Eardley Factor Articles: Home: A Strategy Markedly
Improving the Probability of TV Marketing Success
The Eardley
Factor and You
Marketing
Success
Do Your Ads
Match The Eardley Factor Standard of Excellence?
EardleyFactor
Confidently Predicts Bush Victory
Teresa Heinz-Kerry's
Democratic Disconnect
Why John
Kerry Lost
Fox
News 100 Ads Eardley Factor Evaluation
Sublime, Subliminal, Secrets and Shambles
CNN 100 Ads Eardley
Factor Evaluation
MSNBC 100 Ads
Eardley Factor Evaluation
ABC 100 Ads Eardley
Factor Evaluation
Fox News
37 Ads Eardley Factor Evaluation
Hillary
Rodham Clinton, Our Next President
Eardley
Factor Gives Mrs. Snowball the "Cold Shoulder"
Predicting
Election 2008 Through the Lens of Eardley Factor Analysis
The
Race to the White House
Obama
on the Slide
`Walking
the Plank' or `Jumping Ship?'
McCain
Back from the Brink
Neuromarketing
the Next Big Idea?
Market
Research the Poor Relation
'Head
On' Proves the Point
Dollar
Woes Spell Doom
Smell:
The Sense We Neglect
Bits and
Pieces
Primary
Dyspepsia
Don't
be afraid of the 'Holy Grail'
Mother's
Milk Can Turn Women On!
For Love
or Money
When
Life was Brutish and Short
Is
Bob Prechter Right?
Torture?
What Torture!
Dollar
Weakness Now Critical
Telling
it like it is
Sublime, Subliminal, Secrets and Shambles
There is one issue that could not be ignored in this series of articles concerning ' The Eardley Factor', referring of course to the claims made for and against subliminal advertising. One may recall that the idea has been around for half a century and was first mentioned by Vance Packard in' The Hidden Persuaders'. It was later taken up by many others including James Vicary and Wilson Bryan Key. If it is practiced by agencies today and believe that it is, then it is not done well. Of course, no one is even prepared to admit its use. Officially it is illegal and nobody wants to break the law, do they? Forget the row in 2000 when the RNC was accused of using the word RATS hidden in an anti-Gore political ad, or the hidden genitalia in the Camel Cigarettes Ad. Or, consider the 'missing' breast in the Black Velvet Ad of so many years ago. One will doubtless be familiar with them all. The question is 'Does it work?' Clearly there are many who still believe it does. Unless evidence for its efficacy is made public one ought not comment. And since there's little chance of anyone publishing their data without contravening their agreements one can but speculate. Company insiders will be all too familiar with the claims and some of our readers may well use these techniques themselves believing them to highly successful, to understand how the techniques are applied. What one would add and much more importantly is that they are at the very least superfluous. They may even rebound negatively.
Each individual is already programmed to determine his needs. Sex and Survival. Remember? One does not require an embedded message telling them that a particular cigarrette will make them that more 'macho' than one really is. Nor does one require sexual suggestions 'hidden' in ice cubes to associate a particular drink with becoming Don Juan. What is surprising to us is that people who spend lots of time and money embedding a 'message' remain unaware of the damage their ad is doing at the cognitive level. This part of the advertising process may well fall within the remit of another member of the team who honestly believes that one has done a great job. The result is that any desirable effects which may have been made possible by the subliminal elements are nullified by the cognitive content. Instead of the subject saying to himself, 'If I apply this body spray I'll be more successful with women', it is then translated to, 'If one use this product one will fail with women.' Such is the hidden power of unwitting negativity. Positivity must be present at ALL LEVELS. All too often there is occuring a direct clash of opposites. Result: At best- Neutrality. At worst, serious damage to the image of the product. The degree of harm varies in each individual case.
The key to successful marketing and advertising is to get every element
of the process in the right place at the right time. In order to achieve
this, every member of a team needs to understand what one calls the '
Big Picture'.
The problem with this is that if everyone knew what Eardleyfactor meant,
then Advertising would no longer be comfortable in the Domain of Creativity.
It would be Science Based layered over with applications from the 'Creative
Team' each of whom would needs be fully aware of the result the inclusion
or exclusion of each and every millisecond of material would bring about.
Competition is the' name of the game' in these United States.Advertising
is surely the most important 'driver' of the Greatest Economy the world
has yet seen. Being perceived as a top 'creative' is to be at or near
the pinnacle of power and influence in this or any other Western country.
