Effective ads: some clients get it, some clients don’t

I don’t often single out individual ads for comment but a couple have been pinging around in my head and I finally found enough of a link – ok it’s tenuous -  to merit lumping them together in a post.

First up is a pair of ads that sit next to each other in my local train station. They push similar propositions – holidaying on islands. Take a quick look at the ads, forgiving the mobile phone quality shots.

The first fails miserably to the extent that one assumes the client’s brother-in-law must have created it. Norfolk Island is by all accounts a very sellable destination, certainly one which I wanted to visit…until  I saw this ad which completely dampened my positive predisposition.

OK, there’s more to Norfolk Island…than what? And if there’s more, can you perhaps tell me about it?

Norfolk Island Tourism General Manager, Glen Buffett described his offering thus:  “a fascinating perspective on natural beauty, history and culture”. Well he sure failed to deliver on that promise in his campaign featuring poor photography in a bland, featureless and utterly generic location which tells you precisely nothing about the product. The ad confounds the visual errors by confusing you with multiple copylines and needlessly spells out full social media url’s. Apparently Norfolk Island is bust…this poor effort wont help.

And then there’s this for NZ’s Bay of Islands. Also a place I’d like to visit. And now I’m determined to. Beautiful headline, beautiful shot (you’ll have to take my word for it). And new Zealand’s national brand 100% Pure  provides a brilliant umbrella. It’s so simply and it simply works…are you listening Norfolk Island?

Interestingly Norfolk Island’s ad agency won a 2010 Award for Marketing Effectiveness for its branding work for Norfolk Island. One wonders what’s gone wrong subsequently.

So much for tourism, and onto my tenuous link in the form of a totally unrelated campaign that demonstrates another way in which advertising can add value – humour.

And in this case it’s an ad that draws on a subject with even more comedic potential than the poor mother-in-law: advertising itself. By some miracle, ads that make fun of advertising are almost routinely effective.  But for an ad to make fun of its own category and in doing so to break its own category rules, surely takes a client with some courage. The result is undeniably effective – over 700,000 viral shares of this piece. Enjoy this one.

 

Related articles

• Norfolk Island pleads for federal budget help (abc.net.au)

Consumer kids; sponges and spikes

The past 30 years or so have seen an explosion of consumerism in the West with all that entails, good and bad. As it spills into new markets, the world has changed because of it,  physically, politically and sociologically.

Whilst economic activity has lifted millions out of poverty, there have been great costs. I personally think it’s valid to characterise the era in some respects as one of profits vs people. There have been victories on both sides but overall, profits have won. Look at wealth distribution as evidence of this – in the West, it’s never been greater (see video at end of this post).

A symptomatic front line in the profits vs people battle is online user-generated review sites, once touted to be the consumer’s best friend, now shown to have been infiltrated by corporate interests. The potential for the internet to truly democratise consumption by ensuring price transparency and giving consumers free voice has not – unsurprisingly – been embraced by business.

When I look at brands gathering hundreds of thousands of Facebook Friends, I wonder about gen XY and Z’s  mindlessly enthusiastic, utterly uncritical and apparently bottomless appetite for sponging up marketing. Tons of research shows how ‘marketing savvy’ kids are, but the amazing thing is that doesn’t stop them for one second. The idealism of Rock n Roll has been replaced by the rampant greed of hip-hop. “Get Rich or Die Tryin” sang rapper 50 Cent. And he nearly did – die tryin’ that is (he was shot nine times in 2000).

But not everybody is so complicit. Whatever you might say about its focus and effectiveness, the Occupy movement gave temporary voice to deep unrest. And if you look around, you will see lots of kids thinking a little more deeply about marketing, spiking and popping dishonesty and manipulation when they detect it. And sharing. Here’s an example I’d like to celebrate.

