Advertisers follow the money. But at what cost?

I've lectured a fair bit on the growth of the advertising markets in the so-called BRIC economies. One thing I'm always keen to impress on students is that there are potential brakes on development in the emerging giants, despite the massive investment major advertising groups have made in recent years.

Some of the obstacles are structural - the shockingly low literacy rate in India, for instance, particularly among women - while others are political and cultural. From January 2012, the Chinese have announced that they will ban ads during TV and film dramas which are longer than 45 minutes. In a television ad market which GroupM estimates to be worth over Rmb200 billion (more than $31 billion), such decisions are going to hurt financially. They will also strike a blow to creatives looking to compete on an even playing field with their counterparts in Paris, New York and London.

What justification is given for the ban? According to FT reporter Kathrin Hill, it's all about the Communist Party trying to 'assert control over the country's increasingly commercial media industry'. In other words, this is one of the most explosively productive capitalist economies in the modern world, but it's still notionally run by people who condemn the whole capitalist ethos.

Advertisers love the central planning and infrastructural investment which the Chinese government champions. Outdoor media giant JC Decaux, for example, has benefited hugely from the expansion of the Shanghai metro and the associated increase in middle-class passengers. But, to steal from Lenin, there's always a danger that it's one step forward, two steps back in a country which may not have a clear consensus about its ultimate destiny. Authorities in Beijing have been trying, over the past year, to control ambient advertising - particularly for luxury goods which stimulates demand among an audience as yet unable to afford them.

There are certainly huge opportunities ahead, but advertisers need to be prepared for setbacks too. After all, we live in interesting times.

How to take the plunge with social media

One of the advantages of running workshops in marketing communications is that I get to meet a very wide range of interesting people from a diverse range of sectors. There's no doubt that the sessions are always a learning curve for me, as well as for the people who sign up.

Earlier this week, I met a representative of the British Heart Foundation - a charity known for its pioneering research and campaigning work in the field of heart health. They also seem to be ahead of the game when it comes to the successful and innovative use of social media to communicate their message.

It would be wrong to pretend that BHF is a small organisation. Through fundraising, legacies and its retail operations (as well as some public funding), it raises the equivalent of $185m a year. On the other hand, it's not a Nike, Coca-Cola or Shell. From my conversations, it's taking the world of social world very seriously though - making sure, for instance, that people are on hand to answer queries on platforms such as Facebook in real time and that medical expertise is on tap to tackle even technical questions on people's conditions and treatment as they arise.

BHF has made one of the big psychological leaps that many businesses fail to achieve with social media. Success requires investment. That means investment of time, staff resources and money. People who dip their toes in the water will often complain to me that they can't see the return. But a little half-hearted tweeting is no kind of strategy. It may be fine for an individual who uses the microblogging network for fun, but is hopeless for an organisation using it as a mass communication tool. No one expects to run successful advertising or direct mail campaigns by devoting a few minutes a day to them. Social media is no different. It's hard work, I'm afraid.

Further evidence of BHF's forward thinking in this arena can be found in their current 'mend a broken heart' campaign. The charity's scientists have identified the fact that zebrafish have the capacity to regenerate their heart cells and it's hoped that they'll be able to conduct more research into these unique biological properties. The thinking is that humans may, eventually, be able to heal their tickers in the same way as their aquatic friends.

If you go to the BHF homepage, it's possible to enter an animation of a water tank and create your own zebrafish who swims around with a message. At the time of writing, there are over 5,000 fish in the nicely designed virtual pond - each one a potential supporter or donor. Embedded video gives background information on the campaign and it's possible to involve your friends via Facebook, where the charity's page is liked by over 100,000 people.

The neatness of this particular package comes down to its strong thematic content, high production values and genuine sense of involvement. There's actually a reason to visit. Unfortunately, with so many other brands, there just isn't.

So hats off to the BHF for making a splash. My only question is this: why exactly are the zebrafish suffering from heart failure in the first place? Perhaps a lifestyle change is in order.


The science in black and white: a BHF boffin explains the importance of zebrafish to research

The death of the QR code

Who needs QR codes when augmented reality is advancing like this?

With friends like this...

Businesses are usually delighted when we endorse their products and only too happy if we provide them with free publicity via our social networks. It seems somewhat strange, therefore, that French fashion brand Lacoste and the iconic American brand Abercrombie & Fitch have both recently been in the news for trying to stop people wearing their clothes.

