Campaign

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.

Multiple ideas

 

The best advice I can give you about pitching is this - brush your tongue as well as your teeth. Because 75% of the microbes which cause bad breath are on the tongue.


And 75% of pitches are about personal chemistry, not about ideas.


I remember when we used to get the intermediaries in to HHCL to talk about pitching. One of them told a very funny story about how a senior female client had said that she fancied “everyone in the room” of the agency which (surprise, surprise) went on to win the pitch.  


It was a very funny story for lots of people – but not unfortunately for us, because we’d lost that particular pitch.


Again, I wonder if I’d spent more time in Savile Row and less time in Milletts, how different history might have been.


But as I said last week, if you want sexual chemistry, why not go to a speed-dating event ?


(Although in the case of some people I know, the dating would have to take place at the speed of light for them to pick up any positive responses.)


Pitches should be about ideas.


But don’t just take my word for it. Alex Bogusky is saying the same thing when he says agencies should be factories, rather than thinking they’re in the service industry.


And then, you have to look at one very important question.


Do you present one idea in the pitch, or several ?


Years ago, I remember writing a column where I criticised Saatchis for winning the Toyota pitch by using spectacular pitch theatre.


Basically, they’d somehow managed to get a Toyota into their Reception area, (by removing the glass from their windows, as I understood it) to create an impressive first impression.


I wrote rather huffily that surely strategic thinking was more important than knowing the phone number of a good glazier.


But the fact is that Simon Dicketts had come up with one of the best lines ever created for a pitch – “The car in front is a Toyota” -  so it wasn’t empty theatre.


So, that’s one way of going about it  – find a great idea and get 100% behind it.


And, if you’re pitching for Anusol, stick a giant arsehole in Reception.


(You’ve probably got one quite near there already.)


But look at the other option.


Because you could show a whole bunch of ideas – as long as all of them are provocative.


And then you could say – let’s make a few of these, and see what happens.


This is where it gets exciting. And this is what I think agencies should be advocating now.


Because creativity has changed fundamentally.


In bad, traditional agencies, 99% of the planning happens before the work breaks.


You get one script that takes 6 months to get through research, and it’s then put out there for a year or more, gathering dust and boring the pants off people.


In good agencies, at least 50% of the planning happens after the work breaks. Because half the skill of it is in developing and evolving it.


It has to be reactive, adaptive.


And that means being less precious about it all.


A very bright planner called Jon Leach who worked at HHCL was once working on a positioning statement for the agency - and he came up with the phrase “Strong opinions, lightly held”.


At the time I thought – that’s b*llocks, we’re about strong opinions, strongly held. But a minute later I thought  - no, he’s right.


Rather proving him right, as it happened.


Because the agency loved to explore radical positions for clients, but we’d very rarely die on a sword for anything.


And I think we’d stumbled onto something very valuable about running work.


By being less precious about it, you can maybe create more value.


Present several ideas. Make several ideas. As I pointed out much later to the Whiskas client, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.


And all I care about is that the client does do something radical – rather than the invisible garbage which makes up 95% of our industry’s output.


When we first developed this multiple-idea approach all those years ago, we had to use research to help us pick the best idea out of several.


But that’s far from ideal  –  because research is tricky.


In fact, research is like sex.


Good research is very good, but bad research is the worst thing in the world.


It’s also like sex in that it involves one-way mirrors, cheap wine, M&S sausage rolls and some bored-looking women wondering if this is really the best use of their evening.


But these days you can push out several ideas and see which one gets talked about most on the internet – thus involving consumers directly and saving yourself the expense of using conventional research.


Because the one thing we know about conventional research is that it doesn’t work.


All new business launches use conventional research, but about 80% of them fail.


(That's worse odds than avoiding halitosis.)

Life's a pitch and then you die

I was fascinated by the story of Tom Williams, the Harlequins winger who went off with a fake injury, to allow another player on.


We once pulled the planner Dave O'Hanlon out of a pitch with a fake ruptured colon. Because there was a fear that his statistical analysis of the market would be too provocative. We didn't have any blood capsules, so we improvised with a bar of chocolate. But you don't want to know the full details.


And actually pitching in general is a very demoralizing and stupid process.


How much of the truly great work that's run has come directly out of a pitch process ?


