Methods, techniques and formulae from advertising. But do they work?

by Sanat Vallikappen

I’ve always hated marketers who try to sugarcoat the ordinary and sell it to me as the best thing going. So I found it unusually satisfying last week to watch The Persuaders, a documentary in which so-called gurus of marketing were exposed, their methods questioned, and the clutter crisis in advertising evaluated.

For those who haven’t watched the film, the following paragraphs attempt to give you some glimpses.

Presented by the Marketing Club, the film alternated between voices that rhapsodized over the kind of advertising practiced, and equally powerful, dissenting voices that tore these methods apart.

The script writers, Barak Goodman and Douglas Rushkoff, took a rather cynical view of promotional marketing, clarifying in no uncertain terms, the truth inherent in one of the oldest aphorisms about advertising – "I know I am wasting half my ad dollars, but I just don’t know which half.”

When you’re bombarded with it 24/7 – in the corner of the elevator car, the bottom of the cup when you go to pick up the golf ball, through sky-writing, a passing bus or even a subway tunnel which serves as a backdrop to display messages – it’s difficult to break through the clutter, and every effort at it only creates more clutter.

But that doesn’t stop those like Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide to come out with the kind of spiel even the ludicrously naïve would find hard to believe. “Tide’s not a laundry detergent any more. All detergents get your clothes cleaned. Tide’s something deeper. It’s an enabler, it’s a liberator. I guess you’d think about moving Tide from the heart of the laundry to the heart of the family,” he says in the film.

The critics’ take is that these pseudo-spiritual marketing messages that try to strike the innermost cord in the consumer, seldom work. One such instance, well-documented in the film, is about Song, a no-frills subsidiary of Delta Airlines, which decided to focus on women’s needs in its advertising - so much so that very few identified it as promotion for an airline.

Apart from AT&T, Hallmark and Coca-Cola, most companies that have tried to make this emotional connect with consumers have failed, says Bob Garfield, columnist at Advertising Age, and one of the sane voices in the film.

Nike, which said that it was about the meaning of sports, but more than that, it was about transcendence through sports, or Starbucks, which said that it’s about a third place that’s neither home nor work, are probably a handful that can also boast success.

But sample this hilarious, but failed message: “Polaroid is not a camera, it’s a social lubricant.”

Product placement was another area that came in for harsh criticism. The advertiser might want to call it the seamless integration of product and narrative, but Garfield says that whatever MBA euphemism one may attach to it, it was still product placement.

Market research also came under heavy fire in the film. In fact, in an instance of dichotomous questioning (a research method where your answer can either be ‘yes’ or ‘no’) shown in the film, one of the questions was, “When you’re eating white bread, do you feel lonely?” What was that all about?

So what makes advertisers tick? What makes them come up with often-incoherent, often-ineffective messages day after day? “Once you’re in the game, you can’t stop. If for no other reason, that the competition will eat you alive,” is a possible explanation offered by a former executive at J Walter Thompson. That means this noisy chatter will go on endlessly. And whether or not it helps sell the product, at least there’s going to be enough going around for all of us to have fun at someone else’s expense.

Those interested in learning more about the film may visit its website at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders.

Photo Source: The Persuaders website