Is the BBC right to pull the DEC Gaza Appeal?

This weekend the BBC DG Mark Thompson announced the corporation's refusal to air an appeal for the victims of Gaza, saying it would compromise the BBC’s hard-fought stance of editorial impartiality. Today, Sky followed suit. When questioned, Editor-in-Chief Thompson said he believed there was no political motivation behind the Appeal and that the public could distinguish between a humanitarian Appeal and a political message.

But, contrarily and uncomprehendingly, he still insisted that the BBC would be sending the wrong signal to the public if they went ahead and broadcast the Appeal. His reasons for doing so still require an adequate explanation. In the absence of which, here's one. Post-Hutton timidity. Many of the individual charities who form the DEC are on the ground in Gaza in places like Beit Lahia in the north and Rafa in the south and therefore well placed to take advantage of the fragile ceasefire. For the half a million people in Gaza who have not had access to clean water since the conflict began, this ceasefire is a humanitarian window. No one knows how long it ceasefire will hold - when or if Hamas will renew their rocket attacks into Southern Israel and how long it would then take for Israeli tanks to renew their pounding of 'Hamas positions'. So much is unclear, the fog of war is still thick on the ground.

But one truth is undeniable. Once again, it’s children who are caught in the crossfire. Children. And they know no political context, have no hatred in their hearts, assume no pretence of moral authority, exert no right to retribution. All they know is raw fear, hunger and pain. Surely we can apply the word ‘impartiality’ to an Appeal focused on Innocents. To quote one charity's programme manager who has been working on the ground in Gaza throughout the conflict, “Children are terrified by what they hear, by the bombs. They see the dead. The number of traumatised children is increasing rapidly.” Like Thompson, programme workers such as these and the NGOs they represent also hold sacrosanct the rule of impartiality in areas of conflict.

Like the BBC, it’s not an indulgence, a question of high principle or integrity. It's about survival. Without adopting an impartial position, they would neither gain access to the dying, the suffering, the bereaved and the traumatised nor would they themselves be secure. You can’t help feeling that Thompson’s stand is a kick in the guts to humanitarian and developmental charities who have themselves striven to maintain an impartial standpoint to save lives and rehabilitate people whose worlds have been torn apart by internecine political unrest. Mark Thompson’s judgment call comes almost five years to the day since the resignations of Gavin Davies and Greg *** following Government criticism and pressure on the organisation over the Hutton Report . Remember it? It was headlined as 'the biggest crisis in the 82-year history of the BBC'. It prompted BECTU and the NUJ to challenge any attempts to curb the independence of the organisation. One journalist went on record as saying “Any news organisation has to be seen as impartial to be credible and that is what we are fighting for”.

It's strange how these events have paled since then, slipped into our collective unconsciousness. But they're still all too real when it comes to the separation of State and an independent BBC - and they've re-emerged in the wake of Thompson's announcement. You really can’t help but sense the legacy of Hutton in the refusal to broadcast the DEC Gaza Appeal, that the top brass at the BBC has learned little since ***’s departure – that impartiality is merely a cloak for their lack of courage. Something I’m glad to say can’t be said of BBC journalists or NGOs who are every minute of every day struggling to establish a lifeline amid the rubble of Gaza.

