Bones on Fox

Now, I realize that James Cameron is a big shot (there were two separate articles about him and the movie in the most recent issue of Wired magazine, for example), and that the movie is being released by Fox sibling 20th Century Fox, but really? It felt over the top to me. There were times where they could have stopped, having gotten their impressions and audience engagement, but instead they chose to go on and give us too much of a good thing.

Avatar Movie

Anyway, take a look at the show on the Fox website or on Hulu (it’s episode nine from season five, “The Gamer in the Grease”) and see what you think. Perhaps I’ve just lost it, but if it weren’t because I was able to fast-forward through the commercials, I would have watched more commercial messaging than program content. I’m all for product integration as a way to help pay for good content we get “for free” on television, but I’m also for restraint thereof.

While I can speak to the marketing budget slashing issue, that’s been done to death. There is ample evidence that the marketers with the stomach to power through a downturn and maintain (or increase) their marketing investments in times like these are the ones who profit handsomely when the business environment improves.

The other issue that gets my goat is the myopic shifting of multicultural business to a general market agency. I believe that generally to be a misguided decision that will backfire.

When making such moves, the marketers generally cite the savings that they will realize by combining multicultural and general market activities in the same agency. Some openly acknowledge that the quality of the work will suffer but still opt for the short-term savings in order to relieve the pressure put on them by their finance folks. Some others have been led to believe that the quality will be the same as it was with the multicultural agency (in some cases better!) and so to the marketer it seems like a no-brainer. What folly!

For the uninitiated, this is generally what happens:

• Step One: The client finance people issue an edict requiring marketers to reduce their expenses in agency compensation (some clients do that in parallel with overall budget cuts, while others do so as a “share-of-budget” exercise, keeping budgets flat year-over-year but reducing the percentage that is dedicated to compensating agencies.)
• Step Two: Marketers contact their agencies to let them know what will be required. Some contact all agencies, others start off with their “lead” (read: general market) agencies, where the bulk of the agency fee expenditures occur.
• Step Three: General market agencies, facing the prospect of revenue reductions, opt instead for manageable margin reductions and thus offer to take on the multicultural work for the same agency fee as in the previous year (or perhaps a bit more). It goes something like “Hey, instead of cutting our fee, how about we keep it flat to last year and instead we take on the multicultural work for no additional fee (or a very small fee)? That way, you save all those fees you’re now paying the multicultural shops.”

Now the client looks at the option of streamlining his or her life by working with one agency, having one scope discussion, paying one fee, having one meeting, etc. And on top of that, they save a bunch of money! It sounds like a dream. But it is more like a nightmare. Here are a couple of thoughts for marketers contemplating such a move.

1. Ask yourself how the general agency can do the multicultural work for no incremental fee (or a very small one). The work that was being done still needs to be done. If the work can just be absorbed by the general agency, that’s a tell-tale sign that either they have been overcharging or they will put a junior person with the appropriate last name or skin color on the multicultural portion of the business and call it a day (after all, the objective is a lower price tag, not good multicultural marketing). Maybe both.
2. Ask the general agency to provide proof of the quality of the work they say they’ll deliver. Have they done multicultural work before? Are they a leader in their space? Is that their specialty? Would they know good multicultural work if they saw it? Don’t discount the importance of quality work in trying economic times. Remember that alienating a multicultural audience will cost you dearly and for the long term.
3. Don’t cut the multicultural agencies out of the conversation. Share the issues openly with all stakeholders and get everyone working together to arrive at a workable solution that achieves your cost reduction goals without gutting any one area in your marketing plan. If you have to reduce overall compensation costs by X%, see how the whole team can share the burden. (Perhaps efficiencies can be achieved by consolidations in production or by sharing resources, instead of reducing intellectual capital).

All this notwithstanding, should you choose to follow the silly notion of moving business from agency to agency, do the right thing and offer the option to everyone. That is, if you’re considering moving your multicultural work to the general market agency, also entertain the option of bringing your general market work to the multicultural shop.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see the multicultural agency, experienced in working with constrained budgets and compensation, being the best option for the overall account. They can provide the same assurances of quality on the general market work as the general agencies do on the multicultural work, and they will certainly do it for less.

