About: SamNorth
Posts by SamNorth:
- Be audience-centric. Know who you are talking to.
- The importance of research. Research the market, but also know what other competitive forces are out there.
- Talk to other stakeholders. Extend your reach to other interested groups in the field and get them involved early on in the planning stages.
- Don’t depend on just one communication channel. Audiences hear messages in wide variety of places and media and it is important to have a presence in all those places.
- Assess what you are doing as it goes on and be open to change if the evidence suggest it’s not working as well as you thought it would.
The Social Side of Marketing
Ogilvy PR Managing Director John Studdert set the scene and jogged a few memories with his opening remarks: “Life. Be In it; Slip, Slop, Slap; Click, clack, front and back; Arrive alive – don’t drink and drive . . . these are all memorable campaigns that raised awareness, shaped or changed opinion and impacted our behaviour.”
Studdert was speaking at the third in a continuing series of Ogilvy PR breakfast events designed to inform and stimulate a select group of guests.
This week’s topic was Ogilvy On…Profit vs Public Good with the subject being the value of social marketing.
Held in Sydney’s Establishment Ballroom, the 80 invited guests were treated to a lively panel debate, moderated in his usual entertaining, forthright style by Tony Jones, the host of ABC TV’s Q&A program.
On the panel were Peter Ritchie, the former chief executive and chairman of McDonald’s Australia, Dr Christine Bennett, the chief medical officer and director of healthcare leadership at Bupa Australia Group, Tim Gartrell, the CEO of newly launched not-for-profit group GenerationOne which aims to alleviate indigenous disadvantage, Tony Thirlwell, the CEO of the Heart Foundation of NSW, the NSW Shadow Treasurer Mike Baird, Tom Beall, the managing director of Ogilvy PR Worldwide’s global social marketing practice, and Greg Sam, the joint managing director of Parker & Partners, Australia’s leading bi-partisan public affairs company and a member of the Ogilvy group.
The discussion started with a debate about the definition of social marketing. Most thought it boiled down to promoting change for social and public good, without profit being a motive. Beall, while agreeing with that definition, recalled that 25 years ago when he was invited to join Ogilvy from the public sector to set up the social marketing practice in Washington he was assured that he would be “working on the side of the angels”. Ritchie, however, saw it as an organisation adopting a continuing positive social role within its community so that the organisation actually lived that role and came to be seen in a positive light.
Thirlwell related the concern within some parts of the Heart Foundation when they allowed McDonald’s to carry the foundation’s tick of approval on some of its products. Some were outraged at the charity being associated with a fast food outlet but Thirlwell said the reality was that an enormous number of people ate fast food on a regular basis so it made sense to try and encourage the industry to have healthy options on offer.
The talk around fast food led to a discussion of obesity levels, with Bennett, who also was chair of the Federal Government’s National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, pointing out that 50 per cent of our health burden relates to how we live our life.
The problem, of course, is how to change people’s behaviour. Gartrell said the difficulty GenerationOne faced was that there was widespread awareness of the disadvantages faced by Australia’s indigenous population – which meant that awareness campaigns were not needed – but attitudinal change by white Australians was essential before real change could occur.
Beall said the object of most social marketing campaigns was behavioural change and cited the Heart Truth campaign which he ran in the US. The campaign started seven years ago and its aim was to raise awareness of heart disease among American women.
At the time, even though heart disease was the No 1 killer of women, it was largely seen as a man’s disease.
The campaign, which is still running strong, has been shown to have raised both the awareness of heart disease and of the symptoms and has markedly decreased the female rates of death from the disease.
And, just in case you were thinking about it, the consensus was that fear campaigns generally don’t work.
After the panel session, Beall gave his top five tips for any organisation considering engaging in social marketing.
Tony Abbott: mistaking the crowd for the audience
On the day before Tuesday’s health debate I was giving media training to a client. Tony Abbott should have been there.
“Remember who your audience is,” the client was told. “There’s a huge difference between talking to A Current Affair and talking to the 7.30 Report.”
Abbott thought his audience was the political insiders being wined and dined at the National Press Club. His knee-raised, arms-splayed, loud-laughing, bad-joking, interjecting persona might have raised a cheer from the Liberal faithful in the room but that’s not who his real audience was. If you are talking to Tracey Grimshaw or Kerry O’Brien then you had better understand that while they are conducting the interview you are really giving answers to the hundreds of thousands of viewers out there.
Abbott forgot that and came across to the wider public as aggressive, undisciplined and (whisper it quiet) almost Lathamesque.
Our client was also told never to trash an opposition brand. He could say his product is better, faster, more efficient than other brands but he should never resort to saying another brand was no good and he should never ever ever attack another brand on a personal level.
Abbott had a duty to attack the government’s health plan, and because he has decided not to release the Coalition health plan until closer to the election it was difficult to attack in a constructive way by comparing it unfavourably to his own product. Yet he broke the golden rule when he went after Kevin Rudd on a personal level. Perhaps he was looking for the nightly news grab, but once again he misunderstood his audience.
Making jokes about Rudd being a boring speaker might be all well and good in Parliament – or at the National Press Club during a normal presentation – but personal attacks just don’t fly with anyone except the rapid supporters.
When Mark Latham spoke before the 2004 election of the Howard government being a “conga line of suckholes” Labor stalwarts cheered because he was “giving it” to the Coalition. Undecided voters – the ones he had to impress – wondered whether he had the gravitas to be Prime Minister. A couple of months later they decided, and Latham was no longer.
