In addition to being a great venue at which to catch up with the latest thinking on measuring advertising effectiveness, The European Advertising Effectiveness Symposium offers insights into the practice of advertising and how it might evolve in future. This was the intent of the session last Thursday. John Philip Jones, Professor of Communications, University of Syracuse, started the session with this statement, “The ad agency world is a profoundly conservative business, very, very, slow to change.” The following two speakers then did their best to suggest that things had changed.
John’s presentation came across as slightly schizophrenic. If the ad agency of today is not what it used to be, can it still be stuck in the 1950’s? Maybe it can if we separate thinking from execution.
John suggests that in spite of the shift away from ad spending by packaged goods companies to spending by durable, high tech and service companies, agency thinking remains firmly rooted in the packaged goods mindset. He suggests that because packaged goods brands are largely undifferentiated, advertising developed for them tends to be visual and aimed at evoking an emotional, not rational, response. He criticizes current agency practice for not using words to advertise the highly rational and differentiated categories that receive the majority of today’s ad spend. He suggests that Account Planning has failed and states that Alan Hedges book, “Testing to Destruction”, simply “Tells account planners what they want to hear.” If we want more proof on what does work, then John recommends we read one of his numerous books.
Funnily enough, the next speaker seemed to agree with John that Account Planning has failed - but then, he too has a book to sell. Jim Taylor, Global Communications Planning Director, mediaedge.cia, stated that Account Planning is “a pure luxury as it is today in ad agencies.” Jim suggests that while planning in general is often under-valued as a discipline, the cost to the client is often duplicated across agencies: creative, media, direct and promotion.
So what is Jim’s solution? He envisages that over the course of the next 20 years clients will take back the planning role, empowered by new technology that will both improve the planning process and inform their decisions. Communications planning, he proposes, will integrate both marketing and trade marketing into one planning process, which will ensure efficient use of planning time, and integrated and effective use of marketing and trade promotion budgets. His ultimate phase of communications planning will see the full separation of idea generation from implementation and technology will reveal the true ROI of ideas.
Last, but not least, Bart van der Vleit, Managing Partner, Naked, Amsterdam, gave us his point of view. The agency of the future has already arrived, and it is Naked.
Not surprisingly, Bart too believes that ad agencies are unable to plan effectively. He sees the fact that agencies develop ideas and implement them as the root cause of this problem. He suggests that the two disciplines conflict. For economic reasons he believes it will not be in agencies best interests to propose something that they cannot then execute. He suggests that this conflict has led to a situation where, “Creatives start by developing ads, not ideas.”
Instead of putting channels at the center of the planning process, Bart stated that the Naked planning model puts the consumer at the center. He demonstrated this with a four layer model in the form of concentric squares:
- At the outer layer are the broadcast media designed to create awareness. The “talk at” level and, apparently, the domain of the ‘traditional’ ad agency.
- The next layer is response mechanisms, e.g. Internet, direct mail and competitions.
- The third layer is experience, e.g. event marketing, editorial and POS.
- Lastly we have “inspiration”, where people “wear the T-shirt”. This layer includes guerilla marketing and viral.
Bart rounded off his presentation with a case study featuring the successful launch of a paid directory service called The NumberTM, 118-118.
Overall, I found this an interesting session, but one that left me unconvinced:
Unconvinced that agencies are mired in packaged goods thinking
In my experience ad and media agencies definitely get the fact that durables, high tech and services require a different approach to packaged goods. Even if they did not, John’s proposal that we return to the use of carefully worded print ads is not going to work. First, most product and service offerings are to all intents and purposes undifferentiated today, because the differences are too subtle or technically complex to be easily perceived by the ordinary consumer. Lack of differentiation is not just a problem that faces packaged goods. Second, print ads that rely on words are unlikely to engage today’s consumer, who is by their nature more visually oriented than they were in John’s advertising days.
Unconvinced that technology will reveal the true value of ideas
While I absolutely agree that the integration of marketing and trade marketing into one planning process would result in more effective and efficient use of budgets, I am skeptical that technology is going to be the panacea that Jim proposes. It seems far more likely that technology will obfuscate the situation, unless we dramatically improve our analysis and stop focusing on short-term variation in sales. I am reminded of the claims made when scanned sales data became available. It was claimed that scanning would identify the true ROI of advertising and sales promotion. The end result today seems to be more price promotions, thinner margins and weaker brands.
Unconvinced that the agency of the future has arrived
Bart’s presentation seemed like a case of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. Is the Naked model really different from that of ‘traditional’ agencies? While the nice schematic did have the consumer in the middle, both its description and the case study worked from the outside in. In retrospect it looked like a square bull’s eye, where the consumer is the target to be aimed at. In addition, by the time we had moved through the layers to the “Inspiration” layer we were dealing with seemingly trivial and low penetration activities, like a washing line with 118-118 T-shirts on it being hung outside the Tate Modern art gallery in London. Amusing, yes, but inspirational or even engaging, no. To me, the planning challenge is to identify the real source of peoples’ enthusiasm for the brands they buy, and then find channels that will amplify that enthusiasm as naturally as possible, not resort to marketing gimmicks.
(19 votes, average: 3.53 out of 5)
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