What do you get for pounds 10,000 in advertising these days? Take
your pick from a couple of days with an HHCL project team, a double-page
spread in Campaign, a day’s commercial directing from the likes of Paul
Weiland or a year’s parking space for the agency chairman in central
London. Those with racier tastes might plump for 99 bottles of house
champagne and ten admission tickets for the Blue Angel hostess bar.
But there is one advertising commodity that money cannot buy and it was
referred to by the chief executive of United Biscuits, Eric Nicoli, in
last week’s Boardroom Players feature in Campaign: ’Judgment will always
be important in advertising,’ said Nicoli, warning darkly of the dangers
of relying on technical measures. ’I want to be important to my agencies
but it is a partnership; I don’t want people who respond because they
are afraid not to.’
How gratifying this must be for Nicoli’s agencies, and how right he is.
I used to think that there was nothing the matter with research, only
with the way it was handled. Now, having witnessed a few consumer groups
hard at work mangling ads, I find it impossible to avoid the conclusion
that research itself is flawed when it tries to be predictive. It is
good for explaining things that have happened, but to rely on it for
forecasting the success or otherwise of an ad, as most clients do, is a
very dangerous practice.
Just about every focus group that I have watched in action was being
listened to as if they were unlocking the secrets of the universe, but
it soon became apparent that they were bent not so much on giving their
views on ads as impressing the rest of the group - and on giving the
convenor the answers they thought she or he wanted. This is no more than
human nature but the organisers of the group were taking it all deadly
seriously.
I suppose the Campaign equivalent would be us deciding agency of the
year based solely on the most unstructured measuring system we could
come up with: let’s say the sum of the nominations for the Pick of the
Week slot which runs on the Leader page. (In which case, step forward
Bartle Bogle Hegarty.)
Not to mince words, I think it is stupid to rely on consumer opinion to
tell you how well or badly an ad will work. It’s like the probably
apocryphal tale of the man in the pub who was asked whether he was
influenced by advertising. ’Never,’ he replied. ’For instance, I drink
Guinness because it’s good for me.’
Which reminds me. Close observation of the United Biscuits reel enables
me to calculate that the Mr Motivator Go Ahead spot has not benefited
from that dose of advertising judgment so beloved of the company’s chief
executive. Still, you can’t have everything.
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