Campaign

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.

Mess

We’ve given away the mess of pottage.

 
Now, I’m not exactly sure what a mess of pottage is.

 
But there was a story in the Bible about Esau giving it away.

 
And, if I remember the story right, it’s about giving away your birthright.


It’s about losing the only thing worth having.


And it feels to me that we’ve given away our magic. By which I mean, the unpredictable, spontaneous side of creativity.

 
And that’s a big deal, I reckon.


Look at a couple of sporting analogies. Recently the England cricket captain, Andrew Strauss, said why he thought the current Australian side was beat-able. "I don’t think this Australia side has an aura about it", he said.

 
We’ll get back to that “aura”, later.


From the world of football, I'm fond of quoting Andy Roxburgh, the director of UEFA. He talks about something very similar – about how football needs flair, but these days is being analysed to death.


And it's the same with advertising. Which used to be about a few talented individuals who drank and smoked too much, and who spent too long in the pub or down the bookies, but who created magic.

 
The only difference was that the footballers wore baggy shorts while the people I’m talking about usually didn’t.


But advertising, like football, has so much money in it, that it is now being analysed to death.

 
In any given project, I bet you that 80% of the allotted time is spent writing the brief.


And only between 10 and 20% given to the people who can really make a difference - the "creative" people.

 
Now those people CAN come from any area of the agency, but they’ll have a set of talents that set them apart.


Years ago, in his office overlooking Santa Monica, Lee Clow told me that he thought our industry should be about making a "leap" - from understanding to insight.

 
And that only a relatively small proportion of people in his agency could do that.


I couldn't agree more. Those "leaps" are what make marketing interesting. Frankly, without them, it's as dull as double-entry book-keeping.


And for those of you spend more time looking at porn sites than doing your accounts, trust me. That "double-entry" bit isn't as sexy as it sounds.


This is what Andy Roxburgh means about when he says that football needs more "code-breaker" players.


Players like Messi and Ronaldo, who are the most valued and most expensive players in the world - because they’re unpredictable. A master strategist like Mourinho can analyse every permutation of what his opponents might do - but someone like Ronaldo screws that up, because they do what they do without thinking about it.


They bring about game-changing "leaps".


To return to cricket, that's the aura Shane Warne had about him, and which the current Australian side don't have.


The sheer bloody hell-making of a maverick, high as a kite on the belief that they can do something nobody has done before, something everybody is telling them CAN'T be done, and which they’re gonna do or break their bones trying.


And our industry has a fair number of people who can do that. Code-breaker thinkers.


Years ago, Frank Lowe built the best agency the industry has ever known around this. He hired the best creative talent, and he cherished it.


At one point CDP was working for Fiat, but so highly regarded was the creativity in the agency that clients at other car companies would take CDP staff out for lunch and literally beg them to take their account.


Would that happen these days ?


No way, Mourinho.

 
What conclusions can we draw from all this ?

 
1.  Napoleon once said that "no man is a hero to his valet". And Napoleon should know, because it was his valet who sold his (very small) penis to a museum after he died.


2. Bill Bernbach, my favourite adman of all time, said this.

 
“We spend so much time measuring public opinion that we forget that sometimes we can create it.”

 
3. All we know about Esau, from the Alan Bennett monologue, is that he was “a hairy man”.

 
Bring back the hairy man.

 
And give him a mess of pottage while you’re at it.

Trying harder

 Did you know that Rafael Nadal plays with bald balls ?

You do now.

And so does the entire audience at this year’s Singapore IAS Conference.

Because that was just one example which the great Adam Morgan gave of how people use restrictions to improve their creativity.

Nadal, as you’re probably aware, is a great top-spinner. And top spinners love to play with shaggy balls.

(This is all taken verbatim from Adam’s speech, by the way. It’s not me being childish.)

But in order to make himself the best top-spinner in the world, Nadal practises with bald balls and bangs his around the court till it hurts.

(OK. That is me being childish.)

You see, the title of the conference  was “Creativity on a Budget”, and frankly I can’t think of a better title for a conference.

Now I’m not sure what the morality is of spilling the beans on another chap’s speech, and given that I’m always going on about morality in advertising (there’s a short book for you, ha ha) – I ought to be careful.

So I won’t pass on all Adam’s brilliant stuff about how brands can fight bigger brands and win.

But I can’t resist telling you about his idea to dig out the contract between DDB and Avis from the early 1960s.

In the honeymoon period of just winning the account, Bill Bernbach sat down with the CEO of Avis and wrote a contract suggesting how both sides should work together.

And the 7 points they agreed upon were stuck up on the walls of all relevant offices.

Point One was that Avis know about car rental, DDB know about ads.  Essentially, it was about mutual respect.

Point Two was a wonderfully clear and to-the-point brief, stating that all work produced “would attempt to persuade frequent business renters to try Avis”. Compare that with the latest brief you’re working on right now. How clear and to-the-point does yours look ?

Point Three stated that both parties were engaged in “a serious attempt” to create advertising that worked 5 times harder than Hertz’s. Because Hertz’s budget was 5 times bigger than Avis’.

This was about impact. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with Matthew Charlton once, who ran Johnny Walker at BBH for many years. When I asked him how they got such great work through (because TBWA were working on Chivas at the time) – he said that the client had agreed 3 words that described the brand at the very beginning of the process. And one of the words was Pioneering. Once they’d agreed that, only fresh work would fit.

And you can see how DDB’s contract with Avis would have led to similarly high standards of freshness being demanded.

Point  Four went on to say that Avis could “approve” or “disapprove” ads, but not “try to improve” them.

Hmm. Tricky to see how that would work these days.

Like Point One, times have moved on, and it’s no use just wishing the old days were back.

But a recognition of the skill sets that lie within agencies is long overdue.

