Campaign

Older Budweiser

In 1951 Cyril Washbrook was brought out of retirement to play in the third test against Australia. He was 41 and hadn't played a test for more than 5 years.


He was a selector at the time and so had decided to leave the room while the matter of his own inclusion was discussed.


His innings of 98 turned out to be the turning point of the series.


In the next test, David Sheppard was brought out of semi retirement for the 4th test where he made 113.


And in the last test, Denis Compton was brought out of retirement. Compton "was no fitness fanatic or avowed teetotaller". He came in to bat on the first day when England were faltering at 66 for 3.


His innings of 94 was described by Don Bradman as being the best batting of the series.


And England won the Ashes.


Largely due to a bunch of people considered "past it".


There are currently more people over 60 than there are under 16 in this country - but you wouldn't know it by looking at the ads.


And this trend will continue - because the birth rate is falling due to better contraception (like the new week-after pill.)


And the death rate among older people is falling, maybe because Harold Shipman got put in prison.


Then he died, which had a kind of poetic justice to it.


Physician, Top thyself.


As Fred Pearce, science writer and consultant to New Scientist, says -


"The extension of the working and contributing lives of society's most qualified, most experienced individuals is potentially a huge new demographic resource."


Or as you might put it, f*ck me there's a lot of wrinklies about.

What are we gonna do with them ?


In his new book, Peoplequake, Fred continues - "Lke the youth bulge before it, the silver bulge can be seen either as a threat or a promise. Fear it and our societies will founder; harness it and the prospects are endless".


I think he's put his finger on the problem there. And it's an image problem. Because the term " silver bulge" is in itself spectacularly unattractive.


If not physically rather unlikely.


Although maybe if Fred has put his finger on it, the silver bulge may indeed be materialising in the hiked-up corduroys that are Britain in the Teenies.


Fred sees the role of these wrinklies as helping to sort out the environmental crisis.


Which is only fair because it was their fault that we're in that mess in the first place.


And I say "their" but of course in ad terms I'm a wrinkly myself now. Over 50.


There was a book written by a bloke in advertising in Australia a few years ago called "Fat Fired and Forty".


There are days when I feel "fattish, fifty and f*cked if I know where I put the door keys."


When my partners and I started HHCL we were accused of being "too young" (by Campaign, among others) - a problem which, as I said at the time, a) we can't do anything about and b) will sort itself out without us having to do anything about it anyway.


If only all problems were like that.


But advertising is a "young person's game", isn't it ?


Well yes, it seems to be - but you might want to pause every now and again to ask "why ?"


Maybe it's fair enough if  you see it as insubstantial - the froth on the venti soya decaf cappucino of life.


But if you see it as being about the meeting place of commerce and creativity, where brands create content that needs to live in and influence our culture - then maybe a few wiser heads wouldn't be a bad thing.


A friend of mine who is also a colleague of Nigel Bogle's was describing to me why he loved working with him - apart from anything else, he said, Nigel's seen every problem we encounter already.


(As well as clearly being one of the brightest people ever to work in Soho.)


There's only one caveat I'd put into this thinking. Which is that the oldies, to be useful, have to love new stuff.


David Bowie, now a wrinkly himself although probably, if the surgeons of Berlin are up their job, a bit of a twinkly wrinkly, described creativity as "something I haven't seen before".


So, to be a useful adman in their fifties (and that phrase may be the most oxymoronic thing I've ever written)
you've got to have seen it all before but be looking out for something you've never seen before.


Which may, again, be physically impossible.


A pal of mine called Paul Simonet was saying how he thought advertising appealed to conservative people because most brand stories are inherently backward-looking. "Launched in 1867", etc etc.


He's right.


But the people who are most needed in advertising right now are the people who are prepared to look forward and take risks.


Come on Cyril.


Run two.

The power of three

Recently I found myself reading the Daily Mail, something I would only do if I were on a plane where they handed it out free or if someone had a gun to my head.


One day perhaps both conditions will apply and I will fly helplessly into oblivion with an article on why men should wear ties as my last contact with earthly life.


It struck me that the Mail's modus operandi was to create a feeling of inescapable doom (such that you believe the editor is Samuel Beckett, brought back to life) and then blame the situation on either immigrants, the Labour party, or a lack of good manners.


Inspired by this, I have decided that the current condition of advertising is similarly due to 3 things.


The conventional view is that we're f*cked because the agencies let media planning go. Clients will understandably listen very carefully to figures-based arguments and media companies have a near monopoly on these apparent certainties.


(The fact is, however, that the figures are largely unreliable and built on the myth of the captive audience - a myth as seductive and useless as the myth that there is a god.)


A second argument was put to me last year by a Dutchman working in advertising, who said that we'd lost our power by giving away research. How else can we persuade clients to buy brave work ?, he argued.


This rung several bells with me. For a start, one of the two great agencies from the era when advertising was great, BMP, built its reputation on doing this.


Secondly, at HHCL, all our fresh early work was created when we insisted on doing our own research groups, run by our own planners. As soon as clients asked to use external research companies, it became a lot harder to get outstanding work made.


A third argument would be that we’ve given creative direction over to clients. And this again resonates very deeply with me.


On an anecdotal level, I can remember being in Cannes once about 10 years ago. And noticing something rather strange.


All the talk was about which high-powered clients would be at which parties - rather than about which famous creatives or directors would be.


The power and even the glamour had started to switch.


Now there are two possible reasons for this. One, the industry lost sight of what made it interesting and powerful - creativity - and became more interested in the empty goal of money for its own sake.


Which, for an industry which has built capitalism to its pre-eminent position in the world, is poignantly ironic.


Secondly, that as the creative world expanded into non-traditional areas, traditional creatives began to seem as old-fashioned as rock stars or comedians who have slipped past their sell-by date.


At that time - 10 years ago - most clients were grappling with the complexities of a multi-platform world much more ambitiously than most creative directors.


So from that perspective, it's not surprising that we lost creative leadership and authority.


But we’re left in a situation now where many clients don't trust their agency's creative recommendations, at the same time as knowing that they don't have the expertise to make the decisions themselves.


So the decision gets made by 8 disinterested people munching Pringles.


Anyway. That's filled the time of my flight back from Istanbul. A city, if you want my opinion, of ineffable beauty and centuries-old magic.