Salaries reflect this and quite rightly so. Yet as Bob Goldstein remarked
all those years ago,' 'Ninety per cent of all new products fail. If we
were so smart there would be no failure.'' Somewhere lots of people are
getting it wrong. 
It
certainly makes one wonder!
Psssst! Can you keep a secret? Of course I can. I won't tell a soul. You
can trust me! How often have we heard these words, or something like them?
This is mentioned because as we all know, often to our cost, secrets are
notoriously difficult to keep. The world of marketing and advertising
is full of secrets. Personal secrets and Corporate secrets, which employees
are sworn to keep under every kind of oath imaginable. To reveal them
triggers litigation and is a sure fire 'career stopper'. In spite of all
these sanctions do you ever imagine that information remains compartmentalised
for very long? You guessed it.
The real secret is in not being found out.Being found out is to break the' Eleventh Commandment'. Take poor Martha Stewart. Her problems came about for a few thousand dollars. It's called 'Insider Dealing' and it goes on all the time. Somehow she got found out. Why is this noted? Precisely because if there existed 'secret knowledge' out there concerning the 'Holy Grail' of Advertising success it would have found its way into the industry by now and would be in common use. One knows that it is not, because there are so many 'really dreadful' ads out there which are a complete waste of the manufacturers money. These ads are not merely confined to smaller 'provincial' agencies; they are on display day in, day out, on all the major networks and representing very high profile companies and their products.
If anyone had that elusive knowledge, agencies would not be losing business with the almost alarming frequency that does occur. One only has to scan 'Advertising Age' to come to the realisation that the producers of products are often unhappy with what agencies produce. Let us take a few examples.
The worlds leading brand name is generally acknowledged to be that of 'Coca Cola'. Listen to what Chairman/CEO Neville Isdell had to say about Coke marketing in recent editions of late 2004. He stated that there would be a 'return to first class marketing' and a $400m increase in marketing spend. Similarly P&G Chairman A.G. Laffley indicated that there would have to be changes in Marketing Strategy to replace the mass marketing models of the recent past. Forty 'Experiments' would be initiated to discover a New Model which would take into account the rise of 'consumer control '. ''We need a new model. It does not exist. No one else has one yet. But we need to get going now.'' The list is almost endless. When two of the world's most Impactful Powerhouses are looking for something new, you can bet that everyone else is, bar none. This tells us that no individual has ever found the secret that unlocks the door to controlling what people buy.
Human nature has not changed and it never will. We are all driven by the two most powerful urges, Sex and Survival - and there are no exceptions. One can say it again and again and again. There are no exceptions! It is possible to convince ourselves by observing an aggregate in excess of 25,000 individuals in situations where choices have to made, and by noting how these choices were determined and by what stimuli. So we are not talking about a focus group or a small number of individuals in a laboratory situation.We are referring to real people in real life situations. Indeed the results became yawningly predictable, so accurately were to predict exactly what type of stimuli and the sequence and intensity in which they would need to be presented to effect a particular outcome, that the process became almost automatic.
Neither of us were seeking to apply this accumulated knowledge to Marketing
and Advertising. It is comparitively recently that together that the knowledge
acquired over a lifetime is applicable to those modalities. Call it Serendipitous!
Assume that the majority of our readers are 'in the business', so it is
patently not necessary to remind you of strategies about which you are
already familiar. For the most part you are puzzled. Puzzled because a
particular strategy worked fine several times in the past, but then just
when you needed it to work the oracle again, it was a disaster. You are
not the only one. It happens all the time, and for the same reason. You
only THINK you are using the same strategy. In fact you are not. One can
imagine 'creatives' scratching their heads in disbelief as sales plummet
and the 'business' is referred to a rival agency leaving you with the
proverbial 'egg on the face'. Especially in serial ads, positive and negative
elements are presented unwittingly as part of the 'story' by THE SAME
AGENCY. There are times imagination of a particular 'creative' is beginning
to see the light only to note in their next offering that they are as
far away as ever. People like Laffley & Isdell are clearly not completely
happy with matters as they are, one would assume. This translates into
'The entire Industry is not happy'. The human mind and what makes it behave
this way rather than that remains the same. It's just that the professionals
have not found the secret yet; but of course they'll keep on trying. It's
really quite simple.
Robert Jack Eardley, M.D.
Robert Francis Eardley, Cert. Ed., B.A.
3366 Commodore Drive
e-mail: robertfrancis@eardley.org
Lexington, Kentucky 40502-3602
(859) 229-7714
For those interested e-mail
inquiry@eardleyfactor.com
or
robertjack@eardley.org