Enthralled by tech we don't understand

The advertising world has discovered this week that an app purporting to crowd-source spotting migrant boats in trouble in the Mediterranean did no such thing.

It rendered the same static image for every user and when they 'spotted' the boat in it, asked for their contact details.

On the plus side, it did update with the weather forecast for Libya.

The app just won a Bronze award at Cannes.

Apple has pulled it from their app store and an investigation has started.

Whatever the morality of producing the app in the first place - which is pretty shocking - what the episode brings home to me, is the need for senior managers making decisions about tech, to actually understand the technology. Not to be programmers themselves necessarily, but to have a good idea of what is possible, what is easy and what is difficult.

A bunch of judges at Cannes decided that the migrant spotting app was worthy of an award.

None of them apparently had the nous to say "hang on, where are they getting their live satellite images?"

Of course the app can't exist. Marketing creative agencies don't have access to live satellite video streams of the Mediterranean. This isn't 24 and Jack Bauer's not an agency staffer.

Google Earth isn't a live stream.

You can get live images, if by 'live' you mean one per day. And it's not cloudy.

At the very least when it comes to technology, if we don't know, then we need to find an expert and ask. There are charlatans out there in the world. Some of them are software vendors, some do digital advertising and some make apps. If we're not to be taken in, the level of tech savvy in our industry needs to increase and quickly.

Mapping UK Adland

I've been putting together a lot of advertiser spend data recently, for our own internal Tableau dashboards, and thought it might be fun to throw the dataset at R too and make something less functional but a little bit prettier.

These are contour maps showing the locations of UK advertisers spending more than £500k on TV, radio, print and posters last year. Darker equals more businesses in the area and I've deliberately dropped legends to avoid cluttering up the maps.

Huge thanks to the people behind R and the ggmap package, who are much, much cleverer than I am!


UK businesses spending more than £500k on advertising in 2013 (Click for bigger)

Focussing on England and Wales...

It's not all about London...

Nobody goes South of the River...

Are we branding? Or selling?

If you've worked in advertising for a while, you'll have come across the question of whether it's ok to compromise the 'creative vision' of a 'brand' ad, by sullying it with practical things like phone numbers and web addresses.

Being a data-type person and so not the sort to think that the majority of TV ads have a great deal of 'creative vision', I don't really understand this question, but it's a question that comes up a lot.

I wrote some time ago about adverts, which don't have the product that they're advertising in them and ads which don't tell you how to buy the product, fall into pretty much the same category. The challenge of making an ad is to make something that holds people's attention, so that you can talk to them about a product. Holding people's attention for 30" without the discipline of showing the product, is easy. It's a music video. You just show whatever you want and anyone can do that, even me.

So we need an ad with the product in it. A comment on the post I linked to above, summed it up perfectly: "Can you describe the advertisement without mentioning the product?" Keep that one in mind as you watch an ad break tonight - it's scary how often the answer is, "yes you can and by the way, what was the product?"


OK, Mr. Super-Brand so now you've communicated your product to me and I want to buy it. What do I do next? Oh, you've gone.

If it's not blazingly obvious what to do next then you need to tell me, because your ad wasn't that gripping and I'm very, very lazy. Give me a phone number, give me a web address, tell me where to buy your product. Do not make me work hard to buy you.

Apple can get away with 'pure' brand ads that have no direction afterwards (but that always, always, have the product in them), because everybody knows where to buy Apple's stuff. Most brands aren't Apple.

If a creative agency tells you that their advert won't work so well if it includes your phone number, or retail stores, or web address, or (God forbid) the product that you sell, then they're not doing their job properly. Their job is to include all of those things and still make the ad interesting enough that people will pay attention. That's hard. It's why creative agencies cost money.

Here's something that's caught my eye recently; Samsung have taken to sticking their logo in the corner of the screen for virtually the entire duration of a TV spot.

In a laptop ad, this makes perfect sense because let's face it, all laptops look the same. Without that logo, you're asking somebody to really pay close attention to the ad in order to realise whose laptop they're looking at.

Why don't many, many more advertisers do this?