A place with both a history and a future.


Perhaps because it's a place that has always embraced change.


So.


Take your pick as to which you think is the most powerful of the 3 reasons.


Personally I think the Daily Mail is right, and the problem is down to the fact that we don't treat the immigrants in the Labour party with enough good manners.

Like each other, you bastards

I was talking to a couple of clients one evening last week and I asked them what was the biggest problem they faced.


For one, it was his wife’s jealousy and for the other, a bizarre pattern of baldness not normally seen outside distressed chimpanzees in an inner city zoo.


But once we’d got past that, they both agreed that their biggest business problem was getting their various agencies to work together.


You'd think that was easy. By and large human beings like other people, and if you're working WITH someone, by definition that should mean less work for you.


So, for instance, if the branding agency comes up with a stonking brand positioning, that's less work for the ad agency, the digital agency, etc.


But anyone who works in the ad industry would laugh that last sentence out of court.


They’d hoot and slap their thighs and laugh at me as if I was the funniest thing since the John West bear ad.


Because, in most creative industries, competition wins over collaboration - by default, all of the time, without exception.


It's partly down to creative ego.


Which is by no means exclusive to advertising.


Norman Mailer wrote a review of a large Tom Wolfe book as follows -
"Reading the work can be said to resemble the act of making love to a 300lb woman. Once she gets on top, it's all over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated."


Byron said of Keats - "There is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin".


Cyril Connolly said of George Orwell - "He would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry".


Etc etc.


But this kind of envy is very prevalent in advertising.


Look at some of the conversations happening about Fallon right now. Hand-rubbing conversations predicting problems for what has been one of the outstanding agencies, not only of the last decade, but of all time.


That agency's creative work has changed the realm of possibilities for our industry and regularly blown the socks off people coming into contact with it. The people who’ve created that agency should be in the pantheon of all time heroes.


But people who couldn't get a job as a runner there are happily slagging it off right now.


OK. Different tack.


Even the reaction to the new advertising sit-com, the Persuasionists, has been revealing in this light.


Campaign asked me to review it and (admiring the writer very much) I agreed.


The first episode wasn't as good as I'd hoped, but I said I believed it was worth persevering with, because early episodes of comedies are very hard to review.


The IT crowd, for instance, started off looking a bit rough. Even Fawlty Towers had terrible reviews when it started.


And the 2nd episode of The Persuasionists (Jon's working title of "The Scum Also Rises" was much better) proved the point to me.


I started to really like it. I think it could really grab people.


But Adland would, on the whole, rather bitch.


However, if you look at the great ideas being produced now, I bet you’ll see a list of credits that stretches far beyond the old-fashioned, exclusive, two-person creative duo. I.e. working processes that rely on collaboration, not competition.


Look at the work in Contagious’ review of last year.  There's some seriously cracking stuff.


My top-of-the-head favourites are probably – the Puma underwear models who stripped off as the stock markets plunged, the Ask Jozi brand which launched by selling rip-off versions of its own brand in street markets in South Africa, and the Sagami condoms story.


In order to show off the fact that they’ve got the thinnest condoms on the market, they created a story of two lovers living in Tokyo and Fukuoka (yes, I know) and mapped their gradual approach to each other digitally.

Until they were – well, 0.2mm  apart.


Most of the stuff in the Contagious review would have had multiple, cross-disciplinary credits.


On another level, I can tell you that at least 3 agencies always played havoc with Campaign’s request to credit just two creative people for each ad in their old Private View column.  Those agencies were GGT under Dave Trott, HHCL and Mother.


So it’s not a question of creative collaboration being something that’s only encouraged in big bad network agencies.  Quite the opposite, it might seem.


But, if you're a client, and you want your digital agency playing nicely with your ad agency and both of them playing nicely with your design agency, what are the chances ?


About the same chance as any TV programme about Youtube not showing a film with a cat in it.

Respect

Two ads have caught my eye recently.


One, for Sensodyne toothpaste,  is, in itself, a one-ad reason to get Sky+.


Some smoothiechops chap who may or may not be pretending to be a dentist, rabbits on about sensitive teeth in a way that sets your molars on edge.


Maybe that's the point of the ad - to get people grinding their teeth so furiously that they end up needing the product.


(Following this train of thought, Optrex could produce ads that screw with your eyes, Nurofen could do ads that give you a blinding headache, and Anusol - well, let's get back to Anusol later.)


I found myself out of reach of the remote control while it was on, and had to endure the whole thing. An experience so horrible I vowed to switch to own-label sensitive-toothpaste on my next visit to the shops.


If you look for the ad on Youtube, you won’t find it anywhere.


Not surprisingly.


But you can find several parodies of Sensodyne advertising, including the following one which I rather liked, because it captured the whole anxiety-neurosis implied in this kind of messaging.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za09wFTX6qM



Against that, I'd like to look at an ad for Corsodyl that features a slow tracking-shot up the naked body of a very fit girl in a cornfield.


I say I’d like to look at it, but the whole thing does my head in so much, I’m not sure I should.


It’s for a mouth hygiene product and at the end of the ad it’s revealed that the naked girl in the cornfield is missing a tooth.


But, for me,  the whole thing  feels a bit like Cadbury’s Gorilla.


Never mind any product benefits, or indeed any link to the product at all, let's just entertain the viewers and slap a logo on the end.


Which raises a puzzling question.


Because, although I yield to none in my love of the sheer freshness of the Gorilla when it first appeared, I've since felt that it could turn into a bit of a creative cul-de-sac.


(And that’s a curious bit of metaphor mixing. Imagine turning into a cul-de-sac and finding a gorilla.)


If all you’ve got to do is entertain -  well, it’s a bit like how Robert Frost described free verse - "playing tennis without a net".


Imagine you get a brief for a sparkling mineral water. Now, which is the better ad – the one with dogs playing basketball, or the one where two rabbits sing “Hey Jude” ?


So let's look at the new Horlicks ad instead.


It’s a bit slow and sleepy as an ad, but that all ties in with the product anyway. And it makes a dramatic change from Hectoring Hector in the Senselessodyne ad.


If I saw the strategy written on a bit of paper, I'd probably throw it away – or even, possibly, throw up -  because in summary it just says  “drink coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon and Horlicks at night”.


