Campaign

This may well be the most unsuccessful advertising idea ever...

...and it's over 150 years old.

In 1959 my own agency was responsible for a textbook example of advertising failure: "You're never alone with a Strand" was much liked by the public (the theme song subsequently even charted at no. 38), but accepted wisdom holds (glibly) that people associated the brand with loneliness and the brand's launch was soon after abandoned. Interestingly, a very similar approach - though with humour - was successfully adopted for Hamlet cigars 15 years later: proof perhaps that you can't judge strategies - only executions.

I think I have now found a more extreme case of disastrous advertising failure. Remember to be truly disastrous, your work must suffer a far worse fate than indifference - it must have the opposite effect to that intended.

 Here it is:

I've been a wild rover for many's the year,
and I spent all me money on whisky and beer.
And now I'm returning with gold in great store,
and I never will play the wild rover no more.

(Chorus)
And it's no, nay, never! No, nay, never, no more,
will I play the wild rover. No never no more!

I went to an alehouse I used to frequent,
and I told the landlady my money was spent.
I asked her for credit, she answered me "nay,
For such custom as yours I could have any day".

(Chorus) and so on....

As any fule kno, this is a Irish Drinking Song. In fact it is one of the most requested songs in the repertoire of The Pogues, of The Dropkick Murphys (and of Michael 'Mick' Byrne, OgilvyOne Planning Director, during those late-night drinking sessions which seem to erupt at the bar of King's Cross station when trains to Potters Bar are only momentarily delayed). You can tell it's a drinking song because everyone who sings it is either drunk, very drunk or intending to get drunk: it is not a song you can sing and stay sober for long. So the sales of beer and whisky generated by this song since 1840 must be incalculable.

Which makes the song a bit problematic: because it has just been learned that this isn't an Irish drinking song at all. It is a Scottish temperance Song. (In retrospect, the landlady's canny reluctance to engage in sub-prime lending might have been a clue to its Scottishness).

Not bad, eh? You write a song intending to celebrate self-restraint and it ends up encouraging drunken boorishness for over 150 years.

It is an early example of a misfire: rather like Harry Enfield's loadsamoney character, which ended up cheering the very people it was supposed to satirise.

Public service or health advertising (and the temperance movement was an early example of this) is dangerously prone to the misfire. Quite often this is because of the motivation behind it. This is advertising which does not seek so much to solve the problem as to demonstrate that the advertiser takes the problem very seriously indeed. One economic paper (summarised in the book More Sex is Safer Sex by Landsburg) even suggested that fear-mongering AIDS advertising can exacerbate the spread of HIV.

There is also the problem that the people who are most keen to suppress the bad habits of others simply do not understand the psychology involved: your typical quango is unlikely to contain many chain smoking burger munchers nowadays. These are people who genuinely believe that vegetables are enjoyable to eat.

Hence the greater likelihood of a misfire.

As Phil Teer suggested on an earlier blog, much anti-smoking information (which tells people that smoking kills you) may actually be an incentive for young people to smoke - for young people may smoke to demonstrate bravado. Certainly the sentence on the fag packets of my own teenage years - "Most doctors don't smoke" - was probably inapposite for the under-25s for whom nothing is more likely to commend a course of action than the fact that most doctors don't do it. "Many accountants are heavy smokers" might have worked better.

Now here's another question: is our current obsession with food health actually promoting overeating? 

As a child growing up in 1970s Wales (a period I spent largely mainlining Corona's splendid Dandelion and Burdock) I cannot remember anyone ever giving a damn about what they drank or ate. In fact I am not sure that anyone even connected health and diet at all. If there was a prevailing belief, it was simply that the more artificial a food might be, and the less it resembled anything found in nature, the better it was. Had there been an Inorganic section in the supermarkets, we would have flocked there. Strangely, everyone seemed pretty much fine.

Now what might have gone wrong? Perhaps, just as emphasising the risk of smoking gives it a certain appeal, so is it conceivable that the guilt that attaches to the consumption of certain foods now makes them more enjoyable to eat?

More research needs to be done into guilt. Many behaviours - retail therapy, for instance - only seem to work if they actually create guilt, which may explain why handbags and shoes need to be insanely expensive to be popular.

This fear and guilt may also explain a greater mystery: the extraordinary level of sexual transgression among politicians. Here there is the possibility that the fear of exposure makes otherwise banal or unpleasant sexual activity fantastically enjoyable. To most of you, I venture, the act of carrying around a briefcase full of a rent-boy's poo may strike you as no more than a mildly insanitary inconvenience: yet if I were to give you a job on the Lib-Dem front bench team, you might well find it a positive thrill.

