John Lewis: a smart, insightful and sweet ad

 

This is the Christmas ad created by Lowe for John Lewis, and it’s:

- smart, because they don’t play  blind in front of the credit crunch, but acknowledge it and suggest small and meaningful, rather than expensive and shallow, presents

- insightful, because they recognize how the best gifts are those that come out knowing the person, and what they’d like or need

- sweet, because it is. Weirdos help, and so do the Beatles.

 

Final Burp: then why is John  Lewis reviewing its advertising account? Oh, right, because they see advertising as a cost rather than an investment.

What if a major corporation was asked to create a “STOP” sign?

Straight from YouTube, a video that outlines what would really happen (we all know it) if there was no “STOP” sign, and a major corporation was charged with inventing one.

Final Burp: Before you feel good about yourself as an advertising man, let’s keep in mind that it’s all our fault, as we have let these people get away with the belief that they know anything at all about communication. How come they would not have the same attitude towards, let’s say, a plumber?

Brand Ideas far and beyond advertising

(And yes, the evergreen fear of extinction for strategic planners…)

Richard Huntington shares his view on the relationship between Brand Ideas and advertising on his AdLiterate.

His view is that advertising used to be large enough to fit the simple, modest ideas of the past, but today’s potent brand thought is too big to be restrained by traditional adv. He’s suggesting to “free advertising from the need to represent the entirety of the brand idea and recognise that other disciplines are capable of doing this in a richer and more rewarding way”, and that “for many brands it is their online experience that should be delivering the big brand idea in all its technicolour glory. “

While I agree about the limits of traditional adv, I don’t think that drawing a line between adv (for sales) and web (for experience) is the right path for today’s challenges, nor that it pays full justice to the opportunities for integration that multimedia technology is offering us.

The reason why we’ve been spending a number of years trying to talk our way out of advertising and into communication, is that we should think at communication as a package, with different pieces along different media (and different purposes), but all related to the same idea, that consumers can engage with. Think at a tv commercial introducing a product that can be better explained and personalized on a website. Or a print teaser and tv trailer redirecting to a website where you can be entertained on a given Brand Idea, and then download discount coupons to be redeemed at your neighbourhood store. How can we separate tv from web? Or why should we?

Think at Axe’s “Gamekillers“. Or BK’s “Have it your way”, a brand idea that paves the way for most of the brand’s communication.

Or we can change our point of view and look at brand communication with consumers just like your relationship with your friends. If you want them to come to your party (ie. sell your product), maybe you text them/twitter them/email them first in advance; you’ll have spent time with them already so they know if you’re fun/friendly/smart/sexy, and how welcome your invitation is; you then call them and tell them something more about the party to engage them; you might post pictures of the club where you throw it on the web to get them excited; you might even arrange for a ride for them to get to the place; while at the party, you make sure that they’re enjoying themselves, and that you spend some time with each one of them.

Are you doing each of this to strengthen your bond with them, or just to get them to come to your party? How can you draw a line?

On the other hand I think that what Richard is saying is that the web offers better opportunities for engagement and intercation, and that’s true, of course. Just like tv is probably still the best place to say “Limited edition – 99 cents – Expires next Sunday”.

Now the sad part: as with litterally anything that is happening in advertising (or communication, ok…) this sounds a good enough excuse for someone to announce the upcoming death of planning. And judge it “,these days at least, an utterly futile activity (and a very dull career).” Apparently that’s because the really cool brands (Apple, Starbuck’s, Nike) “do not and have never needed Planners to tell them what they’re about”.

I don’t get it.

First, saying that no (adv agency) Planners worked on that doesn’t mean that they haven’t been planned at all. They have been planned by their founder (and their mates). I believe it’s due to the usual mistake of thinking at strategic planning as if it was a position on a business card, rather than an activity.

Second, there’s loads of other cool brands that have been planned by, guess who?, strategic planners. (Take Axe).

I’m always amazed at how often I stumble upon mournings for strategic (or account, or brand) planners. My opinion is that our work is so detached by any kind of specialization, or structure, or execution, that it will always be relevant, in one way or another. We can change employer, workmates, routines, tools, but we’re probably going to be around for longer than lots of the people we meet everyday, who face a more serious threat than us (journalists, anchormen, tv-focused creatives, some researchers…)

Final Burp: in the same article someone is pointing out how today’s powerful brand ideas are not only outer brand messages, but they can also be relevantly applied within the company, thus getting closer to a brand vision. (Take Dirt is good, or Power of Dreams). This makes much sense now that the boundaries between the brand, the company, the corporation and the society are falling apart.

What happens when some consumers are given the chance to own a brand (or at least an ad)

Is Dove Pro-age showing signs of aging?

 

I’m starting to think that too many posts from this blog are inspired by AdAge, but in this case I can’t help but refer to it once again.