My personal conviction is that marketers carry enormous responsibilities, maybe more than politicians. People need to keep both kinds of bastards honest  for similar reasons.  Both have voting constituents (in the case of businesses it’s consumers exercising buying decisions) who need to be wary of being spoonfed the corporate line, and there needs to be as much informed debate around business as politics. Unfortunately that is simply not the case, so it’s good to see kids like this getting wise to the ways of the world.

Perhaps the new cry should be “Unhitch … or Die Buyin’”.

Related articles

• Ex-Vogue editor: agencies are wringing the sponge dry (mumbrella.com.au)

Dirty Deeds in aisle three? The funny business of supermarkets missionaries.

Back in 2007, Coles released a  booklet imposing what it called ethical business practices on its suppliers.

Although it drew some smirks since many vendors felt they had been unethically treated by Coles for years, the initiative seemed to have merit. In his introduction, CEO John Fletcher called it “a set of values and behaviours that provide a framework for how we do business.”

Illustration by B&T Magazine

Last weekend  Fairfax’s Business Day revealed how Coles used a labyrinth of corporate structures including a $10 company in the British Virgin Islands to buy a shopping centre in the upmarket Sydney suburb of Neutral Bay where arch rival Woolies has been turning over $75m pa as the tenant of some 18 years.

The story has now been widely reported and I’m struck that although some commentators have noted the almost absurd levels being reached in the supermarket war, few have discussed the ethical dimension of Coles’ actions.

The structure that  Coles used to pay $40 million for the property –  30% above market rates and probably a record price – was hardly business as usual. The Sydney Morning Herald explained that the company which made the purchase – Sino Ace Investment Pty Ltd – had been registered just days before by one Bernard Chiu* which it described as a wealthy Sydney lawyer, and is owned by a company of the same name set up in the British Virgin Islands tax haven – preventing Woolworths from knowing the identity of its new landlord.

The true identity of the owner as Coles was only uncovered by The Herald from internal board papers – don’t ask how it got them but from this and other Fairfax reports it’s clear Fairfax has a well-placed deep throat in Coles!

Similarly, the terms of the sale were equally mysterious. The Herald found records showing that Sino Ace Investment bought the property from Vanbridge Pty Ltd which had purchased it in 1992 for $12.7m. Vanbridge is owned by Phun Lim and six members of the Mok family who list their company address in Sydney’s Pitt Street but home addresses in Hong Kong. The relationship between Sino Ace Investment and Vanbridge is not known.

Who is that masked man?

If you thought there must be some winner here, perhaps its Bernard Chiu, the man who registered Sino Ace Investment. Four months after the Neutral Bay deal with Vanbridge, he listed  the ludicrously palatial 7 bedroom home shown above for $13 million.  Trading up perhaps?

I’d like to reveal more about this ‘prominent lawyer’, but unfortunately I can find almost nothing about him. Could he be behind Bernard Chiu Legal & Business Solutions, the trading name of  Bernard Hang Man Chiu … a sole trader entity with no website or other web presence whatsoever? Is he the Bernard Chiu listed on LinkedIn with absolutely no other information. Another approach: a Financial Review property feature says Chiu bought his house ‘through his Berneva Consultancy company in 2005 for $9 million’. Berneva Consultancy was registered as a company in 2005 (the year the house was purchased), only registered for GST in 2009 and has no web presence at all – not even yielding anything in  a Google search.

And that’s it. No legal history, no public addresses, no awards, no big business deals, no splashy donations no business activity apart from buying and selling a multi-million dollar property with its Teppanyaki bar and kitchen and its ‘porte-cochere’.  Who is the masked man behind this $40m property deal?

Extravagant corporate squabble or dishonest and unethical practice?

This is not the first time a war has erupted over leases. Woolworths evicted Coles from a centre in the Blue Mountains town of Katoomba in 2012 after buying the site in 2000. So perhaps this could be explained as tit for tat, a petty squabble between massive wallets, and the covert aspect simply  business strategy being kept secret from competitors in the normal way. Perhaps.

