August 2001
MAINE MEDIA & MARKETING
Talkin' television: A pro weighs in on creating spots to sell, sway and satisfy your audience
Copyright © 2001 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
| Recently in MAINE MARKETING & MEDIA: | |
|
Make your story compelling to the media (June, 2001) A web tale: Site development, spam and search engines (May, 2001) Does television advertising work for small businesses? (March, 2001) Is radio advertising a good buy for your business? Get the scoop from an ace. (February, 2001) Peppy promotions planning (January 2001) Pitching your story to the media (December 2000) Good marketing help doesn't have to be hard to find (October 2000) The importance of a cohesive marketing team (July 2000) Be prepared: the crisis communications plan (June 2000) Media relations: the good, the bad, and the ugly (April 2000)
|
I took my questions to David Fuller, creative director at VP Films (www.vpfilm.com) a television production company in Portland. David Fuller and partner Mark Carpentier are responsible for many of the commercials familiar to Mainers, including spots for L.L. Bean, Central Maine Power and Shaw’s Supermarkets. Along with Four City Media, which handles digital media and post production, the companies create television commercials, marketing communications programs and interactive and web-based projects.
Kimberly McCall: Good or bad, television commercials generate buzz. In Portland, there are lawyers acting out Tyson fights and brandishing baseball bats mixed with visually sumptuous spots like those you've created for Young's Furniture. Is there such a thing as a bad television spot, or is just about getting the customer's name out there over and over?
David Fuller: Sure there are bad television spots. As my step-daughter said when she was about nine years old, "they waste your time."
Television ads have a job to do. They can be artful, but they are not art. They’re strategic marketing communication. All of the creative in a TV spot–the writing, the look, the music, the editing–all of it has to speak to the audience if the spot’s to be effective.
It's interesting you've picked that particular group of commercials to illustrate your question. My company produced all of those spots. Young's Furniture and Hardy Wolf & Downing are both long-term clients. Those two sets of commercials were crafted for very different audiences, and they’ve worked very well. They have generated a lot of buzz. While the buzz about the Young's spots was positive, the Hardy Wolf & Downing buzz was more negative. But more importantly, they’ve generated a lot of traffic for those businesses and helped them grow. They’ve done that because they were directed at the right audience with the right message.
The content of an ad really does matter. The average person sees thousands of advertising messages a week. The art of the television spot is to craft a commercial that really speaks to the right audience with a message that cuts through all those other messages and is truly memorable. That's what all the creative should be about: making the message memorable to the audience. For most potential customers, the only connection they ever have with a company before they walk through the door is advertising. For those people, you are what your ads show you to be.
McCall: What are the elements of a television spot that's both pleasing to the audience and effective for the advertiser?
Fuller: A good story, great music, beautiful photography, interesting characters, strong acting. They're really all the things you would expect, but they're not the same for every audience.
As an advertiser, it's important you know who your audience is and who it is not, because that has an effect on your creative. For example, some of people don't like rap music, but if you run a shop that sells skateboards, rap may be exactly what you should use in a TV spot. Will that annoy some people? Yes it will. My mother, for one, will hate it. But is she going to buy a skateboard? No. And the kids who do buy skateboards will love it.
McCall: Say a small business owner with a retail shop wants to put together her first 30-second television spot. How should she start the process? How much should she budget?
Fuller: She should ask herself two questions: "Who am I talking to?" and "What do I want to happen as a result of this ad?" (The answer to the first question is never "Everyone.") When she has those answers, she should look for a production company to develop a script and produce the commercial. If she has trouble answering those questions, I'd urge her to look for a marketing consultant or ad agency to help her develop a creative strategy.
Some ideas are more expensive to produce than others. The more locations, actors and sets a project needs, the more it will cost to produce. And one of the worse things she can do is to try to produce a $30,000 idea with a $15,000 budget. It will just look like a badly-produced commercial. On the other hand, a well-produced $10,000 idea can have a tremendous impact.
The best way to get a good commercial for a modest budget is to work with a production company to develop the concept with budget in mind. I would urge her to budget at least $10,000 for the production.
McCall: What are your favorite local and national television spots?
Fuller: There are a lot of great ads out there. A couple of my favorite national spots are Monster.com's "When I Grow Up..." and IBM's "Where Are all the Flying Cars?" I love the clarity of their vision, and I love the characters. They stop you, draw you in, get you to watch. Then the script turns that emotion toward their objective. I especially love the music in the IBM spot. It's very American Beauty. I also love everything Audi has done since the introduction of the TT and most of [Arnold Advertising's] Volkswagen ads.
What local ads do I like? Well, I have to root for the home team. I think our commercials for Young's Furniture stand up well against national spots. I love the photography and music in those spots. Another campaign that stands up well against the national competition is our work for the Partnership for a Tobacco-Free Maine. One of the most interesting things about that campaign is that we have involved high school filmmakers in the production of commercials targeted at the high school audience. They’ve done much of the shooting for the campaign, and it’s very fresh and original. And I have to say that I like the boxing spot for Hardy Wolf & Downing. It's a very cinematic commercial with an interesting editing style, terrific sound design and fabulous music.
Good advertising requires an element of risk. If you want a commercial to cut through all the visual "clutter," it needs a creative concept that’s strong and interesting. That concept is quite possibly going to make you a little uncomfortable. It may be more aggressive than you’d like; it may be more expensive than you'd like. But if you've really done your strategic homework, if you're sure of your audience and your message, that creative risk you take can yield tremendous rewards in terms of audience recognition and response.
Kimberly McCall is a writer and the president of McCallMedia & Marketing, Inc., a business communications company in Freeport, Maine. She is the monthly "Game Plan" columnist for Entrepreneur magazine and contributes to inc.com. Reach her at 207-865-0055 or www.MarketingAngel.com.