The world is watching
How's this for a tall order: Create an advertising campaign that satisfies not one but 11 company clients and their 11 respective ad agencies. That's not all: The product you're advertising has somewhat of an image problem.
These were some of the tasks facing the staff at the New York City offices of Dentsu Corporation of America in developing a print campaign to promote the U.S. hosting of the 1994 World Cup. The Cup, soccer's premier event, will consist of 52 matches played in nine U.S. cities over 31 days this summer.
"Any time you have to come up with a creative campaign that needs to be approved by 11 clients, it's difficult," says Richard Levy, Dentsu's senior vice president, creative director, and master of understatement.
Billions of fans
It's really quite a coup for the U.S. to snare the World Cup, which is held in a different country every four years to determine true world soccer supremacy. Unlike major league baseball's World Series, which only involves teams from two measly countries, the World Cup is sought after by teams on six continents.
The event holds billions of people in rapt attention - except here in the U.S. For while millions of Americans play soccer and various professional leagues have made a go of it over the years, as a nation we've never been gripped by professional soccer mania. Most of us reserve that energy for our own version of football.
Bringing the games to America is no small undertaking, especially from the financial end. Hence the event has 11 international sponsors, from McDonald's to Fuji Film, and eight worldwide marketing partners such as Sun Microsystems and American Airlines. "The ads were intended as a way to recognize the sponsors, the people who had put up the money to bring the World Cup to the U.S. We had to make sure that the message we were giving fit with the sponsors. We also wanted to build excitement that the event was coming to the U.S. because soccer has never been a major part of the American professional sports mindset," Levy says.
By playfully inserting a soccer ball into several familiar images of Americana - an old photo of a leather-helmeted football player, Grant Wood's American Gothic, a shot of an astronaut on the moon, a cowboy roping steers - the campaign makes it clear that this time around, the U.S. is part of the "world" in World Cup.
The body copy mentions the efforts of the "dedicated soccer fans and visionary companies" who are helping bring the Cup to the U.S. It also communicates the magnitude and locations of the event and invites the reader to call for ticket information. Each ad also features the logos of the sponsors and marketing partners.
The ads ran in publications such as Time, Money, Sports Illustrated and Fortune. All the ads had the same dual target: business leaders - CEOs of other companies, business influencers - and the general public. "These giant multinational companies want their peers to see what they're doing. They want people to know that they're a sponsor of a gigantic event, that they are good corporate citizens," Levy says.
Projective technique
To assist in the development of the ads, Dentsu used a projective research technique called Brand Keys, which seeks to uncover the elements that cause consumers to create an emotional bond to a brand or product.
Brand Keys takes a cue from an Advertising Research Foundation Copy Research Validity Project, which showed that emotional bonding to a brand or commercial was the best predictor of sales. If you can discover the keys to that bond, the reasoning goes, you have a better chance to influence purchase.
"Brand Keys tells you exactly which buttons to push, and you can measure how well you've pushed a certain button," Levy says. "If I'm trying to get someone to react to a certain attribute of a product or service, I can create my advertising in that direction and test to see if I've actually done it.
"It's also helpful because when you push one button you've often hurt another and you can see very precisely where if you improve one area you affect others. Most often you end up trying to change or improve upon perception and the one thing you're hurting is core brand equity, which you never want to do."
In the Brand Keys scheme, consumers have predispositions or feelings towards the products and brands in the marketplace. These are called locks. At the same time, each brand or product has a set of attributes or keys. Brand Keys aims to define those attributes, using projective techniques in which consumers answer standardized questions.
For example, respondents are asked how they would feel or act if they were a certain brand. "If you were Brand X would you tend to plan things in advance or tend to do things on the spur of the moment?" Or, "If you were Brand X would you have a big crowd of friends or have a few close friends?" Respondents also answer these questions as if they were their ideal brand.
