advertising

I know a good spot when I SMELL one.

Nader Ashway2 Comments

No, no, no.  This is not about some crazy new scratch ‘n sniff technology.  It’s about the latest television commercial for Nationwide Insurance, simply called “Baby.”  It comes from the agency McKinney (Durham, NC & NYC.) I like this spot a lot.  And you’ll see why in a minute.

Here’s the spot:

While this spot may not win a Gold Lion, it is perfectly and productively creative.  It also embraces virtually all of the classic conventions of good, solid advertising. I’ve developed a simple acronym/meme called SMELL to outline the five primary points of enumerating the creative approach through this process.  [Not the most elegant thing in the world, but hey, it works.]

This spot is Simple.
It’s a very concise idea.  The man in this spot thinks of his brand new Mustang as his “baby.”  He cleans it, treats it with care, makes sure it doesn’t get hurt.  Then when something does go wrong, he gets it fixed, and both he and baby are happy again.  No fancy tricks (except the enlarged baby effect,) no special lighting, no explosions.  Just a straight metaphor idea, simply executed.

Even the copy (voiced over by Julia Roberts) is simple:

“In the Nation, we know how you feel about your car.
So when coverage really counts, count on Nationwide Insurance.

Because what’s precious to you is precious to us.
Just another way we put members first.  Because we don’t have shareholders.

Join the Nation.”

Note:  I don’t quite get the “because we don’t have shareholders” bit, but it must have been a mandatory in the creative brief.  Oh well.

This spot is Memorable.
It’s hard to get this idea out of your head.  Once you see the car equated with “baby,” you get it, and there’s no need to explain it any further. Plus, because there’s a clear narrative thread (man loves car, man protects car, man hits fire hydrant with car, man gets car fixed and all is right again,) it’s easy to remember the story in context of the baby image.  That happy baby playing with a tire in the auto shop is super cute!  (And super cute is super memorable.)

In addition, the jingled slogan “Nationwide is on your side” is also memorable.  The line, developed by Ogilvy, Benson & Mather (now Ogilvy Worldwide,) in 1964, was sung to the distinctive 7-note jingle in 1973 and hasn’t changed since.  Consistency aids memorability.

This spot is Emotional.
One of the most important aspects of marketing is that it appeals to the emotions.  Brands create bonds on the emotional level, not the intellectual.  We start by desiring them, then come to trust them, and in some cases, we become deeply bonded to them.  That’s not rational – it’s pure feeling.

By humanizing the car (and with a cute little baby, no less,) this spot plays to emotions.  We see it happy, then we see it sad (after the accident,) then we see it happy again.  An emotional up-and-down within 30 seconds.

This spot is Likeable.
One of the key aspects of this spot is that it’s easy to like.  The main character is likeable, (he waves to the neighbor while washing his baby,) the baby (unless you’re an alien) provides likeability, they get Ms. Likeable herself Julia Roberts to do the voiceover, and they use the classic “Love is Strange” song from Mickey and Sylvia (from 1956) to provide the soundtrack:  a wailing wooing and cooing “baaaaaa-by!”  I like that.  It fits.

To lend some fairness to the conversation, the spot is NOT for everyone.  There are a host of dissenting opinions on this spot, (some people find it creepy, or weird, or just plain silly,) and I found a thread that sums it up here: http://www.commercialsihate.com/aahits-a-giant-babynationwide-stop_topic16598.html

This spot is Lasting.
Perhaps the most important thing about this spot is that it has a timeless quality to it.  This spot could have been released 10, or 20 or even 30 years ago.  I suspect that it will be relevant in 10 or 20 or 30 years from now.  That’s because there’s no “inside joke” being used, no “markers” of the current era (except for maybe the model year of the car itself,) and no descriptors in the copy that would be out of place years from now.

Because the ad taps into universal truths (babies are cute, we love our cars, sometimes we get into accidents, etc.) it has a quality about it that allows it to be relevant for a long, long time.

On second thought, maybe it should win a Gold Lion?

Advertising: starring social media

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I’m sure you’ve noticed this, but the phenomenon of digital interactivity – and especially via social media – has become a pervasive theme in modern television advertising.  Everywhere you look, brands of all kinds are using dramatic setups in their spots that either include, focus on or ultimately lead to some kind of digital interactivity.

To clarify, this is not just listing all the places you can find the brand on social media with a tag at the end of the spots.  This is regarding the growing number of spots being ABOUT social media, and about our digital lives, and how the brands are woven into our modern lifestyles.

