Archive for ad agencies
What Makes Great Ads Great?
Posted by: | CommentsLast year following the Super Bowl I wrote a post about what happened to Volkswagen? It was in response to a tweet from Marty St. George the CMO of jetBlue following VWs lackluster Super Bowl spot. The ad was mildly entertaining but hardly that compelling. It got me wondering about what makes great advertising, great.
As if to emphasize this even further, recently I had an interesting interaction with my 7 year old daughter. I was reading “Beezus and Ramona” to her. Despite there being a recent movie about these two precocious sisters, the reality is the books are pretty old. In this passage there was a reference to one of the most famous Alka Seltzer commercials. I read it as if from the commercial, “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing.” When we finished the passage I asked her if she’d like to see the original commercial, fairly confident we could find it on YouTube. We found it and my daughter would laugh hysterically reenacting it over the course of the next several weeks.
Husband: “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing.”
Wife: “You ate it Ralph.”
Husband: “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing.”
Wife: “Take two Alka Seltzer.”
As she laughed to herself, it dawned on me, this was a great ad. Iconic even. But why?
I think in this case it was less Ralph and more his wife. A subtlety that just worked.
As I did with the original VW post I think it’s important that we need to provide a simple rating system for the quality of ads.
I think it might look something like this. Let’s consider this a spectrum in which generally a lot of the same companies generally hover in the same area.
Legendary/Iconic is just that. It’s designated as once in a lifetime… we talk about it for generations. Think DDB’s VW “Think Small” ads, Arnold’s “Driver’s Wanted”, Alka Seltzer’s “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”, Apple’s “1984”, Coke’s “I’d like to buy the world a Coke”.
Great means it stands out in the category and continually performs well and is stylistically imitated. For example Apple’s “Mac vs. PC” ads now being imitated by T-Mobile stand out in my mind. Another example would be Target. It’s really hard to say the impact Target’s brand ads have had on the industry let alone on their partners brands. Target has been amazing at nurturing its own brand while leveraging iconic brands.
Good means it basically does its job. And let’s not forget, the company and product have to stand behind the work. Generally successful ads here are incumbent of being a part of a larger campaign. For example I would put Hyundai in this category. Individually wouldn’t say any of Hyundai’s advertising is all that memorable. As a part of their entire marketing effort they’ve obviously done a pretty stand-up job.
Honorable Mention means it’s functionally decent break-even advertising. The sort of advertising that speaks to knowing 50 percent of your advertising works but not knowing which 50 percent.
Much like wealth in our country the greatest ads occupy the top one or two percent.
When I wrote the piece about the VW ads of yore, I wrote it because that’s what we were used to from VW. We were used to Legendary or at least Great. Even when campaigns weren’t great, they flirted with great.
But what makes great ads great? In my mind, there are a few things and they largely rest on the following:
- The Idea
- Suspension of Disbelief
- Casting
- That little something or certain moment
The Idea – First and foremost the best ads are generated from a good idea. At its foundation, it should go without saying that any great ad is borne from a fundamentally good and sound idea.
Suspension of Disbelief – Just because you’re dealing with 60 seconds, 30 or even 15, doesn’t mean that the rules of suspension of disbelief don’t apply. It becomes harder to suspend disbelief when you’re presenting “real life” moments. Humor is probably the most effective way to enable people to suspend disbelief. The problem is that humor which while certainly subjective still relies on two critical things. The first is timing. The second is delivery.
Consider the Sony ads with Justin Timberlake who treats them more like an SNL skit than an ad. He’s genuinely funny and allows the absurdity of any moment to disappear.
M&M successfully uses humor to suspend disbelief. One of my favorite spots as of late is the one where M&Ms characters are in the kitchen cabinet throwing things at this guy who’s simply trying to get his pregnant wife a “snack”. He tells the M&Ms to “get in the bowl.” One of the M&Ms fires back the most common of childish comebacks, “You get in the bowl.”
Another successful use of humor is with the FedEx ad where a group of staffers are looking at a map of the world and one of them is supposed to put a pin where China is. He doesn’t know where it is and tears down the whole map to avoid being “outted”.
As such with humor, casting becomes so important. In general it’s a very little moment, a split second that makes it or breaks it and that’s usually as a result of good casting.
