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…

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...

Is it time to call time on Tusker?

I’ve been waiting for the next big thing from Tusker for a long time now – a good 15 years at least in my estimation. On the evidence of this new "It’s our time” campaign, I’ll be waiting for a lot longer…

Tusker is a brand that many Kenyan men hold very close to their heart, especially at around 2.30 am whilst swaying slowly and unsteadily on the dancefloor whilst imagining that Mariah Carey is actually singing those sweet words to you personally.

But there’s (a lot) more to it than that. Every Nation’s manhood has a lager brand which is a fundamental part of the self-definition of that Nation’s manhood - ‘This is the beer that the men of this Nation drink.’ Now in Kenya, the ‘beer of the men of the Nation’ is Tusker – it is the beer that “makes us equal (as Kenyan men) and has no equal (amongst and for Kenyan men)”.

Now some years ago it would appear that the powers at eabl/Diageo made a decision to push the Tusker brand into the wider African market. This was a very brave decision as it essentially necessitated an attempt to create and define a sense of African (as opposed to Zimbabwean, Kenyan, Angolan or Yoruban) ‘man-hood’. It was this push that drove the development of the line ‘refresh your roots’ (which I note keeps getting smaller and smaller in the Tusker layouts), the idea or insight being, I guess, that a respect for tradition and our fore-fathers is a common feature of all African societies.

To my mind the way that eabl went about selling Tusker in other markets was strategically incorrect. When you take one Nation’s beer to another Nation, the approach, I think, should not be to try and subsume the other Nation’s identity under a new one (African-ness). Instead one should be trying to sell the ‘manhood-ness’ of the Nation from which the beer comes to the men of the Nation to whence it is going. Thus Budweiser will never be the number one beer in any Nation other than USA!!!, but it has a significant following around the world amongst men who ‘buy-in’ to the vision of young, baggy-clothes-wearing, wasssuuup-shouting, baseball-watching, blue-collar American ‘manhood-ness’ that Bud is so good at selling.

All beers that have successfully sold in their non-domestic markets (as per my far from in-depth study of these matters) have done so by following essentially the same approach. Thus both Fosters and Castlemaine XXXX sell the concept of irreverent, don’t-give-a-damn, straight-talking, semi-cowboy Australian ‘manhood-ness’. Castle tries the same (though with little luck hapa Kenya) with their whole braai & rugby South African ‘manhood-ness’ thing. Corona sells ‘Yarriibaa!!!’ Mexican ‘manhood-ness’. Kirin sells ‘deadly ninja’ Japanese manhood-ness, Peroni sells ‘check-my-Gucci-suit’ Italian manhood-ness, Tennent’s sells ‘what you looking at’ Scottish manhood-ness, and so on and so forth. Therefore, for me, the way to sell Tusker to the World would be to sell Kenyan manhood-ness, whatever that may be (Answers on a postcard please.)

To an extent I digress. The flipside of the push into Africa, and the resulting ‘South Africans dancing on tables’ refresh your roots TV ad, was a big disconnect with the men of the home market. A quick change in bottle shape (probox) to try and divert the attention and then, as any kindergarten child could have predicted, Tusker come back waving the flag for all that it’s worth in a rather desperate attempt to say ‘no no no, we’re still Kenyan…’

Now the rule discussed above in relation to selling a lager brand in foreign markets applies equally to the home market – what you are actually selling is the concept of Kenyan manhood. The feeling (ain’t no logic with beer) that Mr. Kenyan Everyman must get when he watches your advert is “Damn right I’m a Kenyan man, I’m damn proud to be one and I wouldn’t be seen dead drinking anything other than Tusker” (or words to that effect).

This is the reason why both the ‘Baada ya Kazi” and “Mbili Mbili” campaigns were so powerful and so effective. Both excellently captured a key truism about the lives of Kenyan men – we work hard, are focused and determined, but we still like to pass by the local for a quick two with our boys before we head home to wifey and kids.

So therefore the question I ask of this “It’s our time” campaign is this: what does it say to me about what it means to be a Kenyan man?

Not very much I’m afraid is the answer. Does the song stir something deep in my belly that links me back down through the soil to my ancestors who roamed this land before me? Hell no. It sounds like it’s sung by a choirboy. Then it’s in English!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! When was the last time that there was a (local) hit song in this town that was in English (and no the use of the word ‘kwetu’ at the end doesn’t count). Visually there is no story – it is simply a collection of clichés – and I can prove it – simply replace the Tusker bottle at the end with the Vision 2030 logo and voila, nothing’s really changed. In fact, this ad reminds me a lot of Obak’s Jamhuri Day speech, but I won’t go there…

As a Kenyan man, I consider the Tusker brand to be my personal property, I am a shareholder (which I believe is the level of engagement that every brand should aspire to). Therefore, as a shareholder, when Tusker doesn’t ‘Talk nicely’, I take it very personally. To me this advert is perhaps the classic example of the “let’s sit in our ivory towers in Nairobi and pontificate at great length about how wonderfully glorious Kenya is without actually saying anything” syndrome that so utterly drives me insane.

The great way to test a beer ad for a brand like Tusker is to ask a very simple question: would you show this ad with pride to visiting man from the other Nations of the world? Would you sit a Russian, a Mexican, a Nigerian, a Danish and an Indonesian man in front of the TV and tell them “Watch… here you shall see everything about what it means to be a Kenyan man…” Hell. No.

Straight up, and I say this with the greatest of respect to homosexual men, with whom I have no beef, this ad is gay. It’s weak, it’s floppy, it’s insipid. It is as far away from a celebration of Kenyan manhood as anything that I can imagine. Mboya, Kimathi, Kenyatta, Kaggia, Jaramogi, and all them other original bad-boy Kenyan men must be turning in their graves.

