Ultimately, who deserves the credit for successful and highly creative marketing campaigns?

Sure, the agency’s fingerprints will be all over them. But experience tells me that work that genuinely stands out is characterised by one common denominator: an ambitious, brave and open-minded client.

Taking the plunge

So why are some clients willing to sign-off radical work while others play it safe? Is it due to individual personalities? Is it a matter of corporate culture? Does it depend on where in the company pecking-order the client sits and how worried they are about the boss’s reaction?

It’s a crunch question for anyone who wants to produce outstanding advertising. So it prompted me to ask a number of individuals, both in Ireland and internationally, how they ducked the bullets and produced award-winning campaigns.

One of these was Brett Colliver of DDB New Zealand, a prime mover in the New Zealand Coastguard’s ‘Live Rescue’ campaign last January.

Winner of a Gold Lion at this year’s Cannes Direct Awards, this campaign aim was to shake New Zealand’s community of ‘boaties’ out of their complacency that, even if they got in trouble at sea, the Coastguard would inevitably rescue them.

Rather than producing the traditional series of press/TV/radio ads, DDB took a far more radical approach in actually dumping four ‘victims’ into the sea. They then challenged New Zealand to direct – via the internet – a Coastguard search plane to find these people in time. Only approximately 1% of participants succeeded, a statistic that matched the real chances of being located.

It was a great idea. But it was also a highly risky one, not least because the simulated danger could become very real. Brett Colliver explained that this potential obstacle was overcome by the client’s combination of vision and realism: ‘The client totally understands how valuable media coverage is, so they weren’t worried about having people in the water – provided we took the necessary precautions.’

While the outcome involved a real rescue, it didn’t start out like that. But when the agency and Coastguard both realised the idea’s potential, they collaborated in its development: Colliver explains: ‘The idea was an evolving beast once it got rolling which made the budget issues interesting. Initially the idea was just the website. People would go there and experience how difficult the Coastguard’s job is’.

‘There was also a TV idea that was going to be produced, but it wasn’t directly linked to the website. Then we realised that we could make it so much more engaging and the idea of running first person TV and radio spots to drive people to the site was born.’

Brett summed up the experience by saying: ‘Basically I guess the secret to getting the campaign up was simply a willingness from everyone involved to make it happen.’

Speaking to Brett, it was obvious that he regarded Live Rescue’s success as the result of a team effort. And another of this year’s big winners at Cannes echoed this insight.

Passion and commitment

In 2009, Leo Burnett in Sydney, Australia was responsible for ‘Photochains’, a campaign for Canon EOS cameras that integrated old and new media in a stunning and seamless blend.

Stimulating thousands of photographers worldwide to create endless chains of photographs, one after another, has won it a number of awards, including a Gold Lion at Cannes Direct.

Alissa Breit of ?Leo Burnett Australia made it obvious to me that commitment from both client and agency was a crucial factor: ‘When there is passion behind an idea at both ends and belief that it is a strong strategy the commitment comes – that’s not to say the process was easy, there were many, many meetings and iterations of the broader strategy and idea structure.’

Pressing her on this, Alissa elaborated: ‘Overall, the clients at Canon are really passionate about the work they do and the work we produce. They are a very hands-on client and like to be taken on the whole journey.’

Home grown goodies

Nearer to home, a project that also reeked of a perceptive and brave client was the campaign that launched Rabodirect in Ireland. Produced by the now-defunct Pulse and written by Gai Griffin, Rabo ran a series of genuinely funny ads based on the line: ‘Life’s more interesting when you’re direct’.

Gai recognised that although understandably nervous, Rabo clearly foresaw a dividend in being brave: ‘They were all behind the challenger brand strategy. They knew it was the only way they could establish a presence in the Irish market’.

While the Dutch half of the team sometimes didn’t fully understand the Irish sense of humour, they were smart enough to recognise and accept that, in Gai’s words, ‘when it came to funny stuff we really were coming from different places.’

