Author: Julia Kirby

Let’s say you believed deeply in the importance of sleep health, and you wanted to start a movement to change people’s attitudes and behavior. Maybe, like Arianna Huffington, it’s a personal crisis that convinces you. Or maybe it’s a key piece of research or two that opens your eyes, as it were, to the dangers of too little sleep:

As a choice of cause, you could do a lot worse. Getting sufficient sleep is a need that every human on the planet shares. And for many people, the ability to do that is increasingly under assault, as daily rhythms are disrupted by the changing nature of work and always-on technology. Your arguments for that cause would be helped along by a mountain of evidence about the incidence and costs of sleeplessness, and the efficacy of various interventions. You’d have the advantage of a solid and accumulating knowledge base regarding what works. Yet you’d still have the gratifying ability to move the needle dramatically with your efforts because, for most people, sleep health — their own, their employees’, their communities’ — hasn’t yet become a top-of-mind issue. In the three-legged stool of good health, nutrition and exercise are constantly discussed, while sleep has so far come up short. Put all this together, and it’s hard to imagine a cause that would offer you a greater chance to change so many lives for the better.

Even better, you’d have access to a pretty good playbook for how to start a movement. The precedents are out there, and some of the most inspiring of them have been in the realm of public health. We’ve seen movements succeed in getting people to quit smoking, getting health workers to wash their hands, and getting people to register as organ donors. Smart people are working to codify the best approaches and tools for raising awareness, changing minds, and inciting action. Even if you don’t have time to master the rules yourself, there is consulting expertise available for hire.

A key piece of advice in that playbook would be to influence the influencers. Those include, for example, the entertainment industry: What would it take to get scriptwriters and directors to stop portraying people operating on no sleep as models of machismo and dedication? A second major set of influencers to influence would be the tech community. What new apps, for example, could they create to nudge people toward more healthful behavior? And then there are the healthcare and education sectors to influence. These are the trusted professionals with whom people already interact about health and informed behavior. What would it take to make sleep a topic of more of those interactions?

But also note that, on top of all those usual influencers, there is another sector that should be recruited into the movement for better sleep health. That would be the corporate sector — and the rationale for targeting it in particular has four parts:

• Selfish Interest. As the world’s largest employers, big companies stand to benefit directly from a greater awareness of the importance of sleep. It makes all the difference to productivity (which is diminished by sleeplessness in the same way it is by drug use or drunkenness), and hits the bottom line, too, in lower healthcare costs.
• Substantial infrastructure. Companies have invaluable capabilities they can apply to a public health campaign, such as communication channels to get the word out and wellness programs to support good habits. They also have the power, through their policies, to change how employees work (and how managers encourage them to).
• Social Influence. As well as having internal, local influence over their own workers, large employers help to establish broader norms in society. It’s important to get them focused on the importance of sleep health, because the expectations they create about the keys to good work and success spill over to other realms.
• Sense of Involvement. There’s also the fact, perhaps obvious, that the work environments cultivated by many companies are the cause of many people’s inadequate sleep. Whether it’s a hypercompetitive culture encouraging ambitious employees to burn the midnight oil, or the anxiety of working for a bad boss causing insomnia, or a level of pressure that leaves decision-makers lying awake at night, companies contribute to people’s sleep deficits. For some firms, that involvement might translate to a sense of obligation.

For all these reasons, it makes sense to pull more businesses into the movement to change attitudes and behaviors toward sleep. That’s why HBR publishes books, interviews, articles, and blog posts on sleep research (and for that matter, tries to save its own staff from evening and weekend work). And it’s why we’re participating in the Corporate Leaders Summit being hosted this month by the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School. (I’ll be moderating a panel there.)

If you’re a corporate leader, you’re constantly being asked to pitch in on a cause or add power to the arm of some activist. This is one of those cases where your answer should be yes. You have the reasons and you have the means to change today’s dysfunctional culture around sleep — and so many will rest easier when you do.

This year, more than ever before it seems, businesses got into the spirit of April Fools’ Day. Twitter, for example, announced a policy change that tweeters would henceforth have to pay if they wanted to use vowels. Sony pretended it had launched a new product line, Animalia, consisting of electronics especially designed for pets. Google tried to trick the world into thinking it now offered olfactory search.

