Building brand loyalty requires more creative tactics for the Web
Ad agencies are in the brand-building business, but sometimes their efforts transcend the kind of process automation that intermediaries such as Google and MSN introduce to Web advertising. How can online creativity be bottled and distributed?
NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - In the drive to make online advertising more accessible to, and more targeted toward, individual Web users, something may be lost in translation: the creative element that makes most ad campaigns unique and innovative. One of the panel discussions at today's OnMedia NYC conference, sponsored by AlwaysOn, centered around this question, expressed exactly the way it was phrased here by several presenters: "How do we get to creative?"
The alternative -- albeit an expensive one -- to simply outsourcing the job of campaign management to an intermediary service, is to work directly with an ad agency to tailor the campaign around the brand and the venue where that brand will be presented. And sometimes the value of that campaign can be maximized when multiple advertisers pool together in a single effort, as panelists here demonstrated.
As Jean-Philippe Maheu, the chief digital officer of international PR and ad agency Ogilvy North America, demonstrated, a single campaign that either follows no rules or breaks them all can be embraced by viewers everywhere.
One groundbreaking example Maheu provided was its "Campaign for Real Beauty" for Dove Soap. This was an interactive campaign that got people's attention through bus stop signs and TV spots featuring "ordinary" women without makeup, declared beautiful for who they are. But Ogilvy went a big step further, by launching a public forum dedicated to the subject of girls' and women's low self-esteem, and how public imagery reinforces it.
Through Ogilvy's interactive surveys and research, Maheu reported, only 2% of women were willing to declare themselves beautiful. Usually an ad agency conducts surveys to determine the market segment it should affirm. This time, it built a tremendously successful and somewhat gratifying campaign expressly targeted toward the 98% of respondents who rejected its own basic premise: that women are naturally beautiful.
"We're big believers in storytelling," said Maheu. "The storytelling aspect helps to continue brand loyalty." Ogilvy was also responsible for crafting the "Unlock the Xbox Challenge" campaign, which brought together not only Microsoft but also Frito-Lay -- whose Doritos bags featured the main invitation -- and Nike, which got in on the act through its health and fitness angle.
Imagine health, Microsoft, and Doritos in the same context.
Panel moderator Bill Cleary took up the baton at that point and mentioned perhaps the most successful brand loyalty re-invigoration effort in history: Steve Jobs' rebuilding of Apple in the public consciousness. Its ability to transcend media -- and in its own exclusive case, to construct an entirely new medium for itself -- made it capable of addressing consumers on a one-to-one level, in an unprecedented new way, Cleary said.
Tom Bedacarre, the CEO of interactive ad agency AKQA (pronounced "aqua"), brought up what he perceives to be the problem facing most traditional ad agency executives today: Without coming right out and saying, "We're old," Bedacarre said that while they and their clients' representatives probably remember the Kennedy administration, they can't seem to catch up with the technology in front of their faces...the stuff their own kids bring home.
"They know the world is passing them by," he remarked. "They've got kids with their own Facebook pages, and they know what the opportunities are, but they don't know who to work with to take advantage of them." The agencies themselves, he explained, may be creative but they haven't yet evolved to be able to leverage this new power.
To that end, panelists offered a few exceptions. One comes from another joint campaign, this time involving Dell Computer and Pontiac, featuring the ability for users to take a car out for a virtual test drive. Such a campaign, moderator Cleary said, gives consumers more of those "touch points" they need to be able to make contact with the product in their own minds. "The more touch points they have to an item," he noted, "the more likely [consumers] are to buy it."
Another exception was emphasized by Creative Strategies media analyst Ben Bajarin, and it didn't need much explanation, especially today: The presidential campaign of one Sen. Barack Obama (D - Ill.), whose capability to transcend into both online media and personal appearances has met with very warm receptions from his target audience.
It was after tossing around the topic of Sen. Obama that one audience member asked a question that should not have been too difficult: How does a company seeking to transcend the boundaries of media, apply context searching ability like what's found in Google AdWords to full-motion video?
Surprisingly, every panelist present appeared stymied by the question.