The psychology of naked girls and burning books

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday June 1, 2012

So many of the best advertising campaigns are not just ads. By getting into the psychology of their audience and communicating to their wants and needs, marketers can achieve so much, for so little cost.

Imagine a beautiful near-naked girl writhing with pleasure as she looks at your picture. Or a morning alarm call that drags you out of bed to go running, by threatening you. Or the prospects of burning 200,000 books to make a political point.

They don't sound like billboards and TV commercials, do they? Yet they are some of the most successful ad campaigns over the past year.

Of course your interested is piqued by the beautiful girl wearing just flimsy lace bra and tiny panties, writhing on her bed in pleasure as she thinks about you. Well this is a bit of interactive trickery from Sydney agency Arnold Furnace, promoting Stonemen underwear.

It's an online video, accessed through your computer or mobile phone, that requires you to upload a head shot of yourself (or unsuspecting friend). When it is played, a stunning model goes through her soft-porn motions for a minute, and is finally revealed to be looking at a hunky, muscular magazine centrefold - with your face.

Reebok have created The Promise Keeper. It's a smartphone app that you can set to wake you up on jogging mornings and then tells your friends, through Facebook, how good you've been. If you don't get up it tells them you're a wimp and failed your commitment. Better pull the blanket over your head.

But the best example of a psychological campaign was devised by Leo Burnett, Detroit. Last year the library at Troy, Michigan, needed funds to survive the coming five years. The council proposed an 0.7 per cent levy on rates. When the conservative Tea Party heard this they frothed and massed, condemning "New Taxes", and defeated the measure.

There was a second opportunity to vote on August 2. So a campaign was launched: "Vote to close the library. Book burning party on August 5!" Signs were planted around town and on social media promoting the event - and now it was the pro-library faction that frothed.

The campaign grabbed the national press, the TV and radio, even foreign news broadcasts - all without a cent of media expenditure.

On Facebook, slogans proclaimed, "The Troy Public Library might be short on money but it has books to burn!" Another post showed a barbecue burning some books: "Imagine this times 200,000. How cool is that?" A band was booked for the event.

When the indignation became overwhelming, the secret slipped out: the real campaign slogan was "A vote to close the library is like a vote to burn books." They actually wanted to save the library. And it would only take a 0.7 levy to do it. They had succeeded in turning the conversation around from "No more taxes!" to "Save the books!"

On voting day thousands who wouldn't normally turn out to vote took themselves to the booths. In the end, the Yes vote was a landslide, 342 per cent higher than projected, and the Teas were bagged.

None of these three campaigns cost much more than the price of a handful of prime time ads. Yet they were far more effective than their expensive competitors. They worked because their creators thought through, into the minds of their audience, and triggered their psychology.

Unfortunately these success stories are rare. Not because the ideas aren't out there - but too often, because of a lack of courage to risk a daring stroke.

Maybe I should send an outline of the "Taxes" campaign to the Prime Minister...

ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com

Kangaroo hops the ads

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday May 25, 2012

A cartoon kangaroo is at the centre of a new American media storm that is going to be just as relevant here. It's the perennial topic of ad skipping. Are you being unfair, and risking your nightly entertainment, by removing the ads?

The topic has surfaced with the recent release of a new heavy-duty digital video recorder called "The Hopper" (hence the kangaroo logo). It will record up to six channels at once, and as it replays, it can automatically cut out the commercials - hop over them.

The television networks don't like this recorder. In fact several have refused to play commercials for the product (rather ironic if you think about it) because of its potential to damage them. The latest, just this past week, was Fox Network in New York.

The reason is obvious. If everyone was able to skip the ads on their nightly programs, the advertisers would close their cheque books and walk out. Network revenue would plummet and they would suffer even greater financial pains than many of them are already feeling.

The simple fact is that if we want varied, entertaining TV stations they have to be paid for, somehow. Currently it's through an invisible tax - the manufacturers' advertising budgets. Oh yes it is a tax - it is collected from every dollar you pass across the shopping counter. Fortunately for our governments, no-one calls it a tax.

The popular alternative to ads is the ABC. But once again you are paying the cost of those invisible commercials. Only here the tax is direct, paid from consolidated revenue so you actually see it. Hence the annual brawl between the network's management trying to get more, against the government trying to balance the budget.

If ad skipping robbed the TV stations of their income, they too would then have to charge us direct - some kind of monthly subscription fees, like the cable stations already do. But even those fees would rise if they lost the subsidies provided by the advertisers.

Again in America, the head of CBS, Les Moonves, used this very point as a warning over the growth of hopper technology. "How does Charlie Ergen," the manufacturer of the technology, "expect I produce CSI without advertisements?" All that blood and gore costs around $6 million an episode to produce.

Time Warner's Glenn Britt agreed: "The dual stream of advertising and subscription fees has been great for content providers and we don't want to destroy one of those revenue streams,"

This argument has been around since the earliest introduction of video recorders. The fast-forward button allows you to "zap" the commercials out of pre-recorded programs, perhaps not as efficiently as a hop but just as effectively.

But what we have learned from that experience is that once we're settled in for the night, the zapping decreases. After all, those three-minute breaks are the ideal length to check the kids' bedrooms or visit the loo.

However, automated hopping is a command you can set and forget. This is what has agitated the networks.

This battle has already been fought, nearly a decade ago. When the TiVo first hit the American market it had commercial-zapping technology as a major selling point. But it was a laborious process involving transfers to your PC and installation of downloaded apps.

A competitor, ReplayTV, had built-in, automatic cutting. They were sued by the TV industry, sending their parent company broke.

Will this be the fate of the hopping kangaroo? Right now there are intense discussions among the normally factious networks about the ways and means to kill this threat to their revenues.

ray@ebeatty.com

Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com