When the going gets toxic

According to Marketing Magazine it was

"pressure from advertisers [which] forced the shock closure of the UK's most-read Sunday newspaper, the News of the World"

That's to rather overclaim advertisers' influence. As the ensuing events have demonstrated, there are forces at work even more powerful than where we spend our media budgets. But the story does open up quite thorny questions about where ads are placed. I wonder to what extent marketers feel responsible for the media content they pay for? The printed press, just like its online equivalent, as well as broadcast TV, relies on advertising revenue. Every ad placement is a cash-vote in favour of that channel.

In general brands work hard to build wholesome reputations. Yet the attention to detail doesn't make it onto the media plan. Many media brands are, at best, salacious and scurrilous. The ethical brand manager would struggle to reconcile the two. One might argue that marketing decisions are purely commercial, without an ethical dimension. But even then, it's clearly far from ideal that the major channels to reach great swathes of the audience are so incongruous with the brand's own message. And in a wiki-world, where reputation is everything, such "its only business" arguments are valid only if you believe you could stand on them, even in the heat of an as-yet-unimagined crisis. Could you? I couldn't.

The truth is that, for most of us, media channels are but a means to an end, a necessary evil to be endured (as they have been for politicians). The question, of course, is just how necessary. Renault has said it will not be advertising in any News International titles for the timebeing. Is this as noble as it sounds? Does Renault believe the competition are, ultimately, a better fit for its brand, or is this just a crisis management response? Would your brand choose to be identified with the sentiments expressed on any of these covers:



Of course, the last one is a viral spoof. But what brand would freely choose to be associated with a publication that attracts such parody (even if it were undeserved)? As Marshall McLuhan observed almost 50 years ago, "the media is the message". Too often, I fear, our message is expediency. Not good enough. Unless one of your brand values is "prejudiced", of course. But it probably isn't.

Some people can't relate and others have a lot to learn

When I worked for Britvic, the Tango brand director (who I have to thank for hiring me in to my first real job), bought all the tabloid papers each day, in an effort to know what the brand's consumers were seeing, reading and talking about. For a while in the 90s I attempted similar discipline to the internet - visiting the "big" sites that would otherwise be out of my repertoire, as an act of professional diligence. Futile, obviously. (When vinyl records were invented my grandfather decided to amass a complete set of all the 78s published - he had to abandon that plan quite quickly too).

It is no longer possible to attempt to see through others' eyes. The biggest websites each deliver a combination of search and social, so we all see them differently. (The top 10 by hits are Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo, Live, Blogspot, Baidu, Wikipedia, Twitter and QQ. You are forgiven for not knowing Baidu or QQ if you don't speak Chinese). Content led sites don't feature very highly - and I suspect our choices, at that level, are as fragmented as ever (the BBC is #41, livejasmin is #44 - take your pick).

This is part of a general trend of cultural and social fragmentation. I sat today on the tube next to a guy little more than half my age, as we both listened to our mp3s. I take a little pride in my music taste, but I suspect my age is beginning to show. Mine may be the most ear-bleeding trendy guitar based music in town but, as Decca observed with much foresight when they turned down the Beatles in 1962, "guitar groups are on the way out". My neighbour was listening to Tinie Tempah, for all I know.

Aside from being an obvious problem for media planning, this is a seismic issue for brands that have made themselves "relevant" to consumers by simply mimicking the consumer's perceived interests: "You like XXXXX, so do we!" If consumers aren't into the same things, just what should a mass market brand align to? The few big unifying consumer interests (such as major sports) are not very differentiating. And in many spheres there's little to unify consumers at all. (As far as I understand, the unifying theme of fashion these last few months has been nothing more complex than "socks".)

Affinity marketing was always lazy - the "in thing" is surely an overpriced way to reach the audience. Winning brands have the confidence to carve their own groove. The trick is doing so in ways that consumers are drawn towards.

Enough about you... let's talk about me

Rowse Honey's newly launched marketing activity has a lot going for it. They asked their own staff to write and film potential TV ads which are now online (facebook.com/rowsehoney), and they're asking people to vote on their favourite. It's a really nice demonstration of employee engagement - they've clearly managed to infuse their whole workforce with the joy of marketing. And what comes across is that they are a small, family centred company - quite an attractive, yet subtle, positioning for honey. Not bad, for their first ever piece of TV advertising.

There are at least three respects, though, in which it could go much further:

1) The awareness driving kicked off with a TVC about the potential TVCs - that's quite an investment in airtime when the whole thing could instead be given a chance to bubble up through social media. And in some ways a glossy launch TVC slightly undermines the "hand-made" credentials. If this is representative of the media plan as a whole (we'll soon see) then it's probably still too "conventional".

