Saying you work in advertising is like saying you sell snake oil. It’s just not a highly respected profession.

And it’s true: We deserve a great deal of the disrespect sent our way. As an industry, we have a shockingly low moral standard. In general, we’re unable to moderate our activities for simple things like right and wrong unless legally obligated.

That said, we do have our redeeming points.

Advertising = Ridiculously Low Cost Media

Who hasn’t groaned when a commercial comes on, right before you find out if the protagonist is going to survive or if the girl finally gets the kiss she’s been pining for the last 3 seasons?

Advertisers pay media companies to get access to your attention. We interrupt your favourite TV shows, take up two thirds of the space in most magazines, and generally try to buy our way into your life. That sounds like a pretty raw deal until you consider one important fact: how much do you actually pay for media?

A cursory look at Bell.ca shows that for only $30 a month, you get over 500 channels. Each channel is costing you $0.06 a month. 6 freaking cents.

$0.06 is all you’re paying for each channel. Think about what you’re getting there. Someone is paying an entire crew of people very good money to produce the content. (Actors, writers, directors, lighting people, camera crews, editors, etc.) Then that content is streamed over the wires to your service provider and out to your home. Those wires didn’t come cheap. Your cable company spend an awful lot of money every year to maintain those suckers.

How do you think all of this is being paid for? I’ll tell you: It’s paid for by advertisers.

So if you want to live in a world where your TV shows are never interrupted, be prepared to pay a heck of a lot more than $0.06 per channel. (My understanding is HBO Canada costs about $15 a month. That’s an increase of 25,000% for advertising-free entertainment. For half the price of 500 channels, you can get 1 lonely channel. Enjoy!)

This is true for all media. When you buy a newspaper or a magazine, you’re barely covering the cost of printing. Advertisers are subsidizing the vast majority of the cost of the media you consume every day. Facebook – that gem of a site that has a growing number of people hooked all day long – is interruption free. There’s just a tiny little ad on the right side that you most likely ignore. Same for Google. Same for virtually every website in existence (except for the ones you’d be embarrassed to admit you frequent… a lot of those are paid sites).

Advertising is Informative

Some ads are clearly of value to society: They promote non-profit organizations, or let you know about important changes to legislation, or try to keep you from sticking a fork in the socket. (Don’t do it! It’s not even remotely funny. Seriously. Do not stick a fork in the electrical socket, ok?)

On the other end of the spectrum, you have sleaze. Sure, they subsidize your media costs as well, but they promote products or services or ideas that are detrimental to you, the people around you, and/or society as a whole. (Cue: Cash4Gold ads, those late-night party lines, and those terrible spots from the Conservative Party of Canada.)

But in between those two extremes is the territory most advertisers play in. They have products to sell. Products you need or would benefit from. We all consume products every day, and being informed of your options is a good thing.

In other words: Whether or not a particular ad is good for society (and thus a noble thing to produce) is highly dependant on what it is the ad is promoting. Promoting the consumption of cola for babies is a very bad thing to do.

Advertising CAN Be In Good Taste

Despite what I’ve said above, I do still think advertisers have a moral obligation to respect the viewer/listener/reader. To respect you. Sure, we’ve rightfully bought our way into your life. And sure, the products we’re pushing are generally good for you (or otherwise good to know about). But is that enough?

No, it’s not. Advertising should respect your intelligence. It should never condescend, talk down, or belittle. It should be interesting… worthy of your attention. It should never be annoying. It should be in good taste.

The good news is that having good taste pays off. When an ad is worthy of your attention, you’re more likely to pay attention. And if you pay attention, you’re more likely to hear out the arguments we’re making for the product. And if you hear out those arguments, there’s a chance you’ll agree with us and subsequently buy the product. Everybody wins when advertising is done well.

So even though I do think advertising is a noble profession, feel free to continue to attack every dimwitted thing you see that insults you as a human being.

