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Tommy Walls and the Native Advertising Caper

25th September 2014 By Jonathan Crossfield

Tommy Walls and the Native Advertising Caper

Tommy Walls from Eagle comicThe GI Joe comic book is probably the best known case study of a brand partnering with a comic publisher for content marketing. First published in 1982, the popular Marvel comic was part of a deliberate marketing strategy by toy manufacturer Hasbro to help relaunch the line of action figures. But GI Joe was far from the first.

Wall’s Ice Cream beat Hasbro by over thirty years, with the weekly Tommy Walls comic strip that ran in the popular Eagle comic between 1950 and 1954. Tommy Walls, the Wonder Boy, also serves as a fantastic example of how good native advertising can be.

I’ve collected both US and UK comics most of my life, with examples of both famous and long-forgotten titles going back over a hundred years catalogued neatly in folders. So I was already very familiar with Tommy Walls, having become a fan of 1950s Eagle comics as a teenager. But familiarity can sometimes blind us. It was only when I tried to come up with some new and less obvious pre-internet examples of content marketing for a recent workshop that I had the forehead-slapping moment of realising there was a fantastic and fun example right next to me on the shelf.

Tommy Walls comic page from Eagle, November 1950
Early strip from Nov 1950.
Click to view

In 1950, Wall’s Ice Cream partnered with Hulton Press, a magazine publisher preparing to launch a brand new weekly comic; Eagle. Hulton had never published a comic before, previously known for titles such as Farmers Weekly and Leader Magazine. This might be why the publisher was more open to branded content than other comic publishers (most of whom had already turned down Eagle when the proposal was shopped around in 1949). Magazine advertorials were nothing new, so why not use the same approach in comics? Marcus Morris, the editor, knew this was an innovation, and the deal was only agreed after a lot of market research and negotiation. However, Morris knew the high quality comic was an expensive gamble. This deal meant Wall’s would pay for the space and the entire production of one page of comic strip adventure, helping reduce costs without reducing the number of comic pages.

The first issue of Eagle went on sale on April 8th, 1950 (cover dated 14 April 1950). The new comic was a sell-out, partly thanks to the front cover adventures of a new kind of space hero – Dan Dare. Only eight of the comic’s twenty pages were in full colour, and one of those was dedicated to the adventures of Tommy Walls. The character appeared throughout the early golden years of the comic, finally exiting the lineup in 1954. Eagle continued until 1969 and is still fondly remembered and celebrated as one of the greatest comics of all time.

“Thanks to the Magic ‘W’ – and Wall’s”

Tommy Walls comic page from Eagle, May 1953.
Tommy Walls from May 1953.
Click to view

Tommy Walls combined product placement with childhood fantasy. By forming the magic W symbol with his fingers, Tommy could fly, exhibit super strength, and whatever else was needed to apprehend bank robbers or rescue experimental airplanes. Naturally, Tommy always credited his powers to Wall’s Ice Cream.

After a few years, the superhero elements faded, to be replaced by multi-episode adventures with more detailed plots. Tommy and his friends would assist Sir Gerald of the British secret service to defeat the nation’s (not always politically correct) enemies. The second page reproduced here is a perfect example, while still demonstrating how the brand could be squeezed into the storyline as a helpful Wall’s van driver uses a random ice cream fact to prove Tommy’s sanity – an extra bit of branded education for the reader.

Wall’s and Eagle never attempted to hide that this was marketing. The full page comic strip always carried the legend “advertising announcement” above the Tommy Walls masthead and the product placement was clear enough to make the brand’s agenda obvious. The target readership (10-15 year olds) were certainly old enough to recognise that they were being marketed to. But who cares if the content is actually good? (It’s actually very corny, but it’s fun.)

I’m sure no child reading the comic genuinely believed he or she could gain super powers or catch spies by licking a raspberry ripple and sticking some fingers in the air. But the fantasy was fun. It, no doubt, lead to more than a few Wall’s Ice Cream purchases, each one eaten with a healthy topping of imagination. Wall’s was the only ice cream that promised adventure.

For the more classically educated among you, this is also a classic example of ethos, with a healthy scoop of decorum. Ethos is one of the three appeals of rhetoric, tapping into the interests of the audience and being likeable enough to warrant attention. Decorum is the adaptation of the message, language and presentation to suit the time, place and sensibilities of the audience – surely the core goal of content marketing and, especially, native advertising.

