Whatever you do, don't mention the name

I was being interviewed by someone recently. They wanted my opinion about the relationship between social-media and advertising.

I said, give me an example. She said, “The crowd sourcing thing that happened at that railway station.”

I said, who was that for? She said, “Vodafone.”

I said, Vodafone?

She said, “Er, I think so, or maybe it was Nokia. Someone like that, a mobile phone company anyway.”

I said, let’s back up.

You want to know about the relationship between social-media and advertising. And as an example you’ve given me a commercial, and you can’t remember the name of the company that ran it.

What was the message you got out of that piece of communication?

She said, “Well, I suppose that it’s good to be connected. Mobile phones help everyone stay in touch and interact.”

I said, okay who is that unique to?

She said, “Well no one obviously, all mobile phones do that.”

I said, Okay, so do you think the brief was: let’s run some ads with a generic benefit and sell a lot of mobile phones, our competitors as well as our own?

She said huffily, “Obviously not.”

I said okay, so before you look at the media, look at what you’re putting in the media.

Probably you should sort out what you want to do, before you sort out where to do it.

That’s the problem.

We think we’re in the communication business, but actually we’re in the fashion business. A lot of people start at the answer and work their way back to a problem they can shoe-horn into that answer.

Currently the fashion is social-media. So that’s the answer, now what’s the question.

The actual company that ran the dancing-and-singing-in-the-station ad was T Mobile. The odd thing for me is that it wouldn’t have taken much to get her to remember that.

You don’t have to change a frame of the film. All you have to do is have a line at the end that says something like, “It’s not just a flash-mob. It’s a T Mob”.

Just an old fashioned mnemonic to link it to your brand. Then you can’t remember it as, “It’s not just a flash-mob, it’s a Vodafone”, or a Nokia, or anything else.

And you’re not spending your money advertising your competitors.

But that’s the problem with old-fashioned mnemonics. They’re old fashioned. And we’re not starting from the point of what works.

We’re starting from the point of what’s fashionable.

And fashionable thinking is all you have to do is get the brand values right. If your advertising reflects your brand values people will automatically know who it’s for. Because your brand values are unique.

But are they?

I was having a debate with some students a while back. They wanted to know about celebrities in advertising. When should you use them, when do they work?

I said, okay let’s take David Beckham’s Nike ads as an example.

What does David Beckham have to do with Nike and what does “Impossible is nothing” mean anyway?

Is it just, “Nothing is impossible” backwards? If so, why?

The students spent ten minutes telling me why Beckham was the right image for the brand. The line was modern and catchy. The ads were well written and well shot.

After ten minutes I pointed out David Beckham doesn’t advertise Nike. He advertises Adidas.

We spent 10 minutes discussing the wrong brand. And all the students went, “Oh yeah”.

And wondered what point I was trying to make. That’s why I often feel as if I’m in a different business.

The name of the brand or product is almost seen as a nuisance. Something that gets in the way of the advertising.

It reminds me of art galleries which are sponsored by big companies. These firms can have their names discreetly on the outside of the gallery, but nowhere near the art.

The art must remain pure and free from grubby commercialism. Maybe that’s what we do now. Sponsorship.

The spirit of the law v The letter of the law

When I was a student, I used to make extra money counting the votes at elections.

At East Ham Town hall, we were told to only count votes that were clearly marked with an X next to a candidate’s name. Anything else should be counted as a spoiled vote. We should put it aside to be adjudicated by the Town Clerk later.

As I was counting, one of the votes clearly didn’t meet those criteria. It had a massive black cross running corner to corner across the whole ballot paper. Obviously this person was angry. Disgusted and frustrated, with the candidates, with the system, maybe with democracy in general.

Either way, it didn’t fit the criteria I’d been given. It was pretty obviously a spoiled vote. So I put it aside.

At the end of the evening, the Town Clerk was going through the spoiled votes and he came to that one.

He said, “Well the X intersects at the Conservative candidate’s name. So that was obviously intended as a vote for him”.

And that’s how it was counted.

It didn’t look that way to me. But it made perfect sense to the Town Clerk.