I’ve long been suspicious about Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, because it seemed to me:

a) hypocritical: on a corporate level, coming from the same company that positioned Lux with the opposite promise (“makes you beautiful”); but mostly, on a human level, because the correlation between beauty and harmony/perfection lies in our mind and hearts, long before it was promoted by shallow advertising;

b) naive: because no matter how much money Dove had, it’ld be way outspent by all other ads+fashion shows+movies+ Paris Hilton amateur films stating a conventional model of beauty (which, by the way, is closer to our natural expectation of beauty than that of an old, wrinkled woman);

c) conseguently, cheesy and fake (“paracula”, for italians): designed more to make the brand sounds socially correct than to really challenge opinions and grow true consensus

That’s why I’ve always been curious regarding its results, and from what I found out over the past two years or so, the campaign has allegedly contributed to a significant growth, mostly through loyalty (franchise consumers buying more and more Dove products).

According to AdAge, it seems that the recently launched Pro-Age line is not performing as brilliantly, and this offers an opportunity to take a look at the whole brand, and ask ourselves some questions:

1) Was Dove’s recent growth mostly due to the brand (and its social statements) or to appealing products?

2) Is Real Beauty now a cage for Dove, forcing it to launche a Pro-Age product, competing with Anti-Age miracle potions for the favour of women that desperately don’t want to get (look) old?

3) Is this the evidence that the Campaign for Natural Beauty is, after all, a second-best strategy? A well-executed and well-marketed version of the “You’re not ugly, you’re different…” sentences from the old days of Junior High?

Final Burp: Even if the message “Accept yourself the way you are” should have appeal, why would you need a product to do so?

Is the epidemic of viral to be arrested?

AdAge is reporting results from a research by sociologist Duncan Watts that might challenge the growing faith in viral marketing.

Professor Watts is pretty much claiming that even if influencers may be particularly effective over otheer people, they are only able to do so to their immediate neighbourhood, and not much beyond.

This has spurred a wild controversy between supporters of buzz theories (namely Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping point) and others who have been waiting a good decadeto call it well-marketed nonsense.

As to me, I’m surprised by how easily the web is being flooded by passionate, yet meaningless arguments (yes, I’m thinking at blogging vs planning…)

It’s not a matter of qualitative theory vs math. It’s a matter of common sense.

Throught human history word-of-mouth has always worked, and it has done so depending on the subject of communication, the cohesion of the community and the means of communication.

Today there’s not doubt we have more means of communication. We can even pretend that we are more cohese.

So the subject of communication is key to how relevant buzz can be, because it implies how interesting the message is going to be, to how many and what people it will relate to, and how easily it can be transmitted from one to another.

Common sense tells us that a service like Skype can benefit greatly from viral, whereas in the case of goods with low involvment (toothpicks?), products aimed at little-networked consumers (dentures?) or complex messages it’s a little less so.

And in general… Viral for niche marketing: very good. Viral for mass marketing: less good (but growing steadily).

Final Burp: Viral is pretty much like a side dish. There’s cases in which it can be enough for a whole meal, but most times it needs to be served with a main course (even though the latter may be less tasty)

Media vs Creative

I think we can all agree that the advertising world is failing to innovate and comply with the full potential of the evolution in communication, to the point that already many marketers are ahead of us.

To make things worse for our side, there’s a growing opinion that media agencies are better fit to understand and take the lead in the new paradigm of communication, whatever that will be in the future.

The dumb reason to believe so is that media agencies are more accountable and can “get” numbers, as if creative agencies don’t have to make both ends meet at the end of each year (or quarter). It’s weird how people seem to forget that creative agencies are run by managers, and not by dope-addicted weirdos, and that lots of them have been profitably around for much longer than their client companies.

The more pertinent reason to say that media agencies will take the lead is that what’s going on is seen as a revolution in media (less tv, more web) to the point, for instance, that social networking is seen as a media. And it is, but it’s not just that.

What’s going on is seen as a media revolution, because media consumption can be summed up in statistics, and stats are easy to deal with because they’re numbers: everyone understands numbers (more or less), numbers can be stated, shouted, compared. It’s easy to be fascinated or scared by numbers. Numbers are straight.

But along with changes in media (the where), there’s changes in content (the what): there’s a larger, wider, more various kind of content that is broadcasted and shared; new languages are getting popular; opportunities for true interaction between content-and-content, and content-and-user arise.

Now, though this latter is revolution is harder to track because it can’t be summed up in stats, it’s actually more relevant than media shift: after all, people keep being attracted by the “what” (content and/or other people), and the “where” is subsequential.

If this is true, then creative agencies are facing a tougher task than media agencies, because they must address even more complicated issues, but if they tackle that, they can mantain, and even increase, their key role in communication development.

Final Burp: Even if you don’t buy this, would it be easier to endow creative agencies’ staff with number-savyness, or to gift media agencies with creativity and a sense of humanity?