When I say I don’t want you to be my friend I don’t mean you, dear readers.
I mean brands.
Even lovely Innocent thinks I might want to chum up to them on the social network de jour and I don’t, I’m sorry I don’t.
Image courtesy of Ali K I recently had the pleasure of judging two sets of industry accolades. The first was the Account Planning Group’s Creative…
Here is a naïve hope for the future.
That our personal and intimate involvement in the social media revolution will stop us making the mistakes of the past when it comes to applying the many and varied techniques, tools and applications of web 2.0 and beyond to our clients’ brands.
The word monologue has acquired a rather pejorative meaning in the world of marketing.
Monologue, where the brand addresses an audience and puts forward its point of view (as happens in traditional one to many advertising), is seen to be out of step with the idea that markets are conversations and depend on a dialogue of equals between brands and customers.
More than that, brand monologues are assumed to narcissistic, self referential, and disrespectful of empowered consumers that don’t have to or want to take that kind of shit from anyone least of all businesses.
Well I want to make a stand for brand monologues – right here and right now. Indeed I am going to insist that great dialogues start with a passionate monologue.
I was talking to an eminent chap from the media world recently.
I was giving him my impression of media planners that was almost completely incorrect. He was giving me his impression of what we used to call account planners.
And I was rather shocked at what he said.
I have just had to get myself a mobile phone contract.
I guess that dates me since mobiles/cellphones happened after I started work and so I have never had one of my own.
So as a matter of course I went to the Carphone Warehouse (The UK’s largest cellphone intermediary).
Needless to say it was a pretty grim experience.
It has of late become awfully fashionable to lay the many and varied problems of the advertising industry at the feet of creatives.
They are accused of many things including introspection, arrogance, irrelevance and rank stupidity.
And of all their crimes the ultimate is that they simply ‘don’t get it’.
Neither planners nor suits are collectively damned in this way.
Indeed in some circles, particularly the blogosphere, the ridicule meted out to above-the-line creatives borders on a kind of blood sport like hare coursing or bear baiting. In particular it is practiced by members of the new marketing mafia who never made it in proper advertising and consequently have a massive chip on their shoulders.
Well I’m getting a little fed up of this.
Image courtesy of Jacob Botter
I hate brainstorms.
I hate running them, I hate contributing to them and I hate using them to solve problems.
They waste huge amounts of time and talent and they are no fucking good at delivering decent ideas.
And so six months ago I cleansed my professional life of this trojan horse of mediocrity, favouring aggregated individual working or two person thinking sessions.
I suggest it’s time you gave them the boot too.
Death the the brainstorm. Long live great ideas.
Will regulation hole advertising below the water line?
As if advertising weren’t challenged enough already by consumer behaviour and technology, the regulators are coming.
They have been circling for a long time but until now self-regulation has kept them at bay.
But with pressure to ban the advertising of ‘junk food’ altogether to follow its prohibition in children’s media and increasing calls to ban alcohol advertising things are getting serious.
Lester Wunderman who identified, defined and named Direct Marketing.
Direct is having a tough time of it at the moment.
In a world of increasing consumer antipathy towards orthodox communications channels (you’ll remember the TGI chart showing the decline in people thinking the ads are as good as the programmes) DM – both mail and its bastard offspring telemarketing – set new standards in irritation and intrusiveness. And you better believe that the in cards are marked by the self-regulation bodies if not the legislators.
And that’s before you get onto the thorny issue of DM’s environmental footprint. Both the consumption of materials and energy to create it in the first place and the residue it leaves in the home – the disposal of which falls to individuals and their council tax.
In all this ethical mess I have recently found some reasons to be cheerful and to recognise the specific qualities that DM contributes to the process of bringing brand ideas to life.
Propaganda – a job to do, something to say and therefore nothing gets in the way
One of the more stupid cliches that you hear banded about advertising agencies is the phrase “your strategy is showing”.
It is usually used by creatives to describe work in which the brand idea is not totally obscured by the creative execution. And by weak planners to explain why their thinking isn’t in the work.
I can’t speak for you but as far as I am concerned strategies should scream out from communications.
I mean why have them if they don’t?
When you think about campaigns like Avis’s ‘we try harder’, BA’s ‘the world’s favourite airline’, Stella’s ‘reassuringly expensive’, BT’s ‘it’s good to talk’, the AA’s ‘fourth emergency service’ or Honda’s ‘power of dreams’ it is bleeding obvious what the brand is up to, the strategy stands out like a modesty at a new business meeting.
Creative work should engage people, provide an emotional connection, build memorability, invite people to join the conversation, absorb them in the moment, build emotional desire and all of those wonderful things that it does. But it should also dramatise the strategy.
I can’t for the life of me think why you wouldn’t want your strategy showing unless of course it is so lifeless and limp that 10,000 volts wouldn’t bring the bloody thing to life.
If that is the case then burying it under layers of creative artifice and never speaking of it again is the least you can do.
Andrex – part of my life since 1969. Image courtesy of Mezhopking
My father recently bought a new car and almost immediately ran the battery down because he left the hazard warning lights on all night.
Anyway, he was telling me this story when suddenly he said he had sorted the problem by calling the RAC out. He might as well have told me that he was sleeping with a woman that was not my mother.
The RAC! That is not how we were brought up! We were an AA family, always have been, always will be. I was shattered. What next? Swinging? Gun crime? Voting Tory?
The AA is what I call a maternal brand. I was brought up with it and like my other maternal brands I find it familiar and comforting.
And alongside Persil, Fairy Liquid, Andrex, Anchor butter and Heinz tomato ketchup, I choose it without consideration of the alternatives and without substitution.
Having the keys to a brand, that for sufficient numbers of people is a maternal brand, should be a licence to print money.
But these brands are under a new threat beyond the traditional own label foe.
They are under threat because they don’t believe in the stuff we believe in, indeed they often don’t believe in anything.
