part 11. how to waste advertising money - how not to name a brand

did you see the tv ad for the give-me-a-name effort? or hear the radio ad? print ad? the billboard? i had not seen any of those but the nestle website said they had those materials and even gave the media schedule. so if like me, you have not seen any of these ads, it looks like we are not the target audience of the ads. they must have placed those ads in media programs and newspapers we don't watch nor read or the media weights must have been so sparse that we all missed the ads.

given what they say in the website, this effort must have a very high cost. and with such a high cost, equally high expectations must come with it. but how do you measure the success of the effort?

given the objective of generating buzz and excitement behind the new product launch and since they have used their website as the end medium for it, a key measure would be the responses generated in their website. that would be number of hits the website has gotten, and most importantly, the number of entries and votes the names have gotten.

you can't measure buzz and excitement directly as these are emotional reactions but marketing people measure these indirectly through the number of target audience reached and number of target audience who have responded to the effort. based on these measures, it looks like the effort failed miserably.

we don't know the specific weight (frequency and spend)of the media plan, but the media plan they had put there, at least from the point of view of media used and months, seem to be literally a WAWAM!

for one, its a WAWAM because i don't think anyone really saw the ads. if they actually aired the materials, that means the weights must have been so low that nobody noticed. in marketing terms, spending very little money on advertising that too few people are reached is like spending no money at all on advertising. why spend too little that it has no impact? if it's no impact you want, then there is no need to spend any money.

on the other hand, if they were really intent on creating buzz, given the short period of time of the effort, around 5-6 months, for media to make real impact, they need to spend very high amount of money to rise above the clutter. now, that by itself is a problem and one that i don't think nestle will see as a good investment since this is NOT yet the brand, it's just an effort dedicated to figuring out the name for the brand. the brand is yet to be sold, it has not sold a case yet which means this brand's p&l is already at a loss even before they launch the brand.

this is the nature of media spending behind an advertising campaign - spending too little and spending too much are both a waste of precious advertising money. unfortunately, often times many advertising agencies get their clients to spend on advertising just so they so something in advertising and generate revenues for the ad agency even if it has no positive impact on the their client's business.

to be continued....