Where is YOUR advertsing dollar going?

I collected mail from a PO box today and was once again struck how many people did what I did. I struggled to get the mail out of the small box; not because there was a lot of mail in there, simply because of all the unsolicited brochures, mailers, junk flyers etc. They come in a huge bundle and a royal pain in the nether regions.

There are big tables and very large trash bins, as far as I ca see only to serve to sort the wheat from the chaff and to dump the chaff. The bins are invariably full.

Someone is paying big bucks to create, print, and mail these items. And all that happens is they get dumped without a second glance. Your ONLY chance of making an impression (positive or not?) is when the recipient sorts through to ensure that there is no real mail in the middle of this stuff.

Is that how you invest your marketing spend? Do YOU pay for creative, print, mail just to see your investment thrown away?

I hope not, but its worth checking!

Truth in Advertising???

Has to be the most truthful adverting I have seen for a while…..

Now you start to understand my sense of humor …..

Renault in Los Angeles

I was in the UK this week – I’m always fascinated to watch the TV ads and see the differences in approach between the UK and the US.

One ad that really grated was a Renault car ad – it will become clear why!

The premise of that ad is a tour bus taking visitors around to view star’s homes in the Hollywood hills (presumably), big houses, pools, expensive cars, etc., etc.

The typical image that is portrayed of a luxurious and expensive lifestyle. The bus departs. The scene cuts to a guy on a radio saying ‘It’s OK, they’ve gone for the day’. What we see next at first made me smile. In each house, the big, expensive and exotic cars are moved into the garage, and the Renault moved from hiding, into the driveway.

Which is fine and dandy, quite amusing really. Except that Renault does NOT sell cars in the United States. I’ve never seen one anywhere. Not even an odd import (which I do see once in a while, Puegots, Citroens, etc.). Never a single Renault.

So, a bit of harmless fun you say?

Well after chewing it for a while, and playing devil’s advocate with myself, it still grates. Surely there is a truthful way to achieve the same end result? It troubles me that a company will play fast and loose with such a basic lie. As the body that supervises advertising in the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority, says:

“The main principles of the advertising standards codes are that ads should not mislead, cause harm, or offend.”

It clearly doesn’t offend or cause harm (well not to me at least), but what about that mislead bit?

Tell me if you think I’m being too pedantic……..

Lexus – Truth in Advertising?

I have pondered before – and sometimes here, in public – if I’m from a different planet. Many others have made comments that might cause me to thing that they think I am too!

So I am always reassured to find others who question the ‘truth in advertising’ in similar ways as I do. If you have read much of my blog, you will know that I’m a passionate naval history buff and subscribe to an email group about the same. Actually, they draw the boundaries a little differently ‘Two topics: the works of Patrick O’Brian and everything else’.

The list is packed with interesting people who have a range of backgrounds and expertise (they can sometimes be a little intimidating, not for nothing are they known as the “All Knowing List”) but who are also amusing, fun, erudite and inspiring.

One who contributes a great deal is Gary W Sims, a California engineer and desert dweller with a background in – amongst other things – developing the GPS system. I’m going to quote – with his permission – his email.

But before I do, my point: Advertisers are trying to get us to feel good about something. In order to do so, they must put all aspects of their message – and their Brand – together so that they do NOT cause the type of dissonance that Gary experienced watching the ad.

Sounds easy. It’s not!

You do not have to be an engineer, or as smart as Gary – or both as is Gary – to get the feeling that something “Ain’t right”. That’s enough to dissuade many buyers – or at least create an – albeit small – niggle and negative perception.

