Campaign

Glass half full

I think I may have done something rather foolish in my last blog.


Not calling British advertising a “a f*cking disgrace”, because I think a lot of us would concur in that.


(Although, like my hero D.Drogba esq,  I may have to go through a 6-pitch ban.)


No – the thing is that I promised a way for you, the reader, to test out this hypothesis that British advertising is a disgrace. And I’ll give you the suggestion – but be warned, it is both time-consuming and humiliating.


Rather like going through all the clothes you wore 15 years ago, and seeing which ones still fit.


(And if there are any readers of this blog who have recently undergone such an exercise, and want to share their thoughts with me, please email me via this website. I’ve already received some rather interesting propositions via this medium, and not all of them relate to possible start-ups.)


No, the idea is this.


Burrow into Campaign’s archive. Go back – 5 years, 7 years, 10 years. And read the PR releases that accompany the launch of any new ad campaign.


Witness the bragadaccio. Clock the hubris. Be astonished by the bollocks.


(By the way, what happened to that seminal agency Hubris, Bollocks and Bragadaccio ?    Did they get bought by Omnivore ?)


And, after you’ve read the promises, laugh like a drain at what really happened.


You will see people making extravagant claims for their campaigns which time, alas, has not proved correct.


Now, I haven’t done this in any methodical way. (I’m not a very methodical person, really.) I haven’t asked Claire for permission to ransack her back catalogue. (A part of me doubts if Campaign even has archives, in any recognisable way – but I would be very happy to be proved wrong.)


I’ve merely dug out a few past issues of Campaign at home which I’ve kept for personal reasons and looked at the pages I don’t normally look at – i.e. the bits which don’t feature me.


Now – I wouldn’t dream of embarrassing any of the parties concerned in these embarrassing over-claims.


Because I’m a gentleman, and a fair few of the people involved are mates.


But there would be nothing stopping a student of marketing from doing that.


Or a marketing consultancy who wished to follow on from the disturbing results unearthed by the company called Copernicus which I revealed in my last blog.


(For those of you who can’t be bothered to dig thru past blogs – Copernicus claimed that only 16% of ad campaigns added any value for clients.)


Campaign could feature a “10 years ago” column which didn’t just show the ridiculous haircuts and clothes we all had back then, but also the rather diverting gap between promise and reality.


As TS Eliot wrote  -

Between the idea and the reality …

Between the conception and the creation …

Falls the shadow.


And that line alone is enough to convince me that the greatest poet of the last century must have spent some time moonlighting in an ad agency.


(Raymond Chandler once described something in one of his books as “the biggest waste of talent outside of an ad agency” – so he must have put in some time as well. Possibly on a dog-food account.)


But if you go through that exercise, you will find honourable exceptions. Campaigns that delivered against their promise and which seriously influenced the hearts and minds of their consumers.


In about the proportions described by Copernicus – i.e. between 10 and 20% of them seem to have actually worked.


Now, this brings me to something else which I’ve always said about advertising, which is that it’s full of optimists. Brilliant people who can convince you that the glass is half-full when in fact the barmaid who’s wandering among the tables is actually attempting to remove it from your table.


And that reminds me of a brilliant idea which Chas Bayfield and Jim Bolton once had for Guinness, when they were working at HHCL. It was all about seeing life as glass half-full.


The idea was to celebrate the half-way point in a Guinness as a perspective-changing watershed.


And what I loved most about it was that it lived beyond any media executions - drinkers would be reminded of the campaign every time they drank a pint.


Now, whether this campaign would have been as successful as the Guinness campaign which seems to have won several Gold Lions at Cannes every year is, for me, neither here not there.


Because the idea could probably be transplanted to any mood-altering beverage, and disseminated via short clips on Youtube without the need to bother the over-stretched BACC.


And there you go. On one hand I slag off the industry as a shameful waste of money and talent – and on the other hand get all excited about an old idea.


I’m obviously either schizophrenic or an incurable optimist.

Didi revisited

The sentiment expressed by Didier Drogba recently was one that has been
expressed by many poets and artists.


When Didier said “what a f*cking disgrace”, referring to some dubious refereeing decisions relating to the Barcelona 12-yard area, he was echoing the sense of despair and disappointment that has haunted Man down the ages.


It has perhaps been most eloquently expressed by Matthew Arnold in the lines from the end of his poem Dover Beach –


 … for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here, as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.



Which brings us back to advertising.


Because I have often thought that British advertising is a f*cking disgrace.


And you may be thinking – no, hang on Steve – you’ve got that completely *rse about t*t.


(There go those Campaign lawyers with their asterisks again.)


You’re probably thinking – it’s the best in the world,  a never-ending paean of delight whose thirty-second odes to the joys of catfood are rightly lauded to the heavens.


And I’d say – well … maybe.


It can be outstanding. It’s certainly full of astonishingly bright people.


And let’s leave the catfood to one side for the minute.


