What does Bill look out for when he’s casing a house in readiness for a spot of breaking and entering? Windows that are hidden by landscaping, tall bushes and shrubs, perhaps? More than one way out? A side passage or side door? Detailed alarm signs on the exterior wall that gives him the necessary information to disable it? An attached garage that affords cover, another way in, or even a stash of valuables? Nearby A -roads or motorways for a quick getaway? A house on a thoroughfare rather than a dead-end street or cul-de-sac? A gaff near a park or wooded area that's easy to disappear into? Or does he just look out for the nearest internet café and Google Street View where he can case the joint virtually in eye-boggling detail? He could yesterday. Maybe he can’t today. Because Google have had to black out areas of London and blank out dozens of images. Not as a security risk, but in response to a number of complaints about invasion of privacy. But for the millions of homes now open to the view of credit -crunched ex-cons, shouldn't this be a clear-cut case of opt in to Google Street View, not opt out?
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Has Facebook inadvertently exposed the flaw at its heart? An application that allows people to tag fellow users with a joke gift such as anorexia, schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder has been roundly condemned by mental health charities. But this joke gift viral says more about Facebook users than it does about Facebook itself, who make it a policy not to monitor applications created by individual members. What this reveals in the Facebook member who’s created this application is a worrying pathology - and probably not untypical of those who lose a grip on reality by mistaking social grazing for meaningful relationships . It’s not that making a gift of mental illness is ‘tasteless’. It really wouldn’t offend me if someone sent me a bumper fun-pack of dementia, bulimia and agoraphobia all tied up with a ribbon and bow– it would just complete the set. But playing with mental illness isn’t that funny, shocking or subversive either. Just a bit sad. Which demonstrates just how severely out of touch with human beings some Facebook users have become. Whilst this user has managed to catalogue most mental illnesses, they’ve crucially left one out – call it Dissociative Facebook Abuse Disorder.
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‘Tmesis’, I learn, is the only word in the English language that starts with the letters Tm and it means a word split by another word – such as ‘absofrigginlutley’. I haven’t yet spotted it in Obamaspeak – I don’t think it’s an Aristotelian oratorical technique, but I could be mistaken. I’ll keep listening to Barack’s speeches. Meanwhile a piece of news today that would attract a bout of tmesitis. A 330 ml can of Coke embodies the equivalent of 170g of carbon dioxide whilst Innocent, which helped the Carbon Trust pioneer its footprinting, has a 250ml bottle of mango and passion fruit smoothie with a carbon footprint of 209g. ‘Abso-friggin-lutely unbe-eco-lieveable’.
Fewer than one in 5 conventional ad campaigns now has any effect on brands or sales. Unsurprisingly. As John Naish writes in 'Enough' , 'we are bombarded with up to 3,500 sales shots each day, or one every 15 seconds of our waking lives... And more new information has been produced within the past 30 years than in the previous 5,000'. So we planners and creatives are not just about promoting our brands, but mitigating communication fatigue. Given this responsibility, please tell me why it is that, in the vast majority of cases, you can recall the campaign creative but not the brand? Scenario one: Man pulls up on a road in his car, gets out, pulls down (or pulls up?) a new backdrop and drives on into a new horizon. Scenario two: Man explains the birds and the bees to his son as he drives along - we can't hear what he's saying but his body language is pretty direct. The gag? When his son asked him where he's come from, he's talking geography not biology. Scenario three. Buildings anthropomorphize, trying to swat and block the passage of a car through the city. But the car is so agile that it evades all the obstacles put in its way. Can you actually recall the brand in any of these scenarios - all of which involve sizable production budgets, hefty production values multi-locations and mega peak-time media spend? If, like me, the answer is 'no', then it's insane. Because it means that agencies are serially failing. Yet I know that a car racing a jet is Saab, I know that a car made as a cake is Skoda, I know that no car and a choir is Honda. I recall the brands because the creative embraces a core brand truth and a strong idea that aids comprehension. And comprehension should be the North Star of any campaign. Message to creatives - aim for the star and you'll reach the moon, aim to deliver comprehension and you'll not only deliver awareness, you'll deliver sales into the bargain.
Mrs T, aka TINA (There Is No Alternative) to her cabinet colleagues, aka Saint Margaret of Finchley, aka Thatcher the milk-snatcher, aka The Iron Lady. Call her what you will, it’s 30 years this May since she came to power. She broke the unions, she made a virtue of greed and selfishness. She eschewed the principle of collective responsibility and surrounded herself with a supine, venal cabinet. She spawned a neo-liberal Wild West state in which deregulation and free-market lawlessness thrived. And this year, more than any other, the country is reaping the whirlwind of her autocratic tenure. Most of my colleagues are too young to remember the powerful effect she had on the nation’s psyche, but whether we know it or not, we in advertising are all children of her contradictory legacy. She was no friend to the arts, but she was to advertising. She employed Gordon Reece as her style guru – a man who knew nothing about politics and everything about telegenic image-making. He helped her to harness the power of the soundbite and the short-form narrative of advertising by introducing her to the Saatchis and Tim Bell. If Thatcher was still in power, we would all find her demagogic style at odds with our free creative sensibility. But, despite our tendency to demonise the woman and distance ourselves from her unblinking manic stare and cut-glass haranguing voice, we are all of us faced with an unpalatable truth. Margaret Thatcher was the high-priestess of consumerism. And consumerism is a language we’ve all profited from through the good times. In the midst of this recession, there is a stonking great 800 pound gorilla with a coiffeured hair-do in the pitch room. We’ve helped to blow this bubble up. We’ve helped to carpet bomb consumers with loan offers. We’ve helped to create the very idea of free money. We’ve brought the language of FMCG to the trading floor. We’ve turned money markets into shopping aisles. We’ve introduced the illusion of choice and control. And we’ve made plastic valuable. All under the guise of grand strategising and breakthrough thinking. So the big question is this - who’s to say we aren’t as culpable for the state we’re in as Mrs T and the bankers?
Edging the great cumulus of negative financial news massing over our heads, I've spied one tiny sliver of silver. Last week, Lego reported a healthy rise in profits for 2008 - $232 million, up from $177 million in 2007. Analysts put it down to a number of things - innovation (the launch of an Indiana Jones edition and the strength of the Star Wars edition), comfort (people turn to tried and trusted brands at times like these), quality (Danish solidity, design integrity and dependability), service and heritage (born in a carpenter's workshop in 1932, Lego are fiercely protective of copyright, famously litigious and remain religiously pure to their brand values). All of which is entirely feasible and consistent with success. But here's a more psychologically-geared theory which could be the most potent. This recession is about managing uncertainty. And life itself looks a bit wobbly when the paradigm shifts so unpredictably and the walls of the free market come tumbling down. So maybe, just maybe, there's a whole generation of Dads out there who are thinking about mortality and looking for a little kit of permanence and solidity to bequeath to their offspring. Leaving them Lego bricks which they can be constructive with is the next best thing to giving them real ones which, let's face it, is the biggest single possession we can pass on in our lives. In this current climate, Lego bricks look safer (and a whole lot cheaper) than houses.
Dan Douglass
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Member since: 06 Oct 2008
Last login: 17 Sep 2009
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