It's on!

Now I’m reliably informed that the last time that Pepsi was a serious player in the Kenya market was some time before I was born, in other words back in the day when the original Kenyatta wielded power from the house on the hill. At some point they decided to say adieu to Kenya and left us in the kind and caring hands of the boys and girls from Atlanta (Coca Cola).

Pepsi of course has been running a ‘soft launch’ in this town for a while now, and it is no longer a surprise to find a Pepsi Max, Seven Up or Miranda strategically located in the drinks section of your friendly neighborhood petrol station convenience store, often lovingly encased in a new Pepsi-branded refrigerator.

This new billboard campaign however is the first that I have seen of them going ‘above the line', and it is interesting to me at two levels, firstly because of the old adage that ‘you only get one chance to launch something’, and secondly because of the structure/construction/messaging of the ad itself.

I’ll begin with the former. Imagine that you are the brand manager for Pepsi hapa Kenya. How would you launch it? Bare in mind that you already have in place a fairly good distribution system – your product is on the shelf – and that you are dealing with a brand that is already fairly well known, especially amongst your core target audience. How would you go about officially announcing to the people of Kenya that ‘Pepsi Imefika!’

Would you hold a big bash and bring in some teenage heartthrob to headline it? Would you slaughter 5,000 goats and liberally distribute the Nyama across the towns and cities of the republic? Would you blow all your budget on a TV ad directed by Quentin Tarantino and starring Will Smith, Lil Weezy, 50 Cent and Mike ‘Sonko’ Mbuvi? Would you take up the sponsorship of both Gor and AFC? Would you set up a street basketball league with a grand prize of 10M? Or would you just give every Kenyan who registered to vote a free cold Pepsi? The decision would be yours, and of course making these sorts of decisions is exactly what marketing is all about…

Now I don’t watch the necessary programming or listen to the relevant radio stations to know what else Pepsi is doing to launch and build their brand here in Kenya, so I’ll have to work with the billboard that I’ve been seeing around the place – “Dare for More!” (Da da da…)

Pepsi, globally, can be described as the ‘cheeky little brother’ of its big competitor, Coca Cola. Where Coke is wholesome (image-wise), family friendly and endorsed by HRH Father Christmas, Pepsi is younger (they are, after all, the guys who invented Generation X), cheekier, funnier, cooler and edgier (though never too edgy). The general idea (for the core tween-age market) is that you drink Coke with your dad/grand dad but you drink Pepsi with your Peeps (there’s a headline in there somewhere).

I have to say that I’m a touch disappointed with what Pepsi has come up with as the opening verse in the song that they no doubt intend to be singing to us for many years to come. Do not be fooled by the angled font and the torrent of gushing brown liquid, what we have here is a pack shot and a headline.

Now there is nothing wrong per se with a pack shot and a headline, in fact if in doubt a pack-shot and a headline is probably your best bet, for the simple reason that the worst you will probably achieve will be to boost your visual equity (assuming of course that the headline makes something approaching sense). That said, for a brand that is declaring that the world should ‘dare for more’, I would have expected them to dare a touch more…

When it comes to billboards, which are one of the most powerful ways to quickly build a ‘big brand feel’, the headline is pretty much everything – it’s the beginning, the middle and the end. The headline has to capture the essence of all that you want to say in, according to various studies that I have seen, ideally no more than seven words – remember that we tend to absorb billboards by osmosis, so your message better be clear and to the point.

I kind of feel that ‘dare for more’ is one of those ‘bottom drawer’ lines, one of those lines that we copywriters pull out when we are a bit unsure as to what we want to say but we still want to show that ‘we got lyrical game’. It sounds kind of cool and ‘with it’ and it will get you through the client presentation without any egg on your face, but you know deep down that it’s just a bit soft…

I can see what the ‘dare for more’ headline is trying to do – namely to tap into the psychographic of the modern urban youth who, we are told at great expense by research agencies, is hungry, aspirational, ambitious, deficient in attention, ‘lives for the moment’ (another bottom-drawer headline that one) and ever so slightly spoilt by a completely unjustified sense of entitlement. This description, which you will frequently come across packaged in various guises, is in my opinion generic to the point of irrelevancy. Pointing out that young people are in a hurry but tend not to be able to see beyond their noses is a bit like saying that the sky is blue – indeed you have spoken the truth, but exactly what light have you shone upon this murky world?