Whilst presumably legal, Cole’s structure was clearly designed to hide the true nature of the deal. In 2011 Michael D’Ascenzo Commissioner of Taxation wrote “Proper governance should ensure that large public companies do not use tax havens for concealment purposes… We are in fact seeing dealings by large business that may involve related companies in tax havens and we will be reviewing such arrangements.”

For me, not just does this deal transgress reasonable and acceptable business practices, there is something else besides: under the terms of Neutral Bay lease, Woolies has to show its landlord its sales data.

To supermarkets, data is everything. Recently I’ve been working with a major national retailer that actually runs its marketing at a profit. How? By selling customer sales data to its vendors. Data is gold.

Using a concealed and devious means to extract critical intelligence from your direct competitor seems only one step away from corporate espionage. This is not seeking a competitive advantage through fair means – this is going to any extent to win by fair means or foul. This is the corporation as psychopath, working that gray space between what society accepts and what it clearly outlaws, the space that a book tellingly entitled Hardball: Five Killer Strategies for Trouncing the Opposition, labelled  ‘so rich in possibilities.’

This tussle may be the tip of an iceberg. Woolworths recently floated a $1.5 billion property portfolio on the Australian Securities Exchange and some industry observers believe the Coles/Woolies fight will shift to property. The supermarket giants have been put on notice about their aggressive property strategies, with the ACCC looking into whether two recent proposed acquisitions by Woolworths in the ACT and NSW could ”substantially lessen competition” in the market.

Should we care about one chest-beating corporate slogging it out against another, dirty tricks or no? In recent years both Coles and Woolworths have moved beyond food into liquor hardware, pubs, pokies, petrol, clothes, loyalty cards and more.  How they behave has the potential to affect not just countless other businesses, but almost every Australian consumer in one way or another.

The Mission Position

With a warm avuncular purr, Coles’ website says its mission is “To give the people of Australia a shop they trust”. Parent company Wesfarmers punishes punctuation to promise it “adheres to four core values: integrity; openness; accountability; and boldness.” Woolworths simply simpers “We strive to be open, honest, fair and transparent in everything we do.”

For the record, Enron’s mission statement included “We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment. Ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don’t belong here.” Maybe Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dave Barry had it right when he said “A mission statement is a dense slab of words that a large organization produces when it needs to establish that its workers are not just sitting around downloading Internet porn”

Adopting the Mission Position on websites is easy. Shafting suppliers and the competition is at odds with such statements. Let the supermarket Missionaries be judged on their actions.

Related articles

• Store wars at new high (smh.com.au)
• Woolies’ new landlord (theage.com.au)
• Coles, Woolies and faux outrage (smh.com.au)

Coca Cola brand Mt Franklin cops a mountain of criticism for opposing recycling initiaitive. Social media overdrive response.

Often things look a bit, erm, off kilter in the remote wilds of the Northen Territory, but this time it’s the city slickers not making any sense. OK a quick summary of where we’re at with this:  The Northern Territory recently established a 10 cent recycle refund on bottles and cans, an approach which has been helpful in other States in reducing pollution. Sounds like a bonza scheme..no? Coca Cola though its bottled water brand Mt Franklin, says not.

In what might prove to be an ill considered response, Coca Cola through Mount Franklin is opting to sue the Northern Territory government for establishing this “cash for cans” scheme. NT Chief Minister, Terry Mills, said the Government would fight the legal challenge in the interests of consumers, the recycling industry and the Territory as a whole.

“Today Coca-Cola has followed through with a threat it has made since the Container Deposit Scheme was first introduced in the Northern Territory – I have instructed our lawyers to prepare immediately to fight this challenge in Court,” Mr Mills said. “ Territory families now utilise it daily as a means of reward-based recycling…More than 35.5 million containers have been processed through the scheme since 3 January 2012″.

