UK causes Cash4Gold to have sense of humour failure

What a let down.

First the hullabaloo earlier this week about Cash4Gold promising to become 'the UK's biggest direct response advertiser'.

Typical bravado from a Florida-based gold trader that managed to pony up enough cash to buy 30 seconds of famously expensive Super Bowl airtime earlier this year.

The Super Bowl ads with MC Hammer and Ed McMahon had some central creative conceit too - using famously impoverished celebrities who might need to cash in their valuables.

But Cash4Gold's debut UK ad is truly woeful - a dinosaur of a direct response TV ad. Looks like it was made in-house, but it was in fact created by Euro RSCG.

You don't think it's Cash4Gold's idea of UK-style irony, do you?

Still I cheered up when I saw a spoof Cash4Gold ad. Watch it. It's funny.

Official: King Henry VIII was a home shopper

Michelle Obama is a home shopper. The Queen apparently is too, as well as being a catalogue owner selling souvenirs at various palaces and stately homes.

But Henry VIII? He of the six wives, big girth and 16th century bloodthirstiness fame?

Now we must add 'celebrity home shopper' to this list of attributes.

Wandering around the 'Dressed to kill' Henry VIII exhibition at the Tower of London last week, I stumbled across a nugget.  The glass cases featured armour and weapons that were custom made for the king way back in the 16th century.

Henry's PR was as a man of action who built his identity around his military and sporting prowess. Not surprisingly, the King of England wanted the best, most flexible, most fashionable armour - complete with enormous codpieces.

But he had to order it all from Italy and Germany.

Okay, so it's not likely Big Hal picked his armour from a catalogue or website but he was liable to return the kit, in true home shopping style, if he found he couldn't do handstands in it (a reliable test of good armour, apparently).

His other attempt at home shopping, when he hooked up with mail order bride Anne of Cleves, was a disaster. The Holbein portrait of Anne was said to have misrepresented and missold the product. 

Now, where was the DMA's client complaint body, the Direct Marketing Commission, when Henry needed it?

The DMA's Robert Keitch may be 'grumpy' but he is impressive

I once sat in an intimidating Radio 4 studio, poaching in my own sweat on a very hot day in September, across the microphones from the DMA's Robert Keitch, cool as a cucumber. Keitch and I were there to take part in a live Radio 4 discussion about the national media onslaught on DM in August 2006.

That scene came to mind when I heard that Keitch has been appointed as chief of Membership & Brand and as part of that, be the DMA's official mouthpiece.

It should solve a weakness that has proved a huge issue for the DMA these past few years: the lack of a decent internal spokesperson.

Late last year, when we rang around for nominations for our Marketing Direct person of 2008, Keitch's name came up repeatedly, often with the word 'grumpy' in the same sentence. 

Grumpy perhaps from sheer exhaustion in trying to get the green standard PAS 20:20 off the ground.

But he did so, early this year. 

If passion and energy are the flip sides of being grumpy, give me Keitch the Grump anytime.

Sky's hot new marketing weapon

I'm being bombarded by Sky to subscribe to its Sky+HD service at the moment, and from an unlikely source: its lovely and well-respected marketing strategy director Danny Russell.

Yesterday evening, I opened my front door to the usual snow drift of pizza menus (grrrrrr...), supermarket promotions (hmmm...) and estate agent promos (nooooooo...).

A door drop for Sky+HD caught my eye, partly because I'd heard from TNT Doordrop Media that trusty old D2D is Sky's second biggest acquisition channel. I put it aside (not into the bin, note, but for later reading. Those TNT/Royal Mail/DMA surveys on consumer use of door drops are actually true).

This morning at work, I was greeted with an email from Danny Russell, an email also sent to his other work/personal contacts.

Entitled 'Good news!' I was expecting an email from Danny about his promotion, or the arrival of a new baby, or the completion of another feat of daring-do (Danny recently did the London Marathon for charity).

But no, it was an in-yer-face promotion for Sky+HD, and for Sky Sports and Movies too.