What’s behind all this tomfoolery? Let’s start with the main reason that companies are playing these jokes: It’s because they can. Large-scale gags on the order of BBC News’ revelation that spaghetti grows on trees used to be the sole province of major broadcasters. Now that every business has a web presence that allows it to publish daily, it’s easy to post creative content for April 1 only to take it down by April 2.

Amidst all the fun, some killjoys have started raising the question: Just because you can prank the public, does that mean you should? As many have hinted or outright said: Shouldn’t you be, um, working?

But the better question is this: Why wouldn’t you do an April Fools’ Day stunt?

If you think about it, even a joke that’s just okay is going to get more positive attention for your brand than almost anything else you could do today, or this month. Let’s stipulate that the humor behind your prank is the self-effacing kind that plays on your own quirks rather than the cruel, “kick me” kind that makes sport of your victim’s gullibility. In that case, you are striking exactly the tone that social media applauds brands for in other instances. Indeed, your April Fools’ gag will see plenty of extra amplification, as media from ABC News to Huffington Post to Time aggregate examples in their April Fools’ Day coverage.

I’ll push the point even further: A good April Fools joke — again, assuming it involves a light dose of self-mockery — can even pay benefits internally. Just as having your caricature drawn by a street artist is a good way to open your eyes to your most pronounced features, a parody is a great way to get past managers’ defenses and show in stark relief what the brand really stands for in customers’ minds.

Several years ago I had the idea to actually put this notion to the test. Thanks to my friend (and long-time HBR author) Tom Davenport, I had an “in” to the inner sanctum of the Harvard Lampoon. Tom’s son Hayes was a Harvard undergraduate at the time, and one of the Lampoon’s officers. Since the Lampoon is known for its magazine parodies, I asked him: Why don’t you ever make fun of HBR? I even thought we might induce them to choose us for their next spoof by doing three things: sharing fonts and templates to make it easy to mimic the graphic design; lending lists to help them direct-market to the people who would be most likely to buy; and giving them access to archives and editors so they’d get an up-close look at our worst excesses.

Sadly, the idea died in committee here. Harvard wasn’t ready to turn quite so crimson. But it made so much sense that Hayes turned around and pitched the concept to National Geographic, and they went for it.

If you’re looking for any more argument that there’s a positive ROI on April foolery, think of this. Workplaces have always been ground zero for April Fools’ Day pranks among colleagues. The time and energy, in other words, are already being spent. Unleashing the humor on the public is a way to capitalize on it. So if you didn’t do it this year, resolve to go for the jocular in 2014, and let your customers in on the joke.

Content providers maintain an uneasy alliance with advertisers. Both sides know that ads enjoy greater attention when they are hard to separate from the content that surrounds them. And both sides need the advertising to succeed. But the content people also know their customers will balk if they feel that content has been compromised by paid marketing.

As consumers’ devices and desires to filter out ads continue to advance, the line of permissible intrusion keeps moving deeper. First there were advertorials and ad copy rendered in a publication’s house font (usually but not always discreetly labeled “Paid Advertising”). The most infamous, of course, was the recent Scientology advertorial that was quickly yanked from The Atlantic’s website. (The publication has since revised its sponsored content policies.)

Then there was material published by “content marketers” to serve the kinds of information needs typically met by traditional content providers, thus adding value to a customer’s engagement with a brand. And all along we’ve had product placement in films, TV shows, and games.

A recent campaign shows how far a marketer can now go to make its advertising blend in with the surrounding context. After the retailers Target and Neiman Marcus teamed up on some merchandise, they decided to advertise it on ABC’s drama series Revenge. First they opted for a “takeover” of the program, meaning that every ad in the hour-long segment was theirs. Then, to make the most of that sole sponsorship, they hired the show’s cast to perform in character in five long-form commercials. These were unquestionably ads (the Target-Neiman Marcus line was prominent in them), but by borrowing all the elements viewers had chosen to enjoy and stringing the spots into a “story within a story,” the marketers made them hard to tune out. Here’s a sample of one (pardon the more obvious ad technique that is pre-roll):

What instantly became clear is that there is a big difference between ads that travel into native territory and ads that “go native.” Clearly, there are major expenses as well as tricky constraints involved when a brand opts to blend in with indigenous content. But there will be enough opportunities, and enough reasons, for marketers to do more of this.Those that discover they can move comfortably in this realm may never go home again.