Let’s let the venerable Crikey lay it all out in their usually tongue deep in cheek style:

You get the idea…unsurprisingly Coca Cola’s action has not exactly endeared it to those of us who actually prefer their planet a little less strewn with plastic waste. And there a quite a lot who feel that way…over 11,000 so far according to a social media campaign being run through the sumofus.org platform. Witness the response on the Facebook site of Coca Cola’s bottled water brand Mt Franklin – it’s quite something…when I logged on about three hours ago there were hundreds of messages criticizing the company for its stance…so many that I simply could scroll through them all. I looked for an official response posting, or indeed any posting from the corporation, but either there was none, or it was completely overwhelmed.

Boy those angry consumers can get busy. But so can the corporates. When I logged onto the Facebook site just a few hour later, all the old messages had gone!  Those poor poor people at Mt Franklin’s social media agency must be wearing themselves ragged trying to stay ahead of the necessary deletions….they’d been busy adding happy positive posts about anything but recycling, however the new posts were again being swamped by new protest posts. Watching this fascinating power struggle unfold in real time made me wonder how the drones in the social media agency will sleep tonight knowing they have been actively quelling the validly concerned voices of their clients customers…much in the spirit of any totalitarian response to free speech.

What irony given that Mt Franklin created an admirably thinner plastic for its bottles (the lightest 600mL water bottle produced in Australia) which, in keeping with it’s ‘pure, green(washed)’ brand values is heavily featured in its site and on youtube. Exactly what’s so threatening about the NT’s recycling program that Coca Cola would do so much damage to one of its brands remains somewhat obscure.

Related articles

• Protesters arrested outside Coke Sydney HQ (news.com.au)
• Calls to protect Cash for Containers Scheme (abc.net.au)

The value of truth. Did it just decrease?

If you haven’t seen the Lance Armstrong interview with Oprah Winfrey, part 1 is in the clip below in its entirety. Audio quality is low, you may have to turn it up.

Lance admits to it all, and throughout he seems thoughtful, prepared and not very sorry – or at least that’;s the way I see it. It’s an admission but not an apology.

For those who don’t follow cycling, Lance didn’t just cheat and then for a decade vigorously lie about it, he also viciously attacked anybody who dared doubt him; he brought down several innocent people (cyclists and non cyclists) who tried to tell the truth. You get a measure of just some of the hurt caused in the interview with his ex masseuse below.

There is miles of op-ed being written right now about Armstrong, and I’m not going to add to it. What I’m thinking about is if and how these events affect our cultural standards of ethics and our view of the value of truth. If you can absolve yourself of past crimes by putting on some showbiz sparkle, ‘fessing up while lookin’ good, and then get on with your life with a smirk, dusting your hands with a ‘job done’ attitude as Lance seems intent on doing (and we’ve seen plenty of similarly high flying corporate liars exposed  in recent years), does that not somehow reduce the implied seriousness of the fact that you treated the truth with such disregard?
It’s a bit like the kids story, every time you cuss a fairy dies. Well, every time a high profile person gets away with stuff the rest of us would go to jail for, does the value of truth not die a little? And if we end up in a society where truth is no longer important, our moral corruption leads us … where…. is it a slippery slope?

Or is truth simply unimportant. After all, some truths hurt us and some falsehoods are comforting and useful. Should we always seek out truth for its own sake? Most people think they are about 15% smarter or good-looking than they actually are, and that keeps many people from being depressed. Are they (we) not better off without that particular truth? But then again, isn’t science and the quest for knowledge based on seeking the truth?

Not all truths are created equal so perhaps we just need to simplify this. Clayton M Christensen, one of the world’s leading thinkers on innovation said: ‘It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time. The boundary – your own personal moral line – is powerful if you don’t cross it; if you have justified doing so once, there’s nothing to stop you doing it again. Decide what you stand for and then stand for it all the time.’

Is telling the truth to another person not simply a matter of respect (and dammit, if you can’t handle the truth, well that’s tough). And is the idea that abandoning the truth will lead us down some slippery slope toward utter disregard for other people just a product of the moral framework taught to me in my own western upbringing?

