Blondes have more fun? Hold up, wait a minute, are you for real? Is this a quote from the series Mad Men or similar?
Believe it or not, someone actually made this claim in the 21st century.
Special note:
I am just recording what I saw and heard, think Thucydides or Strabo or Polybius etc.
I couldn’t believe it when I heard this person say it, especially because they were serious. Even bard AI knows there is no scientific evidence to back this up.
Now, what if I suggested that you should base all your media purchases on this idea? In other words, whenever you include a photo of a woman in your creative materials, she must be blonde.
Of course, you are asking why, and someone back then DID ask “why?”
The answer you get is “because blondes have more fun.”
Do you go along with this or recommend you don’t spend the entire ad budget based on such an insane idea? Well, the person that suggested it is a VP of “whatever” with “X” number of years at the company.
After probing the ridiculous premise of “blondes only” in creative assets (by attempting to use the most inquisitive yet non-incredulous tone of disbelief), you finally extract a fairly interesting piece of information:
The previous creative assets that had blonde women in them got the most click-throughs, hands down.
NOTE: What they didn’t tell either was how long they ran these creatives. Was it one week, two weeks, or a few months?
Thus far, based on the cagey and cryptic information we had at that time, the reasons for using a photo of blonde women in creative are:
1 Blondes have more fun
2 The creatives with blonde women get the most click-throughs.
But is that really enough to justify the reason to blaze through your ad dollars all year especially without any A/B tests of any kind?
Here are some things that I don’t think they ever thought about but should have:
1) What are the quality of those click-throughs as a result?
2) Could just using blondes only damage the brand, especially if the photos are cheap stock photos? What kind of message does that send to the public if that’s the only human being in their ads?
I can guarantee you that somebody noticed. Especially because the internet has been critical of this company for some of their other practices when it came to online ads.
3) What is the effect on ROAS or CPA?
4) What type of search intent did the users have?
5) How many paid subscriptions did they gain from it?
6) What about attribution as in what sites and placements did they have or did this come from one of the affiliate Networks..
Anyone can tell you a high click-through rate with zero sales may be okay if that is one of your KPIs and if all you’re thinking of is brand awareness. I don’t think that would fly in the current year, especially with all these companies making cuts.
This was a company that made its money from subscriptions. On top of that, I was in the marketing meetings, and nobody ever said that the whole point of the ad campaigns is for brand awareness. But guess what, there was a discussion about return on ad spend and reducing cost per acquisition.
Some people were thinking about it but not the key personnel making the decision to use the same myopic viewpoint when it came to ad campaigns/spending.
They just burned through that budget without even giving it a second thought.
Nobody seemed to care or sound the alarm, which is odd when you think about it because revenue growth is what keeps the lights on.
So what have we learned:
– Decisions based on one metric alone (like click-thru only) may not always be best for your brand.
– People still say dumb stuff even in the 21st century.
When you work with us we will use what works best for your company and your audience, taking in all of your past learnings better practices and combine that with ours instead of going off of a blind assumption based on one data point.