Clean pants & strategy required

I want to get right to the point with this - it's terrific. In fact, it leaves me with very little to say other than "good job."



Simple, funny, insightful, genuine, and not shy about selling the product. Clearly a creative team that got the memo, eh, followed the brief.

Being funny is not easy - but it is easier than using humor intentionally to stay within a defined strategic framework and use the ha ha's to set up a premise that sells the product. That's why the later often end up getting ignored.

Fortunately, that's not the case here. This spot does it all without skipping a beat.

There's a great insight here too - and for a stain remover pen, of all things.

Boys learn from a young age that getting dirty is OK - it's what boys do. It may be OK for a boy, but as a grown man, you have a social responsibility to keep your clothes clean. And, important distinction,...there is a difference between bad wardrobe decision (that's your choice) and stained wardrobe (that's not).

Thanks to Tide To Go, keeping your ugly grey sweatpants clean is a cinch.

While I fear this may endorse bad male dressing, it is ON STRATEGY and likely to sell a few Tide pens to an audience that otherwise wouldn't give it a thought.

Must follow through

This spot makes a number of mistakes, but I'll just focus on failure to follow through.



Some people may find this funny, but I'm sure I don't know any of them. The humor is simply too gratuitous to pay off. But that's not really the point, since the humor has nothing to do with anything here.

There are far more interesting ads to talk about, but I chose to blog about this because the product appears to face a common problem. That is, figuring out what (if anything) makes it unique and what insight could possibly fuel inspiring creative.

I do believe there are cases where neither will be true. In other words, product will be a copy cat and there really won't be any compelling "new" insight to unlock some hidden door. None of this excuses the need for a strategy.

In this case, we have a fruit flavored energy drink (at least that's what it is since the spot doesn't offer much in the way of a description). And, what do fruit flavored energy drinks do? They rev you up, get you going, and set you on your way. Fine.

There are any number of reasons people need energy. Amp decided to focus on mornings at the office. That's fine too.

Presumably the nerdy protagonist is in need of a little spark to get his mundane day off to a speedy start, so he chugs one of these Amp energy drinks and....

Well, then he turns an old PC into an ice-cream serving robot and we spend the rest of the spot watching his co-workers dive head first into an ice cream feeding frenzy (that is ice cream, right?) There's oogles of obvious sexual innuendo, but certainly nothing gratifying, in fact pretty distasteful.

But most importantly, tell me again why we're watching this ice cream orgy in the first place, not to mention why it deserves more focus than the alleged product benefit? We don't even see the product for a second time until the very end of the :60 spot. We're offered no product description and the link between getting hyped up from this drink and building the robot is virtually imperceptible.

Let's assume the creators of this ad started with a nugget of a boring insight - work takes energy to get big, overwhelming, otherwise complicated tasks accomplished - well, then you've simply got to carry this through or the viewer will miss it entirely. No where do we see any of this toiling made oh so much easier thanks to the fire power of Amp.

This will end up on You Tube getting mashed up every which way by high school boys who will enjoy the part that has nothing to do Amp, but it certainly won't move the product.

I think this spot is just plain awful, but I'll just call it OFF STRATEGY and move on.

Funny is not a strategy.

This spot is very funny.



Exceptional casting, brilliant performances.

But, let's talk about the message.

Is there really nothing more that can be said for these new fizzy fruit Skittles other than claiming superiority over a punch in the tounge by a giant tube sock? I'm half kidding, but unfortunately only half.

The assumption here is that people want their tounges to tingle SO bad, they'll do whatever it takes to get that tingly sensation.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't wake with a mission to make my tounge tingle.

This is obviously a far too literal translation, but I'm doing it intentionally to illustrate the faulty logic on which the humor is based. Perhaps if the logic WERE more fluid, this would work.

But it's not, so what I need is to hear more about this fizzy tingly thing - what it feels like, tastes like and why I shouldn't spend another day on the planet without experiencing it.

In its current form, this spot could easily be re-cut with any kind of candy on that tray table and the message would be exactly the same. Is there any candy that DOESN'T taste better than a sock?

I'm all for humor. And just to prove it, I'm going to give Snickers a big shout out here.

Snickers latest campaign, including the now-famous Betty White spot, is a good example of how humor and strategy can co-exist. In Snickers case, humor is used with greater purpose - to define the problem (when you get hungry, you're not yourself) and establish the product as a solution (Snickers satisfies your hunger so you can get back to yourself).

So, back to Skittles. I'm calling this one OFF STRATEGY. (But, funny.)

Overleveraging..or, too much of a good thing can be bad

I applaud brands with the courage to leverage a consumer insight.
Sounds easy. And obvious. But, sadly too few brands actually do it.

