Bruce Benidt
Jon Austin
tcarideo
Ellen Mrja
Mike Keliher
Joe LovelandOne of the most profound paradoxes of American politics is that citizens love to hate negative political ads, yet negative ads persist, because the same consumers that hate them are consistently persuaded by them.
If negative ads work so well for bottom-line driven political consultants unselling the competitors’ politicians, it would seem bottom line-driven corporate marketers would use similar tactics to unsell the competitors’ widgets. So why, for instance, aren’t the makers of Toasty O’s attacking the makers of Cheerios for downsizing package sizes while not lowering prices? Why isn’t Best Buy attacking on-line competitors for shipping costs and customer service hassles?
A few commercial advertisers have made heavy use of attack ads, though I’m sure they’d object to the use of that unsavory term. For instance, MacIntosh has the ubiquitous “I’m a PC/I’m a Mac” campaign, which features affable and laughable attacks, but attacks all the same. In ad after ad, Mac Personified attacks PC Personified with as much vigor and verve as McCain and Obama attacked each other on the campaign airwaves.
And just as it worked for Carville and Atwater, it has worked for Mac. Mac market share, while still the relative size of a pimple on Bill Gates’ prosperous posterior, has increased dramatically during the run of these ads. And the ad industry has applauded, giving Macintosh and its ad agency a Grand Effie, which is given to the most effin’ successful ad campaign of the year.
So if corporations are so bottom-line driven, why don’t we see more attack ads in commercial advertising?
- Loveland
Filed under: Communications, Politics, advertising, branding | Tagged: Atwater, Best Buy, Carville, Cheerios, General Mills, Get a Mac, Get a Mac campaign, I'm a Mac, I'm a Mac campaign, I'm a PC, Macintosh, Malt-O-Meal, Microsoft, PC, personal computers, Toasty O's
Maybe the solution to your paradox is to be found by unwrapping an assumption in your first paragraph–how do you know that it is the SAME people who hate these ads that are also persuaded by them? Maybe it is simply the Twitterati(digerati?intelligentati?eliterati? you get what i mean…) who hate these ads, while the larger public treats them as any other ad–dislikes them, but is too lazy to change the channel.
Or, maybe, it is effective subliminally, and we simply are not aware that these ads have gotten past our defenses…
In any event, I think that most large corporations are more concerned about playing it safe–while they would love to move up from a 20% share to a 23% share (nice bonus here), they are more worried about the possibility of going from a 20% share to a 19% share (this will cost you your job). Once you are big enough to afford a significant advertising budget, you have too much to lose to take such a risk. Safer to follow the herd….
I have no data, but I venture to guess that less than 10% of registered voters would answer “yes” to the question “Do you enjoy negative political ads where one candidate attacks the other?”
Sure, the most ardent supporters of Candidate A don’t object to attack ads produced by Candidate A, but my 100% fact free assertion is that almost nobody enjoys the genre in the abstract.
My guess is that your question would elicit a response rate similar to this question “Do you beat your wife often?”
Your theory that corporate America is too risk adverse to take on attack advertising is interesting. At the same time, though, the current wrap on corporate America is that it will do ANYTHING to show short-term earnings improvements that speculators on Wall Street demand. Do you agree with that oft made accusation? If so, then why wouldn’t they grasp at anything, including attack ads, to jack up short-term performance?
Same reason–the fear of that tactic backfiring is the problem. Better to do nothing than to fail.
Yes, corporate America has a very short term horizon–but they are afraid that negative ads will backfire in the short term. The other option (the type of ads they do now) will never backfire–they might not do anything, but they will never backfire.
I think that a better question is why doesn’t corporate America simply stop advertising, and add all of that expense to the bottom line? Or substitute an inexpensive, viral internet strategy and can ALL of their hugely expensive network advertising. Frankly, I think most of that advertising is wasted anyway–who really pays attention to it?
Then television will go the way of the newspapers…..
Online denizens always point to viral advertising as the answer. While viral promotion has a very romantic appeal to it, and there have been some really cool successes, the number of successful case studies are few. Moreover, the successful viral efforts usually are based on the kind of ultra-edgy creative that most corporations would never approve. If it’s not edgy, it generally won’t spread virally, and corporations almost never approve edgy. That’s the dilemma.
