Thursday, October 02, 2008

Throwing Mud

This story from the Wall Street Journal shows that it's not just politicians that are bashing the competition:

And in This Corner .... Marketers Take Some Jabs

Rivals Are Called Out as Comparison Spots Become Feistier
During Economic Downturn; Domino's Squares Off With Subway

By SUZANNE VRANICA

As the economy gets ugly, marketers are getting nasty too.

From soup companies to pizza chains, marketers are stepping up their so-called attack ads, calling out rivals by name, comparing products and poking fun at competitors.

Campbell Soup; Burger King

Advertisers are increasingly taking each other on head to head, comparing their products and poking fun.

An example: This week, Domino's Pizza is giving away oven-baked sandwiches to the first 1,000 customers named Jared -- a reference to Jared Fogle, the well-known pitchman for Subway Restaurants. The Ann Arbor, Mich., pizza chain says this is the first time that it has referenced one of its competitors in an ad.

Just how acrimonious is it getting out there? The National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, which acts as the ad police, is fielding many more complaints from marketers who believe they are the victim of misleading comparison ads. Andrea Levine, director of the NAD, says that in August alone, the NAD had 15 advertisers challenge competitive ads that rivals had begun using -- compared with six challenges in August 2007. September also saw complaints jump about 50% from last year. (Marketers hope the NAD will agree that the ad being challenged is misleading and will ask that it be discontinued, but the NAD doesn't have the power to force an ad's removal.)

"In a downturn, people are being more and more careful on how they are spending their money, and more than usual you have to make sure you are breaking through and giving them a reason to buy you," says Patrick Doyle, president of Domino's USA.

Several weeks ago, Campbell Soup kicked off a big ad effort, created by Omnicom Group's BBDO, that took on rival General Mills' Progresso. One print ad shows a can of Progresso with the caption, "Made With MSG," while a headline above an adjacent picture of a can of Campbell's Select Harvest reads: "Made With TLC." The two brands have taken shots at each other in the past, but this is the most aggressive Campbell Soup has gotten.

Campbell Soup's used the technique in 2001, another economic down cycle, but that ad effort only used blue soup cans in ads as a way to allude to its rival Progresso. Campbell says the genesis of the campaign came from new research that showed consumers are reading food labels 60% more than they did a year ago.

Meanwhile, Burger King has deployed a steady string of ad attacks against its archrival McDonald's and other competitors this year. One billboard ad featured a Whopper sandwich not fitting into a Big Mac box with a headline that reads: "SILLY WHOPPER, THAT'S A BIG MAC BOX." BK's ads were created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, a unit of MDC Partners.

Comparison ads have been around since the 1970s, when the major television networks lifted a ban on the practice after the Federal Trade Commission publicly began to encourage it. Since then, they have been used to sell everything from antacids to paper towels. The technique is most closely associated with the cola wars between Coke and Pepsi.

"When hard times hit, the singing, dancing and emotional ads go out the window, and clients say, 'How do I nail my competitor?' " says Jack Trout, president of Trout & Partners, a marketing-strategy firm in Old Greenwich, Conn.

With the current financial crisis looking like it is far from over, consumers can expect plenty more attack ads. Russ Klein, Burger King's president of global marketing strategy, says over the next 12 months, the company's customers are going to get a "richer dose" of competitive ads than they have in the past 12.

Attack ads, when they get too intense, can confuse consumers. Several years ago, an ad war between SABMiller's Miller Brewing (now MillerCoors) and Anheuser-Busch got so heated that it was hard to keep track which ad was for which brewer, experts say.

The key is some subtlety in the delivery, marketers say. It is "inappropriate to get overly aggressive," says Colin Watts, vice president and general manager of Campbell's U.S. Soups. "We were trying to really have a little bit of fun," he says, referring to one of the TV ads that shows a woman participating in a mock blind taste test. The woman calls out all the artificial flavors in the Progresso Soup and then, after tasting the Campbell soup, says "the carrots in the soup are from the Peterson Jacobs farm, I believe."

Despite the risks, many marketers say they have scored points with hard-edged ads. A print ad for Nasdaq that ran in July took a swipe at the New York Stock Exchange with a headline that read, "Maybe We Should Call It the Not-So-Big Board." The ad, which was created by McKinney, an ad firm in Durham, N.C. to celebrate the first time the Nasdaq Stock Market eclipsed the New York Stock Exchange in the number of shares traded for NYSE-listed stocks, was one of the most successful ads that Nadaq has done, says John L. Jacobs, chief marketing officer of Nasdaq OMX.

Campbell Soup's taste-test commercial was the fifth-most-liked television ad that ran from Aug. 18 to Sept. 14, according to IAG, a Nielsen Co.-owned market-research firm that uses an online panel to measure ad performance.

Write to Suzanne Vranica at suzanne.vranica@wsj.com

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