Campaign

MM

 

I think the mistake I made in the last blog was in trying to talk about something very complicated while under the influence of very strong dental anaesthetics.

 

The blog was a complete mess.

 

And I apologise to my loyal readership of one man and his dog.

(Apparently the dog in question is the one which featured on X Factor recently as one half of an act claiming to be a singing duet. After the act had finished, and the human half had sung but the dog had done nothing, Simon Cowell delivered the immortal line - "Your dog doesn't sing, does it ?"


(I love it. I mean - how many dogs do sing ?)

Anyway, because I'm still suffering with my upper right rear molar, I'm going to attempt a less ambitious topic this time.


Which is Marilyn Monroe's bottom.


As both of you will know (try to keep up, Bonzo) she was famous for coming up with the line "Chanel no 5" when an interviewer asked her what she wore in bed.


(And if you were Chanel no 5, you couldn't buy publicity like that. Although these days you would try, and, as a result, it wouldn't be half so effective.)


But I'm thinking of another occasion.


This was the time when she kept John F. Kennedy waiting at a party for 2 hours. And the reason she was so late was because a friend of hers was helping her into "the tightest goddam dress I have ever seen on a woman".


The quote comes from the friend in question, a certain Milt Ebbins.


When she arrived at the event, the guests apparently "parted like the Red Sea". One guest described her entrance as being "magical ... Everything stopped. Everyone stopped."


By the end of the evening she and JFK had swapped phone numbers - and later went on to sleep together.


She achieved impact, awareness, positive interest, desired customer response,  sampling and an ongoing relationship.


She went all the way down “the funnel of response”.


Which is essentially what people in marketing all want to achieve through their creativity.


What can we learn about this ?


1. She aimed high. Don't try to pull the guy in accounts. Pull the President.


2. She didn't care about deadlines. It was more important to be right than to be on time.


3. She really cared about initial impact. First impressions are 90% of the battle.


4. She realised she would only achieve her target by doing something extreme. ("The tightest goddam dress" etc.) In any creative endeavour, you need a first or a most.


Of course there are a series of other questions which are raised.


Like - who is Milt Ebbins, and how did he get that job ?


And - was it polite for everyone to stare at her entrance ?


But essentially MM was demonstrating the sheer chutzpah needed to achieve ambitious targets.


Then again, her stated ambition was "to be wonderful".


Is that something which most brands would be brave enough to claim ?
 

Confused ? You should be

A flyer is lying on my kitchen table, which reads like this.


“Hosted by Jackie Brambles, the event celebrates inspirational women. Attendees will include ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ star Brendan Cole”.


Now that has confused me.


Which is appropriate really – because this blog is about confusion.


Partly because I’ve got an abscess on my tooth and I’m on more painkillers than the entire Jackson Five.


But also because uncertainty is at the heart of creativity.


You can dislike that fact. You can try and change it.


But it’s always true.


Talk to anybody who’s genuinely creative and they’ll tell you it’s about making decisions – knowing that there are no clear, easy answers.


So - who’s going to make those decisions ?


Who’s got the best instincts ? Who’s most likely to get it right?
Who’s gonna make the tough calls ?


As Oliver Burkeman says in the Guardian magazine - the world is divided into people who think they are right.


I.e. everybody thinks they’re right.


I’m reminded of how Tom and Walt used to work up at AMV, in the time when they were producing all the best work in London from one single office.


Apparently, if there was a disagreement with the client about anything – casting, music, location, whatever – they’d say - “Ok, tell you what. You put your reel on, and we’ll put out reel on, and whoever’s got the better reel, gets to make the decision.”


It sounds glib.


(These days, God knows, it sounds like commercial suicide.)


But it actually does make sense.


If your mortgage depended on how well an ad was going to perform – who would you trust to make the really important decisions ? Someone who’s made a lot of great ads, or someone who hasn’t ?


It seems fairly straightforward - but there is one flaw in that argument.


Which is that some creative people have different agendas to their clients.


I.e., they want to win creative awards.


It’s an interesting question – if you took awards out of the picture, and the industry was judged just on how WELL the marketing worked – maybe you’d remove that dual agenda, and maybe you’d get trust back into the picture … and much better creative work as a result.


And you’d get back to a situation where people understood that creativity is about embracing confusion.


F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the sign of a truly great mind was being able to hold two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time.


And anyone who’s worked with outstanding directors like Frank Budgen or the late, great Paul Arden knows exactly what that feels like.


What’s “right” one second is “completely wrong” the next.


And that’s … true.


Uncomfortable and annoying though it sometimes is.


And if this all sounds massively confused – well, as I said, I’m on more painkillers than a bunch of prostitutes at a dentists’ convention.


But also because I believe that when it comes to getting creative work right – oddly enough, the person you most want is the one who is happiest being in the uncertainty.


Is that right ?


Or is it wrong ?


I don’t f*cking know.


