Google Zeitgeist 13. It's not about the money money money.

Google Zeitgeist 13 provides a much needed relief from the hurried, urgent and short-term lives that many of us lead.  As well as inspiring with wild visions of the future, the real benefit of this gathering of young and old wisdom to remind us what all this is for, and to give us time to ‘Rethink. Reset’.  

As usual, Google gathered the great and good of politics, technology, the arts, military, media, charity, academia, business, and of course Google, to educate, enlighten and entertain.

As a brand man, I wondered how any of the above luminaries could usefully instruct our craft of brand building?  Quite considerably, as it happens.

For starters, all the invited speakers I caught were successful ‘brands’ in their own right – elevated above their peers through a combination of being in the right place at the right time (luck), strength of conviction (belief), infectious charisma (personality), persistence (hard work) and a fresh, relevant perspective on the world around us (differentiation).

My favourite example of all the above was Leymah Gbowee, Liberian activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who confessed to living her life by diving in, never walking on tip-toes.

They were also, unsurprisingly, great communicators.  Each had a different and interesting story to tell, they had insights that were fresh and challenging, and they made the audience feel things they weren’t feeling before.  This included conductor Charles Hazlewood who, against seemingly insurmountable odds, succeeded in getting 300+ weary executives enjoying themselves singing together in 3-part harmony.

Most concluded that success in most things is to be judged over the long term, so much that it leaves a legacy.  General Sir Michael Jackson shared some of the challenges of long-term strategy building (eg 25 years in his case), and in so doing relegated most of our ‘strategies’ to the short-term box.

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And we were also reminded that if we don’t think there is a relationship between money and happiness, we’re clearly not spending our money right.  We should be spending it on other people!

And lest we forgot, Jessie J reminded us in person in song after dinner.

So the shared metaphors with the world of branding are obvious - courage, conviction, communication, long-term, and being good to those you value.

Congratulations to Google for providing the space to think…about brands.

24 Hour Marketing People

There is a new vision of the future…not in an Arthur C Clark style but more like an episode of ‘The West Wing’ on campaign night or ‘Broadcast News’. Being a 24 hour society, where opinions can be shared, praised then disputed so easily via social media, and where brands and their multi-million pound campaigns can be destroyed within the click of a mouse, marketing departments and their agencies now have to react as quickly as their journalistic and political party counterparts.

For a long time social media was feared by brands.  No longer could a brand control its look and language via simple marketing and ad campaigns.  When the consumer become involved, all control of a brand’s carefully monitored and honed values and identity became fair game to Tweeters, bloggers and Facebookers.     Now, crack ‘brand social’ teams can react in a heartbeat to try and field off any negative comment, or worse still, the complaint which has gone viral, and so threatening a new campaign.  A recent example of this being KFC’s breaded chicken kidney viral tweet, not ‘So Good’!

This shift in working style for advertisers was perfectly demonstrated this year at the Super Bowl. Typically, Super Bowl advertisers carefully plan every aspect of their presence months in advance of the game.  However, this time Coca-Cola, Audi, and Oreo opted not to sit back and simply watch the game but put in place ‘rapid response teams’ that adapted to events as they happened. So when the power outage in the stadium occurred (and who could have predicted that in advance!), the brands responded “appropriately and in their own brand voice”. Oreo’s now famous tweeted ad with the caption “Power Out? No Problem. You can still dunk in the dark” went viral in seconds and was the Monday morning office talking point

Many would argue that the campaign-based model of advertising for brands is heading for the bin, and tweeting during an event clearly isn’t enough – you need to be lightning fast, reactive and smart in your response.

Enter a new process that kicks off with ‘creative context development’, where brands and their agencies create reactive content through visuals, text and multimedia.  A fast online media purchase then occurs e.g promoted posts, ads etc, finishing up with ‘promotion and engagement’ through the distribution of content.   It’s quick and as The Harvard Business Review (HBR) suggested in its blog ”the future of advertising is for advertisers to act like newsrooms – to be prolific, audience-centric and agile”.

But it is questionable whether brand marketing departments and their agencies can adapt their working style sufficiently to act more like newsrooms to promote and protect a brand’s values. They are by trade different animals that operate in their own distinct ways.  Will we see more journalists in the marketing department so that they can continuously reflect the consumer culture?  Perhaps.

Ad Age’s Sarah Hofsetter disagrees that marketing departments need to change radically.  Writing after February’s Oscars, where brands delivering real-time marketing reached a new high: “Real-time marketing may not be right for every brand. Even for brands that have the strategy and structures in place to warrant it, not every major cultural moment deserves a real-time response…Real-time content can be created and distributed in minutes, but putting yourself in a position to do this successfully takes a lot of upfront planning. Brands need to create a strong social foundation in order to be ready for success when the right opportunity strikes”.

One thing is a given, whether your brand opts for real-time responses or not, every brand is required to develop a social persona, tone of voice and guidelines for how your brand behaves and converses in social channels.  As Hofsetter says “You must also ask some hard questions. How does your social personality impact the types of content you create, comment on or share?”.   A social response can raise your brand to the heady heights of ‘favourite tweet’ and water-cooler moment discussion which then leads to purchase, or it can damage a reputation, going viral for all the wrong reasons.

