Night Driving - what a glorious idea

I have often suggested that brands should abandon the idea of owning a target audience - and try to own a target moment instead.

Volkswagen's Night Driving campaign is a spectacularly good example of this.

Rather deftly it connects the brand to the last remaining mode of driving which is still unambiguously enjoyable. 

For many people, surely, the prospect of a damn fine night drive is a pleasure like little else. It can even act as an inducement both to sobriety and sexual continence....  "Appreciative as I am of your kind offer to 'come in for coffee', I can't help noticing that the old motor's running rather smoothly at the moment and the thought of a nice run home rather trumps the idea of a few moments spent entwined in the throes of ecstasy, if it's all the same to you. How about a coffee to go? It's just I've got these new cup-holders...." 

The promise of a trip on the night-bus will rarely have this effect. 

This idea understands all that.

Mind you, when you think about it, the idea has been done before.

Don't worry, chaps; not in advertising. No, it's been done by Edward Hopper.

I have always liked Hopper more than any other 20th Century artist. For one thing, the people depicted in his work are not French, and so it is easier to develop affectionate feelings for them. But the really wonderful thing about Hopper is the way he captures and reframes of a particular mood-moment - often after dark.

Night Hawks you all know. There is also a particularly fine depiction of a deserted gas-station.  All of his signature pictures seem to reposition the idea of solitude. Once you have seen these works, certain moments are never quite the same again. A stop for petrol at a remote BP station at 1am suddenly acquires a poignancy you'd never quite expect.

It's a wonderful thing to do. And wonderful to see advertising doing it.

If you heard a friend had landed a job at the Playboy mansion, your first question probably wouldn’t be “What’s the pension plan like?”

Or how advertising people could have a much better life on far less money.

I am old enough to remember a time in London when friends would spend the odd evening trying to work out what our contemporaries were earning. Back then, someone’s salary was an interesting source of speculation.

Nowadays there isn’t much point in asking what someone earns. Instead you can find out all you need to know about a Londoner’s wealth by asking two apparently innocuous questions instead. These are “Do you work in banking” and “when did you buy your house”.

A third, supplementary question “are you a Russian criminal of some kind” may occasionally clarify matters.

The first question is important. The last few years have seen rewards in the financial sector move far beyond reach of any other salaried economic activity. Of my own university contemporaries, with one exception, every single person who works in banking or finance is richer than everyone who does not. Along with that spectacular exception (Dr Michael Lynch, the onetime billionaire founder of Autonomy) I am one of only a few people not working in finance or law who could be described as vaguely prosperous.

But the housing question is just as much a cause for concern. Someone brilliant in our industry who has not yet bought a flat, or who has bought one only recently, cannot reasonably expect to be well housed in London in their lifetime. Contrastingly almost any minor advertising staffer who borrowed heavily in the mid 80s is a millionaire. If this iniquity affected people by gender or race rather than by age we would consider it appalling.

These problems aren’t unconnected. The property issue is certainly worsened by the city/oligarch factor (it is an eye-opener to see how well senior advertising colleagues live outside London, New York and Tokyo where they do not have to compete with large financial or expatriate communities). It is compounded by a tax policy which taxes earnings derived from work at 41% but gives vast allowances to money made from selling your house, engaging in Russian criminal activity or peculiar banking practices. Taxing the proceeds of hard work more heavily than the proceeds of luck and deviousness seems odd behaviour from a chancellor who is supposed to be a Socialist and a Presbyterian, but there you go. It’s also a bit galling to see London endlessly celebrated as a “centre for the creative industries” when the city’s real wealth goes to people of high numerical ability yet limited imagination working in a culture of stultifying conformity.

So how can we compete? We can’t.

So, er, don’t.

Everything we have learned as marketers surely teaches us that you should never tackle a competitor in a field where they enjoy unassailable strength.

It is now almost impossible to out-earn people in financial services. It is, however, amazingly easy to outthink them. They are not imaginative to begin with. But, on top of this, their herd mentality has rendered them incapable of independent thought, action or taste. A successful banker simply aspires to be an even more successful banker. (You can see the effect of this in ghettos such as Clapham or Fulham where the uniformity of aspiration has created something resembling a council estate only with the average income multiplied by 50.)