‘Be bold’

That was the brief of Amie Peters, An Post’s Head of Direct Mail. And it recently inspired Dialogue to promote direct mail by creating a mailing that featured a cut-out, life-size torso wearing a real mankini – with an invitation for the recipient to try on the garment for themselves. (If you’ve a strong stomach, you can see the results at www.madmankini.com)

Unfortunately, requests like this are as rare as hens’ teeth.

However in looking at some extraordinary campaigns, it quickly becomes obvious that without a client’s desire to produce work that’s out of the ordinary and trust the agency to deliver it, it simply won’t happen.

Many are reluctant to push for this. Yet the campaigns touched on in this article do prove one thing: a passion for the highest standards, a commitment to partnership and a desire to create bold, groundbreaking work can pay real dividends.

But unless this is shared – indeed demanded – by clients, the very best ideas will continue to have a very small audience: the cleaner who empties the agency bins each evening.

Des Columb, Dialogue

Is The Apprentice sending out the wrong message? We ask a seasoned marketer, Gerry Ryan and a student, Zoë Bradley what they think of Bill’s cullings.

YES, “You’re Fired” writes Gerry [read here]

NO, “You’re Hired” writes Zoë [read here]

Marketing – You’re Fired!

Forget madmen, The Apprentice makes marketers look like lunatics, writes marketing man Gerry Ryan

Marketing: Bunch of chancers and incompetent spoilt brats, shooting in the dark and flying by the seat of their pants? Watching The Apprentice, you might think so. The perception of the marketing industry seems to be: we do everything slipshod seconds before presentation; we don’t know the difference between strategy and creative; we go to photographers and focus groups without any concepts and ask them if they have any. And we tamper with the client’s logo without even knowing it! Well, we marketers don’t like them apples.

Serious discipline

Can’t Bill focus on some other business disciplines? Couldn’t the candidates tackle an IT or HR task? Perhaps ask them to come up with a viable economic solution for Ireland? Or learn to pilot a plane? Or perform heart surgery with Bill mixing things up a little and announcing “you won’t be using scalpels boys and girls but knives and forks”.

How hard can it be to find another sector to belittle?

It can’t be as hard as writing a memorable slogan, for example. Of course, the young go-getters of The Apprentice last year reckoned: “how hard can that be?” Remember? The strap-line they delivered for Samsung was ‘Live. Enjoy. Dream.’ Then ‘Live. Every. Dream’. Then ‘Love. Every. Dream’. They couldn’t even remember it themselves!

Marketing’s a serious discipline. It can change consumer behaviour when delivered properly. It can even save the lives of the poor and helpless around the globe that we help fundraise for every day. But you wouldn’t think it from watching The Apprentice.

Job interviewees from Hell

The candidates call themselves team players, but they arrogantly shout over everyone else to get what they want. They’ll take full credit for a job that gets praise and heap all responsibility onto someone else when it goes wrong. And they delegate tasks like disorganised, blue-arsed flies.

Worst of all, they’re rude when presenting concepts – defending their bad ideas by shouting down the client and trying to blatantly bullshit and spoof them.

Ssh! Marketing managers might be watching

According to Emma Everard in Mediaworks, 408,000 adults over 15 watch The Apprentice regularly: including 207,000 ABC1 adults. Are these viewers left with the impression that advertising is just a joke?

Watching them brainstorm ideas is as unintentionally hilarious as seeing a tone deaf delusional on X Factor who can’t accept that superstardom is not in their stars. “What’s easy to use?” they ask. “An abacus is easy to use!” Brilliant! Or even better: “how about a piece of cake with the line ‘it’s a piece of cake’.” Astounding. It’s like Spinal Tap for marketers.

After all, who needs robust planning, sharp insights, challenging clients and defining the key measurements of a project when you’ve got entrepreneur turned creative Barry (the genius who tells us he regrets spending 150k on a car during the Celtic Tiger).

“I haven’t seen it before, so it must be original”, he says, talking about portraying products as animations i.e. M&Ms. His face fell when the client called his idea ‘repetitious’ – but it didn’t stop him the following week from painting one of his teeth blue to highlight a ‘Bluetooth’ feature on a phone. Maybe he hadn’t seen that idea before either…

If this chancer represents the perception of marketing out there, I’m off selling penny apples. How hard can that be?

