Campaign

Didi

I like what Didier Drogba had to say last week.


For those of you who missed the moral backlash, he offended the sensitive ears of football fans everywhere by calling the Norwegian referee for the Barcelona game  “a f*cking disgrace".


And that asterisk had to be inserted by Campaign’s legal team.


Although personally I think they should insert an asterisk themselves.


For those of you who missed the offending action, Sky Sports went straight back to it after the ad break, just to make sure you didn’t miss the opportunity to be offended.


And for those of you who missed the awful words then, they were repeated in every newspaper several times the next day.


Now, to be honest, the refereeing WAS a bit fishy. (Hardly surprising, given that the bloke’s name was reported in some papers as Thomas Herring Ovrebo.)


But really Didier’s comment could apply to so much of life.


MPs’ expense claims are a f*cking disgrace. National Express’ train service to Ipswich at weekends is a f*cking disgrace. British Gas’s supposed insurance service for plumbing is a total, unbelievable f*cking disgrace.


Firstly, whatever you say is the problem, they automatically reply  – “That’s not covered”.  (Seriously.  Taps, washing machines, radiators – they’re all “not covered”. This is supposed to be plumbing cover. I reckon it’s in their call-centre training to say it’s not covered and hope that frightens most people away. Either that or it’s the least comprehensive plumbing cover I’ve ever come across.) Secondly, and predictably, they don’t come when they say they will. Thirdly, it costs you a fortune to ring up and be kept on hold while they supposedly try to find out where the plumber is. And fourthly, the plumber who turned up told me that British Gas had told him not to fix anything.


I’m just reporting what he said to me.


He said they told him they wouldn’t pay him for any materials he used, and it would be better if he didn’t do any actual work.


I call that a f*cking disgrace.


So, you’re thinking – well, what’s this got to do with advertising ?


Nothing.


I’m just pissed off with f*cking British Gas.


No, hang on – I’ll think of something.


Ah, got it.


Actually, the point is this. Most people I talk to these days have a horror story similar to my British Gas one. Whether it’s their insurance company, their bank, their utility company, or any of their phone suppliers – it’s like all these companies are terrified of their profit figures for this year and so they’re saying “Screw our customers out of every single penny you can. Raise the prices. Don’t tell them. Back-date the price rises. Etc, etc.”


(And perish the thought that any ad agencies would take the same approach to THEIR clients now – for instance, hitting them with bills for every extra meeting they had, etc – they wouldn’t do that, would they ?!)


But it’s against this background that you’ve got to see the recent advertising campaigns for companies like Aviva and Axa.


Because customers are going to be very, very price-sensitive right now.  And they won’t appreciate companies who rack up their prices, while at the same time spending millions on a campaign talking about their high moral principles.


I mean, it's fine to run the campaign - if you can stand up to what you promise.

(In fact, that's f*cking great.)


But this area is fraught with difficulties.


For instance, another thing which really annoys me is this - if you bother to ring up and threaten to leave, they then often chop the figure down. I mean, that’s immoral, isn’t it ? Because it’s unfair on the people who don’t ring up.


It makes you ask the question – could companies spend their marketing budgets in ways that might really help their customers ?


I can remember years ago hiring a team who had an idea in their book which just read “Mothercare should use their marketing budget to set up crèches all round the country.”


Brilliant.


And that thinking is more relevant now than it’s ever been.


That’s the kind of thinking which companies are really going to need – to help build loyalty during the Recession.


But I suspect it’s rarer than a picture of Didier Drogba having a quiet drink with a bunch of Norwegian referees.

Pics

Dunno about you but I’ve had a frantic week.

Getting near deadlines on the book I’m doing.

And I’m aware that this is supposed to be a “creative’s” blog – whereas I tend to ramble on about more strategic issues.

So this week, something nice and easy.

The equivalent of one of those shows Chris Tarrant used to do
(before he found more and more odd ways of giving people money).

I.e. a selection of ambient ideas which I really like.

 

Somebody called Mondo Pasta. Probably done for awards. But I love it.

 


Ditto. (Although not for pasta, but for some hair conditioning product called Rejoice, apparently.)

 

I can’t just keep writing “Ditto” after each one, can I ?



Maybe I can.


 

Love this.  I worked on this product once.
We did a couple of interesting virals.
Wish we’d thought of this as well.

 


If you zoom in you’ll see on the 3rd building that
this is for retirement insurance.
Personally I think it’s a better ad for paint.


