Almost five years since his first appearance on Inside Marketing, industry legend Mark Ritson is back, the ink barely dry on the multi-million euro sale of his highly successful mini MBA programmes in marketing, brand management and management.
He’s still running the show, much to the relief of aspiring students, many of whom come from Ireland each year, he tells Winterlich.
Ritson was also back at Cannes Lions this year, his second time, with a presentation entitled The Creative Dividend – Advertising that Pays Off. In it he made the case for fewer but longer running ads with emotional appeal, pointing out that creativity, when done right, is a significant driver of growth.
Ads wear in, he told delegates, not out, arguing that by pulling them too soon, brands are leaving return on investment on the table.
RM Block
Working with data from Andrew Tindall of global marketing research and effectiveness company System 1, his Cannes presentation identified three fundamental drivers of effectiveness, the first of which is emotion.
“We’ve known for a long time that pressing the emotional button gives you a massive impact in terms of not just of ad effectiveness but profitability from ads. So, the more emotional, the better,” says Ritson
The second is the importance of distinctive brand assets, and the codification required within them that make an ad work. “Tindall’s work is very clear here. In a 30 second ad, the magic number is seven,” he explains.
“You want seven of your distinctive brand assets repeated, somehow, within the frame, so that 100 per cent of the market knows who the ad is from.”
The last vital ingredient is time. “If you look at the effects of emotion, and distinctive assets, they reach their peak after two and probably close to three years of the same ad. That reiterates the message that we are pulling our ads long before they have had the full chance to actually work properly,” he points out.
“It’s emotion, times codification, times time. It sounds so basic, but if you look at ads on a weekly basis they tend to fail all three tests miserably, which is why most advertising isn’t making that much impact.”
Under the influence
The media environment has shifted significantly since Ritson last guested on Inside Marketing, points out Winterlich, with massive growth in the use of content creators and influencers as part of what is a much more fragmented ecosystem.
For some sectors, such as beauty, the combination of community, influencers and short form video, can come together to form “something pretty potent and special”, admits Ritson, who works with beauty retailer Sephora, whose up-and-coming brands use influencers to great effect.
Having said that, there’s an awful lot of fraudulent nonsense surrounding influencers too, he cautions. “Do they really have influence, do they really have authority, and do they really have the reach they claim? And for the most part, the answer is no,” he says.
Having famously written a column some years ago about having paid 20 well known influencers to retweet a picture of his backside, asking them to retweet it as a work of art entitled The Colour of Influence, which they duly did, he makes a compelling point.
Some embrace of the very different timelines between longer term, brand building ads and much shorter and more immediate content creation is required, he suggests.
But when it comes to assessing where real media value is to be found, and why brand building should vastly outweigh performance advertising, which focuses on short term results such as clicks or sales, the far thornier issue is the fact that so few marketers are properly schooled in their discipline.
“Always remember, three-quarters of the marketers out there have no training in marketing at all,” says Ritson, an academic of long standing. “They’re just plodding on, making shit up left, right and centre, so the first problem is just good old-fashioned ignorance.”
The second problem is that, even when marketers do ‘get it’, in relation to the need for brand building advertising, too often they “don’t have the power” to convince the rest of their organisation of that fact.
“We’ve done a very poor job of selling the effect of brand building, and I don’t think that’s going to change,” says Ritson.
There is a bias towards performance in ROI that only a few companies will be smart enough to avoid, he adds, “but they’re the ones to follow, right? Let them benefit from being better at it than the idiots doubling down on too much performance in sales, promotion, and everything else.”
Belief and reality
The fact that the industry skews young may explain why it also skews performance over brand building.
Winterlich points to a recent case he worked on, for a drinks brand, where the client’s focus was wholly on winning new and younger customers on socials, rather than focusing on older consumers with who already drank that category of product. For these latter, newspaper, TV and radio were the obvious choice, but one the client didn’t want to hear.
As we head into the Christmas season, which each year brings with it a fresh set of new, brand building advertising, traditional media’s strength is clear. Unfortunately that’s a fact too easily forgotten for the rest of the year, he points out.
“TV advertising, if you can afford it and it’s done well, is pretty hard to surpass,” says Ritson.
“But if you try delivering that message in a room full of 28 year old marketers, they’d think you were on drugs. They’re like, ‘Oh nobody watches TV advertising’ anymore, when in fact, it’s the source of 85 per cent of video advertising in most countries. I’ve never seen a disparity as crazy as the one between marketing belief and marketing reality, and the cynicism towards TV, radio, press and outdoor versus what it can actually do for a brand.”
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