How can you work without passion?

Have you ever been to a restaurant where the staff just don’t care? They don’t have to walk over to your table and declare that they don’t give a damn; you just know they don’t.

I’m not too sure why, it could be a number of things but what happens when the management doesn’t care either? What happens when they care even less?

Last week I was at a client. We were having a meeting with a web design company; they’re very well known, they have 25 staff, posh offices with a foosball table, and for diplomatic reasons, I can’t name them, but let’s refer to them as “The Company”.

About a minute or so into their presentation I knew that “The Company” just didn’t care. I had my suspicions about this right from the start. You see, it had been exactly five weeks to the day since I first approached “The Company” to generate a quote to upgrade my client’s website. In all honesty, it shouldn’t have taken them five weeks to get the quote done, but it did.

Twenty minutes into their presentation, after they had spoken at great length about their own awesomeness and the majesty of their client list, they simply left without even going into the actual numbers they’d been asked to present. Instead, they handed us a bound document and walked out.

When I finally found the quote (and it was skillfully hidden in the middle of the doc and not on the last page) I was amazed. Amazed because they wanted $45,000 to do the job and they weren’t even prepared to discuss it or substantiate it or even allow us to query it.

In this situation, the rot started at the top. The head of “The Company”, who’s been in charge for 15 years, took us through the presentation so I can’t say this is the fault of some junior execs that were too unprepared or cocky to believe they could fail. Right from the very start, it was clear to see that the only way to get passion out of “The Company” was to buy it. And apparently 45k simply isn’t enough.

There are lots of people out there who are passionate beyond belief and who don’t need Steve Jobs to tell them to do what they love because they knew it before they knew who Steve Jobs was. They know they will not find their passion in a call centre or behind a counter at a Burger King. They are the lucky few that will be labelled either crackpot or genius. To them I say don’t give up. Don’t let those that have lost their passion destroy yours. But once you find your success and you make your mark, don’t let your own success poison your passion like it did at “The Company”.

From one Junior Creative to another

There’s a true story about an advertising graduate who put herself into a coffin and had it delivered to a Creative Director’s office in Wellington. When the coffin arrived, she popped up and said: “I’m dying to work here”. She didn’t get the job.

Some advertising graduates go to extraordinary lengths to be noticed by a Creative Director. After all, seeking employment in an advertising agency can be a very daunting and challenging prospect for a young creative.  Like many creative industries there is an abundance of candidates competing for only a handful of positions. An Art Director once told me that advertising agencies are looking for someone who can “put a man on the moon!” When I asked him to elaborate, he explained that the ideal creative is someone who can find a way to do the impossible without going over budget and without going off brief.  Sounds pretty straightforward?  If you’re a graduate and you’re not still nodding away at this point then typically you’ll be the type to settle down in another department or rethink your career options altogether. Those who possess that killer instinct will be quick to put their hand up. The reality is that the right candidate probably wouldn’t be able to meet all of those expectations, but they would be prepared to give it a damn good try and that is what’s important. Apparently advertising agencies are looking for someone who is tenacious, confident in their creative ability and also incredibly resilient. These individuals view an advertising agency as a channel through which they can express their creative flare. They’re excited about a career in advertising because they’re confident that one day they may be part of a revolutionary Google campaign that will reach millions of people worldwide or perhaps they’ll put a man on the moon as part of a game-changing Red Bull campaign.  
 
It is plain to see why self-confidence is essential in the advertising industry - if the creative isn’t confident in their own ideas then why should the client feel any different? The industry is not always friendly nor is it very forgiving and young creatives are prone to being a bit sceptical and hyper critical of their ideas. This can lead to a state of paralysis. While studying at Award School of Advertising, every week I was required to present campaign concepts to experienced Copywriters and Art Directors at a critique session. Presentations involved standing up at long conference tables and sharing ideas to a room full of intimidating creatives and my twelve peers who were competing with me for the Executive Creative Director’s attention.
 
