Opportunity Finds Empowerment

(continued from Ideas that Empower, see 5/31/07 below)

Okay, we’re ready to take a stab at refreshing our definition of advertising for the 21st century. Based on our discussion from previous posts, we’re beginning from a definition established in 1904 by John E. Kennedy when he said advertising is “salesmanship in print.” Kennedy’s definition superseded the idea that advertising was “keeping your name before the public” or that advertising was “news about a product”.

Let’s consider three things we’ve learned about advertising over the years related to timing, relationships with media, and empowering ideas.

Our new definition of advertising should capture the idea that advertising is effective when it is relevant to the consumer at a particular point in time. For advertising to work, there has to be opportunity. A consumer must have a need or a hope (although this could be latent or sub-conscious), and the means for fulfillment. The advertising message should be present when it is most relevant to the consumer.

Our new definition of advertising should also respect the “delivery” of the advertising message. “Delivery” is something of a misnomer. Advertising is discovered, rather than delivered. It is found because a consumer has a relationship with a particular media vehicle where the advertising also visits. For advertising to be welcome, it should respect the relationship between the consumer and the media.

Finally, our new definition of advertising should recognize that successful advertising motivates and empowers individuals. Empowering communications enable consumers to find what they need (rationally or emotionally) in the ad message.

Our new definition for advertising in the 21st century might begin as follows: Advertising is an empowering expression (an idea) in search of a hopeful prospect with the means for fulfillment. In other words, advertising is “Empowerment seeking Opportunity.”

“Empowerment seeking Opportunity” sounds a lot like “salesmanship in print,” doesn’t it? Only it’s not as pithy. “Empowerment seeking Opportunity” defines the challenge we face as planners and advertisers, but we’re not finished yet. Our definition needs to be turned around to more accurately portray the relatively weaker position of advertising to the stronger position of the consumer. We chase prospects until they catch us.

Success in advertising is the result of opportunity finding empowerment through relationships with media and the ideas expressed therein. We might better say that advertising is the catalyst for Opportunity finding Empowerment. “Opportunity finding Empowerment” frames our understanding of the challenges we face better than its opposite, “Empowerment seeking Opportunity” which is simply another way of saying “salesmanship in print.”

In 2001, Bob Brennan (then President of Leo Burnett Worldwide), made the following observation:

Until recently, our industry has been dominated by the creative function at the exclusion of all else. Creative is essential, but the leading marketing communications companies of the future will have three core competencies:

Fact-driven customer knowledge at the individual level derived from sophisticated database management tools;

Superior media capabilities that allow us to effectively make contact and interact with our target consumer across a variety of media disciplines;

Innovative, creative ideas, flawlessly executed, that inspire and motivate consumers to invite the brand into their lives.

In the 21st century, our success in advertising will depend on our ability to act as catalysts for enabling Opportunity to find Empowerment.

Ideas that Empower

(continued from If You Tame Me…, see 5/9/07 below)

Over $100 billion is spent each year in advertising. In our industry, we use very sophisticated technology. We allocate hundreds of millions of dollars each year to research on all kinds of consumer behavior surveillance techniques ranging from simple diaries to brain scans and yet, surprisingly, after more than 160 years of the existence of the advertising industry, we still don’t know how advertising works. We only know that it does work.

For many years, an accepted model of how advertising works was a hierarchical model. We believed people moved through a series of events – Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action – which took us from advertising to sales. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, however, the research simply did not support this model. The research showed us we could have behavioral changes before attitudinal changes. We could have increases in sales before we had increases in awareness.

Maybe some day we’ll figure it out. But as we’re struggling now to update our definition of advertising, let’s take a different approach and consider the observations of some who were considered among the most successful in advertising.

As we’ve recounted in earlier posts, there was a period in time when some, at least, thought we understood advertising. In his famous book, Scientific Advertising, Claude Hopkins wrote, “The time has come when advertising has reached the status of a science. It is based on fixed principles, and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analyzed until they are well understood. The correct method of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic law.” Here are a couple of Hopkins’ “laws” of advertising:

– Ads are not written to entertain. When they do, those entertainment seekers are little likely to be the people whom you want. That is one of the greatest advertising faults. Ad writers… forget they are salesmen and try to be performers. Instead of sales, they seek applause.

