Gerry McGovern has written a very interesting article on why marketers should stop treating their customers like fools; you can read the article here. Sadly, the truth is that, in the short term at least, irritating and misleading web banners will generate response. The trouble is they also generate resentment, and in the long terms that’s fatal to any brand.
This from the Director of Strategy at Saatchi and Saatchi, Richard Huntingdon:
“Much advertising is self indulgent nonsense that serves simply to wate the client’s money and the consumer’s time.”
Now this guy has a senior role at a global ad agency; he isn’t a Consumer Rights champion, or a data protection advocate; he comes from adland, and that’s what he has said in the trade press this week.
He goes on to give some context to his words, taking both clients and agencies to task, and in his own way making the point I’d like to make - it’s not that all marketing and advertising is rubbish, it’s just that most is, and the bar needs to be raised quite a bit to achieve something worthwhile.
To emphasise the point - some pure opinion - if I were running the marketing budget for just about any automotive firm, I’d be shaking my head at the moment. Car ads - it’s hard to tell one from the other let alone the brands their selling, someone please have a good idea in the area soon.
Working as I do, on the edge of the digital marketing industry, I get an insight in to what digital marketers, and the journalists who write for them, are thinking. I’m following a story that’s been bubbling away for a while - the debate around whether ISP’s should be able to target users with online ads. For those who don’t know, ISP’s (or Internet Service Providers) are the people who provide you with the connection to the internet, it might be Virgin media, or BT, or Tiscali, or a service provided by one of the mobile phone companies.
The idea is that, if ISP’s track consumer behaviour online they can use this to fire targeted ads at their customers. Not surprisingly, a majority of customers don’t want their surfing habits tracked and used by ISP’s for marketing purposes; they are concerned about data privacy issues.
Industry journal, New Media Age, has been wrestling with this issue and this week they report from their own research which shows that 58% of consumers think on line advertising is irrelevant (I’m surprised it’s not more) and 81% would opt out if they could from their ISP tracking their behaviour. What is interesting is reading Deputy Editor Nic Howell’s mild indignation at the fact that consumers don’t want to be ‘helped’ by more targeted advertising. His argument is that if consumers think on line advertising is irrelevant then they should welcome a more targeted approach. Nic says:
“58% of users think ad’s they see online are irrelevant, yet they are suspicious of relating ad’s to behaviour”
Well of course they are Nic. The belief of a lot of people in the industry is that somehow they are doing consumers a favour by making advertising more targeting, that it will make the ads more relevant - and that’s the argument that they tend to present. But what these guys don’t get is that consumers are never going to buy the line that the ad’s can be there for their benefit: the truth that consumers understand, and most marketers don’t is that generally ads are just a necessary irritation and making them a bit more targeting isn’t going to change that. They pay for the content, that’s what they are there for from the consumers point of view. If the industry tries to use the line that ads can somehow benefit consumers their words are going to fall like seeds on stony ground. What makes this situation even worse is that consumers perceive this to be an infringement of their privacy, and tthey care about data privacy much more than better targeted ads.
The irony is that behavioural targeting can be anonymous and personal, you don’t have to know who someone is to understand their behaviour, and advertisers needs be none the wiser about their customers if behavioural targeting is adopted. But somehow I suspect that the industry wont be able to get this message across; it will be people’s perceptions that count and so far it looks like a lot of people are giving a more targeted approach the thumbs down.
If the ISP’s and their advertising paymasters lose this one, in part it will be their own fault - they have tried to sell behavioural targeting as a benefit for consumers and the consumers have seen this for the bunkum that it is; they will need to change strategy soon or they will lose the chance to use any kind of targeting with an ever more sceptical public.
I’ve been to the Online Marketing and Media confernce to hear Michael Nutley, editor in chief of New Media Age (NMA) speaking frankly about the state of play in the industry. Nutley had a few words to say about why the great British public find marketing irritating and are now able to ‘tune out’ a lot of marketing messages.
