Marketing 505: Lecture 17, Creative

Transcription

1 Marketing 505: Lecture 17, Creative [Dr. Darrel Muehling]: Welcome to Marketing 505. This is week 7, final week of the seven week term. This week I have two topics planned to be discussed. One is creative that will be the topic of discussion in this lecture presentation followed by a discussion on evaluation and research topics. So what I plan to do in both of these presentations rather than maybe provide you with a lot of additional information, I m actually going to be doing kind of as we sometimes say cherry-picking exercise, especially in the second video where I will rely upon your reading of the textbook for further information about a number of notions that we re going to be talking about. By this time into the term, we re into week seven. The first question that s being asked in the slide should be fairly obvious to you. The question is what are the three major departments or functional areas in most advertising agencies. And whether they re specifically divided up this way or not, these functions should be something that should be considered essential in the advertising business. Those would be research, media, and creative, and as you re already aware, we ve spent three lectures the last three lectures talking about media. Today is creative and then next time we ll end up with a discussion with research. Three major departments found in most advertising agencies? (three functions performed) Research, media, creative [Dr. Darrel Muehling]: And as become custom here, the promotional plan outline just to remind you where we have been and where we re going. We re going to be talking about Roman numeral 5 of the promotional plan outline, that s the creative recommendations and specifically part b of that outline, which deals with creative strategy and execution. Promotional Plan I. Executive Summary II. Situation Analysis Company/product history Product evaluation Consumer evaluation Competitive evaluation Other forces/trends (e.g., regulatory) III. Marketing Goals IV. Budget V. Creative Recommendations a) Advertising Objectives 1

2 VI. VII. VIII. IX. b) Creative Strategy and Executions Media Recommendations Media Objectives, Strategies, and Plans Other Promotion Mix Recommendations Sales Promotion Public Relations Personal Selling/Direct Marketing Evaluation (Effectiveness measures) Summary and conclusions [Dr. Darrel Muehling]: And has also been kind of a custom let s start with a little comic strip. This happens to come from Dilbert, two pages of strip and six panels. So here we have if you follow the Dilbert comic strip, you know it s the pointed hair boss and he is surrounded by people in the business board room. Dilbert to his right, our left, and then there s a creative looking fellow working for the advertising agency. And so the pointed hair boss says, I hired the Amorphous Ad Company to do our campaign. And immediately the ad creative person goes into some thoughts of what the advertisement might look like, I see a gaseous cloud and some music no. just a noise. And of course, the pointed hair boss, he s agreeing with everything. He says, Excellent. And then we say the name of our company? And the creative fellow says, Sure, if you want to ruin the ad. Let s go to the next slides. Now he s in his botches presenting his creative work. He says, Your print ads would look like this. It s a shape with no text. I did some checking and found out that all the good ideas have been used. This is all that s left. And then the pointy hair boss says, Can it be green? And then the creative person says, Whoa! Who s the creative person here? So what we re going to be talking about is creativity and before we go considering the following ad, recognize as I mentioned in the study guide or the course space, I m not going to be discussing or lecturing on how to be creative. That s not the purpose. In fact, go to an advertising agency, there s not going to be lesson plans drawn out for you either in terms of the creative process. So we re gonna take it from a different perspective, a managerial perspective as we ve been employing throughout the term. But, more of a checklist of things you should be considering when developing creative as opposed to what it takes to be creative. And again, before we show you this print ad, recognize that the creative process if done by an advertising agency or in-house, is in the encoding stage of the communication process. You may recall from a previous lecture, an exam, we talked about the communication process: sender, receiver. And the encoding was where the advertising creative people make their big bucks. That s where they take a client s idea and turn it into that hopefully communicates through visuals, through sounds, through words the intended communicative objective or point. And I don t know how creative I am on a scale of Who knows? Maybe somewhere in the middle. So, it may be best that I talk about this as an innocent bystander, observer as opposed to somebody that s actually been out there doing the creative site. So you know if I were an advertising agency creative person and someone gave me a task to do, you know I would do my 2

