The conference section of Promotions Now 2014 gave us the opportunity to invite Bob Hoffman, the author behind the refreshingly honest, no-bollocks-you-can’t-handle-the-truth-I’m-not-buying-it AdContrarian blog. We talked over Skype about what kind of attitude could make the advertising industry a better place to work in and what makes a promotion great or awful. For those who don’t know him yet, first of all, you’re welcome! And then here’s a short bio: Bob is an author, speaker, and partner in Type A Group, a consultancy firm working with agencies and marketers. He is the author of "101 Contrarian Ideas about Advertising" which is the top selling advertising book on Amazon. Bob is also the author of "The Ad Contrarian" book and "The Ad Contrarian" blog, which was named one of the world's most influential advertising and marketing blogs by Business Insider. In 2012, Bob was selected the Ad Person of the Year by the San Francisco Advertising Club.
IQads: Hello, Bob. Can you see me?
Bob Hoffman: Yes, can you see me? Am I gorgeous? How are you?
IQads: Yes, just as I had hoped :). So let’s start. One of the very refreshing concepts on your blog is the ‘troublemaker’ and the need for troublemakers in the advertising industry, so what would a serious troublemaker have to say about promotional campaigns?
Bob Hoffman: Actually the title of my next book is going to be “Advertising Needs Troublemakers”. That's not specifically about promotions, it’s about the advertising industry in general. There’s too much agreement on everything, there's not enough controversy, there aren't enough people saying ‘wait a minute, let's think about this before we accept what you say as the truth’. A perfect example, in AdWeek, one of our primary advertising magazine, there was an article today titled You won't believe how big TV still is. Now, for 10 years, here in the States, the same publications have been writing how no one watches TV anymore and television is dying. Now, all of a sudden, they're waking up and they're realizing that all along that was baloney. And we need people to stand up to the experts and to the geniuses and say ‘no’, ‘the facts are not congruent with what you're saying’, ‘you're wrong’. The advertising industry has been consolidated and there are just a handful of huge agencies that control so much of the advertising in the world. I don't know how it is in your country, but here in the States there are 3 huge global entities that control over 70% of the advertising and they're dictating what the conversation is, they're dictating what people believe. So there is a need for troublemakers who say ‘no, you're wrong’, for more people who stand up and argue against what is conventional wisdom and what is commonly believed in the advertising industry these days.
IQads: Could you tell me what a ‘wait-a-minute’ question about promotions would be?
Bob Hoffman: I think there are a couple of wait-a-minute questions about promotions. For one thing, we take it for granted that promoting all the time is a bad thing and that it's going to destroy the brand, right? Everyone says that you can't be promoting all the time or you're going to destroy your brand. How do we know that? McDonald's is promoting all the time, they always have something on sale, they always have a value proposition.
Secondly, I'm not so sure that brand loyalty is really as important as we make it out to be. I think that, to a large degree, brand loyalty isn't loyalty at all, it's just habit. I prefer Coke to Pepsi for example, but if I go to a baseball game and they don't have Coke but they have Pepsi, I'm very happy to go back to my subsequent Pepsi. I don't mind, it's not a big deal. Loyalty to me is an inch deep, it's not really what we in the advertising business make it out to be a lot of the time. And yes, I do have brand preferences, there's no question about that, there are brands that I usually buy and for some reason I like them better, but it's very easy to break me of that habit. If you have a better value, if you have a better proposition or if you have something that seems more appealing to me I'm ready to change my mind.
I think brands are finding that out. And, as they begin finding that out, I think promotions are going to become more and more important, because people are willing to make changes particularly when economic times are tough. People are willing to forego their brand habits, to do something new if it saves them some money and gives them equal or better value.
IQads: A lot of marketers talk about the consumers' increasing pragmatism and how to fight it.
Bob Hoffman: Of course, advertisers and marketers want religious advocates to their brand, they want people who truly believe. But most people are not that ideological, most people are practical about what they do with their money and they want to do things that make sense to them. Now, there are certain categories, like cigarettes and alcohol and beer, in which there is no logic at all, it's all about emotion. But for most people there aren't that many of those brands that we really feel strongly about. We are exposed to hundreds of product categories and maybe there are 5 or 10 in which we're strongly brand loyal, for most of the other stuff we just have habits. Smart marketers are always working to break the habits that other brands are benefiting from, people are staying up late every night to try and figure out how to get me to switch from Coke to Pepsi. And I'll do it, if the deal is right, I'll do it.
Now I'm not saying that human beings are logical machines and that there's no emotion involved in decision making. In fact, there's plenty of emotion involved in decision making, but one of the things that I always found interesting was that emotion is the response, it's not a stimulus and factual matter can produce an emotional response just as much as emotional matter can produce an emotion. We always think that an emotional output requires an emotional input. But if someone tells me I can buy a car for a hundred dollars, I'm going to explode with happiness. I will have an emotional reaction to that factual matter.
IQads: Could you give me an example of a good promotional campaign you've worked on and tell us why it worked?
Bob Hoffman: One of the most successful promotional campaigns I worked on was for McDonald's, for a product called the McDouble. It was very successful and I think the key to success for the campaign was that, number 1: it was a pretty good product, that always helps; number 2: we had a very good price; number 3: we did extensive media, including television, radio and in-store, so it was a very well-rounded campaign.
