So we thought we'd write some Welsh ramblings for him, which we recorded in Chicago with his band improvising the music for each ramble. Which was kind of weird given you are supposed to make as much of the work as you can in Wales with Welsh talent. But not letting that get in the way is one of the reasons they are a great Client.

Sheep music 60 seconds

Dragons 60 seconds

LL's 60 seconds

Area 60 seconds

Enjoy the radio and I suggest you get yourself on that pitch - though Wiedens won't be letting go of it without a fight.

Comments (5)

One from the vaults

Lee Scratch Perry. Image courtesy of Ariel Publicity

The Guiness Extra Cold work is a great example of top quality thinking from the planner (I think it was Dave Cobban now the Planning Director of Wieden's in Amsterdam but I could be wrong) and then an inspired creative solution from Creative Director Jay Pond Jones.

The thought was that 'Guiness Extra Cold was a few degrees out from ordinary Guiness' which led Jay to the dub reggae legend (and inventor of the 'scratch' turntable effect) Lee Scratch Perry whose life and reputation is anything but ordinary.

It shows that a proper strategic idea doesn't emasculate creatives but helps them take a real leap away from a linear creative solution into the realms of the magical.

How easy it would have been to have written a strategy about Colder Guiness, and how dreary.

I think looking at them now I could do with a little more of a product focus but on the other hand its a campaign that ubderstood the demads of content way before most people were thinking about creating content properties.

There are loads of ads in the campaign, so here are just a few for you to enjoy.

And for a bit of Scratch at work here is a clip from a Jules Holland programme in the mid '80s.

Comments (5)

A new golden age for radio?

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.

According to these figures listening to the radio via the TV is storming ahead. 41% of UK adults listen to the radio with a digital TV, a figure that has more than doubled in the last 4 years, while 1 in 5 listen once a week or more. Incidentally this is one of the reasons why Sky launched their gnome product which allows wireless listening to your Sky enabled TV.

Perhaps surprisingly TV is ahead of the internet for listenership with 24% of UK adults listeninng online and 13.4% doing so at least once a week While just 8% of adults have so far listened to the radio via their mobile phones.

There also is some other interesting stuff on penetration of DAB and of MP3 players (now at 27.3% but with growth slowing) and the proportion of MP3 owners listening to podcasts.

More grist to my belief that agencies need to stop bundling together the TV and radio craft discplines and create a separate sound design practice to give this means of communication the respect that it clearly deserves.

Download the RAJAR presentation here

Comments (10)

Ethnicity - adland's forgotten mission

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.

Time was that advertising was held up as a paragon of virtue when it came to the representation of ethnic diversity, particularly in the UK.

Only five years ago ad people couldn't move without being invited to ethnicity forums to talk about the way in which advertising was helping to mainstream diversity.

It was all a bit bemusing because we weren't really used to being the good guys. Remember this was shortly after the less scrupulous people in the business had desperately tried to preserve the right to advertise tobacco and this had cast a shadow over the ethics of the entire industry, and still does.

But five years ago it felt like real progress was being made, specifically in the casting of non-white artists in principle roles.

In part this was because a number of agencies at that time (like HHCL and St Lukes) had strong liberal agendas. HHCL even won an award from the Commission for Racial Equality for its 'token black man' ad for egg, the online bank.

Sure there were still issues and inconsistencies. Ethnic casting was getting better but decisions over ethnicity were taken in pre-production so scripts weren't written about the lives or experiences of black or Asian Britons. At HHCL we caused a stir with our 'arguing Asian couple' ad for AA Insurance, but the truth was that the decision to make the couple Asian was taken quite a long way down the line. Much of this was because of the ethnicity of people working in advertising which is catastrophically unrepresentative of the population.

And we have to admit that egg and the AA were exceptions in the normaility of the products. Ethicity was a category specific issue and you were much more likely to see non-white people in ads for trainers or sports drinks than for cars or washing up liquid.

Then the pace of progress slowed to a halt. If you look at our screens these days you'd still get the impression that Britain was a white country, even in London where a third of the population are not white.

