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.