So Danny, the good news is a) I might just subscribe and b) I think you've just invented a new form of marketing - JRM or journalist relationship management.

The bad news is I just can’t see it taking off...

Steve Harrison's back - and DM life just got more interesting

Steve Harrison, DM's most awarded creative and the industry's creative critic-in-chief, is back.

Not back at an agency. Not yet, anyway. A few months after his departure from Wunderman in July 2007, he said he would 'probably not' return to agency life. "The days when UK DM was a dominant force in global DM creativity are long gone and are not returning," he said at a DM event in April last year. "I've done my time furthering creative standards in DM and it's now someone else's turn."

But he hasn't thrown the towel in, or been idle, needless to say of this famously workaholic creative. Steve has been working on a creative 'how to' book, aptly titled 'How to do better creative work'. The official launch is in June, and Waterstones is already advertising it.

Why did he feel the need to write a book? "A lot of people I know and respect in the industry have been suffering from chronic depression for the past couple of years, brow-beaten into thinking that what they’re doing is no longer important," he told me yesterday. "My book is fairly simple stuff that I thought everybody knew but nobody is propagating these principles anymore – good things that need to be vigilantly preserved. The great direct marketing we did five years ago didn’t just happen – it happened because great DM creatives propagating best practice. But there's a loss of faith in what we do."

Can't wait to read the chapter entitled 'How to run a creative department'. He was known not to suffer fools in his creative teams.

Inspiring, iconoclastic, caustic in wit - Steve, we've missed you. Welcome back.

TMW gamble on joint executive creative director arrangement

The new creative arrangements at TMW - where Gareth James, former digital creative director, has been promoted joint creative director alongside TMW stalwart Daren Kay - are intriguing.

Joint ECDs are unusual, partly because the set-up is deemed not to work in the long run, just as joint MDs tend not to last.

Agencies, like any business, are pyramids and you need a person on top of the creative pyramid to make the final call as to whether that piece of work is right for the client.

It's tempting to see the Kay/James alignment as symbolic of the battle for creative supremacy between digital immigrants and natives.

That's the cynic's view anyway, but the facts are these:

- Daren Kay is one of the most decorated creatives in the business
- TMW is repositioning itself as 'channel neutral', for that read digital
- TMW can obviously afford to have two ECDs
- It's an indicator of how highly TMW/Creston value the creative product. TMW is a mature agency that obviously needs both Kay and James at the creative helm.

It's a fascinating scenario, especially when you throw in the fact that Daren is only one of two UK DM creative directors judging at Cannes this year.




 

David Cameron is right. MPs’ direct mail and door-drops are awful

Talk about low hanging fruit. As Tory leader David Cameron planned his moral-high-ground strategy on the parliamentary expenses scandal last week, one line on the MPs' expenditure sheet caught his eye.

MPs can claim £10,000 a year as a 'communications allowance' in order to correspond with their constituents; such 'communications' take the form of mail-merged letters (style: circa 1990) informing constituents of MPs' clinics and door-dropped newsletters full of bad photos of MPs on their rubber chicken rounds.

At Prime Minister's question time last Tuesday, Cameron ridiculed the literature MPs produced with the allowance.

"Let's be honest taxpayers are effectively paying out thousands of pounds so we can all tell our constituents what a wonderful job we are doing," he said at PM's Question Time. "Isn't this a gigantic waste of money? Scrap the communications allowance now."

The use of leaflets, inserts, door-drops by MPs wouldn't be such an easy target if they were properly used.

It's a shame, because leaflets - handed out or door-dropped - are a potent political marketing tool.

Why, even in President Obama's digital-centric election campaign last year, leaflets (used to full effect, that is) managed to grab national headlines.

Perhaps the fault lies in the relatively miniscule amount granted for MP communications. Compared to the profits being made by ministers and MPs on the sale of second homes, an allowance of £10,000 is small beer.

I can't help wondering what direct marketing's finest printers would do for MPs' communications, given a decent budget and a meaningful message to deliver.

BSkyB, like most brands, is obsessed with acquisition rather than retention

There are glad tidings in BSkyB’s latest quarterly report, but its churn rate of 10.6 per cent isn’t one of them.

