If Daniel Morel has a few days off, you might find him atop a peak in Colorado. Or he might be popping in on Tulane University in New Orleans, his MBA alma mater, as part of an extensive cycling tour of the Gulf Coast. Perhaps he's adding to the 1,500-plus underwater dives he has done, including those accomplished as a combat diver in the French Navy.
These are not the activities of someone who embraces the softer aspects of direct marketing. They seem to be those of a modern pragmatic marketer, one who has no use for a campaign's bells and whistles, the type of ad exec who is only interested in ROI.
Not so.
In person, the 56-year-old Toulon, France native is wiry and energetic. Morel will start an interview sitting, but as questions begin to flow he jumps up and moves about his office — to his desk, to a stack of magazines on a nearby table, to a cabinet where he ladles heaping spoonfuls of a powdery nutritional supplement into a glass of milk.
Yet while his tones remain measured and his words considered, his primary area of concern goes beyond the metrics. For Morel, the creative element is key, and numbers will take care of themselves.
“If I have a good piece of creative, if I know the consumer likes it, if I have a good offer, then I can make it pay,” he says. “I can get results. I can test differently. I can get the numbers up.”
Morel brings the same outlook to the way he serves as Wunderman CEO. Take the time Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, Wunderman's parent company, told Morel: “Daniel, give me profit.”
“I said: ‘No, I am going to give you revenue, and then next year I am going to give you profit.’ It is very difficult to get revenue up, meaning, to seduce a client to come in,” Morel says.
Morel certainly is bringing in the revenue. Advertising Age speculated that in 2005, Wunderman accounted for $447.7 million of the WPP Group's $10.03 billion in revenue, making it the fifth-largest of the company's two-dozen-plus advertising properties — and top among its marketing services firms.
Those figures cover a good chunk of Morel's tenure at Wunderman. He was hired in 2001, when direct marketing was “on the tail end of the dot-com boom,” he says. “People in our industry were a bit hesitant about what to do next. They had a new tool, which was quite sexy in those days, and still is, with digital communication and immediate feedback.”
Spend a little time with Morel, and one notices certain words coming to the forefront. Online channels aren't powerful, they're sexy. And one does not win over customers: One seduces them.
But sexy is not always desirable. “I talk to young folks in [Wunderman's] training program, and all they want to talk about is what we're going to do with digital and the Internet,” Morel complains.
Moreover, for all its alleged glamour, marketers have been slow to embrace the Internet as a unique medium, according to Morel. “If you take a magazine and flip through it, you quickly get an idea what that magazine is about,” he says. “You see the articles, the names, a photo. Sometimes you smell a sample of perfume. Each element of communication goes quickly to the next page. Try to do that on a laptop. You can't replicate cursory reading and the surprise that you have reading a magazine or reading something in the mail.”
For Morel, creative must be tailored to each channel. He once asked media professionals at a major consumer packaged goods marketer how they judged creativity in the various media.
“I got some interesting answers,” he says. “‘I use common sense.’ ‘I use what I learned throughout 20 years in my career using television and print and TV.’ ‘I look at it the way I use it as a customer.’ These answers were all perfectly reasonable, all perfectly fine and all perfectly wrong. Every time you have a new medium, you have to rethink the architecture of the brand.”
Take television. People in 1950 didn't know how to use it. “They said: ‘How are we going to be creative on TV? We're going to put Walter Cronkite behind a desk, and we're going to put a fixed camera on him,’” he says. “But that's not television, that's radio with a photo. They were using the creative understanding of the past medium and applying it to a new one.”
He continues that the Internet was “not built to broadcast 30-second commercials.”
So what is its unique creative use? Morel confesses that he doesn't know, and that the person who discovers it will become rich. But he does offer one possibility. “BMW is saying it's an edgy nine-minute film,” he says. “Thirty-two million people downloaded that thing, so it must have been interesting. Thirty-two million people cannot be wrong at the same time.”
Among the vertical markets, the automotive industry is best at using the Internet, Morel says. But that doesn't mean it's using it well.
