Ahem, Ahem… Legal, decent and all that

How’s this for a cute bit of doublespeak?: “What the report shows is that there is no evidence of benefit, which is not the same as there being evidence of no benefit.”  Rumsfeld eat your heart out.

The subject matter to which this comment related?  Well, not WMD, but the rather more mundane battlefield of OTC cough remedies.  Whilst laid flat with the latest lung-crushing lurgy, the said Telegraph article infiltrated my delerium.  A topic literally close to my heart, I wasn’t surprised to read that a major ‘study of studies’ had concluded the the stuff doesn’t work (or is that “doesn’t not work”… and where have I heard that one before?).

Now, actually, I’m sure we all know the facts about cough mixture: you take it, you cough.  Eventually you get better.  Like whitening toothpaste and anti-wrinkle cream, carpet shampoo and cat-deterrent pellets, there are some product categories which seem able to defy the unwritten laws of advertising, and the written laws of Trades Description – and get clean away with it.  How come?

Only 63 Shopping Days till Easter

I'm sure you've already noticed - but I must register a complaint all the same - the 'seasonal' aisle in the supermarkets has now transformed into an Easter egg battery farm.  Ho hum... just a couple of months to go to the big day...

Am I the only person who clings to the old-fangled notion that much-loved events (like Christmas and Halloween, Valentine's and Mother's Day) are all the sweeter because of the anticipation?  Wasn't it Shakespeare who said something like 'If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work'?

I know that we idiots pushing the trolleys must buy the darned stuff (then the kids probably find it and scoff the lot, so we buy more), but jamming the shelves with a product that has no relevance for approaching a quarter of a year seems to be asking for an eventual backlash.  If only we could protest en masse and not buy anything until Good Friday - that would wreck the DPP calculations and force a rethink.  Easter eggs used to be magical.  Today the supermarkets have given them all the appeal of plastic flowers - and I don't mean the infamous SP daffodils!  

Meningitis ads miss the mark

Yesterday morning I heard an ad for what you could call ‘Meningitis Awareness’ on local radio.  Later in the day, waiting at traffic lights while ‘taxiing’ kids home from highland dancing, I noticed a poster for the same thing in a shop window.  While it was a good example of how different channels can build a campaign when targeted at an interested customer, I was staggered by a major omission in the execution.

Both ads talk about the dangers of meningitis, and give a phone number (and I think possibly a url) where you can get information on how to recognise the symptoms.  As a parent I’m an interested customer of long standing.  But I don’t want to know where I can get information to recognise the symptoms.  I want to know what they are.   Now, please!  And I’d like them regularly repeated, because it’s easy to forget this kind of stuff.  As a soccer coach for one of my kids’ teams I’m also a first-aider, and I have to read my training manual every couple of weeks just to keep up with basics like recognising the difference between shock and concussion.

I find extraordinary the lengths that advertisers expect their customers to go on their behalf.  For instance, what’s the point of giving out phone numbers on local radio?  The reason people listen to the radio is so they can do something else at the same time: that doesn’t usually include sitting with pen poised and notebook at the ready, to write down any ads of vague interest.

Equally fundamental is the fact that people mainly act when they need to.  For instance, if spare tyres weren’t built in to cars as standard, how many motorists do you think would take the trouble to carry them around?  Parents are busy enough, never mind expecting them to phone up about obscure diseases their kids might get.

Then there’s the switch-off factor.  Once you know an ad’s of no use to you, you process it out.  It goes under the radar.  Yet if these ads actually described the common symptoms of meningitis, I can tell you I for one would be paying attention – and listening out for the next one to rehearse my knowledge.

I’ve been pondering why they don’t want to do something so obvious as describe the symptoms.  It must be a deliberate decision.  Maybe to avoid thousands of panic-striken parents flooding local surgeries and A&Es with false alarms?  Does that mean you have to wait until your child has something which you think might be meningitis (but you don’t really know, because they won’t tell you)… then try to remember the phone number or the url or even that there actually is somewhere you can officially check it out?  This campaign seems like a big waste of money to me.  Please send me a sticker I can put in the bathroom cabinet.

Marketing, for the Very Dull

Scanning this week’s eDM from the CIM, I was intrigued to read that the institute has created a Wikipedia page to widen the debate on its proposed new definition of marketing:  ‘The strategic business function that creates value by stimulating, facilitating and fulfilling customer demand.’  Oh… groan.  Is this the flag we must fight under for the next 30 years?  Bang goes another generation of talent, off to the French foreign legion, Broadway, Hollywood, Big Brother…

If I were a graduate leafing through the dictionary definitions, I’d want to feel inspired: ‘Make great ads that wow people to buy your product!’ Why didn’t they ask a copywriter or a journalist to do this job?  Talk about ‘Ivory Tower Syndrome Strikes CIM’.  Even accountancy sounds more fun.

Firmly donning my Little-boy-in-the-tale-of-the-Emperor’s-clothes hat, I must loudly exclaim why does the academic marketing fraternity live in the Land of Pomposity?  What about Sales?  (There – I said the forbidden word.  Sales… I said it again.)  Everybody who works in real marketing knows their job is about sales.  If sales are not forthcoming, an Allardyce-like slide down the slippery slope to the recruitment consultant is.

Even my sector, Sales Promotion, now largely prefers to refer to itself as Promotional Marketing – allthough Clive Mishon has done his bit to revive the word sales in our strapline: ‘When promoting sales is your business’.  (When you think about it, when isn’t promoting sales your business?)

Do we want a world of little Kotlers strutting around with their slide-rules?  Or do we want the new kids with imagination and zest kicking up a stink on the block?  I think I know the answer, but it’s getting harder by the minute to attract the latter.

All the great marketers, past and present, from the Ogilvys to the Bransons, were and are great salespeople.  It’s the essence of marketing and actually what makes it exciting.  Anyone who’s ever worked client-side will tell you they most enjoyed the times with their agencies and sales teams.  Come on CIM, wise up. 

iPhone... or maybe I don't

Not so many years ago I bemoaned the impossibility of viewing Banks' Save while discussing it in the pub with my mate Ken.  This Christmas Santa made all such things possible... or so I thought.

Armed with my latest flashy gadget and two pints of Deuchars from the bar, last night I proudly announced we were going to turn soccer fantasy into fiction (Ken had been one of the reviewers of my book).

Eagerly, ham-fistedly, we made various attempts at typing the correct words on the tiny touchpad and - after a couple of misfires on Google (Banks' Cave... Vanjd Dace... that kind of thing) - sure enough up came the film clips.

But... oh no!  It says we need wifi to see the action.  Do we want to join the [local pub name] network?  Well - yes we did - except the sullen-faced barstaff refused to give us the password ('Company policy... staff use only').

Ah well... there's always the maps, I said.  Look, I can show you where we are and get names and phone numbers of nearby bars - this one even.  (We can phone our next order from our table!).  But... more disappointment... maps only viewable with wifi.  This ain't gonna help next time I'm lost in the mist, somewhere on the slippery slopes of Ben McDuff.

Christmas was tough enough, what with wiring up the Wii (1 hr), building the impossibly fiddly fairy castle (4 hrs), taking back the jacket with missing buttons (2 hrs)... and now I find the latest supergadget a bit of a let down.  Life was definitely simpler back in the original 'wireless' days of Banks v Pele.