 

Yea. Another nice one probably done for the juries.

But the thing about all these is that they surprise you.

You don’t expect them and they make you think.

In a world in which most marketing communications are formulaic and just very expensive wallpaper, these ideas are great exceptions.

Up Golden Square

 This week I went up west.


To speak in the hallowed marble halls of M+C Saatchi, following an invitation from Mr Graham Fink.


Now, as someone said to me, Finky’s Thursday Night talks are legendary. He has had the great and the crazy in there, luminaries from Tony Kaye to Adrian Holmes and back again.


This did not make me feel relaxed.


A preparatory trip, to get a reel sorted out, made me feel more anxious. Not only is the agency super slick, but it seems to have a hiring policy of recruiting only stunning-looking people.


It’s long been an axiom in adland that it costs the same to hire pretty people as ugly ones, so why not hire the former?  But M+C have turned it into an art form.


However, despite appearances, M+C isn’t a throwback to 90s advertising (a time of long lunches and louche liquidity).  Largely because of Graham. I think he’s the only CD from a  conventional agency  who gets invited to Creative Social, the meeting forum for digital CDs. He’s always been into radical stuff -  so he isn’t as fazed by all the changes in our industry as some of the other current inhabitants of the fire engines, tea-cups and flying pigs which make up the Creative Directors Merry-Go-Round.


I had a good time chatting to some of the staff up there, and I’ll précis 4 of the points I tried to make.


1. The industry is in a state of more upheaval than ever before. (Which I love.) Back in the mid-90s Jay Chiat came back from a conference about the internet and found his CD Lee Clow working on a TV ad. Jay informed him “You’re working on a dead animal”.


Jay was ahead of his time in this (as he was in most things), and adland has felt the threat to be exaggerated ever since.


But as a brilliant journalist called Jeff Jarvis from the Guardian wrote recently – you ignore the warning signals at your peril. Jarvis was talking about how newspaper editors are complaining about the internet killing newspapers, (and it is, by the thousand in America) and he said  - it’s been 20 years since the Internet arrived, 15 years since the first commercial browser, 10 years since Google and the first blogs.


It’s not like this thing has suddenly appeared overnight. They’ve been coming over the hill for a decade or two.


(And if you want to know how bad the threat is, I would ask you to consider one thought. What are ad agencies called ? They used to be called “creative agencies”. Now they’re called “traditional” agencies, or “conventional” agencies. Hmm.)


2. Your view of advertising (as seen from within the industry) is vastly distorted in relation to how real people see it. I’ve written about this before – but the research industry props up a view in which people supposedly take a huge interest in ads. (Because we pay people money to talk about them, in a way which none of them really would in the real world …)


So, if you want to understand how people really see the products of adland, take a step outside the industry.


3. In relation to point 2 above, only very, very few ads really impinge on people’s consciousness. 5% of them, if that. So all the arguments which happen in agencies about getting work from 5 out of 10 to 6 out of 10 – or worrying that the client is knocking a 7 /10 ad down to a 5 /10 by insisting on a bigger logo – they’re all a giant waste of time.


If you’ve got something that’s 9/10 or 10 /10 – die on a sword for it. If you haven’t, it doesn’t matter. No-one will care.


Not even your Mum.


4. Ethics.


Partly because of the internet, we need to be more ethical in our communications. As I’ve written before, this is (relatively) straightforward when it comes to honesty. We just need to be more vigilant of weasels and half-truths. (The internet has taken power away from corporations as effectively as the printing press did to the Church in the Middle Ages – with, I would guess, a similar exposure of hypocrisy and greed.)


But there’s a further element to this which is about responsible consumption – and that’s a real poser.


So I’m going to pass on a thought which completely blew me away when I first heard it 9 years ago.


I was emailing a guy with the wonderful name of Jelly Helm, who had been working as a copywriter in Wieden and Kennedy. But then Jelly started thinking about consumption and ethics.


He told me that if the rest of the world consumed at the level America consumed, we’d need 4 more planets to provide the raw material.


Ie Advertising wasn’t … fuelling the economy, stoking up the market, etc. All the reassuring clichés we like to believe. It was creating massively unsustainable over-demand.


What do we do about that ?


That is a really difficult question.


At the end of my talk, one of the young creatives came up and wanted to chat about this.


And that alone is proof that advertising is still – potentially - a great industry.

Essays

 I don’t know if you saw last week’s Campaign supplement that had some of the IPA Excellence Diploma essays in it.