TV channels do it. Their only purpose is to entertain and they still stick their logo in the corner of the screen!

But the advertisers who pay to show their products on those TV channels, don't do it. Why on earth not? The only reason can be due to a feeling that it would make the ad look 'cheap'. Putting your logo on the screen isn't subtle. Maybe we're afraid to be caught actually doing marketing, so we pretend not to.

Me? In my 30" spot, I'd want my product front and centre, my brand logo next to it and a dirty great web address on the screen at the end. When you say that would compromise the 'quality' of the ad, are you saying my brand looks cheap? You might want to try another argument.

Adblock penetration has doubled in three years

Three years ago, I did some back of a fag packet maths to estimate the penetration of Adblock amongst UK internet users. It's something that's not easy to get data on, which surprises me because it's potentially pretty important. Yes, you don't pay for internet ads that are never served to users, but Adblock has the potential to severely limit the reach of an online campaign. You'd think at least the SEO community would want to know how many people run Adblock, because those people don't see paid search ads, making SEO all the more powerful.

For the uninitiated, Adblock sits in your internet browser - usually Firefox or Chrome - and blocks the links that are used to serve advertising. You see a website as normal, just with no ads on it and the mechanics are clever enough that it doesn't leave big white spaces on the page where the advertising would normally be. The site's regular content is flowed into the gaps left by ads that have been removed.

If you ask me, I think it's brilliant. Shhhhhh, don't tell anyone.

Three years ago, my best guess based on Firefox users running Adblock was a total UK internet user penetration of around 2.2%. Not really enough to worry about back then, but what about in 2012?

Since 2009, Firefox and Chrome have continued to grow, to a point where between them, they account for very nearly 50% of browser usage.

Both of these browsers can run a variety of blocking software and so potentially, we're looking at a lot more people avoiding adverts than we were three years ago.

This is where the maths gets a bit vague, but stay with me.

It's hard to get figures for how many users run blocking software, but Mozilla do share daily active user numbers for the Firefox addon.

Globally, we've got 15m daily active users of Adblock on Firefox.

And in mid 2010, we had 120m users of Firefox itself. These are the most recent stats I can find unfortunately. If we project the trend forward to 2012, we should be on about 150m active Firefox users by now.

Globally, that would give a penetration within the Firefox user base of around 10%.

Lets assume Chrome is about the same and is also running at about 10% penetration. We're going to have to assume that one, because I can't find any stats beyond "1,000,000+" users for Adblock on Chrome, via the Chrome webstore.

We saw earlier that Firefox and Chrome together account for 50% of browsers. I'm going to make a further assumption that virtually nobody using Internet Explorer has an ad blocking plugin installed. Plugins do exist, but it you're using Explorer, then you're almost certainly not the sort of user who's found out about Adblock. I'll leave Safari and Opera to one side too, in the interests of our estimate being deliberately aimed towards the low end. Adding to the low end nature of this guess are a variety of other plugins, which do a similar job to Adblock and which I haven't included.

So, 50% of browsers are Firefox or Chrome, and 10% of those users have Adblock installed = 5% total penetration. Ish.

Using a similar method to 2009, we've got a more than doubling of usage, from 2.2% then, to 5% now. It's still not so big that you'd panic, but is starting to become a significant minority of internet users, who don't see any of the paid-for advertising that brands throw at the web.

See you back here in another three years for more fag packet maths and the conclusion that it's broken the 10% mark?

The irresistable urge to fiddle...

...Is the only reason I can think of why you'd abandon a campaign, which has been working - incredibly successfully - since 1972.

Your predecessors as Brand Manager have created one of the iconic British brands. All you have to do is to keep your head down, serve your time and repeat their successful formula. By all means build microsites, do social media and get all web 2.0, but do not, under any circumstances, digitise the Andrex Puppy.

Showing your workings

One of two things happened with Volvo's latest ad for the V60.

Either...

It's a very clever, self-referential commentary on TV spots for cars, composed by a genius.

Or...