Through these questions the technique helps determine what consumers are willing to believe about a brand or product and how that brand or product compares to the consumer's ideal brand. Responses are grouped into two dimensions, attitudinal and behavioral, with each consisting of two sets of opposing attributes, outer directed/inner directed, deductive /intuitive, careful/casual, rational/emotional.
Since scores are generated for the brand(s) in question and the respondent's ideal brand, advertisers can test ads to determine how well they fit into the target audience's "locks."
In addition, the technique can guide the creative process, says Robert Passikoff, creator the Brand Keys technique and president of Brand Keys, New York City. "These dimensions, when given to agency creatives, offer them horizons - rather than boundaries - to think about when developing ads."
Passikoff says the technique arose out of his experience as an ad agency research director and doing promotion research years ago at Cato Johnson/Y&R.
"In researching promotions, you were looking for some consumer behavior in the marketplace on a very short-term basis. Advertising was always an attitudinal thing where you had, at least in years past, the luxury of waiting it out and seeing what happened in the marketplace. But in promotion research, if you were going to use a certain measure, and take the consumer's pulse, you wanted something that would correlate highly to a real sale.
"When I worked as an agency research director, it got tougher and tougher to provide the creatives with real insights. There was a need for something that would provide some consumer direction that was different than what we had."
New product
For the World Cup ad campaign research, the product was almost approached as if it were a new product, because for many Americans, that's what professional soccer is, Passikoff says. "The campaign was not only introducing the World Cup to the U.S. but it was also an umbrella for the sponsors and the research gave Dentsu an understanding of each one of the sponsors and how they best fit under a World Cup umbrella. We were able to find out not only what people believed about World Cup soccer but what they were willing to believe and I think ultimately that's the most important thing."
It's important, for example, because while it's true that the World Cup is bigger than the Super Bowl, it would be foolish to make those claims in an ad if no one would believe you.
In addition, says Richard Levy, "Brand Keys helped us determine which approaches would fit with certain companies. That was important with 11 international sponsors and eight worldwide marketing partners. We found going in that there were certain companies that consumers had no trouble believing would sponsor an event like the World Cup. For some of the other companies, people had a hard time thinking of them as a worldwide corporate sponsor of an event of this magnitude.
"Brand Keys gave us the opportunity to recommend to certain companies, that if they wanted to do World Cup specific tie-ins, certain kinds would be more appropriate. For Canon, for example, the research showed it would be more appropriate to do a 'rules of the game' tie-in. For Coke it would be a 'world wide event' tie-in."
Education needed
For the World Cup ad research, interviews were conducted in six census regions, using central location intercepts, with three segments: general consumers aged 16-49, soccer enthusiasts, and a business segment. "We had a feeling going in that people knew what the World Cup was, but we thought there would be more excitement about it coming to the United States than there was," Levy says. "We found that we had to do much more education about the event. There was a need to understand rules and regulations, how the game is played. There was also a need to tell an American audience about the magnitude of the event, that it was as big as 12 Super Bowls, without specifically comparing it to other sports."
The ad with the football player was meant to differentiate football as we define it from the way the rest of the world defines it. "We found that there was some confusion between what's called football in the rest of the world and what's called football here. We needed to show them that it's just as exciting as U.S. football. That's something that we probably would not have done without Brand Keys.
"The ad that shows Neil Armstrong on the moon talks about the magnitude of the event, that it's a once in a lifetime happening. That, too, is an ad that we may not have created if it wasn't for Brand Keys. We tested two executions to see if there were differences between the two, the American Gothic ad and the man on the moon ad. They both did well in communicating the size of the event, the fact that it's coming to the United States, and that it's being brought to you by these companies."
More information, better work
Levy says that the research filled a great informational need. "In creative, the more tools you have, and the more information you have access to, the better the work. To get great work you have to pore over it until it becomes a good piece of creative. You have to do your homework and research is a big part of that.
"The fact that the work was well received and that millions of tickets were sold has very much to do with not only the creative product but the thinking and the research that went into it. It was an impossible task and we pulled it off."