Indeed, so driven now are such people by competing with each other (rather than asking whether the game is worth winning) that, in the Anglo-Saxon world at least, almost all people with type-A personalities (what I call ‘Nature’s BMW drivers’) have completely lost the plot of capitalism. The purpose of which is surely not to accumulate as much money as possible but to accumulate as much money as is necessary to have a good time with as little effort as possible.

In asking the question “who has more money” we have completely lost sight of the question “what is this money for?”

Look at the strange people who are admired in business nowadays. Twenty years ago it was people like Hugh Hefner or James Goldsmith, people with lives worth emulating: now it’s a bunch of austere workaholics – or septuagenarians who still go to the office every day. Do you think Hefner (a pioneer of the working-from-home movement, incidentally) ever took a Blackberry into the grotto? Now there was a man who really understood work-life balance.

Today, no sooner is the word out that Conrad Black knows how to throw a decent party than the vultures start circling.

We, as a creative industry should fight this trend. We should ignore the senseless greed and purposeless effort of other areas of business and set out to establish ourselves as simply the best place for sane, imaginative and thoughtful people to work anywhere in the UK. Which isn’t far from what the business was when I joined it in 1988.

Back then we earned a lot less than our banking colleagues too. But I don’t think we doubted for a second that we had other benefits which compensated for the differential. With a little imagination (and that is our USP versus bankers, remember) we can restore those benefits.

Here’s how we could do it at Ogilvy.

1)      Move at least half the agency out of London. Brighton or Ashford might be a good idea for a second location. New electronic means of communication no longer require everyone to be in London all the time. Ashford (with fast trains to Victoria, Charing X and St Pancras) is a hideous place but the surrounding countryside is glorious, with apple-cheeked barmaids serving large tankards of frothing ale on every village green. An agency which offered the option of living out of London would attract more than its share of those bright young talents who can’t afford London. Your agency could have its own cricket pitch (better than a pool table, no?). Best of all, people could stay in Whitstable all week.

2)      Cut all senior people’s salaries by 20% and cap them at around £100,000. As part of my rejection of senseless capitalist thrust, I occasionally ask myself whether extra money would actually add to my happiness. The answer is the opposite. When given more money than you need, one is prone to engage in foolish, uncreative, status-driven activities such as buying second homes abroad (only sensible, frankly, if your idea of a good summer holiday is going to the same bloody place every year and then spending two weeks learning the Italian for “my septic tank appears to have exploded”). Yachts  - no more than floating caravans that make you sick - are even stupider still. The rising levels of wealth, coupled with the low prices of consumer goods, mean that differential displays of status require increasingly foolish expenditure.  

3)      Use half the money saved in senior salaries to create a large bonus pool to be shared among younger staff – who generally need lump sums more than senior people do.

4)      Use most of the remainder to join Netjets and keep an Ogilvy Gulfstream poised on the tarmac at Lydd or Biggin Hill 24 hours a day. As Hefner, Warren Buffett and Conrad Black have all found, private aviation is the single compelling reason to be rich rather than merely prosperous. And, as Conrad found, the very best kind of private aviation is the kind you don’t pay for yourself. (It’s more tax efficient, too.)

5)      Award bonuses not of money but of working perks. After a certain length of service people earn the right to work from home weekly or to work irregular hours.

6)      Spend well on hospitality and entertaining (Paris, remember, is only an hour and a half away).  If they are having a good enough time, people don’t mind what they are paid. I mean, if you heard that a friend of yours had landed a job at the Playboy mansion, your first question probably wouldn’t be “what’s the pension plan like?”

7)      Instigate a four-day working week of 10 hours per day. I do most of my best thinking at the weekend, which means a three-day weekend would make me 50% more productive. And what a USP that would be for future recruits.

8)      Remove payment by the hour and replace it with – well, anything frankly. This system of payment maintains the absurd pretence that value created is proportionate to effort expended –the very belief a creative organisation should be fighting. According to payment by the hour, the value of a song is directly proportionate to the time it took to write it. This conception leads to the encouragement of unproductive but time consuming activities in agencies: account management, for instance.