What Advertisers Still Need To Be Criticized For

1. Advertising to kids. Kids are too impressionable. We need to stop doing this. A child’s life should not revolve around whether or not they have more of the latest toys than their friends.
2. Cheap tactics. Again, it’s incumbent upon us to have good taste.
3. Degrading, stereotyping, or otherwise doing harm to one social group to boost our sales. How many beer ads depict scantily clad women with no self-respect? How many house cleaning products seem to be exclusively for the use of white suburban women? How many wealth ads seem to only care about old white men? Aren’t we better than this by now?
4. Misleading the public. There are laws against the most egregious forms of this. (Before those laws, advertisers were all too comfortable with flat-out lying. The only advertisers who still get to do this are politicians… they’re exempt from many of the laws the rest of us need to obey.) Still, it’s not very hard to say the truth in a such a way that people perceive something entirely different, something that isn’t true. This is wrong even if the laws haven’t caught up.
5. Violating privacy. Anyone following the trends with digital media should be concerned with how much information is being gathered on individuals and rented out to advertisers to help us target you better. Sure, more relevant ads are a good thing. But not when it means there’s a database hidden somewhere that’s tracking everything you do. There are lines that should not be crossed, and once again our industry seems all to happy to cross them until lawmakers do something about it.
6. General low moral standards. All of the above criticisms basically come down to knowing the difference between right and wrong. It’s not rocket science.

We Can Do Better

A little over a year ago, I wrote:

Advertising shouldn’t be such a joke. It shouldn’t be ridiculous to think we are indeed in a “noble profession.”

Great advertising creates meaning where others see only product. Great advertising is fun. Great advertising changes the world for the better. Great advertising creates fortunes for our clients not because we’re apt at conning people but because we’ve helped them to see the greatness of our clients products and services. Great advertising spreads ideas like wildfire.

Is that funny? I’m not laughing.  Are you?

And I concluded with the following quote from Bill Bernbach:

“All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.”

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I’m reading a rather good book called “The Idea Writers.” Although I don’t fully agree with the ideas expressed within it (the author is far too fond of overhyping digital media’s transformative power, in my opinion), it does pose a rather thought-provoking question: What does it mean to be an advertising copywriter today?

It used to be a very simple question to answer. Copywriters wrote the headlines, subheadlines, captions, and body copy for advertisements. They were usually responsible or at least heavily involved in developing the concepts behind the ads.

Radio expanded the copywriter’s realm to writing scripts of pure dialogue.

TV expanded it to include writing visually driven scripts where the dialogue was flexible. (Sometimes it didn’t exist at all.)

The Web for the most part meant learning to write long, sales-driven copy organized by headings like “Products”, “About Us”, etc. (For most direct marketers, the learning curve was very low. They’re used to writing long copy because they’ve always known it to be effective at driving sales.)

But somewhere between, say, 1995 and today, the copywriter’s job has become muddled. It still includes all of the above, of course. But the importance of integrated marketing has meant that the copywriter’s job is very different than it once was.

Some examples:

1. Where it was once very common for writers to specialize in specific forms of media (radio people would focus on radio, print people focused on print), that distinction is almost impossible today. Copywriters need to be able to work with the full spectrum of media. Integrated marketing means integrated copywriters. (By contrast, designers and art people can often still get away with being specialized.)
2. Writers need to be able to create compelling (click-worthy) headlines in under 120 characters in order to work on Twitter with room for a Bit.ly link.
3. Writers need to consider that their work may appear outside of the context for which they are writing. The Web means that great content is borrowed, stolen, and shared with wanton abandon. This is a good thing, but we need to be flexible.
4. Writers need to be able to express ideas simply enough for other people to be able to talk about it. The holy grail is word of mouth, where people are not going to repeat what you said word for word. This means writing for a world where any degree of misunderstanding means your message gets warped faster than a 2nd grade game of telephone.
5. Writers need to think beyond language. I might be an English writer, but I can’t depend on word play to make an idea compelling. As soon as it gets translated, any cleverness is immediately lost.
6. Writers need to think beyond words. Visual communication is powerful. Large photographs and video have largely become the most powerful forms of media online (as well as on TV, of course, viewership of which is at its highest point ever, despite what digital media people might like to tell you).
7. Writers need to think socially. Is the idea big enough to get people talking? To get them to share it with their friends? For people to actually take part in the idea and make it their own? If not, you might need to go back to the drawing board.

