I’m feeling the need to attack Telecom’s recent promotion of its new XT mobile network.

Call me old school, but successful communicating is about making sure the messages are the right ones for a particular audience, then making sure to use appropriate communications channels to those selected audiences. There is also the not insignificant factor of timing and resources to consider.

But I won’t be complicated; let’s just stick to the question of appropriate messaging.

My daughter, a very media savvy 18 year old, watched the 2Degrees TV commercials and laughed her approval for the way it connected her with the essential messages via a very kiwi sense of humour. The use of Reece Darby created an inspiring and simple vehicle for 2Dgrees to promote a completely new offering to New Zealand consumers.

What is Telecom doing in the same market space? Let’s not forget that Telecom is the firmly entrenched ‘old foggy’ in this market with a corporate reputation as something of a big, slow dragger. Telecom’s answer is Richard Hammond from the BBC’s Top Gear programme.

I can just here the logic at Telecom – high tech innovation demands a smart young presenter from a leading international car programme. Well that’s not what my daughter thinks. She compares the humour and kiwi slant of 2Dgrees communications with Telecom’s offering and there is only one winner.

Telecom need to get out more and work out that New Zealanders, not just 18 year olds, are no longer conned by flash-harries from aunty BBC TV shows talking about how you can get 3G reception from a shipping container sitting in the middle of the Hauraki Gulf.

The old rules remain the same. Appropriate communications can never be improved with the kinds of big corporate budgets and production values Telecom throws at its marketing.

Hey, and I’m not the only one less than impressed.

A great thing about advertising is that it has always run with a tension between leading social trends and merely following them. I’m inclined to the view that the latter is where it goes mostly. Why? Because most advertising is paid for by commercial organisations who employ research companies to observe trends and then piggy-back the trends into the brand and messaging. It’s safer that way and it means the brand doesn’t have to invest in creating the trend, which can mean that a competitor brand can less expensively follow.

But it seems to me that if advertising is to pick up on social events or trend, it should at least attempt to push the trend or expand on it in some way. A notably bland example is happening right now with the slew of commercial ads that include reference to the current election campaign. None of it is particularly persuasive or relevant. Rather like waiting for Christmas so they can plonk Father Christmas on the ad!

The debate has raged again this week about ‘air brushing’ on the campaign photographs of the Prime Minister. In particular the Dominion Post’s ‘letters to the editor’ section has attracted much of the venom.

It may seem like an argument about truth verses distortion, but it’s simply about the choices made by each party campaign to present itself in the best possible light. But where it crosses into indecent idiocy is when people make the point based selectively on gender. Where is the debate, for example, about John Key combing his hair in a more fetching manner – obviously a bald-faced attempt to attract young female voters! Or were the National Party’s television commercials, featuring a private school choir with smoke blown into the room, a victim of the school incinerator, or was the smoke there to make the room look like heaven and Key god-like?

So what; a little smoke in John Key’s ad and some retouching on Helen’s photo?

When have you ever heard someone complain after they’ve bought a new car that the sales brochure of the car set against an attractive background misled them into a bad purchase, or that someone refused to eat the baked beans because the photo on the tin made it look too apetitising?

The recently reported struggles of BurgerFuel to apparently reach their targets for investment from a public offer raises the age old question of marketing – message may be crucial, timing is essential, but define your target market first!

Here’s the story. BurgerFuel have built a thriving little business here in New Zealand based on quality burgers. One assumes that those burgers appeal to a wide and hungery market, but must be skewed towards people who prefer frys and ketchup – probably mostly young people and students. (more…)