To me it seemed like someone wanting to register their disgust with all the candidates. But that was my intuitive feeling.

It couldn’t be argued by pure logic. Logically, the Town Clerk adhered to the literal interpretation of the criteria.

The only candidate whose name this X could be said to be next to, was the one where the two lines crossed. The Conservative.

This is a logical interpretation versus an intuitive interpretation. It’s why creatives have such problems with research. There’s often no room for intuition, for feeling. Just literal interpretation of the research in a very mechanical way.

But human beings aren’t mechanical. We’re meat, not metal.

In research, people can’t always put into words exactly what they’re feeling. So they get as close as they can.

But this is often taken literally, and dissected bit-by-bit.

My dad was policeman. He always taught me that the correct interpretation is ‘the spirit of the law’ not ‘the letter of the law’.

In other words, use your common sense. Don’t be like a robot. Something may make perfect sense in a literal, mechanical interpretation. But it may not work in the real world.

Experts seem to agree that around 25% of communication is verbal. What you say, the actual words you use.

But apparently 75% of communication is non-verbal. It’s how you say it. Angry, sorry, happy, sad, bored, suspicious, cunning, honest. And this is the part you interpret with your feelings, not your brain. It’s intuitive.

So three-quarters of our communication is the non-logical part. The intuitive, common sense part. The spirit of the law, not the letter of the law. Einstein said two things I like a lot.He said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

And he also said, “We will not get any major insights by gradual, incremental logic. First we must make the intuitive leap, then we must build a bridge of logic back to where we started.”

So logic comes after the creative leap, not before. As David Hume said, “Reason alone is motivationally inert.”

Semiotics v Reality

When I first went to Singapore, I went out one morning looking for a local café.

In Singapore, blocks of flats are built on massive concrete stilts with open areas underneath. Children play in these areas. The locals use them to hang their washing out.

But under this particular block some enterprising local had started a little café. There were several tables around, with lots of stools around them. On the tables were bowls of fruit. All very neat and clean.

They’d even hung some curtains, to separate off the kitchen. They didn’t have any customers and I couldn’t see anyone serving.

So I sat down and waited. I thought I’d have a local coffee. I waited quite a while, no one came.

Then I noticed someone peeking at me from around a corner. As soon as I saw them they ducked back.

After a while someone else was peeping at me from another corner. When they saw me looking they ducked back.

This went on for a while.

Eventually I thought I should look for someone to order a coffee from. So I got up and went over to where the kitchen area was.

I pulled the curtain aside and looked in. There wasn’t anyone in there either.

All there was a counter about 7 feet long, 2 feet wide, 2 feet deep. It was set up on trestles and draped with a tapestry.

I thought that’s a strange counter. Why did it need to be so deep? And where was the tea urn, or coffee-making machine?

Gradually it dawned on me. It wasn’t a counter. It was a coffin.

There was a dead body inside.

I’d walked into the preparations for a wake. So I gradually backed out and left.

The locals wouldn’t come and tell me because they didn’t speak English. And they couldn’t understand why an Ang Mo (white man) would come and sit at a Chinese wake.

I couldn’t work out why they didn’t have any signs around to tell anyone that it was a wake. Obviously they didn’t think they needed to do that.

In their world, everyone knew it was a wake. They’d never encounter anyone who didn’t know what a wake looked like. Their semiotics were ingrained.

Why would you need a sign for something everyone knew?

But my semiotics were ingrained too. And they were different, to me it was a café. It had tables, chairs, fruit, everything ready for customers.

See semiotics is just another word for a language. An accepted system of signs and symbols for communicating.

Different semiotics needn’t be a problem if you keep separate systems of semiotics, separate.

But it is a problem if you’re in the communications business.

I recently did a recording and dub for a commercial. When the final mix was ready the engineer played it back and it sounded great.

I asked him if he could play it back over small, crappy speakers. Because everything sounds great over massive studio speakers. But the reality is it’ll never be heard that way.

So he played it back, and I said I thought the sound effects were louder in the gaps between the VO.

He said, “Yes, they sound louder but actually they’re not.” I said, yes but they do sound louder.

