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Style over Substance

[ photo (c) CaptureInfinityPhotos ]

Last week was Internet Week Europe and it was a pretty full-on week of various events and talks, lots of brain fodder and food for thought. One of the events was the Creative Social’s The Future of Advertising, featuring several members of Creative Social musing on their vision of the future of advertising.

The very talented Flo Heiss discussed how he was getting fed up of the relentless focus on participation and that actually he wanted to get back to making beautiful stuff.

I’m all for beauty. Beauty is great. But whilst making beautiful stuff is the purpose of art, I’m not sure that’s what the purpose of advertising is supposed to be (or what I actually think everyone really meant when they talked about ‘advertising’, ‘brand communication’ – which is I think much bigger than the world of advertising.) I think when it’s done well, making something beautiful can be a very desirable and wonderful by-product. But surely it shouldn’t be the goal. Making something that solves the client’s problem should be the goal, surely?.

I’m sure that this was intended to be absolutely implicit in what Flo was saying, and the reason he didn’t spell it out was that he took it as read, because he’s a smart fella. But form over function, and style over substance, is something we see all too often in brand communication, and I’m not sure that the industry is set up to value work that works over work that’s beautiful.

Whilst winning an IPA Effectiveness Award rightfully carries massive kudos, it still doesn’t seem to have the same prestige within the industry as a Cannes Lion or D&AD pencil. Effectiveness isn’t yet as sexy as creativity. At least, that’s my take on how they appear to be perceived by the industry as a whole (although I’m sure amongst clients and planners it’s unsurprisingly valued the other way around).

Creativity is the lifeblood of our industry. Great ideas that excite and engage are what it’s all about. And it’s right to reward that.

But making something beautiful shouldn’t be the end goal. And if it’s beautiful but doesn’t actually work towards achieving a given brand or business objective, if the work doesn’t actually work, I don’t think it’s right to fetishise it. And yet the industry does.

Take Cadbury’s Gorilla, which cleaned up at the awards. It was the industry’s obsession of 2008. You couldn’t move for plaudits lauding the work. It’s reported that it did a great job in driving brand engagement. And it apparently helped to sell more chocolate bars in the immediate period following the campaign. But ultimately, brand perceptions are only really valuable insofar as they ultimately make a difference to the business and the bottom line. And Cadbury’s Dairy Milk lost market share to Galaxy. I don’t know the full details but from what I can tell from the details published, Gorilla was fantastically fun, a great piece of creative work, but the work didn’t ultimately work as well as Galaxy’s. It might have Gorilla might have got the creative community wetting themselves, but it didn’t translate into business success.

I’m all for making beautiful things, and I want our industry to be a hive of creativity and brilliant ideas. But if these ideas aren’t helping to solve the given problem, whilst they might be absolutely stunning examples of artistic and creative expression, they’re fundamentally not doing their job as a means of brand communication.

I hope the future of brand communication is chock full of beautiful work. But I’m much more interested in really effective work that happens to be beautiful – and personally I’m much more excited by elegant and beautifully designed services and products that DO rather than beautiful ads that simply SAY.

November 23, 2010 in Advertising | Permalink | Leave a Comment

Time to move on from military marketing

[ photo courtesy ]

The below post is cross-posted from the newly launched WARC blog, where I’ll be posting the occasional ramble – nothing remotely groundbreaking here for regular readers, but musings I thought worth raising for the WARC audience:

 

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the holy grail for marketers is engagement – to build meaningful relationships between people and our brands. And yet the way we think about marketing is frequently diametrically opposed to the desired end result.

The vocabulary of marketing is largely one of warfare – with the consumer as enemy combatant, on the receiving end of our merciless attacks. The etymology of the word ‘strategy’ is military – literally meaning ‘the art of a general‘. And it’s just as applicable to the world of marketing as it is to the battlefield.

Think about it. How many times do we start by referring to the ‘target’ when considering audiences? (The fact that we talk about ‘consumers’ rather than simply ‘people’ is another strange beast, as it automatically frames people purely within the context of consumption rather than as the multifaceted human animals that we are, but that’s a whole other issue). So we launch aggressive campaigns carefully designed for maximum impact and to gain captive audiences, thinking about strikeweights and guerilla tactics to do battle, gain market dominance and kill the competition.

Hardly the language of fostering engagement and relationship building, is it?

We all know by now that people aren’t receptacles waiting eagerly for our advertising messages, and very often could quite happily live without whatever we’re trying to sell – but surely trying to conquer the enemy and beat them into submission isn’t the most effective solution? Isn’t trying to earn the right for our brands to be a part of people’s world, rather than trying to force our way in, ultimately going to be more valuable in the longer term?