I bet you were too busy to read them, right ?


I remember when I was working full-time as a CD, and I didn’t have time to go to the toilet. It was half-hour meeting followed by half-hour meeting, and the commode got emptied every 2 hours. Some days I got so busy I’d answer my phone with the words of Samuel Beckett “I must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”  


But that’s Samuel Beckett for you – always going on about something.


However, you really should try to read them. Those essays – and a lot of the others which weren’t published  -  were amazing. I’m slowly making my way through meeting the authors, because I was knocked out by them.


These are 19 of the brightest people in the industry, who’ve been picked by their agencies to be tutored intensively for a year. These are people who have read all the books their bosses haven’t had time to read. These are people who are reading all the blogs their bosses don’t know how to read.


Let’s not beat about the bush - these are people who are quite probably a damn sight smarter than their bosses.


And they’ve put their thoughts down into finely-crafted and meticulously researched 7,000 word essays.


Their conclusions were massively varied. (Although not one of them said “it’s fine as it is, let’s just keep going” - which, I would argue, is the message quite often being put out by their bosses.)


One of the things which fascinated me was what happened in the face-to-face judging on one of the panels.


When Stephen Woodford lost it completely and rammed a water jug up Moray MacLennan’s … No, I’m joking.


Either that, or hallucinating.


No, what happened was that the judges who worked in agencies (some of the brightest people you’ll ever put in a single room) were very positive and loved the essays. To take some examples at random, they got very excited by thoughts such as how you could exploit data much more imaginatively, how it was more cost-effective to build loyalty programmes than to seek acquisition relentlessly, and how massively important the in-store environment was.


(75% of purchase decisions are made in-store. Think about that for a second, then tell me how many great in-store campaigns you’ve been involved with yourself.)


But the single client on the jury was rather less impressed. This was all stuff that he was doing already, and had been thinking about for ages.


Clients get all this. Or the better ones do, anyway.


But most agencies are still hanging onto a very narrow range of conventional solutions.


Why ?


One argument has it that conventional agencies have vested interests in keeping conventional solutions going. Put it simply, they’ve got TV departments, so why wouldn’t they sell TV ads ?


Of course the same argument  is true of so-called digital agencies. They’ve got web-designers on staff, so why wouldn’t they recommend a website re-design ?


You could argue that, as soon as you staff up like this, you limit the answers you may want to give the client. But the answer, for a client, can lie almost anywhere.


Take Starbucks, for example. I don’t know if they’ve ever done any conventional marketing. I know what they do is spend a lot of money on staff training. So – even though I’m a coffee junkie, and even though I prefer the coffee in Cafe Nero – I love going into Starbucks.


Their staff will recognize you if you go in a few times and remember what you ordered. So they create a great environment.


Staff training could be absolutely the right way to spend your marketing budget.


So could encouraging your staff to blog, or using the budget to improve the environment.


The answer could be a new pack design or a 90-minute feature film.


As Richard Hytner said to me a few months ago, there’s a hidden danger in all this. I.e. in agencies not opening up to offer a wider selection of solutions to clients.


The obvious danger is that clients think even less highly of agencies than they seem to do already, and take their business elsewhere.


The hidden danger is that all those incredibly bright people who wrote the IPA essays, who know all this, and who want to change our industry -  are told to get back in their box.


And then they get frustrated and leave the industry.


If any of them are thinking of doing that, I hope they decide instead to start new agencies.

Bone idle gossip

I came back from the Algarve last week to find that I’d joined McCanns Birmingham.

Apparently.

Now I’m not saying that this opening sentence has quite the same power as “Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find he’d been transformed into a giant insect.” But it does seem to have prompted a few ripples in adland.

Firstly, a couple of friends texted me saying “Congratulations” and I didn’t know what they meant. It emerged that the two of them had seen a story running on The Drum website which reported that I’d “joined” McCanns in Birmingham.

(They should have run the headline as “Henry in Drum Brum Shock”.)

Now, both these friends would maintain that McCanns is a fine, long-standing brand and that Birmingham is, if nothing else, to be esteemed for all time as the birthplace of T. Beattie esquire (the nearest thing adland currently has to Jesus Christ). But they were still shocked that I’d apparently joined the agency.

As, indeed, was I.

Later that day, my former PA texted me to say that “everybody” was asking her about the rumours.

So – what’s the truth ?

(And this is where the story gets interesting, I think. Because adland has a tenuous relationship with the truth. And I’ll get onto that later.)

