Market-ING Things

So, the Clios came by again with its self-important congratulatory tone as per the usual. Those of you not familiar with the business will not know what I’m talking about, which is exactly what I’m talking about. The Clios is the annual award show for advertisers. They make a big to-do about how creative and brilliant their ad campaigns are, but no one besides advertisers care. The main flaw of the Clios lies in the fact that it consist solely of the creatives department.

Now, I’m going to act under the assumption that you have no clue how the creatives department acts. Let me give you an example of the typical creatives/market research struggle goes. Typically, the intelligent approach when drafting an advertising campaign is to test the effectiveness of each creative copy with a sample market prior to releasing it to the public. Which makes sense. Now, every other division of marketing is fully on board with this as it is a logical and organized way to determine the effectiveness of a campaign before you dump several million dollars into it to later find out it is a complete failure. However, the creatives department, on average, loathes this process. Specifically when you tell them to change something. Anything as minute as “hey, most people can’t read this copy font, why don’t you change it to something more serif and legible” or “fuchsia and sea foam green do not mesh well for this particular insert” will drive a creatives member to the brink of utter madness. Now, I’m usually with you creative people when it comes down to subjectivity of art. I hated it when artistic classes graded you on creative aspects because it was a subjective field overall; however, this isn’t art class. It’s business. And such, it is vital to obtain a generally universal appeal (per target market, of course). Creatives will fight with a decision because it goes against their vision. The creatives department can consist of a sort of diva-istic population.

Now to complete my circuitous explanation. The Clios are based solely on creatives and what they like regarding the work of other creatives artistically. The Clios are not a measure of resulting sales or increases in brand awareness or changes of brand perception, etc. It’s just what they thought was pretty and artsy. Now, again, I pretty much don’t have an issue with this, except for the fact that they utterly adore throwing around the fact that a firm has won Clios when they are bidding for an account. No. Bad marketeers, bad! You should sell yourself by your results, not by your art awards.

Enough of that. So. Clios. This year there was a big applause for Microsoft’s Xbox division of marketing, which won three gold awards at the Clios. They’re admittedly interesting and entertaining if you’re within their realm of targeted demographics! I managed to find one example in Adweek’s article about the Clios which caught my eye with the oh so clever title “Halo Effect”, which naturally refers to Xbox’s quintessential star Halo series. Watch it, judge it by its artistic value, then reflect on the fact that they didn’t need to do a thousand of these different commercials to generate hype for a game which everyone was already pining for. Honestly, I could have made an equally effective campaign. It would have gone like this:

[black background, bold white text]

HEY.

YOU.

YEAH

HALO 3 IS OUT

JUST IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

IT IS OUT AT STORES

GO BUY IT

HALO 3: ON SALE NOW

Thank you. I’ll be accepting my Clio now.