All advertisers are liars

No one is compelled to tell the truth. Doesn’t matter who you are or what your position is in life, it’s up to you to decide the level of truth you’re prepared to deliver.

Some professions seem to attract a certain type of person who just finds it easy to fabricate facts. Lawyers and politicians seem to rank highest on the lie scale. In fact, these two professions are banned from participating in the World’s Biggest Liar competition, an annual get-together of fork-tongued fibbers held in the United Kingdom. Apparently, they have an unfair advantage over the rest of the field.

So what's the alternative to lies in advertising?

They should add advertisers to that list. And that’s not easy for me to say, considering what I do, and have always done, to make a living. I don’t consider myself a gifted liar, nor am I a saint, but I know that many involved in my profession (especially clients) tend to be somewhat addicted to their own masquerade. Worst of all is that consumers let advertisers get away with it and that’s a big problem because advertisers are consumers too so we fall for the same crap. How many BMWs, Porches and Mercs will you find lurking in the parking lots of Auckland's leading advertising agencies? And why are they there? The folk who bought them bought into the same lies of status and branding that advertising sold to the rest of us. There’s no other reason. Why do these same people wear Gucci, Prada or Chanel? For the same reason as anyone else: because advertising told them to.

I love Apple. Nothing else compares and naysayers should be thrown to the lions. Why am I such a fervent supporter of the brand when I’ve had some terrible experiences with Apple? My iPhone 5 was an out-of-box failure. When I returned it to Vodafone I felt unsettled, like someone came into my house when I was away and had licked all my clean knives and forks and then put them back in the drawer. But I was cool with the failure and as of today, I’ve been waiting 28 days for Vodafone to deliver my iPhone 6. Truth be told, I’ll wait as long as it takes because I’m comfortable accepting and forgiving Apple’s lies. They’re such brilliant deceptions that I’m prepared to ignore the videos posted online of the iPhone 6 bending in half and the ugly-looking, glitch-prone iOS. Why? Because I want to.

I’m not prepared to be forgiving of Tegel and their claim of being “New Zealand’s Favourite Chicken”, nor of Quilton’s claim to be “New Zealand’s Favourite Toilet Paper”. It’s rubbish and we should all see through these weak claims for the drivel they are. Is that any way to build a brand? Apparently so.

If you saw an ad for a restaurant and it said, “We promise not to spit in your food”, would you be relieved or worried? Let’s say for instance that Air New Zealand ran a TV ad and they said “We promise our pilots will not fly drunk and will not to crash into the ocean”, would you choose them over another airline?

As consumers, we are entitled to take a few things for granted. Assurances of saliva-free food and crash-free journeys shouldn’t have to be made by restaurants and airlines. What the restaurant should be promising is that they make the finest Ossobuco in the world, which is based on a 300-year-old family recipe that is closely guarded by the Mafia. The airline should be promising that they will always be on time, that your luggage won’t be lost and that they won’t be retrenching thousands of local staff so they can outsource to Mumbai and save a few dollars.

Any fool can make a promise. The good thing is that thanks to the absolute explosion of the Internet and Social Media, consumers are becoming much savvier. We want something remarkable from all the promises that advertisers make, simply because the best ones are the hardest to keep. Keep that in mind in 2015.

George would have had a bright future in advertising.

How to brief an Advertising Agency

It’s inevitable that the paths of marketing and advertising agencies will cross. They’re twin industries, joined at the hip.

When briefing an advertising agency it’s good to bear in mind the following:

1. You have to go beyond the basics

2. What makes a good brief?

3. Creative freedom comes with restraints

This is why it’s so important to know how to properly brief an advertising agency.  Depending on what your role in marketing entails, you may have had a little or a lot of experience dealing with the Suits and the Creatives and the dreaded Ninjas that live in Adland. Regardless of your exposure, you’ll definitely know that they’re a strange bunch. So what does it take to get the most out of them when you brief in new work?

You have to go beyond the basics

I’m going to assume that you know the basics of briefing an advertising agency, such as defining your target audience, your strategy, your budget, your objectives and so forth. But to be honest, the basics just aren’t enough.

