Campaign

Up Golden Square

 This week I went up west.


To speak in the hallowed marble halls of M+C Saatchi, following an invitation from Mr Graham Fink.


Now, as someone said to me, Finky’s Thursday Night talks are legendary. He has had the great and the crazy in there, luminaries from Tony Kaye to Adrian Holmes and back again.


This did not make me feel relaxed.


A preparatory trip, to get a reel sorted out, made me feel more anxious. Not only is the agency super slick, but it seems to have a hiring policy of recruiting only stunning-looking people.


It’s long been an axiom in adland that it costs the same to hire pretty people as ugly ones, so why not hire the former?  But M+C have turned it into an art form.


However, despite appearances, M+C isn’t a throwback to 90s advertising (a time of long lunches and louche liquidity).  Largely because of Graham. I think he’s the only CD from a  conventional agency  who gets invited to Creative Social, the meeting forum for digital CDs. He’s always been into radical stuff -  so he isn’t as fazed by all the changes in our industry as some of the other current inhabitants of the fire engines, tea-cups and flying pigs which make up the Creative Directors Merry-Go-Round.


I had a good time chatting to some of the staff up there, and I’ll précis 4 of the points I tried to make.


1. The industry is in a state of more upheaval than ever before. (Which I love.) Back in the mid-90s Jay Chiat came back from a conference about the internet and found his CD Lee Clow working on a TV ad. Jay informed him “You’re working on a dead animal”.


Jay was ahead of his time in this (as he was in most things), and adland has felt the threat to be exaggerated ever since.


But as a brilliant journalist called Jeff Jarvis from the Guardian wrote recently – you ignore the warning signals at your peril. Jarvis was talking about how newspaper editors are complaining about the internet killing newspapers, (and it is, by the thousand in America) and he said  - it’s been 20 years since the Internet arrived, 15 years since the first commercial browser, 10 years since Google and the first blogs.


It’s not like this thing has suddenly appeared overnight. They’ve been coming over the hill for a decade or two.


(And if you want to know how bad the threat is, I would ask you to consider one thought. What are ad agencies called ? They used to be called “creative agencies”. Now they’re called “traditional” agencies, or “conventional” agencies. Hmm.)


2. Your view of advertising (as seen from within the industry) is vastly distorted in relation to how real people see it. I’ve written about this before – but the research industry props up a view in which people supposedly take a huge interest in ads. (Because we pay people money to talk about them, in a way which none of them really would in the real world …)


So, if you want to understand how people really see the products of adland, take a step outside the industry.


3. In relation to point 2 above, only very, very few ads really impinge on people’s consciousness. 5% of them, if that. So all the arguments which happen in agencies about getting work from 5 out of 10 to 6 out of 10 – or worrying that the client is knocking a 7 /10 ad down to a 5 /10 by insisting on a bigger logo – they’re all a giant waste of time.


If you’ve got something that’s 9/10 or 10 /10 – die on a sword for it. If you haven’t, it doesn’t matter. No-one will care.


Not even your Mum.


4. Ethics.


Partly because of the internet, we need to be more ethical in our communications. As I’ve written before, this is (relatively) straightforward when it comes to honesty. We just need to be more vigilant of weasels and half-truths. (The internet has taken power away from corporations as effectively as the printing press did to the Church in the Middle Ages – with, I would guess, a similar exposure of hypocrisy and greed.)


But there’s a further element to this which is about responsible consumption – and that’s a real poser.


So I’m going to pass on a thought which completely blew me away when I first heard it 9 years ago.


I was emailing a guy with the wonderful name of Jelly Helm, who had been working as a copywriter in Wieden and Kennedy. But then Jelly started thinking about consumption and ethics.


He told me that if the rest of the world consumed at the level America consumed, we’d need 4 more planets to provide the raw material.


Ie Advertising wasn’t … fuelling the economy, stoking up the market, etc. All the reassuring clichés we like to believe. It was creating massively unsustainable over-demand.


