13 December 2022 The single most important thing is being noticed

Last month, Netflix released Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?, a documentary series on the infamous Harrier Jet consumer-promo-gone-wrong scandal.

It’s a real David and Goliath story. Deep into the Cola Wars of the 90s, Pepsi launches a loyalty program, and jokingly advertises the opportunity to purchase a US$23m military aircraft for 7,000,000 Pepsi Points. One enterprising young man discovers you can buy the required points for just US$700k, and a very public legal battle ensues.

The marketing industry has been quick to criticise Pepsi, suggesting the negative PR back then, and now with the doco, could easily have been avoided by ponying up for the jet. Spin a negative into a positive. But does the scandal actually harm Pepsi? Or help them?

Indeed, Byron Sharp suggests in How Brands Grow to never give people a reason not to buy you. But we might be stretching the definition of “a reason”.

People don’t walk through the supermarket debating the morals of brands. In fact, we don’t really make rational decisions at all. For the most part, we’re in zombie mode, not overthinking, grabbing whatever is easiest.

Our brain doesn’t like to think too hard. We like choices, and brands, which are no-brainers.

In that way, brands are like safety nets. Rory Sutherland says “brands don’t exist to make you think a product is excellent, rather to reassure you it won’t be terrible”. If it does what it says on the tin, and if I believe people like me won’t think I’ve made a bad decision, it’s a no-brainer.

Of course, for brands to be a safe choice, they must still tick the right boxes. You don’t want to be famous for unsafe reasons. When Vodafone’s poor network trended in Australia as #vodafail, it became a lot less choosable.

But is the questionable moral behaviour of a company really enough to make a brand unchoosable? And does it affect purchasing behaviour?

How does Volkswagen fare when they’re outed in the 2015 emissions scandal? Four years of consecutive growth (disrupted only by COVID-19).

Likewise, what happens after the Pepsi scandal plays out in the media over years? US market share grows +0.9pp between 1995 and 2000. Can’t have been too harmful, hey?

The best marketing science tells us humans choose brands which easily come to mind. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls it ‘mental availability’. Stand out, be noticed, and be recalled when needed.

Years of media coverage over a scandal which isn’t really a scandal, may have only helped Pepsi. And when millions of people spend hours once again with the brand watching the doco, I suspect PepsiCo won’t be too upset.

Of course, the lesson here is not “Do bad things”. As a general rule, people and brands should live by the motto “Don’t be a dick”. And there’s plenty of research suggesting consumers increasingly seek brands which align with their values (although I remain cautious of stated behaviour).

But we must be careful in overstating the extent to which a brand acting like a dick adversely influences buying behaviour. Unless it breaches the ‘safety’ requirement with something truly heinous, some bad PR and a few negative tweets likely help a brand in the long term. Not harm it.

BrewDog has largely built its business on this approach. The latest is a campaign calling out the World Cup. Cue massive criticism once it was revealed they’re still streaming games in their pubs.

This is the BrewDog playbook. Do things which stand out, even if it means some backlash. Maybe, in hope of some backlash. And it works, they grew 31% last year.

It’s a good reminder of Les Binet and Sarah Carter’s research in How Not To Plan: “In over 30 years of evaluation research, we’ve not seen a single example of an ad campaign that’s been shown to have a negative effect on sales. Not one.”

So, what is the lesson? Salience really matters. Do things to grab attention and disrupt. Push your brand into culture. Create work which people talk about and share. Aim for fame.

And yes, do good as well, but don’t forget the getting-noticed part. Heck, maybe even do both.

But there’s no point being right if no one notices.

Zac Martin is a Planning Director at TBWA\Melbourne. This article was originally published in Mumbrella.

25 May 2022 Don’t overthink it. Your consumers aren’t.

There’s a tradie at my house. We’re talking about a local bar, who have gone full QAnon. Like, anti-vax posters in the windows.

“I guess we’ll have to hit up the other pub from now on” I say.

He looks at me and shrugs: “Nah, as long as the beers are cold.”

It was a good reminder we don’t spend nearly enough time talking to real people. Desktop research and bouncing ideas around your marketing/agency bubble really is a dangerous place to view the world (to butcher a quote from John Le Carré).