The success of BSkyB’s marketing to prospects has rarely been matched by customer retention. It’s a cut-throat sector, but even so, it’s worrying that the proportion of customers defecting from Sky is persistently in double digits.

Once upon a time BSkyB actually had a person in the role of “head of churn”. They did away with that glamorous job title.  

The broadcaster is said to have one of the most enlightened organisational structures when it comes to managing the retention and acquisition functions. The acquisition and retention departments are integrated, a feature that few brand owners can boast.

Indeed, the last time Marketing Direct ventured into the company’s Osterley, west London, offices, BSkyB customer marketing director Mark Anderson sat across from the man responsible for acquisition, John Orriss, the director of direct sales and marketing. Both reported to William Mellis, director of customer acquisition and retention.

Back then, Anderson told Marketing Direct that “customer experience is our new battleground, and we believe passionately that it is our differentiator," he says.

But the latest churn figure suggests otherwise. It seems that the battle with Virgin Media, BT and Setanta has become so adversarial, that losing swathes of customers to them has become an accepted part of BSkyB's business model.

Why Honda, Citroen, Kia can't blame the Government for its modest handout

Car makers spent yesterday afternoon absorbing the sting in the tail of the Government's much-heralded car scrappage scheme, confirmed by Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling in his 2009 Budget speech.

Car brands were understandably deflated by the scheme's proviso that the Government would contribute £1,000 to the £2,000 consumer discount, on the understanding that car makers would contribute the other half.

Not quite the fillip that car marques had anticipated. Check out the reaction:

– Kia told whatcar.com, a sister title to Marketing Direct, that the Government was "only going half way" in its incentive to boost car sales. Paul Philpott, managing director of Kia UK, said: "The reality is that the Government is shifting a large part of the cost of this programme onto the shoulders of the manufacturers, when it is the manufacturers who are working hard night and day to deal with the effects of the economic turmoil and recession around the world."

– Citroen tried to say positive things about the Government scheme but added that it was a "complicated" incentive. Xavier Duchemin, managing director of Citroën UK told whatcar.com that the scheme is "good news for the industry and the car buyer and we'll support it. Finding £1000 on a car like a C1 will be difficult, but we'll find a way."

– A Ford UK spokesman told Marketing Direct that the required participation by car makers "wasn't anticipated, and it's different from other European scrappage schemes. We're going to need more details about it before we make any announcements." But Ford is still pushing ahead with its cash-for-bangers online promo.

– Honda likewise said it was "waiting to see the detail". A spokesperson said: "It's difficult to comment when nothing official has been released. We can't make any decisions from a marketing point of view, but we need to think how this is going to affect our existing marketing campaigns."

So should we feel sorry for car makers? 

Now that the dust has settled, the answer must be no.

The car market was stimulated in the past few years by the same subprime lending as we saw in housing, which post-credit crunch has led to car overcapacity.

One DM agency director yesterday pointed out a certain car maker that was planning to produce several thousand extra units to tie in with the scrappage programme, "but the feeling is that [the Government's proposal] is not rich enough to support those incremental sales".

But why should government intervene in a free market system to overcome market failure?

Adding to the UK's burgeoning public debt by giving large sums of money to fuel car sales doesn't make sense. It's time for a correction, some pain and hopefully a return to a sustainable car business.

Amazon is playing to the gallery by blocking Phorm

At last. Some common sense about the so-called enfant terribles of behavioural targeting, Phorm, and from the mouth of a client to give it added credibility.  

John Lewis Direct's head of web selling told an Institute of Direct Marketing event last night that Phorm's model is "good" and that the retailer's website user database has a 60% match with that of Phorm's.

It's oh-so-easy to blame Phorm for the PR predicament that behavioural targeting finds itself in. Phorm's tests with British Telecom last year whipped up the privacy storm that even a new code from the Internet Advertising Bureau hasn't managed to calm.

Now the European Commission (no less) is investigating the UK (no less) for its attitude to the privacy issues around Phorm's technology. Client body ISBA has asked the EC not to proceed.

