How to over think your advertising

It is said that advertising is the greatest waste of human intellect, second only to chess.

Which brings neatly on to messaging architectures. What on earth are they? The output is invariably a powerpoint slide with all the messages a brand wants it customers to understand about itself or its products. The polite expression is assumptive.

It assumes consumers are interested. It sometimes assumes that consumers are so fascinated by a brand that they are happy to consume and process the messages in the order a brand wants them to do. They are like all a lot of plans, extremely seductive on paper but invariably useless when you get to implement anything. Their main purpose is to show everyone else we have thought of everything unfortunately they have a major negative effect. They encourage you to focus on the Ts & Cs, the additional points not necessarily the interesting bit.

A wise person said the job of marketing and advertising is to find something interesting about your product and then say it in an interesting way. When you invite someone round to a party. You say it is going to be brilliant we will get obscenely drunk/play whist - depending on your age. You don't send out an agenda with details of what to do with your coats and drinks when you arrive. Maybe you do. Sorry.

Knocking the ad industry

Looks like we are still an easy target. I didn't get drawn on the 'paid handsomely' and the 'wacky'. Article below, response at the bottom.

Bernard Matthews ad is a right turkey

Richard Fletcher - Telegraph 15 Jan 09

USING your own staff in your adverts is the latest whizz of those clever admen, who are paid so handsomely to come up with "wacky" ideas.

It all started with those (rather annoying) Halifax adverts – starring Howard the cashier.

With his singing and dancing routines Howard quickly gained cult status and others inevitably followed. It has even got to the stage where actors pretend to be real staff.

One of the last to jump on the bandwagon is Bernard Matthews.

As part of its rebranding (following that rather unfortunate bird flu incident) its own staff starred in Bernard Matthews' adverts – holding up handmade signs expressing how proud they were to work for the company.

Let's just hope that none of the "stars" are among the 130 redundancies announced yesterday. Somehow I doubt those clever ad guys factored that possibility in when they pitched the idea.

Read the piece on Bernard Matthews, an interesting perspective. And in the interests of disclosure, I don't work for the ad agency or Bernard Matthews, nor expect to do so in the near future. I am not related to Bernard either.

You would like to think that the possibility of staff redundancy had occurred to team Bernard Matthews. It would certainly have occurred to the admen, there are too many stories about what can go wrong when you turn staff into media stars.

But two points. One. The ad is clearly about product quality not staff commitment, this must have been a blessed relieve given recent history. As you suggest Bird Flu is hardly likely to be a source of competitive advantage.

Two. Clever admen, you are joking. No we are not. All we do is give advice and consultancy on marketing strategy, branding, pricing, service, customer management, marketing optimisation but only get paid for the production of the advertising, then get picked on by journalists. If you do it again i am going to become a banker.