Actually that's a pretty difficult question to answer. I'd be seriously surprised if anyone could answer that question.


You'd have to be a nut-case to even attempt it.


Anyway.


I've got a new idea for pitching.


Just ideas.


No chemistry, no sexual chemistry - honestly, if clients want that, there are any number of speed-dating events they can go to.


So, on that note, I went off last week to brief the students at Bucks College in High Wycombe on two brands that have been going through the pitch process recently.


Young’s and Dulux.


I had a great couple of hours down there, and I'll give you a taster of 10 ideas for each client.



Young’s Seafood.


1.
In cities, construction sites with tower cranes are used as oversized fishing rods. Huge installed fishes hang on the hooks of the cranes. When you send an sms to one of the fishes, it starts to make big soap bubbles.
 


2.
We send out a team of deep sea divers, who take packs of Young’s Seafood and plant them in fishermen's nets, so when they pulled them in, they would be like 'What the f*ck? How did they get there?' We could even target the fishermen that work for Birdseye. We would also like to get a 'mole' onto the boats to film the reactions - the footage could then be released as a viral.


3.
We associate Young’s seafood with brain training, because fish is good for the brain. This influences packaging and all marketing. Every pack has a brain training puzzle.


4.
We show short films showing how meat-producing animals are killed. The message is - "Take responsibility for what you eat."


5.
Traditional fishmongers used to wrap fresh fish in newspaper to keep it cool once the customer had bought it. That, and traditional fish and chips being wrapped in newspaper, serves as an iconic idea for a new line of packaging with a twist - ie it looks like a bunch of different newspapers.

Threadfin Bream, for example, comes from the Indian Ocean and therefore we would have an Indian style newspaper wraparound.

The newspaper date could correlate to the day the fish had been caught, and there could be a photograph of that specific fishing boat or its captain.


6.
Eating too much meat is directly linked to a number of types of cancer. Suggestion: Place empty fridge cabinets in supermarkets with signs warning that the supermarket is selling less meat due to the link between cancer and meat - with a suggestion to eat fish as a healthier alternative


7.
We haven't had fish flu yet. Or mad fish disease. We could make spoof videos with men in white coats (who turn out to be doctors, not actors) telling us this.


8. A fleet of fish tank lorries tour around the streets of London. These lorries contain live fish. Rods are passed to people looking out of their office windows, and they are encouraged to 'go fishing'.


9
This idea came from looking at the way fish spasm around when they have just been caught; it could go beautifully to music. Line  -"It's flip flopping great".

The students sent me a link which frankly is about the most unappetizing bit of footage I’ve ever seen, and the music track which would supposedly made it funny has been disabled for copyright reasons – but here it is, anyway. There’s a really good idea in here somewhere …

.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uMLCWhj0Js



10.
Invent a game in which people “fish” on the internet.

You cast your virtual rod and who knows what “tidbit” you’ll find.

Bring Britain’s favourite hobby to the online world.




DULUX


 
1. A competition to find Britain's Skankiest Rooms. You nominate people you know. We film them and shame them, then re-decorate the rooms.


Or we paint over road markings in Dulux colours. We could paint over zebra crossings with different, fresh colours, double yellow lines, keep clear boxes, cycle lanes, speed bumps etc. Dulux would then reveal via a website where users can vote for their town as 'The most depressing town in England', for the chance to have the same Dulux colour splash treatment. The colours used could be specifically chosen as mood enhancing, for example yellows and oranges to enliven or soft pinks and lilacs to create calm.


2. We sneak into Buckingham Palace and repaint the Queen's living room. Because her taste is, frankly, dreadful.


3. You could use augmented reality to let people see how their rooms might look with new colours.


The problem is, there is already an interesting iPhone application, which does something similar. You take a photo of your room and the application allows you to change the colour of the walls. This a rather dull demo on  YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiTdKrQ0MU8.


Or - more low-fi -  give people torches that project new colours via filters onto primed walls.


4.  We create a campaign of "weeping walls ", showing how houses have feelings. Is your living room feeling ignored ? When was the last time you did something nice for your pantry ? Maybe your house wants to divorce you.


5. We put up posters for the "lost" Dulux dog on lamp-posts all over Britain. Then audition for a new one. Or better still, a new mascot - it could be the Dulux badger. Whoever wins goes into a face-off against the original iconic shaggy dog.


