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NEWS - PLANNING
How to hit the target market
8/8/2001
Recently, Belgiovane Williams Mackay collected the Australian Television Awards trophy for effectiveness. The campaign, for TDK, features posters and TV ads with people who have evolved with bigger than normal ears and strange square eyes. It has certainly been described as memorable and creative, not to mention weird and in some cases repulsive.
The reason it won, however, is because it sold more product than any other ad campaign entered. And it did that, not because it was different, but because its youthful target audience could relate to the freakish images. Kids love belonging to a tribe.
Unless creative advertising ideas are underpinned by an insight into human behaviour, they won't pull the skin off a rice pudding, let alone a sale.
This year at the Cannes Advertising Festival there was a television ad for Kiss Mints entered by an ad agency from Buenos Aires. The set-up is a young couple on a dinner date. The lady excuses herself to freshen up. He then picks his teeth, using his fingers to remove a dead rat from his mouth. Then he eats some mints.
I won't argue that it wasn't memorable and creative but it was more about shock value than a meaningful insight. Did it sell? Unless repulsive is now a sales technique, I doubt it.
Edward DeBono's interpretation of creativity is thinking laterally. If you zig when everyone else is zagging, that's being creative. If you visit the local pub nude when everyone else is dressed, this is being creative. But would it sell anything?
In other words, if merely being different is being creative, when applied to advertising, does it sell?
If you were a salesman visiting the pub nude to sell diaries, would you do better because you were different? If it was a wharfies' pub, your creative clothes choice probably won't enhance your sales skills - unless, of course, you were a female selling Playboy diaries.
It's the same in advertising. A creative ad won't sell a thing if the creativity is gratuitous. Relevant and empathetic ads sell. Memorable and creative is simply not enough.
Take a look at the dot com category. Here was creativity and memorability in spades: pictures of big fish for an online auction house; people with buckets on their heads for an e-loan mob. If it was different and wacky, it was in a dot com ad. They had plenty of creative juice and, in some cases, plenty of money. But to no avail.
What was missing? Empathy and relevance. We can all empathise with the small business woman who's assistant forgot to place her yellow pages ad. "Not happy, Jan" speaks to all of us.
Dot com creativity, on the other hand, was - in technical terms - a complete wank. Their wacky imagery was often not connected to an emotive or rational consumer benefit.
Creativity only sells when it more effectively illustrates a selling point. Just being different is useless. Film of a dog excreting will stand out but unless it's selling a pet laxative you'll struggle to remember a brand name that follows it.
Even more importantly, does anybody really care about creativity in ads? Try this exercise. How many creative ads can you remember? Now, how many uncreative ads can you remember? Is there a difference?
Given that we see about 1,000 ads a day, most of us remember very few - and very few of us can distinguish between a creative ad and a not so creative ad.
Everyone remembers (or knows of) Aeroplane Jelly, C'mon Aussie C'mon, Mrs Marsh and the Toyota Camry Chook, but would you call these creative? Hardly. Charming, cute, and fun might be more appropriate. Because when it comes to ads, people have a simple view. They either like them, don't like them , or don't see them at all. Occasionally, ads that would otherwise be in the "don't see them at all" category cheat their way into noticeability with a big media budget. Harvey Norman, for example, runs ads comprising a jingle, shots of furniture, a financial offer delivered by an assertive voice - and a $30 million media budget.
This technique is also shared, with a smaller budget, by Fantastic Furniture, Nick Scali and countless others. Repetitive and annoying they certainly are. Memorable? I don't think you'd hear, "Did you see that great Harvey Norman ad last night?" at a dinner party. And given the relative commonness of this style of advertising, you'd hardly call it creative. But look at the results: Harvey Norman's financial performance is legendary.
However, this technique would not be recommended for media budgets under $5 million.
If you really want to kick goals, and maximise every cent of your media budget, then relevance, empathy, charm and humour are the qualities your advertising needs.
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