Point Five is fascinating. DDB agree to put forward only ads that they “recommend”.  What’s odd about that, you might think ? But the paragraph goes on to say that DDB must never put forward ads “to see what Avis think of that one”.

Wow.

All those years ago, but it feels like Bill Bernbach is sitting in any number of offices round London today.

Point Six was about media selection, and stated that it was NOT  about “cold numbers”. “Conviction should prevail”, the contract said, “compromises should be avoided”.

Lovely stuff again.

And Point Seven was a complete anticlimax. It should have said something like “Tell the truth, because losing the trust of your customers is the worst sin you can commit.”  But it didn’t. I just made that up.

Bill’s point Seven was about how all their ads would be approved by Ford, who obviously had some skin in the game.

But six out of seven ain’t bad.

Personally, I was never a huge fan of the commandment about coveting your neighbour’s wife’s ass. So, getting 100%  is never easy.

Now the really, really difficult question is how many of those Points could be usefully tried out today ?

Because the relationship between client and agency has changed fundamentally.

It’s more mutual, more collaborative, more overlapping.

But still.

I love the balls of where Bernbach was coming from.

Big, shaggy balls.

Like the ones Rafael Nadal dreams about.


P.S.  I’m giving a talk at Wolff Olins this Thursday at 6.30. It’ll be pretty much the same speech I gave in Singapore, so if you caught it there, feel free to duck out of this one. Personally, I’m just wondering if I’ve got the number of “o”s, “f”s and “l”s  right.

Optimism and its opposite

Through a combination of circumstances too horrible to tell, I found myself reading the Daily Mail the other day.

Having attacked shallow optimism in my last blog I was suddenly overwhelmed by the opposite. Every page you turned to, everything was all too terrible to contemplate.

It seemed to be a question of either killing yourself or leaving the country. (Or possibly combining the 2 in a one-way ticket to Walt Dignitasworld in Switzerland.)

I opted for merely leaving, and headed out to Singapore where I gave a speech at the IAS Conference.

Where it was slightly unnerving to see that about  50% of the people on the streets were wearing little face masks. Either there are a lot of distraught Jacko fans out here (and I did see a lot of eBay activity for Jackson 4 tickets) or the flu fear is even worse here than in England.

Probably the latter.  First they had Asian bird flu and now swine flu. They're probably thinking - if pigs had wings, we'd all be f*cked.

A further irony relating to optimism is that, while I was blogging about what I considered the pernicious optimism in advertising, I was being accused by several journalists of being too optimistic myself, in a book I’ve  just written. (Called “You’re Really Rich”, published by Random House, etc etc.)

And that’s not just the Sackcloth & Ashes correspondent from  the Daily Mail.

I had to tell the journos I was a miserable bastard in reality, and that seemed to cheer them up.

Although my generally hangdog demeanour was sweetened by the IAS conference in Singapore – hosted superbly by David Tang of DDB - and in fact it became dangerously close to the demeanour of a well-hung dog.

Because the conference was superb and I love being in Asia.

I think I've figured out why I prefer it to most other continents (especially Antarctica which is frankly a dump) - and it's their attitude.

At the end of my speech I compared two quotes. One from a 1980s adman - " It's not enough to win, someone else has to lose" . And one from more recent times - "Nobody wins unless everybody wins".
The first idea holds sway in most Western interactions (and Eckhart Tolle writes about it brilliantly as being why everybody in that culture is essentially unhappy, no matter how “successful” they are).
Whereas what little I understand of the Confucian approach to life seems to support the latter.

The only problem is - where does that leave advertising ?

Which almost has one-up-manship as its core belief.

Of course it may not be a problem. We may all, everywhere in the world, turn into rapacious and competitive bastards. Problem sorted.

But if we went the other way, and became more considerate and community-focussed, would capitalism and consumerism lose its grip on our psyches ?

It's a genuine question, by the way.

Answers, please,  in less than 12 words.  “I think advertising has a future because ...”

Incidentally, I think advertising has a future because you come across people like Adam Morgan in it. The deservedly famous author of “Eat the Big Fish”  was speaking after me at the conference and frankly it's a good job I was playing with the idea of non-competition  - because anybody competitive should never share a platform with Adam Morgan.

I enjoy provoking an audience and think I did quite a good job. But he wowed them.

I'm tempted to spike his guns, (or blunt his harpoon), by telling you all his stuff here and now - but I’m on holiday this week.

On holiday from being a miserable bastard, for just one week.

So I’ll tell you a bit more in another blog.

But let me whet your appetite by saying  that he had an absolutely brilliant wheeze, to dig out the contract that was agreed between Bill Bernbach and the boss of Avis shortly after they agreed to work together in the early 1960s.

Which was truly fascinating.

It's weird - I spend half my time thinking that planners over-complicate the process, and waste too much of the precious little time allotted to solving clients' problems. And the other half of the time thinking that the very best thing about the industry is when you meet planners like Adam Morgan, Jon Steele or Russell Davies.

It makes me feel like God is in his heaven and let's look at a quadrant of how the angels should be arranged.

More Angels

I was trying to get to the Michael Jackson Memorial Service last week. But (in the absence of a full-time PA) I somehow ended up, not at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, but at Staples Corner, near Brent Cross.


An easy mistake to make.


And talking of kings reminds me of one of my favourite cartoons of all time. It’s either from Private Eye or the New Yorker, I can’t remember which.


It shows a Renaissance ruler looking at a portrait of himself in full pomp and he’s addressing the artist standing in front of him.


The ruler’s looking a bit pissed off and he says  - “Give me more angels. And make them more pleased to see me”.


I’ve always loved that cartoon. And I think it raises a couple of interesting questions about the ad industry.


One is about the nature of patronage. But let’s leave that for now. Cos it’s a tricky subject to negotiate.


But the second point is the relentless cheerfulness of most marketing messages.


How come most ads seem to resemble a chat between Little Orphan Annie and Polyanna over the picket fence about how good a product Prozac is - and such good value, too ?