One of the Boys

Frank Hampson, the award-winning Dan Dare creator and artist, illustrated the first six episodes. This is the comic equivalent of Orwell writing your blog posts or Coppola shooting your YouTube videos. Hampson was succeeded by a number of other leading Eagle artists, including Harold Johns (who also worked on Dan Dare), John Worsley (PC49) and Richard Jennings (Storm Nelson).

This is an important point. Unlike a lot of native advertising today, this content wasn’t produced by the brand or its content or advertising agency, supplied to the publisher to fill a paid slot. It doesn’t try to copy the house style; it is the house style. The whole strategy relied on the comic strip receiving the same creative process and production values as any other page in the comic. As a result, Tommy Walls is listed alongside all of the other Eagle characters in any documented history of the comic. He was as much an Eagle character as Dan Dare, Harris Tweed, PC49, Riders of the Range or Luck of the Legion. Not many advertising features can claim that!

Good content marketing is that which the target audience actually chooses to read. While other full page adverts might attract a moment’s attention as the reader flicked the page to the next adventure strip, Tommy Walls WAS that adventure strip. Now that’s native advertising!

Filed Under: Case Studies, Content Marketing, Featured Tagged With: Comics, content marketing, Eagle

Creativity, not content, is king

20th July 2012 By Jonathan Crossfield

Creativity, not content, is king

If you’ve attended any marketing conference over the last few years, you would likely have seen plenty of talk about tools and process and less about genuine creativity.

Sure, some extremely creative and ground breaking case studies would be shown. But too often they are presented to illustrate a series of mechanical tasks. “Brand X drove a 20% increase in sales with this innovative Facebook campaign from the best creative minds in the business. So here’s how you build a Facebook brand page…”

No, no and thrice no. And it’s not just conferences. So many blogs, books and more attempt to simplify complex and sometimes unique content marketing scenarios into “Ten Top Tips to Tripling Twitter Traffic”.

These have their place, but I think the discussion has been dominated with attempts to simplify marketing to a series of hints, tricks and tips “we can all do at home, folks”.

Science or art

When presenting these case studies there’s very little, if any, talk about the creative process that comes up with the ideas and a ton of info about the mechanics, the channels used and metrics gained.

It’s not surprising so many people think sending something viral is a simple and mechanical process. The discussion reduced it to one by forgetting everything that makes the content special in the first place. And it’s that special sauce that causes something to go viral, not some switch inside YouTube.

‘Content is King’ may be one of the most over used phrases in marketing history. But it is too regularly co-opted into arguing for quantity and scale than it is about quality. It is used to justify the reduction of content to a production line of generic blog posts and landing pages driven by keyword research, automated or mass produced for chump change in the hope sheer volume and persistence will outweigh the blandness of it all.

Creativity reduced to a science, not art. Content reduced to tasks, not ideas.

Not that the tools aren’t important. Of course they are. But it’s like presenting a case study on the novels of George Orwell to a conference of budding writers by discussing whether he used notepads or a typewriter to write Animal Farm. And then pointing to his book sales as evidence that typewriters are the way to go, before launching into a pitch for the Acme Typewriter company, “Come see our stand in the main exhibition hall”.

OK, maybe it’s not quite that bad. But the last few years have definitely seen far too much focus on the technology; the code, the meta tags, keyword density, widgets, bots, black hat, white hat and more in between. Everything presented as accessible to all, a box of tricks guaranteed to rain fortune down on your business.

Clicks are people too!

It is as if the arrival of internet marketing brought with it a contagious amnesia, causing many to forget that clicks are people too, that success or failure lives in the nuances between the numbers. Just as picking up the phone doesn’t make someone a communications genius, the tools are nothing without creative thought and genuine insight.

It’s not hard to see how this amnesia came about. The pioneers of online marketing were developers, not marketers. They built the tools and showed the rest of us how to use them. Therefore, the concepts underpinning online marketing were reduced to a language of zeroes and ones. I’m not blaming them; that’s what they do and do it well.

Customers were no longer people but numbers on a spread sheet, captured by a tracking code and stripped of all individuality except for whatever demographic information was deemed relevant in a shopping cart form.

In the last few years, marketers began to reclaim the customer. Now there’s more talk of ‘content marketing’, recognising the importance of message over channel. There’s less talk of clicks and more talk of people; with individual motivations, goals and behaviours. Less talk of hits on a page and more talk of what’s on that page.

