gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

the beermat story

Earlier I said:

The trouble corporations have with blogging is that it's easy. People who work in large companies are used to making everything as complicated and unknowable as possible, in order to protect the perceived value of what they do. Doing something that is cheap, easy and effective is culturally counter-intuitive.

Here's a good example of what I mean; what I call "The Beermat Story":

I worked for a large ad agency a while ago. The ad agency had a large beer account. Me and 40 other creatives spent 6 months writing beer campaign after beer campaign, trying to come up with "The Superbowl Ad". Something we could sell for millions of dollars to the folks in Milwaukee. And we would need to- our hourly billings must have been worth almost that alone.

I won't even tell you what we sold them in the end. It was appalling. Campaign got killed soon after. Heads rolled.

Whatever. During the campaign writing I had this thought:

If the idea doesn't work on a beermat, it's not going to work on a 60-second Superbowl spot. So maybe get the beermat campaign working BEFORE the Superbowl ad, not vice versa.

Instead of spending milions of dollars on "The Superbowl Ad", why not spend that money cranking out beermat campaigns, till you find one that really works? Using beermats in small, test markets, you could easily create 50, 100 (500? Who knows?) campaigns for one tenth the price of one decent Superbowl/TV commercial. It would be a simple, cheap and quick way of working out the necessary language to resonate with the beer-drinking public.

Of course, nobody was interested in the idea. From the agency's point of view, there was more money in selling Superbowl ads that didn't work than selling beermat ideas that did work.

So the beermat story taught me this painful lesson about big business: an expensive solution will always look better politically than the cheap solution, because the former allows the client to justify his large salary.

It's not about solving your brand's problem. It's about buying access to private schools and country clubs for people who don't give a damn about you or your business. That's where your money goes when you embrace the ordinary. You have been warned.

[UPDATE:] John Moore from Brand Autopsy sums it up nicely in the comments:

It forces you to focus your marketing message and if the idea manages to break through the clutter in a bar then it might just break through the clutter on the air.

He says he's going to have to "borrow" the idea one day. Hmmm... I may have to "borrow" that sentence one day. Heh.

[UPDATE: 19th October:] Robert McCabe in the comment also makes the following interesting point:

Beermats are the number one marketing tool for micro breweries, but they have to be functional, with a clear easy to read message.

A good, FUNCTIONAL (ie absorbs spills!) beermat will stay on a table for more than one customer and influence the next person who sits down (the "I'll try one of these." effect) and get you far more brand recognition in the bar than posters and neon lights.

A good beermat is also well liked by the bar staff, which makes sure that your beermat gets used over less functional ones (I've seen thin, non-absorbent paper beermats that looked great but never got used).

They're used by microbreweries because they're small, cheap, tactile, and easy to find out if they're working or not. If they work, the bars order more. If they don't, then it's just back to the ol' drawing board. No big deal. No big loss. No big army of ad agency salaries to shell out for before finding out their campaign they charged big money for actually sucks.

I'm a big fan of tactile advertising. Heh.

Posted by hugh macleod at October 18, 2004 3:14 PM | TrackBack