It's as if we all just got bored and something else new and shiny caught our attention. For some reason we are far more interested in whether our brand has a store in Second Life or its sodding carbon footprint of than whether its communications recognise the diversity of its customer base. Few clients have a grip on the ethnicity of their customers, research is still done mainly amongst white people (because white recruiters like recruiting white people), ads are almost always created by white people and 99 times out of a hundred they feature white people.

As a result Ad Britain looks far too much like the 1950s.

All we are left with are ill conceived parodies of black Britain like the ghastly work for Trident chewing gum, thankfully now banned by the ASA.

Comments (22)

Sorry Mum

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.

Sorry mum,
sorry mum,
I got dirty
I didn’t even notice
Where was my head?

I was distracted saving human lives
Feeding my daughter
Your daughter
Your grand-daughter, mum.

It happened while I was helping others
Leaving behind illogical fears
Here, I got dirty learning to have ideas of my own
Here, learning not to be selfish
To interact with others

Playing like this helped me
To notice how important is to help others
to not quit in the face of trouble

Sorry mum,
Getting dirty I reinforced my self-esteem
So in future I won’t let anybody
Carry me away.

You already know it
Mum, do you forgive me for getting dirty?
It wasn’t a very mature thing to do.

I promise you…
I promise you that I will do it again.

What they learn stays,
dirty goes away.
Ala (the equivalent to Persil)

Comments (18)

Dirt really is good

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'.

The latest barrage against Dirt is Good (DiG) came from the legendary Charlie Snow, planning director of the singing agency DLKW.

In an article for Marketing Magazine in the UK he wrote:

"I'm starting to build real doubts about the whole campaign. The evidence is stacking up against it. In all the research groups I've attended across the country in the past few years, I've certainly never heard anyone mention the fantastic Dirt is Good campaign. The brand's cut-through is being questioned, and if the share figures are to be believed, both value and volume have hit spin cycle"

Sales of Persil are in decline in the UK, on this very blog John Lowery has quoted a volume share decrease from 26.6% to 21.8% and a value decrease from 26.8% to 23.3%, over the last three years. And few planners have evidence of people taking this idea to their hearts out there in consumer land.

Surely it is time for Persil and Omo to ditch the dirt.

Well, I'm not such a fair weather friend of DiG - I still think that it is a wonderful strategy.

The Unilever website tells us that "The campaign was created to communicate the Persil brand's philosophy that children should be given the freedom to be creative – which leads to their learning and development – without worrying about getting dirty."

And as a parent of two pre-schoolers that is spot on for me. I know I need to let them get messier but that my overwhelming parental instinct is to minimise mess. So I want Persil to succeed - for me and my childrens' sake.

That is why I remain rock solid behind the strategic intent of Persil/Omo, it is the advertising I want to question.

Much has been made of the deficiencies of the creative work on DiG.

While it has got considerably better in its new home at BBH, in the past it has been overly dependent on a vignette style of advertising, which is what you do when you can't think of a creative idea. While I can't help feeling that the ads have lacked real emotional depth and so don't find their mark in the customer's heart - in other words the emotion is all on the screen not in the viewer. Still more evidence comes form the difficulty in finding the work online - its not exactly the toast of you tube.

But I'm not sure that a big brand film is what the TV should be doing for Persil.

All to often the temptation with TV is to provide a window on the whole brand idea. After all isn't that the heritage of great and hugely successful TV advertising, like CDP's classic Hovis?

But in a communications landscape that offers so many more ways and places for brands and people to engage in dialogue, TV may not always be the best medium in which to do the brand thing.

I would argue that the other stuff that Persi/Omo does, online and in people's lives are both better executed and better ways to make an idea like this come to life. There is the wonderful unitedkingdomofdirt microsite (with its 30 things to do before you are 10), a Corporate Social Responsibility programme built out of DiG, tightly knitted in promotions like the splat balls and a PR machine turning out stuff on play malnutrition. It is in these places that the DiG idea finds its most involving expression, not the TV ads.

So what I am really questioning is the role that the advertising has been given to deliver. Maybe it should be used in a far more focused way than dramatising the brand idea. And maybe in doing this Persil and its agency would start to resolve some of the concerns about efficacy. And I think the focus for advertising should be on the brand's promise.

