I always find I enjoy focus groups more when I draw the people in them. This won’t help you make better ads. But it might help you enjoy your career a little more.
Category: focus-groups
You and Your Target Market
On the right is Mary Beth O’Neil. Lives outside of Indianapolis. Single mom. Two kids. Works at a real estate office. Drives a Ford Explorer. Likes Celine Dion.
On the left is you. Fixed-gear bikes, skinny jeans, PBR. You live in the city, take the subway to work. Really into the Arctic Monkeys right now. Working on a coffee table book of photos of broken coffee tables. So hip that your portrait is spray paint.
Okay, so maybe I’m stereotyping a little. You don’t like PBR. My point is, this is you and your target. For most of the projects you work on in your career, you will not be your target audience. Not even close. Remember that. You should like your ads, but it’s more important that your ads connect with her than amuse you. This sounds straightforward, yet time and again, I see work in student books, or have creatives pitch ideas that are obviously meant to entertain people like themselves.
Before I get too far, let me stop and be clear. I am not:
1) Disrespecting Mary Beth in any way. And when you’re thinking about your target, neither should you.
2) Saying that you should do lame advertising, or ads that you think suck.
What I am saying is that Mary Beth probably won’t get the irony of obscure German house music over visuals of robots in the style of old Japanese monster movies in her Tuna Helper commercial. Honestly, these are the kinds of decisions I see sometimes. Usually executional things. Weird for the sake of being weird. The kind of stuff that drives clients nuts.
Just consider your audience, is all I’m saying. If you get the chance, go to focus groups and listen to them talk about their lives for a few hours. Then come up with something great that connects with them.
Showing Your Work Around
“I don’t know what’s good anymore.”
We’ve all had this experience. We work on something so much, for so long, that we completely lose perspective. We’re too close to it. We can’t tell if something’s clear, funny, stupid, or so stupid it’s funny. At times like this, it’s good to have a few go-to people.
“Hey, what do you think of this?”
You need someone who’s smart, has good taste, and will be brutally honest with you. Sometimes it’s good to have a few of those people.
“One person I showed thought that the cat kind of reminded her of aliens, because this one time she had a dream about alien cats.”
If you focus-group an ad around long enough, you will get some pretty strange feedback. We all know the chronic focus-groupers. Sometimes they’re legitimately confused, but often they’re just fishing for compliments, or searching for the one person who will tell them that their crap ad is brilliant. Don’t be that person.
Have your few trusted brains. Use them as necessary. If they all agree that the ad’s not working, take that to heart. But don’t take every piece of thinking that you ever poop out and show it around to everyone. It’s annoying and, because everyone will have a different take on it, it will just confuse you.
As much as learning how to come up with a good idea, you need to learn to evaluate a good idea. Trust your gut. And when your gut is full, trust the guts of a few smart people around you. But don’t trust the guts of everyone in the school, or everyone in the agency. That just leads to a big, gooey, gross, gutty mess.
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