Image credit: by andrea francesco
Fresh from speaking at the IAB’s FMCG forum, it was revealing to hear the language of a digital industry that still regards FMCG advertisers as ‘laggards’ for not committing huge portions of their budget to online.
For me, this fails to understand – or give proper respect – to the one vertical sector that knows more about marketing than any other. What actually differentiates Persil from Ariel, Pampers from Huggies or Right Guard from Lynx? In a market where the product is barely distinguishable from its competitors, it is only ‘marketing’ that makes us choose these brands over the own-label alternatives. THAT is really good marketing.
And, yet, we still consider FMCGs to have missed the point of online – as if they have no good reason for committing – as Laurie Kirschner of Yahoo told us – just 1% of their marketing budgets to digital, when everyone else (on average) commits 5%. One still hears people refer to those that don’t spend wads on our beloved online as those that don’t ‘get it’.
In fact, they do get it – they get it all too well. In a nutshell, devoting cash to online is all about being able to value the interaction it creates. What can a car company do with a click? Turn it into a test drive. What can BA do with a click? Sell it a flight. What can Pampers do with a click – even presuming anyone would give it one? Not a lot.
This is the reason FMCG advertisers have not fallen over themselves to leap onto the digital bandwagon – not that they haven’t been open to being convinced.
There are ways around this problem based essentially on creating other reasons for people to interact (Flora’s London Marathon, Persil’s ‘Dirt is Good’ events or Red Bull’s wealth of sponsorships, for example.) But, if you are seeking reach and frequency – as, in the main, they are – then there are more cost-effective places to go than the web, particularly as those sectors better able to value interaction flee TV for online. For FMCGs, TV is even more cost-effective than it used to be.
Their problem – and the reason they continue to show up at events like today’s – is that they are fully aware that their audience is moving to online and yet online hasn’t been able to demonstrate its ability to help them follow. That is because it can’t. ‘Mass media’ do not exist in the online space. There are enormous websites, garnering huge shares of the traffic, yet each of us is off doing our own very particular thing in those sites and in our own very particular place. We are not all sitting doing one thing (like watching Coronation Street) at the same time.
In this world, FMCGs need real help, not in ‘getting’ online, but in understanding their own relevance. As LBi’s Chris Clarke brilliantly explained, the internet enables us to quickly discover the essential ‘truth’ about a product, brand or service. If that truth is that your bottled water actually came out of a tap, then no amount of marketing is going to help.
So, the message I most took away from today’s mighty interesting sessions, was that FMCGs have to do something much harder than add digital to their media plan – they have to go back to their products and work out why anyone would buy them over their competitors’. In this process, the instant access to their customers that digital channels enable will be invaluable, and then online will deserve not just the attention, but the budgets it desires.
There’s a quick write-up of the whole event on the IAB site here http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/therevolutionisover150709.mxs
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July 24th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
As ‘Head of Digital’ at a PR firm, I had a bit of a roller-coaster of thoughts reading this article. I think the one line that got me typing back was “What can Pampers do with a click – even presuming anyone would give it one? Not a lot.” Now this just isn’t true. I’ve worked with a number of Pharma brands (OTC and beyond) plus a hell of a lot of consumer products– to truely understand the value of digital, you need to look beyond the simple maths of clicks=boxes shifted, towards clicks=opinions forming. I try to encourage my clients to use their sites as a source of ambassadors, a place where the very keen consumer can be taken to a deeper level and turned from someone who buys the brand to someone who will talk about it in the aisles of Sainsburys or on the telephone to a friend. The most exposed level of some websites might well seem a little pointless (yes we know what nappies do, we don’t often search on them, there’s not a huge amount of lifestyle interest in them), but underneath you’ll see people like myself tracking movements across certain words and phrases, jumps from one site or micro-site to another, building up a picture of my consumer that just can’t be made from the one way channels of traditional marketing. They might not result directly in new consumers, but through this sort of deep level data gathering and indeed open invites of my visitors into closed networks of discussion and product testing/feedback, they will result in a narrower gap between what the consumer desires and what you are providing.
There’s also the basic foundations of brand perception to take into account– this year I haven’t seen a single TV advert that I felt was ‘talking to me’ specifically. I may have been impressed or at least interested in what was being said, but I rarely felt like the material was intended for my eyes and ears. I, like many others, feel that a blanket campaign such as a TV ad, a newspaper advert or radio story just doesn’t have the ‘they are one of us’ feeling that a web-application involving two way interaction can have.
So I agree, it’s not that FMCG advertisers ‘dont get it’, but perhaps that they themselves don’t see how they are being influenced (and indeed building) the social web around them. Only last week I sat in a cafe with a good friend, a very articulate and intelligent man who spends his day earning money in aerospace. The subject of one of my latest web campaigns came up and he (quite rightly I think) said “well that’s nice alex, but I’m only going to buy the next film/camera/movie/mobile based on the reviews.. I don’t trust what the website says, no matter how pretty”… so we checked those reviews… I could name the PR source of 90% of them, no matter how many links back the content came or on what online evidence they had been based. We in true digital martketing know that sites are the foundations for our work– we often see them as simply the ‘what must be’ of marketing, whilst the real work goes on underneath, tracking, influencing, measuring, seeding.
At the end of the day, I use digital media to influence opinion in the same way an artist builds emotion into a print advert or a copy guy lays emphasis on phrases within a page. You can be assured that everyone has a mistrust of everything that ‘advertises’ but even more so can know that the alternatives they turn to (reputation, advice, street word, peers, reviews) have their seed in the digital world. It can’t be any other way, it would be too slow, too expensive, too tiring.
If the truth is that bottled water came out of a tap then fine… but that statement originated on the Internet and I bet I could have told the brand in question where, when it would come and how best to re-align the product before it did. I can do that, because digital allows me to know what’s about to happen 3 months before your print comes out, somewhere between the initial meeting when someone had the idea (and blogged about it after going to the pub) and the point where a pictrue of a bottle of water and a logo hit the shelves.
Media is digital, before it is anything else.