You see, in my model of problem, position, promise and brand idea - the one I have been peddling ad nauseam, there is not only a requirement for the brand to have a point of view but for it to deliver a promise as well. This proves to the consumer that the brand is doing something about its position. And the reality is that while Persil delivers the position in spades in its advertising, the promise (that no matter how dirty they get Persil will get them clean again time after time) remains tacit and unsaid.

I know that focusing the advertising on the efficacy story doesn't sound sexy and will have creatives sobbing into their lattes but these days we have to be more disciplined about the tasks each communications discipline is asked to undertake.

And in this case I think advertising's job is too sell while other's build the DiG brand world.

And isn't that interesting. As a commerical endevour advertising's primary responsibility will always be to sell - whether immediately or over the long term. So maybe we will see advertising swapping places with some of the other disciplines (especially a brand's online experience) and take on a traditionally below-the-line mantle. In other words advertising will be at the sharp end of sales and digital, promotions, and PR doing the brand thing.

Just because there is a little confusion over the precise role for advertising on Persil, that may be causing a sub optimal performance, doesn't mean the idea is wrong and Unilever should just walk away from it as many of DiG's detrators seem to suggest.

Or are we saying that a strategy is only as good as the work the present agency of choice is able to rustle up?

Comments (18)

Rumsfeld on the future of advertising

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.

Clearly both parties know what they know about the other discipline. This knowledge may be clouded by prejudice, inadequate understanding and half truths on both sides but of one thing I am certain, I know what I know about digital. And of course those people in the digital space that hail from advertising have a more complete knowledge or what we do - albeit frozen in the late '90s.

And we are starting to figure out the stuff we know we don't know and making up for this through an ongoing talent swap. Advertising agenices are falling over themselves to attract digital parctitioners into the fold. Partly in the belief that the whopping great salaries that are on offer are a damn sight better value than the multiples they will have to pay if they try to buy the agencies these luminaries work for. And of course we are also seeing digital agencies bringing in strategic and production talent (particularly in TV) from the ad agenices where these skills have been honed over decades.

What fascinates me, however, is stuff that we don't know we don't know.

The more people I meet with, talk to and argue with from the digital side of the divide the more I realise that the real issue is I don't know what I don't know - and I suspect neither do you.

What I mean is that if you work in an ad agency exploration of the digital world is like playing a computer game where the map or terrain only becomes visible as you visit it. Every day I gain a better understanding of digital, and often about things that I previously had no idea happened or were important.

Of course few people on either side of the fence will admit to their lack of understanding but for me its a rather liberating idea. Instead of starting the conversation on the basis of the stuff you think you don't know about and need to have some help with, you start it in a spirit of complete openess. help me understnad the things I don't know I don't know.

And maybe it is a philosophy we should apply rather more often to the process of building strategy, particularly in pitch situations.

Thanks Donald. Shame about Iraq, but you have certainly helped to put my head straight.

I'm now off to wrestle with the stuff I don't know I know.

Comments (6)

The most important search engine is in our minds

A laboured analogy for the way search engine marketing works. Image courtesy of Glennfinlas

People are very keen on search these days.

Whether Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

It is not much of a business to be in (since it is becoming rapidly commoditised) but it's something every business should be into.

However, my view is that SEO and SEM should be viewed as a safety net and not a marketing panacea.

A recent comment suggested that search had replaced TV as the number one priority on the marketing plan.

This made me sad.

Sad that this assertion wasn't backed up with some evidence and sad because I'm not sure the obsession with search is altogether healthy.

Don't get me wrong, the TV thing is neither here nor there. I seek neither to fetishise nor demonise TV since both positions bore me rigid. No, it is the idea that if you are optimised in search all your problems will go away.

Search seems to do two things for a brand.

It gives you visibility in the natural searches that people make for terms that relate to your business and the services it provides.

And it gives you ownership of your brand name online if people decide to search you out.

Both of which strike me as hideously passive activities.

The first is remarkably random, a shit fight with all of your competitors to climb to the top of natural or paid for search around terms losely associated with your business. The whole endevour resembles a flock of seagulls following a plough in the hope of some juicy worms. And how many search terms is enough search terms?

The latter is a no brainer but its efficacy is rather dependent on whether anybody can be bothered to look you up.

Both are necessary but neither are sufficient.