Very grating grinning.


But look at your favourite films, or books, or music tracks.


Most of them will be flavoured with a tang of bitter-sweet. Sure, some Pixar films will be in your list, but if all your top 10 films were animated feel-good epics, I'd be worried.


By contrast with “real” entertainment, most ads have a tone of voice which feels like you're watching something aimed at 7-year-olds.


So it’s interesting to explore other tones of voice.


Many years ago, I was involved in the launch of one of the first premium lagers.


At that time, ads for ordinary lagers (or "throwing lagers" to use the correct technical name) featured 3 blokes in loud shirts who enjoyed a good time, to some upbeat music track.


I pointed out to our client that most people's music collections were largely made up of tracks that weren't so sweetly, anodynely cheerful, and we made a campaign featuring black and white films of people having a tough time, to some blues tracks. It's still one of my favourite campaigns, because that brand took off massively, and within a year, about 5 other premium lagers had also launched with "serious" advertising.


We redefined the category by breaking the rules. (Well, thinking about it, how else are you going to redefine a category ?)


Music gets all this, big time. There are a million examples. But take a listen to a new band getting a lot of attention called Skint and Demoralised – well, you’ve got the tone already from the name of the band.


How many ad briefs would start from that set of words ?


Their lyricist is a guy called Matt Abbott, and you’ll get a flavour of his approach just from the titles of his songs. How about “You probably don’t even realize when you do the things I love the most” or  “Only lust ignores violence involving ambulances”.


Reminds me of my favourite band name of all time - The F*cking C*nts Treat Us Like Pr*cks.


Try sticking that in your desired consumer response.


Perhaps more relevantly than this, a lot of campaigns which I love have dealt with reality by taking on some form of social pioneering role - from HHCL's Fuji film work, through Benetton, through Dove and Persil, to a recent campaign in the States in which Kentucky Fried Chicken went round some local towns and filled in the pot holes in the road. There was some line about filling a hole, but what was brilliant was the fact of a brand doing something useful, fighting a battle on behalf of its customers.


It's the difference between "feel-good" (which is often as vapid as a stream of soap bubbles dissolving on the air) and "do-good" - which might necessitate dealing with some unsavoury but very real aspects of the world.


I'd love to believe that marketing could do this. But I fear that in the heads of many industry people is that old ad slogan:


"Nothing acts faster than anodyne".

Odd balls

I was reading in the Observer recently about how  JB Priestley made a 40-minute film of his erect penis.


No, hang on a minute, I’ve got that wrong. It was John Lennon who made a 40-minute of his erect penis. On the next page, in another article, there was a feature on J B Priestley and his epic trip around Britain, recording the thoughts and emotions of people in the year 1933.


If you made a similar trip these days, you’d probably find that the average bloke was making a  40-minute film about his erect penis.


And uploading it onto YouPube.


And that highlights one of my favourite quotes about creativity, from the art critic John Berger.


He said that the first time you walk into a restaurant with a needle in your tongue, you’re liable to be arrested.


The second time you do it, you’re liable to be hired as the cabaret.


And this is a genuine human truth, which the advertising industry has yet to get its head round.  


I.e. Stuff which people initially consider shocking is quite quickly assimilated into culture.


Incidentally, Berger wrote that thought about 40 years ago, when sticking a needle in your tongue would have been considered unthinkable.  These days, half the waitresses in London have got studs in their tongues. So, his observation has, in a sense, already come true.


And that has implications for creativity and research, which nobody has yet figured out how to deal with.


If you go into research with the equivalent of a needle in your tongue,   people are liable to say –  No, we don’t like that. You’ve done a better ad over there, the one with Penelope Cruz telling me that I’m worth it.


So the Penelope Cruz ad gets made, over the one with Jimmy Nail, with a needle in his tongue, telling people that they’re a bag of shite.


Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating to make the point.


But it’s enormously difficult to get original thinking through conventional research.


Someone told me that “Gorilla” wasn’t put into research. It was the umbrella concept of  
“glass and a half productions” that gathered the necessary scores to prise the budget out of the board.


I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds very plausible to me. The chances of getting an ad like Gorilla through conventional research are tiny.


But – once you MAKE an ad like that  – people go, hey that’s funny, or they expand their mental horizons to accommodate the new thought, and hey presto it works.


And in fact, the weirder it is the better. Because people are bombarded with ordinary crap the whole time.


It wasn’t the umbrella thoughts of “glass and a half productions” that got  4 million hits on Youtube. It was the weird sh*t of a gorilla playing the drums.


Although if they’d given the Gorilla an umbrella, or maybe had a ball-boy standing behind him holding an umbrella, I don’t think it would have done any harm.


But if you go into conventional research, people will try to help you by telling you how to make your stuff more like the ads that are out there already.


They think they’re being helpful, that way.


It’s like a huge, expensive version of your Mum telling you that if you go out without a scarf you’ll catch a cold. I.e. stating the bleedin’ obvious.


So – how do you get really original stuff through ?


Well, I’ve got a few ideas on that. (Which I’ll expand on in another blog.)


But I think most agencies right now are just dragging out Youtube and saying -  look, people are already doing this on the net anyway -  can we do it as well ?


Look, this film of a cat playing the banjo has had 2 million hits, let’s try it for your toothpaste.


Which only makes a very limited sort of sense.


Because, at least on Youtube people are experimenting,  and the boundaries are being pushed all the time. I don’t just mean in terms of taste - I mean in terms of weirdness and surreality and creativity and all the rest of it.


Now, being odd isn’t the only way to get noticed. But it worked for the gorilla, it worked for Sony’s balls , it worked for the Skoda cake, it worked for a lot of the stuff at HHCL, it worked for a lot of the stuff at CDP, etc, etc.


It’s something to think about.


And if it stops you thinking about J B Priestley’s penis, that’s probably a good thing too.

