Wednesday March 31, 2010

90% of advertising doesn't work

In 2005, over £18.3 billion was spent on all forms of advertising and marketing.

Just 4% was remembered positively, 7% was remembered negatively while 89% was either not even noticed or not remembered.

In a nutshell, nearly 90% of advertising was a waste of money.

This is because most advertising doesn't challenge the status quo. It usually has too many messages and is happy to to be the rule, rather than the exception. It’s something we’ve mentioned many times over, to clients and peers alike.

Because of this, more than ever, the key to advertising success is doing something that is both innovative and simple, i.e. different!

Innovative to get your ad noticed in the first place and simple becuase over one million adults in the UK have a reading age of just eight (The Sun is the country’s best selling newspaper for a reason).

So let's keep it simple, let's start being innovative and let's not be in the 90%.

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Gordon Vs Dave

With the General Election around the corner, the latest advertising strategy to woo our vote has become clear, with each party concentrating their efforts on trying to discredit the other.

Although commonplace in politics, bar the odd exception, it is rarely an approach seen in the commercial world.

Is this because brands are too scared of this tactic, or just simply that today’s political parties don’t have a point of difference?

Either way, it worked with Saatchi & Saatchi’s infamous 'Labour isn’t working’ poster. Let the battle of the marketing budgets commence.

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top 10 marketing blunders no. 8

Every month we look at the most brilliant marketing screw-ups. This month Clairol.

They introduced the "Mist Stick", a curling iron, into Germany only to find out that "mist" is slang for manure. Not too many people wanted a "manure stick".

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