You gotta be in it to win it

It’s the biggest night of the year for the advertising industry, the moment when the most effective campaigns of 2004 are showcased for the business world. Agencies have their glory and organisations get reassurance of the power of advertising. At least, what can be done for their consumer audiences.

For B2B, awards events like the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) Effectiveness Awards last November are stark proof of the state of things. B2B was represented with just one award. No surprise to most people. But shouldn’t this rankle a bit more?

Big budgets might allow for the TV airtime that leads to mass recognition – but does that necessarily equate with creative quality? Fair enough, there was a special award for campaigns carried out on a small budget. But in this case “small budget” still meant up to £1 million. A television campaign won it.

The B2B campaign that picked up a Silver Award in November last year was the Demand Broadband campaign created by Omobono on behalf of the East of England Development Agency (EEDA). It typifies the problems that B2B faces – not as an exception but as the rule – and helps to illustrate the kind of thinking that deserves more recognition from organisations and the wider industry.

In B2B, the starting point is rarely an actual brief in the form expected by a consumer agency. More often there’s a problem which needs to be worked through and some new solutions identified before the communications stage can start. Access to existing research or a sizeable research budget is something of a given for the major consumer campaigns. This just isn’t the case for B2B. And the necessary research isn’t available off-the-shelf. You have to roll up your sleeves and spend time digging it out, talking directly to audiences and intermediaries. It can be hard work – but can also mean accessing a fresher, more honest, more challenging set of views and information to base your work around. Nothing’s neatly packaged up to support preconceptions and initial propositions.

There have been some great ads for anti-smoking and drink-driving campaigns. But aren’t these examples of campaigns where the message sells itself? You’d be hard-pushed not to create effective ads when the subject is life and death. Try doing the same with payroll software or a business insurance product. The audiences are small and varied and the decision-making process is complex. Most importantly, the subject areas aren’t of general interest. It doesn’t matter if the people you’re targeting are the experts in that field, they don’t stop being human beings when they walk into the workplace, they don’t suddenly switch into a work-focused consciousness. B2B still has to work that bit harder to be compelling.

Without the budget for media spend to make an instant splash, creativity comes to the fore. TV is ruled out, radio unlikely (and even when budget is available, there’s inevitably going to be high wastage). Which actually means there’s more scope for pinpointing channels and activities that directly engage with very specific audiences. It’s an exercise that many B2C agencies could find valuable, because it creates a rigid discipline of creativity where straightforward “telling” won’t work. If you’re not able to come up with schemes and activities that deserve attention in their own right – without the support of advertising – the campaign is already doomed.

The Demand Broadband campaign overcame these by speaking with senior management in telecommunications and with industry analysts, making use of parish databases and what we call “collaborative media”: piggybacking on existing business networks and relationships so that organisations such as the CBI, the Institute of Management and the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors carried messages about the campaign in emails and newsletters to their existing members.

So rather than B2C’s little brother, B2B is more the free-thinking, hardworking member of the comms family, wise beyond its years.

At the same time, there’s no excuse for a lack of effort from B2B agencies in making a noise about what they do. We were really chuffed about the award because the judges saw and recognised the intricacy of a B2B campaign. But there are surely plenty of other examples of work the wider industry needs telling about it. This is the time for a major B2B-specific effectiveness awards – one that shouts about the hard-nosed, problem-solving, results-oriented delivery of the sector, that shows how in many cases money doesn’t buy creativity and intelligence but only airtime.

Either way, B2B needs to get out more.

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