Put baldly like that, it would seem to be as patronising as the mad non-dentist - but somehow it carries it off.


For me, anyway.


Having seen it just once, I felt expertly and softly cajoled into believing that every day should end with a Horlicks.


There are better ways to end a day, of course, but the ad manages to make it look like quite a good proposition on the nights when you’re too knackered to nip down China White.


Two things come out of this, for me.


One, the importance of execution. The strategy could have been very prosaic, but it's been executed with real care and expertise.


And two, the importance of treating your audience with respect.


The Sensodyne ad assumes a captive audience and consequently (I would suggest) alienates everyone who sees it. The Horlicks ad has that healthy paranoia which all advertising should have – unless we engage with our audience using all our skills, they may turn off at any second.


Now don’t get me wrong. Horlicks isn’t gonna trouble any juries.


But it’s a whole lot better than most of the stuff out there.


Because I feel like they respect their audience.


I used to insist that on every HHCL creative brief was a description of the people we were talking to, written in such a way that I liked and respected them.


Try that with the brief you’re working on now.


Try asking your client if they want that.


Because a frightening number of brands seem to feel that they don’t need to try at all.


It’s not just that they represent a distress purchase – it’s that they don’t care if the whole process is a distressing purchase.


For instance, when you hear that Ryanair's service to Copenhagen used to land in Malmo in Sweden, you realise that there is a brand that feels like it doesn't need to treat anyone with respect.


As was borne out by their attempt last year to charge people for using the toilets on their planes.


Which, as one blogger put it, should have resulted in the headline - "Ryanair. Slashes priced."


(I know, I've used that gag before. Not very respectful of me, really, when you think about it. But then again, how many times do ads repeat the same joke ...?)

Advertising's a joke, isn't it?

 In the same week as some newspaper TV sections were trailering a TV programme about a man who can't stop hiccupping, a new comedy about the advertising world, The Persuasionists, kicked off.

Which might suggest that the people behind it understand media schedules. If your competition is a man who can't stop hiccupping,  that's got be a relatively weak week on TV.

But although that is a) good for drawing audiences, it's actually b) less good if it means the gimlet eye of AA Gill is drawn towards you.

I'm not sure I'd want Gill reviewing this. Especially because Gill always refers to TV industry people he doesn't like as "Tristrams" and the credit for director on this show reads Tristram Shapeero.

That may, in itself, be an anti-AA Gill joke.

But talking of comedy names leads me to the name of the agency. When you hear that the fictional outfit is called HHH&H,  that either amuses you or it doesn't.

Me, it amuses very much.

But it does raise the question of whether the agency is based on HHCL. God, I hope it is. Anywhere that was as dysfunctional, f*cked-up and hopeless as HHH&H would be a good place to work.

Although I like to think that there may be some very minor nuances of difference between me and the babbling, violent, and catastrophically inept ego-maniac of a boss.

I may be wrong.

Earlier on in the week, an article in the Indy complained that the programme wasn't enough like Mad Men. That's a bit like saying that Come Dine With Me isn't enough like Match of the Day.

This is a sit com, not a drama series. So the big question is - is it funny ?

I really wanted to like it. I wanted to laugh like a drain that's been smoking spliff and then been told not to laugh.

But it didn't quite grab me in the way I wanted it to. Of course it's notoriously difficult to judge the first episode of a comedy. Because you've got to build the world. And comedies work best when they're just automatically accepted - not being judged, as a first episode usually is.

You've got to lose yourself in comedy, not analyse it.

This episode had some inspired comic acting, but, in my view, not enough situation. It just didn't seem real enough.

Some years ago Les Blair made a film about advertising called Honest Decent and True, which was so well-observed and so close to the reality of advertising that it was almost unbearable to watch.

It was absolutely brilliant. And that's how I'd want to do a comedy about advertising right now. Keep it close to reality - because the reality of advertising is crazy enough to be funny without being underscored with hyperbole.

I'll probably end up eating my words when this turns out to be the most popular comedy since Father Ted - but the show just seemed too stylised, too comic book.

Whenever I want an ad to be funnier than the script I am looking at, I  advise the creative team to dial up the pain. With all the desperation, panic, and paranoia in ad agencies, I'd have thought that the more real you make it, the funnier it's going to be.

And I may be the wrong person to write about this, anyway.  I don't watch many programmes on TV these days - preferring instead to use my 55" Hitachi plasma  to act as a section of moving wallpaper with either polar bears from National Geographic HD or lingerie models from Fashion TV moving sinuously over it.

I'm not sure I'd set the  Sky + for this, because there are no ad breaks to fast forward through, and I'm usually in at 10pm on wednesday night - but I'd definitely watch it again.

It's got real potential - some funny characters and the writer, Jon Thake, knows how to come up with  great lines.   

In terms of the characters, the central figure is a copywriter played by Iain Lee. Previously Lee has been rent-a-presenter on various channels so far down the Sky EPG that only the full-time unemployed would ever get to them. But this is his first character part, and I thought he was really good in it.

Adam Buxton plays an account man who's terrified of everybody.  

But the main comedy plaudits go to a scary cockney client who shouts "Gertcha" when he orgasms,  and a crazy Head of Global played by Simon Farnaby who strides around with an oversized pencil, the maddest hair since Kramer from Seinfeld and a very funny accent that could be Eastern European, Dutch or Finnish.

It's worth watching the show just for him.

In terms of the writing -  I hired Jon twice. First time through, he wrote some of the funniest ads ever to come out of HHCL, including Pot Noodle's Slag of All Snacks. I always knew that he was a naturally gifted comedy writer.

Second time through, at TBWA, he arrived on the very same day I left, an incident of such poignance and sadness to me  that I fully expect to see it recreated as a side-splitting scene  in episode 4 or 5 of the series. 

Safe isn't safe

The best definition of happiness which I've come across recently is - cake wrestling with a 24-year-old Hungarian girl in a pitch black room filled with laughing gas.


You’ve probably got your own version of this. But please do make up your own version and don’t nick my 24-year-old.


But if you put together your own version, it will probably have some element of risk involved. In my case, the Hungarian may have an allergy to jam sponge, or, in the darkness, I might stub part of my anatomy on the laughing gas cylinder.


Nothing, sadly, is risk-free.


