HEAD BLOG

Working with the new breed of developer publisher has been an exciting challenge. In a world of digital downloads how are you going to make your product stand out? Do you confine your promotions solely to the online world or do you learn from companies such as Google and utilise the power of old media and the attention it still attracts?

At Head First we ask all of these questions and help shape the creative campaign to suit the product and the client. With The Mysteries of Little Riddle we have been lucky enough to bring our skills to this issue and create a series of images that are sales focussed.

And luckily there is still great fun to be had in creating real world objects.

If I were to leave you with an image of a broken rattle and an NSPCC logo you could fill in the blanks. As far as advertisements go you would be in no doubt as to the message. That is, of course, assuming you are aware of what the initials ‘NSPCC’ stand for. So whilst the advert could be seen as a risk (the risk being leaving you clueless as to its intention), it’s a minimal one.

Stood upon a train platform at 6:30 in the morning each day I take special note of the billboards that cycle through my early morning life. Even on the darkest of mornings, when it’s hard to see the person next to you, the powers that be ensure a warm glow surrounds the hoarding as it sits, fattened by years of paper and glue, by the platform edge.

If I were to leave you with an image of a guitar on a chair and a strapline of ‘It pays to be confused.com’ you might ask why, you might guess at the meaning by knowing that confused.com are in the insurance business or, like me, you might not understand what the message is supposed to be.

Teaser ads, ads that don’t give you a clear understanding of their purpose are a difficult form of advertising. Sometimes, as with the excellent campaign for The Economist, the tease is the message. But often they are designed to intrigue the viewer enough to peak interest and spark some sort of follow through whether it be through the viewer talking about the mystery or tapping the company name into a search engine.

Often, these campaign elements are a part of a larger, linked concept.

The result hopefully being greater than the sum of its parts; but that assumes the tease concept has sufficient power to spark that interest.

When I saw the billboard for confused.com I gave it quite a bit of thought. I didn’t understand its aim but I carried on thinking because advertsing is what I do. Was it just there to reinforce the brand name (which seemed like a waste of money) or was there a clever sight gag I was missing? I just didn’t know.

I’m reminded of something Dan Chung once said, that we naturally form ourselves into patterns. He was describing the way people will form unconscious patterns by the choices they make when sitting down ( so people might choose to skip a seat in order to retain personal space and in so doing form a checkerboard) but the observation works equally well for describing how we naturally look for such patterns.

And when it comes to interpreting advertisements this behaviour can be used (and is used) to great effect.

I couldn’t see a meaning, however. So I sent out a Tweet.

The socially aware guys over at confused.com came back to me saying that if I watched the TV ad then all would be made clear.

Why didn’t they tell me that on the billboard?

Maybe the TV ad would make it all clear. Maybe if I’d seen that first I would be more receptive to the billboard; receptive enough for it to give the old brand retention a dig in the elbow. The bus and underground ads show the real message and it’s a cool one. It makes sense, offers real incentive to use them by being appropriate to people’s lives – all a great campaign apart from the billboards. Which makes me wonder why they expected me to see those and run to a TV set to see what it all meant.

Which I didn’t.

Mainly because the imagery and approach weren’t interesting enough to compensate for the lack of message, the lack of reasons to engage that would prompt me to action. I work in the advertising world and so have a bit more motivation when it comes to pursuing this sort of thing. For others, advertising is an inconvenience; street furniture that can get in the way. They aren’t proactive.

This tendency to assume knowledge of a wider campaign isn’t a pecualiarity of teaser ads. Nor is it confined to confused.com (whose social media policy, incidentally, I admire). Look around at the billboards on your way to work and ask yourself whether you get their message and on what level.

MacDonalds have an ad running featuring a burger and the headline “The best things in life are 3″. Now of course I get that they sell burgers and I get the free/3 joke. But what does it mean? There is a pay-off line at the bottom of the ad with a list of ingredients but it doesn’t seem inclusive of all the real ingredients which make up the burger so I assume it’s part of an in-store promotion. But what in-store promotion? Do I get three items for a low price? Are there three really lovely new burgers to choose from? Or is it really just a burger with three ingredients (one of which is onion)? What? And why should I find out?