The reality is that search optimisation of either colour should be seen as a safety net for a brand. It should be working as a final attempt to secure the attention of consumers if everything else has failed. But it is far better (and probably rather cheaper) if people approach their browsers with your brand already in pole position in their mental search engine - already ahead of the field because people know more about you and they care more about you.

That instead of searching for low cost air fares to Barcelona they are looking up BA.com or Travelocity.

And instead of searching for vehicle recovery services they are searching for the AA

And instead of searching for cheap home insurance they are checking out Norwich Union (yeah right)

After all how many of us search for 'book sellers' on Google rather than going straight Amazon?

Any monkey can buy up some search terms but the real value that marketers can add is making us care about the brand in the first place.

That's what we might call brand optimisation.

And thats what I want to do.

By the way for a more helpful and considered point of view on the role of search try out my favourite brand search consultants Hayward Carbery.

Comments (7)

Digital and TV sitting in a tree K.I.S.S.I.N.G.

People tend to rather bang on about the death of the 30 second television commercial.

It is unclear which bit they hate the most, the 30 seconds, the television or the commerical.

Obviously I am a big fan of the commercial element, I like being commercial.

I'm still rather unsure about the television component of course. I think that we have to accept that the potency of commerical messages added to the broadcast stream is being significantly challenged - by technology, by consumer behaviour and by media fragmentation. That said there is plenty of evidence that telly is in rather rude health at the moment - time shifting may spell trouble for advertisers but it is making TV a rather more enjoyable pastime. Indeed Nielsen have recently reported that in the 2005-2006 season television usage hit an all time high in the US at eight and a quarter hours a day.

But today I want to have a go at the idea that somehow creating 30 second bursts of 'broadcast' communication is at best moribund and at worst sexually deviant.

I want to argue that while digital media are beginning to offer brands an unparalleled means of immersing consumers in rich and often interactive brand experiences there is nothing quite like the 30, 40 or 60 second blast of message and meaning that comes from what we used to call a television ad.

Don't getting your knickers in a twist that they are linear in form and that they represent the brand in 'broadcast' mode - sometimes brands and consumers both need that. And sometimes it does the digital experience no end of good into the bargain.

I will stop going on about the Old Spice campaign shortly. But I strikes me that the reason that I persevered with the whole online experience was because I got what they were up to. And I got what they were up to because I had been subjected to their ad, once on a blog and once on the Old Spice site. In 60 seconds a single linear, non-interactive ad had primed me to forget everything I understood about a brand, put aside a truck load of cynicism, deployed a brand idea accurately and delivered up a brand personality all of which are essential to 'getting' and sticking with the online experience. Oh and I laughed too, not bad for 60 seconds work.

I think the PC and Mac ads work in a similar way. In the UK Apple have celebrated the launch of Windows Vista by reworking their combative US personification of PC and Mac with the comedians Mitchell and Webb.

Its not entirely clear why this was necessary as we Brits expect Mac to have a US 'accent' as provenance is part of the Apple story. Any road up here is a brand famous for design led communications that said little but made you feel good, resorting to good old didactic advertising that lands a punch with every outing. Our relationships with the Apple brand are extremely rich and complex but sometimes there is a place for communications that tell it like it is. And the added twist is that the regulatory environment in the UK prohibits these ads being shown on TV and so the promise of seeing them at all is being used to draw people to mac.com where the viewer can be subjected to the full on charms of Apple's online experience.

In a way short form ads, however they are delivered, are working not as a window onto the entire brand (like say CDP's classic Hovis work) but as the brand's storm troopers - going in fast and executing a specific task with ruthless efficiency. A sort of primer for the online experience to come and which promises to explain it all in more detail.

Ads do what digital experiences are poor at, delivering quick, accurate and often emotionally rich communications. Digital does what ads are bad at, immersing the consumer in the brand world and facilitating two way conversations between people and that brand.

Time to stand up for the 30 second commerical even if you are may be more likely to see it online than on the telly and time to recognise that ads and digital enjoy a marriage made in heaven.

Comments (11)

A kick in the teeth for LIP

Call me old fashioned but I like a nice bit of rational communication. I think that if you set out to persuade people of your brands qualities and point of view you ought to do just that, persuade them.