Well of cource people avoid marketing messages, consumers are not engaging with content (on the web, TV, print, or whereever) to see the ads, most people consider exposure to marketing commmunication as a necessary evil and as a consequence do indeed try to screen it out.
Nutley touched on what I think is the main reason why most people have a stressful relationship with marketing. He was talking about Nike, the sportswear manufacturer who came up with the idea of ‘Nike +’ an online community for runners. This has been a successful venture for Nike, but these on line initiatives are like getting a pet, you can’t just get bored with it and walk away. To borrow from the popular phrase, online community involvement is for life not just for Christmas (or the lifetime of a traditional campaign). So whilst Nike may well have benefitted in terms of sales, they have also built an expectation that they need to fulfil. Herein is the problem for this sort of marketing, at the end of the day commercial marketing is there to sell stuff; even if a particular marketing campaign is all about brand, the fundamental goal of marketing activity is to make money.
Conversely, the fundamental goal of an online community is to create an environment for quality interaction, and the development of relationship. Sure that might involve buying the odd pair of running shoes, but if a company is spending money on creating the environment and there’s no tangible benefit in sales, someone in the board room will soon be asking hard questions.
It’s because, as consumers, we know that this conflict of interest exists that we get suspicious or even cynical about marketing activity, even the covert brand stuff. We may enjoy the few campaigns that are genuinely witty, funny, or insightful. But we know what the real agenda is.
The challenge for mareters is to account for our suspicions and still delight us, and motivate us to engage and buy. Only the best marketing can achieve this.
Don’t believe the hype
On a more straightforward note, we are told to shop around for the best credit card. That’s fair enough, and in such a business brands can be discarded for the irrelevance that they are, but behind these cards are one of the payment processing companies (Visa, Mastercard, AmEx etc.). For most consumers the significance of these brands are nil. And yet Mastercard are spending big money on sponsorship and advertising during Euro 2008, with amusing little bits of fluff like this. Maybe they are really trying to reach the retailers, I don’t know. Meanwhile, for us consumers getting the card that has the right benefits will laways be much more important than who is processing the payments.
By which I mean Nearly All Marketing Is Rubbish (NAMIR) which brings a broader scope to my series.
I want to highlight anything in marketing that I think is especially bad (not just the slightly bad, of which there is legion) but the particularly bad, and maybe also what is good.
It was interesting to see the ‘Drench’ ad which I thought was a rare good ad, making it in to the ‘most recognised ads’ chart last week at 3rd place, so there’s one highlight amongst an awful lot of nonsense.
I was intrigued to see what the chief exec of an integrated marketing agency said in ‘Marketing’ magazine this week
“We are a nation of self-obsessed cynics and all we really care about is what price we are paying and the level of service we are receiving.” Adam Leigh, The Communications Agency
Ouch. Well he’s half right; we do care about price and service, and there’s nothing wrong with caring about these things, after all when you cut through all the marketing bull these are the things we care about as consumers, and quite right too. It’s about the price we pay and the experience we have, that encompasses the quality of the product or service, it’s reliability, after sales service, and so on… the experience of the product or service we are buying. It’s not about the ads or the marketing or the brand development.
I can hear the marketer in me howling - ’sometimes the brand is the experience!!!’
Yes, rarely it is, that’s true. There are a few brands that really have some integrity behind the promise they give, just a few. You can maybe think of some, here are three I just thought of:
These are really strong brands, if you don’t come from the world of marketing believe me people get really excited about this sort of thing. You might disagree with these, you might be able to think of some yourself, but for every one of these there are a hundred brands that are shallow and fake and need to be treated with indifference.
In a world where the smart consumer is king, some marketing still works well, but not much. If I see any that’s really good I’ll let you know, and if I see anything I think is exceptionally bad I’ll call that out as well.
In the meantime as the phrase goes, don’t believe the hype!
