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Steve Henry's Blog

August 2009 - Posts

Principles

I was intrigued to see Sir Alan Sugar labelled as "clueless" the other day.


The fact that the accusation came from the bloke who set up Pimlico Plumbers (which in itself has a few clueless people working for it) only adds to the excitement.


I've got nothing personal against Sir Alan.  But he did help HHCL in a matter of principles.


When we first launched, we had no clients. Then we heard that Amstrad was pitching and we wangled ourselves onto the list.


Then we asked the marketing director how the work was approved. Apparently, Sir Alan took the work home with him for the weekend, showed it to his wife, and came back on Monday when he dictated his views to the marketing chap who passed them on to the agency.


Now, this approval process may seem good or bad to you.


But if you’re in any doubt, take a look at the advertising campaign which Amstrad was running at the time. (What do you mean, you don't remember it? It had MASSIVE branding.)


Anyway, we said that we had some founding principles in the agency (which we'd hammered out over a pizza one night) and they included - we had to have access to the client decision-maker.


We asked for this and were turned down flat. Unbelievably, looking back on it, we then suggested that one of us would sit in Sir Alan's car and discuss the work with him on the way to or from his lady wife at weekends.


Although, in retrospect, I think we must have been mad. You can't imagine a much more unpleasant way to start the weekend (or, god forbid, the following week) than sitting in a car discussing Amstrad advertising.


But we were young.


And stupid.


We were really stupid.


Anyway, this was turned down as well and we pulled off the pitch.


I was thinking about this and wondering - how many agencies are there today who would put their principles before a chance to pitch ?


As Bill Bernbach famously said, a principle isn't a principle until it costs you money.


And I was thinking glibly – s*dding few.


And then I remembered that two agencies HAD pulled off a pitch recently for reasons of principle.


My old mates at TBWA and Fallon pulled off the Bud pitch because of the clients' insistence on them handing over intellectual property rights on a whole range of work.


And that’s a really interesting debate.


On the one hand you’ve got Marina Palomba arguing very passionately and convincingly that this is less a fine point of principle than an absolutely basic instinct for survival.


(Something which didn’t seem to be of any importance to the 2 agencies who didn't pull off the pitch.)


And on the other hand, you could argue that getting all prissy about copyright was part of the problem in the music industry. Maybe we should just give stuff away.


But somehow we need to figure out how to get paid fairly for what we do, and we need to make creativity respected again.


However, the ad industry has a genius for self-destruction.


It reminds me of what is possibly an apocryphal story from the 90s. What apparently happened was that a particular agency hired a heavyweight suit to front them up - and incentivised the bloke on the basis of billings not income.


So the said individual (being no idiot) pitched for everything that moved and promised every client that the agency would work for virtually nothing.


They won a ton of business, and chappy got a huge bonus.


With only two slight drawbacks. Which was that it was impossible to adequately service clients on those fees, and clients started asking (quite understandably) for more and more discounts from then on in.


The intellectual property argument could be a similar watershed.


So. If you look at Dave Trott's wonderfully argued thesis last week that new media won't kill old media – I think it may be academic. Because if agencies give in to terms like Budweiser's without at least a discussion, it won't matter which media are there or not. The agencies will just be staffed by spineless bean-counters, and the industry's whole raison d'etre will disappear.


Which makes us slightly worse than clueless.


Because a bunch of lickspittles like that wouldn’t even impress Sir Alan.


Now, if you’ve got  5 minutes, enjoy Cassette Boy vs Sir Alan Sugar. It’s f*cking brilliant.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxi6QDwQyLU
 

Posted Aug 26 2009, 06:28 PM by steve henry with 2 comment(s)

The reel




Who do you think has got the best reel in London ?


It’s a subjective question, of course, and maybe everybody would have different views on it.


And that may be one reason why creative awards are so much a part of our industry. 


Although in my view they are totally antithetical to what is genuinely creative. What creative awards do is allow people who don’t know what creativity is, to try and evaluate it. “Our agency in New Zealand has more points on the Guano Report than our agency in
Buenos Aires. Fire the CD in Argentina, and give the CD in Auckland a tax-deductible pat on the back.”


But let’s go back to the question again. Every time a client puts a pitch list together, they are presumably making this decision – assuming that they are genuinely looking for exciting new work, and not just going through the process as a smoke-screen to hide terrible sales figures that are a result of something completely unassociated with the performance of their previous agency.


(Well, it could happen. Unlikely, I know.)


For me, and this could change at any second if I suddenly come across somebody new, the best reel in London at the minute belongs to 4 Creative.


They did the 4 logo idents, which knocked everybody’s eyes out when they first came out. They did the Honda live parachute jump, which took everybody’s breath away when it aired. They did the films with famous people answering questions which you had to guess the question for. (On their website is the one asking celebs what their favourite swear word is. It’s eye-wateringly good.)


