Out of the Ordinary

A view from the top

Whatever you think about Sir Martin Sorrell, and as with so many successful people opinions most definitely seem to vary, his thoughts on the outlook for the 'marketing services' sector are worth listening to. After all he founded and continues to run the second biggest holding company in the industry and counts among his clients many of the world's biggest marketeers. With this in mind I can thoroughly recommend his recent interview with Charlie Rose. In just over thirty minutes he covers off the impact of the recession, emerging market growth and technology on the global media and advertising landscape with some style.  And even manages to quote Bill Shankly as well. Impressive stuff.

A bankable idea

Oscar Wilde once said "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken" and as a piece of advice I think it's something that most brands could do with heeding. After all, I've lost count of the number of brands desperately trying to own the same three categories: sport, music, film with little or no obvious connection to them, and quite frankly it's all becoming a bit embarrassing.

Nevertheless, every now and then you come across a campaign which absolutely nails the sweet spot at the intersection of it's brand values, popular culture and a territory such as music and the recent Banner Concerts campaign for Axion Bank is a great example of this. It has just picked up a much deserved gold pencil at the One Show in New York but what I love about is that it so obviously combines a great audience insight, a great use of technology and a great understanding of the evolving media landscape. Now that's what I call an idea.

Just do it

I am just on way back from presenting at the Beijing London Advertising Forum 2009 in China on the subject of branding in the post-advertising world, or even post digital world as Russell Davies calls it.  In my presentation I used a quote by former P&G Global CMO Jim Stengel, who commenting on the challenge of building consumer relationships in the 21st century at the 2007 AAAA Media Conference, said:

"What we really need is a mindset shift. A mindset shift that will make us relevant to today's consumers. A mindset shift from "telling and selling" to building relationships."

Fine words but even the most ardent P&G marketing enthusiast would have to agree that two years later P&G still has some way to go in turning them into a compelling reality. 

Of course, we increasingly live in an ‘and’ as opposed to ‘or’ world so throwing the proverbial branding baby out with the bath water doesn’t make much sense but it did get me thinking about brands who have made a successful transformation from the traditional awareness based advertising approach to a more contemporary conversation orientated communications strategy.

Some relatively obvious smaller challenger brands like 42 Below, my perennial favourite, immediately sprung to mind but I have to admit that I was struggling to think of a mainstream consumer brand that had made this transition convincingly until I started to piece together the different strands of Nike’s marketing activity over the last couple of years.

The 28 million, and counting, views of Nike’s Ronaldinho: 'Touch of Gold' video on YouTube alone suggests that they have understood that the pen of content is indeed more powerful than the sword of advertising in a pull as opposed to push world.

The way that they seeded their Kobe Bryant HyperDunk viral, and the resulting 35,000 comments generated within weeks of its release, shows that they recognise that as the social media era replaces the broadcast media era conversation is more effective than messaging.

Their commitment to Nike ID demonstrates an acceptance that as advances in digital technology continue to tip the balance of power between consumers and brands back in favour of the consumer that successful brands will need to embrace collaboration at the expense of control.

And the extraordinary success of the Nike+ concept is a testament to the benefits of thinking about people as communities rather than audiences as the media landscape continues to fragment.

Finally the fact that I could have chosen a myriad of different examples of their marketing activity to support my proposition depending on which geographic region I was looking at highlights how Nike seem to have placed context above the false god of matching luggage in the name of consistency.

Of course in linking these examples together in such a way I may well have fallen into the all too common trap of putting the cart of strategy before the horse of tactics but a recent comment from UK marketing chief Simon Pestridge in January’s edition of Revolution magazine reflecting on their approach to marketing communications suggests otherwise:

"We don't do advertising any more. We just do cool stuff. It sounds a bit wanky, but that's just the way it is. Advertising is all about achieving awareness, and we no longer need awareness. We need to become part of people's lives and digital allows us to do that."

From that it seems somewhat reassuringly, given their brand promise, that Nike is one of the only mainstream brands who have just got on and done it and as a result they may well be the best connected brand on the planet. Enough said.

