The War for the Soul of Advertising

Harvard Business Review

4:17 PM Tuesday April 26, 2011

by Grant McCracken

If you are watching TV these days, you've probably seen two ads from AT&T.

One shows a guy working late at his desk. His wife calls to ask where they're meeting for their anniversary dinner. Oops.

The other shows a guy sitting in a diner losing a bet about the song "Whoomp! (There It Is).

Compare these ads to the one now running for Claritin.

This shows a glassy-eyed woman who shouts at the camera, "I can't let allergies stop me from leading the way, so I get Claritin Clear!"

She is leading a wilderness trek and at this very moment taking her team across a rope bridge.

"Whoa!" shouts the man behind her.

"Watch your step!" she shouts back.

"Thanks! I couldn't do this without you!" he replies.

These two campaigns are competing for the soul of advertising. The AT&T ads give us something recognizably human: a guy who forgets his anniversary, one friend besting another. The Claritin ad gives us the opposite. These people are not really people at all, but sandwich boards designed to communicate the USP, the unique selling proposition.

The Claritin woman is brittle and shrill. She is in fact an idiot. And the ad assumes that we are idiots too. Claritin begins to sound like Chris Tucker in Rush Hour, the brand shouting, "Can you understand the words coming out of my mouth?" It's as if the brand believes English might be our second language or that we are just too stupid to follow anything more complicated. This is more than sophomoric and irritating. It damages the brand.

We, viewers and customers, are alert to nuance. The AT&T ads engage us accordingly. In the first AT&T ad, we see our husband go from someone suffering a call from his wife ("Hey, baby, what's going on"), to a man suddenly in free fall as he realizes the order of his error and scrambles to control the damage. In the second, we see two friends engaged in that mock hostile banter with which many male friends regale one another. "Your fifth year of high school" is precisely that kind of familiar insult.

The strategic issue: brands get the consumers they deserve. Treat consumers like morons and they act like morons. They don't really pay attention. They use their DVRs with a vengeance, and rip through what we have to offer them. When asked, they will say advertising is something crafted by idiots for idiots. When asked, they will say they can't really remember that Claritin spot. And this can't surprise us, because after all the ad shut them out. It created a cultural artifact so obvious and annoying that no one will waste a second on it.

But if we give the consumer a little credit, they reward us. They watch the ad. They dwell on the ad. They relate to the ad. And they relate to the brand. Give the consumer a little credit and that credit rebounds to the brand.

I can't say who is winning this war for the soul of advertising. The Claritin camp is powerful. (The forces of evil always are.) And to be sure there will always be agencies and clients who prefer to make their marketing a laborious, clamoring, shouting match. But there is a small band of rebels, lead by the likes of A.G. Lafley, Henry Jenkins, Steven Johnson, and John Kay, who stand for nuance, depth, and subtlety. Soon may they triumph.

My congratulations to the makers of the AT&T ads: Bobby Pearce, Chief Creative Officer, Heather Gorman, copywriter, and Jeff Spillane, Art Director, at BBDO Atlanta. The creative and client team at Claritin shall go unnamed. (You know who you are.)

Grant McCracken is a research affiliate at MIT and the author of Chief Culture Officer.

Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/04/the_war_for_the_soul_of_advert.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Watch an Ad..Get a Free Pepsi!

TV Check-in App IntoNow Downloads Coupon to Phone in Exchange for Watching

By:
Michael Learmonth
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Published: April 20, 2011

Watch an ad on TV, get a free Pepsi. Simple concept, tough to execute. But that will be a reality with a new app that allows users to "check in" to TV commercials, starting Wednesday.

Here is how it works: Consumers download the iPhone check-in app IntoNow and hit it while the commercial plays on TV. Audio-fingerprinting technology then recognizes the ad and a coupon gets downloaded to your phone for a free 20-ounce bottle of Pepsi Max.

Hopefully, for PepsiCo, that transaction then gets shared out to the user's connections on the social TV app, as well as to Facebook and Twitter. Pepsi has agreed to honor as many as 50,000 such coupons as an experiment in both driving trial of Pepsi Max, as well as the potential for interactive TV ads.

