The Problem With Casting The First Stone In Advertising
Jul 6th, 2009 by David Svet
Have you seen the TV ads for Bing? They’re really quite cleaver. One person poses a question to another and gets a rambling response of gibberish, riffing off the root of the original question. Obviously, it is intended to poke Google and Yahoo in the eye with the accusation that their search results are scrambled and unrelated by logic. We’re supposed to suddenly recognize the great pain that we live with everyday putting up with the shortcomings of search engines and realize that Bing will be the cure all.
OK, going for the pain is a great sales tactic for discovering the reason a prospect will be willing to change brands. Find out where someone really hurts and you have the keys to the kingdom — if you can help them. Using this as a lead in your marketing makes perfect sense — unless the pain that you’re pointing out doesn’t exist.
This is part of the problem that I’ve had with the Bing ads — I don’t have any pain. I watch the ads and I’m entertained. I like them, I like the name, and I like the idea of having some new super-search tool. But the pain that they point to, the rambling gibberish, isn’t how I see search results. I have no compelling reason to change, so I watch the commercials and appreciate their production values and am thankful for the entertainment. But in my gut I am perplexed every time one airs.
Then I saw an announcement online that Bing could search Social Media streams. Bing! The light went on for me. Now I had a reason to switch. Here was a pain that I really felt. So, I fired up Bing and ran a search on my Twitter name. Then I burst out laughing — Bing returned a stream of Tweets that mention me in a flow of search results unrelated by time, sequence, or logic. Bing made their commercials come true by delivering their own punch line — and I laughed really hard. Not only do their ads point out a problem that I believe doesn’t exist, but, they actually create the problem! How did these ads get approved?
Prior to the 1980s, directly assaulting your competitors in advertising was a taboo. Today it’s fairly commonplace, but it’s still considered risky because you open yourself up for a counterpunch. In order to pull it off you have to be unassailable and who among us is without sin? So, casting the first stone doesn’t seem like a very good idea. Especially if you’ve manufactured a customer pain that doesn’t exist based on a flaw that you want people to believe is in your competitor’s product, but you know is in your own product.
Rule of thumb going forward — if discussion about a marketing tactic is documented in Scripture as a “don’t”, you should end the discussion and move on.
