Liverpool St moonwalk: origins of the meme

As you're probably only too aware, Twitter is abuzz with the notion of a mass moonwalk at Liverpool St station at 6.00 this evening. Quite what this is going to do to rush hour commuters I can only imagine. If you're going, I'd pack some bottled water and maybe oxygen along with your glitter glove.

 It's amusing to see how the whole thing started a few hours ago. My old mate Rob Manuel, founder of web pranksters b3ta.com, put a tentative post out on Twitter, which quickly got picked up by  @Markcorrigan who turned it from a question into a fact. Which it has now become (unless the police move in a pre-emptive strike...)

 All the planning, all the theory in the world, can't replace a little idea that just clicks.

 

 

 

Chris Boardman, champion of digital engagement

As you probably know, Chris Boardman is an ex-cycling champion who now puts his name to a range of high-end bikes which is available in Halfords. While the bikes have been praised for their good value (carbon framed road bikes for less than a grand...), they've had a poor reception from the cycling community. This is partially brand snobbery - the bikes are only available in Halfords, not a particularly cred store with the Lungs on Legs brigade.

 

But if you read cycling forums (welcome to my nerdy life) it's hard to miss the complaints about the poor service that accompanies the bikes. Often it seems they haven't been assembled properly, and the wheels break before they've been ridden home. Angry posts on forums like bikeradar have done enormous damage to the brand. I was certainly put off, and I was in the market.

 

Well, Boardman has responded in kind, with Chris Boardman himself posting a brilliant reply on bikeradar last Friday. Whether he wrote it himself or got a PR company to do it for him, it's a really great example of showing your customers that you're listening to them. 

 

A lot of the posts I read were about these two issues and even after weeding out those that had an axe to grind, there were still too many legitimate issues, so I wrote to Paul McClenaghan, the Commercial Director of Halfords and attached a large selection of forum posts. As soon as he got the mail, Paul contacted me and we arranged to meet. This happened yesterday.

Paul and another board member, Andy Torrance (Store Operations and Logistics Director) had already got together and personally looked at every post. Andy's immediate response was that many of the issues raised were 'many of the issues raised were just unacceptable and below the standards that Halfords set' which was a good start. From this point, lots of ideas were discussed on how the service you receive can/would be improved/made more consistent in the stores that sell the Boardman range.

I am not going to hold myself responsible for how well or how fast Halfords
tackles the issues, I would be making promises that aren't mine to keep but I can promise I will keep pushing them towards being World Class in this area, which is what they wanted, or at the very least make very clear to the customer what they can and can't expect from them.
I'll keep you updated on progress and post actions that Halfords agree to
put in place. 

 

If you scroll down to the responses, people are so happy that someone (let alone a sporting hero) has actually listened to them and is doing something about their complaints. Of course, the two big questions are: now that Boardman has acknowledged the problem, will they fix it?

 

And second, is Boardman really reading the forums?

 

In response to one poster who said, 

 

He wont be back, just copy paste and away he goes

 

Boardman replied

 

To quote the former Mr Universe (which is not something you do every day)

"I'll be back"

Chris B

 

 

Sounds like the real deal.

 

 

 

 

 

Green copywriting

Any copywriter will tell you that you can change people’s behaviour by writing insightfully. So can copywriters change consumers’ behaviour to make them think greener? I’m sure we can. But not in the obvious way by writing big punning ads (anyone remember those environ-mental posters? Only the ad nerds among you).

Rather, it’s in the way we start to make people think and feel about their actions. Advertising is manipulative. But there’s no reason why that should be a bad thing. As the philosopher Jayme White wrote recently, imagine if you only had one leg. How could advertising help your condition?

Last year some psychologists messed with the heads of hotel guests, using differently worded tags on towel rails. You know the kind: “please re-use these towels and help us save the environment.”

They changed the wording on the tags. The one which got a 10% uplift in towel re-use said “JOIN YOUR FELLOW GUESTS IN HELPING TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT. Almost 75% of guests who are asked to participate in our new re- source savings program do help by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow guests in this program to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.”

Lucky these boffins have a day job.

The insight here is that people are competitively environmental. If other people are being green, then they will be green too. Being green involves sacrifice (will the towel be slightly damp in the morning? The horror...) So we want to at least keep up with the sacrifices of the Joneses.

Another amazing example of creating this kind of competition is the World Bank’s Doing Business league, which measures how business-friendly countries are. Since its publication, developing nations have competed to move up the table. Some estimates say it may have lifted more Africans out of poverty than any aid initiative.

 

One obvious thing we could 'mess with people's heads' over is wind  farms. Currently the big issue is that people think they look ugly.  Really they're just new: I'm sure medieval Dutch people thought  windmills blighted their landscape.