Initially I developed a terrible habit of discarding ideas that I felt weren’t impressive or eye-opening. But, when the work load increased, I couldn’t afford to discard ideas otherwise I simply wouldn’t have enough work to present. This taught me a valuable lesson. You don’t need to be afraid of bad ideas, instead you just need to focus on turning them into great ideas.
 
When I recently freelanced at Partisan Advertising this lesson became the law. Each week I would sit down with Greg Kramer for a few hours at a time and together we would create three piles of options. A pile of good ideas, a pile of potentially good ideas and a pile of ideas that need to be turned into good ideas. The process is incredibly satisfying, not only because it is exciting but because there really isn’t any other time when problems are resolved in such a matter-of-fact way. It is like going through a mediation process; only you simply must arrive at a positive outcome in a relatively short period of time because at the end of the day there is a client to please. Working in my first official Art Director role at Partisan Advertising I realise that I really am quite fortunate to be in this industry. Being employed to produce campaign concepts is an occupation that many naysayers believe is a myth.  There are times when the work does feel too good to be true. Aside from being paid to be creative, you also get to enjoy the satisfaction of watching your ideas be professionally executed and sometimes you get to bask in the client’s contentment with the results. A Senior Art Director warned me that eventually the novelty does wear off, but for the time being the challenges are absolutely worth embracing.
 

Grudge purchases - a 2015 perspective

Buying something you don’t actually want is never easy, which is why grudge purchases are the hardest things to advertise and sell.

Don’t misunderstand me here – all the stuff that we don’t want, but have to have, will always sell. But when it comes to grudge purchases, no one gives a damn about the brand, the supplier or anything else except the lowest price, the most convenient access, and the best warranty where applicable.

Think about it, we all need petrol, tyres and shock absorbers for the car, or insurance for our health, houses and lives but we don’t really want them. When your tyres get bald and your car fails its WOF, you get new tyres or you walk. But that doesn’t mean you like shelling out eight hundred dollars to keep your car moving. When you need tyres, you probably do exactly what I do – identify the type of tyre you need and then call around to find the best deal. I do the same with insurance and electricity.

If there was a site that gave me the prices of tyres around Auckland, I’d be there in a second.

When I bought travel insurance for my current overseas trip, I looked on Squaremouth. I was presented with exactly what I wanted from a wide range of insurers, most of which I’d never heard of. At this point, brand was the least important thing on my mind – what I wanted was the best deal for the amount of cover I needed, and I wanted peace of mind i.e. good customer reviews, of which there were plenty (this is a great example of where keeping your customers happy pays off in the long run).

So I think it’s safe to say that grudge purchases are the worst kind of product to have to sell, and they’re just as tough to advertise. Here’s an example of how deeply people resent grudge purchases – my partner is a health practitioner. She specialises in helping adults and kids sort out symptoms involving speech, breathing, appearance and other oral-related concerns, and she does it all online.

It’s easy to see how much some patients resent having to go through the treatment. Yes, it has the potential to change their lives or the lives of their children, but it’s just another thing they didn’t want to have to spend over $2,000 on, let alone to have to work intensively with her for months on end. So they show up late, miss appointments or occasionally, they just drop out entirely. Some don’t even sign up in the first place even though they need the treatment and a dentist or orthodontist has referred them. Cutting off their noses to spite their faces you might say.

On the other hand, my partner also teaches other practitioners how to do what she does. These clients are fired up with the idea of starting a new career, earning more money, and even perhaps moving to a new phase in their lives. They’re always there, always on time, and they’re totally involved in the process. They know that they both needed and wanted this purchase. That’s the holy grail of sales and marketing, and it’s nice to have that kind of product or service if you can get it.
But what do you do when you can’t? When you’ve got something that’s not just a parity product but also a grudge purchase? It’s tempting to advise you to just close the doors and go fishing but there’s an enormous amount of money to be made in that space – this stuff always sells remember? You just have to sell more of it than everyone else.

The answer is that you have to stand out. Not by being the official tyre of Formula One, or the approved deodorant of the All Blacks but by being better than everyone else in some way that’s both tangible to your existing customers and can be marketed to your potential customers.