A few weeks back, I was invited by Robin Price to meet a mate of his – a smashing bloke called Dean Lovett. For those of you who don’t know, Robin was the fifth founding partner of HHCL – and indeed is know in some circles as “The Fifth Monkee”.

So we all met in Sheekeys, and it emerged that Dean was looking for someone to do some freelance consultancy work, involving a kind of mentoring role with a new Creative Director he was thinking of hiring.

I went to look at the agency. I went and met the bloke who was up for the CD job. And I really liked them both. So I agreed to do it - and it’ll be for a few days a month, for a few months.

Now, the thing about most freelance gigs is that they don’t normally attract or warrant any publicity.

And actually, the last thing I’d wanted right now was to “join” any agency full-time. I’ve told all the head-hunters that. Because I’m enjoying writing a book, (to be published by Random House, out in late summer), I’m doing freelance gigs with a variety of different agencies (including some of the smartest digital agencies in town), I’m doing a TV writing job with the lovely Peter Souter and the lovelier Mary Wear, I’m going to be teaching at the EACA European ad school, I’ve got about 18 projects on the go, and my diary is probably busier than it’s ever been.

It’s what the writer Charles Handy called a “portfolio” career, and what an American friend of mine called “going plural”. So, when the Drum mis-represented the facts (by stating that I’d “joined” McCanns), it pissed me off a bit.

What does the story tell us? Firstly, perhaps, that adland has got a few snobs who actually don’t know that McCanns Birmingham is a hugely successful agency, with an enviably integrated set-up – I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it doesn’t produce some fantastic work in the next year under the direction of Gary Setchell, who is one of the smartest people I’ve met in ages.

And, more interestingly I think, that journalists use what you might call “journalistic license”. Or what you could call (if you were the wronged party) a bit of flaming cheek.

And I know all about that because, as an adman, I’ve written a few weasels myself.

(That sounds like that old joke which ends “But f*ck ONE sheep …”)

I admit it. I’ve coined a few weasels. There. It’s out now.

One of the few geniuses I’ve ever met in advertising, Paul Arden, had a brilliant weasel as the sub-head to his first book. Do you remember it? “The world’s best-selling book by Paul Arden.” This was when it first appeared. I was half-way out of the shop, having given Waterstones my money, before I realise what he’d done there.

And I work in the bloody business. So – the Drum weren’t lying when they said I’d “joined” the agency. They were just putting a juicy spin on it.

But I’ve felt for a long time that that’s one of the dodgiest things about the ad industry. For decades it’s been telling weasels and half-truths. (From real truth-stretchers like “Guinness is good for you” to “A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play”, onto the subtler half-truths of today.)

And when you have a friend who’s always exaggerating and making stuff up, after a while you stop trusting them. So, how do you think the public feels about the ad industry?

However. What is interesting is that one agency in our industry has a motto which I’ve always believed the rest of us should live up to.

That motto is “The truth, well told”.

I love it. The agency ?

McCanns.

(But don’t hold the front page - that doesn’t mean I’m going to join them quite yet …)

More or less

I’ve just come back from Portugal, where I’ve been thinking mainly about bikinis, bottoms and (just to ring the changes) bikini bottoms. But a stray paragraph in an old copy of the Guardian Saturday Review, which I was using to protect my nose, struck me as relevant to the world of marketing.

Apparently, in 1343, while besieging the town of Kaffa, the general of the invading Mongol forces had a brainwave. And he started catapulting into the town the corpses of various plague victims.

Now I don’t know what it was about the image of a stinking, flea-infested corpse that put me in mind of marketing, but I kept reading. And I found out that from this humble beginning, we can actually trace the beginnings of the Black Death – which was to ravage Europe for years and eventually claim 25 million victims.

There’s contagious for you.

I’ve thought for a long time that one of the best brand names for the modern era of marketing is Contagious (a magazine + DVD which celebrates non-traditional ideas).

And that set me thinking. What is it about modern marketing that separates it from marketing of about 10 years ago ?

For me, the essential thing is the lack of a captive audience.

Which makes the whole damn thing a whole damn lot harder. There’s never been a greater need for market-challenging thinking – which is one reason why I love the story of www.theimpossiblepitch.com

Apparently this guy in Sweden has asked 3 interns to pitch for the global adidas business in just 3 weeks. And they’re coming up with really good ideas.

Love it.

