All Blacks are a brain strain

Melbourne Herald Sun 12 June, 2010

A few months ago I helped out at an agency that needed some web-page copy written urgently. The client was a manufacturer of breakfast cereals, the market was New Zealand and the promotion was all about rugby and All Blacks.

So for the few days I had to think like a teenage Kiwi rugby-tragic All Blacks fanatic. It was a strain on the brain cells I can tell you. I never understood rugby even in my own teens.

But in business you often find yourself having to think through the mind of a customer who is not the least bit like you. And you have to be convincing.

This calls for that much overused word “empathy”. It’s different from sympathy. It means feeling what they are feeling, from the inside, taking aboard their likes and dislikes and even prejudices.

A US research firm has been doing a lot of work on this, and has put people into 16 different categories. For example, people like me, in advertising or journalism, they put in a class called “word” people. Probably you would fit in that too.

But these people make up just 18.5 per cent of the population, who do much of the talking to everyone else.

The trouble is that the ads we create tend to appeal to other word people - like the clients and their marketing managers - and maybe don’t strike the right note with the rest of the population.

The company, Xyte Inc, did tests on TV commercials. And found that these ads tend to do disproportionately well with word people.

The company’s CEO, Larry Burns, was not surprised. “This is happening more often than we would like to admit," he said. While agencies are briefed on their target markets, they also want the clients and their own peers to like the ads. “We like to talk. We like word problems. We like to express ourselves. "

But often this is not what appeals to the customers. They don’t want to know how clever you are, they want to know if the product will give them what they want - in tangible, understandable terms.

Another category Xyte calls the "hands". These are people who prefer working with their hands. Their focus is much more immediate and practical. And they make up 30% of the population, a bigger portion than word group. "They like touching things, tangible things, and they often don't like ads that appeal to word people," says Burns.

Anyone who’s raised a child knows that they emerge from the womb hard-wired with certain personality traits, likes and dislikes, that no amount of training or enforcement will change. So it is that a person will be dismal in one environment yet exceptional in another.

A product or advertisement will appeal to one set of people but turn off another. It’s important to know the market for each product - and when you identify those who react against it, you can vary your message accordingly.

This you can only do by studying your audience - your customers. Talking to them and understanding their view of the world. The researchers say they are “segmented via patterns of predictability in media, messaging and purchase”. In plain English, if you know your customers and their core attitudes, this will tell you what to say and where to reach them.

Because the fact is that conventional classifications don’t necessarily work. A middle aged woman and a teenage boy might respond to the same stimulus (“Carn the All Blacks!”) while two adult men might totally disagree with each other on a product or issue (“Magpies!”, “Blues!”).

Money-sucking vampires bite teenage girls

Melbourne Herald Sun, 28 November, 2009

The spectacular success of this week’s money-sucking vampires just goes to show that teenage girls still go gaga at handsome, pale skinned, sexually dangerous young men. And their boyfrends are happy to take them along to the movies in the hope of receiving some of the transferred arousal afterwards.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon serves to remind us that there is plenty of financial clout tucked into the pockets of teenagers’ jeans. The opening weekend pulled $16 million, leapfrogging the biggest-opening Harry Potter films by two million.

In North America it pulled $150 million - huge, but which is actually a lot less than here, on a per-head basis. In the UK, where Twilight fever is equally manic, the first weekend scored $20 million - again much less than Oz when you count the heads. Here we managed to take over a quarter of the country’s cinema screens to satisfy the were-wolf frenzy of the fans.

Teen passions have always been a market driver since before the time of the yo-yo and the hoola hoop. Harry Potter showed how a wizardly schoolyard tale can be as engulfing now as The Wizard of Oz was in great-grandma’s day. And with the addition of endless merchandising - yes there’s already a Barbie Twilight Edward doll - the loot can more than double the theatre takings.

Advertisers watch these fads very closely because such passions can give them an inroad to that difficult-to-penetrate territory, the teenage mind.

We know that among 12-24 year olds TV viewing is at its lowest. Teens watch 50 per cent less TV than their parents. At school they are taught to never accept advertising at its face value, and this justifies their natural suspicion of grown-ups selling them things.

This distrust extends to what they read in advertising on the internet. After years of being exposed to dubious medical promises that they can barely understand, who can blame them?

For the girls there are their teen magazines - against an ebb tide for magazines in general and women’s magazines especially, the ever pink and bubbly Dolly has managed to increase its circulation by four per cent. Celebrities are still big, with the latest Who Did What to Whom mag, Famous, climbing by 20 per cent.

Boys are left out in the wilderness. The only recent attempt to give them a teen magazine, Explode, in fact imploded after a mere eight months. If their hoodies and sunnies make them look hard to penetrate, that’s because they are.

So maybe the answer is screen advertising. The multiplex is the one place where you are guaranteed to meet swarms of teenagers. And there’s no fad like a movie fad.

On You-Tube worldwide interviews show girls, surrounded by obligatory girlfriends and a couple of token boys, clutching each other and swearing they thought they would die when Taylor Lautner took his shirt off. And each claimed to be the very first in her school to see the movie after queuing for most of the night.

Screen advertising has long been the poor relation at the media feast. But right now things are looking pretty good.

Paul Butler is Managing Director of Val Morgan, Australia’s leading cinema advertising network. Naturally enough, he has a smile on his face this week. “This year’s box office is running 16 per cent higher than last,” he said. “We’re very likely to top the $1 billion mark this year.”

With Christmas approaching, life is looking good on the axminster carpets. “Christmas is always a boom time,” he adds, and in just three weeks we’ll see the release of Avatar, another guaranteed blockbuster.

So if you plan to spend any Christmas time with teenage kids, I hope you like popcorn.

Ray@ebeatty.com

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