Connect Advertising to Your Brand, Connect the Brand to Users
How many times has this happened to you–you’re sitting with friends, talking about funny TV shows or commercials. Someone says something like, “Hey, remember that commercial with the gorilla dancing in his car while waiting for a light to turn green?”
“Oh, yeah, I think I remember that one. What company was that for again?”
And nobody remembers the advertiser!
“Um, I think it was for a mortgage company . . . no, no, it was for life insurance . . . oh, no, wait, I think that was that commercial with the talking buffalo.”
Well, guess what–if you can’t remember who an ad was for, no matter how entertained you may have been, there’s very little chance the ad has been successful in making a connection between you (the potential user) the brand doing the advertising.
David Ogilvie stated that 80% of advertising confuses the consumer (if it wasn’t 80%, it was a similar figure–it has been several years since I learned the figure in advertising school). We could divide advertising effectiveness into three levels:
1. Boring and safe, something very few people will notice. (BTW, this is a big problem in Utah, where my agency is located.) Such advertising is usually very factual, and is based on the very wrong assumption that your prospective users are as interested in a company as the owners of the company are. In fact, that is never the case. To the owner(s), that business is lifeblood, the thing they spend most waking hours thinking about. To consumers, it’s just another one of about 16 billion companies. This type of advertising is only effective to the 0.5% of viewers who are very much in the market right now for what a company offers. A few viewers may have spent the past two weeks thinking, I need to get an electric skooter! The boring, very factual ad comes on and spouts all the features and affordability of your skooter. Of course they pay attention to the ad. However, the other 99+% of viewers tune it out immediately. If the ad had some creativity, they’d have paid more attention, and, if the creativity was done right, a connection with the brand may have been initiated. When the time came to perhaps look into buying the product, or at least to recommend it to someone else, that name brand would likely be on their list of considerations.
2. Creative, but with little or no connection to the brand. This is like the type of commercial I used to lead off my blog entry. I won’t say that anybody can be creative, but I will say that there are a lot more ad agencies out there that can conjure up creative ideas that have nothing to do with the product than there are agencies that can make creative that connects the dots.
Usually, there is a weak connection, a feeble attempt to get people interested in the product itself, but not the brand. An example of this is in the new ads for Amp, an energy drink mothered by Pepsi Co. You may have seen the main commercial, one which was debuted on the Super Bowl broadcast in January, 2008. If you haven’t, you can see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecQnqW80zbU.
In this spot, a fat, pseudo-hip (hat on backwards, ultra-skinny beard) twenty-something, has taken his tow truck into the desert to jump start the stalled car of a young woman. His jumpsuit is pulling open in front, revealing a plump belly and a set of “man boobs.” This guy (ouch!) proceeds to hook up the jumper cables to his nipples, and goes into a very annoying dance, apparently trying to produce enough energy to start the car at the other end of the cables. As this fails to start the car, he then gulps down some Amp, tries again, and this time the car starts right up. The amp ad fails on many counts because although it evokes attention, there are many negative associations:
a. The boy is fat, unattractive, and annoying. People don’t want to ingest something that will make then fat, unattractive, and annoying.
b. The mere image of someone clipping jumper cables to his nipples is painful. I would imagine such an image to be especially painful to women viewers.
c. The attempted link to the product is to what the product can do for viewers, not to the brand itself. The product will give someone energy. However, products such as these which are advertised to the masses must create a “me too” feeling. The viewer wants to be included with the others who use the product. Ads for the Mini Cooper, The Gap, and Sketchers (to name just a few) are much more successful. Such ads depict people not overly concerned about the product’s details. Instead, the people are shown to be having a good time with friends while using the product. This creates a connection to the brand itself. When a connection is forged with the brand, people become brand loyal. Things like price become secondary.
The third effectiveness level of advertising, the type a company and it’s advertising people should strive for is
3. Creative and connects to the brand. That’s the trick. Advertising must be creative and entertaining to get people to watch. It then must connect to what is essential to the brand and how that brand’s products and services will affect prospective users, both emotionally and practically.
There are countless illustrations of good, creative ads that succeed. One that comes to mind right now as a stellar example is one from a few years ago from Computer Associates. The commercial shows three men walking in a hallway, heading to an important meeting with clients. The leader of the three asks one of the others if he has all the pertinent information for the meeting. The one with the info points to his head and tells his boss, “It’s all up here.” A second later, he walks head on into something hanging into the hallway, and is knocked out cold. They attempt to revive him, but he’s not coming back for awhile! The other man tells his boss that he also has all the info stored in his head. However, as they enter the conference room to start the meeting, that man’s hand, which he was using to lean his weight on the conference table, slips off the edge of the table, causing his jaw to bang on the table, knocking him out. Now the boss is left alone to present, but he has none of the vital facts needed to make the presentation.
Computer Associates provides computer backup services. The ad is successful because, again, it is creative and provocative, but also, there is a direct link between that creative and the brand–you don’t want to not back up vital information.
Connecting advertising to a brand requires a good, creative ad agency, one with a track record of creating such campaign. It also requires a company that is conscientious enough to realize that a creative agency will always come up with better creativity and production than the people in company would. The company must trust that creativity. The companies who trust their agencies almost always enjoy more successful ad campaigns that connect their advertising to their brand, and ultimately, connect the brand to users.