Obama and Lessons in the Copywriter's Art

Tuesday 20th January, a day we will never see again. The inauguration of America’s first black president. Much has been said of Obama’s soaring rhetoric, the way he can articulate a big idea through the power of oratory. We hear influences old and new in his phrases – those of both Cicero and his speechwriter, 27 year old David Favreau – perfectly attuned to his preachifying cadences and vibrating baritone. Favreau – the youngest chief speechwriter on record at The Whitehouse - could just as well be a DM agency copywriter. Obama demands high levels of response from his campaign and he's turned to Favreau as his wordsmith. No pressure there, then. For me, no one has really provided an adequate analysis of Favreau's craft. There has been no adequate dissection of the oratory – no adequate explanation of what makes Obamaspeak so persuasive technically. Beyond the audacity of hope - belief and the truth at the heart of the man - what makes it such compelling language? That is until Saturday's FT. Here, Sam Leith has delivered what should be a text-book lesson about Obamaspeak for all copywriters, more useful and pitch perfect than any text by Ogilvy, Bernbach or Abbot. So, for those who didn't see the piece, I’ve attempted to fillet his article below. Why are Obama’s rhetorical flourishes worth examining when it comes to the copywriter’s craft? Because, like the DM copywriter,Obama has only words to persuade his audience to change their behaviour - to take personal and collective responsibility for change. He has to persuade the people that governments alone cannot solve America’s problems. “If we’re waiting for someone else to do something, it never gets done”. This call-to-action has shape and substance in Obama’s urging his supporters to engage in a day of community service. It’s like urging your audience to sign a petition, go online pick up the phone, register, sign-up, recommend a friend, trade up, then go out and do your marketing for you - all at once and on a grand scale. That’s a big audience and it’s a big ask. And, if words can force behavioural change, they have to be the right ones. Leith makes the point that what Obama is doing is taking ground-rules from Aristotle four centuries before the birth of Christ. Broken down into its component parts, it involves ‘Ethos’, ‘Logos’ and ‘Pathos’. ‘Ethos’ is that part of rhetoric that establishes the speaker’s bona fides, ‘Logos’ the actual argument. And ‘pathos’ the emotional manipulation of the audience. Then there’s the tricolon – three terms in ascending order such as “I came, I saw, I conquered”. And to add another layer to the tricolon, balanced doubles known in formal rhetoric as syntheton (“men and women”, “colour and creed”, “ young and old” and so forth). Leith quotes classic tricolon balanced doubles in Obama’s speech at the Victory column in Berlin in front of 100,000 people. “As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice-caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya”. A double (“Boston and Beijing”) leading to a tricolon whose third term is itself doubled up, the whole mixture thick with alliteration. “This is very far from informal or direct or off-the-cuff speech. It is marvellously and intentionally musical… the mode and shape of address are vital to its persuasive force” Obama’s winning slogan, “Yes, we can” benefits from its three stressed syllables. It is a metrical object called a molossus – thump, thump, thump. It is also an anapaest (diddy dum). Finally, Leith picks up on repetition, or what is called ‘anaphora’, where a phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive lines. His speech at the Iowa caucus on January 3rd 2008 opened: ”You know, they said this time would never come. They said that our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose”. Rolling repetitions are also the stuff of the Declaration of Independence. – Obama reaches back to the Founding Fathers in the way his phrases are scanned. His language is littered, - not just for euphony but to give the impression of striving for the right word, the exact idea – with parallels, mock hesitations, qualifications. As we have seen, he seldom uses one word when a balanced pair will do. Like all the best orators, he at times affects to mistrust rhetoric, remembering perhaps the points in his dorm-room debates as a student. In Dreams from My Father, he points out the dangers in stopping thinking and slipping into cant. To this end, he borrows one of Lincoln’s most effective rhetorical tricks – the sudden drop in register to plain style – the folksiness of an injunction on the night of the New Hampshire Primary “to disagree without being disagreeable” being a prime example. David Favreau knows all this. It’s now intuitive. But it still takes hard work and painstaking research to get to a form of words that dovetail with Obama’s natural rhythms of speech To get to today’s inaugural address, David Favreau spent weeks researching, interviewed historians and speech writers, studied periods of crisis and listened to past inaugural orations. When ready he took up residence in Starbucks in Washington and wrote the first draft. Just as Favreau has a responsibility to his audience and the Obama brand, as much as he has a responsibility to sound out every phrase for its resonance, so writers have a responsibility to their audiences and their brands. And creative’s should never underestimate the power of rhetorical devices to help them. This afternoon at 5 pm, the agency will gather to watch Obama’s inaugural address. I for one will be tuned in to the style as much as the substance. Leith refers to TS Eliot who once said the meaning of a poem is merely something the poet uses to distract the reader while the poem does its work on him. His rhetoric is not only serving to restore a nation's belief in itself and renewing hope of a better future for billions worldwide - it is in its own way reinforcing our faith in the power of words to transform behaviour.

Norwich City 1, Aviva 0

Norwich. It's a place that has long suffered the faint odour of provincialism, well masked by illusions of grandeur and ideas well above its station (which, by all accounts, people try hard not to get off at).

Norwich embodies the peculiarly British trait that if you big something up by saying it often enough, people will come to believe in it.

And yet, like any good brand, for people to believe in it, there has to be a truth at its heart. Remember that effusive trail to 'The Sale of The Century?' - Anglia TV's finest hour - the slick gameshow hosted by the debonair Nicolas Parsons almost three decades ago, which marked the beginnings of reality TV? 'Live from Norwich...' teased the excitable announcer,'it's the Quiz of the Week'. We all knew even then that was stretching things a bit. 'From LA, it's the Quiz of the week',yes. 'From Monaco, it's the Quiz of the week', could be. 'From Manchester, it's the Quiz of the Week', unlikely but possible. But 'From Norwich...'?

Since then, the good burghers of Norwich have had to endure a continuous stream of bile projectile vomited at them from media folk.

First it was Steve Coogan in the form of brilliant comic creation Alan Partridge, now it's Glen Roeder, in the form of crap Manager of the Canaries, currently lying gassed and inert at the bottom of a cage that is the relegation zone in the pits of the Coca Cola Championship.

