Ads with oomph factor
John Fanning on why the latest book on Britain's most effective ads is essential reading

Although the title Advertising Works has remained unchanged since the launch of the effectiveness awards scheme back in 1980, the changing landscape of the business is fully taken into account. The latest line-up of winners in the 19^th edition of the IPA-published book series includes a range of marketing communications channels.

The average number of channels in the winning papers has more than doubled over the years, reflecting the fact that emerging channels have now reached critical mass and that integration is now the norm. But in spite of that, the judges noted “the large majority of the winners this year are still focused on familiar and traditional above-the-line media” and they could have added, “especially big TV-led ideas”.

A regular visitor to Dublin, Professor Malcolm McDonald, opens with the familiar line about the failure of businesses to fully embrace the marketing concept and the consequent decline of influence of marketing personnel, but then confesses that the quality of the entries in this batch of awards has produced a Pauline conversion.

Not only was the judging process a career highlight, it renewed his faith in “the marketing discipline and its future as a central plank in the sustainable creation of shareholder value”. The quote is not over the top; the bumper crop of entries (68) produced 38 award winners and the quality of the work is often hugely impressive.

Reflecting the increasing number of advertisers adopting professional, marketing-led communications, the winners cover a diverse range of financial services, Barclaycard: featuring an impressive TV commercial led approach, HSBC, one of the best examples of global branding with a local twist, and Lloyds to O2's music sponsorship to public sector campaigns for stroke awareness, safe driving and teacher recruitment.

The latter campaign was awarded on the basis of its approach to media planning, rather than creative work. The target group was people thinking of becoming teachers but who kept putting off the decision when it came to the crunch. The media strategy, fashionably evoking behavioural economics, was designed to keep nudging the target in the desired direction and used the analogy of a pinball machine to keep people ‘in play'. Expect a flood of ‘pinball machine' media strategies to follow.

GRAIN OF TRUTH Hovis have been among the most celebrated British ads since the time Ridley Scott shot a boy pushing his bicycle up a hill in Dorset to the strains of Dvorak's New World Symphony and changed the way TV commercials were perceived.

Given that Britain is a nation of shopkeepers you would expect retailers to be among the prize winners and Sainsbury's and Waitrose are among the seven gold award winners. Both papers take very different approaches and both show significantly increased turnover as a direct result of their campaigns.

The judges are demanding when it comes to rigorous proof of cause and effect. The best papers were the poor old battered FMCG brands, caught between the recession and the unreality of powerful retailer demands but who overcame both with brave, often brilliantly conceived, old fashioned TV commercial led campaigns.

Included in this category were famous brands like Cadbury's Dairy Milk, Heinz, Hovis and Bisto. The introductions to these papers are littered with phrases that will strike a chord with many Marketing.ie readers; “a category which was haemorrhaging profitability due to promotional discounting” and “the downward spiral of promotional addiction locked in a battle with retailers no one could win”. The fact that so many of the brands featured here managed to triumph over these adversities should bring much needed relief to Irish manufacturers in the same position.

The Hovis campaign was equally ambitious featuring a 122-sec (reflecting the age of the brand) TV commercial showing ‘Great British Moments' through the eyes of a young lad thus providing a subtle link to the brand's heritage and one of the most famous commercials of all time. Heinz similarly rejected the option of price cutting at the behest of the retailers and ran with a big budget traditional campaign based on sensitive observation of real lives appealing to the heart rather than the wallet under the theme; ‘there are moments for all of us when only Heinz will do'.

These and many more case histories in this book could easily be the basis of internal half day seminars for communication agency clients or even an industry event from IAPI as they demonstrate the extraordinary power of creative ideas to withstand recession and other adversities. If anyone was interested in hosting such an event they might well use a line from the HSBC case history as an epigraph: the best brand ideas are indistinguishable from business strategy. This notion needs wider distribution in boardrooms generally and among managing directors in particular. Marketing communications is being pushed too far down the management chain and apart from some obvious exceptions is rarely considered central to overall business strategy.

It's probably too much to expect a single book to change things but stranger things have happened. Either way, Marketing readers should study the contents carefully. It seems odd recommending an old-fashioned print book, all 800-plus pages, to a Kindle generation but you'd be an awful eejit not to make an exception for this one.