Advertising Thingys

Cola Wars are back. But this time, it’s Airlines.

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At last!  Airline advertising is interesting again.  And competitive again.  And at least for Southwest, good again.

As you know by my recent rant, I’ve just about had it with airlines.  Not just because the experience of interacting with their brands isn’t enjoyable, but because their advertising and other marketing isn’t enjoyable either.  American’s “we know why you fly” spots are cheeky, sort of, but targeted at business travelers.  Continental has been running a nice mix of print ads, but “work hard fly right” doesn’t resonate with the headlines in most of the ads.  And have you seen Delta’s in-flight video?  Check out the “smoking is not allowed” bit at 1:50.  Yikes.  Cheeky. In a literal way.

So here comes Southwest.  First, they entertained us with the “bags fly free” spots, poking fun at airlines on a key consumer hot-button, the checked baggage fees that most larger airlines are charging.  Good, solid, features-based advertising that tells a story, entertains and communicates clear benefits. (And, by the way, support Southwest’s casual attitude brand position.)

More recently, they’ve launched a new series of spots that is simply sublime.  The “fee court” campaign takes aim at another big airline peever, the dreaded “change fees.”  In the spots, from GSD&M’s Idea City, we see plaintiffs, called “real travelers” seeking restitution from “big airline executive,” who simply can’t be bothered.  The casting is perfect, the performances are wonderfully glib, and the big airlines are comically vilified in spots that make their points brilliantly.  In one spot, real traveler and big airline executive have approached the bench, and big airline executive rolls his eyes and asks, “will we be here very long?”  The court gasps, the jury whispers, and the verdict is returned:  GUILTY.

In another spot, a business traveler asks a simple question:  “how can three clicks of a mouse cost me $150?”  Big airline executive stumbles and mumbles his response about personnel, computer time and how we “can’t afford to do this for free.”  Jury giggles under their breath.  And in the real payoff, a family of travelers pleads their case.  When a young girl, who was scheduled to fly to see “grammy and grampy” fractures her leg and has to change the flight, big airline executive charges the $150 change fee for all three family tickets.  The spot wins with everyone repeating the basic math “that’s $450.”  The judge looks at the defendant, who arrogantly retorts “it’s an honest dollar, your honor.”

Using the courtroom convention engages viewers in a familiar dramatic setting, (which garners attention) and also allows a lot of content to transpire in a very short time.  These spots are :30s.  The timing is perfect, and the lo-fi production ethos is not an accident or a shortsight, it’s a perfect riff on the afternoon court television format.

And the best part of all these spots is that the focus is singular:  the entire campaign is centered on a specific and definable objective:  communicating the simple benefit that Southwest is the only airline with no change fees.  The creative, the execution, the fun…all of it is able to blossom as a result of such clear focus.

In my last post, I wrote that it’s only a matter of time before the big airlines get “corrected” by the market.  Southwest has done a marvelous job at truncating that timeline by invading unaware enemy territory in the new “cola wars.”  Check out more of the spots at youtube.

I’ll take the airlines. But please hold the advertising.

Nader Ashway3 Comments

Face it, big airlines.  You suck.  You suck because you can’t keep your promises. You suck because you’re delivering the same or less service than you were a year ago, and charging way more for it. You suck because you can’t even throw in the lousy meals anymore. You suck because your advertising is a big fat lie.

Please American, Continental/United, Delta, and yes, even you JetBlue.  Please do us all a favor.  Stop spending tens of, no make that hundreds of millions of dollars on all that advertising only to fail us at the ticket counter, and at the gate, and in the sky and when we get our credit card statements.

Truth is, you don’t have exceptional service.  You don’t have the lowest fares.  You don’t have the best routes.  You don’t have the most flights.  You’re not really that convenient after all.

Come to think of it, it’s really funny how just about ALL your advertising focuses on those key benefits, when almost none of you can deliver on these basic promises.

Instead, let’s focus on the basic truths:  across the board, your service is on the scale somewhere between below-grade and adequate.  I don’t discount that there may be an exceptional and caring employee flying the skies on any given A320, but by and large, your staff is just going through the motions.

Your fares are out of whack, and on no discernible pattern. I recently researched a flight from New York/Newark to San Diego on Continental.  (I looked up to THREE months out.)  $1,064.  REALLY?  A thousand bucks?  I could practically get chauffered out there on that dime.  And, hey, JetBlue, those “discount” fares of yours are all but a distant memory now, huh?  When I compared, you were only about $200 cheaper.  Honestly?

