It Pays To Advertise
The National Theatre, on London’s South Bank, played host to the IPA’s tribute to last year’s best advertising campaigns. Good use was made of the setting as the audience in the Oliver Theatre were treated to a spectacular opening as dramatic, gradually louder, music pre-empted the flashing lights of the ‘Guys & Dolls’ backdrop. From the back of the stage, amid the smoke, appeared the conference’s first speaker, IPA president John Bartle. With his entrance a large screen bordered by yet more glowing light bulbs came from above .
Such an opening left Bartle with the audience’s complete, unswerving, attention. He introduced Adrian Horsford’s and David Cowan’s description of BT’s phenomenal success with their infamous ‘It’s Good To Talk’ commercials. The accompanying screenings of past advertisements acted effectively as a reminder to everyone of the history of BT’s attack on the ‘Non-communicating Society’, stemming from their advice to ‘Get Through To Someone’, and snowballing into the profit swelling effect that Maureen Lipman and Bob Hoskins had on the nation. Focussed on were the problems BT faced in the beginning, not least an identified cultural British image of being a non-talkative country (highlighted by the presentation’s inclusion of live drama in which the actors portrayed short scenes with the moral being communication equals happiness!). Research found that other countries on average spent far longer on the phone (compared with the likes of USA, Germany, Japan, etc), and further study unearthed a popular misconception amongst customers that the cost of telecommunication were far more than in reality. From the basis of this research data, BT was able to launch an ambitious campaign which attempted to alter the nation’s conciousness, with Bob particurlarly shaming us men for not talking more……on the phone. The measure of the guilt we felt meant a gain of £297 million pounds for British Telecom in 15 months (Bob was happy too!).
Of course, few of the IPA winners had British Telecom’s budget, as was illustrated by the representatives from Orange, Daewoo and Felix cat food. Each contrasted greatly with the situation BT had in that they were widely conceived, largely new and unknown small brands. This common ground between them was reflected by the set-up in which BMP DDB Chairman James Best lead their discussion, the format being a mock company meeting in which member was sat at a long table, with Best acting as the chair. Orange Communication’s approach to the largely saturated market of telecommunication was to ‘invent’ a new market category – the ‘Wirefree Future’ rather than compete in the mobile and fixed wire sectors. The screening of Orange’s commercials illustrated it’s use of recent discourse on enviromental issuses to highlight the benefits of doing away with the telegraph poles with rather spoil the landscape. Daewoo relied heavily on customer research and so based their image upon being saviours in the areas in which they found car buyers were being mistreated. Likewise Felix concentrated on studying cat owners and found their market gap, amongst a 50% plus market share for Whiskas, by highlighting the experiences owners have with their feline pets, representing the behaviour of cats in their Felix character.
Brand Revival was the theme for the next set of winners. Safeway’s award winning creations addressed the need to aid the shopper with children, the novel value of which was viewed through the young eyes of toddlers Harry and Molly. The Automobile Association re-invented itself from an image of just providing breakdown recovery to being the ‘4th emergency service’, a professional elite. The benefits of this campaign stretched to not only altering public perceptions of the AA, but also causing the staff themselves to have more self-belief, to feel their service was more worthwhile. Walkers employed the services of a well loved national figure in order to bridge the gap from being a much loved regional brand to being likewise on a national scale. The convenience of Gary Lineker also being from Leicester was obvious, but still used to great effect.
Sustaining the position of a well established product was the topic next dwelled upon. A common theme amongst each winner here was the requirement for consistency whilst adapting to change. Copycat brands provided the change for Philaphelpia to deal with. Their ten year campaign featuring the soft cheese mad secretaries showed a need to keep the audience interested in the characters of a long advertisement serial as did the characters in the Barclaycard and, of course, the Gold Blend campaigns, the interest of which led to the tabloid press to speculate about what would happen next. Barclaycard opted to concentrate on the benefits of it’s product (with the aid of Rowan Atkinson) rather than compete in a price war with new, cheaper, rivals. Gold Blend offered romantic fantasy whilst at the same time an accessibility to a more expensive coffee. Indeed Stella Artois took this further with the slogan that it is ‘Reassuringly Expensive’ – the success of which is made all the more remarkable when it is considered that in blind taste tests with other lagers Stella came a distant last (also remarkable was that Andy Palmer chose to include this piece of information!). Yet the reasons for improved sales were revealed in the study in which lager drinkers were asked which brand is ‘For Someone Like Me’, where the French beer came top.
“Nothing kills a good product faster than good advertising.” Bill Bernbach. The afternoon session option on ‘Creativity and Effectiveness’ insisted on disproving this quoted theory, attempting to show there being a link between quality and resultant increased sales in creative advertising. Global examples, facts and figures were put to the audience. 86.5% of award winning commercials achieved commercial success during the period 1992-95, for example. This was an encouraging, if predictable, conclusion which led conveniently onto the final speech, ‘Making The Case For Advertising Investment’, given by the passionate Brian Carlisle (MD, Kraft Jacobs Suchard). His summing up compared launching an ad campaign to purchasing a horse for racing, the point being they required similar planning and strategy, and that still success in advertising would be a safer bet. Certainly the audience left more confident of advertising’s potential than their chances of winning at a day at the races.
(K.North)