But although brave thinking feels like the answer, it’s not the real differentiating factor for right now. For what that is, let’s look at a story which Edward de Bono told in one of his books.

It’s about a king with a beautiful daughter and two princes who are suitors for her hand.

One of the princes does everything he can for the king – he mows his lawn, paints his drawbridge, cleans out the moat, and fixes the clicking sound in the king’s chariot.

The other one asks the king to do him a favour. He says “Lend us your chariot for Friday night please, your Maj.”

And the second one is the one who wins the daughter. Because the king feels emotionally much closer to this prince, having done him a favour.

I’ve always loved that story – and always felt like it had a meaning for the ad industry.

But it was only when I was judging last year’s IPA Excellence Diploma essays that I saw how it really worked. (Incidentally, the standard of essays overall was fantastic. If the industry hangs onto those 19 people, its future is assured. But of course that’s a big “if”.)

One of the most brilliant essays was by someone called Chris Gallery, and it compared the marketing techniques of Clinton and Obama in the Democratic Primaries.

Clinton believed in “messaging”. She had messages she wanted to put out, and she put them out there, usually in paid-for media.

Obama had a very simple theme – “Change/Hope”- and he didn’t so much put it out there, as let people bring it back to him. And by asking people to donate even very small amounts of money to his cause, he built incredible loyalty.

He asked people to help him, like the prince in de Bono’s story.

And that, I think, is the essence of marketing in a world in which we no longer have a captive audience.

We can put messages out there, but people will by and large refuse to play that game in the future. However, if you offer something that people believe in, they will come to you.

And that takes me back to what I’ve been saying in the last couple of blogs. If you can create a theme for your brand – a social theme that matters to people – that will have far more resonance than any product message.

And, once you take that approach, it’s got an added advantage. Because, instead of just PUSHING your message out in paid media channels, you can be talking about whatever your brand’s theme is, and people will come towards it.

If, for instance, you’re an Italian washing machine company, and you decide that your theme should be about families – why not, the washing machine is near the heart of a lot of families and Italians really get family values – you can start up networks about families, join discussions online and in the real world about families – and people may actually want to hear what you’ve got to say.

Whereas if you just do an ad telling people about your washing machine, people may not actually care very much.

The answer, in this new world, is to pull, not push.

Ms Clinton pushed; Mr Obama pulled. And boy, did he pull.

In other words, when it comes to selling, less is definitely more.

Which, incidentally, I’ve found is also true of bikini bottoms.

For Real

I heard this story about Hitler the other day.

No, don’t worry. He’s not coming back.

Although if he was around now, I’m sure he’d be saying it wasn’t really his fault and claiming a £5million a year pension.

No, this concerns a man called Wilhelm Furtwangler, who was one of his advisers. Which is not necessarily something you’d put high up your CV. But at one point the two men were talking.

And Furtwangler told Hitler that it was imperative that Germany celebrated the anniversary of Richard Strauss’ birthday. “If we don’t celebrate it”, Furtwangler argued, “we risk alienating international public opinion.” This was in 1944. Seriously.

Now, history’s not my subject – but I would have thought that by 1944 it might have been a bit late to worry about this.

Talk about being out of touch with reality. And that brings me to the Aviva name-change ad. Now, as it happens, I quite like the new Aviva ad – the one about treating people as individuals.

(With some reservations, which I’ll get onto later.) But boy, they needed something good, after their massive name-change ad. Which I found posted on Youtube under the heading of The Worst Ad on TV.

Talk about being out of touch with what real people are thinking. Everybody was tightening their belts and they splashed the cash like it was going out of fashion. (Which, actually, maybe it is – but that’s a story for later.)

Like Bruce Willis needs some extra dosh. That’s a good cause.

And you’ve done what as a company – launched a new product, revolutionised the market, pledged better service ?

Oh, I see. You’ve changed your name. That’s kind of – more in your interests to tell me, than it’s in my interests to listen to it. Because you know what – I’ve got 8 million more important things to worry about.

And then in the Youtube comments, there’s a defensive post from one of their staff, saying that the campaign had been planned for ages and cancelling it could have been counter-productive.

Well – yes and no. It comes back to what I was saying in my last blog. Companies need to put themselves on the same side as their customers. And this ad misjudged that mood horribly.

You COULD argue, if you wanted to be perverse (and I love perverse arguments) that the ad could be reassuring – because at a time when a lot of big companies are crashing and burning, these guys still seem to have a lot of money to burn.

