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Not more PR for Brand and Ross, but will you be following your kids down the road for the annual celebration of pagan ritual? As you all know, Hallowe’en was originally a Celtic pagan festival, celebrating the end of harvest time, to give thanks or offerings for good or bad luck for the following year. Somehow, it’s all been turned into a pumpkin. My lot are out tonight - and for the coolest new media kids in Stoke Newington - we’ll be following them on Twitter. Well, 280,003 active influencers can’t be wrong, can they?

Branding utility will save the day. Seriously.

 “An extraordinary, almost unimaginable sequence of events” says Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England commenting on the past weeks' goings on in the global financial markets. Which do you prefer – the culture of blame, or the culture of coping? Weak people immediately point the finger at others, stronger people move on and work out how to make things work, develop products customers need and communication strategies to help consumers realise that's what they want, and build genuine underlying performance in their businesses.

In the FT today, the question is asked – is the MBA culture responsible? From the country that has chosen Sarah Palin as a legitimate candidate for president in waiting, one might question the decision making processes that got her there, and it’s too easy to blame the overt complexity built into the debt instruments that have brought the world's capital markets to a state of chaos. Palin is a nutter, obviously, but I think the true characteristic of disaster is the ability of executives to take things at face value. By ‘branding’ toxic assets as ‘debt instruments’ it’s easy not to look under the skin, do the due diligence, and frankly bullshit past the next quarter's earnings to worry about the next crisis.

What can we learn from all this?  One point of view about branding is that it is only meaningful if supported by a set of values that a brand is credible in, performs to, stands for and stands by. For lots of products and services, this is hard to achieve, if the product doesn’t work, for example, or the service promise isn’t delivered. One enormous impact of the internet is enabling consumers to share issues about brands. These can be both negative and positive vibes. Brand owners now have to develop strategy and process internally and externally to manage this. And they are challenging their support networks (of branding consultants, PR people, agencies and technology partners) to help.

Ad people talk about campaigns, and hitting the message home and how to unravel the narrative in linear way. Consumers don’t think about this at all. They tend to see ads in passing, remember some of them, and if the ad is strong enough, may even remember the name of the brand. This works well enough, but if the brand doesn’t have a set of values to stand for, by and for consumers to believe in, they won’t necessarily hand over cash for the stuff. Everyone now likes the idea of branded utilities - virtual test driving, travel advice, holiday planners, Christmas planners and so on - as the necessary adjunct for consumers to build everyday experience of a brand in some way (beyond running in the shoes or actually eating the chocolate.)  If you’ve worked in the world of the web for a while, creating interactive experience and regular customer interaction, you might say – hang on, that’s what we’ve been doing for years, but suddenly it’s become branded.

That’s what happens when the ad people get involved. If we give it a name it’s easier to believe in. I sympathise with both sides, if sides is the right term to use. Having run both ad agency and web agency organisations, you get privileged insight. The fact remains though, that unless there is genuine usefulness (either from entertainment or information value) the measurement of such things will remain in the world of wool. In the old world, if the brand didn’t stand for anything, (or indeed, as much more likely in the regulatory environment we now operate in, couldn’t), the advertising itself had to deliver the substantiation. Think glamorous cigarette ads from the 80s. In the branded utility world, you can’t just make it up. There has to be genuine interaction and exchange for consumers to see a benefit of spending, rather than wasting, time with the brand. This is where our creative and tech brains should be focused. If we get it right, and know how to get it done, there’s a new marketing nirvana to be had.

The only transformational figure is $700bn

15 days to go till the US Election, and Obama has neatly raised $150m (that’s nearly £90m) in private donations to drive his campaigning message home in the heartland of America. Even Republicans are rooting for him now. Colin Powell’s statement of support is as incomprehensible in style “We need a president who is a generational change…a transformational figure” as it is in its subtlety of asking for a job in the new administration “If the president asks you to do something, you have to consider it.”

I’m with Colin on the concerns about Sarah Palin. Probability tells us that she is actually highly likely to be president should McCain a) be elected and b) kick the bucket in the next four years. However if the president asks you to invade Iraq on unfounded evidence of chemical weapon plants, it does beg a question as to the information he is working with. One would hope that the next President is a voracious consumer of data, is able to work out the difference between fact and opinion and has the ability to judge upon limited information. Obama appears to present as if he has these qualities. Not so sure about McCain. Still, at least they’re spending a little bit of cash on advertising.
 

