The HSBC ‘Points of View’ Campaign
For the past four years, HSBC has run a provocative poster campaign from JWT. Using a brilliant media buy in high traffic airport jetways, the ads highlight paradoxical points-of-view. Simple graphics and headlines illustrate the insight that people from different regions, backgrounds or cultures often view the same phenomena in vastly different ways.
More than anything, this campaign demonstrates the fungible nature of opinion; something that’s become all the more relevant with the massive informational and behavioral changes brought on by the pervasive, worldwide adoption of the participatory Web 2.0. By most any measure, opinion’s recently emerged mass distribution channel makes it far more impactful than TV, print, and radio combined. We may not think of it as a traditional medium per se, but we ignore it at our peril. As word-of-mouth experts are fond of saying, as much as 92% of all purchase decisions are driven by recommendation, which is nothing more than vocalized opinion. More importantly, opinions have never been easier to come by; out culture is literally awash in it.
Google “review of Pixar’s Up” and you get 3.6 million entries in .33 seconds… Every product on Amazon features buyers’ ratings and other key retailers like iTunes, NetFlix and eBay encourage prominent feedback opportunities. The crushing volume of blogs and soon the exponentially larger world of Tweets can be simply searched. We even edit our own networks to match our personal opinions, watching Fox News, listening to Air America, or subscribing to magazines and blogs because they reflect our personal politics. Opinion is literally everywhere and louder than it has ever been.
All of which threatens the relevance and usefulness of those long-held marketing saws ‘brand truth’ and ‘consumer truth.’ What is ‘truth’ in a world where opinion holds such dominance? And whose truth? Can there truly be a universal product or consumer truth?
Instead of the classic Venn diagram that guided years of integrated marketing by highlighting the intersection of ‘brand truth’ and ‘consumer truth’ we now have one vastly larger, much less uniformly shaped universe of consumer opinion, with all of its variants, anomalies and conflict. Brands are opinions–and so our agency job today is to determine not something as debatable as brand truth, but rather the Brand Authenticity (and yes, Authenticities) within all of that opinion and then help meld and coalesce them into a universally-accepted Brand Authenticity.
Do that, and you bring powerful alignment to the often warring worlds of paid and earned media.
At least, that’s my opinion…