Bereft of original ideas at the end of an all-day creative session, somebody looked at a list on the whiteboard that was drawn up four hours ago (as a joke that had seemed funny at the time) listing the 'formula' for a car ad and said "sod it, we've got nothing else, let's run with that".

1. Show a sexy car
2. Include a visual metaphor
3. Make it all wet and steamy
4. Finish with an obscure product demonstration


Draw your own conclusion, but ads like this rarely strike me as being all that clever. It feels more like showing your workings.

Are we having an 80s revival?

Watching telly last night, there were a string of perfume and car ads that made me think I'd been timewarped back to sometime in the mid 1980s.

Apparently Peugeot have decided to go back to basics and that you can't beat a girl in white, in the rain, draping herself over the car. Wait for the clever 2011 turnaround on the old cliche at the end though... Hang on, what do you mean there isn't one?

Courtesy of youtube, enjoy some borderline nsfw French car pr0n.

Things you used to see

I visited Goathland station in the Yorkshire Moors yesterday. It's been preserved pretty much as it would have looked 100 years ago, complete with steam trains and there's nothing quite like a steam train to bring out your inner five year old. It was great.

Historical accuracy and the fact you can't buy Woodbines any more, must be why they're allowed to still have this poster on display.


Probably nobody ever tried to measure its effectiveness and I doubt the word 'brand' came up once in the design meeting. Actually I doubt there even was a design meeting. Bet it sold its share of Woodbines though.

Hotmail turkeys in voting for Christmas shocker

Microsoft did a brave thing last week. They sent the Hotmail team onto Reddit to ask users why they didn't like Hotmail.

I should probably have said 'to get feedback on Hotmail' but since nobody really likes Hotmail (I think I'm on safe ground there) it was a brave thing to do.

Some of the replies were a real surprise. I used to use Hotmail - most thirtysomethings did at some point because it's what there was when we first needed email. Apparently we're all leaving now though and when Microsoft asked what it would take to get us back, the first reply and one that kept coming up was...

"Rebrand it and run an ad campaign"

So much for focus groups. Everyone's an amateur marketer!

There's a good point hiding in there somewhere about how "@hotmail" sounds a bit unprofessional and lots of people would probably like an "@office.com" address but it's really not why we all left for gmail in droves.


Quick taste test. Is this a Microsoft product or a Google one?


That was too easy.

Hotmail's a mess. It's had half hearted attempts at social networking and news feeds bolted to it, is awkward to use and it doesn't play nicely with smartphones (through the web UI or IMAP) to name just a few problems. Actually, being a Microsoft tool it doesn't play nicely with anything that Microsoft don't build.

These are huge issues that need to be sorted long before you even think about a re-brand, otherwise you're just spending advertising money bringing people to your site, so that they can remind themselves how bad it is and disappear for another few years.

it's been a while since this one came out. Apparently some email users think it really works too.

How much free stuff are you worth?

Twitter's free, Facebook's free, Youtube's free and they're all trying to raise enough cash to be profitable by selling advertising space.

Time for a back of a fag packet analytics session. How much free content can advertising support?

So far, I've seen this question approached in terms of dwell time and attention. A site attracts ten thousand visitors a month, they spend an average of three minutes looking at it and so through some kind of TV spot equivalence, broadcast ad space has a value. Either that or it's click through rates, in which case each site has a different value to different advertisers, depending on how well targeted the site is, and it all gets complicated very quickly.

Here's an easy way.

Average UK household income is £30,000 after tax.

Assume that on average, they will spend all of it (some will save and some will borrow, which is too much maths to fit on the back of a box of Marlboro Lights.)

Companies spend, on average, around 3% of their total turnover on advertising. (American data, from 2007. Stop moaning, it's a fag packet analysis.)

This would mean that in the UK, each household is generating about £900 per year of advertising. That's £17.31 per week.

With a few exceptions (traditional Outdoor advertising being one) all advertising piggy backs on content. ITV programmes, subsidised newspaper prices, websites, whatever. You permit companies to advertise to you in return for free stuff.