But I would argue that it’s exactly that kind of arrogance which got us into this horrible financial mess in the first place. Like I said before. Every great brand needs an attitude, a belief, a passion.

But it needs to be something which genuinely helps its customers. I’m looking for an attitude more akin to what Dove tried to do with the Campaign for Real Beauty, or Persil tried to do with Dirt is Good. i.e. fight a battle, on behalf of the customer, which is credible to that brand.

So, stop now – sit back, take a deep breath, make yourself a Baileys and Red Bull spritzer, mainline some crack into your last remaining functional eyeball, and think – which brands do I really feel loyal to?

I think you’ll find that a) there aren’t that many of them and b) most of them did the above. Not the mainlining crack into the crack of your arse stuff – very few successful brands have pursued that particular business approach - no, the fighting a battle on behalf of the customer thing.

Some of our most famous brands originally had very strong philanthropic principles, and that helped build them up. And what’s interesting is that it’s not enough just to talk about it.

One of my favourite campaigns of all time was DDB’s mould-breaking “We Try Harder” work for Avis in the US in the 60s.

They took a depressing part of the brief – to wit, “Hertz is bigger and more successful than us” – and turned it into something motivating and compelling and believable.

“We’re number 2. We try harder.” Sheer bloody genius. And one of the most brilliant ads within that campaign showed a dirty ashtray. With a headline to the effect that this wasn’t good enough.

The copy told the story about a guy who worked in the ad company that wrote Avis’ ads, and how he’d found the uncleaned ashtray in an Avis car.

And he didn’t feel that the company were living up to the claims made in the advertising. Wow. Stop and think about that for second. Now, apply it to Aviva.

Wouldn’t it be great if the next commercial message from Aviva was from a copywriter at AMV saying they’d been badly treated by Aviva, and they didn’t feel like the company was living up to the claims that AMV were giving them?

Makes you think. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Aviva. If any of their customers feel like they’re not getting treated with respect, I hope they complain loudly.

Don’t get me wrong. If Aviva can live up to this claim, I think it’s fantastic.

I think it’s exactly what they should be doing. But it’s rather like the red line stuff for Axa. Is it real? Or is it just “Washes whiter than white whitewash” from adland

The L shaped room

This week I’ve been mostly helping Sir Martin Sorrell with his imagery for the Recession.

A few years ago, he came up with the “bath-shaped recession” all by himself – he got the idea, in fact, while lying in the bath.

And the image was a worldwide success.

T-shirts were printed in the Far East showing Sir Martin in a bath.

I take a certain pride in knowing that when a Recession hits this country,  and even if advertising budgets get cut by 30%, the man we can rely on to get the image right is one of the most powerful men in the ad industry.

So everybody was looking to Sir Martin to see what he’d come up with this time.

Initially, we tried various other rooms to see if they’d work. I suggested a “spare- bedroom-shaped recession”. Because they’re horrible and uncomfortable and they always have a badly designed cupboard jutting angularly into the room and they just feel like whoever designed them didn’t have a f*cking clue what they were doing.

But then I made an instinctive leap, and said “Sir Martin, it’s a toilet”.

“Why ?”, he asked - in that narrow-eyed, perceptive way he has about him.

Several reasons, I said.

1. It’s not somewhere you want to spend an awful lot of time.

2. There’s a sense of somebody in the next cubicle papering over the cracks.

3. Nobody wants to really, deeply look into it. We’d rather just sit down and read the Sun.

I’m afraid Sir Martin pooh-poohed this straightaway. He told me he didn’t like the look of my number 2.

And then he came up with his genius insight of the “L-shaped Recession”.

(And, incidentally, talked about it all rather brilliantly on Radio 4's The Bottom Line.)

But the Recession also led me into thinking about brands and branding.

For instance. Say your Mum switches her weekly shop from one of the Big Four into Lidl or Aldi.

(And why she was doing her weekly shopping in a high street bank in the first place is anybody’s guess.)

But by doing this, she isn’t just loosening her tie with Tesco or Sainsbury’s. She’s potentially loosening her ties with 100s of brands which Lidl and Aldi do their own versions of.

Massive, household names that we've all lived with for years.

Because the trouble with a lot of those brands is that they’ve been content to build relatively loose ties with their customers.  And that’s worked very well for them for the last 50 years or so.

(I think this is what Robert Heath is describing when he writes about Low Attention Processing. I.e. Nescafe works on the level of “there’s a bunch of coffees here, I trust Nescafe, I can’t be arsed to stand here all day weighing up the various merits and demerits of instant coffees, Nescafe it is.”)

