There seems to be a growing body of opinion that mass marketing – and the waste that comes with it – is the way to go, says Dominic Mills. The trouble is that none of this fits well with the drive for accountability.
There won’t be a single reader of this column who isn’t familiar with the adage “I know half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half” – variously attributed to US retailer John Wanamaker, Lord Leverhulme and Henry Ford (I always thought it was Leverhulme, but now I neither know or care).
But maybe there’s another way of looking at it, and not just from the perspective that in the era of micro-targeting advertising waste is, if not banished, at least minimised.
This is the entirely counter-intuitive notion that waste is good. Of course, if you heard a media owner make this assertion, you’d rightly be suspicious. And if you heard a media buyer tell you the same thing, you’d be thinking they’d massively overpaid for some media and were trying to post-rationalise it before the auditors highlighted their profligacy.
But at MediaTel and Sky IQ’s breakfast on TV advertising last week, a number of people effectively made this very point.
Of course, the idea that waste might be good is not a black-and-white concept. There is a lot of nuance in this area. It won’t work for all brands at all times, but it might for launches, or in a particular set of competitive circumstances. Or it might in conjunction with a targeted, micro approach working alongside or below a mass-market campaign.
Perhaps a better way to think of it, therefore, is as ‘deliberate’ waste or, in the ultimate media oxymoron, ‘targeted waste’.
It seems an appropriate subject to look at in the immediate aftermath of the Super Bowl, the biggest advertising splurge known to man. Forbes estimates the average cost of a spot at $134,000 a second or, in real money, about $4 million for a 30-second spot (and that’s before you even get to humongous production costs because, hey, you can’t turn up to the party half-dressed).
It’s a curious thing, but in all the excitement about the Super Bowl, and in all the millions of words written about it, no-one ever seems to take a hard look at the targeting strategies employed by advertisers.
How much of all the money spent is wasted? And how do you define waste?
Well, for most brands, if you take the conventional media line of audience segmentation and targeting, there is potentially a huge amount of waste involved. Very few of the 35 or so brands that have bought Super Bowl time will have a universal appeal to the audience of 160 million or so Americans watching the show.
Some will have mass appeal, but still not to all ages, both sexes or across the socio-economic divide: Pepsi, Coke, Budweiser, Heinz, Bank of America, Ford, Doritos. Others will have a smaller target market: M&Ms, Kia, H&M, Audi.
And some will have a distinctly minority appeal. Take Jaguar, which made its Super Bowl debut with a blockbuster special for the launch of its F-type (cost: around £60,000).
You can watch its entertaining ad, featuring ‘evil’ Sir Ben Kingsley et al as stereotypical Hollywood British villains here.
But what proportion of the Super Bowl audience is, as one might typically define it, in the target market for an expensive motor like a Jag? I’d say significantly less than 1 per cent. You could also make the case that a significant part of Jaguar’s target market might not be watching the Super Bowl, thus leading to even more waste.
That doesn’t mean Jaguar and its agencies, Spark44 and Mindshare, are bonkers though. There’s a wonderful scene in Mad Men (season five, for aficianodos) where Don Draper tries to persuade Jaguar – against the views of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s media department – that they should be on telly. Remember, we’re talking the 60s here, when telly was much more ‘mass medium’ than it is today.
Why? Because it’s all about aspiration. So while only a tiny minority of the Super Bowl can afford an F-type Jag, there’s no price tag on a dream. And what Jaguar wants is to get everyone dreaming, not just about the F-type but about the marque as a whole – the so-called halo effect.
That’s part of the answer. The other is fame, getting talked about, or ‘buzz’ if you want American-speak.
Hard-headed empiricists will want to know how fame, or its modern cousin, engagement, translates into sales. Short-term it is probably irrelevant, certainly for pricey items or those with long consideration times. Longer-term, these things are hard to measure.
As a classically executed piece of RoI thinking, therefore, the Super Bowl doesn’t stack up. On this basis, most brands should forget it and go for the targeted advertising approach.
But there seems to be a growing body of opinion that mass marketing – and the waste that comes with it – is the way to go. Take Professor Byron Sharp, author of How Brands Grow, who believes that positioning brands for carefully targeted segments is futile.
The thoughts of two distinguished UK practitioners, Les Binet and Peter Field, on the long-term effects of advertising and the value of fame are also worth exploring.
The trouble is that none of this fits well with the drive for accountability. What CMO will approach their finance director with a request for a cheque to pay for, say, a media budget with 50 per cent waste? And what media buyer will enthusiastically pitch a plan that contains waste? Not if they want to hang on to the business, they won’t.
But clients might buy a mixed approach, a Super Bowl (or the UK equivalent of X-Factor final, Downton finale or Corrie Christmas special) as the ‘targeted waste’ fame driver and targeted ads to maintain the momentum.
I’m now racking my brains to think of brands closer to home that have done the equivalent. John Lewis perhaps, with the original ‘Always a Woman‘ ad in 2010 that put it on the map; the Yeo Valley two-minute rap in X-Factor in 2010; and maybe the meerkats Christmas special with Gary Barlow last year.
It’s not a long list though. Which might prove few brands have the balls to do it; the theory has no mileage; or I’m missing some obvious examples.
Over to you, readers.