Once upon a time, a couple of millennia ago, Norwich was fashionable - which no doubt would have presented a neat branding solution for a financial services company headquartered in the City, led by fine, upstanding, public-spirited, top-hatted, frock-coated actuaries who, as pillars of the community, would have decided to add the 'Union' bit to reflect their communitarian values. Make no mistake, they had dreams of making the big time with a brand named 'Norwich'. Alas, Boxing Day and New Year 2008/9 has finally killed off that ambition.

Any remaining hopes that the pride of the Fens can compete as a world class city have been well and truly extinguished. It's official. Norwich is uncool. Advertising has spoken. And Norwich Union has re-branded as Aviva. Well, it speaks for itself, doesn't it. Aviva. One of those clever, latinate neologisms - just like Consignia - that communicates dynamic, life-affirming, progressive values without having to spell them out.

The obvious question is not why the marketing folk at Norwich Union have chosen the greatest period of instability and turmoil in UK financial services history to reveal a name change (answer, it's part of a phased global roll-out and therefore has an unstoppable momentum - along with the full endorsement of Amanda MacKenzie, Aviva's Chief Marketing Officer, who states: 'This is the beginning of an even better way of doing things for our customers.".)

No, the real question is why they've asked Bruce Willis to tell us in a highly visible, massively costly TV brand campaign. Surprisingly, the answer isn't that Norwich has never featured in a 'Die Hard' story-line, so would therefore be off Bruce's ISA shopping list. It's a lot less straightforward than that. The point is Bruce Willis wouldn't be half the man he is today if he hadn't changed his name from Walter before he became famous.

Neither would Ringo Starr, whose parents named him Richard Starkey and who subsequently changed his name to that of an extruded potato snack.Or Sir Dame Edna Humphreys-Average known previously as plain Mrs Everage.

Nor, indeed, Alice Cooper, the artist formerly known as Iggy Pop, sorry correction, that should be Vincent Damon Furnier. For the record, Elle Macpherson completes the list as down-home Eleanor Gow (do I look as though I care?).

Which is all very well. But what's all that got to do with Norwich? You see, not only did these smart artistes decide to change their names before they started their careers and ditch their birth-names altogether, but they don't have their alter-egos out there right now living under their real names in the real world, stalking their every move. Unfortunately, Aviva do.

The problem with Norwich Union changing to Aviva is that, unlike Walter Willis, Richard Starkey, Mrs Everage, Vincent Furnier and Eleanor Gow, Norwich still exists. And, short of a nuclear strike or Act of God, it always will.

A Quick Fix For Retailers

Sign on A-board seen outside A fast food outlet in Goodge Street to promote its breakfast deal. Headline above offer reads 'MORNING HAS BROKEN. FIX IT'. Apologies to Cat Stevens, but it's heartening to see the copywriter's art in promotional language on the High Street when elsewhere retailers are engaged in some sort of brazen pissing contest to see who's got the highest discount. Lesson - on this pell-mell rush to buy off the consumer with gargantuan savings let's not forget the value of personality and empathy when it comes to the communication of price promotion.

Beware head cuts - or cutting off your nose...

Two pieces of news for The New Year that are seemingly conflicting but connected. First WPP looks set to shed several thousand staff in the US and Western Europe as recession bites. Any business within the group where the income to staff cost ratio exceeds 60% is a target for cuts.

Secondly, the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel Development) urges companies not to 'over-sack' - the average cost of a redundancy is apparently £16,375. The cost of recruitment to re-fill the position coupled with the cost of redundancy. So in this time of economic uncertainty, it's likely that many companies will knee-jerk into false economies. And human nature being what it is, others will use the recession as a cover to pare down its workforce, maximise margins and knacker their remaining staff - which, in a creative industry, carries its own dangers.

Two things strike me. Firstly, at a time when too many marketing services companies and agencies are chasing too little in the way of budget, and clients are in need of positive results, now is definitely not the time for us direct agencies to use the 60% staff cost/income ratio as our compass. One of the ways we can insure our industry against client defections is to invest in the future and the efficacy of direct as a means out of recession. Secondly, it's become a truism that in times of recession marketing is the first to go as a budget line.

And we name and shame advertisers who have withdrawn investment in their brands through the lean times only to see their market-share plummet irrevocably (often we do so with not a little schadenfreude). Our people are our brand. Our brand is our people. So let's be careful - if we all followed Martin Sorrel's lead, we'd be guilty of undermining not just our brand essence but our credo, the very reason we're in business in the first place. And the very thing that should make us attractive to advertisers in these recessionary times.