When do terms and conditions matter?

Pams has recently started an advertising and branding campaign claiming that it is “the most popular grocery brand in the land”. Their substantiation? “New Zealanders buy more Pams groceries than groceries from any other single brand. Based on Homescan data NielsonIQ, 2023. T&Cs apply.”

That’s directly from their website, and it’s a weasel claim. The “T&Cs apply” are proof of that.

Considering that Pams is the (often) cheapest white-label brand of choice for New World, Pak’nSave, and Four Square, their claim seems legitimate—or does it?

Pams is part of New Zealand’s grocery cartel, so it’s obvious that they’ll sell more since they have more shelf space, lower prices, and the widest range of products. This doesn’t make them the most popular brand.

The claim Pams puts out there is the same as the New Zealand Transport Agency claiming that the SH1 motorway is New Zealand’s most popular road because it sees the most traffic.

Bunnings and Mitre10 have their own nebulous claim, which also comes with T&Cs: if you find a lower-priced item at a competitor, they’ll beat that price by 15%.

But since they’re another cartel, they can control their stock, which means you’ll never find the exact same big-ticket products like a Masport lawnmower at Bunnings or find a Bosch lawnmower at Mitre 10.

Even if you drill down to products like turpentine or nails, the brands are never the same at the two stores, so how much worth is there in a perceived 15% discount?

It was David Ogilvy who stated that “the consumer is not a moron.” But every day, more and more advertisers and big businesses push us into that category. That’s not where I want anyone to be.

Shouldn’t we all be loath to be taken advantage of in this way? I know I am.

PS. I called Pams to find out what the T&Cs are, and they didn’t know themselves.

Road to Zero will never work. Here’s why.

Perfection is unattainable. We cannot eliminate human error, complacency, mechanical failure, and outside influences.

I recently lost a good friend in a car accident. I don’t know exactly what happened, except there was a collision involving a truck. My friend, Marianne Mckenzie, owned a media company and was actively involved in the advertising industry. We’d spoken about Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Association’s (NZTA) advertising on many occasions. But she’s gone now to join the other 379 who died on New Zealand’s roads in 2022.

Is the NZTA’s advertising working?

No. With an advertising budget of fourteen million dollars, you have to ask why. The messaging is fractured and confusing, and worst of all, it’s now focusing more on using scare tactics to get its message across. Have a look at the NZTA’s current campaigns running on their marketing campaign page and you can see what they’re doing. My opinion is that of the 14 campaigns displayed, only three do not use scare tactics.

And now other companies are taking matters into their own hands. The HW Richardson Group has just launched a driver safety campaign called Almost Dead. Their Almost Dead campaign uses real-life dashcam footage, collected from its fleet of over 1,300 trucks to show how reckless drivers are on the roads. It’s a fascinating view of how bad drivers can be. Kudos to HWR for taking the wheel here.

Is the NZTA’s advertising agency, BBDO Clemenger, responsible for the higher death tolls?

Yes – 2022 was the worst year for road deaths since 2017, and the worst for deaths over the Festive Season since 2018. The road death toll is up 18% since 2017. Proof of BBDO’s failure to convert. Advertising is all about results but Clemenger BBDO likely has other goals: advertising awards.

In 2014, Clemenger BBDO won 38 global and local advertising awards. In 2014, 293 people died on our roads. Effectively, Clemenger BBDO won just over one advertising award for every seven people who died.

Was Clemenger BBDO’s 2014 advertising campaign for the NZTA effective? Based on the death toll in 2014, no, it wasn’t. And they haven’t created an effective, results-driven campaign since then and the numbers in 2022 prove it.

Lowering our death toll isn’t all about creativity, nor does it necessarily require it. Clemenger BBDO is in a very privileged position to work with the NZTA. I know lowering the death toll is a difficult task, but Clemenger BBDO has immense resources, global partners, and colossal manpower. We must demand more from them.

Going back to my friend Marianne’s death, anything could have happened. I believe she was a good driver – I drove with her on many occasions from Auckland to Hamilton, and she showed no signs of bad driving habits. So, was she distracted when she died? Was the other party driving sensibly? Who knows.

What can we, as road users, do?

Driving better is the obvious, clichéd answer. But that’s far too simple to work. We should already be driving better, and the NZTA should be making progress in dropping the death toll, but neither of us is succeeding.

Should we be asking the NZTA to produce advertising about car maintenance? Should they lower the WOF requirements back to six months? Can they get off their butts and do something about the state of the roads? Should we ask that the NZTA move all advertising in-house and remove the advertising awards influence, or even go as far as saying that all advertising done for the NZTA can’t be entered in awards? There are many possibilities, but it’s unlikely we’ll get a solution acceptable to every road user.

It’s Thursday night as I type this, and I can hear two cars racing on Te Irirangi Drive, about one kilometre away, where the speed limit is 60km/h. I’m sure one of them has a V-Tech engine. I don’t think any of the drivers care.

My next-door neighbour owns a car tuning company called Eastern Automotive. One of the engine upgrades they can do to a Holden is the Walkinshaw Package, where they can take the car’s power output up to 547KW. And just down the road, another neighbour earns extra income by tuning BMWs to increase their power output. Speed kills, but it makes lots of money too. And as long as there are people actively chasing speed, the roads will not get any safer.

Writing this blog has just made me even more sceptical about Road to Zero, and I’d like to think there’s more optimist in me than cynic but there isn’t about this topic.

Road to Zero will never work.

AI Ad Revolution: How AI is Redefining Advertising

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionising the way brands, agencies, and advertisers approach advertising.

