Monday July 5, 2010

the best media is free

There are three basic kinds of media: PAID, OWNED, and EARNED.

PAID media is the stuff you actually pay money for e.g. TV, press, posters, radio, online, idents, ambient, DM. Anything we generally refer to when we say ‘media’.

The second is OWNED media. That’s any space you’ve got, that you could use without paying for it e.g. bus rears, t-sides, coves, station posters, train posters etc.

But it is the third part, EARNED media, where your agency can really make a difference. It's “what people say about you” e.g. “WOM, buzz, viral” and it's also the the most powerful of the three. But the best bit is that it is also free.

To explain better here is an extract of an ad from a big agency in the 80's:

THE MEDIA MONEY CAN’T BUY.

The most effective form of advertising you can have is word-of-mouth. Unfortunately you can’t buy space in this medium yet. At least not with money.

How you can buy it is with advertising that gets noticed and talked about. The more it gets noticed the more it gets talked about. The more it gets talked about, the more it gets noticed.

Strangely enough, this advertising doesn’t actually cost any more than the advertising that doesn’t get noticed or talked about.

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take a chance on me

Stand up all you marketers whos next campaign could be described as "this better work" as opposed to the ray of light that is "this might work."

Those of you standing will, unfortunately, work in a culture of safety, of proven, of beyond blame – where it is better not to fail than to chance spectacular success. Those remaining seated however, hopefully work in an environment where innovation and insight are encouraged.

If you spend all day working on campaigns that better work, you back yourself into a corner, because you'll never have the space or resources to throw some 'might' stuff into the mix. On the other hand, if you spend all your time on stuff that might work, you'll never need to dream up something that better work, because your innovation will have paid off long ago.

Think we all know which camp the majority of public transport marketing is in don’t we?

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why do people ignore my ads?

We’ve mentioned before that over 90% of advertising doesn’t work – largely due to a lack of creativity in the execution and poor highlighting of any real benefit in the product.

The odds are that this percentage is a fair bit higher when it comes to public transport and there are a few key reasons why most people ignore what they see about the bus and train.

Put simply, too many transport operators:

• forget that over 15million adults in the UK have literacy level of primary school age

• sell their brand rather than their product

• try to please everybody and upset nobody

• say what they want to say, not what their customers need to know

• forget the most important rule - SIMPLE SELLS!

In our opinion plenty of room for improvement…

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