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Monday
Sep032012

Controversial Ads

Recently on The Morning Show we discussed the latest round of controversial ads. 

The often used axiom of "any news is good news" is a dangerous one in the advertising world. What may be cool & funky for one brand can have seriously damaging effects on another.

This can become difficult when you are approaching different market demographics.  The Toyota Yaris example in the video below is a case in point, while normally a very conservative  marketer with most of it sales coming in the mainstream auto market, it's attempt at luring the younger crowd with this user generated ad had the potential to turn off it largest demographic base.

The companies that do do this well typically try to separate their product brands from the corporate brand. A good example is Unilever, who markets both the Lynx deodorant brands and Dove - their approach for both products is totally disparate but most consumers do not know the products are made by the same company.

Transcrtipt from the segment

Kylie Gillies Have been the most complained about ad of 2011 and now the controversial Rip and Roll campaign, which promotes safe sex in the gay community has made a return to Queensland bus shelters and billboards this week.

Toby Squires: It's certainly not the first marketing campaign to push a few boundaries, but as others have shown over the years, sometimes not all publicity is good publicity. This was the most complained about ad of last year. The Queensland safe sex campaign was temporarily pulled from billboards and bus shelters after the Advertising Standards Board received a record 222 complaints. Now it's making a comeback with a revamped version of the poster hitting Queensland this week. Organizers say this year's version is designed to be subtle, and while they don't anticipate a backlash, they're ready if they do. It's not the only ad campaign to cop serious criticism. The Commonwealth Bank was recently forced to apologize after this advert making light of a bomb hoax at the London Olympics.

Speaker 3: There's a guy over the road who just asked us he wants to take his backpack into the stadium. He's sweating profusely.

Speaker 4: The backpack's making like ticking.

Speaker 3: Ticking kind of sounds.

Speaker 5: Isn't he with you?

Speaker 3: No.

Speaker 4: No.

Toby Squires: The Australian Medical Institute continue to be the bad boy of the industry. Their want longer-lasting sex billboard received a whopping 265 complaints. Proving sex doesn't always sell. Chicken commercial was meant as a joke.

Speaker 6: So what if you're one of the 14 Australians who don't like chicken. Then there is something wrong with you.

Toby Squires: Religious groups and vegetarians were outraged with 181 official complaints calling for it to be canned.

Speaker 7: I'm here to take Jennifer's virginity out tonight.

Toby Squires: It didn't take long for this raunchy Toyota Yaris ad to be pulled from the web.

Speaker 7: Yep. A couple of nice big SRS airbags up front to throw my head into.

Toby Squires: While this campaign made Lara Bingle a household name.

Speaker 8: So everybody hello.

Toby Squires: The controversial catch phrase offended some countries with Britain banning the ad altogether.

Kylie Gillies Well, let's take a look at these [inaudible] in the studio with Morning's media expert, Tim Burrows from Umbrella and marketing guru, Matthew Bywater from Four Promote. Good morning to you both. Tim I'm going to start with you. Rip and Roll ad has been toned down a bit because of last year's controversy. Is that the same as caving in?

Tim Burrows: It's a weird position to start from because what was actually quite a small campaign last year had an enormous amount of attention drawn to it because of the complaints. Complaints they didn't go out looking for. So they're much more under the spotlight than they would have expected. So I think you know that they've taken a sensible approach. Yes, it does feel like it's a bit toned down, but really it's still a win. The fact that we're talking about it, this isn't just a small campaign running on a few billboards. It's got more attention. So I think the pluses is more than the negatives in this case.

Kylie Gillies It's more of a community service thing as opposed to a commercial. Do they look at that differently as opposed to say for a condom maker or?

Tim Burrows: There are some differences in how the Ad Standards Board looks at things, which is the body that sort of looks at these things.

Tim Burrows: It will give a bit more sort of room when there's excerpt safety message for instance. So there's a bit more wiggle room, but it doesn't give everyone sort of completely free reign.