Is that why burgers and fizzy drinks now taste much better than they did in 1970? Because in the 1970s nobody told us we weren't supposed to eat them?

There is an even more extreme case of guilt driving extreme behaviour: that found among American fundamentalist televangelists - probably the most sexually incontinent group of people on the planet. In their defence, spending a few hours in an Albuquerque motel room with a big-haired Texan model called Tammy must be pretty good at any time; so, if you're a nationally-known fundamentalist preacher in fear of exposure, the thrill must be unimaginable.

So give me the money and I'll run a new government campaign recommending we don't eat burgers or lard more than twice a day - except at the weekend, obviously. That's the obesity problem solved in no time.

Let's put sales promotion at the heart of the agency

It has become almost universal - and for a very good reason - for advertising agencies to seek to reinvent themselves around digital media. But there is another discipline they may overlook in the process.

Here are just four of many useless ideas I have come across this year at Ogilvy.

1) Rail companies should give everyone in their catchment area free off-peak travel on their birthdays. Our belief is that, for that vast number of people who never use the train, a free sampling campaign would cost almost nothing and would create a few converts.

2) Supermarkets should keep a small number of trolleys and baskets available half-way round the store, for those people who enter the shop empty-handed with the intention of buying only one or two things, and whose subsequent purchasing is limited by what they can carry. (This is vital in Boots, a place where many men feel the act of picking up a basket may bring their sexual orientation into question).

3) All airport car parks should have a number of parking spaces which are three times more expensive than any others - so people can confidently head off to the airport knowing they will always find somewhere to park. This would extend to the rich a luxury currently limited to the disabled. 

4) The McPicnic - a family meal for McDonald's complete with rug, a few games, etc, intended to be collected from the Drive Thru and consumed outdoors, hence deurbanising fast food. (If you're wondering what we're doing working with McDonald's, we weren't: this was the product of a graduate training exercise.)

I call these ideas "useless" because I know (and this is partly why I am giving them away) that we do not stand a chance of selling them - or of seeing them happen.

And the reason for this is simple. These are all behaviour changing ideas, not attitude shifting ideas. And the job of an agency is now just to do the attitude stuff, love.

Why? Perhaps agencies have so overplayed the "brand" justification for their activities that they have sometimes disqualified themselves from adding value to clients anywhere else. If the sole and single value of an activity is not "the brand", it is seen as outside our area of competence.

There are two dangerous assumptions in this "We're just paid to focus on the brand" approach.

First the whole "brand-led" approach is based on the dangerous assumption that behavioral change is the product of attitudinal change: in reality it happens more often the other way round. Or, as St Bob puts it in Brownsville Girl, "People don't do what they say they believe, they just do what's convenient and then they repent."

The second assumption is just as dangerous: it is the dangerously linear assumption that the best way to build a brand is to set out to build a brand.

I really don't believe this. I think if you set out to build a great business, you'll stand a fair chance of building a great brand. I am not equally confident that someone aspiring to build a great brand will build a great business.

To use a phrase popularised in a famous FT article, great brands are often built obliquely. They are generally a by-product of something (ideals, vision, focus) and not a product of anything.

Saying that you build a brand by setting out to build a brand is a little like saying that you can end poverty by giving poor people money. It doesn't work like that.

 So in building a brand, don't necessaily start by looking at the brand. Instead ask a broader marketing question: how can I turn human understanding into business advantage.

This may mean that you start with the transaction and work back. It may mean you look at changing behaviour first and let perception follow. It may mean you have good business ideas and then brand them (Tesco have been masters of this).

Sales promotion agencies (the good ones) are familiar with this approach... that of "make people buy and hopefully they'll love you" rather than "make people love you and hopefully they'll buy". Their philosophy needs to be as much at the heart of what we do as any other.

Please can you refute this argument.

I have suddenly conceived the insane notion that brands are good for the environment. Can this possibly be true?

It is now common to ask why property prices in Britain are so high. Another way of phrasing the question might be to ask why - at least from 1945 to 1990 - UK property prices were so insanely low.

To give you one anecdotal example, my grandfather was but a reasonably prosperous GP on the Welsh borders; yet in the 1950s he could easily have bought pretty much any house he wished within 30 miles. One of the houses he considered and rejected is now a 20 bedroom hotel with a handy quarter-mile of salmon fishing on the Usk. It was on sale for about six thousand pounds.

