Which commercials do you believe?  Too few!

Many commercials are produced these days with little thought of suggesting their message is actually believable. Continue reading ‘Commercials That We Don’t Believe’ »

The People’s Choice awards was well on its way when they declared a pizza break and a team of well labelled DiGiorno pizza servers came marching out with pizza.  And then there were the celebrities who were taking photos with their Kodak cameras – loudly labelled at that.

It got me wondering where the line between editorial and commercial got that blurred.

Product placement has been with us for a long time, famously when ET preferred Reese’s Pieces.  Product placement appearances, though, have not always been so blatant or heavy handled.

Is it that the advertisers have more power or have the producers of programming become overwhelmed?

Flimsy programing, like game shows, that have little editorial content and are designed to be extended commercials, have long integrated commercial mentions with content.  When Monty Hall revealed the brand new car his contestant won, it came with a list of advertiser defined features.

But when the CSI Miami crew make pointed use of Hummers, an incongruous placement of $100,000 vehicles for a police force, we sort of accept it.  How many police forces would allocate that kind of money for a status vehicle?

But is The People’s Choice award show any more than a prime time version of a game show?  Isn’t it just a promotional vehicle?

Like the OSCARS, or any “award” show, the show is designed to promote the entertainment industry.  It doesn’t have any real editorial content.  So cheesy (pun intended) product placement is nothing to be concerned about.

What is interesting is that few people see award shows as promotional vehicles.  They are considered newsworthy content and reported on the News shows.  The News shows are also part of the entertainment industry and have a vested interest in promoting the awards shows.

That’s why half of the news is not journalistic but promotional.  Public relations folks do their jobs really well.  And the news folks don’t seem to mind or notice.  When the sports guy tells us about the game to come, he is promoting it, not providing news.  And what TV news cast doesn’t have their celebrity report or talk about the shows on their own network?  News stories about Jay Leno’s show are not exactly incisive journalism.

Or, when the football post-game show features a presentation from our old pal Jared from Subway of a new sandwich feature to the coach/expert panel.  What does that have to do with football?

Perhaps this intrusion, or crossing the line, reflects a need from both broadcasters and advertisers.  Broadcasting is suffering from fragmentation.  Each channel is losing viewers to more and more channels that are proliferating on cable.  Each channel is also losing viewers to internet downloads such as Hulu, the networks themselves or file sharing.

Advertisers are losing eyeballs on their commercials to internet viewing, TIVO/PVRs, downloads, channel surfing and plain old lousy commercials that are uninspired and tedious.  So how do you intrude and get viewers to notice you if they are fast forwarding through your commercial on their PVR?

With one move.  Broadcasters add revenue by selling in show features and integrate the advertiser into the program for all future downloads.  Advertisers have always been keen on doing this and are happy to buy.  It even adds a small factor of endorsement at times that advertisers also like.

The downside for viewers is full time infomercials which will test viewers desire to watch particularly such commercialized promotional vehicles such as award shows.

What I would love to see is a show, let me call it “Awards of Awards,” where celebrities give out awards for: the best award show, the best award show presentations, the best staging, the best award show blooper, best fashion statement at an awards show and, maybe, even the best product placement.

One of the funny things about working in advertising as long as I have is that you constantly run into people who tell you about great advertising they have seen.  More than half the time they cannot, for the life of them, tell you what the product is.

While they are entertained by what they have seen, it isn’t good advertising.  Advertising’s goal is to convince you to buy into a product, service or idea.  If you can’t remember what it was, it fails as effective advertising.

These folks are just voyeurs of advertising.  They are constantly exposed to it and therefore consider themselves to be somewhat experts.  Proximity does not create expertise.

Each year, I find my patience with advertising voyeurs is waning more and more.  They seem to think that advertising is some kind of entertainment.  It ain’t.  If it entertains, fine, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of achieving its objective.

Inside the industry we have a different kind of uninformed.  These are the poseurs, who, by strength of personality, charisma, or politics, are in a position of authority or decision making in the communications industry.

These people think they understand advertising by reading the industry press – which it like learning colour appreciation from the blind.

A poseur, says the dictionary, is “a person who habitually pretends to be something he is not.”  A lot of people pretend to be experts in advertising.  I once had an interview with a person who had been an agency president who claimed that his way of determining great advertising was “I’ll know it when I see it!”  I immediately thought this guy was full of… well a political player with no technical knowledge of advertising.  Well, with international

Without criteria for assessment, it is a personality or authority test more than one of assessing ideas.  A poseur.

Years ago I was working on a brand in New York.  The client had cancelled all advertising until the agency could come up with a great idea.  The agency was striking out.  Three campaigns went for quantitative testing.  Two were abject failures, the third barely squeaked into being nearly average.  It was below average, but not enough below to be eliminated.

We had been off the air for nine months and decided to give this advertising a chance while we continued to come up with the “great idea.”  Besides, the advertising featured minority talent and there was concern that the public would not be inspired by it.

The advertising went on and sales immediately went up 25% on a long established packaged good.  “Must be the promotion” said the client.  Must be.

We decided to do some quick focus groups in Atlanta to get feedback on the advertising and find out if something was happening.  We started our focus group with participants speaking about the category and then focused in on the advertising.  The moderator showed one of our commercials.  The lights came back on and she was about to ask for discussion on the commercial.  One participant raised her hand and asked “can we see the commercial again?”

“Of course” said the moderator.  And then, with continued requests, showed the commercial five or six times.  The participants smiling, chuckling, and feeling better and better each time.

Behind the one-way mirror, I knew we had found gold in the advertising.  A commercial that had almost not made it to air because of weak quantitative scores.  A commercial that we did not recognize as a great idea.

Yet it was a campaign that brand used successfully for more than 25 years.  It was a campaign that became more important than the brand because it allowed line extensions and ended up embracing the client’s category line not just the one brand.

The campaign I am talking about is the Jell-O Pudding advertising featuring Bill Cosby.  One that textbooks quote as a great marriage of personality with brand.  But it took the market place to prove it worked, not the experts, including me, in the meeting rooms.

So when some poseur tells me “I’ll know it when I see it,” I know they know nothing.  The market knows.  We can only put together the best elements.

I have been involved with other advertising that became notoriously effective and was still memorable twenty years after the fact.  The Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” and Subway’s bad penny, Jared.  No one saw them coming either.  We weren’t all stupid.  But the truth is the market knows more than the experts, real or poseurs.

The fact is: Great advertising has to pass a sniff test of being clear, provocative and persuasive.  It takes years to put those pieces in a nice package.  People outside the industry have no clue how advertising works.  And many in the industry, who can pontificate on their innate ability to know good advertising when they see it, don’t really know either.  They don’t know where the beef is.