Posts filed under 'advertising'
Making Britain think
Andrew Curry writes:
We’ve been sharing some of the puzzlement about the ‘Britainthinks’ posters which have appeared since the New Year. The claim on the website is that “Britainthinks is an independent space where the opinions of the British public can be publicly expressed.” But it turns out that they’re actually a cunning plan by the ad industry to promote the value of outdoor as an advertising platform. So, obviously it’s worked, since we’ve been exchanging emails and I’ve been moved to write a blog post about it.
But the slogans they’ve chosen to provoke Britain to thought seem carelessly unimaginative. The ‘Career Women Make Bad Mothers‘ posters had to be pulled after a howl of disapproval on Mumsnet (more than a thousand posts at time of writing) , which I suppose goes to prove the point of the Outdoor Advertising Association’s chief executive that outdoor can drive online traffic. Be careful what you wish for.
And as for ‘Educashun isn’t working‘ (see what they did there?), for people of my generation it inevitably recalls – no doubt deliberately – the Saatchi campaign which elected Margaret Thatcher in 1979. So much so that when my son asked me about it I told him (before I’d found out about the OAA’s thumbprints) it was probably put up ahead of this year’s election by a group which supported the Conservative party.
Add comment 13 January 2010
The Great Brand Quiz
Eloise Keightley writes:
Every fortnight The Futures Company holds an internal breakfast meeting, the MMM (or Monday Morning Meetings), to share knowledge and ideas. In our last meeting before Christmas the MMM team put together a quick brands and advertising quiz to test how much the company had been paying attention to British brands and their ad campaigns during 2009.
Here’s a selection of the questions from the quiz. We think a good score is more than half – the answers are below the fold, if you feel the need to cheat a little. Just click on the right or left hand side of the slides to go forwards and back.
Add comment 23 December 2009
Apologies from the future
Stacey Yates writes:
This engaging advertising campaign, supposedly from the future, was commissioned by Greenpeace and revealed at Copenhagen airport last month in the run up to the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference.
The series of posters display photographs of world leaders, manipulated to appear ten years older, saying sorry for not having done more about climate change. Some haven’t aged well. The aim: to make us – and them – think about the consequences of not taking climate change seriously enough.
I think it’s a successful campaign that resonates with what we do at the Futures Company when we ask people to position themselves in the future, and testament to photography’s immediacy in communicating a convincing truth.
From top to bottom: Obama; Brown; Lula; Sarkozy. Agency: Arc Communications/ Concept, design, creative direction: Toby Cotton/ Airport photos of the ads in situ: ©Christian Aslund/Greenpeace
Add comment 8 December 2009
Boosterism
Sophie Stringer writes:
Stepping through Waterloo Station on my way to work the other day a sprightly looking girl in luminous green leggings and a white t-shirt passed me a sample for Bassetts ‘Soft and Chewy’ – as seen in the picture.
These energisers, the packaging tells me, are ‘delicious citrus flavour pastilles with B vitamins and CoQ10’. The packaging looks pretty feminine (and the sample pack – as someone pointed out – bears an unfortunate resemblance to a packet of condoms), and the pastilles themselves are in a blister pack, Strepsils-style. The instructions are to pop one a day, or up to three if you’re in need of an extra boost. There’s theory as well as method: the associated leaflet advises that ‘avoiding the slump’ is ‘not about a quick fix, it’s all about maintenance’.
Bassetts already makes a range of chewy vitamins for different ages, and for ‘all the family’. But this is the first time I’ve seen a specific product for adults, and also the first time I’ve seen fortification for energy promoted with a vitamin product. The inclusion of Coenzyme Q10 is also a novelty.
So why launch this now? The product certainly responds to our burgeoning desire for peak performance, along with concerns about the health effects of pick-me-ups like cola or coffee. It also speaks to the resurgence of time-pressured consumers in the wake of the financial crisis. It’s not enough any longer for supplements just to be good for us; they need to work hard and be focused about the needs they are addressing, it seems. But at the same time, there’s some pleasure to be had in the eating, unlike the yeasty smelling vitamin C tablets of yesteryear.
They are probably better for you than mopping up the spare biscuits as you leave a meeting, but I’m a bit suspicious about the proposition: things which sound quite similar to confectionery promising an energy boost might be treading close to a sugar rush, and Bassetts’ efforts to dissuade us of this – with box and blister pack – make them feel oddly medical. And Bassetts can’t help but evoke Trebor Bassett, and as it happens the Bassetts’ parent company, like Trebor Bassett, is part of the Cadbury group.