If you would like to see the debate that the post engendered, just Google some of the text below.
Read on:

“The purpose of a television commercial is to grab your eye, and often they explicitly do *not* want you listening, since they must by law say distracting things better left to very fine print. Like ”use of this product may cause parts to fall off some people.“

The only obligatory statements I know of in automobile ads are those ”professional driver on closed course“ notices, which are always reassuring after they show the car leaping off a roof or some such thing. (We might have thought just anybody could do that.) But sometimes the fine print or sotto voce comments are just plain confusing. Case in point:

A current Lexus commercial shows a helicopter dropping a Lexus coupe. This is definitely a thirty-second show I would enjoy far more if I were not such an obsessive about detail. As the car begins to fall toward a runway with a target painted on it, another coupe begins to accelerate down the runway.
They are converging as this script is read:

”Gravity will propel this Lexus IS over 4,000 feet in a matter of seconds.“ [camera shifts to car on ground]

”*This* Lexus IS will attempt to cover the same distance even faster.“

[car on ground passes target just before the falling car impacts.]

”So much for gravity.“

First time I saw this, I started to do the arithmetic every engineer among us just began. How long would it take that Lexus to fall 4,000 feet?
Muttering about terminal velocity estimates and so forth. Oh, no matter, I realized about one premise into the calculation. Can’t happen that way because ordinary street cars are limited to about nine tenths the force of gravity in any axis because of tire adhesion. Call it 29 fps gained per second as compared to 32 for a falling object. And that is when cornering a sports car, or stopping a car with excellent brakes. You can cheat and bounce off walls to generate higher acceleration, but that’s a technique with limited utility. Or strap on JATO units like the Mythbusters did.
But…

Only the most powerful cars approach that 0.9g in the forward direction and then only for a few tens of feet. Current verrry fast street cars can only sustain about 24 fps2 in the forward direction. Cars that cost about like a house. A big fancy house. Top Ferraris, Bugatti Veyrons and the like.

No, I realized quickly that it takes a top-of-the-line race car to generate the sustained acceleration that falling car is experiencing. And I do mean ‘top’. Something like a Formula One car, and it cannot sustain that rate for 4000 feet. So a Lexus definitely cannot do what is shown in that commercial if they ”cover the same distance“ as the script says. ”Ehhh, so what.“ Went back to book.

Commercial came on again. Watched for disclaimers or explanation:

”Based on horizontal drop. Aerial sequence simulated.“

Oh. They… No, they… Huh? There’s the challenge for our group. What the Devil does this mean?

Well, no. Obviously, it means nothing, since things cannot fall horizontally. That’s one way of defining ‘horizontal’ for all love. (e.g. A ball will not begin rolling if placed on a horizontal surface.) But we’ll assume they thought it meant something when they wrote it.

The challenge I offer is to figure out what that ad agency *thinks* they were saying. So the non-geeks or novice geeks can enjoy the game, let me donate a couple of techie hints. [I might add that any non-techie interpretations are far more likely to be right than anything we geeks will come up with living under the constraint of knowing physics.<g>]

So, you may do better ignoring these tidbits of reality, but:

1. Traveling 4000 feet ”in seconds“ permits us to assume an average speed much slower than objects fall. It hints at ten seconds of course, but 59 seconds is semantically acceptable as ”in seconds“ just as well. (That’s good, because the falling car — neglecting air drag — would reach about 350 mph and only take 16 seconds to cover that 4000 feet.)

2. 4,000 feet in 59 seconds is 89 seconds to cover a nautical mile [just slipped that in for the POBishness of it] or about 46 mph. Call it 75 kph since I don’t care to find my calculator. Big deal. We have sailboats that go that fast.

3. To cover that distance from a standing start is nearly as trivial. Suppose that Lexus accelerated like the Old Man in a Hat… uh, older man who always seems to be in front of me at freeway on ramps when the traffic we must merge with is going 85 mph. Call it a nice gentle 4 fps that won’t spill his Geritol. (As an aside, this rate takes 22 seconds to reach 60 mph, which the OMH ahead of me rarely does by the end of the on ramp. This is like parallel parking in reverse at 25 mph when you try to merge at that speed. At least at the speed of traffic in the ’slow’ lane of our freeways.) In fact, let’s not scare the OMH with that frantic rush. Let’s call it 3.2 fps or one tenth the acceleration of gravity. Unless I just miskeyed my calculator [which I gave up and fetched] it still will take only 50 seconds to cover that 4,000 feet. The final velocity would be about 110 mph, but that’s within the reach of nearly anything on the road today. Even a slightly refurbished Yugo. Certainly with the ”professional driver on a closed course“ of commercials.