There must be thousands of basic examples of how to brief an ad agency available online. The Communications Agencies Association of New Zealand (CAANZ) has a cute, five-page, basic briefing guide on their site. I only refer to it here in a similar way to the United Nations placing “Danger! Minefield!” signs all over old battlefields. It’s truly average and any brief sheet that says the most important point of a brief is “to save money” needs to be rewritten.

On the other end of the scale, The New Zealand Transport Association, in all its bureaucratic glory, has a 60-page manual on how they brief their advertising partners. They cover almost everything from what font should be used on a billboard design, to how you should evaluate creative concepts. Amazingly, they devote 12 pages of their guide purely on how to avoid “common mistakes” in advertising. That means they’ve set aside 20% of their manual to cover possible negative outcomes of an advertising campaign. This means that either the other 80% of their guide is very badly written, or briefing an advertising agency isn’t as easy as it seems.

 So what makes a good brief?

The answer to that all-important question is very simple: one that delivers results! After all, advertising is all about results, whether it’s in the form of increased sales, higher profits or better conversions. Your advertising agency has to know exactly what you want them to deliver, and how they deliver it is up to you to decide. That’s why you need to give them a seriously tight brief.

Who's interested in boring advertising?

The freedom of a tight brief.

It’s important to set up very strict parameters as early as possible when briefing an advertising agency, simply because you’re asking your advertising agency to be creative. Granted that this is part of their job, but the thing with creativity is that one man’s Picasso is another man’s piece of junk. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that the size of your target audience is one million people. This means the creative work being produced by your advertising agency has to appeal to a very wide range of folk, so there’s most likely no place for Picasso here. On top of this, there’s always the chance you might alienate your target audience if you’re creative just for the sake of creativity.

Creative freedom has to come with constraints.

You need to rein in your advertising agency and make it clear in the briefing process that this is a financial transaction, and that you expect them to deliver what you’ve all agreed to. If you invested a million dollars on building a new home, you’d expect the builder to build as per the approved plans. You’re not going to want the builder to put together your home with seven bathrooms and one bedroom just because he was feeling creative, so why should your advertising be any different?

Now many people will say you shouldn’t ever constrain creativity and that creative people should be free to do as they please but I disagree. When you enforce constraints, when you make the journey to find real creativity as challenging as possible, that’s when the magic really happens. Who wants to see a daredevil ramp his motorbike over a single car? It’s blasé and we know it. That’s why we demand that daredevils ramp their bikes across the Grand Canyon, over rows of hovering helicopters, through burning hoops of napalm while being chased by Stinger missiles. That’s where the glory is, that’s what the audience wants to see and that’s where you will find true creativity.

Advertising, and the associated creativity found within the industry, have to have restraints. Every creative person working in an advertising agency wants to break the rules and push the envelope right out of the box into some new, as yet undefined, realm. But seriously, let them do it with their hands tied behind their back.

Will advertising work for you?

Does the size of your advertising budget contribute to your advertising’s success?

One of my clients recently asked me, “Does advertising work?” I wasn’t sure why he asked me this. Our advertising had been extremely successful at raising his sales in recent months so I assumed he knew that it worked. So why the question? It turned out that he was wondering if there was a perfect way to measure the effectiveness of advertising. There’s no perfect way to measure anything but I thought I’d take a look at three key points that may help my client, and you, make more balanced decisions around your ad spend

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Does money influence brand value through advertising?

No. Money isn’t a guarantee of success in any industry. In 2013, Microsoft spent $2.6 billion on advertising, while Apple spent $1.1 billion. Did Microsoft’s bigger budget make them a bigger brand?

The answer is no. According to a 2013 report in Forbes, Apple is the world’s most valuable brand, worth a staggering $105 billion, while the Microsoft brand is only valued at $57 billion. Proof then that having deeper pockets doesn’t make you more successful. Perhaps it’s far easier to advertise, and in turn sell, better brands that are worth more than the sum of their parts? Everyone knows Apple is an awesome brand that makes amazing products, while Microsoft is a lot less remarkable.

But what would happen if you had to advertise a more ordinary product, like cheese or cat food? Well there should be no difference as to how effective your budget is, regardless of whether you’re spending $150k a year or $2 billion a year. You have to ensure that the basics are done right, that your creative execution is smack bang on brief, and that your media buying is as effective as possible. While I’ve never worked for Apple, I’m sure their basic advertising processes are similar to Microsoft’s. The same can be said for Toyota and Ford.

