Probably the most important thing to remember when working on any marketing activities for any product targetted at anyone. It doesn’t matter what else you get right. If you get this wrong, it’s all wasted.

One of the most common problems. Usually caused by ‘gut-feel’ and perpetuated by the fact that if you work in advertising and create a campaign that appeals to yourself, then it’ll appeal to your peers, and your peers give out awards. In the meantime, your client’s target audience will ignore it.

The Bud Light debacle happened because the people given the marketing task made every mistake outlined on this website.

They hired someone because of what she was rather than who she was. So she thought she didn’t need to do her homework. She thought her gut-feel was enough. A gut-feel based on her beliefs, experiences, and what she’d consumed in her media.

Surrounded by people who wouldn’t dare go against her stupid ideas and appear ‘fratty’ or ‘out of touch’ because they hired her because of what she is.

What’s funny is, if is this had not gone so spectacularly badly, but only dragged the brand down by an amount that could be covered up by the good stuff Bud Light does, it probably would have been handed an award or ten by other marketers.

The text in the picture comes from a review of the latest book by Jenni Romaniuk, who works at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Fuckwittery. It appeared within our local advertising trade publication – Resumé

The translation of the first sentence is: ‘People don’t care about brands or advertising’ (the rest blathers on about how the guy writing this review likes that this is the basis for the book).

This became popular to say within ad agencies a few years ago. It was a convenient excuse for why so little of what the industry produces does anything.

The review appeared about a week before the Bud Light mess kicked off.

Still think people don’t care about brands and advertising?

Relevance isn’t enough. In fact, striving for relevance can be harmful. Relevance too often leads to irritating communication. Too rational. Too intrusive. Too repetitive. Too creepy.

And social media is a social event.

They can all be explained. Most of the time the explanation is that a purchase will help the buyer gain approval from someone else. Even if it’s just the voices in their head.

It looks like a scary mess, but, in fact, it’s all now neatly packaged with a few handy targeting and deployment tools attached. Which is why so many advertisers are now doing it themselves. Unfortunately, the shiny packaging only serves to obscure a far nastier horror story. And the more you know the worse it gets.

But who cares? You’re seeing a decent short-term return yeah? But careful with that brand. It’s more important now than it’s ever been before.

Being useful isn’t just about rational solutions. It’s whatever makes your customers and potential customers feel good. About themselves. And about you.

Being useful is helping with confidence, inventiveness, initiative, and empathy. Being relevant too often becomes needy, servile, obsequious, and self-serving. The benefactors of someone useful strengthen their belief in them. The benefactors of relevant soon doubt the wisdom of their choice.

Instead of damaging your brand by stalking your customers with what you think are relevant messages, why not learn more about them, find out what what they’d find useful, and do that instead?

Various studies, including a recent one by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and another by du Plessis in 1994 show that over 80% of ads can’t be usefully recalled. The current methods aren’t working. And never have. We need new methods. Useful methods.

You can find a lot in data, but you won’t find it without a hypothesis. And to set a worthwhile hypothesis, you need some knowledge and experience of what you’re researching.

Over the past six years, the average age of Kanal 5’s linear TV audience has aged 13 years! For TV3 it’s 9, and for TV8 and Sjuan it’s 10 and 11 respectively. Even TV4, which has always been pretty old, managed to age 7 years in that time to reach the grand old age of 58. This is significant, because if this trend continues it will soon make linear TV in Sweden entirely useless to the vast majority of advertisers. Most are targeting people up to the age of around 40. It’s already difficult to buy an effective level of reach against this group on linear TV at a price that generates a return on the media investment. In the not too distant future, it could become impossible.

If you know best, then don’t bother with data. It’ll save you a lot of time, bother and heartache. It’ll still cost you money though.

They define the roles we want to play. Before social media these were confined to what used to be called ’conspicuous consumption’ items, like cars and clothes. But now it’s everything. So, whatever you’re selling, you’d better be working on your image harder than ever before.