When you’re not using humor and presenting truly real moments the challenge becomes one of sincerity. Now you’re in a position where it has to be believable. Generally the best work in this realm comes from clearly understanding the brand. While Disney has lost some of its “magic” in my mind, its motivation is still to be thought of as truly the most magical place on earth. Or take Folgers’ spots. I’m fairly certain Folgers’ motivation in their ads is to make you cry. But in order to pull this sort of work off, it has to be sincere. Not about the coffee but about the moment.
All this being said perhaps though what is most important for great ads are two things. A collective will. And brave clients.
David Lubars Thinks You’re Dumb
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I belong to a group on LinkedIn called “Re-inventing the Advertising Agency Business Model”.
Here is where my advertising and marketing brethren pontificate on the future of advertising. In my mind it’s a useful exercise if only someone would actually do anything about it.
Lately, this issue is one of the most widely discussed topics in the marketing/advertising community. Forrester has several reports on the matter. Fast Company is planning to dedicate the December/January issue to the “tumultuous state of advertising.” As a part of this issue they recently asked the three top creatives of three very different agencies to visually demonstrate the future of advertising.
David Lubars, BBDO’s chairman and chief creative officer said this, “Everything will continuously change, but people will always stay the same. Go back 70 years, go ahead 50 years, a human is a human. There are primal things that will always drive us: Will this product be better, will it help me succeed, will it make me more attractive? So the technology and the way we to speak to people will change, but those fundamentals will never change.” How he visually represented this is pictured above.
Herein lies the disconnect between the consumer and marketers.
One of my previous blog posts was about the chaos that is today’s consumer marketplace. These days we can’t even agree whether or not to call ourselves consumers. Alex Bogusky wonders if the term is a dirty word. Grant McCracken offers the term “multipliers.” No matter what, they’re far more diverse, sophisticated and interesting than we’ve ever given them credit for. And while we try various new means of reaching consumers such as geo-tagging, QR codes, harnessing viral and so forth, at the end of the day on the whole, we default to the same old same old. No disrespect to David Lubars. I don’t even know the guy and am not so sure they’d let me in the building but the same old same old is generally what agencies like BBDO produce. Advertising to the lowest common denominator.
Don’t get me wrong, BBDO has done some amazing work and continues to do so and the sheer size of BBDO globally is beyond intimidating. Nevertheless all too often it seems like big agencies are in protectionist mode as the biggest purveyors of disruption marketing.
Every day, the 30-second spot is becoming less and less relevant. Commercials are background noise. Banner ads have become plain beige wallpaper. Brian Morrissey recently pointed out that click through rates on banner ads have stabilized. Phew. Good. At .09 percent. Ummm Houston… we have a problem.
Grant McCracken has a wonderful section in his book “Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living Breathing Corporation” where he refers to the “American scholar Lewis Mumford [who] offered his vision of the world created by commerce.” It looks something along the lines of the set of “The Truman Show”. As McCracken says, “This became the intellectuals favorite thing to say about popular culture: that culture touched by commerce must be diminished by it,” when in fact the exact opposite has happened. So while Lubars would have you believe that we as consumers are primal and simple the reality is we have evolved considerably. Sure there are ways to simplify explaining consumer purchase behavior but in general consumers are extraordinarily complex.
In Mark J. Penn’s book “Microtrends: Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes” he says, “With the availability of choice has come a rise in individuality. And with the rise of individuality has come a rise in the power of choice. The more choices people have, the more they segregate themselves into smaller and smaller niches of society.” In his book he offers glimpses into 82 of these “niches”. To me, that’s relatively daunting.
We talk about the notion of true change but the reality is we continue to produce mediocre dumbed-down work largely at the request of the client.
Agencies are still effectively layers upon layers of management with peer-to-peer alignment with clients. That being said, clients haven’t asked for it to change much. When the ads aren’t performing, fire the agency!
In my humble opinion it’s going to take CEO/CFO level leadership on the corporate side to force their CMOs and marketing organizations out of their comfort zones to explore agencies with new business models and to change the way in which they interact with those agencies and who takes responsibility for idea creation. And to consider bringing some of those people who generate ideas in-house.
I don’t think there is one standard “agency of the future”. I think there will be numerous solutions providers who all find unique ways to solve client’s problems and I think the more flexible and nimble those types of “agencies” are the better they will succeed.
And in fact according to Fast Company, Kraft appears to be on the cusp of doing it.
