Suddenly the news drop like a bomb. The big yearly price comparison on groceries organized by the National Penioners’ Association in Sweden was rigged by many of the store chains – and the one chain that usually wins was the worst offender. Suddenly no quirky traditional television commercial will help, because suddenly truth showed up at your door step. The point? Focus on what drives the bottom line, not what drives advertising awards. Oh, and never lie.
Last week I wrote about how Forsman & Bodenfors don’t understand how the internet works. In absolute terms, the description was fair, but in relative terms, they are not worse than most of the advertising business. Yesterday we got another painfull piece of evidence to that effect.
I’m talking about the brand new website of Lowe Brindfors. But to discuss the site we need to separate two things: Design and communications efficiency.
Design
It’s a matter of taste of course, but I think this page is very well designed from a print designers point of view. It’s excellent print design, but awful interactive design. Because it is not interactive. It’s like designing a very pretty car with only passenger seats. And just like such a beautiful but useless car, this site belongs in a museum. Which leads me into point 2:
Communications Efficiency
This thing is a very pretty printed catalogue in digital format. It’s what websites were in the late 90’s. The entire thing is a big Flash-page, with text that you cannot copy, films you cannot share, posters that you can download as PDFs (!) but not share with anyone, and invisible coworkers that you can only reach via email or telephone. No wonder they have this disclaimer on the site:
Apparently they think that the elusive internet out there is about technology and gadgets, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Because really, these new technologies are VEHICLES of ideas. Nothing else. But the ideas have to be made for a world of transparency, not to fill expensive media plans. And for you to come up with such ideas, you have to know how this transparent world functions.
Search and SEO is ONE important aspect to understand in order to get people “to spend time with the brand” (to use Lowe Brindfors’ own terminology), and this is what the brand new Lowe Brindfors site looks like to Google:
According to Google, what’s most interesting about the new Lowe Brindfors site seems to be their webmail (!), followed by pages from their old site, and a PDF press-release from August 2008.
Disclaiming your way out of obvious lack of knowledge about the psychology and behavior on the internet with something general like a “Hey, boy slow it down”-disclaimer becomes embarrassing when confronted with clients who know the internet – something that becomes more and more common every day thanks to knowledgeable rebels and speakers on the topic like Johan Ronnestam, Simon Sundén, and Björn Alberts, just to name a few. [Edit: + Jesper Åström]
“Resume.se thankfully notes that the trend is the same as in other digital communication: simpler, faster, and more head on”.
This statement is very general, and also wrong. The site isn’t fast. It’s a heavy Flash film with a loader from hell. The trend of the internet is not “simpler, faster, and more head on”. The trend, or rather the permanent shift, is to social participation in dynamically coordinated institution-less groups, which means that a site needs to support that behavior. You need to love people, not just say you love them. The new thing about the internet is not that people can now talk back to you, it is that everybody can talk to everybody and coordinate discussions and topics without necessarily involving you. If anything, this is more complex, not simpler. Grasping the entire strategy for this more complex system requires a more diverse skill set ranging from behavioral psychology to technology.
The bottom line is that you can have the prettiest house in the world, but to make friends, you have to meet them. Or else you’ll end up being very lonely.
It’s now official. Supercar maker Koenigsegg buys Saab and turns the sleepy techy brand into something completely different. Because even tough Saab has had a sporty aura over it, and a reputation as a fun car to drive, it has had kind of a geeky aroma as well. Koenigsegg adds flair to it, and one cannot help but wonder what on earth they have in mind now.
Saab has just gone from one of those brands that I would have been reluctant to work with to being one of the most interesting ones. They have incorporated a communicative truth into the brand that they can now work out of instead of trying to ad layers of gold to the outer shell with pop songs and fighter jets. And as you know, Honesty is all about communicative truths.
Last week I announced that I will be speaking at the Bring Dialogue Conference this summer, a speaking opportunity that I’m very excited about.
Today I’m proud to announce that I will also be making the opening keynote adress at the Esomar WM3 Conference to be held Sweden this year. At the Clarion Sign Hotel in Stockholm on May 5 to be exact.
I would like to thank the programme committee for choosing me, and also Mr. Anders Haraldsson, CEO at Norstat, Sweden and Tony Jarvis, Former EVP Global Research at Clear Channel Outdoor, USA for recommending me.
ESOMAR is the world organisation for enabling better research into markets, consumers and societies. With 5000 members in 100 countries, ESOMAR’s aim is to promote the value of market and opinion research and help effective decision-making.