The trade press reported the launch of a new agency this week. When asked what they want to achieve, the new owner said this: “We want to help our customers create growth. We want to achieve this by putting more energy into working creatively with the customer’s offer, thereby creating the right conditions for proper communication.” Maybe they should put some more energy into working creatively with their own offer.

In a recent trade press interview with a new media agency boss, the following exchange occurred:

“What will be most difficult for media agencies in general in the next few years?”

“People in the media agency industry need to take a step back and really think about what adds value to the customer. Much of the work that agencies used to do earlier can now be done automatically.”

It’s about time the ad industry learned how to create effective commercial communications consistently. To date, it’s been pretty useless at what it gets paid to do, with very few truly effective campaigns (and most of those coming about by dumb luck).

It has survived by a) having control of the means to produce and deploy campaigns, and b) having limited accountability due to limited measurement. But digital has changed all that. Now anyone can produce and distribute commercial communications, and easily gathered response data is showing that the well paid agencies don’t do any better than some kid on a laptop in his bedroom. The creation of commercial communications can currently be likened to the room full of monkeys on typewriters coming up with a Shakespeare sonnet now and again. There are now a lot more monkeys, and how much you pay them doesn’t seem to increase the chances of success. It’s about time the industry figured out how to knock out a sonnet on the first, second, third, fourth and fifth time of asking. Or at least know how to recognise those who can. Applying useful communication principles would fix a lot of its problems.

Because a significant percentage of your target audience will misinterpret what you’re trying to say. And usually in the worst possible way. If you still can’t help yourself, then do some research so you can foresee how bad it’s likely to get.

Outside of the Internet, few companies advertise on unedited media produced by kids who spend a little too much time in their bedrooms. And if they do, they understand the risks and price it accordingly.

TV ads are often pre-tested because they’re expensive to make. Banners, radio and print ads not so much. Though the latter can miss just as many opportunities, or cause just as much damage as the former.

Marketers and their agencies believe that their campaigns only do varying degrees of good. Given that adblockers have been the fastest adopted tech in the history of the planet, there is clearly a very big potential to do harm. If you don’t measure the harm, it’ll remain hidden, and you’ll never know how many sales you lost and are unlikely to ever get back because you won’t be able to address the problem you created.

I regularly see the harm done to brands by poorly thought out campaigns. Online campaigns are the worst offenders. Cheap to produce, and so not much thought given to them before they’re released into the wild. The damage is easy to see and quantify in lost business, but it seems few monitor it, and even fewer take action. Probably because they don’t know how.

‘It’s easier to unite people against something. Much more difficult to unite them for something. It’s the entire basis of the success of Virgin, Sverigedemokraterna (in fact, pretty much all political parties), organisations like Sea Shepard, and activists like Greta Thunberg. Highlighting others’ problems gathers a bigger crowd more quickly than offering your own solutions.

Unless the creative execution calls for it. You’re much better off placing a single poster in as many different locations as possible. If you feel the need to place multiple posters in a single location in order to be seen, then your creative execution isn’t useful to your audience.

Direct response is selling off the page/screen. There’s an immediate reason to buy offered in the communication. This usually isn’t the reason people should trust you (or at least it isn’t the entire reason). This is provided within the fame communication. This makes you famous for something that you can be trusted to deliver. It can be as simple as strengthening a reputation for actually delivering the goods on offer, or as complex as delivering cool.

Direct response communication can sometimes deliver the fame (especially with value brands), but more often than not it can’t.

The medium is also the message. If the medium you’ve paid for your ad to be exposed within doesn’t expose it in accordance with what has been agreed (or if they do something as stupid as what you can see above), don’t pay for it.

The combination of the flaws in linear TV audience measurement, how reach is built with TV, and the way TV channels charge for different spotlengths mean that 40 and 45″ films are the cheapest in terms of the cost per awareness point generated.

It’s a lot more difficult to come up with something that your potential customers will find useful. In fact, chasing industry accolades with ’clever’ ideas often causes harm to your business because too often it appeals to the media and the ad industry a lot more than it appeals to your potential customers.