We’d probably all agree that this is what we’re trying to do, and that a relationship based on permission and trust is far more desirable than one of force and conquest – and yet the language of marketing doesn’t appear to have caught up.

The vocabulary we use undoubtedly affects the way we approach things – both consciously and subconsciously. So if we want to actually develop marketing that’s based on marketing with people rather than to them, awareness of the language we use, and a concerted effort to move away from thinking about marketing as warfare, has got to be a move in the right direction.

January 26, 2010 in Advertising | Permalink | 11 Comments

When earned media isn’t earned, part III (but paid media raises money for charity)

[ image courtesy ]

So after my previous posts about GoViral, they contacted me to ask if I’d consider posting a video from TFL highlighting the dangers of illegal minicabs, in return for payment (based on the same pay per view basis discussed below). As I’ve said before, this is not a brothel, there are no prostitutes here, but then I thought, well, I don’t like the idea of taking money, but then I thought, I wonder if we could we turn a straightforward paid media placement into something a bit more worthwhile.

In the spirit of full disclosure, every view of the below video generates payment. And given the nature of the issue, I would like to use any payment generated to donate to Rape Crisis. And because it’s the season of goodwill, in the spirit of giving, I will also personally match any revenue generated to double the donation to what I think is a very worthy cause.  If you’d also like to support this cause directly, you can donate here. Or you can view the video. Or ideally both.

It’s an interesting juxtaposition, though, to think about what a more engaging proposition might be. The aim of the campaign is to generate views & raise awareness of the dangers of illegal minicabs through viewing the film. And so to extend the reach of the TV and Cinema campaign, TFL are also looking at paid-for video placements via the GoViral network. So far so good, a pretty bog standard bought media campaign, which I’m sure will do a fine job. And at 3.5p a view, it’s cheap as chips when you compare the cost per impact against TV & Cinema. So fair enough, as far as it goes. Although it’s worth noting, as Rachel Clarke observes, that at no point do GoViral ask bloggers to actively disclose that the video is a paid-for placement, as the fact that the GoViral player says ‘sponsored’ at the beginning is supposed to do the trick. So compliant but not exactly ethical, one might say.

But imagine this. And obviously please note that TFL aren’t my client, I don’t work for them, don’t know anyone who does work for them, and don’t know what their current plans are for the campaign outside the bought activity. So treat this purely as the rambling mind of a curious bystander, musing on possibilities, not making recommendations.

Imagine that a proportion of the media budget was ringfenced and instead of being used to buy media directly, it was used as an incentive to earn media. For example, instead of paying bloggers as media owners, and paying them for the real estate to host the video player on their blog, what about if bloggers were asked to share the video in return for the paid media equivalent being donated to a relevant charity. A bit like I’ve done here. I wonder if a cash-for-good-cause route would be more likely to earn media than a cash-for-views route? And whether the eventual outcome of greater genuine earned media in terms of positive word of mouth, trust and overall engagement would be greater and more valuable than through paid alone?

I genuinely don’t know the answer to this. Whilst I’d like to think that the incremental effect of the earned route would be more valuable than the equivalent budget invested in incremental direct paid-for media, this might just be a flight of fancy. But I’d love to think it would be true.

In the mean time, let’s try our own experiment and try and raise some money for charity. Let’s make something paid into something much better. Please support this very good cause by donating, or viewing, (or both).

December 13, 2009 in Advertising | Permalink | 1 Comment

When earned media isn’t earned, Part II

[ photo courtesy ]

So my previous post ruffled a few feathers. And Claus at GoViral was kind enough to respond to my questions via email, for which I’m very grateful.

The GoViral video player itself is branded as providing sponsored content, and if you want to get paid, you have to embed the GoViral player, so disclosure box ticked there. But my worries were around the additional activity that GoViral were happy to fund:

There is additional budget available for posting, commenting, tweeting, social bookmarking the videos as well as writing articles, creating a page and uploading the content on other websites so that users can interact and comment on the videos. Let us know if you are keen for any of these options as well.

Blog posts, comments and tweets aren’t controlled by GoViral, and dependent on the publishers (as GoViral calls the bloggers it recruits) to include the relevant disclosure. So my question was whether it was a mandatory part of the agreement between GoViral and its publishers that they were obliged to disclose that these blog posts, comments and tweets had been paid for by the brand in question.

Because, if not, then they’d be breaking the law.

