The Last Post Sounds for the TVC at Marketing Conference
October 2005
If anyone in the marketing industry thought they heard the mournful sounds of The Last Post pealing from the direction of Auckland’s Langham Hotel last week, they were probably overhearing the various eulogies being presented for the 30sec television commercial.
Fortunately the event at the Langham was much more enjoyable than the average funeral, as it was the annual Marketing Today conference, and the first one held since the DMA reinvented itself as the Marketing Association.
With the theme of ‘Extreme Marketing’, an impressively high calibre of speakers was present, testament perhaps to the greater pulling power that the conference now has, with the ‘DM’ component now clearly just one part of an ever-expanding mix of marketing approaches being used in an integrated manner. In fact, the vast range of media and database usage now being used for so many campaigns clearly affirms the DMA’s decision to shed the DM moniker, opting instead to promote marketing as an all-encompassing craft, and not a collection of separate entities such as DM, PR, WWW or whatever other initials you can think of.
This was all the more obvious when case studies were presented for products as widely diverse as Australia’s “Nudie” juice brand and Tourism New Zealand’s “100% Pure New Zealand” campaign. Both brands have been developed and promoted on a shoestring, and under permanent threat of being completely swamped by better-healed competitors. Yet both have had success completely out of proportion to their expenditure because of their clever use of alternative media, PR, web and events-marketing, and a steer away from the crippling cost and diminishing returns from using traditional TV advertising on its own.
The eulogy for TV-focused campaigns got louder when the young Turk of the conference, Australian wunderkind Max Baxter spoke. Baxter presented his take on how communications planning is moving DM further up the foodchain, with the argument that the direct-to-consumer communication that denotes DM is becoming increasingly vital in all media, and that it’s leaving the letterbox as it evolves: the brand-consumer connection can now be vastly more effective when enacted through event-oriented marketing, getting consumers to interact with brands via such examples as branded pubs, rock concerts, sports events, theme stores and product placement.
Baxter went so far as to claim that those who still cling to TVCs as the mainstay of their marketing tactics are akin to last century’s steam train lovers who failed to appreciate the threat of the fledging aviation industry – but then at 24 years, one could excuse Baxter if he ruffled a few feathers.
Yet if Baxter’s extravagant claims could be written off as the bright-eyed exuberance of youth, the same could not be said of the older and more established speakers from WRC. Andrew Mitchell and David Thomason demonstrated how a year-long Coruba campaign used almost every medium in the book to develop an event that fully involved and interacted with participants in a way that developed increased levels of brand awareness, consumer community, brand affinity, and product usage far beyond what spending triple the budget on TV could have achieved.
In a similar vein, Tom Eslinger, worldwide Director of Interactive at Saatchi & Saatchi and an internet marketing veteran of at least seven years, reiterated the shift towards multi-faceted campaigns with a huge focus on the increasingly necessary interaction between TV and internet. When the giant of international marketing that is Saatchi’s starts talking in this way, it is clear that this view of marketing’s future is no short-lived fascination with technology for technology’s sake.
What this also demonstrates is that the requirements that marketers will need advertising agencies to meet are going to become more complicated than ever before, and will require a depth of technical and strategic talent that is difficult to provide from within a smaller agency. The future of smaller agencies may well look as bleak as the fading star that is the TVC.