Ad campaigns  creating a cracker

Christmas on the high street seems to start earlier every year. So maybe we should be thankful that the marketing departments of the UK ‘s leading mobile phone providers at least wait until November before they launch those Yuletide TV campaigns, custom-designed to cash in on the seasonal spike in the all-important gifting market.

This year only one operator, Vodafone, has chosen to put Christmas actually onto the screen. Its latest execution uses film of a family on a fun-filled visit to a Christmas Fayre to launch a brand new tariff package, Vodafone Family, with which it hopes to steal a march on its competitors.
Vodafone went to Prague to shoot this commercial and expects it to play a key role in beating last year ‘s record Christmas-quarter performance  when its Under the Tree commercial, which starred Michael Schumacher and spawned a Top 20 hit single, helped it add on some 561,000 new subscribers, increasing its year on year customer base by 7 per cent.
There is an obvious synergy between Christmas and family at this time of year, says Dominic Chambers, head of brand and marketing communications at Vodafone UK. But we ‘re also lucky that our key colour is red, so that works very well for us at Christmas too. It ‘s the highlight of our year and we work hard at adding that extra bit of theatre to our offer.
Vodafone is not alone in reporting the acquisition of significant six figure numbers of new customers during the October to December period. Other sector leaders like O2 or Orange are nervous of the fact that an overly seasonal TV ad, however successful, has a limited shelf-life and cannot be repeated into the New Year. But Vodafone ‘s Chambers remains unperturbed.
Our hope is that this Christmas commercial will have sufficient impact that we can use it to launch more communications in 2007 featuring the same individuals in different environments to keep customers talking about the family offer, he says.

Avante-garde ads
One of the immediately identifiable hallmarks of TV ads created in the last couple of years by mobile phone manufacturers and service providers are the high-tech sci-fi worlds in which users can fall out of buildings and bounce on the pavement, look through walls and walk down streets where the buildings collapse around them.
Of course, they are all part of a blatant bid to capture the imagination of the younger end of the 18-34 demographic (with a few ABC1 adults thrown in for good measure) and excite both the serial early-adopters and fashion-conscious ܘaccessoristas ‘ alike. But they ‘re also among the most imaginative pieces of film on the small screen and, as such, can only boost the profile of the industry at large on what is still the pre-eminent advertising platform.
Motorola ‘s latest eyestopper, for example, in which a boy and a girl meet in a crazily kaleidoscopic world, was directed by the same whizz-kid Frenchman Francois Vogel who first came to notice putting picture frames over his own head in a groundbreaking HP Printers ad in 2005. It continues a computer-graphic-heavy theme which Motorola initiated with an earlier commercial for its ultra slimline SLVR, which not only made a ܘhero ‘ proposition of the handset itself, but also used the hardware to dictate the look of the film.
The new KRZR is the first product on the market with a custom glass finish, which gives a really interesting mirror effect, says James King, Motorola UK marketing manager. After the success we had with the SLVR ad, where all the scenery was made up of tiny slithers, it was decided to pick up on the mirror idea and bring a slightly different world to life in the way the two characters interact.
Clever as these ads are, King nonetheless rebuffs the charge that TV commercials in the mobile phone sector must necessarily outperform each other on the special effects front in order to be effective. The TV audience is increasingly fragmented, he continues. There ‘s a lot of noise out there and a lot of people advertising at any one stage  so you need something which gives you standout engagement. You don ‘t have to use special effects, but if they do the job then why not? At the same time, you have to avoid the tail wagging the dog.
Unsurprisingly, all the leading players carry out extensive research in a bid to identify the visual factors that will create those crucial points of difference  and are most likely to boost recall and with it brand awareness within the precious 18-34 market. It is commonly recognised not only that the younger end of the consumer spectrum needs to be actively courted, even if the product in question has a wider appeal, but that a TV execution aimed at a 50-year-old woman is far more likely to alienate an 18-year-old student than vice versa.

Concepts, not handsets
Nevertheless, Orange has bravely never actually shown a handset in any of a long series of arresting TV ads which have variously focused on a bicycle out for a spin on its own, an elderly couple dancing in slow motion through the autumn of their days, and three huge balloons inflated in a desert. Instead it has preferred to go for films which set up what Orange ‘s head of media relations Stuart Jackson terms emotional resonance.
This year ‘s Christmas period Togetherness, Keep It Going commercial is no exception. It stars a pair of wind-up toys created from a Japanese design and filmed by Oscar-winning Aardman Animations, of Wallace and Gromit fame. With mum and dad ‘s favourite 1930s comedians Laurel and Hardy singing the old chestnut Let Me Call You Sweetheart in the background, you might be hard-pressed guessing what was being promoted until the final tagline gives the game away.
Our research told us that right across the board people of all ages like to get together with friends and family at Christmas and then regret being unable to continue that emotional attachment throughout the year, Jackson explains. Once we ‘d come up with the Togetherness theme we thought we ‘d build on that rather than try to stuff a sales message down consumers ‘ throats.
And indeed, in the full 40-second version of the Wind-Up film, Orange has chosen to downplay details of its services  preferring instead to use the individual 10- and 20-second stings to subtly remind viewers of its contract, pre-pay and free broadband offers.
O2 is another service provider whose latest campaign has been designed as much to consolidate awareness and brand loyalty among existing customers as to attract new business. In this respect, head of consumer brand Tom Sutton feels O2 ‘s overall TV marketing strategy differs from its rivals.
In the six weeks before Christmas, we believe our competitors tend to focus more on acquisitions, whereas we seek to address our current users and subscribers as a priority, he says. It ‘s all to do with influencing mindshare and making people aware of the various upgrades they should be going for once the Christmas rush is over. At the same time, though, it ‘s important that you don ‘t get complacent and that what you put up on the screen stays fresh and challenging.
Central to the string of commercials O2 has been running for the last nine months under the slogan It ‘s Your O2, See What You Can Do has been the bubble, which floats over a range of different landscapes, bending goalposts here and turning buildings into maps there as it passes by. Narrated by actor Sean Bean, each separate execution has specifically supported products and packages aimed at one or another of O2 ‘s key market segments. So it is that the Long Weekend pre-pay tariff is the focus of its Christmas period TV execution in which the bubble literally raises a smile from everything it passes.