Superbowl 2013 - The Great Movie Theft

However interesting and differentiated your brand strategy, there are apparently only 8 ways to express an idea in advertising.  Or at least, that is what I was taught when I was in marketing short trousers. These are:  

The Presenter

The Demonstration

The Comparison

The Analogy

The Slice of Life

The Inversion

The Borrowed Interest

Shock the Audience

Over the years I have always felt that this list is one short.  The Movie Rip-Off  (or The Movie, Commercial or Pop-Video Rip-Off to give it its full title) is simple to spot and disappointingly commonplace.

The Movie Rip-Off is simply lazy and insulting of our intelligence.  The narrative with which we are being asked to engage has invariably changed little from the original, yet somehow we the viewer are supposed to welcome the introduction of a can of this or a packet of that. Examples include Berocca’s Treadmill Dancing spot that was shamelessly “inspired by” OK Go’s Here It Goes Again.

I caught the latest culprit in this year's Superbowl with Budweiser’s Clydesdale spot. A bloke and his best friend (a horse) are separated and enjoy an emotional reunion many years later. Recognise this story?

I know I'm in a minority (it has apparently become the most viral Superbowl ad of all time) but it fails me how I’m expected to respond.  Perhaps if I hadn’t seen Warhorse then I might have thought it a charming take on male friendship.  But with box office takings alone of over $134 million, as well as stage, DVD and TV audiences, the narrative is scarcely a surprise to most of us.

Surely, if you are going to “be inspired” by someone else’s content, then you need to take it somewhere it wasn’t already heading. For example, Sir John Hegarty’s brilliant Boddingtons campaigns of yesteryear gently mocked the genre of posh toiletries commercials. Ridley Scott’s 1984 Apple launch ad provided an optimistic twist to George Orwell’s bleak original.  Both brought wit or a powerfully relevant brand attitude to surprise the viewer.

So, fellow brand and communications people, if we’re going to be inspired by others’ work, let it inspire us to do something new, fresh and surprising.  Let us not just nick it and bask in the reflected glory of the original.

A winter warmer

Were a fantasy Marketing Olympics held any time soon, Team Cable Satellite and IPTV should feel quietly confident that they might return home with a medal, based on their consistent performance over the last couple of decades. The team has, through a relentless blend of entrepreneurial tenacity, marketing dogma and cash, managed to persuade the ordinary people of Europe and beyond to part with bucket loads of their hard-earned cash, month in month out.  In return, we have filled their living rooms with endless transitional technologies, most of which have provided reasons for families to sit at home and avoid talking to each other. Marketing genius. A medal performance, indeed. But I predict that the medal would not be the glorious radiant gold of the winner, but a slightly dull bronze. This is because I fear that too many of the marketing and branding teams and their agencies have been sharing a handbook that appears to be missing the most important creed: Thou shalt excite people, engage their hearts as well as their minds, make them feel!

In today’s marketing world of oceans of data, metrics and real time analytics, this attitude might appear somewhat cavalier (old fashioned, even). But the most effective marketing, branding and communications have always been those which engage our emotions not just our brains, and which make us feel something we didn’t feel before.

That we are in technology-based businesses is no excuse.  Some of the finest examples of mould-breaking marketing are to be found in technology businesses.  Apple has consistently led the field, from the astounding 1984 launch campaign to the irreverent PC vs Mac ‘People’ series.  The world stood still when Orange launched with John Hurt, a swimming baby and the promise of a brighter future. Google has the confidence to surprise and delight through so many of its touchpoints, from the ever-changing home page to the remarkable office environments.

As for the content providers, MTV and Channel 4 are past masters of positioning, packaging and communicating themselves so that viewers genuinely feel engaged with their brands (if you haven’t seen Channel 4’s ‘swearing’ promo you should).

So in this industry today, who is making us feel what?

Cutting a thin slice through recent communications reveals a few, but only a few, who really try to engage consumers with their brand, rather default to the unarticulated protocols of product features, price and token celebrity endorsement. However, I’ve found some shining examples that prompt a mixture of surprise, disgust, fear, anticipation, amusement, courage and joy.

Everyone should catch Sundance Channel’s Xmas promo last year for The Walking Dead.  Horror set to the music of Silent Night was startling enough, but the ‘For Xmas Adopt a Zombie’ plea was comic magic. You don’t know whether to laugh, cry or hide behind the sofa, but I challenge you not to feel something.  And you end up warming to an intelligent, witty channel brand.

You should also catch a viral video for TNT’s Benelux launch. It makes absolutely no sense performing a stunt in the square of a small Belgian town, except that at the last count it had achieved over 41 million hits on YouTube.  This impressive virality is down to the sheer brazenness of the act and genuine responses from members of the public, feelings that viewers recognise and share.

However, if you only get a chance to see one, watch VirginMedia’s very literal communication of speed in 2012, using the world’s fastest man.  Simplicity, shameless irreverence, and an outrageously confident tagline ‘Keep up’ combine instantly to share with customers the slightly smug glow of feeling part of a winning team. All these are examples of effective communications that encourage us to feel warm towards the brands.  We want to like them, so we are considerably more likely to buy something from them once our rational brain kicks in. And the more we do this, the shinier our medal prospects will be next time round.

This article was first published in TV & Broadband News January 2013