As you advertise, so shall you sell. How much was blown on this little extravaganza?

Someone had an idea with balls. This ad – bad layout, bad copy – castrated it. Wasting how much? £50,000? Let’s have a guess

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The last recorded figures I saw state that throughout Europe Volvo sales are down 11.3% over the last four months.

Let us try to work out what contribution their advertising may have made to that performance.

On Friday, they ran four full pages in Metro, the free paper that runs all over Britain.

They took the front cover, inside front, inside back and back page. The full page rate is £28,800 – but unless they are mad (always a possibility) they negotiated hard and paid far less.

Let’s say they were really smart and g0t about 60% off, paying £50,000.

Well, you can see what they spent it on.

We start with the rather ugly back view of a car and a line which is the literary equivalent of the first fumbling attempts of a teenager at masturbation.

I am biased because we have a Mercedes and they were my clients for years. But why anyone should wish to switch from sleek German competence – which in the car world is doing rather well – to Swedish steel I have no idea. However the correct phrase is either “bored with” or “bored by” unless you were educated in a South London sink estate.

But car buyers are not literary perfectionists, and carefully hidden in this ad is a bold idea – not new, but at least an idea, a commodity singularly absent from most advertising.

It is explained very badly on the next page. If you test drive the new Volvo for a month and you don’t agree it is better than the Mercedes A class “we’ll cover your first month’s payments”.

This is astoundingly vague. I was not sure if they mean the payments for the Mercedes or the Volvo – a rather important point. Nor was it clear whether if you did agree they would pay that first month’s money or not.

It doesn’t really matter because the type is very small in white on grey to ensure nobody can read it. I have made the effort (which no normal reader would) and noticed that the tiniest print covers all the exceptions – but does not answer the questions I just raised.

This is just sheer sloth, incompetence, or both.

Copy that sells the idea (badly, again) is in the wrong place and too late: inside the back cover; and just to deflect any interest there is a picture of the car’s front wheel which could only interest demented garage mechanics.

Even the most witless of copywriters must surely comprehend that whatever your idea, you should start with it. And make it 100% clear to even the thickest of readers.

I have written copy for about 9 car marques. In 1966 I wrote an ad to launch the Audi – one so bad that I still wince when I recall it. But at least the idea was expressed clearly.

If this offer were made clearly in other media like direct mail and online it could do well, simply because once people have driven a car for a while they can’t be arsed to change.

This entire sad but costly confection displays blithe and complete ignorance of what advertising is for.

“Promise, large promise is the soul of an advertisement” said Dr. Johnson some 250 years ago. Not if you hide it as they have here at Volvo.

If they had a human being (a real one, not one of those dreadful models) making the offer it would do even better.

80 years ago or so Chrysler became a real competitor to Ford and Chevrolet by running an ad in which Walter Chrysler challenged readers to “Look at all three”.

But the numpties in advertising today know nothing of this. And as George Santayana noted, “Those who fail to study the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them”.

Tom Collins, co-founder of once famous agency Rapp and Collins said “Advertising is hard”. It certainly is if you ignore simple facts – e.g. that a car is an incredibly important buy to most people and they prefer helpful, clear information to silly boasts.

What causes this sort of piffle – particularly rife in car and financial advertising? Not lack of talent. Lack of study. And conceit: a belief that it’s easy.

It is too late for most people in advertising agencies and know-nothings at the big clueless firms who pay them, but not for you.

If you run a business or are responsible for marketing or copy and want your messages – online or off – to make money, you may find www.AskDrayton.com worth looking at.

You will then escape some of the costly mistakes I have made, and have some chance of surviving and prospering through the huge depression our leaders have stored up for us.

One which I see the Cabinet Secretary has admitted is likely to last for about 20 years in this country.

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

7 Comments

  1. Drayton,
    Thanks for the post and another “mini master class” in advertising.
    Ah, Volvo. A case study not just in tactical marketing idiocy, but also long term strategic and management folly on a gargantuan level.
    Many readers most likely will remember the time when Volvo owned a category in the car market – “Safety”. It may not have been very sexy but they dominated that segment and I believe they were pretty successful.
    But that wasn’t enough…and the company had always had something of a split personality because they also made “sporty” cars (remember “The Saint”?). So rather than kill off the “sporty” part of the business and concentrate on success…over the years they have attempted to reposition the company.
    The results have been dismal, of course, and the company has been a financial disaster. I think Ford admitted to losses of $4.7bn when it offloaded Volvo a few years back and the real cost was probably much higher.
    And even though the company is a financial mess, the 50,000 pounds wasted here probably won’t even register.
    Thanks again for a great post!
    Kevin Francis

    1. Drayton

      I am puzzling over which advertising category is worse – cars or finance? It’s a tricky one, because in both cases buckets of money are involved.

      What is bizarre is that nobody in either industry seems to ask themselves relatively simple questions like, “Would it be a good idea to measure the results of our advertising?” “Could our spectacular losses have anything to do with our advertising?” “Might we not do just as well saving our money?”

      I happen to be chairman of a firm that runs events for some of the world’s biggest car firms. I also happen have a partner who does marketing for a financial firm that is about 50 times bigger than their biggest competitor.

      In both cases no money is spent on anything that does not produce a measurable profit. And in both cases most of the other people in the industry fail to draw the blindingly obvious conclusion.

      1. Jamie

        Here in Oz I just cringe at the way cars dealerships (not just the car companies) advertise.

        There’s usually a goofball salesman. Or, a ditzy customer. Or an ad that is about 25 seconds worth of who-the-hell knows what the ad is for, then a 5 second shot of the car which was apparently the product being advertised.

        There was a cringe worthy attempt at cleverness with a campaign called B.A.D. TV (acronym for Best Automotive Deals TV). Or a car known as the Opel Ja (pronounced ‘Ya’), with another cringe worthy tagline ‘It’s the Opel Mid-Ja Sale!”.

        Who knows – maybe the ads do work? But I doubt it. And I take offense that these advertising companies (or in-house marketing teams) don’t give their craft the respect it deserves.

        I have to admit – I sometimes fall in to the trap of forced cleverness when trying to help my own boss with his advertising.

        Sadly, he likes some of my ideas.

        That’s when I have to take a step back and think “okay, I’m doing something wrong” 🙂

        1. Drayton

          You are not alone in having the odd clever idea – and being seduced into thinking it must sell.

          Made the same mistake myself a few times!

          The chief problem with many car ads is not cleverness; it is incomprehensibility.

          Others just abdicate any attempt to sell; they just show snazzy shots of the car and think that’ll do the trick.

          Some of the most pathetic – and laughably common ones – try to kid you that just one look at your car will have some sexy number crawling all over you.

          What is quite sad is that the ads that try this one on usually feature nasty little cars people only buy because they can’t afford a Mercedes.

  2. Jamie

    Drayton, love your work

    The blog posts I like the best are ones like these, where you break down what is wrong with an advertisement. Your insights help me understand the mechanics of good advertising.

    Jamie.

    1. Drayton

      Thanks, Jamie. I believe there is a lot of room for people who do take the trouble to study properly. The overwhelming majority never read or learn at all. That’s good news for anyone diligent and professional

  3. […] Bird’s blog attacks a wrap-around newspaper advertisement by Volvo. The promise of the advert is hidden and vague. Drayton’s conclusion: bad […]

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