Commentary By: David
Issue: Advertising to Children

Today the Wall Street Journal featured an in-depth article explaining Kraft’s January 2005 decision to voluntarily limit food advertising to Children under 12 years old. The article mentioned that Kraft saw an emerging movement against food advertising to children and decided to get in front of it. The Wall Street Journal quoted Roger Deromedi, Kraft’s CEO as saying, “It’s important to align with society and engage our critics. And we have learned that from Altria.” Deromedi is referring to Philip Morris’s 1998 decision to support government regulation of the tobacco industry in the wake of successful litigation against the industry by a group of U.S. States.

The question that gets asked over and over again about children’s advertising is: Is it harmful? For younger childern, at least, the answer seems to be “yes.” A meta-analysis of studies by the American Psychological Association suggests that two problems arising from advertising to children have been proven by multiple controlled trials:

1. Change in Eating Habits – Advertising affects children’s consumption patterns and seems to be at least partly responsible for the jump in childhood obesity. The number of overweight children 6-11 years old has quadrupled from around 4% in 1963-1970 to 16% in 1999-2002. (See the diagram here.)
2. Increase in Child Parent Conflicts – Attributed to parental refusal of purchase requests.

The APA lays out two ‘tests’ for advertising to children:

1. Can the child distinguish commercials from the main body of the program? – Children gain this ability between 4 and 5 years of age.
2. Can the child recognize the persuasive intent of the ad message? - Children begin to see the persuasive intent of these messages between 7 and 8 years of age.

This would suggest that after age 8, children can distinguish commercials from programs and know that they are selling messages. The APA points out that very little work has been done to understand at what age children are equipped to evaluate these messages fairly and that this age would very likely be older than 8.

Neither the Kraft answer – which limits advertising of food products in shows with a majority of viewers under the age of 12 – nor the APA report answers the question which should be most relevant to marketers:

Is Advertising to Children Good Marketing?

Let us assume that advertising to children has a positive short-term ROI – that it produces a greater short-term financial return than the advertising investment. To understand whether it is good marketing, we need to go beyond the short-term ROI and ask two questions which will indicate whether the long-term ROI of advertising to children will be positive:

1. Can Advertising to Children Successfully Position Brands?
   
2. Does Advertising to Children Create Desirable Consumers?

This Advertising Blog will argue that the answer to both these questions is ‘No’, and further that the reason the British Parliament first passed laws protecting children from commercial solicitations in 1874 was because this practice ultimately hurts everyone involved, from the children themselves to the commercial interests of the advertisers.

Why Advertising to Children is Bad Branding

Brand Positioning has two important underpinnings. The brand must present a unique selling proposition that the consumer can understand and evaluate and, having accepted the proposition, the consumer must create a memorable and lasting association between a desirable attribute in the selling proposition (think ‘Safety’) and the brand (think ‘Volvo’).

Advertising to children cannot meet the first test. If children do not understand that they are being presented with an explicitly biased commercial message, then they cannot properly evaluate the message and there is no possibility of forming the informed emotional attachment to the brand that true branding seeks. This is similar to the position of this Advertising Blog on DTC Advertising (click here). In both cases, we believe the consumer is not equipped to evaluate the unique selling proposition. In the case of DTC advertising, the consumer does not have the medical background to weigh the risks and benefits of a particular drug and understand alternative treatment options. In the case of advertising to children, the child does not possess the emotional maturity to understand that an advertiser is presenting a one-sided view of the brand and that committing to the brand involves critically evaluating that proposition against his or her outside knowledge and experience.

In some ways, advertising to children cannot be good branding because good branding always involves informed consent. Children too young to evaluate advertising cannot “consent” to branding any more than children too young to understand the emotional consequences of sexual activity can consent to intercourse.

