New Zealand’s Worst Brand - HRV Home Ventilation

The reason for HRV winning New Zealand’s Worst Brand of 2012 has nothing to do with their dodgy sales tactics that came to light late in 2012, but more about how they responded to the allegations. Hundreds of people complained about how bad HRV were, and when hundreds complain you can extrapolate the number of grumpy folks even further due to the lazy, can’t-be-bothered nature of people to voice their frustrations.

When Bruce Gordon, CEO of HRV joined John Campbell live on TV, he humbly claimed that since arriving at the helm he had changed the gung-ho mentality that was rife in his business, and that these reports flowing in about HRV were a thing of the past. At least he was brave enough to appear on TV and try to appease the masses.

The problem was the fire was raging and nothing changed. After Bruce Gordon’s TV appearance, HRV set up a dedicated “No Pressure Hotline” for customers who wanted to discuss a “sales experience or customer experience”. And that was it. 

The truth of the matter is that every brand can learn more from the customers who complain then they ever can from the customers who don’t. The first step they should have taken was to take stock of the enormity of the problem and call every single customer they have (surely there must be thousands?) and say “Thank you for being an HRV customer – what are your experiences with HRV?” If the vast majority were negative then HRV knew they were boned. They didn’t do this, and perhaps this is the cynic in me talking, but I think they already knew what the answer would be before the calls were made.

This is why I wasn’t very surprised when I received two calls from HRV in November asking me first if I could recommend a friend for  HRV, for which I would be rewarded with a cheap bottle of wine, and second if they could help me heat my house in winter. To both of these, I replied with a polite “Get Fu##ed!”

HRV’s current advertising agency is Y&R. They used to be fairly cool, especially back in the day when Vaughn Davis was in charge of their creativity, but now they’re as limp as month-old celery. I have no idea what they proposed to HRV to help them put out the fire but if they think they can carry on fighting their sentimental hogwash of a sixty-second ad and things will go away, then they may just be wrong.

But I doubt it. Consumers are very forgetful and we tend to forget the injustices of the past. So I can only predict that HRV will remain fairly well-off after this debacle and that Y&R will continue to be their agency for a year or so before the “new broom” sweeps them out the door and HRV appoint some other indistinguishable agency to the role.

All in all, HRV is still the winner of New Zealand’s Worst Brand 2012. Merry Christmas! 

What's the similarity between Jackson Pollock and advertising?

They both do something anyone could do. Or so the story goes.

Many people have looked upon the work of Jackson Pollock with much disdain. Cries of "I could've done that!" and "My six-year-old could've done that" echo across the gallery. But you didn't and your six-year-old can't. So regardless of what you think, for once, you're not right. And any work done by Pollock will still sell for $30 million, no matter what you think of it.

The reason a Jackson Pollock sells for so much is because that's what someone is prepared to pay for it and they understand its value. Just like everything, from houses to cars to sex, people only pay what they're prepared to pay and what they see as valuable only matters to them. Your perception of value and worth is meaningless to the purchaser.

When it comes to things like creativity, such as art and advertising, which are traditionally hard to measure and quantify, the lines pointing to value and worth become almost invisible. What difference is there between a logo designed for $50 and a logo designed for $5,000? If the client is happy to pay $50 or $5,000 then surely it boils down to the Jackson Pollock principle of perceived value? A logo's a logo, right? And a watch is just a watch? Yes, but people don't buy watches to tell the time. A $50 watch is just as accurate at telling the time as a $25,000 watch, so why do people buy them?

It's the same with advertising. There's advertising that's cheap and there's advertising that isn't. I'm not saying that the expensive stuff is superior because it often isn't. Harvey Norman spent over $60 million advertising in 2011 and their work isn't good. From a creative point of view, it's really awful.

The reality of the situation is that advertising agencies have been making money the wrong way. Advertising agencies were born from the fact that businesses needed an intermediary between the media and themselves, to negotiate the best rates and spots. For a long time, it wasn’t the creative work that was making agencies money, it was the fat, juicy commissions that they were getting from booking media and from hiking up print and production costs. Eventually, when creativity became a factor in choosing one agency over another, it was almost impossible to put a definitive cost to it. This is most likely where the idea of advertising awards came from.

If Agency X had more awards than Agency Y, then it stands to reason that Agency X are worth more. But that’s not entirely right. The vast majority of advertising awards are developed, curated and judged by the people within the industry itself. In the same manner that the aloof, fine-art cognoscenti look down their noses at the common folk, so do the advertising Illuminati. For too long they’ve been trying to justify what they do and the high costs involved but they shouldn’t have had to.

An accountant or a lawyer (even a plumber) knows exactly what they do. And most importantly, so does Joe Public. So they know the value of choosing a good lawyer over a bad one. Isn’t it time that advertising agencies reevaluated their business? We’ll take a look at how this could happen in a future blog.

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?