I did a deal recently with a medium, that many advertisers believe they can’t even get their advertising into, that not only achieved this discount, but also secured quality exposure towards my client’s very specific target audience with minimal wastage. And in return, my client committed to spending less than half the average advertiser’s spend with that medium. It had nothing to do with any great negotiation skills and everything to do with a ratecard that makes no sense whatsoever. Never be put off by media price lists. They’re worse than meaningless.

It’s just supply over demand, or revenue divided by audience delivered. Both aren’t that difficult to find out. Know this and you know if you’re being ripped off. And if that’s a bit too tricky, give your friendly neighbourhood media auditor a call. They’ll usually be pleased to give you their average pool prices.

Apple use it all the time with product upgrades. And if it can make them the most valuable company in the world… And did you know that 8 out of 10 advertisers say they prefer Useful?

Companies, organisations and individuals have been destroyed by carefully constructed questions. While others have gained huge success. Here’s a couple of examples: Are today’s agencies really so lacking in basic communication expertise that they’re wasting billions of dollars of their clients’ money on useless advertising campaigns? And how quickly will Useful be able to fix these advertisers’ woes? Contact me, and I’ll give you an answer. You might not want to use this trick, but you should be ready when others use it against you.

The vast majority of people you’re paying for are inside a vehicle. And that includes bus stop sites. If your execution can’t be seen and understood in around three quarters of a second, you’ve wasted most of your media money.

Communicate with confidence, but don’t look down on your target audience.

Don’t try to be an artist. Write like a popular musician. Write about your audience. They’ll think you’re writing about yourself. But it’ll feel like themselves. They’ll relate to you. And you’ll make a connection.

Everyone passing this poster is in a car. They have less than a second to see it. This is not new information. It’s been known for decades. Yet agencies continue to put ads on this expensive medium that can’t possibly be comprehended. And it happens every week without fail.

Show a bunch of people two (or more) different executions rather than one and you’ll get a greater positive response. Even if you have the exact same message, but done in different colours (some people prefer green, some red, some yellow, etc).

When there’s an unusual amount of air in a ratecard, someone’s probably getting a bung.

43% of adults in the US say they feel disappointed or deceived by native ads, with this percentage increasing with age. A fifth of people say they think worse of a brand that uses native ads, while only a tenth are more positive. So common sense is right sometimes.

This is how digital works. Its speed has led people to want to be first rather than right. Beta campaigns go live and are subsequently adjusted to try and improve their performance. It comes from a belief that the stuff put out there can’t do any harm. But of course it can. It’s why observation and response rates are so dismal on the web.

Given that the media you use contributes to your message, then it’s a good idea to avoid using any media owned by companies that try to protect revenues by turning a blind eye to harassment and other inappropriate behaviour towards their employees. It’s not just that you wouldn’t want to be seen to be supporting such morally bankrupt organisations, but any such company is likely to take care of your campaigns as badly as they take care of their staff. In fact, taking a stand is likely to enhance your brand more, and for a fraction of the cost of a campaign bought within their media.

As a professional user of VR since 2003, I’ve yet to find affordable, true VR technology. And I don’t see it arriving any time soon. In the meantime, manufacturers should produce ’almost’ VR devices and applications that work honestly with today’s consumer VR-tech limitations. They need to realise that dumping the sealed face-box and allowing users to see their hands, and have the option to see through the screen, produces a greater level of immersion for almost all VR and AR applications. This has the added benefit of allowing products to be designed that are not only more useful, but also don’t look so daft.

If I had one krona for every time someone has told me about the imminent arrival of the online fridge during the past 20 years, I’d have over 500 kr. But it’d be in old money, so it’d be as worthless as their predictions. The online fridge has become a meme for just how wrong you can get it (and keep getting it) if you don’t do proper studies to really understand a market. It also demonstrates how shiny new things can blind your common sense. Really, how often does the average person buy a new fridge? And how many that do get a new one get to choose its specs rather than get it with their new house/apartment? And even if they did choose its specs, how important is ’online’ (not very, because it’s not very useful).