This brings us back to the aforementioned good reviews. In an environment where all the products are much of a muchness, you need to have positive customer feedback and proactive engagement. You have to find a way to shine. If you offer a service, then do something, anything to offer extra value. And at this point, let me clarify that I don’t mean giving something away. Instead, could you set up the best call centre in the country, with the lowest waiting times for example?
If you’re selling products, then what could you do that your competition simply can’t or won’t? More useful information on your website perhaps? Product demonstrations? There has to be some way to actually engage with your customers.
And once you’ve done all that, you still need to look at your marketing with a fresh pair of eyes. If everyone in the game is doing one thing, you might want to do something different. A prime example of this type of thinking can be found in this case study.

How does one launch a product into a market with a strongly entrenched competitor, especially a product that no one really cares about because it’s just something used by farmers to treat cows?

Well, you do the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing. Then you get results like these:

• It sold 406% above forecast in less than two months.

• The product sold out in two months and all advertising had to be temporarily halted so that production could catch up to demand.

• After just one year in the market, it’s the third biggest product of its kind in New Zealand.

They said it couldn’t be done. It can if you’re brave enough. And yes the campaign was planned and executed by my brother but 406% is 406%. End of story.

A world without advertising already exists

How much advertising is too much that it becomes meaningless?

I spent much of the second half of 2014 in the USA, mostly around the Seattle area. Over there, there’s no doubt that you’re in the home of consumerism, especially as the holiday season gets into high gear.

The Americans sure do love to spend, so there’s a barrage of advertising and promotion that makes New Zealand look and feel a touch tame. Every niche is covered by more brands and products than anyone from a little island at the bottom of the world could imagine.

But from an advertising perspective, it seems to have reached the saturation point that many commentators have been expecting for a while.

There’s just so much advertising that it’s become tough to interface with most of it, let alone all of it. I paid close attention to the way the people I stayed with interacted with the advertising they were subjected to (and yes, I do mean “subjected to”, American advertising isn’t particularly good).

Admittedly, these people make up an infinitesimal fraction of the total audience but they’re also a pretty typical cross-section of American consumers. Their habits are interesting to say the least.

Effectively, it seems they’ve become experts at ignoring the vast majority of advertising, and cherry-picking only the tiniest sliver of what captures their attention. They tune out television advertising the same way a politician tunes out a poll result he doesn’t like.

The TV becomes a white noise generator while they multi-screen away to smartphones and tablets. No one even seems to register most of the magazine or newspaper ads.

Then we have the vast piles of circulars that go unnoticed except for the ones that address a specific need – picture the old-fashioned scene of a housewife clipping coupons from a catalogue – she’s not cutting out the ones she doesn’t need. That’s how these people consume their media – by ignoring most of it.

I’ve said that this was already the case when it came to TV advertising in New Zealand, and I’ve looked at multi-screening in the past. The industry loves the idea that consumers are still seeing their advertising somewhere, and as long as that’s happening, they’re adamant that it’s getting results. It isn’t, at least not as much as you think, if it ever did.

"Ah this show ain't no good!" - Elvis loved television but he sure hated advertising.

We all knew this was coming. Logically, no one can take in every single advertising message they encounter, so a new specialisation skill is developing.

Please don’t kid yourself that your advertising isn’t being affected by this enhanced indifference. Unless you’re reaching your consumers and reaching them in a meaningful way around the time they’re contemplating a purchase, then you’re wasting much of your money.

Frankly, this has always been the case, but it’s truer than ever today. You used to think you were wasting 50% of your advertising dollars, I believe that’s now a very conservative estimate.

I was asked if people could live in a world without advertising. I’d say that in some areas of the developed world, that’s already the case. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean anyone is seeing it.

Mr. Advertiser, I hate to break it to you but there’s a very good chance that unless you’re doing something unique, then you’re just part of the noise. And no, you can’t overcome this problem by throwing more money at it.

You need to think outside the rhombus, and if your advertising agency can’t do that, then you’re seriously going to get left behind; maybe not next year but pretty damn soon. If your agency is telling you to do what you’ve always done or to replicate what your competition is doing (but with some minor spin to it), then you shouldn’t walk away, you should run.