So I return to my challenge: what the Devil *are* they trying to say? Seems unlikely the ad agency meant to brag that the new Lexus IS 350 will keep up with an aged Yugo.”

{advertising, Brand, Product}

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Ford comes up trumps – or people matter most…..

I railed against my local Ford dealer in an earlier post, and in conclusion noted that the misfire was still evident when I drove away. I’ve just finished a “thank you” letter to the dealer’s service agent who has, he said with crossed fingers, etc, etc., finally fixed my car. Copied to the General Manager of course.

An update.

It got worse, much worse. The engine light came on again, and stayed on this time. I took the car in and they diagnosed a faulty coil and replaced it. A mere $460.

I picked up the car and after less than three hours, the engine light is sneering at me. In goes the car again. Ah, a coil is faulty they tell me. It turns out that, since i last turned a spanner (wrench in US parlance), cars now have not a single coil, but one for each cylinder. Mine has eight…. This was sounding expensive…..

This time though, I talked to Jack the service advisor who was suitably sympathetic and reassuring. No bull, but sensible conversation and an acceptance that things were not as they should be.

Each day the car was in, Jack called with a status update, even when there was little positive he could say. That takes guts – a majority of service reps of all ilks seem to avoid the hard calls – and Jack was not bringing good news most of the time. The problem was that the fault was hard to pin down. The engine light would come on, but with little information as to why, apparently. Nonetheless Jack called, assuring me that it would go out only when he would be happy for his wife to drive it.

They ended up replacing TWO more coils, at a much (and I do mean much) reduced rate, and that seemed reasonable to me.

Within 24 hours the engine light is doing it’s thing. “How are you?” says Jack. “Very unhappy.” says I. He got it, and said all that could. This time it was three days. They could not pin down any fault, though they could consistently replicate the engine light. The short version – they replaced an injector. Free of charge. And since then (two weeks now) it has been like driving a different car.

As I told Jack in the letter, I was ready for never going back after the brake episode. So does all end well? Yes, but….

It fascinates me that I got a flyer via regular mail for service – they do that all the time – that proclaimed in big, bold letters “Jack’s Back!”. Which got me a-thinking. They obviously recognize his talent and abilities, and reading between the lines, regard it as a coup to have him back. So if they know that his skills mean better service, happier customers, etc. etc. why don’t they recruit more like him and/or train the other reps to be similar? Superstars are always interesting, but you can’t rely on them to hold up an otherwise mediocre team. Every interaction with a customer moulds their perception of your brand. Negatives are easy to accumulate – and one good or positive experience doe not erase a negative one.

{advertising, Customer Service, Marketing, WOM}

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Customer Service, User Experience, WOM

Amazon’s Unbox and Tivo

I’m on The Tivo subscriber’s email list and they recently sent out a notification that I could now download video from Amazon’s Unbox and have the program show up on my Tivo.

Sounded good! I signed up (just making the connection between my Amazon account and my Tivo account, really). I’m an ardent user of each service and imagined that it would be a marriage made in heaven. Boy was I wrong!

Whilst I have always liked Amazon – and spend a significant amount of money with them each year – their new services lack the ease of use and intuitiveness that I have come to love. Buying books etc. is simple, streamlined and a pleasure. The ancillary services – like Unbox (and their webhosting and publishing – which I TRIED to use in a previous life) are a nightmare. Unbox requires me to search – fair enough – and presents me with results. But there is no way – upfront – of notifying the system that I want results for a TIvo. And far, far from all (or even most as far as I can determine) of the videos available are capable of being downloaded to Tivo. But you can’t tell that. So i order a download, and after the transaction is complete I worked out that it wasn’t heading my way any time soon.

I’ll download it and view it on my MacBook – no way PC only supported for downloads and viewing!

