Business Monitor Think beyond the ordinary
The most effective marketing can often be the most weird. Bog standard doesn’t necessarily work. You might indeed say that bog standard doesn’t work. This certainly applies to creative execution. Confused? Marketing expert Paul Clapham explains.
I
canʼt tell you how many times when I was working in agencies I had to say something like ʻthis product/service is not oddball and wonʼt benefit from a wacky treatmentʼ. Cue creative foot- stamping. Not my job to define creative direction, you see. As you might imagine, I wasnʼt having
any: ʻif you stick an unsellable idea on me, I wonʼt sell it to the clientʼ. An everyday tale of agency life, with the resignation threats left out. But the truth is that those wacky ideas have a record of bringing home the bacon.
In the first place they stand out – not, perhaps so difficult when they are surrounded by the dull and the dreary. Open any paper, switch on a radio and ask yourself ʻhow do these people keep their jobs?ʼ The answer is probably ʻtemporarilyʼ. The simple fact is that dull doesnʼt do it.
Creative delivery That isnʼt just true of creative delivery of the idea. It is at least as relevant for the medium. There was the building society that ran a TV commercial in black and white using only half the screen: cutting their marketing costs to the bone, you see. It was rubbish but effective rubbish because it banged home the message ʻthese people wonʼt waste my money like some others you could think ofʼ. So think creatively about where your advertising goes. That should read ʻyour marketing messageʼ. This subject began with the editor seeing an ad on the inside of a toilet door at a motorway service station. Bing! Ding! Lights went on! Quite right – how often do you have several exclusive, uninterrupted minutes to tell your story? OK thereʼs a chunk of ʻah butsʼ attached to that – which applies to any creative, new idea. For every person with a new workable idea I can find you 10 who will swear blind this peach is a lemon.
Potential buyers
For a start most marketing people would have a fit at the idea of advertising their brand in a public toilet. I can hear ʻbrand heritageʼ and ʻcorporate imageʼ getting an airing with the unspoken ʼmy personal review is imminentʼ. But and but, you might find that this is the perfect route to find potential buyers of printwear.
| 28 | September 2018
They are after all exactly the sort of people who charge up and down the motorways everyday taking regular pit-stops. In my experience service station coffee rather goes through you. Continuing the toilet theme (I promise this is the last) I came up with an idea for Bryant and May for their smokersʼ requisites section i.e. rolling papers in this case. The reps were leaving papers off their sales pitch because the sector was, and doubtless still is, dominated by Rizla. So we gave them each an A4 version of the poster you will have seen of a kid on the toilet with the message ʻthe jobʼs not finished till the paper workʼs doneʼ. They were encouraged to hang it in the toilet. Nothing beats a daily reminder. Most of them did (after all, itʼs cute) and sales rose, starting immediately, and they stayed up because the habit had been developed.
Pavement advertising had a short but successful run. In essence it put a brandʼs image right under peopleʼs noses just as they were hitting the shops. You canʼt beat the brand positioning! Reverse graffiti was another clever idea that deserved greater success. Apart from Banksy and his fans pretty well everybody hates graffiti. Itʼs unsightly and encourages more of the same. Not good when youʼre paying rent for premises on that street.
By contrast reverse graffiti steam- cleaned it off leaving a razor sharp brand name and message via a stencil. As with pavement ads it was placed exactly where people were about to go shopping. If you are looking for alternative media routes a Google search or similar may well be the wrong route. It tends to lead you to ʻalternativeʼ as in ʻtotally wackoʼ. The more you narrow your search parameters, the worse it gets. If you find what at first looks like an ideal online medium, start by being suspicious. They have a tendency to have a narrow range of opinions expressed and are often extreme in one direction or another. They also tend to be American which probably doesnʼt fit your needs.
Strong suspicion
I have the strong suspicion that such sites are likely to proliferate fake news. The latter is becoming an increasing threat to the quality of media around the world.
More than that I have seen comments saying that as people come to distrust mainstream media, they switch to the alternative option because itʼs perceived as more reliable. That is plain nonsense and should be treated as such. The worst thing you can do is to support it by buying the associated advertising space.
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
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