Real people don’t overthink brands. Only marketers and their agencies worry about “being authentic”. Or changing the world. Or whatever the latest white paper is claiming based on stated behaviour supposedly representing an entire generation.

People don’t need more purpose from their brands. Yes it can be a valid way to position your brand, or to build a campaign around, but it’s not the only way.

When you talk to real people you find it’s not that they don’t spend time thinking brands should be doing more, it’s that they don’t spend time thinking about brands at all.

In his book Decoded, Phil Barden shares a study where people were asked to purchase either their favourite brand or their non-favourite brand. Which one lights up the brain like a Christmas tree?

Despite common rhetoric, those buying their favourite brand are the ones who don’t light up (the left). Choosing something familiar to you is easy and doesn’t require thought. That’s how we like it. When we have to process the decision, we have to change gears. Which is hard.

Humans are hard-wired to be lazy. We don’t like to overthink. Or think at all.

Tom Roach says we need to “make our brands no-brainers”.

When we’re deciding where to grab a beer, most Aussies don’t have an internal debate about the pub’s position on vaccines. Or any other matter. Most people are ‘satisficers’ – good enough is good enough.

We must remember this when we’re building brands and creating ideas.

Our job as marketers and advertisers isn’t too difficult. Understand Clayton Christensen’s ‘jobs to be done’. Build distinctive brand assets. Connect your brand to a need. Invest in creativity to stand out, be famous and remembered. Then spend as much as you can building mental and physical availability.

Before worrying about your brand’s social cause, or how you might be able to save the world, consider if you’ve done enough to cover the basics needs real people want from you.

Be the car brand who comes to mind most easily when someone wants to keep their family safe (Volvo). Be the thing to bring when you’re told not to bring a thing (Favourites). Be the computer for creative people (Mac). Be the chocolate you eat when you’re not being yourself (Snickers).

Don’t overthink the importance of your brand. Or its role in the world. Because consumers don’t.

Instead, be the brand who comes to mind when someone wants a cold beer.

Zac Martin is a Planning Director at TBWA\Melbourne. This article was originally published in B&T Magazine.

01 July 2021 Turn non-buyers into buyers by finding what makes them different

Sometimes you come across something which is so obvious you feel stupid in hindsight.

Like Stephen Fry’s movement encouraging parents to Turn on the Subtitles when children are watching TV. Of course!

Another was when I first stumbled across the forgotten art of Acceptor/Rejector Analysis.

I realised, the way we analyse brand health market research is wrong.

You survey a sample of the target audience to better understand your brand funnel (awareness, consideration, etc.) and brand perceptions. The latter helps you understand how much people associate different attributes with your brand.

Normally it looks like something like this example. Sometimes it’s presented in a fancy spider chart.

The problem with brand associations

When presented with the data above, you might make a decision to double down on your strength (Perception A), or focus to repair a weakness (Perception E). Or if you compare the same attributes with competitors, you might identify white space to go after that.
But there’s two issues with this:

Firstly, it doesn’t tell you which perceptions matter to consumers. Your brand might have strong associations with “is a brand you can share with friends” but this perception might be meaningless in influencing decisions. Likewise you may under-index in “is an Australian brand”, but there’s no value in addressing it.

It’s not uncommon to have complementary research where you ask consumers which factors matter to them when making a purchase. But we know what people say and what people do are almost always different.

Secondly, the brand associations above are averages. This data includes both your most loyal heavy buyers, and those who despise you. Hardly useful.

Finding what matters by analysing the differences

To overcome these issues, we do Acceptor/Rejector Analysis. Rather than look at brand associations as whole, we split the data into two cohorts:

1. People who are aware of you but not buyers, let’s call them Rejectors.
2. And buyers, let’s call the… Buyers.

To turn the Rejectors into Buyers, we look at what makes them different. And we close the gap.

Here’s what the same data above looks like when it’s split out:

We’re less interested in the absolute numbers of each cohort, but rather, the biggest gap between them.

In the case above, a new insight emerges. Perception C was something we’d ignored to date – not quite a weakness and not quite a strength. But once we split it across the two cohorts, we see it is our most polarising brand association. The biggest difference between Buyers and Rejectors is the one we want to focus on.

So you would build a campaign to tackle Perception C.

The best part, this analysis you can often do for free using an old brand health study. No extra cost, just 15 minutes to cut the data in a new way.

