I Am Ready For More Beauty Ads Like This One

(“Idle Advertising: Beating You Over The Head With A Joke Since 2015.”)

I’m often a little hesitant to jump into discussing ads with an expressly different demographic to my own. Maybe I’ll like it for the wrong reasons – or maybe I’ll dislike it for the wrong reasons.

And with that caveat in place, here’s an absolutely fantastic ad, "Ready For More", for Boots No.7 by Mother London.

“Ready For More.” Simple. Unpretentious. Most importantly, an easily understood message. You age, and you keep going, because you’re still thirsty for success, even when tempered with experience. In the spotlight is Alessandra Ferri, age 52 – and Alessandra Ferri, age 19, as a hologram. The interplay between the past and present makes for a gorgeous, engaging film, with an empowering message that blends the nostalgic with the forward-facing. In fact I can’t say it more clearly than Ferri herself:

“I’m proud of what I’ve done and who I was when I was younger, but I’m also proud of what I’m doing now and who I am now.”

And yes, Boots’ anti-ageing products are a part of enabling that future. It’s not an aggressive push, but there’s a clear brand and product logic and a positive message behind it. Think “Like A Girl” but a bit more subtle.

Visually and musically it’s just stunning. The movement, the contrasting styles, the passion and the movement of the music – it’s all beautifully put together. The little moments – the younger Ferri looking to the older, their coming together at the end – they feel genuinely emotional. They feel full of life.

And with no script, Ferri’s personality and strength shine through far stronger than if she were spouting your usual beauty ad lines. As is pretty well established at this point, I’m a sucker for a stripped down, clean piece of short, strong copy.

(No extraneous words, no blathering on and on with unnecessary text and freewheeling that adds nothing to the conversation and drags you on with increasing bewilderment and boredom. No sir. I hate that.)

It’s a bold move to directly contrast the older and younger versions of a woman in an ad, bringing them in sharp relief while selling a product that is explicitly supposed to “hide away” the imperfections that age brings. Done poorly and it comes as cynical, a guilt-laden ploy to shame women into covering up their age/their weaknesses/the fact that they don’t have a penis (quelle horreur).

But this spot is all the better for that contrast of young and old.

Ferri does certainly looks older. She looks her age; she looks worn and unvarnished.

By god she looks powerful though. I wouldn’t want to go toe to toe with her.

(Not least because I hear ballerinas basically have claws on their feet. They are much like beautiful, beautiful eagles in that regard.)

It's a little-known fact that Natalie Portman prepared for her role in Black Swan by spending six months catching rabbits up in the Rocky Mountains.

Her younger self is beautiful and talented. But her present self has the confidence, the authority and the self-possession of a queen. The message? That growing up does mean ageing – of course – but ageing doesn’t mean you take a step back. You keep moving forward, like Alessandra Ferri.

That is the power of this ad.

Asda: Every Little Helps

This one isn’t so much about advertising. It’s more about how sometimes, the best PR happens when you simply create an environment for simple, good deeds.

(Yes, apparently doing nice things can make people think that you’re nice. I also recently heard that the Pope is a practising Catholic.)

But the story I want to talk about is this one – an Asda store manager in Manchester taking a very small, but powerful decision to introduce a “quiet hour” for shoppers, and especially those who struggle with loud, busy places due to autism.

The screens go off.

The escalators halt.

Voices are kept to a minimum.

It’s a simple but powerful gesture.

And no, it isn’t earth-shattering. It’s certainly not the basis for a mass media campaign, and it can’t be. But there’s something simple, identifiable and attractive about a shop that takes a little step to help even just a little part of their community that feels underserved.

More interesting, more eye-catching, and more memorable as a brand offering than your standard bland slogan.

And there’s another point you can make about the “quiet hour”. We always assume supermarkets have to be brand-consistent, blaring music, jauntily tuned and brightly coloured behemoths. But there’s something to be said for stripping back the sound and fury, for subtracting rather than adding to the noise.

Something to think about. Possibly something for a future article.

But for now – time to shut up.

What Goes Unsaid

Here’s a good, simple TV spot for Innocence in Danger, from ROSAPARK, a Parisian ad firm. It’s about incest and child abuse, so this article may be slightly joke-light compared to normal.

What makes this one powerful is as much by what it doesn’t say as what it does. It’s all there visually, the father, the bedtime story, the sleeping child – and the creeping implication. It opens with familial bliss. And then it twists the familial bliss of the opening like a knife.

Words don’t get in the way of the message, which is important. Often charity appeals and PSAs can get overloaded with facts and figures and words. Sometimes that’s OK. But in this context, and with a message this important and unsettling, the simplicity of the message makes it far more potent.

A wordless implication, done right, can catch your attention better than any clever combination of words.

It’s especially relevant here because child abuse amongst family members is far too common, and far too often ignored or dismissed. The estimated number of victims of incest, just within France, is 4 million. Which is just fucking horrifying, frankly. So if nothing else, that scale of the problem makes bringing it to everyone’s attention all the more important.

