Hayden: Cable Needs a ‘Big Ideal’
Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide Vice Chairman: ‘Stand for Something More than a $99 Triple Play’
By Tom Steinert-Threlkeld -- Multichannel News, 7/24/2007 11:29:00 PM
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Cable-system operators need to have a "big ideal," not just a big deal, according to Steve Hayden, vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. Operators "have to stand for something more than a $99 triple play, he told the CTAM Summit here Tuesday.
"Big ideals" drive the best-known brands in the world, he said. And those brands "stand for something more than the bottom line.'' A few examples: Apple ("Think Different"), Nike ("Just Do It") and Toyota (maker of the Prius eco-friendly car). And Dove, which started out life as a non-irritating skin cleaner for use on burns and wounds.
Dove in the past year, he said, has transformed itself as the brand that "allows women to feel good about themselves." Its “Real Beauty” campaign appeals to the 98% of women who do not classify themselves as beautiful -- and the 85% who feel worse about themselves, he said, after reading fashion magazines Vogue and Glamour.
Its campaign features viral video that shows how advertising pushes unreal beauty and print ads that feature a wide variety of old, young, middle-aged and other women that face the everyday challenges of business and life, with questions superimposed such as "Wrinkled? Or Wonderful?," “Gray? Or Gorgeous?" and "Oversized? or Outstanding?''
The Dove Real Beauty Workshop for Girls video got posted on just two sites, YouTube and Dove's own. It has now been viewed by 500 million people around the world, Hayden said, and it has created "more media value" than any Super Bowl ad in history, including "the vaunted 1984 commercial'' from Apple that launched its Macintosh computer.
Hayden should know: He was the author of that commercial, which, this week, 23 years later, was rated as the second-most-memorable commercial of all time in the pages of USA Today.
The idea that a company must mean more than a simple numeric equation, that its brand needs to stand for higher values than profits -- if it wants outsized profits -- is a quality Hayden called "obliquity. You make more when you mean more,'' he said.
Apple, Hayden said, for instance, fills in the "ideal" statement this way: The world would be a better place if people had the tools to unleash their potential. And from that has come the Macintosh, the iPod and now the iPhone.
Cable-system operators, Hayden said, in effect need to figure out how they would fill in the end of that same statement: “The world would be a better place if ...”
