A Target Worth Watching

Some think that Target has lost its cachet.  A June WSJ article says that the star retailer’s recession-driven strategy to focus on food and low prices works at the expense of its chic image.  This, they say, has confused its audience and put pressure on the company’s large, high-margin fashion and home décor business.   After you look at this ad from the September issue of House Beautiful, what do you think?

When we first saw the colorful ad, we were impressed by Target’s bold strategy and sharp focus (and not a little surprised by how broad the Missoni product line has grown).  Going well beyond Missoni’s roots as an upscale Italian fashion house, the ad shows many home products such as drinking glasses, plates, bowls, even wall hangings, all with the iconic chevron design.   In a magazine aimed at interests other than clothing and for a store interested in clothing and more, Target highlights the upcoming promotion with showing newly added accessories such as kitchenware, home décor, bikes, handbags and shoes, in addition to their flagship look in clothes.  Target plans to spotlight the Missoni products between September 13 and October 22, or “as long as supplies last”, many of which will be sold within the startling price range of $2.99 to $54.99.  Further, the ad features Margharita Missoni, the third generation family member and model involved in developing the Missoni line, differentiating and personalizing the brand from other design icons now part of large conglomerates.

If you haven’t heard of Missoni, mention the name to a few of your style-conscious friends or check out the 20-page Missoni for Target blockbuster in the September issue of Vogue.

As interesting as the ad was to us as an example of how to add excitement in a usually been-there-done-that product category, it was even more so as an example of high-risk-high-reward advertising.  What do you think?  Ennui or excitement?  Risk or reward?  Bonus question: Do you think the TV commercial is as strong as the print ad?

Postscript: Advertising Proof of Life

Added October 14, 2011

Target’s Missoni offer proved so successful that the Target website crashed on the first day. And in “an unusual fumble for the large retailer, Target was unprepared for online shoppers’ hunger for the items. The Target.com site was wiped out for most of the day; the company said that demand for items was higher than it was on a typical day after Thanksgiving, and that is usually the biggest shopping day of the year.” (New York Times) For the month, Target’s same-store sales were up a better than expected 5.3%.

Uncommonly Good Advertising

Did you catch the most recent Keebler commercial featuring two sisters returning home after school?  It’s saporous.  After a cursory greeting to their Mom on their way straight to the kitchen, the older sister, maybe 11- or 12-years-old, reaches for the last yummy-looking cookie in the pack.  The scene shifts to the younger sister, maybe 6-years-old, watching her older sister’s actions with a puppy-dog expression that says, “Can I have one, too?”  Then, the two girls’ eyes meet and the older girl, in a moment of decisive hesitation, selflessly gives the cookie to her sister.  As the older sister turns back to the package, lo-and-behold, there’s one more cookie left – goodness rewarded – with the help of head elf Ernie and the Hollow Tree Factory.  All are winners, even the viewers, who will be drawn into the mini-drama and feel like standing up and cheering when it is over.  Quite a sensitive use of narrative, emotion and viewer involvement on both the parent and child levels.  The chronology, climax/resolution, character, context and a :30 dash of imagery/detail all contribute to an emotional intensity that may vary based on the audience, but will create a few positive emotional moments for the target.  And, very importantly, all while still keeping the product center-stage.  Look for it if you dare…because if you do you’ll want some Keebler cookies.

Very Pretty, General. Very Pretty. But, Can they Fight?*

According to Carl von Clausewitz, the best strategy in war is always to be very strong, first generally then at the decisive point.  It is also the best strategy in advertising.  For us, being generally strong is about branding and the decisive point is about belief change.  Simply, effective advertising should brand well and present meaning that changes beliefs.

These IBM ads from the August 11, 2011 Wall Street Journal present an interesting case in point.  Ads that are colorful, marshaled in large force and well-positioned (each on the back page of a different section of the newspaper) make them and the brand name more likely to be noticed.  But ads that talk meaningfully to a small proportion of the audience, lack visualization of the benefit (including the execution that is about visualization), and are hard-to-read in places (some body copy support) make them less likely to be strong at the decisive point of changing beliefs.   What would advertising disciples of Clausewitz and Pinkley say about them?

* Memorably asked by Vernon Pinkley (Donald Sutherland), prisoner 2 in “The Dirty Dozen,” as he inspects Number 1 Company of Col. Everett Dasher Breed (Robert Ryan).

Battle of the Brand(Manager)s

Two juice pouch ads from Kraft exemplify the classic struggle advertisers and parents face when talking with kids – fun vs. sensibleness.  The Kool-Aid ad definitely brings the fun with the bright purple tongue while the Capri Sun ad touches on both fun and sensible choice.  On the one hand, fun is important, but ads that are only about fun are generally less persuasive and make a less long-lasting appeal.  On the other hand, it is hard to do both fun and sensibility well in the same ad.

