Magic for dogs

It's Friday. Enjoy.

The Other Side Of The Coin – Let's Get Social

We are nothing if not fair here at Sell! Towers. So in the interests of balance, as a counterpoint to yesterday's post, here is the other side of the coin...

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The Most Controversial Suggestion In Advertising?

The Most Controversial Suggestion In Advertising?

“Make the product the centre of your advertising.”

It doesn’t sound that controversial does it? But it seems that if you want to use advertising to get more people to buy your product more of the time, your average agency person is likely to sigh and exclaim, “You just don’t get it, do you?”

That’s possibly because the idea of giving people a reason why they might buy your product is out of fashion in the advertising industry. It appears that even the idea of featuring the product at all has become deeply unfashionable in agencies.

Fashionable planners and creatives argue that all products are the same, so it’s just down to getting people to ”connect with your brand”. And they believe that advertising can influence consumers’ attitudes to the brand enough to change their buying behaviour.

Because they think your target audience are stupid.

They think of consumers as emotional zombies who lack decision-making abilities and buy only on feelings. They attempt to woo them with fluffy, happy-clappy ads and emotional mood-pieces that leave no place for the thing that would actually be of interest to the viewer (whisper it: the product).

It’s a point of view that is all-pervasive in the advertising industry.

The trouble is, they’re wrong.
Consumers are people. People like us, people like you.
And they’re way smarter than most advertising people give them credit for.

They know when advertising is being condescending and disingenuous. They’re intelligent and discerning, and deserve to be treated as intelligent and discerning.

We think advertising should treat people with more respect. It should provide them with a good reason to try your product, whilst being charming, engaging and entertaining. We don’t think that all products are the same. We think that’s lazy thinking from people who would rather be making some award-winning film than selling your product anyway.

Our simple belief is that the best way to grow a business or brand is to sell more products. (That’s pretty much how all great brands have been built.) That buying behaviour influences attitudes far more than attitudes influence buying behaviour.

And so the best way advertising can help is by communicating to people why the product might be of benefit to them, what they’ll get out of it. It should be honest and true to the product – and treat the consumer with intelligence and respect.

And it should do all of that in an entertaining, engaging, memorable way. And crucially – in a way that is distinctive in the category. (Because sometimes products are similar – and the way you communicate the benefit gives you the edge.)

We sometimes meet marketing directors and CEOs who feel a sense of relief as we show them that it is possible to feature their products in good advertising, whilst doing a strong job for the brand. (The secret is that every ad says something about the brand, whether you like it or not. The tone, character and approach of your advertising influences what people think about your brand, even if the focus is on what makes the product of benefit to them.)

This all hardly sounds like rocket science I know, but it’s the equivalent of shouting “Jehovah” in advertising agencies today.

And it isn’t just theory. We’ve been taking this approach on behalf of our clients for the last eight years. Putting their products at the centre of eye-catching entertaining, distinctive advertising. Making them the star of the show, not just a walk-on at the end.

We’ve helped to consistently increase sales, and grow their brands in the process. People tend to come to us when they feel they have good products that just aren’t getting the advertising they deserve.

If that sounds familiar to you, maybe we should talk.

Shit Infographic Of The Day

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Stephen Wildish's Taxonomy of Shit. More good stuff from Wildish & Co here .

Like Films... only shitter and with Jessica Ennis

At the weekend I visited my local multiplex. I arrived nice and early, got comfy, and the lights dimmed. Before the movie started - there were 25 minutes of cinema length adverts aka extended versions of sop story narratives tenuously brought back to brand values by tail-ending them with a logo end frame. You don't just find these type of commercials in cinemas, but having all these extended cuts back to back made their efforts to be poignant all the more hollow and cringeworthy.

The grade, the wispy voice, the piano based soundtrack, the slow motion humanity stuff - given the cinema setting and the length of these ads they transcend into something akin to a Terrance Malick movie... only they're not, they're really really not. No matter how poetic the script and all the money that's pumped into the production - any moment you're waiting for them to link all those adjectives the vo's been listing back to ... you guessed it ... the Brand.

Enter a fake-panting Jessica Ennis, a bank logo and half a screen of legal supers detailing how they're going to take your house unless you keep up payments. Santanders' attempt at story telling lasted a total of 120 seconds with a 90 and following 30 to really hammer it home. I love going to the movies, and don't mind an ad or two whilst my eyes and buttocks are adjusting - but it all got a bit silly, and judging from the audience's groaning as they were subjected to the brand launched emotional barrage one after another - reality check time.

Cinema advertising can be a really powerful media - you've a relatively undistracted captive audience, and amazing sound and picture quality to play with - but for the love of god just because you're playing in a cinema before a Film does not make your advert any less of an advert. Sell things!

Luckily the film eventually started - and for two hours Captain America showed me with his fists and sexy sidekick why Capitalism is awesome.

Shooting Fentimans..

For the last two days we have been shooting Fentimans' first TV commercial with the illustrious and talented Mr Mark Denton Esq. and Lady Fern Berresford from Coy! It was a great cast and crew, with superb performances, costume and art direction, which means we're pretty excited to bring this together. And... wait for it... there's a product in every scene, and not a kitten in sight! Can you imagine? So unfashionable. A few phone pics from the studio...

Zombies are in vogue. The dumbing down of modern advertising.