What do we do about that ?


That is a really difficult question.


At the end of my talk, one of the young creatives came up and wanted to chat about this.


And that alone is proof that advertising is still – potentially - a great industry.

Essays

 I don’t know if you saw last week’s Campaign supplement that had some of the IPA Excellence Diploma essays in it.


I bet you were too busy to read them, right ?


I remember when I was working full-time as a CD, and I didn’t have time to go to the toilet. It was half-hour meeting followed by half-hour meeting, and the commode got emptied every 2 hours. Some days I got so busy I’d answer my phone with the words of Samuel Beckett “I must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”  


But that’s Samuel Beckett for you – always going on about something.


However, you really should try to read them. Those essays – and a lot of the others which weren’t published  -  were amazing. I’m slowly making my way through meeting the authors, because I was knocked out by them.


These are 19 of the brightest people in the industry, who’ve been picked by their agencies to be tutored intensively for a year. These are people who have read all the books their bosses haven’t had time to read. These are people who are reading all the blogs their bosses don’t know how to read.


Let’s not beat about the bush - these are people who are quite probably a damn sight smarter than their bosses.


And they’ve put their thoughts down into finely-crafted and meticulously researched 7,000 word essays.


Their conclusions were massively varied. (Although not one of them said “it’s fine as it is, let’s just keep going” - which, I would argue, is the message quite often being put out by their bosses.)


One of the things which fascinated me was what happened in the face-to-face judging on one of the panels.


When Stephen Woodford lost it completely and rammed a water jug up Moray MacLennan’s … No, I’m joking.


Either that, or hallucinating.


No, what happened was that the judges who worked in agencies (some of the brightest people you’ll ever put in a single room) were very positive and loved the essays. To take some examples at random, they got very excited by thoughts such as how you could exploit data much more imaginatively, how it was more cost-effective to build loyalty programmes than to seek acquisition relentlessly, and how massively important the in-store environment was.


(75% of purchase decisions are made in-store. Think about that for a second, then tell me how many great in-store campaigns you’ve been involved with yourself.)


But the single client on the jury was rather less impressed. This was all stuff that he was doing already, and had been thinking about for ages.


Clients get all this. Or the better ones do, anyway.


But most agencies are still hanging onto a very narrow range of conventional solutions.


Why ?


One argument has it that conventional agencies have vested interests in keeping conventional solutions going. Put it simply, they’ve got TV departments, so why wouldn’t they sell TV ads ?


Of course the same argument  is true of so-called digital agencies. They’ve got web-designers on staff, so why wouldn’t they recommend a website re-design ?


You could argue that, as soon as you staff up like this, you limit the answers you may want to give the client. But the answer, for a client, can lie almost anywhere.


Take Starbucks, for example. I don’t know if they’ve ever done any conventional marketing. I know what they do is spend a lot of money on staff training. So – even though I’m a coffee junkie, and even though I prefer the coffee in Cafe Nero – I love going into Starbucks.


Their staff will recognize you if you go in a few times and remember what you ordered. So they create a great environment.


Staff training could be absolutely the right way to spend your marketing budget.


So could encouraging your staff to blog, or using the budget to improve the environment.


The answer could be a new pack design or a 90-minute feature film.


As Richard Hytner said to me a few months ago, there’s a hidden danger in all this. I.e. in agencies not opening up to offer a wider selection of solutions to clients.


The obvious danger is that clients think even less highly of agencies than they seem to do already, and take their business elsewhere.


The hidden danger is that all those incredibly bright people who wrote the IPA essays, who know all this, and who want to change our industry -  are told to get back in their box.


And then they get frustrated and leave the industry.


If any of them are thinking of doing that, I hope they decide instead to start new agencies.

Bone idle gossip

I came back from the Algarve last week to find that I’d joined McCanns Birmingham.

Apparently.

Now I’m not saying that this opening sentence has quite the same power as “Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find he’d been transformed into a giant insect.” But it does seem to have prompted a few ripples in adland.

