The Peter Pan Generation

Better known as the “millennials” this generation is also sometimes referred to as the Boomerang Generation or Peter Pan Generation, because of the members' perceived penchant for delaying some rites of passage into adulthood, longer periods than most generations before them. These labels were also a reference to a trend toward members living with their parents for longer periods than previous generations.

What makes them interesting to marketers and media planners is that having been born somewhere typically between the late 1980’s and 2000, they are the last of the children of the 20th Century and therefore know nothing else other than digital communication and being part of online communities across a diverse number of platforms primarily mobile. Those in the workplace like structure and working in a team and because of their digital literacy are able to multitask like crazy.

Some really interesting research carried out by Nicola Payne working for Eloqua Limited shows that the millennials are mad about Facebook. They can’t get enough of it. According to Quantcast, 76% of Facebook users visit the site at least 30 times per month. If my children are anything to go by its more like 100 plus! Twitter has a rate of 57% and sites like Linkedin and Foursquare less than 1%. When advertising to the millenials the same rules apply as when talking to most groups, especially in social media circles. Be transparent – engender trust. Be interactive – they liked to be entertained. Be generous – they like a deal as much as anybody else.

So media selection seems pretty straightforward but engaging with them is something else. The Peter Pans can become the Lost Boys if you get it wrong.

Ian Prager, Planning Director

The stars come out for Max

Our TV Manager, Vicky Nunn, was at the recent IoF - here are some of her thoughts:

At the this month’s Institute of Fundraising conference, Max Clifford the PR guru opened up proceedings with a presentation dealing with the use of celebrities in the fundraising areana. With 40 years of experience, he talked a lot of good sense such as making sure the celebrity has a real and genuine connection with the charity. Also, you’re more likely to enlist the support of a celebrity, if you ask for their help on a particular aspect of the charities work.

As someone who has been buying TV airtime over quite a few years this has led me to think why it’s very rare to see commercials feature celebrities. Sure there are a few celebrity voiceovers but not a full blown personal appeal. The last one I can remember is Davina McCall, who featured in the Action for Children commercial.

Why is this?

Maybe charities appreciate Mike Masnick (Techdirt.com) point of view that today's consumer is a totally different animal than the consumer of even five years ago. This means that what was effective and influential five years ago is not necessarily so today, as today's consumer is more likely to be influenced by someone in their social network than a weak celebrity connection.

Today's consumer is informed, time-compressed, and difficult to impress, and they are only influenced by ads that are relevant and provide information. They don't want to have products pushed at them, even from a celebrity. In fact, the data show that relevance and information attributes were key missing ingredients from most celebrity ads. There is no reason why this is not true about fundraising commercials.

Oh and there is always the Tiger Woods/Ryan Giggs scenario to put you off...

World Cup Review

World Cup 2010 was last night brought to an end by a Yorkshireman amid eruptions of celebration around the stadium; unfortunately the Englishman was the referee and the fans in rapture were the Spanish.

World Cup 2010 began 11th June 2010 with thirty two teams in the group stages; it will be remembered for the early exits of holder’s Italy, the sullen French and another year England failed to deliver. The World Cup was viewed by a collective audience of approximately 26 billion, once again underlining the opinion that the World Cup is the largest worldwide event and therefore for those in marketing and media, every four years it’s ‘all systems go’. A well-placed advertising campaign during this period of time is guaranteed to have the largest audience than any other time, equally a media gaff on the scale of ITV HD ‘0-1 USA win’ after cutting to an advert and missing England’s goal, can be catastrophic. A major issue faced by an advertiser is the thrashing that ITV took in the ratings battle with the BBC, many citing the lack of advertising being a major pull for their 54 percent share of those viewing the final. 3.3 million viewers tuned in to watch the final on ITV and ITVHD compared to the 15.1 million on BBC and their HD channel. Therefore it seems clear that although the World Cup is the largest sporting event on the planet, the media and advertising world must be creative and not merely bombard the viewer with television advertising, as they will ultimately switch over. To put the efforts of ITV in perspective, the highest recorded ratings of Coronation Street is 27 million; room for improvement indeed.