And when it comes to creativity, taking risks is the only game in town.


But if you wandered into most ad agency meeting rooms, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the highest ambition they had was to produce something that was ok, that was “good enough”.


As probably the most gifted man ever to work in US advertising, Jay Chiat, once said - good enough isn't good enough.


As probably the most gifted man ever to work in UK advertising, Frank Lowe, once said - the good is the enemy of the great.


If you aim for good, you never over-shoot and accidentally hit great.


As definitely the most gifted man ever to write this particular blog, me, says – F*ck Good.


Nobody remembers good.


Good’ll kill ya.


Lucy Mangan, the brilliant Guardian columnist, wrote that last year she read just over 100 books. And yet "what is most frightening is that ... I can remember almost nothing about any of the books I’ve read other than whether or not I enjoyed them."


There's a universal truth in that. We absorb huge quantities of stuff and virtually none of it sticks.


As Geoff Deehan, producer of the upcoming Channel 4 programme "Plane Crash" put it, "If you're not visible, you're run of the mill - and who wants to watch that ? "


Nobody watches ordinary stuff. Nobody remembers ordinary stuff.


But most ad agencies spent most of their time arguing about stuff that is hideously average.


It’s actually a bit of a vicious circle.


Most advertising is invisible. Most clients would be hard pressed to prove worthwhile ROI on their campaigns.


(One of the top IPA Effectiveness campaigns last year boasted of an ROI figure of 1.04p for every pound spent. I.e. they believed that that figure was enough to win them an award for one of the top 20 performing campaigns of the year. The most frightening thing of all is, they were right ...)


So most clients are anxious.


So they play safe - and the inevitable result of playing safe is invisible advertising.


Because investing in advertising is very different from investing money in a bank. In the latter case, if you "play safe", you'll most likely make c. 2-4% per year.


If you "play safe" in advertising, you'll lose money hand over fist.


The reason marketing budgets get cut so quickly is the fact that, even after 50 years of mainstream advertising in this country, nobody can really prove that it does anything.


So playing safe isn't safe.


The best thing for me about working at TBWA was working with the "Disruption" philosophy of Jean-Marie Dru. You could argue for ever if the ‘D’ word is right, but the approach is outstanding. What it does is encapsulate and codify the principles by which most of the truly great agencies have produced truly great work.


Of course it's not the only way to do it, but the workshops are a brilliant way of getting everyone in the client-agency team to see how vital it is to stand out.


And what's the killer app in Disruption workshops ?


Well as Fiona Clancy told me recently, the killer app is the bit where you confront a client with a wall of all the marketing comms in their area. They suddenly see that doing the same as everybody else (i.e. following a very natural herd instinct) condemns you to producing indistinguishable wallpaper.


Maybe it helps to look at it like this. With money, if you "play safe", you get a low but usually safe return. With anything creative, that doesn't tend to be true.


Creativity ONLY works if it stands out.


And that's triply true in advertising. Because we’re trying to change people’s spending habits – and habits are meant to be hard to change.


Habits allow our brains to take short cuts, saving time, saving worry, making as many actions as possible automatic.


So, even more than books or TV programmes, advertising has to stand out.


And that's the reason why, as advertising agencies becomes more and more the province of people from a financial background, the more likely they are ... to fail.


Ironic, that.

Talking about a resolution

 
Another year dawns for the adbiz. With all the leaden promise of a knock on the door mid-morning from someone enquiring if they can sell you some clothes pegs.


The staple topic for this time of year is New Year’s Resolutions. Something which is very, very pertinent for the adbiz.


After all it’s well known that the Government is the biggest spender on advertising and they usually spend their money telling us not to do stuff.


Not, to be honest, with any apparent great success. At a time when it’s been pointed out that alcohol abuse is reaching epidemic proportions, this country has seemingly decided that the best way to get through the Recession is to peer at it with one eye closed and the other trying to ascertain exactly where the bar is (perhaps in the style of Nelson seeing “no ships”).


Hospital admissions for alcohol-related problems are clogging up the few hospitals that are still open.


In last year’s Hard Sell Awards given out by the Guardian, two public service campaigns got ironic awards – “Know your limits” picked up “Most backfiring public awareness ad”  and the “Change4life” plasticine figures picked up the baldly named “Least effective” award.


Now these awards are just the Guardian having a dig at adland, and I could argue strongly for the creative merits of both campaigns. They both certainly stick out.


I personally think the “Know your limits” work has got plenty of grit and stickiness to it.


But these are probably the two most pressing health issues facing this country – and it would be good if newspaper coverage was complimenting the paid-for stuff.


It’s true that the Guardian’s “Most Effective” award  went to “Pablo the drug mule”, a wonderfully imaginative campaign – but tell me honestly that cocaine use has declined and I’ll eat a rolled-up twenty pound note.


Public service campaigns tend to be backfiring – like the famous heroin chic ads of a few years ago – or too bland and over-researched to cut any ice.


(Is that what you do with “ice”, by the way ? Or do you just snort it ?)


Although, to be honest, it is incredibly difficult to get people to change their behaviour.


As Paul Simon sang “After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same”.


We’re all f*cked up – as Larkin said, putting the blame firmly on the old mater and pater. We all cling to addictions that even a child’s rationality would tell us are massively counter-productive.


But actually there have been at least two major changes in public behaviour in relatively recent times. Attitudes to smoking and to drink-driving have changed fundamentally.


Why have those campaigns done it, and so many others haven’t ?


I don’t think it’s down to any one spectacular piece of advertising. Although both smoking and drink-driving have had very good executions along the way, I’d be surprised if anybody claimed it was down to just one bit of work.


(Although, if you did want just one piece of amazing anti-drink-drive work, you couldn’t do much better than the following. The TAC in Australia have been doing brilliant work for 20 years, and they recently did a compilation ad which I think is one of the best things ever to come out of our industry –
http://www.bestadsontv.com/ad_details.php?id=25992)


But I think the key thing is to make people feel that their behaviour isn’t just “anti-social” in some abstract way – I think the key thing is to make people really fear ostracisation.


One of the biggest emotional drivers we have is the need to be part of a crowd. So we need to make people feel that they could lose that.