The Boomerang Effect – What Kind of Consumers are we Building?
The second important question about advertising to children is one that the marketing community is not asking. How does being exposed to branding messages at an age where they are manifestly unfair change us as consumers later in life? There is little clinical evidence on this, but we would suggest that it is no coincidence that the coming of age of the first generation of ‘ad kids’ from the eighties has coincided with a sharp drop in the effectiveness of advertising to adults.

It may be difficult to remember, but advertising to children was not always as widespread as it is today. Although it existed in one form or another since the dawn of commercial television, it was always limited by the limited programming available on commercial channels for children. This changed with the advent of cable networks and the boom in child-focused programming, especially in the 1980′s.

Is it surprising that two decades later we find that these same children are cautious, skeptical consumers inclined to disbelieve things that they do not hear from friend or authority figures? Can this be why marketers have turned to socalled ‘product experts’ and paid them for endorsements of their products on news shows and have paid agencies to get these same products placed in movies and television shows? All of this in an attempt to substitute for the ‘trust gap’ that these younger consumers show versus previous generations?

Good branding is a fair value exchange. It gives consumers something they want and creates a bond of trust that can positively influence not just the consumer but also the company behind the brand. (Think of Johnson & Johnson’s ethical but potentially financially devastating recall of Tylenol after the 1982 tampering scandal.)

Branding to children doesn’t meet this test. It is bad business and it hurts all marketers.

News Subject: Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) Advertising
Commentary by: David

AdAge today reports that 200 medical school professors have signed a document condemning Direct-to-Consumer, or DTC, advertising. You can read the article here. The advertising is condemned as inherently misleading, and the profs single out the ‘primarily emotive’ nature of the advertising as being the biggest problem.

This advertising blog concurs for two reasons, as we stated in our May 24th post on Lunesta:

1. DTC Advertising Presents an Incomplete Value Proposition – because consumers are not able to evaluate the offer being made by the brand, there is always a ‘trust gap’ in DTC advertising.
2. DTC Advertising Creates Flawed Brand Loyalty – The ‘Fair Balance’ requirements of the FDA require DTC advertising to list the potentially harmful side effects of each drug, even if they occur to very few people. This gives every potential user a measure of caution that clouds the the bond with the brand.

Although DTC advertising may be cost-justified in the short term by high ROI (primarily because these drugs are so expensive), it fails the long-term test of building the brand. Overreaching has put these advertisers squarely in the regulatory crosshairs and given the current political environment as well as high-profile FDA failures like Vioxx, these companies cannot depend on their friends to bail them out. Bad business is its own reward.

Brand: TD Banknorth (Maine)
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here – it is the second to last spot, entitled “Teller Window Hook Shot”
Target: Consumers looking for the personal touch in banking
Rating: ****
Reviewer: David

Description:
A Mustang convertible approaches a drive-through bank window. A bank teller says, “He’s back!” to her female colleague and they lean towards the window. Funky, 70′s era music begins to play as we see the driver – a guy dressed in green with long hair, beard, mustache and a green sweatband wink at the tellers. He carefully puts change in the deposit envelope and seals it, then as the spot pans back we see him execute a slow hook shot into the bank deposit drawer. The two women jump and cheer, high-fiving each other and one exclaims, “That’s my man!” The words “We’re fans too” banner across the screen before it wipes to the TD Banknorth name and logo with the tagline “above and beyond.”

What Works:
This advertising blog has covered many bank spots over the past months and most of them boil down to putting lipstick on a pig – no matter what they say, these advertisering banks are huge institutions with more assets than most Latin American countries. So showing the bank manager handling a deposit personally or greeting a customer is nice but it doesn’t really compensate for the annoying hidden fees, automated voice menus and crushing teller lines on Fridays.

This makes it all the more interesting to watch a small bank launch a television ad campaign. TD Banknorth is not exactly a hometown bank as they have outlets throughout New England, but they do qualify as a small regional bank and they have much less to lose by being quirky. This Maine-based bank uses this spot to glorify stubborn New England individualism. It looks very similar to Applebee’s positioning without that feeling of a national franchise trying to act local. It is surprising how well the familiar “we live here, too” formulation works for a smallish bank whose claim feel genuine.