– Any studied attempt to sell, if apparent, creates corresponding resistance.

Fast forward a number of years and consider Bill Bernbach. He rejected the idea of advertising as science and considered it more of an art:

- Advertising isn't a science, it's persuasion. And persuasion is an art.

- It’s not just what you say that stirs people, it’s the way that you say it.

But on some points, Bernbach and Hopkins would seem to agree. It’s hard to imagine Hopkins disagreeing with these observations by Bernbach:

- Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise...not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.

- Getting a product known isn’t the answer. Getting it wanted is the answer. Some of the best known product names have failed.

David Ogilvy, who came from a background in direct response, leaned more towards the “scientific” school of thought on advertising effectiveness. In a speech he gave to the advertising community, Ogilvy chastised “generalists” for putting creativity above the commercial goals of advertising:

You generalists pride yourselves on being creative, whatever that awful word means. You cultivate the mystique of creativity…. We directs do not regard advertising as an art form. Our clients don’t give a damn whether we win awards at Cannes. They pay us to sell their products. Nothing else….

When sales go up, you claim credit for it. When sales go down, you blame the product. We in direct response know exactly to the penny how many products we sell with each of our advertisements.

You generalists use short copy. We use long copy. Experience has taught us that short copy doesn’t sell. In our headlines, we promise the consumer a benefit. You generalists don’t think it is creative.

You have never had to live with the discipline of knowing the results of your advertising. We pack our advertisements and letters with information about the product. We have found out we have to if we want to sell anything.

And yet, Ogilvy had a great deal of respect for another successful ad man, Leo Burnett. Burnett created the advertising campaign that succeeded above all other campaigns: the Marlboro Man. The Marlboro Man campaign is credited with taking a cigarette brand that at one time had about a quarter of a share point in sales and drove it to become the top-ranked brand in the world. The Marlboro Man campaign had none of the fact-based, long copy which Ogilvy criticized the ad community for leaving out in its advertising. It was an image campaign.

So what does this all mean? What does it tell us about what advertising is or is not? For one thing, it suggests there is more than one path to advertising success. There are times when rational, information-based appeals can succeed, and there are times when emotional-based appeals can succeed. Through generation after generation, successful advertising practitioners have concluded that advertising may be entertaining, but it is not entertainment. As the saying goes, “it’s only creative if it sells.”

Here’s another saying that’s relevant: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Every year, it seems, we struggle with the same challenge – how to make advertising more effective – and in many cases we keep finding similar answers. Aren’t the views of Hopkins, Bernbach, Ogilvy, Burnett, and many other successful ad men as relevant today as they were in their own time? For instance, haven’t we learned that advertising is not a popularity contest? Don’t we discover time and time again that the most popular ads are not necessarily the most effective? And yet, what is it that we continue to strive for when we measure advertising recall, and now try to measure engagement? Recall and engagement are best suited as measures of entertainment value, are they not? There is no definitive correlation between recall and sales. Here’s a prediction, there won’t be a definitive correlation between engagement and sales either.

Let’s move beyond engagement and embrace empowerment. When advertising is successful, it empowers people to take action to satisfy some need, want, or desire. The goal of advertising is to create ideas that empower.

In our next post, we’ll try to take the ideas expressed in these last three posts and put them together to offer our new definition of advertising. Meanwhile, I’m curious, what’s your definition of advertising?

If You Tame Me....

(continued from The Time is Now, see 5/1/07 below)

“If you tame me, then we shall need each other.
To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….”

The Little Prince
Antoine de St. Exupery

The Little Prince is a delightful book full of profound insights about life and love. Highly recommended, if you haven’t already read it.

There’s a chapter in the book where the little prince is learning about love and friendship from a fox. “What does that mean – ‘tame’?” asks the little prince. “It means to establish ties,” answers the fox.

We are all creatures of habit. Although each of our habits is unique, we all follow a regular routine.

