ThinkNoLimit Marketing Coaching

For a change, I have selected some quotes about Advertising for you to savour. Enjoy : "The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague." - Bill Cosby "What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it." - David Ogilvy "Advertising is legalized lying." - H.G. Wells "Advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on." - Jerry Della Femina "I've learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one." - Leo Burnett "In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide." - William Bernbach "The headline is the most important element of an ad. It must offer a promise to the reader of a believable benefit. And it must be phrased in a way to make it memorable." - Morris Hite "Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising." - John Lahr

So looks like the fights goes on between HK Broadband and PCCW. My brother sent me this Flash comic (click onto the above image to see). I guess it is an eDM sent to internet users. It is bascially laughing at the credibility of PCCW's coverage of optical fibre. There are several things worth noting about this fight-back initiative. First it picked the right channel talking to internet users via eDM. Second there is no censorship on the net. Hence, it can push it to limit in term of compeitive message. You just can't show this on TV without getting banned. Finally it is very clever to use animation/comic to continue the campaign (I'm aware that it is using the same approach for print ads and outdoors). It is cheap and fast to produce. The felxibility would enable it to react to any competitive move of PCCW. Don't know whether it is by accident or something planned. If it is the latter, the agency and the marketers in HK Broadband must be really really smart. They shoul...

High Definition TV service is not yet launched while various brands are advertising about their HD TV sets already. Understand that they all want to gain the first-mover advantage. This is an interesting scenario. Rate of adoption of a new technology often depend on trialability. By trialability, we mean consumers need to try and experience before they make a purchase. Brands talk about 1080 resolution and true HD yet there is no way to demonstrate how good it is as HD is not in service yet. A TVC like this one will only remind us that Sony will have HD TV sets available. Is it good ? Is it better ? Consumers just can't tell when they see the ad on their current low-resolution TV sets. So how do we go about it ? First it's all about timing. I would block a heavy media schedule, say two weeks before the service launch. Try to be the exclusive TV set advertiser in prime times if I could afford the budget. The objective of the TVC would be to encourage people to check out the new ...

This is quite an enjoyable TVC. However, I'm not a big fan of corporate advertising, I have to say. In many cases, corporate advertising can only bring up the awareness and saliency of the company. Nothing more. Nothing less. Corporate ads are not really selling any product or service in specific and they usually target at broad audiences. Well, if your audiences are from 3 to 80, how creative can you be ? Creativity is not about pleasing everyone after all. So the corporate ads we see are usually warm, motherhood and nice to watch but easy to forget with cliche messages. For this Construction Bank TVC as an example, its message is basically "Construction Bank helps you realize your dreams". Sounds familiar, doesn't it ? Every bank says so one way or another. While advertising is often taken as the easy way out in corporate communications, PR is in fact a more effective tool for building awareness and image. The Standard Chartered Marathon is a very good example.

The TVCs of HK Broadband has really made a stir to the advertising scene. My post about the HK Broadband campaign have received quite a few comments. Guess generating talk-abouts is what 王維基 is good at. Thanks the readers who contributed this link of PCCW 1000M+ TVC. PCCW is fighting back. Interesting that it uses rats to make a mockery of HK Broadband. It doesn't look like a gentlemen act as the market leader. I think the TVC is not really striking the right chord. Basically the HK Broadband TVCs are talking about its high speed with optical fibres going into home. High speed is the claim and supposedly the benefit that people are looking for. The coverage of optical fibres is the support. So if PCCW is fighting back head-on, it should talk about speed, rather than its coverage of optical fibres. It has also invented a new brand name, PCCW 1000M+. I searched in its website and it is in fact a new service plan. Now we have choices of 3M, 6M or 1000M services depending on where yo...

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People always say "女人錢容易賺", especially in beauty products. Maybe it's me as a guy. I find some ads are trying to kid women. The Vidal Sassoon one I talked about yesterday is one and this Neutrogena Hydro-Boost Mask is another. It is said that the mask has many holes and can press the moisturizing essence into the pores of the skin through some hole-to-hole action. It sounds like a great invention but to me, it's just too magical to believe. Sometimes, I wonder whether it is my problem only. Would people really believe that ?