The message needs to be clear. And the message might be as simple as “remember our name” which is fine of course. Putting your brand out there for people to remember next time they go in-store is as worthy an aim as pushing a specific product or feature. The way in which they are achieved, however, differs greatly.

I have read a bold claim.

An agency claimed that a piece of creative they were responsible for had led to an increase in sales.

It might be true.

But the claim came on the back of the information that sales rose after the ad was aired.

So was it the creative?

Or was it just the media buy?

How do we know where responsibility lies?

The problem with making a claim is that once made, it is open to question. A designer who claims their logo concept boosts sales has to do so with confidence that the rest of the activity isn’t also having an affect.

Regardless of this, however, is a deeper question: what does advertising do?

My feeling is that advertising doesn’t sell…

It creates the urge to buy.

There’s a big difference. I’ve had arguments as to the effectiveness of advertising. Friends not wrapped up in the world of advertising claim that an advert has no effect on them; that it doesn’t influence them. The fact that companies are spending billions each year to reach people like them has no effect on the argument. They just insist they aren’t influenced and that’s that. Then they go and buy a BMW.

Whilst there is little doubt that many companies waste huge amounts of money on ineffectual advertising, it’s certainly not true to say adverts have no effect. Even as a barrage of messages upon our collective consciousness they have a cumulative effect.

What matters to me is whether that effectiveness is selling or creating the urge to buy.

The difference may seem pedantic but it governs the way we approach the creation of advertising.

A Twitter post on Monday morning caught my eye because it said “Consumers are the new ad agency”. The tweet linked through to a blog which made several statements to back it up.

This was my response:

The word “consumers” is a pretty broad brush but really the usage you employ would cover only a tiny percentage of them. Some consumer generated content has earned respect – but there is only a tiny amount of it and even the Doritos ads were originated (conceptually) by an agency. And did people respond positively because it was user-generated? I have no idea but I wasn’t aware (until this article) that that was what it was. I thought it was just a nicely scripted ad which made me laugh.

Some brands and some consumers are in a two-way dialogue. Equal though? I’m not so sure. In so far as consumers have always had a choice whether to buy product A or not then yes, the responsibility continues to rest in the hands of the consumer.

Social media can empower people but as with most things, most just don’t care. Protests have always helped shaped brands, the digital age has made that easier but in some ways this could be headed for a fall as consumers become desensitized to screaming reactions from the Twitterati. But we’ll see.

Consumers have, in addition, always looked to one another for what brands to support. That’s why agencies take such pains to research and target opinion formers. Even the term “traditional media” is liquid – changing as it does with the shifts in technology that have seen advertising transform across the ages.

From focus groups to the Tupperware party, these affects have always been with us. “Consumers” are no more an ad agency than they ever were.

Social media is broadcast word of mouth, but as with so much else on Twitter – it’s a simplication that helps nobody.

An eye on the future

Natal is exciting.

I was excited when the Wii was announced (and remain so to this day) but Natal is something else entirely. A hands-free approach to gaming which can change everything.

At Head First, where we strive to find what is exciting about any product, that’s something to sit up and pay attention to.

What’s more exciting, however, is how Microsoft are beginning to crank up the interest in it.

On Wednesday, Sony issued a press release to inform the world that their version of the Wii motion sensor was delayed. For those of you who aren’t glued to video games, Sony are entering the same market as Nintendo Wii motion and Microsoft’s Natal system. Their answer, announced last year will arrive in the form of a wand device which would be tracked by cameras similar to those on the Nintendo Wii.

On its own that would have been impressive.

But then Microsoft blew everyone out of the water with Natal. If that were me, I’d have taken my wand home and sulked for a while, muttering about not being understood.

To their credit, Sony haven’t done that and without getting a hands-on experience I can’t tell whether it won’t be even more successful than Natal. I certainly hope it competes because I love what Sony does.

So what’s exciting about Microsoft’s approach?

Apart from the technology, which sounds amazing, it comes down to Wednesday and Sony’s press release.