I could go on and on like this, so I’ll stop right there. The point is, today’s writer isn’t so much a writer of words but a communicator of ideas. The media isn’t the message, because we can no longer exclusively work within the context of a specific form of media. Some people call this becoming “media agnostic.” I suppose that’s as good a word for it as any.

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Join me for a few minutes in The Land of Fiction, won’t you?

The Setup

Today’s story takes place in some mega metropolis, on the top floor of some huge skyscraper. I have a corner office. I’m wearing a suit, not jeans. My coffee cost more than any reasonable person would spend on lunch.

(Yes, I’m aware that I’m pegging myself as a major small-town kid. I’m ok with that.)

I’m the Chief Marketing Officer of Mega Corp., the largest consumer product company in the world. Perhaps one of my biggest areas of responsibility is managing the corporation’s relationship with its marketing agency.

What would I do?

The Idea

First, I would divide my market areas into a dozen smaller chunks. (Perhaps based on provinces or states.)

Then, I would hire an equal number of creative agencies and give them each one of those markets. Their mission: To create the best damn advertising for their market as possible. I would give them as much freedom as possible.

Then, after a year or some other pre-determined time frame, I would compare their results. Doing my best to take into account the differences between each market, how much of an impact did each agency have on the sales for their region? And how much did it cost for them to do it?

I’d rank each agency based on the ROI they produced, and I’d eliminate the bottom half of that list. The remaining agencies would each be given a second market to tackle.

I would continue to do this until all I had was one agency taking care of all my marketing needs across my entire market.

As far as I know, no one actually runs their marketing in this way.

The Reasoning

1. It’s fair. Companies are always putting agencies through the ringer with lengthy RFP processes that don’t really tell you how well that agency is going to perform anyway. Meanwhile, the agencies are pitching for free. My understanding is that at some of the bigger agencies, a single new business pitch can run well over a million bucks in agency costs. Through my approach, every agency is paid in full for their services.
2. Because every agency is being paid, there are no losers. Which means no reasonable agency would turn down the invitation. The worst case scenario is they’re being well paid for a year to run wild with their ideas. How is that a bad thing? In my mind, such a scenario would mean having access to the top talents in the business.
3. The test is real. It’s not my subjective opinion of which agency is best. Nor is it the result of focus groups, copy testing, or other forms of fiction marketers like to partake in. Either the agency is boosting my company’s sales, or they’re not. It’s really that simple.
4. By starting with such a large number of agencies, I can pick from radically different schools of thought to see what works. In other words, I wouldn’t pick 12 agencies like CP+B, Wieden+Kennedy, and Taxi. I’d mix it up. I’d pick mortal enemies. If I didn’t know who to pick, I’d start with the agencies winning all the awards, and then ask them which agencies they thought were total shit. And then I’d pick those guys.
5. Though there might be an initial inefficiency involved in working with so many agencies, I’d make up for it by giving them so much freedom. My experience is that the majority of agency costs revolve around dealing with the client, preparing for presentations, undergoing endless rounds of revision. I wouldn’t want any of that. I’d say: “Do whatever you want, just run it by me for a disaster check only. Otherwise I’ll let you run with any idea you want, even if I hate it.” Plus, the end result of the process is of course one agency to run it all. At which point they’ll have earned so much of my confidence that I wouldn’t dream of interfering anyway.

Feedback?

What are your thoughts? Is this a good idea? Or is it the worst idea in the history of bad ideas? It’s always so easy to judge how other people work and casually talk about how you would do their jobs differently. So if anyone has experience on the client-side, I’d love to hear your feedback.

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Lately it seems every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the marketing field is raving about the revolution of technology. How many times have we heard the line, “This changes everything!”?

Monthly? Weekly? Daily?

The challenge with all these new(ish) developments is sorting through what’s real and what’s not. It’s very easy to get carried away with all this new marketing mumbo jumbo. But it’s also very easy to become overly cynical and to miss the real changes happening in front of us.

Back in 2007, OneDegree.ca published an article of mine where I wrote:

The basic principle [behind Web 2.0] is this: Can you appeal to a community? The spirit of the web is communal. The entire reason the web works is because it connects us and renders everyone an equal. It’s not about technology. It’s about connecting as people.