That there is a distinct and rapidly growing urban youth market in Kenya goes without saying. Furthermore, this is a market that is overflowing with novel and innovative cultural richness. Never forget when you listen to people speaking sheng that you are enjoying the exceedingly rare privilege of watching the birth of a new language… this market segment has it’s own music style, it’s own super stars, it’s own media and, to an extent, it’s own fashion sense and visual vernacular. That this Pepsi ad reflects none of the above is to me something of a shame, and it is weaker as a result. Globally Pepsi have a long and successful history of partnering with young and cool (but not too edgy) pop stars in their prime (Madonna in the 80’s, Britney in the 90’s) to help them push their product. Me wonders whom they should be teaming up with here? Answers on a postcard please…

Don't tell me what to think

For various reasons, the amorphous animal known as a ‘brand campaign’ is the subject of today’s post.

Now to my mind, brand campaigns are the most miss-understood activity in the ad game. The first warning sign is a brief that says ‘brand campaign’. The immediate reaction to receiving a brief so titled should be to return it to sender with a note attached reading ‘please revise thoroughly’.

Because of course there is no such thing in the ad game as a ‘brand campaign’, there is only a ‘brand (re)positioning campaign’, which is quite a different thing – the addition of the ‘additional’ word serving to focus the mind as to exactly what one is trying to achieve with a campaign such as this.

Often when a client asks you for a brand campaign what they are trying to say is that they want to make some noise about their company, what they do and why they are good at it. There is not necessarily any harm in this, though it’s really more of a corporate campaign, but it must remembered that there is a big difference between patting yourself on the back/blowing your own trumpet and building a brand.

The point of a brand campaign is to position a brand. This word position is one of the most important technical terms in the realm of advertising, yet it is unfortunately also one of the most ignored and least understood.

I’ve said this before (I think), and I ill say it again and again and again: a brand is a proactively constructed set of feelings, thoughts, memories, beliefs, experiences and associations towards a particular product, service, company, institution or person. The key word here is proactively – and in many ways the whole point of advertising is to create the thoughts/feelings/ associations that people file away in their minds under ‘your brand’.

Remember that the minute that you put yourself ‘out there’, people will immediately begin to build up a file on you in their minds, therefore the key issue is whether or not what they are ‘filing’ is what you want them to be ‘filing’.

The truth of the matter is that there are a lot of products and services and companies in this town that have all the accoutrements of a brand – logos, colours, fonts, packaging – but which are not actually brands. This is because it is not ultimately the accoutrements that make a brand (these are just expressions), it is the pre-determined taking of a position in the consumers minds that makes a brand.

To put it in very plain English, building a brand essentially involves telling people what to think about a particular product/service/company. It does sound somehow ruthless, but fundamentally this is what advertising is all about – telling people, in the nicest possible way of course, exactly what you need them to think/believe about a thing – and until you understand this about the ad game, you are not playing the ad game, you are playing the layout game, or the word-play game, or the negotiate an extra 5% discount from the media house game, but most certainly not the ad game.

Remember that the point of advertising is to build a brand, this is the alpha and omega of every ad you ever run, every script you ever write, every experience you ever design and every POS material you ever produce.