Firstly, a couple of friends texted me saying “Congratulations” and I didn’t know what they meant. It emerged that the two of them had seen a story running on The Drum website which reported that I’d “joined” McCanns in Birmingham.

(They should have run the headline as “Henry in Drum Brum Shock”.)

Now, both these friends would maintain that McCanns is a fine, long-standing brand and that Birmingham is, if nothing else, to be esteemed for all time as the birthplace of T. Beattie esquire (the nearest thing adland currently has to Jesus Christ). But they were still shocked that I’d apparently joined the agency.

As, indeed, was I.

Later that day, my former PA texted me to say that “everybody” was asking her about the rumours.

So – what’s the truth ?

(And this is where the story gets interesting, I think. Because adland has a tenuous relationship with the truth. And I’ll get onto that later.)

A few weeks back, I was invited by Robin Price to meet a mate of his – a smashing bloke called Dean Lovett. For those of you who don’t know, Robin was the fifth founding partner of HHCL – and indeed is know in some circles as “The Fifth Monkee”.

So we all met in Sheekeys, and it emerged that Dean was looking for someone to do some freelance consultancy work, involving a kind of mentoring role with a new Creative Director he was thinking of hiring.

I went to look at the agency. I went and met the bloke who was up for the CD job. And I really liked them both. So I agreed to do it - and it’ll be for a few days a month, for a few months.

Now, the thing about most freelance gigs is that they don’t normally attract or warrant any publicity.

And actually, the last thing I’d wanted right now was to “join” any agency full-time. I’ve told all the head-hunters that. Because I’m enjoying writing a book, (to be published by Random House, out in late summer), I’m doing freelance gigs with a variety of different agencies (including some of the smartest digital agencies in town), I’m doing a TV writing job with the lovely Peter Souter and the lovelier Mary Wear, I’m going to be teaching at the EACA European ad school, I’ve got about 18 projects on the go, and my diary is probably busier than it’s ever been.

It’s what the writer Charles Handy called a “portfolio” career, and what an American friend of mine called “going plural”. So, when the Drum mis-represented the facts (by stating that I’d “joined” McCanns), it pissed me off a bit.

What does the story tell us? Firstly, perhaps, that adland has got a few snobs who actually don’t know that McCanns Birmingham is a hugely successful agency, with an enviably integrated set-up – I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it doesn’t produce some fantastic work in the next year under the direction of Gary Setchell, who is one of the smartest people I’ve met in ages.

And, more interestingly I think, that journalists use what you might call “journalistic license”. Or what you could call (if you were the wronged party) a bit of flaming cheek.

And I know all about that because, as an adman, I’ve written a few weasels myself.

(That sounds like that old joke which ends “But f*ck ONE sheep …”)

I admit it. I’ve coined a few weasels. There. It’s out now.

One of the few geniuses I’ve ever met in advertising, Paul Arden, had a brilliant weasel as the sub-head to his first book. Do you remember it? “The world’s best-selling book by Paul Arden.” This was when it first appeared. I was half-way out of the shop, having given Waterstones my money, before I realise what he’d done there.

And I work in the bloody business. So – the Drum weren’t lying when they said I’d “joined” the agency. They were just putting a juicy spin on it.

But I’ve felt for a long time that that’s one of the dodgiest things about the ad industry. For decades it’s been telling weasels and half-truths. (From real truth-stretchers like “Guinness is good for you” to “A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play”, onto the subtler half-truths of today.)

And when you have a friend who’s always exaggerating and making stuff up, after a while you stop trusting them. So, how do you think the public feels about the ad industry?

However. What is interesting is that one agency in our industry has a motto which I’ve always believed the rest of us should live up to.

That motto is “The truth, well told”.

I love it. The agency ?

McCanns.

