Active advertising
Neil Sharman, head of research and analysis, Telegraph Media Group, says we are distracted from two truths about advertising. Firstly branding online works. Secondly print advertising works in a different way to ads on TV, helping increasingly picky consumers make active choices. As online branding proves itself, will we also learn that it works similarly to press?
There is a scene in Mad Men where a potentially new and huge client specifies that, “we want to get really serious with this campaign”, to which the one TV guy in the agency says “you’ll want TV?”, only to hear, “no, we want to get really serious”. A comic line to a modern audience.
Why did the Mad Men view TV so lightly yet we view it so differently?
Back in their day it was widely assumed that ‘active thinking’ by the consumer was how advertising worked. During that period, in 1965 a marketing researcher at General Electric, Herb Krugman noted that often TV advertising was “trivial and sometimes silly”. Krugman said: “Does this suggest that if television bombards us with enough trivia about a product we may be persuaded to believe it? On the contrary, it suggests that persuasion as such… is not involved at all and it is a mistake to look for it… as a test of advertising’s impact.” Television was different.
Mad Men‘s protagonist, Don Draper, was the master of the branding ad in press. His fight was against the prevailing belief, inspired by the coupon response industry, that advertising needed to do four things – create awareness, interest, desire and action. Instead Draper’s creative brain sought a single clear proposition.
We readily talk about a USP now but it was only in 1961 that Rosser Reeves, CEO of the influential Bates agency (and, some say, model for Don Draper) wrote: “Advertising is the art of getting a unique selling proposition into the heads of the most people at the lowest possible cost.” The USP had arrived. With a clear and honest USP, Reeves thought, an audience could consider it, test the product against it and, when satisfied, become a valued repeat purchaser.
Today, we have a situation Draper might recognise. It is so easy to measure the immediate response to online advertising that the opportunities of using branded ads in that medium can be overlooked. Recently, however, it was reported that Cadbury’s are boosting online spend due to a growing confidence that ROI can be directly attributed to digital activity and they have concluded that they make £3 for every £1 spent on digital ads. Draper might smile, branding ads work.
He might also be interested to know how it works out for TV too. Firstly he would marvel at the size of the TV advertising business and its position within an agency structure. Secondly, he would be interested to read the conclusion of Robert Heath, a leading thinker on advertising in our age. Heath wrote in 2007 that “TV and newspaper processing are quite different. Newspaper processing appears to conform to the systematic goal-driven ‘top-down’ processing of the Information Processing Model. But TV processing is predominantly automatic, stimulus driven ‘bottom-up’ processing”. Newspaper ads make people actively think, a fact of increasing value for today’s marketing savvy, credit-crunched consumers, more willing and enabled to pick and choose.
Our world is dominated by two forces. On the one hand there is the idea that online advertising is all about direct response. On the other hand we try and judge all branded advertising by the way TV works – scanning print readers’ brains for heat spots in the subconscious and monitoring eye movement.
At TMG we are committed to showing how the Telegraph works: firstly demonstrating that press works in an active way – and showing the benefits of that to today’s more active and enabled consumers. Secondly, by adding to the growing proof that online branding works – and by finding out if it works in the same active way as print advertising.