Polar bears and skateboards 🩻 EBH

Why doesn't employer brand do more brand ads?

A clear and compelling brand story gives products context and narrative, which can help increase their desirability. When a brand sells products, it’s selling a story. When consumers buy products, they are buying into this story. - Ana Andjelic

What do polar bears have to do with Coke?

Coke has used polar bears in its advertising off and on since 1922, but why does a company spend $4billion on marketing in a year (and knows a thing or two about advertising) to show commercials where there’s no call to action?

Because it is a brand message, not a direct ad.

Marketing tends to come in two flavors:

Direct marketing or direct advertisement, where you target someone who has expressed some kind of interest in what you offer, and now you need to convert that interest into action. Think of all the ads you get from H&M or The Gap after you look at sweaters on their website: they know you like sweaters, so know they are going to focus their efforts on getting you to buy.

These ads have a single goal: conversion. Assuming 100 buyers, 5 people will buy without seeing further ads (organic conversion). But 15 people will buy with the ads. That means the campaign has converted more people, and justified its own expense.

Direct ads are often filled with offers. Use this coupon! Find it in your grocer’s freezer! Available for a limited time! These things are meant to spur action immediately.

99% of all recruiting/TA/EB ads are some version of direct marketing ads. Here’s a video of the office where you were looking at open roles. Here’s a video of the hiring manager saying why their team is interesting. Here’s a day in the life video about being a nurse that is embedded on the nurse hiring page. The ad is designed to encourage action and is measured thusly. These ares are on places where active job seekers are because they are meant (and evaluated) by how well they turn job seekers into applicants.

But there is another kind of ad. The brand ad. This ad is different because of who it should be seen by, its purpose and its metrics.

A brand ad is targeted to people who haven’t expressed interest in a job or a company. This is often a much larger audience (in B2B the rule of thumb is that 95% of your total market isn’t ready to get serious about buying, but 5% is). And because this audience isn’t looking for what you have to buy, you can’t use the same messages you would use to get a browser into a buyer. The purpose of a brand ad is to plant an idea about that brand: We’re the future of home buying, We’ll keep your money safe, You’re the kind of person who deserves a Lexus, and You’re the Pepsi generation. The Coke polar bears never offer a coupon. They don’t tell you Coke is available in your grocery store. These are brand ads.

They aren’t supposed to convert people to action. Thus, you have to evaluate them differently than you would a direct ad. You can’t swap them out. They are different things.

One of the challenges of a brand ad is that the person who sees your ad might need to remember something about it six months after they see it. They weren’t in the market for a car, home or bank when they saw the ad, but they are now. A good brand ad makes the brand top of mind when that person is ready to take action.

The best way to make something memorable like that is to take a tip from Maya Angelou: people will never forget how you made them feel.

The best brand ads spark a feeling. That’s why Coke keeps coming back to polar bears: people have feelings about polar bears, and when they are anthropomorphized into looking and acting like a family, they get under out skin.

So I’d like to take a moment and suggest, a small slice of your recruiting marketing and employer brand budget be moved from direct ad-focused materials to something that establishes your brand. Not a direct ad that suggests a brand, but a true brand ad.

Here’s an example:

I’m an old dude who never skateboarded, so clearly, this ad isn’t for me. It’s for a 20-year-old who is still wondering what and who they are going to be. And I can absolutely see how this audience will feel something when they see this. Especially relative to other employer brand ads that are exclusively focused on “getting the click.”

There’s no “go to www.getajob.site to apply” messages. It’s not even clear what jobs they are promoting. Or how I could learn about them. Because they aren’t. They are trying to spark a feeling that will live in someone’s mind for months, right up until the moment someone thinks, “I think I need a new job” and VF is top of mind.

Everything in this commercial is here to establish an emotion. From the lighting and slomo/montage cuts to the music and widescreen framing. Everything here says, “this is important” because to a 20yo, everything feels important. Everything here is speaking to them.

When the purpose of the ad is to inspire, your metrics can’t be focused on “did it generate action?” The metric must be, “does it inspire?” When the purpose is, to tell a story that will linger in their minds, the metric is, “was it a memorable story?”

This isn’t a suggestion that you should stop building direct ad messages. Hardly. But we work in an industry that doesn’t often use true brand ads because it doesn’t generate applications. But there’s data that shows that spending some time building true brand ads leads to higher conversions from your direct ads. They work best when they work together.

So think about what a brand ad would look like in your world. What emotion should it elicit? How will you tell a story that takes root slowly over time, becoming the reason they look to YOU for their next role?

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-James

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