By Kim Walsh-Phillips
A couple of weeks ago, AMC gave us a sneak peek into their new reality show, “The Pitch.” Each episode showcases a battle of two different agencies making a pitch to get a major advertising account. Being that I live and breathe by marketing messages, I will admit my advertising nerd-ness was in its full glory with this concept. I will also admit that I spent most of the hour yelling at the TV like crazy people and sports fans do, as my patient husband reassured me that all was going to be okay. (No, this isn’t the first time this has happened in our household.) I was flabbergasted by the number of mistakes made by the agencies and by Subway. At the same time, there were some invaluable lessons offered for anyone in marketing or business.
First, here are details of Episode One taken from amctv.com:
National restaurant chain Subway is looking for a new advertising campaign to take its breakfast menu to the next level. Drawing on the tagline “Eat Fresh,” Subway’s Chief Marketing Officer Tony Pace wants the campaign to convince 18- to 24-year-olds to eat breakfast at Subway. Two rival ad agencies are pitching to helm the project:
- · McKinney
- · WDCW
Details of the show out of the way, here are the two biggest mistakes the agencies made and the lessons you can learn from them:
Mistake #1: No research, and marketing based on assumptions. One of the things that drove me most mad while watching this episode was the lack of research behind either of the pitches. The worst offender was McKinney though. Not only did they not look at any research on their age 18-24 target market, but they thought they were going in the right direction by pulling the youngest staff into the team because they matched the demographic. Great marketing cannot be based on assumptions or our own human experiences. Four young people in advertising are NOT the average demographic of the Subway audience. Mentioned in one of my earlier blogs, but worth repeating now, Duncan Watts, the researcher behind Yahoo, dove into the psychology of assumption in his book, “Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer.”
From his book:
Common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry.
It seems obvious, for example, that people respond to incentives; yet policy makers and managers alike frequently fail to anticipate how people will respond to the incentives they create.
A campaign that also targeted this demographic BUT USED RESEARCH to back up their messaging is the Dos Equis Beer campaign.
First, they researched a pain of their target market–men 21 to 34. Their research showed the greatest fear of this group was that they are not interesting enough. (Blame social media for this.) To combat this fear, they produced “The Most Interesting Man in the World Campaign.” They featured a 70-year-old rugged man and his off-the-wall antics. (Best line– “He is so interesting, sharks have a week about him.”) The campaign started with commercials that went viral. Social media was later added to the campaign. What they did with social media:
The Dos Equis team followed the proven success model for social media/marketing ROI–research, engage and sell–and it worked. Each year they have surpassed goals for increased market share.
Lesson learned: It is so easy to stay with what “we believe” versus what “we know” and act upon it. Just because you belong in your target demographic, you are not all of the market research you will ever have to do. Put yourself in the top 5% of your industry and research your target market before engaging them in messaging.
Mistake #2: A lack of questioning at the pre-pitch meeting with Subway. The greatest marketers, businesspeople, sales professionals, parents, etc, are great questioners and listeners. In my opinion, however, the majority are not. They operate on assumptions and are often wrong. If WDCW had asked Subway what concerns they would have about working with them prior to creating the pitch, they would have discovered that they never could have won. According to Subway (Subway’s rationale), McKinney wasn’t chosen based on the pitch, but on the ability to be a long-term partner with them. The reality is, there was very little WDCW could have done ever to have won this account. Of course, this was still a chance to showcase their work to a national audience, so it was worth producing their best work, but would their work have changed if they knew their audience was never Subway and it was only the viewer? Of course we will never know, because they didn’t ask.
Lesson learned: Always ask as many questions as possible before you invest your time, energy and resources into making a pitch, writing a proposal or doing a sales presentation. You not only need to know what the prospect wants, but what the prospect’s concerns are and if there is anything preventing you from getting the work in the first place. Most of us won’t have a secondary benefit of having our work showcased on a national stage, so we shouldn’t waste our time doing unpaid consulting for people who will never hire us.
Tonight is the full launch of the show with two back-to-back episodes. I encourage you to watch, but with a critical eye and a thought on how, if you were the brand or the agencies, you might have done things differently. I will be watching as well, tweeting at @prgurukim and, I am sure, yelling at the TV. I would love to hear your thoughts on the episodes as well.
Interested in having a conversation with an agency that asks questions and believes in market research so that you get the best return on investment? Contact us to request a prospective client interview today!