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There’s bad
advertising and good advertising, but even the most basic business
philosophies agree that no advertising is worse.
While there are
differences in the quality of one campaign or execution and another,
advertising’s intrinsic worth has never been in doubt. Telling people about
your product makes very basic sense. You could wait for them to discover
what you do, try it for themselves and then wait for word of mouth to
spread. But that might take too long. Or it might not happen at all. So you
buy an ad in the local Yellow Pages or you hire a heavyweight agency and a
media buying service and you pay millions of dollars to drill your product
and its brand character into the consciousness of every possible consumer as
well as their friends, relatives and neighbors. Really well-made advertising
offers a welcome respite from whatever shabby, ill-conceived media product
it’s supposed to be underwriting.
Everybody loves
ice cream, too. But a gallon-and-a-half at one sitting isn’t likely to be a
popular menu item.
Turns out there is
such a thing as bad advertising. Too much of anything can be detrimental.
When advertising repels consumers, it’s bad. And it is possible to bombard
consumers too thoroughly, to saturate them past the point of brand awareness
to outright aversion.
Ask Phil Knight or
any of his waffle-soled lieutenants at Nike. There was a time — one that
seems pretty recent — when Nike was the quintessential example of a
business/advertising paradigm for the next millennium. The company was
founded on an evangelical mission, with Knight selling shoes out of the
trunk of his car. That same rebellious ethos powered the company to the top
of the athletic-shoe heap. And what helped it get there was marketing.
Portland’s Wieden & Kennedy translated that passion into advertising that
built a brand identity that every flabby-assed sofa-spud who wanted to
identify with high-priced athletes just had to have two pieces of. Until
this year, when Nike’s revenues and profits cratered alarmingly. After a lot
of fretful soul-searching and some market research, it was revealed that
Nike’s marketing had changed at some point from a steamroller crushing every
kernel of consumer resistance to a big, fat liability.
Used to be you
couldn’t spit without hitting that swoosh. Its ubiquity prompted the online
pamphleteers at Suck to posit a time in the near future when Nike
would trademark empty space, since it and the swoosh were rapidly
approaching equivalency. But then there came a tipping point; consumers had
seen too much of the swoosh and started trying to escape it. They
encountered it enough on the way to and from work, on television, in print,
on their kids. The last place they wanted to see it was in their closets or
on themselves. Nike didn’t help its case much with an overreaching greed
that arrogantly presumed it could charge whatever it damned well pleased for
its products. Cheap Vietnamese labor meant profit margins were already
obscene; whatever arbitrarily astronomical price-point the company chose to
charge was just a matter of degree.
Now look at Nike’s
advertising. That swoosh is so diminished you have to squint to see it in
the final frames of a comparatively narrow selection of TV commercials. It’s
been shrunk and reincorporated with the company’s name. This less overt
approach might work. Or the company might have to scale things back further.
It might be too late. Once you’ve shown consumers how much your business is
predicated on an abiding contempt for them, will they ever think of anything
else when they see any of your marketing?
The last couple of
weeks have seen disappointing quarterly numbers for titans such as
Coca-Cola, Gillette and McDonald’s. Known as “non-cyclicals” by traders and
analysts, they were thought impervious to the business cycle; they push
products people want — not need, want — because of superior and relentless
marketing. And everybody can think of a recent movie whose advertising
couldn’t be escaped and was so execrable that each new billboard, transit ad
or TV spot elicited wincing or a derisive snort (hello, Godzilla).
Most recently, colleagues have been making ornery
“boy-am-I-getting-sick-of-that-campaign” noises about the “Pre/Post” ads for
Hollinger’s daily newspaper, the National Post. And consumer
awareness of that arrival had been cranked up to unprecedented levels thanks
to the mounting tide of anticipointment advancing ahead of it among the
chatterati.
All these
companies employ media strategies similar to air war tactics that were
mighty popular among the generals running the Vietnam war. Variously known
as carpet — or saturation — bombing, its inescapability makes perfect,
unassailable sense on paper. How can it fail, you might think, seeing it
laid out as matter of simple arithmetic. Then ask yourself who won the
Vietnam War. |