And can I ever get on a flight that isn’t “oversold?”

What’s astonishing to me is that the basic laws of marketing, branding and social media all state that airlines should essentially wither on the vine and die, and lose share to the competitor that meets customer needs, and to a market that demands choice.  And yet, these behemoths survive.  Promises are being broken, word of mouth is almost entirely negative, (when was the last time you heard about an “exceptional” flying experience from a co-worker?) prices are going up, and now you’re getting charged for checked baggage and crazy needs like “legroom,” and big airlines seem to almost universally be having banner years.  Where is the competitor who “gets it?” Where is the market demanding choice?

So again, I state my initial request.  Please re-allocate your budgets.  Hold the advertising.  Take the 8- and 9-figure advertising budgets, and instead, just lower rates.  Just STOP with the checked bag fees.  And please stop making me sit in the middle of row 26 when I book a flight a month in advance.

WTF, Financial Advertising? [What’s the Focus?]

Nader Ashway1 Comment

I’ve been watching a lot of financial advertising lately, and I can’t help but wonder where all the typical metaphors have gone. If you’ve ever seen a commercial about a middle-aged man getting ready for his daughter’s wedding, (cue the flashback vignette of her birth, first tooth, college graduation, etc.,) well, you’ve seen them all.

But much of that seems to be changing.  In fact, financial advertising is undergoing an interesting transformation in that the commercials today are, as a group, much less about the money/ security/ wealth promise and more about the technology with which you can access it. Financial advertising has shifted the vector. And in a sense, it’s emblematic of our cultural catch-up with technology – new devices, broadband, more access – and how we choose to interact with our institutions.

John Hancock insurance is running a campaign now where a single person is seen sitting in a relatively quiet environment (on a train, at a diner, in an office) sending a text message to someone (likely a spouse) talking about retirement and/or some other financial benchmark.  “Remember we used to say ‘when’ we retire” the off-screen counterpart texts, and the exchange ensues.  It’s pithy, to be sure.  But it’s wildly interesting in that the technology part of the engagement takes center stage in the advertising.  The texting IS the creative.

Similarly, Bank of America is running a campaign to promote its app for smartphones.  A few friendly talking heads extol the virtues of checking balances, transferring funds, finding ATMs “all right from my phone.”  Here, the technology is the hero and it easily outshines the services it enables. And of course, how can Citi resist the urge to bring a Facebook reference to their ads with a spot where a guy buys a laptop for his mom with a Citi card and she turns into a social networking monster: “then one day…she friend-ed me.”

And recently, there have been several new commercials that have foregone actors altogether (for Northwestern Mutual, JP Morgan Chase) and instead feature tech-inspired motion graphics to communicate brand points like trying to “recapture that feeling of financial invincibility” (Northwestern) and “being a leader means moving fast,” (JP Morgan Chase.)  All tech, no touch.

While there’s nothing wrong with this collective approach – advertising has always borrowed pop culturally relevant isms – it just seems off the mark.  Combined, these companies are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to air these commercials and they seem to want to focus on the pathways rather than the destinations.  It’s like developing advertising for a new shopping mall and creating spots touting how shiny and new the highways are that lead to it.

Advertising should be singular.  But the single focus you choose should be the highest benefit you can claim for your product or service.  In best-case scenarios, it should be the benefit that no one else can claim, or claim nearly as well.  I’m just not sure that “we offer technology” offers enough juice to convince an already fragmented, already distracted, already engaged audience to bank/invest/insure here.

Relax. With marketing, price is NOT the issue.

Nader Ashway1 Comment

If you’re looking for an advertising agency or a marketing communications firm or a web developer or a direct marketing partner, there’s good news.  You won’t be shopping on price.

This is kind of weird for most market consumers – virtually everything we buy has a price attached to it, and generally, the choice we make on any given purchase tends to include price as a determining factor.

But with marketing, it’s different.  With marketing services, YOU set the price.  You say “I want this and this and that and that, and I’m willing to spend $X.”  Pretty cool position to be in, eh?  Imagine if you could walk into your favorite restaurant, and say “I want the Sea Scallops appetizer and the John Dory Entrée and I think I’ll have the Green Tea Ice Cream dessert… and I want to only pay $42 for everything.  Oh, and throw in a glass of Riesling with the entrée!”

