I was watching Ghost Whisperer one afternoon and got to thinking about how much its life paralleled the average ad campaign. No, no. Hear me out. First, sex sells. Jennifer Love Hewitt shared more cleavage with CBS viewers than their oxygen tanks could handle. For a while there, it comfortably rode that cleavage to decent ratings. Then the Friday Night Lights phenomenon came a callin’.
I wasn’t in the room, but I suspect that’s about the time that someone said, “We need a change. We can’t just have Melinda Gordon crossing ghosts over every week. We need to jazz it up.” So Melinda got a new partner who could hear ghosts but not see them. And she got knocked up and had a kid who was even more powerful than her. And she developed new powers herself, including the ability to touch an object and see its history. And then there were Shinies and Shadows and Watchers, oh my!
What all those things were is irrelevant (though I personally started tuning out the show when the little kid started talking about Shadows being the bad parts of dead souls that were left behind). It got strange. It got creepy. That, of course, is saying a lot when you’re talking about a show whose average guest star was the walking dead.
Now, back to marketing. I once had a client who came to the agency and said, “It’s been six months. I’m bored with this campaign. Let’s concept something else.”
We, of course were floored, not because we had to start over, but because not a single ad had run. Not a single person outside the marketing team had seen the work. But because for six months, the director of marketing had seen it cross his desk virtually unchanged day in and day out, he got the idea that the rest of the world had gotten bored with it, too.
Did Ghost Whisperer’s ratings slip because people were bored with ghost after ghost getting crossed over? I don’t think so. They changed the formula because they thought they had to to survive. “Friday Night Lights is kicking our asses and we’re tired of our current premise, so the rest of the world must be, too.” Did my client’s campaign get scrapped because people were tired of it? No. He changed the formula because he thought he had to to keep the product fresh in people’s minds.
For every Absolut, which has run the same campaign since the Renaissance, there’s a thousand (insert my client’s brand here). They own vodka. Unaided recalls scores on Absolute have to be the highest by a long margin.
It’s OK to fear the competition. But changing just because they’re out there serves to only dilute the brand equity you’ve established. It’s better to stay the course than to change for change’s sake. All you’re doing is giving your competition an opportunity to take away the audience you alienate.
And it doesn’t take a campaign whisperer to figure that one out.