He said, “They only sound louder because there’s no VO at that point. Actually they’re the same level.”

I said, yes but they still sound louder.

He said, “Look, I can show you on the dials they’re not.”

I said, yes, but that’s kind of irrelevant if they sound louder.

He said, “Well I can lower them if you like.”

And he did, but he wasn’t happy about it.

Because in his world, what it says on the dials is the reality. And I was being unreasonable.

But in my world what the ordinary person’s brain thinks it hears is the reality. That’s the first thing we have to recognise about our business.

There are two realities, two sets of semiotics. The professionals and the consumers.

And we need to decide who we’re actually producing ads for. Are we doing ads for the respect of our peers, or for the public? For awards, or people in the street.

Sometimes they’re the same thing, but a lot of times they’re not.

Then which way do we go? Do we believe what it says on the dial? Or do we believe what we hear?

Nobody's Perfect

(I was going to rewrite this article, pull bits out, précis it.

But it’s actually so good, I think I should just print the whole thing.

It’s written by Al Ries who, along with Jack Trout, wrote one of my favourite books ‘Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind”.

This article is written in response to a book that was apparently very critical about Bill Bernbach.)

Recognizing Good Ideas Can Be More Important than Creativity

by Al Ries 
Published: July 06, 2009

“Nobody’s perfect” is the title of Doris Willens' new book on Bill Bernbach and the golden age of advertising.

And just to make sure you get the point of the title, the book explores every imperfection she could find in the career of perhaps the most famous person in the history of advertising.

Fair enough. Nobody's perfect. But I think she failed to stress the essence of Bernbach's genius which, in my opinion, was his incredible ability to recognize a good idea. (Willens' book is particularly interesting since I knew many of the people she writes about. Our agency at the time shared the Uniroyal account with Doyle Dane Bernbach, although we had by far the smaller share.)

In spite of Doris Willens' many negative comments about Bill Bernbach, I think he was a true advertising genius.

One example from Willens' book: "From Helmut Krone's wastepaper basket, Bernbach fished wads of crumpled papers and beamed upon spreading open a sheet with the words, "We're only No. 2. So we try harder." (That was the genesis of the Avis campaign, No. 10 on Ad Age's list of the top 100 advertising campaigns of the 20th century.)

Another example: Future Hall of Fame art director Bill Taubin and copywriter David Reider discovered that Israeli airline El Al made all its flights at night. So they took the idea, "The only fly-by-night airline," to Bill Bernbach for his approval.

"Are you kidding?" End of meeting.

Sorting the good from the bad
In the course of developing a campaign, advertising people usually dream up lots of ideas, some good and some bad. But no one had the ability to sort the good from the bad like Bernbach. It's a trait that's extremely rare.

How rare? You only have to watch a dozen TV commercials or leaf through a dozen magazine ads to figure that one out.

Most advertising is mediocre at best. And yet every advertisement was approved by someone at some company somewhere in the world. Why didn't the people who approved these mediocre advertisements demand to see "something better?"

The truth is, they thought the ads were good. Actually it's worse. Based on my personal experience in working with advertising people, I believe that most of them thought their advertisements were "great."

The advertising industry worships the creative process. At Cannes and at countless other places, the industry lavishes praise on its creative folks, the people who think up these wonderful ads.

But it's a rare individual who is good at recognizing the power of an idea once it is created.

You lose your objectivity once you create an idea, especially an idea in which you have invested a lot of emotional energy. Every creative person needs a Bill Bernbach, a sounding board to bounce ideas off of.

The difficulty of judging
In my opinion, there are far more people who are good at coming up with great advertising ideas than there are people who are good at recognizing great ideas created by others.

In the history of the advertising industry, there were far more David Ogilvys, Hal Rineys and Shirley Polykoffs than there were Bill Bernbachs. Far more.

Why is it so difficult to judge the potential effectiveness of a proposed advertisement? I believe most people tend to make their judgments against a background of "accepted standards," or conventional wisdom.

Take Doyle Dane Bernbach's Volkswagen campaign, which was launched in 1959 with the famous "Think small" advertisement. (According to Advertising Age, the No. 1 campaign of the 20th century.) If there was one ad that marked the start of the golden era of advertising, "Think small" was the one.