Neophilia

At HHCL, we were always accused of being different for the sake of being different.

I struggled with the accusation, because it was so obviously true.  So I tried changing it to “different for the sake of being better” and that might have kept some people quiet for a bit, but essentially we were always just interested in being   different for the sake of being different.

And I still think that’s a valid business strategy in our industry – in fact, now more than ever.

With this in mind, I scooted round the Saatchis’ New Directors Showcase channel on Youtube. And then went to look at the D&AD New Blood student show at Olympia.

The main thing to say about the first one is that (at last) you don’t have to go to Cannes to see it. God, I hate Cannes. You know that Oscar Wilde quote about foxhunting – “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable” ? I’ve got my version for Cannes – “the drunk in pursuit of the useless”. To be fair, it doesn’t quite have Oscar’s assonance -  and Oscar is famous for his assonance -  but it’s pretty much true.

The Showcase is fantastic, though. Keith Loutit’s films have picked up a bit of PR in the newspapers but a photo in Metro doesn’t do justice to their unnerving poetry. Christopher Hutsul’s Nike film is almost exactly how advertising should be done – disarming, funny, compelling. Zhu Jin Jing’s film about Bruce Lee playing table tennis is wonderful and everybody who sees it will be mesmerised by it.


There’s a lot of experimentation, for its own sake. Then on Monday afternoon I went to Olympia and judged a section of New Blood, the D&AD student exhibition. I cycled there, while listening on my iPod to the Verve track “the drugs don’t work”. Somewhat unnervingly, at the first junction, I found that my brakes didn’t work.


And if there’s one thing worse than the drugs not working, it’s the brakes not working.

But I got there.

Some of the stuff was brilliant - like the Bucks College stand, which was worth the price of admission alone. But even though the price of admission is zero, some of the other advertising stands couldn’t live up to the same claim.

Walking round them was the equivalent of Proust ordering a large white tea and a packet of 10 madeleines. For some of these tutors, clearly nothing has changed in the last 20 years.

What are these people doing teaching students ? 

I know what you’re thinking. They should be working in some of the bigger ad agencies in London.

But actually what they’re doing is no joke to the students involved. They’re failing to teach them to use the media which we still call “new” or “emerging” but which in about 18 months’ time, we’ll just call “the media”.

Look at the two Titanium films for Obama’s marketing and you’ll see how it should be done.

One of the Saatchis’ directors, Laurie Thinot, has a beautiful film for a fantastic track called “Stay the same” by Autokratz.  The lyric says “we can always stay the same” but sometimes it sounds like  “we can’t always stay the same.”

( I had an accountant who spoke like that once. “You cyan take the money out after one year.” “I can or I can’t ?”   “You cyan”. )

Which lyric you prefer could say a lot about your attitude to advertising right now.

Alternatives

I was reading Paul Schrader, the legendary screen-writer of  “Taxi driver”, in the Guardian last week..


Famously, he wrote the screenplay in a furious 3-week burst while living rough in his car in Hollywood. I think I’ve got that story right. He might have written it in a furious 3-hour burst while sitting in the back of a black cab in Boreham Wood.


Either way, he was furious, and he wrote one of the great films of modern time.


And in the Guardian essay, he was complaining about how everybody is surrounded by stories these days. How the average person sees all the variations on all the basic plotlines in all the genres by the time they’re 25.  


As he puts it “the media marketplace puts a premium on anything “new” or “fresh” and, at the same time, inundates its viewers with continual and competing narratives”.


Ring any bells ?


In the world of marketing, we bombard people with messages, many of which have “continual and competing narratives”. Asda are cheaper than Tesco. Tesco are cheaper than Asda. (Sometimes I’m tempted to lock them both in a room and say – “Now one of you must be lying”.)  


And it’s not just the directly competitive ones, because actually they’re all competing. If I remember the Yorkshire Tea ad because I really like John Shuttleworth (and both those statements are true), then I’ve got less room  for the next commercial message knocking on my door, which might be trying to tell me that L’Oreal think I’m worth a punt.


Shrader points to 6 “counter-narrative” developments – ie other ways of getting the attention of the poor old time-poor viewer. Reality TV and documentary style are self-evident. Then there are two he calls “anecdotal narrative” and “re-enactment drama” –  ie quasi-realism. Then come two which I think are really interesting.


Video games. In these, the viewer participates – because, if they don’t, it gets very boring and the game finishes quite quickly.


But this participation essentially means that the viewer re-creates the story afresh every time.  And once you’re into this form of interaction, passive viewership can seem very passé. If you look at the popularity of MMOGs (massively multi-player online games), I’ve seen figures claiming worldwide subscriptions of  50 million.


It’s hard to resist the idea that one day, we’ll all end up playing inside these universes. F*ck it, we could all end up LIVING in them.


And the final alternative is “mini-mini-dramas” – ie 3- to 5-minute stories created for mobiles and Youtube.


This has got to be worth exploring more. From the age of 12 onwards, both my kids more or less only watched music channels – which is a TV experience built around 2- to 3-minute programmes.


And if you think that the main attraction of Twitter vs Facebook is that it’s only 140 characters, the same criterion applies to Youtube vs conventional TV.


I’m old enough to remember when music videos first kicked in. Record companies had miniscule budgets, and nobody knew how it worked, and it was a free-for-all. So the best directors, the ones who liked experimenting and who weren’t just in it for the money, threw themselves into it, and it was a fantastic creative revolution.


You could do that with commercial messages and Youtube right now.


Instead of a client researching 3 ads, why not make 3 short films, put them on Youtube and see which one gets the most hits ?


It’s not fake like all that research done in halls – nobody’s paid to participate in something they wouldn’t normally care a toss about.


So the only losers would be research companies.


(There’s a loss.)


I heard Kevin Roberts talk once – and he was f*cking impressive, if slightly more in-your-face than a New Zealand All Black with a wasp in his jock strap.


