The Lost Art of Competitive Advertising

Today’s Advertising Fashion

Advertising fashion over recent years has been all about “emotional” creative. Why? Consultants have argued that people aren’t rational buyers. Instead, they make purchase decisions based on personal feelings and then intellectually justify the decision later.

I’ll accept this argument for shoes, phones, even cars (just ask my contractor neighbors about Ford versus Chevy trucks).

But complex B2B technology deals involve dozens of decision makers of every flavor across a company and around the globe. Are they all deciding a multi-million dollar purchase based on their personal feelings?

A parallel challenge is that B2B companies often fail to uncover powerful emotional stories. So the back up approach has become product messaging through customer success stories that often boil down to, “Acme runs our software and isn’t mad at us”.

Again, I’ll accept that customer validation is critical as a step in the buying process. But as either an awareness or a demand generation play, all the digital metrics argue that buyers don’t care yet. Instead, these proof points come into play after a solution is chosen –  providing reassurance that other people have had the success the buyer envisions.

An Alternative:  Competitive Ads

Oracle was long famous for aggressive, competitive advertising. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples and weigh the pros/cons.

As a first example, pop into the time machine and go back to 2015. Workday had established a beachhead in cloud solutions for HR departments. They were also getting lots of positive press and analyst coverage for their push into applications for Finance. 

Worse, the advertising budget at “little” Workday was four times larger than at “giant” Oracle. It was time to get competitive!

Luckily for me, the co-CEO of Workday Aneel Bhusri helped me with the creative concept… if unknowingly. At their annual user conference, his presentation highlighted capabilities they were working on for upcoming versions. With that list, I worked with Oracle product gurus to identify those features that our long-lived offering already delivered. After many rounds of legal review, the end result was:

One could certainly argue that we were spending our own limited budget to increase awareness of a relatively small competitor. That is always a danger.

But digital versions of this ad showed 146% higher engagement rate than the prior customer-centric creative and click-thrus spent 22% more time on site than the average visitor.

Another Example:  Getting Snarky

The ad below ran in the years after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. With the goal of demonstrating that the Oracle database ran fastest on Sun hardware, it featured the results of an independent industry benchmark. 

Don’t worry, I’m not going to geek out and lecture you on transactions per minute or how much every vendor tuned systems to perform that particular test most efficiently.

Instead focus on how it delivers one single message. The headline states the claim and the body simply backs it up with a fact. Great ads say one thing, strongly.

One senior executive at Oracle directed us to add “helpful” animal graphics – a cheetah for Oracle+Sun, a stallion for IBM, and a turtle for HP. Childish… but techies often have much in common with teenage boys. 

HP reached out behind the scenes to complain about the turtle and threatened legal action. If they had made this public, we would have been overjoyed. Every “free” article in the press talking about the controversy simply amplified our limited budget. This happened quite often and was integral to the value of our aggressive competitive advertising.

I would admit that this ad would have been more effective if it told readers why faster is better. Something like, “Save money by using fewer, faster servers”. But this ran in a tiny Wall Street Journal jewel box ad and required voluminous footnotes by the independent standards body. 

And yes, you should question the WSJ placement. This message was much more appropriate to IT audiences versus business readers (though the Journal was a strong channel to reach senior IT decision makers).

Beware of Going Too Far

By 2014, IBM had abandoned their PC business, offloaded the Intel-based server division and even paid someone to take over their chip manufacturing facilities. We smelled a unique opportunity to create doubt about the future of IBM’s Power Systems line of servers that were still the backbone of their business.

One concept at the time featured milk cartons highlighting IBM’s “missing” businesses and raised fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about IBM’s remaining hardware line.

Quite rightly, this never ran. It failed to say anything about our competitive offering. Plus the added negative of playing off missing children. But I loved seeing our team test the boundaries of the creative rather than delivering the same old, gray corporate concepts.

Final Caveats

Beware of creating awareness for your competitor – I chose the initial Workday example with this in mind. They had been receiving adoring press coverage and were thought to be a long-term threat to monopolize the HR applications business (much as Salesforce has done for CRM). 

So we were given clear marching orders to use our ad channels to educate the market about the immaturity of their offering.

But unaided awareness of Workday among HR audiences was actually very low (based on surveys asking, “when thinking of HR software, which company names come to mind”). So calling them out with our advertising dollars was also helping build their brand name. 

Lastly, there are cultural differences around the world. For example, competitive advertising in Japan was illegal and Brazilian audiences considered it incredibly rude. Be ready to adapt the core creative/message so that you maintain one global message but flex appropriately.