But in a Recession, you start asking a different question.

To wit, how many brands are you REALLY loyal to ?

And probably the list wouldn’t extend further than 10.

So -  what’s the secret of the ones you ARE deeply loyal to ?

Well, that would be a big question to answer, wouldn’t it ?

My view is that it tends to be brands that fight a battle on behalf of the consumer.

Apple vs Microsoft. Or Virgin vs BA. Or Nike vs the forces of obesity.

You get a sense that they’re on our side, against something else.

Which is probably why it’s worth asking this question when you work on a brand:

 “What battle should this brand fight on behalf of the consumer ?”

Or:

 “How can we put the brand unmistakably on the same side as the consumer ?”

Overall, I’m fascinated by how few genuinely sticky brands we seem to have created.

And the greatest minds in our industry are asking similar questions.

Russell Davies has talked about how “the branding machine has started to run out of steam”.

Mark Earls has written about “learning to live without the brand”.

John Grant has talked about how these days branding is essentially “voluntary” – people will only engage if they want to.

Compare that with the old model – which worked brilliantly for 50 years – and which I think is best summed up by this quote from Paul Feldwick. “Somehow”, he wrote, “ 30 seconds of entertaining nonsense leads to a situation where people pay 35% more for (PG Tips).”

But this approach to brand-building – which I might loosely describe as “create a brand personality, put it across with entertaining nonsense, and they will come” may well be found wanting as we flail around in the large L-shaped room.

Because the thing about an L-shaped room is that, from most positions within it, you have no idea what could be lurking around the corner.

Get out more

Half way through last year I did something which everybody who works in the advertising industry, should do.

I left it.

Now, I don’t mean this in quite the way that Bill Hicks used to say that anyone who worked in advertising should kill themselves.

Although I can think of a couple of people who might benefit from a set of Le Creuset Hara-kiri knives on their next birthday.

Or a one-way ticket to the “Happy Rest Just Sign Here” Clinic in Switzerland.

(And by the way – if you ever visit one of those clinics, don’t try the welcome drink they give you in Reception. It tastes disgusting and it’ll probably be the last thing you ever do.)

I just mean that you get a new perspective when you quit the industry - even if only temporarily.

You get to join the “Rest of the World”, the civilians.

And you realise something that you’ve half-suspected for a while – which is that people really aren’t interested in advertising. Virtually nobody watches it, looks at it, listens to it, or reads it.

And when you realise this, you might start thinking about  … non-traditional forms of marketing.

Pack design, and social networking sites, and websites, and advertiser-funded programmes and massively multiplayer online games - and other good stuff like that.

Or you may not be ready to hear this at all. You may still believe that people are glued to the ads.

Because you probably work in the industry and you think people are like you.

And you watch the ads - because you’re in the industry.

It’s what they call a viscous circle – because it’s very sticky.

You might claim that you “don’t watch the ads”, but you’ve always got half an eye open for someone who might be doing a better car ad than your car ad – so you’re watching, even if you think you aren’t.

It’s only people who quit advertising, or who go off on maternity leave, or people who never joined in the first place, who will know what I’m saying.

So here’s a couple of tests to help you see what I mean.

Go on the tube and see how many people are looking at the escalator panels. Even the new whiz-bang digital ones (which I think look great).

Nobody’s looking at them.

And the alternative is looking at someone’s dandruff-infested collar.

But people would rather count the scurf on a scarf than look at the ads.

Second test. You’ve just had Christmas, seen your extended family (and realised WHY they’re extended).

At some point in all that, you will have had a conversation like this.

“Hello, {your name goes here}. What do you do ?

“I work in advertising”.

“Oh really. Yea, I love that funny one with the fat guy advertising the bank.”

At this point you are thinking “This person is a moron. That’s the Nationwide campaign, brilliantly written, dunno why it went up for review, not for a bank at all, in fact that’s the whole point of it.”

The other person is thinking “Jeez, this person probably writes the L’Oreal ads, I need to  get away from here fast. Better say something nice – which ad can you remember that isn’t complete ***  ?”

Now, which person is really the moron ?

And I think this problem is right at the core of our industry.  People care a lot less about advertising than we’re prepared to admit.

Because ads interrupt whatever it is people are engaged with, and try to engage them in a conversation the consumer has shown no interest in starting in the first place.

Compound that with the fact that most of those conversations are incredibly tedious, and you begin to see the problem.