Here’s what we like about this spot:

1. Simple and Direct – It is not difficult to understand what’s going on and there are no flashy distractions.
2. Brand Positioning is Clear – The’ local bank understands you’ positioning is not unique, but it allows TD Banknorth to stake their competitive turf. This spot is really a category building spot that could benefit any local bank with a distinctive personality. But it allows TD to stand apart from the Chases and Citibanks of the world and compete against the smaller banks.
3. Low Budget Execution – It is nice to see a spot that entertains without special effects This spot has only one setup and makes the actors do all of the work. Which works just fine.
4. Humor that works – the humor in this case works for the brand positioning and it is relevant. We like a bank that has employees with a human side. We love the fact that this goofball, 70′s throwback, middle-age guy has become a mascot for these bank tellers. It puts a human face on the bank.

What Doesn’t:
We were careful above to say that this positioning is not unique. TD Banknorth is not the only bank that can claim to be local boosters. This positioning only builds a shield against the big banks that TD can use to try to compete where the playing ground is more sloped in its favor – against even smaller local banks. That is not a bad strategy, but unless TD continues to build this campaign with similarly iconic executions this one spot will not change much. Like most small companies, TD Banknorth needs to commit to the marketing effort for it to be successful.

A smaller concern with this spot is branding. Until the last frame, we do not see the TD brand. While the execution is unusual, the link back to TD could be much stronger. When the customer is pulling into the bank in the first frame, we would like to see some visual identification of the bank.

Branding Bottom Line:
TD Banknorth takes on the big guys with some down-home cookin’.

Brand: Milk (California Milk Processor Board)
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here
Target: Performance-Seeking Athletes
Rating: ****
Reviewer: David

Description:
A series of five spots from the California Milk Processing Board. These spots are the newest generation of the familiar ‘Got Milk’ campaign, but with a distinctly different execution. The introductory spot starts with a news anchor talking about the suspension of a fictional baseball slugger for using a ‘performance enhancing substance … the substance, said to rebuild muscles and help maintain bone strength was found in the hitter’s locker before game time.” And at this moment the spot cuts to video footage of a league official pulling a carton of milk out of a baseball locker. The slugger is shown responding to reporters, saying ‘I think I’m being unfairly singled out. This stuff is everywhere. You can buy it in broad daylight – it’s on about every corner.” Reports ask him ‘did you pour?’ as he drives away in a black SUV. The other spots in this campaign continue the theme of this performance-enhancing substance as team managers, fellow players and friends discuss the hitter’s milk use.

What Works:
Major League Baseball is absolutely furious about this campaign – and that is good news for the California Milk Processor Board. They clearly intended this campaign to serve double duty as both advertising and buzz-building PR. Most consumers and fans won’t sympathize with Major League Baseball’s protests because, frankly, the League had this coming. The steriods scandal was already self-parody before ‘Got Milk’ showed up and this campaign serves to highlight the absurdity of the situation. These commercials almost equal the congressional hearings on Baseball steriod abuse as social satire.

There is also a subtler ‘back to basics’ message which provides the brand positioning foundation for the spot. This message is well-timed. When former NFL linebacker Bill Romanowski did the PR rounds for his new memoir last week, his confessed addiction to exotic supplements (in addition to steroids) was almost more fascinating than his use of the words ‘I have to live with that’ to deny moral responsibility for most of the unnecessary violence he inflicted around the league. Romanowski has surely ingested the nether regions of animals that we would prefer never to see let alone eat. Beyond his extremism, however, there is certainly a cult of ‘the next big thing’ among health enthusiasts which mirrors our cultural obsession with the new and the young.

‘Got Milk’ knows better. This campaign understands that every cult creates a backlash. The supplement culture has fortified the movement for wholesome foods which favors basic foods and good nutrition. And those people are the core milk customers.

