Tango, youth brands, spies and big data

After a peaceful, media-free week in Turkey, Dominic Mills is back with a Tango flavoured war-cry as he takes a look at the latest campaign from the black sheep of adland, BBH. So, can the new ads match the genius of Howell Henry’s 1990 classics? Perhaps, but it’ll take time and money to make it really work…

Ad agencies are always in a bit of a cleft stick when they take on a brand with a history of famous advertising – and all the more so when, like Tango, it hasn’t been on the screens for a few years.

The temptation is to go with something radically different – one underlying motivation being for the agency to mark out its territory and differentiate itself from its predecessor/s. It’s more difficult for the agency to resist temptation and stick with the tried-and-trusted, perhaps adding a small tweak to make the ad more contemporary.

One way or another, the new agency is on a hiding to nothing. So which side of the line do the new BBH Tango ads – Swings and Cornershop, which debuted at last weekend in Britain’s Got Talent – fall?

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is that they’re pretty much bang in line with those made famous in the 90s by Howell Henry. You can watch a ‘Greatest Hits’ compilation here, starting with the infamous ‘slap’ ad that subsequently drew a ban for fear that it would encourage kids to go round smacking each other.

I say ‘surprisingly’ because BBH (whose symbol is the black sheep) isn’t an agency that achieved fame by following, er, sheepishly in its rivals’ footsteps. But BBH is also very smart when it comes to strategy, smart enough to realise that the strategy behind the original Tango ads is as relevant today as then.

And that strategy – pompous as it may be to use the word in conjunction with a carbonated fruit drink – is all about the instant hit you get with the first taste.

Howell Henry turned the instant hit into the slap, while BBH’s metaphor is the bodybuilder who shouts ‘Aaargh’. Very simple, really.

And like the first-generation Tango ads, the personality and tone of voice are similar: cheeky, irreverent and funny.

But Howell Henry’s genius was to turn make the slap idea part of popular culture, and you can see that BBH wants to do the same with ‘Aaargh’.

Will the kids run around bulking themselves up and shouting ‘Aaargh’? I’m not sure these ads will do the trick just yet. But I suspect the campaign will build and get better – just so long as Tango owner Britvic has the money and the time to stick with it.

Generation Y brand preferences – same as Mum and Dad’s

Well, here’s a surprise: Generation Y’s favourite brands include old-timers like Cadbury, Pringles, Heinz, Colgate and the BBC. Just like Generation A, or whatever you call the ones before Gen X.

How do we explain that? It’s not that difficult really. As every brand owner knows, brand preferences are formed early in life. It’s why marketing for products that aren’t age-specific or price-prohibitive is generally aimed at the younger age cohorts.

The likes of Cadbury, Pringles and Heinz are the brands they have grown up with and see every day in the larder or in their parents’ shopping baskets.

It’s also why, incidentally, when your parents complain that none of the ads are aimed at their cohort, you should tell them that’s because they’re unlikely to change their toothpaste or detergent brand now.

One of the more interesting things about the survey is that, when asked why they chose those brands, the top reasons were quality (72%) and performance (67%).

What they might have added, though, was that they’re also the ones that advertise most or, as with the BBC, possess a certain ubiquity.

Spies and big data

I’m just back from a media-free week in Turkey, and one of the joys of cutting yourself off is that you don’t waste time on any of the big issues in life such as, well, the future of mobile advertising or big data.

This nirvana-like state lasted until I got on the plane back and picked up The Times. Call it serendipity, call it punishment, but in close succession I read about the US Prism electronic snooping project and then an ad for IBM headlined ‘From details to desires: the power of big data’, extolling the virtues of some snake-oil system called IBM Smarter Analytics.

Apparently, IBM says, 80% of data currently produced is unstructured (another way of saying it doesn’t belong to corporates), originating from sources like images, videos, e-mails, posts and tweets – stuff it calls the ‘data of desire’.

Hmmm, I thought, just the kind of stuff the US spies will be looking through – not necessarily the data of desire, although there will be terrabytes of that around too.

So, really, Prism is just a big data story. It makes you wonder though, since there’s little evidence that the smartest marketers, geeks and pointy-heads can deal with all this volume of data, what hope has the US government? Can they predict, not customer churn, but ideological churn? And what about channel optimisation for terrorist communication?

Let’s hope they’ve seen the IBM ad and, as we speak, are signing up for Smarter Analytics.

By the way, there’s a number of marketing agencies out there by the name of Prism/Prizm, some of which play in the data space. Maybe they should change their names.