Superbowl Musings

The Superbowl is big news in the good old US of A.

So big that it’s often the most-watched television event in America in the course of a given year. In fact, the 2011 Superbowl was the most-watched piece of TV in American history. It’s also very heavily watched globally, which is lovely for the players and the NFL but is likely of less relevance to the American advertisers who see the bowl as the annual holy grail of advertising. 

Once a year, the big brands know that they’ve got a massive captive audience covering a wide variety of demographics, so they throw the whole nine yards at making as much of an impact as possible. Of course, the networks exploit this phenomenon as hard as they can because they effectively hold all the cards. If advertisers want to reach that captive audience, well then they’re going to have to open their wallets big time because Superbowl ads do not come cheap. Recent Superbowls have some freaky average costs per ad – try US$4 million for size. This obviously means that only the biggest brands can get in on the action, and once you commit to that kind of spend, you really need to do it right.

This brings us to the second complication of advertising during the Superbowl besides the cost – audience expectation. Some would say that the ads are as important to much of the audience as the game is. This is true to a degree – as big as the game is, only two teams are playing, which means that only a small portion of the viewers (the supporters) will have a deep-seated loyalty and the associated passion behind them. Many of the rest are watching simply because it’s the Superbowl in the same way that Kiwis would still watch a Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and Australia even if the All Blacks had been knocked out in the quarter-finals. But there’s also a large segment of the audience who are just watching the ads, so much so that there’s a USA Today live poll that tracks the response to the ads in real-time.

The problem with all this excitement and all the hype around the advertising is that a run-of-the-mill ad is going to be somewhat disregarded, falling far behind the really eye-catching ads in the minds of the viewers, soon to be forgotten.

So there’s an element of needing to absolutely pull out all the stops, which again pushes up the cost. These ads are also in ‘jump the shark’ territory – once you’ve created that amazing, big-budget ad that wows the viewers, what do you do next year? Anything less impressive will lead to disappointment and mutterings of “That GM ad was rubbish compared to the one from last year, but wow, did you see the Nissan ad?”

If your mega-ad does get totally trumped by the opposition, or even by an incredibly entertaining ad from a brand in a totally different industry segment, then was there any point in spending that money? Agency executives will argue that of course the ad had merit and reached people, even if it wasn’t particularly popular, and to an extent, they’re obviously right but both the agency folk and the clients would be cringing if their ad wasn’t well received. This is the gladiatorial arena of interruption marketing and there’ll be scant mercy for the losers when the numbers are tallied.

Does the question then have to be whether it’s worth jumping through these hoops once a year? Well regardless of what you do, it’s going to be something of a gamble but if you’ve got the money, the right product and the creative geniuses on hand to really give it your best shot, then it’s worth taking a punt because how often do you have the chance to blow away that many people across so many age ranges and demographics. Winners win big, losers get a caning but that’s the way of the business world.

On the other hand, what if you’re not one of the big gorillas with bottomless wallets? How on earth do you reach your key audience (and all the hangers-on and influencers too) without spending the earth? It’s a valid question especially for us in little old New Zealand, where the closest parallel would be the aforementioned Rugby World Cup final. Only a few brands get to be involved with that, so what about the rest?

Well, the answer is pretty simple, as it’s always been. To get results that are better than they were last year and the year before, you need to do something different than you did in the past. While the competition is treading the same turf, you should be exploring different ways to engage your customers instead of just yelling at them. Everyone will tell you they’re already doing something vastly different but they’re actually all doing the same damn thing, social, experiential, outdoor, and they’re still much of a muchness. Being innovative doesn’t need to cost a load of money but it can make your company a whole heap of cash if it’s done right. What choice do you have if you don’t have millions in the marketing budget? 

Four simple steps to end your year with a bang

We’ve passed the halfway mark in 2013 and many of you might already be looking for ways to elevate your sales for the rest of the year and even for 2014.

With that in mind here are four simple marketing approaches that will help you.

