Today the ThirdWay Advertising Blog announces our Awards for Most Effective Advertising for 2005. These are, in our judgement, the most effective single ads or campaigns running during 2005 (regardless of when they were produced). In the selection process this year we noticed a few trends. Here are five trends in effective advertising for 2005:

1. Few Celebrities – Only two of our top 10 picks employed celebrity spokespeople. For one of these (USA Networks) the celebrities were an integral part of the brand offering that was being advertised.
2. Small Budgets – The Most Effective Advertising for 2005 was not the most expensive. Fully half of our picks feature people talking directly to a camera. None involved elaborate production numbers or expensive stunts. A few involved visual effects, but only those where the effect reinforced the brand.
3. Not So Funny – Only three of our picks used humor. While we believe humor can be effective, it can distract if it doesn’t link back to the brand. Nothing is worse from the brand manager’s standpoint than a funny ad that everyone remembers selling a brand that nobody remembers.
4. Not Just “Buzz-Worthy” – Several of our picks for 2005 generated lots of Buzz. But for these brands, the Buzz reinforced the brand positioning. Buzz without the right connection to the brand is just static on the screen to brand marketers.
5. Old Brands Return – Four of our picks are for brands that have used these campaigns to stage a comeback in 2005. For all of these brands, the advertising campaign was central to the resurgence of the brand.

Commentary by: David
Issue: Best and Worst Campaigns of 2005 Named by WSJ

Susan Vranica and Brian Steinberg of the Wall Street Journal today named their picks for the best and worst advertising of 2005.

This Advertising Blog will announce the “ThirdWay Awards” – our picks for best spots and campaigns of 2005 as well as our choices for the year’s worst efforts on Monday, January 2^nd. In the meantime, however, we offer you a brief synopsis of the Wall Street Journal’s picks (read the original story here) along with our thoughts and links to our reviews of these spots.

The Best Advertising of 2005 –

1. Dove “Real Women” (Unilever)
• WSJ Rationale – Unilever broke new ground with this campaign which championed the cause of real women with real curves. The campaign created a public dialogue about our society’s sometimes unhealthy beauty ideal and generated a tremendous surge of media coverage for the ad.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ** (Click Here for our review)

While we agreed with the cause and applauded Unilever for supporting the Campaign for Real Beauty (the partner non-profit in these spots), we believed that Dove as a brand was not a good match for the real beauty message. Dove lotion is still a beauty product, intended to enhance a woman’s looks and ends up feeding the self-doubt the campaign seeks to end.

1. Target “New Yorker Issue” (Target Brands)
• WSJ Rationale – Buying out an entire issue of the New Yorker magazine and commissioning original artwork was “gutsy”, generating the kind of attention the retailer is looking for in a medium that has gotten short shrift from advertisers of late. Target showed how it and print can make a difference.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ***** (Click Here for our review)

With one masterstroke, Target sealed its ownership of “Design for All” – a bold step forward in its decade-long move away from Wal-Mart in the mass merchandiser retail sphere. In spite of these years of steady progress in bringing design to everyday life, Target seemed to arrive all at once last year and the New Yorker spread was the tipping point. Suddenly, Minneapolis and not Bentonville looks like the capital of the retailing world – as evidenced by the fact that Wal-Mart hired away a top marketer from Target and started running design-centric advertising (click here).

1. Budweiser “Superbowl Salute to the Troops” (Anheuser-Busch)
• WSJ Rationale – A smart turn to the right from the usually “sophomoric” Superbowl ads from the leading American beer-maker, this “poignant” spot featuring soldiers returning from overseas to spontaneous applause in an airport featured understated branding but a powerful message. Budweiser executes perfectly and scores a big win.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ****

We agree that this spot was perfectly executed. Anheuser-Busch precisely judged the mood of the country and was rewarded with generous press coverage and strong recall for the spot. This was a tactical move, no doubt, and doesn’t build the unique rationale for the brand but does connect to some of the core brand attributes for Budweiser. And most importantly it stood out against some of the cheesier executions in the all-important Superbowl ad war.

