Ideas & issues: Advertising and the art of fly fishing

I was lucky enough to go to Trinity College Glenalmond in Perthshire and, among its many wonderful facilities, the school had the River Almond flowing through its grounds. If you caught a salmon the kitchen would cook and serve it to your table at supper – a highly prized delicacy given the variable standard of the school’s food. So we spent hours creating the most exotic lures out of beautiful feathers and threads in order to land a fish. Aesthetically pleasing as they were, I never caught a single one with mine.

Many years later I read an article which made me feel pretty foolish. The author had taken a fish-eye-view of what a fisherman’s fly looks like when it lands on the surface of the water. The salmon doesn’t see the object of beauty on which so much time and effort has been spent. What it actually sees is the tiny footprints of the ‘fly’ as they rest upon the surface in their distinctive configuration – it’s the similarity to the footprints of a real insect that makes it attractive to a hungry fish.

But different types of insects hatch at different times of the year and these appeal to different sorts of fish at different times – some swim fast upstream in the middle of the river while others are resting deep in a pool, or dawdling in the shallows by the river bank.

By analogy, we can see that a customer’s ‘life flow’ is increasingly intermingled with the ‘media flow’ and we can use this model to empathise better with their needs and construct more effective advertising and marketing communications campaigns.

Key insights into the complexity of life and media flows for any given customer category are provided by IPA TouchPoints.

The vast amounts of data available can be analysed to reveal a comprehensive picture comprising demographics, product use, location, who the respondent is with, media exposure and life activities such as shopping and leisure. Using these insights the media planner can then place the brand in the media flow where the target customers are stepping in, but the competition is fierce.

The bait debate

Accenture Media Management estimates that the average UK individual is exposed to 1,009 commercial communications daily. And of course, these individuals are each stepping into the flow at different points on their own personal spectrum from ‘not buying’ to ‘buying’.

Dunnhumby estimates the number of purchases that the average household makes in a day is 21 and for main grocery shoppers it’s 16. So customers have constantly varying needs of brand communications which must be served.

In this context we can view each medium being, as it were, a fisherman’s line with the fly being the content bait. In order to get an insight into how many lines (and flies) are required to land a customer we can learn from more than 30 years of IPA Effectiveness Awards cases – the gold standard in the proof of how advertising and marketing communications works. Analysis by Roger Ingham

of Data Alive has revealed that the number of potential media options and media used by campaigns has increased dramatically over the years. We have now got to the point where there are 20 different options listed in the author questionnaire and, on average, the winning cases use just over nine channels each.

Meanwhile, in their seminal analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Awards, Marketing in the Era of Accountability, co-authors Les Binet and Peter Field found that a mix of three or four ‘bought’ media, depending on budget size, is far more effective than using just one medium. And there’s no limit to the benefits of additional ‘owned’ and ‘earned’ media.

Binet and Field also concluded that ‘fame’ is the most powerful driver of effectiveness. This is the kind of campaign that creates buzz about the brand, which gets passed on to others through social media. It creates the ‘water-cooler conversations’ that can multiply the paid-for media spend through ‘earned’ media. In this context, it’s unsurprising that television, with its audio-visual power to engage emotionally, is the most effective single medium and is used in 92% of winning cases with an important leveraging effect on other channels.

Find the right stream

So, having looked long and hard at these analyses, and many other sources, Jim Marshall of Aegis Media and I determined that there are five key roles for a brand’s media mix within the ‘flow’:

1. ‘Fame’, or the ability of a medium with the right creative content to generate ‘buzz’ and ‘talkability’ for a brand.

2. ‘Advocacy’, or the ability of a medium to enable consumers and citizens to pass on their opinions to other people, increasinggly via ‘word of mouse’.

"Using the fishing analogy, the media planner can then place the brand in the media flow where the target customers are stepping in, but the competition is fierce"

3. ‘Information’, or the ability of a medium to provide customers with detailed information about the product or service, or company, that they’re interested in.

4. ‘Price’, or the ability of a medium to deliver a price point or special offers.

5. ‘Availability’, or the ability of a medium to point consumers towards where they can buy the product or service they desire.

But, of course, it’s not just a question of channel – content is crucial too. The brand has to have appropriate creative work that has a synergistic and optimal relationship with the particular medium through which it’s being deployed.

The Link Between Creativity and Effectiveness, Peter Field’s report on the cross-analysis of the Gunn Report and the IPA Effectiveness Awards databases, has shown just how powerful award-winning creativity can be. Over the period 1994–2002, creatively awarded campaigns were around three-times as efficient as non-awarded ones; however, for the period 2003–2010, this number rises to 12 times.

Taken alongside the wealth of analysis proving the correlation between share of voice and share of market, brand owners face a stark choice if they want to win market share. Either they have to buy excess share of voice, or they have to invest in outstanding strategic thinking, channel planning and outstanding creative content.

If you’re a challenger brand the former strategy may be unaffordable, so the alternative is to cast accurately to where customers are in the media flow, making sure to have perfect flies at the end of each line.

Hamish Pringle, strategic adviser, 23red, and co-author with Jim Marshall, chief client officer, Aegis Media UK, of ‘Spending Advertising Money in the Digital Age’ published by Kogan Page, January 2012.