NRMA goes national

The boss of Accenture Interactive and The Monkeys, Mark Green, has “busted” IAG CMO Brent Smart’s career-long resistance to pre-testing advertising campaigns before they launch. 

The once Telstra-owned Yellow Pages is one of the more renowned Australian examples of a brand ignoring its research company’s pre-testing advice for an ad for its now famed “Goggomobil” TV commercial in 1991.

The campaign launched despite ad testing advising Telstra’s marketing team and ad agency George Patterson – now absorbed into WPP-owned VMLY&R – to dump the quirky little yellow German car which featured in the ad for a Ford Falcon because it would resonate better with middle Australia. The rest is history but it’s examples like this which raise the ire of creatively-minded advertising types.      

In this week’s Mi3 podcast covering the back story to NRMA winning the Advertising Council’s 2021 Grand Effectiveness Award, Green said the overhaul of the NRMA brand from 2017 had avoided any pre-testing of ads except “maybe one campaign we’ve done some research on as we pushed into new frontiers”.

The exception Green spoke of was a move two weeks ago by the NRMA to expand beyond the Eastern seaboard to become a quasi national brand, launching into the South Australia and Western Australian markets, where it already owns local insurers, SGIC and SGIO respectively.

The “N” in NRMA is for National Roads and Motoring Association – not NSW as many assume. NRMA already operates in Queensland, ACT and Tasmania and controls 70 per cent of a company that manufacturers insurance products for the Victorian market that are distributed by RACV, which owns the remaining 30 per cent. 

But the NRMA’s move into the WA and SA markets was a delicate one and Smart admits he acquiesced on his long stance against pre-testing ads. 

“Not wedded to it is putting it very politely,” he says on the Mi3 Podcast. “I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe it makes ideas better. I believe in doing plenty of research upfront to really understand the customer, understand the brief and have proper insights. But I don’t believe in pre-testing ads at all. Greenie just busted my cover big time by saying we’ve done it once.”

Eastern brand, western market

So what changed? Smart says the parochial nature of SA and WA, which has only intensified through Covid, meant it was critical that the NRMA’s launch campaign into those markets wasn’t tone deaf. “We just wanted to make sure that we weren’t sitting in a Surry Hills bubble, creating something that wasn’t going to resonate in Perth and Adelaide,” he says. “That was an example where research was very useful. We learned some stuff that informed the script and made it better.”

But Smart says consumer pre-testing of the new campaigns in those markets did not using the “formulaic pre-testing” deployed by global research firms. “It was much more in-depth, qualitative work to really understand what’s going on,” he says.

The Monkeys and NRMA teams needed to get the tone of voice right at launch. “Humility was really important,” says Smart. “We couldn’t be the big NSW brand loudly coming into South Australia like we’re here to save the day.”

The Monkeys Chief Strategy Officer and Accenture Interactive Managing Director, Fabio Buresti, worked closely on the pre-testing phase – he says the “hero complex” was something NRMA’s ads had to avoid. “They don’t need an Eastern Seaboard brand coming into save them from themselves,” he says. “Just having some cultural connection to their local states was super important. We needed to introduce ourselves in the right way. Just getting that tone right, just the little pieces right, was critical to cutting through. It’s early days yet on it but hopefully it’s going to go gangbusters over there.”