The Pepsi Max spot features a "Field of Dreams" theme and many major league baseball players past and present. The spot, already on YouTube, will air during MLB games and through the end of the year.

IntoNow's fingerprinting technology knows not only what consumers are watching, but also if they're watching it live or delayed on a DVR or some other kind of recording device, key information for advertisers. It will even work on the YouTube clip of the ad (so go ahead and give it a whirl).

The deal is the first major brand implementation for IntoNow based on audio fingerprinting technology spun out from video ad server Auditude earlier this year. Auditude spent years recording and fingerprinting a multitude of TV programming from 130 major national networks. Initially that technology was intended to recognize shows and insert ads online; now it is being used to allow consumers to "check-in" to shows to let their connections know what they're watching.

CEO Adam Cahan said it takes the technology only four to 12 seconds to recognize a given clip. "If it has aired on TV in the last five years, its in our catalog," he said. "Our coverage is pretty big. There are a few things that are missing. We don't have movies until they hit the premium channels, and we don't have truly local content."

What IntoNow does have is an audience already tagging TV shows -- 3million tags and 600,000 downloads since the app was launched in January.

IntoNow is not the first to give consumers a reason to check in to TV commercials. Shazam, the original audio-tagging service for the iPhone, powered a giveaway where the first 1,000 users that tagged an original song during an Old Navy TV add got a free pair of jeans. The music video spent several weeks on Ad Age's Viral Video Chart due to its popularity on the web.


The difference, said Mr. Cahan, is that IntoNow has indexed enough TV that users can check in to any TV ad or even a live broadcast. It has a catalog of TV that is as comprehensive as Shazam's is for music.

In the case of Pepsi Max, the app shows marketers not only who is paying attention to the ads, but also allows them to reward that attention, as well as drive offline behavior.

Among Media, TV Is Still on Top

Time Spent on the Web Grows, but Ad Dollars and Viewers Stick With TV

By:
Edmund Lee Bio
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Published: March 29, 2011

The internet is consuming ever more of our waking moments, not to mention ever more ad spending, but that doesn't mean that traditional media is the loser. At least not when "traditional media" means TV.

According to the latest research from eMarketer, advertisers are spending more than ever on the broadcast networks and cable, around $60.5 billion on commercial time this year, making TV the richest media segment, with 39.1% of all ad spending, up from 38.6% in 2010. The research firm attributes the share growth to the "recovering economy," but also found the industry is expanding at the expense of other media, specifically newspapers and magazines, and to some degree the internet.

The durability and growth of TV has to come as a surprise to many who predicted that TV dollars would shift to the web along with the growing amount of time consumers spend entertaining themselves on Facebook, Hulu and YouTube.

"Even though online advertising has been robust, it hasn't stopped advertisers from keeping the bulk of their budgets right on TV," eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey said, pointing out that even in spite of consumers' healthy appetite for content on laptops and cellphones, it's not having any discernible effect on their TV habits, or on the amount of money marketers are looking to spend to get in front of their faces.

EMarketer estimates that $64.5 billion will be spent on TV advertising next year, almost double the amount marketers will spend on the internet. "TV remains supreme because it's still seen as a mass-reach vehicle that drives awareness," Mr. Ramsay said. But in an age of simultaneous media usage where one media often drives another and back again, it will become harder to justify discrete budget.

Simultaneous media consumption has become a regular habit among Americans, according to Nielsen Co. Since 2009, around 60% of the TV audience has been regularly clicking through the internet while watching their favorite shows, a fact that is more astounding when considering we're watching more TV than ever, averaging about 35 hours per week in early 2010, vs. 33 hours a week in 2009. But we're not distracting ourselves into oblivion. It turns out that people aren't watching Fox's "Glee" while checking e-mail, but they are more likely commenting on the latest episode on Twitter and Facebook while scrolling through websites such as IMDB to check a particular actor's resume or scan synopses of previous episodes.

"The internet is fueling the TV content," Mr. Ramsay said, noting how the two media have become much more blurred. And as more people adopt the practice of watching internet content on their TV screens, whether via specialized set-top boxes or even a jerry-rigged set up, it will become harder to discern where TV begins and the internet ends, Mr. Ramsay said. "We're already staring to see the semblance of this now," he said, "but TV will remain dominant for some time."