Great Ad but Did it Sell?

I always thought this was a very underrated advert. However given that it's never won any awards that I'm aware of nor is it well known, I can only presume I'm missing something.

Did it sell any product? No idea. What I do know is that Alan Sugar hasn't got a clue either. On room 101 this week, he suggested that both the Honda Cog and launch adverts for Orange were both worthless since they can't have sold any product. I can't comment about the Honda ad (although I have a stong belief that it did very well) but I can be certain that the launch ads for Orange were vastly more successful that the traditional positioning employed by One2One (now T-mobile in the UK). For more on this, check out Simply Better by Patrick Barwise.

I think Alan Sugar may have misunderstood the nature of building a brand or he's being deliberately obtuse about the whole thing. More on this another time...

Is user generated content overvalued?

The rise of websites such as youtube, Facebook, Flickr and MySpace has led to a raft of discussions in media land about how to best harness this phenomenon from an advertising perspective. Clearly the explosion in the number of people using such online sites has exceeded anything one could have imagined just five years ago.

Back then, we were all getting over the disappointment of WAP and other first generation web technologies - online marketing was in its infancy. Back then it was all banner ads and pop-ups until we all figured out that a) people were downloading lots and lots of ad blocker programs and b) the ads themselves were of negligible impact because the reach of the medium was quite poor. Five years on and the online digital experiment has changed quite a bit. Ad targeting has improved immeasurably and the range of measures for online campaigns is now so vast, many struggle to keep up with the latest trends.

In recent years, online advertisers have been able to rely on new targeting technologies (mainly cookie and / or content based) to help promote their ads across vast online networks. Google changed the game with their adwords program and now almost every business will be using some sort of online advertising and communication to promote their wares. These vast online advertising networks stretch far and wide across the web and one place they specialise in targeting are the User Generated Content (UGC) sites, forums, bulletin boards and chat rooms right around the world.

UCG attracts a multitude of users from around the world but very little advertising on these sites is “placed”. Most is brought as part of a package and the content against which you advertise is largely up to the site as opposed to the buyer. Of course the danger with throwing your online advertising out there without any say as to where it is being placed is now blindingly obvious yet until last week many UK brands didn’t understand this.

Last week, big brands such as Vodafone, T-Mobile, Virgin Media, Halifax, the AA, First Direct and even the UK Government were forced to pull advertising on Facebook after their ads were seen running against sites for the British National Party (a racist right wing organisation). Whilst Facebook are now offering UK advertisers an opt-out option for sites such as these (to be rolled out across other markets later on), this is the obvious risk that advertisers are taking when they have no clue on the type of content their ads will run next to. This incident in unlikely to be the only one of its type and many agencies are now going to be struggling to work out how they respond to this issue.

The great prize with UGC is that it supposedly offers much higher levels of engagement than other channels. An almost endless supply of fresh copy enables sites to grow quickly and capture hours of users online time at little cost – certainly no expensive journalists to worry about. However this also means is that there is little or no editorial control over what is being viewed, written about and discussed.

For advertisers, UCG is an interesting place to be although whether the benefits go beyond just getting another set of eyeballs is debatable. For UGC websites, these type of issues start to undermine the enormous values being placed on these companies. Google paid an amazing sum for youtube ($1.65bn - but much of this was paper money anyway i.e. a stock swap) whilst News International paid $580m (cash?) for MySpace. These valuations are almost exclusively based on potential and forecast ad revenues. Allegedly Facebook has not been sold because the valuation placed on the business is $8bn whilst organisations such as Microsoft only value the business at $6bn (see http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/item/57164/343/298/3). Such valuations are dependent on reliable revenue streams that will increase at a significant rate.

Whether these valuations take a knock after the Facebook débâcle remains to be seen. For my money, issues such as these reinforce the place of traditional media owners online. Groups like the FT, News International, Economist and Guardian have all embraced web 2.0 type interactivity but in each case, content may be vetted and advertisers are reasonably sure that their messages will reside in a suitable place. For those advertisers embracing UGC advertising, caution is recommended!

Walmart's Brand Positioning Report Leaked

The NYTimes has published a branding report on Walmart which was prepared by their agency GSD&M. There's going to be a lot of chatter about this online the gist of it is that the Brand Reputation may be failing or at least the "Pride" in the brand needs reinventing.

See Brand Autopsy for further comments on this (http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/11572/18918300).

Report available here - http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/business/20070530_WALMART.pdf

Banks and the Brand Promise

I recently wrote about the gap which sometimes exists between the folks in an organisation who run the numbers and those who manage the brand (Numbers don't make up for the branding). I guess it was inevitable that having praised the folk at HSBC for their "World's local bank" campaign, someone over zealous bean counter would go and ruin the story.

In case you are not aware, HSBC last week decided that one branch in Dorset would now only offer "Full service banking" to premier customers. The reason? Well the quote from the HSBC spokesperson was as follows - "We are trying to treat everyone fairly - not everybody in the world is equal. Some people have higher incomes and need greater services through the bank. These customers demand a better service."

For me, this seems like a case of the branding and finance teams not really understanding each others needs. I sort of understand the logic that this branch is in an affluent area and in one sense this appears to demonstrate the bank acting to meet local needs. However they are forgetting some of the basics which must come before the tag line - namely that they are still a full service bank which means that their first duty to the brand is to maintain all the services which go with the category. If this is some kind of segmentation exercise gone wrong then it's even more surprising given that HSBC managed to segment customers very successfully in the past when they launched First Direct.

If HSBC really wanted to meet local needs then they should have repeated the same steps which they adopt in other areas by set up a premium area within the bank. Banks such as Coutts can afford to put security guards on the doors and turn the majority of the population away in exchange for a higher share of business from the elite - however HSBC probably can't afford to loose the broader populations business in the UK.

Numbers don't make up for the branding

Many analysts like myself get a bit carried away from time to time with the power of the numbers! However we often forget to remind organisations about the benefits of a strong brand proposition. Everyone in marketing knows that to be exceptional, you need a strong brand - that doesn't mean a great logo or fantastic web domain but it means you need a compelling proposition which is well executed. What's amazing is how many poor brands stay above water and even prosper for so long so there's clearly more to it!

There are a thousand presentations out there about "keeping it simple" and "think differently" and almost each presentation uses the same examples - Google, Southwest/Ryanair/Jetblue, Dell, Innocent (next time you see a branding presentation, play brand bingo - the updated version of buzzword bingo). However this one - "The Brand Gap" made an impression on me and i heartily recommend it.

As an aside, i am always impressed when people make strong brands from low interest industries and in recent years, HSBC have taken the lead at doing this in the banking field. They have successfully turned globalisation to their advantage in a manner which Barclay's failed to grasp a few years ago. Their latest "the World's local bank" ad is another good example of this campaign although for me, the cream of the ads are those which appear at every major airport on boarding / departure - genius!