22 Feb 10

Look Who's Talking

“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

Oscar Wilde, 1890

“A neutral impression is pretty much the same as having no advertising at all.”
Yankelovich and Sequent Partners, LLC, 2010

The second of these two quotes comes from the ‘When Advertising Works’ report (compiled in the US over the last two years from survey-based profiles of 16 media platforms) and clearly refers to situations where the authors believe advertising doesn’t.

Alarmingly this appears to be rather a lot;

“Roughly one-third of ads rated for traditional media platforms and nearly half of the ads rated for digital media platforms make neither a positive nor a negative impression on consumers. Neutral impressions are far and away the most likely to result in no follow-up action by consumers. Even negative impressions are more likely to stimulate actions of some sort than neutral impressions.” Cue Oscar Wilde.

The advantages of not having ‘neutral impressions’ are made manifold in another recent report authored by Ed Keller and Brad Fay; ‘Word of Mouth, Advertising and Media Planning.’ Here the authors state that their on-going ‘TalkTrack’ research reports 3.3 billion brand impressions via word of mouth, every day in the US.

Depending on your outlook this either presents a big problem or a big opportunity. One advertiser who definitely falls into the latter category is T-mobile. Despite an innovative and competitive offering T-Mobile had fallen behind its rivals. But on a fraction of the budget of its big competitors its ‘Life’s for Sharing’ strategy was the basis for a re-launch that got people talking, literally.

Indeed so talked about has been the ‘T-Mobile dance’ campaign it hardly needs describing here. Except perhaps to highlight the brilliance with which its huge WOM (resulting in 20 million+ on-line views) was actually generated. An event to create talkability was magnified many times over by seeding special video content across the full range of on-line and mobile social channels (You Tube, Flickr, Facebook, e-Blogger, Twitter etc) where people passed it on, commented on it and speculated as to what might happen next. Such was the on-line and off-line buzz that over 13,000 people crammed into Trafalgar Square for the second event three months later.

According to the ‘When Advertising Works’ research this massively ‘positive ad impression’ should have lead to more consumer actions (particularly more purchasing) even in the short term. With the highest store footfall ever and hand set sales up 22% in the first month alone we’re still talking about it now.

Sourced from: World Advertising Research Centre, Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, MediaCom Beyond Advertising.