Opportunism runs riot among Britain's snow-bound headline-writers

A week that started with an Arctic white-out saw Orange Tango running a headline advising people not to drink orange snow and Extreme, the sports channel and high energy lifestyle brand, snow-tagging their identity in 350 Central London locations. Surprising that David Cameron didn't capitalise on this free ambient medium when, in characteristically headline-grabbing opportunistic slanging mode, he branded Gordon Brown an 'opportunist'. But the award for opportunistic headline-writing of the week goes to Virgin Trains who advertised a 'Liverpool to London return faster than Robbie Keane'. The journey takes just 2 hours and 7 minutes, which these days is nearly as long as it takes for a game to run before Benitez even considers getting him off the bench.

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.

DMA in Defensive Mode at The Grosvenor House last night

Last night The Grosvenor House had the rare distinction of hosting not one but two DMA events. The first in The Great Ballroom for the Direct Marketing Association Awards and the other in a heavily fortified bunker of a function room, for the Defence Manufacturers' Association Ball.

One event was focused on impact, campaign planning, logistics, targeting and delivery, the other was focused on, well, much the same really...which got us all thinking (including our compere, Dara O'Brien). With the Direct Marketing Association expanding its categories to 32 this year, we sat there wondering what the Defence Manufacturer Association Awards would look like.

Best use of sea-launched guided missile, best firearm anti-jamming mechanism, best tracer bullet, best thermo nuclear bomb. Interesting, isn't it, how we in marketing deploy the language of war to describe what we do. Perhaps the two industries aren't so different after all. Maybe next year, we could all join up and share our learnings.

Postgate Postscript

The marketing community says a fond farewell to Oliver Postgate, creator of Ivor the Engine, The Clangers, Bagpuss and Noggin the Nog, whose death was announced today. I loved Ivor The Engine. It was gentle, enchanting, escapist stuff - and pandered to the truism that every little boy born in the late 50's and early 60's wanted to be an engine driver when they grew up.

At a time where there was more emphasis on adult role models, the engine driver took me along on an incredible journey every week. I also loved the fact that The Clangers could say so much in their whooping and swooping musical utterances without saying anything. And the Soup Dragon was pure genius. Postgate was influential in so many ways. Even his name sounds like one of his character creations - he became a brand in his own right even before animation brands became big business. Wherever the credits featured the name Oliver Postgate, you felt as a kid somehow comforted.

Postgate rose to prominence in the days of two channels, when his animations headed the prized teatime line-up that was children's hour. And he worked out of a shed in his garden. Now that the marketing community has discovered the power of classic characters to appeal to the inner child (Paddington Bear for Marmite, Wallace and Gromit for Kingsmill, Mr Men for Persil) and we are using these creations to mine a nostalgic seam among an older audience, my guess is that brands will re-discover his work. And, in so doing, my hope is that this will have a halo effect - allowing younger audiences to pick up on the genius of Oliver Postgate.

Scientific proof that laughter is more potent than shock in viral marketing

I've been wondering why I've had not one comment on my recent blog-post about direct marketing surviving the recession. And then the penny dropped. Yesterday, I heard about how scientists have revealed that fear is quite literally physically contagious (presumably, these scientists are the ones who haven't been busy discovering the human genome, genetically re-mastering crops, refining the blueprint for coal-fired nuclear power, cloning human tissue or patenting anti-cancer drugs - and therefore have time to do this sort of inconsequential study). Apparently, we don't just smell fear in others. It's passed on through pheromones secreted by the human sweat glands (which is why panic and terror spread so quickly). Indeed, the armed services are now looking at human sweat as a counter-insurgency weapon. Hard on the heels of this comes the blinding revelation that happiness is entirely a social phenomenon. Another set of researchers from The University of the Common Cold, or some such American- mid-west -quasi-scientific-para-academic -institution- foundation, have deduced the following from a study of 5,000 people over a number of years. That if you surround yourself with happy people, you too will be happy. And if those people know other happy people, you will be ecstatic. And if those people know other happy people who know other happy people, then you'll be like a pig in do-do. It goes to about four degrees of separation before the effect starts to wear out. Which is interesting, if unsurprising. Because, with the digital age, seven degrees of human separation have now been reduced to just 4.5. So you could say viral marketing is one of the most powerful tools human civilization has at its disposal in spreading global happiness. And why all of us involved in viral marketing should take that responsibility very seriously indeed. I won't even go into the debate about what defines happiness (it was a bacon roll for me this morning), but suffice to say it's now scientifically proven - laughter and joy are infectious. And, unlike fear, you don't physically have to be in the company of happy people to be infected. Just surround yourself with them, virtually or otherwise and it will happen osmotically. Which accounts for the reason why, with viral, funny is more powerful than shocking. And may account for the lack of interest in my blog-post raising the spectre of recession. After all, despite the term 'viral', digital experts have as yet failed to find a way to transmit fear pheromones and sweat droplets down our broadband wires. And virtual fear and shock are poor substitutes for that.

