A few months ago I received a text message that said, “Shane just won custody.” The phone number was from my hometown, but I didn’t recognize it. After a reverse lookup yielded nothing, I decided to text back even though the message was obviously not meant for me. I thought it might make a good story. Which it didn’t. So here goes nothing.
The coincidence is that my dog is named Shane. He looks like this:
He’s a fairly happy mutt, and as far as I know, he hasn’t been involved in any custody battles. I responded to the text, “Who is this?” I didn’t get an answer. A few hours later I texted again, “The weird thing is I have a dog named Shane.” Still nothing. I was left feeling very unfulfilled, but maybe there’s an interesting backstory that I didn’t know. I didn’t text again; I could have gotten in trouble for textual harrassment. That wouldn’t be cool. I did, however, imagine a story that revolves around that one short text. Think of the possibilities:
Wendy, an unwed mother, texting her best friend with the bad news that Shane, her former lover, won custody of their baby. The best friend will call to try to comfort Wendy…
A lawyer texting his colleagues back at the office that Shane, his client, won an expensive and emotionally draining case. The legal team will celebrate tonight…
A friend texting on behalf of Pat that Shane, Pat’s newly estranged twin, gets to keep the poodle that Shane and Pat took to the Westminster Dog Show last year and whose stud services are are sold at thousands of dollars an hour…
This anecdote demonstrates two potentially opposing advertising tactics:
Be as clear as possible as quickly as possible
Make people curious so they want to learn more
The text message I got about Shane wasn’t clear, so I wasn’t sure how to respond. (It wasn’t marketing, of course, but the example still works.) Text-message marketing — heck, most marketing — usually hits hard and fast. The benefit is front and center and the call to action is obvious.
But I responded anyway. The text message that might or might not have been about my dog wouldn’t have grabbed my attention unless there had been that odd coincidence. I was curious, but probably nobody else would have been. In general, however, I think people respond to cliff-hangers. (That’s why people stayed up all night to read The DaVinci Code; it certainly wasn’t for the quality of prose.)
Which begs the question of which is better, advertising that gives you answers or advertising that makes you ask questions? Well, I think it depends a lot more on the execution than how you get there.
For better or for worse, advertising affects us culturally as much as it affects us economicall. The United States, more than any other country, gets accused of having a culture of consumerism, consumption, and excess. We commoditize our lives and often rely on products to fix our problems. Some companies have even managed to create demand in markets that previously were empty.
I don’t know which came first, whether Americans naturally want stuff and advertisers help companies figure out the best way to satisfy them, or whether companies want to sell stuff and advertisers help them figure out how to tap into Americans’ psyches. The first scenario is demand-driven, and the second is supply-driven. But I suspect it’s a combination of both.
Demand-side consumerism is trickle-up — the call starts with people who want/need something and is answered by companies who develop products to fill the market. Supply-side consumerism is trickle-down — a company develops a product and shows people why they want/need it. Like I said, I think our socio-economy has a mix. For this blog post, however I’m going to focus on supply-side consumerism and how advertising can affect people’s attitudes. (The topic of how supply-side consumerism is influenced by culture is a whole different discussion.)
Take the case of diamonds. This article, written almost twenty years ago, describes how De Beers altered consumers’ perceptions of diamonds. This excerpt is long, but the entire article is worth reading:
Although it could do little about the state of the economy, N. W. Ayer [De Beers' advertising agency] suggested that through a well-orchestrated advertising and public-relations campaign it could have a significant impact on the “social attitudes of the public at large and thereby channel American spending toward larger and more expensive diamonds instead of “competitive luxuries.” Specifically, the Ayer study stressed the need to strengthen the association in the public’s mind of diamonds with romance. Since “young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings” it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship.
Since the Ayer plan to romanticize diamonds required subtly altering the public’s picture of the way a man courts — and wins — a woman, the advertising agency strongly suggested exploiting the relatively new medium of motion pictures. Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love. In addition, the agency suggested offering stories and society photographs to selected magazines and newspapers which would reinforce the link between diamonds and romance. Stories would stress the size of diamonds that celebrities presented to their loved ones, and photographs would conspicuously show the glittering stone on the hand of a well-known woman. Fashion designers would talk on radio programs about the “trend towards diamonds” that Ayer planned to start. The Ayer plan also envisioned using the British royal family to help foster the romantic allure of diamonds. An Ayer memo said, “Since Great Britain has such an important interest in the diamond industry, the royal couple could be of tremendous assistance to this British industry by wearing diamonds rather than other jewels.” Queen Elizabeth later went on a well-publicized trip to several South African diamond mines, and she accepted a diamond from Oppenheimer.