And he said something I’ve never forgotten.


Which is that “the only question worth asking is – “Do I want to watch that again ?”


It may not be the only criterion, but to my mind, it’s quite possibly the most important one.


With my suggestion for Youtube,  the only question worth asking is  something along the lines of  “Are you looking at me ?”


Which takes us back to where we came in.

Fame

 How important is it to stand out in your marketing ?


It would seem to be an obvious answer – we’re exposed to 4,000 commercial messages a day, people remember maybe 1 of them – yes, Steve, standing out is quite important.


But if you were to pick the 10 brands you were most loyal to, chances are that in that list would be some of the following – Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube. And I don’t remember any of those brands “doing a Gorilla”.


Incidentally, I use the phrase “doing a Gorilla” to mean “using paid-for media in a truly outstanding way” – as opposed to “having sex with a large monkey”.


They didn’t get where they are today by screwing large, hairy simians, whether Phil Collins was playing in the background or not.


(I nearly said “whether Phil Collins was playing with himself in the background or not”, but I’m pretty sure that’s an inaccurate picture. I reckon Phil had a band with him on that track.)


Those brands were all pioneers and they gave their customers a sense that they were on the same side as them.


But, to paraphrase Rousseau, most people in advertising work on brands of quiet desperation. Brands whose pioneering days are behind them, but who crave some sort of fame in our cluttered world.


So they try to stand out.


I was chatting to Russell Davies the other day. And he told me something very interesting about working with Nike.


When they get together in those god-awful things called sales conferences, and show each other what they’ve been doing all year, they get brownie points for originality. I.e. if you’re the marketing director of Nike Sweden and you stand up and your work is the same as everybody else’s, you don’t get brownie points. But if you stand up and your work is different from everybody else’s round the table, you do get brownie points.


That one rule by itself would be enough to make sure that they produced outstanding marketing. Because it’s about cherishing and celebrating salience – and it’s also a lot harder than you think.


You'll find this out if you talk to  Patrick Collister, who runs some fantastic creative training courses.

Patrick is a very clever guy, who has disguised himself as an accountant from Weybridge, while housing in his head some of the most radical and pertinent thinking to be found in our industry right now.


He was saying – take a room-full of CDs, and give them the old “50 uses of a brick” test.


(And incidentally, if you ever have to do this test, I’ve got a tip to make it dead easy. Just don’t think of the brick as a brick . If you do that, you stop after one or two answers. But if you think about anything else and think how the brick might fit in to that, you’ll go on for ever.)


And once they’ve worked on it for half an hour, you say to them – ok who’s come up with something that nobody else in the room has come up with ?


You’ll find that virtually nobody has.


Because we’ve all seen the same films, read the same books, etc. We've all been subjected to the same stimuli.


So it’s tricky.


But  the rewards are huge if you’re willing to take the risks.

Alternatively, you can wait for a new medium like the internet to come along and be one of the first brands to really exploit it.


Those are the choices really. If you're after fame.


There may be others, I don’t know.


Maybe you can go into the Big Brother house and call yourself “F*ckface”.


Although,  of the 3 options, that would be my least favourite.

Talking or not talking

First things first.


I was going to give a talk at Wolff Olins on Thursday 11 June, about what happened at HHCL and other topics. But because of the Tube strike, that’s had to be postponed.


So, if you were thinking of going – please don’t.


I know the holding board at WPP were thinking of hiring a fleet of those scooters you propel along the pavement with one foot, in order to get there.


Because they had “skin in the game” of  HHCL and I think there’s still a few queries out about my cab account.


Similarly, the bigwigs at TBWA Global were planning to turn up on space-hoppers, in order to figure out  a) why I hadn’t been able to turn TBWA into HHCL and b) whether lunch with Jonathan Durden falls into the category of entertainment or business.


Anyway.  I can use this blog to look at some of what happened to HHCL all those years ago.


It’s interesting. The whole time HHCL was going, people would ask – you guys take these risks – when has it failed ?


It’s almost like they wanted to hear that our approach had failed, so that then they wouldn’t have to bother to take a risk themselves.


Maybe this is down to British laziness. Because Brits are perfectionists, and perfectionists know that it’s going to be f*cking hard work doing the job properly, so – why bother ?


And maybe it’s because we know that, at some level, people are nicer if they fail.


Try talking to anyone at the top of their game.


Firstly, you  won’t get through, because they’re surrounded by an army of PAs. (One client I worked with in the dotcom bubble years had 3 PAs on shift duty – including one in the middle of the night.)


Secondly, they’ll probably be too arrogant to have a laugh with. Simon Dicketts reminded me recently of a talk I once gave about HHCL and which I had titled “10 years of breaking the rules”.


I don’t particularly like the word “w*nky” - but Simon would have been perfectly within his rights to have muttered it under his breath then.


But someone’s got to go out on a limb – and actually HHCL did do that pretty regularly.


We enjoyed it.


Despite people waiting for us to fall off.


(I’m reading quite a good book about this topic at the minute. Called “The Black Swan”, it’s all about the disproportionate power of unpredictable actions.)


Unpredictable, seemingly irrational stuff stands out. But it causes discomfort.


Look at some recent stand-out ads. How many people have you met  who’ve told you with weird excitement that Sony Balls “didn’t work” ? Or that Cadbury’s Gorilla “didn’t work” ? I don’t have the metrics to hand, but I’ve read stuff which suggested (very forcefully) that both these ads “failed”.


Of course I’ve said something like this myself – hypocrisy comes as second nature to someone who’s worked in advertising for a while  - but in my case, I was merely trying to point out the importance of following through with an integrated campaign.


However, you get the feeling that most people who tell you this, want to just go back to their offices and make boring, middle-of-the-road ads which will be forgotten even before they’ve aired.


