Campaign

Does something that survives for eighteen months deserve to be called a strategy?

Or should you fire most of your planners and replace them with jingle-writers?

I am old enough (just) to remember when televisions showed a small glowing dot after they were switched off and when radio dials carried strange words like "Hilversum"; I can remember when (though not why) something called 3-2-1 attracted a weekly audience of 17m; I can even remember an interesting historical curiosity called "a long-running advertising campaign".

How many of these rarities still survive in the UK? I can think of about ten. Stella Artois. Yellow Pages. The Economist.  Andrex. BT, interestingly. Erm.... maybe not as many as ten.

In fact so rare has the campaign become in advertising circles that the very title of our trade magazine is actually an overclaim. It should be renamed "Short Term Tactical Fix".

This is a terrible state of affairs. The benefits of owning a brand are entirely connected to longevity - something which is true even of "new" brands such as Google. A brand provides an organisation with its heritable characteristics, with a trust that survives beyond an individual transaction. That trust hangs on consistency.

It is also through consistency that brands become truly eloquent, by a kind of power of distillation - rather as, when you are in a long-term relationship, you can leave a great deal unsaid. This brand shorthand (Steve Hayden describes a brand as the most effective form of data compression in existence) should give long lived brands a considerable advantage over competitors. Twenty years ago it did.

What has gone wrong? I can think of a few things. Too much pointless activity born of sobriety and earnestness, as I menioned last week, may be part of it. The Americanisation of organisations does not help, either (Americans are fantastically industrious people, but seem to be fantastically industrious whether there is a point to the activity or not - which may explain why so many great luxury brands are managed by the lazy French on 35 hours a week).

But there is a bigger reason, I suspect, and it goes by the word "strategy".  

The conventional idea seems to be that advertising strategy defers to brand strategy which in turn serves the business strategy. This is probably a sensible way for things to work in a family-owned business where the management may actually be around for a decade or so, and where the firm's whole purpose isn't reinvented every couple of years to suit the whims and fashions of a few 28-year-old city analysts. It may also work in a company fortunate enough to be bought by private equity, which can unfold its plans over years, rather than having to explain itself one quarter at a time.

But now when, in publicly-held organisations, strategy has become volatile, a new question needs to be asked: is business strategy no longer stable enough to drive a successful advertising strategy?

In other words, is strategy now so hopelessly mutable that hanging your brand on a strategy is like tying your dog to a parked car (something that works for as long as the car remains stationary, but with terrible consequences once it moves off)?

Even in an organisation with an unwavering business purpose, an advertising strategy will rarely stay constant: After all, in marketing, the definition of "strategy" is "that thing which an incoming marketing director seeks to change or reinvent - usually biannually".

So, grand as it is as a word, is a strategy a hopeless thing to which to hitch advertising. When even magnificent strategies manifested in such lines as "The 4th Emergency Service", "You're amazing, we want you to stay that way", "Have a break, have a KitKat", "Membership has its Privileges", seem to be killed off with barely a thought, what hope is there for yours?

I remember a wonderful thought for Morethan (back to normal) surfaced a couple of years ago. "What a wonderful strategy", I thought, and it was too for the two months it lasted. 

So, should we abandon all this fine long-term planning as a hopelessly idealistic lost cause and just say that ad campaigns would be better off hitching their futures to "minor" executional details which are (ironically) far harder to kill than a strategy.....

The Andrex Puppy, Silk Cut, The Yellow Pages bloke, The BT Bloke, Cillit Bang, The Sheilah's Wheels tune? The Dulux dog?

Imagine this. You are going into a meeting at Dulux to announce your new advertising strategy. Will anyone ask you a hard question about what was wrong with the old one? Probably not. Announce you are killing off the dog, and you'll face a fight. Next try suggesting the Economist should abandon red, and Sheilah's Wheels should try plainsong. See the point?