In addition to putting these plans into action, N. W. Ayer placed a series of lush four-color advertisements in magazines that were presumed to mold elite opinion, featuring reproductions of famous paintings by such artists as Picasso, Derain, Dali, and Dufy. The advertisements were intended to convey the idea that diamonds, like paintings, were unique works of art.
By 1941, The advertising agency reported to its client that it had already achieved impressive results in its campaign. The sale of diamonds had increased by 55 percent in the United States since 1938, reversing the previous downward trend in retail sales. N. W. Ayer noted also that its campaign had required “the conception of a new form of advertising which has been widely imitated ever since. There was no direct sale to be made. There was no brand name to be impressed on the public mind. There was simply an idea — the eternal emotional value surrounding the diamond.” It further claimed that “a new type of art was devised … and a new color, diamond blue, was created and used in these campaigns….
In its 1947 strategy plan, the advertising agency strongly emphasized a psychological approach. “We are dealing with a problem in mass psychology. We seek to … strengthen the tradition of the diamond engagement ring — to make it a psychological necessity capable of competing successfully at the retail level with utility goods and services….” It defined as its target audience “some 70 million people 15 years and over whose opinion we hope to influence in support of our objectives.” N. W. Ayer outlined a subtle program that included arranging for lecturers to visit high schools across the country. “All of these lectures revolve around the diamond engagement ring, and are reaching thousands of girls in their assemblies, classes and informal meetings in our leading educational institutions,” the agency explained in a memorandum to De Beers. The agency had organized, in 1946, a weekly service called “Hollywood Personalities,” which provided 125 leading newspapers with descriptions of the diamonds worn by movie stars. And it continued its efforts to encourage news coverage of celebrities displaying diamond rings as symbols of romantic involvement. In 1947, the agency commissioned a series of portraits of “engaged socialites.” The idea was to create prestigious “role models” for the poorer middle-class wage-earners. The advertising agency explained, in its 1948 strategy paper, “We spread the word of diamonds worn by stars of screen and stage, by wives and daughters of political leaders, by any woman who can make the grocer’s wife and the mechanic’s sweetheart say ‘I wish I had what she has.’”
De Beers needed a slogan for diamonds that expressed both the theme of romance and legitimacy. An N. W. Ayer copywriter came up with the caption “A Diamond Is Forever,” which was scrawled on the bottom of a picture of two young lovers on a honeymoon. Even though diamonds can in fact be shattered, chipped, discolored, or incinerated to ash, the concept of eternity perfectly captured the magical qualities that the advertising agency wanted to attribute to diamonds. Within a year, “A Diamond Is Forever” became the official motto of De Beers.
This wasn’t just about selling diamonds, it was about connecting diamonds to love — a product to an emotion — and to marriage — a product to a cultural institution. Forever.
Wait a minute… that actually happened? Diamonds haven’t been the symbol of love and pricelessness forever? Advertising alters cultural perceptions that quickly and profoundly?
Projecting forward, wouldn’t it be great if advertising could be used to shift our cultural perceptions toward a form of sustainable consumerism? I don’t mean sustainable in a patchouli-fueled down-with-the-man way, I mean sustainable in a this-contributes-to-our-long-term-quality-of-life way. Indeed, sometimes we advertise products or lifestyles that do the opposite (cough cough… cigarettes… Humvees… cough cough).
If advertisers can alter perceptions about marriage, how hard would it be, with a concerted effort, to alter people’s perceptions about our health? Or our environment? What if the phrase “Pollution is forever” entered our lexicon to counter “Drill, baby, drill”?
I read an article last week suggesting that “placing advertisements in sports games is one of the most effective ways to reach the sports fan audience.” It’s been going on for a few years (see these search results). It seems completely obvious — next we’ll learn that beer advertisements in bars are effective ways to reach drinkers. And EA Sports has a conflict of interest in sponsoring this study: they stand to make money on in-game ads. But I think there’s something interesting here… I’ll try to write more about it later.
