Advertising
Old versus new
Philip Kleinman
One of the biggest problems in advertising is deciding whether and when to change a successful campaign. Is it better to go on telling consumers the same old story, or will you create a fresh surge of interest in your product by telling a new one? When a campaign really is successful there's an understand
able reluctance on the part of the both advertiser and agency to muck about with it for fear of
killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, and there are quite a number of campaigns which have run, with only minor variations, for years, even decades. A good example is Wilkinson Sword razor blades. The television
commercials, produced by agency Masius Wynne-Williams, have stayed substantially the same since the early 'sixties. They have majored on Wilkinson's 200-year history of British craftsmanship,
using pictures of swords (the company still makes them), musical fanfares and voices-over declaiming about ''the name on the world's finest blade." These commercials are not what trendy young copywriters would
call "creative", i.e. they are not witty and full of human interest. In fact Masius has throughout
eschewed showing human beings
at all, unlike Gillette's agency, J. Walter Thompson, whose latest commercials feature an actor whose face in the mirror lectures him about how to treat it.
The whole point of the Wilkins-on campaign has been to stay on ground where Gillette, not having
a 200-year-old British stiff upper lip, cannot compete. Even Gil
lette's marketing director, Derek Coward, says: "If I had Wilkinson's campaign I'd be very pleased." Unsurprisingly he adds: "But I'd be scared of the future. Where do they go from here?" , The answer appears, at least for the moment, to be that they stay exactly where they are. George Palmer, Wilkinson Sword's managing director and an ex-Masius man himself, has great faith in the effectiveness of his agency's strategy. Changes in the marketplace — for example evidence that Gillette's current price-cutting promotion for its Gil razors wa,F. drastically increasing its brand share — might force Wilkinson to think again. But the Mere repetitiveness of its advertising is not considered a drawback. There are other cases, however, in which a successful, long-running campaign is felt to have becorrie stale and a rethink is undertaken before the market dictates one. This is more likely to happen when the product depends for its sales on the vagaries of fashion. An example is vodka, consumption of which has trebled since 1969. Smirnoff, the brand leader, has been well served by its press and poster campaign created by agency Young and Rubicam. The ads, among the most admired of their kind, have been going strong for five years. You almost certainly know them, which is more than can be said of most ads. They are the ones which, humorously portray liberated young people with captions such as "Accountancy was my life until I discovered Smirnoff. The effect is shattering." While the campaign is due to ' continue until the end of 1975, Young and Rubicam has already started to work on ideas for a fresh concept to succeed it. Sometimes the decision to jettison an old campaign is of questionable wisdom. Argument is still to be heard over the action of Schweppes in putting an end to the long-running series of humorous commercials starring actor Bill Franklyn and the famous "Schh . . you know who" line. Schweppe's reasoning was that the commercials, though popular' as entertainment, were failing to persuade the public of the merits of individual products within the company's range of soft drinks and mixers. After presentations from several agencies the account was taken away form Ogilvy Benson and Mather and given to J. Walter Thompson, which came up with a campaign based on the concept that different kinds of "Weppes" were used in different Schweppes products. People at OBM were not alone in thinking that, after the sparkle of their own scampaign, this heavily facetious new approach was something of a let-down. A wag at OBM summed it up when he pinned up on an agency noticeboard the comment -Jesus Wepped." Unfortunately not every change of advertising inspires as good a joke as that.
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