There are valuable lessons to be learned outside of adland’s bubble, writes Dominic Mills.
It’s tempting to think, sometimes, that advertising operates in the real world. But actually it doesn’t really, or at least not all the time.
Looking at some of the contents of my inbox this week, I felt I was living in a parallel universe. Here’s one…’Ten Browser Extensions That’ll Make You a Marketing God’. Just try explaining what that means to your mum or your aunt. Or why anyone should care.
Here’s another…’Doritos Challenges the Lad Bible to take the world’s first 12-hour holiday’. Imagine telling a friend, let’s say a teacher, that you had this cracking idea for Doritos and that it involved, er, the Lad Bible and a holiday challenge. They’d think you were off your head.
So this week, rather than write about adland-type stuff, I thought I’d look for real-world stuff and see how it relates to advertising.
And shock, there’s lots of it.
1. People like real things
Yes, we know that as the digital and virtual worlds expand, so real, physical, objects and experiences are coming back into in vogue: vinyl, festivals, beards and chin-stroking hipsters scribbling in Moleskine notebooks.
But here’s a celebration of the physical that takes it all a step further, the Future Artefacts Fair, taking place in Shoreditch (where else?) from 23-25 October. As it sounds, it is a celebration of ‘the future’ of physical media objects and a demonstration that things such as print are far from dead.
This obviously includes magazines – and I hope we see such lovingly crafted titles as Hot Rum Cow, Salt – a self-described magazine about ‘compassionate business thinking’, and Little White Lies – present.
But why not mail, too? After all, as Royal Mail’s Private Life of Mail research this year demonstrated, physicality assists long-term memory encoding.
More to the point, I hope the fair is attended by some planners – creative/digital/media/whatever – who can see what real-world people like and consume. They’d be less likely to dismiss stuff that’s printed as irrelevant.
2. Successful people read print
I found this fascinating piece by Michael Skapinker of the Financial Times from July, which reported on a reading study by two academics.
The nub of the argument, Skapinker suggests, is that print reading is better for people who want to get ahead in business because it encourages peripheral vision (literally and metaphorically, I assume). This matters because it is peripheral vision that encourages us to make lateral connections and see threats and opportunities – all useful tools for ambitious business people.
How does he come to this conclusion? According to the academic study, people who read non-fiction (the core of business reading matter) on a screen are less immersed in it, less sympathetic to it and less aware of the narrative thrust, than those who read the same material in print.
Amongst those who read non-fiction on screen and in paper, by contrast, there was no significant difference.
Hmm. I have some sympathy with his argument. I know I find it easier to retain information from print than from a screen. If I have to edit copy, I prefer to start from a print-out. And when I am reading a printed copy of a magazine or newspaper, the serendipity factor is attractive.
But this may simply to be an age thing, nothing to do with peripheral vision.
And at the same time, however, you can’t beat the convenience of a screen.
Nevertheless, it reminds us of a simple truth: in the media’s battle for attention and ad budgets, how people read or watch stuff can be as important as what they read or watch.
3. What goes on in China doesn’t stay there
Let me take a not-very-wild guess: that the economic events in China last week – devaluation, ongoing stock market crisis – will eventually feed their way through to adland in the form of major pitches for the likes of Diageo, GSK, Burberry, HSBC and L’Oreal.
They are all exposed to the Chinese economy, or the higher-end elements of it, and thus vulnerable to any crisis of confidence.
Indeed, we have already seen the effect of the ongoing slowdown in the Chinese economy on Diageo when it reported results in July.
Faced with problems like this, Diaego resorted to the time-honoured tactic – designed to keep the City happy – of declaring that it would find cost cuts to the tune of £500m.
It won’t be long before the beady eye of Diageo’s CCCO (that’s Chief Cost-Cutting Officer) falls on the marketing and media budgets. He or she will conclude that, in cost-cutting terms, this constitutes the low-hanging fruit, so off we go with another round of mega-pitches.
But will this work the other way round? Will those western companies that buy from or manufacture in China (e.g. Apple, B&Q, Gap, clothing and white goods companies) take advantage of a cheaper renminbi to go for top-line growth and ramp up their marketing efforts accordingly?
It would be nice to think so – just imagine, a round of pitches that aren’t about saving money, but about spending more.
But I doubt it, somehow. They’ll just use it as a means to ramp up margins.
4. Every cloud has a silver lining
So, the end of last week was pretty crap, weather-wise.
Those old standbyes of weather-linked promotional and advertising activity for the summer – the supermarket BBQ and lager ads, and the pharmacy sunscreen ads – were conspicuous by their absence.
But it seems that, beyond this, advertisers are pretty unimaginative when it comes to using the weather to boost tactical activity, as Mediatel’s fascinating piece by The Weather Channel last week showed.
This is odd, because the latest research from Barclaycard shows that when the sun shines pub takings go up (so far, so obvious), but when it’s rainy spend on takeaways and cinema visits increases.
There’s a clear lesson here – and it doesn’t take a genius to spot it: that short-term, weather-linked promotional and advertising activity, can make a difference in some sectors.
In the old days, the inflexibility of the media meant this sort of reactive spend was difficult. But that excuse won’t wash any more. The media owners are much more responsive, and advertisers claim to be more adept, nimble and reactive.
If they are, then let’s see more quick-turnaround, weather-linked, activity.