Eventually you realise something.

It’s only two fish fingers short of a miracle that ads were ever granted any attention at all.

(And incidentally, a tribute to the incredible creative talent the industry has got.)

But.

Against that, you could argue the fact that right now, average creative standards in TV advertising are possibly higher than they've ever been.

And the cost of TV advertising is lower than it's been since the early 90s.

So - is it worth still doing conventional advertising ?

Hmm.

I love new solutions. I love new stuff, just because it's new. But I'd probably answer with a muted yes - if the creative work is really, really outstanding.

It's just not where I'd START.

Preliminaries

Hello.

I’m going to treat this initial blog as a soft launch. Because I've been told that all the publicity  - the massive war-engine of publicity which Campaign has at its disposal – is to be deployed next week.

So this week, we’re not expecting anyone to log on at all.

So, please look at this as a kind of preliminary taster.

A kind of "pre-come" column, if you will.

A preliminary and preparatory outpouring – but not the actual,  honest-to-goodness, genuine thing.

So, anyway - I was at the Creative Circle Awards bash last week. Although I was only there because my old mate and former boss Dave Trott was being given a lifetime’s achievement award, and I wanted to honour the bloke.

It’s always good to see Dave and he was on great form as ever.

Just not quite as feisty as I’d have liked. Because Dave taught me all I ever knew about being feisty.

The person who WAS feisty was Alan Carr, the paid-for entertainment.

It’s interesting seeing famous people try to host these awards dos – because they usually think the whole thing is about as important as an Under-12s 5-a-side rounders tournament, where your kid isn't playing.

And they rip the piss out of it, and then wonder why the people they’re taking the piss out of, don’t find it hugely funny.

I’ve seen really good comedians looking shell-shocked and dazed as they joke away at the industry’s expense and get a less than rapturous response.

Which is hilarious, if you’re in the right mood.

Although I was once on the wrong end of it myself. A female comedian who’d been paid to host a Radio Awards night introduced me as the Chairman of the Judges. As I walked on stage, she said “Doesn’t he walk funny – it looks like he’s shat his pants”.

I kid you not.

To be honest, it wasn’t the happiest hour of my life doling out the awards after that. Me and the female comedian smiling into the camera as the plucky winners picked up their gongs – I think my grin might have looked a bit forced.

You know when you start thinking – oh god, maybe I HAVE shat my pants ?

There’s no subtle way to check really.

But it reminds me of a story about Dave Droga. Nothing to do with his pants, obviously, because Dave's hygiene is second to none. But he once told me he was chairing some awards do in Perth - and he was insulted for an hour and a half by a glove puppet.

So, these things happen.

But, having spent a bit of time away from the ad industry, I must say that I enjoyed Alan’s cynical take on the whole thing enormously.

So – when a nicely provocative ad for HSBC won a well-deserved award,  Alan said something about how they’d “only lost £2billion that day – it must be working”.

He moaned about how bloody depressing charity ads were, reducing the audience to hoots of laughter as a Barnardo’s ad played out its emotional angst on the screen.

And most astonishingly of all, when he came to hand out the Platinum Award, and the spreads for the Harvey Nichols Bristol store came up on screen, he looked aghast and said “That’s not it, is it ?”

You don’t get that happening at the Oscars, do you ?

“And the winner of Best Picture is – No, that’s a mistake isn’t it ?”

But this extremely casual attitude, I would argue, pretty much sums up the general public’s view of advertising.

I’m gonna talk more about this – if this blog carries on. Because when you spend some time out of the industry, you realise that only really, really outstanding marketing cuts through.

That old Lord Leverhulme quote about 50% of his ad budget being wasted, and him not knowing which half it was – that’s bollocks really.

95% of marketing budgets are wasted.

And if Lord Leverhulme was around today, I’d tell him that to his face.

I’d say “Lord Leverhulme, me old mucker, you’re out by 45%. Go back and work it out again.”

We’ll talk more about this - and about whether there’s still a role for conventional advertising – in later blogs.

For now, I’ll leave you with a story I heard about a Creative Director leaving the Grosvenor one night, with an armful of awards. The taxi driver who picked him up asked him what had been happening that evening, and the CD said “It’s an awards do for the advertising industry”.

“Blimey”, replied the cabbie, “whatever will they think of next ?”

Anyway, that’s enough for the pre-come column.

Hardly seminal, maybe.

But I do hope it’s going to be sticky.