Marks & Spencer sent me an email this week announcing their new TV advert that was about to launch. I barely watch TV ads so this would surely have passed me by but did they really need to tell me?

Well, I’m an existing customer so this wasn’t about acquisition but it may inspire repeat business as they bang the “as seen on TV” drum. I don’t particularly care what the ad shows but it’ll be the ultimate video content for many consumers as they like the clothes on characters and try to emulate that.

Pepsi created great interest when they first advertised their new advert was coming. Not sure this is quite as innovative, or interesting, but it is duplicating your message across all platforms and that’s to be commended.

It’s rare that I’m in front of the TV as much as I have been this evening and I don’t mean to be a humbug but a couple of things have struck me under the bombardment of advertising:

- Many would argue the marketers have appropriated Christmas. On the face of tonight’s TV advertising they’d be right. It’s milk-the-event-dry stuff;

- Sales stat: Boots will sell more fragrance tomorrow (Christmas eve) than they do in the month of April;

- Argos were the first to pull the Christmas advert trigger by airing on 16^th October;

- VISA expected to handle 26.5 million transactions today, totalling more than £1.2 billion;

- Brits will spend £150 million on trees and £40m on turkeys this Christmas;

- Woolworths – a company that infamously only ever made a profit in Q4 – produced the first blockbuster advert in 1982. It really was a watershed when you look at the big players today and their celebrity feast (John Lewis, M&S et al).

Just saying…

Modern marketers (whatever they are) might well say TV advertising is dead, that it’s a bygone era. I’m not sure I agree.

The communications group and advertising giant, WPP sells more than its fair share of TV ads and they’ve just had their best quarter for ten years. According to chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell, “growth was helped by a recovery in the US and in traditional media.”

A £10 million ad spend is brainwashing via repetition and frequency, and it’s still happening aplenty. I don’t watch TV ads anymore (the little TV I watch is from Sky+ and I skip the ads) which is a shame given the amount of money changing hands: a 30-second Super Bowl ad costs $2.5 million and they’ve nearly sold out! A slot on the X-factor breaks would set you back between £181k and £250k.

Somebody in the marketing department must still thinks it’s working.

It’s a marketing myth to say the web has killed traditional marketing. Video rentals (remember them?) didn’t kill the cinema and TV didn’t kill the radio. This isn’t the car versus the horse stuff. It’s not a binary yes/no; there’s a possible meld here. WPP is clearly keeping a close eye on Facebook ads with a $5 million stake in Buddy Media, a Facebook management system for brands and marketers.

Surprisingly, a study by the Pew Center found the average American still spends close to an hour a day on traditional media. That’s apparently unchanged from a decade ago.

Add to this the explosion of content online and it shows that we’re really consuming media as blend. It isn’t wholly about the web or TV,  about Google ads or magazines – the smart money is finding a balance for their brands.

What say you? What’s working for you and your brand this year?

Image credit: Zazzle

Should every penny SMEs spend on marketing go on traffic initiatives that directly affect turnover?

I know plenty of small business owners who’d say that branding is just for the big guys. They’re enraged with the anecdote that says, “half of all marketing is junk, and half of it works, but you never know which is which until after you’ve paid the money.”

But is it possible in today’s increasingly cookie-enabled world?

Look at all the new outreach programs you’re employing: Facebook, Twitter, blogging, YouTube, Flikr, Foursquare etc. These all cost you money despite being free to sign up, so unless they help you increase turnover, they are marketing exercises not sales initiatives. Or are they the same thing?

Branding with large budgets over traditional channels might still be the preserve of the Big Boys, but branding for the small firm has never been so applicable and opportunistic as it is right now.

[Side note: I agree with Tom Asacker and believe branding to be a reflection of who you are, your business model and how you make customers feel, but this sees the noun branding in a more off-the-shelf manner.]

Photo credit: AON

Rebranding is an ugly word. All too often it’s a euphemism for ‘we were rubbish but a cleaner logo and new strapline means you should forgive our history and buy into this new stuff.’ Perversely, not rebranding is one of the reasons Mr Brown is going to be punished so badly on Thursday.

But I am a fan of change. I love improvement and progress and no one needs that more than a trio of uber-brands: Toyota, BP and Nike. All three have had a disastrous time in 2010 but the BP spill is sickening beyond belief. All three are surely hiring branding experts to refocus messages and ensure customer buy in?