The problem for Abercrombie was that one of their most high-profile ambassadors turned out to be none other than Mike 'The Situation' Sorrentino from reality TV show Jersey Shore. Strangely, the Italian-American's image didn't fit with the values the Ohio-based lifestyle brand wanted to project. The spat is now at a stage where The Sitch's lawyers are reported to be involved.

Abercrombie's problems are put into perspective, however, by the PR embarrassment haunting Lacoste. Every time that spree killer Anders Behring Breivik travels to court in Norway, he seems to be sporting the apparel favoured for so long on the French Riviera. You may think there's not a lot the brand managers can do about it, and you'd be right. According to news reports, they've been reduced to pleading with the Norwegian police to find the crazed gunman an alternative outfit.

These two related stories demonstrate the international nature of brands, of course, but also reveal something quite important for advertisers and marketing communications professionals. Brand owners have always deluded themselves about the extent to which they are in control of their property. In 2011, with instant communication, 24-hour rolling news formats, social networking and the ability of people to publish anything they like online, the consumers are firmly in the driving seat. If we leave them to their own devices, they can potentially warp and misinterpret our message to the market place. Yet if we intervene, the ensuing public relations fiasco can quickly overwhelm us. Now, that is a situation.

Lovely ambient ad for BlackBerry PlayBook captured in Manchester, UK, last month.

Tweet, watch TV and play your Xbox. While you read this blog.

The future of advertising in a morning. It’s a big ask, but I guess time is money for a lot of the leading executives who attended the seminar organised by the Westminster Media Forum on 31st May 2011 in London. We had a good mix of broadcasters and media representatives at the Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace, as well as people from creative agencies and leading brands.

Stephen Adshead of Plum Consulting led an interesting discussion of targeted advertising via set-top boxes, which is a clear challenge to the traditional ‘linear’ model of communication in broadcast media. Although many of us naturally worry about privacy and the extent to which brands can get inside our heads, Adshead raised the valid point that the technology could also help to protect people. We could, for instance, use data to block messages about fast food to houses with kids. Counter-intuitively, the technology that seems to be a regulator’s nightmare might turn out to be the nanny state’s best friend.

Microsoft’s UK Managing Director of Consumer & Online, Ashley Highfield, talked about a campaign for Lynx, the feisty deodorant brand which is known as Axe outside the UK. He made the point that we are going well beyond basic demographic targeting now. We can gather data on whether the typical male user is watching the TV, using a PC or playing on the Xbox at particular times of the day and target messages accordingly. Click-thru rates on the Microsoft-owned gaming platform reached an astonishing 20%. Even angels would fall for statistics like that.

A new directive from the EU threatens the ability of marketers to use online cookies to track consumers. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft favours industry self-regulation here and we were told about the anti-tracking opt-in that exists in the latest versions of the Internet Explorer browser. The software giant would rather focus on the possibilities presented by the first ads using voice and gesture commands, due to arrive as early as this autumn. Not to mention a Britain which is 100% digital – allowing advertisers the same online reach that they have long had through television.

Television, incidentally, isn’t doing too badly if you listen to Channel 4’s Mike Parker, who heads up the broadcaster’s Strategic Sales & Commercial Marketing operation. He is buoyed by econometric studies which demonstrate that TV is a key driver of online activity and notes that age-old programmes such as BBC’s Question Time have been given a new lease of life through realtime commentary on Facebook and Twitter. And as Sarah Goldman from UKTV entertainingly noted, no one goes home to watch the internet.

I suppose it could be argued that the real future was represented by Mark Slade of 4th Screen Advertising. While mobile is a surprisingly small advertising market at the moment in terms of spend, it’s also one of the largest growing and will probably be pushing a value of £1bn by 2015. It’s clearly also going to be an important part of what one tweeting delegate described as a ‘surf ‘n’ turf’ approach to media.

If there’s one conclusion I’d draw from the commentary at the event, it would be that the years ahead won’t be dominated by any one particular medium. TV won’t disappear. It will adapt to integrate and interact better with other digital, mobile and gaming platforms. If any ‘traditional’ medium is under threat, it’s probably print, but even the old-fashioned newspaper has its stalwart defenders. Lawson Muncaster, the MD of London free sheet City AM, gave a bullish defence of the 300 hours of journalism that his staff pack into a 10-minute read.

Maybe that’s the world we live in today? I can be leafing through City AM while playing on my Xbox and tweeting about the latest instalment of #bgt. Will there be room for attending conferences?

Watch out for commentary on 108th Street from the Westminster Media Forum's seminar on The Future of Advertising. I'll be attending the meeting next week in central London, which will bring together speakers and commentators from leading brands and agencies with key policy makers.