Peter Bradley, Trainee MC&C

Twitter or TV?

At the iMedia conference in Brighton this week there was a good deal of discussion about social media and how best to measure it.

Oddly though, there was little consideration of the fact that different verticals will be able to benefit from social media in very different ways.

One way of looking at verticals is to place them on a grid where one axis runs from low to high emotional importance and the other axis runs from low to high rational importance.

Verticals with high emotional importance contain products that we buy because they “say” something about us. Verticals with high rational importance contain products that we buy because we need them.

Using the emotional-rational grid we can divide verticals into four sectors:

High rational, high emotional (HRHE) verticals like travel, motor cars and electrical devices. These are verticals where the functionality needs to be right, where we are risking relatively large amounts of money, and where part of why we buy is because we feel comfortable with the brand

Low rational, high emotional (LRHE) verticals like fashion, print media and charity. These are verticals where we are not risking a great deal, where we don’t really need the products but where we do feel emotional engagement because the products we buy “say” a lot about us

High rational, low emotional (HRLE) verticals like banking, retail and utilities. These are verticals where the functionality needs to be right, where we are risking relatively large amounts of money, but where we are not emotionally engaged with the brand

Low rational, low emotional (LRLE) verticals like washing powder and petrol. These are verticals where we are not taking great risks and where there is no emotional involvement with the brands. While products in these verticals are important the functionality they deliver is generally simple.

HRHE verticals can use social media very creatively. As well as using social media to research the marketplace by listening to conversations and to manage their reputation they can actively “campaign” messages through social media.

LRHE verticals are in a similar position – able to exploit their emotional connection with consumers through social media, although they may need to work harder as there is little they can say about rational benefits.

HRLE verticals however will find it far harder to exploit social media for campaigning. They have little emotional connection with their consumers and proactive use of social media platforms will frequently be considered intrusive – who wants to hear from their bank on Facebook? They can however use social media for market research and importantly for managing their reputations. For instance few people are likely to praise a bank’s service to their friends but many will criticise it if something goes wrong.

The LRLE verticals are the Cinderellas of social media. No one is interested in them: why would you blog about washing powder or review a cleaning fluid? For brands in these verticals social media are far less important. While they should monitor conversations just in case a big issue starts to brew, they need to do little more than that.

Both HRLEs and LRLEs need to employ advertising techniques to add a layer of emotional connection to their brands. But for HRHEs and LRHEs that are considerable opportunities to enhance their brands through social media.

The lesson here is that brands should consider whether they are in a vertical that can usefully use social media for active campaigning or merely for research and for more reactive communication.

A failure to understand this can result in wasted budgets and in losing the opportunities that more powerful media activities can deliver.

Jeremy Swinfen Green, Digital Director
jeremy@mcand.co.uk

DRTV exists - honest!

On Tuesday I was invited, along with some of my colleagues, to Response TV – an event organised by ITV to present some research they had conducted with the DMA to prove that TV advertising makes other media work harder.

Well, I can tell you I went with high hopes that ITV were finally going to acknowledge that DRTV exists. And that it is a good thing.

We arrived at Television Centre and were invited to watch a film. The voice-over stated: “It is widely accepted that TV advertising works by building brand associations over the long term. ... However, the responsiveness of TV campaigns could historically only be estimated by long-term sales figures or post-campaign research. Response was almost impossible to calculate accurately and brand owners would shy away from television”

Right – so I’ll just get my coat then as clearly I have been making up all of those phone calls generated in direct response to a TV ad.

No wait – once again it's simply a case that DRTV doesn't actually seem to exist. The only thing worth talking about seems to be 'Brand' television advertising.

I do get a bit cross at times – DRTV is estimated to account for 35-40% of all TV advertising. Based on 2009 Neilson figures that would put the value at between £1.2 and £1.35 billion!

But let me forget my grumpiness for a minute. A study being done by a reputable trade body such as the DMA backing up what we have been saying for quite a while now is fantastic.

At MC&C, we have numerous case studies showing that TV uplifts other activity – DRTV, inserts, doordrops, search etc. And it's nice to have someone back it up.