With his sensibly Scottish approach to such things, however, he bought a modest six-bedroom villa a few miles away, and wisely spent the savings on.....among other things.... a dishwasher. 

Gee, thanks, Gramps!

Mind you, this was no ordinary dishwasher. For a start, it was only the third dishwasher sold in Wales (there's posh for you). It was manufactured in New Zealand. And it cost in real terms about the same as a Ford Ka does today*.

And that in part-explains why property prices were so low then - and so high today. Back then, domestic items were insanely expensive, and acquiring them soaked up most of people's discretionary expenditure. Air travel, domestic appliances, televisions, even telephone calls were near prohibitive to most people. Indeed in the late 1950s a ten-minute call to New York cost more in real terms than a transatlantic flight today.

Now, with these things cheap in relative terms, the money saved goes elsewhere. Not into more dishwashers but into property. Into services. Into convenience. And into brands.

Note that the new wealth rarely goes towards more cars, more dishwashers....not even to more flights. 

This refutes the lazy assumption that increasing levels of wealth must inexorably lead to increasing levels of consumption.

By and large there is a limit to the number of TVs people want. I have heard of one man with two dishwashers, but he is a rare exception. There are very few five-car households. Mostly, as people enrich themselves, they do not buy more things but better versions of the same things - or best of all buy better branded verion of the same things. Most people, say, would rather buy three pairs of designer sunglasses than twenty cheap pairs. 

Which leads me to ask this simple question: unless you wish to tackle environmental problems by impoverishing us all, can anyone think of a more environmentally friendly way to spend money than in the purchasing of brand value? 

Brands are, after all, gloriously intangible. You can build a brand without killing trees and few precious raw materials are needed in their creation. The exploitation of child labour in making brands is rare. And yet brand value creates pleasure and confers status as surely as any more wasteful (ie tangible) value.

It may seem bizarre to say it, but brands actually succeed in making us happy with less. That is precisely why they make money for the people who own them.

Want to sell a car? You could kill a cow and give it leather seats. Or you could put the money behind making the cloth-seated car more desirable.

I might go futher. The value of any branded item often decays far more slowly than the value of unbranded equivalent. Those Chanel sunglasses you buy today will still fetch a fair price on eBay in 20 years time when third-hand, while their cheaper unbranded equivalents have been clogging up a landfill for a decade.  

Yet, such is my instinctive lack of confidence in the environmental benefit of brands, I can't really comfortably believe my own argument here. It can't be true, can it?

Please, someone tell me why it's rubbish.

^{* It still works, incidentally.}

A green conundrum: how do you market moderation?

A few lessons the environmental movement might learn from Californians, Caravanners, Cornwall, Chardonnay, Coach-travel, Cellphones, Chips, Caviar, Cigarettes, Conference-Calling, Campaign Awards and Convenience foods. 

This week's blog is brought to you by the letter C. 

In California in the summer, rooms are air conditioned to about 66F - suggesting that this is a rather nice, comfortable temperature at which to maintain a room. Except that in New York in January rooms are typically heated to about, er, 76F.

What is going on? 

Quite simply, every time they set the temperature dial, our Colonial chums are unthinkingly saying this: "Take the room up (or down) to a temperature I'd really like, and then add a few degrees more for good measure - just to remind my guests that I'm not short of a buck or two."

Later on, when our Septic cousins go out for a meal, the restaurant will adopt a similar approach: "Right, put on each plate the number of calories that would sustain an African for four days - then add a couple thousand calories on top - just to prove we aren't skimping."

Our family will then drive home in a car which is exactly as large and powerful as the car they actually need - except about 40% more so - while perhaps stopping en route for a few pints of coffee or a bucket of Pepsi.

All these minor excesses are what you might call reassuringly expensive. They are motivated by a simple human urge - the urge to continually demonstrate that one has resources to spare and to prove that one's every action is driven by choice and not by need. 

The peacock of yesterday's blog is demonstrating this surplus with his tail. People generally seek the same end with their spending.

By continual minor extravagance we prove to ourselves and to others that we are free-acting, self-determining, unconstrained human beings, in no way limited by the contents of our own wallets.   