3 best, give it the old college trial. But I don t think I would be at the end of the scale of the 9 or the 10. And an example of this, let s suppose we have a client and the client happens to be a tire manufacturer. We have a national account with a tire manufacturer, and they want us to develop a new creative strategy for their product. Well I would do some brainstorming and certainly would consult research and try to come up with some fun and interesting creative twist on the tire product. I don t know what I would come up with, but I know what I wouldn t come up with. And that s what the creative folks for Michelin did several years ago. Do you recall their advertising campaign with the tag line with something to the effect that you have a lot riding on your tires. Do you remember that campaign? If you don t, just recall with me here some examples from that campaign. Instead of featuring the tire, even though the tire was shown, how durable or strong or whatever, they used a safety positioning strategy. And more specifically, the ads featured babies? Babies? Tires? I mean I can see babies and you know, soft tissues or fabric softener. But babies and tires? Let s think about the tag line again: you have a lot riding on your tires. You, parent, drive a car have a precious cargo in the back, that cargo is your children and what better way to communicate safety feature of your tire than through these babies. So that encoding, that taking that safety positioning idea and creating this campaign, you ve got a lot riding on your tires featuring babies in my opinion is a great example of the creative process and specifically encoding in particular. [Image of comic strip from Dilbert] [Dr. Darrel Muehling]: So now let s look at this following this ad. Consider the following ad [Dr. Darrel Muehling]: Here s an ad and if you want to go to the next slide you ll see that it was a youth media campaign for the Center for Disease Control. [Image of Center for Disease Control ad] Youth media campaign from the Center for Disease Control (designed to encourage young people to by physically active every day) [Dr. Darrel Muehling]: It was designed to encourage young people to by physically active every day. And you kind of have to wonder how creative this is. And I m not going to make a judgment but here you see this what looks to be kind of a video screen and obviously targeting young people who would be playing videos. And then video games that is, and it says to give your thumbs a rest. So if you re using the thumbs or rather the appendages to do your video 3

4 gaming, the ad is suggesting you give your thumbs a rest. And kind of interesting, entertaining technique here they use to try to communicate that point. Now where that ad would be placed if it were placed in a magazine targeting young people, still wondering how many young people if they re playing video games or reading any magazines let alone the ones you re placing your ad in. so you know, we talked about the creative process, recognize that we can t talk about it in isolation, not only what the ad looks like but where it appears, what the communication is saying, plus who it s reaching is very very important. So, one more little comic strip. This one happens to come from Buckets, Mr. and Mrs. Buckets are watching an ad. You can tell they re totally entertained by this. She says, What a great commercial! That was hilarious! And he even asks, you can see he s wiping tears of joy or tears of laughter from his eyes. And he says, What was it advertising? And she looks at him rather puzzled and the third frame they re just sitting there trying to figure out what they were just talking about. And then he concludes after further contemplation of this says, What a lousy commercial. So he said it was a great commercial, it was hilarious. And then when they asked what it was advertising, they have no idea. Then it becomes a lousy commercial. [Image of Buckets comic strip] [Dr. Darrel Muehling]: What I alluded to earlier is now what I d like to do. Instead of talking about the creative process, let s talk about things you would have to do as a marketing promotional planner before you would develop a creative strategy. So this isn t the creative strategy in process, this is things that need to be done. And as I alluded to in the course space, I m hoping by this time these are more check offs and reminders than they are of new information. Maybe a little bit of new information or information in a little different context but not really meant to be. By this time in the course, I m hoping that you can kind of check these off in your mind and notes and say that indeed these are things that need to be done before we embark in any kind of creative strategy. So from the top, let s just do these bullet point by bullet point and elaborate just briefly on each of them. And these aren t in any order of importance but certainly would be near the top of my list would be to know your target market. You know how many times have you heard that? From almost day one, we ve been talking about target marketing and positioning with a specific market in mind. And so if you re developing a creative strategy, you know, obviously you have to have a good understanding, knowledge, of your target market. To remind you of a past lecture when we discussed the situational analysis. One the major components of that situational analysis is a review of your consumers. So knowing who your target market or target markets are is very important to the creative process. And then similarly in the situational analysis, we do a product evaluation. And here, we would certainly want to know the features and benefits. And I ll leave the features and benefits dichotomy to subsequent lectures, the next lecture presentation. But to suffice it to say right now that when we know our product, the features we re talking about the characteristics of the product. And the benefits are what those product attributes can do for us the consumer, how we can benefit from 4

