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Published by World Advertising Research Center Farm Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 1EJ, UK Tel: +44 (0)1491 411000 Web: www.warc.com |
September 2006, Issue 475 |
It is almost inconceivable that you would leave a fully fit and 'firing' David Beckham out of your dream football team. Knowing his skills, guile and experience, it would be almost professionally negligent not to pick him.
Yet that is often what advertisers metaphorically do when embarking upon new campaigns; they fail to give any kind of role to PR – arguably the modern communication industry's star performer, which can help to positively profile new campaign launches.
Today, when leading advertisers such as Chevy, Nike and Virgin are ceding control of ad content to their target audiences, it is more critical than ever that a key role is given to PR when campaigns are being developed and rolled out. Increasingly, when PR is not involved, the results can be unnecessarily disastrous.
BIG BANK'S BIG PROBLEM
You might remember the Barclays 'Big Bank' ad campaign? Only two years ago, the UK financial institution created TV slots where Robbie Coltrane, Anthony Hopkins and various other celebrities and movie stars lauded the brand's 'big' thinking philosophy. However, at a retail operations level, Barclays was closing branches at locations deemed to be unprofitable. With the loss of local services plus the relocation of jobs, this created a 'big beef' for many customers and staff.
The dissonance – the brand's behaviour was at odds with its advertising boast – created PR problems, as stakeholders such as customers, journalists and even politicians became vocally critical.
A competitor bank even seized the PR high ground by advertising that it was not decimating essential community services!
While media watchers were baffled by Barclays' doublespeak, bank PR operatives were rushed off the bench to prevent a bad result turning into a massacre. Plainly, this PR disaster constituted a case of mixed messages, inconsistent brand behaviour and a costly waste of communications resources.
CHOCOLATE-MAKER'S PR RAP
Similarly, UK confectioner Cadbury ran a promotion encouraging kids to save choc bar wrappers and exchange them for school sports equipment. On the surface, it seemed a neat way for a choc manufacturer to demonstrate its social responsibility while also combating the obesity epidemic consuming British kids.
Upon its launch, the Guardian newspaper highlighted that kids would need to eat scores of chocolate bars just to get one basketball. The bad publicity completely overshadowed the doubtless positive intentions of the promotion.
In both the Barclays and Cadbury cases, there seems to have been scant consideration for the potential stakeholder impact – often generically referred to as the 'PR' – these ad or promotional campaigns might have catalysed.
REPUTATIONS AT RISK
While advertising has long been about creating a 'buzz' or 'selling the sizzle' for a client product or service, one of its principal attractions is that it offers security. You pay for media space, then pretty much get to say what you want to within that space. The issue today, is that a pronounced 'ennui' has crept into contemporary consumer culture, where audiences are growing impervious to most advertising tricks and angles.
Consequently, advertising 'buzz' is getting harder to generate, forcing ad makers and clients to adopt a greater risk profile to arrest consumer attention. Of course, the harder advertisers try to push the boundaries, the greater the chance of losing the historic control and security that the discipline has typically traded on.
Australian PR blogger Trevor Cook provides this great example:
'The ads by P&O selling cruises as opportunities for easy sex might have sounded great in terms of pitching to young males, but they did terrible damage to P&O's reputation (when they came to light during an inquest into a sex-scandal-related death on a P&O cruise). A PR person might have counselled against this kind of base appeal from the outset or at least urged its withdrawal during the inquest period and beyond.'
Having ad campaigns morph into PR disasters reflects badly on the creative agency as well as the organisation (and marketing director) that signed off the work. However, with some early-warning PR involvement, you can take ad 'risks' in a more calculated way – a way that negates causing a reputational stoush.
PR IS NOT JUST PRESS RELATIONS
I am not saying that a press release can make or break any ad campaign. The history of good advertising scotches that notion completely. But that was in the pre-'citizen media' days, but now PR must counsel advertising particularly because web-enabled bloggers and journos are just as capable of influencing brand, product or personal reputation as an ad campaign is.