Many businesses have a long way to go. Some are already there and have been for a while. Others may never ditch their obsessions with production line neuromancy, looking for push-button solutions. These last will continue to add to the graveyard of sub par corporate blogs, abandoned forums, ignored Twitter streams and unliked Facebook pages. Some of those businesses will die, wondering why the mechanics of online marketing failed them while writing it all off as an over-hyped fad.

The last decade belonged to the tactics of technology: the tools, the channels, the code. The next decade belongs to creative approaches to content strategy; what we actually say, why and how we say it.

And technology better get used to holding the door open.

Filed Under: Content Marketing Tagged With: content marketing, developers, George Orwell, Online marketing

Time versus money versus quality content

15th June 2012 By Jonathan Crossfield

Time versus money versus quality content

As more businesses realise the importance of quality content marketing, discussions have shifted from whether there should be a corporate blog, etc, to how much can be achieved. And then balancing the results against budget. This is throwing up new pressures and arguments, particularly as every client wants it all, now.

Unfortunately, before briefing out a project or delegating internally, there are only two factors most business clients consider: how much and how fast. It is only after the client receives the content that the typical manager completely forgets those two factors in favour of whether it is actually any good at driving results.

And so time and again, clients place pressure on content producers to deliver rushed work at low-cost. And when the results aren’t as good as the client hoped, it will be considered the content producer’s fault.

I recently appeared on a massively fun panel at the Social Media Down Under (#SMDU) event in Sydney where a question prompted me to remember this fantastic Venn diagram developed by Colin Harman a few months back. Although referring to graphic design, it actually is a pretty universal description of the expectations a client should expect when outsourcing any creative task – or indeed anything requiring some level of cognitive, and not merely mechanical, skill.

How would you like your graphic design?

It illustrates extremely well that fast, cheap and great quality do not coexist. However, in most cases it is possible to get two out of three. It is then up to the business client to look at their needs and choose the right two.

Here’s a hint. Great quality content should always be one of those two. Don’t make the mistake of so many businesses over the last ten or so years of the internet and opt for fast, cheap but ultimately uninteresting content purely because someone said more content of any kind is good for SEO. The latest Google Panda update pretty much smashed that idea. With millions of blogs and billions of pieces of content out there, anything less than ‘great’ just won’t stand out and be noticed.

So, if great quality content is one of your two elements, then the challenge is finding the best balance of budget or time. For example, if you have a big budget, you can have that industry-leading blog with multiple wonderfully written posts per week because you can pay the best writers to do so.

Hot tip: Be ready to pay journalism rates, not SEO copy rates. The best professional bloggers charge hundreds per post. To charge less, they need to turn over many more posts in a single day to make it worthwhile, and that reduces the quality. As a rule of thumb, this post is approximately 700 words and took me ninety minutes of my working day to write, check, optimise for SEO and prepare to go live. I would charge anywhere between $250-$500 for such a post, depending on the level of research required and the regularity of the work.

So it can be very expensive to compromise time if you don’t want to compromise quality. Hence why many businesses try to produce as much of the content they can in-house themselves. A cheaper alternative, as suggested by Glenn Murray (@DivineWrite) at Social Media Down Under, might be to bring in the professionals to sub-edit and polish your DIY content and blog posts for a more affordable rate.

But if like most small businesses you do not have such a large and flexible budget, it might be better to plan for fewer high quality pieces each year and schedule them for maximum impact. Instead of three expensive but great blog posts per week, release two well-written and designed ebooks per year or a carefully planned YouTube video every month or whichever way you choose to cut your cloth.

Once you adopt this pragmatic approach to your content marketing, all the questions and pressures over “how do I find the time and money to do all this content marketing stuff” falls away and you get to focus instead on developing a content strategy that is right for your business.

With a little experimentation, negotiation and trial and error, you’ll eventually find the right mix between time, money and quality that will drive the best results.

Filed Under: Content Marketing Tagged With: content marketing, copy writing, copywriting, quality content

Fake Attraction: Linkbait at any Cost?

16th May 2008 By Jonathan Crossfield

Fake Attraction: Linkbait at any Cost?

Winner of the Golden Moggy, for Best Marketing Post 2008

Good linkbait is the holy grail of online marketing. The right post or web article can spread through social media sites, or sometimes mainstream news sites, to point potentially hundreds of valuable links back to you.

But what is the “right” article and is it “anything goes” to create a story that captures the web?

Online marketer Lyndon Antcliff recently helped a client achieve more than 1,500 inbound links in under a week with a story designed to grab attention.

