Back to the Advertising Future

My ClickZ piece this morning, inspired in no small measure by the many excellent pieces of feedback I received in my Facebook CGM Group, focuses on my latest strategy to drive smart investment online (including consumer-generated media endeavors).  The strategy is called "Back to the Advertising Future,"  and I focus on three core core foundations in marketing: focus groups, the store shelf, and television.  I write: 

Let's get back to basics. Yes, the boring, vanilla, everyday basics. When I started at Procter & Gamble, such fundamentals weighed heavily in my training like the Great Books of Western Civilization. Indeed, there was a whole science and discipline around category management (managing the shelf), TV copy effectiveness (television), and consumer understanding (focus groups). These fundamental still matter, maybe even more than ever. We just need to tweak them to fit the new environment.

Back to the Focus Group Basics:  Within the first 48 hours of starting at P&G, I was coleading live focus groups with Hispanic moms in Miami and Los Angeles. Deep, intimate listening, I learned, especially around unmet needs, really matters and translates to business success. Focus groups still matter, of course, but the universe of harvestable content has exploded across the CGM (define) universe. Offline focus groups still matter, but you often find a more honest, unprompted, unsolicited candor in the online conversation. With the explosion of audio, video, and personal Web site mash-ups, consumer expression has taken on unique new meaning, and marketers are only at the tip of the iceberg of this insight-rich conversation. Even if you're still scratching your head about the Web's role as a marketing vehicle, there's no question it's a far superior focus-group platform. The Web also has the opportunity to be far more efficient and less expensive. This is why I'm such a strong believer in CGM analytics.

Takeaway: The focus group endures, but now it's on steroids and takes place independent of marketer recruitment efforts.

Back to TV Basics:  Sure, folks are reaching for the TiVo or DVR, but let's face it: TV ads still work, and I'll bet my bambinos that Super Bowl advertisers will continue to fork out nearly $2.5 million per :30 spot in 2008. As I learned well at P&G, great TV copy works because it connects emotionally, allows persuasive "benefit visualization" (e.g., side-by-side demos), and often works around a single, engaging, dramatic big idea or insight. But lo and behold, those are the same factors driving the off-the-charts popularity with online video. Consumer-generated multimedia (CGM2) is particular persuasive and engaging online. Far from reinventing the wheel, advertisers should simply start their online exploratory by porting over proven principles from successful TV copy development and tweak them based on the medium's unique characteristics. Can my brand, for example, use the power of on-demand video to explain or demonstrate how to use products?

Takeaway: Use everything you know about TV as an accelerator to the Web's most promising new feature: online video.

Back to the Shelf Space Basics:   Brand managers live and breathe category management. If a product slips up or down the shelf or two slots to the right, millions of dollars in incremental or lost sales could be on the line -- or even a promotion to VP or marketing director. P&G's A.G. Lafley captures the essence of this principle in his "first moment of truth." What consumers see on the shelf, and where it's placed, matters. Why not apply the same logic to the online space, especially as more buyers zip through the Web research aisles before they buy? Google has built a company with a $200 billion market cap selling access to the virtual shelf in the form of advertising that hangs on the margins of search results. What about the value of the organic middle? If CGM dominates search results when you type "pampers," "tide," or "huggies" into the search box, what's that worth? It obviously depends on the favorability of the comment, or what we might call the attractiveness of the conversational packaging. Google search results are a shelf. Wikipedia results are a shelf. Brand Web site content are a shelf. And the questions we ask to build, promote, and protect shelf presence online are similar to what we ask offline:What specific steps do I need to take to improve my shelf presence? How will my product launch be impacted by early shelf results? Can I shape that?

Takeaway: Your brand standing is still your shelf landing.

   

Comments

[Richard Stacy]

Re. Back to TV basics - I'm not convinced. Yes the TV ad is still important. The issue is that it is declining in importance as other forms of communication become more influential. This lessening of attention is what is (or should be) changing the dynamics of TV advertising - accepting the realities of a reduced role within a much broader communications portfolio and abandoning the hitherto central idea that the TV ad shall carry the entire brand narrative.

My experience has been that to succeed in producing this new type of content, (and new type of ads) you have to abandon previous thinking and techniques. You have to think editorially, rather than promotionally and most ad agencies are institutionally incapable in this respect and show precious little signs of making this intellectual transition.

Ultimately the 30 second TV ad will still live - as outlined in this post
http://tinyurl.com/2w96bl
But it will be dramatically different, produced in radically different way by an agency that bears little resemblance thing currently known as an advertising agency.

In other words - in advertising at least -I think there is limited value is assuming the old rules still apply.

[Krista Neher]

I think that TV will become less relevant over time as an advertising vehicle. TV is still booming, but DVR penetration is still relatively low (about 7%) and is projected to reach 41% by 2009. (I just looked this up).

At the same time, the internet is still a relatively new medium with far stronger capabilities than TV. Online advertising will continue to evolve to provide better targetting, messanging and innovative ad formats.

My thoughts are far too numerous for the comments section....I'm going to write a blog post on this. (www.kribaby.com)

Great article - thought provoking and interesting :)

Side note on the Search Engine Comment - interesting post in Ad Age today about CPG Search Engine Marketing http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=121437.

[AndrewGoodman]

Pete, this reads as a savvy analysis from someone who has clearly "been there." On search, though, I think you are off the mark - and maybe it points to a deeper "P&G mentality" that still won't comfortably coexist with the new reality you describe. You use the analogy that a Wikipedia entry or a content site are "shelves."

To be quite literal about it, they are not shelves.

But really - even not taken literally, but taken in terms of how you need to understand them, they are not shelves.

P&G exercises control over shelves, through dollars, power, and leverage; in part the effect to constrain consumer choices. Can it do this with said "online shelves"? Isn't this precisely *why* search (and what they do post search) is so beloved by consumers? Because they're escaping the power of the shelf.