5 that. So before we ve put any words on the page or any pictures on the screen, we re doing some research and understanding our target market and our product. Not surprisingly, bullet point number three and also an element of the situational analysis is to understand our competition, to competitive analysis. So, we recognize here that our brand, our product, our company is typically not marketing in a vacuum. We don t have a monopoly, there are competitors. So, we need to know how consumers perceive our brand in comparison to other brands. And that means to know our competition. And that may seem like a very obvious and easy situation to deal with in that we have competition. So we take example like if we were the advertiser Pizza Hut, who s our competition. And we might immediately rattle off some pizza restaurants that Pizza Hut competes with. But recognize that competition can be broadly defined as well as narrowly defined. So in addition to pizza restaurants we could include grocery stores that sell pizzas. Or we could even consider other items that could be sold: food items in grocery stores or other restaurants that are not pizza. I mean the fact that some individuals deciding to go out and eat choose pizza over burgers would suggest that burgers are still a notable competitor with pizza places. So this notion, bullet point number three-know how your brand is perceived in comparison to other brands i.e. knowing your competition-may be a little easier said than done that s what I intended to say. Bullet point number four-know how users and nonusers view the product/service differently. Now we re assuming that nonusers are still in our target market. So don t assume that we re trying to stretch that target market into new or that market into new groups. We re not talking about that. We re suggesting that if we had defined our category as gamers, video game players of a certain age, certain sex and all the other characteristics that we would define our target market by that there are some individuals that are users and some that may not be evading themselves of our product or service. This is saying, let s do some research. Let s determine how users and nonusers view our product or service differently. Now obviously our bread and butter is the users, but there may be some opportunity for us to expand our bottom line and market share if we were to determine ways that we could target nonusers. You know, quick example, sometimes we again as local retailers may find it very helpful and I may suggest that this is good too to do research. As consumers walk into our store, ask them to complete a simple survey or ask them a few questions and we fill out the answers for them to determine things like whether the products that we re offering are the kinds of products that they would want, the store hours, or other service activities that we could be performing that we re not currently performing. And all of those are well and good, but what it leaves out-the point I m making here with bullet point number four-is what about those individuals that might be potential customers of our store but are not coming into the store to fill out the survey. Then what is it that they might be saying to us that might be different than the users. So this is not an easy task to master but one that we would obviously want to consider and that would be how would we reach those nonusers, how would we be able to find out what their needs are and then from that, develop a creative strategy. Bullet point number five, which is actually part of the target market definition and one that definitely needs to be included in the creative strategy discussion is what s your objective? What specifically are you hoping to achieve with your 5

6 advertising? And as noted in previous lectures and you d be tested over this: the question is how does an objective generate or have any influence on creative decisions or media decisions or other decisions-budget decisions-that the company makes. Should be clear by this time that it has a huge major impact. So if we re trying to change people s attitudes versed trying to make them aware of our brand, the creative strategy that develops from that could be quite different. Bullet point five then was to know what the objective of your ad is or will be. The last two-kind of talk about these-these you may not seem as germane but still relevant to this discussion. These may be duhs. If you re developing a creative strategy, it would be helpful to know if you re developing an ad that s gonna be in print or radio or TV or in some other form-internet, base form-and also how much money you have to spend on developing this campaign. Sometimes we won t have a blank check as an advertising agency creative side of things so we would want to know how much money we have in our budget. What do you need to know (and/or do) before developing a creative strategy? Know your target market Know your product (features and benefits) Know how your brand is perceived in comparison to other brands-know your competition Know how users and nonusers view the product/service differently Know what the objective of your ad is/will be The medium (TV, radio, print, etc.) for which the ad will be designed (Perhaps) the budget you have to work with [Dr. Darrel Muehling]: At a minimum, I m going onto the next slide then, there are at least four things that good creative advertising should do. And you see again that these are not really creative things as much as just checklists of good marketing promotion principles. One, the ad needs to be capable of gaining attention. It needs to be distinctive, somehow separate itself from all the others. We discussed again in previous lectures the notion of selectivity and the information processing model. Here we re talking about selective attention-what can we do to cut through the clutter and make our ad more acceptable, more attention getting than other? But just getting attention isn t enough and bullet point two suggests that once we ve got your attention as a consumer, we re hoping to communicate something effectively about our product, service, or company. In other words, what is it that we hope to communicate? What do we want to tell the audience about our product, service, or company? A good ad is going to effectively communicate that. Third component of a good ad would be that it s memorable. The best of the advertising are ads that are ones that people don t forget-that they remember the selling point. They re likely to take those selling points and somehow include them in their decision process. We talked about the elaboration likelihood model in the central route of the ELM and remember if we can persuade individuals through that central route when they re involved, when they re 6

