Out of the Ordinary

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.

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 Tyranny of large numbers

At a time when financial institutions of all kinds are under fire for their inability to manage their own numbers it would seem like a good opportunity to take another look at the role of numbers in advertising. Reach and frequency are among the most common measures of marketing activity but when it comes to these two titans of the marketing lexicon is bigger always better? Indeed are all numbers or even audiences created equally? As someone who makes their living in the digital space you would expect me to celebrate the relative value of interactivity. Indeed its hard to argue with the premise that it is easier to measure the impact of a piece of communication if the recipient actively interacts with it. But beyond interactivity it seems to me that we need to look at the audience for any brand or service not just as a amorphous mass of equal units but instead as a collection of people with very different states of mind. Of course these states of mind are myriad but for simplicity's sake it would be progress to at least group these states of mind into four categories; passive, neutral, active and activist.

In this context few individuals permanently inhabit only one of these states of mind for a prolonged period of time. Nevertheless from a marketing perspective individuals occupying these different categories have very different values:

Those in a passive state are unlikely to even register the existence of any commercial message they are exposed to let alone be influenced by it. This is the fundamental weakness of the GRP.

Those in a neutral state are more likely to register the existence of any given commercial message but its impact on them is likely to be for the most part fleeting.  In this context message frequency may extend this impact but it is unlikely to lead to any significant action on the part of the neutral consumer. This may contribute to long-term brand equity at best.

In the active state individuals are more receptive to commercial messages provided they are appropriately targeted, ill-targeted messages are likely to push the recipient back into the neutral or passive state. As a result the likelihood of an explicit or implicit actions increases significantly.

Finally in the activist state an individual is so receptive to the message that they become a conduit for it, amplifying its effect immeasurably, ultimately leading others who may not have even been exposed to the original message to act.

Thought about in these terms it is obvious that not all audiences are created equal. In fact the absolute reach of a campaign becomes less important than the proportional mix of the states of mind of the audience reached. After all its easy to see how an audience of 100 activists and 1,000 actives is more valuable than 10,000 neutrals and 100,000 passives.

Although this may sound a bit like I'm trying to tell you that 1 + 1 doesn't equal 2 it is certainly worth thinking about the next time you hear the words high reach and frequency!