Talk at Ad Conference Turns to Risk, Failure and Mistakes

October 12, 2012, 4:51 pm

By STUART ELLIOTT

ORLANDO, Fla. - Advertising ought to be more of a risky business, according to some of the more interesting and best-received speakers at a major marketing conference.

The speakers addressed the 2012 annual conference of the Association of National Advertisers. More than 2,000 people are attending the conference, which began Wednesday and is to conclude Saturday.

Lisa Cochrane, senior vice president for marketing at the Allstate Insurance Company, praised the value of “a big disruptive idea” in describing how Allstate came to introduce a risk-taking campaign in 2010 that is centered on a dark character named Mayhem, who personifies what Allstate believes are the dangers of buying insurance sole ly on price.

“Very early on, Mayhem was nearly killed,” Ms. Cochrane said, by Allstate agents who were nervous about the premise of the campaign and concerned it would clash with the more mainstream “Good hands” ads featuring the actor Dennis Haysbert.

“There was a lot of internal pressure to kill it, but I knew Mayhem was the right idea at the right time,” she confided. “I bravely told everyone to calm down and back off and give us a couple of days.”

The Mayhem ads, which feature the actor Dean Winters, were meant to help Allstate “take back the conversation” from insurers selling policies on price, Ms. Cochrane said, “and get people as uncomfortable with their insurance status quo as we were with our marketing status quo.”

The campaign has been successful on several fronts, she added, including an increase in consumers seeking quotes from Allstate agents and the character's becoming part of the cultural vernacular. Even the 2013 calendar that agents will give to customers will feature Mayhem, Ms. Cochrane said.

As a surprise for the audience at the general session at which Ms. Cochrane appeared on Friday, Mr. Winters joined her for her presentation, behaving in character as Mayhem and wreaking havoc. And his 2013 Allstate calendars were stacked in the back of the room for the audience.

Ms. Cochrane's parting advice: “Don't be afraid to jump into the mayhem, and create your own.”

Another speaker on Friday, Alison E. Lewis, senior vice president of marketing for North America at the Coca-Cola Company, outlined how the company began in 2005 to tackle the task of stimulating demand for the Coke brand in North America when soft drinks were under attack “from a health and wellness standpoint” and “we weren't delivering steady, predictable growth.”

“We had to figure out how to make consumers fall in love with our brand again,” s he said.

Among the risky moves was “stepping back and focusing on fundamentals,” Ms. Lewis said, by simplifying logo and brand graphics, rethinking packaging, adjusting pricing and concentrating on “one central idea” in advertising, that “Coke brings joy.”

One “huge risk” was an online promotion for the 2012 Super Bowl that asked consumers to watch the Coke polar bear characters at the same time they watched the game, she added, and another was changing the classic red Coke cans to white for a cause marketing effort to help polar bears in partnership with the World Wildlife Federation.

Both initiatives were deemed to be hits, Ms. Lewis said, but “we didn't succeed in all the things we tried.”

“If you don't take bold risks, you don't break through,” she added.

Another speaker on Friday, James D. Farley, group vice president for global marketing, sales and service at the Ford Motor Company, also acknowledged that his com pany had made mistakes in marketing, but said he considered them learning experiences.

For instance, a campaign to encourage consumers to test-drive the new Ford Focus “didn't work at all,” Mr. Farley said, because it was global when it should have been done on a local level. “But we got it right with the next launch,” he added, of the Ford Ranger truck.

And a prime-time television series on NBC, “Escape Routes,” to promote the new Ford Escape “maybe wasn't the best idea,” Mr. Farley said, because it did such a good job of publicizing the new model that dealers were forced to discount old models to move them off their lots.

An initiative to build interest in a new Ford Fiesta before its United States introduction by giving it to 100 young drivers to try out before the official release, however, turned out to be a risk worth taking, he added.

“You can imagine” the concerns among senior managers, Mr. Farley said. “‘What if someon e smokes weed in the car?' ‘What if someone has an accident?'”

“And we did have incidents,” he added, but the initiative helped generate a brand awareness level of 58 percent for Fiesta before its introduction, along with 52,000 test drives.

As a result of the initiative, Mr. Farley said, Ford even decided to add “a Red Bull-size cup holder in Fiesta” because the young drivers asked for it.

“Boy, did we learn from that,” he added.

Other speakers during the conference have been forthcoming about mistakes, too, among them Marc S. Pritchard, global marketing and brand building officer at Procter & Gamble, who talked about mishaps with marketing the Pantene line of hair care products, and Kimberly Kadlec, worldwide vice president for the global marketing group at Johnson & Johnson, who described an effort in Canada to mollify customers upset about a shortage of the company's O.B. tampons.

But mea culpas sometimes go only so far. For instance, Ms. Kadlec was silent on the continual problems with quality control that have kept Johnson & Johnson products like Tylenol and Pepcid off store shelves in the United States for months at a time.