The data comes from TiVo’s StopWatch, available since February of this year, which measures second-by-second viewership from a random sample of 20,000 TiVo units. Two months of data were released (April and May) and the results, while preliminary, are telling.

TiVo

It seems that commercials at what Steinberg calls “opposite ends of the spectrum” did well against the fast forward button. One is “bare-bones direct response” and the other is “high-production-value movie ads.” The data on movie ads are tenuous, in my opinion, given the small amount of those ads on the list of least fast-forwarded. On the direct response side, however, the data are more convincing.

In the month of May, for example, three of the top five least fast-forwarded spots were DRTV ads. I’ll spare you the somewhat-less-than-kind words Steinberg used to describe direct response ads.

Todd Juenger, from TiVo Audience Research, says that the information is still too new to draw strong, sustainable conclusions. In fact, you can’t even break down the data by demographics. Still directionally it’s suggestive. Mr. Juenger suggests that direct response ads do well “because they are easily understood.” He also points to the relevance of the message as an important consideration, although I struggle to link lack of message relevance to fast-forwarding when the sample is random.

Based on this, some agency media buyers expect agencies to offer more bare bones information in advertising, suggesting an approach closer to that of text-based online paid search ads.

It will be interesting to see what the future releases of the TiVo data show, but for now at least, my interest is piqued.

This time, the research study mentioned by author Brian Steinberg hails from IAG Research and found a few interesting tidbits of information. First and most concerning is that “people who use DVRs have one-third less general recall of commercials than people who watch the ads on live TV.” That’s right: one third. That’s in stark contrast to the finding by the NBC Universal TV Research folks that says that the drop in ad effectiveness in households with DVRs is slight. “Consider the source,” I said before.

According to estimates by Interpublic’s Magna Global, DVR subscribers will number almost 40 million (34% of US households) by the end of 2011. Further, the article notes that “already, a Nielsen study of the 2006-2007 TV season finds that ‘nearly all the viewing declines in live TV can be attributed to the increase in DVR use.’ And that’s with 97% of prime time viewing still occurring live.” That’s not an insignificant impact for a device that is currently in about 20 million homes.

As I’ve said before, it is incumbent on us to figure out how to get our consumers to engage with our message before it’s too late. The days of disrupting and interrupting the target to feed her our message are quickly coming to an end. Enter the days of getting consumers to seek out your message. That’s a paradigm shift that few are prepared to surmount. It’s about using other channels but also about using all channels (yes, even television) differently. Are we ready?

The research study’s second finding noted by the article is that contrary to conventional wisdom, the place for your TV spot to be is not the first position in the pod, but rather the last. Ad recall in DVR homes was found to be highest for those that run last in the commercial break. Why? I can tell you from personal experience. It’s easy to notice that a commercial break is starting (and thus you hit the fast forward button on your TiVo remote) but it’s difficult to figure out when it ends (especially when in fast forward mode). Since I don’t want to miss any part of the show I’m watching, I tend to stop early and catch the last spot in the pod.

Can last-in-pod positions exclusively be bought? At least in the general market, that’s a delicate situation. Networks have tended to parcel out first and last positions across clients to keep everyone happy and not rock any boats. What will happen when everyone starts clamoring for last positions? Perhaps we’ll end up with many more commercial breaks (kind of like the Oprah show) that are one minute long, offering only first and last positions to advertisers.

A third finding that may spark some controversy according to the author can be summarized as “creativity works.” As the article puts it, ads with more “‘creative’ flair tend to be better recalled by DVR viewers.” The author notes that this finding dovetails nicely with the network executives position that while they have to figure out a way to address these issues, advertisers have to do their part by improving their ads.

I also addressed this point in an earlier post on the DVR issue. We have to give consumers what they want, what they will seek. Great creative will find an audience or an audience will find it. It’s encouraging to hear that great creative is still very much a critical part of our craft. The bar continues to be raised, though, and it’s up to us to keep jumping over it time and time again.

You can read the article in full (heads up: subscription may be required).