From automated campaigns to improved audience targeting, AI is fundamentally reshaping how we connect with our audiences through digital media. Find out how AI is redefining advertising here!

What is AI in Advertising?

AI in advertising is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically generate and target digital ads. AI-driven technologies are used to identify the right audiences, deliver the right ad formats, place ads in the right channels, optimise campaigns for performance, anticipate customer behaviour, and more.

With these technologies, brands can drastically increase their efficiency with digital advertising while reducing costs and driving better results.

How AI Can Improve Targeting and Performance.

AI has enabled advertisers to use sophisticated machine learning and deep neural networks to accurately target the right audience at the right time.

AI-powered algorithms can detect trends, patterns, and correlations within customer data in order to uncover deeper insights about user behaviour.

With this data, brands can personalise ads for each user and increase their chances of making a sale or conversion. Additionally, these technologies enable marketers to optimise campaigns in real-time, detect anomalies early on, boost ROI, measure performance accurately, and more

Adaptive Learning And Automated Campaigns With AI.

AI allows for a huge level of automation when it comes to campaign analysis and ad optimisation. With machine learning, insights about user behaviour can be obtained quickly and reliably to help create more tailored ads that better meet customer needs.

Furthermore, AI-driven technologies enable the automatic creation of campaigns based on an understanding of customer interests and behaviours while automating optimisation processes.

This means more accurate decisions are made in real time with no human input necessary.

Improved Analytics for a Data-Driven Marketing Strategy.

With advanced analytics, AI-driven marketing strategies can boost customer engagement while identifying customer needs and preferences.

By leveraging advanced analytics, marketers can obtain actionable insights on users with automated analysis of customer data such as demographic information, user preferences, and web browsing behaviour. These help to provide more useful insights regarding target persona in order to develop an improved strategy with tailored messages and maximum outreach.

Furthermore, the automation of data analysis ensures that even the most complex customer insights can be accessed quickly and efficiently, allowing for increased campaign optimisation in real time.

Maximising Your Return on Investment with AI Advertising Solutions.

With AI-powered advertising solutions, advertisers can maximise their Return on Investment (ROI) through increased personalisation.

By leveraging data analysis to gain a complete understanding of customers’ needs and preferences, advertisers can easily devise strategies to attract and retain them.

Moreover, AI helps buyers to customise campaigns more accurately, enabling marketers to ensure they receive the highest ROI possible on each ad. AI-driven predictive analytics also enables them to make informed decisions based on updated and accurate customer data, providing potential for increased ROI from each campaign.

A Guide to Choosing an Advertising Agency in 2023.

Here are five questions to ask yourself when looking to choose an advertising agency.

1. Does the advertising agency advertise its own services?

Most Auckland advertising agencies will advertise their successes in an “aren’t we cool” fashion, in publications aimed at their peers and the industry as a whole. Still, almost all do not advertise in mainstream media.

If you asked around, you’d get told that advertising agencies work in a business-to-business environment and that their product is best suited to the business-to-consumer space. So there’s theoretically no real “fit”.

Many agencies have major clients that operate in a business-to-business environment, and these agencies happily manage to accept money for services rendered, so let’s scratch that excuse.

2. Does the size of the agency matter?

Working with a big advertising agency can be quite prestigious, but there are drawbacks:

• Where will your business fit in its hierarchy?

• Who will handle your account?

• Are you more than a number?

In equal measure, you’ll find other questions when working with a smaller advertising agency:

• Does the agency have the capacity, expertise, and vision to advance your brand?

• Will they have the buying power and connections you need to deliver cost-effective advertising and marketing solutions?

Whether the agency is big or small, they are all capable of doing amazing work, especially with your guidance. Working with an advertising agency isn’t a one-way street. Your input is vital in creating work that builds connections, creates trust, and most importantly, delivers results.

3. How will the advertising results be measured?

Advertising isn’t an exact science and there’s no easy way to measure its overall effectiveness. While few adverts have absolutely zero effect, there’s no precise way to measure the success of an advertising campaign. In fact, it’s almost impossible to measure how many dollars of sales were generated by each advertising dollar that you spent.

A good advertising agency will have a number of methods that can give some kind of an idea as to whether its ads are hitting the mark or not. This needs to be in place over all the media platforms they use.

If you’re in any doubt about measurement, ask for tangible case studies that show this agency knows what it’s talking about.

4. What about the agency’s work?

An advertising agency’s portfolio of work needs to stand on its own merits, and you have to critically look at that work to make sure that the agency’s overall creative vision is what your business needs. Here are three tips:

1. Forget about how much they talk up past successes, including awards. You need to know if their work will drive sales for you.

2. Look at the agency’s creative track record and ask yourself how much of it is focused on winning awards, and how much is aimed at getting real results – the two are often very different things.

3. Ask the hard questions, pick one of their accounts and ask to see all the work done on that account in a year.

And most importantly, don’t forget the Jackson Pollock Rule. It’s a simple rule and it goes like this: some people will love what you created and others will totally loathe it.

5. What about the people that work there?

When you ask an advertising agency to pitch for your business, you’re likely to get a great response, and a team of smart-suited go-getters will arrive at your door, ready to promise the Earth and more. But what happens after they get your business? Be on the lookout for:

1. Changes in the people who are working on your account

2. Lack of time with upper management, such as creative directors

3. Slow progress on delivering your work

If points like these rear their head then it’s time to take things to the highest authority. You’ll soon be able to judge how important your business is to the advertising agency by the response you get. You might get told that it’s none of your business how the agency manages its people or its job flow, but they’re actually your people, and in all seriousness, that’s your job flow.

Take a look at some of these Advertising Agency Websites.