Agile Advertising

There are a lot of smart people out there talking about the future of business and marketing so I guess it's not that surprising that I spend quite a lot of my time reading other people's posts wishing that I had written them myself. Probably the best example of this recently is the brilliant post by Neil Perkin about Agile Advertising. In this post Neil highlights the disconnect between the traditional campaign focused approach to advertising and the increasingly fluid conversational collaborative nature of markets. He then goes on to suggest that we need to move towards an approach to advertising that borrows some of the attributes of the Agile development methodology used in the software industry. This would provide for much more adaptable, experimental and iterative advertising which is better aligned to the increasingly active consumer.

Neil also goes on to point out that much of the Digital sector already works in this way with its focus on experimentation and optimization. While this is certainly true for much of the best digital work, there is a serious danger that, as marketing investment in digital grows, we lose this flexibility and spirit of adventure in a misguided attempt to appear 'strategic'. Thankfully brands such as Burger King and Nike have shown that putting digital at the heart of communications strategy does not require a return to command and control marketing but instead provides an opportunity to move to a much more flexible and responsive style of advertising. The King is dead, long live the King.

TweetEnders

Twitter is most definitely the media’s flavour of the month right now. Newspapers, TV programmes and blogs are awash with the ‘latest craze to grip the nation’. While the hyperbole that always characterises these debates will undoubtedly pass as quickly as it arose, it does raise some interesting questions about the compelling nature of Twitter.

Beyond, the obvious fact that humans have always been social beings and that Twitter is yet another example of an advance in digital technology that makes it easier for us to satisfy our underlying human need to feel connected with each other, there are some interesting parallels to be drawn from the traditional media world to help explain why the average Twitter user is so interested in the minutia of the lives of some many people beyond their immediate social circle.

First and most obviously the fact that Stephen Fry has over 250,000 followers on Twitter, and counting, can easily be explained by the obsession with celebrity which fuels the modern media and specifically by looking at the success of magazines like Hello which provide their readers with an insight into the daily lives of their ‘heroes’. In that regard Twitter can be seen as just Hello magazine in real time.

But that doesn’t explain why so many of us are as equally interested in the vicissitudes of the lives of those who we know but wouldn’t necessarily buy more than one beer for on a big night out. In my view this is more akin to the fascination in the details of everyday live that has sustained soap operas like EastEnders and Coronation Street for so long. Yes these soap operas have the occasional 'big' story' lines but for the most part they are focused on the detail of the ordinary lives of everyday folk. Just like Twitter.

It’s not rocket science but it is life Jim, only just as we know it.

Some serious sausage

I don't want to give the impression that all I do these days is read books (if only) but I've just finished  reading David J Taylor's book Never Mind the Sizzle...Where's the Sausage?: Branding Based on Substance, Not Spin and I've got to say I absolutely loved it. This came as something of a surprise to me as its been sitting on my shelf for ages and I only picked it up as I had nothing else to read. To be honest I think my initial indifference to it came about as a result of reading the back cover on which one of the reviewers comments that the book can be read in two hours. Now in reality a great book that you can finish in two hours is an absolute bonus particularly when it has been recommended by such a list of marketing luminaries but somehow in my head this got translated as 'if it only takes two hours it can't be worth reading'. Funny how the human mind, or perhaps just my mind, works because that couldn't be further from the truth.

Not only has David got a really timely and well thought-out message in reminding us that there is more to brand building than multi-million pound ad campaigns and nice logos. In the trials and tribulations of Bob Jones and Simpton's Sausages he has found the perfect vehicle to bring it to life. It is as entertaining and engaging as it is wise. I was also particularly impressed with how David has managed to overcome the obvious limitation of using the parable style, which is the difficulty of providing detailed examples without breaking the the flow of the narrative, by integrating the book with his blog wheresthesausage.com.

All in all the book is a brilliant example of something that combines just the right amounts of sausage and sizzle.

The power of positive branding

In these difficult economic times, with consumer confidence at an all time low, successful brands need to do more than just convince consumers to purchase their brands over and above their competition. They need to make consumers feel positive about the very act of consumption, particularly where it is of a non-essential nature. Of course advertising which creates a positive emotional connection to a brand, in addition to or in place of, a rational argument for it is nothing new but in my view it has never been more important than it is now to get these things in the right balance. The current Virgin Atlantic Still Red Hot campaign and the T-mobile Life's for Sharing campaign are both great examples of this. Both create a very positive emotional link to the brand but do it in a way that links back to a rational brand truth. In contrast the latest 'Portrait' TV ad from Cadbury tries hard on the emotional side but fails to make a strong enough rational connection back to the brand and thus falls flat. No surprise then that I'm booked on a Virgin Atlantic flight to New York next month but I'll be economising on the chocolate front to pay for it.

