The biggest challenge for food & drink advertising in the new decade

Google the words “food and drink advertising” and you’ll be left in little doubt as to the most important topic of 2009, that of increased industry regulation particularly in the HFSS and children’s categories. The general gist of the coverage is that the authorities are having to step in to protect unscrupulous marketers from exploiting the country’s most vulnerable individuals.

Yet while a few companies try and shift the odd case here and there by sailing close to the regulatory wind, the enlightened have already recognized that consumer sentiment was leading regulation in the first place, and reacted accordingly.

These brands, both big and small, understand that consumer perceptions are no longer framed by one way conversations. In short, you can make all the fantastic advertising you want but if it’s dissonant with the other aspects of a brand’s behavior, such as corporate provenance or sourcing of ingredients, then consumers will at best ignore you and at worst attack you.

Many ad industry experts cite share of voice as one of the key determinants of success. And while it clearly has a role to play, the important thing to recognize is that it is only a means to an end. In 2010, the most important channel is people. Advertising can help encourage conversation but it’s only one element. A more wise move is to see it in context alongside the other elements of the brand and frame it accordingly. 

Has OTC advertising moved on from Mad Men?

A prominent pre-testing company recently presented “breakthrough” findings on what makes effective OTC advertising.

Their advice was to avoid “visual vampires”, that problem/solution is always best, having a single minded relevant idea is vital, believability is key, mention the brand name within the first five seconds of the ad and that creativity is not a critical ingredient to effectiveness.

Sound familiar.  They ought to.  These insights are the very same ones you would have found 50 years ago in the golden age of the Mad Men.  Amazing how little the accepted OTC advertising formula has changed.

Like it or not, the way in which people view and interact with brands has changed, and that pace of change is increasing. Winning brands and categories constantly find new ways to fuse cultural and category conventions that help define the markets in which people live and think in the present day. I can't help think that most OTC advertising would struggle to qualify in this regard.

The equation for perfect advertising

A few months ago Wired ran an article on "the formula that killed Wall Street". It was about an equation (the Gaussian Copula formula) which our financial institutions used to bundle up risk and thereby identify the value of sub-prime mortgages. Self evidently it didn't work, or if you believe the formula's creator David X. Li, the formula was fine but just misused.

In the new(ish) field of behavioural economics there would be some kind of explanation for this. In fact, you could probably write another equation to explain how and why the first one stopped working so spectacularly. Can we then create some sort of formula that would allow us to create the perfect ad?

A friend of mine has small holiday cottage which we sometimes borrow during the summer. Amongst the holiday reading on the bookshelves is an ancient leather bound tome entitled 'How to advertise' from the 1930s. It contains many simple and straightforward formulas for creating adverts that, if followed to the letter, would guarantee success.

Much has of course moved on since then and the word 'formulaic' is often used to describe advertising we find dull and familiar. Rarely is formulaic used positively, especially when applied to the subject of creativity. But whilst there may not be formula, perhaps there is at least a definition of creativity we can agree on. My favourite is "A mental process involving the generation of new ideas, or new association between existing ideas. The result of this (divergent) thinking should be generally both original and appropriate".

It's can't be so hard to build this into a formula can it? In which case formulaic ideas are the best ones, and highly leveraged practitioners can bring the world of communications to its knees by misusing it in the pursuit of unsustainable growth. Sound familiar?

What advertising can learn from investment banking

I've no idea what the difference between ethics and morals is. Theologians I'm sure enjoy many a field day over the church wine but for a humble communications planner such arguments exist on a higher plane than I'm capable of reaching. They are by and large an inconsequential pile of BS too.

In the world of advertising, something vaguely approaching either a moral or ethical dilemma occurs when the best advice for the client diverges from what, on the face of it, is best for the agency. We are in a service industry, and a competitive one too, so like all servants we should serve to the best of our ability right? But also, as managers of our own independent commercial practices, we also need to focus on our own back yard. Often, the two are identical but just occassionally they diverge. More importantly, what then?

It struck me that much like investment banking the answer lies in whether you take a short or long term view. Our City friends nearly brought the world to financial Armageddon through relentless short termism and a similar story is beginning to emrge in the communications sector too.

In a downturn, it's all too easy to be paralysed by fear. Of lost opportunity, of lost growth and most of all of lost clients. So the impartial advice that deep down we all long to give risks being tainted by a heavy dose of realism on the part of considering what outcome suits us best.

In the long term, offering anything other than best advice is self defeating. If we don't give it you can bet your bottom dollar somebody else will. Eventually that will lead to clients questioning just who they want to go forward with. But that's way off in the future. Most of us have to manage in shorter time frames and that's where conflict occurs.

I can't see Alistair Darling imposing any rules and regulations on how we pay ourselves so perhaps the answer lies in how get paid by our clients. Structures that reflect how long things take to happen in the real world rather than the next bonus cycle surely will lead to more and better advice.

In the end, no one wins by giving the duplicitous advice. None more so than the individuals who feel so pressurised into giving it in the first place.

When integration goes bad

There are numerous articles, posts and even books written on the subject of integration in communications. When to do it, how to do it and where to do it. And there are many practitioners in advertising who know a lot more than me about it.