It’s cr*p. We should all be worshipping at the sort of buzz which surrounded Sony Balls and Cadbury Gorilla. That kind of buzz is absolute gold-dust.


And following through is tough.  You can drive people to the electrical store, but if the salespeople then sell Samsung harder than Sony (for whatever reason), you’re pushing 250,000 balls uphill.


But the other question people ask about HHCL is – what happened ? What went wrong ?


Well, there are probably 18 different answers.


But as Nigel Bogle has famously said, every agency is only 3 phone calls away from disaster.


We got those 3 phone calls in the form of losing Tango, Egg, and the AA.


Now, I’m probably extraordinarily stupid, but I’m not sure exactly why that happened. (There is a theory in the industry that you win business on the basis of creative work, and lose it in the area of account service. Which appeals to me, because I don’t work in the area of account service.)


And I do wonder if any of those brands has had work as good as HHCL’s  stuff since then.

First Things

 First things first.


I was going to give a talk at Wolff Olins on Thursday 11 June, about what happened at HHCL and other topics. But because of the Tube strike, that’s had to be postponed.


So, if you were thinking of going – don’t.


I know the holding board at WPP were thinking of hiring a fleet of those scooters you propel along the pavement with one foot, in order to get there.


Because they had “skin in the game” of  HHCL and I think there’s still a few queries out about my cab account.


Similarly, the bigwigs at TBWA Global were planning to turn up, in order to figure out a) why I hadn’t been able to turn TBWA into HHCL and b) whether lunch with Jonathan Durden falls into the category of entertainment or business.


Anyway.  I can use this blog to look at some of what happened to HHCL all those years ago.


It’s interesting. The whole time HHCL was going, people would ask – you guys take these risks -  when has it failed ?


It’s almost like they wanted to hear that our approach had failed, so that then they wouldn’t have to bother to take a risk themselves.


Maybe this is down to British laziness. Because Brits are perfectionists, and perfectionists know that it’s going to be f*cking hard work doing the job properly, so – why bother ?


And maybe it’s because we know that, at some level, people are nicer if they fail.


Try talking to anyone at the top of their game.


Firstly, you  won’t get through, because they’re surrounded by an army of PAs. (One client I worked with in the dotcom bubble years had 3 PAs on shift duty – including one in the middle of the night.)


Secondly, they’ll probably be too arrogant to have a laugh with. Simon Dicketts reminded me recently of a talk I once gave about HHCL and which I had titled “10 years of breaking the rules”.


I don’t particularly like the word “w*nky” - but Simon would have been perfectly within his rights to have muttered it under his breath then.


But someone’s got to go out on a limb – and actually HHCL did do that pretty regularly.


We enjoyed it.


Despite people waiting for us to fall off.


(I’m reading quite a good book about this topic at the minute. Called “The Black Swan”, it’s all about the disproportionate power of unpredictable actions.)


Unpredictable, seemingly irrational stuff stands out. But it causes discomfort.


Look at some recent stand-out ads. How many people have you met  who’ve told you with weird excitement that Sony Balls “didn’t work” ? Or that Cadbury’s Gorilla “didn’t work” ? I don’t have the metrics to hand, but I’ve read stuff which suggested (very forcefully) that both these ads “failed”.


Of course I’ve said something like this myself – hypocrisy comes as second nature to someone who’s worked in advertising for a while  - but in my case, I was merely trying to point out the importance of following through with an integrated campaign.


However, you get the feeling that most people who tell you this, want to just go back to their offices and make boring, middle-of-the-road ads which will be forgotten even before they’ve aired.


It’s cr*p. We should all be worshipping at the sort of buzz which surrounded Sony Balls and Cadbury Gorilla. That kind of buzz is absolute gold-dust.


And following through is tough.  You can drive people to the electrical store, but if the salespeople sell Samsung harder than Sony (for whatever reason), you’re pushing 250,000 balls uphill.


But the other question people ask about HHCL is – what happened ? What went wrong ?


Well, there are probably 18 different answers.


But as Nigel Bogle has famously said, every agency is only 3 phone calls away from disaster.


We got those 3 phone calls in the form of losing Tango, Egg, and the AA.


Now, I’m probably extraordinarily stupid, but I’m not sure exactly why that happened. (There is a theory in the industry that you win business on the basis of creative work, and lose it in the area of account service. Which appeals to me, because I don't work in the area of account service.)


And I do wonder if any of those brands has had work as good as HHCL’s stuff since then.

Who watches the watchmen ?

I spent most of last Friday in Marshall Street Editors, putting together a short reel of old HHCL work.


Because in the next 6 weeks I’ve been invited to give talks at Wolff Olins, the D&AD New Blood Show, and a conference in Singapore, where I’ll be sharing a platform with Adam Morgan.


(I met him years ago for lunch in LA, and advised him that the fish was very good. I don’t know if he took my advice.)


But looking at the old ads made me think.


Last week, I asked what would happen if we went back and looked at the ad campaigns we all launched with such pizzazz 10 years ago ... because, as I’ve said several times before, I believe that most advertising fails.


So – how did HHCL’s work stand up to that test ? 


Well. Pretty well, I reckon.


(Come on ! You didn’t expect me to say anything different, did  you ? I’m an ad-man … ) 


But I’ll tell you why.


Because, if you don’t want your work to fail, I reckon you need two things.


One – a f*ck-off lead execution. Traditionally this has been a TV ad, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be a TV programme or an event or an online multiplayer game or a book or a Youtube channel. 


But you’ve got to have guts for this stage of the execution. Because its role is to draw attention to the brand, to act like a barker.


(95% of  current TV ads fail in this.  They’re too cautious, too sell-y, too formulaic.  Although I do like the new Mastercard one.)


And once you’ve barked, you draw people into the more intimate world of marketing where you can surround people with digital love and appropriate attention.


So that’s the second thing you need. Integration. (An old-fashioned, ugly word for such a crucial concept.)