But how did the '60s differ from the '50s? I recently analyzed 146 automobile advertisements from the 1950s and compared them with the Volkswagen ad.

Almost all of the 1950s auto ads (137 advertisements, or 94%) showed people in the ads. How else was a creative director going to demonstrate the pleasure that car buyers might feel about their new acquisitions?

Almost all of them (135 advertisements, or 92%) used artwork, not photography. How else was a creative director going to make the cars look long and low and beautiful?

Most of them (102, or 70%) used multiple illustrations. Some single-page advertisements had as many as eight separate illustrations. How else was a creative director going to communicate all of the car's exciting features except by using a number of different illustrations?

Almost all the ads were in color with hand-lettered headlines, big illustrations and large logotypes. How else was a creative director going to communicate the excitement of buying a new car?

Some typical automobile headlines from the 1950s:

Buick: "You can make your 'someday' come true now."

Cadillac: "Maybe this will be the year."

Oldsmobile: "You've got to drive it to believe it!"

Chevrolet: "Filled with grace and great new things."

Now compare these ads with "Think small." The Volkswagen ad was in black and white with a small illustration, lots of white space and a headline totally lacking in news value. Everybody knew that Beetles were small cars.

At the time the ad ran, Volkswagen had been in the American market for nine years, had sold more than 350,000 vehicles and had generated a lot of favorable publicity.

Looking back
In retrospect, it's easy to see that the difference between the 1950s automobile ads and the 1960s Volkswagen ads. It's the difference between complexity and simplicity, between artificiality and realism.

But why didn't the creative directors of the 1950s value simplicity and realism? Because it's exceptionally hard to go against accepted wisdom. That wasn't the way advertising was done in that decade -- especially automobile advertising.

People don't want to be different. They want to be better. Clients want advertising à la mode. And most creative directors want the same thing. They want advertising "in the fashion" of the times, only better.

That's why it's hard to recognize a great advertising idea. It doesn't look right because it goes against accepted wisdom.

I remember a new-business presentation we made to a large account a number of years ago. The company's CEO dismissed us by saying: "Your ads have big pictures and this is the era of long copy."

Bernbach never believed in à la mode advertising. His creative philosophy was outlined in a guide he once wrote:

"Merely to let your imagination run riot, to dream unrelated dreams, to indulge in graphic acrobatics and verbal gymnastics is not being creative. The creative person has harnessed his imagination. He has disciplined it so that every thought, every idea, every line he draws, every light and shadow in every photograph he takes, makes more vivid, more believable, more persuasive the original theme or product advantage he has decided he must convey."

Now I wonder what he might have said about the Press Grand Prix winner at Cannes this year, a Wrangler advertisement with an illustration of a woman lying in a pool of water pretending to be a crocodile and the headline: "We are animals."

"Are you kidding?"

Use your loaf

We were on holiday in Umbria, and we were driving to a medieval, hilltop city called Cortona. So we put it into the SatNav and followed the directions.

The SatNav got us to Cortona okay, but I wasn’t sure about the route. It was taking us to the heart of the city.

The streets were getting narrower and narrower. Something didn’t seem right.

But the SatNav was the expert, and it said straight ahead. So we kept going.

Up tiny little ancient cobblestone tracks built centuries before cars. Still the SatNav said keep going.

The roads changed from streets to alleys. The alleys changed into narrow paths, I had to pull the wing mirrors in.

The SatNav said straight ahead. Eventually I stopped.

Cathy said, “Carry on, the TomTom says straight ahead.” I said, “Cath, that’s medieval steps in front. We can’t drive down that unless you want to do a remake of The Italian Job.”

And we had to carefully and slowly reverse all the way back. We went the wrong way because what I had done was to totally put my trust in an expert: the TomTom. And switch off my common sense.

That’s what we all do.

Steve Henry wrote the Holsten Pils campaign using the ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’ technique.

We wanted a young, alternative comedian to intercut with the old footage of dead film stars. As if they were both talking about Holsten Pils.