This is the seventh in a series of posts from our March issue on the future of advertising. Stay tuned for more “Creative That Cracks the Code” over the coming weeks; topics include Variations on a Meme; Collaborating With the Crowd; The Ad as a Game; Just Enough Humor; A New Social Movement; Apps as the New Ads; Personalized Products; and Ads in the Public Sphere.

We also want to know which ad campaigns strike you as innovative; tell us below and we could analyze your pick as part of this series.

The Future of Advertising
An HBR Insight Center

• Television’s Future Has a Social Soundtrack
• Advertising and the Internet of Things
• How Media Companies Can Boost Ad Revenues
• Say Goodbye to Creativity Awards

Ask anyone in consumer goods why their industry is not more committed to sustainability and you’ll hear the same thing: because the marketplace doesn’t reward us for being so. Sadly, most “socially responsible” goods cost more to produce than alternatives that leave the world worse off, and those costs translate into higher prices. Regarding the merits of passing up the greater bargain for the greater good, most shoppers remain unpersuaded.

But persuading people is what advertising is designed to do. So as marketers become more authentically committed to corporate responsibility goals, expect to see more for-profit companies investing in social marketing — that is, using their messaging powers to change consumer attitudes and behavior.

This is what the British retailing giant Marks & Spencer is doing in its “shwopping” campaign. The term is a conflation of shopping and swapping, and the thing being pushed here is a suggestion: that, before you rush out to buy the latest fashion, you might visit your closet and decide what it will replace. Very likely, there’s an old article of clothing you could recycle — and your Marks & Spencer will make that easy for you through a partnership with Oxfam and helpfully located “shwop drops” in its stores. But chances are also that, now that you look at it, that old thing is perfectly fine to wear again. Perhaps you don’t need a new one.

Andrew Winston, a frequent HBR blogger and author of Green to Gold, explains how the company got the project rolling:

To get the word out, M&S covered a multi-story warehouse entirely with old clothing. The scale of the guerilla marketing effort was not random: the roughly 10,000 garments hanging on the building represented the amount of clothing sent to landfill in the UK every 5 minutes. As Adam Elman, head of Plan A, told me, “we wanted to bring the idea to life.” (“Plan A” is the name of M&S’s sustainability initiative, because “there is no plan B.”)

The building got plenty of attention, but it was only the beginning of a multi-pronged effort to drive the initiative into the business and integrate it with all marketing. M&S is utilizing a range of the hottest marketing techniques, from running temporary “pop-up” Shwop shops, with garments donated by celebrities, to “gamification” efforts that give customers Facebook points and “badges” for donating. The company is also leveraging star power, putting its “Plan A Ambassador,” the actress Joanne Lumley (most famous abroad for co-starring in the sitcom Absolutely Fabulous), at the center of marketing efforts.

Pause for a moment to appreciate all this. Here we have a for-profit company spending limited marketing funds not only to promote something other than the goods it has for sale — but even to some extent to suppress demand for them. It seems like madness until you realize that M&S is playing a longer game. As the UK’s biggest clothing retailer, it can’t afford to be irresponsible; its practices are under heavy scrutiny. And it can’t prosper by being responsible until its customers start to value that. But when its customers do learn to value sustainability, it stands to win big. CEO Marc Bolland is determined to get there: “We’re leading a change in the way we all shop for clothing, forever.” He hopes the movement will catch on to the point where all stores take back one garment for every one they sell. “For us that’s 350 million a year,” he says. “It is a big number, but with our customers’ help, we will do it.”

This is the fifth in a series of posts from our March issue on the future of advertising. Stay tuned for more “Creative That Cracks the Code” over the coming weeks; topics include Variations on a Meme; Collaborating With the Crowd; The Ad as a Game; Just Enough Humor; Ads That “Go Native”; Apps as the New Ads; Personalized Products; and Ads in the Public Sphere.

We also want to know which ad campaigns strike you as innovative; tell us below and we could analyze your pick as part of this series.

The Future of Advertising
An HBR Insight Center

• Martin Sorrell on What’s Next
• Invest in Your Customers More Than Your Brand
• The Decline and Fall of Product Placement
• Advertisers Must Be Inventors

In March 2009, Kia Motors America aired a fun little ad for its Soul model car. To evoke the drab mindlessness of the typical daily commute, it showed roads filled with hamster wheels. When a Soul drove up alongside one and its window slid down, the hamsters in the car, chilling to their hip tunes, showed everyone “a new way to roll.”

