- Page 26 of 35 - Radical thinking for the brand advice business

28/03/200720/01/2016Advertising

Ethnicity – adland’s forgotten mission

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There is only one creature more obsesssed with shiny new things than the marketing community. Image courtesy of Amkhosla.

At the Future Marketing Summit I talked about the way people in marketing exhibit acute neophilia – a love of the new.

This is all well and good, but a the result of this is that we charge in to new places, spaces and technologies without the slightest idea of what the rules are, whether they add value to our client’s business or critically whether we are invited.

And then we get bored and forget about it transfixed by the next new thing.

And what happens is we over estimate the short term impact of new things and underestimate their long term impact (e-commerce, PVRs, web 2.0, social media, China and the like). Incidentally Ray Amara calls this behaviour the first law of technology.

I call it marketing’s Attention Deficit Disorder.

And one of the things I worry that we got bored of and which could have had a far more significant impact on real people, is ethnicity.

26/03/2007Provocations

Separated by a common language

by Richard17 Comments

The Wassily chair, designed by Marcel Breuer in 1925 – anyone remember any ads made that year? Image courtesy of Alex Terzich.

My first love is design.

I got into advertising by accident. I was all set to become an industrial designer, when irresistable lure of Geography took me away from the path of righteousness (which is another story).

And a love of design is handy these days since it is looming ever larger in the lives of advertising people.

For one thing identity is no longer content to sit in the bottom right hand corner of the ads but demands to play a bigger role – sometimes with brilliant results (the Guardian) and sometimes in less edifying form (O2). We have to recognise that identity rich advertising is here to stay and that ads that ignore identity feel somehow distant from the brand.

We are also starting to see the value of design in-house
not just to dress up weak ideas but as a distinct practice allowing us to extend our role within Client businesses.

Finally I think we all admire the way that designers make stuff at every stage of the process when so often our ideas exist simply as words on paper right down to the point of production. Designers know that producing stuff means that they win clients over on a very emotional level.

But anyone in advertising or design that has worked closely with the other will know that a truely collaborative relationship is not easy.

Part of the problem is that, just like the relatioship between the US and UK, advertising and design are separated by a common language.

22/03/2007Advertising

Sorry Mum

by Richard18 Comments

I know I seem obsessed with Persil.

But here is how to make proper Dirt is Good advertising rather than the tat on our tellies. It is for Ala Omo, which is the equivalent of Persil in Argentina. It works because it turns the intellectual concept of dirt being good into something very tangiable and visceral, it is advertising that you become involved in rather than advertising you view. The endline is interesting too, it translates as “What they learn stays, dirty goes away”.

And guess what you are going to think every time you are about to bollock your kids for getting grubby? “What an arsehole I am”.

If you click through I have put up an English translation. If you don’t speak Spanish I recommend you read it first.

Thanks to Adstructure who posted the ad and translation and put me onto this.

Come on BBH sort it out.

21/03/2007Uncategorized

Future Marketing Summit scaled

by Richard2 Comments

Hillary and Tenzing enjoying a hearty cup of beef tea while scaling their own summit. Image courtesy of bernard-Voyer.com

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of chair in a panel session on technology at the Future Marketing Summit in London. With me were Steve Henry (creative legend and ex-employer), Rory Sutherland (Ogilvy supremo), Amelia Torode (VCCP’s digital chief) and David Grebert (P&G’s future guru on advertising and instore experience). We were a little light on technologists to be honest but I rather enjoyed myself having these brains at my beck and call.

It is always a pain as a facilitator that you can’t lob in your own point of view so I make sure I pissed all over the subject to before hand in my introduction. I talked about the need to retain the magic and delight that new technology brings back to marketing, my preference for tech’ that amplifies brand ideas and the need for us to be more modest when approaching new technology and media.

You can download the speech (if you are a regular reader don’t expect too much you haven’t seen here already) while the slides are on a slideshare (which you won’t be able to see if you are reading this as a feed).