7 engaged, then hopefully that attitude would be more enduring. So here we re talking about an enduring nature of our advertising as well and making it memorable would be a minimum requirement. And last but not least, and one that s surprisingly I think is overlooked-and that is being able to register the brand name. So, we have gained individuals attention, we communicated something about our product, our service, our company, we ve made it memorable, but bullet point number four-if we ve gone awry, we ve made a mistake here because individuals don t equate that communication point-they re not remembering the points we like to make associated with our specific brand. In other words, they may think of product characteristics but associate it unfortunately with a competitor. So at a minimum, the brand name needs to be registered. I ll talk about that a little bit more in a different context here in the next presentation as well. At a minimum, the ad should: Be capable of gaining attention (be distinctive?) Effectively communicate something about your product/service/company Be memorable Register the brand name [Dr. Darrel Muehling]: If you are working ahead, you may know in the class that one of the exercises I m going to ask you to do is to see a short video case and then write a creative brief. So here s kind of a brief on the brief-when asked to do creative strategies, we can all go into our corporate board rooms and we could brainstorm and come up with ideas and hopefully something will stick to the wall and that will be acceptable to our client. But is there any other mechanism, any other tool that might be useful in helping us kind of focus on the issue at hand, the problem at hand and come up with a reasonable solution especially from the creative side? And the answer is yes. The term that your authors use is the copy platform. I ve been more likely to see it referred to it as a creative brief. You can use those two interchangeably. But the emphasis is on brief, and when I mean brief, it s usually one page, single page, which is what you re going to be asked to do in your exercise. A one-page document that specifies the basic elements of the creative strategy. Creative Brief (Copy Platform) A brief (often one-page) document that specifies the basic elements of the creative strategy. [Dr. Darrel Muehling]: If you go to the next slide, you ll see that these elements again are helping us to kind of focus on the necessary points before we go into the creative process. So, the 7

8 basic problem or issue the advertising must address. What is it that we re hoping to accomplish generally? And then more specifically, what are our advertising or communication objective? Is it to change an image? Is it to encourage a behavior? What is it? Who s our target audience? Remember we could have more than one audience, so we could have more than one brief. The major selling idea or key benefits to communicate. What is it that is key to us to communicating something about our product, our service. The campaign theme or appeal. A little bit more about that on the next slide. But we could be talking about whether it s a humorous appeal, fear appeal, you know what is it that we re going to be using. Humor kind of soft sell or hard sell-a reason why kind of campaign. And then the last bullet point here with respect to the elements of creative brief would include supportive information or requirements. Many times if we re making claims, we ve got to make sure those claims are backed up by evidence-research evidence. And so there are some legal factors that we need to consider and that would be part of the supportive information or requirements plus technical information. What we are expecting technical to do or not to do with our promotion. So, these are the elements. You ll see that in the exercise I m going to ask you to do, I m going to give you a template to follow and these are not the exact same bullet points. Instead, what I m giving you is questions that would be answered in one sentence or more. But if you were to take any scenario-a real scenario or the one that I m giving you to do in the exercise-i m hoping that by answering those questions, it will force you as a creative person or somebody involved in the creative decision, to make the tough decisions that need to be made before the words and pictures and all the other elements are created. Elements: The basic problem or issue the advertising must address The advertising/communications objectives Target audience Major selling idea or key benefits to communicate Campaign theme or appeal Supportive information or requirements [Dr. Darrel Muehling]: So last slide for this presentation is a short list, not meant to be exhaustive list, of the kinds of decisions that are likely to be made in the creative execution. And we could spend hours, days, chapters of reading to talk about each of these. But recognize, you know I think of promotion whether advertising or otherwise is almost done in layers. That there s this layer added to this layer to this layer. And you may recall an example I gave some time ago in another lecture video presentation, I was talking about the lengths that the household cleaner advertiser was going to develop a background for its kitchen shot and the different angles and whatnot. But that s not the exception. That s basically the rule. I ve heard red stories about beer advertising where the pour, the beer into the glass and the foam reaching to the top sometimes takes hours and hours to perfect so it s just perfect. Now you as a beer drinker or as someone 8