And they’ve done a huge range of films and posters and online initiatives and books and events to publicise Channel 4 programmes. They’re all good – and how rare is that on a reel – and some of them are so good they make you change your mind about a programme you’ve already made your mind up about.


They’ve got a spot for SyFy which will blow your socks off, they did the Allan-Carr-as-a-4-year-old films, they did the sensational Skins promos, they make Jamie Oliver funnier than he ever is in his programmes or the Sainsbury’s ads, and they did a promo about Britain’s Forgotten Children which will give me nightmares for weeks to come.


If I’m honest, I don’t think they do work in other media that’s as powerful as their promo work – but then again, as I’ve said, that’s a high bar to jump over.


I went and spoke to Tom Tagholm, the CD there, to find out if there were any secret formulas to producing this level of work so regularly. And I think there are at least two interesting thoughts here.


One is that they allow people to experiment – and to make mistakes. They do stuff, chuck it away and start again. For me, that’s the very essence of creativity.


Two was the sense that in the early days they genuinely didn’t care what the rest of the industry thought of them.


Tom was (in his own estimation) a not-very-successful writer, doing mainly below-the-line at Bates Dorlands eight years ago. Even answering the ad in the back of Campaign to work at the then-unheard-of 4 Creative seemed like career suicide.


When we launched HHCL, it was similar. For about 3 years, we got slagged off every week in Campaign. The turning point probably came when Maxell Tapes suddenly started winning awards and the industry went overnight from “you’re sh*t” to “you’re brilliant”. Although one unfortunate guy doing Private View got the timing slightly wrong and slagged off Maxell tapes something rotten – before it went on to win every award given out that year.


But at HHCL it was thankfully too late and we didn’t care about awards by then. And it’s been the same for 4 Creative. They’ve won tons of awards now, which sit gathering dust in a meeting room that looks like your spare room.


So. Look out. The people who are going to be at the very top of this industry in about 4 years’ time almost certainly aren’t the well-respected middle-weights in acronymously-named group agencies, who have a respectable handful of silver doorstops.


They’re the people who got fired last year, or who got so bored by what they were doing that they left and took a chance doing something completely different.


The outsiders.


And that is exactly as it should be in a creative industry.

Posted Aug 19 2009, 08:10 PM by steve henry with no comments

Siggi

 
It was Freud who first drew the comparison between money and sh*t. (Sigmund I mean, not Matthew. )


(Let alone Clement, with his "meaty chunks".)


And there is certainly something very satisfying about making a substantial deposit in Barclays.


But I’d like to propose a different analogy – between advertising budgets and willy-waving.


The other day I was in a tube station and Coke had covered a lot of the available surfaces with their logo and advertising.


Now, I like the Coke advertising. And Coke are usually very innovative marketeers. But in this instance it just felt wrong.


It felt arrogant. When, if they'd been a bit braver and a bit more philanthropic, it could have been brilliant.


Why not make some repairs to the station (which frankly could have done with it), given it a nice lick of paint, and found a discreet way of saying “this better bit of life brought to you by Coke” ?


Gary Setchell, the ECD at McCanns Birmingham, told me the story of KFC in the States repairing the pot holes in a particular town and branding them with some line about KFC filling a hole.


Or look at what Confused.com did during the last Tube strike. They had people with signs saying “here to help” giving out bus maps and advice. You’ve got to love a brand that does that.


Pret-a-manger’s giving out leftovers to the homeless is one of the reasons I love that brand to pieces.


I remember a creative team years ago saying to me “Let’s take Mothercare's ad budget and put it into setting up crèches”.


How about a mobile phone company allowing people free calls for personal emergencies if they go into the shop ?


Or an airline giving away 2 free seats every 10th trip to deserving people ?


Personally I love Coke's sponsorship of the Football League - that feels philanthropic. But I sometimes wonder if it wasn't a transatlantic c*ck-up. Along the lines of the American businessman who bought "London Bridge" 30 years ago, thinking it was Tower Bridge, but instead found that he'd imported into Texas a perfectly ordinary brick bridge that wouldn't draw a crowd on a wet Wednesday in Grimsby.


But philanthropy feels right for now in so many ways. Look at the Million mobile phone project that seems to have won every major prize in Cannes for the last 3 years.


Here’s a creative challenge. Take some techie breakthrough – like the widget which tracks your eye movement and lets your cursor follow your eyes without needing your mouse (I love that one). And come up with a philanthropic marketing idea round it.


Bet you’ll pick up a Lion at Cannes. (If that’s really what turns you on. It doesn’t interest me in the slightest, but I’m trying to wake up a creative industry that seems to have temporarily fallen asleep.)


