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…

Of headlines and tag lines

The headline and the tagline are the ‘top and tail’ of your advert. They are the opening move and the grand finale of your attempt to tell a story that successfully sells. They are equally important. The headline sucks the reader in and tempts them to read more, whilst the tagline is the last thought that you leave with them, it is the ‘seed’ that everything in the advert that precedes it has been ‘preparing the ground’ for the planting of.

The ad referenced here has a very strong tagline – “Banking on Women” – but quite a weak headline – “Unique as you are” – which to me doesn’t say very much about that which is being sold, plus ‘womanhood’ is only unique in so far as half the world’s population are ‘unique’.

One of the challenges that you will often come across as a copy-writer is where in your ad to place/use your ‘killer-line’. In other words you will often be torn between the desire to blast it ‘loud and proud’ as your headline, and thus grab a bit of attention and sell hard up front, and the understanding that what your line actually does is capture the essence of the brand, and as such should be held-back and used only as the final ‘killer’ blow.

By way of a rule, I would say that the best way to distinguish and differentiate between what is a headline and what is a tagline in your mind would be on the basis of the function of each, with primary function of the headline being to grab the attention, and the primary function of the tagline being to position the brand.

When I write ads, I (almost) always write from the tagline backwards. The tagline is the conclusion of the story. In the case of this ad, therefore, the story needs to be constructed as follows: “Headline… blah blah blah blah blah… and therefore, KWFT, Banking on Women”

N.B. I will come back to this, but one of the reasons that it is so hard to write ads for poorly positioned brands i.e. brands with nothing or nonsensical taglines is that it is impossible to logically draw the conclusion on the basis of the product and service offering that the tagline is suggesting.

Tag-lines are often treated as rather throw-away entities. There’s many a brand that would appear to have one simply for the sake of having one. This is almost always a mistake, and it is indeed better to have no tagline than a tagline that says something but means nothing. Remember that these few little words next to your logo will, purely by the power of repetition, begin to embed themselves in the collective mind as being the ‘definitive’ definition of who your brand is and what it stands for – after all if you declare to the world that you are ‘XYZ”, who is the world to argue with you?

By way of an illustration of the point above I am reminded of the primary school girl who, when asked to tell the school’s distinguished guests from Safaricom what Safaricom’s slogan was, replied with a straight face “Terms & Conditions Apply!”

To my mind the one time that your tagline can perhaps become your headline is when you are running a ‘brand campaign’ i.e. when the primary focus of your communication is to build a particular position for your brand. If this is the case there is no ‘sales story’ per se, and thus the conclusion can also be the introduction, though this is by no means the only way to approach a brand positioning campaign – can you extend the tagline, a la ‘Niko na this, Niko na that, Niko na Safaricom…’

Writing a tagline for a brand, giving it a slogan or a motto, distilling everything that it stands for, all it’s hopes and dreams and plans and strengths, into three, four or five short words is one of the hardest jobs in the game. It is also the job that perhaps deserves more care or attention than any other.

To hammer this point home, I would ask you to spend just 10 minutes writing a slogan or tagline for yourself. Remember that everytime anyone ever interacts with you the last thing that they will hear or see is your shiny new tagline, and that whatever it says is what they will begin to believe over time about you (unless of course it is manifestly fake, as in ‘Tall dark and handsome” when you are actually five foot nothing with no front teeth).

When you conduct this exercise you will quickly understand how important it is to get your tagline right, in other words how important it is to get your core brand position right, for your tagline is simply the external expression, in words, of this position.

Remember that in the marketplace your brand position has to be competitive and distinctive. If you are a footballer and you come up with the tagline “Good right foot” the chances are that you won’t make it much past Ligi Ndogo. If however you should declare to the world that you “Pierce any defence with laser-like passing” then the chances of Sir Alex paying attention are much higher, especially given the present state of Paul Scholes’ legs…

Very often in the ad game you will find yourself struggling to come up with a way to sell a product or service because the brand behind the product or service lacks a clear position. If you take this KWFT example the strong tagline – “Banking on Women” – means that writing ads for them should actually be quite simple – all you have to do is demonstrate how every single product or service proves that they are ‘banking on women’.

There are essentially only two types of companies that you will come across in the ad game: those who’s mission it is to make money and those who make money as a means towards achieving their mission. The former are commercial enterprises, the latter are the stuff of which true brands are made. Interestingly enough, it is the latter who tend to make more money in the long run.

Really?

My favorite thing in advertising, as befits a former copywriter, is the headline. This is the catchy phrase or pithy comment that grabs the attention, arouses the interest and leaves the reader with absolutely no choice but to read on.

Some of my favorite headlines: “Hello boys” (Wonderbra), “You know when you’ve been Tangoe’d” (Tango fizzy juice” and the best of the lot “Drink Amarios sherry and understand why birds fly” (Utter poetry).

Your headline is your opening gambit. It is the first thing that your prospective customer reads. It is the equivalent of knocking on the door of someone that you have never met before and having exactly five seconds to explain to them why they should give you another five minutes of their precious time to listen to you – remembering that you are knocking on the door of someone who immediately knows that you are trying to sell something to them, and who is therefore immediately ‘en guard’.