I’m reminded of something that Chris Satterthwaite said to me once. He said – in order to change people’s behaviour, you’ve got to make sure they hear the same message in at least 3 different media. I.e., if you read an article in the paper,  see an ad, and have a conversation with your mate, and they all revolve around the same topic, then you’re gonna think  there’s something in it.


Ian Fleming said something similar when he had James Bond and Goldfinger discuss the notion that “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action”.


I.e. what we need is good old integration.


And, in order for this to work, you have to have an agency which understands integration.


There’s a New Year’s resolution for you.


Speaking personally, my resolution is never to watch the Halifax radio station ad ever again. I did it once out of professional curiosity.

Nec Tecum

 
I was chatting to a photographer friend of mine the other day who was reminiscing about the good old days of about 2 years ago.


She was talking about a job where she'd been given a brief and (in her words) a bag of money, and gone round Europe with an assistant taking great pictures for a shoe brand.


What she'd particularly liked was the lack of any client interference on the job - and I always find it a salutary thing to remember that, to directors and photographers etc, agency creatives are "the client".


That's something that's difficult for most agency creatives to get their heads round because for them the word "client" is not a term of approval.


In ad-agency-land, the word can pick up a patina of distaste - almost like the your mum might say the word "bed-sit".


But of course without clients, there is no industry, no nothing.


At HHCL, I once tried banning the word "client" and insisting on using their first names only. There is, I believe, a difference between saying "the client doesn't like it" and "Jim doesn't like it", but you may think I've gone barking mad.


But ask yourself one question. Under what circumstances did you produce your very best work ? I'm sure there were battles to be fought and arguments to be had, but I can tell you that from my perspective, the work I've been proudest of has always come out of a good relationship with a client.


Get that right and good work falls out like nicely sliced bread.


(Is that a well known phrase or have I just made up something that doesn't make sense ?)


So, for me, on any kind of shoot, I want the client there.


They may not know much about the production process, in fact their ignorance may be extraordinary.


A friend of mine was telling me how a client was looking at a storyboard for a breakfast cereal ad and she said "Yea, it looks great, but how will the viewer know that the woman in scene 7 is the same as the woman in scene 1" ?


Err. Because it will be the same actress.


Moving on.


But having them there allows for improvisation.


In my view, the worst kind of work comes out of a process where the client says "shoot the storyboard and nothing else".


In a recent Observer there was a list of famous scenes from films in which the action was improvised on the day and wasn't in the script or the storyboard.


These include -

De Niro's "you talking to me" speech from Taxi Driver, Jack Nicholson's "here's Johnny" schtick in The Shining, the chestbursting scene in Alien, the gun v sword scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Roy Schneider's "you're gonna need a bigger boat" in Jaws, Rutger Hauer's "tears in the rain" speech from Bladerunner, and Orson Welles's "cuckoo clock" speech in The Third Man.


That's pretty much the best bits of modern cinema from the last 50 years.


And it's interesting. Robert McKee gives an exhaustive and exhausting 3-day seminar on Plot in film, but virtually nobody walks out of a cinema raving about the plot.


Most plots, like most advertising briefs, are formulaic and predictable and they're just there to hang the interesting stuff off.


People remember great scenes from movies. Details. And far more often than you'd think, these are improvised on the day, not painstakingly storyboarded in a committee meeting.


Which is probably what my photographer friend was saying in the first place.


Although exactly how to achieve that in the world of commercial, not pure, art is the mootest of moot points.


PS If anybody's wondering what to get me for Christmas, I'm quite intrigued by a book that's just been brought out by the welsh baritone Aled Jones.


It's called "My 40 favourite hymens".


Happy hols.

Two out of three

 

It’s a good job I wasn’t trying to set up an illegal massage parlour over the last two weeks.


I would have been buggered on the SEO.


Anybody typing in the words “Henry” and “hand job” into Google would have had to wade through pages of stuff about Thierry Henry before getting to my page.


And there are multiple ironies in that story.


Perhaps the most interesting of which is the pickle Gillette now find themselves in.


Whether a pun was intended or not, it’s obvious that they’d picked the three most clean-cut sportsmen they could find for their advertising campaign.


A piece of work which incidentally can be found on Wikipedia if you try to look up the words “wooden”, “bad acting” or “unconvincing”.


But I can imagine that detailed meetings were held in which various totemic male athletes
were discussed and their propriety examined. Mika Hakkinnen, for instance,  LOOKS boring enough, but unfortunately he once went to a lap-dancing club.


I wish I’d been in one of the meetings because I could have suggested Maradona.  Although after the recent press conference in which he suggested that all journalists “take it up the arse”, he might have been knocked off the short-list.


But you get the feeling that Gillette rather hanker after the old days when vicars played for the England cricket XI.


Gillette Razors, as used by the Right Reverend David Sheppard.


But these days most vicars aren’t willing to take enough drugs to pursue sporting excellence, so Gillette were forced into spending millions of pounds getting three non-clerical men at the very top of their profession.


Although they maybe hoped they’d save a few quid on the insurance premiums for what is referred to as “death or disgrace”.


After all, what could go wrong with Thierry Henry, Tiger Woods or Roger Federer ?


That list is, let’s face it, pure genius.


Henry was an ambassador for the sport. Woods was the nearest thing to Mother Teresa to ever hold a 7-iron. Federer was more of a gamble. But dammit, he was Swiss and if you ignore the fact that they're willing to financially support thousands of drug-dealers, torturers, and abusers of human rights through their scheme of secret numbered bank accounts, the Swiss are as clean as the driven snow.


Although the marketing team might have been a bit worried when the Federer-lookalike Jimmy Carr suddenly started making controversial jokes. “Jesus,” the Gillette executives must have been saying, “Didn’t we put something in the contract to stop Roger making jokes about amputees and the Paralympics ?”


Anyway.


Two out of 3 ain’t bad.

Or maybe that should read, 2 out of 3 ARE bad.

The irony I love best is this.


Those celebrities were clearly chosen by people who are risk-averse. They wanted the cleanest their money could buy.


And yet I bet their ads have been talked about more than ever before, now that two of the three have  proved themselves fallible.


And maybe, just maybe, the fact that Gillette are now more in the real world, and less in glossy un-real ad-land – means that the brand might start to get more traction.


If Nike, who deliberately try to choose the “bad boys” of sport, had put this group together, you’d have been astounded at their marketing acumen.