“For the enterprising client that can see clearly through the chaos, this new world holds promise. Kraft, for instance, has assembled a growing Rolodex of 70 new specialist partners. This isn’t some fringe brand — it’s Kraft, the country’s largest food marketer, which spends some $1.6 billion on marketing every year. The company is so open to new thinking that it recently hired a startup called GeniusRocket to develop a new campaign for the relaunch of its Athenos Hummus.”
My bet is that agencies will look a lot more like production companies and content will be king. I am also betting that audience segmentation will be far less about traditional demographics (age/race/HHI) and will be more about lifestyle/lifestage/interests. As we know Facebook is betting most heavily on “groups” and I guarantee you they will mine the data of the largest groups and offer up “access” to the largest groups at a steep premium. Social media in general has proven itself as a place where people with like interests congregate irrelevant of race or household income but don’t think for a second the consumer isn’t hip to what’s going on. We as marketers must be respectful and creative as to how we segment consumers.
May the best content win.
Looking at the Past to Arrive at the Future
Posted by: | CommentsI’m a partner in a start-up agency called Pomegranate.
Like many of my brethren in the industry, we’re working hard to address the question of the business model as well as the compensation model. I think plenty of agencies have tried to address the compensation model (which in some instances led to huge industry shifts e.g. the segregation of media) but few have tackled the actual business model.
We’re not necessarily sure we’re going to create the template for the “agency of the future” but we’re certainly hoping to not look anything like a “traditional” agency. This is probably easier said than done but we’ll die trying and hopefully all remain housed, fed and clothed in the process.
Our bet is that it will look something like what Joseph Jaffe proposed which is sort of a hybrid model. Incidentally, Bud Caddell did a great blog post rounding up the latest and greatest pontifications on what the “agency of the future” will look like.
One of our key goals is to address the issue of extensive overhead. And not necessarily so we can put it back into our own pockets. Of course we’d like to make a nice living but don’t feel a need to be obscene.
In any event one of the first people recruited was a CFO. He’s hardly the CFO type actually but his acuity with all things dollars and cents (and other things too) is astounding. We also wanted someone from outside of the ad/marketing business. This was very much by design.
In recruiting someone with no real marketing experience let alone advertising experience required me giving him a sort of Agency 101 tutorial. This was a wonderfully helpful exercise for me because looking at the model of yesterday really got me to think about how and why we will do it differently today.
I’d love to get feedback and encourage discussion about what’s missing or am I completely off my rocker?
What drives costs at agencies is overhead. Space and people. Roughly 6-10% of an agency’s revenue goes to space. Every big agency is in A-class space and spends a boatload on it. Then it’s people who drive costs and everything essentially boils down to billable hours. (New business pitches drive costs as well but that’s a whole other blog post.)
Agencies have traditionally been built based on mediums (ways to reach the consumer) and there were four basic mediums:
· Advertising (TV and print)
· Direct marketing (direct mail, direct response, 800# call to actions)
· Public relations
· Digital (web sites)
There are also media companies which are responsible for buying ad media (places where the ads go e.g. TV, online magazines, sponsorships).
All of this is based on what’s known as disruption marketing. In other words, I as the consumer am interrupted from a program and fed an ad, like it or not. These days the world is moving more towards permission-based marketing. This is where I as the consumer am largely in control of which “content” ads or otherwise I’d like to see. There may still be some disruption marketing there but companies have to be much smarter about placement because if marketing is not aligned with content appropriately I’ll find something else to watch.
So what does this have to do with the hybrid approach? It’s acknowledged that for any client it’s imperative that we know our client’s business inside and out and we understand their customers and everything about those customers. However, gone are the days where we “push” a message out to the broadest amount of people and hope that they’ll respond which is basically what :30 (thirty second) TV spots are.
Now, for any given effort we may decide to develop say… a mobile phone application. This requires idea creation and oversight from the principals, a little art direction and then programmers to develop it. The heavy lifting is done by the programmers but that’s not a function we want to own, nor should we because every client is different every client’s need is different and every client’s customer is different and how we reach them is inevitably going to be a broad mix of mediums.
I’ll use Sunoco as an example. Sunoco’s retail strategy for the past several years has been “The Official Fuel of NASCAR”. So they put the signage on everything and then some and do a few ads with NASCAR drivers and sprinkle it with a loyalty program and presto everyone comes running. Not so much. They’ve effectively made NASCAR “the” strategy as opposed to being a part of “a” strategy and in all likelihood have probably alienated anyone who isn’t a fan of NASCAR.