P.S. Talking of great, brave creativity. Colin Marrs, the Digital chief at Campaign, sent me this amazing film from Marcus Brambilla which plays in the lifts at the Standard hotel in New York.
I love it to pieces – and I suspect that even when I’m not on Codeine Phosphate, I’ll still love it.

What is wrong with this picture ?

 

 I'm thinking of bringing out a t-shirt which reads "Polly Perkins is a tw*t".


Although the asterisk is only there for Campaign's lawyers.


You may know who Polly Perkins is. She's been in the papers a bit recently, because she was the reader at Faber who turned down Lord of the Flies for publication, scribbling on the manuscript the words "uninteresting fantasy".


History can be a lovely thing, when it allows anyone with a genuine love of literature and originality to turn round to Polly Perkins right now and say - you rejected one of the most important and successful books of the last century.


People will be reading your name and associating it with idiocy for decades to come.


How d'you like them apples, Perky ?


Interesting enough for you, is it ?


And what has this got to do with advertising, the supposed topic of this blog, you may be asking ?


Well, everything. Because how ideas are appreciated and judged should be at the heart of any creative business.


Especially when there’s a lot of interesting debate right now about things like the Peperami crowd-sourcing initiative.

 

But.


We’ve somehow turned into an industry where all decisions are made by committee. And where people only feel they're contributing if they can tell you what their "concerns" are.


The best story about this comes from a wonderful semi-fictional book about the ad industry called "Was 9.99, Now 6.99"


Written by a guy who I think was working at Y&R Paris.


At one point he writes about a very stressful presentation to a hugely important yoghurt client.


(Imagine, for a bit of light relief, that previous sentence without the last word.)


Our hero presents his script and the head yoghurt (honcho) does that thing of letting all 14 people on his team say what they think of it.


I think we've all been in meetings like that.


I wonder if Michelangelo Buonarroti had that experience with his Sistine chapel ceiling.


"What do you think, Brian ?"


"Well I like it of course, but I'm just concerned about what it will say to non-believers, i.e. the people we're trying to attract into the brand ? Will they like all the religious stuff I wonder ?"


So in the yoghurt meeting, our hero bites his tongue as 14 people express their perfectly logical and plausible concerns. He knows that in meetings like this, it only matters what the head honcho says.


And then the head yoghurt (honcho) says "I love it. This is the best work the agency has presented to me for 5 years. I pass my sincere congratulations on to the whole team."


Phew. Everybody smiles and lets out a sigh of relief.


"I have just one question," he adds.


Pregnant pause.


"… Is humour really necessary ?"


In four words, he's killed the idea more comprehensively than any of his lieutenants.


Because without humour, the script is just two people eating yoghurt.


However, in normal meetings, the killing isn’t as clean as this. Normally it’s deadly attrition.


Take a look at any list of so-called “100 greatest ads” - which by the way won't have many examples in it from the last few years. (What you might call the “committee years”.) Imagine if any of those great pieces of work could have got through a meeting where a group of 14 people are encouraged to voice their "concerns".


In fact what you'll see is a bunch of ads that all have one thing in common – which is that they all have something "wrong" with them.


In fact, what's “wrong” with them is what makes them successful.


Breaking the right rules is what any creative person will tell you is what you have to do.


And the really interesting question is this.


How many "bad" ads have killed products ?


I.e. how many people have been turned off a brand because of some element of the advertising ?


Name me one, apart from Strand cigarettes - which is 50 years old.


I.e. this search for the "concerns", for what might be "wrong", is by and large a complete waste of time.


Ads tend to work a little bit - or work really well. Very few of them actively damage a brand.


Their biggest enemy is just disappearing into the wallpaper of invisible marketing communications. Which, of course, is what most of them do.


So a far more useful discussion would revolve around asking - "What is good about this ? What is the most interesting thing about this communication ? Have we got something really spiky here ?"


But try telling that to Polly Perkins.


She'd tell you what was wrong with that idea straightaway.

Basterds

 I was just thinking that maybe the ad industry needs more bastards when I went to see George Michaelides at Mindshare.


Not that George is a bastard, of course. In fact, he’s a very smart and very nice bloke. Although our meeting in the “Stockholm room” at 40, The Strand was hampered by the fact that George sat on the single comfortable sofa while I perched on a precarious object from a sci-fi sit-com from the 1970s which someone had decided (wrongly) might be construed as a chair.


We were both pondering the parlous state of affairs in the industry. WPP, George’s parent, had recently announced that its profits were down by half for the first half. Which, while being lexically pleasing, is fiscally less fortuitous.


George declared that the industry was going through its “Fleet Street” period, a very good analogy I thought. The newspaper industry went through a massive upheaval in the 80s which saw a whole host of old practices and skills swept away.


Although we both struggled to name the equivalent of Eddie Shah for today.


So – what to do about it ? George is doing various radical things which sound great – but
faced with this crisis, a lot of people  (including one half of me) crave a return to old-style industry chutzpah.


