Upstream media thinking

A few years back there was a train crash at Paddington. This meant all the trains had to terminate a few stops before Paddington, at Ealing.

The trouble was Ealing is only a little station, and they couldn’t handle all the extra traffic.

One day we were down there waiting for a train to a client. The little station was absolutely packed. Like everyone else we were watching the information on the huge TV screens on the platform.

The passengers were giving the staff a hard time because all the TV screens were showing inaccurate information. I overheard one of the staff walk over to the station manager and say, “Everyone’s getting really upset because the trains aren’t coming in or departing at the time shown on the screens. What’ll we do?”

The station manager said, “I’ll fix it.” He got a broom and, using the handle, reached up and turned all the screens off one-by-one. Then he said, “There, problem gone.”

I thought, what an interesting approach. Don’t spend ages trying to get the screens to show the correct times. Just turn ‘em off. A great example of upstream media thinking.

Another example was BBH’s work for Boddingtons beer. Boddingtons is a Manchester beer and they wanted to make it fashionable in London. So the obvious media was Time Out, the London listings mag.

But the really clever thinking was they didn’t place the ads inside Time Out. They placed them on the outside of the back cover. Just the place no one else wanted. Because no one reading a magazine reads the back cover.

But BBH reasoned that most people read Time Out on the tube. And if you put the ad inside you only got one person. But if you put the ad outside you got everyone else in the carriage. Like a little poster.

This thinking then dictated the creative. Being little posters the ads couldn’t be fussy with lots of copy. They had to be simple, powerful graphic executions. Another great campaign that started in the media department.

I always found that’s where a lot of the real creativity came from. When the SDP was first formed, GGT had them as a client. But the real star of our campaign wasn’t the creative work, it was the media department.

Obviously you want opinion formers to see political advertising. And in an election most of those opinion formers are either in Parliament or in the news media. So how do you get to them?

You couldn’t buy poster sites anywhere near the Houses of Parliament, or Fleet Street, where the newspapers were. So Mike Gold thought, if Mohammed won’t come to the mountain bring the mountain to Mohammed.

He hired a lorry and pasted our posters on the side. Then he had the lorry drive between Parliament Square and Fleet Street. Coincidentally the lorry would get a ‘puncture’ in both places, and have to change the wheel. This meant it would be jacked-up and stationary for about thirty minutes at each end of its trip.

Which meant we had poster sites in Parliament Square and Fleet Street, for half an hour, several times a day. Great idea.

It wasn’t me that said it, but it’s true. If you’ve got a creative media department, the medium is the message.

Context is content

Apparently, when you’re mating rabbits, you never take the female to the male’s hutch.

If you do she feels uncomfortable, and gets uptight in the strange environment. And, when the male tries to mate, she kicks the *** out of him. But it’s different if you take the male to the female’s hutch. She’s more comfortable and relaxed in her own home, and willing to mate.

The same is true with clients. There will be somewhere where they’re more comfortable and receptive. Might be your offices, might be their offices.

It varies with clients. But find out where it is. That’s where you should present your work. Where you’re going to get the best reception.

Remember at school in Physics’ class? One of the first things they taught us was about Sulphuric acid and water. You can mix them, but only if you get it the right way round.

You should never add water to the acid. If you do, the acid tries to consume the water, which superheats, and you get an explosion.


You must only ever add the acid to water. See it isn’t just a matter of elements that will behave exactly the same wherever they’re encountered.

But that’s how we do advertising. We judge an ad in a meeting room. Laid on a table or stuck on a wall, on its own, presented to look its best. Except it will never ever appear that way.

So we’re judging the ad exactly the way we shouldn’t. We’re creating an area of calm around it. Which advert anywhere, ever had an area of calm around it?

It’s the job of the ad to break through the clutter. Yet we never judge it amongst any clutter. So we never judge if it will do the one thing it absolutely has to do.

No one judges how it will work in the centre of a commercial break in someone’s front room.

Or in a copy of The Sun on a packed rush hour tube. Or on a laptop screen when it pops up over someone’s FaceBook or YouTube page.

Everyone’s only thinking about the content, not the context. Why do you suppose Rolex don’t advertise in The News of the World? Lots of the people who read it actually buy Rolex.

Could it be that News of the World isn’t the right image? It isn’t the place they want to be seen, because the consumer won’t think it’s worth so much.

It has less exclusivity value. Because the context rubs off on the content. That’s why you only ever see Rolex advertised in upmarket, exclusive  media.
So when we buy Rolex we’re buying part of that media. Part of that context. In fact the context actually determines the content.