Kia has stuck with the hamsters since, and in every outing they’re funny but not uproariously so. New research suggests that might be key to their product-selling success. (The campaign is credited with spurring multiple years of double-digit growth in Kia’s U.S. sales.) According to the marketing scholars Thales Teixeira, Rosalind Picard, and Rana el Kaliouby, who used web-based facial tracking to gauge consumer responses to various humorous ads, “excessive amounts of entertainment” tend to backfire and actually reduce an ad’s persuasiveness.

Timing counts, too. “Entertainment evoked before the consumer is aware of the brand being advertised … reduces purchase intent,” the authors report. “But entertainment evoked after the consumer sees the brand … increases purchase intent. In this case, entertainment has a cooperating effect with persuasion.”

Humor has always been part of the advertiser’s tool kit, but its use has always been controversial. “You can entertain a million people and not sell one of them,” observed the ad guru John Caples. Advising copywriters to avoid it, he pointed out, “There is not a single humorous line in two of the most influential books in the world, namely, the Bible and the Sears, Roebuck catalog.”

Still, it’s hard to imagine following that advice in an era when consumers are inundated with communications and gravitate instantly to those they find most fun. As research techniques become ever more sophisticated, we’re bound to see humor used more than ever — but also with more precision.

This is the second in a series of posts from our March issue on the future of advertising. Stay tuned for more “Creative That Cracks the Code” over the coming weeks; topics include Variations on a Meme; The Ad as a Game; Collaborating With the Crowd; A New Social Movement; Ads That “Go Native”; Apps as the New Ads; Personalized Products; and Ads in the Public Sphere.

We also want to know which ad campaigns strike you as innovative; tell us below and we could analyze your pick as part of this series.

The Future of Advertising
An HBR Insight Center

• Advertisers Must Be Inventors
• February Shows Advertisers Still Love Broadcast Channels
• Advertisers Should Act More Like Newsrooms
• How Crowdsourcing a “Daily Twist” Paid Off for Nabisco

It’s easy to forget that companies have been inviting ideas from “the crowd” for a very long time. If you’re in doubt, read The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, a memoir of 1950s America in which the author’s mother writes advertising jingles for contest after contest. Years before Jeff Howe coined and defined the term “crowdsourcing,” marketers knew its power.

Now that the business world has rediscovered the concept, most people celebrate crowdsourcing as a way to get fresher, better ideas. And they’re right: If a consumer goods company uses Tongal or a similar platform to solicit and sift through thousands of creative submissions, the odds are good that it will be rewarded with some real gems. But the quality of the winning idea is at best only half the argument for crowdsourcing. When ordinary folks sit down to think about how a product should be advertised, the marketer doesn’t only get more creative options, it gets more engaged customers. Each spends at least a little time considering what makes a product special. Whether their crack at conveying that specialness ultimately wins a contest or not, it at least leaves an impression on them.

Focus on maximizing the engagement payoff and you realize there is an ideal time commitment to be asked of the crowd — and it measures in the minutes. By contrast, if you expect hours to be spent on beautifully rendered creative, you’ve raised the bar too high. Ninety-nine percent of your public lacks the time and confidence, and won’t engage at all.

Nabisco’s “Daily Twist” campaign for Oreo cookies is an example of a marketer getting it right. In honor of its 100th anniversary, the brand launched a 100-day series of cookie designs pegged to each day’s news. It invited the public to do two things: suggest news pegs via social media and, on the last day, select the winning design. That left the middle of the process, the creamy creative execution, to be cooked up in a matter of hours by paid, and highly talented, designers. With the bar so low for crowd participation, anyone could offer their thoughts.

The campaign was still paying off months after the 100 daily twists had come to an end. During Super Bowl XLVII, a creative team well-practiced in quick executions was able to seize on an unforeseeable power outage and create the night’s most talked about ad. And it wasn’t aired on television — only on the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook, where it was up to Oreo’s followers to pass it along.

The base the brand needed to amplify that ad was in place because of engagement-builders like the Daily Twist. In the course of that campaign, Oreo saw people’s “sharing” of its brand page on Facebook rise by 4400% as compared with prior months. Plenty of those people also went out and bought Oreos. Whether there was any sharing of the cookies themselves remains unknown.

This is the third in a series of posts from our March issue on the future of advertising. Stay tuned for more “Creative That Cracks the Code” over the coming weeks; topics include Variations on a Meme; The Ad as a Game; Collaborating With the Crowd; Just Enough Humor; A New Social Movement; Ads That “Go Native”; Apps as the New Ads; Personalized Products; and Ads in the Public Sphere.