Now since a brand is simply a product or service about which people think that which you have decided to tell them to think, it obviously follows that the crux of the matter is knowing what to tell people to think, which is nowhere near as simple as it may sound. Where so many supposed brands fail in this town is that they (the ‘custodians’) do not know what they want people to think about their brand, and if you do not know what you want people to think about your brand, you are in no position to tell them what to think about it, which means that you will leave them to decide for themselves (horror) what to think about your brand, which means that you do not have a brand, you have an accident. Now of course accidents can be both for the better and for the worse, but a brand can only be for the better, because you so designed it to be…

So the next time that you have to dream up a ‘brand campaign’, remember the key question that you have to ask yourself – what do you want people to think/believe about the brand? The great joy of advertising (or one of them), and this is what is essentially ‘creative’ about the business, is that you can get people to think/believe pretty much anything about a thing, provided that you are genuinely convincing, and that your ‘pitch’ is not manifestly countered by the experience of reality – as for example, were you to try and sell Coca Cola as the taste of Oranges, though please note that Fanta has done exactly that with no small success despite the fact that it bears little or no relationship to the oranges that grow on trees here on planet earth.

Remember please further that ‘what you want people to think/believe’ is actually ‘what you want people to think/believe in order for your business to meet it’s objectives’. I cannot stress this enough – a brand is a mental construct in the collective consciousness that creates a psychologically-enabling environment within which a business can sell to its optimal level.

In a small market such as ours, many businesses make money almost by default, by being the only provider of a particular product/service, or by being one of only a few providers, or by being one of the cheaper providers… but our market will not be small for ever, and it is getting more competitive by the day, and as the market gets more competitive, you need to up your game, and there is no better way to up your game (Kaizen perhaps excluded) than to start to build a brand…

Reason to believe

Here’s an interesting one from LG, a full page ad that exists primarily to make the point that the 4:3 aspect ratio of their phone screens allows you to see more of an image.

Now one of the first things that you should do when you are writing an ad for anything is make yourself a list of all the reasons why a person should make the purchase that you are asking them to make – the ‘reasons to believe’ that the product or service is worth the money that you are asking for – infact not just that it’s worth the money but that it’s the most amazing value for the money that they will come across between today and the next Mayan end of the world.

Once you have written this list of all the reasons why the thing that you are selling is so wonderful, the next thing that you have to do is write similar lists for all the competing products/services within a similar price bracket in the market.

Now that you have all your lists, the question becomes twofold: is there anything that your product or service is offering that the others don’t and, if not, is there something that you are offering that your product or service does better/faster/more easily than it’s competitors? The answer to these two questions form the basis for putting together an ad…

There is however, as almost always, a but, and this ‘but’ can and will be the cause of more than one ‘heated discussion’ between you and your clients. When you get an answer(s) to the questions above, before you proceed to write an advert, you need to ask yourself a subsequent and crucial question, which is ‘are the reasons to believe that I have identified relevant to my target audience?’ This second question is often forgotten, which is why (as a creative) you will often get a brief that lists seven great features of a product and then get a dirty look when you revert with an ad that only talks about one of them, or what’s worse that talks about something other than the seven ‘great features’.

It is the ability to answer this subsequent question that separates the ‘men from the boys’ in advertising. Now matter how great you think the product is, and no matter how great the client thinks that the product is, you have to be able to honestly analyze what value, if any, the product is going to add to your customers lives.

Someone once told me that the first role of an ad agency is to represent the consumer. This means that you have to put everything that your client and (often) suits are telling you about product X to one side and look at it through the eyes of the targeted consumer. This is why you cannot be a good creative if you lack empathy, as you need to be able to think and feel like a teenage girl, teenage boy, housewife, retired pensioner, bachelor, CFO and DINKY couple, often over the course of the same day…

The ad shown here focuses on a highly functional ‘reason to believe’ – wider ‘real estate’. The key question is to what extent a sufficient proportion of the target audience will be sufficiently moved by this ‘competitive proposition’ to chose LG over the iPhone. My instinct is that it is a differentiating factor that is distinctly of the niche variety.

So to recap. What are your strong points, what are your competitors’ strong points, what therefore are your relative strong points and which, if any, of your relative strong points are most relevant to a majority of your target audience?

N.B. It is essentially the job of a good suit to answer the above series of questions, to sell the answer arrived at to the client and then to put it in as a creative brief. It then becomes the job of the creatives to figure out how they are going to communicate the well-thought-out and relevant proposition to the audience in as effective and engaging a manner as possible.

