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.