The fashionable thinking in agencies today is that people are controlled by their emotions, and that brands need to get potential customers on board by owning an emotion, or creating an emotional bond with them.

So when a recent study to find out the secret of the UK’s happiest brands takes some of our most treasured emotions – happiness, optimism, trust, playfulness, generosity – and applies them to brands, it may seem par for the course [Be careful if you read the article, the startling revelation that people like chocolate and ice cream more than banks, political parties and Ryanair may make you fall off your chair].

However, by attempting to boil things down to an emotional essence we are in danger of simplifying humans and insulting their intelligence. And in the process, agencies are totally misunderstanding how people come to buy what they do, and how brands become popular and successful.

Unfortunately, this thinking tends to over-emphasise the role that emotions plays in brand building, whilst simultaneously depicting consumers as unthinking, emotionally-led zombies.

But why then has this thinking become so popular?

The underlying theory is worth looking at in a wider context, and examining where these ideas may have come from.

It does seems that some findings from neuroscience have left the lab, passed through the lens of popular culture and tiptoed into agencies, reappearing, often oversimplified, as seductive reasons why the primary goal of ads should be attempting to make consumers feel an emotion about the brand.

Neuromarketing and ‘buyologists’ (yes, really) today search for what they call the ‘buy button’ in our brains. They are infatuated by the lighting-up in brain scans of that walnut-shaped bit of our brain called the amygdala.

“Neuroscience shows us that the decision to purchase something is often formed deep within the subconscious” say Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience. “Consumer choice is an inescapable biological process” claims NeuroFocus, a neuromarketing firm located in London.

And here is A.K. Pradeep, CEO of NeuroFocus, in an interview with Fast Company, on the subject of the iPad, "When you move an icon on the iPad and it does what you thought it would do, you're surprised and delighted it actually happened," he says. "That surprise and delight turns into a dopamine squirt, and you don't even know why you liked it."

He talks as if the damn thing doesn’t even work on a functional level, or lacks a rational purpose.

  

The view seems to be that there is no room any more for human reasoning. To them we are biologically determined to behave in certain ways. There is no room for autonomy or free will.

Interestingly when they are challenged about this, they claim you are simply post-rationalising, the choice was made by your objective brain and not your subjective mind.  Worryingly, to them we are all mindless zombies.

Noticeably, law firms have more issues with this that ad firms.  In law, people are judged to be in control of their faculties unless demonstrated otherwise – whereas ad-land seems to be taking the opposite view.

In fact neuro-marketers appear to have more faith in neuroscience than neuroscientists. Raymond Tallis, neuroscientist and humanist, “If human beings were so simple that they could be understood in scientific terms alone, then we’d be too simple to be able to understand ourselves.”

With over a billion neurons and zillions of synapses in the brain, neuroscience is at its earliest stage of understanding the most complex object in the known universe.

This misappropriation of neuroscience (which I am sure will turn out to be of huge importance to medicine eventually) by agencies and clients leads them to leap to the apparent end conclusion of “Hey, why bother mentioning product attributes, or providing any rationale to buy? Lets not bother with the conscious mind at all”.

Our own point of view is rather old-fashioned I’m afraid, and empirically based. Brands are, in fact, built by the cumulative effects of people purchasing and using products, which over time builds an emotional attachment to the brand providing that product.

For now, at least, effective advertising must be noticed (consciously), believed, remembered and acted upon – as if that’s not enough of a challenge in this crowded, over-communicated world. We maintain that behaviour change precedes attitude change not vice versa.

We believe that ads should treat people as reasoning subjects rather than passive objects. The thinking behind an ad should start with what we know about the product and where it sits in its category, why people might benefit from it and why people may choose it over our competitors’ products.

Only once we have this understanding do we think about how to have impact – by being entertaining, emotionally engaging, charming or unexpected.

Greedily, we want advertising to be both rational (in what it communicates) and emotional (in how it demands attention and interest, and stays in the memory).

Purely emotion-laden films with the product as a mere afterthought are lazy shortcuts in advertising, and lack empirical evidence as to how they get people to try their subject’s wares (and keep them front of mind for future purchases).

In fact products are often invented for a rational reason – to do something more efficiently or better, or differently. And our non-zombie consumer understands this. It is most clearly demonstrated in word-of-mouth, when one person advises another. They tend to tell the other person the specific reason why they may like the product, rather than they “will just love it”, or “get joy from it”, or “feel like a with-it thirty something” for no given reason at all. Yet for some reason, advertisers seem to treat this as too simplistic an approach for advertising.

We worry about the damaging consequences for brands of forgoing their heritage or the actual function of their product and replacing it with emotional brand qualities. We fear that in an age where the consumer demands transparency and authenticity, they will be seen as disingenuous in their desire to emotionally manipulate the audience. If trust is key to advertisers, treating us as zombies is probably not the best way.

Product advertising doesn’t have to rely on boring technical jargon or corny metaphors, but it is often depicted as such by those who prefer the emotional brand approach. It’s all too easy to argue against it by using bad examples of the genre.

But we believe that the product should more often play the lead and not just a walk-on role in smart, compelling, entertaining advertising. It’s far from easy to do well, but it’s not brain surgery either.

Let’s be mindful of the sort of advertising we create and not treat people as mouth-breathing morons. People are way smarter than most agencies are giving them credit for right now. It’s time the industry started making smarter advertising that gives people a real reason to believe.

As Mr Bernbach famously said, "The magic is in the product".