I think one of the keys to a successful campaign is it being specific. One of the problems that promotional people have sometimes is they will take a standard advertising unit, like a TV commercial, and they'll run their regular TV commercial and, during the last 5 seconds, they will deliver some promotional message – “Now, get it for 3.99” - instead of focusing on the promotion itself throughout the advertising unit. If you're doing a promotion, promote the promotion, don't tag it on to something else. Make the whole ad about the promotion, don't make it about something and then tag the promotion on at the end.
IQads: Could you also tell me about a promotion that didn't go as planned and elaborate on what went wrong?
Bob Hoffman: There are tons of them. I think the primary reason that promotions don't go well is, first of all, the offer isn't compelling. If you're going to do a promotion, you have to do something that's going to really motivate people. You can’t do stuff that you think is cool or you think is fun if it's not going to be motivational to people, if they're not going to see it as a good deal or as good value. So the number 1 thing in a promotion is: the offer has to be compelling. The second thing is the media has to be targeted enough and intense enough in order for the people to get the message, and third, you need good creative work, you need to deliver your message in a way that is interesting and that's going to penetrate people's consciousness so they get it. Those are the 3 key things, the offer, the media and the creative. And, I hate to say it, 'cause I came out of the creative department and I always think creative should be first, but probably in that order: the offer has to be compelling, the media has to be intense enough and the creative has to deliver the message in an interesting way.
An example of a stinker, yeah? Ok, I'll give you one. I'm not going to mention the client's name because it’s going to be embarrassing, but we did a promotion in which we were trying to do some good. And we were going to take a certain percent of sales of a product and donate it to a very worthy cause. It was a very nice idea, very well integrated into the brand, it was done with all the kinds of things that you want built into a promotion, it wasn't done in a cheap or lousy way. It was supposed to last for 2 or 3 months and after 3 weeks we had to stop it because nobody cared. That was very disheartening to us because it was a good idea. You know there's a whole lot of talk about cause marketing and how the consumer really wants to participate with brands which are doing good, but unfortunately that's not always the case. We have to be realistic about that. This was a promotion that was meant to do some very good work and just failed miserably.
IQads: I would also like to talk to you about Facebook contests, because a lot of promotions are now announced and made entirely on Facebook. What do you think about them?
Bob Hoffman: There are over a billion people on Facebook, so if you want to reach a lot of people, Facebook is very good for that. It might actually be more effective for promotions and prizes than it is for advertising in the general sense, of creating a general demand and brand-building. So, although I'm a skeptic about Facebook advertising in general, I think that, for promotions and prize offerings, if it's done correctly and well targeted, it can probably be a good medium for that.
IQads: Even “the like our picture and you might get something” Facebook contests?
Bob Hoffman: Oh, that stuff is awful. “Tell us about your moment” contests - that's baloney, nobody is interested in that. That's marketers thinking they're marketing, but what they're really doing is kidding themselves. Nobody's interested in that stuff.
IQads: Yet you see a lot of participants every time.
Bob Hoffman: Most of whom are probably not real people, there's a whole industry of fake Likes, Facebook is doing a terrible job of controlling it. I think the whole accumulation of likes on Facebook is pretty soon going to fade, I don't think intelligent marketers take that as seriously as they used too anymore.
IQads: You also said that counting Facebook likes and Twitter followers is not a legitimate goal, so what would a legitimate goal be?
Bob Hoffman: The legitimate goal is to sell stuff. If you're selling stuff, you're doing your job. If you're not selling stuff, all the rest is irrelevant. We use Facebook likes and Twitter followers and all that stuff as a substitute for sales. It's supposed to somehow correlate to sales, but it doesn't. And it's very hard to draw a straight line between Facebook likes and Twitter followers and actually selling stuff. The perfect example of that was the Pepsi Refresh project a couple of years ago. I'll bet you they spent almost 100 million dollars on that promotion, and they got 3.5 million likes on Facebook and they lost 5% market share that year. So where's the correlation? The correlation was: the more Facebook likes Pepsi got, the more business Coke got. So using Facebook likes as a proxy for sales is just plain stupid. Sales are sales and Facebook likes are not sales.
Plus the people who like you on Facebook generally tend to be your loyal users, but the way brands grow is by getting new users. Talking to your loyal users is nice, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it's not going to grow your brand. So you need to find new users and people who are not your customers are generally not following you on Facebook or Twitter.
IQads: So what would you say is the role of social media in the channel mix?
Bob Hoffman: Social media is good for small brands that know who it is they want to reach and can get those people to follow them. For example, social media has been very effective for me, it’s been helping me sell my book. But it doesn't scale, I'm a tiny little brand and I work very, very hard at social media. Most brands that are huge don't know how to use social media, they think that accumulating large numbers of people is the answer. Also, they don't work hard at it, what they post in social media is horrible, it's just self-serving nonsense, it doesn't help their potential customer do anything. I try to make what I post, on my blog or on Twitter, either informative or entertaining so that people stick with it and get a good feel for what my AdContrarian brand is about. But most marketers don't have the time or energy or intelligence to do that, they have interns running their social media program. If you look at what most of these brands post on their Facebook page, it's just self-serving baloney that no intelligent person is interested in.