This requires active engagement from people towards the brand or communication, not just their passive attention.

However, in recent years, this model has been significantly challenged by the Low Involvement Processing school of communication.

And I began to think that I ought to raise the white flag on rational persuasion, especially as a superficial reading of some of the stuff coming out of cognitive neuroscience seemed to endorse LIP.

Not any longer I don't.

I had the pleasure of enjoying Millward Brown's hospitality last week as they presented some of the conclusions they have drawn from recent developments in cognitive neuroscience for the world of advertising.

They have been working with Jane Raymond (Professor of Experimental Consumer Psychology at the University of Wales Bangor) to understand what this scary new world might mean for us.

It turns out it might be good news those of us that believe in active persuasion.

Apparently the brain is organised into a hierarchy of specialised modules, at the top of which are three mega modules which represent information according to their specialism. Roughly they relate to Knowledge (concrete information associated with an object), Action (the actions that we associate with an object) and Emotion (the value of that object to us).

When required, information from these three mega-modules is integrated in the Mental Workspace. This is where we do our 'thinking' - when we are conscious of things, make decisions, place thinks into our long term memory, build further associations and control our voluntary actions. In other words the kind of stuff we want to happen as the result of communications.

But for this to take place information has to gain entry to your Workspace. And access to the Workspace is chronically limited - we can only think about 3-4 things at once less when it comes to more complex ideas. Incidentally at long last we have some proof that the hoary old Creative Director cliche about tennis balls may actually be true.

With information competing to be the subject of attention we must filter our the less relevant stuff. And as a result we sort information into four categories:

Attended - stuff that gets into the workspace to be acted on and integrated.

Passively ignored - stuff that is not in the workspace but ready to enter. It can enter the workspace quickly if required but if it doesn't its behavioural effects will be short-lived and subtle.

Actively ignored - stuff we must ignore as it is actively irrelevant and distracting to the task at hand. This is important because we emotionally devalue this information, causing negative reactions when we next come across it (a significant challenge for online advertising and urban spam).

Not registered - the vast majority of information available to us that is just edited out and therefore redundant.

If information gets through it then can be acted upon and a representation created - the currency of thought in the Workspace. Each representation has to have input from all three mega modules - knowledge, action and emotion and this process is what takes the time.

Indeed there is evidence that the whole thing takes so much time and effort that the brain literally 'blinks' having completed a representation which leads to attention blind spots. This has implications for the creation of linear communication like moving image or sound.

And this is the challenge to Low Involvement Processing. It is not that it doesn't exist or doesn't work, but that it is a cop out.

For us to do anything as a result of brand communication takes the brain to do a hell of a lot of work and uses up time and attention - time and attention that it could be devoting to other stuff.

It is our job to get people to devote scarce Workspace resources to our brand and its qualities and get our messages actively attended to.

If people do not actively attend to a piece of communication then it is left either passively ignored or actively ignored. In the first case LIP may help us but the effects will be subtle and short-lived. While if it is actively ignored you are just storing up problems for the future.

I know what effect I'd like my client's marketing expenditure to engender in consumers. You go low involvement if you want - I'm going to actively persuade them.

If you want to know more I'm sure the nice people at Millward Brown will let you in on their work (Graham Page is responsible for this aspect of their work) while ESOMAR carry the complete paper that he and Professor Raymond presented at the ESOMAR congress last year (payment required - how open source is that?).

Comments (15)

We are all doomed

I should probably say that this is data from the very wonderful TGI and they will probably ask me to take it down. But maybe if they realise that this is as blatant an attribution as I can create and you are all potentially extremely valuable clients for them they will be nice and give me an opensource break.

Comments (11)

I'm in love with IPTV

Men of the London Rifle Brigade meet the enemy in no man's land, Christmas Day, 1914 - the Christmas day truce between German and British soldiers at which fraternisation and football were the order of the day.

Sometimes, just sometimes people who are normally at each others throats lay down their arms and come together in a spirit of unity and common purpose

Last thursday David pulled together the tribes of WPP for a conference on Internet Protocol TV, which basically meant he dragged some of the brightest coolest people inthe IPTV space into a posh hotel for the benefit of dullards like myself to get up to speed with this stuff. That in a stroke is why WPP is a holding company Jim but not as we know it.

