Successful Advertising: The Obvious and Not-So-Obvious

For advertising to be successful, you must have a product or service that will fulfill the promise of the advertising campaign. Otherwise, it’s a bad idea. First, a successful ad campaign is an idea rooted in a potent, powerful consumer insight. It is something that a consumer, while engaging with the message or proposition, feels “is part of me and I am part of it.” He or she should use it or become part of the cause or use it to express part of who they are. Second, the expression of that advertising execution must be theatrical and really jar the consumers’ interest and imagination. It must ask them to spend a few seconds with us, but they must opt into it on their own, and there is power behind that. Third, it must find a way to engage in a consumer’s life at a time and point that is relevant. Fourth, it must continue to evolve in the same way the consumer is evolving, so it can continue to be cumulative.

It sounds quite simple, but that is basically what you need to do. If you want to take a financial perspective on how you create the impact potential, you must ensure that you have the ability as a total entity, a campaign, to break through the threshold of indifference and put a spear through the consumer’s heart so he’s enamored of something. As you think about a campaign in a more holistic way, you have to create a sequence of experiences or touch points with the consumer that brings them all the way from something they fall in love with to something they will buy to an experience that will make them want to buy again. That constitutes a successful advertising program.

To be successful, you also must avoid the major pitfalls: ideas that don’t have merit; executions that are brilliant but no one remembers what they’re for; promises that are so inconsistent with the actual product or service delivery that advertising becomes its biggest enemy because you’ve create unmet expectations. Those are all pretty obvious. A subtler element in a very complex market is to make sure a consumer understands that your brand is different. If you fail to do that, you become ordinary and fail to be differentiated. Distribution is another major failure point. You must figure in the distribution and the availability of a product in a relevant way. If you’re running advertising to empty shelves, you may be making a mistake. If you have a certain amount of promotion within your advertising and communication plan, over-promoting a product when it first comes out can devalue it over the long term. Many small mistakes can be made, but the biggest ones relate to making a promise that will create disappointment, creating communications that are so wonderfully entertaining that they fail to sell something, or just making it so irrelevant to the consumer that it doesn’t matter.

The best thing people in the advertising business can do is buy large stacks of magazines on a regular basis and look through them frequently. You have to be culturally attuned with the people you’re trying to sell. One of the ways to do that is to absorb the culture and trends and what’s going on. It’s not just magazines, but also television programs. Sometimes I watch television programs I normally wouldn’t watch – like Road Rules, The Sopranos, or Six Feet Under – because those shows are important to people today and that’s what they’re watching. Those shows are social currency and a strong indication of how people are thinking about life and how they’re finding their entertainment. It is critical that we stay contemporary. I often listen to my kids’ music for the very same reasons. The notion of staying culturally attuned is critical. It’s not just about marketing smarts, it’s about marketing smarts in a relevant way. The relevancy is defined by the consumer’s life.