Think about it. I went to the ICA gallery and there was a plumbed-in, working, flushing toilet on display. Everyone was standing around, looking at it and stroking their chins.
Thinking about it, working it out. Yet the identical plumbed-in, working, flushing toilet was in the Gents and Ladies lavatories downstairs.

But no one went down there to look at them. The content was identical. The only difference was context. One toilet has the function of a piece of art.

The reaction is to study it. The other toilet has the context of something unpleasant. The reaction is to get away asap. The only thing that’s changed is the context.

Maybe advertising should stop putting all our attention into judging content in a vacuum. Maybe we should only ever judge content in context. Because the ad is the context.

I found this really moving

I found this really moving.

See what you think.

People don't think like we think they should think

Every time there was an election, exactly the same thing happened in our house. Dad would come home from work, Mum would put his tea (dinner to us) in the oven to stay warm. Then they’d go to the polls together.

Mum would vote Labour, Dad would vote Conservative. Then they’d come home and Mum would get Dad’s tea up. There were no big political confrontations. They were just exercising their right, and fulfilling their obligation, to vote.

I was always told, “People fought a war for our right to vote.” So what mattered was that they voted, not how they voted. That was their right.

That was just a healthy difference of opinion. Mind you, this was in the days before media pundits decided differing political views were fundamentally incompatible. In the world before planners and marketing departments.

Nowadays that would be a household made up of two representatives of opposite, mutually incompatible, hostile psychographic groups. But Mum and Dad, being ordinary people, didn’t know they were supposed to behave like that. So they didn’t.

Them and millions of others. They voted and that was that. That’s what people do, that’s how they live their lives. They don’t do things according to the tramlines media gurus lay down.

They don’t stay within the boxes we’ve got them in. They don’t think and act the way we think they should. That’s what free will is.

I was discussing this with Ken Livingstone once. We’d just finished doing an anti Third World Debt commercial. We were talking about Margaret Thatcher as the only politician that understood the working class. Ken agreed, being working class himself he knew what I meant.

The Labour party had become the party of the Left. That’s not the same as the working class. I told him that my mum had voted Labour ever since she’d been old enough to vote, in the 1920s.

Then in 1984, after my dad died, she went to vote on her own. I said to her, “I suppose you voted Labour as usual?” She said, “No, I voted Conservative.”

I was gobsmacked after over 50 years of voting Labour. I asked Mum why she’d done that. She said, “Did you see that old man on TV on Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph, wearing a donkey jacket? At least Mrs Thatcher showed the proper respect and dressed smartly.” Ken Livingstone sat there shaking his head, saying, “I know, I know, poor Michael never understood the working class. He thought he was showing solidarity with them.” 

People don’t do what they’re supposed to do. The working class don’t do what The Guardian thinks they should do. They vote with their hearts not their heads.

Because that’s what we all do. When we media professionals strategise about advertising, it’s rational and logical, as if all people will behave according to our plans. Then, when we leave the office, we become consumers and do exactly what our emotions tell us we should do. That’s why it’s our job to excite people, not to try to herd them.

We have to make a case in the simplest, most memorable, way we can. Then get out of the way. There’s security in hiding behind long words and convoluted thinking, but no real power. We have to go beyond the complicated to get to the simple.

Over 2,000 years ago, Democritus said, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited.”

People, all of us, are simpler than we want to believe. Advertising, all of it, is simpler than we want it to be. I’m convinced, in communication, simplicity is power.

But three of my heroes: Brian Clough, Bill Bernbach, and Ron Greenwood, all felt even more strongly. They all said, “Simplicity is genius.”

My first encounter with a planner

My first encounter with a planner was at BMP in the seventies. I’d just come back from New York, and they didn’t have planners there. Over there the creatives had to do the thinking for themselves.

So I’d never met a planner before. The first one I met (like every single planner I’ve ever met since) had a university degree.
He also had a beard. And glasses, roll neck jumper, corduroy trousers, and Earth Shoes (the seventies version of Birkenstocks).

In fact the whole university, intellectual look at that time. Anyway, we were working on Pepsi. The target market was 13 year old kids, and they were trying to find out more about them. So I sat behind a two-way mirror and watched this guy run the group.

They were a scruffy little bunch of 13 year olds from Poplar. The planner pointed to a large board with the names of lots of TV shows on it.

He said to the kids, “Now, do you watch any of these shows on television?”

One little kid said, “Yeah, we watch all them. Except Star Trek, UFO, and Thunderbirds. We don’t watch them.” All the other little kids agreed.

