Brown has clearly got his priorities right

Who would have thought Prime Minister Brown would have appointed Sir Alan Sugar as business adviser to the Government before getting round to naming his Foreign Secretary and Chancellor? It is going to be fascinating to see how this one plays out. Any chance of the apprentice PM being fired?

Go to work on the BACC

So the miserable killjoys at the BACC have banned the revived "Go to work on an egg" campaign.

Their argument: it breaches health guidelines. Anyone who cares about the freedom to advertise (provided it’s legal, decent and true) should hop on a soapbox now, galvanise A4A - Action for Ads – into action and tell the BACC to get real.

I invite you to view the ads here. For those of us old enough to remember them the first time round, they look as sharp as ever. I’m sure my younger readers will love them as well. What on earth harm could this campaign possibly do, when it’s OK for us to be allowed to watch advertisements for that nutritional gem Pot Noodles? 

Please write to the BACC. Write to the papers. Write to your MP. Blog for England. This freedom is as important as free speech (and what is happening to that?). It is a rich irony that while the glitterati of the industry are soaking up the sun in Cannes, our resident thought police are hell bent on reducing legitimate opportunities to create new award-winners.  

Sir John Hegarty – recognition for John, BBH and the whole industry

Almost forgotten what it was like to get good news in the morning paper. Then on Saturday we read that both Hegarty and Beefy have been knightedJohn’s has to be the first knighthood for someone who actually writes the ads – as opposed to a suit, whose citation is usually for good works of one sort or another. It is a bit like cricket, where they said Francis Drake was the last bowler to be knighted (before Alec Bedser received his overdue recognition). And now gongs for both a CD and another bowler! Very exciting. Sharp-eyed readers will also have spotted a CBE for a planner (Leslie Butterfield) and an OBE for a media man (John Ayling). So advertising is OK again. No nonsense either about services to the marketing communications industry. ‘Advertising’ is how it was described – and quite right too. 

I rejoice for this recognition of excellence. Hegarty is clearly the outstanding talent of his generation, BBH has done wonderfully well. And the industry – our industry – does a fantastic job in simultaneously making companies successful, consumers happy, and people laugh.

What are agency CEO's for?

It is not meant to be a rude question. But with seemingly half the agencies in town either currently leaderless or having recently taken on new top talent, it is timely to ask what roles Chairmen and CEO’s are supposed to fulfil.In my agency days I’d always thought that the CEO was basically there to inspire, lead and manage the agency team – with the additional responsibility of handling shareholders, parent company, holding group or whatever. Normally the CEO would only be involved with a handful of key clients – the majority being managed by “account barons”, who were generally very long serving. In the 60’s and 70’s agency chiefs were far better known in their agencies than outside, and rarely moved from agency to agency at that level.

In the nearly twenty years I have spent at Agency Assessments I have become far more conscious of the “super salesman” role. Today’s Chairmen and CEO’s regularly front up pitches, and are prominent (and well-travelled) figures thanks to carefully spun PR – and the exact opposite. So what happens when the 2007 CEO quits or is fired? We can assume that owners and shareholders can handle it, although they might be apprehensive if it is a genuine resignation. But how does it play with staff, clients and indeed prospects? Let’s put it simply: not well. The staff will often miss their leader, even though he/she might not have been a genius – and more prominent players may fear for their jobs. Very few agencies have kept their account barons, so existing business is less adhesive.  Clients will probably feel uneasy. Prospects – in my experience – will stay away until a new team has proved itself.

So, given this analysis, why is it that agencies are apparently so ready to change their captains? And as an interested outside observer, why is it that headhunters so often seem to fail to take the whole picture into account (all the dimensions of the job) when they put forward candidates? The CEO role is so tough nowadays – with internal pressure to deliver the numbers as big a challenge as the external aspect – such that I wonder if one person can cope. It’s interesting how well the collective leadership that characterises most start-ups seems to work. Maybe large corporate agencies should learn from this, and genuinely distribute the burden among three or more people.

ARISE MIDDLE CLASS WINE DRINKERS!!

It has taken a typical front page headline piece in today’s Times ('Crackdown on middle class wine drinkers') to shake me out of my self-imposed midsummer moratorium on whingeing posts. Action for Ads (A4A) warriors naturally have to be on their guard against direct attacks on the freedom to advertise.
But we also have to watchful to catch the insidious spinning of medical and scientific findings and opinion, laced with leaks from Whitehall sources.

Why should middle class wine drinkers stand up and be counted? Apparently our caring, sharing Government are outraged at the strain on “society and the National Health Service” caused by wicked older drinkers, who have the effrontery to bring back a few bottles of wine from the supermarket in order to drink them at home. The shame of it. Admittedly the Home Office and the Department of Health (for it is they) have bracketed these dissolute winos with under-age drinkers and wrecked and wasted 18-24’s – so it’s not just the middle aged and middle class. But The Times knows a story when it sees one, and guess who is featured in the headline! So who is stirring it? New Labour’s staunch anti-joy allies the BMA and the Royal College of Physicians – that's who. And the evidence? Apparently it is the cost to the NHS (based on four year-old figures) of treating drink-related disease and drink-related injuries. We had all better watch out. Heaven knows what the cost is to the NHS of dealing with sick and dying people. Have any of them in any way contributed to their ill health? What about the cost of providing services to mothers and children? Having babies is self-inflicted, if the argument is about recovering the social cost of lifestyle choices.

We know that miserable people often want to stop happier people enjoying themselves. Call it envy, or call it mean-spirited. That’s human nature. But when it is served up by nanny staters, hell-bent on justifying yet more ridiculous legislation with dollops of half-baked statistics – then it’s time to say something.