BenAnyan.com

Telcos are the biggest clients in Ghana, they are also the most challenging. If you have a client paying a $100k+ in monthly retainers, it takes a special kind of pizzazz to stay true to your craft even if it contradicts CMO’s ideas. A $100k+ client can easily turn your ‘Do what you feel is best’ CEO to a ‘Are you fricking kidding me?! If they want a talking chicken in a choir robe, give them the fricking chicken in a choir robe, leading the bloody choir!’ one.

The 4 Suspects

Before we go any further, let’s get something straight; the CMO isn’t the advertising expert. The advertising expert is. He should also know the clients’ business, industry and consumer as well as (if not better than) the CMO. That’s the easiest way to get the kind of trust and respect needed to steer them in the right direction. In the absence of this, you are left with nothing but the expert ability of ass kissing to win the CMO’s approval. This is the leading cause of ad campaigns designed to do little more than pleasing a CMO.

There are two kinds of CMOs; those who live off being adulated, being the smartest in the room, being unchallenged, seeing their magnificent vision brought to life untouched untweaked unquestioned! Then there are those in desperate search of highly productive banter, more concerned about their business doing well than their egos. If your CMO comes from the former cluster, sorry. This is the second leading cause of ad campaigns designed to do little more than pleasing a CMO. It gets even worse if somehow a close-minded CMO convinces himself that he actually is open-minded.

Sometimes it’s not the CMO but rather those he has delegated to make the decisions on his behalf. This is their shot to play boss and they must have visible imprints on the final output at all cost!

Lastly, a fourth factor lies not with the CMO but with the quality of options the creative agency serves him. When all he has to choose from are wishy washy, his best-case scenario will still be subpar.

All of these four scenarios…

(i)            Timid creatives who haven’t earned client respect

(ii)           CMOs who hate being challenged and

(iii)         CMO delegates who want their way, no matter what you say

(iv)          Crap creative options agency serves client.

…are very dangerous because you end up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars crafting ineffective ads that suck. I don’t have the numbers so I can’t tell with facts whether an ad brought in the numbers or not, but I’ve been party to this charade long enough to tell a ‘CMO ad.’

Live Example

Let’s use the recent Vodafone Ghana ad as an example. The hardest thing about using a live example is stepping on toes, but it’s the fear of this that keeps us from having frank conversations in this industry! It’s not personal, heck there are loads of ads I’ve done I’m not proud of. I’m probably being over idealistic in hoping we can separate issues from emotions, but what the heck, I’m neck-deep already.

If you’d like to, you can see it HERE;

Immediately I saw the ad, it reminded me of times I’ve had to comply with such requests.

First; it has to be funny! A Ghanaian ad that’s not funny by all means is not worth making. To make it funnier, let’s use someone people like and competition hasn’t used yet. Let’s have him do something funny. Then when we’re cracking everyone up, let’s tell them about our offer! Let’s make sure someone is speaking Twi, another Fante, another pidgin, another Twi with an Ewe accent so that as many people from the mid-low socio-economic bracket will connect with it. The gamble is that the ad will be so funny and the character so liked that any gaping issue will be forgiven.

I am guessing this product was designed to ramp up voice revenue. Possibly people aren’t making as many phone calls as before. This may worsen with the recent 20% hike in telco tariffs, so clearly, we’re working with an objective around getting more people to talk more. The issue is that people are communicating more now than ever, they just prefer to do so via social media.

Getting Clemento Suarez to do a skit where his line cuts midway and having three friends offer their phones…it’s hard to find an insight in there. What seems hardest to digest for me is the fact that the product is about getting free data when you talk more, but the ad is about a guy who runs out of airtime and then continues his conversation on a friend’s phone motivated more by the desire to continue his conversation than the free data.

Did I smile or laugh at the ad? Yeah! I’ll remember Clemento and his joke. Did that make me want to talk more on my Voda line? No, I may not even remember the details of the offer.

Young trendy socially active people are the most likely to be attracted by free data but I’m sure there was good reason for giving it a mass appeal. Perhaps the solution would have been in answering the question;

Why will our target be so excited about getting free data that they’ll be willing to talk on phone more?

The answer to that and interesting executions featuring Clemento could come after hours of brainstorming, but at least you end up with a situation where the comical character is an enabler of a great idea and not the idea in itself.

I realize how hard it is to avoid this scenario in an industry where numerous promos and products are churned out faster than it takes to innovate. The one who loses most however is the brand paying for all this. I think losses incurred from relaxing deadlines to get things right is much less than putting something out there that doesn’t do justice to the objective that necessitated it in the first place. What do you think?