So here's one suggestion: sack half your planners and replace them with jingle-writers. It's not that planning was wrong (it was a noble ideal for sure) it just didn't work. It simply produced a wine that required laying down for people who were planning to hold a party that night.

Here's plan B. Keep your planning function, but don't attach your advertising to a conventional strategy but to a higher purpose. What we at Ogilvy call a Big Ideal. Dirt is Good. Campaign for Real Beauty. Just Do It.

You see the great thing about ideals is that they are difficult to walk away from. Embarrassing, even. Yet they can accommodate an immense amount of change and variation. But only up to a point.

The next Dove client of ours might change the packaging. They may develop a new product range. They could change their underlying strategy. But if they were to suggest using six-foot Ukrainian blondes in all the advertising we'd say "Oi, Dove Client, No!"

And this time we might actually win.

Perhaps we were better when we were smashed

Get Smashed, the new book by Sam Delaney, is a very necessary record of the advertising industry's fast-fading memory....

It is at once immensely funny and very slightly depressing. Depressing because every anecdote reminds the reader of an embarrassing but significant truth: that our business in many ways did a better job when it wasn't so busy pretending to be grown up. Or sober.

There are many explanations for this. The usual suspects (media fragmentation, blah, power of the retailers, blah) may have played their part. But, when I reread this email from Neil French, another more interesting explanation ocurred to me.

There's no nice way of saying this. But I rather suspect our newfound earnestness and sobriety are inimicable to the business of building great brands. Might we perhaps be more valuable to our clients if we worked less and drank more?

Here is the main thrust of Neil's email. "The German General Staff [the story goes] used to divide army officers into four categories: the clever and lazy, the clever and hard-working, the stupid and lazy and the stupid and hard-working. The best Generals, the Germans found, came from the clever and lazy; the best staff officers emerged from the clever and hard-working; the stupid and lazy could be made useful as regimental officers; but the stupid and hard-working were a menace, to be disposed of as soon as possible."

Maybe, just maybe, intelligent laziness is just as valuable a commodity in advertising agencies as in the German High Command?

 Let me put it this way. Can you point to a single brand which has really suffered becaise it has stuck with the same strategy and creative approach for too long? Because it has changed tack too rarely? Because it has retained an old endline? In fact can you actually point to more than five UK brands which have persisted in the same advertising approach for the past decade?

Back in the 1970s the very method of agency remuneration rewarded intelligent idleness. To produce a few film executions which ran and ran was a route to riches.  Next best was to sink the budget in a single, long-running campaign. Nowadays a system of payment by the hour rewards a kind of fatuous industry. You see this take shape in complex, endlessly reworked strategies, generally following something you might call the "path of most resistance".

As an aside, American Governement buildings are the only buildings on the world where lavatories and washrooms are often not stacked above each other on successive floors - a universal practice in the private sector where it serves to minimise plumbing. The reason? The US Government pays builders and plumbers by the hour, not by the job. More industrious stupidity, in other words. Yet we do the same thing by separating planning from creative development - and who cares, so long as it adds to the length of our mental pipework?

I might go further. Is the single most valuable function of the advertising agency to be a dampener on client activity? To discourage new initiatives and exciting new developments? And can it no longer play this role for fear that the budgets simply migrate to those ever so energetic people in new media, promotion or whatever? Actually would the perfect agency be one so fantastically drunk and obstreperous that the pain of working with them would forced clients to focus their entire marketing communications into one or two simple messages?

Like the good old days, in other words.

Next week I plan to extend this theory further - by explaining why the whole idea of strategy in advertising is probably a mistake. Unlike 1) A big ideal or 2) an executional device (a puppy, say) a strategy is just the kind of middle-sized thought that will tempt any incoming markting director to meddle with it. If you want a long-lived brand, avoid stratgy altogether - instead have an Ideal (like Nike, Apple) or an executional device (Andrex, The Economist). Anything with a strategy is doomed never to outlive your client. Discuss.