One of the 24 illustrations by Eric Ravilious for Highstreet published in 1938.

We are undertaking a major project in Saatchi & Saatchi at the moment on the future of the high street. While this is a subject that has been repeatedly dug over in the past couple of years as the high street has imploded in the UK, we have chosen to look at a very specific audience. Rather than turning to the retail experts, household shoppers, urban planners or politicians we have focused instead on young people aged 16 to 29. If the high street has a future then this is it. ]]> We have unearthed a powerful story about both the failure of the high street to meet the needs of this group and profound optimism for its future from these digital natives.

There are three fundamental things that young people are asking of the high street - social connection, local pride and opportunities for entrepreneurialism. And I have been giving a bit of thought to the first of these.

What gets me excited about the desire for social connection is when you move beyond urban planning solutions (seemingly always provided through copious seating and skateboard parks) and inside the retailers. The high street was always brilliant at ‘social’ as we now seem to call it - the authentic and engaged voice of the brand or business - after all this really was a place where everyone knew your name. But the truth is that modern retail has destroyed the sociability of the high street replacing it with something that is far easier to control from head office - service.

Now I am not arguing for one minute that service isn’t important in retailing along with the other elements of the retail trinity - value and quality. But that service has squeezed out sociability and that without it the high street really doesn’t have a hope since it can’t do value, range, or many aspects of quality or service as well as online or out of town. Nowadays a trip to your so called Sainsbury’s Local or Tesco Express can take place with absolutely no human connection whatsoever as you choose and pay for your goods on your own. And the fact is no one minds because the value of the social connection that preceded it was so low automated check out didn’t really make things any worse.

Of course there is a place where brands are tentatively experimenting with being more sociable, in social media. Of course this is proving profoundly difficult precisely because sociability runs counter to the instincts of big brands and businesses. However, I believe that the real revolution in social will come not when brands are sociable in social media (important though this is) but when they crack sociability face to face and specifically in their high street presence.

And one of the exciting things about this is that its can’t be solved with more data. In many respects the key to great service online, out of town or on the high street is great data but it is bugger all help in improving sociability - that is a deeply human skill that algorithms will never be any good as the principal requirement is humanity.

A rapid injection of sociability is not a panacea to solve the problem of our dying high street but an important part of the solution that differentiates this essential part of our daily lives from the retail alternatives.

Image courtesy of freefotouk

2012 may not have be greeted by the industry with a great deal of enthusiasm, after all the big Olympic event that should have marked the end of our economic woes will now merely record their nadir. Nonetheless, it is a fresh, crisp, virginal new year so not only is it ripe and full of possibilities it is also as yet unsullied by much ghastliness from the advertising world.

So with this fresh start in mind I would like to make a plea, a plea that we have a quiet word with ourselves about social media. And in particular that we offer rather better advice to our clients in this arena than we evidently mustered in 2011 – given the social media fare that we allowed to pollute people’s lives last year. ]]> The industry may be falling over itself to set up social media units, hire social media strategists, attend the multitude of social media conferences and devour the outpourings of the blogosphere and that’s all well and good. However, it doesn’t seem to be having much effect on output.

The involvement of most brands and in the social media lives of the public remains clumsy, inept and disrespectful. Driven, it seems, by a profound misunderstanding of our place in this world, our importance in people’s lives and the basic question that we should have learned a long time ago ‘why would anyone give a fuck?’ As my girlfriend incredulously remarked over the Christmas break, ‘how sad do you have to be to ‘like’ a brand on Facebook?’

So I thought we might make a little pledge, a pledge to eradicate crimes against social media that we are either perpetrating or more dangerously, allowing to take place on our watch.

In 2012 we pledge not to:

1) Bribe people to ‘like’ or follow our brands. Engagement with a brand must be driven by affection or admiration and if the truth is that you are short of either its not a social media campaign you need it’s something rather more fundamental.

2) Accept or set social media metrics as the KPIs for a campaign. We must demand an end to briefings that include arbitrary number of likes, views or followers as campaign objectives. While these are indicative of popularity they are only a means to an end and can never be the end in itself, we need to prove the value of these relationships.

3) Ask people to do something that we wouldn’t ourselves want to do or that requires effort far greater than the reward. It sounds bleeding obvious but how come we so very rarely learn this lesson and continue to ask people to confess, upload and create for us?
4) Desperately try and start online conversations with vapid inanities - you know the kind of thing ‘we love lemon cupcakes, what’s your favourite cupcake?’ If this were the conversational style of a real friend we would punch them repeatedly in the face.

5) Collude in the idea that social media campaigns provide a cheap or even free way to have a constant dialogue with customers and prospects. Providing constant content of sufficient quality is extremely difficult to pull off and it’s rarely cheap – though we need to develop new production models in order to deliver this and ensure that the task doesn’t fall to the PR agencies for reasons of cost.

