Clownvertising, Terrorism, and Candy Cane Briefs

I‘ve always been interested in economics, because economics is a great way to model, measure and understand human behavior. In a TED-talk I watched over a bowl of indian curry (I got stuck alone in the office over lunch), Loretta Napoleoni explains the economics of terrorism and how it relates to the economics of the rest of us. One thing that caught my interest was what she refers to as rogue economics, where politics looses control of the economy, and the economy becomes a rogue force. Rogue economics “always lurks in the background” as she puts it, and “comes back in times of change…such as globalization”. This is not surprising. Politics is a system, and systems always take time to adjust to disturbances. In the meantime, the disturbance affects those affected by the system.

This talk made me think – could this be exactly what is happening in our industry right now? That the system that controlled and demanded relevance and results from marketing spend looses control when the world of communications changes rapidly? Could it be that clownvertising is the rogue economics of the advertising industry?

I sat down with a couple of our industry’s most respected names the other day at Le Rouge and discussed this topic. What they said resonated with my hypothesis. They, like me, also saw campaigns like “The Fun Theory” as irrelevant clownvertising where the client is blinded by the blizzard of change, where the strategists are seduced by the “how can we make it viral”-love potion, and where the creatives watch in astonishment as they receive the most delicious candy cane of a brief they’ve ever seen (“just make it fun, ok?”). I haven’t been in the industry as long, but according to my discussion company at Le Rouge, the blizzard of change that came along with the introduction of television advertising spurred similar epidemics of clownvertising in television. “The Fun Theory” is by no means the only famous clownvertising example. To me, the Cadbury’s gorilla falls into the same category, even though “pointless but fun” is perhaps more relevant to a chocolate bar than a $20 000 vehicle. A smaller but more recent example is “The Wall of Sound” for Brothers.

But anyway, back to the question of rogue economics. Because what we DO know about rogue economics is that the system stabilizes over time. This means that pretty soon, it will no longer be accepted to just “go viral” with irrelevant humor, and that a much more difficult task will be put on the plate of advertising agencies. In this new stabilized system, you will have to be attractive (in the literal sense of the word), sticky (in the Gladwell sense of the word), re-shareable, and effective in terms of what you want to achieve (which at the very least requires relevance). This is not easy. It will place enormous demands on the shoulders of advertising creatives and it will – and this is what I love about this change – place less crap in the lap of the consumer. It’s time to step up the game.

[Edit: Consequently misspelled rogue. Sorry about that. Le Rouge probably threw me off. Thanks Matthieu for noticing.]

Martin

Agree that it’s important not to forget that the ad business is a business business. Then there’s different ways of getting business rolling or changing peoples perception to eventually get business rolling. Volkswagen has their mindset clear on that. They have used full-page ads for a long time and it seems to work for them. They have a few hundred full pagers a year in Sweden. So taking the budget of just a few of those to create some interest for the BlueMotion-site on the web wasn’t much of a risk, or at least it was a calculated risk. No one was tricked in to anything. It doesn’t work like that with big, or any clients.

So, why have we done this? (maybe you know this butt still...)

The brief was to build a site in where Volkswagens environmental program BlueMotion Technology was presented and then create interest around the site and how Volkswagen looks on environmental cars, without any media spend.

The first insight came from Volkwagen – they believe more people will choose an environmentally friendly car if it’s more attractive, powerful and fun to drive. We thought it was just as simple as great. Simple children’s pedagogy applied in the grown ups world.

Not a new insight in any way but something you have to be reminded of sometimes. However, we decided that this thought was even more powerful an interesting if we also applied in other situations than just talk about Volkwagens cars and how they reflected it. So we tested out the theory and that resulted in the three behavioural experiments films. If you ask me its wrong to categorise it as “just doing fun stuff for the sake of it”, it was using something as simple as fun to create some form of change different situations. I thought it was pretty interesting to se.