Microsoft took their time, all of a handful of hours, and responded with a bold claim about Natal.

It was, they said, “fraught with risk“.

This is a great thing to say. Put yourself in a movie for a minute and listen to the dialogue when two heroes are faced with an almost impossible situation. They think of a plan. “It’s risky, ” they say, “but it might just work”.

That’s what Microsoft have effectively done. Showing great confidence in their product by making claims to the contrary.

It sounds like they aren’t going in quiet on this one.

In this country we like to focus on the negative.

Don’t speed or you’ll kill someone.

Don’t try to claim benefits because we’re always watching you.

Give us £2 a week or children will continue to be hurt.

Ironically, the one ad I saw that was positive was for ID cards which said that if you carried an ID card, you could prove how old you were. Presumably this was the Government’s way of helping young looking 18 year olds to start binge drinking.

It’s as though we respond better to the stick than the carrot. And that might be true.

But it might not be.

Because if there is one thing I have learned it’s never to take other people’s research or “facts” for granted.

Contrast it with this neat viral for TV Licences over in in Sweden. I don’t know how effective it has been but it made me smile. I don’t know if it would make me change my behaviour because I pay the fee now but I think I’d feel good about it.

It’s different.

It’s positive.

Whatever happened to ideas?

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about consolidation. The big advertising agencies have woken up (it’s said) to the fact that there’s this big thing called the internet and that many of their clients are wanting to get face time with their audience on there. Personally I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification (of an oversimplification). But who cares? We’re all businesses first and foremost right? And businesses expand, acquire other businesses, close down, split up. It’s just life. Business life anyway.

But somehow, in the whirl of talk about web 2.0, social marketing, open web, something gets lost. It’s not enough to have ideas any more. You have to be seen to be surfing the next wave.

So these big agencies are buying up the digital agencies, strengthening their teams by purchasing the skills needed to go online. It seems an odd move. Not because being online isn’t an important part of a campaign but because these agencies should have the skills in place already. Because the skill most needed to go online is the skill of ideas.

I’m sure Head First isn’t alone in being an advertising and design agency capable of having ideas. I’ve heard rumours of one or two others in the North West alone. We don’t see our ideas as being print ideas, or TV ideas or online ideas. We see them as ideas. And the better the ideas, the more exciting it is, the more strategic it is – well, these are the ideas that transcend media. They are the lynch pin of campaigns that clients ought to be chasing.

To take an example from an old issue of The Drum let’s look at Vimto’s site. The idea there is “seriously mixed up fruit”. It’s a fun idea. It informs the development of the site but it’s easy to view it as bigger than the web side of Vimto’s new marketing direction. The idea isn’t tied to the web but is open to interpretation for any purpose. Need a print ad? No problem, the line looks sufficiently stout to withstand a whole forest of them. TV? Yep, I see from the site they’ve already been there too. How about a novelty coaster – I could rustle up some neat concepts for those too.

Our work on Bionic Commando started from a similar position. Establish an idea strong enough to carry a campaign and the rest falls into place. It helps having a team talented enough to translate the big idea into media specific projects but the fact remains that it is the idea which excites the entire campaign. And that idea must be a tangible communicable concept.

As technologies merge and consumer behaviour shifts, this need to focus on the idea first will only increase in importance. As the line between advertising, PR and online disappears the primary skill-set will be in having the ideas needed to start the conversations or open brand ears to what the consumer wants.

An idea can cut through all the hype and sounds of lumbering agencies swinging into line with consumer trends. By rushing around buying up skills, all big advertising seems to be advertising is their lack of said skills.

Following on from my earlier entry on celebrity endorsements for advertising I’d like to focuss on one particular product area: fragrances.

I can’t help but notice that TV ad time is swamped with star-studded endorsements for – The Fragrance (the last resort Xmas present). Ad-slots have heated up despite the snow with James Franco, Vincent Cassell, Josh Harnett, Ewan McGregor, Kiera Knightly, Nichol Kidman, Kate Moss, Beyonce all doing their utmost to convince us to buy the scent they represent.

