John Drake

The Right Amount of Attention

When advertising is at its best we, as the audience, get wonderfully lost in its content. We're not questioning why things are happening in an ad. We're not getting hung up on copy points. We're not asking why a regular guy is playing one-on-one with an NBA player. Rather, we are just enjoying the moment.

Like watching "Forrest Gump." We never say there's no way this could ever happen, we just root for Forrest. This is the sign of good storytelling and good production. Really good advertising wants to attract attention and present an idea but it doesn't want the audience to think too much about the ad. When the details get in the way, the ad doesn't work as well. 

There's research to back this up. Robert Heath at the University of Bath has proven the effectiveness of low level processing on recall, especially when advertising carries high emotion. And a 1989 study by Robert Bornstein confirmed that the less aware we are of the elements in advertising the better the ads are likely to work because the viewer has less opportunity to rationally evaluate and contradict things. So we sit back, enjoy and connect.

 

Why Creativity Is An Investment

In "Deja Vu" we follow a man's journey through exotic nightclubs around the world and see a new Heineken bottle--the first redesign since 1946. It's the latest in a successful series of executions around #ArriveBIG.

The ad is directed by Snow White and the Huntsman's Rupert Sanders. The lead actor you may have seen in James Bond's Quantum of Solace. The costumes are courtesy of three-time Oscar Winner Colleen Atwood (Memoirs of a Geisha) and the music is from a 1971 Indian film by RD Burman. Indeed, it's a "very exotic commercial" as one YouTube commenter put it. Brands of mass scale can do this.

That's quite a production.  

"While it may seem counter intuitive for agencies and clients alike to deliver and demand more audacious and potent creativity when there is an air of pessimism and caution, it is precisely what is needed. For the confidence that high altitude creativity builds around a brand whether with colleagues, the trade, opinion formers or customers is capable of kick starting growth and a powerful virtuous circle of activity." 

There's some evidence to back this thought up.

A bankable way for a brand to grow is to spend ahead of its market share. IPA Databank and Nielsen compiled a study which Martin Weigel so effectively captured--as he often does--in this presentation.

According to that study, increases in share-of-voice spending can lead to market share growth of .5 percent per every 10 percentage point of excess share-of-voice spent. But whenever a creatively-awarded campaign was evaluated against the same metric it generated 11 times more share of growth per every 10 points of excess share-of-voice.

The IPA/Nielsen findings align with what Leo Burnett sees every year when they evaluate whether Cannes Lion winners also achieved their intended business success. The agency cites an 86 percent correlation between award-winning work and its effectiveness. (This is up from 78 percent in 1997.)

And both of these findings relate to a new University of Cologne study that compared 347 campaigns from 90 brands assessed by their levels of originality, elaboration and artistic value. The University found that a 1 percent increase in adspend translated into a .2 percent increase in purchases. But when the more creative ads were analyzed the increase bumped up to .3 percent.

All of this works together, of course--to grow more share and sell more stuff. That's what good creativity can do. For Heineken and others.

Emotional Speeds

Every day you should have some laughter, you should spend some time in thought and you should have your emotions moved to tears of joy or appreciation. If you do that, Jimmy V said, you will have a wonderful life. Indeed, we are all built with both the ability and the need to move our heart, mind and soul in ways that make life richer.

I believe that more of this should come through in our work.

Many brands pick an emotion and stay there. Jack In The Box brings humor, Uniqlo embraces irreverence, Southwest is always fun. This, of course, is a proven way to go and is often a solution that can pay dividends for years.

Another way to go is to work at varying emotional speeds. It's made possible when a brand stands on very high ground and allows marketing to explore the natural range of human emotion within that ground. VW has been re-focused around "the people's car," which is a nice example of this.

A second example of this is Expedia whose "Find Yours" campaign from 180/LA began with some joy and is now sharing a different side of travel with the powerful message of "strength"...

Varying emotional speed is a beautiful form of marketing. It's harder to find. It's much more difficult to do. Yet it appreciates, perhaps more so than other strategies, that on the other end of the product is a person and that people have days where they laugh, they cry and they have some thought.

Doesn't it seem like brands who operate at different emotional speeds feel as if there's people like us working there as opposed to just advertisers? I think so.

Say Two Things

Watching these recent examples and then re-watching this terrific advice, is a reminder that in the big communication outlets we should try to focus on saying only two things. The first is, of course, the key product takeaway. And the second is the tone and emotion that it's presented in for it's what lingers, sells and motivates over the long term.

Aiming For The Heart

The causal role of conscious thought has been vastly overrated. It is often a post hoc explanation of responses that emanated from the adaptive unconscious. And this experiment shows with rather shocking clarity the huge difference that can exist between the way we think we choose things and the ways that we really choose. We are quite capable of feeling a strong preference for something for reasons which we're totally ignorant of, but we are good at disguising this to ourselves because we automatically tend to create an apparently rational cover story, which we then believe in.

From here.

The Science of Optimism

 

Are people more pessimistic or optimistic? As we watch the nightly news and follow political commentary one might immediately say we're a pessimistic bunch. But science says differently. Human brains are built to tilt toward the positive according to a stellar report by Tali Sharot called The Optimism Bias.

We imagine what could be. Apparently inside our brains our prefrontal cortex and the amygdala work together to keep us looking forward. It's a proactive survival mechanism. Because we are a species that is consciously aware of our pending mortality it is optimism that keeps us balanced. It's what motivated us to move out of caves in the first place. 

From the article:

"Optimism starts with what may be the most extraordinary of human talents: mental time travel, the ability to move back and forth through time and space in one's mind. Our capacity to envision a different time and place is in fact critical to our survival."