Agree totally that it would be dangerous if the amount of youtube-hits became some kind of measuring standard in the industry, but I don’t think there is any risk in that. But it’s really nice to see how this newly conceptualised but a thousand year old children’s pedagogy-insight has been travelling around internet. People are discussing it, taking it apart, reinventing it and applying it to their own things. And people are starting to pay interest in the Volkswagen brand and how they look at the environmental issue and in witch way their cars reflects the theory. From the BlueMotion-site connected the Fun Theory-site people are booking test drives and learning more about the technology and the models that - as Volkswagen and we see it - backs the theory. Hopefully some people’s perception on how an environmental car can perform will change. If not we still have a gziljon full pagers.

You are right that we don’t really know how social media work, but I really think no one does. Maybe there is a more direct or better way of creating interest on this particular topic. We tried this one.

Now I’m going to get the last christmas gifts. I wish you a nice christmas and a successful 2010. See you around.

Walter Naeslund

Even though this may sound like criticism of specific agencies, creatives and campaigns, it's really not. What I find interesting here is clownvertising as a phenomenon. This phenomenon is not unique or new, or even unexpected or bad, but rather cyclical and inevitable. We saw something similar when television advertising arrived, though what we're seeing now is much more powerful since distribution cannot be bought, but relies on built in attraction values.

For the next wave of advertising hype (my guess is that this will be in search marketing) there will be plenty of clownvertising as well. Strategies will be devised to give creatives a reasonable chance to catch a ride on the search train, and relevance will come second. At the same time, other social web (or whatever we choose to call it) activities will mature as we all get better at understanding online gossip psychology. The year after that, search marketing will have matured as well and will be increasingly free from clownvertising.

We don't have to agree if The Fun Theory is clownvertising or not, and that is not the point of my post either. To me, it was merely a good example to explain my point. And just like in the case of the Forsman & Bodenfors SEO-debacle with The Church of Sweden, it feels more fair to pick an example from a large network agency than a small founder owned one. But there are of course plenty of examples there too. At the time of the F&B SEO-post, you could basically just point and pick one with your eyes closed. They were by no means alone in their sin.

I also think that it's good to raise the point with a very public campaign like this one to make the new generation of creatives think before they just grab the "fun"-position because it's the easiest to do creative on. I see A LOT of portfolios passing through our agency, and this very common. It's sort of like the flu. This year it's a "fun"-positioning flu, and last year it was a "the-idea-is-that-we'll-be-on-Facebook"-flu. Next year it'll be an SEO-flu. I just like to keep everybody on their toes as best I can.

So, with this said, I hope that you understand my motives for using your campaign as an example and we can still be friends when we meet again in the trenches next year. :-)

Merry Christmas!

Walter Naeslund

@Anders
Amen. BTW, in my humble opinion, talking about strength in the Citroen campaign is perhaps a bit of a stretch too. :-)

Anders Flodqvist

I'm not sure it is a relevant argument. And that's where I think a lot of companies go wrong. In my comment I partly choose to look beyond whether it is a good argument or not. Hopefully there is some sort of marketing survey behind the choice of argument, probably it's not.

However, if the strength in the Citroën campaign is that it involved cars then they probably shouldn't have gone for the argument "fun" but for the argument "car". And in that case it pretty much failed.

My point is that fun commercials are possible to make, but you have to be aware of why you use fun as a communication strategy and you can't build it upon fun alone. Fun isn't an argument, it's a hook to get people listening to your arguments.

Matthieu

Yes, Citroën did show their cars... but is it really in their advantage?
Cheap cars (VW, Fiat, Renault) are sold on values like ethics or "fun". Expensive cars (Audi, Mercedes) show shiny muscles and mechanics. Makes sense to me.

Walter Naeslund

Glad to hear that there are other opinions, but seeing relevance in this is just beyond my creativity. At least Citroen had cars in their ad. :-)

lalexandersson

Tänkvärt. RT @wiselykenneth: Läsvärt! Go Walter! http://bit.ly/6UfUzP

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wiselykenneth

Läsvärt! Go Walter! http://bit.ly/6UfUzP

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Anders Flodqvist

@Matthieu Interesting points. When I first saw the fun theory campaign I googled for other car trademarks that tried to market themselves as the fun alternative (relevant argument enough or not, that's up to everyone to decide for themselves) and found ads from Renault or Citroën (don't remember) that was really colourful and playful associating to toys. I didn't think they were a bad craftsmanship, they looked nice. But the problem was they really didn't made me feel anything at all.