So we've got £17.31 per household per week to spend on content - all of it, from TV programmes to Twitter. Straight away you can see why a lot of web business models have got a problem. A Napster subscription is £10 a month, so free music would take about £2.50 off your weekly budget to start with. A Sky HD subscription is £55.75 a month all in*, which would take nearly £14 of your weekly budget.

As a rule of thumb, with a little bit left over, I think it makes sense to say that advertising could support content up to the value of a free Sky HD subscription, plus free on-tap music for everybody in the country. And no more. That's quite a lot of free stuff, but how many websites, TV channels, newspapers, magazines, sports matches and others have we got bidding for a piece of the pie?


* Yes I know Sky has a large element of ad funding too. It's a back of a... you know the rest.

Adverts with the X Factor

Was going to post this last week, but I couldn't and we'll come back to that.

I don't watch a lot of commercial TV. Football on ITV, the odd Channel 4 drama (Generation Kill is great, but on too late for a school night) and that's about it. That and The X Factor. It's my guilty secret and one of the few times that I'll sit in front of ITV and actually watch the ads.



You watch the ads on X Factor, more than other programmes, because the show provokes a discussion. Instead of channel hopping or going to get a beer like you do at half time in the Champions' League, the break is a time to chat about the show.

Maybe this isn't a revelation, but I was staggered by what a low proportion of the advertising minutes actually featured any brands at all. You know the sort of thing - twenty five seconds to set the scene and then maybe a pack shot at the end. Maybe.

There was one for a home freshening scent that might have been a plug-in one or might not, I can't remember. It mostly featured lingering shots of paddy fields and deserts and was in conjunction with National Geographic (I remember that. Their name was on it more often.) Do deserts smell good? Not really the point. The point is I couldn't use that ad to make my point in this post, because I can't remember who it was for. And that's trying to make an effort!

That's why I couldn't write this post last week. There were so many ads where the brand itself was such a tiny feature, that I decided during the show it might make a blog post. Should have written down the bad examples though, because there was no way in hell I could remember what any of them were by Monday.

So this weekend I tried again. Here's one. Thirty five seconds of Paul Whitehouse being a camp hairdresser and if we're being generous, five seconds of Aviva. The word Aviva is said twice and their logo is on screen once, for one second. Everybody in the country 'watching' TV is discussing those creepy twins who can't sing and not paying attention. Blink and you've missed it.



Where's the effort? Surely the difficult bit of creating an ad is making it interesting with the product in it. Paul Whitehouse is already interesting, that bit's easy. Thirty five seconds of Paul Whitehouse practicing his accents and then a quick logo doesn't communicate much of anything.

Here's the one I did remember. The good example as a contrast. Will it win awards? Probably not, but I like it. And you know what? I could remember who it was for on Monday because it's got the bloody product in it!

Real Cheese in the M..
Watch the ad...

There's no such thing as Brand and Direct

In the quest to better explain how advertising works, marketers have invented an artificial distinction between advertising that is 'Brand' and advertising that is 'Direct'. It was useful for a while, but like an overused metaphor*, is starting to make things more difficult to understand than they need to be.

Go to jail, go directly to jail...

The always excellent Ad Contrarian has a quote on his homepage, pointing to where the problem starts.

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

You can't run a 'Direct ad' in isolation. Give people a phone number using a low production value 10" spot in daytime and it might well generate low cost responses but it also generates a brand impression. That you're a bit cheap.

I've come across good few different blurred distinctions of Brand and Direct that make life even more complicated.

• We can measure direct, but not brand, so brand advertising is everything we can't measure


• Direct sells product but brand drives awareness and consideration


• Direct means cheap airtime


• Brand means expensive, peak airtime (but using the same daytime creative, obviously...)


• Direct means black and white press. Colour press is 'brand' because it costs more but doesn't seem to generate any extra response


• Our ad is a 'Direct ad', because it's got a phone number on it


• Our ad is not a 'Direct ad' even though it's got a phone number on it

There's only one useful definition of direct advertising and it's not related to branding. Direct advertising can be measured with a response rate - to a phone number, to a website, via coupons returned, whatever.... Crucially, this has got absolutely nothing to do with what effect the ad is supposed to have on consumers; it's a technical distinction about how we track response that has unhelpfully been blown up into some kind of model of consumer behaviour.

