Lord Puttnam gave a speech this morning at one of the new TBWA Wake Up seminars that the advertising agency has started running. Brand Strategy was there (of course!) and some of the highlights included:
- The importance of integrity, co-creation and entertainment as three overarching themes which will increase word-of-mouth advocacy for brands. It is vital for companies to be authentic and honest in their actions; involve ‘consumers’ so they can be ‘participants’ in the brand-building and marketing process; and making sure you entertain people so they want to talk about you.
- Lord Puttnam, who is deputy chairman of Channel 4, spoke about how the channel tracks its performance but had stopped tracking ‘respect’ and ‘trust’ in recent years. He said that it was very important to always track these concepts because all brands, no matter what sector they operate in, need to track their respect and trust levels among consumers. He said this would be increasingly important looking forward.
- Puttnam also spoke about how new technology advances made it possible for brands and governments to communicate with people and personalise services on a never-before-seen scale. He used Amazon as an example: it can predict what choices you might enjoy based on your previous use of the service. It tries to offer a very tailored brand. Puttnam suggested that governments could use this to engage their consumers. For example, if your main interest was climate change, you could receive a feed from the goverment telling you that climate was being discussed in the Commons at 3pm – would you like to tune in? Or you could receive highlights by text.
- Puttnam suggested that only about 100 of the 1000 people active in parliament, in the Commons or Lords, are truly computer and internet literate in the broadest sense. He said that this made it very difficult to interact with generations of young people who are all very literate in technology. He asked how many brands also had senior management who might talk about ‘the internet’ but didn’t REALLY understand its use, so never really used the medium to effectively engage consumers. He stressed the importance of having people at the top who actually understood their consumer.
- He said that product placement was a good marketing method because it made sense for TV and film industry – as long as it kept to being authentic. He said that if an airline wanted to fly the crew around in exchange for being the airline featured in the film, that probably made sense. But if it was say, a low-budget airline brand on the outside of the plane and the show featured a shot of caviar being served inside, this was stretching authenticity in the story. Product placement needs to be subtle and there for a reason.
- Puttnam talked about how advertising had changed over time from the days in the early 60s, where advertising something meant sticking a star with ‘new’ or ‘improved’ on a picture of the product and listing the stockists. He talked of how he had once promoted a tyre brand by showing a picture of a child in the back of a car because really, getting new tyres is all about safety. He said brand owners need to look for the ‘truth’ of what they are selling to people and draw inspiration from that.
- He also mentioned that an interesting way for companies to behave in future might be to create ‘hit squads’ of people to respond or react to viral campaigns.
- Puttnam finished by reading a quote about changing opinions, attitudes and values. He said that changing opinions was relatively easy, changing attitudes was harder but changing people’s values was very, very difficult. He advised everyone to remember this!
All in all, it was an interesting talk, where much of the time, Puttnam used analogies with government to demonstrate the case for business and brands. Do you agree with his points or do you have any of your own? Let us know.