My analysis is that the difference between the two campaigns is that the french car (whichever it was) told the audience what to think whereas VW used the old writers golden rule, aka show don't tell.

walternaeslund

Clownvertising, Terrorism, and Candy Cane Briefs http://bit.ly/6UfUzP #clownvertising

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Matthieu

Hello W.
You must have meant "rogue", a synonym for criminal or outlaw, instead of "rouge" which is the french for red... though i admit most reds are frauds, but that's another debate, since most of them have abandonned terrorism by now.

Apart from that, i'm pleased to see that we seem to disagree on "the Fun theory"-campaign. at last. Always agreeing on everything is never good in the long-term.
I really think "the Fun theory" is relevant, because it manages to associate VW with fun and healthy/responsible/ethical behaviours, and because that is something that wasn't really obvious in VW's brand DNA (even though they've been exploring this path for quite a long time with print ads).
Compare it with the pitiful attempt from Citroën, where the cars are "fun to drive" because they dance like transformers-robots. Now, this last example is really clownvertising, just like this oh-so-emotional dude in gorilla costume faking (badly) Phil Collins' drumming. I've seen that the gorilla's been chosen as this decade's best campaign... which leaves me speechless (quite unusual, isn't it).
I'm not saying that "the fun theory" is the ultimate advertising, but it's way better than 99% of what i see today. And i don't find it irrelevant. Short-lived, absolutely. but irrelevant... no.

"Time to step up the game" you said. Couldn't agree more. But what will it take to raise the level of advertising, especially on the buyer's side?

Anders Flodqvist

In a rhetorical point of view (which is one of my areas of expertise) I would say that this has to do with one of the basic rules of rhetoric. The rule that says that in according to make the audience willingly lending you your ears you have to "teach" them something. Now, in this case teaching can be interpreted very broadly, like for example as in "presenting them to something they haven't seen before".

But at the same time you need to argue for your cause with relevant arguments. It's easy to get the attention, but it's far more difficult to get their attention in a way that makes your relevant arguments strong (or even to make the way for relevant arguments).

Those two parameters must be fulfilled. If you don't "teach" anything (in "clownvertising" this most often means to entertain) the audience has no reason to listen at all. But if you present irrelevant arguments when you've got the audience attention, you might as well shut your mouth. The goal isn't to make anyone listen, but to listen to your message.

The problem a lot of commercial struggle with is that either it's fun and grabs the attention but presents irrelevant arguments. Or it presents relevant arguments but in a way that is plain boring.

This is so basic that it is almost embarrassing for me to write this down. But nevertheless it is a fact that most advertising today if run through these two checkpoints wouldn't make it to become public.

To summarize you could say that a lot of todays advertising only in part takes the first rule of good rhetorics into consideration, to get the listeners attention. Problem is it doesn't take the whole rule in consideration and even if it did it often totally fails to take the other six into consideration. Or, in other words, it's really bad rhetorics.

That's also why I think rhetoric should be taught in a much higher degree in the advertising schools than it is today (or at least when I went to one of them, couldn't really tell how it is today). I'd say at least one semester with chosen parts of theoretical rhetorics should be mandatory in advertising schools. Which leads me to my opinion that education in advertising schools should be longer, but now I'm very close to get off topic.

KatjaJanford

Mjau! RT@WalterNaeslund Clownvertising, Terrorism, and Candy Cane Briefs http://bit.ly/6UfUzP #clownvertising

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Christel

Thank you(!) for putting words to exactly what I've been thinking. All too many seem to think that as long as you've made a facebook app or got your campaign circling on youtube that you've done your job. More substance and relevance to upcoming campaigns please!

WalterNaeslund

Clownvertising, Terrorism, and Candy Cane Briefs http://bit.ly/6UfUzP #clownvertising

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

Clownvertising, Terrorism, and Candy Cane Briefs

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