16/03/2007Provocations

Advertising is not a profession

by Richard27 Comments

Ede and Ravenscroft of Chancery Lane, specialists in gowns, wigs and other legal paraphernalia. Photo courtesy of avtost

People still seem very keen to join advertising agencies, and in particular to become planners. And why not its a brilliant job.

One of the key questions is always how to get in. Since on the outside this can seem an utterly impenetrable industry.

And just to save anyone the trouble of traipsing to Clerkenwell for a nasty cup of coffee to ask me in person, the truth is I don’t know.

There isn’t a formal way in because there are no qualifications whatsoever that you need to have under your belt to do this job.

And that is because it is a trade and not a profession.

06/03/2007Provocations

Another nail in the coffin for CRM

by Richard46 Comments

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Violetta meets her consumptive end in La Traviata. Image courtesy of Steven Ford.

One of the great delights of advancing middle-age is that you can decide that some things are just not your cup of tea.

You can say categorically that you just can’t be doing with them. You’ve tried them, often repeatedly and you just don’t like them.

I feel that way about opera. I love virtually all performing arts, but I hate opera. In fact I genuinely believe that there are two types of people in the world, people that don’t like opera and liars.

And I have come to the same conclusion about Customer Relationship Marketing or CRM as the acronym freaks like to call it.

04/03/2007Uncategorized

Dynamic micro brands

by Richard6 Comments

The Swallow tailed hummingbird. Like most dynamic micro brands they are small agile and very fast. Image courtesy of Flavio Cruvinel Brandao

So, I have been obsessing recently about cool and funky little brands like Method, Hendricks, Riverford Organic Vegetables, Dorset Cereals, Good Energy and the like.

And I thought I might draw some conclusions about what is going on and the things that unite them.

The intention is to provide some learning for other brand owners, especially when they are approaching NPD projects.

02/03/2007Planning

The data dump

by Richard20 Comments

Image courtesy of cutangus

One of the great criticisms of the plannersphere is that it is data shy.

So here are three lovely charts for the data hungry amongst you to feast on.

01/03/2007Uncategorized

The Brand Catwalk – Dorset Cereals

by Richard5 Comments

Gold Hill in Shaftesbury, Dorset. Location for THAT ad. Image courtesy of Andy Latt

I don’t know what I love most about the uber premium breakfast cereal brand, Dorset Cereals – the idea, the product, the packaging or the online experience. So you are just going to have to endure me whittering on about all of them.

26/02/2007Advertising

Dirt really is good

by Richard18 Comments

Image courtesy of LalliSig

Poor old Dirt is Good.

Everyone is turning against it – especially in the planning fraternity.

And why? Well it stands accused of the most heinous crime – it doesn’t work.

It may have strategist’s hearts a flutter but it is not shifting detergent – certainly in the UK.

Well I want to ride to it’s rescue and suggest the problem is squarely with the advertising. Not the executions but the role advertising is being asked, or has elected, to perform.

And I want to round off with the contention that ‘advertising is the new below the line’.

23/02/2007Advertising

Rumsfeld on the future of advertising

by Richard6 Comments

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Donald Rumsfeld at Princeton in the ’50s because I couldn’t bare to defile adliterate with an image of the man as we now know him.

I have started quoting Rumsfeld rather a lot.

Not the quote “I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started” nor the outstanding “Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.” Neither of these are much use in charting the un-navigated waters of marketing communications.

But this one.

“There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

You may pour scorn on him mangling our language and scrambling our brains but its sheer genius.

Or at the very least it helps articulate the relationship between advertising and digital agencies and their practitioners.

22/02/2007Uncategorized

The Brand Catwalk – Good Energy

by Richard3 Comments

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Image courtesy of Hans van Reenen

Brands help businesses fight the inexorable drift towards commoditisation – the point at which consumers can’t tell the difference between the offerings in the marketplace and can only choose on price.

And you don’t get much more commoditised than the UK energy market, where there is the square root of sod all to differentiate the miserable operations that try and claw out an existence in this market.

So price rules, especially in times of high wholesale energy prices.

However, there is one corner of the market where real difference is starting to emerge – green electricity tariffs and suppliers.