To clarify, when I use the term PR I do not just mean media publicity. I mean the more strategic, future-focused kind of PR. Truly strategic PR has the broadest of all communication 'worldviews' because PR is, theoretically, keenly interested in establishing and maintaining good relationships with all key influencers from consumer, corporate, governmental, legal, media or regulatory audiences.
Good PR staff should be interested in – and skilled enough to conduct – open dialogue with these groups, to assess and forecast the likely impact and consequences of all organisational output, whether it is a service offering, a manufacturing by-product or even an ad campaign.
For ad agencies and makers, this kind of PR – sometimes called issues forecasting or scenario planning – needs to take place when there is a shortlist of possible ad executions, not when a communication fire needs to be put out after a mass media campaign becomes a media or stakeholder crisis. Alan VanderMolen, president of Edelman Asia Pacific, firmly believes in PR's essential midfield role in any communications team:
'Understanding the “offensive” and “defensive” angles on ad campaigns should be the domain of PR, especially in today's multi-stakeholder world where media and technology convergence gives great rise to peer-to-peer communication.'
A GOLDEN PR OPPORTUNITY
Down under, NAB (National Australia Bank) was able to generate considerable reputational (PR) kudos via one strand of its 2006 Commonwealth Games sponsorship. To demonstrate its strategic position as the bank that backs people with dreams, it struck a sponsorship deal with an unknown, young Aussie discus thrower named Scott Martin.
In a quirky ad campaign, Martin attends a jazz ballet class, where an experienced ballet teacher shows him how to pirouette more efficiently. Her advice mirrors the words of experience NAB offers its customers. In the TV, outdoor, press and in-branch ad executions, her wisdom results in Martin throwing better. In the run-up to competition, media commentators loved the PR angle of the baldy bloke from the bank ballet ads. Then, life imitated art when Scott Martin competed in Melbourne, turning his Games dreams into reality by winning discus gold. The media (PR) coverage was hugely positive. Journos interviewed Scott and his mum; they wrote about Irina the TV ad's ballet teacher; they spoke to sports sponsorship experts about Martin's worth as a piece of sponsorship collateral.
In addition to national media comment discussing the advertising and PR synergy, the bank saw a one million-plus 'spike' in visits to its website.
'It's been the most successful marketing initiative this organisation has ever undertaken,' NAB's Greg Sutherland, GM of strategy and marketing, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
MY WAY OR THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY
Publicity aside, advertisers need early PR counsel because of the seismic changes taking place in new media. The web has created a major shift in the nature of the relationship between advertisers and consumers and, at a broader level, between organisations and stakeholders.
With virtually everyone able to publish their opinions and network them virally, organizations are becoming compelled to consider the feelings and responses of all their stakeholders and so embrace a two-way communications model, which makes them more accountable to their audiences.
Some advertisers seem surprised to see their ads boomerang back to them, often necessitating an appropriate PR response. As a result of cheap digital production technology, clients and ad agencies are having their ad campaigns remade, which takes the concept of adbusting to a new level.
This was demonstrated when a small Aussie agency made a rogue version of the Australian Tourist Board's headline-grabbing 'Where the bloody hell are you?' campaign, turning it into a popular viral email. The new ad lampooned the Sydney race riots and the Aussie government's refugee policy.
The original script read:
'We've bought you a beer' (an Aussie pub patron says)
'And we've had the camels shampooed' (a camel train is silhouetted at sunset)
'We've saved you a spot on the beach' (says a bikini-clad woman at the beach)
'So where the bloody hell are you?'
The parody version read:
'We packed you a cone' (two guys puff joints near Sydney Harbour)
'We got the ethnics off the beach' (with a gang chasing a beach-goer)
'We got you some free accommodation' (says a detention centre warden)
'And the dingoes are well-fed' (zoo staff feed a kid's doll to a tethered dingo)
'And our human rights record has been improving for over 200 years' (says a black man being attacked by police)
'So where the f**king hell are you?' (pursued beach-goer is attacked by race-riot thugs wrapped in Aussie flags).