9 that s watching the advertisement probably could care less whether the foam was at the top or what it looks like. But to advertisers, at least creative decisions numerous hours developing the creative execution to its finest point. Millions of dollars may be spent, and we want to get it right. So I talk about these layers, don t assume it s just one layer after another, let s get this done and that s a wrap and in half an hour we ve got our creative decision made. Even at the local level, now we want to take time to recognize that there are essential cues, there are peripheral cues that both, all of those cues can have an impact, great impact on how individuals perceive our message, the person that s delivering the message or the company that is sponsoring the message. So, you know, maybe these are fairly self-explanatory, these bullet points with respected decisions. Here we re talking about appeals in the first bullet point. So rational appeals so sometimes you ll see promotions that are very matter of fact, reason why, this is why you should buy our product. And they may be fairly heavily laden with copy, copy being words, you know meaning to explain in detail why our product is better than the competitors or why you should purchase it now as opposed to later. And then maybe on the other end of the continuum even these are really not end points, that would be the emotional: you know fear, sex are a couple of emotions that are often used in advertising. You ll find that when ads are submitted to ad contests, for example the Clio Awards, it s often the emotional ads that tend to be submitted and win these awards rather than the rational ones. But you know as we say and maybe I ve said it in previous lectures, a good ad-the difference between a good ad and a bad ad-isn t so much in the creative as in whether it works. Works means that it achieves its objective. So you may have what some ad critics may say is a very boring ad that could still be very effective. And if it s effective, then it s good. So, rational, boring types, reason-why ads are appeals than many advertisers do consider even though the emotional ones tend to be shown during Super Bowl or other high visibility times. Reminder advertisement is just that, you know appeals, you already know about our product, hey just keep it in your mind. And billboards are often examples of reminders, but television ads or any other kinds of ads where the focus is on the brand name, just keeping top of the mind awareness reminder. And then teaser ads, like I mentioned in an earlier video or Infinity campaign where they didn t show the automobile, just the infinity name and a bunch of blocks and walls and things like that. They were obviously done with a purpose in mind, this is done to generate some interest and questions. And hopefully with enough interest, then when the ad reveals the brand name then you know, it has a greater impact. Moving on to some of these other bullet points very quickly. A spokespersons, whether they re real or fictitious, there s obviously a trade-off on real may have a greater impact in some ways. But in the case let s say Tiger Woods who s a real spokesperson when he is faced with a PR nightmare, then it might be better to have someone that s a cartoon character that you don t have to worry about getting into any legal media trouble. Cues, just a couple of examples of those. Thingscolor, headlines, illustrations, copy, music, voice-overs-again, just to show you how critical each element of the execution is. Voice-overs-the person that is doing the narrations, someone you might not see in the television screen and certainly wouldn t see on a radio spot because there is no visuals-much care, great care is taken to make sure that the voice, the resonance, the sounds, 9

10 the qualities of the voice are consistent with the brand image. So, you don t just pull someone off the street and say here, read this. You re picking a voice that is consistent with your total promotional maybe even with your marketing strategy. And then a lot of other creative elements, some I ve eluded to already-animation, special effects, legal issues all are part of the creative execution decision. So with that, I m going to end this lecture on the creative process. We have one more lecture to go and we ll be done with the seven week session. So until I see you again, so on, bye. Decisions to make regarding the creative execution Appeals (rational, emotional, reminder, teaser) Spokesperson (real, fictitious) Cues (color, headlines, illustrations, copy, music, voice-overs) Other creative elements (animation, special effects, legal issues) 10