How to get noticed

Common Sense Idea 7. At all costs get noticed. Be heard. Stand for something.

Inside all sorts of organisations, people are spending hours and hours and massive amounts of money honing their communication material, as if consumers out there are waiting to examine every word of it. Layers of staff pore over ads. Panels of suburban ‘indicative target market samples’ pre-test them. Feedback is documented and revisions are made. Colours are examined, visuals commented on and typefaces carefully chosen.

Here is the thing: NO ONE CARES! They are doing their very best to ignore it and they have become very good at filtering out almost everything.

It’s been said that consumers are subjected to over 3000 advertising messages a day and that typically, they absorb two of these, at best. This means the other 2998 messages – messages that people in tall buildings all over town have sweated time and money over – are completely wasted.

Why? They are too boring. In being obsessed in what they say, they have forgotten the importance of how they say it. In an obsession to inform, they have forgotten to entertain. They have also forgotten that everyone out there is desperately trying to avoid their message.

Most advertising strategy starts with ‘What do we want to say?’ That is okay until people become fixated on that. Only about 20 per cent of your ad should be the message; the rest should be all about entertaining, so you get noticed. This is the opposite of what most ‘prudent marketers’ do. Their ads are 80 per cent proposition, 20 per cent entertainment.

Here’s another great quote; ‘If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.’

Common Sense Idea 8. Word of mouth is the most powerful medium in the world.

At Saatchi, a client once asked me, ‘What is the most powerful medium in the world?’ I instantly replied ‘TV.’ I was wrong. The most powerful medium in the world is word of mouth. Think about a recent purchase you have made, maybe a new shirt. What prompted you to buy it? Probably not an ad you saw recently – more likely a recommendation from a friend, something you read about in a magazine you rate, or seeing a similar shirt and asking the wearer where they got it. Perhaps the shop assistant talked you into it.

Word of mouth also travels, without cost. The classic ‘I told one friend and she told two friends’, and so on, has a very powerful effect. The challenge is to get it underway. Bland messages will not travel; neither will a sound marketing proposition. Only a story with enough of a talk factor will travel.

At 42 Below, we often sent out stories, in many forms. Some travelled; some didn’t. There wasn’t a formula – we couldn’t predict their success. The best examples were our viral MPEG videos. These were loosely related to 42 Below, but more importantly, they picked something in popular culture that people got a kick out of and wanted to pass on to a mate. MPEGS about targeting the pink dollar, English tourists and Australian beer guzzlers were all entertaining enough stories to be passed on and viewed by hundreds of thousands in a month. Our website became a little library of great stories.

But outside the Internet, there were other ways in which the story of this young maverick of a brand was travelling. Everything we did was an opportunity to tell a story that would travel, whether the focus was:

• Winning more awards than any other vodka
• Being poured at the best bars in the world
• Ruffling feathers in the ‘establishment’
• A Vodka University tutorial
• A Cocktail World Cup, with cocktails made while bungee jumping
• Brand ambassadors with Perspex briefcases full of vodka.

An interesting story is always worth passing on. Proud young Kiwis love telling foreigners that New Zealand isn’t only about All Blacks and sheep. Such word of mouth did more to build our brand than any ad (although contentious or captivating enough ads can also start word of mouth).

• This information is provided by Geoff Ross:
  
  www.ecoya.co.nz