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Steve Henry's Blog

July 2009 - Posts

Trying harder

 Did you know that Rafael Nadal plays with bald balls ?

You do now.

And so does the entire audience at this year’s Singapore IAS Conference.

Because that was just one example which the great Adam Morgan gave of how people use restrictions to improve their creativity.

Nadal, as you’re probably aware, is a great top-spinner. And top spinners love to play with shaggy balls.

(This is all taken verbatim from Adam’s speech, by the way. It’s not me being childish.)

But in order to make himself the best top-spinner in the world, Nadal practises with bald balls and bangs his around the court till it hurts.

(OK. That is me being childish.)

You see, the title of the conference  was “Creativity on a Budget”, and frankly I can’t think of a better title for a conference.

Now I’m not sure what the morality is of spilling the beans on another chap’s speech, and given that I’m always going on about morality in advertising (there’s a short book for you, ha ha) – I ought to be careful.

So I won’t pass on all Adam’s brilliant stuff about how brands can fight bigger brands and win.

But I can’t resist telling you about his idea to dig out the contract between DDB and Avis from the early 1960s.

In the honeymoon period of just winning the account, Bill Bernbach sat down with the CEO of Avis and wrote a contract suggesting how both sides should work together.

And the 7 points they agreed upon were stuck up on the walls of all relevant offices.

Point One was that Avis know about car rental, DDB know about ads.  Essentially, it was about mutual respect.

Point Two was a wonderfully clear and to-the-point brief, stating that all work produced “would attempt to persuade frequent business renters to try Avis”. Compare that with the latest brief you’re working on right now. How clear and to-the-point does yours look ?

Point Three stated that both parties were engaged in “a serious attempt” to create advertising that worked 5 times harder than Hertz’s. Because Hertz’s budget was 5 times bigger than Avis’.

This was about impact. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with Matthew Charlton once, who ran Johnny Walker at BBH for many years. When I asked him how they got such great work through (because TBWA were working on Chivas at the time) – he said that the client had agreed 3 words that described the brand at the very beginning of the process. And one of the words was Pioneering. Once they’d agreed that, only fresh work would fit.

And you can see how DDB’s contract with Avis would have led to similarly high standards of freshness being demanded.

Point  Four went on to say that Avis could “approve” or “disapprove” ads, but not “try to improve” them.

Hmm. Tricky to see how that would work these days.

Like Point One, times have moved on, and it’s no use just wishing the old days were back.

But a recognition of the skill sets that lie within agencies is long overdue.

Point Five is fascinating. DDB agree to put forward only ads that they “recommend”.  What’s odd about that, you might think ? But the paragraph goes on to say that DDB must never put forward ads “to see what Avis think of that one”.

Wow.

All those years ago, but it feels like Bill Bernbach is sitting in any number of offices round London today.

Point Six was about media selection, and stated that it was NOT  about “cold numbers”. “Conviction should prevail”, the contract said, “compromises should be avoided”.

Lovely stuff again.

And Point Seven was a complete anticlimax. It should have said something like “Tell the truth, because losing the trust of your customers is the worst sin you can commit.”  But it didn’t. I just made that up.

Bill’s point Seven was about how all their ads would be approved by Ford, who obviously had some skin in the game.

But six out of seven ain’t bad.

Personally, I was never a huge fan of the commandment about coveting your neighbour’s wife’s ass. So, getting 100%  is never easy.

Now the really, really difficult question is how many of those Points could be usefully tried out today ?

Because the relationship between client and agency has changed fundamentally.

It’s more mutual, more collaborative, more overlapping.

But still.

I love the balls of where Bernbach was coming from.

Big, shaggy balls.

Like the ones Rafael Nadal dreams about.


P.S.  I’m giving a talk at Wolff Olins this Thursday at 6.30. It’ll be pretty much the same speech I gave in Singapore, so if you caught it there, feel free to duck out of this one. Personally, I’m just wondering if I’ve got the number of “o”s, “f”s and “l”s  right.

Posted Jul 27 2009, 09:08 PM by steve henry with no comments

Optimism and its opposite

 

Through a combination of circumstances too horrible to tell, I found myself reading the Daily Mail the other day.

Having attacked shallow optimism in my last blog I was suddenly overwhelmed by the opposite. Every page you turned to, everything was all too terrible to contemplate.

It seemed to be a question of either killing yourself or leaving the country. (Or possibly combining the 2 in a one-way ticket to Walt Dignitasworld in Switzerland.)

