A song in a film uses a popular brand in its lyrics. It runs as part of the film’s promotion on all the channels a month prior to its launch. One week after the film’s release and a declaration of it being a box office super-hit, the brand owner decides to sue the producer for misuse of brand name. It creates media buzz; the brand is alleged to have grown by 12 per cent in the same period! A week later, media announces that there has been an out-of-court settlement and the star who sang the song has become the brand’s official ambassador.
Did the film benefit — bums on seats — because of all this buzz? Has the brand benefited from all the exposure — in the song and the media buzz that followed?
In the 1987 movie Wall Street, Gekko and his protégé Bud Fox set the standard for men’s power fashions with contrast collar shirts and silk square pockets. It popularised French cuffs, suspenders and brighter shirts. Men imitated the look (forgetting that the man who wore it went straight to prison). The new movie is more subtle yet awash with brands — Dunhill, Hickey Freeman, Vacheron Constantin, Cartier, Jaeger Le Coultre, Gucci, Pucci, Vera Yang, Oscar de la Renta, Marchesa. Riding on the popularity of the fashions promoted in the earlier version, publicists are working overtime to get the word out on who is wearing what in the movie to draw mileage for and rub off onto the brands — just in case viewers missed them!
Closer home, viewers are exposed to reality shows filled with brand and film promotions to seed themselves in. While stars appear regularly in shows to promote their upcoming movies, brands have found myriad ways to be present in such shows to reach their audiences. Chocolate is given when someone wins, soft drinks tell people to take a cool break, phones are used by anchors to call friends from the venue, a bank name prominently appears when a winner is given his cheque and anchors speak from laptops with brand names prominently displayed.
Aamir Khan is quite celebrated in the advertising and marketing world for his innovative film promotions. For 3 Idiots, he actually toured small towns incognito to get coverage in local media. For Ghajini, he generated interest by providing Ghajini-type haircuts in saloons, mannequins and ushers with similar hairstyles were seen in multiplexes.
A combination of in-content brand placement and subtle (or not so subtle) public relations support is being used to grab viewer attention. Media innovation is what it’s called in advertising lingo. Do these work or do they end up being gimmicks? Would the box-office returns of Ghajini and 3 Idiots have been the same in case Aamir Khan didn’t do what he did or did these acts actually bolster the films? Are brands placed in-content actually getting more consumers to buy them?
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We, no doubt, live in a very cluttered environment. Getting consumer attention is a challenge. Besides the brand and media overload, consumers today have more cluttered minds — thinking and worrying about many more things. In this context, marketers need to work harder and harder to intrude into their minds. And, further, displace other brands from the consideration set. In this scenario, thinking new ideas — innovations — is perhaps a good thing. And experimenting is the only way.
Bombardment is one possible strategy. This, of course, needs big bucks. Yet, it doesn’t guarantee attention. Blind spots and apathy occur naturally. Consumers are able to blank out what they don’t want to listen to or retain. And much of the bombardment that happens could be just a waste of money.
Targeting communication in a more focused way is the other option. The challenge remains that in a mass, penetration market like India where scale is the name of the game, this doesn’t generate confidence that niche media vehicles help reach select groups adequately enough and this provides enough width to deliver results.
Not surprisingly, it comes down to do “innovation” in mass channels to try to get attention. However, the challenge remains two-fold:
- To do the innovation in a way that ties in with brand message and proposition. Pure salience has limited value as brands occupy slots in consumer minds based on past experience, imagery and relationship. Displacement would be difficult with such advertising. Further, as the media innovations field also gets crowded, they become blind spots. Empirical data show few people, except the most involved, actually go out to open magazine cover gatefolds or notice innovative shapes in print. And fewer people consciously notice brands plugged into video content as there are so many. Unless the styles and looks are distinct as in the new version of Wall Street, impact is likely to be limited.
- There is a need to determine new metric of measurement. There may be a case of subliminal impact of many of such brand messages — from the bombardment that takes place by omnipresent brands to the more subtle ones done by placing within content. There could be a case of the unconscious being impacted and that influencing final purchase decisions, especially for the more impulse and low involvement categories. However, there exists very little tracking mechanism to determine how much final brand decisions are made on the back of such messaging. This could provide another model on how advertising works — beyond the classic AIDA and advertising cut through systems currently in place.
Clearly, the fact that marketers are investing in new innovations in brand messaging and advertising celebrates media innovations, indicates an intuitive need to go beyond reach and opportunities-to-see model of advertising. There is a growing recognition that if you don’t make impact, you are lost. Creativity and insight do help — Fevicol remains a brand that has, with single-digit television budgets, succeeded in gaining consumer mind-space. However, in more crowded categories, a different solution is needed.
Film brands whose success depends on the opening weekend performance are experimenting — and experimenting a lot — often out of Hobson’s choice. Product brands tend to have more time. Controversy-of-the-song kind that I spoke of at the start of this piece or just doing things differently is needed to get into the consumer’s mind. However, the time has come for marketers to explore such innovations on large scale and measure their impact.
Something worth thinking about.
The author is country head-Discovery and Planning, Ogilvy and Mather India. Views expressed are personal. Comments at: madhukar.sabnavis@ogilvy.com