6. Dulux could create an eye-dropper function on their website, that the user could then use on any webpage to select a colour that they want. Maybe you can also repaint boring websites this way.


7. Set up a campaign in which we claim that Dulux have stolen colours from famous paintings (and possibly other famous things) for their new range. Set up a stunt in which some public art pieces are made to look like their colours have been nicked.


8. On a massive scale wall in the city centre a message invites the viewer to test the newest colour trends from Dulux - directly onto the scene. The viewer gets a mobile application on his iPhone (mobile with motion control).

With the application he can now choose his favourite colours and paint something (in the air). A beamer transfers the paintings onto the wall. Afterwards the viewer can send a link with his painting to friends.


9.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHcvbcmnNu4&feature=PlayList&p=B62D4F665A818F99&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=37>


Commission Giuliano del Sorbo to create an ambient piece for Dulux using their vibrant range of colours on a large branded canvas. White strips of card embossed with the Dulux logo would be scattered at the base of the canvas catching splatters of paint. These could then be collected as souvenirs or taken to a Dulux colour matching counter.


10. Own the mood-changing properties of colours.

Paint prisons or drug rehab places.

Every week Dulux takes on a new challenge in the real world.

Change the world with colour.

 
There you go.

I think they did really well.

Young Bucks

 

A journalist in Creative Review (who went on to write for the Sunday Times, so he was no mug) once described me as having the worst dress sense of anybody in advertising.


It was a fair point, and one I was reminded of when I went to talk to Bucks College in High Wycombe last week.


Because students are always scruffier than you remember.


And I like that.


(Although it does raise the question. What could HHCL have achieved, beyond being Campaign’s Agency of The Decade, if I’d only put a bit more effort into co-ordinating my chinos.)


I went there to brief them on an idea I’ve got, so I needed their cooperation.


So I started off by telling them that they were studying the wrong subject at the wrong time.


As you do.


I told them it felt like the end of something.


I could have pointed out that in a recent survey of the 20 coolest brands in the UK, only about 6 of them have ever had any cool advertising. And only 1 of them has had any cool advertising in the last 12 months.

 

1 out of 20, in an industry which supposedly builds brands.

 

I could have gone on to quote the writer and actor Charlie Higson.


He was in a recent Guardian “My Media” feature. Increasingly, the celebrities answering the questions in this don’t bother to talk about advertising at all, although they’re all asked about it.


But Mr Higson did.


And his reply was a splendid bit of invective. He said “It tends to drive me insane. I get very cross at the way it leeches ideas from other media, adapts them, and then gives itself awards for them - completely unscrupulous."


Then, in a TV programme from last week, Mike Mills of REM was asked how he felt about his songs being used in advertising. “I’d rather cut my own finger off”, he said.


Of course, people have always been rude about advertising. The singer Neil Young once found that one of his songs, Heart of Gold, had been sold to MacDonald’s for an ad. He played it once at a concert, changing the words to “Hamburger of Gold” and then swore never to sing it live again.


Going even further back in history (although if you saw Neil Young at one of his recent concerts in London, you’d think it was impossible to go any further back in history that Neil Young) there’s a quote I’ve always liked which George Orwell used about our industry.


He wrote “Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a bucket of swill ”.


Presumably Ringan Ledwidge (one of the top 3 directors working in our industry right now) likes the quote as well since that’s the name of his production company.


But saying “advertising has always been bad” doesn’t solve the problem of how bad it is right now.


Does it ?

 

Although that does seem to be the attitituide of a few people in the industry right now.

 

Thinking like that would mean that no aspect of human life would ever progress in any way whatsoever.


“Yea, it’s pretty crap not having fire, it tends to mean we’re quite cold and our food options are severely restricted – but what can you do ? It’s always been like that.”


That’s why I was talking to a bunch of students. Because I wanted to see what they can come up with.


I gave them two brands which are going through a pitch process right now – Youngs Seafood and Dulux. I said – show me some ideas I won’t see anywhere else.


Show me ideas where I’m going to respond by saying – not “that’s nice”, or “that’s good” – both of which mean they will be invisible in the highly competitive media world out there.


But which I’ll respond to by saying – “Where the f*ck did that come from ?” or “Can we do that ?”


I gave them a week, so I’ll let you know how I get on.

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.

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
 

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.

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.