The final speaker of the Annual Conference is Greg Stuart, the president and CEO for the IAB. He opened by saying, “I am here to share NOT Masters of marketing. I am here to share what the other 95% are doing.”
Marketing is not doing too well- there is some real trouble in the world of advertising. His presentation: What if We Were Wrong.
Over the past five years he has done research against $1 billion in advertising spending- his findings look at what is happening in marketing and it’s not a pretty picture.
He asks, if advertising had a slogan, what would it be? “Ads work wonders?” No. “Half the money is wasted” is more like it.
In the research- done against 30 major brands- including Motorola, Warner Brothers, ESPN, P&G, ING, Ford, Universal and Fisher Price- a random audience was divided in half, with a variable introduced to one side so that they could isolate what had an effect. This surveyed 1.1 million consumers. They found that over $112 billion of US ad spending is wasted.
Greg posed this question to the audience: What makes you think yours isn’t?
Advertisers have a tendency to believe that their ads are right, with no evidence to necessarily support that.
We know there are three things that we have to get right:
motivations, messaging, and media. The percentages that his study found that people are actually getting right, are 36%, 31%, and 83% respectively.
His example of not understanding customer motivations was ING, who used “Fresh Innovative Thinking” as one of their taglines. Greg asked the audience how many people choose financial institutions based on that motivator, to which no one raised their hands. “That’s exactly what we found.” So ING changed their ads, focusing on their simplicity for consumers, and the fact that they do all the behind the scenes work. The results were much more benefits-focused campaign.
His advice is to figure out why consumers buy your brand, are you targeting a valuable customer segment, and have you wrung all ambiguity from your definition.
For messaging, Stuart conducted five recent studies of online ads with creative testing done prior to launch. Only one set of ads required no adjustment. Two of the brands found half were not effective, and two discarded all of the ads and started all over. Who were these five? P&G, J&J, Kraft, Nestle and Target.
Key learning? Online advertising MUST pass the glance test. Better creative can make the difference between success and absolute failure- he showed a Colgate online ad that was largely more effective once it had an image of the toothpaste in it constantly. Persistent branding making all the difference.
Media has so many issues, the largest of which is diminishing returns. Without knowing your ROI, you can’t optimize it. So you must know the value of each and every dollar.
The truth be told: Marketing is hard. Part of the problem is that we haven’t recognized how hard it really is. Suppose you have five options- five brand positionings, five customer segmentations, five ad creative approaches, five magazine schedules/plans, and five online plans. That is 3,125 different possible combinations, so how many do you think really succeed?
The future will only be more confusing, he says. We haven’t really acknowledged how hard this is, and how much trouble the business is. The reality is that no one is saying that the industry is doing well.
So what is a marketer to do? Here is Greg’s Magic Formula for Success:
- Universal agreement to goals
- Have a backup plan (Plan B)
- Know the value of a dollar
The fourth M, and the real opportunity, is Maximization. His example is Ford- the launch of their Ford F150 truck, the #1 selling vehicle in the US. Usually you launch a truck on Sunday during an NFL football weekend. Ford said, what if we start online on a Saturday? They ran an ad on the homepage of the three portals on Saturday- Yahoo!, MSN and Netscape all showed a simple online ad that day, and in that one day that ad reached 43% of ALL men 25-49.
He ended by telling the audience that “There’s a big opportunity for us to really fix the business and change the world of advertising. We have to come up to snuff with the rest of the aspects of business.”
He hits the nail on the head. All the effort wasted and the billions spent without any idea of ROI.
I have the solution: Positioning
Instead of creating an ad for them to remember.... We place an ad within a moment they will never forget.
Posted by: stephanl8 | October 09, 2006 at 04:49 PM