• we wake up at the same time every day, perhaps to a radio that’s tuned to the same station every day
• we drive to work along the same route, passing the same signs
• we read the same daily newspaper
• we read the same business or personal magazines month in and month out
• we watch our favorite TV programs every day
• we sometimes surf the internet, but we return to our favorite sites regularly

We establish ties with the media that tame us; they become part of the fabric of our lives.

They are our friends, always welcome, comfortable to spend time with, and trusted. From childhood, we are taught to be wary of strangers. When a stranger tells us something, we listen with caution. We are trusting of our friends. When a friend tells us something, we are more receptive.

It should come as no surprise that advertising is more effective when it is communicated through a vehicle we trust. Studies confirm this. For example, a 2003 study by Knowledge Networks looked at “reader involvement” in relation to ad recall. Reader involvement was determined by such things as frequency of reading (e.g. read four out of four issues), reading time per issue, and preference (e.g. citing the magazine as “one of my favorites”). The study found that highly involved readers were three times more likely to recall ads than readers with average levels of involvement, and 10 times more likely to recall ads than readers with low levels of involvement. Other similar studies show similar results. In other words, readers are more responsive to advertising in their favorite publications.

It baffles me how often this insight into human behavior is ignored in advertising. How many times have you seen an advertiser or its agency painstakingly investigate and compare magazines to find the absolute best, top tier, ultimate magazines to reach a specific target audience with the right message in the right environment? Then, with hopeful ambitions to influence the attitudes and behavior of targeted prospects, they set as an objective or goal to maintain continuous advertising pressure against this target audience. And after all that, advertise in these paramount publications a total of…what…four times? Based on an informal survey among a few publishing friends of mine, it seems less than five percent of advertisers run continuously in all 12 issues of a monthly magazine. Twelve contacts in a year is apparently considered way too much exposure against the absolute best, top tier, ultimate targeted readers with the right message in the right environment for most advertisers. Go figure.

The average price of a :30 in the Super Bowl exceeds $2.5 million. Why do advertisers continue to pay top dollar for the Super Bowl and other media events?

In part, of course, it’s because of the opportunity to reach large numbers of people at one time. We know that’s true. But partly, too, it’s because advertisers believe higher levels of involvement (or engagement, if you prefer that term du jour) viewers have with these programs translates to higher levels of response, which justifies the premium cost.

Fortunately, consumers enjoy the relationships they have with their media every day, and advertisers do not have to pay premium prices to benefit from those relationships.

Relationships matter. We should consider that in our *new* definition of advertising. Better yet, we should consider that more in our practice of it.

(to be continued…)

The Time is Now

(continued from What is Advertising? (Revisited), see 4/19/07 below)

We may not be certain how to define advertising, or how advertising works, but oddly enough we have accumulated some research over the years that tells us something about how much is needed to make it work. Here is a question that has challenged media planners and advertisers for decades: How much advertising exposure is enough?

With finite resources that must be allocated as optimally as we can conceive, this question gives us a strategic choice and puts us at risk. If we advertise with too little pressure, our efforts may not have enough impact to show measurable results. If we advertise too much, we squander precious resources where we have already done our job. We face the risk of too little advertising pressure versus the risk of too much.

When we distill this challenge down to its basic elements, the strategic decision we media planners make goes something like this: if we could only afford to send one advertising message to one person, we could probably identify who that message should go to. The strategic challenge of advertising pressure arises when we can afford to send out the next message. Do we repeat the message to the same person, or do we send it to a new person? When should we send it?

If we can afford to send a third message, the strategic choices increase to six. If we also have the option of sending different messages to each person each time, the choices increase exponentially. What can we use to guide our strategic decision?

What Shape Are You In?
Although we may not always think of it in these terms, the key to making strategic decisions about advertising pressure lies with our expectation of the shape of the advertising response curve.

S-Shaped Curve
The S-shaped advertising response curve was the dominant model for media planning from the 1970s, and it suggests that advertising must reach a threshold level before it becomes effective. This was typically expressed by setting a communication goal of achieving a “3+ reach” for the advertising to be deemed “effective” (i.e. to achieve a desired response).