Will it take off? The trends are on its side, but it may take time to persuade consumers of the value of this particular solution. The jury’s still out.
Add comment 15 October 2009
The last place to go
Andrew Curry writes:
We’ve been having a bit of an argument in the London office about dixons.co.uk advertising which has been running on the London underground. The picture, above, captures the flavour; lots of text in which a trip to an identifiable department store to look at some upmarket consumer electronics is descibed quite affectionately, with the final line, in Dixons’ branding, “then go to dixons.co.uk to buy it.”
The argument is about the ad’s effectiveness. On the one hand, it’s right on trend. Work we did for AOL a couple of years ago identified the way in which consumers shift between online and offline channels increasingly seamlessly as their customer journey develops from awareness to purchase and maintenance. And our post-recession research shows an increase in ’savvy shopping‘.
On another hand, the copywriting about the department store experience is sufficiently warm that it reminds you of the service such stores offer – and not everyone is as transactional as the ad tries to suggest, even in a recession.
And on another: the argument is about the effectiveness of this for Dixon’s. Its own stores, now closed or rolled into the Curry’s Digital brand (full disclosure: absolutely no relation), were a byword for customer indifference. And online, Dixon’s is not the cheapest supplier.
In fact the ad polarised office opinion – an impromptu survey showed that half the people who responded liked it, and half didn’t. The half that didn’t tended to be older and better-off.
And I have to say that I’m in the second category. The ad’s strapline, “Dixon’s; the last place to go”, is clever, but it’s too clever for its own good. For me it taps in, almost too precisely, to a whole lot of brand associations which – were if I Dixons – I’d have preferred to leave dormant.
1 comment 7 October 2009
Hiding out in the coffee wars
Alex Steer writes:
Starbucks hasn’t had it easy, at least for the past decade. But whether being attacked by Naomi Klein for alleged anti-competitiveness in No Logo in 2001, or more literally attacked by demonstrators during a rally in London in January, Starbucks has always toughed it out. Until the recession, that is.
In late 2008, McDonald’s set up a giant billboard outside Starbucks HQ in its home town of Seattle. Proclaiming that ‘Four Bucks Is Dumb’, it advertised McDonald’s new line of (less expensive) espresso coffees. It was a well-timed campaign, and to judge from its share price, Starbucks spent three months in shock.
Its new strategy, announced last week, suggests that the coffee giant still has the caffeine jitters. It has opened three new outlets in Seattle – without any Starbucks branding. 15th Ave. Coffee and Tea and its sisters look and feel like independents. The muted press release from Starbucks says that the unbranded stores offer ‘new opportunities for discovery, a high level of interaction and a deep connection to the local community’.
But these things – experience, interaction, community – are central to Starbucks’s brand. Hiding the brand suggests a company with an identity crisis. Perhaps Starbucks has been told that, in a recession, consumers retrench to the familiar and local. This may be true, but research from the US and elsewhere suggests that reports of a ‘bonfire of the brands’ are somewhat exaggerated.
The fuller story is that, for American consumers, price matters more. It’s no longer the poor relation to quality and convenience. But price isn’t everything. The brands that thrive in the downturn will be those that offer quality and experience at a fair price and give consumers what they want – for example, acting on the recessionary trend towards going out for breakfast, not dinner (good news for coffee houses).
So four bucks may not be bad – if they come with a little bit more of a bang. Starbucks needs to show its consumers that it understands this. But to build this trust, it needs to keep on being Starbucks.
The picture at the top is of Rob Brandt’s ‘Crushed Coffee Cup’ design, and is used with thanks.
1 comment 28 July 2009
Advertising or bust
Andrew Curry writes:
I’ve been watching quite a lot of ITV4 this month, because of its Tour de France coverage, which means I’ve seen a lot of the current ad for the VW Passat. It’s a curiosity for two reasons; first, it’s clearly been made, inexpensively, for the British market, rather than being a ‘Euro-ad’ with English voiceover, and second, because it has a clear ‘recession’ storyline. Man leaves large bank-type building with his work things in a cardboard box, which promptly sheds its contents onto the pavement, leading to a little cameo story along a closure-laden high street before (at last) he gets to his car, singing all the way (more than a nod to Morecambe and Wise) about the power of positive thinking.
There seems to be a sting in the tail; the cheery sheep, nodding along to the song through the bars of their truck are clearly on their way to the slaughterhouse. With the implication, of course, that our hero might also be on the way to the knacker’s yard.
