Lessons from Seattle MarketMix: Advertising

Part of the reason the Seattle marketing and advertising community is so strong must be due to the Puget Sound American Marketing Association. As an agency, Drake Cooper works with the PSAMA on one of their major Seattle events, the annual Pulse Awards (naming, identity, design, event collateral, branding), which celebrates marketing effectiveness.

Another major event the PSAMA puts together is MarketMix and there were some terrific learnings at this year’s presentations. (This post is about some of advertising takeaways but other topics will follow.)

IPSOS ASI talked about ways to estimate the potential of an ad’s re-transmission via viral or social media channels. This was interesting. According to IPSOS, ad re-transmission typically needs four things:

1. Buzzworthiness

2. Personal Relevance

3. Emotive Power

4. Uniqueness That Links

Those are good benchmarks to file away.

The first two are fairly self-explanatory. The last two are worth some quick commentary…

Emotive Power

Using 2012 Super Bowl ad re-transmissions online as metrics, IPSOS concluded that the higher the emotive power of the ad the more it was shared and liked. Chrysler and VW, in particular, succeeded here. It’s not the emotion of the brand itself, but rather the emotion that is stirred within and relatable to the audience. This is very important because consumer attention on YouTube is 1.5x higher than on TV.

Uniqueness That Links

The other key point IPSOS discussed on advertising was the importance of producing creativity that uniquely links. The firm revealed that after years of testing effective advertising they’ve come to the conclusion that fifty percent of the time an ad is ineffective it’s because the audience fails to link the advertiser to the advertising. We’ve seen this time and time again in the industry… People recalling an ad to precision except for who it was for.

Going back to the Super Bowl portfolio, M&M’s navigated this beautifully. Which is also part of the reason they won YouTube’s 2012 Ad Blitz.

Lastly, IPSOS reminded the audience that the intro of an ad continues to be of increased importance: As we know on TV the first 5 – 7 seconds of an ad often makes or breaks the execution in terms of attention. On the web, this shrinks to the first 3 seconds.