Does the size of your advertising agency contribute to your success?

David Ogilvy wrote in his autobiography, “Confessions of an Advertising Man”, that size wasn’t necessarily relevant unless you wanted it to be. He wrote about the time the head of a mammoth advertising agency solicited the Camel Cigarette account and promised to assign 30 copywriters to it, but the head of R.J. Reynolds simply replied, “Why can’t you just give us one good one?” Makes sense to me.

However, if you’re the kind of person who needs to delegate everything, then 30 people working on your advertising is what you need. If you’d prefer to be more hands on and in touch, then perhaps you only need two people working on your advertising. In some cases the very business model that you’re trying to advertise might be so flawed that no amount of people can fix it. Take as an example the recent demise of The Good Guys. Could a huge number of advertising folk have saved them? No. The Good Guys were about being cheap and boring but in New Zealand, you don’t get anything cheaper or more boring than Harvey Norman. The boring slot was already taken and no amount of advertising or money could change that or save The Good Guys.

Caveat emptor - “Let the Buyer Beware”

What is the most important contributing factor to the success of your advertising? It’s you. Think of your advertising in the same way as if you were buying a new car. You can try out as many different brands and variations as you’d like until you’re happy, but how much you pay for it, what marque you buy, what colour it is, how many extras you get – these are all decisions that you make. Sure the salesman and the brochure may sway your thinking, but you, and only you, get to say yes or no to the final purchasing decision. This responsibility carries on throughout your ownership, as all the decisions you make as the owner are yours and yours alone.

Let’s face it – you’re the one making the decisions when it comes to your advertising. Whether you choose a campaign that’s going to challenge the status quo or whether you wimp out and go for something mundane that pleases the board of directors, you made those decisions, you gave the instructions and approved whatever it was that lead to the end result that the advertising delivered. The success of any advertising will always rest with the person who signed for it.

Is there truth in advertising?

Last night I was in front of the TV watching the news. During the advertising break the Mad Butcher’s advertisement popped up about his latest chicken offer.

He said he was having a special on Tegel Chicken, which he declared is “New Zealand’s Favourite Chicken”. That got me wondering how Tegel and Sir Peter came up with that claim.

I went onto both the Tegel and the Mad Butcher’s websites and couldn’t find much to substantiate their claim. Perhaps they got to this conclusion based on how much chicken they produce and sell but having a monopoly on chicken production doesn’t make you the country’s favourite. That’s like claiming that the Northern Motorway from Albany into Auckland is New Zealand’s most popular road just because of the huge volume of traffic on it every day. Highly illogical. 

Add into this that Tegel is not a New Zealand owned company (they are owned by an Asian-Pacific company called Affinity Equity Partners) and it seems highly dubious that they are indeed “New Zealand’s Favourite”, given how much fuss us Kiwis kick up when it comes to foreign ownership of our land and businesses.

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Tegel’s advertising “claims” are nothing new. There are hordes of similar ones out there, from the biggest companies to the smallest. British Airways claims to be “The World’s Favourite Airline”.  Carlsberg Beer jokingly claims to be “probably the best beer in the world” (at least I think they’re joking). Quilton Toilet Paper claim to be "New Zealand's favourite toilet paper" which asks so many questions, especially " how does Quilton know?" Who honestly submits their bum to market research? Who would sit on a loo and test various grades of toilet paper for $15 an hour? Quilton's claim is the most empty of the all the brand promises you're likely to find from now until the end of the world.

The problem is that companies and their advertisers are not obligated to be 100% honest with consumers and there are some that really go out of their way to be dishonest. Sure there are certain controls put in place by the advertising industry but in reality, it is you, the consumer, that has to be 100% certain you believe them. If you’re unhappy with advertising then you shouldn’t support that brand and you should definitely complain, it’s the only way your voice will be heard. However, make sure you complain at the highest level possible. The poor sod working behind the counter for $12 an hour most likely wont give a damn (after all, this isn't his real job) so you need to climb the ladder. Find the Muppet with the Land Rover and let him know what you think. The truth is he/she (if they care) should be happy for the feedback you give them, after all, you can learn so much more from the customers who complain than from those who don't.