Collectively we can be pessimistic, but when it comes to ourselves, we are mostly optimistic. For example, a recent survey found that while 70% of respondents thought families in general were less successful than in their parents' day, 76% of respondents were optimistic about the future of their own family. 

We are hard-wired to think about what could be. In marketing let's not over think stuff: put the optimistic emotion of the product out there. People want that.

The next thing about optimism is that it's largely constructed out of experiences. The more experiences we have in our lives the more we learn. And the more we learn, interestingly, the more optimistic science says we tend to become. This is because prior experience allows us to find the silver lining in the clouds since we've been there before.

Different experiences also allow us to put things in the proper perspective. For instance, right before I read the Optimism Bias I was scanning an article about Oscar winning actress, Marion Cotillard, who was asked if she prefers the small films or big Hollywood productions...

MC: "Oh, I love both. I have the possibility to travel into so many universes, and that is what really makes the job marvelous for me. I wouldn't say I prefer one or the other. It's the richness (of both) that makes me think I will always have sparkles in my eyes and in my heart."

The value is in the balance and being well-rounded. 

And if we're going to be well-rounded from experiences then that's extra good for organizations. In Change By Design, IDEO's Tim Brown talks about the importance of T-Shaped people in an organization. T-Shaped people are those who vertically specialize in something (the vertical part of the "T") but because they push themselves outside their core competency they also have the ability to collaborate across disciplines (the horizontal part of the "T").

So it's important to seek experiences in ourselves and others... it makes for more optimistic and collaborative groups.

The science of optimism is fascinating. Read the full article here.

Is Expensive Wine Worth The Price?

When drinking wine it is both true and untrue to say that the expensive stuff tastes better than the inexpensive stuff. 

First the untrue. In a recent study of blind tasting, psychologist Richard Wiseman asked 600 people to say which wines were more expensive after sipping. People only picked correctly 53% of the time--the equivalent of a coin flip.

Now the true. We love to rank and score things but we can't really quantify taste on a 100 point scale. The more we know about the wine we're drinking--from imagining the region where it's from to seeing the transporting label design--the more we engage our full brain in the process, thus receiving a better experience.

From Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex who originally posted this research:

The taste of a wine, like the taste of everything, is not merely the sum of that alcoholic liquid in the glass. It cannot be deduced by beginning with our sensations and extrapolating upwards. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories, wine shop factoids and idiosyncratic desires. As the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars pointed out, there is no reasonable way to divide sensory experience into what is “given to the mind” and what is “added by the mind.” When we take a sip of wine, for instance, we don’t taste the wine first, and the cheapness second. We taste everything all at once, in a single gulp of thiswineisplonk, or thiswineisexpensive. Our senses are vague in their instructions, and we parse their inputs based upon whatever other knowledge we can summon to the surface.

And that's how we assign value to brands too. 'We taste everything all at once.'

Read the original post from Jonah here. There's tons of great stuff like this over at The Frontal Cortex.

On A Mass Scale We Choose Emotion

When a company is in it for the long term it's essential that an emotional reason to buy plays at the heart of activity. I call this Purpose Driven Marketing. Others have other names. But what's starting to play out is that over the last several years there have been lots of one-off ideas, cool tactics and tons of "you gotta check this out" moments. These are good. These work. But when the goal is long-term victory and dominance across a vast scale of consumers, then the emotional core is the most fortified of approaches.

Quick example... If you watch network TV on Sunday night you have a viewing choice at 8pm: Secret Millionaire (ABC) or America's Next Great Restaurant (NBC). Both are new and unique. But nearly 6 million more people choose Secret Millionaire. The difference between the two: Secret Millionaire stirs emotions while the Next Great Restaurant is pragmatic.

Back to companies... McDonald's vs. Burger King. Over the last several years BK has focused their marketing efforts on one-off ideas surrounding big food, such as Whopper Virgins and Whopper Sacrifice. On the other side, McDonald's has continued globally with I'm Lovin' It, a comprehensive message that taps our emotions greater than one-off efforts. BK experienced solid sales increases from 2005 through 2009 but today (long term) they are off 2.5%. McDonald's is up 4.4%. Mark Kalinowski, restaurant industry analyst with Janney Capital Markets summed it up concisely last month: "Burger King is a brand that needs to find its voice in the market, and right now it's having trouble doing that."

Another example... Coke vs. Pepsi. Ad Age recently reported how Pepsi fell to #3 behind Coke and Diet Coke respectively. I don't believe this points to what Pepsi did wrong ("Refresh" is genius) but rather what Coke did amazingly well across the world: a global refinement of the emotional positioning of "coke brings joy" across packaging, branding, advertising, sponsorship and engagement. Take this spot or these elements and you can put them immediately into the US, Spain or China and it translates the same. No explanation needed. 

Many brands are doing great work today. This I truly believe. (And if you don't believe it you should probably expose yourself to more work.) But when it comes to communicating across a vast amount of consumers over the long term, one-off ideas can win the round but it's the emotional, purpose driven approach that wins the match.

Photo Mosaic

There's a button on Flickr that allows you to view icons of all the photos taken by other people that you've favorited over time. Above is mine. It's nice to look at a snapshot of stuff that's caught your eye... No rhyme or reason per se, but definitely an overarching theme. (Each of us have themes, of course.) But it's a pleasant feeling to look back at a collage of lots of images--favorited at random times on random days in random moods--and immediately think, yep, that feels about right.

Throwdown

If only a few of the five dozen Super Bowl ads moved you, and you'd really like to see another new ad that positively motivates and celebrates the product and the emotion behind the product, then I present, "Throwdown." Terrific.