Ads that don’t get out of the way

Today I came across another ad that simply keeps spreading the thinking of  interruption marketing on the web. Besides the fact that the website below as a lot of ads, the one in the middle is just annoying, and one of those banners that as you scroll up or down it follows, covering the text that indeed you’re looking forward to read.

So the point when mentioning again the awareness vs engagement, is that you can get a lot of awareness here – buy ads, buy more ads, buy more and more ads, and people will notice your brand! Great, but will they buy it? Will they get out of their own way to click, read, spend time learning more, send an email asking for more information, pick up the phone and call your company asking about your service, schedule a meeting and eventually convince others or themselves to close a deal with you? just because you interrupted them when they were reading something that they were interested in and the ad didn’t went out of their way so easily?

What attracts companies to keep working like this is that if you buy a lot of ads, spend a lot of money, get a lot of impressions and eventually some clicks – Yes.. Eventually someone will buy it! But the percentage of that “someone” compared with the money spent or impressions, i.e. conversions, will be probably not relevant, not worthy, insignificant within lower budget opportunities. You can build high awareness, but low CTR’s, in the same way you interrupt people to make them buy your products, but you don’t engage them to build your brand and eventually buy your products in a sustainable way.

Key thing here is to stop interrupting people and start thinking on how you could engage and spread the word about your brand, make a better product, make a better marketing campaign that doesn’t annoy a lot of people, build interaction, fun, curiosity, help people solve their problems, communicate how you can help people solve their problems, integrate different channels, innovate, create something new, something worth to talk about, talk with people, change the way you handle the service, use the web to connect people on achieving something good, it can be free, or you can use ads to reinforce your message, not to interrupt people, use them to make people participate in something, not to try to find the “close this window” link. Want an example? Find them, create them! Below you can find two already.

www.twix.com

www.willitblend.com

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Why advertising fails? One of many reasons

I am reading a fine book on advertising, and what makes this book quite good is the approach on common sense key points that we usually tend to forget. Beyond several insights that caught my attention so far, there is one to highlight that is simple when building a communication strategy but ignored often, it says:

Clearly list and brainstorm the features, advantages and benefits of your offering, but start by the benefits, advantages and features when communicating with your market.

The attention your consumers dedicate to your brand is scarce within today’s landscape of ad clutter, if you don’t show fast the benefits consumers have with your offering, how do you think you’re going to get their buy-in in a tremendous competitive landscape? Below is a easy simple framework which should be always kept in mind. Consumers think on the benefits first, though several advertising messages think on the features first.

According with the authors, the thinking on true value propositions for the consumer is being easily filled by blank “buy me” propositions. As advertising seems to be dying nowadays, if you keep thinking on the traditional monologue, it will die faster. Why does this book have to highlight simple common sense and the community repeatedly be reminded of these time and time again? Here are a couple of reasons why I think it happens:

- Lack of proper research

- Research is not converted into valuable insights

- Consumers fail to provide true behavioral answers

- A few people in a focus group is not enough to get valuable conclusions

- Advertisers, marketers are busy enough they ignore insights from stakeholders

- Advertisers try to please marketers, marketers CEO’s: all fail on customers

If your advertising copy says, “we pride ourselves on the exceptional service we provide to all of our clients”, or “the best place on earth”, erase, rethink today.

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Brand preference hard to say

“I bought it because was cheap and I really like the brand”. Says a friend of mine regarding a sun cream. So I asked, why do you really like the brand? First thing was, “I don’t know”. Then trying to extend his arguments came more rational attributes to justify the brand choice. The product smell or parfum experience was great and could even make the bathroom have an aroma in the air. Then also the competitive pricing and some comparisons with other brands, as well as the creamy side of Dove’s line of products. Funny to see how rational attributes come to justify a brand choice when there’s a bunch of emotional attributes behind that. The first glimpse of my friend’s answer was that he actually didn’t know what to answer. People take it hard to understand, market researchers harder.

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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.

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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.

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