Whoops - twice in a week is careless!

Today's front cover of the Pictish edition of The Times features a shot (oops, missed it) of the dejected Scott Carson and the headline 'Now they know how it feels to be Scottish.'(You mean you didn't know the 'English' newspapers wore kilts up here!)  Actually, I can answer the rhetorical question - 'Just the same... and it's nothing new!'  And now that Prof Sykes and his little DNA testing kits have proved we're all Celts, anyway, there should be no big surprise in that.  But I digress on my hobby horse.  Whoa there.

Whoops - there goes the database

I don't wish to make light of Her Majesty's Customs & Revenue's unfortunate loss of the national Child Benefit database, but as cock-ups go, it’s certainly a big ‘un.  As an exercise in damage-limitation, it also raises that all-important question: when to blow the gaff?

A similar – though smaller-scale – incident took place many years back when I worked for Clarke-Hooper.  A trainee Account Exec was entrusted with the task of sending some £3,000 worth of Tesco vouchers to a pub that had won an incentive scheme.  She efficiently popped them in the first-class post before anyone could so much as mention the word ‘Recorded’… never mind ‘Registered’.  Suitably chastised, early next morning she phoned the winner to explain her predicament, and ask would they let her know as soon as they received them.

Yes – you’ve guessed.  No delivery.  We waited a week, two weeks… nothing.  Eventually we had to replace the vouchers at our own cost (this time by courier, helmets and all).  What we did get right, however, was immediately to inform our client, and Tesco.  At least we had a record of the missing serial numbers.

And – yes, correct again – not long after, we received the news that a person had been apprehended at the tills at a Tesco store, trying to buy up its entire stock of spirits with the missing vouchers.

Ah – but did you guess who?  Well – the store was spookily near to the winning pub… and the person bang to rights… ?  None other than the winning publican!

Very naughty.

FEWER FUMES, LESSER ADS?

My mole in Europe tells me the ad industry is having a bit of a hairy over the EU’s recent move to force all car ads to devote 20% of space to green credentials.  It seems that hands have been sat on and now it’s red faces all round as ‘suddenly’ legislation looms large upon the horizon.  Surely this is a storm that has been brewing for many a year?

For once, however, as all things Brussels go, this is no typhoon in a teacup.  There’s unprecedented unanimity and cross-border determination to see it through.  Soon the makers of gas-guzzlers will have to come clean.

I shan’t state the obvious (well, I shall) that this is an opportunity to brawl on a battleground that is far more relevant to most consumers, but it does leave me wondering what all the fuss is about.  “It will kill creativity!”  Come off it.  If we get fed some decent car ads instead of the low-cal visual platitudes and clichés that make up a normal night-in’s diet, then hurrah!  Maybe I’ll stop throwing beer cans and pizza boxes at the telly.

More BOGOFs? We’re all doomed

I see there’s another article bemoaning BOGOFs in Marketing this week

The subhead in the article complains that ‘Multibuy promotions are unsustainable for brands and retailers alike, so why keep running them?’ With more column inches to its name down the years than Coronation Street, this sob story – oops, soap story – has to be the Jack and Vera of the marketing channel.

Call me naïve – or pessimistic, depending upon your persuasion – but I reckon as long as there are supermarkets there’ll be BOGOFs… and twofers, and threefers… indeed an armful of incisions guaranteed to bleed the life out of any self-respecting brand. Or so the tale is told. I mean – aren’t the experts agreed that price-cutting haemorrhages brand loyalty?

The trouble is – for this argument and its advocates – deep discounting in the UK is now well into its fourth decade, and major brands are showing few signs of its predicted vampirical effects.

I also find curious the pathos that commentators reserve for the said brands and their dedicated, downtrodden managers. Okay – it’s no fun waiting for the Friday afternoon phone call, relayed via a quaking NAM (“There’s good news and bad news”) – I’ve been there… but do they think brand managers are hapless guardians, defending their helpless charges with a makeshift wooden cross hastily assembled from a ruler and pencil? No! They use a calculator. Think about it. Brands are booming.

How come? Apparently there’s some IGD research that suggests BOGOFs have now become as effective as TV ads in gaining consumer trial. Wait a minute… I just read this in the same article! Do I detect a sub-editor making mischief?

Owl puke - for the child who has everything

It’s that time of year again – hell for posties labouring under unseasonably heavy loads, and heaven for house-dogs who get to gnaw overtime on the marketing manna which drums daily upon the doormat.  Yuletide beckons and it’s raining catalogues!

Online shopping may have come of age, but it shows no sign of elbowing the good old printed catalogue out to grass.  Right now our paper-recycling bin is matching its wine-bottle counterpart pound for pound – and that takes some doing, I can tell you.

Of course, being in the promotional marketing business, I have every excuse to spend as much non-washing-up time as I wish in scrutinising these pocket emporia – more than once I’ve solved a brief with their assistance.  And fun reading they can make, to boot.  Take Hawkin’s Bazaar – a company who always seems to employ copywriters after my own heart.  This year their Christmas suggestions include ‘Russian Roulette Chocolates’ (“delicious pralines, one of which contains enough chilli to blow your head off”), a book ominously entitled ‘101 Illnesses You Don’t Want to Get’ (described as “not for the faint-hearted” – pun intended, I bet), and best of all, ‘Owl Puke’, a kit containing a real owl-pellet and a 92-page guide to its dissection.

Under normal circumstances I would have ended that last sentence with an exclamation mark, but if you’ve clicked on my profile (which I fully appreciate is hardly likely) you’ll know I have more than a fluttering interest in all things ornithological, and not least the miraculous dried-dung-like fur-ball that is the owl-pellet.  However, I have to confess, that not even in my wildest dreams did I see their potential in the gift market! (And there goes the said screamer.)

Gunpowder Pricing Plot

I’m always on the lookout for those twin terrors – Harry Hyperbole and Percy Platitude, playground bullies in the School of Dismal Copywriting – and my vigilance yesterday wasn’t in vain.

At the time, I was agonising over the best way to burn some good Scottish fivers (not easily done, as you’ll know if you’ve ever tried), working my way diligently through the collection of fireworks leaflets I’d picked up on my recent store-surveying travels.  As with most things major multiple, I was finding it hard to spot the difference between their offerings, but one particular claim caught my eye.

It was in a section of extraordinary cake-like explosives called barrages – more Beirut than back garden - “Fantastic value for money with 1000 shots.”   Immediately the dreaded platitude-cum-hyperbole f-word put me on my guard, and prompted me to calculate – based on their advertised time durations – that some of these munitions shake the neighbours from their beds at a rate of £75 a minute!  That’s £4,500 an hour – comfortably more than Shevchenko earns.

Now, call me old fashioned, but… “fantastic” value for money?