Marketing – You’re Hired!

The Apprentice isn’t making a mockery of marketing, it’s promoting it, writes student Zoë Bradley

Every Monday night, hundreds of thousands of us sit in front of our TVs and do what comes naturally to most of us – judge others from the safety of our front rooms. This most entertaining activity has been increasingly seen as a thorn in the side of the marketing profession. As a student myself, I see it in a different light.

Brand Awareness

Firstly, I think the show increases awareness of marketing itself and emphasises its importance in business. Even Bill says it! The marketing aspect is invariably a key element of every task. Often the success of the candidates is judged on the amount of sales the team has made and certainly those with the best marketing strategy invariably win the challenge.

Take for example this year’s current Irish Apprentice. In the second episode the teams were required to make a radio advert and design an original menu for a new diet service. Though both teams were slated, the girls won by the skin of their teeth – why? Because their marketing strategy was deemed to be absolutely spot on. So the show itself highlights the importance of getting your marketing strategy right. Many entrepreneurs consider their product to be so fantastic that it needs no advertisements, relying merely on word of mouth. However I think that the show demonstrates how a great marketing strategy can really boost a product’s performance.

With more people becoming aware of the possibilities created in the marketing world, more people will enter the market which will help promote greater competition and higher standards.

Dog-eat-Dog world?

Undoubtedly, it is the bitching and backstabbing in Bill’s boardroom that has most viewers hooked, and some say this damages the industry – showing today’s youth that to get ahead you must be bolshy, selfish, arrogant and all-in-all an unlikeable person. However, these contestants can be viewed as being a horrible warning as opposed to a good example. In fact, ridiculing these foolish figures is one of the most entertaining aspects of watching the show! Watching them shoot themselves in the foot through their bad behaviour could only be an incentive to act in the polar opposite. Who would actually in their right minds hire some of the idiots on this show??

Fast, Cheap, Good?

Showing the teams strategising, recording and presenting in about two days could be misleading to the public and make marketing look like it’s done quick and cheap. But any marketing student knows a job can never be fast, cheap and good – you will always have to compensate on one aspect! This is hilariously highlighted often throughout the series. Could anyone really look at the standard of the work presented by some of the teams and applaud?

Who could not agree that professional marketing is the way to go, when watching episode 6 of the current UK Apprentice where a housewife dresses up in a ridiculous octopus costume. I’m sure that 50% of viewers ran from the room screaming!*

The Apprentice can only be good for the industry. It emphasises the importance of a good marketing strategy in all business ventures; it highlights how teamwork wins over self-important egotistical maniacs; and if seeing an octopus in your kitchen doesn’t convince you that the job is best left to the professionals, then I don’t know what will!

Finally let’s not forget that Donald Trump himself wanted The Apprentice to be educational as well as entertaining. Even if it’s just learning what not to do!

*not based on any actual figures/realistic analysis.

Gerry Ryan and Zoë Bradley, Dialogue

American advertising legend Tom MacArthur famously said that ‘‘Awards might get you on the dance floor but they won’t get you laid’’.

And he may well have answered the above question. Tom understood that agencies can win awards for designing a can of beans. Tom also recognised that clients, who he believed were smart folk, saw through all the false back-slapping. He described awards as ‘‘sparkling crutches to lean on for the unaccountable’’. He was so right.

So why the industry fixation to fill our board rooms with fresh awards when so much time and cost are required? Are they worth the effort? Agencies used to believe that silverware lured new business. That clients were enamoured and only invited laden agencies to pitch for new business was always in play.

So Dialogue recently asked a number of Irish clients whether this was the case and an interesting pattern emerged when asked flat out. We’ll call it:

‘‘The three step shuffle’’

Firstly, you get the ‘absolutely not important, it has never influenced our thinking or our agency selection’. This is generally followed by the ‘I suppose it’s not a bad thing to recognise industry excellence’. Then finally you get: ‘they can be important particularly if we’re looking to work with a new agency we don’t know’. Fair enough.

