Search Ads Not Replacing TV Commercials, Web Banners After All

An article in today's Adweek highlights a new Microsoft study that purportedly shows that search ads are a waste of money.

Relevant quote:

"The reality is those people are already intending to go to your Web site," said Young-Bean Song, vp of analytics for Atlas, formerly part of aQuantive and now a unit of Microsoft. "What you're really paying for is a glorified Yellow Pages listing."

Also noted was that when eBay stopped advertising with Google for 10 days this June, their traffic was "not noticeably impacted."
This conclusion should come as no surprise, particularly to those of you who follow Toad's Tirades. If you think about how you interact with search ads, it's fairly obvious you're using them to find what you're looking for. So if I put "Volvo" into Google, intended to visit the car maker's site, it's sometimes easier to click on the search ad that comes up on top than to go to the list of link Google creates.

Not to say search ads are a complete waste. They're great for small companies in niche businesses where there are no well-known players. So if I'm looking for bird houses, and you're an investment banker who quit it all to open a small carpentry studio in Vermont, a search ad that links to Barry's Organic Bird Houses will definitely yield some results.

Casting Matters

TSR's comment about meeting the guy from the brilliant Starburst Berries & Cream commercial (YouTubed here as a special Monday morning treat for my lazier readers) put me in mind of how important casting really is.

There's something unique the actor pulled off in the aforementioned spot that takes it from weird to brilliant.

An even better example is "the Dell dude" (Ben Curtis) whose performance took what should have been a forgettably banal spot and turned it into a national catchphrase ("Dude, You're Getting A Dell!") There was something about the guy, something at once charming and likable and goofy that made that work. It's the magic of casting.

To that end, it never ceases to amaze me that clients insist on creating animatics to test TV commercials. (For the unintiated, animatics are crude animated renditions of a TV commercial that's meant to be filmed with live actors. The voices for the animated figures are provided by agency employees who clearly aren't actors and the whole thing bears as much resemblance to the real spot as I do to George Bush.) These monstrosities are, unfortunately, a staple of packaged goods clients and are literally used to determine which spots get on the air. (For those people not in the ad business, the absurdity of commercial testing is so unreal as to border on the fantastical.)

So what I've always wanted to do is put together a reel of classic movie scenes done as animatics, just to show what the effect of casting is. You know, the "Frankly, Scarlett I don't give a damn" scene from Gone With The Wind, the "You talkin' to me? There's no one else here?" scene from Taxi Driver. Vince Vaughn in Swingers. Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man... the list of great movies where casting made the movie is pretty endless. But I can think of no better way to show clients the foolishness of testing anything that involves casting before it's actually been cast than to show them how these scenes would have come off as animatics.

Get Your Head In The Game

Poor Virginia Heffernan. The Times’ very serious TV critic has the unenviable task today of reviewing the latest iteration of the Disney über-juggernaut High School Musical. And like so many in our business when confronted with content that’s clearly not aimed at them, she makes the mistake of reviewing it from her point of view.

So rather than an thoughtful explanation of why a 9 year-old might be enthralled with the production, we get a long-winded explanation of why a childless 30something hipstress is not.

Now Disney’s marketing machine has all but ensured that this evening’s premiere of High School Musical 2 is a seminal event in the lives of elementary school students across America, if not the world. (The Tadpoles are actually attending a party one of their friends is having where they can watch the show in all its 60 inch screen glory.) But Heffernan is only concerned with how she and her friends can enjoy the show via ironic karaoke experiences and doesn’t try and examine its popularity other than to express her complete bafflement.

The only positive note from her review is that all across Brooklyn the sort of hipster fathers who ban the Wiggles and force-feed their toddlers Death Cab For Cutie are vowing to themselves that their little Oscars and Esmés (and every hipster either has or knows a toddler named Oscar or Esmé) will never ever watch something this banal. (Fat chance.)

But for marketers and ad folk, the lesson here is that content-- whether it's a movie, a show, a website or a TV commercial-- needs to be judged using the aesthetics of the community it's targeted at. Because something aimed at old ladies-- or elementary school kids-- is not necessarily going to have universal appeal.

Nor should it.

Privacy Matters

So both Ad Age and Newsweek seem to have simultaneously discovered Facebook.

And completely missed LinkedIn and what makes it a far superior networking device for anyone who doesn’t want to mix their business and social lives.

The key to LinkedIn—and I can’t emphasize enough what a big deal this is—is privacy. You see with LinkedIn, the only way I can see who your connections are is if they’re my connections as well. Or connections of my connections. (Even then, it won’t tell you who they are—just that one or more of Xs “connections” knows your buddies Y and Z.) Better yet, you can turn that feature off, so that even people you’re connected to can’t see who else is part of your posse.

That’s huge. Facebook feels like you’ve put your entire address book online for the world to see. Which is very cool when you’re a senior in college, but not so cool when you’re a senior vice president.

LinkedIn also doesn’t require photographs. So I never have to see pictures of people I work with at the beach with no shirt on. I don’t have to know what kind of music they like either, or whether or not they saw “Die Hard 3.” The only feature it seems to have is a “Question” section that seems to draw a surprising amount of traffic. (You only get to see/answer questions from people in your extended network. Most of those doing the asking in my extended network seem to be some sort of HR consultants.)

I’m not saying that Facebook is useless: it’s a great for socializing, particularly if you’re in a life stage where that takes priority. Many of the tools on there are a lot of fun and definitely have potential beyond Facebook.

