Ideas Made Well

It wasn’t so long ago that media fragmentation was all about finding unlikely places to put advertising messages: petrol pumps, parking meters, and even people’s foreheads each had their 15 minutes of fame. As digital grew, and enabled a level of measurement that went far beyond the capabilities of other media, more and more budget was diverted away from traditional media. Now money is being diverted away from traditional new media (such as banner ads), and mobile/games consoles have become this season’s ‘must do’s.

Ironically, at the same time, the election debates demonstrated not just the value of television as a communications medium, but also the value of journalism (even if the physical sales of newspapers continue to slide), so it is a brave and foolhardy person who predicts their imminent death.

There is little doubt that media fragmentation will continue, probably for ever more.

And while it is as true as ever that you shouldn’t throw out the baby (traditional media) with the bathwater, the way that new media are used is far more important than the act of using them. There are some truly pedestrian iPhone apps in existence, some positively damaging uses of Facebook and Twitter, and millions of dire uses of email. The recession hasn’t helped as marketers have been under pressure to make their budgets go further and clearly there has also been pressure from non-marketers ‘to get the selling messages across as blatantly as possible’. Which, of course, in many ways is precisely how you shouldn’t use many of the new media, which rely on people wanting to interact with something about the brand.

So the business of sorting out which medium to use for which objective, as well as understanding how best to use those media, has become more and more complex, and in all likelihood will continue to get more complex.

There’s no doubt that a strong enough idea can work across multiple media and across different objectives, but these tend to be rare.

Often, an advertising idea is shoe-horned into ‘working’ across multiple media. Campaign ideas though, come and go, so even if you come up with a brilliant idea for a campaign, what happens next? Cadbury’s Gorilla was truly brilliant, but was then followed by some truly dire communications, ruining the impact of the original campaign.

This new era of media options calls for some new thinking.

Critically, this can’t just be new thinking in a silo – there has to be a more coordinated approach for it to work effectively or else you could end up with an unruly mess.

Understanding brands is therefore more important than ever, and having ideas that work across media (although not necessarily all of them) is equally important. Agencies can no longer rest on their laurels. If they are a specialist in a particular discipline they need to evolve into specialists in more than one discipline. The ‘one stop shop’ model has rarely worked, but that is a different beast to a more integrated approach that genuinely pulls together a number of different expertises across a defined area of disciplines.

Only with this capability will agencies be able to look at media fragmentation as an opportunity rather than a threat.

A decade or so ago, festivals were not things that troubled brands unduly. Glastonbury was still very faithful to its hippy roots, ‘T in the Park’, backed by Tennants Lager, was successful but it took months to sell out, the ‘V Festival’, backed by Virgin , was similar – successful but not manically so.

Various other festivals came and went, struggling to reach critical mass, and from a marketing perspective festivals were seen as an indulgence rather than a core means of reaching the music loving public. Fast forward 10 years and the situation is very different.

Tennants and Virgin have been followed by brands too numerous to mention, and festivals have lost their reputations as dens of iniquity and become shining beacons in the marketing plans of brands that want to connect with a youth/youthful audience.

So much so, that each festival is in danger of being subsumed by brands. Thankfully, the festival promoters have, in most cases, resisted the temptation to take the money and run, and have imposed severe restrictions on what brands can and cannot do. Add value to the festival experience and you are welcomed. Go on a tree-branding mission and you will be castigated.

Many of the most successful activations of brand activity have not been ‘on site’, but have been treating festivals as a 6- or even 9-month programme of marketing that culminates in the festival itself. A good example of this has been how the Guardian, by being the main Glastonbury media partner, has been able to give added weight to its festival coverage, which starts as soon as the sun comes out in spring and provides thousands of column inches by the end of the summer.

Or there is Virgin’s policy of offering tickets to its customers before they go on sale to the general public, a tactic now embraced by O2 for all the venues it sponsors.

Virgin Mobile also launched an ad-funded series on Channel 4 called ‘Road to V’, which featured unsigned acts all vying to get the ultimate prize of a slot at the V Festival, which ran in the two months prior to the festival itself.

But by being brilliant on-site, in other words adding value to the festival experience, as brands such as Bacardi have done with their Bacardi bars or Walls ice-cream have done with their sand-filled beaches, you absolutely can stand out from the other brand activity on site; it is much harder if your effort and your return on investment relies on just a couple of days’ activity. And if you just do something bog standard on site, then you will drift into the background as easily as a member of the crowd.

So, what does it take to succeed?

Do you have to do something brilliant and spend a fortune in order to stand out?

No you don’t. What you do need to do is to understand the mentality and needs of the festival-going public. For instance, an astonishingly large number of people don’t go to festivals to listen to the music. The repeat purchase percentage is very high. with people going back to the same festival year after year. They don’t want brands that don’t belong there, cr*pping on their festival. Again it comes back to how you, as a brand, can add value to their experience. So a tethered hot-air balloon, that is used for branding purposes, would go down like a lead one. A tethered hot-air balloon that is used to help punters see the festival site from the air would be seen in a far more positive light .

In many ways, festival marketing is no different to normal marketing. It’s just that your audience will applaud you louder if you get it right, ignore you if you don’t make an effort and laugh at you if you get it wrong.

Thank you and goodnight.