But the difference is that Nike love risk and Gillette look like they don’t.


And, in that, Gillette are like the majority of people.


I had lunch with the lovely Rory Sutherland last week, and we were bemoaning that fact. Rory had read in one of his behavioural science books a possible explanation for it.


It seems that most people derive more pain from losing a five-pound note than they derive pleasure from finding a new one.


Although the version of hide and seek which would have been devised to test this hypothesis must have been hideously complicated.


So … most people are more risk-averse than they are success-hungry.


So … most creative meetings are spent hunting out what might possibly be “damaging” to the brand, although it’s my contention that it’s virtually impossible to do that.


And actually Gillette could help me on this.


Given that two out of their three spokesmen have suddenly displayed the very traits and behaviours which they’ve sought to avoid – what’s happened to the brand share ?


Have people suddenly deserted Gillette in their droves, and switched to Wilkinson Sword ? Was it too terrifying for Gillette’s audience of grown men to countenance such things as having sex with attractive cocktail waitresses or handling the ball when you’ve got a chance to put your team through to the World Cup Finals and hoping no-one notices ?


Hmmm.

The importance of staples in a big network agency

I think now is a good time to go and get a job in a big network agency.


I’m working on the same principle that now is a good time to go on holiday to Dubai – because who knows what the f*ck will be left by this time next year.


If you’ve ever hankered after the perks of working in a large old-fashioned corporation, now is the time.


But, for god’s sake, don’t delay. Before you know it, it’ll just be vicious sand-storms and the occasional mad-eyed lizard.


(That’s Dubai I’m talking about, by the way, not Grey.)


But then again – what perks are there, these days ?


The big network agencies are all being financially micromanaged down to the last staple.


A friend of mine runs a brilliant independent agency. He was telling me how he’d been approached by one of the giant holding companies, which wanted to link him to a network – as it happens, one of the very few with a good creative reputation.


So my mate was talking to one of the holding bigwigs and the bigwig said  “Well of course, the problem with our agency in London is this …”


My friend wondered what the guy would say. Would there be some insight into the creative process he hadn’t thought about before ?


The holding bigwig continued.


"The big problem is that they make a normal number of phone calls in the morning – but they’re way above average for the afternoon”.


I love telling that story - just to see the look on people’s faces.


Everybody does their own silent version of  “Whaaaaaaaaat ?”


But that’s where financial micromanagement leads you. It’ll tell you who’s using too much photocopier paper. It won’t tell you who’s coming up with the great ideas.


I was once judging the Asian awards in Bali, when I got a call on my mobile from a network cost-controller, querying my cab account.


Which might have been relevant if I’d been using a London-based cab account in Bali.


(I tried, but they kept taking too long to turn up.)  


But a smart person would have realized that the phone call would have cost more than the item being questioned.


No wonder the industry is teetering.  The only thing that matters is creative originality and that’s being squeezed out, stamped on and thrown away.


But future generations will know whether an agency made more phone calls in the morning or the afternoon.


Incidentally. I know of at least 3 start-ups currently being planned from within the walls of the big network agencies.


So the holding bigwigs would be best served by figuring out – who do they really need, who their best people are, and trying to look after them. Rather than in their by-now traditional Christmas pastimes of firing, consulting, cost-cutting and penny-pinching.


But that’s always assuming that the bigwigs care about the industry’s survival.


And maybe.


Just maybe.


They don’t.


Maybe they’ve squeezed enough money out of it and they’ll move on. Or retire.


If I was a big holding bigwig, I’d retire. Because what they’ve created is so bloody boring.


The big networks sell – meetings.


Not creative solutions.


They charge by the hour, and it’s actually in their interest to spin out the problem for as long as they can, having one pointless meeting after another.


So in the vicious circle of cost-cutting, they hang onto the people who can run meetings, but not the people who can come up with the mould-breaking ideas.


What chance is there of the industry turning the corner ?


Well, as Avi Schlaim said in the Guardian on Saturday, “there are no corners in a vicious circle.”

A cloud on the horizon

"Digital creativity has yet to produce its masterpiece". Discuss. Using, perhaps, 140 characters or less.


Thus spake one of the bosses of the digitally-focussed agencies I've been working with recently.


It’s fascinating. Digital media are so clearly the place to be if you care about innovative marketing – but a lot of people struggle to come up with a list of what you might call great creative ideas in that field.


Seeing as how the whole nature of digital is built around interactivity, maybe the concept of an “idea” is somehow antithetical
to how it works.


Strategically speaking, Obama's campaign WAS a massive masterpiece. Not only in its use of social media, but in the whole pull-not-push approach.


(It was the LACK of concrete “messaging” that was actually brilliant.)


And it had elements of brilliant creativity in it, like The Great Schlep.


But in terms of pure creative concepts, I guess most people would say that the best digital idea we've seen has been Subservient Chicken.


(Alternative answers on a post, please.)


So it takes a brave man or a fool to disagree with the guy who came up with that.


(And, since everyone who knows me, knows I'm a coward - I clearly fall into the second category.)


But I do want to look at what Benjamin Palmer, the highly gifted founder of Barbarian, said recently.


I may be quoting him out of context, but Benjamin was being asked about crowd-sourcing in Adweek and he said "I'm interested in the high end of marketing creativity and production, and don’t think you can get anything high end [in crowd-sourcing].”


He went on to add “By definition you’re asking people who are not at the top of their field.”


Now, as in many complicated debates, I can see both sides of this. (Ouch. This picket fence is sharp.)


I agree that only a few gifted people can regularly come up with really great ideas.


I just don't think they're all inside the tiny walled garden of the ad industry.


And I think a huge number of people can bring one-off fresh solutions to a problem


I introduced crowd-sourcing at TBWA a few years ago and we got some fascinating stuff back, including an adidas poster campaign and some great short films for Skittles.


I'm actually building a website with some friends right now to explore all this further.


But I don't think crowd-sourcing is the answer by itself. You also need strong, experienced creative direction - something which I don’t think any of the current crowd sites have.


Not just to filter the answers, but also to put the right questions out there.


However, it does really tantalise me. Out there, somewhere, are really fresh ideas, rather than the stale formulas and Youtube rip-offs that clog up most marketing campaigns.


What I'm interested in finding are the ideas that nobody else could come up with.