 1. Be honest with your customers.

People don’t do business with businesses; we do business with people. If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face. Our brains cannot relate to the over-perfected, over-Photoshopped advertising messages we see every day, so we are simply ignoring or deriding them. How many adverts have you seen that portray an ideal family environment that just doesn’t exist or match anything you’ve seen in your life? When was the last time you had a burger that actually looked like the burger you saw in the advert? How many ads have you approved that portray consumers using your products like they’ve just discovered a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? No one acts and behaves like that in the real world and the sooner you recognise and understand this the better.  Start to care. That simple word sums up so much. Have you ever been to a restaurant or a hospital where they genuinely care? You can tell, immediately. So can your customers.

2. Satisfy your customer’s wants.

We no longer buy products because we need them; we buy them because we want them. This is true because almost everything we can realistically imagine that we need has already been invented. There used to be a time when we had fewer choices but now we have an infinite supply. This wasn’t true just 20 years ago when we had a lot more time and a lot less choices. Our disposable income had far fewer ways to get squandered, so if a company came up with something really cool, like the mobile phone, we’d find a way to pay for it. But the game has changed and now we’re only interested in satisfying our wants so please start satisfying our wants.

3. You can’t be everywhere.

Start prioritising where you want to interact with your clients. When it comes to advertising, the media landscape is just too vast to reach everyone. Simply put, there are so many media alternatives that consumers can no longer be effectively reached by mass media such as television or radio. At the end of the day, every business has a financial target to reach and it doesn’t matter whether it takes 5000 or 100 customers to reach that goal, so why chase everyone? A woodpecker can peck once on every tree in a forest in the hopes that he’ll find what he’s looking for or he can concentrate his efforts on a smaller number of trees and get results.

4. Leave the centre of the market and aim for the edges.

Every market has two parts: there’s the big, fat juicy centre and then there are the edges. For obvious reasons the centre appeals to more of us than it should (must be the Lizard-Brain at work) but it’s not a safe place because nothing remarkable ever takes place there. If we take a look at the music industry and compare Lady Gaga to Britney Spears it’s easy to see where their position in the market lies. When Britney decided to go to the edges a few years back she reworked her image, forgot her underwear and tried to reinvent herself but her audience rejected her, forcing her brand further back into the centre than it had ever been before. Lady Gaga on the other hand, started at the edge and the centre moved towards her. Now she can wear dresses made out of meat or ride a panda to the next Grammy Awards and it will all fit perfectly within the scope of her brand and (even better) people will accept it. The edge isn’t for everyone, but would you really want to market yourself as “more bland than the leading brand”?

Who’d want to work in Hell(ers)?

I stumbled upon this marketing image on facebook a few weeks ago.

What the Hellers is going on with the expiry date?

I assume it was created by the company’s Human Resources department. HR departments the world over are always super keen to dot the i's and cross the t's and make sure everyone knows where the lines are in Corporate Land. I wonder if the Marketing Department had any say in it? I assume so. Someone had to design it and lay it out in the correct corporate font and make sure it was framed in the correct colour.

The reality however is that from an internal marketing point of view this is a complete cock up. Who’d want to work in an environment where the company has to so blatantly state the obvious about what you should and shouldn’t be doing? I know that it’s fairly uncommon to see the human race using common sense but do Hellers really have to tell their staff not to be bullies and that they shouldn’t swear at people? And should this really have an expiry date? We’re talking about people here, not sausages!

Someone in a leadership position had to have authorized this when they should really have rejected it. There’s no way that this kind of corporate mantra will ever attract and keep top-quality staff. Could you imagine this sign at Google, Apple or Virgin? All Hellers are going to get here are Sheepwalkers. But I suppose that’s OK since all they manufacture is processed meats, and really, how much innovation can there be in that field?

Quite a lot I’d say. Consider that Todd Heller opened the first Hellers butchery in Christchurch in 1985 and in less than 28 years has grown the business to become New Zealand’s largest smallgoods manufacturer. You don’t get growth like that without innovation, especially from a marketing perspective. But now that they’re at the top I suspect they’re resting on their laurels a bit. Who could (and who’d want to) try and claim their throne?

As consumers, we never get to see behind the doors of big businesses like Hellers. We don’t know what happens in their boardrooms or what goes on at the production line. All we see is what they want us to see. The problem with that is it’s 2013 and far too often consumers get to peek behind the curtain and see what’s really going on.

