Packaging: tobacco’s last-gasp (and futile) stand
Whenever I think of tobacco companies and advertising, I think of cockroaches: however hard the government stamps on their efforts to promote themselves, they keep coming up the drainpipe and inserting themselves into your life.
But now I think we are seeing their last stand, in the form of the current battle over packaging. No sooner had the ASA trod hard on early efforts to fight plain packaging on the grounds that it would encourage the black market trade in cigarettes, than Japan Tobacco International, whose brands in the UK include Benson and Hedges and Silk Cut, popped up again with a new ad in the national press last week.
The ad itself is based on a FoI request and features a letter from a Department of Health official to his/her Australian counterpart. “There isn’t any evidence to show it [plain packaging] works,” the UK official writes lamely, asking the recipient if they have any info.
It reminds of me how I used to ‘borrow’ physics homework from a friend when I didn’t have a clue what I was doing (and it makes you wonder how much policy is made like this…).
But this isn’t really about packaging per se; it’s all about colour branding, colour being pretty much the only serious weapon the tobacco manufacturers have left (apart from price) in their ongoing struggle to promote themselves.
Over the years, all forms of tobacco promotion (in the widest sense of the word including, but not limited to, advertising) have been sliced away. But like cockroaches, the tobacco companies are highly resilient and inventive.
Back in the 90s, Marlboro used to kit out girls in red jumpsuits and get them to hand out free cigarettes at racetracks and other events. It, like a number of other cigarette brands, has developed diffusion ranges in clothing. B&H went even further in Malaysia and launched branded cafes (gold-themed, of course). You can read about their various brand-stretching activities here.
Often the link between all these activities was colour. Red for Marlboro, gold for Benson and Hedges, purple for Silk Cut, silver for Lambert and Butler and so on. And why not? Colour is a legitimate branding tool. Think of certain colours and brands come to mind – red (Virgin/Coke/HSBC), orange (Easyjet), blue (Barclays), green (Heineken), for example.
Wipe out the colour option for cigarette brands, and their ability to differentiate themselves or stand out is much impaired. Of course, to brand loyalists that might not make a difference, but it will when it comes to recruiting new customers or switchers – the key metric in tobacco.
However much the tobacco companies might kid themselves, they are not going to win the packaging battle. They will fight all the way – but the wind is only blowing in one direction and it’s towards a ban on branded packs.
Reappraising newspapers (er, sorry, newsbrands)
Like Greg Grimmer, I was also at the Newsworks Shift conference last week.
If there’s one medium that needs reappraisal, it’s the press. As Trinity Mirror CEO Simon Fox noted, media buyer indifference to the press as an advertising medium – probably because they don’t read the things themselves – is a major obstacle.
To overcome it, of course, the industry as a whole has to get off the back foot and underline the extent to which it is shedding the past (as lazy-thinking media buyers would glibly describe shrinking circulations, dead trees etc) and grasping the future. Hence Shift – you can see more stuff here.
So, here are five things I learnt at the conference.
1. With the exception of the Guardian and the Mirror (for now), there is a noticeable move towards paywalls of some kind. Whether this is a total lock-down or a freemium/metered model is up for debate and is brand-dependent. The latter seems more sensible as it allows publishers to turn the meter up or down, or to adjust the amount or type of content that is available for free. Daily Mail Plus looks like one to watch, although it surely has to offer subscribers more than just interactive puzzles and ‘nostalgia magazines’.
Even MailOnline might go down this road eventually, Mail boss Lord Rothermere intimated – although reach is its real selling point – but only if it invested in premium content like sports rights. Well, why not? There’s no reason sports rights should belong to broadcasters or telecoms companies.
2. Industry metrics need to get with the times. Sometimes it takes an outsider like Fox (a just-in-time escapee from HMV) to point out how nonsensical it is in this day and age for the newspapers to report circulation on a monthly basis. Cross-platform, de-duplicated data is also essential.
3. Belying its readership, the Telegraph has embraced digital. Much of the editorial decision-making is influenced by data, and daily news conferences start with a data round-up rather than the traditional round-the-departments (home-politics-foreign-sport-business) style pitch. That is some culture change.
4. The Daily Telegraph produces so much online content a day – 600 articles, 40 videos, 25 picture galleries – that only a tiny proportion survives for the next day’s print edition. Rather than dump all this stuff, it is now looking at digital afternoon/evening editions (primarily for the commute home). Assuming other publishers generate similar amounts of ‘spare’ content, that opens up whole new opportunities for newspaper groups.
5. Consumers, according to Justin Gibbons, creative director of media buyer Arena Media, increasingly use cultural or trending reference points when making purchasing decisions. And of all media, the press – thanks to campaigns, debates, trust (yes, still there post-Leveson) and partisanships – are the most culturally resonant.
Media planners seeking to use contextual planning (i.e. looking to get with the Zeitgeist) should therefore use the press. Obviously, you don’t get invited to speak at a conference about the future of newspapers unless you have something nice to say, but even so this was a thought-provoking offering. I wasn’t the only one in the audience nodding my head.
Hallelujah – this could be the end of TUPE
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I can think of few better-intended pieces of legislation than TUPE.
To those who have never dealt with HR or an acquisition, TUPE stands for Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) and is designed to protect employees from getting screwed over by a new employer changing their terms and conditions when their company was sold.
TUPE was born of an era when ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring’ were all the rage – i.e. cost-cutting – hence it being generally regarded as a good thing because it protected the low-paid and often unskilled. By a quirk of legal drafting, however, TUPE also applied to service businesses like advertising.
Let’s say I and 30 colleagues worked on Account X for Agency A. But Agency A, thanks to monumental cock-ups and mismanagement, lost the business to Agency B. Under TUPE, I and my colleagues could request to transfer to Agency B. Clearly this would suit neither the Client X nor Agency B.
Of course, it would suit Agency A – unless I was a star employee it wanted to keep – because it would no longer have to pay all those redundancy costs. Madness? Of course, especially if it is the winning agency which then has to pay redundancies.
Now, after years of lobbying by the IPA, it seems the government is finally taking the lessons on board. If, as seems likely, the clauses relating to Service Provision Changes are deleted, agencies winning a piece of new business can get on with celebrating it rather than phoning an HR lawyer.