Creative Ideas. Identical twins? Or doppelgangers?

Interesting. In this week's Campaign, Simon Impney, Founder of Open Soho writes of 'an identical twin' appearing in 'The Work' on 14th November. I quote from Simon's letter 'The beautifully formed ad for World Vision features an identical idea to one which we delivered for a client nearly a year ago to the day. In our ad for Smartcells, we feature a baby in its mother's womb informing us there's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take stem cells from the cord that connects me to my mummy.

The World Vision film features a baby in its mother's womb questioning whether or not it will be born into a life of poverty. Ironically, both were born within The Unit production company.' I'm not sure whether my reply to Simon's letter will itself be published, but as the creator of the 'baby' DRTV ad for World Vision, now currently airing, here's my reply. 'Simon Impney (letter 28th November) is correct in pointing out the similarities between the Smartcells and World Vision work. Both feature babies in the womb who have a voice which denotes a certain prescience.

There the similarity ends. The technique is not new. It also featured in Massive Attack's 'Teardrop' in which the baby has a musical sensibility and mouths lyrics. What is different about the Word Vision work, inspired not by Smartcells, but by the moving womb shots of the developing fetus in Robert Winston's BBC series 'A Child Of Our Time' , is that it dramatises the fact that just because children are born into poverty doesn't mean they have to live their lives that way. And is based on the premise that the country of your birth doesn't have to determine the course of your life. Meteorite gestated the idea and gave birth to it. The Unit expertly rendered it.' Work that resembles others' work is the stock-in-trade of film-makers, from The Coen Brothers to Tarantino and there's no reason advertising creatives shouldn't draw inspiration from the cultural ether. All I'd add to Simon is that similarities do not an identical twin make. In the case of World Vision's 'Baby', conception occurred at a different time and between different parents.

Related to this very debate, this week's Campaign also features an excellent piece by Craig Walmsley on intellectual rights. To quote Walmsley (ironically) quoting Picasso "Good artists borrow. Great artists steal". And to quote Walmsley not quoting anyone else, but borrowing a theory instead as if to illustrate his theme (very post-modern), 'In truth, creative industries can thrive on the re-conceiving and re-purposing of previous work. There are just seven basic plots that any story can have - so you are only going to come up with a variation on a theme'. If Simon Impney wants a neatly articulated response to his letter, I'd direct him to Walmsley's (borrowed) words on page 10 of the same issue of Campaign. As a footnote, The World Vision baby ad also features in this week's 'Private View' in which both Brian Fraser, ECD of McCanns and Paul Hammersley of The Red Brick Road,' faintly praise the ad's 'well-intentioned' approach.

They will both be pleased to know that 'with the credit crunch and the recession at the front of everyone's mind' (to borrow from Fraser) the ad is indeed 'working even harder than before' and that 'that 'this stuff' (to borrow from Hammersley) is pulling better than 'good old-fashioned DRTV'. And, with a committed give of £18 a month over (on average)10 years, that's an even more difficult task than the already difficult one of 'getting people to put their hands in their pockets and give to charities' (to borrow from Fraser again). By the way, Brian and Paul, I'll be happy to share the results with you - one thing I can honestly say isn't borrowed.

Good-buzzin' cool-talkin' ever-givin' copy

Talking about the copywriter's art. 'Lip-smackin' thirst-quenchin' ace-tastin' motivatin' good-buzzin' cool-talkin' high-walkin' fast-livin' ever-givin' cool-fizzin' Pepsi.'

It was 35 years ago. I can recite the lyrics as easily as I can Sergeant Pepper or Space Oddity. Which must be an advertising record. A long-copy strap-line that's entirely memorable. It was really a rap track deployed in the service of advertising before rap was even a glimmer in P. Diddy's eye and before P. Diddy was even a twinkle in the eye himself.

So it had that rare thing - it was both of and ahead of its time. Which means the copy delivers on the Pepsi promise and vice versa - it's good-buzzin', cool-talkin', ever-givin' copy. Anyone under thirty of the purely digital persuasion who views advertising as ephemeral had better view Pepsi in 1973. Think about it. Today the end-line would just be lipsmackin.com.

How will the Direct Marketing community outlive the recession?

With the world's economies convulsing, read Dr. Thomas Homer Dixon's 'The upside of down'. There are some very interesting implications for Direct.