Because, unless we include M+C Saatchi’s Whiskas work from about 10 years ago, we haven’t really done much that’s good in the way of petfood.


Which is odd given how Youtube has demonstrated the natural marriage that exists between cats and the 30-second format.


But, to illustrate my point, let me take a slight detour via Finland. (And bear with me because there’s a cracking new business idea in this.)


One of the best things about the TBWA network was its Finnish office. Run by one of the most talented people I’ve met in the industry called Petteri Kilpinen.


(And if you think this is me buttering up Petteri because I want a job there, think again. The weather being what it is in Finland, and the only sport in the 11 months of winter being competitive lager drinking between surly, heavily-bearded men, they couldn’t pay me enough to go there.)


But Petteri had a brilliant new business idea – which was to announce that Finnish advertising was a national disgrace.


“We’re worse than the Swedes and the Norwegians,” he said – which would be the equivalent of me saying we’re worse than the Welsh and the Scots.


I.e., it was totally infuriating to the good people of Finland.


He then called various urgent breakfast meetings and conferences to discuss this state of Scandinavian disgrace – in which he was able, fortunately, to propose a way out of the malaise.


To wit - his agency, the heavily-garlanded TBWA network, and Jean-Marie Dru’s brilliant brainchild Disruption.


It worked gang-busters – as it deserved to do since Petteri is brilliant and the other components all stacked up too.


And as a result, they won tons of new business and produced tons of great work.


So, my hope in saying that our industry is a national disgrace is to do the same.


To shake us out of it.


Because, actually I believe it.


90% of the advertising we produce is – mediocre. Which means it’s invisible. Which means it won’t really work.


But you don’t have to take my word for it.


I’ll suggest a way to test it out in the next blog. But in the meantime, look at this statistic.


In 2005, a marketing consultancy called Copernicus analysed over 500 marketing programmes and found that 84% of these programmes failed to drive value for their organisations.


So, only 16% worked.


I don’t know what Didier Drogba would say about that, but I know what I think.

An awkward question

I don’t actually have a copy of last week’s Campaign to hand as I write this.


If you were to look under my desk, you wouldn’t find any neatly stacked piles of my favourite magazine.


Why bother, I reckon, when the sort of pornographic images I most enjoy are so easy to get on the Internet anyway.


But – getting back to Campaign -  I did peruse the latest issue in the Reception of one of the agencies I was visiting last week.


And I saw an interesting article about how to follow on a great ad with a great second one.


This was in light of T-mobile’s sudden and very surprising ascent from very poor also-ran in the Mobile Phone handicapped 2,000 metres – to a sort of front runner.


I can’t see much point in adding my twopennorth to the debate – because actually I think it’s sort of the wrong question to ask.


Now – obviously – a huge point of reference for this debate is the Gorilla ad.


Which I have always felt is a brilliant, stunning piece of work. It should be on every creative’s Top 10 ads of all time.


The ad had received (by mid 2008) several million You Tube hits and there was enormous buzz – which was measured using things like Wavemetrics online buzz research.


But the buzz was nearly all about the ad – hardly any of it was about the brand or the product.


Now this is absolutely fine – if you know how to follow up on it, how to translate the fantastic interest into commercial action.


But where were the creative ideas which grew out of this ?


Did the agency team sit down and go – how can we really exploit this ?


Maybe with cuddly toys at point-of-purchase, or some kind of mobile couponing exercise, or event exploitation at music festivals ?


Was there a packaging idea, an in-store idea, a sampling idea ?


A TV programme idea, an iPhone app or a widget that sat on your desktop ?


Free drumming lessons with every 10 wrappers.


A competition with lunch with Phil Collins for the winner and a whole day out with Phil Collins for the runners-up.


Did they think – wow, we’ve come back off the ropes, and we’ve got Galaxy tottering – let’s deliver a killer blow to the side of the head ?


Or did they just think – God, that was great fun. Let’s go down that slide again …


One of the best arguments I’ve heard recently is that TV ads could play a brilliant part in marketing campaigns – shouting out like barkers at a fair, attracting attention to  .. something else.


Essentially to a journey, or a world, where the marketing really engages you.


It’s the best way to use TV ads, I think   – to feed into more complex marketing approaches.


But making the mini-epics is so seductive. Sometimes it’s too easy to believe that’s all you really need to do.


And let’s be clear on one thing - I don’t blame anyone on the Gorilla team. (Because, apart from anything else, maybe they did all the stuff above, and I just haven’t read the right articles.)


And  their marketing is leagues ahead of most people’s. They created huge, genuine interest, and broke about eighteen obsolete rules along the way.


In some ways, it reminds me a bit of the original Tango campaign.


And just in case anybody thinks I’m being a bit arrogant about all this, let me point out that when we did “Slap” at HHCL, we ran our second ad at the same time as the first one.


It was a fairly forgettable film in which a man shouted “Oranges” into the ear of someone on a railway platform.


And it sank without trace.