6) Create mediocre content hoping that it’s going to ‘go viral’ – even worse paying someone to seed mediocre content. People only engage with content that is either useful or utterly delightful and delivering this takes a set of skills that we possess in spades but need to learn to deliver more consistently.

So let us commit ourselves to eradicate these and many other crimes against social media and help ensure that in 2012 social media marketing not only comes of age but grows up.

All great marketing solutions start with a well and accurately defined problem and a correct diagnosis of the course of action that needs to be followed. So I thought I’d talk a little about this to kick the new year off in a back to basics style.

There is a very basic diagnostic tool I want to share with you that works a treat at the very start of a project and ensures that you are directing your efforts in the right and most profitable direction. ]]> It involves asking whether you think the real problem that needs to be solved, the blockage that needs to be opened up, is a product, brand or communications problem.

And the starting point is to scrutinise the product, service or occasionally business - to ask whether the problem lies at the product level.

A problem with the product is pretty fundamental. This indicates that in some way what the consumer is being presented doesn’t work for them - whether because of performance, pricing, distribution/accessibility. It may well be that you can’t do much about this - certainly in the short term but it is nonetheless valuable to know as you try to put your plans in place that they will always be compromised because you are not bringing the right product to the consumer. I worked on Pot Noodle for a while in the early part of the last decade. While magnificent work has been done at both brand and communications levels to help Pot Noodle the fundamental problem is at a product level. It’s not that some people don’t love Pot Noodle - they do - but the market for dehydrated soya protein snacks is literally drying up. The product needs re-formulating if it’s not to die out altogether.

If there appears to be no fundamental product issue it is time to move on to the brand. Is there something about the brand and specifically people’s relationship with or beliefs about that brand that are holding sales back. Many perfectly good products are compromised by unhelpful brand associations that ensure their popularity is not far greater with predictable effects on sales. One of the classic examples of this in the automotive category was, of course, Skoda. Under new ownership product quality had been transformed, however perceptions of the brand dated back to the cold war era. Or to be specific brand associations amongst Skoda buyers had been improved through experience but the jokes about the brand persisted in the wider group of influencers and this was having a detrimental effect on sales. Skoda had to deal with the brand problem first and foremost.

And finally if it’s not a product or brand problem it’s probably a communications problem - that the communications for the brand are not telling the right story, working in the right way or targeting the right people. In a sense this is to be welcomed as it’s a damn site easier to sort out a brand’s comms than the brand itself the product or business at it’s core. In the first half of the last decade Cadbury weren’t doing particularly well. This had nothing to do with the product (people adored the taste of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk) though that didn’t stop them spending time, energy and valuable distribution on NPD. And quite obviously there wasn’t really a brand problem either - Cadbury’s place in the affections of the nation was secure and the nature of its brand associations rich and robust. Its problem was with its communications - they were simply failing to inspire people and successfully communication the joy at the heart of the brand. That all changed in August 2007 thanks to that drumming Gorilla. Of course the communications solution required may not be about or only about the content you create. It could well be the audience you are targeting, the channels that you are using or the brief at the root of your campaigns - the selling idea that you are employing. If the requirement is to create behaviour change finding the trigger for change is often at the heart of the matter - I’m still a big fan of the Metropolitan Police campaign that set out to recruit high calibre candidates by communicating that 999 out of 1000 people could never be police officers.

Now, you might find all this simplistic, old hat or old fashioned. But it doesn’t half help me right up front to understand and show where the problem lies. I used it at the beginning of our journey on WeightWatchers to show that there was no fundamental product problem at hand and that while its communications could be better they were quite successful for what they were. What was holding WeightWatchers back as a business were perceptions of the brand among people that had never tried the programme, and that is what they needed to sort out.

Late last year I was asked to give a talk at the IPA, along with the brilliant Rachel Barrie (from sister agency Fallon), about content driven campaigns. Rachel talked about her experiences working on Gorilla and I talked about our learnings from T-Mobile Dance - both IPA award winners in 2010. It was a rather informal Q&A affair and so there are no charts but in an attempt at prep I scribbled down a few lessons I think that we have learned from our T-Mobile experiences and perhaps more latterly from WeightWatchers. So here they are with the minimum explanation.]]> 1. The more you let go of control the more influence you gain - easy to say but hard to achieve. The long and short is the less it feels like an ad the further it will go

2. Drive mass participation or mass viewership of participation - never settle for marginal reach the only point of doing something is to do it big

3. Emotion is the highest form of participation not clicks or likes

4. The magic of creative development almost always happens in production – this makes the work phenomenally difficult to test

5. Don’t get too poncey about the idea - usually the idea is the hero piece of content and that's what you should integrate with rather than a broader communications idea. The dance campaign wasn't about people dancing in public spaces it was about 'that' dance.