It used to be that the industry was full of charismatic bastards. They'd charm the pants off the clients and then go and shag their best friends' wives while indulging in bouts of drug-taking so wide-ranging that Hunter S.Thompson would hold up his hands and say "Whoa, boys. Enough is f*cking enough."


Then somewhere along the line the industry got nice.


And boring.


Polite, smiley people meet polite, business-like people in beige rooms, and anything spiky is surgically removed from ideas which get 64% in Millward Brown hall tests, and nobody remembers the work or the brands, or even why they're there in the first place.


The edges get taken off, the ideas are neutered, and then a year later the account is put up for review because the work didn't bring about the results which everybody hoped for.


But, while this may all be true, a part of me wonders if I’m just indulging in Don Draper nostalgia. Because it’s not enough to get chutzpah back, we’ve got to get what is happening. We’ve got to get all the changes going on.


As Gaston Legorburu, from digital agency Sapient, has said,  “trying to turn an old-school Madison Avenue institution into something different is  (hugely) difficult.”


In fact, is it even do-able ?


 As Jim Stengel, formerly the chief marketing officer of P+G, has said of all this change: “In the long term, it’s positive because I think it has opened people’s minds up to different ideas and models, and to taking more risks.”


Now Jim Stengel is one of the most widely-respected people talking about the watershed in the industry right now, but I wonder exactly who he’s talking about here.


It doesn’t sound like many ad agencies I’ve seen recently.


As a point of comparison, look at this recent story from the music biz:


-  Radiohead manager Brian Message is co-launching a new music label called Polyphonic, focused on innovative digital releases.


-  The label will be funded with over $20 million in its first year, with the money being used to give artists the ability to operate without seeking out traditional record companies.


-  Co-chief executive of the MAMA Group Adam Driscoll said: "We will do whatever is most effective to get an artist noticed. Giving an album away for free may get one million people listening to a new artist."


What a great story. It’s got creativity and ingenuity and innovation and entrepreneurialism and chutzpah running through it like words in a stick of rock.


And what a bastard it didn’t come from the ad biz.

Brekky

 

I used to think that whoever invented breakfast meetings didn't really know how to enjoy the night before the breakfast meeting.


But I don’t mind them so much these days, and last week I found myself at one convened to discuss "the future of advertising". As Robert Saville said to me, it should have taken place in an air bubble with everyone wearing jet-powered roller skates and helmets – but unfortunately it was the usual bagels and pressed napery affair.


Robert, needless to say, wasn't there himself because he's busy creating the future of advertising more or less single-handedly.


However, I always quite enjoy these sort of meetings because it's a chance to trumpet the imminent death of the industry as we know it.


It's all very well Dave Trott pointing out quite legitimately that the arrival of new media doesn't necessarily kill all the old media (although I'm glad I'm not in the slide rule business) - (actually, for a whole host of reasons) - but he's missing half the fun.


Which is to tell people from the big network agencies who are interested in the future that in all likelihood they won't have a part to play in it.


(A friend of mine, who gets very wound up about this, likes to say that “it’s about time these people woke up and smelled the coffee”. Forgetting that actually smelling the coffee is a very pleasurable experience. Particularly at a breakfast meeting. It’s not like the smell of napalm in the morning which (I imagine) is pretty unpleasant.)


The problem is that these days nobody from the big network agencies gets invited to events like this – so they can’t sit there and be told that their days of roaming the earth with huge teeth and stumpy useless little arms are numbered.


The breakfast thing was a bunch of digital superstars and me. So whenever an awkward question came my way I stuffed a bagel in my mouth and protested that although I would love to talk about what Douglas Coupland called the “real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information”, and post-twitter social media opportunities, unfortunately right now I'd got my mouth full.


But the thing which did get me down was that there wasn't enough of the usual "death-to-the-dinosaurs" stuff, which is frankly meat and bagel to me.


Have digital agencies started to become the dinosaurs ? If so - great, what's next ?


So we actually got a lot of what I would call complacency. When I did my usual schtick about 95% of advertising being pure crap, I was informed that it "had pretty much always been like that".


Well, yes and no. That same day a journalist I love called Stephen Armstrong (who among many other accomplishments is Comedy Correspondent for the Sunday Times) was writing in the Guardian that this was the worst period for advertising creativity he could ever remember.


He didn’t write “now is the winter of our discontent”; he wrote “this summer has seen the onset of the worst advertising of all time”.


Hear hear.


It's garbage.


The creative highlight of the year is undoubtedly the Meerkat.


And while I love VCCP's integration skills -  and I think they should be on every new business pitch list for that reason alone -  Meerkat isn't a gold pencil.


I’m not even 100% sure that it warrants a silver biro.


But it IS the creative highlight of the year.


The other problem, as I see it,  is that complacency is what got us into this mess in the first place.


So I hope I ruffled a few feathers.


I'd like to say "over the eggs". But I didn't see any eggs.


Just bags of bagels.