“Search came about, and now people don't go to Ford.com,” he continues. “They go to Google.com and type: ‘20 Best SUVs.’ They get the aggregator, which pulls the cars from Ford, from Toyota, and they will go to the page with the particular SUV.”
He adds: “The creativity has changed. It is not about shouting and making sure prospects go to Ford.com. It is about buying keywords and building your Web page in order to have those key words serve into it, or paying to have it up front [in the listings].”
It gets worse. “The customers click, directing them to that particular landing page on your site,” he says. “And they see only that. You have to be able to retain them on that page so they don't click on the back button, to go back to the [search] listings and go to the other pages. This is very difficult, because you don't have a Web site, you have only one page to make the sale. What does that resemble? It resembles the selling that you do in print, or through a catalog.”
Marketers, Morel notes, paid $5.9 billion for search engine marketing last year. But “96% of those clicks lead nowhere. [Visitors] could be clicking a button to attend a sales event, requesting a piece of literature, asking someone to call, filling out a form. Some kind of action. But 96% do nothing. And that resembles the performance of a direct mail piece. People are now starting to realize that if the industry is paying $5.9 billion for search, and 96% leads nowhere, what are they accomplishing?
Morel's obsession with creative is especially odd given his academic interests. He's done a fair amount of work toward a Ph.D. at the Econometrics Laboratory of the National Center for Scientific Research in France. His focus is bullionism — the 16th-century economic theory that holds wealth should be judged solely on access to precious metals.
Not that he has surrendered his interest in that which glitters. He's a judge in the Cannes Lions Direct creative awards contest. He helps award gold, silver and bronze prizes every year.
But that gives rise to his frustration with American direct marketing. U.S. agencies historically have not fared well in the top tiers of the Cannes competition.
Why? For one thing, European judges “tend to favor tricks, tend to favor something that's a bit whimsical, things that are plays on words,” Morel speculates. “There's more of a self-deprecating humor.” In contrast, American ads tend to be a bit more hard-sell oriented.
But the main reason that American firms don't do well is sheer numbers. Roughly 90% of the Cannes entries come from outside the United States, Morel estimates. He further hypothesizes that a vicious circle might be at work: American firms may be discouraged by their lack of performance, and therefore don't enter. But the lack of entries means that by dint of sheer numbers, fewer earn Lions.
Morel would like to see the number of American entries increase. “I am challenging the United States by saying: ‘I don't care if you win, I don't care how good you are, just participate. Measure yourself against the best, and see how you stack up. I'm just asking you to be there and fight the fight.’”
Personal Best: Coke
The Internet is a marketer's dream come true — it's immediate, creates a dialogue, provides downloadable entertainment and allows membership in a virtual community. Who could make this medium better? And what would make it better?
Coke did it simply by using original content. They saw the opportunity to adapt their brand architecture and visual imagery to the Web and created CokeStudios for the mycoke.com site. Original content is king in the digital space, and for a creative director this is a delight! CokeStudios is exceptional because it is forward-looking and entertaining, and fosters a community. By harnessing the power of dialogue, CokeStudios goes where print and TV campaigns cannot.
At its core, CokeStudios is true to the essence of the brand. It's appealing to young people by communicating to them in a language they understand. It also provides tools like downloadable music and games that create a culture that makes them want to return.
The creative work fosters a lifestyle, demonstrates who the Coke drinker is, and gives them entertaining content that they want. Gone are the days of advertising that simply shows people drinking Coke and smiling.
This approach is working for Coke. CokeStudios has acquired a life of its own. It gathered over 2 million registered users in its first five months and picks up another 12 each minute. The average time logged on to it is over half an hour, which is staggering. The virtual furniture that you can create on the site has even been sold on eBay!
Digital marketing is NEVER about the masses. The new order is built upon “persona marketing.” Simply put, it's creative that is created for the end-user and asks the question, “Would the persona it was designed for like it?” In CokeStudios' case, the answer is an overwhelming “yes.”
—Daniel Morel