9)      Kent Grammar schools would amount to a saving of perhaps £30,000 in pretax income for most senior staff with children – partly offsetting my swingeing pay-cuts. Private education is another rich man’s folly – generally a means of ensuring that your children can eventually lead professional lives in banking and accountancy involving just as much grinding tedium as your own. (Fortunately I have different aspirations for my two daughters: my dream is for them to become country and western singers, and hence I have told them that an expensive education would be a serious setback to their careers versus, say, time spent waitressing at a truckstop.)

10)  Restore compulsory company cars (au fond people really prefer cars to salary – but if you give them – or their wives – any choice in the matter, they tend to choose the boring option of money instead). The agency should also operate a small stable of really flash motors to loan to younger staff. If a 23 year old can turn up at a wedding with their banker chums in an Aston once a year, who cares what they actually earn?

Money is, in short, a commodity. As believers in differentiation, we should seek to reward people in currencies that our competitors cannot supply in greater quantities – such as civility or quality of life. Unusually this approach could actually hold appeal to our shareholders and ourselves.

How do you react to this proposal? I would be very happy to discuss it further – either in the space below or at a meeting held at a country pub some time after 11am.

Too radical? It is only a later expression of David Ogilvy’s dream of moving the agency to Princeton from Manhattan, a plan vetoed by cowardly colleagues. Its time has now come.

This Facebook thing - allow me to explain.

It is time for me to acknowledge what anomalous Welsh papist Mark Earls has been telling us all along: we really are a herd species. (Humans, I mean, not just the Welsh.)

And I finally came to this conclusion when I found myself checking Facebook or Twitter every morning before I turned to a newspaper or opened up my email.

Why would I do this?

In other words, why is it more compelling to know that one of my friends is buying a latte than to read news of geniuine importance? I think Mark provides most of the explanation in his recent and excellent Twitter article in Market Leader... but there is one more thing I would like to add.

In Market Leader Mark describes much of the anthropology that lies behind social media. That people, quite simply, like contact with other people. And that interpersonal communication does not exist simply for the transmission of information but as a form of bonding activity.

Indeed I was very taken recently to hear of a practice that has arisen in Africa. In that continent, many of the mobile operators allow users (they are rarely subscribers) to send anyone unlimited free SMSes reading simply "Call me" - the reason being that at any one time many people have no available call time left on their PAYG accounts. Every day millions of people take advantage of this, even when they have no wish to hear from anyone else: the sending of "call me" has come to mean "I care", "I love you" or "I am thinking of you"; a kind of digital "Ca va?". If you actually want the person to call, I understand, you send the message twice.

It's a super illustration of the value of a kind of communication that is as high in value as it is low in bandwidth. The very kind of communication which has been most persistently undervalued and misunderstood.

While people have waxed on endlessly about the possibility of video on mobile*, rich media 3G networks, WAP and Video over Broadband, most of the real successes have been those minimal, short forms of interpersonal communication (such as SMS) where a) the effort required is small and b) the level of self-importance exhibited by the sender is relatively low. Forms of communication whose analogue equivalents are far closer to the saucy seaside postcard than the two-page A4 letter on headed paper. 

Why are these forms so popular, Simply because people like DollyMessitering - sharing myriad (often unimportant) facts about their lives with others. But they are inhibited from doing so when the effort is high (a phone call demands five minutes of pleasantries which an SMS does not) or when the form of communication has too great an import or level of intrusion to justify the content (you can reasonably use the post to send a wedding invitation but not a minor item of news).

Facebook and Twitter add something altogether new to the individual's communications palette - in that they are the first ever forms of digital communication to be semi-addressable. What I mean by semi-addressable is that they generally confine your outpourings to a community of friends - but the message is not addressed to specifically named individuals.