So I ask for a refund. I get it, along with what I interpreted as a snippy note saying that whilst they had refunded me, it was against company policy. Even though they could (at least the should have been able to) determine that no video had been harmed, downloaded, or actually stirred at all from their systems.

The whole point of personalization – which Amazon does as well as most (not as good as it should, it knows I use Canon cameras, but still recommends Nikon stuff from time to time), so why does Unbox NOT know that I’m a Tivo guy? They could, with little effort, also determine that my notebook is a Mac and tailor the video listed for me.

Worse, they have Recommendations for me. Of the top ten I have to go to number 5 before I find one that will run on the systems I have. How do I discover that? I have to display the list of recommendations then click on ‘See all Buying Options’ for each video listed in turn. Then I have to scrutinize the text and spot the ‘Also works with Tivo’.

So of the Top 10 Recommends for me, only 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 are viewable on systems I have. Hmmmmn. And I only needed to make twentytwo clicks to get that information…..

Not the sort of ease of use and convenience I associate with Amazon.

{Product, advertising, Brand, Marketing, Product Management}

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Brand, Customer Service, Marketing, Product, Product Management, User Experience

Are we there yet?

I’m an avid participant in an email list that notionally discusses the works of Patrick O’Brian – especially the Aubrey & Maturin series of books. For those of you unfamiliar, the recentish movie ‘Master & Commander’ was based on these books. For those of you interested, you can find out more at www.hmssurprise.org – including the mailing list signup.

This list has an especially lively and erudite crowd from around the world (recent topics have ranged from moors of Northern England, Coin valuation and a rant about my ‘political’ photo for the Alameda on Camera competition).

So what has this got to do with our subject? Well, one of the list members who uses Gmail to read the list posts reported the list of Google ads displayed whilst reading the list yesterday – and it appealed to my warped sense of humor. The ads comprised ‘Ship Model for Master & Commander’, ‘Boccherini Music’ (his music is played by the protagonists in the book), AND last by no means least the book Walter The Farting Dog!

So Are We There Yet? At least as far as contextual ads go. Perhaps not, there has been much speculation about what was in context that triggered the ad, but we couldn’t work it out. My curiosity sparked (I’ll plead it’s because Barbara reads books and tells stories to 5-8 year olds in a school program here), I checkout out
Amazon. It turns out that there is a whole series of books on Walter. Who knew?
.

{Marketing, advertising, WOM}

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Media, User Experience

All Our Yesterdays – Trade Shows

One of my clients is planning on attending a couple of trade shows as part of their 2007 marketing plan. It was a case of recalling all my past learning and trying to formalize that so that we made the investment worthwhile.

In the middle of the planning, I attended MacWorld in San Francisco. I’d forgotten the sheer exhaustion of attending – let alone exhibiting at – one of these events. It all came pouring back!

So did the glaring shortfalls that seem so obvious as I walked around. Clearly organizations go to such events to generate business, awareness, or to reinforce a purchase decision. There were companies there who, it seemed to me, had not thought about any of these things. Many clearly had. I’ll focus on the sins I saw:

* I’m a big Tivo fan and TivoToGo has just been announced for the Mac. To use it you need a copy of Roxio Toast (a multimedia application and CD/DVD burner) and Roxio had a booth with the product for 1/3 off – way to go! Now the MacWorld folks are one of the many who believe that in order to register and pay them money, I must be forced to submit (i.e. it is mandatory on the form) all manner of information.

As an aside, this is one of the things that pushes my hot buttons (the fact that it is mandatory), so I, as a marketing professional I always doubt the efficacy of such data as I assume that there are many who do as I do and put in information that the recipient, presumably, takes as gospel but is in fact meaningless. So my occupation on this one was Coronation Programme Seller. For those of you not in the know, we haven’t had a Coronation in the UK since 1953. I have also been a chicken sexer and other dubious occupations. I have data for each of the other, in my judgement, intrusive or unnecessary questions. So when YOU, the customer buy this data, be very aware that I, and I believe many others like me, exist. You may not get what you think you are paying for…….

