"What you want/How you want/When you want/Every time you want it/That's a good idea"
- Otis Redding, "That's a Good Idea"
Redding might
have been crooning to an amorous girlfriend, but his lyrics resonate for marketers everywhere trying to keep up with empowered consumers in an increasingly fragmented market. Indeed, consumers are
turning the advertising world on its head.
As Alan Cohen, executive vice president and managing director of Initiative Innovations, puts it: "Consumer empowerment has
changed the world of marketing. There's more individualism than ever before, and [consumers] will decide whether or not [your product] is good enough for them."
Once it
was the dollar sign and the muscle. Now it's the light bulb and a brain.
Not so long ago, it all seemed so easy...and dull. Media buying and planning were recognized as
a necessity of the advertising business, but more along the lines of remembering to feed the cat or change the oil in your car. If you didn't do it, the campaign, cat, or car would die, but nobody was
going to give you an award for it.
Media buying was a commodity, like Purina Kitten Chow or Quaker State, and like most commodity-based businesses, the bigger you were,
the more weight you could throw around. A big agency with big clients could make big television buys and beat consumers into submission.
No longer.
Today, with technology balanced on the razor's edge between ally and villain for marketers, media buying, planning, and strategy aren't so much about CPMs, ratings, and the like
- they're about unearthing unusual and effective idea-driven media strategies upon which an entire advertising campaign can be built.
"Ideas are the new commodity of
the media business," says Donna Speciale, president of video investment and activation at MediaVest, USA, who first raised the concept during a panel at MediaPost's Outfront conference last spring.
"Because the media conglomerates own so many platforms...if you don't have innovation, the conversation stops."
Since Speciale acquired her new title last year,
"activation" has become a buzzword in the media industry, signifying the discipline's importance in setting a creative idea in motion.
It's also led to an increasingly
uncomfortable battle for supremacy between the so-called "creative" agencies and media agencies - more blowback from the years-old decision to unbundle the two disciplines. As the playing field has
shifted, it's the media agencies that are adapting and innovating more quickly.
"The whole problem that's slowing down the transition that should be taking place in
advertising is that creative directors think they're artists but they're not. They're there to sell [things]," says Sean Carton, chief strategy office for id5, a Baltimore marketing consultancy.
"People in the media business don't carry these pretensions of being artists; their job has always been numbers, analytics, knowing where to put stuff. So it just makes more sense that it would be
easier for them to adapt to a world where the consumer is put first."
Everybody's Talkin'
Not surprisingly, one of the
first agencies to master this was one that never had to deal with the industry's unbundling trend: Miami's Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
"Necessity is the mother of
invention," says Jim Poh, director of creative content and distribution at CP+B. "It's not so much that we were ahead of our time, but more like we had a bunch of clients that didn't have that scale,
and couldn't spend so much money that we could force people to see their advertising. We had to find ways around that, and now that's the norm."
Poh says that since you
can no longer force advertising on people, marketing is now "all about making people want to come in contact with it. The old model said, 'Let's look at this product and see what we can advertise.'
Now it's like, 'Let's build something interesting around the product and then go from there."
CP+B's latest example is the creation of the "Snapalope" for Slim Jim,
created out of the slender meat stick snacks and as true to life as a snipe hunt, but more fun.
"We based it on the notion that man is by nature a meat eater and
hunter, and we need to give him the ability to satisfy these primal urges, appeal to the inner caveman," Poh says. "We encourage them to hunt them in their natural habitat, which is convenience
stores, mostly."
CP+B did the usual new media stuff, like building a Web site devoted to the Snapalope, but it extended the gag even further by distributing Snapalope
targets to shooting ranges and gun shops around the country. "It really brings to life that this is Snapalope hunting season," Poh explains.
Sometimes a media idea can
be created just to ignite conversation about a product and not much more. On the Snapalope site, visitors can order a Slim Jim bouquet, ostensibly for men to send other men.
"Hey, we realize this gets a little crazy, over the top," Poh says. "But even if you've just got guys looking at something like this and saying, 'This is wild, this is too much,'
you've still got them talking about the brand." It's not so much one big idea, Poh concludes, but "a collection of ideas adding up to something big."
