Advertising in no small measure

Move over ROC, it’s time for ROC. In the advertising business, the often used financial metric ‘Return on Capital’ or ROCE (return on capital employed) takes a new meaning.

The hotshot global creative agency, Crispin, Porter+ Bogusky calls it Return on Creativity. Rather, the agency’s Executive Strategy Director, Benny Thomas, says the proof lies in the pudding, or in the dog food.

Some years ago, at the prestigious Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show that’s all about showing off pedigreed dogs, the pet food brand Pedigree put the focus on shelter dogs. Of the four million shelter dogs, only two million find homes.

The CMO of Mars Petcare, the company that owns Pedigree, in his address focused on the plight of shelter dogs and said that for every penny that donors made towards the shelter dogs, Mars would put in its share. The money that Pedigree hoped to raise over the next six days was raised in the next 12 hours after the announcement was made.

However, Thomas points out that when the idea had been initially pitched to the client, “they hated the idea and said you have just signed your termination letter”.

Imagine a snobbish show with pedigreed dogs being contaminated with talk about shelter dogs. However, the overwhelming response from consumers following the campaign shifted market share for the brand by one per cent. “For a billion-dollar brand that translates to a lot of money,” says Thomas.

In another case involving the pizza chain Domino’s, the advertising idea became a well-documented case study, Pizza Turnaround. The agency got to hear through focus groups that the Domino’s pizza tasted like cardboard. Instead of burying such criticism under the carpet, as brand managers normally do, the client and the agency decided to take the criticism and the critics head-on.

A team of chefs developed a new recipe for Domino’s pizza and landed up at the doors of people who did not have good things to say about the chain’s pizzas. These customers were offered the new recipe and their views were recorded. That became the basis of the company’s new campaign which saw the company’s stock price rocketing within a month of the campaign’s launch. That made the CEO and CMO of the chain call this a case of return on creativity. “They had the courage to stand up and say, we make terrible pizzas. Normally, that’s a recipe for disaster, right,” asks Thomas. The CEO Patrick Doyle reportedly said at that time, when you take out all the variables and isolate the cause for that spike in sales, this campaign was the cause.

However, in the zeal to boost the return on creativity, Thomas says that one should often pay attention to the hygiene factors — not hurt people and be culturally sensitive. Still in the case of Burger King, CP+B decided to push the boundaries. When everybody was talking about eating healthy, salads and so on, the agency decided to go ahead and do the opposite.

The agency targeted a group called the super fans of the brand in the 15-25 age bracket. This generation did not care much about salads. For them, a product called the Baconator was created. “I call it an instant heart attack,” says Thomas, adding that the 22-year-olds don’t care about cholesterol, though.

“We were clear about who we are talking to,” says Thomas and adds that every campaign done by the agency first identifies the business objective in order to deliver on the ROC factor.

In this case, the objective was to get one more visit by that super fan every month. If the super fan visited the outlet twice a month, the objective was to increase it to three visits.

The Baconator gave the brand a bigger bite of the market.