TRUTH, LIES, AND ADVERTISING Adweek Books is designed to present interesting, insightful books for the general business reader and for professionals in the worlds of media, marketing, and advertising. These are innovative, creative books that address the chal- lenges and opportunities of these industries, written by lead- ers in the business. Some of our writers head their awn companies, others have worked their way up to the top of their field in large multinationals. But they share a knowl- edge of their craft and a desire to enlighten others. We hope readers will find these books as helpful and inspir- ing as Adweek, Brandweek, and Mediaweek magazines. Published Disruption: Overturning Conventions and Shaking up the Market- place, Jean-Marie Dm "Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This!": A Guide to Creating Great Ads), Luke Sullivan Truth, Lies, arid Advertising: The Art of Account Planning, Jon Steel Under the Radar: Talking to Today's Cynical Consumer, Jonathan Bond & Richard Kirshenbaum Forthcoming Eating the Big fish: How "Challenger Brands" Can Compete Against Brand Leaders, Adam Morgan TRUTH, LIES, AND ADVERTISING The Art of Account Planning by Jon Steel John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York • Chichester • Weinheim • Brisbane • Singapore • Toronto Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. In all instances where John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is aware of a claim, the product names appear in initial capital or all capital letters. Readers, however, should contact the appropriate companies for more complete informa- tion regarding trademarks and registration. This book is printed on acid-free paper. © Copyright © 1998 by Jon Steel. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published simultaneously in Canada. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permis- sion of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per- copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (508) 750-8400, fax (508) 750-4744. Requests to the Publisher for permis- sion should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158-0012, (212) 850-6011, fax (212) 850-6008, E-Mail: [email protected]. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional ser- vices. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a com- petent professional person should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Steel, Jon. Truth, Lies, and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning. Jon Steel. p. cm. — (Adweek books) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-471-18962-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Advertising campaigns — United States—Planning. 2. Advertising—United States. 3. Advertising agencies—Customer services—United States. I. Title. II. Series. HF5837.S73 1998 659.1'll-dc21 97-40334 CIP Credits for copyrighted material are listed on pages 275-283. Printed in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 This book is dedicated to Ethel Alice Morris 1904-1993 Contents Introduction ix Firing Blanks 1. No Room for the Mouse 1 The Failure to Involve Consumers in Advertising Communication 2. Silent Partners 31 Account Planning and the New Consumer Alliance 3. The Blind Leading the Bland 59 Advertising Follows Research... in the Wrong Direction 4. Peeling the Onion 103 Uncovering the Truth and Stimulating Creative Ideas through Research 5. The Fisherman's Guide 139 The Importance of Creative Briefing 6. Ten Housewives in Des Moines 189 The Perils of Researching Rough Creative Ideas 7. Serendipity 231 "got milk?" Acknowledgments 271 Bibliography 277 Index 281 Credits 287 About the Author 297 Vll Introduction Firing Blanks Is advertising worth saving? From an economic point of view I don't think that most of it is. From an aesthetic point of view I'm damn sure it's not; it is thoughtless, boring, and there is simply too much of it. Howard Luck Gossage More than 30 years ago, Howard Gossage, a legendary San Francisco advertising man, gave an interview to Time maga- zine in which he said of advertising, "I don't know a single first class brain in the business who has any respect for it." Afterward, he was appalled that none of his industry col- leagues were upset by his remark and concluded that it was because they all agreed with him but were too lazy to do any- thing that might bring them some of that missing respect. More recently, in 1992, a Gallup poll asked consumers across America to rate 26 different professions according to the degree to which they trusted them. At the top of the list, with 65 percent of respondents giv- ing them a "very high" or "high" ethical rating, were phar- macists, closely followed by the clergy, college teachers, medical doctors, and policemen. Farther down the list, jour- nalists lay in eleventh place with an ethical rating of 26 per- cent, senators and lawyers were sixteenth and seventeenth IX Introduction respectively, and real estate agents and congressmen placed nineteenth and twentieth. Languishing in twenty-fifth place, with only an 8 percent ethical rating, just behind insurance salesmen, were advertising practitioners. Only one profes- sion received a lower ethical rating, and I would thus like to suggest that all advertising people reading this should pause for a moment, raise their eyes to the heavens, and give thanks for the very existence of car salesmen. In my first year working in the United States, I once naively suggested that a commercial my agency had pro- duced might play well in movie theaters. Both my agency colleagues and clients looked at me aghast. "Oh God, no," I was told. "People would go nuts. The movies are the one place where they're not assaulted by advertising. They go there to escape, and we don't want to be the ones to piss them off." In the eight years that have passed since then, I have come to understand why they felt that way. As I travel around the country conducting research for the agency, talk- ing to people from all walks of life and economic strata, I hear consistent and heartfelt criticism of the way that adver- tising invades all parts of their lives. Their TV and radio pro- grams are interrupted, their magazines are difficult to read because of all the ads that consume the features, their mail- boxes are routinely jammed with unsolicited material, blimps and planes carry messages over their cities, moving images are projected onto the sides of buildings, and their dinnertime conversations are interrupted by telemarketers. The American public is surrounded, with the movie theater as its final line of defense. In 1990, a study conducted by The Economist estimated that the average American is exposed to 3,000 commercial messages a day in "all media." Now I'm always suspicious of statistics, especially averages, because if you think about it, the "average American" has one breast and one testicle, but I wouldn't deny that we all see a lot of advertising. Maybe 3,000 messages is overstating it; other studies are more con- X Introduction servative, estimating anywhere between 150 and 300 expo- sures in just TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers. Although I may really have seen or heard 300 messages yesterday, I can remember no more than about 10 of them. Of those, I liked and connected to maybe only two or three. A host of other research suggests that I am not atypical. With remote control units permanently trained on every commercial break, radios on for background noise, and peo- ple flicking randomly through magazines, the majority of those 300 potential exposures just vaporize. People do not even need a remote control to successfully ignore advertise- ments —we have evolved to the point where we can recog- nize commercials that concern us or interest us and grant them at least a few seconds' attention, while ads that fall into neither of those categories are prevented from taking up valuable brain space by our newly developed mental deflec- tor shields. It's not that advertising is failing to present itself to its target. It appears in our homes with monotonous regularity, but when it gets there, it often fails to make the necessary connections. I suppose that if advertising were a person (to use a protective technique popular among moderators of qualitative research), it would be a person with a very low sperm count. A GRENADE TO CATCH A TROUT The purpose of this book is not to argue that advertising does not work at all, because there is a mountain of evidence to suggest that it does. Companies with higher advertising- to-sales ratios tend to dominate in their categories and on the whole are more profitable. Companies who have advertised during and after recessions have grown at the expense of competitors who have reduced their budgets. Advertising helps turn products into brands; and, in turn, brands build a company's value, sustain higher market share and higher XI Introduction margins, and provide a powerful barrier to competitive entry. All those things are true, and I could have filled this whole book with examples of advertising's effectiveness in building sales, share, and profitability. Such a history of effective advertising would doubtless contain many examples of campaigns whose success was achieved more by sheer weight and presence than by smart strategic insights or distinctive creative executions.