There's probably a handful of reasons for this, which we'll get at in future posts, but quickly, my experience suggests it's most likely one of these 4:

a) marketer thinks brand speaks for itself; insights are for wussies. We just need logo, flash and celebrity talent.

b) marketer and/or agency uncovers insight, but they don't like it, so they come up with one they like better. unfortunately it's unlikely to resonate.

c) marketer and/or agency identifies a juicy insight, planner seeds it in the brief, creative team ignores it entirely as they get caught up making flashy ads, ad never delivers against the insight, rendering the earlier part of the process useless.

d) everything goes splendidly; then, in the eleventh hour, the client who thinks he knows exactly what the advertising SHOULD be, trashes the insight-driven ads, writes his own and tells the agency to produce it.

Enough about why insights don't get baked into the advertising. This post is about a brand that did the opposite. Indeed, they FOUND an insight, BAKED it into the advertising, and they are now undoing their earlier good by over-extending the strategy well beyond intelligible parameters.

That brand is Philips.

The insight: people (including and especially men) don't want body hair. They're trimming it off. It can be embarrassing to discuss and tricky to "do right". Check out their earlier work, which I believe was from Tribal DDB.

Enter the latest effort - some contrived linkage to deforestation?? I guess Philips wants us to know they're PRO removing your forest and AGAINST deforestation. They propose to solve the deforestation problem by planting a tree for every bodygrooming razor purchased.

Need I say more?

These are two very separate ideas that really ought not be linked. I could call green washing on this whole thing, but it doesn't seem necessary to go there.

We get it. You want to be viewed as a socially responsible company. But, really this is just too far a stretch. You had a good thing - a consumer insight, advertising and cool viral content that expressed it with some nice humor, a compelling product proposition ...and now you give us this.

I'm calling this one OFF STRATEGY.

Step 1: Admitting you have a problem

Seems this logic applies to advertising too.

At least, Domino's thought so. And now they're reaping the rewards.

Domino's latest effort had its fair share of critics (many ill informed about this category, but nevertheless..) I can proudly proclaim I was not among them. No Monday morning quarterbacking here; I called this one a winner from the jump.

Sales were in the toilet; where else to go but up?

Off they went to focus groups. But the difference is they LISTENED rather than rattle off predictable qualitative research excuses like "how can we listen to 8 people x 3 groups x 2 cities?" Or my favorite "that's just DIRECTIONAL insight".

I love "Directional insight". Translation: we heard something we didn't like and don't have the ability to fix so we'll dismiss it on the grounds of small sample size. N=...nevermind.

(caveat: I really have no idea whether they listened or whether someone at the top forced this approach down the CMO's throat or something else entirely, but as an outsider, it appears they went to learn and they listened.)

Customers (and perhaps no more than 8x3x2) told Domino's their pizza sucked. They listened. And then, they answered the critical question - and it appears, they answered correctly - do they launch a campaign that attempts to convince consumers they're wrong about what they think they tasted OR do they acknowledge the consumers might be right, head back to the kitchen, fix the product, admit there was a problem with the product, claim to have fixed it and THEN attempt to convince consumers to give it another try? They obviously made the difficult choice for the latter.

A smart business decision, for sure. But what I applaud here is the ability of the advertising to stay on strategy and deliver this message rather than bury it in flashy creative non-sequitor. The TV spots tell the course correction story in an arresting way and the pizza holdouts effort is both unconventional and impactful.

I've heard plenty creative teams rant and rave about the impossibility of delivering the entire message in 30 seconds. Apparantly Crispin's team didn't have that problem.

The proof is in the pudding. Or in this case, the pizza sales.

I say Domino's is ON STRATEGY.

Intent

To blog...

I was a late adopter of Facebook.
I've got a Twitter page I never use.
I'm an early Foursquare advocate, albeit still a bit of a skeptic.
And I'm determined to realize the value of building a cautiously robust LinkedIn Network.

As a member of the marketing community, dedicated to building brand awesomeness, I view all this social media connectedness as a professional responsibility. 20% fun; 80% job.

So, onward to blogging and a bloggER I will be...at least for now, until some 18 year old tech cadet invents something much better, faster, cheaper, +/or cooler and renders this useless.

First, to establish a purpose for this blog. (Because that's what I do.)

I'm dedicating my blog to a discussion of marketing efforts and ad like objects that just plain feel off strategy as well as those that appear to be spot on strategy. In fairness to the creators of the "off strategy" set, I offer this caveat - there may well be a perfectly acceptable strategy or juicy, well-baked insight that I've simply missed because I'm not the intended target. Perhaps.

As a planner and self proclaimed strategic stickler, I can't help but evaluate advertising through this lens. It begs the question (or, I do), if advertising is intended to build equity and sell product, is a relevant strategic insight an imperative or is it ok to let the former become a casualty in the process if you end up with a really cool looking or cool sounding or cool doing ad (or the crap a client just paid you dearly to create)?

I realize there's all sorts of good reasons WHY advertising gets strategically derailed, not the least of which is that C word that pays our salaries and keeps agencies in business.

So don't take it personally. It's just a blog. Now off we go..