The trip to the Goa Ad fest was like dream come true. After the meltdown, which took all the industries across the world into downsizing their human resources, and their advertising budgets to cut down cost. From the consumers end, they started to concentrate more on savings and spending only on necessities rather then luxury products and services to sustain in the time of recession. This year’s theme at the GOA ADFEST 2010 was “Survival of the Freshest” where some of the top advertising agencies showcased some of the freshest ideas, which they had created, on behalf of their clients to catch the imagination of the target market and made the brand stand apart from the cluttered competition.
During recession when the consumers are choosy to pick among various options available in the market, it usually takes a “fresh idea” or an out of the box idea to break the clutter and competition. One such seminar which I attended during the Goa Ad Fest 2010 was of Will Collin, Founder Partner, Naked Communication, where he talked about the importance of thinking fresh and tailoring the communication to the needs of the target audience rather than being over creative.
In his presentation, Collin began by incorporating the popular adage into his idea, saying that freshness is not about trying different things, but doing things differently. "The problem is that we forget that only through process, we arrive at fresh ideas. Freshness in communication means asking what you are actually planning for," he said. Collin resented the fact that fresh communication is often thought of as doing "cool stuff".
"Challenge everything! If you want to make a difference, go to the core of the problem," he suggested.
He added that fresh communication is not about chasing "shiny, new things" or about finding different routes to reach the same place. "Start conversation in a different place. Recognize there is a need to change. Start a conversation to find the core problem, than jumping straight to the solution," he elaborated.
To explain his point further he cited an example from a 1940s Clark Gable movie, The Huckster, where in a particular scene, a marketing official insists on forcefully pushing the brand to the consumer. "How much has really changed from those days? How much have we moved from the marketing paradigm we choose to work in?" he asked.
Collin, thereafter, proceeded to share some 'lessons' for fresh communication.
The first lesson, which he gave, was Avoiding Irritation: When we design a communication one should keep in mind the communication should not irritate the consumer. He believes that we are still following this as a legacy which needs to be broken if we need to achieve freshness in communication.
The second lesson to attain freshness in communication is to attain an Integrated Communication where he believes that the communication strategy should be designed around the consumer and not to confront brand in front of the consumer. The consumer experiences a brand not only through the bought media but also through personal experiences of consumers, chat rooms, website, visuals ect. The totality of all mediums creates the perception about a brand. The brand communication is something similar to the human communication where only 7% is about the copy, message, creative which the agency creates and 93% is the way the brand is behaving, the context it is encountered, the style with which it is communicated. This is the main problem, which he thinks is with the advertising agencies where they are too focused on the 7% forgetting about the 93% of the communication. To illustrate this he gave an example of Lloyd TSB Bank campaign “YOU FIRST” where they claimed to put the consumer first. To test this claim, a telephone call was made to the bank; and the caller, posing as a potential customer, asked the bank representative how the bank put the customer first. The results revealed a rather callous approach, with one of the eventual responses being, "That is just something they say in the ads". Collin reiterated that this was definitely not a case of integrated marketing, which is critical for freshness in communication.
The third lesson is avoiding living in a silo and being isolated, which exist on both agency as well as client side in the industry. This is where people work in their individual capacity and in their own ways. In agencies and organizations one department does not interact with the other department. According to Collin, this is a structural fault which most of the agencies and organizations have, which is hampering the freshness in communication.
The fourth lesson, which Collin thinks is important to gain freshness in communication, is to never be compromised. "Media neutrality needs to come from objectivity - free from bias. Think objectively what combination of services would work best," he said. He also suggested that organizations should have an independent communication strategy agency, which should not be part of the core organization. This helps the strategy agency to have a full picture, a bird eye view to suggest what’s best for its client.
For the fifth lesson he reiterated his earlier point of not chasing shiny, new things as the fifth lesson. Most new initiatives are recommended more for the novelty factor, rather than being the right solution to the problem, he observed. "Freshness does not essentially mean you have to be sexy," was the sixth lesson. "Unsexy can be the new sexy," he added. He believes when core strategies are to be designed its best to be unsexy, as being unsexy is to follow the process for designing a complete integrated marketing communication plan. Following a unsexy process always help clients to give a profitable approach rather then a new shiny, sexy solution. He also gave example of one their clients Boots – the chemist in the UK. By this example he said how going by a process helped them to understand the core of the problem, which eventually reduced their cost and increased the profits.
Collin urged that the audience needs to be understood better for getting freshness in communication. Explaining the dangers of taking the audience for granted, he quoted another dialogue from The Huckster, "Someday, 50 million people are going to just reach out and turn off their radios." Collin remarked that consumers should not be seen as the "target audience", but as partners. He attacked the jargon used in marketing lingo, which he termed as "military language". "It is not about carpet bombing or guerilla warfare, but respecting the audience," he said.
He also suggested that we should start thinking from the consumer side and start living a life, which he/she faces as a consumer, instead of just thinking of an idea and then looking at ways of hitting the consumer with that message. This will help agencies to make the correct decision as to where the brand needs to communicate and will be more effective.
The next lesson, he said was to overcome "muscle memory" and following a monotonous routine at work. "There is a better way if you unlearn your muscle memory. Everything your brand does is communication," he said. He also focused on different ways how clients look at their budgets, which are namely, Silos where each department has its own budget and they plan differently which leads to disintegration. The second is the coordination model where different department still work separately but they try to coordinate with each other’s plan. He believes that the third model of integration is most effective where there is a single pool of cash and every department sits together and thinks the most effective way of spending the budget. This is the best way to achieve freshness in communication.
He proceeded to cite case studies of work done by Naked as examples before closing the session. "If we want to be successful, we need to acknowledge our weaknesses," Collin said, as part of his closing remarks.