The words of John Lewis Direct's David Walmsley came in the same week that Amazon wrote to a customer to tell them it was blocking Phorm's technology from tracking its website users.

It's Amazon's prerogative to do so of course. But I suspect it is playing to the gallery. It could have deployed a privacy notice that allowed customers to opt in to Phorm tracking.

Amazon's own targeting will start to look "rudimentary," Walmsley said, as behavioural targeting technology advances in sophistication.

How long before Amazon feels compelled to join John Lewis Direct and other brands and publishers have all deployed behavioural tracking technology) in realising that behavioural targeting is a game-changer for online advertisers?

* The Guardian, Sky, Timesonline etc

For DM agencies with the Ford, Peugeot, Nissan and Vauxhall accounts - good news at last

Once upon a time, having a car account was a badge of merit amongst agencies. Not so recently, as that sector hit the credit crunch doldrums. Car sales fell by almost a third in March this year compared with last year.

But you can bet every agency in the land with automotive business will be burning the midnight oil in the run up to Wednesday's budget, preparing DM that capitalises on the much-anticipated 'scrappage' or 'cash for bangers' incentive to buy a new car.

Assuming this measure actually materializes.

But Treasury briefings to media organisations suggest that it will.

The idea is that buyers will be entitled to a £2,000 discount on a new car if they scrap their old (nine or ten years old, at least) one.

The scheme, billed as an environmental measure because new cars are more fuel-efficient, is intended to throw a lifeline to Britain's ailing motor industry. But it's also a fillip for DM agencies.

Let's remind ourselves of which agency has what account:
Wunderman – Jaguar, Land Rover and Ford
Kitcatt Nohr Alexander Shaw – Lexus and Toyota
Publicis Dialog – Renault
DraftFCB – Vauxhall
CMW – Peugeot
TMW – Nissan Europe
LIDA – Mini
Hicklin Slade & Partners – Honda
Partners Andrews Aldridge – Rolls Royce

Other than Rolls Royce and vintage car owners, many proprietors of older cars are likely to be lured by such an incentive.

I hear of digital Flash ads being feverishly prepared by agencies for their car clients, ready for updating at a moment's notice if Chancellor Alastair Darling announces the measure, sometime between 12.30 and 2pm next Wednesday.

That immediacy is the beauty of digital. Let's face it: such direct responsiveness would have been hard with direct mail.

Martin Sorrell v Rupert Murdoch: now it's personal

To make sense of the mischievous ‘dunce’ cartoon of Sir Martin Sorrell in last Monday's New York Post one has merely to recall who owns the feisty daily paper: one Rupert Murdoch.

The world of business is littered with great rivalries:

– Richard Branson v former BA chairman John King;

– Ryanair's Michael O'Leary v Lord Stelios of easyjet (what's with these airline magnates?);

– Steve Jobs, founder of Apple v Microsoft's Bill Gates

– We could go on…

There's conflict built into any media owner/advertiser relationship.

And the Sorrell v Murdoch tug-of-war is a long running one.

But up until now, Murdoch is more sinned against than sinning in this battle of words.

Sorrell misses few opportunities to question News Corp's strategy, apparently revelling in the newspaper industry's own woes when he delivered his "L-shaped recession" speech as the annual lecture of the Stationers' and Newspaper Makers' Company in London last month.

Which is why the New York Post article initially looks like Murdoch getting even.

But actually, whether or not one believes that Murdoch believes in not interfering with his papers' editorial strategy, the New York Post went easy on Sir Martin - by its own irreverent standards.

True, the paper illustrated its Sorrell/WPP piece by photoshopping a dunce's hat on Sir M's head and writing that the "ad king ... is looking more like a clumsy peasant with his recent blunders".

But Post articles and headlines in the past have been merciless, including the classic but some-would-say hurtful 'Axis of Weasel' to headline news that France and Germany were refusing to join the Iraq war effort back in 2003.

The question is whether Sir Martin is thick-skinned enough to ignore such disrespect from one of Murdoch's titles. Only time will tell.