Survey Monkey, typically regarded as a b-to-b entity, has gone out with an appeal to the consumer audience, and claims that their platform can be used “for all kinds of things, including event planning.”  What I love about this spot is the way it’s contextualized (and well-directed, as the story bookends the extended spot) around the “original” survey model.  Molly leaves a note in little Johnny’s locker, handwritten with crayon:  Do you like me?  With two options:  Yes.  No.  Classic.

Now, obviously, it makes sense for any type of online platform to use the digital life as the basis for the creative.  Google has done this marvelously before in their search spots, and more recently in a spot for their Nexus 7 product, where they use the theme of “search” as the basis for interacting with their electronic gadget.  It’s good – and they touch the humanity button perfectly with good casting and a few carefully planned tugs at the heartstrings.

Samsung’s Galaxy S4, (whose advertising still confounds me, since they’re just marketing around features instead of trying to find differentiating benefits, but that’s another post,) has a new spot featuring a traveling baseball team.  A bored infielder is using the video capture on the device to film his sleepyhead travel companion.  As the nod-er-off-er’s head bounces, the video is captured, and the buddy starts to tool on the loop.

And that’s what’s interesting – the ad isn’t about the quality of the video the device provides, the number of megapixels on the device, or even the dopey “tap to share” feature on the device, but rather on the video loop that this kid will create with the device.  (A primary-grade-level feature on any smartphone today.)  Ostensibly, the owner of the Galaxy S4 in this case is merely considering what a great Vine upload this would be, or at the very least how many likes that GIF will get on Tumblr.  THAT’s the unspoken focus of this spot, and it marginalizes the brand in some ways, because you can do that with ANY bloody phone.

In another category altogether, Wendy’s has taken up the social-media-as-the-end-to-the-means with its latest spot for its chicken flatbread sandwich.  In the old days, we would have just created a situation-comedy style setup with the big laugh at the end and then a 6-second panning beauty shot of the sandwich.  Today, the dialogue and setup is totally based on social media:  male character walks in and starts the dialogue with “hey…you saw my post on this great bakery…” and then ends with him posting a pic of redheaded “Wendy” to Twitter. [They also tagged the spot with a hashtag #twEATfor1k.]

And it goes beyond fast food into several other categories.  One new car commercial (for Honda) touts its “the car reads your emails for you” feature, and positions it as a safety benefit.  Smart.  But stop and think about that for a moment:  the brand recognizes the need for us to stay connected to our digital lives, and has built in an e-mail reading feature into their vehicles, and is now running spots promoting that.  That goes way beyond MP3 players and partnering with Pandora for entertainment purposes.

Surveys.  Search.  Social media posts.  All taking a lead role in spots for big brands.  Going even further, many brands now are using crowdsourced images and videos as the visual basis for their ads. It’s an interesting paradox, or at least a healthy turnabout:  for years, brands have hoped to be discussed and passively promoted through social media and across the digital landscape.  Now, social media and the digital life are being actively promoted via brand advertising.

Brands: Are they nature or nurture?

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I’ve been doing a lot of talking, teaching and pitching around the concept of brands, and it seems that a lot of people – including professionals in the brand business – still have wildly differing ideas about brands and what they are.  And while this post is NOT intended to clear everything up in 500 words or less, I do think that looking at it from a different perspective will help.  So let’s evaluate brands on the simple x/y coordinates of nature vs. nurture.

Let’s take a simple consumer category, like ketchup.  If we’re developing a NEW ketchup brand, we’d have to fit it in the market alongside the primary players like Heinz and Hunt’s and Del Monte, and let’s throw in the niche marketer Annie’s who owns the “all-natural” position.  Aside from the typical line extensions (organic, gluten-free, sugar free, etc.) not a very cluttered market at all.

ketchup_brands

The basic NATURE of brands in this category:

Ingredients
Texture
Flavor

If you were going to enter a competitor into the market, the brand would have to declare itself different by nature (a unique flavor, or a unique combination of ingredients, maybe they only source specific tomatoes, etc.) and then – and this is the important part – have to become different by nurture.

The way brands in this category are NURTURED:

Price
Packaging
Distribution
Merchandising
Advertising (national vs hyper-local)
Social Efforts
Publicity
Partnerships/Sponsorships

So we could develop a brand (let’s call it Kelly’s) and give it a certain NATURE so that it fits in the category and has a chance to carve out some market share.  Let’s suppose Kelly’s is sourced using only organic plum tomatoes from Italy, packaged in a really cool NON-plastic carton, and is frequently preferred over Heinz during blind taste tests.  (Lots of differentiation points there, and also lots of category parody.)