Concave downward
Another school of thought held that the advertising response curve was shaped concave downward, and suggests that the highest response rate occurs after the first exposure and diminishes thereafter. This also suggests that the most effective ad is the one closest to the purchase decision.


In a landmark 1995 study, John Philip Jones used single-source research to measure the short-term effects of advertising on sales. Single-source, unavailable prior to the Jones study, tracked both the media exposure and purchases of a single sample. Jones measured each household’s reception of advertising for specific advertised brands and related this to the purchasing of these same brands by the same household shortly after the advertising.

The analysis drew a startling conclusion: one exposure generates the highest proportion of sales, and additional exposures add very little to the effect of the first.

The Jones study gave support for the concave downward advertising response model and ushered in its practical application in “recency” planning. “Recency planning is based on the sensible idea that most advertising works by influencing the brand choice of consumers who are ready to buy,” noted Erwin Ephron in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1997.

Ironically, in 1972, researcher Herbert Krugman had advanced the idea that there are only three “psychological” exposures:

1. “What is it?” – the first response is to understand the nature of the stimulus.
2. “What of it?” – the second exposure elicits a more personal response of whether or not the message has personal relevance.
3. Reminder/Disengagement – the third exposure is a true reminder, but also the beginning of disengagement by the viewer.

Krugman suggests that most viewers stop at the first psychological exposure until they are in the market for the product advertised. He goes on to say, “the importance of this view of things is that it positions advertising as powerful only when the viewer, the consumer, or shopper is interested…” In the 1970s, Krugman’s thesis was used to support the theory that 3+ exposures were needed to be effective, although clearly it is more supportive of the Recency theory…proof that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Woody Allen said, “80 percent of success is showing up.” A key point from advertising response research is that timing impacts advertising effectiveness. In most cases, emphasis should be placed on continuity and reach. A brand that is out of sight is out of mind.

What this also tells us, however, is how important the consumer is to the advertising equation. A targeted prospect may meet all the demographic and psychographic profile characteristics we are looking for, yet can still be unmotivated by the advertising because the timing is not right. For advertising to be effective, there has to be opportunity. There has to be a need, hope, or desire and the means for fulfillment on the part of the targeted prospect. A prospect with all the other right characteristics may not be moved today if the timing is wrong, but can be moved tomorrow if the timing becomes right. Where there is no opportunity, there is no sale.

(to be continued)

What is Advertising? (Revisited)

“Keeping Everlastingly at it Brings Success” was the motto of N.W. Ayer & Sons, one of the earliest advertising agencies, in the late 1800s. When Albert Lasker asked his contemporaries during that time, “What is Advertising?,” he was told it was “keeping your name before the public.” Lasker, who came from a background as a journalist, had himself noted the success of one of the agencies of his day which wrote advertising as if it were news about a product, and so he thought advertising must be news.

But in 1904, John Kennedy provided Lasker with a new definition of advertising. He defined advertising as “salesmanship in print.” Kennedy’s definition ignited a change in the advertising industry and stands out as perhaps the most succinct definition of advertising ever since. Yet so many things have changed. Kennedy, after all, pre-dated radio, TV, the internet, even the concept of a “brand” and the brand management organization structure. It’s more than 100 years since Kennedy defined advertising as salesmanship in print. Do we need a new definition of advertising?

“Keeping your name before the public” has long been abandoned as any kind of definition of advertising – you would never hear a marketer today say that his goal was to keep his brand’s name before the public. Or would you? As DVRs threaten the advertising model on TV, advertisers respond by increasing product placements. What are product placements if not simply keeping your name before the public? And what topics fill the pages of advertising trade magazines and are on the lips of marketers everywhere? Buzzmarketing, word-of-mouth, viral campaigns…. Is that salesmanship, or is it keeping your name before the public?

So, how do we define advertising? The 4As, formed in 1917, adopted an outline of agency service in 1918 that hasn’t changed much over the years. In it, they describe agency service as consisting of “interpreting to the public, or to that part of it which it is desired to reach, the advantages of a product or service.”