To the agency responsible. This brand is a part of our National heritage. I would blame the client, but the client can only chose to approve from what is placed before them. There is a point at which a brand becomes bigger than the revenue that it generates. As I said at the beginning, this is a brand that Kenyan men hold very close to our hearts. Do our hearts mean so little to you that this is the best that you can do to move them? 

Newsworthy

It is quite a common trick employed by the P.R. agencies to earn column inches for their clients by making a song and a dance about the launch of a new ad campaign, especially if it is of the ‘brand’ variety, and can be packaged with statements like “the move is designed to promote a new brand positioning with a Pan-African focus that will centralize and streamline operations across Africa”.

By way of an aside, I am wondering if someone at Ecobank’s agency once worked on KCB, the whole ‘To make a difference’/’making the difference’ thing being rather to close for comfort.

Whilst in general press release like this can be a rather lazy way for the PR guys to justify their retainer, the underlying logic of the exercise – that you need to get people talking about your latest ad campaign – is sound.

When you make an ad, and it goes out there into the world, one of the greatest and most satisfying results of your endeavors is to hear people say “Have you seen XYZ ad? It’s too deadly/wicked/imenijazz”. Truth be told ad people tend to live for the applause as much as anything else, so knowing that you’ve got a ‘hit’ on your hands is probably worth more than the salary that clocks in at the end of each month.

You’ll notice that when people talk about ads they tend to use very emotional language in relation to them: “I love/hate that ad!” in general if their feelings towards the ad don’t fall into one of these two categories it means that they are ‘feeling nothing’, which a good ad person will and should take as a slap across the face.

The emotional reaction generated by ads puts them in the same territory as other artistic forms like movies, books, music an TV shows. This should not be surprising as all these artforms are essentially forms of story-telling, where the emotions are manipulated and the mind engaged to carry the viewer/listener/reader on a journey from A to B via C, D and E.

Media guys (by which I mean planners/strategists) will always tell you that, at the end of the day, the most powerful media of the lot, by a long way, is word-of-mouth. The basic truth here is that if you can get people talking about your ad, to get them spreading the message (“It’s the one where the guy walks into a bar and there’s a donkey with a pink hat…”), then you are ¾ of the way home…

It is this need to generate a ‘buzz’ around your advert that makes dramatic technique so important to the communication process. Whilst there is often a lot of pressure on an agency to keep an ad ‘simple’, factual and to-the-point (read boring as…), the truth of the matter is that if you do not make an effort to ‘enliven’ the story that you are telling, you ad will almost certainly fall flat – like a book with no plot, a song with no melody and a movie with no point.

‘Creatives’ are often accused of wanting to be ‘creative’ for the sake of being ‘creative’. Whilst this is sometimes true, it is often times the result of the ‘creatives’ understanding that if they don’t do something to make their ad interesting and engaging, no one will pay any attention to it, no one will talk about it, and it won’t be very effective as a result – which means that it won’t sell.

(It occurs to me that if every ad we read in the papers, saw on TV, heard on the radio and drove past on the road ‘jazzed our lives’, Kenya would be a much nicer place to live in, but maybe I should keep such thoughts to myself…?)

It is not especially hard to ‘get creative’ with your ad. It’s just about thinking about the things that you can add to it that will bring a smile to your face (or an emotional/intellectual reaction of some form). Shooting a mum in the kitchen for a cooking oil brand? Why not dress her up with an Orie Rogo-Manduli pineapple head-dress? At least it will catch the eye… or why not have her talking on her mobile as she cooks? You’ll be implying that she has a life beyond the kitchen, as most mothers do. Or why not have her husband in the background fast asleep in an armchair with a newspaper covering his head, much like in my house? The point about these ‘creative touches’ is that they add value and interest to the communication. Many of the ads that we produce in Nairobi are very one-dimensional – mum, dad, kids, pack of orange juice/breakfast cereal/soda/rice/sausages/whatever – there are no layers to the stories that we are telling – is that a parrot in the background? Does the parrot talk? What does it say? Does it swear? Does it speak English, Kikuyu or Dholuo? Where can I get a parrot…?

No matter how you tell someone a story, you must remember that your story is actually happening inside that persons mind. Your words and pictures and sounds are being interpreted by that person’s imagination in a particular way.  Therefore as you tell a story you should try and feed your audiences imagination with as many cues and reference points and implications and question marks as is possible – for by so doing you make their imaginative experience so much more vivid.

At ad agencies we are great ones for choosing to ignore the impact of the work (accountability being the rudest word in advertising). We think that once the client has approved it and it has run, that is it. Given the wonders of the digital age it would be great if we could find a way to measure the ‘buzz’ that each of our ads create – likes on facebook, positive tags, re-tweets and so on.

If you are a true ad man or woman you will encourage the above, because the above is what passes for glory in our game (especially since awards were last held in Kenya when we were still a one party state – now we’re just a one agency state), and if it’s not all about glory, then what exactly is it all about?

And if you are ‘the client’ (da da daaaaaa…) please remember that the issue isn’t always to cram your ad so full of facts about whatever you’re selling that it’s like you’re forcing your customers to study for KCSE (8-4-4 has a lot to answer for).

The issue is just as much to ensure that you make your ad newsworthy, which means that it needs to be: funny/sad/sexy/stupid/silly/dramatic/deadly/cool/fresh/disruptive/provocative/evocative/beautifull/unique/moving/profound/refined/subtle/stunning/sincere/gritty/glamorous/deep/sentimental/stylish/hilarious/mind-blowing and all the other wonderful adjectives by which all true creatives live and breathe. The end.