2) If only consumers could be engaged as deeply as employees. Clicking "Like" in Facebook is at least not as passive as simply watching an ad, but there could be a lot more scope. When can we submit our own ads? Is there a Sandbox on YouTube so we can share "unauthorised" (risqué) ads? "The birds and the bees,Take 1!" Can we write Rowse slogans? (One of the employees' ads concludes "We're Rowse Honey. We're not jacks of all trades, we're masters of one", which is not bad.) And so on. Involve us, interact with us, incorporate us!

3) It takes time and effort to engage consumers in dialogue. By and large, we want that dialogue to be about our product/ service. By and large consumers want to talk about their own lives and interests. So alarm bells should ring when we come up with ideas to talk to consumers about advertising. How much better would this campaign be if these were employees' films about bees, or about flowers? Then people could talk about their own gardens, or photos from their holidays. "Happy bees make the best honey. Send us a photo of your favourite flowers and we'll make posters for our bees to enjoy"...

#hashalongTV

While watching Have I Got News For You last week, I noticed that the BBC has decided to display a hashtag (#bbcHIGNFY) as the show opens. Shortly after, I spotted Question Time sporting one too (#bbcqt). I was intrigued - do the twitterati really watch Question Time? And if so, what do they say about it? So I flicked open the Twitter App on my phone. As it happened, a particularly unctuous hedge fund manager called Hugh Hendry was on the show's panel, and a lot of the #bbcqt tweeting was directed at him:

callummccrae1: Hugh Hendry is a wanker that is all. #bbcqt
markjepson: On a serious note, Hugh Hendry is an obnoxious cretin. #bbcqt

The twitterers had a point, but that's by the by. What struck me was how this totally changes the viewing experience. A passive 'slumped in front of...' moment becomes an active social one. Suddenly we're all sharing a vast virtual sofa, muttering our asides to each other.

For the time being it's rather cumbersome - and not everyone has a smartphone anyway. But one or two iterations and this stuff will be scrolling right across the screen - if we want it to. Some classifications of TV are more ripe for commentating than others - sport, soaps and reality shows are obvious contenders. And while we probably don't want to hear the whole world's commentary on our favourite movie, we may welcome contributions from our friends, so the Facebook hybrid of this will be interesting. A thousand strangers can add nothing to my enjoyment of Withnail & I, but if a friend writes "#withnail @alex - you perfumed ponce" on my wall? ... ROFLMAO

Ad breaks, let's face it, have always been fair game, so we need to work out how brands should react when ads are dissected live ("that stuff's crap"). And what about exploiting the new forum by integrating hashtags inside the campaign through an interactive creative idea? Carlton Draught in Australia has added a hashtag under the brand logo at the end of the ad, to some effect. But what about incorporating the hashtag, or some tweets, into the concept of the ad itself? You don't have to know what one of these campaigns looks like to know they exist. Write the brief.

Of course, in-programme (and indeed in-match) tweeting isn't new. What's new is merely that I have caught on. But if I've got it, then the rest of the population can't be far behind.

High definition optics

The Chile mine rescue was a perfectly formed moment of global media. Respect due to Oakley for spotting the opportunity for a bit of product placement. As Oakley's press release explained it:

The rescue team in Chile is relying on Oakley eyewear to protect the miners’ eyes when they are brought back to the surface... Based on their requirements and full product specifications, Oakley donated 35 pairs of Oakley Radar® with Black Iridium® lenses in Path™ and Range® lens shapes

A good deed... and with it the certainty of appearing on every TV set in the world (33 times!), as well as a chance to convey their scientific credentials. I was in New York this week, and witnessed coverage of Oakley in both the US and UK - and no doubt there was coverage elsewhere round the world too.

Crucially, the mine rescue was perfect PR fodder: compelling, but with no hint of exploitation. Oakley don't seem to have invited any backlash by getting involved. In a poll on The Huffington Post, 90% of respondents thought it was a good thing for Oakley to have done. Smart stuff. I want some.

#iagreewith[insertyourbrandhere]

Cleggmania shows up a couple of interesting things about the political party brands.

Firstly, it shows how brittle brand reputations can be. Despite all the obvious product performance problems the major parties have experienced in the last few years (from unpopular wars to unpopular expenses claims), they - and the pollsters - didn't see this coming. The polls over the last year or two have been misleading, showing relative share without identifying how fragile (maybe even broken) the relationship between voter and party has become. Have the polls really moved so suddenly, or have people begun to engage with the question differently? Its pretty obvious - even with only a week's hindsight - that the signs were there, but they weren't understood by strategists or commentators.

