Campaign

Why creatives should wear ties occasionally

One of the most disturbing advertisements of the last few months is the single page ad for the iPhone. "Solving life's little problems one app at a time."

Frankly this advertisement contravenes all the guidelines for contemporary press advertising. It contains a large shot of the product so you know what it looks like, carries a headline which discloses a consumer benefit and, worst of all, it contains a series of little captions (old direct marketing hands will know them as "call-outs") wherein a number of words are arranged in some grammatical order to convey to the reader useful information about what the product does.

Jesus, I hope this sort of thing doesn't get out of hand. Where could it end? If you're not careful, you'll have readers going to the shops in their droves and exchanging their money for iPhones.

Fortunately, I don't think this will last for long. Soon we'll be back to sanity - with shaven headed women leering out of the page displaying their tongue-piercings beneath incomprehensible two-word headlines.

Why is this perfectly sensible kind of advertising so rare? One problem may be that the same creative brief is often written for print as for TV. I'm not sure this makes sense  - perhaps the kind of low-involvement, image-intensive brief which works well in film may be ill suited to the high involvement medium of print. Another problem may be that the "brevity is always best" assumption that has become a reasonable rule-of-thumb in poster advertising has by now completely infected press.

But there may be a simpler question at stake here. Are we trying too hard to make press ads cool? Perhaps the best thing you can do when writing a good press ad is to abandon any attempt at being even remotely hip. Put on a suit and tie. Read the Daily Mail. Go foxhunting for a day. Visit Croydon.. Push Pineapple. Shake the tree. Push Pineapple. Grind coffee.  To the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees. Come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody. But do not, even for a second, consider going to Magma.

You can do almost anything in press. You can do intelligent, witty, urbane, posh, intelligent, popularist, large breasts, innuendo, informative, helpful, educational, belly-laughs, puns, logic, outrage. But it's hard to do cool. Or, to be more precise, you can do cool, but the line in print between being cool and being a self-indulgent twat is perilously narrow. Remember, too, that when you fail to be cool you alienate everyone - the cool people who hate you for failing and the uncool people who hate you for even trying.

At which point a bigger question. Is it even sensible for most brands to try to be cool at all?  Just remember that in pursuing cool-hunters you are chasing the most fickle market that exists. Cool people do not even form a market that is even specially large or wealthy - and it is by definition fragmented. It may or may not be influential - that varies. But usually the best financial return to be derived from brands is best achieved by having, in Tim Harford's words, "a strong brand in a conservative market".

The single most important financial and social role which brands play is that they create new possibilities - for brand owners and consumers alike. People who are fashionable and experimental will try new things anyway. But strong mainstream brands radically change the behaviours of the many millions of people who are temperamentally less adventurous.

You wouldn't have got a few million people to buy the Focus, the S-Max or the Ka (all radical designs) had they been branded Alfa Romeo. And, if it weren't for Sainsburys, olive oil would still be sold only in chemists' shops.

If we were true to our belief in brands, the dress code for the D&AD awards would stipulate M&S suits.

Are you a capitalist or a creativist?

Recently, practitioners of experimental philosophy (trendily known as x-phi) described two different scenes to a randomly selected audience.

In the first, the vice president of a company explains to the president he has a new plan for the company that will maximize profits but will harm the environment. The president replies that he understands the environment will be harmed but doesn’t care; he tells the vice president to proceed.

The selected audience are then asked whether the president is harming the environment intentionally. On the one hand, his intention is only to maximize profits but he is conscious that this also involves harming the environment. 82% said “yes”.

The second scene is identical to the first except the word harm is replaced with help. The vice president of a company explains to the president he has a new plan for the company that will maximize profits and will help the environment. The president replies that he understands the environment will be helped but doesn’t care; he tells the vice president to proceed. The people are then asked whether the president helped the environment intentionally. Interestingly, only 23% say “yes”.

There is a huge discrepancy here since, to a philosopher at least, the two examples are identical.

One interpretation of this is that, while an action based on self-interest that has bad effects is (unsurprisingly) seen as a bad thing, an action based on self-interest which has good effects is NOT seen as a particularly good thing.

This reveals an essential asymmetry in human perception.

What it seems to show is that people are overwhelmingly intentionalists, not consequentialists. In other words, once they suspect an individual’s intentions are largely self-interested, it colours how they perceive the outcome. Hence they are far readier to attribute a bad outcome to self-interested behaviours than a beneficial one.

To anyone working in business, and in particular to those working in the many thousands of organisations which have spent the last fifteen years in thrall to a narrow, reductionist obsession with short-term shareholder value, this seems an important – and worrying – finding.