The agenda's been captured by local politicians who go on about  'visual pollution'. Rejected planning applications have cost 1000s of  jobs in South Wales alone.  Can we make them seem beautiful, and make people proud to have them on  their horizon? I love them. Why doesn’t everybody?

More generally, advertising defines what people aspire to spend their money on. Not simply  in the things we sell directly, but in the things we surround those products with. The Mondeo pulls up outside a Neutra-designed house on Mulholland. The watch is worn by the pilot in front of his stunt plane.

Simply by beginning to associate those kind of products with environmental projects, we can start the process of nudging public opinion towards acceptance of things like wind farms.

Is BBH really great because it zags?

Or is it great because it zigs better than anyone else?

Have we had enough of corporate whimsy yet?

Over the last few years, it seems like every unimaginative company has wanted a bit of whimsicality to its communications, to be ‘a bit like Innocent’. Can the rest of the industry now move on from whimsicality, and leave Innocent to it?

When I started as a copywriter in the early 90s, every unimaginative client wanted to be like The Economist. I actually wrote ‘Attracts Magnates’ as a headline for a Milton Keynes poster. They rejected it. The Economist ran it about 3 months later. Thinking back, I think the MK client was right.

Francis Fukuyama once wrote that cool had been corporatised. Perhaps now whimsy has too. All those little bits of chat on packs about ‘Easy on the CHILLES’ and ‘Toss in a smidgen of PAPRIKA’ are beginning to sound like a default corporate-speak. Just as we no longer believe a company that tells us ‘We’re passionate about biscuits’. I’m not sure I believe that they really, really pour their soul into each and every custard cream.

Similarly, while I once enjoyed turning jars and bottles upside down to find cute little messages on the bottom, now it seems like half the products on the supermarket shelves from Tate and Lyle’s syrup to Waitrose own brand are owned and managed by Eddie Izzard.

The tricky thing for Innocent is to remain a distinctive brand in a world full of Innocent impersonators. Charlie Chaplin managed it, by proving he was a great actor who also did physical comedy (though he once came second in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest).

Howell Henry managed it when they did the 4th emergency service campaign for the AA, and confounded the creatives who walked around saying ‘we should go a bit HHCL on this brief’, meaning they should do something wacky.


The tricky thing for everyone else is to find a fresh, relevant tone of voice that talks directly to consumers in a genuine way. But then, that’s always been the tricky thing. 

If advertising educates consumers, why do you know so little about washing powder?

One of the big arguments in favour of advertising is that it allows consumers to make informed choices. Sometimes that's true.

But in many industries, it's not. Financial services, for one. And washing powder, for another.

Billions are spent advertising washing powder every year - but nobody seems to know what I'm about to tell you.  So nobody makes an informed choice.

Over the years I've worked for both the big manufacturers of washing powder.

And I've learned a lot of interesting stuff about washing clothes.

Sadly, none of it's ever made it into an ad. It's not a secret. It's just that nobody can be bothered to tell you. So here it is:

 

Biological washing powders are made with enzymes. Enzymes help break down the chemicals that make up difficult stains.

Different enzymes work on different kind of stains: cooking fat, chlorophyll etc. 

You can only put a few enzymes into your washing powder. Put in too many, and it becomes unstable.

So all washing powder manufacturers have to choose which enzymes to put in, and which to leave out.

Which means that Persil's enzymes are better for grass stains, mud and outdoorsy stuff. And Ariel's powder is better for oily things like curry and lipstick stains.

 

That's it.

Perhaps if you cut out this blog post and email it to some people, we can help  consumers make an informed choice, without spending any money at all.

720 degree marketing: it’s twice as good

 Today I am proud to announce the launch of 720 degree marketing. It’s like 360 degree marketing, except you go around twice, making it twice as engaging, twice as integrated and twice as profitable. 360 degree marketing was one of the biggest breakthroughs ever made by ad agencies, equivalent to the moment when airlines realised they could not only make money flying passengers to destinations, but could also fly them home again, instead of having all their planes return empty.

720/DM also embraces radical ideas like having the people who write the ads talk to the people who think about what the ads should say. But it also takes this further, where the people who write the ads will also understand the businesses of the people who pay for them. We believe that creatives are capable of this: they already understand how Adobe works (changing the icons on upgrades of Creative Suite so your agency has to stump up for the upgrade so you don’t look lame when your mates see the dock on your MacBook).

Obviously 720/DM doesn’t go as far as having the people who write the ads talk to the people who decide what media they should be in. However our skunkworks is already putting together some concepts for our planned launch of 1080 degree marketing this time next year.

For more details about this double revolution in marketing, please contact our VP of 720/DM: April Fish.

Is Twitter changing the way people think?