Mainstream advertising is much less effective than it used to be, it’s true. But for the most part still is a better cost per contact deal than the impossibly decentralized Internet. I know from client work that mainstream advertising still produces results, often dramatic results. Maybe not the kind of results it produced in the hey day of newspapers and TVs, but generally better results than their other alternatives. Yes, there is a lot of ineffective advertising out there but the broadside against advertising as a whole is overstated. Mac knows a little bit about online options, but where do they go to make their biggest market share impact? The medium that supposedly no one watches any more.
There is a substantive and lucrative middle ground between “traditional mainstream advertising” and “screw it all, let’s just ‘viral’ videos.”
If you look at campaigns I’ve worked on in my career, I’ve put together several campaigns with lots of non-mainstream ad components — street marketing, banner ads, social networking, street theatre, wild postings, grassroots organizing, grassroots videography, etc. So, I’m not arging against those things.
But I’ve always viewed those things as the spice and mainstream ads as the meat and veggies, because the sheer reach for mainstream ads is still so much broader and the price-per-contact still so much lower than those alternatives. At the end of the day, you need reach and frequency to have a shot at achieving most effectiveness goals, and at this stage you still usually need mainstream ads to get big time reach and frequency. If the campaign budget is large enough, I like to have both meat and veggies and spices. Yum. But when it’s not big enough to fund both, I’m not in favor of funding spices before entrees.
So my point to non-mainstream advertising champions is not “don’t ever do it.” My point is “keep the seductive new tools in proper perspective and don’t make the mistake of ruling out mainstream as as irrelevant just because they are less than they once were.”
Maybe businesses don’t use negative ads because they fear retaliation. Don’t draw your gun against a damn good gunfighter. If you point out that your competitor is selling useless crap, that competitor might convincingly point out how useless and crappy your useless crap is. Let the company that is without bullshit cast the first negative ad…
Are there models of products sold, and sold well, with no advertising? For years I used Paul Sebastian cologne (my dear Ellen still raves…) The company did not advertise — and used the money saved to give their customers premiums. I’d buy cologne at Dayton’s or Saks, and they’d hand me a knapsack with the Paul Sebastian logo on it, or a portable radio. I use both still, years and years later.
Think of all the Multi Level Marketing (MLM) stuff–Amway, Mary Kay, etc. There is one prominent example.
I don’t disagree that going without advertising is possible for some. I just disagree that “simply stopping advertising” is the best decision for most.
(Ask Lisa if Bruce is exaggerating the hypnotic, erotic, symphonic effect that Paul Sebastian cologne mixed with Bruce’s own pheromones produces. Really, he should bottle the stuff.)
I’m sure you’re right about fear of retaliation, Bruce. But politicians fear retaliation too, and they pull the trigger anyway, for fear the other person may fire first. But the same dynamic doesn’t play out with corporate types.
My guess is that attack advertising happens less in the corporate world because The Abyss is less date certain that it is in politics. In politics, they know that if support doesn’t improve in X days, they will lose power. In the corporate world, they can lose power too. Maybe. Some day. It’s much less date certain. Therefore, they have much less of a sense of urgency.
Joe: I think you’re stretching to call the Mac-PC ads “attacks.” If anything, they are popular because they are anti-attacks.
Think of the music that is playing in the background of the ads; it’s similar to a lullabye. The PC man and Mac kid stand facing front..not squaring off against each other. The PC man makes his claim and usually someone else (a customer who is switching over from the Dark Side, for example) counters it for Mac. The Mac kid just stands there all polite and non-threatening like.
I like these ads. But then again, I believe Macs are the way to go (even though the rest of the business world still clings to PCs.)
I’m a Mac guy, and I like the ads too. I admire both their entertainment value and their bottom line effectiveness.
But I have to disagree with you on this one. Ad-after-ad, they’re saying how much their competitors product sucks. It may not be fighting music, but it’s fighting words. Mac is smart to put the velvet on the hammer, but it’s still a hammer.
But, Joe, what if their competitor’s product really does “suck”? Remember, you can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig. Right?
But yeah. Velvet hammers are the way to go. They confuse the people you hit.
I think it’s the creativity of the product commercials as they attack that separates them from the turgid “My opponent shoots dogs out of his bedroom window at night” political ads.
Turn loose Jon Stewart on some politician ads — or his equivalent, if there could be such a person, in advertising — and we’d see some attack ads that are fun and pointed.