Creative Britain's future depends on not giving away copyright. Right.

The Creative Britain debate rages. Well, sort of. Thanks to the IPA for an intriguing debate last night about the ‘new improved’ knowledge economy. A distinguished panel of Peter York, Moray McLennan, Will Hutton and a nice lady called Christine from the design industry talking about copyright as our commercial future, and new interest and energy on the subject from the government which has suddenly realised that our other forms of exports are suddenly screwed. For those of you that saw the launch in Golden Square, it’s a great initiative, but I worry that the commercial premise needs a little more thought.

The debate, whilst witty enough, studiously ignored two fundamentals. One, the Chinese economy, soon to be the largest in the world, represents a billion new capitalists with a different point of view on copyright laws. Competing on the world stage will be tougher.  Two, the ad agency business, in general, hands over all copyright to its clients. Intellectual property will be a new battleground for agencies to learn about. We do support the copyright of our supply chain, as it happens, with image rights and usage rights and so on, but give away our own ideas on the basis of monetising the upfront advice in the form of fees and charges over production.

In my own company we do ideas and make stuff, but we also develop software. This makes us an unusual combination, but a useful one in this context. Years of experience of warranty on the applications we develop (those now ever so trendy brand utilities) and code libraries that (in theory at least!) help us sustain new product at a commercially viable rate. I think all the digital agencies do this to some extent, but as we have to compete on the world stage, we’re all going to have to get a bit more serious about this.

PS Loved the definition “Intangibles are fluff, tangibles are stuff.”

Innovation or investment - the way forward?

Or government bail out, which looks the most likely if you are a German or Irish bank. I suppose bleating about how big you are doesn’t help at this point, because what matters is public and private confidence in the business and stability of client relationships who will continue to look for better ways of getting and keeping consumer attention.

A little reassurance from the past. All across London, there are houses that were built in a mini boom in the early thirties. Think Chertsey Road. Twickenham. Hampstead Garden Suburb. The Holly Lodge Estate. (How can this be? I hear you cry, as the cold winds of the 1929 crash summon up images of the dustbowls of middle America). But the 1930s were in fact a golden age for British innovation. London expanded dramatically, as a trip to the Tranport Museum in Covent Garden will tell you. The cat’s eye was invented, to ease night time driving on the increasingly utilised road networks. That was when modern became post - modern. OK, so there weren’t so many people then, but clever media was just beginning, and modern typography and illustration blossomed.

It was a time of the first jet engine, the first nylon stocking, the first biro, the first parking meter and the first television. All great inventions, and developed at a time when the world was in crisis. I guess Sir Martin Sorrell and Rupert Murdoch have a point – that if you wait for the recession to bite you, it will. Mind you, they’re probably in a better position than most. But for everyone else, it’s not a time to panic. It’s a time to think. And to invest in innovation.

You can't save your way out of recession. You have to innovate.

I was most taken with the comment headlining this post - a quote from Craig Barrett, founder of Intel, last night, courtesy of and Oxford Business School event I was lucky to attend. It reminded me that one of the things that digital marketing has taught the industry in the past ten years is about remembering to innovate.  Advertising people talk about innovation rather a lot, but rarely deliver it. Because we have people with ‘creative ‘ job titles, we think we have a god given right to talk about innovation. Wrong. Most of the innovation in our industry comes from technology changes, and insight into consumer’s use of technology.  I’d like to ‘shout out’ as Jamie Oliver might say to the technologists who solve problems, make stuff happen, think of new stuff every day. We are closer to how magical that can be in a ‘new media’ world than perhaps some of the new entrants are with their mad men ways. I do think that belief in innovation will become an important differentiator in the not too distant future.  It true that creative content generators take advantage of technology, and put it to brilliant use, but they’d be sitting twiddling their thumbs most of the time without clever people who invent things like the internet, make the cinemas 3D, make the computers work. I guess the true test of successful innovation is imitation. And we’re really good at that, aren’t we?