N.B.2. It is the inability to answer the above series of questions that lies at the heart of the failure of many an ad agency (as professionals and as a business). You can have the best creative team in the world since the renaissance, but if that team isn’t strategically guided as to what it needs to be saying, the chances are that your agency will produce no more than the occasional ‘hit’, mostly by accident. The converse is that if your agency is strategically sound, you do not necessarily have to have the best creatives in town (communicators) because your ads will be saying the right things to the right people, even be it in a slightly dull way. This is far superior to saying the wrong things to the wrong people, no matter how well you are saying them.

A final note to creatives. Remember that there is what a thing does and there is what a thing does. The ad here talks about what the screen does – it displays more of a picture – but it doesn’t really talk about what the screen does – let’s you see the ‘bigger picture’, helps you capture ‘more of the moment’ or even ‘treats your eyes’ – none of these is a very good example, but the point is that it is never really enough to declare an attribute, what you have to do is figure out how to package that attribute as a clear and tangible benefit (emotional if possible) to the customer. Remember the question that every consumer on the planet asks of every ad they ever see every day of their lives: What’s in it for me…?

It's easy to criticize

I decided to have a go at some Tusker ads myself. I thought about what 'Refresh your Roots' actually means, and I thought about the fact that next year we turn 50. I thought about my father's favorite saying, and I thought about iconic Kenyan men, of whom these are but three. I am prepared to be critiqued...

Bado iko more

Now my sources tell me, and I have many, that the agency responsible for the Tusker ‘It’s our time’ campaign is BBDO in London. This is the same agency which produced the ‘Refresh your Roots’ campaign which had Kenyan men complaining that they don’t dance on tables. They are also the UK agency that handles a lot of Diageo’s work, especially for Guinness.

Now BBDO is a ‘hot’ agency, of this there is no doubt. Their client list reads like a ‘who’s who’, or more like a creative’s wet dream, ranging from uefa and Mercedes-Benz to Famous Grouse, Mars Bars and the Economist. It is easy to see why any brand or marketing director would want to work with an agency like theirs - no doubt their offices look like something out of a Hollywood movie and they probably throw amazing client parties, which is all good, but what is not really all good is the fact that a Kenyan brand of the status of Tusker is being entrusted to a bunch of London boys – and there are two reasons why it is not all good, which I shall now proceed to break down for ya’ll ‘onetime’.

Reason No. 1: Where the hell is Kenya?

Ok chances are that if you’re working for a top-notch agency in London you probably do know where Kenya is. You probably also know that Kenya has beautiful beaches, loads of wildlife, a fiery political scene and dudes who can run. However you probably don’t know much more.

On a wider context, you are probably aware of the fact that Africa isn’t quite as messed up as it used to be, that things are beginning ‘to happen’, and that we are the next next next ‘big thing’. Infact you can see this ‘African renaissance blah blah blah’ thinking all the way through the Tusker ad (it’s what’s called a comfortable cliché) – infact again, when I think about it, the ‘it’s our time’ concept is little more than a (poor) attempt to remix Shakira’s ‘It’s time for Africa’…

The thinking behind the 'it's our time' campaign is a bit patronizing and is quite typical of the West’s bi-polar view of Africa – that we are either a basket case to be pitied or bright-eyed young things who need a pat on the back – jolly good, it’s your time now… The scene in the ad where it goes to London and somehow the shock waves from Kenya are causing an earth tremor is to my mind very indicative of the whole viewpoint of the commercial – that somehow the recognition that we seek as Kenyan men can only be found around the board room tables of London… I don’t know if anyone else finds this bit of the ad somehow very Nigerian…?

I could digress into an analysis of the psychological underpinnings of the phenomenon known as neo-colonialism, but I won’t, for now…

I like to draw parallels between the world of advertising and the world of stand-up comedy. The truth of the matter, in both artforms, is that cultural understanding and cultural reference points are very important. There are very few stand-ups, if any, on this planet who can bring the house down in every capital city on this planet, the reason being that what is funny in Berlin is not necessarily funny in Bangkok, and what is funny in Beijing is not necessarily funny in Bamako (making the huge assumption of course that everyone speaks the same language, which they don’t.)