Secondly, the fevered buzz on websites shows just how far the relationship between people and media has changed, with the media now playing catch-up with popular opinion rather than leading it. Preference has spread like wildfire, fuelled by Facebook, Twitter, blogs and comments. It is the peer-peer response to what has happened that is most interesting, and that is driving events. Ironically, a digital era phenomenon has been triggered by a TV event.

Of course its entirely possible that in a few days this will all have blown over and the political parties will be doing their best to forget it as a bad dream. But it raises interesting questions:

1) What's the relative importance of tracking brand preference versus identifying emerging trends and deeper motivations? Are we sure we're not driving with our eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror?

2) In a much more volatile media environment, is there any longer a role for "incremental" marketing strategies? Are we building plans that might catch fire (+10%), or still trying to "play safe" (+3%)?

The wrong kind of trouble

I have quite strong opinions, but Plan Phoenix is not the platform to discuss Afghanistan or Gordon Brown's spelling or Stephen Gately's death or Jan Moir's opinions.

Still, the furore kicked up by the Sun's PM couldn't get our name right and the Mail's strange, lonely and troubling death made interesting media experiences. The dominant response to both seemed to be that each paper got it wrong. And this was in evidence even on the papers' own website comment sections - large portions of their own readership reacted quite strongly.

It is easy to get the audience wrong by taking them for granted. On the editors' desks both articles probably seemed well aligned to editorial policy and to the readership's attitudes. But many readers quickly rejected the implicit assumptions about their own prejudices. They had overstepped the mark from a conspiratorial pastiche of the consumer (like the Lynx effect) to a crude caricature.

Some of the complaining readers were not regular ones. In a user generated world there's no guarantee who is participating and strong propositions attract enemies as easily as friends. But both papers' reputations were tarnished in the process, even if some of the outrage was from people who sit well outside the brands' avowed consumer profiles.

Both brands are divisive, but at least they stand for something - demanding attention and generating loyalty. Only big incumbent brands can afford to be bland, and even then its probably a bad strategy. Most of us need to offend people from time to time. So here are two more tasks to add to the brand manager's brief:
1) Am I actively managing the boundary between complicity and condescension with my consumer?
2) Am I creating ways to proactively engage rejectors, even if I do not want to win them over?

Media before message?

The IAB reports today that internet advertising spend has overtaken TV.

What a long journey it has been to get to this point. Personally, I think the final destination is much further (which tells us a lot about the future of TV - it will become a primarily on-demand medium, with broadcast merely a loss leading way to market its own content).

Of course, we don't spend as much time online as we do watching TV. But that's not the point. As a connection moment - in particular the ability to target and to engage - the internet is a superior medium.

Interestingly Nielsen data in the US shows that we increasingly consume several media at once - such as watching TV while online. That's certainly how most of the grocery shopping happens in my household. On those moments a relevant click is going to be far more effective than a haphazard TVC, no matter how great its production values.

But if we're making the right decisions with our investment of media time, are we getting the creative we deserve? How many ideas are still born as scripts? I bet it is more than 50%.

Newsflash 20:35, October 7
Three little updates hot on the heels of publishing this.
1) On 2nd October the Evening Standard announced it is to become a freesheet
2) Over the weekend it was confirmed that no-one is wants the TV rights to the England-Ukraine game, so it will be offered on internet pay per view only.
3) Yesterday the Economist told readers that it is to raise its 'paywall' - i.e. to restrict online access further in favour of paying subscribers.

The game is inconsequential and its a fire sale after the collapse of Setanta, so we should read little in to that: but its a precedent regardless. The Evening Standard's move (there's a whole backstory around London freesheets) is more interesting. They believe increased circulation is worth more in ad revenue than the loss in cover sales. I wonder, from an advertiser's perspective, whether this is true. More eyeballs may not be better eyeballs, so I'm not sure how much more I'd be willing to pay for them. Or maybe its just about increasing the number of advertisers, which merely dilutes the impact for each one. What's really fascinating is that this happens in the same week the Economist moves the opposite direction. All 3 moves are not entirely voluntary, but driven by financial pressures from the economic crisis. Strange, unpredictable, contrary forces.

Street media: Beauty over ugliness

As part of the media mix for The Heineken Cup about 10 years ago, we painted advertisements on garage doors along the route from railway stations to rugby grounds. It was a tactical element of the mix: fun and low cost. Garage doors are not inherently beautiful. I like to think there was social, as well as commercial, value!

Many high streets are currently blighted by shuttered shop fronts. Streetskins are doing us all a favour by providing the opportunity to turn them into advertising space.

Of course, what will turn this from a cost opportunity (pulling down the price of outdoor) in to something more will be the ability of ad agencies to develop some knock-out creative to bestow on them.

Over to you...