Category: Phil Bernstein

Like Clutter? You’ll Love Heathrow

If your travels take you through London’s Heathrow Airport, prepare for an onslaught of sales messages, each one competing for ever-smaller slivers of your attention. According to this morning’s Wall Street Journal, they’re opening a fifth terminal with “more advertising than almost any airport in the world.

The numbers are astounding, especially as they compare with current major US airports:

From giant billboards overlooking security lines to television screens in the underground train station, the ads have been positioned in ways BAA hopes will make them impossible to avoid. There are 333 billboards or posters and 206 flat-screen TV sets, which can change ads to target specific flights. By contrast, Los Angeles International has 34 advertising TV sets in the entire airport and New York’s John F. Kennedy International has 40, according to JCDecaux, a Paris-based specialist in outdoor advertising that was hired to design and sell the new Heathrow ad space to marketers…

Typical Terminal Five visitors will see between 50 and 120 ads, depending on whether they arrive at the airport by car or train and whether they fly domestic or international flights, says Julie France, U.K. managing director of unit J.C. Decaux Airport. That’s at least one ad every two minutes and 55 seconds, based on the two hours and 26 minutes an average traveler spends at Heathrow.

One ad every two minutes and 55 seconds. Our brains aren’t getting any bigger, are they? How are consumers supposed to process all of it? If this idea makes it to our shores, how are advertisers supposed to break through?

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Turning a Negative into a Selling Point

In the past couple of days, I’ve encountered two pharmaceutical companies who are dealing with the same issue — the taste of medicine — in two different ways.

 Nicorette is running radio commercials announcing “a revolution in quitting smoking… a stop-smoking gum that actually tastes good!” Apparently a common objection of Nicorette users up until now was that they hated the taste; Cinnamon Surge is a new product designed to get past that hurdle.

A day after hearing the Nicorette ad, I walked by a drug store display for Buckley’s Cough Mixture, featuring the tag line “It tastes awful. And It Works.” In contrast to Nicorette, Buckley’s has taken the bad taste and made it the centerpiece of their campaign for their “disgustingly effective products.” Their Myspace page (yes, cough syrup has a Myspace page, and I don’t) features the winners of the Buckley’s Bad Taste Face contest, along with a TV ad in which a blindfolded consumer is unable to tell the difference between Buckley’s and trash bag leakage.

In a previous post, I quoted from Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, in which Robert Cialdini discusses the ways people make decisions with incomplete information:

To deal with it, we need shortcuts. We can’t be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects in each person, event and situation we encounter in even one day. We haven’t the time, energy or capacity for it. Instead, we must very often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and then to respond without thinking when one or another these trigger features is present…

The example Cialdini cited involved tourists shopping for jewelry — a price rise actually increased demand, because the shoppers figured that a higher price denoted higher quality. Buckley’s is tapping into a similar psychological shortcut that cough syrup buyers might use: bad taste = effective medicine.

Nicorette is trying to change its prospects’ minds about their product. Buckley’s, by contrast, has accepted the consumer’s mindset and used it to the company’s benefit.

One problem, two opposite approaches. I like Buckley’s chances.

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Health Club Advertising — Meant to Mislead?

Would you set up a system where you deliberately disappoint and anger the people who respond to your marketing? The fitness club industry appears to be doing just that.

On the Get Rich Slowly blog, J.D. Roth details his adventures as he attempts to figure out what it will cost to join a health club. The post is called “Ads I Hate: East Side Athletic Club”, and it begins with a sour experience he has when he responds to that club’s direct mail. He also has trouble getting a straight answer on prices at 24 Hour Fitness and Bally.

More than 75 comments follow the post, many detailing bait-and-switch tactics at fitness clubs all over the country.

Do all health clubs act this way? No — Roth praises Nelson’s Nautilus here in Portland, and the YMCA gets high marks in the comments section. Clearly, there are some good guys.  But it appears that few industries generate more distrust with their marketing than this one.

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2008 SalesGenie Ads — I Think They’ll Work

Time to follow up last year’s post on the SalesGenie Super Bowl ads.

To start with, a note so that you don’t think I’m a complete boob: I hated them. Poor animation. Ethnically insulting, bordering on racist. Not even remotely clever.

And yet…

I think they’ll work. And by “work”, I mean bring in enough business to the company that the seven-figure ad buy turns a profit for them.

The first-quarter ad actually told a story that could resonate with salespeople — a failing seller is threatened with loss of employment, signs up with SalesGenie, and wins Salesman of the Year honors. It answers a question that many sellers are asking — “How can I double my sales?”, cleverly typed by the seller into Google. The answer? SalesGenie.com.

It’s got a clear call to action, with a reward that will appeal to salespeople and managers — go to SalesGenie.com and get 100 free leads for every rep in your company.

The second ad — the one with the pandas — told a story that seemed less clear, but the call to action was there with the same reward.

Neither ad was an artistic success. But as the economy goes south, there is an increasing demand among salespeople for anything that might give them an edge. Even if the tone offends them (and I suspect there’s a segment that won’t be bothered at all), they are likely to hold their noses and give the company a shot. I’m thinking SalesGenie may win the only award that counts.

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Does “Long Tail Media” Pencil Out?

There’a a provocative post by Chris Anderson on the Long Tail Blog about public radio. Mr. Anderson is a fan of a number of public radio shows, but doesn’t much like his local station. And he hates Pledge Week. So…

I’m listening to more and more of my favorite NPR shows (This American Life, Terry Gross’s Fresh Air, Science Friday, etc) as podcasts, something that finally suits me thanks to having a phone that automatically loads the latest shows. I don’t have to avoid the NPR pledge drive anymore…

Now that I get my radio via podcast, I don’t have to take the bad shows with the good. I’ve got an a la carte menu, and I assemble my own schedule with what I want and when I want it.

Anderson believes that radio is going to get “microchunked” so that people can listen to just the shows they want without ever tuning into the station that originated it. He talks about avoiding Pledge Week — I suppose the equivalent is avoiding the ads on commercial radio. 

This is especially interesting to someone like me — my day job is selling advertising on a group of commercial stations. I’m somewhat skeptical (and yes, it’s in my self-interest if the old model holds together long enough for me to get to retirement age). But I wonder:

 Who’s going to pay for all this? Right now, someone can hire me to design a campaign that will deliver their sales message to hundreds of thousands of people. They pay significant dollars for the access to this large audience, which allows my company to pay for the equipment, announcers, engineers, license fees, traffic reporters, and other expenses involved in putting on a broadcast. And there’s enough money left over to compensate me for designing the campaign.

What happens in this magical future when media’s microchunked, and the campaign reaches a few hundred people instead of a few hundred thousand? Does everyone’s paycheck get microchunked, too? And if that happens, how many of these shows actually get produced?

 Just asking.

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