What’s wrong with detergent brands these days?
My daily job enables a lot of YouTube watching (don’t get me wrong, I’m not just interested in fails compilation although I admit it’s a guilty pleasure). More seriously, I’m exposed to a lot of pre-roll advertising and I’m weird enough to watch the whole thing most of the time.
I’m also the type who thinks that a pre-roll ad is 99% of the time inadequate or uninteresting. That said, I have to confess that last week something quite shocking stood out of the rest. Honestly, I thought this was marking the beginning of the end for the detergent category.
First and foremost, with all the advanced targeting and retargeting possibilities that we have now, how come I’ve been served all those detergent ads? That’s the first anomaly. I reassure you that the latter is just a technicality versus THE personal core issue.
The two rare specimens (see below) that completely blew my mind are suggesting a story that appears to be simply senseless. Moreover, I do think the way these brands talk to people brings us back to the post Second World War era in which housewives were the only targets and functionality the only proposition. Let’s hope that people have evolved since then and therefore they won’t believe a fifth of all the bollocks that we’re pushing them. At the end, I just feel really embarrassed to work in advertising when I realize everyday YouTube users are exposed to this.
Brand owners need to consider pushing their creative borders and invest in long-term brand building efforts. In fact, it’s not even an option if they want to grow their business and survive. There’s evidence and research establishing a link between creativity and profitability (read Les Binet and Peter Field stuff to get a better understanding). The ownership of creativity as a business tool becomes even more urgent in FMCG where all brands can be potentially replaced depending on the physical availability of the product. As Byron Sharp pictures it, branding is exceptionally simple even though we enjoy complicating our lives as marketer:
Making the brand easy to buy – by maximising it’s physically availability and creating an attractive and memorable set of distinctive brand assets; sensory and semantic cues such as colours, packaging, logo, design, taglines and celebrity endorsements that make the brand easy to like, memorise and recall.
That specific bit, "creating an attractive and memorable set of distinctive brand assets”, remains where creativity chimes in. And yes, it’s the polar opposite of the hard selling techniques used in the spots above. Horrible.
