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