On its own, the brand’s nature should allow it to enter the market and do fairly well (given the right distribution.)

But here’s where you see that brands are NOT just the sum of what they’re made of.

For Kelly’s to survive – and ultimately, thrive – the real work would be in changing the hearts and minds of those who are in the market for ketchup to allow them to make “mental room” for a new player.  With Heinz owning about 55% of the market, Hunt’s about 20%, Kelly’s would be competing with Del Monte and “all others” for a piece of the remaining 25% of the roughly $1 Billion ketchup market.  At first.  But given the right climate, the right amount of time and the right combination of nature and nurture, there’s no arguing that Kelly’s could ultimately unseat Heinz for the #1 spot.

But how much would that cost, and how long would that take?

The answer lies in how the brand is NURTURED.  If the advertising is cool, and the brand selects some pretty cool partnerships and sponsorships, and doesn’t overly rely on price promotion, and does well on the b-to-b side with slotting and merchandising, and doesn’t suck, then it’s likely that nurturing won’t take too long.

However, if ANY of those things is slightly misaligned, and misperceptions ensue, then it will certainly elongate the process of adoption.

Brands are a phenomenon in two important ways.  First, they’re a perceptual phenomenon. Brands don’t actually exist.  As I’ve told my students, there’s no vault somewhere in Pittsburgh where the Heinz brand is “locked away.”  It simply exists in the minds of consumers as a sum of experiences and interactions.  And while all those versions from all those consumers are slightly different, they do share a basic collective complexion.

Second, brands are a cumulative phenomenon.  Meaning that those experiences, interactions and overall perceptions are forged over time – good or bad – and the one-word phrase that you may connect with the brand (“rich,”  “thick,” “sweet,” whatever,) gets more and more embedded over repeat impressions of that initial imprinting on your mind.

Until ultimately, brands are weighed in the moment of truth in the condiment aisle when the consumer ponders whether she wants “thick” or “sweet” or “rich” when it comes to what she’s putting on her next burger.

So – are brands nature or nurture?  Yes.
But the real work begins ONLY after you’ve gotten everything right.

Creative in Common

Nader Ashway3 Comments

When you consume as much advertising as I do, you start to notice patterns, like when two (or more) advertisements have a very similar theme.  Sometimes it’s an executional element, like the type treatment in a print ad.  Sometimes it’s the music bed in a radio spot.  Jeez, you work in this business long enough, and you start to recognize the more popular commercial actors in one television spot after another!

But once in a while, you catch a glimpse of creative synchronicity – two marketers plying their latest models using extremely similar conventions.  I’ve recently noticed this with the latest spots for Microsoft Surface and a revised spot for Kit-Kat bars.

Two gigantic corporations.  Two very different products.  Two disparate categories.  Two different audiences.  Two different agencies producing the work.  So how did they arrive at virtually the same executional strategy for their recent ads?

First, let’s take a look.

SURFACE

—

KIT-KAT

As you can see, these ads both employ a very specific creative strategy:  the “way in” to each spot is to focus on the “click-click” sound produced by using/consuming the product and create a commercial around it.

They’re both very entertaining.  The Surface ad starts with a little curious “click.” And then it’s followed by another, then another, and soon, the entire world is dancing in a Bieber-video-bonanza of clicking craziness.

In the KitKat spot, (which is not new, but has recently resurfaced in a media schedule that includes NFL programs,) the “click-click” of breaking off the chocolate wafers is soon followed by the “crunch-crunch” of eating the yummy snacks, harmonized with a few “mmm’s” for good measure.

Similar executions:  lots of different people, enjoying the product.  And interestingly, these multiple enjoyment scenes are focused around a singular commonality:  the click-click, or crunch-crunch.

Now there’s good reason to focus on this as a creative strategy.  For Surface, the click-click is an indication of the product features:  a self-stand for the tablet and the main focus of the spot, the quick-quick and easy-peezy snap-on of the Surface Touch Cover, a quick-click add-on that allows you to type into your tablet using a standard keyboard layout.  (You should also know that the Surface Touch Cover is sold separately, for about $120, and does not come with your Surface.)

For Kit-Kat, the click-click, crunch-crunch is the sound of the consumption experience of the product.  Break the wafer off with a click, enjoy the textured wafer with a crunch.  All for less than a buck.

Technically, both spots work very well.  They’re entertaining.  They’re light.  And they create a meme (click or crunch) around which to recall the product into top-of-mind awareness.  So far, so good.

