Campaign

The L shaped room

This week I’ve been mostly helping Sir Martin Sorrell with his imagery for the Recession.

A few years ago, he came up with the “bath-shaped recession” all by himself – he got the idea, in fact, while lying in the bath.

And the image was a worldwide success.

T-shirts were printed in the Far East showing Sir Martin in a bath.

I take a certain pride in knowing that when a Recession hits this country,  and even if advertising budgets get cut by 30%, the man we can rely on to get the image right is one of the most powerful men in the ad industry.

So everybody was looking to Sir Martin to see what he’d come up with this time.

Initially, we tried various other rooms to see if they’d work. I suggested a “spare- bedroom-shaped recession”. Because they’re horrible and uncomfortable and they always have a badly designed cupboard jutting angularly into the room and they just feel like whoever designed them didn’t have a f*cking clue what they were doing.

But then I made an instinctive leap, and said “Sir Martin, it’s a toilet”.

“Why ?”, he asked - in that narrow-eyed, perceptive way he has about him.

Several reasons, I said.

1. It’s not somewhere you want to spend an awful lot of time.

2. There’s a sense of somebody in the next cubicle papering over the cracks.

3. Nobody wants to really, deeply look into it. We’d rather just sit down and read the Sun.

I’m afraid Sir Martin pooh-poohed this straightaway. He told me he didn’t like the look of my number 2.

And then he came up with his genius insight of the “L-shaped Recession”.

(And, incidentally, talked about it all rather brilliantly on Radio 4's The Bottom Line.)

But the Recession also led me into thinking about brands and branding.

For instance. Say your Mum switches her weekly shop from one of the Big Four into Lidl or Aldi.

(And why she was doing her weekly shopping in a high street bank in the first place is anybody’s guess.)

But by doing this, she isn’t just loosening her tie with Tesco or Sainsbury’s. She’s potentially loosening her ties with 100s of brands which Lidl and Aldi do their own versions of.

Massive, household names that we've all lived with for years.

Because the trouble with a lot of those brands is that they’ve been content to build relatively loose ties with their customers.  And that’s worked very well for them for the last 50 years or so.

(I think this is what Robert Heath is describing when he writes about Low Attention Processing. I.e. Nescafe works on the level of “there’s a bunch of coffees here, I trust Nescafe, I can’t be arsed to stand here all day weighing up the various merits and demerits of instant coffees, Nescafe it is.”)

But in a Recession, you start asking a different question.

To wit, how many brands are you REALLY loyal to ?

And probably the list wouldn’t extend further than 10.

So -  what’s the secret of the ones you ARE deeply loyal to ?

Well, that would be a big question to answer, wouldn’t it ?

My view is that it tends to be brands that fight a battle on behalf of the consumer.

Apple vs Microsoft. Or Virgin vs BA. Or Nike vs the forces of obesity.

You get a sense that they’re on our side, against something else.

Which is probably why it’s worth asking this question when you work on a brand:

 “What battle should this brand fight on behalf of the consumer ?”

Or:

 “How can we put the brand unmistakably on the same side as the consumer ?”

Overall, I’m fascinated by how few genuinely sticky brands we seem to have created.

And the greatest minds in our industry are asking similar questions.

Russell Davies has talked about how “the branding machine has started to run out of steam”.

Mark Earls has written about “learning to live without the brand”.

John Grant has talked about how these days branding is essentially “voluntary” – people will only engage if they want to.

Compare that with the old model – which worked brilliantly for 50 years – and which I think is best summed up by this quote from Paul Feldwick. “Somehow”, he wrote, “ 30 seconds of entertaining nonsense leads to a situation where people pay 35% more for (PG Tips).”

But this approach to brand-building – which I might loosely describe as “create a brand personality, put it across with entertaining nonsense, and they will come” may well be found wanting as we flail around in the large L-shaped room.

Because the thing about an L-shaped room is that, from most positions within it, you have no idea what could be lurking around the corner.

Get out more

Half way through last year I did something which everybody who works in the advertising industry, should do.

I left it.

Now, I don’t mean this in quite the way that Bill Hicks used to say that anyone who worked in advertising should kill themselves.

Although I can think of a couple of people who might benefit from a set of Le Creuset Hara-kiri knives on their next birthday.

Or a one-way ticket to the “Happy Rest Just Sign Here” Clinic in Switzerland.

(And by the way – if you ever visit one of those clinics, don’t try the welcome drink they give you in Reception. It tastes disgusting and it’ll probably be the last thing you ever do.)

I just mean that you get a new perspective when you quit the industry - even if only temporarily.

You get to join the “Rest of the World”, the civilians.

And you realise something that you’ve half-suspected for a while – which is that people really aren’t interested in advertising. Virtually nobody watches it, looks at it, listens to it, or reads it.

And when you realise this, you might start thinking about  … non-traditional forms of marketing.

Pack design, and social networking sites, and websites, and advertiser-funded programmes and massively multiplayer online games - and other good stuff like that.

Or you may not be ready to hear this at all. You may still believe that people are glued to the ads.

Because you probably work in the industry and you think people are like you.

And you watch the ads - because you’re in the industry.

It’s what they call a viscous circle – because it’s very sticky.

You might claim that you “don’t watch the ads”, but you’ve always got half an eye open for someone who might be doing a better car ad than your car ad – so you’re watching, even if you think you aren’t.

It’s only people who quit advertising, or who go off on maternity leave, or people who never joined in the first place, who will know what I’m saying.

So here’s a couple of tests to help you see what I mean.