Much as we like to blame Americans for this, it is universal (in fact when Chinese consumerism comes on stream I suspect we shall affectionately view Americans as paragons of moderation). But this simple facet of psychology has consequences for everyone; not only for the boring old planet but for businesses and brands as well. Because it means that environmentally-friendly minimalism and simplicity can become popular, but only if that simplicity is clearly and visibly the result of a conscious choice. 

I have mentioned before the slightly disingenuous way in which certain middle class people rather over-eagerly disdain popular mass brands in their haste to differentiate themselves from the less well off. McDonalds, CocaCola and frozen foods are three good examples. In all three cases, the people affect to dislike these items on grounds of health or taste. This is generally a deep-rooted lie. Deep down they despise these things because they are inexpensive. Frozen food is actually healthier: it is, unfortunately, also cheap*.

The same disdain for the inexpensive also leads to a preference for organic vegetables (rightly seen through Boris Johnson's penetrating eyes as horrible, soiled, misshapen things) and also to the ludicrous middle-class preference for wine over beer. 

This last is not to say that wine cannot be very good. It's just that at 90% of social functions it is absolute piss. If any pub landlord attempted to sell beer with the shocking inconsistency of quality found in everyday wine, his working class patrons would beat him up - and rightly so. Beer is a magnificent, refreshing, consistent, manly and indigenous drink - but unfortunately working class people can afford to drink it. So that won't do at all.

The same applies to chips. Far nicer than caviar, they sadly lack rarity value. Again, working-class people can afford them, so they must be inherently suspect.

You might even argue that cigarettes (an amazingly democratic pleasure) suffered the same fate.

 In short, the consumption of anything inexpensive carries with it the possible stigma that you are doing it because you cannot afford anything more.

UK holidays, until recently, suffered from this very same whiff of desperation. The unintentional marketing of Rock as a playground for Trustifarians was an invaluable boost to Cornwall, as it proved you might be going there by choice and not because you couldn't afford Spain.

Other categories that suffer from the whiff of constraint? 1) Caravanning (seen as something for people who can't afford hotels - yet in reality no less confortable than staying on a yacht). 2) Coach travel: stigmatised as a form of travel for people who can't afford trains - and yet there is no reason why it need be a downmarket form of travel (in Latin America super-luxury coaches with waitress service cover major city routes). 3) Cellular pagers - these died a death in the UK because they were stigmatised as being for people whose bosses didn't trust them to make outgoing calls.

There is a vital environmental lesson to be learned here. That wealthier people may be quite happy to live more frugal lives so long as they can demonstrate that their frugality is the product of choice not desperation. This is why the Prius (with a unique body-shape) succeeds whereas other hybrids (which look like ordinary small cars) do not.

Even coach travel (if it creates a super-premium class) could regain middle-class passengers, but it will take a wholly different, premiumised concept. This would be worth doing as, according to George Monbiot at least, it is far and away the most environmentally friendly form of transportation.

The best example of the difference between choice and constraint was (as ever) a remark by Jeremy Bullmore. "There is an immense difference between how it feels to attend an awards event in a lounge suit because you have chosen not to wear a dinner jacket, and doing so because you do not own a dinner jacket."

The environmental movement must find means for wealthier people to lead modest lives while simultaneously signalling that they are being modest through choice. Social media may play a valuable part here.

So might the lesson of lean businesses such as easyJet or IKEA. By making the consumer trade-off very explicit (no onboard meals; a Nordic saga of a shopping experience) they have managed to suggest that their low prices may come at the cost of convenience rather than that of quality. That's an idea worth stealing.

But I will leave you with a final challenge. Conference calling (with or without video) has an immense role to play in reducing unnecessary travel - not necessarily air travel, but car journeys too. And yet it suffers from the same whiff of constraint. It is seen as being for people who aren't worth an air ticket or can't be trusted with a cab trip. Even though air travel is losing its lustre (the experience is increasingly infantilising) it still retains a certain sense of being reassuringly expensive.

By contrast, a teleconference is seen as a poor relation. It doesn't help that the technology is painfully bad. A system which texted people the call-in details five minutes before hand might help. But the image-issue is the biggest problem, surely. 

What could you do as a marketer to make this practice if not cool then unembarrassing? Answers, please.

_______________________________

 ^{*Interestingly a chain of specialist shops in the Home Counties (Sevenoaks, Tunbridge Wells, Guildford, etc) called Cook sells premiumised, home-made frozen food in large quantities to the very people who would by-pass the frozen food aisle at their local Sainsbury's.}

Of course advertising is expensive. That's the bloody point.