I opted for merely leaving, and headed out to Singapore where I gave a speech at the IAS Conference.

Where it was slightly unnerving to see that about  50% of the people on the streets were wearing little face masks. Either there are a lot of distraught Jacko fans out here (and I did see a lot of eBay activity for Jackson 4 tickets) or the flu fear is even worse here than in England.

Probably the latter.  First they had Asian bird flu and now swine flu. They're probably thinking - if pigs had wings, we'd all be f*cked.

A further irony relating to optimism is that, while I was blogging about what I considered the pernicious optimism in advertising, I was being accused by several journalists of being too optimistic myself, in a book I’ve  just written. (Called “You’re Really Rich”, published by Random House, etc etc.)

And that’s not just the Sackcloth & Ashes correspondent from  the Daily Mail.

I had to tell the journos I was a miserable bastard in reality, and that seemed to cheer them up.

Although my generally hangdog demeanour was sweetened by the IAS conference in Singapore – hosted superbly by David Tang of DDB - and in fact it became dangerously close to the demeanour of a well-hung dog.

Because the conference was superb and I love being in Asia.

I think I've figured out why I prefer it to most other continents (especially Antarctica which is frankly a dump) - and it's their attitude.

At the end of my speech I compared two quotes. One from a 1980s adman - " It's not enough to win, someone else has to lose" . And one from more recent times - "Nobody wins unless everybody wins".
The first idea holds sway in most Western interactions (and Eckhart Tolle writes about it brilliantly as being why everybody in that culture is essentially unhappy, no matter how “successful” they are).
Whereas what little I understand of the Confucian approach to life seems to support the latter.

The only problem is - where does that leave advertising ?

Which almost has one-up-manship as its core belief.

Of course it may not be a problem. We may all, everywhere in the world, turn into rapacious and competitive bastards. Problem sorted.

But if we went the other way, and became more considerate and community-focussed, would capitalism and consumerism lose its grip on our psyches ?

It's a genuine question, by the way.

Answers, please,  in less than 12 words.  “I think advertising has a future because ...”

Incidentally, I think advertising has a future because you come across people like Adam Morgan in it. The deservedly famous author of “Eat the Big Fish”  was speaking after me at the conference and frankly it's a good job I was playing with the idea of non-competition  - because anybody competitive should never share a platform with Adam Morgan.

I enjoy provoking an audience and think I did quite a good job. But he wowed them.

I'm tempted to spike his guns, (or blunt his harpoon), by telling you all his stuff here and now - but I’m on holiday this week.

On holiday from being a miserable bastard, for just one week.

So I’ll tell you a bit more in another blog.

But let me whet your appetite by saying  that he had an absolutely brilliant wheeze, to dig out the contract that was agreed between Bill Bernbach and the boss of Avis shortly after they agreed to work together in the early 1960s.

Which was truly fascinating.

It's weird - I spend half my time thinking that planners over-complicate the process, and waste too much of the precious little time allotted to solving clients' problems. And the other half of the time thinking that the very best thing about the industry is when you meet planners like Adam Morgan, Jon Steele or Russell Davies.

It makes me feel like God is in his heaven and let's look at a quadrant of how the angels should be arranged.

 

 

Posted Jul 22 2009, 04:53 AM by steve henry with 1 comment(s)

More Angels



I was trying to get to the Michael Jackson Memorial Service last week. But (in the absence of a full-time PA) I somehow ended up, not at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, but at Staples Corner, near Brent Cross.


An easy mistake to make.


And talking of kings reminds me of one of my favourite cartoons of all time. It’s either from Private Eye or the New Yorker, I can’t remember which.


It shows a Renaissance ruler looking at a portrait of himself in full pomp and he’s addressing the artist standing in front of him.


The ruler’s looking a bit pissed off and he says  - “Give me more angels. And make them more pleased to see me”.


I’ve always loved that cartoon. And I think it raises a couple of interesting questions about the ad industry.


One is about the nature of patronage. But let’s leave that for now. Cos it’s a tricky subject to negotiate.


But the second point is the relentless cheerfulness of most marketing messages.


How come most ads seem to resemble a chat between Little Orphan Annie and Polyanna over the picket fence about how good a product Prozac is - and such good value, too ?


Very grating grinning.


But look at your favourite films, or books, or music tracks.