Go on the tube and see how many people are looking at the escalator panels. Even the new whiz-bang digital ones (which I think look great).

Nobody’s looking at them.

And the alternative is looking at someone’s dandruff-infested collar.

But people would rather count the scurf on a scarf than look at the ads.

Second test. You’ve just had Christmas, seen your extended family (and realised WHY they’re extended).

At some point in all that, you will have had a conversation like this.

“Hello, {your name goes here}. What do you do ?

“I work in advertising”.

“Oh really. Yea, I love that funny one with the fat guy advertising the bank.”

At this point you are thinking “This person is a moron. That’s the Nationwide campaign, brilliantly written, dunno why it went up for review, not for a bank at all, in fact that’s the whole point of it.”

The other person is thinking “Jeez, this person probably writes the L’Oreal ads, I need to  get away from here fast. Better say something nice – which ad can you remember that isn’t complete ***  ?”

Now, which person is really the moron ?

And I think this problem is right at the core of our industry.  People care a lot less about advertising than we’re prepared to admit.

Because ads interrupt whatever it is people are engaged with, and try to engage them in a conversation the consumer has shown no interest in starting in the first place.

Compound that with the fact that most of those conversations are incredibly tedious, and you begin to see the problem.

Eventually you realise something.

It’s only two fish fingers short of a miracle that ads were ever granted any attention at all.

(And incidentally, a tribute to the incredible creative talent the industry has got.)

But.

Against that, you could argue the fact that right now, average creative standards in TV advertising are possibly higher than they've ever been.

And the cost of TV advertising is lower than it's been since the early 90s.

So - is it worth still doing conventional advertising ?

Hmm.

I love new solutions. I love new stuff, just because it's new. But I'd probably answer with a muted yes - if the creative work is really, really outstanding.

It's just not where I'd START.

Preliminaries

Hello.

I’m going to treat this initial blog as a soft launch. Because I've been told that all the publicity  - the massive war-engine of publicity which Campaign has at its disposal – is to be deployed next week.

So this week, we’re not expecting anyone to log on at all.

So, please look at this as a kind of preliminary taster.

A kind of "pre-come" column, if you will.

A preliminary and preparatory outpouring – but not the actual,  honest-to-goodness, genuine thing.

So, anyway - I was at the Creative Circle Awards bash last week. Although I was only there because my old mate and former boss Dave Trott was being given a lifetime’s achievement award, and I wanted to honour the bloke.

It’s always good to see Dave and he was on great form as ever.

Just not quite as feisty as I’d have liked. Because Dave taught me all I ever knew about being feisty.

The person who WAS feisty was Alan Carr, the paid-for entertainment.

It’s interesting seeing famous people try to host these awards dos – because they usually think the whole thing is about as important as an Under-12s 5-a-side rounders tournament, where your kid isn't playing.

And they rip the piss out of it, and then wonder why the people they’re taking the piss out of, don’t find it hugely funny.

I’ve seen really good comedians looking shell-shocked and dazed as they joke away at the industry’s expense and get a less than rapturous response.

Which is hilarious, if you’re in the right mood.

Although I was once on the wrong end of it myself. A female comedian who’d been paid to host a Radio Awards night introduced me as the Chairman of the Judges. As I walked on stage, she said “Doesn’t he walk funny – it looks like he’s shat his pants”.

I kid you not.

To be honest, it wasn’t the happiest hour of my life doling out the awards after that. Me and the female comedian smiling into the camera as the plucky winners picked up their gongs – I think my grin might have looked a bit forced.

You know when you start thinking – oh god, maybe I HAVE shat my pants ?

There’s no subtle way to check really.

But it reminds me of a story about Dave Droga. Nothing to do with his pants, obviously, because Dave's hygiene is second to none. But he once told me he was chairing some awards do in Perth - and he was insulted for an hour and a half by a glove puppet.

So, these things happen.

But, having spent a bit of time away from the ad industry, I must say that I enjoyed Alan’s cynical take on the whole thing enormously.

So – when a nicely provocative ad for HSBC won a well-deserved award,  Alan said something about how they’d “only lost £2billion that day – it must be working”.

He moaned about how bloody depressing charity ads were, reducing the audience to hoots of laughter as a Barnardo’s ad played out its emotional angst on the screen.

And most astonishingly of all, when he came to hand out the Platinum Award, and the spreads for the Harvey Nichols Bristol store came up on screen, he looked aghast and said “That’s not it, is it ?”

You don’t get that happening at the Oscars, do you ?

“And the winner of Best Picture is – No, that’s a mistake isn’t it ?”

But this extremely casual attitude, I would argue, pretty much sums up the general public’s view of advertising.

I’m gonna talk more about this – if this blog carries on. Because when you spend some time out of the industry, you realise that only really, really outstanding marketing cuts through.

That old Lord Leverhulme quote about 50% of his ad budget being wasted, and him not knowing which half it was – that’s bollocks really.

95% of marketing budgets are wasted.

And if Lord Leverhulme was around today, I’d tell him that to his face.

I’d say “Lord Leverhulme, me old mucker, you’re out by 45%. Go back and work it out again.”

We’ll talk more about this - and about whether there’s still a role for conventional advertising – in later blogs.

For now, I’ll leave you with a story I heard about a Creative Director leaving the Grosvenor one night, with an armful of awards. The taxi driver who picked him up asked him what had been happening that evening, and the CD said “It’s an awards do for the advertising industry”.

“Blimey”, replied the cabbie, “whatever will they think of next ?”

Anyway, that’s enough for the pre-come column.

Hardly seminal, maybe.

But I do hope it’s going to be sticky.