Awareness and engagement

Recently I came across a campaign feedback from an European parliament candidate on the election last month. The feedback was quite good from someone who considered that this candidate had done a great campaign by its clever integrated communications strategy and presence in key places. After revising myself the campaign, I noticed one key fact. There was nothing within the candidate. She didn’t stood for nothing rather than “a new face for Europe”! There was a lack of ideas behind the candidate and simple key explanations on why I should vote on her and what in fact did she stood for? this lack of determined attributes was within all communication materials and website.

I am amazed by the money spent in political campaigns which turn out to be substantially worthless in terms of results, and deeply questioned by how good was in fact this campaign, where it could have been well planned, but never engaging.

The difference between awareness and engagement is wide, and the story goes on with companies that still hope its sole spend in “awareness” will drive results.  Today you can spend millions advertising your brand, interrupting people on the media and on the streets, but that never means people will eventually buy it. On the base of a brand pyramid there is awareness, and indeed you need to build brand awareness and take you word out to your defined market, though, on the other end (top) there is engagement, and in between there must be a clever mix of rational attributes (benefits) and emotional attributes to build up your way to engagement. Most probably your sales will go up if your product or service is really worth buying, if you bought so many ad space that is inevitable for people to become aware of your brand, and also if your campaign remarkably communicates your brand essence.

Still, today rules changed, and instead the web enabled that the gap between awareness and engagement shrunk in time. The speed your brand can travel between the base of the pyramid to the end of it is so fast that it becomes imperative you think clearly on your brand essence and cleverly build up your way with consistent benefits and emotions; simple key ideas amazingly built up internet brands as youtube, facebook or twitter in a couple of weeks.  Within a traditional advertising driven thinking, I believe there should be a shift, one that you can spend millions developing your product or service to make it much better than it is, and then spend a lower percentage of that millions engaging your brand with a clever integrated, creative and interactive campaign that spreads. People will listen and talk and interact if your brand is remarkable, and if you cleverly connect with your audience by understanding it, you’ll probably get much more results than spending all those millions just to interrupt people on the streets with flyer’s and poor TV ads without any sense behind. Awareness gets your word out indeed, but engagement makes your word staying in a conversation.

: : :

How to build compelling marketing stories?

Yesterday a friend reminded me about the dream job a couple of months ago was on the hype in the media. How to build a compelling and powerful marketing campaign is one question we can answer with some examples behind, though, the example of Tourism Queensland was quite amazing as the buzz generated millions of conversations throughout the world.

There was several clever thinking going on in Australia. The first and foremost is that the TQ as a great reason for people to visit them – the great barrier reef, no doubt about that, still, Malaysia, Indonesia, Maldives, Seychelles, Fiji and others nearby also have great reefs, great sea life, amazing beaches, and many other features of a paradisiacal tropical environment. So the key thing here was to think on how to differentiate when facing similar offerings.

If you see a couple of advertising campaigns from different countries is easy to recognize that besides each specific country heritage they all tell the same story: something like visit me and fly back in time or be in paradise. That’s a compelling story for sure if you have great cultural, historical heritage and nature, still it is not a breakthrough today as everyone does it. The buzz generated by the Tourism Queensland campaign was a breakthrough. They told us a different story, not the common story “come here”, but a story about one person getting a dream job, therefore, in a dream place. A story about living in such an extraordinary place, surrounded by amazing nature, taking care of an island and discover its beauty to tell others about it.

The integrated branding campaign asked for a 150,000 dollars job as caretaker on the Great Barrier Reef’s Hamilton Island. Created by CumminsNitro, the Best Job in the World campaign attracted more than 34,000 applicants from over 200 countries. The website had over 200,000 new visitors on the very first day of the campaign, and more than 2.5 million people viewing the campaign website so far, while generating over 11,000 (one minute video) entries in just a few short weeks. The campaign spawned around 200,000 blogs and 43,000 news stories, and some candidates created blogs, established facebook groups to create buzz on themselves. Tourism authorities have said that the campaign, which cost just over 1 million dollars, has so far generated around 150 million dollars in global publicity.

Concerning also a growing issue facing many people today about not getting a job that is satisfying for their life’s or not getting a job at all, indirectly people were actively talking about Australia, and how this place can represent a dream to be in, whether working, living or ultimately visiting! Indirectly they are selling it to everyone at every moment they talk about the job, actively spreading the idea and the story. The campaign was cleverly planned for the future as well. People can still be following the steps of the winner of the dream job and know how is it to work in such an amazing place through his diary on the web, where job duties listed include generating publicity with web videos, blogging, and photo diaries.