But if we’re really evaluating these commercials on their merits, then by far, Kit-Kat wins without a contest.  Sure, the Microsoft spot is cool.  It’s sexy.  It’s energetic.  It’s youthful.  There are back stories on the filming and development of each scene (seriously, even extended scenes of just the schoolgirls dance routine,)  and “making of” videos with director Jon Chu.

But from a brand perspective, Kit-Kat gets more mileage out of this creative convention in a simple 15-second spot than Microsoft does in a one-minute choreographic extravaganza.  Why?  Because the “click-click” used in the Surface spot is highlighting a product feature (that a separately-sold keyboard can click on the tablet for a different type of use,) that has to be dramatically overplayed with all the dancing, twirling, and whirling about.  Conversely, the Kit-Kat “click-click/crunch-crunch” is a feature that is simple and direct, but most importantly, tied directly to the enjoyment benefit:  if you like a crunchy treat, you’re there in a matter of seconds – no big production number necessary.

Creative can be clever.  It can be cool.  It can be quirky.  It can even have things in common with other commercials.  As long as it makes you remember, (really important, especially for brand advertising,) it can pretty much be whatever it wants for whatever product or service or category. But in this case, you can see that it’s far better (and by better, I mean effective,) if the creative convention used in the advertising is tied directly to the enjoyment of the product – the benefit – derived from engaging with the features, rather than just on the features themselves.

Don’t you just love advertising?

Samsung Galaxy S3 ads: a “touch” of tech FAIL

Nader Ashway1 Comment

I’ve been seeing these Samsung Galaxy SIII commercials for months now.  You know, the one where two people “touch” phones and magically share stuff, like playlists or videos?  The first spot (not included here,) made its debut just prior to the release of the iPhone 5, and poked some good fun at Apple and their devotees waiting on long lines for the next great phone offering.  Samsung apparently has gotten good feedback from these spots, and they’ve rushed out several more.

Take a look:

And while I think they’re very good commercials (they each create a moment of drama centered around the product – that’s always good in advertising,) I’m just not sure it’s very good technology.

Let’s get this straight.  We’ve packed supercomputer technology (no really, the average smartphone today has more actual digital technology in its main chip than NASA – all of it combined – had at its disposal to launch the Apollo rocket into space,) into a tiny wireless device that fits in your pocket and runs practically all day on one battery charge.  With a smartphone, you can send a message – text, photo, video – INSTANTLY to your cousin in Kuala Lumpur (doesn’t everyone have a cousin there?) by pressing a few buttons.  [And actually – unless your name is Blackberry – there are no buttons!  It’s just glass with pictures of buttons! ]  With a smartphone, you can download music from the ether, and then listen to it in a matter of seconds.   With a smartphone, you can play an interactive video game, along with three friends in three different cities, in real-time.  And with these cooky add-ons called apps, you can harness vast amounts of neatly packaged information about whether or not your plane is on time, the history of nearly everything, how your stocks are doing and your absolute place in the world through a global positioning satellite.

So with ALL THAT technology literally and figuratively at your fingertips, are we supposed to be impressed that you can “touch” phones and share information?  Is that really a big deal?  Let me make it easy for you:  no, it’s not a big deal at all.

In fact, it’s counterintuitive.  For more on that, see my earlier post on Intuitive Marketing.  Because the very essence of having a wireless device is to figuratively “connect” you to people who are NOT close to you.  This idea of having to be in the same physical space as someone to enjoy the fullness of the phone is downright dopey.  It’s cheap.  It’s a throwaway feature that somehow got left in, and now Samsung is spending tens of millions of dollars trying to convince us how cool it is.   It’s not cool to touch phones.  Actually, I think it’s a little weird.  What’s next?  The Samsung Galaxy S4, now with WIRES to connect to every phone together?

Look in your own smartphone right now.  I’ll wait.  Of all your contacts, how many of them are within one square mile of where you are?  Not many, right?

So let me be very clear here as to why this advertising is twisting my knickers.  Samsung is essentially taking the LEAST useful, least helpful feature of their product and making it the MAIN focus of their advertising.  It’s like BMW running a complete campaign for their latest luxury model and focusing on the idea that you can roll down the windows with this neat little bar that you can insert into the door and turn it over and over again until the window is down.  Sure, the car’s got power windows that let you do that with the touch of a button, but LOOK!  You can roll it down by hand if you want! Ugh.

Lesson for all marketers, big and small:  be proud of your products, and celebrate them and their features through advertising.  But go to the HIGHEST value of your product (not the most gimmick-ey,) and start there.  Don’t beat us over the head with something that’s really not that important, or even really that cool, and then try to convince your audience that it is.  That’s not just bad advertising.  It’s bad business.

This article first appeared on Technorati.