Getting invited to any respectable conference is an honor, but this particular one got my juices flowing a little extra. The way I see it, measurements and research is one of the most important keys for the future of our industry. And I’m not saying this primarily because we need help evaluating our efforts and measure ROI, even though this is indeed very important (there was a heated debate here, here, here, and here about this in Sweden recently). I’m saying it because we need new eyes and ears to guide our communication efforts proactively.
Those of you who have seen my talks have heard me describe several communications strategies and tactics, one of which is what I refer to as “sailing”. I use this term to describe how to harness existing viral “winds” to propell your own topics. This method is just one example where there is no way of succeeding without excellent and very fast metrics. Generally I think that the use of proactive measurements is not given enough focus. This is just one example. There are several.
I am very much looking forward to this talk, which will be entitled “Truth, Transparency, and The Death of Privacy”, and I also warmly recommend registrering for the conference here.
Strike 1.
The first and perhaps the most important mistake in social media is to start out with what you want to say rather than what engages people. Sure, you might be on strategy with your message, but nobody will talk about it. You can’t take the classic advertising agency approach and buy yourself in, and thus you won’t exist.
Strike 2.
Bending the truth will guarantee long term failure. Honesty and transparency is key. Charlatans will be exposed.
Strike 3.
Staying safe means staying anomymous. If you remove the sharp edges there will be nothing to grab on to and nothing to care about. You need to move away from the middle of the road mediocrity to become remarkable. And if you’re not remarkable, you won’t be at all.
Björn Rietz is the new CEO for the Advertising Association of Sweden. I guess I should comment on that.
“The World is Changing” is perhaps one of the most worn out phrases in trend analysis. And it’s always true. But now, the rate of change for our context as marketing professionals act is extreme. Not surprisingly, since in the history of human interaction, there has been no disturbance of the same magnitude as the introduction of the internet. And even though the internet has been around for a while, it has now gone mainstream and truly interactive. Bending the truth is an obsolete strategy, while honesty reigns. The rules have changed. Most agencies haven’t. Yet. Therefore the choice for a new CEO for the AAS is crucial this time.
Björn retains respect from the men of power (yes they’re mostly men) in the industry. He is, to cut things short, a true ad man. But it seems to me that he also enters his new job with a humble attitude towards the changing reality. This is very promising. For instance, I hope he will take a really close look at Guldägget, which is on a dangerous path with strange categories and ludicrious rules. Among other things these rules state that you can’t report results of your campaign, but it has to have been published. This means clients are at risk for being lured into funding art projects.
Björn does talk about advertising being art, which is a shaky proposition. He refers here to how “the same part of the brain is used to produce poems an outdoor headline”, which is true, but doesn’t mean that advertising is art. I wrote my masters thesis on innovation management and involved myself heavily in how the parallell processing right side brain is about synthezis and innovation, of art, creative strategy, products and many other things. I hope this is what Björn meant. Art doesn’t require ROI.
That said I have high hopes for Björn! As a test, I will link to his blog here to see if he keeps track of his incoming links. If you are, Björn, I would also like to encourage you to mix your blog up with shorter posts and get a Twitter account. I can be your first friend at @walternaeslund.
Media independence is a very worn term in marketing. It’s been hyped to the skies by agencies and advertising tutors all over the world, and considered the holy grail by many.
They’re all wrong.
Back in the day when media was equal to mass media and television networks could have 40% rating shares, talking about media independence made sense. Today, the cannels are many, specialized and narrow. Talking about media independence in this new world is like using the same language regardless of country or culture.
The media channels are many and diverse, and they have different audiences. Many times the channels are not the channels at all – the content is. And you are still talking about media independence?
I would rather talk about channel orchestration, distributed marketing, and media dependence. The same product can very well be marketed in different ways to different audiences. It should be. When in Rome…
Our agency is highly media dependent. And channel orchestration is a key part of our strategic toolbox. Integrated marketing is not the holy grail, distributed niche marketing is.
I think that sometimes, we’re over-analyzing and under-synthesizing. We’re reading all these complicated books, finding advanced psychological explanations or statistical correlations. Sometimes old truths just need a dead simple but inspirational explanation to be interesting and valuable.
On some trip I went on a while back I bought a book in the airport bookstore. The book was called “The Undercover Economist”, and I read maybe half of it, and I just started reading the other half this morning. I found it interesting, even though it really didn’t present any new information that I didn’t know. It’s a very basic book, explaining economics and markets. So why did I keep reading?