Most of them will be flavoured with a tang of bitter-sweet. Sure, some Pixar films will be in your list, but if all your top 10 films were animated feel-good epics, I'd be worried.


By contrast with “real” entertainment, most ads have a tone of voice which feels like you're watching something aimed at 7-year-olds.


So it’s interesting to explore other tones of voice.


Many years ago, I was involved in the launch of one of the first premium lagers.


At that time, ads for ordinary lagers (or "throwing lagers" to use the correct technical name) featured 3 blokes in loud shirts who enjoyed a good time, to some upbeat music track.


I pointed out to our client that most people's music collections were largely made up of tracks that weren't so sweetly, anodynely cheerful, and we made a campaign featuring black and white films of people having a tough time, to some blues tracks. It's still one of my favourite campaigns, because that brand took off massively, and within a year, about 5 other premium lagers had also launched with "serious" advertising.


We redefined the category by breaking the rules. (Well, thinking about it, how else are you going to redefine a category ?)


Music gets all this, big time. There are a million examples. But take a listen to a new band getting a lot of attention called Skint and Demoralised – well, you’ve got the tone already from the name of the band.


How many ad briefs would start from that set of words ?


Their lyricist is a guy called Matt Abbott, and you’ll get a flavour of his approach just from the titles of his songs. How about “You probably don’t even realize when you do the things I love the most” or  “Only lust ignores violence involving ambulances”.


Reminds me of my favourite band name of all time - The F*cking C*nts Treat Us Like Pr*cks.


Try sticking that in your desired consumer response.


Perhaps more relevantly than this, a lot of campaigns which I love have dealt with reality by taking on some form of social pioneering role - from HHCL's Fuji film work, through Benetton, through Dove and Persil, to a recent campaign in the States in which Kentucky Fried Chicken went round some local towns and filled in the pot holes in the road. There was some line about filling a hole, but what was brilliant was the fact of a brand doing something useful, fighting a battle on behalf of its customers.


It's the difference between "feel-good" (which is often as vapid as a stream of soap bubbles dissolving on the air) and "do-good" - which might necessitate dealing with some unsavoury but very real aspects of the world.


I'd love to believe that marketing could do this. But I fear that in the heads of many industry people is that old ad slogan:


"Nothing acts faster than anodyne".

Posted Jul 14 2009, 05:55 PM by steve henry with 2 comment(s)

Odd balls

I was reading in the Observer recently about how  JB Priestley made a 40-minute film of his erect penis.


No, hang on a minute, I’ve got that wrong. It was John Lennon who made a 40-minute of his erect penis. On the next page, in another article, there was a feature on J B Priestley and his epic trip around Britain, recording the thoughts and emotions of people in the year 1933.


If you made a similar trip these days, you’d probably find that the average bloke was making a  40-minute film about his erect penis.


And uploading it onto YouPube.


And that highlights one of my favourite quotes about creativity, from the art critic John Berger.


He said that the first time you walk into a restaurant with a needle in your tongue, you’re liable to be arrested.


The second time you do it, you’re liable to be hired as the cabaret.


And this is a genuine human truth, which the advertising industry has yet to get its head round.  


I.e. Stuff which people initially consider shocking is quite quickly assimilated into culture.


Incidentally, Berger wrote that thought about 40 years ago, when sticking a needle in your tongue would have been considered unthinkable.  These days, half the waitresses in London have got studs in their tongues. So, his observation has, in a sense, already come true.


And that has implications for creativity and research, which nobody has yet figured out how to deal with.


If you go into research with the equivalent of a needle in your tongue,   people are liable to say –  No, we don’t like that. You’ve done a better ad over there, the one with Penelope Cruz telling me that I’m worth it.


So the Penelope Cruz ad gets made, over the one with Jimmy Nail, with a needle in his tongue, telling people that they’re a bag of shite.


Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating to make the point.


But it’s enormously difficult to get original thinking through conventional research.


Someone told me that “Gorilla” wasn’t put into research. It was the umbrella concept of  
“glass and a half productions” that gathered the necessary scores to prise the budget out of the board.


I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds very plausible to me. The chances of getting an ad like Gorilla through conventional research are tiny.


But – once you MAKE an ad like that  – people go, hey that’s funny, or they expand their mental horizons to accommodate the new thought, and hey presto it works.


And in fact, the weirder it is the better. Because people are bombarded with ordinary crap the whole time.