Genuinely unique ideas.


And talking of that, I was chatting to Tony Kaye the other day. One of the most talented people to ever work in our industry. He's giving a talk on Friday, and I can't think of anyone better equipped to talk about creativity in this country.


Tony, like Benjamin, comes up with original creative ideas as effortlessly as most agency bosses can conjure up their financial targets.


If you had a creative department filled with people like that,  you wouldn’t need crowd-sourcing. But, even then, I’d want to give it a go.


Because it seems to me to be at the very heart of digital.


And just a very interesting thing to do.  


Tony told me he's also got Sir George Martin and Geoff Emerick (the producer and engineer on Sgt Pepper) turning up - but with Tony you never know what you're gonna get.


So I promise you.


It will be great.


It's in Brick lane. Details and tickets at nissancubestore@borkowski.co.uk

A slap in the face

I went to Albion the other day to do a bit of honest non-execing and found the door locked in my face.



Hang on, I thought. Have they finally figured out that I'm a useless fraud and decided to keep me out of the agency at all costs ?



Would there be people with placards saying “Go Home Henry” ?



Well as it happened, the door was locked not just to me but to everybody. Because they'd done a bit of work so provocative that they needed police protection.



It was a website that allowed you to slap a video of Nick Griffin as he preached to the Ku Klux Klan in the US. One of the creatives came up with the idea during the Question Time programme and had built it by the following morning.



It had to be pulled after 4 days because it was attracting  very threatening calls to the agency.  But it had also attracted 22,145,836 hits -  Griffin was being slapped 2,000 times a second with a new unique visitor every second. It was linked to from about 1,300 online sources, the main one being Facebook with 22,000 referrals. There's also been thousands of tweets.



And the agency was threatened with physical violence, which was why the door was locked.



Now for me this is EXACTLY what a great agency does. Get stuck into culture, have an opinion, have a great creative idea, and get it out there fast.



And make sure to stir it up. Using the wonderful world of social media.



I'm getting sick of saying this, but 90% of advertising goes out there and does nothing at all.



(I heard a figure the other day for what the average ROI is for marketing in this country. I can't tell you the figure because I've been sworn to secrecy for now - but it's diabolically low.)



Only a tiny proportion of marketing comms are interesting enough to elicit a response.



Because most approval processes are designed to try to avoid making "mistakes" - a completely pointless exercise - as opposed to seeking to stand out.


If the partners at Albion had considered all the repercussions, they might have thought twice about doing this.


But they got 22 million hits.


Big ideas take risks.



It’s strange really. We talk up the idea of entrepreneurs – but the ad industry finds every way it can to take every ounce of risk out.



Entrepreneurs take risks.



Maybe Millward Brown should rechristen themselves Millward Brown Trousers, since the whole thing is just an elaborate and expensive way to cover scared arses.



At GGT years ago, Dave Trott did a poster for LWT that took the piss out of the Ayatollah Khomeini. He received death threats and all the creatives working for him thought that was fantastic.



(That's come out slightly wrong. I don't mean we all wanted Dave to be killed by an Iranian hit squad. Just that we loved the idea of an ad provoking that fierce a response. Although I think one art director who’d been refused a pay rise that year, did temporarily join a suicide squad.)



When was the last time your agency did something like that ?



More importantly, when was the last time it even wanted to do something like that ? 

Schad

 Schadenfreude’s a lovely word , isn’t it ?


I was reminded of it, reading Robert Harris’ review of Gyles Brandreth’s autobiography recently. Seeing the failure of Brandreth’s career to take off, Harris remarked that “even Richard Dawkins might start to believe there is a God”.


I wish I'd said that.


In a similar vein, a lot of people have been asking me how I feel about Tim Lindsay leaving TBWA.


Because it was an argument with Tim last year that led to my leaving the place.


So I'd just like to say this. Tim is one of the most talented, intelligent and straightest people you could ever hope to meet.


We disagreed about the philosophy of the agency, because there was a lot of pressure on both of us to try to resuscitate a formerly great brand.


But Tim always treated people fairly, and I consider him one of the most impressive people I've ever met in the industry.


However, it's natural for people to ask, because advertising is a hideously competitive industry, and it would bring out the envy, back-stabbing and schadenfreude in Mother Teresa's nicer baby sister.


It's over-crowded with very ambitious people all jostling for a few crumbs. So it brings out a "scarcity" view of the world.


It's interesting. There are a few very high profile people I know who have prompted various attacks on their characters even though the attackers don't even know the people involved.


(Rather like the old Guinness poster which read “I don’t like it because I’ve never tried it”.)


The first one is my old buddy Rupert Howell. Rupert seems to put some people's backs up - but only if they don't know him.


I can actually understand this completely. Before I'd met him, I couldn't stand him.


In those days he used to appear with monotonous regularity on the front page of Campaign because he was new business director at Y+R and I suspect there has never been a more successful new business director in the history of advertising.


But the photo Campaign used made him look unbearably smug, so I avoided meeting him for about 2 years. Then I bumped into him and realised within 2 minutes that here was not only probably the most gifted account man of his generation, but also a man with absolutely rock solid personal integrity to match. The man was and still is a model of the very best personal qualities.


The second is Trevor Beattie. I once had to defend Trevor in a roomful of people judging some award or another. Because, like Rupert, Trevor's extraordinary success means that people assume there must be something wrong with him.


Tall poppy syndrome. Appropriate for this time of year, perhaps.


But I have to say that every time I've met Trevor, I've found him to be immensely bright, passionate, well-informed on a huge range of subjects, generous with his time and his talent and his money, and just a really nice guy to be around.


Mind you, I've only met him about 10 times, so maybe he really is a bastard.


I realise that this assessment may piss off a number of people who've never got nearer to him than 10 yards' distance at the Grosvenor House, but that's their loss.


This might all seem too saccharine, and I apologise if it does. This isn't me full of the Xmas spirit (because I hate Xmas) or merrily pissed (because I stopped drinking four years ago).


(So as you can imagine, I'm a bundle of laughs at a Xmas party).


It's just an attempt to point out something in advertising which I've never liked. The sniping and the envy.


Of course adland has more than its share of twats, arseholes, rats, prats and pillocks. There are several sharks, and at least two people at the top of the pile whom I would consider to be certifiable psychopaths.


