Advertisers invest heavily on brands promotion but hardly get returns on their investments. How can they reap from their investments? Experts show the way out, reports ADEDEJI ADEMIGBUJI.
For advertisers and creative agencies,the maxim “I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted….I just don’t know which half,” is real. This maxim was popularised by John Wanamaker, regarded as the father of both modern departmental stores and advertising.
Developing advert copies is difficult. It becomes more difficult when such adverts fail to sell the product. When that happens, the creative agency gets fired by the client, then Wanamaker’s maxim becomes apt.
The reality of the advertising business is that many marketing programmes are usually not easily justified if weighed on the balance of return-on-investment. Such advertisement ends up being a leap of faith because it’s particularly expensive and its direct benefits particularly difficult to quantify.
A good advert should sell a product and not just create good impression, humour or recall, especially in the current economic realities which is putting pressure on advertisers to cut down on their marketing budgets. This, perhaps, remains a major reason Cannes Lion Festival, the world’s most coveted advertising and marketing awards, decided to introduce a new award category to reward any outstandingly creative advertising piece or an innovative marketing strategy that truly drives sales.
For Nigerian advertising agencies, the industry has witnessed great creatives that have all the element of good concept, notwithstanding that they are yet to win the Cannes Lion Festival. However, the recognition of their works by some other global rating agencies, is a testimony to the fact that they are not doing badly, except for the fact that most of the ads hardly enhance sales or influence consumers to buy the product.
The abysmal performance of the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) campaign adverts is a case of advert investment gone awry. The telecom sector is among the highest advert spenders in the country.
According to figures from a recent Mediafact, a publication of MediaReach OMD, last year, the sector spent N14.7 billion on advertising to emerge as the biggest spender. During the period under review, all the telecoms operators reportedly invested a larger part of their media investment on MNP a scheme introduced by Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC), to increase quality of service and deepen competition among the players. Surprisingly, the NCC reported few months ago that only a dismal 80, 424 subscribers ported out over 129 million subscribers within 10 months (July 2013 to February 2014).
Further statistics from the telecom industry regulator revealed that between May last year and February this year, MTN, the biggest telecoms company in the country, recorded 36,819 cases of subscribers porting out of the network. This was followed by Airtel, Globacom and Etisalat with 22,595; 12,357; and 8,653 respectively. The figure also showed that within the period under review, MTN recorded monthly out-porting figures of 3,409; 2,719; 3,142; 3,925; 4,266; 4,453; 4,491; 3,052; 3,667; and 3,695. Also, Airtel recorded monthly out-porting figures of 1,190; 1,315; 1,327; 5,826; 6,520; 1,447; 1,004; 1,199; 1,429; and 1,338. Globacom also recorded monthly out-porting figures of 1,646; 1,122; 1,367; 1,354; 1,267; 1,204; 1,206; 973; 978; and 1,240 for the period. Etisalat had the lowest number of subscribers who left its network with a monthly figure of 768; 646; 917; 934; 1,019; 1,001; 1,129; 626; 806 and 807 for the period. In the report, MTN reportedly accounted for about 45.78 per cent of out-porters; Airtel, 28.09 per cent; Globacom, 15.36 per cent; and Etisalat, 10.75 per cent.
While the CEO of TPT, Mr. Charles Igbinidu, is of the opinion that the MNP campaign created a high level of awareness, but to the telcos, such advertising investment has remained a waste, at least, going by the number of people that the portability ads called to action.
In Igbinidu’s assessment, the campaign is not totally a flop as being suggested in some quarters. This is because the portability campaigns have, at least, achieved one goal, which is awareness. “I am sure many Nigerians are now aware that they can change their operator and still retain their numbers. So in the area of awareness creation, it has been a success. I also believe that MTN’s ‘I don port’ campaign is a classic. It is a very creative campaign and the media relations leveraging has also been superb,” said Igbinidu.
The Managing Director of Milward Brown Nigeria, a global marketing research firm, Mrs. Geri Roberts, recalled that one of the campaigns (MTN’s Saka I Don Port) generated high level of appeal with great humour but she wondered that the ad failed to influence people to switch from their network despite the comic model explored to sell the MTN MNP product. She explained that the advert failed as reflected in NCC report because the advertisers and their agencies failed to audit the creative before going to town. She explained that an effort should have been made to understand how the consumers feel about the telecom services and take critical steps to address them before flagging off such campaign which she described as appealing and humorous. “These are four people. All of them same of same. Even when we are talking about MNP, it is not enough to bring Saka dancing. There are issues. Call drops. It’s raining season now, you can hardly have smooth network and so switch from what to what? When these adverts were being aired, if anyone of them had checked the consumer’s opinion, they will know the true picture. In Saka advert, we laughed and enjoyed it but we refused to follow Saka. The advert was just about following Saka (a model who dumped Etisalat for MTN) and no benefit offered,” she said.
Why advert fail to sell the product
The Managing Director, Millward Brown Sub Saharan Africa, Mr. Soumya Saklani, told The Nation that sometimes, an advert can be creative but may not impact on sales of the product being advertised. While most of these ads are memorable, he regrets that they are often classified during gain analysis as waste of investment. “Creative, but can it sell? There are ads that are very engaging, very appealing, people remember them, they enjoy them but there are two things that are equally important beyond just remembering advert,” he said.