The experience of dealing with highly perfectionistic creative people may be painful to procurement departments or to accountants - indeed to anyone familiar with the law of diminishing returns. But, according to some economic thinking, the creative people may be right.

How many finance directors, I wonder, would select an investment on the strength of a couple of A4 cyclostyled sheets? Or would buy their pension from a man in a badly worn suit?

Logically there would be nothing wrong with either decision: in fact you might argue that the shabby suit was evidence of a healthily austere approach to commission.

But both of them, in effect, are the equivalent of buying a car from a bloke in a pub. The initial offering may be attractive on paper but could be hiding any number of ills, some of which may only become apparent years after the transaction (at which point the seller may prove surprisingly elusive).

In economics this kind of transaction suffers from "asymmetry of information". It applies to markets in which at least one party to a transaction (it's typically the buyer, though, in the case of insurance, it is of course the seller) is not playing with a full informational deck.

"Is this man only selling his car because it's crap?" "Is this bookmaker planning to do a runner?" "Is this man only applying for life insurance because he suspects he's dying?" Unless these doubts can be allayed, then no transaction takes place and the value of the exchange is destroyed.

Believe it or not, Nobel Prizes have been won investigating these questions.

Happily, there are quite a few ways to solve the problem. Insurance companies find that the option of a high excess attracts bona fide customers. Car dealers offer a warranty. And so on. But then there is another solution - and that's to demonstrate a very visible sign of long-term commitment. It's for this reason that banks made such lavish use of marble in their branches - as visible proof of permanence. "Surely nobody planning to do a runner next week with all their depositors' savings would go to the trouble of spending a fortune on their offices?"

The marble hall is a form of display advertising. And it works precisely because it is expensive.

That's what's behind the phrase "As seen on TV". Nowadays largely meaningless, it once meant "we are really putting our money where our mouths are." It dated from a time when TV advertising was prohibitively expensive: no marketer would risk the outlay unless their product was seriously good.

Conspicuous waste hence serves a valuable purpose - it allows us to spot the people who are successful enough for us confidently to do business with them.

The same thing is widespread in nature: most famously in the peacock's tail. How can a peahen spot a healthy male? Simple. By the fact that it can afford to sport a ludicrously over elaborate plumage. The very fact that it can thrive despite this encumbrance is unassailable evidence of its success. With humans the principle is at work in sales of jewellery, sports cars, second homes: the very fact that they are impractical is a large part of the point. It's why so many really expensive cars only have two seats.

Boasting of cheap advertising is hence to miss the point completely. It's like bragging that you own a very economical yacht, or that your trophy wife has very frugal tastes. That's not what she's really there for.

Interestingly, aside from a few Superbowl-type anomalies, appearing on TV is no longer proof of deep pockets, and may hence be losing its display value. The cost of entry is diminishing. Which leaves the display-minded advertiser needing to look at a few alternatives. One is, of course, the sponsorship of major sporting events - a visibly extravagant activity if there ever was one*. Another might be to advertise very heavily to smaller niche audiences (hothousing), at least giving that core audience the impression that you are a heavyweight advertiser, even if 80% of people never see you at all.... in extremis, you might just send ten people direct mail on ludicrously luxurious paper. Finally (and here's where the creative people may be right) you could produce some fabulously good ads.

In creative work today, there may actually apply a law of increasing returns: that the last 5% of extra work may actually create 90% of the value. Why? Because, today, absolutely any idiot with a handicam and 50K can produce a fairly good ad and run it on TV. On the other hand to produce a really super ad..... that's difficult. It takes time, talent and money in large quantities. That's hard to fake. Only the really good advertisers can do it at all.

To put it another way, there's no point in being a peacock with a moderately good tail. Go for great or don't bother at all. That's the principle that creatives understand and accountants don't.

It's not that creative people have no sense of proportion - they actually have an acute sense of disproportion.

They would instinctively spend about 50% of a marketing budget on content creation, and skimp on media expenditure. And, amusingly, a few economists would suggest they are absolutely right.

__________________

^{* Once alternative approach is to make a virtue of one's lack of extravagance - what economists call 'reverse signalling'. This is why millionaire rock stars now dress in anoraks, the notion being they are so cool they do not need to make a sartorial effort at all. It is, in a way, what First Direct and many online brands do - making a virtue of 'no marble'. Environmental concerns may make this approach (of conspicuous non-consumption) immensely more common in a few years' time.}