What if your higher purpose is to sell chocolate?

It was (I think) David Ogilvy that said it's only worth advertising something if you had something worth advertising'.

Two of the winners of the 2017 Marketing Society Awards for Effectiveness had obviously listened to that advice. Which leaves a problem for the rest of us. The majority of work produced by agencies is not life changing, it’s proper day to day commerce. Which is why it was so refreshing to hear from Maltesers as well as ITV/National Lottery and #jointheherd at The Marketing Society Best of the Best event last week.

Let me expand.

I Am Team GB

The I am Team GB campaign was incredible. They literally built the UK’s biggest sports day in 4 short months.  They brought in partners that you would think might be a bit tricky (Sport England, National Lottery, Team GB, ITV) and made them play nicely together.  They took the really important decision to put their money where their mouth was (something many many organisations would never ever do) and turn off ITV for 1 hour. It had a huge impact.

#JoinTheHerd

Likewise #jointheherd, the incredible campaign to save the elephants from being slaughtered to extinction by the demand for their tusks. #jointheherd has managed to get even China to agree to phase out the ivory trade by the end of 2017. In terms of results, they don’t get much bigger than that.

And both fit into Marketing’s new mantra, that we must all have a higher purpose. The trouble is, getting people off their backsides to try new sports, or saving the elephant is an easy brief. You’d be hard pushed to do it badly because it’s interesting in its own right.

Maltesers 

But what if your higher purpose is to sell chocolate? The advertising industry, despite recent cuts by both Unilever and P&G to their budgets, largely depends on the promotion of things which don’t have a higher purpose.  And if you think that’s hard, try working in my sector of the industry, B2B, where the link between the product you are advertising and any higher purpose is often complicated by a complex supply chain. But, as David Ogilvy also said, “Whenever you can, make the product itself the hero of your advertising. If you think the product is too dull, I have news for you: there are no dull products, only dull writers.”

The Maltesers campaign was a brilliant example of that. There was a real business problem. People were eating fewer Maltesers than they had been. Previous advertising had been less successful than they’d hoped. The product had remained the same. What do to? The ABV and client team were brave enough to put forward an idea which championed the less able in society via Channel 4’s highly competitive SuperHumans competition.  And Mars ended up with a campaign which was not only a breakthrough in its representation of disabled people, not only spot on for peoples' actual relationship with a confectionary product (they eat it, they fiddle with it, they don’t dream about it) but also which grew the Maltesers business by 7%. That is not easy. And there wasn’t an elephant in sight.

So, as Aisling Ryan said at the end of her talk. “We underestimate all the time what we can do as an industry. We can have a transformative effect.” One thing you often hear marketers say is that we’re not in a life or death industry.  It’s not that important, nobody died, they cry. But that doesn't mean we're not making a difference.  And I would argue we should be as proud of what we do in terms of the business impact as in terms of humanitarian causes. Business actually drives the economy. There are 26.5 million people employed in the UK by businesses (two and a half times the number employed in the public sector). If I’d been a judge, I would have picked Maltesers as the Grand Prix winner too. They had a much harder job.  

By Francesca Brosan 

Marketing Society Excellence Awards

Our Best of the Best event launched our 2018 Excellence Awards, which are now open - see the categories and how to enter here. Watch the video below, for tips on creating an award-winning entry.