Anyway I'm now officially in love with IPTV as you should be dear reader. Not just the narrowcast distribution of content to our TVs (including addressable advertising - very exciting) but more significantly perhaps broadband TV channels working so far down the long tail they can monetise audiences that are smaller than people in the UK that admit to voting Tory (our Republicans).

If you are interested heres a bunch of stuff to get you going.

For one of the best examples anywhere of brand based IPTV visit Go Beyond TV. This is Land Rover's IPTV channel - part licensed content from Discovery and part self generated content.

At Barrio305.com you'll see an IPTV channel built round an audience not a brand - but well on its way to being a significant brand in its own right amongst Reggaeton fans in the Spanglish speaking world.

For a really simple example of IPTV you could do worse than taking a look at Momme.TV - delivering what is often user generated advice to mums and mums to be.

Jump.TV on the other hand doesn't actually create any content itself, but rather repackages ethic TV for migrants, immigrant communities and business travellers who crave a bit of home.

And these days its as easy as blogging frankly. Sure you could built the tech yourself as Go Beyond TV did but its far easier to pop along to Brightcove.com and set up an account. Brightcove provide the back end for loads of these channels delivering the site and handling the ad income if yours is an ad funded model.

The hard bit is the idea and the content.

Thats where we come in dear readers.

Truce over.

Comments (7)

What do advertising agencies do daddy?

Central though brand ideas are to the value we create for clients, advertising agencies have to be more than just idea shops. Ideas without expression serve very little purpose. Ideas have to reach the consumer in engaging and persuasive ways and that involves the agency actually producing something. However, it is high time that we defined the craft product of our agencies by the medium in which we work rather than the media by which it is distributed - TV, press, outdoor, radio, online and the like.

So here is my starter for a spot of restructuring

I reckon there are four core mediums in which active persuasion may be conducted and that any self respecting ad agency of the future should be competent in.

I call the first film. In truth this is simply because I like the word more than the phrase moving image which is what I mean. This is not, I repeat not, TV production, it is the discipline of creating brand films for Clients and frankly it is immaterial how these are distributed. Some will be seen as interuptive ads on television, some as films on the Client's IPTV channel, some will be viewed on websites or downloaded to portable devices, some will be consumed on mobiles and others will form branded content in more traditional media. But as moving image begins to dominate the digital space we must recognise that the brand film is in rude health even if broadcast TV is declining in influence.

Then comes sound. In the old model when we defined our product by media not medium, radio was the bastard child of TV. Production Assistants did a spot of radio when there wasn't a TV ad to shoot. Well I think its high time that the sound design discipline was separated from moving image and the appropriate respect was paid to aural commmunication - whether this is distributed in store, on the radio, online, as podcasts or downloads.

All two dimensional design whether analogue or digital and where images are satic or simply animated should be part of one integrated design discipline. Print, posters, websites, packaging, identity, in fact anyplace where strong two dimensional communication is the order of the day will come under this remit.

And finally there will be a separate discipine focused on creating and contributing to conversations where the principle craft skill will be good old fashioned copywriting - crafting persuasive messages in simple, elegant and memorable ways. These converstions would evidence themselves in PR, online communities, brand blogging, long form copy on websites and brochures, you know just anywhere where words make the difference.

Just a thought, I might get on with it anyway.

Comments (15)

CDP - the original new media agency

BBC 4 have a wonderful documentary on advertising they wheel out from time to time. It's called The Men from the Agency a looks at the contribution to popular culture (largely art and film) of four people who all worked together at CDP in the late '60s - Charles Saatchi, David Putnam and Alan Parker.

One of the most moving parts of the film is effectively an apology by David Putnam for the loose approach to ethics that dominated the industry right up to the '90s and revolved around the idea that it the product was legal it was legitimate to advertise it. This apology is significant because CDP were just as successful at selling fags as they were in selling everything else.

Of course today CDP is a shadow of its former self, but in its hey day it changed British advertising beyond recognition leaving a legacy that remained unchallenged until the likes of HHCL, St Lukes and Mother arrived on the scene 30 years later.