Whether employing a velvet hammer or steely ball-peen, I still am intrigued by why more commercial marketers aren’t doing to their competitors what Mac is successfully doing to its competitor — calling out differentiation.
Bruce, I totally agree with you that creative and humorous attack ads — or “comparative ads” as the more Orwellian advertisers prefer to say — are more palatable. But they aren’t necessarily more effective. Some are, and some aren’t. Some that you and I adore are too subtle, complex and/or indirect to be persuasive with the intended audiences.
This is a little off-subject, but this is a fun parody of Microsoft marketing, produced by Microsoft employees:
As an aside, when I was a kid, I got it into my head that it must be illegal to name a competitor in an ad … because it never, ever happened … first time I saw one, I was shocked.
Maybe you just can’t compare political ads to commercial ads. As I believe Mr. Benidt has said a time or two: Politicians ain’t brands. Or shouldn’t be.
I don’t know why “politicians as brands” troubles people. I have lots of friends in politics, so I’m fully aware these are people not products. But that fact doesn’t mean that the lessons of marketing in the political sector are not relevant to the task of marketing in the commercial sector.
A brand’s job is to exhibit what the brand owner is offering in the marketplace. Well, that’s what candidates are doing when they are running for office. It’s just a democratic marketplace instead of a commercial marketplace.
I think that the idea of politicians as brands suggests that all Republicans are a brand, and therefore all alike (or should be all alike, and that likeness should be enforced as a sort of quality control).
At least that is one objection to the metaphor that I can come up with.
I see your point, PM. But when you look at the bulk of political ads, candidates are marketing themselves as individuals, not as cogs in the party machine. If party is mentioned at all, and it often is not, it is a very small proportion of overall content. Such as…
One important distinction between advertising for a political candidate and advertising for a commercial product is this: All product claims (such as, “We work twice as fast as Pepto-Bismol” must be substantiated with scientific proof if challenged. A politician can never be asked to “prove” any claim.
True, but the commercial rules must be pretty loose. For instance, Windows doesn’t interupt anywhere near as much as Mac claims in this ad. Mac is making a false claim, and it is uncontested by Microsoft or federal regulators. My guess is that Microsoft disputes the truth of a large percentage of the “I’m a Mac” ad accusations, yet, for whatever reason, Microsoft isn’t forcing Mac to substantiate or shut up.
Because politicians are heavily scrutinized by reporters and Internet fact checking services, I’d argue that a political ad is more likely to be publicly be held accountable as false than a commercial ad. On paper, there is more policing authority on the commercial side, but it is a paper tiger. In terms of actual PR accountability, there is more on the political side.
I’ve said it somewhere on this site before but I tend to pay attention to ads that feature humor — doesn’t mean I like the product or service. I just pay attention. The E trade baby ads leave me in stiches. I advise people for a living so the do-it-yourself message doesn’t offend me. My clients don’t want to do it themselves. I think advertising is highly effective and totally worthless at the same time. It depends on what you are advertising. I don’t use it in my business — too much regulation, compliance and I can’t even use testimonials, unlike word of mouth and referrals.
I’m with you on the E-trade babies, Mike. Funny stuff. But it doesn’t convince me to use E-trade, so I’m not sure if the use of humor was effective.
I don’t admire the creativity of political and policy advocacy ads, but I do admire their focus on bottom line effectivenss. An earlier post elaborates….
And now Apple is taking some of it’s own medicine from the challenger candidate Verizon:
Frank Luntz says “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.”
In the Mac commercials, PC-personified is the aggressor against clearly superior (better looking, cooler, more modern) Mac-personified, whose behavior toward PC is always respectful. So, even though the viewer consciously knows it’s Apple’s ad, they see David and Goliath, and side with the nice underdog. When you go negative on your competitors, you demean yourself too. How brilliant to make commercials that look like your opponent is attacking YOU (even as they’re clearly losing.)
I just wish that i could lose like Microsoft!
Really great analysis Zina. Please join us more often.
And let me be clear, the point I am making is not “commercial competitors should be savaging each other.” The point I am making is “commercial competitors shouldn’t be so afraid to point out competitors’ relative weaknesses, because it’s effective.” Yes, Mac’s approach is affable, humorous and indirect, but Mac is pointing out competitive weaknesses of a competitor in a way few private sector entities do.