Search results matching tag 'brand utility'

Brother, can you spare a paradigm?

1319935 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:41:00 GMT

Has any agency really solved the multi-disciplinary thing yet? On both the demand and supply side of the marketing process, we still stumble over the idea that we might be living under a different paradigm. Much of what I’ve seen about cross-disciplinary thinking is actually effort to keep the problem alive, rather than to solve it once and for all. We aren’t always working with today’s realities about media consumption and consumer choice environments, but on yesterday’s paradigm - to reach as many consumers as possible with a single message.

I’m fascinated by the resurgence of interest in ‘emotional’ decision-making. TV is making a play for comeback through the work of Thinkbox, though its efforts to help educate the latest generation of media people into the art of emotion are falling on deaf ears in the DM agency world. The latter ask the (fair) question of “how come they get £3m to spend on a brand campaign with ‘no roi’ yet I have to justify my 200K mailing effort with actual sales?” TV enthusiasts say “without any emotional content presented as frequently as possible to everybody, the brand won’t be famous enough to remember. ROI is about the long term, not just the short term.” Ironically, both have a point. Clients ultimately need to decide where to put the money. But agenda free advice is a rare thing.

Digital media doesn’t respect the old model. Nor does it appreciate the effort of the old paradigm to keep it boxed up as ‘just a direct response channel’. It’s rather more complicated than that. I believe it's as powerful to create emotional experiences that reach right into the hearts and minds of consumers about matters that are important to them on the website as it is in the TV ad. We know it's harder when the exposures aren’t measured in the same way.

Cumulative effect is one way to look at things, and to some extent, the media metrics systems being developed now are beginning to get that. Pretty much every ‘creative’ agency structure, though, still seeks to identify the single effect that each agency is responsible for, and can claim credit for in a credentials later. I’m not sure this is good enough in the new paradigm, where media planning is increasingly about keeping a brand ‘in the air’ not ‘on the air’.

You can't save your way out of recession. You have to innovate.

1319935 — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:12:00 GMT

I was most taken with the comment headlining this post - a quote from Craig Barrett, founder of Intel, last night, courtesy of and Oxford Business School event I was lucky to attend. It reminded me that one of the things that digital marketing has taught the industry in the past ten years is about remembering to innovate. Advertising people talk about innovation rather a lot, but rarely deliver it. Because we have people with ‘creative ‘ job titles, we think we have a god given right to talk about innovation. Wrong. Most of the innovation in our industry comes from technology changes, and insight into consumer’s use of technology. I’d like to ‘shout out’ as Jamie Oliver might say to the technologists who solve problems, make stuff happen, think of new stuff every day. We are closer to how magical that can be in a ‘new media’ world than perhaps some of the new entrants are with their mad men ways. I do think that belief in innovation will become an important differentiator in the not too distant future. It true that creative content generators take advantage of technology, and put it to brilliant use, but they’d be sitting twiddling their thumbs most of the time without clever people who invent things like the internet, make the cinemas 3D, make the computers work. I guess the true test of successful innovation is imitation. And we’re really good at that, aren’t we?

Crisis does not equal danger plus opportunity

1319935 — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:55:00 GMT

Dontcha just hate pseudo profundity? I’ve recently seen (again) the PowerPoint urban myth of the Chinese symbols shown as an answer to the economic conditions the marketing community and indeed the whole community faces. It really doesn’t wash. In fact, check out an incisive critique of this pictogram/linguistic fallacy. I know, I know, we work in the world of overclaim. We are all simple purveyors of seductive presentation technique. But I am also very keen on substantiation, evidence and consideration of the facts in making decisions around investing Clients’ money.

Today the OECD published stats that indicate the UK economy is in technical recession, according to the definition of recession as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Are we able to substantiate this in our own industry? Can we ‘create’ our way out of the gloom?The last Bellwether report back in July used the dramatic turn of phrase ‘worst downturn in marketing spend since 9/11’. It’s a whole two months to go till the next one, but I predict that it won’t be particularly favourable. On the other hand, I am not sure how slavish we should be in responding in a flippy floppy way to these quarterly reports. In Q2 last year, marketing spend was at its highest levels for three years. Not even six months later, it’s at its lowest. Now whilst this data is well qualified, I am of the view that we need to reflect on slightly longer term trends to help focus our minds, and indeed our investments, when it comes to planning.

Where are consumers spending their time? Where can we deliver the most engagement with a brand? Which is more important - providing a useful service from the brand (a brand utility in the fashionable parlance) or creating advertising to seduce consumers into believing the proposition? What is the most cost effective way of getting consumers to spend time interacting with the brand? Does our idea actually make a difference to the brand? These are great questions. It has to be enjoyable, challenging and exciting to answer them. But there remains no excuse for intellectual paucity in our answers.