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Find three examples of campaigns where a creative idea/consumer insight and media have worked together to form great execution. Summaries each campaign and discuss what made it effective. Support with relevant theory where appropriate. Advertising, an inherently creative and continuously evolving industry, is incredibly vast and varied. Whilst the style and form changes extensively between advertisements, it is possible to determine certain factors that contribute to effective advertising.
Essentially, an advertisement that is able to intrigue and stimulate a ewer, persuade consumers that a certain product is worth purchasing, and as a result generate sales for the respective manufacturer, is one that has reached its objectives. Whilst multiple things come into play when producing an effective advertisement, the perfect picture would be useless without the ideal media. Thus, the combination of key consumer insight, a great creative idea, and the appropriate use of media, is fundamental.
Tontine, Apple, and Canadian Club, are three highly successful brands that have each used advertising in powerful ways to increase sales, market share, and awareness. Tontine, Australia’s largest pillow manufacturer, had a share of over half of the pillow market (Caress ; Price 2011). However, Tontine was facing an increasing decline in sales as the environment was stagnant and other labels were slowly taking increasingly larger bites out of the company’s share.
Tontine tapped into certain key insights that enabled them to create such a significant sales impact. Qualitative research revealed that the single biggest reason people change their pillow is when they become too dirty and grotto to bear (Caress & Price 2011). This raised the key question of what is too grotto and why is it that people keep pillows in this state? The company needed to provide consumers with a reason to question their attachment to their pillows.
For the ultimate impact, Tontine decided to highlight the ugly side of the pillow, creating widespread anxiety and a consumer problem, and answering that problem with a ‘Tontine-only long-term solution. Advertisements were created that illustrated the ecosystem of bugs and fungi that grow within pillows over time. In this way, the brilliant idea of date-stamping Tontine pillows was developed, providing an exclusive ND helpful point of difference in what is considered to be a commodity category and encouraging repeat purchases.
Thus, for the first time, the pillow itself became the medium. Tontine ran an intense five-day media blocking campaign in order to quickly spread high reaching evening media, Tontine were able to target viewers right before they were going to bed, making consumers cringe at the thought of putting their heads on their likely bug-infested pillows. Breakfast media was used to inform people of what they had Just experienced the night before and to acknowledge the poor night’s sleep they may have had as a result.
This worked to trigger panic, conversation, and purchase, throughout the day. By opting to use voice over and copy rather than images of pillow ‘grog’, Tontine encouraged viewers to imagine the horrors in their own minds – causing them to relate to the problem on a personal level. This all lead up to integrated point of sales events in major department stores, including catalogue support and widespread point of sale inventory.
The use of public relations was integral to achieving the required impact and driving the credibility and reach of the message, with the use of news and current affairs shows, and radio live reads. The advertising was so effective because the message was helpful and valid without coming across as excessively threatening. In presenting themselves as knowledgeable, and on the side of the consumers, Tontine was able to sell without adopting the role of salesman.
The advertisement allowed people to conclude for themselves that they should buy a Tontine pillow without being told directly to buy one. The ads, immediately discomforting and disturbing, elicited a powerful emotional response. Essentially, the harder people found it to go to sleep at night, the more effective the campaign. After running for five days, Tontine saw an increase on regular sales of +345%, far exceeding the original goal of a 30% sales increment (Caress & Price 2011).
Another example of highly effective advertising is Apple’s Mac vs. PC campaign. This campaign aimed to overcome decades of barriers well ingrained in the minds of PC users all over the world, conquering a seemingly impossible task – to make Mac meaningful to a die-hard PC audience. The key insight was simply that most PC users have never used a Mac, and therefore believe that the frustrations they are commonly experiencing – crashes, viruses, prewar, confusing error messages – are normal (Apple Macintosh: Mac vs. PC 2011).
PC users did not realism they had a problem because they were not aware that there was any other way. Thus, the company’s creative teams developed a metaphor that depicted both experiences – a way for Mac and PC to finally compare themselves to each other side-by-side. Developers created conversations between two friends that could discuss not only what they had in common, but most importantly, the qualities that made them unique. PC was presented as a dear friend who was out-dated and held back by boring work tasks.