If your campaign will work harder with a web address in it, then put one in it. This doesn't fundamentally change the way the campaign works, it just makes it easier for people to find you.

An ad that is expensive doesn't suddenly start doing a miraculous unmeasurable 'brand' job just because it cost more. Peak time is just like daytime, only with different people watching the TV.

Of course there are benefits in consistency and there are benefits in high production values and these things are hard to measure, but they're just as true in your 'Direct' ads as they are anywhere else.


* Overused metaphor as a metaphor... I'm quite proud of that.

The definition of a media channel

We've had a lot of fun with media planning for insurers over the past few weeks and it's brought up - or I should say resurrected - an interesting question... What's a media channel?

The reason it applies to insurers particularly at the moment is that insurance aggregator sites like Money Supermarket and Confused.com are growing at a frightening rate. Frightening if you're a big name insurer who relies on brand recall and affinity to sell policies rather than being the cheapest in the market. Suddenly you're in a list with everybody else that makes this tactic extremely obvious.

Insurers pay aggregators a fee for every policy they sell. That fee comes from the advertising budget and I don't think that makes sense.

Are you advertising when you place your product on an aggregator? I'd argue that what you've done is more the equivalent of an FMCG brand getting stocked in a new supermarket. One where the profit margin is lower (because of the aggregator fee.)

Would you let marketing decide, on their own, whether your product should be stocked in ASDA or not, based on the profit margin? Of course you wouldn't.

There's a very blurred line between retail and advertising. Getting stocked in ASDA could well increase brand awareness because ASDA shoppers will see your product on the shelves, but that doesn't bring it under the remit of the marketing department.

How and when to use aggregators ahould be an all-stakeholder decision, with a budget that comes from outside marketing. Which definitely doesn't mean that marketing might not get their budget reduced as a result...

Marketing's job should be to get the maximum number of policies out of a presence on the aggregator - to create trust in the brand so that when it tops the list as cheapest, conumers will click on it and buy a policy.

No, huge will be 2009

The Guardian is reporting a 'huge decline' in adspend of 10% for the final quarter of 2008.

When numbers for the first half of 2009 (and possibly all of 2009) are available, it will paint a far, far worse picture than that. Media for Q4 will have been booked mostly in Q3, before budgets really went through the floor. My impression now is that everybody started cutting back heavily from around Q4 and really heavily coming into 2009. Many are reducing budgets still further at the moment.

When CBS are running their own poster ads to fill sites, you know things are bad.



Any guesses as to how far down 2009 will be on 2007? I'll start the bidding at 20-25%.

Busman's holiday

About this time of year, I'm surprised that any work gets done at all in adland because everybody's gone skiing. In my case, it would be snowboarding, but there's a lot of work on, so no winter sports for the analysts. Looking on the bright side, I'll be one of those annoying people with loads of holiday left come July...

One of the reasons I loved going out to ski resorts (behind the snow, excitement, food and alcohol obviously) is that they were a rare example of what Naomi Klein in No Logo calls 'unbranded space'.

As somebody who works in advertising, it's refreshing when on holiday, to be somewhere that's not plastered with ads. I know there's loads of branding for Salomon etc, but that's in context and makes it feel just a little a bit more like the Winter Olympics as you're bombing down the slopes. Or as you're picking yourself up out of a snowbank and wondering if you've really smashed your camera to pieces this time.

Then three or four years ago, somebody realised that punters on ski lifts are a captive AB audience, with only the beautiful landscape to look at. Which obviously won't do.

So now we have ski lift outdoor on the pylons and on the chairs.


We're talking a lot in my agency about 'permission' to use an advertising channel. For me, these ads rank somewhere behind the video garbage that my mobile phone provider insists on sending every couple of weeks and unsolicited credit card mailshots. Not ignored, but actively disliked.

I doubt it will damage Canon or Easyjet to be present on ski lifts (to name two from last winter) but these ads do make the winter ski trip feel like a bit of a busman's holiday.