Watchouts on Acceptor/Rejecter Analysis

There’s two things to keep in mind when looking at the gaps:

Firstly, sometimes people have a good reason to reject your brand. If you’re a brewery you probably aren’t interested in perceptions among Coeliacs. Avoid this by filtering responses for people who aware of you AND who don’t buy you AND who buy your competitors.

Second, as Jon Bradshaw reminded me, behaviour isn’t linear. People don’t always think or feel first, then act. Often it’s the other way around – your thoughts and feelings change after you take action. Cognitive dissonance means we’re great at post rationalising, and why some suggest the fastest way to change behaviour is action first, then thoughts and feelings take care of themselves.

As George Box said: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Zac Martin is a Planning Director at Ogilvy Melbourne. This article was originally published in CMO Magazine.

31 March 2021 You’re doing it wrong. Emotion doesn’t mean emotional.

If you’ve been around advertising long enough, you’ve probably seen (or written) a slide which says: “They won’t remember what you say, they’ll remember how you made them feel.”

But it’s wrong. Our understanding of how emotion is used in advertising has been ill informed and poorly applied.

Let’s rewind. It begins, like most strategy presentations, with The Long and Short Of It. In their seminal book, authors Peter Field and Les Binet suggest there’s only two types of advertising: sales now or sales in the future. Direct response, or brand building. Short, or long.

With this came the 60:40 rule of thumb (60% of your advertising investment in long, 40% in short) and direction on how best to execute in both. Short tends to be most effective when it targets tightly with rational persuasion. Long works best when it reaches broadly with emotional priming.

Those last two words are where the trouble begins. As with most business books, readers jumped on the headlines and pretty charts, but overlooked the detail.

The word ’emotion’ is not well understood. “Our brand ad must be emotional” is a generic statement that leaves too much to interpretation. Let’s bust some myths of what ’emotion’ in advertising isn’t.

Three incorrect uses of emotion in advertising.

#1 Ads do not need to make people feel something for your brand.
It sounds nice in the boardroom, but real people don’t ‘love’ brands. Most people don’t even ‘like’ brands. Lovemarks by Kevin Roberts has long been debunked, we know loyalty is a symptom of penetration. An emotional connection with a brand is rare, and certainly should not be an objective. Aim to get the people who don’t buy you at all, to buy you occasionally. Hardly a love story.

#2 Ads do not need to communicate an emotional benefit.

For this I think we can blame the Benefit Ladder.Many of us were taught to climb as high as possible when writing briefs, beyond the product’s features to the rational and emotional benefits. While a helpful tool in unpacking the consumer problem, there’s little evidence to suggest the benefit being communicated must be emotional. The best ad of all time is a product demonstration, the message is rational. “Our trucks are really stable.”

#3 Ads do not need to show emotion.
Having someone cry on camera can elicit emotion (more on this below) but it’s not the only way. Having a killer soundtrack works too. So does telling a good story. Or a joke. Even a rational message or fact can cause an emotional response. Your ads don’t need to show emotion to trigger emotion.

Emotion is a tool that makes memories stronger.

The intention of long advertising is to establish and refresh memory structures. You want to build mental availability, allowing people to easily recall your brand in future buying situations.

But consumers don’t really ‘think’ through most purchases. They run on autopilot.

Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, would call this System 1 Thinking – instantaneous and driven by instinct. Here is where we process and recall memory automatically. And here is where we absorb messages not through deliberate and conscious processing, but rather, emotional response.

Emotion is a tool which helps encode memories.

An emotional response is not the goal of long advertising, but a means to an end. Getting people to feel something helps them build memories. Ideally attaching your brand with a Category Entry Point (a fancy way to say need-state).

Emotion builds muscle memory. Or as Claire Strickett, whose tweets largely inspired this article, explains more articulately: “Emotion is the ink memories are written in.”

Consumers won’t remember the ink, but they will remember the words. Likely without realising it, on autopilot. So no, consumers won’t remember how ads made them feel, but moving them is how you build strong brands that are recalled easily and often.

We need a better word than ’emotion’.

The word ’emotion’ figuratively comes with baggage. It’s a big concept, not easily defined, and therefore easily misused and abused.

