FIPP 2009: What Advertisers Wanted
One of the more heated sessions at FIPP 09 was “What Advertisers Want”, featuring the media directors of Gucci and Unilever. Nikolas Talonpoika of Gucci looks like he’s hired Rodin as his hair stylist, and he proceeded to instantly win the crowd over with his faith in magazines as the chief platform for the group’s advertising – 90% of the the ad spend by the Gucci label is in mags.
So if he was the silver-haired hero of the piece, that meant we could boo and hiss Simon Clift of Unilever, who focused on the Faustian bargains having to be made by editors – namely having to move from nicely demarcated ads and copy to a rather more blurry combination of the two, that pleases advertisers and has editors shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Clift pointed to examples of effective advertising of Unilever products, which ranged from the benign and fun (ink scented with a new detergent range) to the rather more troubling (food sections dominated by Bertolli sauce).
“If the information is useful, relevant and interesting there’s no reason why it can’t sync with a brand’s values”, was Clift’s argument. “What I’m interested in is interesting content, whether it comes from an editor or an advertiser”. The thing is, he’s probably right. While magazine producers like ourselves climb onto a series of high horses, a lot of regular people do just want content. Clift was keen to stress that readers are wise to pure “advertorial”, and is suggesting a more sophisicated (and insidious?) form of advertising through content – he wants to get to the point where readers trust a brand in the same way as they trust a magazine. You can see it happening with one of Unilever’s top brands, Dove, in the way it’s manouevered itself as a champion of natural femininity rather than a soap manufacturer. And like it or not, people are responding positively to it.
“A successful parasite doesn’t kill its host”, he said at one point. Was he referring to himself as a parasite, living on the pages of magazines, or to the magazines themselves, drawing the lifeblood of ad cash? It’s clear that advertisers are expecting a more symbiotic and involved relationship, and while they need to stay visible to stay afloat in the recession, the magazine industry needs their ad spend all the more. Let’s hope the inevitable influx of sleek advertorial won’t be as crass as we fear.
But while Clift was raising shackles, Talonpoika made an interesting point that could have just as great an impact on magazines’ ad income. The glossy pages of a consumer magazine present the brand in a large-format, tactile, luxurious way; an online banner ad can’t begin to replicate that, plus luxury brands want the high quality content that they are juxtaposed with in magazines to be online too. And so Gucci for the moment are tending to stay away; Talonpoika said there would be a decrease in the online spend by the luxury market this year (except perhaps in emerging markets where there isn’t a vigourous luxury magazine press). It’s a sentiment shared by Dylan Jones, editor of GQ, who said in a later session that online was finding it hard to create “a red carpet, a velvet rope”.
I caught up with Nikolas after the session, and he elaborated on the subject, saying it was a two-way reluctance. “Online is a sector that hasn’t prioritised luxury as a key spender, so I think any media vehicle will work around wherever the money is, and we’re not a company that has a lot of money in that area.”
The move onto online is therefore pretty tentative. “You need someone to help you to move into that media space. It’s not that you have the money first and then test, at the moment it’s more: ‘I haven’t got any money, are you willing to be my partner as I move into the digital space and help me understand it’, with hopefully minimal investment.
“The online industry goes: if you test with a bit of money here, you’ll see if it works. It’s an approach the industry on the whole has never done – you don’t test, you go to market knowing it’s going to work. And you’re testing in a space where you’re not historically perhaps comfortable with the creative side of it. And it takes a big investment from the back end of it, the internal organisation, and I think you want to know what it’s going to bring you at the end before you start investing in it heavily. In the current climate that’s why I think we’ll see a pull back from the lower brands in that space. I’m a believer in the digital space but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done getting there.”
The lesson seems to be: make them an offer they can’t refuse. Get the quality of your website to a point where it’s cast iron quality, and the luxury advertisers will be more willing to jump in.
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | May 7, 2009 10:58AM |