Tuesday, October 6, 2009

On advertising - creative, memorable and effective, or not!

One of the lessons that the Proton students remember well is what Rosen Sharma said - an entrepreneur needs to REALLY understand her customers. The same is true in advertising.

A lot of expensive advertisements, though, may be creative but are not memorable, and even if memorable are not effective.

A good (bad?) example was the front page advertisement for Yahoo in the Hindustan Times, the Times of India and other leading dailies earlier this week. which looked like this:


This campaign is managed by Ogilvy and Mather, and they should know what they are doing. But from my (target customer?) perspective, I saw the great Yahoo logo and trademark color totally disregarded. I did not even read the copy, I must confess.

If I had a choice, I think I would instead have the logo splashed all over the front page, with the message following in smaller font below. A sort of "Yahoo is back" message.Now there are many reasons why this could have been done the way it was. a) This is part of a global campaign and maybe they have decided to give the old logo a rest (although India does not seem to be too tired of it). b) Maybe there is a longer term strategy. But by itself it was hardly memorable and definitely not effective as far as I was concerned.

If you talk about Indian TV advertising, I'm surprised by how creative it is. Perhaps it is only because the Indian TV advertising industry is still young and booming, but the average quality of ideas appears to be perhaps superior to that in other parts of the world. But that does not translate necessarily to memorable advertising. An advertisement may gain your fixed attention, but will you remember it the next day?

Even more importantly, do you remember the product with which the advertisement was associated?

A very memorable series of television ads for me is the one with the brash little boy saying things lie, "Do pahiyon ki baat hai, aa jaayenge!" (to the man in the car as he waits on his bicycle). But I don't remember which washing powder it extolled. Perhaps I am not the target customer. Still, I remember a lot of memorable television advertisements where I don't remember which product they sold. I love to point it out to people who are watching TV with me - just after the ad is over, I ask, "Now a quiz: which product was that ad for?" Mostly people don't remember.

In these cases, it seems that the advertising agency got carried away with its creativity and the client company had to pay for it (literally and metaphorically)!

Even if the ad is memorable, does it add a certain attractiveness to the product? Is it truly effective? Of course, that depends on the number of times you see the advertisement or other advertisements of the same product. For example, I have built a respect for the LG brand mainly by watching tons of advertisements in various countries though I don't remember any single one. Perhaps the Yahoo! campaign is meant to be the same way.

All said and done, the general idea - know your customer (or the customer's customer) - is highly applicable here. It's worthwhile being paranoid and continuously worry that you don't know your customer enough!

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Good morning Sir,(its now become our habit to say good morning even at 9.35 p.m)
What i observed from that add is whatever they did, it was good because when i logged on to YAHOO site after seeing that add, i haven't found anything new there...All was OLD YAHOO type of informations and all..so its good that lots of people didn't recognized that because if they did,they will surely get disappointed like me...But what you observed is amazing,learning from this blog is that we also should observe things like you..
Thanks for sharing this knowledge with us.

Akshay Kothari said...

Respected Sir,
It was great to Read about Advertising strategies and how it Affects the Consumer.
Sir but my Perception to this is a bit differnt.
I think Companies which use MUSICAL tones stay for long into brains of Consumer.
AirTel,INTEL can be some of the best Examples for it.We just cant forget those beautiful Compositions.
When it comes to Hoardings i love Ads of AMUL hats off to MR.Piyush Pathak.Heights of Imagination.
But at last really advertisements do give a serious Impact on our buying Decisions and create a Brand Image.
Advertising is the Job of MAD people with HIGHLY creative minds.
Thanks
Proton Akshay
FALL09

Gautam Gunjaria said...

Dear Sir,
After reading this blog the two things that came to my mind are:-
(1) all the companies should first step into customers shoe and then conduct such huge advertisement campaigns.
(2) after all advertisement is the phenomena of getting into customers mind and leaving behind footprints which are retained for a long period in their mind.

Yours sincerely,
Gautam Gunjaria
Fall 2009 intake

Sumeet said...

Respected Sir,
It seems that it is not worth spending millions of dollars on advertisements if it is not communicating to the public in the way the company desires. If we talk of Aamir Khan as a brand ambassador, he simply develops a positive opinion in the minds of consumers. His various advertisements of Coca cola are still remembered and the punch line "Yaara da tashan" is still used by the youth.After all advertisements is a brand building exercise so it shuould be taken as an Investment rather than expenditure.It is worth investing in creative advertisements like Coca cola.

Regards,
Sumeet Navlani
Fall '09

Jagrat said...

Respected Sir,
Your insights on the the advertisement world's fetish for creativity against real business are very true indeed.

Across the globe giants like Unilever, P&G and many more have refined their contract with advertising agencies where payment of fees would be linked to increase in sales so ultimately they need to balance their satisfactions of their creative ego with real business sense.

Now Sir I would like to put forth my analysis of the latest yahoo ads in leading dailies bit differently......

1. As Yahoo and Microsoft have teamed up so this ad is indirectly driving our attention there too.

2. Threat of Google is so much evident to Yahoo that it feels it should at least get noticed and people in anticipation of something new on offer might give it a look.


But again I also agree with your take on less visibility of the great yahoo logo in the ads and its changed form.

Sir in memorable and effective ads in India I would like to mention the "Fevicol" brand and its advertising.

Regards,
Jagrat Sanadhya
Fall-08, PROTON business school, Indore

Test said...

Unfortunately, advertising design being the complicated process it is, the direct involvelment of CEO, COO, Line-of-business-Head, CMO and the Design group (internal or external) becomes important. It is quite often that many of these are not able to meet together during crucial moments when decisions are made. For ex the CEO may be tied up with bankers and the advt HAS to go to the press. He may just say "tum log dekh lo, soch samajh kar banao aur release karo". This may sound too small-companyish but it is frighteningly frequent in big companies especiall when new markets and new products are concerned, and especially at the final execution level. So, this disaster of an advt (Yahoo! one) can be explained by the simple argument that someone important really goofed up big time. It is a hopeless campaign. The logo is missing, the punch is missing, the message is too fancy for many (including me) .. the brand could have done much much better with this kind of a spend.

Vidit Shah said...

Good Evening Sir,
The advertisment given by yahoo is a typical mistake done by Yahoo and at the same time i feel many of the advertising commpanies do the same mistake. They sometimes try to give more stress on advertisments and sometimes on products. Its rarely observed that the combination of advertisment and product are covered equally which leaves an impact on the customer for a long time.
Regards
Vidit Shah

Manas said...

I am often impressed by the quality of thinking behind the comments (even if the English sometimes leaves something to be desired). Jagrat's comment was, for example, quite insightful.