The ever-useful Wikipedia defines advertising as paid communication through a non-personal medium in which the sponsor is identified and the message is controlled. Variations, they note, include publicity, public relations, product placement, sponsorship, underwriting, and sales promotion. Every major medium is used to deliver these messages: television, radio, movies, magazines, newspapers, the internet, and billboards. Advertisements can also be seen on the seats of grocery carts, on the walls of an airport walkway, and on the sides of buses, or heard in telephone hold messages or in-store PA systems – nearly anywhere a visual or audible communication can be placed.

Good old Merriam-Webster provides the following definition:
1 : to make something known to : NOTIFY
2 a : to make publicly and generally known b : to announce publicly especially by a printed notice or a broadcast c : to call public attention to especially by emphasizing desirable qualities so as to arouse a desire to buy or patronize : PROMOTE

David Ogilvy comes at it from the Kennedy school of thought. Ogilvy said that “advertising is no more and no less than an efficient way to sell.” Whereas the hot shop du jour, Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, defines advertising as “anything that makes our clients famous.”

During Media Week last October, Joe Plummer of the Advertising Research Foundation discussed the ARF’s working definition of Engagement as “turning on a consumer to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding content”. But he also talked about this definition as not just about Engagement, but as a whole new construct of marketing communications. Is “turning on a consumer to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding content” a new definition of advertising?

It’s been over 165 years since the first advertising agency was founded. We may not have all the answers – we will probably never have all the answers as advertising continues to evolve with the times -- but we’ve certainly learned a few things along the way. Let’s take another look at how we might define advertising in the 21st century.

(to be continued)

Sales Genie

Critiques of the ads for the Academy Awards, TV’s second biggest event, are coming out and they remind me of something interesting about the Super Bowl ads.

Do you remember the ad for Salesgenie.com? On February 6, MediaBuyerPlanner.com ran this headline: “Salesgenie.com Flubs Big Chance, Lands Worst Super Bowl Spot.” In its first outing as a Super Bowl advertiser, the article states, Salesgenie.com landed the unfortunate position as the most unpopular Super Bowl ad, according to a USA Today national poll.

The very next day, the headline read, “Salesgenie.com's Unpopular Ad Generates Mega Leads.” Surprise, surprise. The “worst Super Bowl ad” pulled in a boat load of registrations for new prospects, more than 10,000, or so the advertiser claimed.

“The success of the spot in terms of generating leads”, the article continues, “is perhaps a testament to the fact that what is ‘successful’ in the eyes of consumers is not necessarily the same for marketers.”

We’ve talked about how at the turn of the century – not this past one, but the one before it, i.e. 1900 -- the head of one of the largest ad agencies of the time, Albert Lasker, was eager to better understand advertising. What was it? What was the definition of advertising? He desperately wanted to know. His answer came in the Spring in 1904 when a man by the name of John E. Kennedy came and told him: Advertising was salesmanship in print.

This definition of advertising has stood the test of time, even though it predates radio and tv, not to mention the internet and everything else that’s coming into play. So, now it’s a new century and many things have changed. What about our understanding of the definition of advertising? Has that changed, too? Should it change?

Over the next few posts, I’d like to explore this topic with you. I have some ideas to share with you, of course, but I’m also interested in your ideas. So, please, drop me a line either here or directly to me and tell me: what is the definition of advertising in the 21st century?

BTW, in case you didn’t hear the news, I recently joined up with my former strategic partner, Media First International. You can reach me there at richard.miller@mediafirst.com.

Look forward to hearing from you soon!

Sources and additional reading:
MediaBuyerPlanner.com, 2/6/07 and 2/7/07

See the SalesGenie.com ad here.

The People Era

(continued from Dawn of a New Era, see 12/22/06 below)

Picking up where we left off…. As we closed 2006 in our historical review, we introduced what I call the People Era, a new era in our advertising history. Time magazine’s crowning of “You” as Person of the Year, and Advertising Age’s anointing of “You” as Agency of the Year would seem to confirm that we are, indeed, now firmly in the People Era. Born from the internet, the People Era began (or so I peg it) with the commercialization of the world wide web in 1994.