Let’s go back upmarket, to Nietzsche who put a lot of weight into how much he personally appreciates truth, and the struggle it somehow entails: “How much truth can a spirit tolerate, how much truth is it willing to risk? This increasingly became the real measure of value for me. . . . Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, comes from courage, from harshness towards yourself, from cleanliness with respect to yourself..[T]he great majority lacks an intellectual conscience – […] I mean: to the great majority it is not contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly without first becoming aware of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterwards: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this ‘great majority’. But what are goodheartedness, refinement, and genius to me when the person possessing these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his believing and judging and when he does not consider the desire for certainty to be his inmost craving and deepest need – as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower!”

In my view, truth is the closest approximation to the actual nature of reality, and we’re far better of dealing with it…and, Mr Armstrong, its consequences…head on. (Are you listening Mr Bush/Mr Nixon & co). Because otherwise I think the world gets kinda weird…

Related articles

• What Lance Armstrong said to Oprah Winfrey (ndtv.com)
• Lying as just another part of life (boston.com)
• Can Lance Armstrong ever win back public respect? (itv.com)
• Doping Was The Least Of Armstrong’s Sins (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• Michael Rosenberg: Without doping Lance Armstrong would be nobody (sportsillustrated.cnn.com)
• Lance Armstrong Interview Gets Mixed Reviews on Social Media (mashable.com)

Innovation: why it’s so damn hard and what to do about it.

What’s obvious is this: it’s a rapidly changing world and businesses have to change accordingly. And yet change does not come naturally to most businesses.

‘In many respects, innovation is seen as the opposite of efficiency, because it is not routine and has unpredictable outcomes,’ argues Ajaz Ahmed in “Velocity: The Seven New Laws for a World Gone Digital”. ‘This can create an environment in which there is no investment into future revenue streams because of the short-term impact on margins. As a result, the established business becomes resistant to innovation because it feels threatened by it, creating forces that actively discourage new thinking.’

I have seen this myself far too many times.

In his latest book, Clayton M Christensen, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, says that every time an executive in an established company needs to make an investment decision, there are two choices on the menu. The first is to use whatever already exists – it’s cheap and, besides, the team already has its hands full doing its current job . The second is to bear the higher cost and effort of making something completely new.

It’s understandable that the low-cost, low-effort and apparently low-risk options almost always win, with innovation being suffocated as a result. However, as Christensen observes, in an environment of change and competition, companies taking the easy route often end up paying dearly for it – because they lose their competitiveness. Compare and contrast this approach with that of Google, where engineers are allowed to spend one-fifth of their time on their own projects. Perhaps the real risk is in not taking the risk that innovation entails.

Now the economic downturn has become the new reality, it’s time for corporations to stop using it as a catch-all excuse for lack of investment.  The recession isn’t going anywhere fast in 2013 and those brands that continue to hope that their business will ‘bounce back’ on the basis of an increasingly elusive economic recovery stand little chance of survival.

Innovation today may require a structural loosening-up. In “Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure”, economist Tim Harford writes that many corporations persist with a level of centralisation created for an era dominated by logistics and scale, which becomes an anchor in an era dominated by innovation and creativity. This is particularly true in marketing, where global marketing arrangements deny local markets the ability to engage with local suppliers to drive fast and adaptive innovation.

Businesses must accept risk as a necessary part of success and cannot let a challenging business environment reduce their stomach for failure. To paraphrase Shakespeare, it is better to have tried to innovate and failed that not to have innovated at all.

Related articles

• 2013 Innovation Resolution: Make Mistakes (customerthink.com)
• Harvard Business: Innovate by Looking for Problem Patterns (blogs.hbr.org)
• The Culture of Innovation (gabrielcatalano.com)
• Downsides to Failure Tolerance (growthology.org)
• Enough with the ‘Innovation’: just try being better (mumbrella.com.au)
• How to Develop a Culture of Innovation (business.time.com)
• Ten things businesses should know about what innovation is and isn’t (futurelab.net)

Anxiety advertisers; how they changed the world for the worse

Advertising was largely built on the fine, opportunistic strategy of trading in human weakness. For almost 100 years, advertisers have honoured the tradition a) pinpoint a problem, perhaps one consumers didn’t even know they had; b) exacerbate anxiety around the problem; c) sell the cure.