We also want to know which ad campaigns strike you as innovative; tell us below and we could analyze your pick as part of this series.

Plenty of advertising is already embedded in electronic games. The new wrinkle is that gaming can be embedded in ads — perhaps the only hope of engaging some people’s interest long enough to get a message across.

Coca-Cola China’s TV ad for the Hong Kong market invited viewers to use their smartphones to “chok” bottle caps flying across their TV screens. A well-timed waggle of the phone would catch a cap on the phone’s screen, earning points (to be redeemed later for sweepstakes entries). This mobile integration was complicated: For instance, people had to download a special app to play, and the timing of the ads had to be announced in advance so that players would be ready. But it all came together and worked. The app was downloaded 380,000 times in its first month, and exposure to the ad (on TV, YouTube, and Weibo combined) exceeded 9 million views. Some background:

Electronic games started out as all whizbang technology and no aesthetic appeal. (Pong, anyone?) Today’s gamers demand not only stunning visuals but also narrative and emotional depth. As advancing technology makes such integration more seamless, many marketers will build on this start. Some of them may be surprised at how rapidly creative talent comes back to the fore.

This is the second in a series of posts from our March issue on the future of advertising. Stay tuned for more “Creative That Cracks the Code” over the coming weeks; topics include Variations on a Meme; Collaborating With the Crowd; Just Enough Humor; A New Social Movement; Ads That “Go Native”; Apps as the New Ads; Personalized Products; and Ads in the Public Sphere.

We also want to know which ads campaigns strike you as innovative; tell us below and we could analyze your pick as part of this series.

The Future of Advertising
An HBR Insight Center

• We Need a Better Definition of “Native Advertising”
• When Advertising Meets the Meme
• Stop Selling Ads and Do Something Useful
• The Power of Real-Time Advertising

Advertising creatives have always known the power of memes, even if they didn’t always use the term. For decades major marketers, with their command of the airwaves and commitment to repetition, were often the ones to launch memes. Consider Alka-Seltzer’s “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”:

Or Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” …

… which got picked up and repurposed from preschools to presidential debates:

The splintering of media channels has made it hard to claim that kind of mindshare by brute force. Add the democratization of publishing and the premium people place on discovering the new, and you have a situation where memes can start anywhere, take off like rockets, and fizzle out a week later. Whereas advertisers once spawned memes, now the better strategy may be to surf them.

So expect to see more creative in the mode of the Wonderful Pistachios campaign, which is simple enough to cycle through executions quickly and cheaply. The campaign started out conventionally, using celebrities, and was highly successful: National TV spots in its first year yielded a 233% increase in sales, and double-digit gains have followed in the years since. But now the ads include memes, such as YouTube’s infamous Honey Badger:

And Secret Service agents partying with prostitutes:

In her paper “An Anatomy of a YouTube Meme,” Limor Shifman of Hebrew University analyzes 30 videos that went viral and finds major commonalities: ordinary people, flawed masculinity, humor, simplicity, repetitiveness, and whimsical content. It’s the perfect recipe, Shifman concludes, for “invoking further creative dialogue.” Much of that dialogue comes in the form of clever redos designed to delight particular constituencies. Thus the ridiculously catchy dance video “Gangnam Style” …

… was tweaked for robot lovers by a Transformers reenactment:

… and infiltrated political circles as “Romney Style.” True to form, Wonderful Pistachios debuted an ad featuring Psy during this year’s Super Bowl:

A major advertiser with a big budget should be more reliably able to nail the execution for its constituency — snack eaters, for example, or Lego fans. This is the opportunity revealed by the newest pistachios ads. Expect more advertisers to follow suit.

This is the first in a series of posts from our March issue on the future of advertising. Stay tuned for more “Creative That Cracks the Code” over the coming weeks; topics include The Ad as a Game; Collaborating With the Crowd; Just Enough Humor; A New Social Movement; Ads That “Go Native”; Apps as the New Ads; Personalized Products; and Ads in the Public Sphere.

We also want to know which ads campaigns strike you as innovative; tell us below and we might analyze your pick as part of this series.

The Future of Advertising
An HBR Insight Center

• Welcome to the Future of Advertising Insight Center
• When Advertising Meets the Meme
• Stop Selling Ads and Do Something Useful
• The Power of Real-Time Advertising