This is nothing new. The entire course of human evolution and history has been about people learning to connect in greater ways.

As corny as this may sound, this is also what advertising has always been about. Advertising is an attempt by businesses (and other organizations) to connect with the rest of us.

Sure, it’s almost always to sell something. (And that’s a good thing, but we can debate the merits of consumerism another time.)

The point remains that every “communications” professional is in the business of helping people connect for one reason or another.

This may all sound like highfalutin philosophical B.S., but it’s actually a really important point to consider when developing your marketing plan:

• Don’t ask yourself, “How does Facebook fit into this campaign?” Instead, ask “Would Facebook help us connect with the people we’re looking to connect with? If so, how?”
• Don’t ask yourself, “How can YouTube get us some free media play?” Instead, ask “Are the people we’re looking to connect with actively using YouTube? If so, can we contribute a video they would actually like while also educating them about our products?”
• Don’t ask yourself, “How can we use Twitter/Facebook/Google to complement this campaign?” Instead, examine what your objectives are, who you are trying to reach, and whether you have an idea that makes sense for the medium.

In short, don’t even think about “new media” (or digital media, or whatever we want to call it these days). Go back to the basics. Focus on developing ideas that help you connect with your customers, then figure out which “channels” make the most sense for that.

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To know what works for industrial advertising, it’s important to know the fundamentals of any form of advertising.

The 3 Levels of Advertising Effectiveness

Advertising works on 3 levels. Some ads only touch on 1 of these levels. Most manage to touch on 2 of them. The best manage to touch on all 3:

1. Name recognition.
2. Appeals to logic.
3. Appeals to emotion.

Any ad should, at a minimum, accomplish name recognition. In theory, your ad could simply be the name of your company in big fat red letter type. This won’t persuade anyone of anything, but if nothing else they’ll recognize your name when they’re looking for what it is you offer. When given the choice between a number of unknown brands, with no perceivable difference in quality, people will choose the name they recognize the most.

Next, we have appeals to logic. The bigger the purchase, the more important a role that logic plays. For example, McDonald’s doesn’t rely too much on logic to get people through the door. (Arguably, the more people think about it, the less likely they would be to choose a heart attack in a bun.) Deciding on a supplier for your business, though, is a very rationally-driven decision. When given the choice between two suppliers, one who provides facts and figures to support their claims, and another without that supporting information, people will choose the first company.

Finally, we have appeals to emotion. A basic selling principle is that people are irrational. Even when we think we’re buying for logical reasons, we’re really buying for emotional ones. Everything we do in life is driven by our emotional needs in some way. So, in advertising, it pays to understand which emotion is being satisfied by buying the product in question, and appealing to that. This is done far more commonly in consumer product marketing. Business to business (B2B) marketing tends to ignore this level of advertising, due to a belief that business people are purely rational.

Why Appeals to Emotion Are Still Important In B2B Marketing.

Let’s agree that the purpose of any B2B marketing initiative is to sell more stuff. Let’s also agree that all sales are persuasion – after all, if I’m already of the mindset to buy, I don’t need to be sold.

Let’s further agree that persuasion is personal. We make decisions for our own reasons, so if we’re persuaded to do something, it’s because the arguments rang true to us on a personal level.

Finally, let’s agree that if it’s personal, it’s emotional.

Ergo, persuasion is emotional. Sales are emotional. Marketing is emotional.

Now, the usual argument for why B2B marketing can’t be emotional is that it’s so rationally driven. Purchase decisions in business are made for logical reasons, because those decisions are going to have to be defended at some point as having been good for the business. In other words, I don’t buy things with the company’s money simply because I like them. I have to believe they are good for the company. So how could that be an emotional decision?

The Big 3 Emotions At Play In B2B Marketing

Look, everything we do is emotional. Accept it. The real question is which emotions are at play in business decisions?

The answer is simple: Ambition, Greed, and Fear.

Ambition, as in the desire to do great things. Very few people start their own businesses or rise to the top in an organization without great ambition.

Greed, as in the desire to have more. Again, very few people go through the stresses associated with entrepreneurship unless they want more money. There are easier ways to satisfy virtually every other desire. If you’re not greedy, you probably aren’t a decision maker in any organization of prominence.