But this industry, which sometimes seems like it's on its knees, would stand more chance of revival if it knew how to celebrate and cherish its heroes better.

Seedy thoughts

 A few years ago I was thinking of setting up a club called  “Five Creative Directors Behaving Badly”.


The idea was fairly explanatory in the title.


I think the members were gonna be me, Robert Saville, Trevor Beattie, Dave Droga  and Robert Campbell.


But rather than just getting p*ssed, there was another agenda, which was that we’d throw our collective weight around. If we didn’t like the way Cannes was behaving, we’d threaten to boycott it. If we felt that Campaign’s treatment of anyone or anything was unfair, we’d let them know.


But it never took off. Because I was too lazy to make it happen.


And it would be even harder to do it these days.


Because – what’s happened to Creative Directors ?


And is there any chance in hell of any of them behaving badly ?


If you want to know what a creative director’s role should be, you could do a lot worse than look at Alex Bogusky.


Because he’s forged an agency which produces great work at a time when just about everybody else seems to have given up.


When he was asked what he did,  he answered – it’s simple, it’s about picking the right idea and making it as good as we can.


And that IS simple to say.


But doing it is another matter.


That’s why pitches are decided on chemistry. Because it’s a lot easier to pick a bunch of people you like than it is to pick a good idea.


That’s why research is king. Because picking the right idea is …  f*cking scary, if you’re serious about it


In Hollywood there are people who make decisions about creativity every day, who’ve done it for years, and they sh*t themselves while trying to pick the next one.


Here, we give the decision to a bunch of disinterested people eating Kettle’s crisps in a room with a suspiciously smoky mirror on one wall.


Picking the right idea is what creative directors should do – it’s what Alex Bogusky does brilliantly, it’s what Dave Droga does brilliantly.


But we’ve done away with the concept here in Britain.


Well ok, not quite – Robert and Richard are outstanding.


And just to be perfectly clear, I’m not questioning the rest of the talent here in the UK. We’ve got probably got more creative talent than ever before. I’m questioning the politics of the industry right now.


The attitude of the industry.


A few years ago, a friend of mine was tasked with answering the question as to why WPP won a lot fewer creative awards than Omnicom agencies.


He did a very meticulous analysis, the precise details of which now escape me.


But having compared all the variables, he concluded that there was only ONE significant structural, difference between the two groups.


Omnicom agencies back then were run jointly by people from creative and account management backgrounds.


WPP agencies were run almost exclusively by people just from account management backgrounds.


And these days it’s not just an issue for WPP, it’s an issue for our industry as a whole – the fact that, currently, creative talent is hired not partnered.


The people who set up the legendary old agencies were all, largely, creatives.  From David Abbott through to Leo Burnett through to David Ogilvy.


But unless you work in Fallon or Mother, when was the last time your Creative Director made a decision that actually carried any real weight ?


A lot of the big network agencies don’t even seem to have ECDs anymore.


Creative Directors used to be the people who made a difference.


Now they’re just people who can be wheeled out for pitches to make small talk.


I’m surprised they don’t all want to  behave really, really badly.

How to win agency of the decade

Can I first of all congratulate Campaign’s picture editor for their work in last week’s issue ?


The front page showed two images of Peter Mandelson - holding a bunch of bananas in one, and minus the bananas in the other.


Where did Mandelson’s bananas go ?


That’s got to be worth a Question Time in itself.


Secondly, in the piece on awards on page 13, it showed great dedication to pick 4 creatives who were all too tall for their hair.


As a result of judicious cropping, 4 world-famous creative gurus looked like a row of hard-boiled eggs.


It was worth the £3.70 for that alone.


Anyway. To business.




I can imagine that the conversation at Mother or Fallon goes a bit like this.


"We're in the running for Campaign Agency of the Decade." "Yea but look what happened to the last Agency of the Decade."


For those of you who can't remember, the last Agency of the Decade was called HHCL (and I was the 2nd "h").


And, for the benefit of any agency in the running for this most prestigious of poisoned chalices, allow me to tell you what I think did happen.


We let the original dynamic of the partners dissipate. In other words, we fought too much. This came about through politics and envy. If, in your current agency, the original partners are still working happily together, you're probably ok.


So my advice to all partners in all agencies is this – see if you can stick together.

If only for the sake of the quids.


It’s weird – there were all sorts of personality differences between us, but they got subsumed when we were young and struggling. However, as soon as success came our way, we fought like cat and dog.


One of the partners in particular was always trying to get other partners off on “sabbaticals” which effectively undermined them in the agency.


It was like Big Brother, with slightly more at stake.


In fact, it was utterly terrifying.


As a result of all these feuds, we eventually fell foul of what is known in the business as "Bogle's Dictum" - the mantra that any ad agency is only 3 telephone calls from disaster.


I.e. if your top 3 clients decide to leave at the same time, you're pretty much f*cked.


When the HHCL partnership dissipated, on a sea of squabbles, niggles and drug-fuelled Christmas parties aboard Sir Phillip Green's 60-foot yacht moored in the Shadwell Basin, (actually I retract the last item on advice from lawyers, several of whom were there at the time),   we ended up getting those 3 Bogellian calls.


In fact we got about 8 of them, pretty much all together over a shortish period of time. I got one, telling us Egg had fired us, just 5 minutes before I had to address a huge conference in Kuala Lumpur.


Anybody leading an agency in the running for Campaign Poisoned Chalice of the Decade, on receiving a string of calls from their 8 biggest clients asking to review the business, would be well advised to wander down from the 34th floor of their ivory tower and start panicking.


Of course it is absolutely a client's prerogative to call a review. But once a couple of them do it to you, the sharks start circling. Sharks with sh*t-eating grins.


I can’t complain about that. It’s just the law of the jungle.


And I apologise for mixing my metaphors there.  As the more observant of you will recognize, you don’t get sharks in a jungle.  


I should of course have referred to lemurs with sh*t-eating grins.


But maybe this is all a result of what my old English tutor would call the "hamartia", the tragic flaw in the characters of dramatic heroes which leads to their eventual downfall.


In the case of Macbeth, it was ambition. In the case of Othello, unbearable jealousy. In our case, we were all off our t*ts in the Shadwell Basin.


Anyway.


I hope that helps.