An approach might be to have NASCAR as a part of a greater motorsports strategy. Sunoco is also the official fuel of Porsche Club of America (not sure how many Porsche Club folks are NASCAR fans). This is a great affinity group and ones who are likely to evangelize the brand. Sunoco also happens to be in Philadelphia within maybe two hours of something like a good 3-4 nationally known Porsche tuners. Another part of the strategy might be supporting those groups with a little more TLC and letting them organically help to grow a loyal base of customers. The bottom line is it’s an effective strategy that doesn’t require the full-time hierarchy of agency staffing that you need to find ways to keep busy.
Typical agency staffing looks something like this:
CEO
Creative (develops ads/strategy)
· Chief Creative Officer
· SVP Creative Director
· VP Creative Director
· Associate Creative Director
· Art directors
· Copywriters
Account Management (client relationships/strategy)
· SVP Group Account Director
· VP Account Director/Management Supervisor
· Account Supervisor
· Account Executives
· Assistant Account Executives
Account Planning (customer insight)
· SVP Account Planner
· VP Account Planners
Studio (prepares creative for production)
Traffic (manages timelines and information flow)
Broadcast Traffic (manages timelines and insures that TV ads get to the right networks/stations/etc)
Then of course there are the support functions for all of this (HR, admins, finance/accounting).
Mirror all these people for all of the different mediums I told you about and you’re talking about a lot of frickin’ money in which people scramble with timesheets to account for the billable hours agreed upon. As advertising agencies battle with corporate procurement, agencies are now butting up against the evil they’ve in essence created.
Our CFO also asked how long clients stayed with agencies.
It used to be forever. Literally. Up until the 80s, accounts stayed with shops for 20+ years. Now days, agencies are lucky to hold onto business for more than a few years. This is largely a result of a three things. 1) Quarterly earnings – if you’re not moving the needle, you’re out. 2) CMO tenure – on average I believe it’s less than 24 months. This is also tied to quarterly earnings. 3) When the CMO goes or there’s a significant shift in the agency such as a creative talent leaving, business often shifts with it. There is very little loyalty left in the business anymore. There are other reasons why client’s part with agencies related to poor client service management or not delivering solid creative product as well but the bottom line is agency/client relationships are often pretty tenuous.
Now after re-reading all of this I’m wondering why I signed up to help these guys?
Oh yeah I love it.
Oh and while I can’t fully predict the success or failure there is one thing that I do know and that is for an agency like thisto succeed is going to require a first client who is willing to take a risk to help the industry evolve and know that mistakes will be made but figured out. Kind of like this whole social media thing.
What Happened to Volkswagen?
Posted by: | Comments@martysg sent me a tweet following the Super Bowl.
“@slprquattro Did you see that Deutsch VW ad last night? They never shoulda dumped CP+B. Terrible.”
While I can’t necessarily say that they never should have dumped CP+B. CP+B isn’t for everyone and I get that but I can say that VW’s work in general has gone down the crapper in my humble opinion. I don’t know if the agency can shoulder all the blame though.
First off let me give overall commentary about the SB spots. I do this because it’s important to my philosophy about creative. 98% of the work sucked and I’m fine with my manliness, thank you very much. The best two spots in my mind were the Google spot and the Dorito’s “Momma” spot. The former seems generally agreed, the latter I would say is highly subjective and a matter of personal taste.
One might legitimately ask, what the hell do I know? My personal top five nor #brandbowl’s were in USA Today’s top 50. And I’m going to guess that USA Today is more representative of the country than #brandbowl or me for that matter. Bottom line is that the disparity between #brandbowl and USA Today should register pause in and of itself. There’s obviously an intellectual disconnect somewhere.
One point: We should make a distinction between great, really good and good. Great should be designated as once in a lifetime… we talk about it for years. Really good means it stands out in the category and continually performs well and perhaps is imitated. Good means it basically does its job. And let’s not forget, the company and product have to stand behind the work.
In general, I think really good broadcast requires finding the subtleties or the intangibles. Most spots have a moment to be great but miss it. Most of the SB spots missed it. Some showed hints of brilliance but most missed it by a long shot.