As a result of this, they enable communication to take place at a gloriously trivial** level. If I were to email you daily with news of my plans for the day, or to tell you of a vague intention to take my kids camping, you would think me an astondingly self important person (if you don't already) or perhaps insane; had I any sensitivity at all I would also feel that the addressing of the email to you imposes on you an obligation to read it out of all proportion to the importance of the contents. If I Twitter or Facebook the same information indiscriminately to my friends, it is on the shared understanding that noone need read or act on the information at all - indeed it may not be aimed at them at all, but some other friends on my list.

That, in short, is the value of the semi-addressable medium. They are the natural home for peripheral or tangential information. The birdsong of social intercourse. Analogous in many ways to the noticeboards we used to have in agencies before email seemed to kill them. Except these boards are visible worldwide.

So far, fine. But why does this matter to brands? Actually for a very good reason. Quite simply because, contrary to what you may have heard from the odd agency claiming that "your brand belongs at the centre of consumers' lives" this simply isn't true.

At the centre of people's lives belong their families, their homes, their communities, their religions and their closest friends. Brands - with very few exceptions - have a natural place either at the periphery of people's lives or occupying the network spaces - the interstices - between people.

As such I truly wonder whether these social media, as natural homes for matters of peripheral importance, and for incidental information - aren't a more natural home for brands than radio or TV.

After all, perhaps the greatest value of many brands is as low-bandwidth, highly compressed form of telegraphing to our friends the more trivial aspects of who we are. For this, social media seem perfect.

And what of brands which actually enable us to project ourselves to our network of friends? I have just suggested to American Express that they issue a card which posts your every purchase (the location, though not necessarily the amount) to Facebook. I think they believe I am mad - but I'll keep trying.

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* Mobile TV was described by one pundit as "like sex out of doors - often desirable but rarely practicable."

** Trivia actually derives from the Latin word for "crossroads" - the place where most minor gossip and twittering took place in the ancient world.

My exciting plans for the Sorrell foundation.

With a tiny fraction of the money divvied up by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, Sir Martin Sorrell could transform the Third World. And through advertising alone.

I was reading An Intimate History of Humanity the other day. And was struck by a marvellous sentence along the lines that "nothing distorts human thinking more than the search for a scapegoat."

This got me thinking. For it seems to me that there is one unfailing rule that pertains the world over: if you really want to mess up a country - or a region - all you need do is give that country someone else on whom to lay all blame for any misfortune that befalls them.

Or, put another way, the world really divides into three types of people: those who believe the glass is half full, those who believe it's half empty, and those who believe that the only reason there is any liquid in the glass at all is because the Americans have pissed in it.

(You can add a little variety by attributing some of the piss to the Israelis and the British as well).

Inter-war Germany, check. The Balkans, check. The Middle-East, check. pre-1990 Ireland, check. Africa, check. The failure of South Africa to criticize Zimbabwe, check. Contemporary Scotland, check. The failure to slow AIDS in Africa, check. All of them cases where someone else got to shoulder the blame.

It is never difficult to propogate this notion, either. Any regime will eagerly connive with you in the pretence that national misfortunes can be laid at the door of some external power, as it handily explains away their own failings, while maintaining the solidarity of the populus against the perceived threat.

Generally the BBC will do a good deal of your work for you too, as it steadfastly maintains the pretence that white Anglo-Saxon Christians are responsible for all the world's ills: with indulgences for your failings being allocated in proportion to the degree to which you practice anti-Americanism, socialism, non-Judeo-Christian religions or general brownness.  

Now I should make clear here that I am passing no judgment on whether the blame is justified or not. Merely that the act of scapegoating is catastrophic for any country. Countries such as India seem to benefit from a fairly sane approach to their colonial past (not banning cricket or tearing up the railways); Mandela's great achievement was surely to avoid some of the wasted energy of recrimination.

So here's my suggestion for the Sorrell foundation. Large posters in all the benighted areas of the world simply reading "You're crap and it's all your fault."

In bomb craters in Sadr City you'd run posters reading "If you were Lutherans, this would be an IKEA". And in Palestine the simple message "If you'd spent as much time working as you did wandering through the streets shouting, you could buy Israel by now."

In truth I think the copy and media buying needs a bit of work. But the core strategy is already there.