Getting the message heard
However, in what is clearly a very crowded and cut-throat market, it ‘s one thing to make a great ad which regularly turns up in the marketing recall charts or is written about in Campaign. It ‘s quite another to get it seen by the right consumers, at the right time and at the right price.
According to market analyst Thompson Intermedia, the five companies contacted for this article between them spent £54.8m on TV advertising in 2005. Figures for the first six months of 2006 suggest that annual totals may dip a little this year, but it could just be that the sector ‘s three biggest spenders  Vodafone, Orange and O2 have been keeping their powder dry ready for a big fourth-quarter push. At various times over the last five years, each have been known to spend up to 40 per cent of their annual TV budgets, representing amounts in excess of £6m, on Christmas period screen time. And that ‘s not counting the six-figure sums that can be spent on producing the films.
Buying screentime is both a science and a skill. The initial premise is simple enough. Every TV channel, whether terrestrial or satellite/cable, is given its own Station Average Price based on total predicted viewing divided by total committed revenue. These figures are agreed annually by the broadcasters and the advertising agencies ‘ media planning teams. Then the maths begins to get trickier. Within that framework, individual programmes are given individual TV ratings, or TVRs, which are based on demographics, or in TV terms, audience ܘcurrencies ‘. These define how much it costs to advertise within a given show  with the disparity between, say, Countdown, worth 0.9 TVRs and costing slightly less than £2,500 and Coronation Street, valued at 20.5 TVRs and costing nearly £64k a spot, being enormous. Then the juggling starts. Working eight weeks in advance, advertisers must buy packages of 300 TVRs and then gauge where to use them up in order to get in front of as many of their target viewers as cost effectively as possible.

TV show sponsorship
As the TV market continues to fragment and viewing figures for even the most popular programmes level off, sponsoring specific TV shows is now generally accepted as a safer way of ensuring communications reach their intended audience. The mobile phone sector is an enthusiastic player in this media game.
Thus Nokia ‘s Music Gets You Talking ܘbumper ‘ tops and tails the current series of X Factor, Motorola ‘s Hello Moto sting heralds the ad breaks in selected ITV movies, while Vodafone not only introduces UEFA Champions ‘ League soccer matches with its Make the Most of Now message, but has gone a stage further by playing a co-production role in Sky1 ‘s new Sunday night show The Big Idea  an X Factor meets Dragon ‘s Den hybrid, where young entrepreneurs compete for a £100,000 investment, the winner decided by a telephone vote.
However, as head of marketing at Nokia UK, Simon Lloyd, is at pains to point out, it ‘s not just a question of securing the best slots at the most advantageous prices. A major part of Nokia ‘s TV strategy also involves co-funding joint campaigns with favoured retail channels such as Phones 4U and The Carphone Warehouse, as well as promoting its own brand ܘhero ܘ handsets in stand-alone commercials.
This means that a multiplicity of Nokia messages, flagging up an array of different products and promotional mechanics, could be going out at any one time. Unless very carefully managed, this could easily result in some very confused consumers  and, far worse, lost customers too.
The biggest challenge is to make a lot of noise, but at the same time create focus, says Lloyd. We work very closely with our media planners Mediacom to ensure that we ‘re not targeting a specific consumer with conflicting activity. There ‘s no point in going into the break in Coronation Street with the Music Gets You Talking ad, which centres on our super-cool new M91 phone with its 4GB hard drive, if we ‘re suddenly in the next one with a more mass-market 3G device. And while our partner channels book their own spots, we don ‘t want them popping up a couple of minutes later with a call to action for some other Nokia product entirely. That would really muddy the waters. ‘

Identity and quality
Creating clear points of difference within a severely crowded Christmas marketplace is an everyday challenge facing everybody in the mobile phone sector.
There ‘s no doubt that this year the leading players have created a set of memorable TV campaigns that should not only get potential customers talking round the water cooler and down the pub, but draw them into stores too.
Once there though, it ‘s only the quality of products and services on offer which will make them pull out their credit cards and part with their cash. No amount of TV time can ever do that.