Given the above situational context, your headline better be, as they say, ‘off the hook’.  There are a number of different strategies you can pursue. Shock is an old favorite, a strategy much used by the so-called gutter press – “An alien ate my hamster” or “Grandmother turns neighbor into frog” or “Obama in Rihanna love-child shocker!”

A shocking headline essentially works by arousing curiosity, which is of course essentially the purpose of all headlines. This point is worth repeating. The fundamental objective of a headline is to get your readers to read on…

It is a common mistake to try and cram all the key selling points of your ad into the headline. This is a big mistake. A headline will never really give you enough room to really sell a product or service – the selling comes in the copy. It is only in the copy that you can build a compelling case – ‘this particular vacuum cleaner, madam, is not only a lovely pink color, it also has a whistle with which you can annoy your husband, and a compartment for holding a coffee cup and it folds up to fit in your handbag’ – that is copy.

There is a hugely incorrect prevailing myth in Kenya that I have heard repeated time after time across marketing departments and agencies that goes as follows: “Kenyans don’t read”.

This is one of the single biggest pieces of you know what that I have ever heard in my ten years in the game in this town. Every time I hear it repeated I want to throw things. Is this the same Kenya that I live in? Is this the same Kenya where working men gather every morning around newspaper vendors to pour over every newspaper available? Is this the same Kenya where women sit in salons for six to eight hours surrounded by nothing but magazines?

It is the ‘Kenyans don’t read’ mentality that causes us to produce so many ads in which we hard-sell in the headline, support with a huge visual and think that the body copy is for nothing more than contact details.

I would like to posit a revolutionary thought: Kenyans love to read!!! More to the point, Kenyans love information of any form from any source – TV, radio, internet, papers, magazines, gossips… often consumed all at the same time.

So if Kenyans do love to read, it therefore follows that we should write lots of copy. Tell people all about your product or service in great detail. If you demonstrate that you are really interested in what you are selling, the chances are that your readers will be really interested in it too. Plus you’re asking for money – why should someone give you money for something you are unwilling to tell them all about?

So once you accept that Kenyans do love to read, you will start writing lots of copy, which means you won’t have to say everything in the headline, and you’ll be free to use it to charm, intrigue and seduce.

Remember though, just as a good headline is supposed to make people read on, a bad headline can just as effectively stop them reading altogether. “My walls will say good things about me”… will they… really???

The issues of the day

Twitter has a great slogan: “Join the conversation”. It captures exactly the essence of the product, and its’ great success is a reflection of the fact that it taps into the great human need to run our mouths.

Because of course conversation, the ability to exchange ideas and thoughts and opinions, is one of, if not the, defining characteristics of humanity. Talking is pretty much the first thing that we learn to do post-birth, and the vast majority of us never stop talking until we meet our maker, myself very much included.

It is very important for advertisers and marketers to realize that every time we run a piece of communication, we are communicating with a society that is already very busily engaged in an intense process of communicating with itself. People are not sitting at home quietly waiting for you to run your ad – if anything you must remember that your ad is almost certainly an interruption of their conversation.

This is why the use of topicality in advertising (a la the Naivas ad here referenced) can be a very powerful tool. It is a bit like if two guys are talking about football and you walk up to them and ask them if they have seen the latest hand bag collection from Prada. Chances are you will walk away with a black eye…

It has been my observation that all the greatest communicators in the world share the characteristic that they are also the greatest listeners. You can only really know how to talk to ‘the people’ if you spend some time and effort to listen to ‘the people’. Thus you can always tell a good ad creative from the quantity and quality of the communication that they ‘input’ – so please don’t be too hard on them next time you see them spend a couple of hours glued to youtube…

Listening, which also means seeing, observing and understanding, is the only way that one can pick up on trends (no you don’t necessarily need a research company), and trends are one of the very driving forces of advertising.  Societies and cultures are permanently changing (sorry about that Al Shabab), and this is expressed in fashion, in music, in art, in architecture, in hairstyles, in language and even in cuisine.

Given this fact, one tends to find that one can break most ad campaigns down into one of two types: those that follow trends and those that set them.

N.B. there is a third type, those that ignore trends, with this type being utterly brilliant or fundamentally incompetent.

Following the trends is the easiest thing to do – it is safe, it is comfortable, people will tend to kind of ‘get it’, and it probably won’t get you fired. However, it will also almost certainly not, ever, turn your brand into a leader. So if you happy with 3^rd/4^th place, follow dem trends…

But if you want your brand to be the leader, then you must lead. You must be… the trendsetter. You must be the one who comes up with new ways of doing things. You must be the first to explore new media opportunities. You must be the first to identify the next hot MC to endorse your brand, before he’s actually become hot. You must be the first to spot the growth of the new ‘retired with money’ market segment. Please note repeated use of the word first.

In many ways, this process of keeping your brand first, of keeping it ahead in an increasingly fast-paced race, is the fundamental job of your ad agency. It’s not “I want posters, flyers, a radio ad and a branded handkerchief”, it’s “I want you to take my brand to the very very top and don’t want it to ever ever leave there”.

It is very important to paint this bigger picture for your agency, because we ad people are a very sensitive bunch, and if we’re not to be found aiming for the stars, we tend to be found drowning (our sorrows) in a ditch…

In closing, remember that advertising – the tools and techniques and exposure and budgets – gives you the power to set trends. With power comes responsibility, so use that power well.