It wasn’t the umbrella thoughts of “glass and a half productions” that got  4 million hits on Youtube. It was the weird sh*t of a gorilla playing the drums.


Although if they’d given the Gorilla an umbrella, or maybe had a ball-boy standing behind him holding an umbrella, I don’t think it would have done any harm.


But if you go into conventional research, people will try to help you by telling you how to make your stuff more like the ads that are out there already.


They think they’re being helpful, that way.


It’s like a huge, expensive version of your Mum telling you that if you go out without a scarf you’ll catch a cold. I.e. stating the bleedin’ obvious.


So – how do you get really original stuff through ?


Well, I’ve got a few ideas on that. (Which I’ll expand on in another blog.)


But I think most agencies right now are just dragging out Youtube and saying -  look, people are already doing this on the net anyway -  can we do it as well ?


Look, this film of a cat playing the banjo has had 2 million hits, let’s try it for your toothpaste.


Which only makes a very limited sort of sense.


Because, at least on Youtube people are experimenting,  and the boundaries are being pushed all the time. I don’t just mean in terms of taste - I mean in terms of weirdness and surreality and creativity and all the rest of it.


Now, being odd isn’t the only way to get noticed. But it worked for the gorilla, it worked for Sony’s balls , it worked for the Skoda cake, it worked for a lot of the stuff at HHCL, it worked for a lot of the stuff at CDP, etc, etc.


It’s something to think about.


And if it stops you thinking about J B Priestley’s penis, that’s probably a good thing too.



Posted Jul 07 2009, 07:58 PM by steve henry with 6 comment(s)

Neophilia

At HHCL, we were always accused of being different for the sake of being different.

I struggled with the accusation, because it was so obviously true.  So I tried changing it to “different for the sake of being better” and that might have kept some people quiet for a bit, but essentially we were always just interested in being   different for the sake of being different.

And I still think that’s a valid business strategy in our industry – in fact, now more than ever.

With this in mind, I scooted round the Saatchis’ New Directors Showcase channel on Youtube. And then went to look at the D&AD New Blood student show at Olympia.

The main thing to say about the first one is that (at last) you don’t have to go to Cannes to see it. God, I hate Cannes. You know that Oscar Wilde quote about foxhunting – “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable” ? I’ve got my version for Cannes – “the drunk in pursuit of the useless”. To be fair, it doesn’t quite have Oscar’s assonance -  and Oscar is famous for his assonance -  but it’s pretty much true.

The Showcase is fantastic, though. Keith Loutit’s films have picked up a bit of PR in the newspapers but a photo in Metro doesn’t do justice to their unnerving poetry. Christopher Hutsul’s Nike film is almost exactly how advertising should be done – disarming, funny, compelling. Zhu Jin Jing’s film about Bruce Lee playing table tennis is wonderful and everybody who sees it will be mesmerised by it.


There’s a lot of experimentation, for its own sake. Then on Monday afternoon I went to Olympia and judged a section of New Blood, the D&AD student exhibition. I cycled there, while listening on my iPod to the Verve track “the drugs don’t work”. Somewhat unnervingly, at the first junction, I found that my brakes didn’t work.


And if there’s one thing worse than the drugs not working, it’s the brakes not working.

But I got there.

Some of the stuff was brilliant - like the Bucks College stand, which was worth the price of admission alone. But even though the price of admission is zero, some of the other advertising stands couldn’t live up to the same claim.

Walking round them was the equivalent of Proust ordering a large white tea and a packet of 10 madeleines. For some of these tutors, clearly nothing has changed in the last 20 years.

What are these people doing teaching students ? 

I know what you’re thinking. They should be working in some of the bigger ad agencies in London.

But actually what they’re doing is no joke to the students involved. They’re failing to teach them to use the media which we still call “new” or “emerging” but which in about 18 months’ time, we’ll just call “the media”.

Look at the two Titanium films for Obama’s marketing and you’ll see how it should be done.

One of the Saatchis’ directors, Laurie Thinot, has a beautiful film for a fantastic track called “Stay the same” by Autokratz.  The lyric says “we can always stay the same” but sometimes it sounds like  “we can’t always stay the same.”

( I had an accountant who spoke like that once. “You cyan take the money out after one year.” “I can or I can’t ?”   “You cyan”. )

Which lyric you prefer could say a lot about your attitude to advertising right now.

Posted Jul 01 2009, 08:28 AM by steve henry with 5 comment(s)
 
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