The Brand Bubble

I recently finished reading The Brand Bubble by John Gerzema and Ed LeBar and I throughly recommend it if you have any interest at all in the future of branding. There is no doubt that part of the rationale for the book is to promote Young and Rubicam's BrandAsset® Valuator but there is certainly nothing wrong with that, particularly when it is a source of such rich data.

Based on their analysis of this data Gerzema and Lebar argue that there is another $4 trillion dollar bubble in the global economy as a result of the fact that the financial markets valuation of brands is fundamentally out of kilter with the value placed on these brands by their consumers. This is an intelligent and very well supported argument.

Nevertheless, from my perspective the most interesting aspect of the book is the authors analysis of the attributes of those brands who are creating sufficient consumer value to justify their significant financial brand valuations. This analysis leads the authors to conclude very convincingly that a brand is not so much a position as a direction and that it is the energy and movement around this direction that creates value for the consumer. This is something that resonates very strongly with me and reinforces my view that an over emphasis on brand strategy at the complete expense of tactical marketing initiatives, something that is surprisingly common, can be detrimental to a brands development. In my view tactics and strategy are equally important and fundamentally complimentary from a branding perspective as the success of brands like 42 Below clearly demonstrate.

Overall,The Brand Bubble is an important and thought provoking book that definitely sits in my top 5 marketing books of recent years.

The future of broadcast TV

In the run up to Christmas I had the pleasure of 'discovering' Summer Heights High, the award winning Australian comedy currently showing on BBC Three. The series provides a brilliantly funny parody of high school life in Australian and is well worth watching. The question is where? My first experience of it was on BBC Three as a result of a tip-off from Jamie C. The problem for me though was that as I was a little late to the party the BBC had already reached episode 5. Not to be put off I went to the BBC iPlayer and found episode 4 which I devoured with indecent haste. Nowhere near sated I then looked around for more of the same and of course this is where the limitations of the otherwise brilliant iPlayer kicked in. With almost all programmes available for only a maximum of seven days after broadcast episodes 1,2 and 3 were nowhere to be found.

Unwilling to accept defeat quite so easily I turned to YouTube to fill in the gaps. Now credit is due to ABC TV who have been progressive enough to create a Summer Heights High YouTube channel but not surprisingly while its stuffed full of clips it doesn't contain full versions of the first three episodes. For this I had to turn to iTunes and take advantage of the fact that I have a Mac Mini connected to the widescreen TV in my living room. So with only minimal delay, three thirty minute episodes download in minutes over a fast broadband connection, I was able to get up to speed and catch-up with the BBC's scheduling. 

So where to from here? Do I reorganise my calender to ensure I am in when episodes 6, 7 and 8 are broadcast on the BBC. Do I trust myself to use the iPlayer to catch the episodes within seven days of broadcast? Do I hand over £1.99 per episode to iTunes as the cost of my busy lifestyle? Thankfully my Sky+ box provides the most obvious answer and I am now happy in the knowledge that, in the absence of a hardware failure, I won't be missing the end of this great series.

So alls well that ends well but this experience does raise an interesting question about the role of broadcast TV in this increasingly on-demand world: has it been reduced to little more than a series of trailers for content shown through more convenient platforms? It certainly seems to be going that way in my world.

Tache love from Remington

As those of you who had the misfortune to bump into me over the last four weeks can testify for the month of September I have been growing a less than glorious mustache to raise sponsorship money for the Everyman charity as part of their annual Tacheback campaign. Its a fantastic event which since 2003 has raised over £700,000 for Everyman's life saving vital research into testicular and prostate cancer. This year Tacheback is being supported by Remington which is a great brand fit given the need to trim even the most unimpressive of taches (trust me I know). So it was with great pleasure that I unwrapped my High Precision washable grooming kit courtesy of Remington for the ceremonial shaving off of my tache yesterday. Of course having provided me with the tools for the job they did not put me under any obligation to write about it here but it certainly served its purpose well and as its so rare to see brands engaging with the community in such a positive fashion I am delighted to give credit where credits due. I just hope that now I am so well tooled up I can avoid the temptation to grow a goatee.

Although the taches all came off at the end September donations can still be made here so please feel free to dig dip.