Steve had found a pretty-much unknown comedian that he thought was great. A Scottish guy called Robbie Coltrane.

So we shot the test films and Steve was right, he was great. The only problem was that Robbie Coltrane was fat. And all the experts know you don’t use fat people in beer ads. Because, if you do, people will work out beer makes you fat. And they won’t buy our beer.

But here’s an unusual thought. What if beer drinkers already know that beer makes you fat? What if it’s not a secret?

Every night they go to the pub and drink a lot of beer. With their friends. So they’re probably already fat. And the friends they drink a lot of beer with are probably fat too. And they don’t care. Because they’re having a good time.

The Pareto principle states that a minority of your consumers account for the majority of your sales. So it obviously makes sense to target these people.

This applies particularly to the beer market. We’re not selling beer to ladies who care about their figures. We’re selling it to blokes, who care about football and beer, and cars and beer, and page 3 birds and beer.

They’ve already confronted the inevitability of  their beer-belly and decided to carry on drinking beer. So the job of the advertising isn’t to stop them finding out that beer isn’t a diet product.

The job of advertising isn’t even to get them to drink more beer. The job of the advertising is to let them drink beer if they want to. But get them to switch to our beer.

In which case a really funny, preferably unknown, comedian is what we’re looking for. The sort of bloke you’d like to go for a beer with. Robbie Coltrane in fact.

But the experts couldn’t be persuaded. They said you didn’t have fat people in beer advertising and that was that.

So we had to look for a slim, good-looking replacement. Eventually we compromised on Griff Rhys Jones instead.

He was well known, and he was better looking, but most importantly he was thin.

So no one would know that beer makes you fat. What would have happened if we'd used Robbie instead of Griff? Would we have sold more beer or less?

We'll never know.

Luckily we had experts to advise us. They're called experts because they've learned the rules.

And you never break the rules. No matter what common-sense says. 

The facts may not be the facts

At the beginning of the First World War, British soldiers went into battle wearing cloth caps. Obviously a lot of them died.

The government had to do something fast. So they issued every soldier with a tin helmet. They thought that would solve the problem.

But it seemed to make it worse. The number of injuries rose dramatically, and many more soldiers ended up in hospital.

At first they couldn’t work out what was wrong. Were the helmets restricting the soldiers’ vision? Were the helmets making them foolhardy? What was wrong?

It turned out that nothing was wrong. The helmets were working perfectly, which was why more soldiers were ending up in hospital. Because they weren’t dead.

The most lethal weapon in the early days of the war was the air-burst artillery shell.

As the troops were advancing, the shells would explode above the ground.

Shrapnel would go straight through the cloth caps and take their heads off.

But the shrapnel couldn’t penetrate the tin helmets. So it hit the rest of their body.

And they were wounded instead of killed. And hospital admissions showed a sharp upturn. Looking at the facts differently presents a completely different picture.

Later in the war it became apparent that Britain was in danger of losing the war to the U boats.

Britain is an island, it can only be supplied by sea. If the Germans cut this link, Britain could be starved into submission.

One answer was to form the cargo ships into large groups. Convoys that could be protected by Royal Navy warships. But when they looked at the numbers they saw there were thousands of ships sailing from British ports every day.

They couldn’t possibly arrange that many ships into convoys. So they didn’t try, and Britain nearly lost the war.

Until someone spotted that 90% of those ships were sailing across the English Channel to France.

The trip was so short they didn’t need protecting. The vital 10% of ships that were going to North America could easily be formed into convoys.

And, in two world wars, that was the system that won the Battle of the Atlantic. But, if no one had bothered looking at the numbers differently, we’d all be speaking German.

When I was at BMP, we were working on a COI account: Fire Prevention. In those days, most domestic fires were due to chip-pan fires.

David Batterby was our MD, and he came to see me, really excited. He said he and the planner had just had a great idea. Here it is:

Creative Leap

What measure will the COI use to evaluate if the fire-prevention campaign is successful?

Obviously, the only measure they’ve got is the number of times fire engines are called out.

So the real focus of the campaign is to
reduce Fire Brigade responses.

