Is the term “below the line” still relevant?
Should it even be used in the day-to-day vernacular when advertising and marketing are being discussed?
The words evoke something sub level, not quite good enough as the stuff above. For too long promo agency folks have been snubbed by the ad guys, snickered at behind their backs as not up to the standards set by Madison Avenue.
Well, as they say, the times they are a changing … and fast.
Ad agencies are reaching across the line trying to slice off a piece of the promotion pie. Promo agencies are punching up, with more and more promotions like events and sampling tours upstaging, or tied to, TV spots.
The rise in stature has been driven in part by companies searching for more effective places to put their marketing dollars than flagging TV spots. Sweepstakes promotions, for example, are no longer just hanging out online, waiting for entrants to stumble across the Web site or learn about it from packaging. TV spots are specifically created around these promotions, building brand exposure, driving trial — and hopefully sales — while creating lots of fun and excitement for consumers.
The scales are tipping in favor of street teams passing out goodies, contests that send young people scrambling through the streets of Las Vegas hunting for treasure chests, and into mud pits searching for car keys. New scrutiny is placed on whether the millions spent for a 30-second spot is truly as effective as what can be accomplished by a group of fresh-faced college students passing out coupons for the latest yogurt at train stations and college campuses.
Elevating promotion to even newer heights is the latest buzzword, “channel-neutral marketing.”
The strategy means that marketers begin planning the launch of a new product or service or any other campaign with a clean slate. No preconceived notions — presumably that the best place to launch any campaign is on TV — and promotion is often rising to the top of the list.
Big names like Kimberly-Clark created a buzz when it announced earlier this year that it had shifted its marketing strategy to channel neutral and hired an agency to lead that charge. That agency, Naked Communications, has also won work from several other large clients over the past year, including Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson. And it reached a new level of credibility when Louise Story profiled it in The New York Times last month. She began the article, “It takes a bit of courage, and perhaps a lot of ego, to tell large companies that their ad campaigns have been failing miserably.”
Channel neutral marketing has added one more weapon for promotion agencies in the fight for elbowroom at the planning table as clients gather with their roster of ad, digital, PR, promotion and other agencies.
These clients are looking for the unusual, the off-beat place to put their marketing dollars to work without the presumption that a 30-second spot must be a part of the mix. That’s what promotion agencies do every day. They craft the wild and the wacky, the untamed and madcap, the serious, the sophomoric and the mature.
In this month’s Q&A (page 40) senior vice president of sales and marketing for Universal Studios Hollywood Mark Mears talks about the “watershed” moment in the agency world in 2006 when the merger of Draft and FCB elevated a “below-the-line service shop” to lead billing over a venerable agency. Since then there have been many other such mergers and acquisitions.
The movement of marketing dollars is also working in favor of promotion. Many promo agencies expect spending on marketing services to outpace that of traditional advertising for the foreseeable future.
This all must make ad agency people quiver.
And in a signal that ad agency people are taking note, I was at the American Association of Advertising Agencies conference in Orlando in March, chatting with such a person, when she began to talk about promotion. She started to say “below the …” but trailed off. She looked around and then uttered the words in a hushed tone as if someone standing nearby might be offended by the words.
The “line” is disappearing, and now emerging is the sincere respect that promotion agencies have long deserved.
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