Great piece of ambient advertising for a company which doesn't allow its chicken to arrive on people's doorsteps cold. Simple, visually striking and effective. McCann Erickson, New Delhi.

Props to the old skool guerrillas

I'm looking forward to giving a couple of evening lectures this week at Chelsea College of Art & Design to students from University of the Arts London and French advertising school Sup de Pub. The topic is guerrilla and ambient advertising and I'll be making the point that we're actually standing on the shoulders of giants.

As well as talking about the adventurous marketing antics of people such as 19th-century circus entrepreneur Phineas Taylor Barnum and Sir Thomas Lipton of tea and infusion fame, I'll be delving into some antiquarian literature. I was recently reading the classic text by Henry Sampson on the history of advertising, which was written in 1874. That's right. Written in 1874. He talks about the problems created by flyposting and has a section on the stencilling of marketing messages on pavements. Unsurpisingly, Victorian police and magistrates started taking a dim view of this kind of guerrilla activity.

With the help of H G Wells, Mr Sampson would have felt right at home if he'd transported himself to 2011. According to the San Francisco Examiner, the City Attorney of the west coast town is currently pursuing Levi's for their sidewalk graffiti on behalf of the Dockers brand. Perhaps there really is nothing new under the sun?

Chinese trainers sold to a suspicious American market. Nice creative work and an interesting commentary on the shifting balance of power between the US and a nascent superpower.

Interesting approach to financial services marketing from British high street retailer, M&S. The overtly feminised creative is designed to demystify insurance, credit and investment products for the typical shopper. But when does cleverly targeted and imaginative communication become patronising?

Interesting ideas from Dentsu and design gurus, Berg.

How would the French save Gordon Brown?

I'm a great believer in giving my students some difficult tasks. It helps to separate the men from the boys or, very often, the women from the girls. Or, in this particular instance, les dames from les filles, as the class in question came from Sup de Pub - the leading advertising school in Paris.

The brief I gave yesterday morning to a group of would-be account handlers and planners was to save Gordon Brown from catastrophic defeat with just 24 hours of the British election campaign remaining. They only had a few hours to work on a problem that would frustrate even the most seasoned admen and political pundits.

There were a number of interesting ideas for tactical media, including the distribution of Oyster card holders at London tube stations tracked on social media such as Twitter and Foursquare. We had a lengthy debate as to whether such giveaways constituted a bribe under electoral law. To my shame, having stood on a couple of occasions as a parliamentary candidate, I was a little vague on this point, but thought we were probably on dodgy ground.

Creatively the strongest campaign idea was one which used iconic British buildings as a metaphor for the economy. We saw Tower Bridge crumbling, with a warning that you shouldn't dump the architect of the recovery at a critical moment. The argument was that we could change the building to reflect a local landmark in key marginal constituencies, which I thought worked very well.

Strategically, there were even braver suggestions from other groups. Recognising the gaffe-prone Gordon Brown as a source of many of Labour's problems, some suggested creative work which had a strong 'mea culpa' theme. Or we could go a stage further - removing Gordon Brown from the equation entirely by admitting publicly that the election wasn't about just one man. It was about everybody else. Coming hot on the heels of Labour Ministers' calls for tactical voting and a Labour candidate suggesting Brown was the worst-ever Prime Minister, the strategy had a plausible, if rather desperate, feel to it.

One thing's for sure. It's always good to get the impartial observations of outsiders on any advertising campaign. And objectivity is often in short supply when it comes to elections.

Very much liking the current LG campaign in the US which is built around those text messages we ought to think twice before sending. I was discussing it this week in London with students from Maryland's Towson University and making the point that it's beautifully integrated across a number of different media. Traditional TV commercials and posters are linked to the web, Flickr and Twitter. I've even befriended the Ponder Beard on Facebook and he's been kind enough to stop by for a chat.

Campaign site: www.giveitaponder.com

A great deal has been written about the way in which charities, campaigns and political movements have borrowed the techniques of commercial marketers and advertisers. Very often, however, the marketing profession would do well to look at the ideas that evolve spontaneously as part of political protests. Many are simple, but ingenious.

Mass movements - particularly those which are denied the right to free speech through conventional channels such as television, radio and the press - have increasingly been using the internet and mobile technology to promote their messages. These newer media are, of course, by their very nature more democratic and difficult to censor effectively. Sometimes, however, activists are forced to think more laterally.