Bonus: does the location of the package cut influence ad performance and, if it does, which is the better placement?

Capri Sun versus Kool-Aid

Trust, But Verify

For a cool $5 million, maybe more, Groupon became this year’s poster child for how not to advertise. And it did so on America’s largest television stage, the Super Bowl.

The company’s commercials, which included an in-program parody about Tibet featuring Timothy Hutton, and similarly-toned pre- and post-game spots about saving the whales with Cuba Gooding and deforestation with Elizabeth Hurley, were met with widespread negativity. Many called the communications offensive. G&R’s own research placed audience reaction near the bottom of all Super Bowl ads, below perennial whipping boy GoDaddy.com, but above HomeAway.com’s “Ministry of Detourism” (Test Baby), which was also pulled by the advertiser and merited another CEO apology.

At first, Groupon defended its efforts. Then, it pulled the ads. Then, CEO Andrew Mason further distanced the company from the criticism by saying that he put too much trust in the ad agency charged with developing the creative (BusinessWeek).

Whether an ad airs on the Super Bowl or elsewhere, the fallout from faulty creative can be significant. The costs go well beyond wasted production and airtime, and red-faced CEOs. Even when it is masked by otherwise strong marketing and business results, poor advertising damages brand and agency reputations, just as if someone had taken a hammer to them. The damage is most obvious when the advertising appears on high visibility programming like the Super Bowl, but can happen with any campaign.

As the many Super Bowl examples of it demonstrate, poor advertising is surprisingly common. Before its current “talking baby” campaign, E*Trade spent $2mm to show a monkey and two men wasting $2mm. Within its better-received monkeys campaign, CareerBuilder.com spent $2.7mm to tell the story of an unhappy employee’s heart bursting out of her body and running to tell her boss that she quits. Outpost.com spent $2.6mm to shoot gerbils at its name for most of its 30 seconds and was not heard from again. And Apple, just one year after running what many people consider to have been the best Super Bowl ad of all time, “1984,” ran what some people consider to be the worst Super Bowl commercial of all time, “Lemmings.” The company didn’t return to the Super Bowl stage until 14 years and one Steven Jobs hiatus later.

Flawed creative hurts agencies as well. Even Super Bowl agencies with strong creative pedigrees see accounts head to the door and their statures suffer. The work for Groupon  was done by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, an agency that is well-known for edgy advertising (Coke Zero) that can be controversial and produce significant PR value (Burger King) and also advertising that is heartfelt and empowering (AmEx Open). The initial E*Trade work was the work of Goodby Silverstein & Partners (Doritos; Sprint; Netflix). Sandwiched in between their more familiar monkey motif, CareerBuilder.com tried out a Wieden+Kennedy (Coca-Cola; Nike; Old Spice) idea. The Outpost.com commercial was created by Cliff Freeman and Partners (Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef”). None of the agencies is still involved with its Super Bowl client and Cliff Freeman is no longer in business.

With so much at stake, why does poor advertising end up getting run at all? The simple answer is that all of us – even writers, producers, directors, experienced marketers and ad agencies – have trouble when it comes to telling whether something that we’ve created is good or not. Here’s why.

1. Ads are deceptively complex stimuli to characterize. Although simpler than movies and TV shows, commercials present the same analytical challenges when anyone attempts to assess how well their many moving parts work or don’t work in isolation and together. That’s because kinetic stimuli contain more variables than the human mind is capable of processing; the brain is limited and selective in the number of items that it perceives, remembers and thinks about. No matter how experienced a movie, network or advertising professional is, he or she is not mentally equipped to weigh all the combinations of content variables and syntaxes that influence response. As evidenced by the number of box office busts, TV cancellations, and advertising failures, simply judging whether a movie is good, a TV show engaging, or a commercial effective will only meet limited success.
2. We are not very good at inferring the relative responses of others. Ninety percent of drivers feel that the quality of their driving is in the top 50 percent of drivers. Sixty-eight percent of professors rate themselves in the top 25 percent for teaching ability. The bottom 25 percent of students think they do better than 65 percent of their class. Ninety percent of entrepreneurs think that their new business will be a success when most new businesses fail. Forecasting whether an ad will be a success or failure in the minds of others is even more uncertain when the stimulus is new and different, which Super Bowl commercials (and all good creative) should be.
3. We are reluctant to use the best means we have for understanding what others will think, which is to ask them. According to Dan Gilbert, this is because we tend to overvalue our own uniqueness. Dan’s thinking may explain why the best opinion-seeking method we have in the advertising world, copy testing,[1] is often left undone. This is unfortunate because the more someone knows about how others will react to a stimulus, the better he or she will be at avoiding the inherent error in affective forecasting and ad approval.