A writer called Robert Wright has written about philanthropy recently in a book called “The Evolution of God” (That’s Robert Wright, not Robin Wight.)


He uses game theory to talk about how empathy and philanthropy work. In zero-sum games (i.e., “it’s not enough to win, someone else has to lose”) there is no overall improvement in humanity. But in non-zero-sum games (i.e., “nobody wins unless everybody wins”) co-operation generates improvements for all players.


I.e., we create a better world.


Or as Steven Pinker put it in the Times, “as people acquire know-how they can share cheaply” – which is about as good a definition of the internet as you’ll ever find – “their incentive to co-operate increases because other people become more valuable to them alive than dead”.


I.e., rather than invading Belgium, you sell stuff to them.


So there’s an argument for thinking about philanthropy and wondering if your brand can make the world a better place. Because the evidence is that the world is going that way already.


But beyond that, I really believe that there is a new way of looking at the world, post-Recession. Vulgar displays of wealth seem horribly out of touch. Covering a tube station with your logo is like driving a 4x4 into Soho.


The world has moved on. And if you can’t see that, you’re spending too much time in the Ivy and not enough time in the real world.


In other words. Stop waving your willy about and saying how big it is.


Even if it is big, it makes you look like a 4-year-old.

Posted Aug 13 2009, 08:18 AM by steve henry with 3 comment(s)

Mess

 

We’ve given away the mess of pottage.

 
Now, I’m not exactly sure what a mess of pottage is.

 
But there was a story in the Bible about Esau giving it away.

 
And, if I remember the story right, it’s about giving away your birthright.


It’s about losing the only thing worth having.


And it feels to me that we’ve given away our magic. By which I mean, the unpredictable, spontaneous side of creativity.

 
And that’s a big deal, I reckon.


Look at a couple of sporting analogies. Recently the England cricket captain, Andrew Strauss, said why he thought the current Australian side was beat-able. "I don’t think this Australia side has an aura about it", he said.

 
We’ll get back to that “aura”, later.


From the world of football, I'm fond of quoting Andy Roxburgh, the director of UEFA. He talks about something very similar – about how football needs flair, but these days is being analysed to death.


And it's the same with advertising. Which used to be about a few talented individuals who drank and smoked too much, and who spent too long in the pub or down the bookies, but who created magic.

 
The only difference was that the footballers wore baggy shorts while the people I’m talking about usually didn’t.


But advertising, like football, has so much money in it, that it is now being analysed to death.

 
In any given project, I bet you that 80% of the allotted time is spent writing the brief.


And only between 10 and 20% given to the people who can really make a difference - the "creative" people.

 
Now those people CAN come from any area of the agency, but they’ll have a set of talents that set them apart.


Years ago, in his office overlooking Santa Monica, Lee Clow told me that he thought our industry should be about making a "leap" - from understanding to insight.

 
And that only a relatively small proportion of people in his agency could do that.


I couldn't agree more. Those "leaps" are what make marketing interesting. Frankly, without them, it's as dull as double-entry book-keeping.


And for those of you spend more time looking at porn sites than doing your accounts, trust me. That "double-entry" bit isn't as sexy as it sounds.


This is what Andy Roxburgh means about when he says that football needs more "code-breaker" players.


Players like Messi and Ronaldo, who are the most valued and most expensive players in the world - because they’re unpredictable. A master strategist like Mourinho can analyse every permutation of what his opponents might do - but someone like Ronaldo screws that up, because they do what they do without thinking about it.


They bring about game-changing "leaps".


To return to cricket, that's the aura Shane Warne had about him, and which the current Australian side don't have.


The sheer bloody hell-making of a maverick, high as a kite on the belief that they can do something nobody has done before, something everybody is telling them CAN'T be done, and which they’re gonna do or break their bones trying.


And our industry has a fair number of people who can do that. Code-breaker thinkers.


Years ago, Frank Lowe built the best agency the industry has ever known around this. He hired the best creative talent, and he cherished it.


At one point CDP was working for Fiat, but so highly regarded was the creativity in the agency that clients at other car companies would take CDP staff out for lunch and literally beg them to take their account.


Would that happen these days ?


No way, Mourinho.

 
What conclusions can we draw from all this ?

 
1.  Napoleon once said that "no man is a hero to his valet". And Napoleon should know, because it was his valet who sold his (very small) penis to a museum after he died.


2. Bill Bernbach, my favourite adman of all time, said this.

 
“We spend so much time measuring public opinion that we forget that sometimes we can create it.”

 
3. All we know about Esau, from the Alan Bennett monologue, is that he was “a hairy man”.

 
Bring back the hairy man.

 
And give him a mess of pottage while you’re at it.

Posted Aug 05 2009, 07:47 AM by steve henry with no comments
 
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