Schedule 11 of The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 states that: “Using editorial content in the media to promote a product where a trader has paid for the promotion without making that clear in the content or by images or sounds clearly identifiable by the consumer” is considered an unfair trading practice (see here for IPA briefing note on the implications of the act for advertisers).

As Rachel Clarke’s Guardian article points out, this is also the case across the EU. And that new FTC regulations in the US went even further

The FTC has approached social media marketing from a different angle to the UK, bringing it all under the updated guidelines about endorsements. The 81-page document carries a lot of information about using celebrities and experts to promote your product. Sprinkled throughout – and taking a lot of space in the introductory commentary – is the digital world of blogging and social networks. This seems to go far further than the EU laws.

There appear to be three main areas of impact:

  • A blogger can be considered an endorser of a product if he is directly paid, if the value of the product/service is “high” (although no guidance given) or if he regularly receives free products for review due to his online influence. This includes people who are part of buzz networks, signing up to receive products for review.

    •  

  • Both bloggers and advertisers are responsible for statements made. A blogger can be held liable for any false claims.

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  • It is the endorser’s responsibility to disclose all relationships, although advertisers have to monitor disclosures and take steps if they are not happening.

Transparency and disclosure are therefore not only considered to be a given by the likes of Forrester when praising the merits of sponsored conversation, they’re mandatory under the law.

I don’t particularly like what the likes of PayPerPost do – and would question the value of sponsored conversation for brands in the first place – but at the very least they make it crystal clear that disclosure is absolutely fundamental:

Mandatory Disclosure

Every sponsored conversation facilitated directly by PayPerPost or through one of our services is required to have disclosure. Bloggers that do not disclose are not permitted to participate in any PayPerPost sponsored conversation and will be removed from our network.

Honesty of Opinion

Bloggers are free to write or say whatever they want. PayPerPost has no restrictions on how bloggers express their genuine thoughts on an advertiser’s product or service. PayPerPost will neither withhold payment based on a negative conversation, nor do we allow advertisers to force bloggers to edit their post to remove critical statements, ever.

Claus was kind enough to answer my questions, and the below is copied from his email (NB please also note that I advised that I wanted to publish his answers on the blog, and that I preferred to use his own words so that I did not misrepresent him, therefore he was fully aware that I wanted to make this correspondence public before responding):

At the end of the day though I guess it is also up to the publishers as we don’t control their sites they do. We can flag it in the player, but they decide how to implement content on their sites… I don’t think there is such a mandatory actually, not sure of the legalities to be honest. We flag it in the player so don’t know if that would be required as well. I am not a legal expert

To his credit, Claus also admitted that “it does makes sense to make it clear in the T&Cs that publishers has responsibility flagging it” and that he had advised the GoViral publishing department to look at changing their T&Cs to include this. He has stated they “want to act within the law of course and are of course also happy to disclose that it’s sponsored content”, and that whilst the “2008 act has been considered in relation to the “sponsored by” on the player that is not to say that what we do is exhaustive, there might be room for improvement.”

Props to GoViral for admitting that things could be improved, and I appreciate that they’re looking into changing their T&Cs. And it doesn’t appear that the non disclosure is wilful. But it’s not as though these are nice-to-have ethics, it’s fundamentally about legal compliance as much as doing the right thing. And as it currently stands, if GoViral publishers are blogging, commenting and tweeting about Stella Artois without disclosing that they’re being paid, it would appear to my non-legal expert mind that according to the aforementioned consumer protection act, Stella would be breaking the law (however if brighter legal eagles than I can advise if I’m misinterpreting the regulations, I’d be hugely grateful).

It worries me that as marketing departments are frantically trying to work out what their ‘social media strategy’ is, and as many struggle with the contrast between the slow-build, non-guaranteed world of earned media vs the quick-build, guaranteed-reach world of paid media, that the temptation to go for the easy route of pay per post will be strongly appealing. And whilst I would always strongly advise my clients against the sponsored conversation route, if brands do decide to go down this route, as long as they’re looking at full disclosure, then it’s at the very least compliant and broadly ‘ethical’.

But it’s far from inconceivable that the more quick fixes that are sought, the more non-compliant, unethical posts, comments & tweets that may slip through the net (whether knowingly or otherwise).

Ciaran pointed out at last night’s IAB debate, paid media is paid, and earned is earned, and you can’t confuse the two. I’d like to think that’s true, but I suspect it’s more than you shouldn’t confuse the two, not that you can’t…

December 8, 2009 in Advertising | Permalink | 1 Comment
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