Saklani explained further: “One of it is do remembering what brand it was for. After time, we found out that people remember what was shown last night. Very good ad. We asked them what brand was it for and they answer it well. So, one of the challengers advertising agency face is not only about coming out with a creative ad that is very strong, they have to make sure that the branding is very good. The brand must be integrated in the advert so that people will not forget which brand it was for. For instance, if you see an MTN ad, you will see Yellow everywhere and they have every other ways to make the advertising more branded. Another is Call to Action. So, yes, I like it, I enjoyed it but what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to buy it, recommend it was for or am I supposed to find out more? So, there are the issues that must be considered to make an ad succeed.”
In addition, Roberts noted that most advert fail to sell because they make consumers look as if they are silly. “What moves me when I watch an advert is that it must be grounded in reality and have a bit of humour. An advert shouldn’t talk to me as if I am silly. Some advert come with someone with a dark complexion and after using a product he becomes white the following day. Many of these advert talk to you as if you are silly. They talk to consumers as if they are silly but the consumers are not silly at all,” said Robert.
Who should be blamed: Client or Agency?
Over the years, Nigerian advertising agencies have complained that clients obstruct their creative concept. In the same vein, advertisers too believe that after developing a good brand, getting a good agency to communicate the value proposition is always a critical task for brand managers.
The former Managing Director of Rosabel Advertising Limited, Mr. Kayode Oluwalana lamented agency experience: “Sometimes you wonder if the client is a copy writer or art director. If he is one, then why does he need an agency? Some clients get in the way so much that by the time the communication material is ready for exposure, it has become completely bastardised and useless, but all the same the client is happy! It’s his work after all. A particular client is known to have shot down an otherwise great concept with ‘my daughter doesn’t like it’. And here, the daughter is way far off from the audience targeted with the campaign.”
Contrary to this position, the General Manager, Marketing for MTN and President, Advertisers Association of Nigeria (ADVAN), Mr. Kola Oyeyemi, in his recent book, “Kill or Get Killed: The Killer Marketing Instinct” wrote: “Once the brand management team has successfully developed a compelling and relevant value proposition base on sound insight, communicating this proposition to the trade and the consumers is the next critical job. The best of propositions can fail if wrongly communicated. Thus, the choice of the right advertising agency as a partner is very important. If you get the hiring decision wrong, you can compromise the fortune of the brand.”
To Robert, neither advertisers nor their agencies should be shielded from the blame of creating a communication that fails to enhance return on investment. She said most communication managers at both end fail to carry the consumers along from the first stage of their brand messaging before it get to the public. “I will blame it on no one but the most important link missing in most adverts is the consumers. I won’t say it is either the client or the agency is to be blamed. It is good for the creative agency to package for the client to approve but remember that the kind of people we are packaging advert for are quite different from clients and the agency. So, for me, I will say that right from the beginning, we should bring in the consumers so that they can give us objective feedback from the creative idea. Though I know that consumers tend to kill the creative ideas because they don’t understand the rationale but we can use them as critique and we don’t have to take everything hook, line and sinker and throw away the ads. The reality still is that they know what make them take purchasing decision, what makes them happy. So, we take the creative from there,” she said.
Making the advert money count
Globally, advertisers are demanding result-oriented advertising copies. One of the recent innovations that are helping them gauge the effectiveness is through software or a method called “Link-Testing” and help stop the waste of investment on advertisement. The proprietor of the software, Milward Brown, said before advertisement is produced and exposed it must go through Link-Testing which accordingly helps predicts the sales response to advertising. “With volumetric predictions included as part of Link, Millward Brown can help you prove the value of strong creative by predicting the sales response, and can also provide insights to help you adjust the broader marketing mix in order to increase ROI from your advertising,” Roberts explained.
According to her, the Link volumetric is a new analytical service that marries Link results with sales (or results from sales response modeling) and other relevant client data to create a more direct measure of the contribution that advertising quality will make to sales.
Link has been extensively validated and evidence shows that ads which perform well in Link are more likely to generate a significant sales uplift than poor performers. This means that marketers can focus on the issues and opportunities identified in Link, safe in the knowledge that addressing those issues will make the advertising more effective.
“In Link, we measure an ad in all these parameters or measure its ability to succeed, it can measure that the branding is good but the call to action is weak. Link started in the 80s and it helps advertising agencies understands how best to make an advert sell a product. Link measure where the problems and correct to make the advert attracts the consumers. It focuses on the quality of the advertising creative,” she explained.
Narrating his experience about the Nigerian advertising creative landscape, Saklani complained that most advert in Nigeria fail because they are not grounded on good research and production values. “The audio and video don’t follow some quality measures. Link offers an opportunity for advertisers and marketers who are spending millions of millions on the advertising budget to maximise the impact of their investment and stop the wastages,” he said.
When agencies can use link to test an advert
“If a building foundation is going on and you wait till it gets to 16 storeys before calling an architect, and he tells you this is bad and you begin to correct it floor to floor. That will spell doom at the end of the completion. But in Link-testing an advert, you start from the beginning of the creative concept. It is a software and methodology designed by Milward Brown to create solution. For instance, it will determine if you will have to reduce a 45 seconds advert to 10 seconds and safe money yet impact on the sales. It will guide advertising agencies and advertisers on quality control of the advert,” Roberts explained.
MNP failed pre-campaign gain loss test?
“In the case of waste in MNP advert, if the advertisers had linked-test the copies, using animation, we would have told you that yes I am laughing and as a consumer I will have been able to tell you that there is nothing to gain in the advert but Link will tell you about the gain losses analysis. Link will tell you that this advert is very funny, very engaging but call to action is very weak. “ she said.
With the Link-Testing software, expert believes consumers will trust most advertisement while advertisers too will experience increase patronage through their promises on their advertisement.