So ... it isn’t easy to make a second ad.


And doing what really counts -  making that ad part of an integrated approach which does more than entertain, but translates into genuine long-term engagement with the brand – well that’s rarer than hens’ teeth.


Which, incidentally, would make a good title for a second album, I reckon.

Didi

I like what Didier Drogba had to say last week.


For those of you who missed the moral backlash, he offended the sensitive ears of football fans everywhere by calling the Norwegian referee for the Barcelona game  “a f*cking disgrace".


And that asterisk had to be inserted by Campaign’s legal team.


Although personally I think they should insert an asterisk themselves.


For those of you who missed the offending action, Sky Sports went straight back to it after the ad break, just to make sure you didn’t miss the opportunity to be offended.


And for those of you who missed the awful words then, they were repeated in every newspaper several times the next day.


Now, to be honest, the refereeing WAS a bit fishy. (Hardly surprising, given that the bloke’s name was reported in some papers as Thomas Herring Ovrebo.)


But really Didier’s comment could apply to so much of life.


MPs’ expense claims are a f*cking disgrace. National Express’ train service to Ipswich at weekends is a f*cking disgrace. British Gas’s supposed insurance service for plumbing is a total, unbelievable f*cking disgrace.


Firstly, whatever you say is the problem, they automatically reply  – “That’s not covered”.  (Seriously.  Taps, washing machines, radiators – they’re all “not covered”. This is supposed to be plumbing cover. I reckon it’s in their call-centre training to say it’s not covered and hope that frightens most people away. Either that or it’s the least comprehensive plumbing cover I’ve ever come across.) Secondly, and predictably, they don’t come when they say they will. Thirdly, it costs you a fortune to ring up and be kept on hold while they supposedly try to find out where the plumber is. And fourthly, the plumber who turned up told me that British Gas had told him not to fix anything.


I’m just reporting what he said to me.


He said they told him they wouldn’t pay him for any materials he used, and it would be better if he didn’t do any actual work.


I call that a f*cking disgrace.


So, you’re thinking – well, what’s this got to do with advertising ?


Nothing.


I’m just pissed off with f*cking British Gas.


No, hang on – I’ll think of something.


Ah, got it.


Actually, the point is this. Most people I talk to these days have a horror story similar to my British Gas one. Whether it’s their insurance company, their bank, their utility company, or any of their phone suppliers – it’s like all these companies are terrified of their profit figures for this year and so they’re saying “Screw our customers out of every single penny you can. Raise the prices. Don’t tell them. Back-date the price rises. Etc, etc.”


(And perish the thought that any ad agencies would take the same approach to THEIR clients now – for instance, hitting them with bills for every extra meeting they had, etc – they wouldn’t do that, would they ?!)


But it’s against this background that you’ve got to see the recent advertising campaigns for companies like Aviva and Axa.


Because customers are going to be very, very price-sensitive right now.  And they won’t appreciate companies who rack up their prices, while at the same time spending millions on a campaign talking about their high moral principles.


I mean, it's fine to run the campaign - if you can stand up to what you promise.

(In fact, that's f*cking great.)


But this area is fraught with difficulties.


For instance, another thing which really annoys me is this - if you bother to ring up and threaten to leave, they then often chop the figure down. I mean, that’s immoral, isn’t it ? Because it’s unfair on the people who don’t ring up.


It makes you ask the question – could companies spend their marketing budgets in ways that might really help their customers ?


I can remember years ago hiring a team who had an idea in their book which just read “Mothercare should use their marketing budget to set up crèches all round the country.”


Brilliant.


And that thinking is more relevant now than it’s ever been.


That’s the kind of thinking which companies are really going to need – to help build loyalty during the Recession.


But I suspect it’s rarer than a picture of Didier Drogba having a quiet drink with a bunch of Norwegian referees.

Pics

Dunno about you but I’ve had a frantic week.

Getting near deadlines on the book I’m doing.

And I’m aware that this is supposed to be a “creative’s” blog – whereas I tend to ramble on about more strategic issues.

So this week, something nice and easy.

The equivalent of one of those shows Chris Tarrant used to do
(before he found more and more odd ways of giving people money).

I.e. a selection of ambient ideas which I really like.

 

Somebody called Mondo Pasta. Probably done for awards. But I love it.

 


Ditto. (Although not for pasta, but for some hair conditioning product called Rejoice, apparently.)

 

I can’t just keep writing “Ditto” after each one, can I ?



Maybe I can.


 

Love this.  I worked on this product once.
We did a couple of interesting virals.
Wish we’d thought of this as well.

 


If you zoom in you’ll see on the 3rd building that
this is for retirement insurance.
Personally I think it’s a better ad for paint.


 

Yea. Another nice one probably done for the juries.

But the thing about all these is that they surprise you.

You don’t expect them and they make you think.

In a world in which most marketing communications are formulaic and just very expensive wallpaper, these ideas are great exceptions.