And obviously you can only do this  a) if you have an integrated offering. (Which, as far as I can see, nobody really does.)


And b) if the client lets you.


Now, it would be rash for a client to let you, in the context of my parenthesis above. Ie. nobody actually doing it.


But some people are trying. So-called traditional agencies like O+M and VCCP are probably the closest.


And at HHCL we took this almost painfully seriously.


A few years into HHCL’s life, we invited in a group of integrated specialists, and gave them 25% of the equity of the company – because we believed in offering a fully integrated service to our clients.


In my view, wherever we were allowed to do this, it worked gangbusters.  To take some examples:


With Tango, we had self-liquidating promotions like the Gotan doll and the megaphone, which featured in the TV ads and were marketed in all sorts of different media. We also shot stuff for the trade, including a series aimed specifically at Asian corner-shop owners. (Another way of describing integration is “closing the sale.”) With the AA, we promoted the concept of the 4th Emergency service through everything from TV ads to the company’s livery and the way they answered the phones. With Go, the airline was launched more or less within our offices – I remember one day when they were interviewing pilots there.


So. When we could do it – I think we didn’t do too badly.


I.e., when I sat in Marshall Street editors, munching summer berries and washing them down with soya lattes – I didn’t feel too bad. Because our lead work was committed to being stand-out, and because we wanted to work with clients on following through and completing the sale.


So. That’s what you’ve got to do, I reckon.


Easy, really.


And the other question people ask about HHCL is – what happened ? What went wrong ?


Well, that’s a tough one.


I might look at that in the next blog.


(Or you could come along and ask me at Wolff Olins on Thursday next week. I don’t really know the answer, but I’ll try and come up with something.)

Glass half full

I think I may have done something rather foolish in my last blog.


Not calling British advertising a “a f*cking disgrace”, because I think a lot of us would concur in that.


(Although, like my hero D.Drogba esq,  I may have to go through a 6-pitch ban.)


No – the thing is that I promised a way for you, the reader, to test out this hypothesis that British advertising is a disgrace. And I’ll give you the suggestion – but be warned, it is both time-consuming and humiliating.


Rather like going through all the clothes you wore 15 years ago, and seeing which ones still fit.


(And if there are any readers of this blog who have recently undergone such an exercise, and want to share their thoughts with me, please email me via this website. I’ve already received some rather interesting propositions via this medium, and not all of them relate to possible start-ups.)


No, the idea is this.


Burrow into Campaign’s archive. Go back – 5 years, 7 years, 10 years. And read the PR releases that accompany the launch of any new ad campaign.


Witness the bragadaccio. Clock the hubris. Be astonished by the bollocks.


(By the way, what happened to that seminal agency Hubris, Bollocks and Bragadaccio ?    Did they get bought by Omnivore ?)


And, after you’ve read the promises, laugh like a drain at what really happened.


You will see people making extravagant claims for their campaigns which time, alas, has not proved correct.


Now, I haven’t done this in any methodical way. (I’m not a very methodical person, really.) I haven’t asked Claire for permission to ransack her back catalogue. (A part of me doubts if Campaign even has archives, in any recognisable way – but I would be very happy to be proved wrong.)


I’ve merely dug out a few past issues of Campaign at home which I’ve kept for personal reasons and looked at the pages I don’t normally look at – i.e. the bits which don’t feature me.


Now – I wouldn’t dream of embarrassing any of the parties concerned in these embarrassing over-claims.


Because I’m a gentleman, and a fair few of the people involved are mates.


But there would be nothing stopping a student of marketing from doing that.


Or a marketing consultancy who wished to follow on from the disturbing results unearthed by the company called Copernicus which I revealed in my last blog.


(For those of you who can’t be bothered to dig thru past blogs – Copernicus claimed that only 16% of ad campaigns added any value for clients.)


Campaign could feature a “10 years ago” column which didn’t just show the ridiculous haircuts and clothes we all had back then, but also the rather diverting gap between promise and reality.


As TS Eliot wrote  -

Between the idea and the reality …

Between the conception and the creation …

Falls the shadow.


And that line alone is enough to convince me that the greatest poet of the last century must have spent some time moonlighting in an ad agency.


(Raymond Chandler once described something in one of his books as “the biggest waste of talent outside of an ad agency” – so he must have put in some time as well. Possibly on a dog-food account.)


But if you go through that exercise, you will find honourable exceptions. Campaigns that delivered against their promise and which seriously influenced the hearts and minds of their consumers.


In about the proportions described by Copernicus – i.e. between 10 and 20% of them seem to have actually worked.


Now, this brings me to something else which I’ve always said about advertising, which is that it’s full of optimists. Brilliant people who can convince you that the glass is half-full when in fact the barmaid who’s wandering among the tables is actually attempting to remove it from your table.


And that reminds me of a brilliant idea which Chas Bayfield and Jim Bolton once had for Guinness, when they were working at HHCL. It was all about seeing life as glass half-full.


The idea was to celebrate the half-way point in a Guinness as a perspective-changing watershed.


And what I loved most about it was that it lived beyond any media executions - drinkers would be reminded of the campaign every time they drank a pint.


Now, whether this campaign would have been as successful as the Guinness campaign which seems to have won several Gold Lions at Cannes every year is, for me, neither here not there.


Because the idea could probably be transplanted to any mood-altering beverage, and disseminated via short clips on Youtube without the need to bother the over-stretched BACC.


And there you go. On one hand I slag off the industry as a shameful waste of money and talent – and on the other hand get all excited about an old idea.


I’m obviously either schizophrenic or an incurable optimist.

Didi revisited

The sentiment expressed by Didier Drogba recently was one that has been
expressed by many poets and artists.


When Didier said “what a f*cking disgrace”, referring to some dubious refereeing decisions relating to the Barcelona 12-yard area, he was echoing the sense of despair and disappointment that has haunted Man down the ages.