Toby Squires: We used to edge in our commercials, we like it. How far should they push? What works, what doesn't work?

Tim Burrows: I think it depends on the brand. Actually when it goes wrong, sometimes it's just a complete blunder, complete cockup. You know, we looked at the CommBank example there. We looked at the Yaris example. Both things that really weren't meant for wide audience, possibly not even meant to reach public eyes at all and did and became a mistake.

Kylie Gillies It's naive to think that it's not going to reach public eyes.

Tim Burrows: Yeah, it was, it was foolish. The combat one was up for a matter of hours before they pulled it down for instance.

Toby Squires: That [inaudible] and the Commonwealth Bank had also cost James Magnuson, a gold medal.

Tim Burrows: Yes I've heard that as well.

Matthew Bywater: That's a long stretch. There can't be an identity crisis here with all of these companies because they're not sure what they want to do. The banks are big, safe, friendly, they're the people who were supposed to look after our home loans, our mortgages, our life savings. Yet they try and bring humor into it and it doesn't quite align with the branding of the bank. So I sometimes question what they're trying to achieve by this.

Kylie Gillies That's a blunder. That's a blunder, isn't it? That's not because it got publicity that's a win.

Tim Burrows: They weren't going out looking for controversy. Some you do. If that's your brand, if that fits your brand, then hey, people would probably be happy with that. So long as it doesn't offend their customers. There are some brands that don't mind who else they offend so long as it brings in customers.

Tim Burrows: The ones with the wider footprint who want to appeal to everyone don't really want to be in that sort of controversy.

Toby Squires: You're right though. You don't think humor when you think banks. That is not naturally funny. That's an absolute wrong path for them to go.

Matthew Bywater: Absolutely and I understand what they're trying to do. Banks, they have this one big advantage in their favors. We do not change banks quickly and easily. It's a very small return factor for clients. So what they're actually after is a Gen Y market, much like the Toyota Yaris ad we saw before. The problem is nobody really knows how to attack that market. They're a different beast and species all together almost and you cannot attack the larger broad story market in the Gen Xers and Baby Boomers and the Gen Y and they had this sort of this identity crisis with it.

Kylie Gillies If you're a company, is it hard to pick it these days? Back 30 years ago, we're a lot more conservative. We all knew the rules. Now it's more open slather. Do you think it's hard to pick now as a community where we stand on things?

Tim Burrows: I think you can't always call which are going to be the controversial ones. I'd never would have caught that Rip and Roll one if there hadn't been a sort of big lobbying campaign, it wouldn't have been the most complained about.

Kylie Gillies But gay is always going to create controversy.

Tim Burrows: You get Christian lobbyists. That essentially what happened with that case. There's lobbying, but you can't always call it, things you see go up, you think, wow what were they thinking? A couple of those saw with definitely in the what were they thinking department.

Kylie Gillies Yeah.

Tim Burrows: Very clever people paid a lot of money, have let these things through.

Kylie Gillies Yeah hard to pick.

Toby Squires: Are they still? I mean we're taught with the image of advertising executives are that young, hip, groovy very, very smart. Is that really what we're looking at?

Tim Burrows: That's when it goes wrong is when they're not actually in touch with the wider audience, when they are young and funky. That was how the Yaris, which was the winner of a user generated competition ended up because there were no grownups in the room when they let it go out.

Kylie Gillies Then grown ups may not be buying Yarises. Maybe 21 year olds are the people who will buy. That's a tick or a fail?

Matthew Bywater: That's right, because the great dichotomy is, is that to get to Gen Ys, you need Gen Y type thinking to get in there. They still need to be vetted by grownups because there's no such thing as narrow casting more because people used to think the web was narrow casting. It's not, it goes viral within minutes. So you need to have some grownups in the room.

Toby Squires: All right. Like this show, sadly we have no grown ups at all. Thank you both for your time.

 

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