Whether it’s being laughed at because you have small muscles or can’t play the piano, not being respected because your car isn’t prestigious enough, not being desired because you have hairy armpits, not being cool because your phone isn’t the latest,  or not being a good mother for oh-so-many reasons, and let’s not even mention menstruation…advertisers sure know which button to push.

Hell, they do it without even trying. Apple’s famous (and brilliant) 1984 campaign – which put them on the map – was meant to inspire. But if you were happy just being you, wouldn’t this (edited) ad copy make you second guess your happiness?…

“Here’s to … The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. … Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Oh boy, I’m clearly not aiming high enough! But not all advertisers require quite so much of us. Dove (about whom I have blogged in approval) simply suggests women need to shave their armpits in order to attain enlightenment. No, Dove say, it’s not them creating the problem, it’s them solving it: according to research cited on Dove’s website, 93% of women think their underarms are unattractive and thus may refuse to wear sleeveless clothing. So if the desire for un-natural armpits hasn’t been caused by images published by beauty advertisers like Dove, then where does it come from?

Advertisers, through this use of shame (which is of course a kind of anxiety), have changed our views, and our world. Before Listerine figured out it could sell more of its anti-septic as a cure for bad breath, there simply was no social stigma attached to it. How many billion dollars has this strategic breakthrough yielded? How has this improved our lot as a race? And in case you think the classic approach to anxiety went out with the advent of colour TV, look at the current ad for Oslo Subway.

Research has refined the use of anxiety as leverage to encourage purchase. A study of commercials for the Danonino kid-food brand found no fewer than five kinds of anxieties being prodded: anxieties linked to the responsibility for providing healthy food to support a child’s physical growth; anxieties associated with the responsibility for providing appropriate nutrients to foster a child’s intellectual development; anxieties linked to the social exclusion of a child from his/her peer group; anxieties raised due to repeated conflicts about food intake that may threaten family bonding relationships and mothers’ anxiety for not being present enough for the child due to their own busy schedules.

Rich pickings for these ‘negative’ ads, for sure. The multi-billion dollar question is: do they work better the positive ads…is the carrot or the stick more effective? Entire books and literally mountains of ad research has been done into this vexed question (eg…), and the answer, like that to many complex questions, is probably ‘it depends’.

For me, this dilemma cuts to the socio-cultural responsibilities that advertisers and marketers have, but so rarely acknowledge. Anxiety disorders are are the most prevalent mental disorders in the United States with an annual societal costs of over $42 billion dollars (source Psychology Today).

Think about it: if all those fear-inducing ads has instead used more positive messaging, would we as a global community, have amassed such an overwhelming state of anxiety? And if we hadn’t, how different would our world look to us? Has the wealth reaped by Listerine and tens of thousands of marketers like them been worth the problems now so prevalent in society?

Before we leave the topic, as ever with advertising, a strategy can work in different ways.  In this ad you literally get rid of your old head:

And, wonderfully, the ad industry can, itself exhibit obvious anxiety. Take this sugar industry response to the ‘problem’ of dieting:

The classic is this response to people’s anxieties about smoking:

For a general discussion on specifically status anxiety I highly recommend Alain de Boton’s book of the same name, or if you prefer there is a spin-off series of videos here.

Do you think anxiety advertising has changed the world?

Related articles

• Lesser known causes of anxiety (drbradshook.com)
• Listerine Popularized the Phrase “Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride” (todayifoundout.com)
• Don’t Sweat It, Girl! How to be Stress-Free in 2013 by Guest Blogger- Ryan Rivera (sanctuaryofstyle.net)