Stefan Stroe – Independent Brand Strategist

It’s an intellectual clash between two men, but at the same time between 2 companies, 2 industries and 2 different cultures:

- Feeling-driven: LB Toronto repr. by Jason Oke (Sr. Strategic Planner)
- Thinking-driven: Millward Brown repr. by Nigel Hollis (Chief Global Analyst)

Basically its a multi-million dollar debate, as MB is popular for its Link pre-test tool and other studies that convinced globally many marketing teams that communication’s contribution in sales can always be anticipated.

I’ll point you quickly some of my beliefs on pre-testing (positive and negative) before you go and read the blog-battle:

(+) Pre-tests help planners assess consumers’ message decoding correctness
(+) Help marketing people take faster decisions
(-) Can recommend creatives to make difficult copy changes, as consumers think in cliches
(-) Create addictiveness for marketing decision-makers, diminishing their courage and guts to change brands communication and go against the flow

Following Jason’s and Nigel’s debate I was thinking that instead of measuring IPA winners vs. Link, I would also try to quantify the percentage of Cannes/Clio/Epica winners in film section (TVCs considered globally as the most creative, being against the ways that consumers are used to see and judge) who scored above index in Link tests vs. overall average for each category.

So until MB finds a way to show that Cannes winners scored previously in Link BETTER than Cannes finalists, I will keep on being skeptic vs. their pre-testing approach.

I’ll let you enjoy Jason’s first post, Nigel’s reply, and Jason’s last reply.

One of my favorite country brand strategies is Croatia, which a few years ago was claiming “The Mediterranean as it used to be”. From the official statistics I remember that they were often fully booked and from my travel agent that they afford premium pricing vs. other SE countries.

Anyway, check this new ad that in my opinion found an excellent place for Liechtenstein in people’s minds.

And now please remember that for some fellows, Romania should claim “fabulospirit”.

Any advertising worker is aware that Romania’s outdoor creativity is severely poor – anybody curious can check for past Ad’Or and Clio winners to compare. We cannot pin-point just one responsible for this situation because creatives, account managers and brand managers are all “accomplices” for this situation. For radio we have a similar state of affairs.

I decided to write this post on creativity because I keep on running over a lot of “literature” billboards and because very few are truly memorable. But I won’t get into outdoor’s effectiveness measurement in Romania as in most cases it is a bed-time story. Besides that, I won’t put pictures of those billboards since I will not make too many new friends.

What’s really striking is that in these “literature” billboards, the long small font copy seems more important than the innovative format or than the disruptive, memorable elements. Moreover, the account management experience proved me that copywriting approval is always time-consuming. Quite often clients hang on to comas and better (read ‘longer’) explanations, just like in press ads.

I think that all these parties involved should be constantly aware that traffic billboards’ exposure is extremely short (2-3 seconds) and that consumers’ eye-balls are not 7.2 MP digital cameras with optical zoom - consumers do not download the pictures at home so they can memorize the text that the communication team believes that “must be ALL in”.

In this regard, here is an idea (I don’t know how original actually it is) of an exercise for practicing more creative and hence effective billboards (all teams involved should know it): as brand’s logo is in most cases is the biggest visual element, TRY TO CREATE OOH ADS WHERE TEXT SHOULD BE TWICE AS TALL AS BRAND’S LOGO.

Here’s a quick example coming from India:

THE OUTCOME:  This way the temptation of including long-texts basically disappears, giving more creative space to the other visual/physical elements of the billboard (images, format, innovative components). If visibility and memorability increase, the brand achieves better communication results and everyone’s happier.