They constructed from scratch a definitively British approach to advertising that picked up the philosophy and approach of Bernbach and reinterpreted it for a Britain undergoing extraordinary social, political and economic change. For many people they and their descendants, agencies like Saatchis and Lowes, kept the Bernbach candle burning when it was almost completely extinguished in the US.

And in doing so they tamed two revolutionary new media - TV and colour print.

Though commercial TV had existed in the UK since the late 50s, CDP that made it work in an idiosyncratically British way - dispensing with sales and production techniques appropriated from America and learning a new approach better suited to British sensibilities - often experimenting by shooting commercials in the basement themselves.

Somewhat surprisingly quality colour print was even more of an emergent media in the late 60s than TV, pioneered by the Sunday Times Magazine which increasingly became a showcase for Collett's work - for Stella Artois, Harveys Bristol Cream and of course Olympus.

CDP 'got it', in as much as they understood the way people were changing and people's media landscape was changing as affluence rose and class structures declined in post war Britain.

It rather reminds me that, while many obsess that advertising is somehow wedded to specific media, in truth it is far more adaptable - jumping from media to media as their fortunes wax and wane in the consumer's lives and hearts.

And it often takes a new generation of agencies to achieve these paradigm shifts in the business with many established names and false hopes (those agencies that start up in the dying years of the old order but don't really get it) unable to adjust.

Just as in the late '60s advertising will emerge from the challenges that it faces at the moment. But it will emerge with a different set of agencies, skills and business models than those, though challenged in the '90s, that remain very much the same as when Saatchi, Putman and Parker left CDP.

And here is the seminal Hovis ad - it seemed rude not to.

And this book (as endorsed by the scary Paul Colman in the comments) tells the story rather better than I have:

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Opinionated Advertising

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Advertising 'junk food' to children

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Monopoly, magic and meaning - the enduring power of advertising

Monopoly, magic and meaning - the enduring power of advertising

In so many ways advertising is on the defensive.

For starters there is the proliferation of new marketing disciplines all of which add powerful new weapons to your armoury and demand that advertising share a little of the financial action.

That’s kind of understandable.

What is less flattering is the increasing degree of consumer disaffection with advertising. People didn’t always dislike the dark art, indeed way back in 1991 32% of all adults in this country believed that the ads were as good as the programmes. That figure is now languishing at 17% and has declined every year since the early ‘90s.

But to be honest this wouldn’t be a tragedy if we could guarantee that they were still paying attention. Who cares whether people like an ad as long as they are being communicated with? Well the bad news is that increasingly consumers are armed with technology, like Sky+, that allows them to fast-forward through the ads. Evidence from Forrester in the US suggests that 92% of all ads get zapped when watchced off a hard disk.

Sounds like we are up a certain creek without a paddle.

Well I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet. Far from it.

At best advertising is an extraordinary business tool and I still love it. In many resects - and to paraphrase Kathy Bates in Misery - I am advertising’s number one fan.

And as such I want to introduce you to my 3 M’s of advertising.

Now I’d like to suggest that I have been working on the 3 M’s for the past 5 years and they are the centerpiece of a new book on marketing that is shortly to be published and is likely to make me rich and hugely famous.

But the reality is that I made them up.

Or rather I have pulled together three ideas about the potency of advertising and added a neat little alliterative twist. But hey I’m a planner and that’s what we do.

My 3 Ms are Monopoly, Magic and Meaning

These do not represent the sum total of reasons why you should advertise but what advertising can uniquely deliver.

First up I want to talk to you about monopoly or specifically monopolies of the mind.

One of the first things that Tim Parker did when he joined the AA last year was to declare his intention to return to the positioning and strapline of the 4th Emergency Service.

He didn’t do this because the 4th Emergency Service is more famous than the ‘just AAsk’ campaign that was running or because he thinks that it will lead to better creative work. He did it because he knows the power of the campaign to fight the commodity conditions that bedevil his category.

At present there are over 100 organisations that can furnish you with breakdown cover, a low interest category, where every provider is seen to offer the same service and where purchase decisions are made almost exclusively on price. It’s tough to maintain a premium service with a premium price in these conditions.

