Joel Pinkham

Integrated Marketing Communications: one of those terms that marketing people throw around but are usually too lazy or in too big of a company to actually do it properly. This safety video is one of the best examples of integrated marketing I’ve ever seen.

The video ties in with their latest ad campaign and strongly communicates the positioning to an extremely captive audience, we weren’t escaping anywhere.

Extremely captivating, you can’t take your eyes off it. Although supposedly no 2 planes are the same, every single safety video is. This video however, is memorable and stands out from the boring stuff we’re used to while impatiently waiting to take off and reach our destination.

5.3 million views on YouTube so far, obviously others feel the same way as me.

Yeah I know I’ve been slack on the blog, but I’m going to get back into it by making a bold statement that is admittedly out of my league. I’m also going to tell the story the long way, for the real juicy part – click here.

As I’ve recently moved to Sydney – I had the joy of setting up a new bank account. I did my research and weighed up pricing and features to see pretty much the same product. I got sold on the brand. NAB painted me a pretty picture of themselves, using bright colours and smiley face rainbows – they had me falling in love. Being new to the country, I hadn’t been exposed to the old “National Australia Bank” brand which is still used in ads along the train line to the airport for some terrible reason. If they still had this logo, I wouldn’t have lusted after them.

They’ve done a great job of making their brand appealing, but as soon as I had to deal with them, I was disappointed. Happy go lucky turned into old time processes that got in the way of pleasing me. I won’t go into the details – but it’s been two weeks and I still don’t have an EFTPOS card and wasn’t allowed to take cash out of the account for the first few days.

So here’s the obvious point: why did they rebrand to appeal to someone like me when they probably know that they can’t live up to that promise? 

Sure they need their processes to make the business operate, but making it seem like I’m going to enjoy it being their customer just makes them look worse and accentuates the pitfalls.

I previously dealt with a client who threw around the strap line ‘Making life easier’ like there was no tomorrow. The thing was, they didn’t make life easier at all. Their old way of thinking and processes made it bloody difficult for their customers. This company needs applauding though – their marketing team had the balls to strip the tag line from the brand because they couldn’t live up to it.

Marketers get too carried away with the warm and fuzzy. There was a time (or so I’m told) where consumers would buy whatever was advertised. Marketers had the power, now consumers have the power. We can see through the fuzzy. This is why it’s most important to get the product and service right, first and foremost.

If Yahoo! advertised and got warm and fuzzy on you, would it take you away from Google?

I just read that AdAge have named Unilever as digital marketer of the year. The interesting point about the article – Unilever doesn’t really do digital campaigns. They use digital as a part of their broader campaigns, or as they put it “far from done in isolation”.

It’s good to see the industry going this way and someone getting awarded for this kind of effort. In a few years things will change for the better. I can assume it’s not so much like this in the bigger parts of the world, but in New Zealand; online marketing is put up on a pedestal like it’s something special. I have to admit, myself included.

Some corporates hire specialist Online Marketing Managers simply because a traditional marketing manager isn’t expected to ‘get it’. These companies are generally looked at as doing the right thing and taking a step in the right direction. It’s a step yes, but I think it’s a temporary step until the marketing manager’s do ‘get it’.

In my second year at uni I took an ‘e-marketing’ paper, which was it’s last time running. Now, instead all of the elements of the course are integrated into the other papers. In a number of years, there should be a bunch of marketing managers who get the online theory into them early so that they do indeed ‘get it’.