I feel uncomfortable. Watching it, talking about it, sharing it.

But that’s exactly why something like this should be shared. And it’s what makes it an effective piece of work.

So watch, talk about it, and share it.

No I Don't Want Your English Wine

Which is better, French wine or English?

A lot of people think that French wine is good. And it is, it’s fantastic and debonair and classy as shit.

(Unlike that sentence perhaps.)

French wine is what people think of when they think of great wine. I mean hell, French wine is what people think of when they think of wine in general. They’re synonymous. Interchangeable. French wine is the wine that you want.

And the pinnacle of French wine’s class and sophistication is held by that French fizzy wine we call champagne.

Which is why it’s an interesting truth that studies find that many people prefer English “champagne” to the Gallic original, in blind taste tests.

That doesn’t make sense. You can’t trust English people with anything gourmet, let alone top quality wine.

(Yes that is a bit rich coming from the land of deep-fried Mars Bars. Dealwivit.)

It makes so little sense that, even knowing this fact, I still know that French wine is better.

Because perceptions of a brand don’t have to have anything to do with reality.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a fantastic current example of this as well. Trump projects certain qualities. Tough on immigration. Standing up for the little guy. No nonsense.

Never mind that Trump has happily employed illegal immigrants, stomped on any little guy he can find, and quite clearly built an entire career on bullshit.

(There’s an entire series of articles I could write on the glory and horror that is the Trump campaign and its wrecking-ball impact on the US presidential election, but I really don’t know if I can be arsed. Being a politics student can do that to you.)

But Trump is an example of the negative side of this phenomenon. If nothing else because a presidential election is rather more important than the bottle of wine in your cupboard.

(You know, until you get home from work and you reall need a drink because Janice has been in your ear all day about Bruce from finance. Fucking Janice.)

The point is that perceptions don’t have to be the same as fact, at least when what you’re selling is an experience. A product should do what it’s supposed to. But if it’s a wine or a painting, or even a child’s toy, it’s not about just what it does. It’s about how it makes you feel. It’s about the imagination and the satisfaction and the idea of the product.

In the least cynical way possible, it’s worth remembering that the product and the brand don’t have to be tied too tightly together. Because often people value what they can believe of the product and a brand as much as what can physically get from it.

A brand may be intangible. But so is value itself. Value is what you make of it.

So get out of here with your English wine. I want my wine pretentious, poetic, and French.

Is Beer Advertising Becoming... Modern?

You might have noticed this lately. It's a marketing trend that seems to be taking hold in 2016. There's a sea change occurring in the world of fermented grain beverages.

Stereotypes and sexism seem (and the key word there is seem) to be on the decline. 

After decades of questionable approaches to beer advertising, running from the paternalistic to the sex-charged, brewers are beginning to drop the old, lad-centric model.

We’ve even said “Hoo-roo” to Foster’s Brad and Dan. Which I have to admit I’m pretty sad about. They had some great ads.

What’s the driver of all of this sudden modernity in the world of beer marketing?

It comes down to women.

One by one, brewers are starting to realise that growing a market that has largely stalled in Europe and the US involves reaching out to more than just one gender.

And when you’re trying to reach out to a demographic that comprises half of the overall population it’s generally not a great move to start the conversation with insults and objectification.

Case in point.

A group in Brazil recently launched a ‘feminist’ beer to protest the portrayal of women in Brazilian beer advertising, where women have only two roles: as eye-candy or as a prize that men win by drinking a certain beer. It was also a critique of the masculine tilt of the Brazilian ad world in general. Do you know how many Brazilian advertising workers are women?

10%.

It's small wonder that Brazilian beer ads follow formulaic, dated tropes about women. And small wonder too that people are sick and tired of it. With this kind of backlash, it’s the right time for brewers to move their marketing into that foreign land that we call the 21st century.

Of course, there are exceptions to the trend.

As I've noted on Idle Advertising before, Bud Light for one has seemed determined to remain depressingly backwards. For a beer that still holds the largest market share in the US, Bud Light acts like a brand in its death-throes, lurching from controversy to controversy, from strange new product line to strange new product line.

Great job guys. Hopefully the latest reboot will change some things.

It’s important to note here that this isn’t about “beer for women”. It’s not about special fruity beer-ish drinks and specially formulated beers to suit a different gender (though these can have their place). And it’s certainly not about writing ads which talk about “women drinking beer, aren’t women all happy drinking our beer, hey women look at this beer, it’s for you! You can have special girl-beer, not like the male beer! Well done!”

From UK beer expert Melissa Cole:

“‘Chick’ beer, ‘clear’ beer, ‘low-calorie’ beer, ‘low-carb’ beer: all have been aimed at women and all have failed. We don’t much like being metaphorically patted on the a--- by the marketers.”