The Australian public want their leaders to be respectful. They have got to be able to envisage them at important occasions, see them at the White House or a world leader’s forum. They want them to fight, but by the rules of good behaviour.
The same is true of leading brands. We want them to be respectable, we want to be able to display them on important occasions and we want them to spruik their wares in an engaging, innovative and positive manner.
The guy I was training now understands that. Tony Abbott still needs to.
Tiger: Not yet out of the Woods
The entirely predictable problems that stem from Tiger Woods’s decision not to confront the media during last month’s stage-managed mea culpa will be well to the fore at next month’s US Masters at Augusta.
In what was always going to be a PR disaster, Woods and his advisors opted for the golfer to read a statement of remorse in front of a handpicked audience, with no questions asked, when he made his first face-to-face utterances about the sex scandal that engulfed his world, and ours, late last year.
Wiser counsel would have had Woods subject himself to the sort of questions that Tracey Grimshaw put to rugby league’s Matthew Johns in the wake of his sex scandal last May. Grimshaw asked all the questions that people wanted answered, leaving viewers able to make up their own minds on the genuineness of Johns’s contrition and remorse. The general perception is that Johns passed that test and both he and the public now feel free to move on.
Woods, however, has still to answer the questions of why, and how could he, and what was he thinking of, and what about his wife and kids. The public still wants to know, and the journalists still want to not-so-politely enquire.
If Woods thinks that returning to competitive golf in the oh-so-regulated Masters means he will be able to duck such questions then I strongly suspect he has another thing coming. The Masters will no doubt try to weed out what they see as the trouble-making tabloid journalists, keeping the media to the golfing faithful. But while golf writers have traditionally shied away from asking questions about anything other than golf there is little doubt that respective editors will have stiffened their spines considerably with subtle lines like: ‘’If you don’t ask the right questions don’t bother reporting back for work the following week.’’
And if the Masters organisers, or Woods’s minders, try to ban any non-golfing questions then be prepared for a media walkout.
The questions will have to be answered, either at Augusta or the next tournament or the next, dragging out a matter that should have been settled months ago.
But that’s what happens when a crisis strategy is all about control, with barely a nod to candour.
Is social media becoming more or less sociable?
The murder of a Queensland schoolgirl, a video of a group of teenage boys in Italy taunting an autistic boy, a $30,000 defamation verdict and Lara Bingle have all combined in the last week or so to show that the world may at last be starting to catch up with social media.
The growth of social media over the past decade has been exponential, so much so that the legal and ethical restrictions that society has for virtually all other activities have struggled to seem relevant.
“The internet is different”, people cried, “Its very basis is the free exchange of information.”
Well, maybe.
A Victorian man posted an anonymous comment on HotCopper, a stock market discussion forum. The comment, about a WA technology security company and its managing director, was defamatory. The managing director tried to get HotCopper to identify the poster. HotCopper refused, but was forced to by a court order. The registered name ended up being false but the poster was eventually tracked down and taken to court for defamation – the result being the $30,000 verdict against him. Two other supposedly anonymous posters on the same site have court action pending against them.
The moral: a court has shown that anonymous is no longer anonymous, and the normal rules of law will apply to anything you say.
In Queensland an outpouring of grief over the murder of a young girl led to a tribute page being set up on Facebook. That page was defaced, with people posting insulting and derogatory remarks and links to porn sites. The call was for Facebook to “do something”, with the general tenor being that Facebook and other sites should be responsible for the material they contain. But, as University of NSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre executive director David Vaile was quoted as saying on smh.com.au, making website owners or internet providers more accountable for online content would lead to their demise and see the end of free social networking sites.
The moral: administrators of Facebook pages need to be aware of their responsibilities. If you set up an open site then you should be able to moderate it – around the clock if necessary. If you can’t then either don’t set up the site or bring in reinforcements.
In Italy, the six month suspended jail sentences given to three Google executives has led to a further outcry. The executives were on trial for defamation and for violating Italy’s privacy laws. The trio were found guilty of the privacy charges in that they were held responsible for Google having hosted the offensive video. The video was online for around two months but was taken down as soon as Google was informed of its contents.
Google announced it would appeal, saying the ruling “attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built.”
Google said the European Union law gave hosting providers “a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence… If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.“
Well, again maybe.
It would certainly create havoc with the Google business model, but perhaps that’s what the judge was getting at. The reasons for the decision have yet to be published but Marc Rotenberg, writing in the Huffington Post, says that there seem to be similarities between this case and cases in the early 1900s which established a person’s right to privacy in the US. Those cases established that a person’s image could not be used for commercial purposes without their permission. Rotenberg says that the Italian case hinged on the prosecutor’s claim that Google was making profit out of the video, which was driving people to the site and its advertisers.
The moral: not certain yet, but it may well be that if you are making money by hosting advertisements on site then you may end up being viewed as a commercial operation rather than just a host.
And to finish with Lara Bingle, the social page habitué who announced that she was taking legal action against AFL player Brendan Fevola after a nude image of her was made public on a website and in a magazine. The picture shows Bingle naked in a shower trying to cover herself.
Bingle is taking action “for breach of privacy, defamation and misuse of her image.” Just what that will result in is anyone’s guess, but it could end up a cautionary tale about mobile phone cameras, ease of downloading and the relentless spread of the web.
The moral: be careful of the company you keep.