But that’s the problem with most branding. It’s not the logo, or font, or jingle, it’s what the company does that makes it what it is. That’s why the purest marketing is a reflection what you are (your true story), not what Madison Avenue portrays you to be. Actions are what customers truly judge you on. The slickest branding in the world won’t get you to invest in Bernard Madoff!

So, Nike needs Tiger to stay on the wagon, Toyota needs consumer confidence more than we need oxygen and BP (along with everything they’re about to devastate) need a biblical miracle.

Nope, branding really isn’t about logo, is it?

As we increase our personal openness and honesty via social media, so too are we appraised more as data-mining never had the chance to go so deep.

Californian data-mining company Rapleaf are at the bleeding edge of social media monitoring (SMM). Short version: they track everything about you online – every comment, every review, every status update, every tweet, every contact, every friend and they appraise you via some massive algorithms.

This pretty much promises to offer the Holy Grail for advertising online where uber-relevant adverts are delivered to you and your peer group. But Rapleaf are taking that peer group and going further than ads – they’re suggesting credit ratings! A ‘prospect’ might fail a credit score rating but their closest online friends are quite affluent, so perhaps some extra leeway should be given (they wouldn’t see you on the street would they?).

Given that we know all this, how long before people start spamming the system? In a view to becoming more credible, will the scumbag hook up with the solicitor, doctor and police officer? If an online friend will upset your credit score, would you oust them? Will this lead to appraising people who ‘poke’ you to see if they lift or drop your ‘perceived value’ to the market (think mortgage providers for a start)?

If you thought social media was free, you’re wrong. Facebook is inching toward its big payday and Rapleaf and others are offering tools that help social media grease the skids nicely.

Cartoon: the infamous “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” by Peter Steiner originally published by The New Yorker in 1993.

Plenty has been said about Dixons’ comparison ads lately. They’re a blatant come-on aimed squarely at John Lewis, Harrods and Selfridges. They invite consumers to research with their competitors and then convert to Dixons for stronger pricing.

This is primarily a drive for Dixons’ website, with their retail sites only operating at airports. The strapline is, Dixons.co.uk: the last place you want to go.

These are more ‘designed’ than the comparison ads seen from the supermarkets. By using rivals’ fonts and colour pallet, they’re well and truly ‘up yours’ ads.

Having seen them for a while, I still can’t fully decide if they’re touting an honest and clever reflection of modern shopping habits or even pushing a wee bit of a class divide.

Either way, I think they’re a bellwether of what to expect from copywriters this winter, where ads will be thin on superlatives and hard on competitors. The Christmas run-up is getting all in your face – don’t skirt around with clever copy, get down to brass tacks and call your competitor out. Just look at Tesco and Asda for more evidence.

I’m driving on the weekend with my three-year-old in the back of the car. “Where [are] we going, daddy?” I reply with, “B and Q.” From behind me comes the cutest singing voice, “You can do it when you B and Q it.” I was flabbergasted.

The only TV she watches in any quantity is CBeebies which runs no adverts, let alone adult DIY targeting. Amazing.

For all our new media talk of Web 2.0 sounding the death knell of TV advertising we shouldn’t underestimate the power of the old fashioned jingle. For penetration and awareness it clearly still packs a hell of a punch.

Complacent and lazy marketers know people like to follow the crowd. There’s safety in numbers, right?

They play this card as often as possible with their marketing messages. The company mindset can be, ‘Why do we need to do any better when product X sells just fine?’ It strikes me that the banking and motor industries have entrenched their businesses in this attitude.

The brave ones break new ground and create a tribe.

At the back of every great fortune lies a great crime (Honoré de Balzac).

Ship’s Biscuit points us to this stunning advert from Philips (by Tribal DDB Amsterdam and Stink Digital). It’s promoting the first Cinema 21:9 TV which has the same viewing dimensions as – you guessed, didn’t you – a cinema screen. That means no more adjusting the aspect ratio with black bars or cropping, just the movie as it was born to be watched.

Personally, I’ve had a pretty awful time with my Philips TV and DVDR combo and I’ve sworn never to buy the brand again, but I can’t deny salivating at this. Quality advertising indeed then. Check out the microsite.