There was a period, a long period, back in the history of advertising when certain things held true. An ad could give advice, for example, or have an opinion and the agency would be pretty certain it would be received as intended. If they made a claim that doctors smoked cigarettes because they were good for your health then you and I would simply just accept this as a fact. If the agency, on behalf of their corporate overlords, assured us that the oil pouring out of a hole in the seabed was actually beneficial to the sea life, well, who could doubt the printed word?

Authority was absolute. At least for the purposes of selling.

The change in behaviour, however, was coming. Our relationship with consumerism and the companies which provided us with product after product was bound to be affected by mass media which showed us different cultures and the impact of our actions upon them. We were given the means through which we could see, test and then question the decisions our political leaders made and we could organise like never before.

These insights into how authority operated affected our relationship with advertising. Like seeing the flaws in a parent as we get older, so were we able to see how misleading the claims of advertising could be.

The past ten years has seen change of this sort again but at an unprecedented pace. The Internet has begun to affect us in ways we were not prepared for and still don’t truly understand. It may well be decades before we adjust to modern life, if such a thing is even possible anymore.

Businesses, and the advertising agencies which represent them, have reacted in different ways. A tiny few have embraced, and appear to understand, the responsibility granted by social marketing but many still adhere to the Authority model, filling their pronouncements so painfully with jargon as to make it appear archaic.

The reasoning, I believe, comes from too much love.

The people who work with these brands all respect the process too much. If a decision is made to make bottled water from tap water then, because they understand the process then they respect the decision. It’s the same logic that swallows the line about a company’s interest being its customers so why would it ever do anything to jeopardise that interest.

The balance comes not from cynicism, however. This leads to being unable to sell what the company has to sell. A cynical creative is one not in a position to see the good in a product that might lie beyond the jargon-filled nonsense.

The balance comes from questioning authority, from demanding it to explain itself in terms you can understand and by using talking points and conversation starters, not declarations.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Just hours after installing the new super one hour photo developing machine, everbody’s grandmother went digital consigning vast towers of squeaky paper and “leather” bound photo albums to the warehouse of oddities last seen in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Suddenly we could all take as many rubbish photos as we liked without some sixteen year old slapping a sticker on our faces telling us to do better.

Websites such as Photobox (Flickr capitalised late on this) sprang up to turn those digital files back into “product” and find a use for all the paper we thought we’d saved.

There are, of course, lessons to be learned from the e-card and the sudden collapse of entire film-to-print industry. We clearly wanted to carry on taking photos and share them with family and friends. We also enjoyed the freedom to “get creative” with our work. Especially when it came to personalisation.

Which is exactly what Moonpig saw and capitalised on to great effect. From out of nowhere came a brand with no real world value. Moonpig just created a great product at the right price and it caught on.

It must have caught the stalwarts of the greeting card industry by surprise. Just as Kodak were caught out by the rapid take-up of digital, so were Hallmark and their heavyweight counterparts. To the outside observer they seemed unfazed by Moonpig’s success even though it was clear from the start that this was an idea which would grow and grow.

Unfazed or calm.

Business strategy is a difficult beast to pin down. Those of us who press our noses up against the windows of other businesses like to weigh in on the decisions made by marketers.

I’m no exception.

Often it’s a good exercise, a sort of what-would-I-do thought experiment that sharpens the mind. Or distracts from real work.

In the case of Moonpig, I’ve often wondered why the big boys didn’t jump all over them immediately. They have the resources to protect their business on and off-line so were they being slow and out of touch with the way the Internet was shaping business or did they have a much larger strategy at hand?

We’ll never truly know of course and perhaps it doesn’t even matter because what they have established looks pretty good. It will appeal to the “rest” of us who are slower to adopt new ideas. Those of us who waited for Boots to begin processing digital films again.

The gut reaction (from what I’ve heard) is that Hallmark were just slow to react, caught with their pants down. And I’d be happy to go along with that if I wasn’t regularly having to think different about what my own industry perceives as good and bad packaging.

Because I don’t think it’s that simple. And thinking like this makes me want to look at things differently.

I can see a good business case for Hallmark waiting. Their name and reputation wasn’t going to disappear overnight and so, if they were fazed by the Internet explosion, it didn’t need to matter too much. They could afford to wait. They could afford to let Moonpig take all the risk, spend all the money and get people used to the concept of ordering and personalising cards online. After all, it’s an approach which works well for Apple who often wait to see how people access new technologies before jumping in and “innovating”.

Hallmark are now advertising on TV. They are doing it in a very “Moonpig” sort of way but with the Hallmark brand. If they go the whole… hog… then they should tie in deals with Boots and use their stores to carry the message back out into the real world where its customer base still live and shop.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Web and viral advertising make this easy because they come with metrics easily attached. The link between creative and clickthroughs is easy to ascertain. The link between clickthroughs and sales is less easy.

I just watched this viral movie. In some ways it is impressive. Certainly it has had a big budget behind it.

Now, forget about the special effects and whatever you might think of the script. Ask yourself what it is doing for the game. It has had a million views on YouTube. That’s an impressive number. Can’t argue with that. If I had a million people choosing to tune in to an ad I had written I wouldn’t be complaining.

So we have to look at what value it is bringing to the product. Is it helping sell more copies of the game? Is that one million figure a million unique viewers? Does it tell us the viewers were considering buying the game or went on to buy the game? If there was a rise in sales was the data separated out from other marketing activities running simultaneously?

To me, the film seems like a gift to existing users. I’d say that’s a pretty nice thing to do. No doubt the scriptwriter had fun fulfilling a live-action dream too.

All I’m seeing, however, is this quote:

Because of the length of the video, this live-action short makes the potential players and audience connect emotionally with the characters on the game, and that will probably make the chances of them buying the game higher.

And that makes me wary. The length of the video is enough to make potential players connect emotionally? It will “probably” increase purchase? Where’s the link between length and quality (that ought to get the spam bots in a frenzy)?

Of course, I’m looking at this from one side. From the side of someone reading a claim about the benefits of lengthy viral movies. From inside the information could change. It could well be that the sales were delivered and the ad paid for itself. It could be that the project was a longterm, brand building exercise designed to heighten awareness of the brand. It could be that I don’t know the full story. Certainly it is true that the game has achieved great pre-orders but whether that is because of this, it’s hard to know.

But as someone who is often asked to create ideas for this whole viral marketing movement I’m still left asking one thing and the answer isn’t clear:

Why?

UPDATE: Ogilvy.com just posted an interesting post which overlaps my cursory thinking on this (and does a better, more analytical job on an article I was going to write about the whole notion of measurement and what it is actually doing for marketeers).

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

They achieved three things:

1) I was followed by @davetrott – we admire his approach to advertising so this is “a good thing”.

2) Our blog traffic increased by around 900%. This is also a “good thing” and shows the degree of influence Dave has as an opinion former.

3) It cheered me up. This is a “good thing” for everyone else in the office.

All in all it shows stuff works.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.