(But don’t hold the front page - that doesn’t mean I’m going to join them quite yet …)

More or less

I’ve just come back from Portugal, where I’ve been thinking mainly about bikinis, bottoms and (just to ring the changes) bikini bottoms. But a stray paragraph in an old copy of the Guardian Saturday Review, which I was using to protect my nose, struck me as relevant to the world of marketing.

Apparently, in 1343, while besieging the town of Kaffa, the general of the invading Mongol forces had a brainwave. And he started catapulting into the town the corpses of various plague victims.

Now I don’t know what it was about the image of a stinking, flea-infested corpse that put me in mind of marketing, but I kept reading. And I found out that from this humble beginning, we can actually trace the beginnings of the Black Death – which was to ravage Europe for years and eventually claim 25 million victims.

There’s contagious for you.

I’ve thought for a long time that one of the best brand names for the modern era of marketing is Contagious (a magazine + DVD which celebrates non-traditional ideas).

And that set me thinking. What is it about modern marketing that separates it from marketing of about 10 years ago ?

For me, the essential thing is the lack of a captive audience.

Which makes the whole damn thing a whole damn lot harder. There’s never been a greater need for market-challenging thinking – which is one reason why I love the story of www.theimpossiblepitch.com

Apparently this guy in Sweden has asked 3 interns to pitch for the global adidas business in just 3 weeks. And they’re coming up with really good ideas.

Love it.

But although brave thinking feels like the answer, it’s not the real differentiating factor for right now. For what that is, let’s look at a story which Edward de Bono told in one of his books.

It’s about a king with a beautiful daughter and two princes who are suitors for her hand.

One of the princes does everything he can for the king – he mows his lawn, paints his drawbridge, cleans out the moat, and fixes the clicking sound in the king’s chariot.

The other one asks the king to do him a favour. He says “Lend us your chariot for Friday night please, your Maj.”

And the second one is the one who wins the daughter. Because the king feels emotionally much closer to this prince, having done him a favour.

I’ve always loved that story – and always felt like it had a meaning for the ad industry.

But it was only when I was judging last year’s IPA Excellence Diploma essays that I saw how it really worked. (Incidentally, the standard of essays overall was fantastic. If the industry hangs onto those 19 people, its future is assured. But of course that’s a big “if”.)

One of the most brilliant essays was by someone called Chris Gallery, and it compared the marketing techniques of Clinton and Obama in the Democratic Primaries.

Clinton believed in “messaging”. She had messages she wanted to put out, and she put them out there, usually in paid-for media.

Obama had a very simple theme – “Change/Hope”- and he didn’t so much put it out there, as let people bring it back to him. And by asking people to donate even very small amounts of money to his cause, he built incredible loyalty.

He asked people to help him, like the prince in de Bono’s story.

And that, I think, is the essence of marketing in a world in which we no longer have a captive audience.

We can put messages out there, but people will by and large refuse to play that game in the future. However, if you offer something that people believe in, they will come to you.

And that takes me back to what I’ve been saying in the last couple of blogs. If you can create a theme for your brand – a social theme that matters to people – that will have far more resonance than any product message.

And, once you take that approach, it’s got an added advantage. Because, instead of just PUSHING your message out in paid media channels, you can be talking about whatever your brand’s theme is, and people will come towards it.

If, for instance, you’re an Italian washing machine company, and you decide that your theme should be about families – why not, the washing machine is near the heart of a lot of families and Italians really get family values – you can start up networks about families, join discussions online and in the real world about families – and people may actually want to hear what you’ve got to say.

Whereas if you just do an ad telling people about your washing machine, people may not actually care very much.

The answer, in this new world, is to pull, not push.

Ms Clinton pushed; Mr Obama pulled. And boy, did he pull.

In other words, when it comes to selling, less is definitely more.

Which, incidentally, I’ve found is also true of bikini bottoms.

For Real

I heard this story about Hitler the other day.

No, don’t worry. He’s not coming back.

Although if he was around now, I’m sure he’d be saying it wasn’t really his fault and claiming a £5million a year pension.