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those guys who say an ad must be made in Kenya and by a Kenyan in order for it to work with Kenyans. I do not believe this to be true, and there is plenty of evidence to show that it is not true. What I do believe though is that it is considerably harder to talk to a culture with which you are unfamiliar, and only those communicators who have a truly profound understanding of what makes humans tick as humans are able to consistently and successfully communicate their ideas across cultures and over time.

Muppets

The fact that BBDO are sitting in London and don’t have much understanding of our local market though doesn’t excuse for me the poverty of their work – if you’re advertising a beer from Africa that has a big elephant on the front and is called Tusker then the very least you can do is make your ad big, bold, awesome, earth-shaking and elephant-bull-like you Muppets…

Reason No. 2: We’re trying to build an industry

It is actually quite frightening, as a Kenyan ad man, to think that one of the very few true Kenyan ‘big brands’ is being shipped off to a London agency. What this means quite clearly is that the marketing people at eabl don’t think that there is an agency in Nairobi that is capable of handling and building their flagship brand.

Here in Nairobi the vast majority of brands with a significant ad-spend behind them are the multi-national FMCG’s – the Coca Colas and the Unilevers and the P&G’s and the Reckitts. Much as all the brands that these conglomerates ‘house’ are ‘with’ and agency in Nairobi (by virtue of affiliations), none of them are really with an agency in the sense of having a deep and meaningful intimate strategic and creative relationship. By and large the brands come pre-positioned from abroad, and the campaigns come pre-designed from abroad, which means that the work of the Nairobi agency is largely to adapt and to implement.

What this means is that the number of local brands for whom the local agencies have the opportunity to produce good work for is rather limited – Safcom, eabl themselves, some of the banks, a few manufacturing outfits, gava and NGO’s. Therefore when one of these local brands, and one of the most iconic at that, decides to take it’s work ‘off-shore’, we should all be very afraid and it is a sad day for the industry.

And industry is indeed the relevant word. This is not about one particular conglomerate or new, hot upstart. This is not about some guys who are well-connected and some other guys who are undercutting everyone else. This is about our collective output and prospects as an industry. I would love to be able to say to eabl that the Kenyan ad industry is super-hot, and that we churn out a killer-campaign every month, but we just don’t… Niko na Safaricom and Mimi ni Member are two bad-boy campaigns that spring to mind, but if you can name me another eight from the last decade I’ll be very surprised.

Wapi Compe?

For me you only get an industry, and a vibrant one at that, on the back of competition, and our industry, such as it is, is sorely lacking in genuine competition – competition for accounts, competition for talent, competition for awards, competition for glory… because there is so little competition, there is no drive to excel, which is why, as an industry, we are not producing a hit a month, which should be the minimum by the way…

I’m not saying that we don’t produce good ads, we do, on occasion, but I’m not talking about the ‘occasional’ funny radio spot or witty headline. I’m talking about the big campaigns that inject themselves into the Nation’s psyche there within to live for generations. These are sadly few and far between.

Ads telling you how to wash your hands and disinfect a toilet, on the other hand, we are masters at, which is wonderful, but ads that kids grow up to tell their own kids about, wapi?

I believe that it is in the long term interests of the marketing departments of Nairobi to have on their doorstep the most vibrant ad industry in Africa (and if you think that Lagos is sleeping, you are sleeping). I therefore think that the marketing departments of Nairobi have to make a conscious effort to help to build the ad industry – after all, they are the ones who fuel it. By way of example, the marketing fraternity should be aghast by the fact that the ad industry does not have an annual awards ceremony, because what that means is that the ad industry isn’t all that bothered to compete and showcase it’s work, which further means that the ad industry isn’t all that bothered about producing competitive work for you… do you get me?

I would love to see Tusker come back home. After all, we can’t do much worse of a job than the London boys, and if you still want to go offshore, I found these Ugandans who had a fair bash at a Tusker ad all of their own…