Adidas supposedly pulled its $10+ million ad campaign from the iAd program because Apple CEO Steve Jobs was being too much of a control freak. According to one industry exec, Adidas decided to cancel its iAds after Apple rejected its creative concept for the third time.
The fact that there are such high standards for quality should generally be regarded as a good thing. Once users acknoledge the fact that iAd adverts are of good quality, acceptance – and hence clickrates – of these ads should increase. Leading to higher revenues for Apple and for the App publishers.
But what good is such a quality control mechanism if you upset all the advertisers? Adidas is apparently not the first company – Chanel already stopped their iAd ambitions, too, according to some sources.
Apple is a company with extremely high standards, which is the reason for their success (heck, I am writing this on a MacBook). But if they want to pull in other companies into their iAd System, they should consider, that they are dealing with clients – not suppliers (or employees). Especially, because there are also some other issues advertisers dislike:
In addition to Apple’s unusual control over the ad creation process, advertisers complain about the lack of control over and visibility into where their ads appear, lack of third-party ad serving tools, and other issues. Apple plans to open up the process once it’s more comfortable with the program, but it appears some advertisers have lost their patience.
Mobile advertising is one of the next (if not current) big things. With many strong competitors and antitrust investigations pending (what’s the latest status on that, by the way?), can Apple really afford to be this drastic?
I missed the last Social Media Club Hamburg meeting, unfortunately. It was booked out when I first looked, and I didn’t have a chance to check the list again later on.
The discussion must have been quite interesting, the topic certainly was: why social media projects fail. Basis for the discussion was a study amongst more than 500 Marketers across Europe.
We all enjoyed the subservient chicken for Burger King. We also enjoyed the Samsung „follow your instinct“ interactive Video story where you can choose how to proceed with the story by clicking on one of several button to continue different paths:
Now, Tipp-Ex has combined those three and came up with a nice advertising Campaign:
You can choose – or shall I say it looks like you can choose – one of two endings. Warning, here is a spoiler:
You don’t have a choice. The bear won’t be shot, in both options the ad changes, the youtube special ad format kicks in and the guy grabs the Tipp-Ex from the box on the righthand side, deletes the word „shoots“ and tells you to tell him, what to do with the bear instead. From then on, it feels like the subservient chicken. You can tell him, for example, to dance with the bear:
Of course, many people tried other commands with the subservient chicken, so I had to try this, too:
Nice combination of stuff that has been seen before… Of course, you can share it on Facebook and Twitter…
Simon Sinek has written a book about a brilliant idea: „Start with why„. Now he has written a semi-good blogpost about the ad industry titled „I hate you: a tale about the advertising industry„. His main take out: agencies knowingly produce stuff people don’t want to see, so they look for ways to make people watch that stuff anyway. His proposal:
the ad industry should work to improve the quality of their product to a point where people want to watch it.
Well, isn’t that what creative agencies are trying to do anyway? It’s a problem of targeting. The best ad is wasted on someone who doesn’t care or even hate the brand. And once an ad is well targeted, it’s message should be relevant, and there should be no question about acceptance. A good creative targeted at the right audience should never fall into the trap of being annoying.
However, the world isn’t perfect, and in mass distributed media, there will always be a spillover – i.e. ads delivered to people who don’t care about the brand, the message, the offer. And it’s not only a question of entertainment, as Simon Sinek suggests:
The quality of advertising should always be measured based on how entertaining or engaging it is. They should stop measuring how many people are forced to watch (reach and frequency) and start measuring how many people choose to watch.
The main factor is not entertainment, it’s relevance. An ad can be highly successfull, if relevant, even if it’s not in the least entertaining. Given the right context, a fitting message and good targeting, you might also want to call advertising „information“.
Of course, if neither of that is true, you should call it „spam“ or simply annoyance.
The main point of Sinek is, however, that ad agencies produce their creative having a different target audience in mind: the client. For that matter, we might even add another target audience that sometimes play an important role: jurys of advertising award shows. Much of what is created serves to satisfy individual client needs, or may be even simply client internal political structures.
So Sinek argues, that ad agencies should instead again focus on their main target audience: the end customer.
Producing a product for the consumers who are the ones actually consuming the product makes more business sense, too. Clients would be able to spend less on media because the work would be more memorable. Plus, if people CHOOSE to watch the ads, they are more likely to like the brands, products and companies featured in those ads. In other words, if advertising was made for consumers and not clients the ultimate benefactor would actually be the client…and isn’t that supposed to be the job of good advertising?
Good idea. Given what I notice in the industry, this is definitely the intention when creating new ideas. Within the realm of highly user-centric media such as social media, this thinking has already started to sink in. It just needs to permeate all the layers of „integrated“ agencies, until even the most classically oriented teams are also familiar with this idea.
Wo ich sonst so bin...