Poor commercials are the consequence of the limitations we run up against when we rely on intuition and logic to analyze complex stimuli and predict how others are going to react to it. They are not the result of too much agency trust as Groupon’s Andrew Mason put it. Independent, quantitative research by expert providers mitigates the considerable downside in high risk/high reward advertising and protects the company’s most important asset – the brand.  Trust, but verify.

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[1] Quantitative testing should not be confused with focus group research, which is good for development work, but not good for evaluative work. The ambiguity of focus group responses is impossible to reliably interpret and the error rate that results from small samples sizes and variable group dynamics is no better than chance alone.

Lil Jon Knows How to Sell Advertising

In Season 11, Episode 4 of Celebrity Apprentice, Teams Backbone and A.S.A.P. were given the challenge to come up with a :30 commercial to showcase a new videophone product from the company, ACN. The two commercials were evaluated by ACN representatives. Did ACN get it right with their final selection?

The teams were charged with creating a commercial that would be judged for creativity and originality, company brand messaging, and product integration.  Additionally, ACN explained to each team that they were looking for a commercial that would make an emotional appeal.

The men’s team, Team Backbone, went with an edgier commercial that they called “Tommy Gets Engaged.”  In the commercial, parents, one of whom is played by Gary Busey, open a Christmas gift from their son, Tommy; it is a videophone with instructions to plug it in and call.  They do, and Tommy then uses the phone to introduce his fiancé, Pablo, a mascara-wearing José Canseco.

The women’s team, Team A.S.A.P., produced a vintage AT&T-style, high-touch commercial that showed a daughter in France as an exchange student phoning her parents back in the U.S.  After talking to the father, and introducing him to her host mother, played by Dionne Warwick, she connects with her mother, played by actress Marlee Matlin, who speaks and signs her deep love to her.

Each commercial was introduced to 450 ACN sales leaders by their Celebrity Apprentice Project Managers. After seeing both spots, the ACN participants were asked to vote on the one they “wanted.” The A.S.A.P. spot received 47% of the votes, while the Backbone spot received 53% of the votes and was declared the winner. By going with “Tommy,” did ACN correctly pick the stronger commercial?

The ACN team does a good job at kicking off the assignment by specifying the success criteria for the commercial.  Creativity and originality are not always necessary, and rarely are they enough by themselves, but coupling them with even vague objectives for brand messaging and product integration provides a good roadmap for brand building advertising. The additional directive that the advertising be emotionally connected helps clarify expectations, but not by much. All effective advertising makes an emotional connection with its audience. Based on the ACN criteria, the Backbone commercial wins on originality, but the A.S.A.P. commercial wins on brand messaging and product integration and so to us is the stronger commercial.

The close 53% to 47% vote in favor of “Tommy Gets Engaged” by the ACN employees/participants shouldn’t move us off that conclusion. Input from the company’s sales organization on an advertising campaign can be useful, but it is the opinion of customers and prospects that will cound. What sales team really “wants” is advertising that will help them sell the most.

Credit, though goes to Lil Jon, the Backbone Project Manager, who was brilliant in “selling” his commercial to the ACN viewers.  He fired them up before and after they watched it. He astutely and credibly pulled them in via emotionally appealing ideas that the commercial was cool, could go viral, and even would be airworthy for Super Bowl telecast. For his efforts, Lil Jon deservedly received $40,000 for his charity, United Methodist Children’s Home.  But in our view, the A.S.A.P. entry better met the ACN communications objectives of originality, brand messaging and product integration and would be the more effective brand building commercial for ACN. In the words of David Ogilvy, “If it doesn’t sell, it’s not creative.”

Unwrapping the Wrapper

Sometimes, advertising that is too bold and “in your face” can cause negative reactions rather than positive ones. What do you think of this ad that wraps around USA Today? Too much, just right or not enough?

Freshness or zestiness? Now that’s a pickle.

Does ad content matter? Is one of these ads more likely to cause you to stop and read it? Which one and why? Does one make you any more likely to buy? Which one and why? Overall, which ad would you run if it was your brand and why?

 

Crocs Come to Life for Summer

You’ve probably seen the new Croc commercials that feature life-like Crocs running to greet their “owner” after a long day of work, and it looks like this concept has also migrated to their print ads. So what are your thoughts on the ads? Are the Croc creatures cute and cuddly or weird and creepy?

Give Us Your 2 Cents On Neutrogena’s Healthy Defense

May is officially Skin Cancer Awareness Month, so it seemed like the appropriate time to take a look at this ad for Neutrogena sunscreen. What do you think about it? Does the two page spread catch your eye and give you the info you are looking for? Or is it too much to take in?