13/13
WTF - The Big Game Ad Meter
Pio:
Hey, Lee. So this is our third WTF blog–which is basically us having a little hissy fit about what we feel is going off the rails with the industry or brands. It is probably our favorite thought leadership piece we do.
Lee:
Well, I’d like to clarify that you may well have hissy fits Pio, I don’t!
Pio:
Well you’re in danger of me throwing one now!
But seriously, this time it's actually going to be a subject very near and dear to your heart, the Super Bowl ads and more specifically the Ad Meter. Not just our peeves as former marketing and agency guys but how it is representative on a much bigger scale of how testing and awards have just corrupted the marketing and advertising business.
Lee:
There are things that I love taking the piss out of - ad measurement and awards are two of them. I mean how good would either be if you somehow managed to snag Cannes Marketer of the Year twice!
Pio:
Hey, hey, I'm very proud of them. But I can now safely admit the truth that I skipped out of accepting the Coca Cola Cannes Marketer of the Year on stage with the rest of the marketing team in favor of drinks and dinner at Le Tilleul in St Paul de Vence – so that’s how seriously I take these awards and how boondoggle-corrupted I was!
I do feel the Ad Meter is a representation of what’s wrong in advertising today–despite some very strong efforts by both client and agency to round out the measurement in a way that truly assesses impact on the business–whether it be digital, social engagement, website traffic, brand lift, product purchase intention, etc.
But despite all that, the Ad Meter is still at the heart of measuring Super Bowl performance, with a particular vulnerability to it that you’ve always pointed out.
Lee:
At the end of the day, it measures how much people “like” a commercial in real time. And what often tips the balance of “likeability” of commercials in the moment of audience measurement is humor. Which is why you get a nauseating amount of animals, babies, and celebs–especially this year with the celeb overload.
Because that’s what will win the Ad Meter. The really benign Budweiser Clydesdales spot did just that on Sunday.
Agencies know the formula and if they’re being judged by it, they’ll write scripts they know will do well. This creates the bad behavior you and I have discussed so often.
But my question is, what happened to creating ads that get measured by how well they drive the business or solve a problem? This is at the heart of what’s wrong in advertising today.
Our focus is on Ad Meters and awards vs. driving the business.
Pio:
Well I haven't seen you so hot and bothered since the time I accidentally opened our Google Meet call in my underwear.
Lee:
Wrong. Then I was just bothered. I’m still going to therapy as a result.
But getting back to the subject at hand, don’t get me wrong, being liked is important, but it's not the only thing that advertising should be measured on.
It should also be measured on what it does for your brand or your product. Does it drive sales? Or does it address a core issue for the brand which a lot of companies are now doing to justify the investment.
But the Ad Meter is just symptomatic of a much larger problem: too many companies judge success by the Ad Meter, Kantar, and Cannes. It’s just gone off the rails in my opinion.
Pio:
And perhaps that is the headline if I could be really dramatic…
Lee:
You, dramatic? NO!
Pio:
…as I was so brilliantly saying before being rudely interrupted.
There really seems to be a corrupting force in advertising and marketing. You engineer your ads to win awards, the Ad Meter, or a one number score on Kantar (then Millward Brown) rather than the outcome of what it means to the business.
Kantar testing, in fact, was the bane of my existence as a marketer.
Oftentimes great work was reduced to a one number score and as a Green or Red light upon which final approval rested. As a result, some really stellar work got killed or even more surgically altered than Madonna’s face.
The value in Kantar for me was to understand if consumers understood and comprehended our message and were persuaded to buy. But it was rarely, if ever, used for that purpose.
You really could get a lot out of it. But when reduced to pass / fail and a one number score, then it led you to a certain well-trodden route and you knew exactly what you had to do–you just engineered the whole commercial to that result.
Was it good? No.
Was it culturally impactful? An emphatic no.
It killed creativity and really undermined some very good client-agency relationships.
Dan Weiden called Kantar the “last refuge of the unimaginative”. I believe he made it a condition that the Levis/WK ads would not be Kantar tested when they won that business..
Very few companies these days actually have the bravery to look outside of that score and all of that system to look at a broader picture.
Lee:
And very few agencies have that cache where the leadership can push against it these days. And that's because of the holding companies buying all of the agencies and losing their best people, but that's a whole other topic to get into for another day.
Pio:
Well the Cannes Awards are probably the most egregious manifestation of that.
Lee:
Yeah, listen, I think the award culture has gotten out of hand.
People are creating ads to run one time at 1:00 a.m. in Idaho just so they can submit it to win an award.
Winning an award for creativity divorced from the business is where it derails for me.
If you're only measuring the creative merit of the ad and not what it's doing vs the purpose of the ad, which is ultimately to drive the business, then something is fundamentally wrong with these award shows.
The only award show in my mind that has merit is probably the Effies.
Pio:
Also, the most boring one for me in the whole industry, but I understand your bigger point.
Coming up through the ad industry–working agency side on the American Expresses, the Mercedes Benzes, the IBMs of the world–you knew that there were some bad players on the agency side who would tell us, “We've got to sell this because we want to win this award or get a great score with the Ad Meter and put it on our reel.”
Lee:
When we were at agencies, we were built and groomed to win awards - that was the culture of an agency.
What's interesting is now, it's not just the culture of an agency, it's the culture of the marketer as well, where the marketer is looking to win the awards just as much, if not more than the agencies.
In fact, if you go to France now in June, there'll be just as many, if not more, marketers than agency folks.
Pio:
I've heard so many agency people tell me that it's their clients who literally say “make us famous” or “make this work win at Cannes.”
When a brief starts with that objective, it's a really corrupt brief, right from the get go. And it's where we as marketers lose so much credibility with C-Suite.
Lee:
That's right. Now if you start to celebrate creativity that drives commerce, the intersection of what advertising was originally built to do, then I will be the first one in line at an award show.
It’s time to wrap up this article. We hope you enjoyed our WTF rant. If anyone wants to do a WTF on Pio and I, you can call BS on us while we drink champagne in Cannes this year. If you’re going to be in town, let us know and come join us.
Pio:
You really are going to force me to go to Cannes despite knowing how much I detested going as a client?
Lee:
How about dinner at Le Tilleul to sweeten the deal?
Pio
Oh, ok if you insist.