That's two posts in a row about avoiding ads... I'll find a campaign I like for the next one, honest.

Here's a fun game

There's a mischievous response to the question "Can you measure the effectiveness of my advertising?", which will sometimes lead to a very straight answer and occasionally cause a client or planner to tie themselves completely in knots.

It's "Sure, what was it supposed to change?"

It's most fun to ask a room full of people and find out that they all think the campaign was supposed to do different things. The finance guy is talking about selling product, the head of marketing is talking about building the brand and somebody else chips in with 'making a noise' or possibly 'maintaining share of voice'.

Building the brand is a difficult one to define because it means so many things to different people. Do we mean awareness? Consideration? Preference? If you can't define the word brand, then setting it as a campaign objective - even implicitly - is fraught with problems.

In the Era of Marketing Accountability^TM, shouldn't everybody be clear on what their marketing budget is designed to achieve?

Open source research

We've all heard plenty about what the internet is doing, and will do, to traditional advertising. So what about advertising research?

There are already a multitude of ways to track your brand online. I pulled a Blogpulse chart for a post in this blog a few weeks ago and there's no reason you can't do the same for any brand. And that's just scratching the surface of what's on offer.

Alongside all the new toys are a few things that would make me worry if I was involved in traditional brand tracking - measuring how many people are aware of a brand, or remember its ads, that sort of thing.

Facebook has decided to become a pollster because it can't make enough money from selling advertising space.

This wonderful timeline of what ads people were twittering about during the Superbowl is easy enough to reproduce if you can code for the (free, in limited form) Twitter API.


Silobreaker has planted itself firmly in the PR tracking space and even Google Trends is a great indicator of the interest a brand is generating. If you pick the terms carefully it can be a quick and easy ad awareness calculator.

A great deal of information about how people are interacting with your brand is becoming available online, either very cheaply or for free. You wouldn't dump brand tracking yet, but it's going to have to start working harder. So ad awareness doubled last month? I can find that out for free from Google, what else have you got?

Advertising in a recession

Ads on Edge

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: branding recession)

Well done to The Economist. Not for the content - when share of voice is all you've got, then you haven't got very much - but definitely one of the prettiest and easiest to follow presentations I've seen in a while.

Why you might not love highly targeted advertising

All this internet ad targeting is brilliant. You can make products pop up on gmail depending on what an email was about, and Facebook keeps trying to sell me motorbike insurance because it knows I need it. Probably something else for you, but that's exactly the point.

The better you target, the higher your conversion to clicks and sales. It's win-win.

Except that it isn't. Not if you sell something low-priced, in a market with several competitors - i.e. everybody who makes supermarket goods.

Imagine a world where ad targeting is perfect. On TV, on the radio, everywhere. It's possible to put your product in front of consumers exactly when they're thinking about buying and persuade them to buy you.

We're not all that far away*, as TV viewing moves online through services like iplayer and kangaroo, why would you show everyone the same copy in each ad break? Come to that, why would you even show the same number of ads?
For advertisers, it will be like buying Google searches - you outbid your competitors, win the slot and win the customer.

In a world like that, some brands would pay an awful lot for an advertising slot. We can already see this on Google searches; bids for high margin items like credit cards and mortgages are way higher than for other categories.

This leaves FMCG marketers with something of a problem. The products they advertise are low-margin and their market is everybody. At the moment, these types of brands that have very wide target audiences can dominate the broadcast media, because broadcast media don't target very well. You hit everybody with your ad, like it or not, and that means a lot of wastage if you sell to a minority of people.

Back to the motorbike insurance example, you never see bike insurance ads on the TV outside of advertising during MotoGP races and even then it's more likely to be sponsorship than in-break spots.
But if motorbike insurance companies could target just the bikers with TV spots, or even better just the bikers whose insurance is coming up for renewal, then they'd pay a lot more than somebody who is trying to sell those bikers baked beans, or frozen ready meals.

In that world, could FMCG brands even afford to advertise on the broadcast media? Wouldn't somebody else always be willing to pay more for the slot?


* OK, so we're really quite far away, but it's fun to speculate about what would happen.