Back to MacWorld; so, I filled in this web form and the basic data (name address etc) are correct and encoded onto my badge. I’m at Roxio, you will recall. I want to buy their product, I really do. So I fight (really!) my way to the front, and ask one of the staff. I get a huge form. “Still using paper” I joke. I look at the form askance, this is like War and Peace.
“Why do you want a shipping address?”
“So we can ship the product to you.”
“I’ll just take it with me.”
“Oh, we don’t have any here.”

End of conversation! How can you go to a trade show to sell and not have product? They tell me I can order on the web, at the show price. Guess what? I can’t. Do you think I have bought their product?

* More booths than should be the case have NO information to attract an attendee to talk to them. Nothing about their product, nothing about what they do, or why I could/should be interested in them. Why be there?

* There were some booths (mercifully few at this show) that have obviously temp staff who have no idea about their products and services. They can’t answer questions, they don’t ask me for my information – what is the point of being there? It is arguably a negative brand touchpoint.

* How many booths have no product information or literature? More than a few. What was the objective in attending?

* Some get it right. I use (or rather used) a product that was in attendance so I went over. I am a happy mapping advocate with attached GPS on the PC. On the Mac it’s a poorly served segment. I was overjoyed when I saw a review of such a product, and bought it (expensive too). It’s a good looking program, it’s just that it is functionally poor (read unusable) for what I want to do. Put in a street address and find it. It doesn’t do that (you have to put ion a lat/long). Anyway, I removed it and vented – quietly – at one of the staff. I had no expectations beyond venting. I got an email from the CMO this week, thanking me for my feedback and asking me to stick with them. Impressive. Maybe I will give the new version another chance.

So all in all, I remain dubious about the ROI of trade shows. We shall see how my client does……

{Product, advertising, Apple, customer, customers, Marketing}

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Apple, Brand, customer, customers, Marketing, Product, User Experience

Advertising in the 21st Century

I was listening – well sort off, I tuned it out mostly – to more gnashing of teeth and wailing from the media industry about how we viewers were avoiding their ads. The latest “ruse” they have employed is to get actors to speak about products as part of the script….

Jay Rosen talks in ‘People Formerly Known as the Audience‘ about the shift in power and that once control is ceded to ‘the masses’ it cannot be regained. I guess the power of the many, enabled by communication, over the few.

This, and a few other teasers, got me thinking – a rare and dangerous thing – about advertising. The regular stuff, the ads that we see on TV all the time. Turns out, I’m not as unique as I was hoping – many of us watch ads that are appealing, and will even seek them out. This was reinforced by a friend (a senior at USC) who has just passed his driving test. After getting over his shock that I not only knew about YouTube, but could show him fun stuff there, he showed me the new VW ads. ‘Unpimp Your Auto‘ is a series of three (search for tags pimp, auto and VW) ads that his generation are seeking out. Yup, that is that they go online and watch them, show them to friends, talk about them. Now THAT’s an advert.

Ditto for the Apple Mac ads are interesting in and of themselves. But the spoofs (for all of them search for tag truenuff) ALSO build credibility for the Mac too. Apple could pay for such ads, but this way they garner huge credibility on the back of someone else’s dollar. That’s RoI!

Now to some of the challenges. Talk a look at Cubicle Wars. Do it now, then read on.

What was the product? I had to go back and look twice. Compelling, funny and a great piece of work – but I can’t remember the product even now. All I can recall is that it’s a report writer. So compelling ads are not enough – there needs to be some good hook.

Also, in the Mac spoof noted above, the company Truenuff included a link along with all the spoof ads. Only problem is, that the link generates an error 404. Whoops. Even a link to the main domain didn’t work. Today, there is a redirect to a blog on Myspace.

So what’s my point? That good, innovative, compelling ads can be produced and we, the customer, will actively seek them out. Smart marketers will will stop trying to force advertising upon us and learn to have us seek it!

Oh, and execution (especially around the whole user (customer) experience) is still all!

Great customer experiences to us all.

Tags: Advertising, Media, WOM

{advertising, Brand, customers, media}

[composed and posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Media, WOM