Is Twitter going to change everything, or is it going to be another SecondLife, interesting to begin with, until you realised that the only people there were other marketing types, sniffing about, wondering what on earth we were supposed to do with this thing.

I think Twitter’s important because it’s a great equaliser of voices. Blogs levelled the playing field for humans. If you have something important or entertaining to say, you now have the same potential audience as the editor of the Wall Street Journal. (In fact yours is bigger, as the WSJ is mainly subscription).

Twitter doesn’t distinguish between people, pseudo-people and outright machines. Clearly Courtney Love writes her own tweets - you couldn’t hire somebody to make that stuff up. Does Britney writer hers, or is the long form too challenging for her? Are Britney’s tweets ghosted?

Who cares, if it’s useful or entertaining? On my Twitter page, Wossy’s bons mots sit alongside Tower Bridge’s Twitter stream, delightfully personalised. It’s just informed me that, “I am closing after the Maintenance Lift has passed upstream.”

Emails and texts can be lumped into three distinct groups. There’s ones written by machine (ebay receipts, notices from my burglar alarm), there’s professionally-written mass mailings and there are actual messages from real human beings. They may come into the same device or program, but I think of them differently.

Twitter lumps them all together, and I no longer care which is what: if it’s interesting, it gets my attention.

In 1950 the visionary mathematician Alan Turing proposed a test to determine whether computers could think. Get a computer and a human to answer questions set by a panel of people. If the majority of the panel can’t tell the difference between the two, then the computer could be said to think.

Twitter bypasses the whole question, because it stops us caring. Barack Obama is asking me for my opinions on the global economy. My houseplant tells me it needs watering. Nike+ invites me to a new running challenge.

Russell Davies has talked about the “uncanny valley” which occurs when machines try to be human (that weird feeling when an answering service tells you, “You're doing great!”) Just as robot designers have largely abandoned trying to make robots look human, perhaps Twitter will free people from caring whether brand communications are automated or hand-crafted.

As blogs levelled the playing field between you and Rupert Murdoch, so Twitter levels the playing field between an you and a house plant.

Digital Natives vs Merrie England

Another week, another kvetch about the havoc that digital communications wreak on our lives. This one is called Elsewhere, USA, and tells the story of “Mr and Mrs Elsewhere,” whose lives are diminished by the fact that their attention is always partially diverted towards the next meeting (while at home) and the next Family Quality Time (while at work).

Historians sometimes talk about the concept of “Merrie England”. The preface to many history books will tell you that just before the start of the period they’re covering, there was a long period of status quo where everyone knew what was what, and where their next meal was coming from, and society was stable. There was beer and fish and chips and morris dancing, probably. Then the period the book is covering begins, and things all get a lot more interesting.

A great deal has been written about this age of continuous partial attention, and the ills it’s caused. I think a lot of that writing depends on a Merrie England-style fallacy. What was it that people concentrated on so hard in previous generations? Dull, repetitive industrial jobs? Anybody who’s worked on an assembly line will tell you that their minds were anything but on bolting a dashboard onto an Austin Allegro. Now you can ‘home from work’ as easily as you can work from home, meaning that you don’t have to rush off as often from the office to sort out things for your family or house.

‘Continuous partial attention’ could also be thought of as the ‘satisfaction of casual curiosity’. I grew up in a small town with a rubbish local library and a school book cupboard that was even worse. Many of the unanswered questions in my mind remained unanswered. Fewer and fewer people have to experience that, now. If you want to know the plot of Tristan and Isolde*, or what’s on the other side of that high fence over there, you can find out - right now, if you have a smartphone.

Yes, today we can all be easily distracted by Wikipedia - but on the other hand, we can have all our easily asked questions answered. Which leaves us to concentrate on the hard ones. What did we have to concentrate on in Merrie England? Morcambe and Wise and The Generation Game.

There’s an insightful review of Elsewhere, USA in Prospect Magazine (The American one, not the UK one). They point out:

Conley is frank enough to acknowledge many inconvenient facts that deviate from this picture. For example, today's parents, despite dual careers, actually spend more time with their children than did those of the 1950s. Has residential mobility risen? No, it has decreased throughout the past century. Although divorce spiked after the 1960s, marriage has stabilized for the college-educated. And jobs "have actually gotten broader" as routine tasks are left to computers. (Conley might also have acknowledged that no one has shown that friendships mediated by online communication are any less real or gratifying than those of the pre-IM-Facebook-MySpace era.)

Maybe we do live in a world where it’s harder to concentrate. But that’s because there’s so much interesting stuff out there. If our main worry is how we cope with the sheer fascinating-ness of the world, then we’re not doing too badly. If Merrie England is an evening concentrating of Dad’s Army, then I’ll stay right here.




*What can I say? I was a weird kid.