Atomic Direct, LTD

Unless you’ve been isolated on a 15 year space mission, you know that the ad business has spend 15 years telling us that DVRs will destroy ad viewing.

But those who pay closest attention have long suspected this isn’t true. And there has been data showing that DVR’s haven’t decreased TV effectiveness. Now Nielsen’s detailed DVR tracking confirms what other studies have shown (click here for the MediaPost summary of the study).

It turns out that DVR’s actually help television advertising succeed: “Contrary to fears that DVRs would wipe out the value of commercials because of viewers fast-forwarding through ads, DVRs actually contribute significantly to commercial viewing.”

Guess that makes it sorta too bad that the coolest of the cool agency creative directors have been writing off TV ads for over a decade. Instead, they’ve put their energy into “content oriented non-advertising that captures consumer attitude and turns it into osmosized action that results in higher revenue” or some such gobblety-gook.

What is TV’s Future? So it has turned out that TV advertising isn’t really that bad. Does that mean agencies will drop their new media follies?

Probably not. Since too few ad people had enough savvy to see that DVR’s weren’t actually destroying TV, technology is moving aggressively to change TV – and it’s doing so without the guidance of the savvy teams that really, truly understand what consumers want from TV.

So this effort labors under two mis-perceptions:

…First, they believe there’s some advertising free way that enough great TV content can be developed to get people a good 30 hours a week of viewing…without government funding.
…And secondly, they believe that consumers absolutely hate advertising and will always skip it.

It probably doesn’t matter that these are mis-perceptions. We’re seeing tremendous support for media approaches to television that very well might kill TV ad effectiveness.

It’s too bad. Because this study suggests that the consumers pretty easily put up with TV advertising as a trade-off in order to get the programming they like.

Copyright 2011 – Doug Garnett – All Rights Reserved

Been reading this book by Byron Sharp (“How Brands Grow”, Oxford University Press). It’s generally an outstanding book and I’ll blog in the future about the truths that it offers which should dramatically change advertising (though I’m not certain anyone will seriously listen).

But despite a brilliant start, this book falls flat on its face when discussing persuasion. Sharp (et. al.) try to tell us that in the world of “new advertising” persuasion is unimportant.

Sharp is not alone. There is a movement among the most up-to-date advertising theorists who will tell you that persuasion is out of vogue and is a concept relegated to the dark ages of advertising (like the 1970′s).

This is bunk. While brands need to leave the right emotional connections behind, advertising is broadly devoted to only one of two outcomes: persuading or merely reminding.

For long established brands (like Duracell batteries or Dial soap) it may be enough for advertising to merely remind us a brand exists in order to cause us to purchase the brand a bit more often. But if you have a product that’s new, a brand that needs to evolve quickly, or a brand that’s being built, your advertising should be entirely devoted to persuasion.

In campaign after campaign, our numbers show that the action driven by persuasion is so big that it’s measurable without too many sophisticated statistical techniques.

So what happened? How could a researcher as perceptive as Sharp come this conclusion? Most of the campaigns he evaluates are reminder campaigns where the advertisers lacks any product or brand values that are significant enough to use for persuasion. And Sharp rightly notes that many branded attempts to persuade rely on minor advantages that don’t offer any significant value. These brands don’t honestly look at the insignificance of what they’re saying.

But also, on this topic his work might be self-predictive. In those campaigns where persuasion would be important, he’s testing campaigns from traditional agencies. And once we got past the 1970′s most agencies lost their ability to persuade. So what do you find when you test poorly executed persuasion advertising?

Seems that we learn that agencies who don’t know how to persuade aren’t able to make campaigns that persuade. No kidding. So what’s going on with agencies and persuasion?

Agencies think too narrowly of persuasion. Read deeply into Sharp’s book and what you’ll see is that the operating definition of “persuasion” is the attempt to persuade using ONLY words and logical arguments.

Yikes. That’s a pretty limited sense of salesmanship. Persuasion happens through a robust communication with the consumer’s heart and mind to create conviction that is far stronger than mere emotional “liking”.

Many agencies think they’ve evolved beyond anything so pedestrian as persuasion. For the past hundred years agencies have rushed to reject the past. Steroids have been added to this mix in the past decade. Taking a lesson from the Ted videocasts, the agency that gets the most attention is the one who promises to change everything.

Unfortunately, while promising massive change in advertising style may help agencies get new business, it’s mass marketing with traditional media that makes brands grow (as Sharp’s book clearly shows). So the agencies who attempt the most change are also the agencies serving their clients the most poorly.

Agencies aren’t designed for persuasion. When we demand persuasion, it makes our work much harder. We have to dig deeper than the superficial to find real meaning for consumers. We have to reject branding that is little more than ivory tower sociology and find, instead, truths that lead to consumer action.