And while control of ad content is being wrested from some advertisers' hands, others are more actively letting it go, warming to the concept of consumer generated media (CGM) in order to get closer to their target audience.
CONSUMERS IN THE DRIVING SEAT
Chevrolet recently got keen consumer interest in one of its new vehicles, by letting customers make ads for its terrain-conquering Tahoe SUV.
However, the Chevy spirit of relationship and rapport was not entirely reciprocated, as a lot of creative effort went into deriding the vehicle's gas-guzzling and eco-destroying characteristics. When these new consumer ads were virally distributed, they attracted widespread media attention, heaping on-and offline PR scorn on Chevy, its Tahoe and the entire advertising strategy.
If you believe that all publicity is good (and from a PR stance, I certainly do not), then you might argue that the Chevy Tahoe campaign was a PR success.
Aussie bank NAB adopted a similar CGM tack to illustrate its role as sponsor of Australia's World Cup Socceroos. NAB helped Aussies make their own Socceroo TV ads, one of which was screened on national TV during World Cup coverage, with the winner getting the chance to dine with the Socceroos.
At SEE, my team developed a secure website stocked with football footage, soundtracks and self-animating caption creator, all of which enabled fans to send their own good luck message to their soccer heroes. Unlike Chevy, however, all the Socceroos ads were fully moderated and housed on a secure site, so not easily bastardised by anyone with an anti-Socceroos or anti-bank axe to grind.
From a PR stakeholder perspective, pro-Socceroos websites and blogs were contacted to promote 'Make Your Own TV Ads' to genuine Socceroos fans. Praise-worthy comments like 'have some fun' and 'the coolest Socceroo competition on the web' were PR music to our ears.
Meanwhile, over at an online site called current.tv/v-cam, consumers can pick up challenging, real briefs to make bona-fide ads for big brands such as Sony and L'Oreal, and be paid for doing it. Yet without judicious PR forethought to accompany the development of such consumer-involving initiatives, they could be a PR disaster waiting to happen.
ADVERTISING AND PR WORKING TOGETHER
What we are seeing on the web and in emerging consumer behaviour is that the old ways of advertising are much less effective on the new, more empowered and more discerning audiences. Easily convinced, passive 'consumers' are being superseded by better-informed audiences who are equipped (technologically and attitudinally) to assert what they want and reject what they do not like.
With advertisers consequently trying bolder, more interactive ways to engage with these targets, the nature of the communication flow changes from one-way to two-way communication. That, certainly theoretically, is where PR is able to offer its expertise in conducting ongoing dialogue with key audiences or groups.
As mentioned earlier, PR is not simply press relations: by one definition, it is the management of reputation. And in this era of triple-bottom-line reporting, every organisation needs a strong reputation just to go about its everyday business.
It is widely accepted that every organisation – from the modest not-for-profit to the most powerful international conglomerate – needs PR representation to help secure a fair share of media voice and to manage increasingly complex and influential stakeholder relationships. Why should advertising agencies or clients launching new ad campaigns be exempt from this mandatory?
Anyway, it is not as if advertising and PR are strangers. Many PR-driven public information campaigns feature prominent ad executions to help get their campaign message across. Likewise, many ad industry gurus create agency and personal mystique not by taking out ads, but via profile-building PR efforts that break news of campaign launches or compile ROI-proving case studies.
All of us in the communications business need to acknowledge that the old smoke-and-mirrors game is over, and that we are fair game for comment, critique and even condemnation. We need to be aware of how our output might affect any stakeholders who can, increasingly, influence reputation – ours, and our clients'.
PLAY PR FROM THE START
By all means, keep pushing the boundaries of advertising creativity, but do not assume that everyone will automatically support or share your belief in your own creative brilliance. When you are next developing that ad campaign, ask a trusted PR pal, 'Who might have an issue with this approach or execution?' The answer could stop your advertising campaign turning into a PR disaster.
Given all the changes in the contemporary communications landscape, PR needs to get a starting – if not a starring – role, in the development of every new communications campaign.
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