3 Advertising - Three Advertising - Albuquerque, New Mexico

Friday, September 4, 2009

The death of a thousand demographic cuts.

As a whole, marketers love determining how people are different. And ad researchers are often pushing to find how people are different. Some clients want us to tell them how their prospective customers are different. And the media outlets work diligently to explain how their audience is different than all the rest. It’s possible to get lost in finding differences and segmenting people to better communicate with them.

But beware that you don’t complexify yourself into a meaningless campaign.

It happens like this: We have 14 target audiences we need to reach. Men over 35 with a shoe size smaller than 9 tend to like our product because it makes them feel younger, teenagers with more than two siblings purchase our product because it makes them feel older, and millenials taller than 5’ 6” tend to choose us because they like the way it makes them look in the morning, and on and on. So, you put together a great media plan, create semi-custom campaigns for each of your audiences and a year later you sit back and wonder, “How come the men over 35 numbers went down? And teenagers just stopped using our product all together? Well, thankfully, sales held firm for our millenials.”

What went wrong? You have a binder that is 5” thick that proves you did your homework. Unfortunately, what you don’t have is a well-defined brand. (A quick refresher: A brand lives in people’s heads, not in your binder. If it is not well-defined, it simply means there is no common positioning and emotional feeling about you among your audience.) Why? Because you tried to give your brand unique meaning across many diverse people, based on their diversity. What you need to do is give your brand unique meaning across many diverse people, based on their sameness.

People do not make purchase decisions based on their demographics. They make decisions on a much more personal level. So, when you get into your planning, sometimes it helps to cut across your demographic segments and figure out, “how are these people the same?” “What values do they share?”
“Is there a common factor that is driving a decision to be made?”

You might be surprised at how the sameness of your segments may be the key to your campaign’s success.

Posted by 3 at 11:20 AM | Post a comment

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Great lemonade only comes from great lemons.

Here’s a thought that’s so obvious, it’s easy to overlook: Before you focus on making your advertising effective, make your product or service effective. Don’t think for a minute that the success of Apple, Nike, Target or any other famous brand is based exclusively on their marketing savvy. They have great lemons. So their lemonade – the advertising and marketing efforts – seems so much sweeter.

How many times has a friend who has recently seen a movie told you, “All the good parts were in the trailer.” Inevitably they are referring to an over-hyped movie with a large promotions budget that ultimately fails at the box office. So why does it fail? It has great marketing. Maybe even a big opening weekend. But it fails because the experience leaves the promise unfulfilled.

If you want any kind of long-term success, make your “movie” great. Great marketing and advertising works only when the experience or product lives up to the marketing. And the advertising is merely an extension – a caption – of what the ultimate experience will be. That is why you rarely see infomercials, with their ridiculous overpromises, work for more than a short period.

Your first and most important priority right now (and “right now” means at any moment, in any economy) is making your product, service or offering so beneficial that your advertising simply needs to capture that in the most efficient way. And then communicate it to the right people.

Advertising will provide you no long-term solution without your benefits living up to the promise.

Lemons first. Lemonade second.

Posted by 3 at 05:28 PM | Post a comment

Friday, May 8, 2009

Ideas first.

In marketing and the advertising agency business, there is an ongoing learning curve to understand and implement new tactics. We constantly work to make sure we can effectively incorporate and implement new media and guerrilla options into our clients' campaigns. In the current environment, most of these popular tactics have to do with utilizing social networking sites and creating meaningful content channels via blogs, podcasts, YouTube, etc.

Many times, these new tactics are treated as ideas in and of themselves. For the record, these tactics are not ideas. They are just a new channel for ideas.

Ideas are the stuff that make campaigns successful, memorable and ultimately, famous. And here’s the truth about great ideas: They’re not easy. Creating meaningful, simple ones is downright hard. There is no formula, software or machine that will give you a great idea. It requires understanding of your objectives, personal knowledge of people, intuition, time, an unrelenting desire to “nail it," and honestly, it takes smart people.

Take time. Take care. And you will take your communications to new level with a simple, smart idea.

Once you have it, then get to work on how to marry your idea to the target through your tactics. But always remember that your idea is the foundation of your campaign’s success. Discard tactics that don’t allow your idea to flourish and aggressively seek those channels that do.

Now, if you ever hear someone say, “I have a great idea, let’s utilize social networks in our campaign," you can reply, “that’s not an idea, it’s a tactic. What’s the idea?”

Posted by 3 at 06:15 PM | Post a comment

The death of a thousand demographic cuts.

Great lemonade only comes from great lemons.

Ideas first.

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The death of a thousand demographic cuts.

Great lemonade only comes from great lemons.

Ideas first.

Page 4 of 14 pages « First < 2 3 4 5 6 > Last »

Latest work: Albuquerque Ambulance

SEARCH BLOG

RECENT BLOG ENTRIES

BLOG ARCHIVES

COOL LINKS

SYNDICATION

Latest work:
Albuquerque Ambulance