Unfortunately theses days, many advertising professionals seems to put more emphasis on building their personal portfolio than on their client's interests. You must first ask yourself, do I want a great ROI or help somebody win an Oscar?
Back to Basic
After countless books written about how to get what you want in life and the common acceptance on the basics of the law of manifestations, we all seems to agree that the first thing for everything is clarity. Whatever you are aiming for, you must be clear on what you want to determine the purpose of our actions (as brilliantly explained by Jack Canfield in The Secret). Guess what? Those universal principles are not only true in your life but also in advertising.
If setting a goal and determining the purpose of an ad before designing it sounds obvious for some, it always amazes me when I see brilliant creatives from famous agencies prioritizing their personal glory instead of goal oriented results.
A Real Case Tragedy
This is the sad story of Meubles Napert. Meubles Napert was a very prosper family owned furniture store chain. When Kevin, the youngest son, took over the company and decided to invest massively in his positioning, he hired one of the most dynamic, provocative and successful young ad agency in the province called AMEN.
The agency advised Mr. Napert to go with a powerful and provocative generic campaign featuring real clients of the retailer having as last names, the name of their main competitors (Most of furniture stores in Canada are named after their founder). The above ad was saying “Leon is shopping at Napert” and was targeting the national giant, Leon’s http://www.leons.ca/.The campaign was praised by the creative industry, as the agency found a brilliant and funny way to build a relationship between the advertiser and its competitors, and created a lot of controversy among Napert’s competition.
Praised by some, hated by others, the campaign was on everybody’s lips. It was a pure success but 7 months later, the company filed for chapter 11. What went wrong? Of course not everything was to blame on the campaign but nevertheless, the campaign failed to bring sales up because while everybody else were advertising queen size mattresses for $599, Napert was spending money advertising the fact that their advertising agency was more creative than those of the competition.
The agency failed in either listen to its client who’s been successfully selling furniture for years or in learning about how to successfully sell in this industry.
Bottom line
Before even thinking about doing ANY advertising attempt, always determine your purpose by asking yourself: What’s my objective? Why am I advertising? What results do I want to produce? If you want to sell more, advertise as such. It may look less sexy and you might not win a prize for creativity but at least you will bring more sales.
A great creative campaign can definitely make you but also destroy you if it fails to produce the anticipated results. Do a furniture retailer need an award winning creative campaign to take its business to the next level? This is something a client objectives driven agency should have ask themselves before taking Napert’s money. As we all know, an Oscar doesn’t necessarily translate in a blockbuster success and vice and versa. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of purpose that will lead every choice in any productions. Keep that in mind when you choose your agency or agree on a concept.
David Morin B.A.V.
Brand Artist
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