Look at the way millennial events have unfolded - 9/11, melting ice caps, the banking crisis - all suddenly coming to light in a way we could never have predicted or prepared for. Even the sanest, most rational person would conclude that nothing is certain any more.

Dixon talks about 'a deep existential fear of the unknown and uncontrolled...the possibility that no one knows enough to protect us is terrifying'. He calls it 'unbounded uncertainty'. In past recessions (I've been through two), we've calculated risk and managed according to probability.

But this time, it's not just the rules of the game that are changing. It's the game itself. The unthinkable has happened in the commercial dynamic. There have been runs on banks, tax-payer bail-outs, nationalisation of free-market financial institutions, full-scale meltdown of the investment big boys. Wall Street and The City have developed a siege mentality. And the fulcrum of global economic power is shifting East. Nothing is as we thought it would be.

The biggest spenders on direct are crumbling into the dust . Sectors previously thought unshakeable - automotive, FS, Retail - are undergoing radical realignment, Car giants such as Ford, GM and Chrysler are begging for federal subsidies, established FS brands' stock is sinking before our eyes and retailers are panicking into January sales pre-Christmas. The cash-cows have turned into mad-cows, stricken by economic BSE. So faced with this new paradigm, how does the Direct community survive? How do we manage uncertainty?

In the past - and through previous recessions - we've pitched our tent on the solid ground of accountability. But if we can't calculate probability any more, our promises to deliver the numbers through the most accountable channels could ring hollow. So how do direct agencies safeguard their greatest selling point? The simple answer is to be vigilant about the threat and relentlessly demonstrate accountability in everything we do, through every campaign case study.

Collectively, we as an industry have to get better at selling our wares on the basis of results. And that means slicing and dicing the metrics in every conceivable way. Awareness tracking studies, psychographics, ROI, Cost per Contact, Cost per Response, Cost per Conversion, Cost per Sale, Lifetime Value, Net Present Value et cetera et cetera. Intelligence on our customers, how they behave and interact with brands, products and services has never been at such a premium.

It's absolute gold-dust. Then we have to demonstrate that the precious analytics enable us to refine our campaigns to positive effect. To make this meaningful, we have to segment and target the long tail that forms the mass. Then and only then will we be able to establish direct and unequivocal links to sales and profitability.

Get granular, get right back to the metrics, the stuff we do best. You may say that's all blindingly obvious, that analytics and segmentation are meat and drink to the industry.

But, hand on heart, can you honestly say that while the good times rolled, you followed best practice? Now's the time to get back to basics and make the robust case for DM. Because, if cynicism, doubt and caution are the sworn enemy of direct, the Barbarians, my friends, are already at the gates.

Carry on, Sergeant

From St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians to 'Strictly Come Dancing' and the bombshell that John Sergeant has walked off the show as revealed in a Sun 'exclusive' today. Last weekend, this respected political commentator-turned-national treasure sailed through another round of 'Strictly Come Dancing' and onto the front page of the tabloids.

The judges cried foul as the nation voted silky Saga poster girl Cherie Lunghi out of the competition. Craig, Arlene, Len and Bruno watched with mounting incredulity as Sergeant won the dance-off with all the finesse of a Maris Piper potato. Fresh on the heels of Ross and Brandgate, the scandal saw the media community's dirty laundry set on another furious spin cycle. More public votes have been cast for Sergeant than for candidates in the last General Election.

So what does this tell us about the audience's appetite that they were minded to respond in these numbers and with this intent? That no matter how much the judges want them to swoon at the technical brilliance of an immaculately performed dance routine, the great unwashed would much rather watch John Sergeant's Paso Doble any day - even if the handling of his professional partner resembled an overworked postman dragging a heavily-laden mail bag to the sorting office. It's called entertainment value. It's called understanding your audience.

It's what we do as Direct Marketers. And, as times get tougher, it's what everybody craves. Let direct marketers take note of the overwhelming response Sergeant's performance elicited and how the high-mindedness of the judges who mistake this for a dance contest, not a prime-time light entertainment vehicle, have deprived the nation of what they want. Entertainment. Pure and simple.

Sergeant connected with the audience because most viewers are like him - a lot of the time people are crap, unfit for purpose, a little muddled in their execution, ungainly, but nevertheless persevering through the rounds and routines of life. They identify and empathise with the blundering, self-apologetic everyman. This is the new celebrity in our culture - we hunger for authenticity, connection and entertainment. The more austere the times, the more voracious that appetite becomes. No amount of technical brilliance can substitute that. And John Sergeant's response rates prove it.

The world's first Direct Response Letter

Question: Where do you begin a blog about direct? Answer: at the beginning of direct. The earliest recorded example of the direct response letter. St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians was written around AD4 and it offers up an object masterclass in the art of copy to all direct marketers.