Finally, fear. As in the fear of failing to fulfill your ambition or satisfy your greed.

Taken together, these 3 emotions are what guide the business community and they are the key to making more sales.

The Winning Formula for Industrial Advertising

Now that we know that the key to any sale is to appeal to Ambition, Greed, or Fear, it’s pretty simply to identify what makes for a great B2B Industrial ad.

A great B2B ad is one that successfully tells the reader/viewer/listener that your company can help them to fulfill their ambition, satisfy their greed, or ease their fears. Ideally, the ad would do all three.

Here’s what that tells us:

1. The best way to persuade people that your product can fulfill one of the Big 3 emotional needs is to prove it. Fact sheets, demonstrations, and testimonials are perfect here.
2. The benefit to any B2B product has to be either (1) it can make you more money; (2) it can save you money; or (3) it can make you famous. (The last one isn’t a very commonly effective appeal, but a flip side to ambition is ego.)
3. Funny ads don’t typically work, because humour does not appeal to ambition, greed, or fear. These are serious emotions that need to be approached in a serious and respectable manner.
4. Short-form ads like billboards and small-space print don’t work so well. They increase brand name recognition, but it’s very difficult to convey logical arguments or appeal to ambition, greed, or fear with such limited space. You need enough space to make your case.
5. Long-copy ads work great, if you can afford them, because you get to say and show so much more. (Which isn’t an excuse to lose focus or run cluttered ads. Clarity is still paramount. But if you can’t make a successful appeal to logic and emotion with 7 words or less, you might as well take the time to say it right.)
6. Because long-form ads also cost more than their short-form brethren, there is a very real need to be highly selective in your media selection. Trade publications make the most sense. Your community radio station makes less sense.
7. Campaign microsites – small websites dedicated to the subject of the advertisement – are a great way to provide more valuable information than you could reasonably fit in an ad. You can also host multi-media content like video demonstrations and testimonials, as well as offer interactive features like an ROI calculator to allow the prospect to calculate the benefit of the product themselves.
8. Supporting material is important. Let’s say I’m convinced and want to proceed with buying what you have. I then have to convince my superior. 9 times out of 10, I won’t do as good a job as you could to sell it to him. You can make it easier on me by providing easily downloadable print material to back me up.
9. More so than any other form of advertising, it’s important that your creative team have domain knowledge. Most of the time, no creative team will know nearly as much as you do about your area of expertise. As such, it can be beneficial to work more closely with them. (A copywriter with limited knowledge can create great ads, but it won’t have the vital touch of knowledge that demonstrates to prospects that you know what you’re doing. It’s not enough for people to find your ads interesting. They must also establish your expertise.)
10. Aesthetically, your advertising must look professional. In most types of advertising, the need to stand out and be interesting can be allowed to overpower the need to look professional. Not so in B2B. As David Ogilvy once noted, nobody buys from clowns. He was wrong when it comes to most consumer product markets, but he was absolutely right in the context of B2B.
11. Show the price if you can. Business people respond well to dollars and cents. Heck, we’re downright attracted to any number that’s preceded by $.
12. When you have an ad that works, keep using it even when you’re tired of looking at it. Again, freshness is vital in most consumer markets, but it’s not as important as making a good point in B2B promotions. When you find an argument that persuades well, stick with it until you find something that works even better.

A Word of Caution

If there is one thing I have discovered more than anything else about industrial clients, it’s the habit of thinking that their customers and prospects think like they do, know the things they do, and are interested and persuaded by the same ideas that they are. This is wrong.

In the excellent book Made to Stick, the authors put forth a theory they call The Curse of Knowledge. In essence, once we know something, it’s hard for us to imagine what it’s like for other people not to know it.

This is most commonly expressed in the way that every industry and business develops its own set of jargon. We all have a habit of utterly destroying the English language, and assuming that other people can still follow whatever it is we’re talking about. Again, this is wrong.

Even if the odds are good that the other person understands your jargon, there is a chance that they do not. In contrast, most anybody can understand plain english.

So when creating promotional material, insist that it be comprehensible to a lay person. It goes a long way.

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