Most authors argue that effective communications should either look the same (the so called matching luggage approach) or say the same thing in manners appropriate to their channel.

I can find few commentators who argue vehemently against integration. Crispin Porter + Bogusky occasionally stray close to this point, but even their fantastic work for Burger King amongst others uses consistent devices more often than not (step forward The King).

While doing some work with an anti-smoking charity recently I came across a particularly compelling case against any form of integration. The argument goes something like this. When it comes to smoking, smokers know it's bad for them. But they still don't like being reminded of the fact. Rather than give up, they look for ways to edit themselves out of the communication. They don't look like the people in the ads. They haven't got any kids or always smoke outside. That way they can convince themselves that the communication isn't referring to them and they therefore don't need to make themselves feel bad yet again.

Against this backdrop, it would be crazy to put all your eggs in one beautifully integrated basket that you know your audience are going to try and jump straight out of. A more succesful approach would be to close down as many 'escape routes' as possible so that smokers are left with nowhere to turn other than to confront their own habit. It's this approach, whether by luck or judgement, that the NHS appears to have taken by splitting its anti-smoking funding between a number of bodies with differing approaches to the problem.

So what does this tell us about how we should approach more conventional brand problems where audiences are hopefully less predisposed to disengagement? My view is that there are many parallels - sure you may not feel as strongly about a stick of deodorant as you do about cigarettes, but in our busy lives we still look for excuses to edit messages out of our consciousness. Rather than one joined up campaign try and hit people with as many different messages, via different channels and at different time as possible.

It'll lead to slightly uncomfortable agency review meetings where the wall of past and present work might end up looking like a dog's dinner, and our chums at Millward Brown might also report declines in (prompted) ad awareness, but if you want get more people to buy your argument more of the same rarely works as well as more of something else.

Why coming second is worse than coming last

I'm sure most of us in agencies have been there. You first get to hear of the McWidgets account by your local favourite intermediary and he suggests you meet the prospect in the first round of 'exploratory chemistry' meetings. Only these days there's never such a thing as a chemistry meeting anymore - with more work and thinking going into these cosy love-ins than in the entire pitch a few years ago.

Somehow over a few posh sarnies, designer mineral water and a wall's full of creative starters you're through to the next round. Ten is whittled down to six and the next meeting's only a week away. So what are you going to show them this time that you didn't before? A bit of tarting up of the most well received ideas from the first meeting, a couple of extra ideas that didn't make it before but that the prospect has hinted at, and you should be fine. Only this time you want to bring the whole thing up to more professional levels and spend a fortune in the studio to make it look more finished, and probably conduct a little research too for good measure.

A few days later the intermediary tells you you've been invited to pitch proper. The team is exhausted already but you're told that the competition really starts now. So bells are elaborately returned, and whistles finely honed. The Chief Executive is wheeled out of his stately grandeur to deliver the opening and closing remarks. A 9am, adenalin levels reach their peak and an argument is forcefully and passionately delivered. High fives all round . The team, so animated just half an hour ago, collapse into their post gig pint.

Just moments later and speculation is rife of what happens next. Fee proposals, schedules and resource plans are produced by the dozen. It was four, but now it's three and most likely two. Just a bit more research, a bit more chartage, a bit more factory walking and the prize will be ours. That's what we believe for the weeks and months that endlessly drag on, until the day the e-mail arrives from the senior suit. A close second. A fantastic team. Breakthrough ideas. Rigourous project management. And yet we didn't quite have the x-factor after all.

In a two horse race, there are only two places worth finishing: first and last. Everything else is just wasted effort. And a lot more of its wasted to come second.

The Best Chart in the World Ever!

Working for a large multinational corporation means many things, but one which was new to me when I first joined Ogilvy was the 'culture of the deck'. Presentations were no longer simple arguments to be shared face to face but instead powerpoint files ('the deck') to be reviewed, reviewed again and then sent around the world for the (countless) end-user's endless delictation.

What amazed me is just how mind-numbingly bad 99.9% of these decks are. Sure, there may be good ideas buried deep within them but they are, almost without fail, lost in amongst the tide of bullet points, indentations and that strange kind of language that is neither proper English nor thematic, but some kind of parallel universe where the word "the" has mysteriously been banned.

The leading statistician Edward Tufte has written several leading books on the visualisation of information. His paper "The Cognitive Theory of Powerpoint" blames the ubiquitous Microsoft application for everything from disrupted sleep patterns to the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster.

Tufte's contention is not that all visual stimulus is bad, just that Powerpoint in particular encourages us to create bad visual stimulus. So what would Edward Tufte say is the best chart in the world? That's where the map at the top of this blog comes in.

It was created 100 years before Powerpoint ever found its ways onto our computer screens and helps explain Naploean's ill fated march to Moscow in the 19th century. It plots the complex relationship between advance and retreat, geography, temperature and time in one beautiful page and is the perfect example of two of his principles: a high data ink ratio (the proportion of ink on the page that's used on the actual display of data) and the use of constant scale.

I would simply argue it's a truly inspiring way of presenting complex arguments in a way which even non-experts on the Napoleonic wars can not just understand but be fascinated by.

So next time you're looking at that co-variance anaylsis between weighted distribution and snowfall in Southern China, give a moments thought to Napoleon before firing up the ppt.