Creative Leap

How can we reduce the number of call-outs? Well if people could put the fire out themselves, they wouldn’t need to call the fire brigade. So let’s tell them how to put out a chip-pan fire.

Creative Leap

But this is a ‘fire prevention’ campaign.

So let’s show them how to put out a chip-pan fire in such a scary way that they never want to have one. So that was the brief the account group gave the creatives. After the campaign ran, Fire Brigade callouts to chip-pan fires went down by 40%.

We won a D&AD silver award for the ads. But the real creative work was done before the brief got anywhere near the creative department.

Advertising doesn't work like we think it does

A couple of years back, I noticed a lot of stories in the paper about a split in the Church of England.

Apparently, the C of E had run a campaign that had caused a controversy amongst bishops. I was quite surprised the C of E had such a high profile.

This story was at least half a page in all the national daily papers. Plus it made the TV news, and interviews on radio programmes.

It just shows you, Christianity is still a big topic in a lot of people’s lives. It must be to be capable of causing such controversy.

If it’s such a big deal in the papers. It’s obviously still relevant to the majority of people. At least that’s what I thought.

Then I met the PR guy who worked on it. He told me the C of E had come to him with a brief to get their profile up. And they had no money.

So his start point was, we need to start people talking about them. Create a controversy.

But if we have no money, we have no media. No, but we do have a lot of churches, 13,000 in fact.

And at least half of those churches have bulletin boards in front. And each bulletin board is a potential poster site. And a national campaign of 6,000 posters is a big campaign. So we do have media after all.

And so they briefed a campaign of posters that would fit this media (about 3 feet tall by 6 feet wide).

I saw one of these posters up. It said “Crucified. Made to wear a crown of thorns. Speared in the side. Now that’s what you call a bad-hair day.”

I didn’t like the poster. But what was brilliant was what the PR guy did with it.

He sent copies of it to all the bishops and asked them what they thought of it. Naturally, some of them liked it and some of them didn’t.

He then called up the papers and told them there was a split in the C of E over whether they should be advertising or not.

He said it was the old guard versus the modernisers.

He said it was a rift that went to the heart of how the C of E saw itself in the modern world.

He created the story and gave it to the papers.

The editors always need a story, they’ve got a paper to fill every day.

And one that comes to them is better than one they have to go looking for.

So they ran his story.

The Church of England got massive national coverage. Their profile went up, as briefed. They got millions of pounds of media for the cost of a few small posters.

That’s real creativity.

The same guy was telling me about the Sony ‘Balls’ commercial that was shot in San Francisco.

He said the PR company got involved before the commercial was shot.

They went to the local papers in San Francisco and told them about the shoot.

They said it was quite a feather in San Francisco’s cap.

Of all the places in the world they could have chosen to shoot, a UK company was coming all the way to their city to shoot a commercial that would run all over Europe.

For the local papers this was a big story.

So they ran lots of articles and pictures of the shoot.

The PR guy then took all these stories and sent them to all the English newspapers.

He said, “Look, this commercial isn’t even running in the USA, yet it’s so big even their newspapers are giving it all this coverage.”

The UK papers then ran stories about the Sony commercial before it had even run on our TVs. Including spot times when it was on, so you could look out for it.

The effect of this was to magnify the commercial into a big event, like a movie launch. Way beyond the media the client was paying for.

Now that’s real creativity.

Which is why Alex Bogusky says that, often when Crispin Porter Bogusky get a brief, they don’t start by thinking about advertising.

They start by thinking, “If we had a PR campaign running after the ads broke, what would that look like?”

Then they work backwards from there.

TV advertising is just the trigger for the PR.

Which is how they came up with their Burger King campaign.

They thought, “What would you be prepared to sacrifice for a Whopper?” would make an interesting story.

Then they thought, how do we make that happen?

So they did the promotion, “Sacrifice ten friends from your ‘Facebook Friends’ list and we’ll give you a free Whopper.”

And, to turn it into a controversial story for the media, it then became, “Which ten friends are you prepared to sacrifice?”

And of course, they got many times the media they were paying for.

Which is what advertising should be doing.

 

Even if it isn’t always advertising.