However, while there may be 100s of breakdown cover providers there is only one 4th Emergency Service. When advertising talks about the AA in this light it creates a monopoly in the mind – an idea about the AA that actively fights substitution and justifies a premium. Its not a real monopoly – few of us will ever be fortunate to run a business in these conditions – but an effective monopoly that fights against the forces of commodification.

Advertising’s power to create monopolies of the mind in commodified markets is one of the principle reason any business should be excited about it.

The second of my M’s is magic and advertising’s lack of predictability.

In the middle of the ‘90s I worked on Its Good to Talk for BT – you know the advertising that almost destroyed Bob Hoskins career. It was another campaign in a long and distinguished tradition of call stimulation advertising that included Busby and Maureen Lipman’s nightmarish vision of motherhood – Beattie. However the effectiveness of ‘It’s Good to Talk’ was in a different league all-together. For every pound that BT spent behind the campaign it delivered six pounds to BT’s bottom line. Both Its good to talk and Bob’s observations about male phone behaviour became part of the vernacular of the late ‘90s.

But for all the success of Its Good to Talk this could never have been predicted. Because great advertising literally goes out of control – or rather out of our control.

And this is what I mean by magic. The strength of thinking and creativity that goes into the best advertising is a magical multiplier. This magic is what propels the brand’s message out of the ad break - which you pay for handsomely - and into people’s day to day conversations - that cost you absolutely nothing.

I’d go further and say that increasingly advertising’s role in the media mix is to act as a catalyst that ignites conversations about the brands we all represent. Catalytic advertising is all the more essential in this category where few purchase decisions are made in isolation, without reference to other people’s opinions whether they are IFAs, journalists or your mates.

So celebrate advertising’s magic and its down right lack of predictability. For one thing it means that the size of your budget isn’t the only determinant of success – smaller brands can walk tall with a sprinkling of the second M.

The third M is meaning.

When James Murdoch arrived to run Sky his appointment stunned the city. Not only were they sceptical about his ability, his youth and his surname but critically his intention to stem the decline in subscriber acquisitions by massively increasing his adspend. BSkyB shares lost 20% of their value on the day he announced the plan last summer.

By close of business on the 31st December 2004 the plan was paying off. Sky had acquired 192,000 net subscriptions in 3 months. This was the first quarterly increase in 18 months, it compared with just 62,000 subscriptions in the preceding quarter and totally outstripped city expectations.

It was direct response press, mail, inserts and online activity, that converted the lion’s share of these new subscribers. However, in the final quarter of 2004 these tried and tested approaches had a different context to operate in. This context was delivered by an entirely new approach to Sky’s advertising – the ‘what do you want to watch?’ campaign.

This campaign gave new meaning to Sky for hundreds of thousands of digital resisters and added impetus to the harder nosed acquisition activity. In particular it turned its back on sports obsessed ‘ransom note’ advertising in favour of work repositioning Sky as a more female focused entertainment brand.

The point is that the meaning that advertising can give a brand not only delivers success in its own right but it creates a positive context for all the brand’s activities and a more fertile environment for the other marketing disciplines to excel.

Love it or loathe it, you have to respect the HBOS Howard campaign. Not only has it directly driven more customers to the brand more efficiently but the other marketing disciplines have successfully fed off it from the reduced cost per response for direct mail to more column inches for PR.

Critically it also galvanized an enormous organisation over a short space of time in a way that no other marketing discipline could match. In fact the best advertising for living brands such as yourselves arguably pays back before it goes on air. By giving the whole company a clear sense of direction, pride in what they do and a standard to live up to – by giving your brand meaning to your people.

So there they are my 3M’s – monopoly, magic and meaning.

These are the achievements that advertising can deliver to your business that the other disciplines can’t touch. Monopolies of the mind help decommodify markets, the sheer magic of advertising can deliver a disproportionate return on investment whatever your budget. And the meaning that advertising can create provides a context for all your organisation’s activities.

Yes advertising is under pressure. It is also one of the most adaptive business tools at your disposal and when its good – its very very good, doing extraordinary things for brands and businesses.

But here is the catch. You see what I have described – my 3Ms of monopoly, magic and meaning – are nothing more than advertising’s promise. They are what advertising does at its best. Whether your advertising lives up to this promise only you can tell.

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