1. Nike “Tiger Woods Miracle Shot” (Nike)
• WSJ Rationale – When Tiger woods sunk an improbably chip shot and the ball hung for a second on the lip of the cup with the Nike swoosh featured prominently, it was a moment made for advertising. “With incidents like these, who needs to make actual ads?” says the Journal. They also applaud Wieden + Kennedy’s deft use of humor to set off the ad. The ad ran only briefly to avoid sounding too self-congratulatory.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ***

The actual event generated so much publicity for Nike that the ad seemed unnecessary and was very different in tone from Nike’s normal ad message. However the execution by Wieden is so spot-on that it is hard to argue with Nike’s decision to run the spot.

1. Audi A3 “Stolen A3” (Volkswagen AG)
• WSJ Rationale – Seamlessly using TV, Print, Billboards and even classified newspaper ads, Audi set up a mystery that led 500,000 consumers on a hunt to find the stole A3 which involved e-mail, IM, pagers and all manner of online and electronic clues. 500 A3’s sold in the first week of availability, in this high-profile test of viral marketing.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating – ****

This campaign is a powerful argument for well-designed viral marketing. Volkswagen and McKinney + Silver orchestrated a seamless campaign that had huge awareness among the target audience and lots of targeted chatter, online and off. What surprised us most about the campaign was how invisible it was outside of the target audience. We did not really understand the extent of the cleverness here until we started adding up the media costs for the campaign and realized how much smaller the budget must have been than we would have guessed.

The Worst Advertising of 2005

1. Coke Zero “Chilltop” (Coca-Cola)

· WSJ Rationale – The spot was intended to launch Coke Zero but fell flat because it did not explain the product which confused consumers. It also left Coke open for a successful jab in an ad by Pepsi. The WSJ thinks the problem is that Coke pitches commercials at youth but tries to appeal to older people at the same time.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ** (Click Here for our review)
While two-thirds of the editors of this blog are former Coca-Cola marketers, we must agree that ‘Chilltop’ was a failure. And it will surprise many regular readers of this advertising blog that we do not blame the failure of this spot on Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Our belief is that what could have been an excellent execution for Coca-Cola classic was subverted by the Coke Zero launch. This ad was indeed confusing and in spite of Coke’s assertion that “strong year-to-date sales” for Coke Zero prove the ad worked we noticed that Coke quickly withdrew the spot and started running another campaign behind Coke Zero.

1. Domino’s “Apprentice Placement” (Domino’s Pizza)

· WSJ Rationale – a mismanaged product placement allowed Domino’s to be outflanked by rival Papa John’s. Domino’s promotes the meatball pizza on the show but advertises a cheeseburger pizza on associated spots. Papa John’s in the meantime is barred from buying network advertising on the same show but sneaks in by making local buys in 64 markets advertising a meatball pizza. At the end, Papa John’s stole the show from Domino’s.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating – *

When product placements are heavy-handed and the monetary exchange is clearly the only rationale for the placement, they are ineffective. Domino’s managed to turn wasted money into lost revenue by mismanaging the execution and allowing Papa John’s to insert the “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza,” tagline they have litigated so hard for into the middle of Domino’s expensive product placement.

1. Carl’s Junior “Paris Hilton” (CKE Restaurants)

· WSJ Rationale – A terrible example of trying to cater to the “lowest-common-denominator” this spot was bad advertising and bad publicity as it stirred up a firestorm against Carl’s in spite of limited airing.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating – *

This advertising blog avoided commenting on the ad and surrounding controversy on the off-chance that it is true that all publicity is good publicity for Carl’s.

1. Lincoln Mark LT Truck “Clergy Lust” (Ford Motor Company)

· WSJ Rationale – Ford made a bad decision in producing a spot featuring a clergyman lusting over a Lincoln truck after finding the keys in a collection plate (and subsequently returning the keys to the owners and writing a sermon with the heading “Lust”). The spot had to be pulled before the Superbowl and never ran despite Ford’s huge investment in production costs.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ****

We agree with the WSJ that this spot was in poor taste and would not have been effective for Ford had it run. But Ford made the right decision in pulling the spot and did so quickly and without triggering a national scandal. While the advertising was not good, we believe that this was a good example of successful public relations. Anyone can make a mistake but to deal with it effectively is the sign of character.