Sometimes I feel that some ads are kidding us, big brands or small brands, one way or another. Vidal Sassoon is an established shampoo brand. P&G does continuous upgrade of formulation to sustain the brand, a typical P&G way of marketing. As we all know, it's not easy to come up with a continuous flow of new/additional product benefit claims. Since breakthrough ideas are hard to find, we see quite many trivialized, sometimes unbelievable, claims. In this TVC, it says the new Vidal Sassoon can smoothen and straighten your hair so that your face looks slimmer. You must be kidding me. Of course, if you are as slim as the model in the TVC, it doesn't matter which shampoo you use. It's a windy season. Your hair won't stay covering your fatty face all the time even if you use it ...

Thanks for the contribution from an anonymous reader who sent me these links. Brilliant TVCs are rare these days. I've been seeing these TVCs for a while but didn't have time to locate them. These are the follow-on TVCs from the last one , still playing mockery of PCCW. Personally I like the Graham Bell version more. Making fun out of a dead person is usually a taboo and going into this route can be a possible turn-off. However, it manages to blend in some thoughtful executions into the TVC to ensure it is surreal and fun : the 粵語長片-like setting, the cute 牛頭馬臉 and the funny dialogue. As for the Ant version, it's not as creative as the Graham Bell version but it ls along the same concept with the last TVC . If we put both TVCs together, they are more like coming from the same series. The Graham Bell one is more creative but it's an odd one out. And I guess that's why they chose to shoot and air both at the same time. Good that they have the budget. But if you had jus...

There are 3 benefits spelled out in this print ad : 防水, 防光, 抗臭氧. This printer can print 防水 pictures. We can understand this benefit but what are 防光 and 抗臭氧 ? Nothing said. That's not important as it seems 防水 is the key benefit that appeals to consumers. I can imagine there could be loads of creative concepts to communicate the water-proof benefit. However, it has taken the celebrity route. Who is 唐素琪 ? Do you know her ? I don't. She simply doesn't add value in communicating the message. I really wonder why people are so obsessed with using celebrity ...

A reader left me a message with these two links of videos and I guess he/she wanted me to talk about and compare these two birdnest TVCs. 老行家 is the pioneer in instant (即食) birdnest. It opened shops around town and invested heavily on A&P. Its business grew and attracted more competitors who invested even more in the market and they collectively made the market explode. Once popular but I think the hype of instant birdnest has gone. Back to the TVCs, the 老行家 used a testimonial approach like the Pepsi challenge to communicate quality superiority. It's quite hard selling but to the point. On the other hand, the 官燕棧 one uses emotional appeal of family values to communicate quality. It's an enjoyable TVC but doesn't it look very familiar ? Same kind of approach has been used by many other products and services like banks,jewelries and even cake shops. At the end of the day, I think a couple of TVCs like these will not turn around the overall category decline. Quality is a ...

Before we see an ad as a consumer, there is a sell-and-buy process behind the scene between the agency and the client. When I see some ads like this one, I really wonder how this sell-and-buy process is like. The key message, I guess, is that Korean Air takes you to anywhere in the world (well, which airline doesn't ?). Ok, it's a me-too message and if you want it to cut through, at least you will need work harder on the creative. Imagine, if you were the marketing guy and the agency presented something like this to you, what would you say ? I wouldn't know how to make a single comment and approving it would be out of the question. However, this kind of ads got through the process and appear in front of us. There must be some magic in it ...

Postal service is a not-for-profit public service. However, unlike other public services, it can potentially generate revenue to help finance its operations so that the government can save some bugs. Over time, we see addition of new products and services and it is becoming more like a business. SpeedPost is a courier service supposed to compete with companies like DHL, Fedex and UPS. When it comes to running a business, marketing has an crucial role to play. However, most governmental services lack marketing know-how as they didn't need marketing in the past. Look at this ad. It's a lucky draw promotion alright but the ad is like an amateur piece of work. The layout is difficult to read, copies are all over the place and in different font colours in order to adjust to the white cloud/blue sky background, the logo is not prominent ... well, come to think of it, we shouldn't demand too much. If you are a good marketer, will you choose to work in a governmental service or a c...

The job market is good and it's approaching the year end. Thinking about changing job ? In the past we bought the Saturday's SCMP to look for jobs. Now we don't need to, thanks to the Internet. It's a case of online medium replacing traditional medium. SCMP has online classified post too but I bet jobsdb has been eating up quite a bit of share from SCMP in the job advertisement market. Here is another player, http://www.careertimes.com.hk/ , with TVC support. It's not a bad TVC at all as it spells accurately the convenience and the benefits of online job hunting. But such convenience and benefits are generic and common to all online job hunting services. The trouble is that it doesn't talk about any competitive advantage or added benefit if any. Be they more jobs, easier navigation, helpful features or so on, we need to communicate them to consumers to win. So this TVC can uplift its awareness only. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Time to have a good break ... I'm having a short vacation from Nov 10 to 13. During my absence, there may be a mystery guest writer in this blog. Stay tuned.