Mac on the other hand, was presented as fun, easy going, and trouble free. In personifying the two computers, Apple were able to talk freely about all the things that make Mac the perfect computer for all aspects of life and contrast that to the common frustrations of the PC experience. As sound and motion were vital to understanding the debate, spots were placed into viewing opportunity, the same audience were able to see the next spot in the sequence as well as add new viewers wherever possible.
Running episodic spots three at a time, rotating them every few weeks, the advertisements were visible everywhere the audience looked. Apple then carried this episodic theme onto the web. This was a vital part of the campaign as reaching people when they were using their computers provided the opportunity to be closer to where they were actually researching their next purchase and perhaps experiencing the frustrations illustrated by the ads. Taking this approach one step further, Apple worked with some of the most significant sites on the web to redesign their homepages.
Creatively, this allowed Apple to develop their own proprietary ad unit in which the campaign could exist, allowing the advertisement’s characters to interact with the environment and content of the sites. Eventually, through the conversation between the two characters, the TV and online ads triggered real conversations, sparking debate in popular culture. PR activity and point-of-purchase materials further echoed the themes raised throughout the campaign.
The success of this campaign is obvious, with Apple finally finding a way to translate the intangible Mac experience into real motivations for PC users. Market share grew 70% – from 5. 1% in 2006 to 8. 7% in 2010, Mac sales more than doubled, 50% of Macs sold in retail stores were bought by PC users new to Mac, and Mac achieved record ales quarter after quarter during the campaign with sales continuing to climb afterwards. However, the most significant indicator of the campaign’s success in relation to its objectives is that Mac growth significantly outpaced the PC category growth.
With the PC industry dwindling, Mac sales continue to grow faster than ever (Apple Macintosh: Mac vs. PC 2011), demonstrating the power of creative advertising to connect with audiences in deep and long-lasting ways. The third clear example of effective advertising is Canadian Club’s ‘Over beer? Campaign. This campaign boosted their product in a difficult regulatory environment n which taxes on premixed drinks had been raised 70%. In order to combat the significant price disadvantage, Canadian Club recognized that the only way to increase sales was to steal market share from beer.
In Australia, beer was usually the first drink by default, and thus the long-term success of the brand depended on its ability to continually attract ‘new recruits’ as this lifestyle is characterized by experimentation before settling into personal favorites (Donald 2011). Canadian Club provided a credible alternative to beer as it was refreshing, light and seasonable. A three-pronged strategy was used to challenge beer. Firstly, they tapped into latent boredom with beer, asking priming questions to drive trial.
Secondly, research uncovered that new recruits usually have no idea what they are going to buy at the bottles before they arrive. This allowed Canadian Club to effectively target new recruits with advertisements on their path to the bottles. Thirdly, they redesigned the branding to be all about “refreshment”. (Donald 2011) it work to quickly tell consumers what the product was an alternative for, but it also romped people to answer the question in their head. If they answered “yes”, it put Canadian Club on their mental list of drinks to try/buy.
Without the budget to run a large campaign, the company instead used the incredibly effective ‘path to pub’ strategy in NEWS, which involved selectively placing advertisements around battleships. This media strategy ensured that people on their way to purchase were questioned ‘Over Beer?. TV advertisements supported the new branding and outdoor ads, depicting ways in which people mindlessly order beer, leveraging priming by asking the key question “Over Beer? To drive trial. This reinvention of Canadian Club lead to the highest sales growth to date, surpassing Beer and Dark RD which have had negative growth (Donald 2011).
Also, In October 2010, Nielsen announced that Canadian Club was officially the fastest growing alcohol trademark in Australia, selling quicker than any other beer, wine, cider, or spirit. Sales grew 32%, going far beyond the original goal of 20%, and Canadian Club has seen the largest year-on-year increase in the brand’s history, smashing the average growth rate of the category. The most significant proof of the making’s effectiveness however, is illustrated in NEWS. They received the same packaging, point-of-sale, and TV support as all other areas, but only in NEWS was the ‘path to pub’ advertising employed.
Whilst sales grew 32% nationally, sales in NEWS grew 58. 3%, clearly illustrating the effectiveness of this cunning technique. Tontine’s exceptionally creative use of their product as a medium, Apple’s refreshing approach in attacking its competitor, and Canadian Club’s clever and cost-effective tactics to challenge beer, are all clear examples that demonstrate the necessity of imbibing key consumer insight, targeted creative ideas, and inventive and appropriate use of media, in order to create effective advertising.