This is a compelling marketing story to talk about, the dream place, and the well executed strategy behind makes it to spread and spread around the world and throughout a wide period of time. Telling stories include building compelling arguments for people to get attracted and interested by what your brand might give them, not about directly arguing the features of your product or service. Understand and explore the several benefits and dimensions your brand can achieve and give to people, create a consistent and clever story, and spread it. Storytelling is powerful.

: : :

The misplacement of ads in news coverage

Both pictures are taken from People magazine on 9/11 2001. The first one shows us a cloud of dust and people running for their lifes scared of the  tragic dimension the event was taking place. On the side page we  have a bra advertisement. The latter shows us an appealing ad from ‘Got Milk‘ campaign with Gisele Bundchen. Model posture worried about milk. The next page shows us a sensitive picture of a women crying for obvious reasons in the course of the 9/11 events. The compelling messages on both pages are contradictory. The only similarities are spotted by the use of jeans, bright shirt, both facing same direction, which make it more thoughtful. On this same edition of People magazine there were other contradictory – ads vs. context – which were quite aggressive by this point of view. David Carson, a remarkable graphic designer speaking on TED refers about this within a design frame. Before seeing Carson’s presentation I eventually also realized the same thing happening on the news coverage of BBC online, namely, after clicking on a report about the terrible African countries situation,  I was first directed to an automated ad of the luxurious Dubai’s Jumeirah and its wealthy lifestyle. Also, to name another,  on the way to see a rather violent news coverage on a US police procedure, I was again first checking the work of the Greece tourism advertisement inviting people to come to their beautiful country (no links as the ads change with time). On both cases we have two contradictory scenarios in which brands are put into the same context, poor-rich and violent-peaceful.

Every organization which is advertising on news coverage should be careful where those ads are going to end up. A large portion of news coverage are about unfortunate events which unfortunately happen more and more in our world. Often these news are preceded by ads which definitely are not well fitted into the context. On print is easier to control, in digital not so much, and as the digital advertising world is still in its first steps, organizations that are involved should definitely be aware of the context in which their ads are displayed. The context in which the brand is presented is highly important as all our senses are working towards defining the brand image, values and working on its associations, rebounding in fields which drive emotional connections as we see the context in which the brand is presented. A heavily bad context is not a good idea to deliver a positive and ‘context fit’ message with most brands which are not related with social causes in the case presented above. The effectiveness of ads takes on the best if  they are presented within a logical context association with the brand positioning and meaning (as Lindstrom carefully analyzes). Considering this, you should be aware that the misplacement of ads in news coverage could lead to create perceptions of:

- Lack of moral and ethics on both media and advertiser

- ‘Interruption ads’ instead of relevant ones for viewer

- Brand fit: context misplacement and probable creation of negative effect on brand equity

: : :

Interact!

Every other week we can see interesting campaigns at the MTR (subway) in Hong Kong. Most are unoticed (80%), some are interesting and catch a glance of people’s attention (15%) and only a very few can make a remark worth to talk about (5%).

Hong Kong as you might know is one of the places in the World where advertising clutter is huge. The search for new ways to interact here are in much higher demand say than a place were few billboards are present, but still, average companies continue to do average things.

Some are exception. Standard Chartered Bank with TBWA Tequila Hong Kong, presented an amazingly effective campaign, the Click-a-Count.  Up the escalators they putted ad screens along the way. Each ad screen was surronded by solid design based on Standard’s colours. The best thing was three different videos displaying on subsequent different screens, each presented a simple and effective message - like an automated movement with flipping coins, fingers clicking and ATM’s, all resembling actions for their core message of easy transactions. Furthermore, they sounded like clicks, cash, coins.

Result: 90% of the people going up on escalators was staring at the ad. Embarked on the experience the brand was giving to them. Senses were touched by the sound of clicks and flipping coins, along with the effective automated movement created by the videos. The rest goes into the marketing team to analyze its ROI and future brand management.

What’s important here is that people want entertainment and they search for new ways of interaction. The future reserves us a complete new dimension of interaction in just a few years from now, but still, most companies are stuck in traditional ways, not fully using existing technology which is definitely effective and putting breaks on their creative teams to indeed break rules.

: : :