It has perhaps been most eloquently expressed by Matthew Arnold in the lines from the end of his poem Dover Beach –


 … for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here, as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.



Which brings us back to advertising.


Because I have often thought that British advertising is a f*cking disgrace.


And you may be thinking – no, hang on Steve – you’ve got that completely *rse about t*t.


(There go those Campaign lawyers with their asterisks again.)


You’re probably thinking – it’s the best in the world,  a never-ending paean of delight whose thirty-second odes to the joys of catfood are rightly lauded to the heavens.


And I’d say – well … maybe.


It can be outstanding. It’s certainly full of astonishingly bright people.


And let’s leave the catfood to one side for the minute.


Because, unless we include M+C Saatchi’s Whiskas work from about 10 years ago, we haven’t really done much that’s good in the way of petfood.


Which is odd given how Youtube has demonstrated the natural marriage that exists between cats and the 30-second format.


But, to illustrate my point, let me take a slight detour via Finland. (And bear with me because there’s a cracking new business idea in this.)


One of the best things about the TBWA network was its Finnish office. Run by one of the most talented people I’ve met in the industry called Petteri Kilpinen.


(And if you think this is me buttering up Petteri because I want a job there, think again. The weather being what it is in Finland, and the only sport in the 11 months of winter being competitive lager drinking between surly, heavily-bearded men, they couldn’t pay me enough to go there.)


But Petteri had a brilliant new business idea – which was to announce that Finnish advertising was a national disgrace.


“We’re worse than the Swedes and the Norwegians,” he said – which would be the equivalent of me saying we’re worse than the Welsh and the Scots.


I.e., it was totally infuriating to the good people of Finland.


He then called various urgent breakfast meetings and conferences to discuss this state of Scandinavian disgrace – in which he was able, fortunately, to propose a way out of the malaise.


To wit - his agency, the heavily-garlanded TBWA network, and Jean-Marie Dru’s brilliant brainchild Disruption.


It worked gang-busters – as it deserved to do since Petteri is brilliant and the other components all stacked up too.


And as a result, they won tons of new business and produced tons of great work.


So, my hope in saying that our industry is a national disgrace is to do the same.


To shake us out of it.


Because, actually I believe it.


90% of the advertising we produce is – mediocre. Which means it’s invisible. Which means it won’t really work.


But you don’t have to take my word for it.


I’ll suggest a way to test it out in the next blog. But in the meantime, look at this statistic.


In 2005, a marketing consultancy called Copernicus analysed over 500 marketing programmes and found that 84% of these programmes failed to drive value for their organisations.


So, only 16% worked.


I don’t know what Didier Drogba would say about that, but I know what I think.

An awkward question

I don’t actually have a copy of last week’s Campaign to hand as I write this.


If you were to look under my desk, you wouldn’t find any neatly stacked piles of my favourite magazine.


Why bother, I reckon, when the sort of pornographic images I most enjoy are so easy to get on the Internet anyway.


But – getting back to Campaign -  I did peruse the latest issue in the Reception of one of the agencies I was visiting last week.


And I saw an interesting article about how to follow on a great ad with a great second one.


This was in light of T-mobile’s sudden and very surprising ascent from very poor also-ran in the Mobile Phone handicapped 2,000 metres – to a sort of front runner.


I can’t see much point in adding my twopennorth to the debate – because actually I think it’s sort of the wrong question to ask.


Now – obviously – a huge point of reference for this debate is the Gorilla ad.


Which I have always felt is a brilliant, stunning piece of work. It should be on every creative’s Top 10 ads of all time.


The ad had received (by mid 2008) several million You Tube hits and there was enormous buzz – which was measured using things like Wavemetrics online buzz research.


But the buzz was nearly all about the ad – hardly any of it was about the brand or the product.


Now this is absolutely fine – if you know how to follow up on it, how to translate the fantastic interest into commercial action.


But where were the creative ideas which grew out of this ?


Did the agency team sit down and go – how can we really exploit this ?


Maybe with cuddly toys at point-of-purchase, or some kind of mobile couponing exercise, or event exploitation at music festivals ?


Was there a packaging idea, an in-store idea, a sampling idea ?


A TV programme idea, an iPhone app or a widget that sat on your desktop ?


Free drumming lessons with every 10 wrappers.


A competition with lunch with Phil Collins for the winner and a whole day out with Phil Collins for the runners-up.


Did they think – wow, we’ve come back off the ropes, and we’ve got Galaxy tottering – let’s deliver a killer blow to the side of the head ?


Or did they just think – God, that was great fun. Let’s go down that slide again …


One of the best arguments I’ve heard recently is that TV ads could play a brilliant part in marketing campaigns – shouting out like barkers at a fair, attracting attention to  .. something else.


Essentially to a journey, or a world, where the marketing really engages you.


It’s the best way to use TV ads, I think   – to feed into more complex marketing approaches.


But making the mini-epics is so seductive. Sometimes it’s too easy to believe that’s all you really need to do.


And let’s be clear on one thing - I don’t blame anyone on the Gorilla team. (Because, apart from anything else, maybe they did all the stuff above, and I just haven’t read the right articles.)


And  their marketing is leagues ahead of most people’s. They created huge, genuine interest, and broke about eighteen obsolete rules along the way.


In some ways, it reminds me a bit of the original Tango campaign.


And just in case anybody thinks I’m being a bit arrogant about all this, let me point out that when we did “Slap” at HHCL, we ran our second ad at the same time as the first one.


It was a fairly forgettable film in which a man shouted “Oranges” into the ear of someone on a railway platform.


And it sank without trace.


So ... it isn’t easy to make a second ad.


And doing what really counts -  making that ad part of an integrated approach which does more than entertain, but translates into genuine long-term engagement with the brand – well that’s rarer than hens’ teeth.


Which, incidentally, would make a good title for a second album, I reckon.