The fact is that little has changed over a decade of asking the same question. Clients all agree that there are far more important items then winning awards when it comes to agency selection. And they usually resolve around that one key word ‘Quality’. Quality of the people, quality of the work, quality of their thinking, quality of their admin tasks, quality of the chemistry (if you don’t like one another you simply won’t work together) and value quality. You will be hard pressed to find a procurement tick box with ‘quality of their awards cabinet’.

Fooling no one

Experienced clients are not fooled by awards and understand that the award game has become a business. In Ireland alone we must have 30 industry award programmes. They are expensive and there are simply too many. Ireland’s industry size could justify one strong national awards programmes, namely the Marketing Institute of Ireland AIM Awards, with maybe five industry specifics. We proudly participate and support the An Post DM Awards as they recognise measurable excellence. We also enter one or two international awards shows which we know stand up to scrutiny. Agencies and clients alike are delighted when we keep it to this kind of commitment each year.

For while it’s great to be recognised by peers, there is only ever one winner at an awards programme – the guy swiping your credit card at the door with a big grin on his face. And don’t forget that if even if you win an award, your client could end up firing your butt simply because you didn’t invite them to accept it!

Dialogue Team

Isn’t it time we explored where marketing’s bubble is at, asks Michael Killeen.

Let’s start with some positive feedback. Brian Ross recently completed a series of interviews with 20 leading Irish Marketing Directors on Dialogue’s behalf. One area he explored was how marketing was performing. It’s a question Brian has asked in five similar sessions over the past 12 years. Brian was extremely upbeat about this year’s responses saying there was definitely a positive lift. Most felt that marketing was performing far better than it had in the past. Marketing was finally standing up and being counted. In one case: ‘‘Marketing’s function was quite simply about selling more boxes and it’s doing just that’’.

Chris Still, a global Ad legend and CEO of Advertising Mergers & Acquisition in London suggested that search and pay-per-click advertising had actually saved the marketing bubble from bursting in the UK. He believes that data analytics is the post digital growth area and that London is screaming out for this kind of talent. Why? Because it steers accountability.

Unfortunately there is a belief that the marketing bubble burst years ago. Ever since a New York planner told us that ‘Advertising was never meant to sell goods, it’s just meant to build brands’ we were heading out the door quicker than you could say ‘sing us another one Taoiseach’.

Changing behaviour

We are a people business, but unfortunately too many of our very own practitioners don’t believe in Marketing. It seems to be a stop off station on their career ladders. They get in and out and hope they don’t get caught up in some serious damage.

They don’t see how marketing changes behaviour or how it can change people’s lives for that matter. They don’t see how it helps get their company growing again. This month’s Dialect article on the ‘Apprentice’ questions whether marketers are now just seen as chancers, shooting in the dark and flying by the seat of their pants. My god was there ever a bubble to begin with?

I often wondered whether the word ‘Marketing’ should even be used any more. Would it be better to simply remove it from our business lexicon rather than attempt to reposition it? Remember when the Human Resource department was once called the ‘Personnel Department’ and they quietly changed their name and positioning within the organisation with great effect. Now every board has a HR Director, right?

I proposed in the past to name change the ‘Marketing Department’ to the ‘Growth Department.’ I comfortably predict that Growth Managers would end up sitting on their respective companies’ boards while the Marketing Manager remains outside looking in.

More than marketing

Have you noticed the growing trend of Marketing Directors switching their title description? The title ‘Commercial and Strategic Director’ seems to becoming more popular every week. Has this any bearing on what’s around the corner? Unfortunately the Marketing title is a title that most are not comfortable with. It conjures up images of large budgets with little or no commercial accountability attached to them. ‘Lower than a Terrier’s tool’ was the definition of marketing from a well-known Irish airline CEO.

Yes, I believe the marketing bubble has long since burst. I believe the confidence of Boards and City analysts are right to question its role in commercial society. Don’t get me wrong – I believe in marketing. I just feel we should consider renaming it.

Maybe it would be easier to change our marketing title rather than reposition it. The post digital drive is all about accountability. Yet Marketing is the only department that can actually influence and sell more boxes. The Marketing Bubble burst a long time ago. Is it time for the ‘Growth Department’ revolution?

Michael Killeen, Managing Director, Dialogue