It doesn't always
have to be about a big idea that crosses all platforms, argues Naked Communications cofounder Paul Woolmington, who says sometimes it's about the right idea for the client. He points to Naked's work
for the Boots chain of pharmacies in the U.K., which had been spending £20 million (about $38 million) on television advertising for its prescription services. After conducting research,
Woolmington says, "We discovered that if you just retrained the staff to talk about the services and redirect resources to in-store advertising, people would stand in [line] and read the advertising,
followed by staff talking to them about it."
Woolmington says Boots saw a 300 percent increase in the use of its prescription services for a campaign that cost about
$35 million less than its TV campaign. "That kind of thing is almost in front of your nose, but it required you to be free of the shackles of bias," he says. "It's not sexy. And if you're one of the
big media agencies, where's the money in it?" Woolmington adds.
It's a dangerous question for the big media companies, but there's an answer in remuneration and reward,
says T.S. Kelly, vice president, director of research and insight for Media Contacts Global.
"The direct-response channel is a preview of what's to come," Kelly claims.
"We'll be judged on sales performance - acquisition cost, sales made, all things related to a client's performance. Expectations on all fronts are rising for those types of solutions, and while it
won't work in every case, thanks to digital there will be a higher consideration."
Not everybody thinks it's going to be that easy. Clients will need to get used to
ponying up to pay for a new stable of experts to ride herd on the multitude of new platforms they'll have to use to reach fragmented audiences.
"The myriad new services
now provided for clients require new skill sets that undoubtedly impact what used to be traditional compensation practices," says Mary Gerzema, U.S. president of Universal McCann. "The implementation
of the 'big idea' now goes well beyond traditional media buying and how services are provided. Implementation often falls on the agency, as clients' marketing departments are already
resource-stretched and often lack the skill sets needed."
From the Screen to the Street
One thing that won't be going
away, everyone agrees, is television. Or video. Or whatever you want to call it. In any case, Nielsen's research recently showed that the average American is watching more television than ever - four
hours and 35 minutes a day, according to a recent study.
For MediaVest's Speciale, that means there are still opportunities for reaching viewers who "don't want to
watch as many commercials as they used to and can get their content other ways." Alternatives include reducing the number of pods, melding commercial messages to programming, placing marketers inside
the programming itself, or creating branded entertainment programs.
MediaVest has done all four. It's halved the number of commercials for some films debuting on TNT,
and TNT's Time Warner sister network TBS will promote "funny commercials" to complement its comedy programming, a MediaVest idea. "We're hoping that context and environment will encourage people to
keep watching," Speciale says.
The agency has also had success partnering with BBDO in placing M&M's characters as cohosts within the syndicated program "Entertainment
Tonight." But per haps MediaVest's most organic idea was instigated by Connective Tissue, the agency's branded entertainment unit, which created a short pseudo-sitcom for Febreze called "The
Poocharellis." The sitcom featured a family of talking dogs and ran on Nick at Nite.
"This was a match of context and content that really worked," says Speciale. The
90-second interstitial program was both a parody of and a tribute to Nick at Nite's evening sitcom schedule and "aired at 9:58 p.m. between shows. It was even listed in TV Guide. We had a
rating for it. You could set your DVR to record it," she notes.
In the end, it all comes down to understanding the brand and finding what there is about it that
resonates with consumers. "The best ideas usually come when the product itself inspires the creative idea, not a brand usage insight," say Barry Lowenthal, president of Media Kitchen.
An example Lowenthal offers is last spring's stunt promotion for the Oxygen reality show "The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency," which channeled the bitchy beauty's brand essence
through the creation of a faux SoHo office to promote the series' premiere on the woman's network.
Media Kitchen teamed with Toy, a boutique shop, and "found an empty
storefront and designed it to look like a modeling agency," says Lowenthal. "You could drop off headshots through the mail slot and there was a doorbell that worked, so when you rang it, Janice's
voice came shouting out at you with one of any number of nasty comments."
Street teams fanned out around SoHo to promote the location of the "agency." The effort
included billboards, signs, and some online promotion. The danger, though, according to Speciale, is the problem that comes with all gimmicks: They can't be duplicated.
"Try to do things that are not one-offs," she advises. "Some of these one-offs are great, but it's hard to learn when you only do it once."