That’s pretty much how it goes with marketing.  Let’s say you’re about to embark on an advertising campaign.  You would never solicit five proposals and then select the most inexpensive agency.  [For one thing, you couldn’t really solicit a proposal without stipulating a budget.]  And secondly, these kinds of services aren’t shopped on price.  You’re searching for ingenuity.  Or practicality.  Or intense creativity.  Or humor.  Or whatever you think might move the needle.

Buying marketing services is NOT like buying tires, where you go from shop to shop, looking for the best deal.

Unfortunately, many would-be marketers like to play the “I’m not telling you my budget” game.  They think that by withholding that parameter, they’ll get more affordable services.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.  Every ad agency, every web development company, every marketing consultant thinks they have a feasible answer to your quandary.  But we all think you should be spending a minimum of $10 million.

Here’s another rub.  The supplier (agency, developer, or restaurant owner) can simply say “no.”  [Sadly, not many of them do.  But it’s really necessary sometimes.]  Some suppliers can’t do what you’re asking for $42.  Or WON’T do what you’re asking for $42.  And those answers will help you make important decisions later on.

So, next time you’re shopping for marketing/advertising/web services, do yourself and the professional on the other side of the table a favor:  set a budget.  It’s the best way to get a straight answer, the only way to compare apples to apples when you’re reviewing your proposals, and probably one of the very few times in your professional life when YOU get to determine what something will cost.

100 Years of Advertising Agency Deliverables – In Three C’s.

Nader Ashway5 Comments

The history of advertising and marketing communications – about the last 100 years or so – has constantly demanded agencies to evolve.  And the evolutionary pace is moving faster than ever, thanks to the advent of the Internet.  New media, new technology, new formats – all of these play critical roles.  But looking backward – and then forward again – this history can be described in three primary phases, each beginning with the letter C.  And if you care to read through, there’s a bonus!

The first C:  Copywriting

In the early days of advertising, say, from its provenances through the late 1950’s, businesses engaged the services of advertising agencies mostly for their superior writing skills.  Copywriters weaved dazzling tales of adventure and promise around products and services.  The primary media were radio (you had to “paint” the scene with words) and print, mostly expressed in newspapers and the burgeoning magazine business.  Consider the scheister-ism of PT Barnum’s “Greatest Show on Earth,” long-copy (and long-promise) miracle cure-all ads and the culmination in the late 1950’s to “E-Day” for the Edsel.  Copy carried us through two world wars.

The Second C:  Commercials

By the 1960’s, art started to capture our imagination. Helmut Krone’s 2:1 layout ratio reduced copy to a shrinking afterthought:  Think Small.  Flowery language and superspun tales gave way to big, beautiful product shots, and – gasp! – moving images on the new-fangled television thingy.  For the next 50 years or so, American advertising would become a bubbling volcanic eruption of 30- and 60-second commercinematic lava.  Rain-slicked roads for car commercials, the beckoning bubbling overflow of the beer money shot, all those great talking heads and one very large, very iconic Mean Joe Green having a Coke and a Smile.    What could possibly top that?

For the better part of five decades, commercials flourished, and made advertising a sexy career choice. And even got big-time movie directors stoked about a supershort form. But in the late 1990’s there was trouble afoot. A new and powerful medium had sprung up, and there were – gulp – NO RULES.  Heck, for a long time, with no IAB, there were no STANDARDS!  But there sure were lots of eyeballs. The Internet did change everything, especially advertising.  And you could almost see the second “C” getting desperate…trying to articulate the new medium with, of all things, ANIMALS:  sock puppets, energized bunnies, and when will cavemen and chimpanzees ever get old?  It was clearly time for a new generation.

The Third C:  Content

Like its predecessors, content will change everything about how advertising agencies go about their business, about the kinds of people they will hire and about the kind of work that will be produced.  In some ways, content is already surpassing commercials – expensive to create, produce and air – as the chief and ultra-scalable deliverable.  Today, in the social media morning of marketing history, content development is as valuable to our clients as the storyboard once was and the concept outline before it.  Programs, movements, essay-writing contests, blogs, handheld video diaries, flash mobs, tweets and check-ins:  all content, and all fueled (okay mostly fueled) by our beloved industry.  Next time you’re having lunch with your client, start talking about content.  You might see a real relationship start to bloom.

The fourth C:  I told you there was more.

Although Content has become the unobtanium of the marketing world, there is a good chance that its reign will not last nearly as long as its forebears.  In the next 10 years (yep, you heard it here first,) if agencies cannot deliver COMMUNITY to their clients, they will be as valuable as shiny, mint-condition Edsels. And we all know where they ended up.