Iran has seen a great deal of turmoil in recent months, with a protest against the bogus election results turning, over time, into a challenge to the theocratic regime itself. Low-resolution video footage on sites such as YouTube has given us a glimpse of the brutality of the government forces, while Twitter has played an important part in the dissemination of news. There are two other developments that have particularly caught my eye though.

The first has been the use of rooftop chanting at night to show the strength of anti-government feeling - a form of protest that was used successfully against the former Shah in the 1970s, prior to the Islamic revolution. The second, reported more recently, is the campaign to deface the Iranian currency with protest slogans. As Iran is a largely cash-based economy, this has even greater impact than it would on the streets of, say, London or Paris.

Perhaps this is the ultimate viral campaign? The medium is ubiquitous, as the currency is in constant use and people can't ignore it. The message spreads quickly via retail outlets and market transactions and the notes can find their way into the hands of absolutely anyone. What's more, there's a constant circulation - at least until such time as the authorities can remove the offending cash.

The government's solution currently is to say that 'defaced' notes will no longer be legal tender from January. I suspect this tactic is doomed to failure by the sheer number in the hands of the public and confusion over the status of individual notes. When exactly does a scribble or a smudge of green ink become a subversive political statement? When does a messy note become an illegal one? Generally, if people receive a 'dodgy' note or coin, they always like to kid themselves that it's ok, don't they? And hope that they'll be able to pass it on. After all, if they accepted it as genuine, maybe someone else will?

Next time you encounter a celebrated viral campaign for a big brand, spread via email or social networks, it's worth remembering that messages are probably travelling more quickly and effectively in Tehran on the back of 1,000 rial note.

In the past, we'd distinguish between traditional forms of advertising aimed at mass audiences and direct marketing techniques which targeted groups or individuals directly. One of the interesting things about the brave new world of Web 2.0 is that these distinctions are becoming blurred. It's no longer TV campaigns, billboards and press advertising versus direct mail, e-shots and targeted web content. We can take an olde-worlde discipline such as radio advertising and adapt it to the brave new world.

Take Spotify, for instance. I was discussing the brand at a recent CIM course on marketing communications and making the point that the music is interrupted by pretty bog-standard commercials. One minute, we're enjoying virtually unlimited 21st-century tunes streamed over the web. The next, we're being treated to one of those cheesy ads that I grew up listening to in the 1970s on LBC or Capital in London. Unconvincing characters spouting stilted dialogue, dreamed up by the agency B-team.

While it may not be easy to drag the creative work kicking and screaming into late 2009, it is becoming possible to make the advertising more relevant to the listener. In an intriguing twist on the personalised communications we see on social networks, Spotify's Daniel Ek recently announced that his business would target ads based on customers' musical tastes.

Apparently it's possible to tell from my choice of tracks whether I'm more inclined towards BMW or Audi. This sounds intriguing, but as someone who's in the market for neither car, I'm wondering if the potential of the personalisation is likely to be rather limited. There's no doubt we're getting another glimpse of the future. How quickly it will arrive, however, is anyone's guess. In the meantime, my listening pleasure will still be disrupted by British Gas and some company which checks the memory of my computer in a free online test.

A number of my clients and delegates on training courses often wonder whether Twitter can truly be used as an effective marketing platform. Too often, we think of it as a vehicle for conveying a message, whereas actually it's an instantaneous method of anyone conveying a message on our behalf.

US space agency NASA recently invited 100 of its followers to Cape Canaveral for the launch of the Space Shuttle. The enthusiasts were only too glad to act as PR ambassadors for the American space program.

Yet another example of marketing communications passing out of the hands of the 'professionals' and into the hands of the general public. And just one of the many ways in which NASA has attempted to exploit the new technologies.

Watch this space.

A fine example of German-style 'buzz' marketing. I wonder what viral messages these flies could carry in the future?

Everything's 4-star, except the hotel...

Earlier this year, budget hotel chain Premier Inn claimed in its UK newspaper advertisements that it offered "everything you'd expect from a 4* hotel".

Having worked in the ad industry, I know there's inevitably a certain amount of poetic licence in the promotion of products and services. Sometimes, however, boundaries get crossed. I protested to the Advertising Standards Authority about the misleading nature of the claim and was pleased to see this week that the watchdog ruled against the Whitbread-owned business, saying that the ads breached three sections of the relevant codes of practice.

As I frequently tell my students, however, the British regulatory system tends to be rather toothless. The ads won't appear again with the same form of words. But the campaign is now over and some months have elapsed since the original insertions. Is there any way we could create a system that works faster and carries more clout?