Rather than ’emotion’, I propose we use the word ‘reaction’.

If the objective of short advertising is action, then the goal of long advertising is reaction. An emotional response to build memory, associating your brand with a need.

Next time someone says we need to use emotion in our ads, ask them for a definition first.

Zac Martin is a Senior Planner at Ogilvy Melbourne. This article was originally published in CMO Magazine.

28 June 2020 Advertising is a waste. And that’s kinda the point.

The world around us is riddled with signals. As our industry continues to turn its back on traditional channels, we cannot overlook their value.

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari points to our strange fascination with lawns. They are expensive, especially difficult to maintain before mowers and sprinklers, and serve no functional purpose. Instead, gardens told locals the owner must have been rich to afford such a green extravaganza. If you visited a Duke and saw his lawn was in bad shape you knew he was in trouble.

Gazelles have been observed repeatedly jumping up and down, an act called stotting. This seemingly strange behaviour makes little sense at first glance. One assumes the smart thing to do when you could end up prey to a hungry lion is conserve energy. But researchers hypothesise the opposite is true – the unnecessary exertion of energy is in fact a warning to predators. “Don’t even bother trying to out run me, because I have so much energy that I can do this all day for no reason at all. Go find an animal that isn’t showing off, because he’s preserving the little energy he has.”

In one study, researchers reviewed a range of apologies to understand which succeeded with positive public reception and which failed. The most important factor in effective apologies? Cost. Not what was said, but if it was hard to say. The apologiser must sacrifice something in the apology – financial, opportunity, or reputation.

How we do the things we do says something about us. Our behaviour transmits, not just the messages we broadcast.

Advertising works the same way.

Rory Sutherland argues costly signalling is what makes advertising effective. Super Bowl ads work not only because of their ability to convey information, but in their inference. Consumers know Super Bowl ads are: (1) seen by many, (2) consumed collectively, and (3) are bloody expensive.

Cost matters. Actions speak louder than words.

It’s why when you get married you declare your love: (1) in front of lots of people, (2) when they’re all together, at what is presumably (3) a very expensive day.

Conversely, digital advertising has the opposite perception. Consumers know when they are served a Facebook ad that it’s: (1) highly targeted, (2) individually consumed, and (3) cheap. Like a bad apology, little has been sacrificed.

In Ads Don’t Work That Way, Kevin Simler suggests advertising is most effective when it achieves cultural imprinting. Here you influence not the association of the brand itself, but of the people using it. If you choose a PC over a Mac, it says something about you. Microsoft can only begin to change this perception through common knowledge – consumers must see an ad, but they also must know (or suspect) their friends have too.

Put simply, we value things more highly when we know others value them too. Brands who spend big signal confidence in future cultural uptake.

Here’s a comment I recently saw on a Facebook ad.

On social media people either know they’re being hyper targeted, which loses its social proof value, or they think it’s underperforming because they can see the crappy view count. This explains why platforms like Instagram have started hiding vanity metrics from consumers – if the signal is weak, distort it.

Sacrifice also brings about reassurance. It infers quality, reliability, and future success. When Uber Eats cast Kim Kardashian, they’re telling us they intend to be around for a while.

The Natural Monopoly Law says the biggest brands attract the least knowledgeable users. Given most customers of a brand are non-buyers or light buyers, it means big brands get bigger. We’re herd creatures who follow the norm. Nothing succeeds like the perception of success.

We’re attracted to the brands with the biggest, greenest lawns.

To get the greenest lawn, you need to waste water. And time. And real estate.

John Wanamaker famously said “I know half of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” In his seminal 2004 paper, Tim Ambler responded “The waste in advertising is the part that works.”

Yes, old school advertising creates waste, but it also signals.

Of course, don’t throw out your digital advertising. Peter Field and Les Binet tell us effective brands think long and short, and digital can be very efficient in driving the latter. But when you’re playing the long game, remember traditional media’s value lies as much as in its signal as its ability to broadcast a message.

Brands who waste time and effort and budget in stotting will be the ones that win.

16 August 2019 Making Brands Matter

In February I published a guide on How to Freelance in Advertising.