The planner stopped and said, “Would you repeat that?” The little kid said, “Yeah, we watch all them, except Star Trek, UFO, and Thunderbirds. We don’t watch them.”

The planner looked towards the mirror, which he knew we were behind, and raised an eyebrow. He turned back to the group of kids.

He said, “So, does this mean that speculation about some vague technological future has no place in your everyday lives?”

The little kid said, “No, they ain’t on no more.

Now that's an account man

Gordon Smith used to work in the studio at CDP. One day the studio head gave him a piece of artwork for a finished ad.

The artwork was ripped in half, and the studio head asked him to repair it. Gordon said, “What happened to it.” The studio head said, “Frank just sold it.”

Apparently, what had happened was that Frank Lowe, then a young account man, had presented the finished ad to a junior client. The junior client made the most of the opportunity.

He stroked his chin, narrowed his eyes and said, “I don’t think it’s quite there yet.” Frank said, “This is the ad I agreed with your board to do, and we already have the space booked.”

The client said, “Yes, but I’d like to see a couple of changes.” Frank turned the ad over, ripped it in half and threw it in the corner.

The client screamed, “What are you doing?”

Frank said, “Well you said you didn’t want to run that ad. Perhaps you can tell me what you do want to do.”

The client said, “I didn’t mean that.” Frank said, “Of course, starting all over again means we’ll miss the copy date that’s already paid for.”

The client said, “Hang on, you’ve misunderstood what I meant.” Frank said, “And the board will want to know why you’re not running the ad they asked me to do.”

The client began picking up the two halves of the ad. “Look, isn’t there some way we can salvage this ad and still make the copy date?” he said. “I thought you didn’t like it.” Said Frank said.

“No, no, I want to run it exactly as it is. Can you help me, please?” said the client. “I’ll see what I can do.” Said Frank.

Which is why Gordon had to put the ad back together because Frank had just sold it. Now that’s an account man.

Just because we’re bored, doesn’t mean everyone is

A couple of years back I went to the Tower of London one Friday evening. It was after it had shut and all the crowds had gone. It was twilight and very atmospheric.

Walking through the Tower of London at night, with no crowds, is walking through history. You can hear your footsteps echoing off the outer walls the Romans built. You can smell the stone as you walk through the gateway the Normans built. You walk past the tower where Richard III buried the little Princes, and wonder if their bones are still there. You walk where Raleigh must have walked while waiting to die.

For so many people, once they entered under the portcullis they never left. You can feel the sense of dread everywhere.

I was with a small group of people who were there for a ceremony to mark the new monument placed where the chopping block used to stand. This was the chopping block that was used to behead the nobility (commoners were beheaded publicly, nearby on Tower Hill).

As the last of the sun died we stood on the spot where, among others, two Queens and a Saint had been beheaded. The service itself was conducted in the chapel nearby, built by Henry VIII.

Under the ground where we would be standing were the bones of those beheaded (as traitors they weren’t allowed a proper burial or tomb).

The music we were to listen to was songs composed by them, the night before their death. And while we were soaking in all this history and atmosphere, the Beefeater who was leading our little party round spoke to us.

He said, "Are you all watching ‘How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?’ on the telly?”

None of us had a clue what he was talking about.

He continued, “I hope you’re all going to vote for that Naomi, she’s streets ahead of the rest: beautiful girl, lovely voice. That’s who me and my wife are voting for.”

We couldn’t understand why he would interrupt this moment with such trivia. But to him, it was the other way round.

You see everything we were fascinated with was old news to him. He walked around this every day, this was just work. So he wanted to talk about something more interesting.

Like a TV reality show he was looking forward to watching. Because he was bored he automatically assumed we were bored too. What was going on with him must be what was going on with everybody.

That’s the attitude which summarises advertising at present. It’s bored with the process of selling. It’s bored with the products it has to sell. So we assume consumers must be bored too.

So let’s change the subject to something we’re not bored with. Let’s make a big budget extravaganza, or huge stunts instead. Or let’s do something so whacky and zany no one will even understand it. We’re bored with advertising, let’s make entertainment instead.

Look at Gorilla. Gorilla wasn’t about selling, it was just about doing something strange and fun and whacky that made no sense. And that was fantastically successful.

So that must be the brief for everything from now on. The brief must be to avoid looking like we’re selling anything. The brief must be to do something strange and fun and whacky that makes no sense. It could be the new Gorilla luv. Could it?

Or is it just a Beefeater who’s bored with his job, so he’s looking for something more interesting?