There is a phenomenon in HK : birth rate is coming down and more people are keeping pets. Looks like HK like pets than babies. Well, if it is said it takes HK$4m to bring up a child, it's much more fun to keep a pet. Pets are becoming important members of many families and pet-related business is definitely growing. And we see a "mirror" approach to the pet-related business development where all product/service ideas for human can be applied on pets. There are spas, saloons, clothing, clinics (western and Chinese) and so on. Here is an example of health supplements, Lingzhi. The ad is almost identical to any other Lingzhi ads for human consumption. Isn't that interesting ? (my doggie)

Ginseng is an aged and long-forgotten health supplement. It's not hot compared with Lingzhi and Cordyceps. If you were the marketer of 正官庒, the one and only leading brand in the ginseng category, what would you do to revitalize this category ? Here is the attempt : re-positioning the overall brand to males, white collar, aged 30+ and different SKUs to different usage occasions and locations : powder for indoor, capsule for outdoor and essence liquid for business trip. What's more, giving the brand a new look/image as well as a new tagline - 蔘中CEO (師醫O). Perfect thinking. Looks like everything is in place but will it work ? Chance is slim. To revitalize a category/brand, it takes new news, new reasons for consumption and new usage. Be it scientific breakthroughs, new technologies or new health benefits, it doesn't matter so long as the newness is big enough to catch attention and create words of mouth. Publicity has a role to play here. In this case, it's still the same...

When I saw this promotion, I tried to dig into the brain of the marketer and figure out the intention. As we all know, there is a hype of whiskey + green tea mix at bars and I'm sure sales of green teas have increased tremendously over the years through such usage extension. Perrier + red wine is a similar attempt. Will it work ? Well, I thought some amateur drinkers might like this bubbly diluted alcohol. But I started to scratch my head when I looked closely at the copies. 10 parts of red wine + 1 part of Perrier ??? That means you can only one bottle of Perrier with 10 bottles of red wine. What's the point ? Very bizarre. Well, here is the catch : you will finish a bottle of Perrier straight up anyway even though you are not drinking 10 bottles of red wine !

Season is changing. All sorts of flu related products are back in the advertising scene. There are basically two brands of sore throat lozenges competing with each other, Dequadin (得果定) and Strepsils (使立消). Between the two, I bet Strepsils has a bigger share of mind. First it has won by its Chinese brand name. 使立消 is a phonetic translation that carries the "fast relief" meaning whereas 得果定 is meaningless. Also, the advertising of Strepsils has been very consistent over many years. Basically its ads are all the same with some variations in executions from time to time. Rotating saw blade in the throat is a brilliant analogy that consumers can really associate with and it aids recall of the benefit of the product. It works, why change ? P.S. We are organizing a program on marketing communications for FMCG on Dec 7. Check out the details of the program and enrolment .

Another classical approach of FMCG advertising is product demonstration. This approach can be used alone to demonstrate product features and benefits. Sometimes it is used in conjunction with "before and after" to highlight the benefits. It's also good for demonstrate product superiority combined with comparative way of selling. This Easy Off Bang is a typical example. Looks familiar ? It used to be a very popular way of selling in the past, especially for detergents, washing powders and all sorts of toiletry products where consumers really care about the functional aspects of the products.

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This is like a classic way of selling in FMCG advertising. "Before and after" is a popular ways of selling for FMCG. Remember the Head & Shoulders TVC - 左邊有頭皮, 右邊冇頭皮 ? It's a classic. In fact, there are many variations to it. Some are more obvious and some are more subtle if you look closely. Other than FMCG, many ads are using this creative approach one way or another. Take a look at the AVIA ad below. It is yet another example.

If you are a reader of this blog for more than a year, you would be aware that I didn't talk too much about Halloween promotions this year. In fact there wasn't much to talk about. The marketing scene during Halloween was almost the same as last year : everyone did a Halloween promotion of some kind and it's getting like Chinese New Year - everyone has to say 恭喜發財. There were promotions that tied really well with Halloween, like the Krispy Kreme one above. On the other extreme however, I wonder what are in the head of some marketers when they do some Halloween promotions like the one below. 想減肥做隻蜘蛛精嗎 ? 嚟大家歸瘦join 呢個Halloween offer 啦! 死未?!