Anything that gets brands back to spending on TV has to be good for everyone in the media and advertising industry. This might help the TV stations get back the nearly £1/2 billion revenue lost from 2008!

Nicky Legg, Broadcast Director

Improving measurability between off line and online media

We now understand more about the link between online and offline media. And we know more about the customer journey. But are we using this understanding to measure the journey a consumer takes between offline and online media?

Is it sufficient to say we know that offline media drives consumers online when we can't measure the success our offline media has in driving potential customers online?

How can we identify which of our offline media drives our search? We can monitor the search uplift in and around television adverts, as we know what time the messages are consumed by our audience so any spikes can reasonably be attributed to these spots.

It's trickier where press and out of home are concerned because when the media are consumed is harder to pin-point. And of course increased time shifting behaviour with TV (e.g. PVRs and ITV Player) makes even TV's effect on online harder to measure.

But what if we told our audience what to search for online within the creative copy?

Potentially we could use one word for tube car panels that is relevant and memorable to the campaign, one for our press adverts and a different one for TV. The copy could simply read “to find out more search…….”, or “to take advantage of this offer search……”.

There's another benefit. If the key words or search terms used are different to those your competitors are using then this could mean you to pay less per click to obtain a customer compared to the more expensive generic search terms that are used by people who have not seen an offline advert.

And you are more likely to convert your audience. Sometimes if you are not at the top of search listings you lose a potential sale to one of your competitors (which you really earned because you paid for the offline ad which drove them online in the first place!)

This problem can be alleviated by using the “search for” mechanism as none (or certainly fewer) of your competitors should appear in the search listings.

Measurable, cheaper and more effective. Media-relevant campaign search terms are a powerful tool!

Christopher Bell, Media Assistant

Hiscox insurance calls a spade a spade

Snapshot whilst waiting for a train this morning: a strong outdoor ad for a potentially dull brand.

Insurance company Hiscox are out to prove they speak plainly to their customer base, cutting through all the usual jargon spouted by a lot of their financial and insurance competitors. In this case, literally calling a spade a spade.

The creative reads: “It’s a Spade. Not an earth relocating implement. At Hiscox, we keep our policies jargon free. After all, what’s wrong with plain English?”

In a world where your office water-cooler arrives via local "water-dispensing solution delivery operatives" and your household rubbish is collected by "refuse waste removal management systems", it's quite refreshing to see a spade called, well, a spade.

Claire Turner

TV Response: the new rules

So last Thursday Louise and I went to a Thinkbox event entitled ‘TV Response, the new rules’.

Not since the late 1990’s has any real research been done into DRTV and how response is being generated, so we had high hopes that this could back up all that we say on a daily basis to our clients. On a basic level it did – so hoorah!

The findings stated that, of all response to a campaign, only 15% came directly from the telephone – mmm not a lot then! Essentially this means that the CPR of a campaign can be over-stated by as much as 85%.

Now the difficulty with this research is that the clients included (anonymously of course) were not all pure DRTV clients. One who chose to wave anonymity was Honda and I don’t think they could even class themselves as a BRTV client! So possibly the 15% could be increased for many clients – maybe to as much as 50%. Where does the other response go?…

Well no surprises: for the bulk – it's online of course… We have been seeing more and more that the use of paid-for and natural search running alongside a tv campaign has a significant uplift in response – but, hey, its always great to see some statistical proof of this!

According to the study 66% of web traffic during the analysis period came via a search engine, 16% recalled the URL from the ad while the remaining 18% guessed the URL!

We still know though that putting a URL on the ad does increase web response – but maybe that’s simply because they then know they can go online – think of it as a green light to search.

The web traffic came at different times to the ads themselves though – more in the evening and more at weekends – shifting the response patterns once again.

We came away with more questions than concrete answers – David Brennan from Thinkbox summed up the findings at the end of the event and his first two conclusions were really interesting

1) There are no rules!

2) We can’t totally control the routes to response – we need to allow for the fact that the stimulus and the route to response is far less connected than before

I know though that I for one would like to attempt to get some more answers from our own responses – maybe try to replicate the study but with pure DRTV brands.

Now then who’s up for that challenge?

Nicky Legg, Broadcast Director