1. US Department of Education “Planted Stories on No Child Left Behind” (US Government)

· WSJ Rationale – When the government hired Omnicom’s Ketchum group and they hired conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and he wrote favorable stories on No Child Left Behind he hurt his reputation, Omnicom’s and that of the Bush Administration.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - *
This advertising blog believes that the real problem here is not that the government engaged in planting stories but that in doing so they were engaging in standard PR industry practice. We believe that many current PR practices are creating great risks for valuable brands and that the day of reckoning may be soon. But that is an issue for the new year.

Commentary By: David
Issue: What next for Target?

“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” – Plutarch, Moralia

If almost nobody seems jolly on the agency side of advertising this year, at least one advertiser has reason for cheer. Target reported November sales up 9% from a year ago with year to date sales improving even more; up 12.2%. (Click here for the data) Same-store sales grew at a blistering rate of 5.8% for the year (2.6% in November). Compare these figures to the numbers we posted on Burger King yesterday (click here), and you’ll see how special this growth is among established retailers. Even more surprisingly, Target’s growth surpassed Wal-Mart’s, which reported year-to-date growth of 9.8% (click here for Wal-Mart data).

The real story for Target is not the growth itself, but how they achieved it. Target made a push this year to own “Design for All” (click here to see the TV spots) and was spectacularly successful. This is an important brand positioning, and one that makes them the envy of their retail neighborhood. Why? Because Target has created an ownable difference from low-cost leader Wal-Mart and may be the second chain after Costco to show how Wal-Mart can be beaten. Making design the ownable difference between the two chains also gives Target the opportunity to avoid direct pricing competition – as long as Target’s prices remain competitive it will be the destination store for many shoppers.

This success is not the product of a year but rather the product of a decades worth of focus around the affluent value shopper. And Target was not without competiton. K-Mart seized on Target’s early moves in this direction to create a strategic alliance with Martha Stewart, whose innovative contributions to the middle class style vocabulary may have saved K-Mart from extinction (by making it a worthwhile takeover target for private equity baron Eddie Lampert). K-Mart lost this battle because they wanted to have it both ways, simultaneously contesting Wal-Mart for price leadership and Target for design sense. But step by step, from Michael Graves teakettles to Isaac Mizrahi tweed blazers, Target built a unique brand.

All of which leads this advertising blog to an intriguing vision of Target’s future. Which would be for Target to lead us out of the era of mass retailing.

For many years the great conundrum of retailing is that chain retailers possess a great deal of information about their customers and do very little with it. Yes, Wal-Mart probably knows that people buy more de-icing fluid in Michigan and more sprinklers in Texas. I am told that the Target store in the Hamptons is a lot more upscale than the one in the Bronx. But go around the country from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart – or Target to Target – and you’ll know that you are in more or less the same place with more or less the same stuff.

This is not accidental. McDonald’s taught marketers that brand consistency in retail outlets was the path to riches. Give people a dependable, consistent experience and they will reward you with repeat business.

But Target can do more. This advertising blog can imagine a future where every Target looks different, feels different and has different designer merchandise. “Did you go to the Target in Dallas during your vacation? I hear they have some amazing kitchenware designers for that store.” Target is in a position to offer the American consumer the Pottery Barn feeling (nice, cool looking stuff for your house) without the Pottery Barn double-take (when you walk into someone else’s house and see your own living room).

Yes, it is true that Crest will still be Crest and 16-rolls of Bounty paper towels will still look and cost the same in each Target around the country. But imagine a future where each store was designed to reflect the community rather than casting a reflection on the community. Where each Target would have a substantial number of unique design items found in no other store and no other Target.

Imagine a future where a talented young jewelry designer could make a living selling unique pieces in one Target store. Where every F.I.T., Pratt and R.I.S.D graduate would have a chance to launch her career by designing for a local Target. And most importantly where every community could feel that their Target was their own – unique and differentiated. Target would still provide a consistent brand experience through design philosophy, customer service and core consumer packaged goods offerings.