The death of advertising and interruption marketing

Interruption marketing is what all advertising is: something that interrupts whatever you’re doing in the hope to steal your attention.

The interruptions have become more overt, extravagant and unbelievable, all in an effort to gain more of our attention. 

The reality is that before this decade is up, this form of interruption marketing will be dead. Marketing will become personalised, customised and adapted to what we, the consumers, want, simply because we will be choosing what content/programming we want to watch. This essentially means that advertising will have to become content and not an interruption and the only way brands will get to show us their content is if they have our permission.

How do I know this? Because it’s already happening. 

Television used to be our biggest influencer but for years we’ve had devices that have allowed us to record what we want and skip adverts. 

The amount of money spent on mobile and online advertising has increased dramatically whilst traditional media spend has declined or experienced smaller growth. 

In the last week, SKY TV lost its multi-million dollar coverage of the English Premier League to an online broadcaster. The relevance of SKY's loss is simple: it shows that choosing content is starting to become important to viewers. SKY said the loss wasn't the end of the world for them, but in reality, it's the beginning of the end. They desperately need to reassess their business model if they want to keep their subscribers. Well done to Coliseum Sports Media for this fantastic coup. And just imagine what will happen when they win the rights to the All Black's games or the World Cup in 2014...

Thanks to the dramatic growth of the mobile market we’re starting to “multi-screen” our TV time. We’re no longer couch potatoes and we’re actually becoming more involved in selecting the programming we want to watch, and then seeking out information about the shows or commenting about them on social networks.

Our Multi-Screening Habits

The Matrix, I mean Google and especially Google Plus, is the biggest influencer of what we see online. Google monitors everything we do online and displays what it thinks we want to see based on our online history. The question is: when will Google start displaying what it thinks we want to see everywhere else? The tech is already here but the link hasn’t been made just yet.

Almost every new television has Internet connectivity as standard. It will only be a matter of time when we’ll be creating specific user accounts for our televisions, most likely through Google, which in turn will allow us to customise what we want to watch. And this will include what advertising we want to see. 

If I make a search online for BMW, Google displays some links and related ads. Wouldn’t it make sense for Google to share this info with my other devices? Instead of then seeing a series of random 30-second ads during a commercial break, I could now watch a 3-minute commercial for BMW? And by commercial, I mean content.

I’ve used BMW as an example because BMW was already doing this way back in 2001. They got a group of leading filmmakers and actors to create and star in a series of short movies based on BMW’s cars. And guess what? It worked brilliantly because it wasn’t advertising – it was content. You can view one of my favourites directed by Guy Ritchie at the end of this post. 

In 2001, BMW's sales increased by 12.5%, and by 17.2% in 2002. No new product launches - just a series of movies. 

So how do we, as advertisers, marketers and business owners, get ready for what’s coming?

The first step is to stop interrupting and focus on getting permission to communicate with your customers.

The future of permission marketing lies with mobile… but not mobile advertising. At the moment all mobile does is interrupt us. Take a look at these screen grabs. Why do I get these ads? I'm married, own an iPhone and WTF is the last ad on the right for? Pointless.

The real marketing benefits of mobile can be found in the apps we use.

Here are five reasons why:

1. Apps aren’t advertising

2. We choose them 

3. We value them for their functionality 

4. We don’t find them interruptive.

5. We spend on average 82% of our mobile time with them.

So if apps are the beginning of the end of interruption marketing, how are you going to use an app as a marketing tool and what should you bear in mind to make it a success?

1. The app must add value to your customers’ lives. How do people buy and use your product? Find a way in which your app can add value to their interaction.

2. Make it convenient to use. Remember the customer’s favourite person: ME. 

3. Make it social. Activities that enhance connections among friends, like apps, will enhance the user experience of connecting with friends. 

4. Entertain us. 40% of our app time is spent on games. 

With more than 275,000 developers registered to build apps just for Apple’s iTunes store, the problem isn’t how to make an app, but what to say and do that will start a long-lasting, permission-based relationship with your customers. 

And the simplest answer is to treat your customers like you would like to be treated yourself. That’s the essence of permission marketing.