But the ad biz isn’t structured to work this hard. Agencies make big money hiring art school or portfolio school grads and turning them loose while charging lots of money for their time. (Many, many clients tell me they are tired of having to deal with freshly minted art school grads who claim to know how they should run their billion dollar businesses.)

The Upside: Clients thrive with persuasion. Persuasion takes place when we communicate consumer truths that have compelling value. And, it’s even stronger when we put all of our communication tools behind the attempt to persuade – words, images, sounds, textures, ideas, logic, emotions, personality, music, and more.

When we do this, persuasion works. Although I always love honing our measurements with deeper analysis, with direct response television persuasion’s impact is big enough that I don’t need clever analysis to get see the sales results it delivers. And it delivers those both with direct sales AND a much more massive retail impact.

But I have been, here, too hard on Mr. Sharp. His book is fundamentally brilliant. Perhaps what we should take from his persuasion research is that effective persuasion is so rare that advertisers usually give up searching.

It’s too bad. And, I’d love to team with him for a serious look at persuasion. Because I think we’d both find surprisingly useful truths.

Copyright 2011 – Doug Garnett, All Rights Reserved.

For all the grand ad agency theorizing about brands, it’s ironic that the most human sense of brands that I’ve read in a very long time comes from an academic statistician reviewing what he learns from hard data.

But Aren’t We Told That New Media Glorifies the Human? I love new media and social media. And I think there will be some excellent and interesting communication opportunities through it. But the self-aggrandized Adbuster fed Utopianism surrounding social media reminds me of 1984′s doublethink and Newspeak.

George Orwell suggested “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”. Listen carefully to what’s said about new media and you’ll hear “Ad Clutter is Beauty; Message Bombardment is Peace; Corporations are my Friend”.

New media theorists seem think that a consumer loves nothing more than to spend their life searching for brand related content on Facebook while trying to learn the latest social media engine. Truth is that we spend a lot more time thinking about other things (like family, work, money, vacation, …) and don’t think about brands all that often

This is part of the humanity revealed through statistics in the book “How Brands Grow; What Marketers Don’t Know” (Byron Sharp (and others); published by Oxford University Press) It’s a highly challenging, terribly real, and refreshingly human read. For the most part it’s also tremendously perceptive and accurate. (Below I’ll note the two areas where I think his conclusions paint far too broad of a picture.)

Sharp offers us “laws” based in his research on behalf of the biggest advertisers around the world as well as a library with over 50 years of research found in the archives of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. To be clear, humanity is the term I apply to what Sharp finds because he shows us a humbling picture of brands and a very real, human sense of their true role in consumer lives.

Sharp finds that brands don’t become big on the sales of their most committed customers. Rather, big brands are big because a lot of people buy a little from them. (Apple is a prime example here.)

He finds that statistics show the 80/20 rule is wrong. This rule suggests that 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers. Research shows that isn’t true. And, he gives a thorough discussion of what the real situation is.

He finds statistically that mass marketing is the way for brands to grow.

And he finds that statistics show that what most marketers think of as “consumer loyalty” is non-existent. What consumers do is simply have a tendency to buy from a few brands. (In fact, his term is “polygamous” – that consumers are polygamous when it comes to brands.)

Why I love this humanity. As brand marketers we live our lives around our brands. But we often develop a myopia that is far off-target when thinking about consumers. Sharp’s observations are humbling reminders that our brands might be OUR jobs, but they’re not the consumer’s job.

I’ve felt this for some time. Last fall I tried to reflect humanity in my post “Most Consumers Don’t Want to Be Your Friend”. It’s true. Brands aren’t friends. They aren’t people. They aren’t relationships. Brands are commercial operations consumers come to trust to deliver something. So they buy a brand when the “something” they need is what the brand offers AND when buying that brand is convenient or available on their terms.

The myopia I most recently encountered at a presentation by Google. Their advocate talked about the glory of having Gmail read his emails to his wife and send ads based on the content of their conversation. It was surreal. The audience was shocked at the invasive nature of the advertising while he was blissfully unaware of audience shock. Google seems to have developed a surreal disconnection from humanity as it has drunk the heady Koolaid of success.

The Best Marketing Success Comes with Humanity. So, sit back and think: Do you treat consumers humanly? Or are you projecting advertiser fantasy onto consumers – perhaps even asking them to do your job? And then, read this book.

There are a couple of areas where I think Mr. Sharp’s enthusiasm for broad conclusive statements are a problem. I’ve written my thoughts about his persuasion conclusions (link here). In a future post I’ll discuss my concerns about his broad declamations concerning differentiation. Overstating his data in these two areas will lead some marketers astray who desperately need to focus on persuasion and differentiation.

Otherwise, his book is extraordinarily well researched, well thought out, and very challenging. And desperately needed if we are to return a solid sense of human reality to the advertising discussion.

Copyright 2011 – Doug Garnett – All Rights Reserved