They affect all media, but the ad industry doesn’t seem to get its knickers quite so twisted over analogue media viewability. I’m willing to bet that the creators of well over 90% of the ads you see on TV, on posters, on the radio, in cinemas and in the press have absolutely no idea what the average viewability is within the media that they’re spending a lot of your money to “appear” in. Try this. Next time you’re discussing the development of an ad campaign, ask the agencies responsible for both creating it and deploying it how many of the ratings bought within the media they’re suggesting you use are actually seen or heard on average. Also ask them how they’re seen or heard (i.e. how long are people exposed, how far away are they, when is the audience delivered, etc). If you don’t get a definite answer that doesn’t include the word ‘depends’, then ask them why on Earth they think they’re qualified to create ads for those media.

In order to make it easier to sell their inventory, many Swedish media owners sell their audience in packages. Advertisers always end up with a bad deal when they buy them. Poster packages are far too large, generating a ton of unnecessary frequency with too many sites crammed into too small areas. Run-by-station bought commercials, and programmatically bought web ads are often shown within inappropriate content and to the wrong people (or just not shown at all in the case of the web). Why pay a media agency to buy inefficient packages? Life might be like a box of chocolates, but you should expect more from your media exposure.

General disappointment with the performance of digital media has put a focus on those who’ve been representing the interests of advertisers. And it seems many, if not all of the media agency groups have had their hand in the till. To be fair to Ronnie Biggs, he never managed to steal anywhere near as much as they have.

Getting it wrong when promoting a tin of beans is unlikely to see any loss of life, but the consequences can get serious when tackling social issues.

Equally, try not to be all of those things when writing for a more mature audience.

…8 words. Unless the poster is something like a cross-track in a tube station, or is located inside a bus or train (not on a bus stop) it won’t be read. And even with those sites, the majority of the audience you’ve been charged for will only glance at your ad as they walk by – not many stand/sit right next to it. So be brief. The same goes for most web banners.

Answers depend on context and who the questioner is. And as every salesperson knows, questions also start a dialogue. And dialogue leads to sales. Always create more questions than you answer.

Useful ads come from a strength of vision for the obvious, and the courage to express it. Neutrality paves the way for polite invisibility. Data based evidence gives you the strength.

“Mummy! Look! Moo cows!”

“Oh yes. And there’s a Max up ahead. Are you still hungry?”

“No.”

Research is rocket fuel to real creative superheroes, but kryptonite to pretenders.

The consequences of a poor marketing communications job are usually much easier for agencies than their clients. When there’s more at stake for those entrusted with your campaigns, you’ll see a better return.

The business is famous for it. It’s expected even. But can you spot it? It’s likely to be coming thick and fast. Even a little knowledge helps you detect it and provides a shield. If you’ve read this far in this list of tips you should be well protected by now. See why here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103117305127

They’re supposed to be getting you the maximum effect for the smallest spend. How can they do that if their income depends on how much you spend?

Centralised, multi-national commission based deals mean that agencies in smaller markets (of which there are dozens) make a lot less than those in the few large markets for doing the same amount of work (and don’t expect the lead agency to spread the money around evenly for you – they rarely do). This means that most of your agency’s people working on your business around the world don’t want to work on your business.

You may need to dress it up a bit more these days, but a lot of what motivates us is a fear of one and a craving for the other.

Can you work it out?

It’s tempting to show what you’re working on while you work on it, but don’t. It’ll end up diluted or destroyed. Do your first draft. Set it aside for as long as you can, then review it and revise if necessary. Only then should you get someone else’s opinion.

If their friends like it, or they might make something out of it, they’ll love it (or at least they’ll say they do). It’s how ugly things get made.

…because beautiful is useful.

This is a real ad. And it worked brilliantly, making this restaurant wildly successful. If its writer didn’t know the restaurant’s potential customer base intimately it would never have seen the light of day, and The Rupali would just be another struggling curry house amongst thousands of others.

Always write ads for the target audience, never yourself (if you’re not a member of that audience).

I was once asked by a friend to check over his contract with one of the larger Swedish media agencies. After looking at it, I asked him how much of his 10M SEK media budget he thought they were keeping. He told me around 500K SEK. It was over 2 MILLION SEK!