For it suggests the spectacular achievement of capitalist free markets in producing cheaper, better goods is often perceptually wasted, since most of us simply don't much respect the selfish motivation behind the achievement.

To Adam Smith's "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." We should add "But don't expect anyone to like the butcher very much."

In short we have an economic system that is much better at delivering efficiency than it is at inspiring affection. The obsession with shareholder value has perhaps created autistic businesses – of a kind that nobody much wants to work for or buy from.

At a societal level, it means the benefits of competitive free market economics (choice, low prices, innovation) don’t really translate into happiness, gratitude or affection – as they are tainted by the self-interest with which they have been obtained.

And if you have ever wondered why people show such affection for public-sector brands (such as the BBC, the Post Office, the NHS) even when their levels of service are, um, questionable, there’s your answer – for all their failings, they are untainted by perceptions of greed.

In the words of Jack Welch, widely seen as the father of the Shareholder Value movement, but now one of its harshest critics. “Shareholder value is an outcome – it’s not a strategy.”

Or as Eddie Izzard remarks, "I'm not a capitalist, I am a creativist. I want to make money so that I can create things. Suddenly all these people have come along who want to create things so they can make money."

It’s an important distinction. Which are you?

Certainly the best brand owners are creativists. Nike, Ford, Kellogg, Apple, Virgin were all created by people whose ambitions went far beyond self-enrichment.

There's an interesting lesson here. Maybe greed is bad for business. It's certainly bad for brands.

The cuddly side of BBH

Undoubtedly the best idea to come from an ad agency this month is BBH's decision to allow staff to vote on a 3.5% voluntary pay cut - in the shape of a day's unpaid leave every month. Certainly the people at BBH seem to think so, since they voted 99.5% in favour, a kind of unanimity you don't usually see outside a North Korean election result.

BBH staff vote for pay cut over redundancies

I can't quite understand why this isn't more common.

For a start, it isn't quite accurate to describe this as a pay-cut at all. A pay cut would involve less money for the same amount of work. Here staff are being offered the chance to trade a 3.5% cut in pay for a near 50% increase in their holiday allowance. It would be interesting to find out how many people would have willingly made this trade-off even before the downturn. Nearly all studies show that employees would like to translate some of their wage gains into greater leisure, but are reluctant to do so for fear of seeming uncommitted. Unless you are a banker, and see your life's purpose as nothing other than a matter of self-enrichment, most people realise that the value of your money is enhanced when you have time enough to enjoy it.

 
However, in a recession, the trade off makes especially good sense. For one thing, this is a disproportionately bad time to lose your job. But it is also a disproportionately good time to keep your job. Prices are falling, and mortgage costs are probably low enough to offset the loss in pay for many people. Moreover the leisure is also offered in an intelligent form - single days off. What always struck me as moronic about the French attempt to enforce a 35-hour working week as part of their bid to reduce unemployment was that there is very little benefit to anyone in a marginally shorter working day. Once I have gone to the trouble of getting up, dressed, washed, shaved and then have to make the journey to and from work, I might as well give it a full nine hours. No, the minimum (or "quantum") unit of worthwhile leisure is the single day off.I might also add the fact that (as my self-employed father always loved to point out) a day off during the week is twice as valuable as a day off on Saturday or Sunday.

 
It is far cheaper for an agency to engage in this arrangement than to lose or hire people every time the climate changes. In fact, given that advertising is becoming a slightly seasonal business - with some months routinely busier than others - it's possible future agency contracts should allow for a certain flexibility of employment as a matter of course. Leisure, incidentally, can be a very tax efficient perk.

But there's a final reason this is such a good for our industry. You see it isn't clear that BBH will be much worse off for everyone's one-day absence. One of the fabulous things about this business, for all its annoyances, is that you can become better at your job by doing just about anything. Actuaries or lawyers don't become better at their jobs by reading a novel,  listening to a conversation on a bus, watching a film, going to an exhibition or sitting in a park. We do. Rather as Google has found, the odd day for staff to pursue their own interests may pay back in more than mere cost savings.   

Beyond advertising, we also need to ask ourselves whether BBH may have pioneered one possible answer to the economic downturn. Reading about this issue the other day, I stumbled on a few articles on the five-day week and the shorter working day. Until then, I had always assumed that Saturday had become a day of leisure through the efforts of social reformers. Not so. In the US, at any rate, it was pioneered by Henry Ford, driven by a mixture of philanthropy self-interest.

 
In his article Why I Favour Five Days' Work for Six Days' Pay Ford explains that a well paid and more leisured working man will have time and money enough to create significant demand for manufactured goods.

With a two-day weekend, it might even be worth buying a car.