Chris Howatson: Australia Must Build “Generationally-Long Ideas” As Market Matures

Australian CMOs and their agencies have an opportunity to commit to long-term brand-building “as we mature as a market”, according to Howatson+Co founder and CEO Chris Howatson.

“CMOs change. Agencies change. And generally, most of the time, the work changes,” he said.

“Take Telstra. Reasonably long CMO tenures. But every time there's a new CMO, that brand changes. The Mark Buckman era was very different to the Jo Pollard era, which is very different to the Brent Smart era. Probably the only common thread between those eras is that the brand's big, and it has a colourful logo, but the message of what that brand is has been very different. So it is a structural challenge. 

“That's where maybe we look at some of those international brands like M&Ms or Snickers or 'Should Have Gone to Specsavers'. These have generationally-long ideas that have been very disciplinedly held to, and maybe that's our opportunity, as we mature as a market, is to stick more strongly to long term brand thoughts.”

Chris’ comments came on a panel at a JCDecaux event yesterday, which also featured REA marketer Sarah Myers and UM’s chief strategy and growth officer, Raj Gupta.

“Brand narrative is built over a very, very long time, and out of home is the purest brand medium right now,” he added, “where you hone all those components into what the feeling of that brand is.”

The event launched JCDecaux’s new positioning, ‘Be Seen. Be Remembered’ - created by Howatson+Company - and saw System1’s senior vice president of global partnerships, Andrew Tindall, present world-first research on the effectiveness of OOH creativity. That research found 70% of OOH ads don’t work because they don’t secure brand recognition quick enough.

Sarah Myers, the general manager of audience and marketing at property business REA Group, said her brand’s OOH messaging skews rational, and she wishes the executions were more creative.

“We have a lot of messages in market because the channel works well for us,” she said of OOH.

“There's this consistent pressure to 'let's have product messages here, and preference driving messages there and brand messages there'. So appreciate that that is quite a lot. But also because we will often have rational messages that deliver for us, we're not as creative as I would like us to be.”

Chris is all too familiar with the strength of REA’s brand codes and rational messaging - Howatson+Co works with key competitor Domain.

“The biggest challenge that Domain has is that REA is red and they're big. All their messages are biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest. So how do you compete with that? 

“In some ways, it's kind of okay for REA to be rational. .. from an out of home point of view, just reinforcing those category leadership points is actually the best thing for that brand to do.”

Applying channel-specific creativity to OOH advertising can increase recall by 50%, and creating an emotional connection doubles commercial effects, System1’s Andrew said. He advised brands to employ showmanship versus salesmanship tactics to maximise an OOH campaign’s effectiveness.

Chris urged creative agencies to not attempt to “solve 10 objectives that Andrew’s just given us in one ad, because you break one of these objectives, which is single-minded messaging.” Instead, “you've got to figure out where your brand is in its market penetration” and from there understand which rules to stick by, and which the brand has permission to break.

“Our role is to create value for brands, to figure out where our brand sits in its life cycle, in the market,” he said. 

“For me, it comes back to a classic metric, which is consideration, or unprompted awareness. If you're a brand like McDonald's, you can ignore some of those things that we've seen and just play with the arches, not have any message there, apart from just directionality with the arches. If you're the fish and chip shop ... you've got to have different expectations [as to] what the outcomes are. 

“Do we have strong codes? Do we have strong messaging? What's the format we're buying into? And where does it go?”

Just as the creative execution should be simple and clear, simplifying the media strategy may be the answer to budgets under pressure, the agency leader added, encouraging strategic sacrifice. “What you don't do is as important as what you do.”

“There's not a room I'm in where the marketing department isn't asking for more money,” he said. 

“Maybe one of the things that we've been as a market in the past is we've had enough money to buy everything, and now we don't. And that's the transition.

“If you break out the drivers of effectiveness, 45% is essentially the medium, the moment, the targeting. 55% is the message. So we've seen a lot about the message today. The medium is a really important component, and so maybe channel reductionism is the conversation that we go to next.

“Maybe it's time that you just focus on a channel. If you can't do everything, just pick one. Dominate your share of voice against your competitors in a channel.”

Sarah explained that while marketing budgets can increase, those increases don’t match the ever-growing demands on marketing departments.

“We've got more channels. We've never dispatched as many different outputs, and everything's bespoke. Every year there is more, and yet budgets go up, but not by enough. That effectiveness engine, we feel like we've cracked it, and we've got that, and then we set a new year, and it's like, 'Let's go again', and 10% more.”

She took Chris’ call for simplicity one step further, choosing to leave the audience with an oft-derided command: “Make the logo bigger.” 

System1’s study in partnership with JCDecaux showed an OOH ad with one message leads to a 4.4% uplift in key brand association, while two messages saw that result drop to 2%, and three messages saw brand association go backwards by 0.4%. Consistency is king, Andrew argued, leading to a 14% climb in brand recognition within the two-second window critical for OOH assets, and 35% improved recall.

Yet consistency is easy to stray from, Sarah admitted, not just as CMOs and agencies change, but because marketing teams get bored before their consumers do.

“Red is our distinctive asset, but so is the house mark, and we've done a lot of research and creative testing,” she said. 

“We test our ads several times a year alongside all others in the category, and we see how important the consistency is, and part of that is reinforcing that message internally. While we are often advocates for the power of consistency, there's always noises in every business around, 'Can we change this up? What about this?' We get tired of our things before anyone else does, but there is such a respect for that consistency now and how well that works for us.”

Last July, REA launched a new strategy and brand platform, ‘Keep Moving’ with 72andSunny, which featured a family zooming through the suburbs on a red lounge, set to the Eurogliders track, ‘Heaven (Must Be There)’.

“Down at Bondi Beach, we turned bus shelters into a red couch,” Sarah said of how the brand extended the campaign across channels.

“We played the same music that featured across the campaign, and commuters could search for local properties ... What was really great was we created video content of that, and that was some of our best performing pieces across TikTok last year. 

“So you can really tune into what is your creative idea, have rational brand and performance messages, but then work out, what are you going to do that's really memorable?”