miriam will give her frank opinion about the sometimes cynical world of advertising and its treatment of the fairer sex.

I am no expert in the world of advertising and I will not even attempt to educate you about it, because I don’t have the skills required for that - I will leave that to the professionals. But I am a woman, therefore a self-confessed shopaholic (we may have not invented money, but we sure know how to use it).  And why is this relevant? Well, because the advertising world needs women, you see, us ladies make an awful lot of money for the clients of advertising agencies. Why? Because we buy stuff all the time. We buy things that we want, things that we need…we even buy things we don’t need! The biggest problem, however, is that advertising targets us based on the high standards of “the expected image” portrayed by the media. These standards are of course unreachable. Therefore advertisers hit us where it hurts the most… our physical appearance. When we see an ad, it’s like it is speaking to us, inviting us into a new world of fabulousness, a world we want to live in, where we’ll be recognized as beautiful. How can this be? Why are we susceptible to all of this?

Well, for me personally, a good advertisement is one that speaks the truth. Take the Dove real women campaign for example. This I can honestly say is a well-done campaign. They used real women! Curvy, short, tall, big busted, small busted, cellulite, the whole lot. 

This is reality, the thing many of us women are oh so afraid of. This ad made headlines in many countries, because, sadly, it was thought to be “an unusual ad”. “To use women who are not size zero? Wow this must be a joke!” But of course this is no joke, the ad actually highlights today’s average woman, who has body imperfections and eats normal food.  I would seriously love to see more of these ads. 
But unfortunately, most ads these days are full of lies, lies, and more lies, but somehow they still make us believe in the product. We fall for it because we are self-conscious human beings who like to spend money on our physical appearance. Women from all over the world look in the mirror disappointed, wanting to change everything about the way they look so they can match the beauty of the models used in ad campaigns. And those clever advertisers know this and so does their loyal Photoshop program, without which, many companies and products would suffer. We always buy new things, things that prove to be useless half of the time, so we end up buying more things. We always want to look better and better. Most advertising agencies are über smart, and they target us this way, knowing we’ll fall for it. The famous psychologist Abraham Maslow believed that a person achieves self-confidence and self-esteem based on their opinion of themselves. Sadly these days, Maslow’s years of hard work have been pushed aside by beauty products and “getting thin” machines. Seriously, all we see in magazines, TV commercials, infomercials (yes I do watch them), bus stops, toilet cubicles etc. is stuff about how to perfect our look, how to lose weight, how to get great skin, how to use fake tan (sadly natural porcelain skin “is so Marie Antoinette”). This literarily makes us feel like we are not good enough, and like lions jumping at a piece of meat, there we are, jumping to reach the phone and order the product, or rushing to a shop.
Take those hair ads for example. All the models in them have amazing, shiny, beautiful, to-die-for hair, all thanks to the shampoo advertised. Or is it? We see the model shake her head from side to side, her hair flowing perfectly from one direction to another. It looks too good to be true… that’s because it probably is. What most of us fail to see is that at the bottom of the ad, there is usually something written in very small writing (this is the trap ladies, that’s how they get us!) What does it say? It says something about the model wearing hair extensions. So the gorgeous hair advertised is not in fact so gorgeous, it’s fake! I suppose one would not be able to call this “false advertisement” because they do reveal their secret, available for the viewers to see – except for it is hardly noticeable, of course. But that doesn’t matter, we will still buy that shampoo, and we will not only do this, but we will tell our neighbours, our friends, our families etc. etc.

Another great example is the make-up campaign, especially the mascara ones. It’s bad enough they use Hollywood’s most gifted women, who are pretty much perfect looking. (Thanks to Dr So and So for the lipo, botox etc). These mascara ads really annoy me – you see Eva Longoria or whoever, holding her new mascara, blinking her eyes at the screen. Her eyelashes look immaculately perfect, long, strong, everything we could ever want. Again, read what is at the bottom of the screen. “Eva's eyes styled with lash inserts”. Well duhhhhh, of course women won’t read that. They will focus on Eva’s eyelashes and visualize themselves looking the same, desperately searching the Internet for the nearest shop selling this product. And voila, millions of mascaras sold!

Some advertisers love to fool us and unfortunately, they know how to do it. In today’s society, physical appearance is considered to be very important, and it can also help people get the jobs they love, and become so-called “role models”. Brains are a thing of the past, beauty rules! Sad but true! Ladies, we are taken as a product of society, an experiment almost, for many ad campaigns. As if it’s not enough that we watch infomercials and buy all these different gym machines that are supposed to make us look skinny in a week (they leave our wallets looking pretty flat too), they do it with beauty products too. They know how to target us through “the promise” we most want to hear about any kind of self-improvement – "In just a few days" and this isn’t really the truth at all.