Creative account handling

I don’t think creativity belongs only in the so-called creative dept. In fact, that’s often the least creative place.

As Edward de Bono said, “There are lots of people calling themselves creative who are actually mere stylists.” Creativity isn’t a particular discipline. It’s the quality of originality and unexpectedness that you bring to whatever you do.

So what forms can creativity take in other departments? In Kung Fu they have an expression,”Wu Wei”, translated as ‘action by inaction’. (Meaning, if possible it’s always better to get your desired result by doing as little as possible.)

Amanda Walsh used to be our CEO and head suit (or frock). One day she got a call from a new business prospect asking if we could help them sort out their strategy. They weren’t a client, but it was an obvious carrot for us. If we helped them sort out their strategy, they’d issue it as brief for a pitch and we’d be on the pitch list.

They asked us because they knew we had Murray Chick as a partner, one of the best strategists in town. For me, this was a great chance to get an unfair advantage over the competition. If I got Murray’s strategy before the other agencies, then our creative dept. could start work earlier.

A bit like starting a race before the other competitors. So I kept pestering Amanda and Murray:
 

Me (week one):          “Is the brief ready yet?”
Amanda:                   “Not yet, the client hasn’t had a chance to read it.”
 

Me (week two):         “Hey, is the brief ready yet?”
Amanda:                  “Not yet. The client’s still thinking about it.”
 
Me (week three):       “Where the *** is the brief?”
Amanda:                  “The client still hasn’t made up their mind..”
 

Me (week four):         “Well that’s brilliant, well done. You’ve just wasted
                                  four weeks when we could have been working on the
                                  pitch.”
 

Amanda:                   “Look, calm down Dave.
                                  We’re not hassling the client because, while they’re  
                                  dragging their feet they’re running out of time.
                                  The whole process has gone on so long that that             
                                  they’ll suddenly realise they’re about to miss their  
                                  airdate.
                                  They won’t have time for a pitch and they’ll have to
                                  give us the account, without one.”
 
 
And that’s exactly what happened.

Wu wei.

The Sun v The Guardian

When my daughter was about thirteen, she went to boarding school. After a term, I got a phone call from her housemistress.
She said my daughter either wasn’t handing in homework, or she was handing it in late. So I drove down to Dorset, to the school.

On the way down I thought about the problem. When I got there I had a chat with the housemistress. I said I thought it was language problem. Her school was a nice, polite, quiet middle-class environment in the country. But my daughter’s background was a big noisy city.

All her relatives were either Chinese, working-class London, or New York. So communication was all about cut-through, not about subtlety. See, the difference is, in urbane, middle class circles the onus is on the person receiving the communication to interpret it correctly.

The way any civilised person would. But where my daughter’s from communication is cruder than that. The onus is on the person making the communication to be heard correctly. It’s all about cut-through.

So, when her teachers discussed homework with her, they say something like, “What do you think, shall we have a look at something towards the end of the week, sort of Fridayish if that’s convenient?” What my daughter heard was, “Homework if you feel like it. It’s not really important.”

The teacher is expecting my daughter to do the work of interpreting what‘s been said, correctly. But she won’t, she’s never been trained to. Because she comes from a world where a communication, over and above everything else, has to penetrate to get through.

So I would have said to my daughter, “Homework by 4 o’clock Friday. When is it?” And I’d have made her repeat it back. Short and impactful. No room for misunderstanding. Now neither way of communicating is right or wrong.

But we do have to recognise that they work in different circumstances. They are about communicating with different target audiences. And different target audiences require different styles, in different media, for different messages.

To over-simplify, the easiest illustration would be The Sun and The Guardian. Both good papers, but both very different. The Guardian sells 350,000 copies, and is read by 800,000 people. The Sun sells 3.5 million copies, and is read by 8 million people.

The Guardian needs a quieter, subtler, wittier approach. The Sun needs a noisier, brasher, cheekier approach. One is upmarket, one is mass market. One needs to engage, one needs to cut through. You decide who your consumers are, and talk to them in their own language.

It doesn’t work when you talk to them in someone else’s language. Here’s a really interesting fact. The Sun is the biggest selling paper in the country. But The Mail is the biggest selling paper amongst people who only buy one paper.

That means lots of people are buying a serious paper for in-depth analysis, and also buying The Sun for fun. Which is how The Sun got to be the UK’s biggest selling paper. This is something Murdoch understood before anyone else. You don’t buy a newspaper for news anymore.

You get your news from TV, radio, or online. Pretty much as it happens. A newspaper can’t compete with that. It takes at least 8 hours to print and distribute.

So it has to give you something you can’t get from the other media. Either in-depth analysis, or fun. If so many people want two such different papers, a quality and The Sun, doesn’t it show the need for more than one type of communication? Maybe that’s a lot of the problem with advertising at present. We think there’s only one right way to do it. Always, and in every case. So we get people who read The Guardian doing advertising for people who read The Sun.

Hitler's socks

Years ago we used to do animatics, to test commercials before they ran. The best illustrator for this was a guy called Harry. Harry had a rep called Al Spartley. Al was from Essex, and drove a BMW.

One day Al told me he’d bought Hitler’s socks. My first question was, how much for? Al said he’d paid £4,000 (and this is 20 years ago). My second question was why?
Who wants Hitler’s socks? Are they clean or dirty? Are they worth more if they’re washed in soap powder or left soiled? Can you smell Hitler’s feet?

Al said it was a one-off chance to get Hitler’s socks, and he couldn’t pass it up. My third question was, how do you know they’re Hitler’s socks? Have they got a little swastika pattern on them? Al said he had a letter of authentication. I repeated the question, how do you know they’re Hitler’s socks?

