SINGAPORE AIRLINES- WHAT'S GOING ON?

It started off as just a little aside overheard- but upon a little circumstantial evidence- such as WHY NO NEW TV COMMERCIAL? IS THERE A NEW TV COMMERCIAL? Since winning the US$67 million account, TBWA in Singapore seem to find the going a bit tough.

Why are the ads so bad? Little or no branding- what about the HOUSTON ad? The one that looks like it was done in a very bad provincial agency in 1974. Why are the huge billboards at Heathrow? Surely, half of the people there have come in from somewhere, half are going out- and if they're going out- they've either booked already onto SQ, or they're with another carrier, so it's too late. The only reason I can think of is to rub BA's nose in it- and everyone else's -because no one else flies an A380 yet. If that's the case, then it's an expensive piece of airline talk and carrier vanity, and certainly not customer focused or customer driven.

What's going on?

My network of spies is still in place throughout the region.

No smoke without fire.

It seems that displeasure at high levels of the airline concerning many things is happening right now.

From a Molestrangler point of view, an airline gets under your skin. It's one of the few accounts where you feel that you are doing something real with immediate results. It's quite romantic- planes taking off for over half a day without landing and so on. Working on a beer and car account is similar. Anyway, to work on one of the great airline accounts, you don't just need a couple of moody men dressed in expensive black t-shirts (and as we all know, TBWA has got more than enough of those), you need an entire department to write all those 7 day and 15 day booklets about the tours.

From memory:...."Your mind reels, staggering with the enormity that is Asia..."

You need the picture library: an Asian couple in every city of the world, an expat couple, a library of the usual stock- Ludwig's castles in Bavaria, Yosemite, the Ginza, cherry blossom in Kyoto, changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the Calgary stampede- and that's just once a year- and so on.

You need to know that there are different sectors: tours, vfrs, business,cargo etc; that there will be timetable and change of address changes throughout the world; there will have to be ads for these ready made and then the details just schlepped in and so on, and so forth. But you knew all this didn't you?

And you have to do it from Singapore. 

You can't just bamboozle your way in saying "digital, customer experience, digital, digital, brand experience, digital,"

Or can you?

TBWA won the account on April 17th 2007. So they have had 17 months already.

Big changes are often afoot after 17 days in advertising and certainly after 17 weeks. Especially when the pitch procedure would have entailed lots of preparation for months already.  But not here.

Definitely something amiss.

Notice how people from TBWA have all rushed forward to defend their agency.

The sound of one hand clapping.