Click the picture to see responses from Digg about this study:
Advertising agencies like to tout their ability to measure the effectiveness of their work — heck, we try to do that right here at RAIN.
That’s all well and good, but what if there’s no formula to figure out how much value an ad has added? To wit, how much value is added when a person likes a jingle for some product? A company can see how much it’s spending on marketing, and it can see what it’s revenue and profit are, but there’s not a perfect correlation between spending and earning. In fact, it’s probably not even close to 1. I’d guess that if you ran regressions to try to eliminate economic and cultural fluctuations, you still wouldn’t even be at a .5 correlation. (For those of you who are already shaking your heads, here’s a primer/refresher on correlation.)
What does this mean? It means that the amount of money you put into marketing isn’t really related to your revenue. Furthermore, as you’ve probably heard, “correlation does not imply causation.” (Here are a few examples that demonstrate this fallacy.) And what does that mean? It means that even if marketing and revenue are positively correlated, that does not imply that more marketing necessarily leads to higher revenue.
Anyway, that’s my guess.
Now that that’s all out of the way, what’s the point? Isn’t it deleterious to the advertising industry to suggest that it’s difficult to understand how our work works? What should we do instead?
What if you could find one person who represented a broader spectrum of people and you could talk to directly to that person to find out what makes him or her tick? For the sake of argument, let’s call this person Peter Backus. Peter knows exactly what he likes, so all we have to do is position the client’s products or services in a way that taps into those wants/needs.
Liking something is one thing, but what about loving something? What about loving someone? (It’s only a few days before Valentines’ Day, and Valentines’ Day is one of the advertising industry’s most gruesome Frankensteins… please indulge me.) Love, perhaps the least rational of emotions and the most difficult to quantify, is the one advertisers most frequently play on — followed, closely, unfortunately, by fear. But Peter Backus, our character from earlier, has tried to quantify love.
What kind of measurements can you take of love? Peter hasn’t tried to figure out how much love is worth; rather, he’s tried to calculate his chances of finding love. In doing so, he relied heavily on math. Notice, he didn’t use math to analyze his decision. Instead, he used it to get information about his target audience, guiding his decision-making process. And that’s a good place for advertising to start. Using numbers to inform your advertising is much more valuable than using numbers to measure your advertising.
Don’t advertise as much as you can afford, advertise as smartly as you can afford. You’ll have a better chance of finding a valentine/customer.
RAIN has been thinking about expanding into Antarctica. We figure we can corner the market, get the we’re-here-first head start. I was tasked with researching whether this is a good idea.
I started off with some basic polling. Turns out people don’t know much about Antarctica. I asked a friend, “What do you know about Antarctica?” His answer was, “It’s the largest continent.” I told him that Asia is the largest continent. He said something along the lines of, “But Antarctica takes up the whole bottom of the map.” I used my limited knowledge of the Mercator projection to explain that things near the poles are distorted and look much bigger than they actually are.
(Which brings me to an interesting tangent. I wanted to make sure I was spelling Mercator right — Mercator vs. Mercater — but I also wanted to remind myself what the other widely used projection is called. It’s the Robinson projection, and it’s been used by Rand McNally since the 1960s and was used by National Geographic from 1988 to 1998. (National Geographic has since switched to the Winkel tripel projection. Most textbooks have followed suit and switched from the Robinson Projection to the Winkel tripel projection, but I haven’t used that type of textbook since before 1998, so the Robinson is still the one that’s stuck in my head. (This slight detour is why I love Wikipedia specifically and the internet in general. It’s gratifying to be able to satisfy my curiosity so quickly.)))
Not that I know a whole lot about Antarctica either, but I do know that hardly anybody has been there. It’s isolated, inhospitable, terra incognita. So I watched Werner Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World to learn more about the types of people who would choose to live and work in Antarctica. Could RAIN personnel cope? Could we even survive?
This clip was encouraging and somehow familiar:
But then I saw this:
That sealed it. If penguins, animals that have evolved to live in Antarctica, are susceptible to derangement, I can only imagine how RAIN personnel would fare. We’re slightly off-kilter here in Portland… how much would that wobble be exaggerated at the bottom of the world? Here’s what would happen: we’d all turn to ICE. (You knew it was coming.)
I called off the proposed Antarctic expansion.
By the way, Antarctica is the fifth largest continent. I looked it up.
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