Successful advertising boils down to a question of economics and longer-term momentum

Creating advertising that’s effective is incredibly expensive.

Case in point: 30 seconds of advertising airtime (that’s just the media slot to flight an already-made commercial) during this year’s Super Bowl broadcast in America would have cost brands $8-million.

That’s R148-million to get your commercial in front of an audience of 182 million people.

Crazy, but well worth the money if the ad is effective. In other words, worth every dollar if the ad creates some kind of commercially relevant impact in the marketplace that justifies this giddy expense.

The $8-million question then is: “What makes advertising effective?”

Decades of research into how brands grow, including case studies from multiple regions and a wide variety of categories, point to a cluster of key elements that have proven to deliver measurable results when applied.

First, effective ads should be distinctive.

There’s obviously very little point in producing material that the audience might associate with a brand other than your own – a special place in advertising hell is reserved for folk who make something that the public ends up associating directly with a competitor’s brand.

It’s precisely for this reason that a brand like Investec has built their reputation, over many decades, on the back of an image of a zebra.

When you see a zebra today, you automatically think of Investec. Right?

After having invested in this simple association for so long, Investec are now handsomely reaping the rewards of their persistence, as the ongoing cost of maintaining that virtuous, strengthening connection between “beast and brand” decreases every year.

As an added plus, zebras don’t normally charge annual royalties for the continued use of their image and if you offer them some tasty grass to eat, they’re predictably pleasant to work with on set.

What’s more, zebras are also lovely to look at, so nobody is going to complain when an image of the animal is used on everything from an annual report to directional signs in a parking garage. Easy-to-use intangible assets like this save marketing folk a lot of time that would otherwise have been spent in pointless meetings and on a therapist’s couch.

Second, effective ads are usually “liked”.

Historically in South Africa a great example of a brand that produced numerous ads that people “liked”, and many still “like” to this day, is Volkswagen.

The brand’s ethos was the promise of being “people’s cars” and in their shrewd approach to embedding a deep relationship with the brand in our hearts, they created many an emotionally charged Volksie bus campaign with David Kramer.

There was that eerily relatable VW Touareg ad featuring the Arno Carstens track, Another Universe. And I challenge you not to get a lump in your throat while listening to the haunting sounds of Vusi Mahlasela in this mid-Nineties ad for the VW Jetta.

Money was invested in the rights to these creative works and in some cases, like with Kramer, in an ongoing promotional relationship with these South African legends. Their images were used for many years in material for ads, posters, brochures and billboards to drive the connection home further.

When people “like” your ads they talk about them, share them, remember them, search for them, yearn for them, turn them into cultural memes and easily connect them to your brand.

Which leads to the third element of effectiveness in brand building through advertising: momentum.

Marketers are often guilty of moving on from ideas far too quickly. They get bored and wrongly assume that the market is bored with them too.

But ordinary people don’t care about brands as much as the marketing community thinks they do. Nobody sits at work and consciously wonders about the colour palette of Omo washing powder and when last it has been refreshed. Or thinks to themselves that they need “a more immersive experience” from their next visit to Starbucks. 

Only marketers suffer from this kind of mental bias. Promotional collateral is slow to seep into the collective subconscious of a culture and great marketers are stoic in their resolve to build meaning patiently over time.

Coca-Cola released their first “Holidays are coming” ad, which they still do a remake of every year, in 1995.

Michael Jordan first signed a sneaker collaboration contract with Nike in 1984.

Santam’s yellow umbrella was adopted in 1981.

KitKat’s “Have a break, have a KitKat” slogan was created in 1958.

These concepts would have initially been expensive to produce, but the exponential value that has been created since would have been because patient custodians of the brand elected to “sweat the asset” over a long time horizon. Momentum is generated through the consistent association of these compelling ideas with the brand.

The last piece of the effectiveness puzzle is to secure an outsized portion of the available “share of voice” on the prevailing advertising spectrum.

Obviously for an ad to have impact, it needs to capture attention. And the strategic objective in this pursuit is always to get more of it than the competition. This “who can shout the loudest” directive can be secured either by outspending the competition on media, or by having a more creative ad and capturing attention through organic intrigue.

You don’t need to look too far to find examples of global politicians who have mastered the art of commanding attention in this way by literally “flooding the zone” with headline-grabbing updates.

Dominating in “share of voice” is what makes buying a Super Bowl ad worth the money. It’s also why very successful brands initially spend a lot of time and money on developing and producing a highly creative, killer concept that can be used repeatedly for many years and then the rest of their annual promotional budgets on distributing that same concept through the media that they buy.

Success in advertising really comes down to economics.

Great marketers know not to spend too much money on an idea that generates short-term hype alone, but rather on a concept that is distinctive, likeable, allows for momentum to be built and inspires confidence in the bean counters to invest large sums into its use for years and years.

So, when I’m asked what I think about an ad for a local supermarket brand featuring a particularly well-known American rapper whose name and image they probably won’t be able to sustainably afford to use for long to promote their loyalty programme in a generic way, I automatically haul out my cost/benefit spreadsheet and unemotionally look at the economic facts of the choice that was made.

On the continuum between a “zebra” and a picture of a “bucket of swill”, this decision is closer to the latter. The same result, or better, could have been achieved by spending far less on appearance fees and far more on a remarkably creative concept that renders a great return on investment in time. DM