Design for all could translate to design for every one of us. Individually. This would present a purchasing task the scale of which has not been known since Imelda Marcos last visited Bloomingdales. The operational issues would be immense. But the rewards for Target and for American consumers would be no less so. After a generation of losing boutique retailers to chains, a chain would finally have rediscovered its inner boutique.

Target can do many things with the momentum it has established. But the chance to remake retailing could give Target a unique and long-lasting position in the American cultural landscape.

Brand: Target
Execution: Print
Link: Not Yet
Target: New Yorker Readers
Rating: *****
Reviewer: David
Description:
The American Society of Magazine Editors yesterday criticized The New Yorker for failing to post a notice in the August 22nd issue of the magazine stating that the content of the magazine had not been influenced by the single advertiser for the issue.

This in itself is hardly worth discussing as it falls into the category of warnings like “do not use this hammer on your thumb” which are both obvious and unhelpful, and other advertising blogs including Adrants take it in the proper spirit. If the advertiser influences the content of a journalistic magazine, it hurts the magazine, the consumer and ultimately the advertiser, too. A disclaimer is a silly artifact of a litigious society.

The more interesting question about the Target/New Yorker marriage is whether it was money well spent for brand Target. Given the obscene amount of publicity and blog interest the issue generated, the answer must be yes. And we believe that it is nearly as obvious that the issue was successful for Target on its own merits. The question of whether other advertisers should follow brings us back to why this worked for Target – and that is the most interested question from the brand manager’s point of view.

What Works:
Why did this single advertiser issue work so well for Target? Here is our take, by the numbers:

1. Brand Positioning Match between Advertiser Brand and Media Brand – Target, positioned as design for smart people who don’t want to spend a fortune (which can and does include well-to-do-people who just think high prices are silly) matches up well with the New Yorker’s positioning as news and commentary for the sceptical and sophisticated reader. The brand character of both of these brands is contrarian as they tend to fly a bit against the mainstream of their categories. Target is the anti-Wal-Mart, almost able to make you forget you’re buying 32 rolls of toilet paper with a well-placed teapot by Michael Graves. The New Yorker defines irony the way Dante describes Hell – with such a wide tonal palate that any single issue is bound to both offend and delight.
2. A Fair Value Proposition for the Consumer – Target realized that dominating a magazine with its fare could have lead to anger or boredom for the consumer. Imagine the effect of page after page of smiling twenty-somethings in sailor clothes, if you can. Instead, they chose to create art that complimented the unique nature of the magazine and drew the reader in because of the lack of an obvious commercial message.
3. Show, Don’t Tell – Most advertisement works the same way as a comedian getting on stage and saying “I’m really funny and if you don’t believe me let me give you three good reasons why you should.” Target goes one better here and shows us that they understand design. This is why the ads work as commercial art – they prove a key part of Target’s brand positioning and do so in a unique, memorable way. It’s hard to argue that Target is not about design when you see these ads.
4. Brand Linkage - An easy mistake to make while getting the first three points right would have been to produce a beautiful, artful magazine which had no linkage whatsoever back to Target. However the ubiquity of the Target bullseye logo in the ads – the only commercial message whatsoever in the magazine – was impossible to miss or forget. On the other hand, the logo was so artfully woven into each drawing that it was a core element rather than a brand slap-on.

What Doesn’t:
The danger here is not for Target – which has clearly gotten it right – as much as for other advertisers who may follow and the magazines who will host them. Advertising may be a necessary evil for many news magazine readers, but advertising by a single sponsor is a different issue. To be a fair value exchange for the reader, the single advertiser must add something to the magazine that would not exist without it – and that cannot just be a product message. This reinforces the message in our Commentary post earlier this week – the advertisement must represent a fair value exchange for the consumer as entertainment as well as presenting a value proposition for the brand.

The danger to the magazine is greater, as the ASME was no doubt thinking when they slapped Target on the wrist as a public example. The possibility that a magazine even without overt pressure from a single advertiser might self-censor its content to give no offense to that advertiser is chilling and real. That in itself is enough to suggest that this particular tactic ought to be the provenance of the few advertisers who can play in the big leagues creatively and have the nuanced understanding of the consumer to pull it off.

Branding Bottom Line:
Kudos to Target which gets it right by bringing design to our doorstep.