From a brand positioning perspective, this is a different proposition than we’ve seen before for milk, but it does not argue with consumers. The factiod ‘milk helps you build strong bones’ was never an end-benefit as it was sometimes purported to be. As permission to believe for ‘healthier performance,’ it works very well.

Executionally, these spots are well crafted. They are fast-paced, well shot and acted and extremely funny. Milk gets plenty of airtime and is such a central part of the joke that it cannot be ommitted in the re-telling of the story, as so often happens in beer commercials.

What Doesn’t:
Spots that are this cleverly and energetically produced create buzz. But the buzz about this spot is not about milk – it’s about steroids. Even if these spots don’t create a real controversy, it is very possible that the buzz about the spot will drown out the real message in the spot about milk that the California Milk Processing Board wants consumers to hear.

This is a peril of success – if you are too funny, to clever and too topical, people may not get the message that you want to send at all. Advertising that makes us feel good about our intelligence and sense of humor is great – as long as it sells more milk. Hopefully someone will be watching to see if that happens.

Branding Bottom Line:
‘Got Milk’ scores at the expense of MLB.

In our last post, we raised the question of whether Adrant’s announcement that the Up Your Budget “contest itself will be promoted almost entirely within the blogosphere with sites Adrants, MarketingVOX and Boing Boing breaking the story” implied that there was some compensation to the bloggers breaking the story.

We are happy to report that the creator of the promotion, B.L. Ochman has assured us that there was no compensation and she simply followed standard PR practice in getting these sites to break the story (which we understand she is very good at).

BL has a number of other concerns about our comments which are worth reading. You can find them in the comments to our last post.

Brand: Budget (Car Rental Company owned by Cendant)
Execution: Blog/Viral
Link: Click Here
Target: Blog-savvy travelers
Rating: ***
Reviewer: David

Description:
The “Up Your Budget” Campaign is a treasure hunt run from a blog that features video clues. A total of $160,000 is being put up as prize money with the money divided into four weekly prizes in four regions. Contestants must correctly find the location of the “magic sticker” from the video clues on the website and call the number on the sticker as well as videotape themselves doing so and upload the video in order to win each $10,000 prize. Awareness for this promotion is being driven entirely through viral efforts by weblogs.

What Works:
This is an interesting and important test of the real viral effects of the blogsphere for marketing purposes. Can blogging alone build a brand or bring new interest to an established brand? Budget is determined to find out. They’ve chosen some fairly heavy hitters to get them started – Steve Hall at Adrants and B.L. Ochman (the designer of the promotion) at What’sNextOnline as well as sites like Boing Boing to create buzz for the promotion. This will take the form of an advertising campaign on 74 blog sites as well as blog posts on Adrants, Boing Boing and several other key properties. [Editor's note: The ThirdWay Advertising Blog was notified of this promotion by the creators but was not compensated in any way to cover this promotion nor does the ThirdWay blog accept compensation for editorial content.]

The game itself seems to offer a fair balance of skill and luck as well as enough prizes, variety and immediacy to keep participants interested. The theme fits well with Budget’s mission (getting people to rent cars) and rewards the frequent traveler.

This also seems like a very clean test of blog propagation (other than the questions noted below) because Budget does not include a link to this promotion on the Budget website and has not as of yet posted a press release for the promotion. So Budget will have the opportunity to see just how far the blog community can get them without any help from Budget’s existing online customer base.

What Doesn’t:
The very obvious omission in this campaign is the link back to Budget. Of course, the name “Up Your Budget!” is a clear reference, but one that most consumers would probably miss without more reinforcement. In fact this is such an obvious omission that it must be intentional, for one of two reasons. The first reason would be to keep this as a pure test without the complication of the Budget name’s effect on the promotion. The second reason might be to see how well the sponsor’s name transmits virally through the blogsphere. If the Budget name is nowhere to be seen on the website, then any post-promotion increase in unaided awareness of the “Budget” brand name might be linked to the promotion (although unless this is a hugely successful promotion they will probably want to look at the brand effects on participants rather than the general population. )

This campaign does raise some potential ethical issues. The Adrants announcement shows that there are two phases to the publicity for this campaign: “Following the blog-based approach, the contest itself will be promoted almost entirely within the blogosphere with sites like Adrants, MarketingVOX and Boing Boing breaking the story and with advertising promotion on 74 weblogs, including Buzzmachine, Metafilter, Gothamist, Jossip and Busblog, through the BlogAds blog advertising network. There will also be some minimal search engine keyword and IM buys.”