In VW’s case, I think that there is a clear desire to appeal more to the mainstream. But does that mean that you have to be GM? OK that might be a little harsh but in my view, advertising needs to inspire and engage, especially when your core customer is less mainstream. Furthermore, just because it’s a :30 spot does not mean that the rules of suspension of disbelief don’t still apply. And based on the most recent Forrester report it doesn’t seem ads are delivering as of late.
The reason why the VW spot was such a disappointment to me is because they have a history of greatness. And SB spots are supposed to be great or at least really good.
Now, with regards to VW, as you might gather from my (former) twitter name, @slprquattro, I’m a bit smitten with Audi/VW. Don’t worry I won’t bore you with my ownership history. I’ve also followed their agency track record, ummm a bit. VW has always flirted with brilliance going back to the days of the DDB Beatle ads.
My all time favorite was the New York Times Magazine ad after Jerry Garcia died. Whoa.
“Driver’s Wanted” debuted and put the company squarely back on the map and re-established it in America’s consciousness. DaDaDaDa was the talk of the water coolers. The “Pink Moon” spot quite literally brought Nick Drake back from the dead. I also loved the “Mr Roboto” spot and the “Singing in the Rain” spot was very cool. At the end of the day, the “Driver’s Wanted” campaign was sheer brilliance. It drove sales and clearly showed that VW and Arnold knew the customer.
More recently, VW in my opinion had so
me nice efforts with “Safe Happens” which were sobering to say the least. And “Unpimp Ze Auto” but admittedly those spots weren’t for everyone. I also liked the “Make Friends with Your Fast” effort. Perhaps less memorable than “Unpimp” and again not for everyone but nevertheless good demonstrations of the sensibilities of the audiences they were trying to reach.
The “Punch Dub” spot perhaps had potential but misses the mark (even with the punch to gramp’s gonads and the Tracy Morgan and Stevie Wonder cameo). I don’t think it’s the agency’s fault. I don’t think CP+B could have saved them either. Liz Vanzura and Kerri Martin’s impact are missed. I think VWs issues are probably embedded in a client who’s playing it safe and has forgotten about their core customer.
These days that’s the last place I’d want to be.
The Fundamental Reason Ad Agencies Lack Diversity
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At breakfast with a colleague today the discussion of advertising agency diversity came up.
Being a black male who spent about 13 years in ad agencies, a lot of people ask me how I managed to be successful and what I think are the reasons why ad agencies can’t seem to tackle the diversity issue.
Although I do think agencies have traditionally “self-selected” its staff which is really just human nature, I do not believe there to be any significant mal intent. And I say this fairly confident that I’ve been discriminated against at least a few times in my agency career.
That being said, my view on the agency diversity problem is exceptionally pragmatic.
The most fundamental reason for why ad agencies lack diversity so much lies with simple economics.
Ever noticed that account service staffs at big agencies are generally made up of good looking white kids who look like they came out of a j. crew catalog? There’s a reason for this. Ad agencies don’t pay well at the entry level and generally the big agencies are in urban centers. Expensive ones. NYC, Chicago, Boston, LA, San Francisco. These two factors are critical. Most of my peers when I was a lowly AAE were subsidized in some way shape or form and almost no one had the burden of a student loan to pay off (including myself). In walking around agencies these days, things haven’t seemed to change very much. If you haven’t read a book called “The Hidden Cost of Being African American” by Thomas M. Shapiro that might be a good place to start in beginning to address the diversity issue in agencies. It’s a fact. Most African Americans coming out of college have significant student loans to pay off. Living in a very expensive city on an assistant account executive’s salary in many cases isn’t even an option.
Most of the best and brightest African American college graduates are pursuing careers in law, medicine or business. This is largely a financially driven decision. Any of the best and brightest kids of color who might have been marketing majors are getting cherry picked by guess who?
Your clients.
And they offer a much clearer career path, training programs, benefits and better salaries in areas where the cost of living is far more sustainable. If a potential client has a diversity requirement as a part of an RFP, might I suggest you request to borrow a few of theirs? And I’m not kidding.
Ad agencies might want to look at organizations like The Posse Foundation which provide access to students of color to generally small liberal arts colleges and further work to ensure retention. I would suspect that ad agencies might find similar challenges to that of small liberal arts colleges.
However, until the wealth gap closes significantly or entry level agency salaries increase significantly, I wouldn’t expect much to change.
