Wednesday Wisdom 11/6: Be Inefficient With Your Brand Awareness Campaign
The strange advice that just might be crazy enough to work
by Greg Lorenzo
You are in charge of marketing for a small F&B company and have been tasked with setting your budgets for 2020. Great news - the company performed well enough in 2019 that the CFO has given you an extra $500K to spend on marketing one of your growing brands. This brand has gained significant distribution in-store, but still has limited consumer awareness overall. The specific goal of the funding is to build salience around the brand and its positioning in order to increase future customer excitement and purchase intent. You know exactly who your current and potential customers are (because you hired Futurm) so you are clear on the people you need to reach.
But you have two choices as to how you can spend the money:
Option 1: You take advantage of the rich data and customization capabilities of digital media by serving your exact potential customer with programmatic ads tailored to their specific desires.
Option 2: You spend the money in a few cities on old-fashioned awareness plays — billboards, transit ads, radio/podcasts spots and some local celebrity partnerships.
Which option do you choose?

It’s Programmatic, Right?
We have been told that the future of advertising is programmatic (serving up targeted ads to customers based on their demographic and current web activity). This year, American advertisers are on track to spend $47 billion on programmatic ads, representing over 80% of total digital advertising. What an incredible world that advertisers live in to have a medium to find their exact consumer and present them with an ad that delivers a message tailored to them. Programmatic is much more efficient than any other form of advertising because brands are only paying to talk to the specific potential customers who are best suited to become a fan of and buy their products.
We are taught that advertising convinces us to buy certain products through emotional connections that seep into our subconscious after repetitive exposure. If we see enough Gatorade commercials with athletes quenching their thirst by drinking Gatorade after a tough workout, then we’ll associate thirst-quenching with the brand and buy it for exercising.
But what if advertising didn’t work the way you thought it did? What if there was actually an argument for mass “inefficient” advertising?

Cultural Imprinting
There is a very interesting read by Kevin Simler that suggests advertising serves a different purpose than we had originally thought and that we aren’t actually falling prey to every emotional message from each brand.
The majority of us are social creatures who crave fitting in. Ignore the innovators and early adopters - 84% of us are drawn to products that other people have already deemed acceptable. What if our behavior was heavily influenced by our fear of looking silly or having to explain our decisions to people? What if the reason we buy Gatorade is not because its emotional advertising has infiltrated our decision-making process, but rather because we know people will understand what it is, why we drink it and what it represents?
Think about the phone you are reading this article on right now. Chances are it’s an iPhone, which isn’t the best actual phone or handheld computer on the market. Other phones have more innovative features, connectivity and screens, but who wants to explain to their friends why they now text with the green bubbles and can’t accept airdrops? It’s just easier to get an iPhone and fit in with the group.
Simply learning about the story, features and emotional associations of a brand through programmatic ads isn’t enough. Mainstream consumers need to know that their community knows about the brand too. Mainstream consumers choose brands that already have a cultural imprint on society, meaning the majority are aware of the product and its positioning.

An Argument for Traditional Advertising
As insane as this theory sounds in 2019, there might be a surprising amount of value in old-school communications. If someone from the mainstream market sees a programmatic ad for a certain drink on an obscure website, it might appeal to them to try it out once. But if they are going to drink something consistently and be seen with it, they have to know that everyone else already knows what the brand is and what it stands for. Billboards, transit ads (in places like NYC), popular radio shows and podcast ads, as well as celebrity broadcast moments are all going to be seen by a lot of people who aren’t even the target consumer, but that might be the point.
The fact that a brand can afford these advertising executions sends two clear messages to the potential consumer. First, the consumer understands that the brand must be selling enough product to afford such an expenditure. Second, the consumer assumes that everyone in the area is going to see what they are seeing and understand the cultural imprint of the brand.
Awareness on the Cheap
Smaller brands shouldn’t be intimidated by this theory. This doesn’t mean they have to produce and air a TV commercial on a major network in order to be accepted. Effective awareness campaigns can start with something as simple as signage on top of a giant display of their product at a local supermarket. People in the area are going to have confidence that their friends will be shopping in the same store and see the same display. The large product presence in the store signals success while the signage establishes positioning. As the brand makes more money, additional traditional channels will become available to them. Focus on making everyone aware of your brand and its positioning one city at a time until a critical mass of people have been reached in that location. There is no value in dividing your resources to be barely known in 10 cities.