It’s been downloaded 5,000 times from 65 countries. And I’ve had some really lovely feedback. Just last week I was sent this bloody nice message:

“I’ve just gone freelance and it’s been my bible. I’ve now got a financial framework (I wouldn’t have had the foggiest) and have even upped my rate thanks to you. I just wanted to say a big thanks! Keep doing stuff!”

But something interesting happened as I was writing the conclusion. Getting a little self reflective, it triggered a long term need for something more fulfilling. Clients and projects I could sink my teeth into and do some proper damage with. (Maybe not the best analogy.)

And the stars aligned. After freelancing with Ogilvy Melbourne for a few months, they asked me to come on board. Today I start with them permanently. Still only four days a week, of course.

Time for the next chapter. 👊🏻

05 August 2019 Not Every Brief is an Opportunity

Two clichés I hear often from agencies are “Good ideas can come from anywhere” and “Every brief is an opportunity”.

The former is true, although ideas are almost always better when they come from the people who are briefed, accountable and experienced.

The latter is false. Not all client problems are equal. Many are not opportunities, for the client or the agency. The smart ones treat these efficiently, pushing simple ads out fast.

Strategy is the same. There’s three ways a planner can write a creative brief.

#1 Write A Decent Brief

We unnecessarily fetishise insights. Sometimes you don’t need a deep cultural truth or an undiscovered human insight. For some problems, you just need a simple articulation of the challenge.

Distill what the client has given the agency, and give the creatives a roadmap so they don’t get lost.

I recently worked on an FMCG brand who were introducing a new flavour. They had a small budget, and pre-booked six second Facebook ads. The problem only needed a decent, clean brief. Some direction on what the answer could look like. In this case a challenge to make it visually compelling, giving the “new” announcement some impact.

The concept the client bought was lovely, and everyone was happy. (It actually allow us additional time to craft the art direction, rare these days.)

Sometimes the best thing a planner can do is very quickly get out of the way.

#2 Write A Good Brief

Better creative briefs bring something new to the table. Something that makes you think “Oh fuck, that’s true and I haven’t thought about it that way.”

They inject something interesting. Setting a richer playground for the creatives by telling them (and the client) something they don’t know.

Then, they sacrifice the alternatives. If strategy is just a fancy word for “focus”, good briefs draw a line in the ground and declare this is the insight to build on, and shape the messaging around.

#3 Write A Killer Brief

This is where the brilliance happens. Where you solve the problem.

It’s a misconception that it’s creative’s job to do the heavy lifting. Because it’s the planner who answers the brief. If you’re just providing the direction, that’s a decent brief. If you’re scarifying with inspiration, that’s a good brief. But when you find the opportunity and make the problem go away, you’re really doing killer work.

These are the kinds of briefs when you observe a behaviour that leads to new product development. Or uncover a new segment which grows the category. Or find a new benefit that’s never been communicated before. Or a way to reposition which kills a competitor.

Rob Campbell, Head of Strategy at R/GA, disagrees. He says “If you solve the problem for Creatives, you’re a dictator.” But sometimes the job of creative is to make the solution more compelling.

If you write two of these in 12 months you’re having a blinder of a year.

– – –

I had an old boss who said “simple or wonderful, but nothing in between”.

You can’t spend your whole career writing wonderful briefs. Sometimes the best strategy is getting out the way, especially when it allows you to focus on the opportunities instead.

17 February 2019 How To Freelance In Advertising

When you decide to freelance, the most common advice you’re given is to expect quiet Januarys.

Well, I had a quiet January. So I wrote How to Freelance in Advertising – a practical guide to getting started and not being homeless, by someone who’s been doing it a while. It’s real long tail stuff.

A blog post accidentally became 12,000 words. Turns out I have a lot of advice and a few battle stories. These are my tools and truths for taking the leap.

Revised August 2019.

If y’all read it, let me know.

04 February 2019 Don’t Sweat The Big Idea

There’s a famous joke called The Aristocrats:

A family walk into a talent agent’s office. The agent asks what their act is. The family get on stage, and do the most vile things to each other. Eventually, the agent asks what the act is called. “The Aristocrats.”

It’s a favourite among comedians, a rite of passage. The setup and the punchline always remain the same, but each person can make it their own, riffing on the middle. Usually it’s an excuse to be as filthy and offensive as possible. This is South Park’s version.

Good advertising works the same way.

