Arnold on ethical marketing

Hi Chris, Anyone who cares about the quality of advertising and is doing whatever they can to exhort the whole industry to try harder gets my support. So – for what it’s worth – good on you, Chris. However, I fear you have succumbed to a bout of self-loathing and self-flagellation, the like of which ad-folk excel at. We should all be much prouder of what advertising achieves, both for the brands advertised and for society in general. Firstly, a word about believing research, especially the sort that online companies conduct online and that relies on claimed behaviour. That David Ogilvy quote comes to mind: “People don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.” Better always to observe or measure what people actually do than ask them. They both consciously and unconsciously distort the truth. And never more so than when advertising and TV viewing are being investigated. We all got scared about DTRs (digital TV recorders) thinking that people acquire them in order to avoid ads. In fact, they get them to watch more of the TV they love. Both the 11,500 individuals on the BARB panel and the 30,000 homes on the Skyview panel offer us much more robust data than the 500 respondents to the Doubleclick research. Here are the hard facts. In the 16% of homes that own a Sky+ or one of the other DTRs, most viewing - about 85% - is still to live broadcast TV. So, only 2.4% of ads are even at risk of being fast-forwarded. Of the time-shifted ad breaks, 44% of ads are viewed at normal speed and 56% fast-forwarded through. But the great news is that getting a DTR makes people enjoy TV more, so the average home watches about 14% more TV after getting one. The net result is that in the UK people end up watching about 6% more ads at normal speed than before they acquired one. No surprise then that BARB tells us that we’re watching more ads than ever in history, some 2.25 billion a day (that’s an average of 40 each). Boringly but illuminatingly, this is a natural consequence of more channels and people watching more TV. It also only represents broadcast TV; additional viewing online and elsewhere isn’t yet measured. People love good ads; they seek them out, talk about them, forward them to their mates, act out the drumming gorilla and pastiche the M&S voiceover. They do put their hands in their pockets, not just buying the advertised products but also buying the merchandise that is associated with ads. Witness the rash of PG Tips monkeys on office desks through the land. People have always disliked boring ads and avoided them psychologically, even if not technologically, but they adore the good ones. We have got lots of research and footage of people talking about ads. They find them useful and relevant often and a delight more often than you think. We can show you people singing and dancing to ads and rewinding recorded breaks to see good adds again. Very happy to share all of that with you. We share some common ground here; we are both on a quest for higher quality advertising. That’s one reason we’ve launched the thinkboxes with this esteemed site’s publishers, to celebrate the great stuff that appears on TV and create ever higher benchmarks to aspire to. Because this response comes from Thinkbox, the marketing body for commercial TV, I fully expect a barrage of “well, you would say that, wouldn’t you”. But I only say it because it’s true and I’m happy to give you and anyone else the proof. Best wishes, Tess

Tess Thanks for the feedback. Data is always a debatable area and some readers may well say "they would say that". You only need to start a conversation about advertising in the bus or at a party and the general response is negative, even if people say they like the Gorilla ad. I put this to the test tonight. I believe that the more facts we have the better our judgment can be, so thanks for the Thinkbox stuff. Maybe the authors of the Google research will be replying soon. Alas, I maintain that there are very few ads that people love, sing along to and want to keep (let alone buy). The same could be said about many other areas of media. There's a lot of rubbish TV, publications, books and the rest. It’s true that Mother have made the Monkey a salable item but it’s an exception. Of course there is another debate about what the public like and quality. Bad TV gets great viewing figures. Does this justify bad TV or bad ads? Or should we always seek quality? I see no reason why, as an industry, we cannot challenge ourselves and raise the bar across all work. I have a belief that we have a responsibility to the public to do our best. To deliver great work that rewards them and enhances them. This is actually the same thinking that Frank Pick had (and it was his thinking that influenced me before I even entered the business). Pick of course revolutionized advertising. In the early part of the last century he ripped all the many ads down from the underground and replaced them with just a few – “quality not quantity”. Even then there were so many ads similar words to pollution were being used. There were complaints from many tube travelers that it was impossible to see what station you were at due to the visual cacophony. He hired the cutting edge artists of the time like E. McKight Kauffer to do great posters. At one time the London public were the most visually educated in the world. Even then people stole the posters and bought them. He took his values across the whole Underground, using top creatives to create a new standard in typography, fabric design, map design, architecture and almost everything he touched. A far cry from today’s tatty system, once the London Underground was the envy of the world. Not a bad standard to aspire to. Sadly, not many Prank Picks around these days.