Ads that make a point of explicitly targeting one gender have a tendency to turn off both.

Show, don’t tell.

Italian beer Peroni’s advertising has led the way in this area, by making its core campaigns centre on characters who embrace the Italian way of life, regardless of gender. It's not about telling women that they should drink Peroni. It's about showing that anyone can drink it.

Peroni’s latest ad campaign, Vita al Mare, has just launched. What do you see in it? Glamorous lifestyles. Beautiful people. Golden Age Italy, and the Mediterranean way of life.

You also see men and women enjoying Peroni, with no judgement – or even the suggestion that there’s something unusual about people from both genders drinking a beer. 

Acting as though there’s something ‘wrong’ with a certain group enjoying your product is inherently self-limiting. 

And the best way to get rid of such a limit is to not even acknowledge that it exists.

So, what is the way forward?

Put simply, it’s to treat your potential customers as individuals, rather than as categories. There’s a world of difference between targeting “women”, and targeting individual people who happen to be female. 

Modern consumers are better informed. They have access to an ever-widening variety of content. And they resent being treated impersonally when the brand choice – as with beer – is so personal.

Slapping a label on someone and declaring them categorised is not a good way to build a real relationship. But if we treat both men and women as living people rather than tick-boxes, we’re on our way to a more modern, more productive interaction between our brand and our intended audience.

Cheers.

Ahem

Apologies for the lack of content these past couple of months; for various reasons I’ve not been able to write. Fortunately the Christmas period never has any notable advertising so I can’t have missed much, right?

Wait, what?

Oh.Oh I see.

I’ll be right back. New, clever, witty articles to come shortly.

Old Spice Empathises With Young People

Old Spice is a great example of exactly how to rebrand.

We all know the fun ad series with Isaiah Mustafa and Terry Crews, the humour, the style in those spots. How it rebuilt Old Spice’s brand, made it cool, made it viral.

(Man, I forgot how good those ads are. I used to imitate them with my friends all the time.)

But there’s more to it than that.

It’s easily forgotten now that Old Spice wasn’t just declining – it was near dead. It was on the verge of being dismantled, delisted and discontinued. This was a product for your granddad; its user base was not just leaving the market but shuffling off this mortal coil. And there was no suggestion that anyone was coming in to replace them.

Wieden + Kennedy knew that the brand needed a shake-up. The core value of that reboot though was empathy, in two very different ways.

Firstly, there was a keen sense of empathy in the rebuilding of the Old Spice brand. They moved from the past to being emblematic of modern manhood: cool, attractive and confident, but also self-aware and self-deprecating when necessary.

(Somehow this manages to be the definition of both coolness and self-deprecation.)

No pretention. Just a strong, expressive voice which spoke to people in the modern world. Sounds a lot more human and relatable than most brands.

The reinvention of Old Spice wasn’t just a nice coat of paint. It was strategic. It staked a claim on modern cool, on something we could identify with, recognising that the world was starting to move away from the Lynx/Axe style of all-out testosterone and quasi-sexism.

(Not that I have anything against Lynx. It takes rare cunning to appear to be marketing towards cool twenty-something guys when you’re really targeting nervous fourteen-year-olds.)

As much as anything it was a recognition that male grooming, like beer, is now a market that is more about attitude than product. Whether or not you like this shift, to make a brand choice in body wash is to make a statement about yourself. It’s a way to declare the lifestyle and character you identify with.  

And W+K and Old Spice saw that there was a clear space going unclaimed, and a lot of young men going unrepresented. They identified, they empathised, and they built a brand and a character around that space – The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.

And on that note, on to part two.

The second way that Old Spice has used empathy has been in stripping back the distance between the brand and its audience. Frank Rose covers this in a great article on brand empathy; “the idea was to give people a way to connect with Isaiah Mustafa, the man who’d become ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’”.

The building of the Mustafa character as not just a mascot, but a figure that interacted and engaged with the audience in near real-time (via Twitter and YouTube) was a huge step in creating genuine empathy for a brand with its potential customers.

And 34 million viewers online in that first week are not to be sniffed at; the response films as a whole had one of the biggest viewerships of the year on YouTube. With every response, every funny answer and clever line, Old Spice wasn’t just innovating – they were connecting with people on a one to one, personal level.

So, what’s the takeaway learning from this?

It’s nothing complicated.

(I always say that though to be fair. And then I carry on for another hundred words*.)

The key idea goes back to a point I’ve made before: people pay attention when they feel you’re talking to them individually – not just to the crowd they’re in. When it feels like you actually get them.

By starting a stream of Twitter conversations, and accompanying YouTube clips, Old Spice literally was talking to people individually. And funnily enough, people went crazy for it.

It’s a simple formula.

First you make your brand seem relatable and engaging.

Then you actually actively engage with your audience.

Then – you profit.

(I mean, you would hope.)

(*86 words, actually.)

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