I simply kept reading because it was interesting and fun. In college, I never found economics particularly interesting or fun, even though I thought so out in the real world. Today I blame that on boring books and teachers. I know now that economics are cool, because they’re an integral part of our reality. Like physics. But this book was interesting. Just because of the way the included information was synthesized.
I guess my point is that explaining something in an interesting way is so much more important than we’re giving it credit for. We need more rockstars in the educational system. Could that be a new frontier for advertisers?
Three years ago, advertising zillionaire Donny Deutsch wrote a book called “Often Wrong Never In Doubt”. And even though he perhaps didn’t mean it in the way I’m going to describe it here, I think it may describe one of the more profound truths of advertising today. Not least in Sweden.
If you think about the job advertising is meant to do, you could perhaps boil it down to this: “Advertising should increase the long and/or short term value of a brand”. Short term value could mean increased sales this saturday, long term value could mean paving the way for future line extentions or increased prices. And since the “value” of a brand doesn’t neccessarily have to be monetary, this definition can also hold true for non profit organizations, political parties, etc.
Value can then be broken down to several underlying currencies like recognition, trust, status, etc.
Before saying what I’m about to say, I also need to assure you that I think a lot of great advertising IS being created today, but that is not the point of this case. What I would like to ask instead is this: How can it be that so much mediocre planning work and luke-warm creative work still leads to increased brand value? Personally I’m particularly puzzled by how weak a lot of campaigns are strategically. But still they seem to work to some degree.
Without knowing it, I think these mediocre agencies benefit from the “Often wrong, never in doubt”-phenomenon. By believing themselves that they’re actually doing a good job, they are at least putting out something void of doubt. They are putting out, with confidence, something with a fairly clear and concise message. And while the message may be poor (or perhaps completely dead), at least they have something that will up the value of the client’s brand, even though it may be a fraction of the increase they could have experienced.
So what’s the lesson behind this? Well – the “Often wrong, never in doubt”-phenomenon is a bad thing since it keeps poor planners, creatives and agencies in the business. I would say that this is the single most important reason why we are seing so much bad advertising out there. But it is also a good thing since it maintains the confidence that is just so important in any campaign, and can actually make a fairly bad campaign work. At least to some degree.
And to those of you amazing planners and creatives out there – I didn’t mean you.
In Cannes I got the question several times why I worked in the design business and not in the advertising business, and for how long I intend to stay. My answer was: I intend to stay with it forever. Regardless of how long I work in “the design business”, I will always keep design as a main focus. I’m in the business of communication, and to me, that business is severely crippled without design. The designer Yves Behar perhaps says it best when he talks about design being the glue that holds all other aspects together. Watch his TED-talk below and be inspired. I would love to work with this guy.
In the talk he also quotes somebody saying that “advertising is the prize companies pay for being unoriginal”. And though I don’t entirely agree with this quote, there is some truth in it. With functionality becoming increasingly similar between products, brand personality is what sets products appart, and design plays a very important role in the building of this brand personality. Imagine for a second two different computers looking exactly the same, but with different brand names on them. It feels cheap and fake. Chevrolet and Daewoo selling the same car with different names on them is a real life example of this.
An example of the opposite is boat outboard engine brands Mercury and Mariner. Two identical products sporting different design and communication, and consequently attract two different target groups.
Another good example of this is Coke Light and Coke Zero. I don’t have to show you this one, but they’ve done incredible work in making the feminine Coke Light macho.
Yet another example that I use a lot to explain how advertising and design should be idea driven and work together is that of naked chips. An ordinary approach for a design agency when presented with the brief to create packaging for the product “chips without salt” would be to take the usual bag, type “no salt chips” on it and make it a different color. Maybe light blue. When giving this product to the advertising agency, they can end up doing anything, because there is no idea in the new packaging at all. Another design and branding approach would be to put a bunch of naked people on the bag and call it “Naked Chips”. Leave this new design to the same advertising agency, and you’ll probably end up with some amazing campaign ideas. Naked chips is a real life example of design found in a London grocery store.
My final example of branding and design driven campaigns is Diamond Shreddies, a Clio winner campaign that was much talked about this year in Cannes. This link will take you to the You Tube search page for Diamond Shreddies. See if you can figure out what’s going on.
My point here is that strong branding and design should be at the core of any communications effort. Like I said – watch the Yves Behar talk below and be inspired. When watching the talk, take special note of the “Why Water” case, and consider if good communication could be made out of this design concept. Myself, I got about ten different ideas instantly.
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