The article – 13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers – appeared on money.co.uk as part of Lyndon’s linkbaiting campaign, and it was certainly successful.

The story soon appeared around the world. Digg users pumped it up to 2452 diggs, driving tons of traffic to the page. Then news outlets leapt on the story of an American teen behaving badly.

In Australia, News.com.au, The Daily Telegraph and others covered the story (since deleted), driving hundreds of links back to the original article.

Detail from The Sun newspaper of the headline Lad, 13, Hires Tart

In the UK, best-selling newspaper The Sun published the story in their pages. While in the states, Fox News aired the story, later spread wide through YouTube.

But the whole article was fiction.

Tricking the Media

On announcing the hoax on his own website, Antcliff was both buoyed by congratulations and surprised at the criticisms, as online marketers rapidly split into two camps over whether such practices could have serious repercussions for the industry.

If producing highly successful linkbait requires nothing more than fabricating a salacious news story, then online marketing presents a serious danger to the integrity of online news.

It is no secret that news outlets trawl the net looking for interesting tit-bits for their readers. It is also true that they should at least attempt to check the facts before publication. But does the fact that many news outlets don’t adequately check small stories exempt an online marketer from responsibility in producing fabricated news?

On Twitter, Antcliff continually insisted that he isn’t a journalist and it isn’t his responsibility if news sites chose to run with the story. Yet many critics – me included – voiced their dismay that Antcliff could deny responsibility when the whole purpose of the linkbait piece was to convince others to link back.

There is no doubt that the piece was written in a journalistic style to encourage readers to accept the story as truth. If readers understood the piece to be fiction, there is no likelihood it would receive any traction on Digg, or any other site for that matter. Short stories don’t get shared much on social media sites. The piece only has value by mimicking fact.

Readers are conditioned to accept journalism under a different set of rules to, for example, fiction or comedy. Although readers may question the bias or agenda behind journalism, it is assumed the facts contained within a journalistic article are correct, even if they may only represent part of a larger story. To deliberately misrepresent facts in journalism can land the writer in court. This leads to an inherent authenticity embedded in any piece that apes a journalistic style without any hints to the contrary.

Trust Me – Not Everything I Write is Fake

Antcliff maintains the piece is satire rather than journalism. But satirising what, exactly? Satire requires context. It’s not just making stuff up.

As the host site and Antcliff’s client, money.co.uk, is not a satirical or comedy site but is actually a large British financial advisor, a reader is given no reason to suspect the fiction.

After all, if this article is a hoax, how can a reader trust any of the financial advice contained on the site?

And it is trust that is most at stake with Antcliff’s tactic. The website loses the trust of readers and also the wider online community who will be less likely to treat any press releases or information from the business seriously again.

But – and this is why so many marketers are worried – it also calls into question the trustworthiness of the wider online marketing industry.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

If my client has a wonderful news story based on some statistics, it could form a great piece others may find value in linking to. But if the wider online community develops a view of online marketing as untrustworthy, they may not believe the statistics or facts, regardless of how accurate they are.

One thing I’ve learnt over the years is that the media is a powerful beast. It can carry you and your goals a long way, but if the media realises it has been duped or misrepresented, it can bite back ferociously.

Marketers, both offline and online, have long understood the line between journalism and marketing. Adverts that mimic news pieces traditionally have to appear with a disclaimer clearly identifying it as a sponsored advertorial. Incorrect statements of fact within the media are often ordered to be corrected with a full apology at the earliest opportunity.

Blogging and web development is open to everyone, which is the beauty of the communal nature of the internet. But that freedom comes at a price. If unregulated marketers start muddying the waters of online communication, there is a risk that we may end up inviting the regulation we have long avoided.

This recent development demonstrates that online marketing may also soon need an international code of conduct to protect the integrity of online information.

Which side of the fence are you on?

UPDATE

Since originally writing this post, the “linkbait-gate” debate (try saying that three times fast) exploded across online marketing websites as webmasters and linkbaiters argued over the points raised here. I continued to report on and shape the debate and the subsequent posts are worth reading for the full story and final outcome.

  • Linkbait-Gate: Examining the Fallout
  • Linkbait-Gate: Money.co.uk Apologises
  • MediaWatch on ABC Television in Australia then entered the fray with a detailed report.

    The final outcome for the website in question was covered on Blogstorm.

Filed Under: Search Marketing Tagged With: content marketing, fail, Google, hoax, linkbait