A friend reminded me this weekend me of a clip from South Park in which the underpant gnomes are stealing all the underpants from the town. This is stage one in a three stage plan in which the third stage is to make a huge amount of profit. The problem is that there is no stage two.
How redolent of the vast majority of advertising campaigns.
Lee Scratch Perry. Image courtesy of Ariel Publicity
When it comes to the back catalogue of the recently departed and much missed HHCL its easy to reel off the famous stuff the agency made over the years from Tango Slap to Pot Noodle’s Slag of all Snacks but I thought I’d draw attention to some of the less famous stuff that I love.
This isn’t easy because most the work predates You Tube and so only exists where fanatics have uploaded old ads, but there is some stuff there to enjoy.
First up is a campaign for Guiness in Ireland and about the launch of Guiness Extra Cold from the early part of this decade.
A push pin rendering of Wieden’s Fail Harder ethos. Image courtesy of media bistro.
Despite the Nike bombshell and a recurring sense that Dan’s ‘I’m just an old hippy’ routine is wearing a bit thin, Wieden + Kennedy is the plannersphere’s ideal agency to work for. And with work like Old Spice and Honda, and that lovely blog, who can blame us.
Listen with mother – backbone of the BBC light programme schedule form 1950 to 1982.
If there is an orthodox medium that has been given a shot in the arm by new technology it has got to be radio (not Last fm and all that marlarkey) but good old gardeners-question-time type wireless.
Radio is in robust health in the UK, most especially the BBC which has recently seen both reach and share of listening hours increase and part of that success is down to new means of distribution, particularly digital TV and the internet.
So it was nice of those people at RAJAR to put together some charts on all of this when they released the lastest figures for radio listening recently.
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.
The Googleplex, home of the world’s most valuable brand. Image courtesy of Keso.
According to new research from WPP released this week, and to which adliterate was given a sneek preview, Google is now officially the most valuable brand on earth – at $66,434m ahead of GE, Microsoft and Coca Cola.
This is the second year that WPP and Millward Brown have produced a ranking of the world’s most powerful brands (using a methodology that is markedly different to other brand equity studies), however it is the first in which Google has reached the top spot.
And yet more proof, if it were needed, that while brands always win the speed at which the brandscape is being rearranged at the moment means no-one can be complacent about their position in peoples’ hearts, minds and wallets.
For the brand valuation geeks I have summarised the WPP approach but you can always cut out the middle-blog and go straight to the study here.
That bridge shot from the Marin Headlands as the fog rushes into the bay. Image courtesy of John Curley
Been on my hols in the extraordinary and beautiful San Francisco. Clearly unable to post while in a California state of mind on account of feeling too damn nice to my fellow man. Now back in London and as cranky as hell so normal service will be resumed shortly.
Image courtesy of Sagasurfer.
Much of my time is spent at the moment thinking about the nature of brand ideas – how to build them, and critically how to spot whether what you have got is good enough.
To date I have been unable to create a fail safe ready reckoner for great brand ideas – although regular readers will know I have a very particular approach to building them.
The truth is that there is no process that you can follow that will churn out great brand ideas, you just sort of, have to have them. And please do not be fooled by charlatans that claim to have a special product, process or workshop to generate these ideas, any hardware is only as good as the software that runs on it.
However, I think that there is one thing that is absolutely true of great brand ideas – they are generous.
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.