But for a business-only social network, LinkedIn seems to have found the right formula.


PS: Shout out to Matt Dickman for getting me thinking about all this. The video on his blog about LinkedIn explains this far better than I can.

A Poll

Mostly as an experiment, and because I'm curious, I've added a poll about the relevance of award shows.

It's completely anonymous and completely unscientific.

NB: I've asked several other bloggers to post this poll on their blogs. Mostly as a Jaffe-esque experiment to test the technology itself and to see the effect of multiple input portals on the data. (I just made that up. I have no idea if "multiple input portals" is a real thing.)
You can also find this poll on
MultiCult Classics
Adpulp
MakeTheLogoBigger

Tricks Of The Trade

A friend of mine got an ad into CA yesterday, and while I was glad for him (it was a nice ad) I have to admit that my first thought was “CA? Are they still around?”

Award shows fall in and out of fashion as the industry changes. CA and the One Show, the West and East coast stalwarts of the 1980s and 90s (respectively) never really adapted to the digital age and thus started to become less relevant. Meanwhile Cannes, formerly a place for big agencies to show off their television work, has stepped into the limelight.

Why is that? Well, first and foremost, award shows are a business, not some sort of quasi-official ceremony. In other words, they rely on agencies paying money—lots of money—to enter their shows in hopes of winning. Look at the UK’s D&AD awards. After years of claiming exclusivity by fastidiously not granting pencils in categories where they felt none were deserved, they’ve sort of been hoisted on their own petard, as agencies started realizing “why are we paying them $10,000 in entry fees if we’re not going to get anything to show for it?” (Clients being notoriously unaware of the difference between a D&AD pencil and say, a Mobius.)

Cannes, to their credit, realized that if agencies were going to spend money on award shows, and send their top creatives to judge them, the idea of an all-expenses paid vacation in the south of France was an especially effective lure. That, and they managed to get the digital and direct things right, thus drawing in a lot of top talent and top work from all areas. And the non-American location makes the whole thing seem decidedly “global.”

And speaking of Cannes, conversations with friends around the industry reveal that pretty much every agency came away from Cannes with the idea of replicating Saatchi New York’s success formula. (For those of you who missed it, Saatchi’s CD, Tony Granger, got their P&G clients to run and (allegedly) pay for a series of ads that were created expressly for Cannes. So while an unusual print campaign for Tide won the Grand Prix, consumers (or the vast majority of them, anyway) never actually saw it.

Now this reminds me of nothing so much as “Fallon Syndrome” in the late 80s and early 90s, where every big agency and junior team went out to try and find a barber shop or hot dog stand they could do ads for, in the hope of replicating the success of such Fallon classics as “A Bad Haircut Can Make Anyone Look Dumb.” (accompanied by a stock photo of Einstein.) A similar strain, “Martin Syndrome” had everyone looking for small quirky museums in need of free advertising.

This is just as dumb an idea today as it was 15 years ago. First off, great work is never easy to pull off, regardless of how many restrictions you remove. But more importantly, as agencies learned to their chagrin back in 1991 or so, if everyone is entering their ad for a barber shop into the One Show, your chances of winning get exponentially smaller.

So what to do? Well how about changing the rules. I mean Saatchi didn’t officially cheat, but come on—what they did certainly wasn’t in the spirit of the rules. Why not change the rules to require that in order to be entered in certain categories, a campaign has to represent a certain percentage of a brands' yearly spending*. Or some other device that prevents agencies from creating campaigns for awards shows.

Letting clients pay for ads that are created for award shows is truly counterproductive. All it does is reinforce the notion that creativity is a precious little indulgence that’s okay for award shows, but that “real” advertising is something completely different.

And that’s just dangerous.


*This is just an off-the-cuff suggestion—please refrain from stating why it makes no sense. Suffice it to say I’m sure it doesn’t.

Public Shaming, 2007

You know that when the Newark Star-Ledger features a story about the newfound power of consumers on the internet, we're beyond trend and moving on into the mainstream.

The article, which they don't seem have picked up from AP or anything, focuses on how consumers are using YouTube and other such sites to shame companies into rectifying their bad behavior.

This is important because once again it shows us the real power of the interweb, which is to put consumers in the drivers seat. Whether it's to ignore advertising and research their purchases on CNET or to counteract advertising with their testimonials to poor products and services.

Caveat emptor.

Back To School

Proving that there really is creative life in Chicago, a new(ish) boutique agency there called The Escape Pod has put together a back-to-school program for teens on behalf of their client Office Max.

Sorta, kinda based on Demi Moore's husband's show Punk'd, the premise of the show is that music students in a high school in suburban New Jersey are told that due to poor prior performance they are in danger of having their music program pulled and, in order to save it, they must pass a test that consists of pulling together and performing the theme from 2001, A Space Odyssey.

I won't give away more of the plot, but the denouement features the hot band The All-American Rejects.

What's more, the YouTube promo above has been viewed close to a million times already. And the show itself actually ran on live TV on the CW network.

There's a more complete website for the show here

Doing a TV show for a client like Office Max is a great idea. Few things are as tied to back-to-school as the purchase of school supplies. And the whole Punk'd format is a great draw.

There are online and offline elements to the campaign which tie together nicely. And The Escape Pod managed to pull the whole thing together without ever once referring to it as "storytelling."