Ad Age: 'Cog' and the Auteur Fantasies of Creative Directors
Writing in Ad Age, Randall Rothenberg, chief marketing officer at consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton, slams the delightful new ad from Honda, 'Cogs.' He writes:
A front-page Advertising Age headline two weeks ago heralded the birth of a new star. "U.K. Honda ad wins global buzz," it blared. Underscoring the importance of what Ad Age called a "Cannes contender" was this "reefer": "Garfield awards four stars to instant classic."
With all due respect to Honda, ad agency Wieden & Kennedy, the editors of this august publication and its bewhiskered critic, this fanfare encapsulates everything that is wrong with contemporary advertising.
His basic point, such that it is, seems to be that TV ads are expensive and deliver ambiguous value. Wow, very insightful. To pick on this brilliant ad, however, misses the point…
Sure, TV ads are expensive. But they also are fairly essential for major brands to capture mind share in this media-saturated world. Car companies are selling a product worth multiple thousands of dollars and require a tremendously complicated decision making process. To talk about ROI of TV ads for car commercials is ludicrous.
First of all, the cost of a few millions dollars for an ad that may impact the decision of thousand of people to spend $20,000+ is easily amortized. More interesting would be to calculate the impact of not running an ad for your model of car and see what happens when you surrender mind share to all your competitors.
So, assuming that as a car company you are going to continue to advertise on TV, why not make a brilliant ad? I have no data to back up these stats, but as a frequent watcher of TV, it seems to me roughly half of all commecials are for cars, and of those 99% feature long shots of the car zooming along winding roads, closing with a plug about low financing deals. Personally, I haven't owned a car in almost 20 years, but were I to buy a car, I would almost certainly go with either a Honda or a VW. Knowing very little about cars, those two just strike me as reliable, affordable and stylish. Could the fact that they are the only car brands whose ads don't suck have anything to do with that impression?
Ad Age's columnist Bob Garfield's interpretation of this commercial sums it up for me:
It's very nice. Also amazing. Also captivating. Also delightful. And also, depending on how charitable you wish to be in assigning meaning to what you've witnessed, a perfect iteration of Honda's brand meaning: the perfectly dependable machine.
(If you haven't seen this commercial and have no idea what I'm going on about, click either of the above Ad Age stories for a link to it.)
What else do we want from our TV commercials if not to have people want to watch them, conentrate on them, enjoy them, talk about them, Tivo them, recommend them to friends? This isn't an ad that's simply funny but you can't remember who made it. It's a perfect ad, where the brand is inextricably woven into the impact it delivers.
I can tell you since we first linked to this ad a few weeks ago, our traffic has more than doubled with people searching it out on Google. This is an ad people want to watch. And Mr. Rothenberg is recommending what, that they'd be better off with a direct response TV ad with a 1-800 number?
How many computers did Apple's classic 1984 commercial sell? The question is virtually unanswerable. Those who want to discount the value of brand advertising are going to make that argument forever regardless of any arguments I can make. But there is no doubt the 1984 spot established Apple as a break-through brand, unlike anything we had seen before. If nothing else, I'm sure a lot of advertising people bought the computer as a result.
If this Honda ad is not the face of advertising to come, maybe I'll stop watching TV. I love this ad so much (I've watched it about 30 times myself) I'm tempted to go buy an Accord just to prove Rothenberg wrong.