Effective brands find new ways to say the same thing again and again. Gareth Price says “Advertising must find new ways of repeating itself.”

This is the power of a brand platform, like Specsavers’ Should’ve Gone To Specsavers and Snickers’ You’re Not You When You’re Hungry. Consistent messaging for decades, not weeks. Sadly it’s often the first thing a new agency or client kills.

I love what UberEats are doing, in the early stages of building their Aristocrats:

This is good advertising. It’s product heavy, uses celebrities to grab attention, and is establishing a clever brand mnemonic in the doorbell.

And it has longevity. As sponsors of the Australian Open, the template was adapted with some very cute executions like this:

The effectiveness in these is not a big idea. They aren’t creatively sexy. But they are good advertising. It’s far from boring and fits their brand platform template. Mark Ritson would call it “disruptively consistent”.

Not all ads need a big idea.

This camping store won’t be winning any creative awards, but the campaign will work its guts off. This car ad doesn’t have a human insight or big idea, and yet is distinctive and positions them as the fun SUV. Especially if they run quirky ads like this for the next decade.

The Nordics have been doing it forever.

As I write this we’re hours away from Superbowl. There will be plenty of big swings, and many of them will hit. But if you’re ever worked in an agency, you know getting to a big idea is hard, and making one is even harder.

14 January 2019 Is our fetishisation of insights misled?

Occasionally I read something which completely challenges a long held belief.

Most recently it was BBH planner Mel Arrow’s piece Forget Human Truth, Brands Should Be Talking Human Fiction. She suggests we spend too long obsessing over insights, when humans are just as attracted to fiction and narrative. It’s a good argument – Homo sapiens lasted by sharing stories.

There is no insight in Justice4Grenfell’s 3 Billboard campaign. It’s simply a cracking media idea.

As a subscriber to “strong opinions, lightly held”, I’m suddenly questioning my philosophy on how advertising works.

I’ve long been fascinated by how agencies treat insights. (I’m partial to Mark Pollard’s definition: “an unspoken truth that sheds new light on the problem”.) One of the great things about freelancing is being exposed to a variety of strategic frameworks. When you flirt with eight agencies in a year, you see their differences in how each uncovers, uses, respects and encourages insightful thinking. (Or rather, how similar everyone is!)

Almost always, at the foundation of every brief template is the coveted ‘human truth’. Surprisingly no one seems to agree exactly what this is:

• An evolutionary truth – human behaviour that has always been true and will always be true
• A pop-cultural truth – a long or short trend to exploit which may only be true right now
• A target market truth – a unique behaviour true only to our audience and no one else

Arrow asks a bigger question – do we need a truth at all? (And no, it’s a cop out to say “the human truth is humans like fiction” – I’m talking about writing a useful creative brief).

Walmart’s Famous Cars campaign is a glorified product demonstration. There’s no insight in this work, but it is fame-building excellence.

Agencies worship their human insights like deities. Yet there are a number of schools of thought suggesting they may not be as critical as we once believed:

1. Low Involvement Processing theory suggests most comms are processed relatively passively. Simply by being exposed to an ad builds preference through familiarity, irrespective of message (see mere exposure effect).
2. The value of advertising is in its signal as much as its message. Ads create (a self fulfilling) faith in the future popularity of something.
3. Byron Sharp’s research on distinctiveness, where being famous for something, even when it’s not technically different from competitors, creates memory structures which influence you at purchase.

Ads do not need a human truth to be effective. Which is a compelling notion having worked on two automative clients last year, where uncovering an insight on yet another retail brief isn’t easy (or necessarily helpful).

Instead, perhaps the role of the planner remains simplifying the problem (not to be underestimated), ensuring the approach to advertising is theoretically effective, and then getting out of the way. 

In many cases the brilliance in an ad comes from a well told story. This is what makes the product or brand famous for something. Like the greatest product demonstration ever made, for Volvo Trucks, which is entirely devoid of truth:

John Hegarty said “Advertising is 80% idea and 80% execution.” That doesn’t leave much room for a human insight.

So when do you need one, and when do you not? I don’t know. If you’re a strategist who’s stretched (lol, joking, that’s everyone) ditching them on retail campaigns might be somewhere to start. Campaigns that focus on specific product attributes might be another. If you have a thought, let me know in the comments below.