No, this concerns a man called Wilhelm Furtwangler, who was one of his advisers. Which is not necessarily something you’d put high up your CV. But at one point the two men were talking.

And Furtwangler told Hitler that it was imperative that Germany celebrated the anniversary of Richard Strauss’ birthday. “If we don’t celebrate it”, Furtwangler argued, “we risk alienating international public opinion.” This was in 1944. Seriously.

Now, history’s not my subject – but I would have thought that by 1944 it might have been a bit late to worry about this.

Talk about being out of touch with reality. And that brings me to the Aviva name-change ad. Now, as it happens, I quite like the new Aviva ad – the one about treating people as individuals.

(With some reservations, which I’ll get onto later.) But boy, they needed something good, after their massive name-change ad. Which I found posted on Youtube under the heading of The Worst Ad on TV.

Talk about being out of touch with what real people are thinking. Everybody was tightening their belts and they splashed the cash like it was going out of fashion. (Which, actually, maybe it is – but that’s a story for later.)

Like Bruce Willis needs some extra dosh. That’s a good cause.

And you’ve done what as a company – launched a new product, revolutionised the market, pledged better service ?

Oh, I see. You’ve changed your name. That’s kind of – more in your interests to tell me, than it’s in my interests to listen to it. Because you know what – I’ve got 8 million more important things to worry about.

And then in the Youtube comments, there’s a defensive post from one of their staff, saying that the campaign had been planned for ages and cancelling it could have been counter-productive.

Well – yes and no. It comes back to what I was saying in my last blog. Companies need to put themselves on the same side as their customers. And this ad misjudged that mood horribly.

You COULD argue, if you wanted to be perverse (and I love perverse arguments) that the ad could be reassuring – because at a time when a lot of big companies are crashing and burning, these guys still seem to have a lot of money to burn.

But I would argue that it’s exactly that kind of arrogance which got us into this horrible financial mess in the first place. Like I said before. Every great brand needs an attitude, a belief, a passion.

But it needs to be something which genuinely helps its customers. I’m looking for an attitude more akin to what Dove tried to do with the Campaign for Real Beauty, or Persil tried to do with Dirt is Good. i.e. fight a battle, on behalf of the customer, which is credible to that brand.

So, stop now – sit back, take a deep breath, make yourself a Baileys and Red Bull spritzer, mainline some crack into your last remaining functional eyeball, and think – which brands do I really feel loyal to?

I think you’ll find that a) there aren’t that many of them and b) most of them did the above. Not the mainlining crack into the crack of your arse stuff – very few successful brands have pursued that particular business approach - no, the fighting a battle on behalf of the customer thing.

Some of our most famous brands originally had very strong philanthropic principles, and that helped build them up. And what’s interesting is that it’s not enough just to talk about it.

One of my favourite campaigns of all time was DDB’s mould-breaking “We Try Harder” work for Avis in the US in the 60s.

They took a depressing part of the brief – to wit, “Hertz is bigger and more successful than us” – and turned it into something motivating and compelling and believable.

“We’re number 2. We try harder.” Sheer bloody genius. And one of the most brilliant ads within that campaign showed a dirty ashtray. With a headline to the effect that this wasn’t good enough.

The copy told the story about a guy who worked in the ad company that wrote Avis’ ads, and how he’d found the uncleaned ashtray in an Avis car.

And he didn’t feel that the company were living up to the claims made in the advertising. Wow. Stop and think about that for second. Now, apply it to Aviva.

Wouldn’t it be great if the next commercial message from Aviva was from a copywriter at AMV saying they’d been badly treated by Aviva, and they didn’t feel like the company was living up to the claims that AMV were giving them?

Makes you think. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Aviva. If any of their customers feel like they’re not getting treated with respect, I hope they complain loudly.

Don’t get me wrong. If Aviva can live up to this claim, I think it’s fantastic.

I think it’s exactly what they should be doing. But it’s rather like the red line stuff for Axa. Is it real? Or is it just “Washes whiter than white whitewash” from adland