The first web banner ads were introduced on HotWired in October, 1994. It was also at this time that the browser Netscape was launched. Netscape was originally the dominant web browser, and later had its successful initial public offering on August 9, 1995 which, it may be argued, triggered the dot.com bubble that became the “dot-bomb” bust. The stock was to be offered at $14 per share. Its value on the first day of trading reached $75. After Netscape, valuations of internet stocks that had no significant revenues, and sometimes no revenues at all, climbed off the charts. It wasn’t until the Spring of 2000 that reality overtook the hype, and the dot.com stock balloon came crashing down.

Yet among the high-flying circus-performing stocks were some real companies with real business models that would develop into real powerhouses. Ebay comes to mind. So, too, does Google.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly we adapted and how easily we now take for granted the powerful information at our fingertips, searched through millions of web pages, and brought to us in nanoseconds by Google. The Google search engine receives about a billion search requests per day. Incredible, isn’t it?

Google began as a research project in January, 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University. They hypothesized that a search engine which analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page). Their hypothesis worked, and Google became far and away the most popular search engine among internet users.

Google was incorporated on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. In 2000, Google began selling ads associated with search keywords. Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. The IPO gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. Many of Google's employees became instant paper millionaires.

On March 30, 2006 – 10 years from its inception as a research project – Google was added to the S&P 500 index. In a 2006 report of the richest people in the U.S., Forbes reported that Sergey Brin was #12 with a net worth of $14.1 billion, and Larry Page was #13 with a net worth of $14.0 billion. They’re companies like eBay and Google that brought us the People Era.

It’s been the purpose of this historical review to try to put our rapidly changing times in perspective. Advertising and media have continually evolved throughout the years, yet there have been only two major “eras” before this one. Let’s take a brief look back. We talked about the Media Era, a period of 62 years from 1841 to 1903. During the Media Era, the advertising business was a media buying business. Power resided with those agencies and entrepreneurs, such as J. Walter Thompson, who controlled advertising access to the media.

By 1903, however, access to the media alone was not sufficient for any agency to command a unique position in the market. It was in 1904, after a fateful meeting between Albert Lasker, head of Lord & Thomas (third largest agency of its day, and forerunner to Foote, Cone & Belding), and John E. Kennedy, a copywriter, that the creative message became the focus of attention and changed the industry forever. Lasker had wanted desperately to know the meaning of advertising; he was not satisfied with the answer his contemporaries gave of “keeping your name before the public.” Kennedy defined it for him. Advertising, Kennedy told Lasker, was “salesmanship in print”. And just that fast, the Creative Era began, lasting 90 years from 1904 to 1994. In the Creative Era, power resided with those agencies and entrepreneurs who could turn perception of a brand into real brand strength. Its leaders were men like Bill Bernbach, Leo Burnett, and David Ogilvy. The crowning achievement of the Creative Era was the Marlboro Man, the masculine image of the rugged, independent cowboy who turned a failing cigarette brand into the most powerful brand in world in a campaign that has lasted decades. No campaign before it or since has had such a demonstrable effect on a brand that can be tied solely to its advertising image.

But the Creative Era was also fueled by mass media. As mass media began to fragment in the 1980s, the Creative Era began to wane, too. Then came the internet.

In the People Era, power has shifted once again. It now resides with ordinary people. In the People Era, perception isn’t reality…reality is reality. Authenticity counts more than image. Information and technology have empowered ordinary people and put them in charge. Success will belong to those companies and entrepreneurs who can harness that power as, for example, American Idol has done.

This concludes our historical review. We hope you enjoyed our journey of highlights through the years. Now we turn to face the challenges in front of us, armed with the lessons of the past but knowing, too, that these are extraordinary times. If history is any guide, the People Era will prevail for many years to follow. It’s a rare and exciting opportunity to be a part of such an historic time in advertising. The rules are changing again and we have a real chance to shape the future of our industry.

So, let’s write some history together, shall we?


Sources and additional reading:
Doubleclick, The Decade in Online Advertising, 1994-2004, April 2005, www.doubleclick.com

Wikipedia, Google, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google