All the chatter lately about Volkswagen's situation, Miller's 'Man Laws' campaign being pulled and that other campaign I posted about the last two days reminded me of a quote from David Ogilvy.
"A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself."
While I don't agree with this entirely in today's over-saturated advertising/media climate, Mr. Ogilvy does make a very good point. At the end of the day, if a company, organization, group, etc., isn't selling more of whatever it is that they're trying to sell, then the marketing as a whole isn't working.
Very often, the brand building piece of that marketing plan has the biggest chunk of the budget attached to it, so the brand advertising campaign gets pulled and the agency is sent back to the drawing board (if they're lucky enough to hold on to the account) to come up with an idea that will sell more, almost immediately. And in some cases where the tolerance is really low, we're seeing organizations make a shift in their "above the line" vs. "below the line" spending. As much as we like to get up on our soap boxes and preach about building brands and raising brand awareness, we mustn't forget that it all ties to a sales number somewhere down the line.
Now I'm not advocating that we should scrap our brand campaigns and go straight to selling messages. That wouldn't do us, nor our clients, much good in the long run. There is a need for ads that communicate a brand message and that message should not be clouded up with multiple sales messages attached. But when we sell our big brand ideas and all the wonderful, exciting, sexy executions that go along with them, we should also look to implement tactics underneath those same strategies and ideas that will create some relatively quick results.
Building brands takes time. It can't be done overnight. And for the longterm health of an organization, it is needed. But we're seeing more and more that patience for seeing the numbers go up is getting shorter and shorter. CMOs and the like are much quicker to pull the plug on a campaign or on their agency and/or internal person directly working with their agency if they don't see some ROI pretty quickly.
If we want to continue to be allowed do our jobs helping our clients build brands and not just sell, we are going to have to help them develop plans that sell more of what they're trying to sell earlier, while protecting their interests, and brands, in the long run with strong brand ideas.
Of course all of this hinges upon having a strong, relevant, compelling brand idea that everything can be executed under. If our big brand idea is only strong enough to support a few advertising executions and nothing else, then that is a problem and corrections should be made. Which reminds me of another David Ogilvy-ism [And a great post Richard has over on Adliterate.]:
"It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea."
In case you missed it yesterday in the article I linked a download to from 
Recent Comments