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.