Actually they are not doing their utmost, in fact they are doing very little but it’s better than just featuring the actual companies behind the product. Yet, is this really the best way to convince the public to buy their fragrance above all others? Especially when (conceptually) they are all the same.

I don’t blame the creatives or the agencies behind the ads; anyone in the ad biz knows the best ideas never get chosen but let’s face it, there’s not even the slightest attempt to stand out.

I get it though. Buy the smell and you’re buying into the glamor of the worlds inhabited by these celebs. Hell, it’s worked in the past and the wisdom here seems to say that if it aint broke… I just thought that maybe the consumer these days was slightly more knowledgeable and cynical about advertising to fall for that old one.

You would think though, that if this is the time of year when sales peak then surely the arena is more competitive.

So why be the same as your rivals?

There is a great opportunity to stand out and be memorable but I smell a rat. Playing safe seems to be the order of the day and in these times of accountability a good defense for decision makers is “well they do it, so why don’t we?”. Safety in numbers and all that.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe they all smell the same, and so the ads are all the same. It could be an honest approach to advertising.

And that, my friends, stinks.

Many complex arguments surround the issue of marketing to children. They are linked in with the world in which we live and the world in which we wished we live where advertising is just one way in which we discover new ways in which to be productive or pass the time. In the world in which we live, these ways often come about in ways in which advertisers wish they had control. Instead we are often left chasing the moment, trying to bend it to our will.

And in this world, more complex than we can ever imagine or control how are we supposed to find the right line to take when parents are terrified to send their children out without a mobile phone? Should the manufacturers not produce phones that are attractive to children? Would that make us better people? Would it save our children from the clutches of the Pied Piper? If only the world were that simple. If only it could be reduced to such things and then solved by a quick chat with Trevor McDonald or David Dimbleby.

Of course it can’t. And so it will continue, rightly so, to be an area that undergoes regular and detailed scrutiny. Maybe it is inevitable that advertising often finds itself at the sharp end of the commentator’s disapproval. Calls for bans on advertising, on video games, on Marilyn Manson’s music surround every anti-social act to be caught by the global news media. It becomes so automatic, so knee-jerk that it is easy to dismiss it in a similarly knee-jerk and automatic manner. Many of us, however, think about the arguments each time a new piece of business comes our way. And often the answers come in the way in which much of the advertising industry conducts itself – by talking and listening to the public. After all, what kind of advertisers would we be if we ignored the public mood? Where’s the strategy in that?. No, talking to the consumer is something we do on a daily basis – something report writers might also look into doing. Without it we would soon find ourselves existing within the sort of bubble some people might wish our children to live in.

It’s this conversation which reminds us that we are no longer in the world of the 1960’s where the Don Drapers could dazzle us with the promise of great new things simply because they were new things. This conversation with the public reminds us that each new piece of work we produce is put into context by a million different minds, each of which consume information (and advertising falls under that category) in a different way. We can create excitement, anticipation even, but to assume the power to steer society towards a dumbed-down mockery of itself – well, isn’t that what we have television for?

Good creativity is full of risk. But such a direction seems to be in direct contradiction to the message of despair and cynicism that currently prevails. Steve Henry of HHCL questions the use of celebrities in advertising during a time of recession saying, whilst acknowledging the escapism value of such strategies, that they don’t represent the best way of talking to people. Rich people advertising cheap food – where’s the connection between brand and consumer there?

Celebrity based advertising (generally speaking) is just one of those fallback positions for Creatives. They are easy propositions which show conservatism in full swing. The reasoning seems to be that by shoe-horning Celebrity D into Brand A there is no risk, or at least a reduced risk. There is a degree of truth to that. Safe advertising done well can be effective, of course it can, and wild, risky ideas can fail miserably. I’m sure Gillette’s “star-studded” tour de force may well have sales to back up its strategy.

More often than not this form of advertising, whether it is stapling Richard Hammond to a supermarket trolley or forcing Ant and Dec into other people’s made-up lives, has to remain true to the basics of good advertising and use their celebrities for solid, persuasive reasons and not because they are flavour of the month or, worse still, flavour of the marketing exec’s better half.