The question is how Budget has guaranteed that Adrants, MarketingVOX and Boing Boing were going to decide to ‘break the story,’ or that this promotion itself would be newsworthy. Of course it is possible that by coordination with these blogs the story was pre-sold and embargoed until a certain moment. That would be a standard PR technique and not much of a problem. The stickier issue is whether any of these sites were compensated for breaking this news – either directly or indirectly (with a promised ad spend, for instance). If you keep an eye on the comments to this post I suspect we will hear the answer from one of the organizers very soon.

This is a particularly sticky issue for the blogsphere right now as consumers, organizations and government institutions try to determine whether bloggers are journalists – entitled to the same rights and protections as print or television journalists – or merely individuals expressing opinions online. In the end it is probably less important whether an individual blogger follows the ethics code of a journalist rather than a publicist and more important that people reading blogs have a clear idea whether they’re reading journalism or some mix of journalism and PR.

Branding Bottom Line:
This promotion won’t stick to the brand but may tell us the future.

As a follow-up to our commentary on Saab (last post – below), here is a blog-post by the Saab General Manager telling us: don’t worry, be happy. This sounds to us like an attempt to keep the plebs quiet while Rome is burning, but judge for yourself.

Commentary By: David
Brand: Saab

The automaker Saab is in desperate straits after having brought to the brink of oblivian by the misguided actions of its parent General Motors over the past fifteen years (G.M. bought half of Saab in 1990 and took the other half in 2000).

The depth of Saab’s plight has been underscored by analyst calls for General Motors to shut Saab down (and it really is charming that analysts who seem not to have a bone business sense in their bodies and no formal marketing training get to exert real influence on brand decisions based on the ‘middle-line’ cost implications alone). In addition, Kirk Kerkorian who now owns almost 10% of General Motors is trying to place Jerry York on the board. York has said publicly that General Motors should focus on fixing the core asset and counts Saab as one of the ‘nits and nats’ that need to be eliminated.

And sadly, this seems very likely to be the case. Personal disclosure – I have a fond history with Saab having helped my sister purchase a Saab in 1988 and then buying a (less great) one myself in 1995. Even in the span of those years – between the ’87 and ’95 models, it was clear that GM was having a bad influence on Saab and it was hurting the brand. Now the torturers may actually succeed in killing it.

Saab has an usual heritage for an auto maker. Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget was founded in Trollhatten, Sweden in 1937 by a sixteen aviation engineers looking to produce high performance fighter aircraft. Only one of these engineers had a driver’s license. Only after the end of World War II did the company turn to producing automobiles as a source of growth. Yet through the years, Saab remained an aircraft company producing cars in spirit rather than just a car company. The Saabs introduced in 1947 and 1949 had drag coefficients similar to modern sports cars. At the time, nobody in automobile manufacturing was thinking about drag and windflow affecting either performance or economy. Saab was also the first automobile maker to introduce turbocharging as a fuel and space-efficient option for higher performance and side impact protection for safety.

And most of all (from the perspective of an advertising blog ) , Saab was a great brand. Not a great brand because it had huge market share, but because it was unique and commanded unbelievable loyalty among it’s followers. In the seventies and eighties, Saab drivers were the adventurous, slightly eccentric folks that thought Saabs just made more sense even if they worked differently than other cars. Lots of things worked differently. The key went into a slot at thigh-level between the two seats which we were told prevented injuries during a crash. The stick-shifter had to be placed in reverse to start manual transmission Saabs which several times stranded friends and relatives borrowing the car to run for coffee or to the grocery store. The heating system seemed to work ten times better than the A/C, which was not surprising for a Swedish car.

