Samersault! Review becomes proview

The Ad Club Bombay was born on August 22, 1954 — it was founded by Bobby Sista. With nearly 3,000 members — all from the advertising, media, and marketing fraternity — it claims to be the biggest advertising club in the world. Since, unfortunately, no one seems to know exactly how many clubs of this sort there really are, the claim remains irrefutable.

The Ad Club Bombay has come a very long way; it's magazine Solus, the annual Abby Awards, and the Advertising Works Seminar, which has evolved through time to become the Effie Awards, are all a very important part of Indian advertising.

The year 2005 is important in the history of the Ad Club; their 50th year in existence saw them appoint Kalpana Rao as their first female president in the history of the Club, and the start of their newest, long overdue, annual event — The Media Review — which was incidentally also conceived by their newest President.

Media planning and buying today is hardly just a division in an advertising agency; it is a booming industry in itself, which has evolved in a way no one could possibly have predicted, and has literally taken the centre-stage in advertising. The Inaugural Media Review 2005 kicked off in end August, with whom else, but the venerable Sam Balsara, Chairman and Managing Director of the Madison Communications Group. Balsara started off by saying that though a 'review' should traditionally be an evaluation and scrutiny of the past, he would like to "play the game a little differently", as he put it, and use his time raising some questions and discussing what the fraternity should be doing "to ensure our meaningful presence under the sun. So I would like to call this talk, not a Media Review, but a Media Proview."

What followed was an interesting evening when case-studies were presented in a strikingly different way; and when probing questions were raised to make the media industry constituents introspect...

The first question Balsara asked was why and how media ever got 'unbundled'; "Did media directors, tired of living in the shadows of Managing Directors or Creative Directors, lead this charge? Did they get tired of always being the last to present in an over-stretched meeting? Or did they get tired of always being overruled by the creative strategy? Or did visionary CEOs of global networks proactively decided to divide and rule?" he asked. All very interesting questions, which one could have immense deliberation and speculation over, but the only answer one got was by way of two quotes: "It was driven by the clients and by the markets, which wanted a greater focus on media" — Sir Martin Sorrell; and a recent Fortune article on the future of advertising, which stated the following: "Over the past decade, global advertisers such as Unilever, Nestle and Phillips have pressurised top agencies to spin off their media units into businesses."

Balsara, then, went on to present a quick overview of the progress made by independent media companies in the last ten years, as compared to the previous 40; to no one's surprise, it concluded that the media discipline would not have progressed as much, had it remained a department of an advertising agency. However, he stressed on the call for a far greater collaboration between creative and media. "The call is not for rebundling or reintegration," he reiterated, "Collaboration is a concept that is gaining increasing currency in the world today, as specialist functions gain currency, across different industries and functions, and it does not mean 'reintegration'."

Evolution of Media Concept
"For advertising to succeed, you have to highlight that feature which no other brand in the market can offer" Thus said advertising and marketing guru Rosser Reeves; and this was in the 60s, when he first elucidated the concept of 'USP' or Unique Selling Proposition. "Rapid developments in technology, increased travel and establishment of communication links across the world, soon led to the neutralization of product benefits," said Balsara, going on to say it was at that very juncture that Al Ries and Jack Trout elucidated 'Positioning' as the order of the day, moving the focus from the product itself to positioning it in the consumer's mind with a single concept or proposition. And this is where 'insight' came in; in the last decade, no advertising has succeeded without it. Balsara defined insight as "an uncommon observation about human behaviour, or the reason for it, which is not so obvious on the surface. A definition we can well use in media too," he surmised, stating the obvious fact that a large number of people viewing an advertisement means nothing if they aren't the target audience of that particular product or service. After all, if your core consumer is completely unaware of something you've just spent millions advertising, what's the point? The challenge though, Balsara said, lay in developing media insight relevant to the brands and categories that are being handled. He went on to cite a few examples of how a chocolate manufactures would go completely bust, if he couldn't reach out to his consumer at just that precise moment he wants to make his mou meetha, and likewise, a cough and cold remedy product simply had to reach out to people more likely to fall ill at that time.

One of the most engrossing parts of the Media Proview was when Balsara — who was on the Cannes Media jury this year — shared with the nearly 400-strong audience present "a cross section of the work to give you a feel and flavour and provoke your creative juices to find suitable take-offs for your own brands," as he eloquently put it.

The first viewing of the evening — also the entry that won the Grand Prix — was from MediaCom in Israel, for Proctor & Gamble's Biomat Laundry Detergent, which consisted of oisting a washing machine atop a van; collecting old clothes; washing them in the Biomat Laundry Detergent; and passing them onto the poor and needy. Now how could this possibly even be a contender for the Cannes Media Grand Prix? Ok, here's how: the laundry detergent was priced at a premium, therefore the goal — for any sort of communication — was the rich, but orthodox Jewish segment. Unfortunately, this particular segment of Israel is the most difficult to reach, let alone influence via mass media, owing to the fact their religious sentiments prevent them from consuming either television or the radio. Added to this, their access to print publications is strictly limited, and they loathe classic advertising. The strategy MediaCom took to market Biomat Laundry Detergent was really very simple; they exploited the religious doctrines of this segment with "Help the Poor", collecting the old clothes from the doorsteps of their very exclusive target audience. Biomat shares in the orthodox sectors grew by almost 50 per cent after the campaign. What made this a Grand Prix winner was the fact that the idea was able to reach an explicitly defined diminutive section of an elusive audience; in spite of the lack of mass media; armed with nothing but a flawless consumer insight.

You know nothing till you've experience it yourself. When the Salvation Army in Johannesburg wanted people to donate warm clothes and blankets for the poor, their agency suggested turning up the air-conditioning and freezing movie auditoriums before films came on; the first slide was of the Salvation Army requesting donations.

At the Osaka Olympics, Adidas — which was not a sponsor while its competitors were — replicated a vertical running track on a tall building; conducting heats, quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals to coincide with the Olympics. More interesting though, was when Daimler Chrysler introduced the 'Smart ForFour' in Germany, they sought to subjugate the lack of road exposure and visibility of the new car; they loaded 25 Smart ForFours onto an open train wag-on, which ran in the Undergro-und tube tracks at peak times interspersed between every 10-15 regular trains. When Chevrolet wanted to sell their new cars as taxis in Columbia, they didn't waste valuable time advertising all around the place; instead — for the first time — advertised on the radio messaging system to which all taxi drivers in Columbia were connected. And who can possibly forget when Pontiac gave away 279 G6 vehicles to every participant on the Oprah Winfrey show? Giving so many G6s cost Pontiac a mere $7 million; it was a mere fraction of the pay-off. The amount of public relations this little stunt generated was an estimated $100 million; it created 87 per cent awareness, and all dealerships sold out.

To read the entire article, buy a copy of Impact Advertising and Marketing magazine dated September 5-11