Strongbow has also been having fun with the financial crash, and has buried a treat or two on the internet. You’ve probably caught their Henry V pastiche in which a Kenneth Branagh lookalike makes a rousing speech to the assembled tradesmen of England (gasfitters, dishfitters, etc). We recently came across a second version in which Henry’s gaze alights on a group of bankers – and he is lost for words. You can see here what happens next.
Add comment 23 July 2009
Some good things we’ve seen #2
Compiled by Tom Ding
Passed around the office lately were:
- A comparison of the news-to-death ratios of Swine Flu and Tubercolosis by Hans Rosling, adding an interesting perspective to Alex’s earlier post. Guess what: lots more people die of TB, but it hardly gets any news coverage.
- Naturally 7 wowing the crowd with some full-on beatboxing, in whch they impersonate a small orchestra, a video from this year’s TED conference.
- A great little insight on depictions of the future in advertising, still strangely trapped in some old-fashioned futures borrowed from the 1970s.
- The idea bounty, where creative sorts can sell ideas straight to brands. Although, as our IT Manager pointed out, the terms and conditions make for scary reading, and might just be enough to make you think twice about offering your best ideas.
- And finally, is it co-creation? is it mass customisation? is it an inventive way of improving the margins on crisps even further? The picture at the top of the post top might offer some clues. Whichever it is, the new Create-a-chip Kit from Kettle Chips is only available in the US at the moment, so we’ll have to leave that piece of research to our American colleagues.
Tuck in!
Add comment 22 May 2009
When saying sorry doesn’t work
Andrew Curry writes:
Suddenly, ’sorry’ seems to be the easiest word, at least in London. Quite apart from politicians saying sorry, eventually, about their expenses, we’ve had Marks and Spencers saying sorry for charging more for bigger bras, and (as Andy Stubbings has mentioned here) the London Evening Standard saying sorry in an extensive poster campaign for, well, for pretty much everything.
It’s true that the Standard’s branding is discreet and it’s mostly done by typography, but it seems as if the paper is saying sorry for being complacent, predictable, negative, and out of touch among other things.
As ad campaigns go, it has the merit of getting them talked about (as this post demonstrates) although for this non-reader the Standard was always a smug evening paper which pandered to the prejudices of its core audience in the commuter belt.
Indeed the whole campaign, prompted by the arrival of new Russian owner and new editor, feels like they’ve done some focus groups with lapsed readers and slapped the findings straight on to the billboards. (Which saves the inconvenience of a debrief, I guess).
Will any of these work? I think the M&S apology will – it’s a simple issue with a simple remedy. I’m sceptical about the other two. In the face of their respective declining markets, both paper and politicians will find that saying sorry isn’t enough.
The picture at the top, published under a Creative Commons licence, was taken by renaissancechambers, whose photostream is here.
1 comment 14 May 2009
Old and unimproved
Andy Stubbings writes:
Pessimism is an often underrated emotion. In this dismal economic climate, brands like Schweppes (with their series of woodcut style print ads that send up British political figures) and even the Evening Standard (with their “Sorry” bus and tube advertising) have sought to capitalise on consumer discontent and, most probably, a simmering resentment towards our political and economic institutions (for a wonderfully vitriolic example of this anger, see Matt Taibbi’s ‘The Big Takeover’).
However, no mainstream brands appear to have done this as explicitly as Shredded Wheat in the US. The “Progress is Overrated” print ad above is part of a campaign by cereal manufacturer Post to publicise the simple, unchanged origins of their product. As you would expect, the long-copy form and type-setting feel of the print ad are wantonly old-fashioned, conveying “back-to-basics” message (although the slapstick tone of other campaign media feels at odds with this). What is especially interesting about the copy, however, is that it namechecks waste concerns, resource shortages and the impact of climate change as evidence that we have not progressed (though curiously no mention of the financial crisis. The people who buy Shredded Wheat are mainstream American consumers, many of them mums buying for their kids. The tone of the campaign (by Ogilvy & Mather in New York) implies that research has found this attitude reasonably prevalent in the target audience, which suggests that consumer discontent may be quite widespread.
While it may be difficult for established brands like Schweppes and Shredded Wheat to reinvent themselves as the Voice of Discontent, I think there is a substantial opportunity for less well-known brands to take this on, in the way that Mountain Dew reinvented itself as the ’slacker’ brand in the midst of the corporate greed of the 1980s. With so many brands offering similar messages of solidarity and empathy with consumers at the moment, it might be that pessimism proves a smarter and more distinctive position.
The picture is borrowed, with thanks, from Noise Between Stations.
1 comment 13 May 2009