The most important thing about the Saab from a branding standpoint is that it embodied the three characteristics of great brands – it was authentic, it was unique and it was consistent. In this world of the Gap, Starbuck’s and McDonald’s the value of brands that are different from the mainstream cannot be overstated. Saab had that. The cars looked unique. They were the only sport sedans that were hatchbacks – bucking the trend of U.S. buyers to think of hatchbacks as economy cars. And Saab’s loyal buyers loved that – loved that the cars looked a little goofy that they worked differently, felt different, drove different.

That made for a pretty good little car company. And an attractive one for General Motors to suck up. When this happened, even in the begining when GM only owned 50%, things began to change immediately. And not for the better.

I’m working on a book on branding right now and trying to distinguish some of the lesser known characteristics of successful brands. One of them is fanatic attention to detail. Great brands have in intuitive ability to get the small things right. Consumers draw cues from the small things and can sense false notes incredibly well. Almost from the beginning of the GM/Saab merger, GM started sending false notes through the Saab brand.

The first signs were very small indeed and they were exactly the sort of thing that Wall Street analysts would applaud. Instead of producing extra parts for Saabs outside of some of the really big items, they started drawing from the GM parts bin. So on my 1995 Saab, the turn signal indicator and numerous other small parts looked suspiciously like what you might find in an Oldsmobile. Not that the ‘big picture’ look of the car had changed. It still had the familiar front fascia (although the edges had softened a bit and not for the better), still had the key in the center location and still had a hatchback. But there were small signs that it was somehow less of a Saab.

As time went on, Saab fell victim to the ‘lowest common denominator’ marketing approach that hurt so many GM brands. The hatcback was dropped in favor of a trunk because market research showed that more consumers would consider buying the Saab if it had a trunk. More small parts and even chassis and platforms merged.

In the process, GM made another vital mistake. They forgot to let Saab be Saab. They forgot to let the Swedish airplane engineers innovate in a unique way. To be clear, Saab did continue to innovate under General Motors. For one thing, they created a unique whiplash prevention system which helps save your neck (literally) in a rear collision by moving the headrest forward. But the innovation was clearly guided by corporate priorities and marketing research. There was no sense that these quirkly engineers got together and decided “this makes sense and will make the car better and even though it is the opposite of what every other car does our drivers will appreciate it.” Even the innovations felt more mainstream.

Now General Motors, having mortally wounded Saab may kill it. Which is ironic, considering that General Motors really ought to be killing their undifferentiated clone-brand cars like most Chevy’s and Buicks. It seems very obvious from the outside that General Motors real problem is that half of their products look like they were designed by a committee, that in the quest to make every product good and popular they prevent themselves from making anything truly great.

Instead of listening to the analysts, General Motors ought to think about a little less centralization in the land of Oz. Imagine a General Motors structured a little less like the U.S. Army and a little more like Johnson & Johnson (or like Saturn was, originally). Independent car companies are given great autonomy in car design and production. Some production facilities, parts etc. are shared but those are not visible to the consumer. The corporate functions as an banker and shareholder to the operating companies (saying yes I will support this project or that depending on your success and plans for using my money). Brands are measured not just on short-term profitability but on measure of customer loyalty and in intensity of interest in new products. Success would ultimately be measured not by the size of the brand but by the percentage premium its products are able to sustain over competing car models. And a GM employee would say “I work for Cadillac” or “I work for Hummer” but never “I work for General Motors.”

In the meantime those of us who loved but ultimately left the Saab franchise will get ready to say a fond fairwell to an original and authentic brand. And hope that someone has the sense to someday make the brand what it once was and could again be.

Brand: Stanley Tools
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here – It is the last spot entitled “World’s Weakest Man”
Target: Home improvers
Rating: ***
Reviewer: David