Are today’s retail ads bland, bland, bland? This was the question posed by AdNews last week after Dick Smith launched a new brand style ad campaign. If you missed it, here is a cut down of my contribution to the debate.          

Dick Smith was an innovator

He built a new category with advertising and brochus that gave Australia’s cardigan wearing tinkerers access to an Alladin’s cave of electronics stuff to play with in their garages. What proved Dick really clever was his ability to sell his growing challenger brand to Woolworths and then go on to innovate time and again. With Australian Geographic and then his Australian Made products, Dick was a natural at creating marketing campaigns that resonated with the public mood of those times.

Contrast this with another retail innovator of Smith’s era, Gerry Harvey. Gerry also made his first million in his early twenties with ads for whitegoods and appliances that yelled, “Why pay more?

Is Gerry a clever Dick?

Gerry didn’t sell his business and continues to be the biggest retail advertiser in the country with ads that follow the same tired formula of thirty years ago. We all know the pitch: yell loud enough and people will rush in to grab a bargain. Except increasingly we’ve learnt to treat those ads as repetitious nagging. We’ve moved on to better retail experiences, which are likely to be online.

It’s time the majority of retailers looked at the current crop of retail innovators, like Net-a-Porter that has just released a new magazine iPad app that makes shopping an exciting, contemporary experience. Or this great campaign in Korea for Tesco’s challenger brand, Home Depot.

This article first appeared in AdNews, 21/10/11

A lateral way to increase retail shelf space: use a billboard

Watch this short video of how Tesco challenged the number 1 retailer in Korea by creating a virtual store.

What’s the next killer app?

The latest stats show Australians are the number 2 adopters of smartphones. And this year, Tablets and iPads are set to outsell mobiles, Australians will buy 1.2 million of them*. In the last couple of years the fastest increase in marketing online has been with using video, so we believe the next big thing for marketers will be video over smart mobile devices.

Ask us about the app factory that will let you make the most of video content. (Soon to be launched by UNO with our partners at Mass Media Solutions.)

*Telsyte mobile device update 2011.