Competition can bring out the best in marketers, or the worst. It can make them clever and creative, or literal and banal. When Verizon Wireless wanted to respond to AT&T’s iPhone-fueled growth, it promoted its advantage in network coverage with the “There’s a Map for That” campaign. When DirecTV wanted to respond to price competition from Dish Network and local cable providers, it created a campaign called “To Tell the Truth” that uses a game show format to claim that only DirecTV tells the truth about its pricing. Similar competitive challenges, but very different creative solutions.

There's a Map for That

The standard agency creative development process involves identifying a significant consumer insight, turning that insight into a relevant, credible claim and bringing the claim to life in a compelling and memorable way. Verizon’s insight was that a smartphone is only as capable as the network it runs on, and its claim was that its network has more coverage than AT&T’s. DirecTV’s insight was that consumers in this category are value-driven, and its claim was that it provides more channels for less money.

Both campaigns are from major agencies: McCann Worldgroup for Verizon and Deutsch for DirecTV. But while Verizon’s commercials make their point in a clever and engaging way, DirecTV’s spots are uninvolving and numbingly literal. One creative team was able to make the jump from Apple’s “There’s an app for that” to Verizon’s network coverage map to “There’s a map for that” while the other creative team got only as far as an old game show. In fact, one wonders whether DirecTV even bothered trying to be creative, or whether they thought that being literal was the best way to reach their audience.

Creativity is a particular challenge in online marketing. In Zavee’s Google advertising we have a very limited space in which to induce users to click, and every word is analyzed and evaluated. If we weren’t highly literal our ads might not even appear where we want them. Within the Zavee site and this blog, we try to use keywords that will improve our rankings in searches. Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization are absolutely vital to Zavee’s marketing plan, but they don’t result in much creativity. In fact, it sometimes feels like we are writing for Google, not for our audience.

One online medium where creativity doesn’t have to be sacrificed for effectiveness is YouTube. Many marketers have figured out how to create videos that pull the audience in, expose them to the marketer’s brand and get them talking about it with others. And some of the best YouTube videos are produced by consumers, not the marketer. Look for Zavee to make greater use of this medium in the near future.

The Zavee takeaway:

• Competition should make marketers more creative, not less.
• SEO and SEM present challenges to creativity, but they aren’t the only online media.
• YouTube is one online medium that rewards creativity.