St. Paul knew his audience, knew how to elicit a response, set out to raise funds from those most able to give and needed to summon up all the powers of expression, argument and persuasion to do so. And, In his letter to the Corinthians, he nailed it. It was a highly effective piece of communication - because he worked it not on bludgeoning sales patois or an overt CTA, but on persuasion, affirmation and psychological insight.

The context was this. After years of drought and floods, the people of Jerusalem were starving. Grain was scarce and there were riots on the streets. Hundreds of people were dying. In contrast, the City of Corinth was flourishing - the people sophisticated, cultured, high-brow, a high-earning, high aspiring Metropolitan elite.

The Kensington and Chelsea of The Holy Lands. It was therefore to the Corinthians that Paul targeted his fundraising appeal. And, in writing his letter, he adopts nine winning techniques. Direct copywriters take note. 1. Immediately engage the audience. St. Paul begins his letter with a story, citing the Philippi - a tribe of Barbarians, the least respectable in the eyes of his target market - and how in times of crisis they gave generously.

"Voluntarily, they gave according to and beyond their means", says the good Saint Paul. It's like Liverpool fans citing Milwall as exemplars of good crowd behaviour. Interestingly, Paul doesn't start his letter with a statement of need, but with a statement of the desired response. By not mentioning the disaster up front, he is robbing the people of Corinth of excuses not to do anything. Instead, motivate people by describing the what can happen when people give.

St. Paul's leading statement of the response appeals to their innate sense of goodness and generosity. It may seem odd that St. Paul avoided mentioning the thousands dying on the streets, but he clearly saw it as more productive to describe the value of the response. 2. Add compelling reinforcement. He then outlines a strategy - not to do with money, but to do with relationships. In this instance he is not asking the Corinthians to identify with those in need (the fact was that the high-minded Corinthians would have looked down on the inhabitants of Jerusalem anyway) but with the Lord.

Money, he says, is a dangerous and dynamic force - so it needs to be given to the Lord. Any organisation has to be seen as a good steward of its customers' money and St. Paul was no different. The credentials of the Christian church are impeccable even if those of the denizens of Jerusalem sometimes left a little to be desired. 3. Prompt affirmation, don't provoke guilt. Paul affirms the donor - 'as you would excel in everything so we want you to excel in this generous undertaking'. He recognises that people are motivated more by affirmation than by guilt.

A great planner's insight. 4. Appeal to loyalty. He then tests the loyalty of the Corinthians - their discipleship when he writes 'I say this not by command, but I'm testing the genuineness of your love against that of the Barbarian Philippi'. In doing so, he knows that, if the Philippi are the benchmark, there's hope for us all. 5. Stimulate the selfish gene. He then not only seeks their sense of justice and fair balance, but asks them to empathise with the plight of others by projecting them into that situation - 'that some day when you are in need, others will give'. So, by giving to ease the food crisis, the Corinthians will be engaged in an act of justice and self-regarding salvation, levelling the playing field. Like Cancer Relief, it's a case of 'there but for the grace of God go I'. 6. Be clear about the response device.

St Paul then does what any direct response copywriter would be sacked for not doing. He creates a response mechanism - he sends a guy called Titus from Jerusalem to Corinth to collect the money. 7. Offer proof. St Paul validates the appeal with the reassurance that the money will go where he says it will - direct to the people of Jerusalem. 'We're doing this so that God will be glorified - we'll ensure in the sight of God that this money is delivered to Jerusalem". 8. Bring the audience along with you. He avoids any proselytising or high-mindedness and invokes his audience's sense of integrity by saying 'I shouldn't have to write to you about this - you already know the need for giving'.

9. Add the ultimate signatory. And finally, he re-asserts the faithfulness of God - 'I am confident God will provide everything you need'. It's a flourish to the sign-off, the ultimate signatory and a name that denotes unimpeachable integrity. So what's all this about? Well, I don't want to get too holy about this, but we in direct marketing are responsible for how money is raised, not just how much.

Not just whether it's given, but why it's given. Jettison the Christian message from St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians and you're still left with a very powerful case for copy that's got truth and integrity at its heart - it's not just about going through the motions of 'the sell'. It's layered, subtle stuff. And this, my first blog, is a call for more of the same. Not just in fundraising, but everywhere.

As the last year has shown, short-termism is a bankrupt philosophy. That's why Barack will take the oaths of office in January. To quote Stephen Mansfield in 'The Faith of Obama', the people who teach us how to make our high-flying rhetoric into grounded reality will be most remembered'. That's why writers in our industry have a responsibility. To be true to our audiences, not just the products and services we represent.