Hitler hasn’t signed the socks has he? They haven’t got a serial number on. How do you know someone didn’t keep the letter, but switch the socks?

Anyway, what does the letter say, “I, Adolf Hitler, hereby vouch for the authenticity of the attached footwear, and verify these are the socks worn by me during the establishment of the Third Reich.” I found the whole thing very strange. But that’s what museums are based on I guess. People are fascinated by things that they wouldn’t otherwise notice.

Like a pair of socks. Just because they belonged to someone famous. So it’s not the actual object itself that we like. In fact it’s everything that isn’t the actual object that intrigues us. It’s what goes in our heads about it. I used to argue a lot with Paul Arden about Duchamp’s bottle rack. Why should I pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for that particular bottle rack, which isn’t even signed?

If I think it’s beautiful, why don’t I pop down to the shops and buy the identical thing for around a tenner? Paul said it isn’t the same, that particular bottle rack is worth more because Marcel Duchamp chose it. Like a photographer choosing an image with a camera, the artist chose that particular bottle rack.Anything else is at best a copy.

While that may be intellectually true, even Duchamp couldn’t tell the difference between that and another bottle rack. And, personally, I think that was Duchamp’s whole point. It’s a modern take on “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I think he was saying the exact same things exist all around us and we don’t even see them.

But put something in an art gallery and we notice it. Because someone has told us that it has meaning. That it ought to be separated off from everything else and considered as more worthy of our attention.

We don’t trust ourselves to work out what things are valuable or not. We let someone else, an expert, an artist, a museum curator, do that for us. The same is true of awards. We don’t have the confidence to trust our own judgement about what’s good and bad. We need someone to do that for us. Some certificate of verification that something is more worthy. We need someone to tell us what’s good.

That’s why we need all the advertising awards schemes. And, more than that, that’s why clients need The Gunn Report. To tell them which agencies are winning more awards. Therefore which agencies are better.

I think it’s a bit like saying Michelangelo is a better artist than da Vinci because he painted more pictures. Or Van Gogh is a better painter than Gauguin because his work is in more museums.

For me, The Gunn report is the “Hitler’s Socks” of advertising.

The Politics of Losing

A few years ago, the LibDems asked some people from the media to a meeting to discuss how we could help them do better in an election.

I listened to everything everyone said, but it just seemed more of the same. They wanted some quite nice posters and cinema ads knocking the Tories and Labour.

Then the election, and the LibDems finish third as usual. I knew just doing some nice ads wasn’t going to change anything. I thought, like any smaller brand, if they really want to change things they need to stop copying the market leaders.

That just maintains the status quo. They need to act like one of Adam Morgan’s ‘Challenger Brands’. They need to break the market rules. They need to take a predatory look at where new votes could come from. They need to get upstream of their competition.

To come up with a strategy for that, first I needed to research the brief. The LibDems had always favoured PR (Proportional Representation). To understand what this means you have to know how voting in the UK works.

We don’t count the national vote, we count constituencies (seats).  So, suppose for instance there were only 3 seats in the UK, each with 100 voters. And suppose there were only 2 parties, Labour and Conservative. Now, in the first seat Labour gets 51 votes, and Conservatives get 49.

The same in the second seat: Labour 51 votes, Conservative 49. But in the third seat, Labour get 0 votes, and Conservatives get all 100 votes.

What happens is Labour only get 102 votes to the Conservatives 198 votes. But Labour got 2 seats to the Conservatives 1 seat.

So Labour win the election because only seats are counted, not number of votes.

The LibDems thought this system was outdated and unfair, because it always resulted in them getting less MPs than they would have got if the actual number of votes were counted instead of just seats.

So I thought, that’s our brief. Switch the electoral system to Proportional Representation. But who do you target with a message like that?

Well actually there’s a very big chunk of the market we could target.  In every election, only about 65% of voters actually bother voting. So we could target the third of the electorate that doesn’t vote.

I reckoned it was because they were so disenchanted with the system. I thought PR was an argument that could motivate people like that.

So, to appeal to that third of the electorate are the target market, I thought the LibDems should stand on a single-issue ticket. That, if elected, they would introduce Proportional Representation.

And then immediately call another election under PR rules. So that, whether or not you like the LibDems, it’s still in your interest to vote for them.

The LibDem campaign line should be:  DON’T JUST CHANGE THE GOVERNMENT: CHANGE THE SYSTEM. Don’t you think all the protest voters, the disenfranchised, the students, everyone who’s dissatisfied, or disenchanted would get behind that?

It’s a bit more exciting than the usual bland, meaningless political slogans.  You can imagine it on T shirts, bumper stickers, grafitti, newspaper headlines.
But best of all, the LibDems couldn’t lose.

There could be 3 possible outcomes of that strategy:
1)    The LibDems win, change the system, and win the revote. (unlikely)
2)    The LibDems win, change the system, and lose the revote. But because of the new system still end up with more MPs. (possible)
3)    The LibDems lose, but because of attracting all the disinterested voters have a much bigger share of the vote, and so end up with more MPs. (most likely)

Briefly, there wasn’t a downside, even if they lost they won.

But, as you know, that never happened.  It was way too much trouble. They didn’t want to rock the boat that much. I think, truthfully the LibDems are quite happy to be where they are.

They like being number three. It’s less effort. Not being high profile, everyone leaves them alone and they get the occasional soundbite.

It’s sort of the old folk’s home of politics. They keep copying the advertising of the market leaders. Consequently they maintain the status quo. And, in that situation, the main beneficiary is the market leader.

Of course you can’t carry on like that in the real world.
In the real world Tesco would have delisted the LibDems ages ago.