6. Perfect context magnifies perfect content - you just need to look at the success of T-Mobile's Royal Wedding to see this in action

7. Excellence wins – excellence of idea and execution, excellence doesn’t come from the crowd

8. Catalyse always – always seed and never forget the power of TV

9. What do you love? – that’s always the best guarantee for success

10.Always ask yourself why anyone will be bothered to share? – bonding, group identity, status or more often, pure wonder

Image courtesy of SonOfJordan.

For those of you frustrated by the lack of sense my trends presentation makes when you only have the charts, here is the story. I wrote it as a column for Brand Republic so its not identical but covers much the same ground.

And when they are not being pressed into service to reassure us that everything is going to be fine, trends also offer us all a little light relief, because lets face it the average trends presentation is down right hilarious. This is, after all the natural habitat of the portmanteau, that linguistic flourish invented by Lewis Caroll in ‘Alice through the looking glass’ but so beloved by the trend watching world. Whenever life gets a little hairy you can always chortle to yourself over gems like tribefacturing, engageonomics, materialism and other such abominations so ludicrous that they send your spell checker into spasms as you type them.

So given their pretence to predict, their power to reassure and their ability to entertain it’s no wonder that marketers love a good trend. However, call me old fashioned but I can’t help feeling that while trends are trendy, it is insights that really get stuff done. And it is insights rather than trends that we should all be reaching for as times get tough. Insights like the one that underpinned the AA’s legendary 4th Emergency Service positioning and so profoundly built the business in the mid ‘90s.

Of course as we all secretly know, the problem with really great insights is that, like the White Rhino, they are almost completely extinct in the wild. The sad truth is that for all the research departments that have been rebranded ‘consumer insight’; all the boxes marked ‘insight’ on client brand diagrams; and all the words on agency creative briefs about ‘insight’, real insight is very, very rare. Just because you call it an insight doesn’t make it one.

I can ‘t help feeling that this is a problem of definition. Not the lack of definitions for insight but the fact that there are far too many, most of which wallow around in the nebulous and uninspiring world of consumer or brand truths. What we are in desperate need of is a new action standard for insight. Much like the universities demanded A stared A level grades so they could tell who the really clever kids were, we need a new way to determine whether what we have in our hands is gold dust or guano.

That’s why at Saatchi & Saatchi we use the word revelation in place of insight. This isn’t yet another definition it’s an action standard that demands people raise their game and their expectations when it comes to finding and delivering insight. A revelation does exactly what it says on the tin, it insists that what follows is in some way an astonishing disclosure about people, the brands they engage with or the wider world. No revelation, no insight, it’s as simple as that.

And how to you find revelations? Well I have a few handy tips to help you on your way.

Firstly and simplest of all, ask yourself does it sound and feel like a revelation to you? Is what you have found, been told about or read truly an astonishing disclosure or is it a statement of the bleeding obvious ?

Secondly, real revelations live in the real world not in viewing facilities or behind one-way glass. They show themselves in the day-to-day lives of your customers as much to be observed as reported on. Get out and understand what your customers really care about and what is actually going on in their lives.

Thirdly, in the words of that great marketing commentator, Donald Rumsfeld, look for the unknown unknowns. Revelations will come from the least expected places not simply from finding the answers to questions that you already have – look for the things that you didn’t know, you didn’t know.

And finally the truth is that much that claims to be insight in the world of marketing is actually corporate wishful thinking that over estimates the importance of a brand or product in people’s lives. The route to revelation is through banishing vanity and accepting the honesty and rawness of genuine insight.

Enjoy the conferences, articles and presentations about the killer trends for 2012, but remember two things. Try as I might can’t find a single presentation on trend predictions for 2008 that contained the phrase ‘global economic cataclysm’. And remember that it’s genuine and behaviour changing insights – revelations even – that offer the best protection and opportunity for our brands in the coming year.

My new rubber stamp. If there is enough interest I might get some more made.

I gave a talk at Haymarket's Trends Plus conference this week. I'm sure it was a wonderful shindig - the speakers I saw were excellent - but I couldn't help feeling a bit contrary about a conference on trends. I've never had much truck with the 'cool hunting' fraternity, about predicting the future and about making money out of stating the bleeding obvious. Or for that matter from Portmanteaus - the ghastly habit of sticking two perfectly good english words together to make a new word that is both ridiculous and unnecessary. You know the sort of thing maturialism, tribefacturing, the statusphere, or engageonomics. Anyway here is the presentation. As usual it makes very little sense without the talk that goes with it, but you might get something out of it. Slideshare have been kind enough to feature it on their home page today.]]> What's so good about trends?

Howard Gossage posing for a Land Rover ad to promote seat belts on the basis that they made you look like a fighter pilot. Image courtesy of Adbuzz.

I have always felt it’s important to honour and respect the legends of our business. The Ogilvys, Bernbachs, Abbotts and Hegartys. Whatever one might think of their work now its clear to see that they were revolutionaries on their own times.

But there is one legend that rarely gets the recognition that he deserves, certainly on this side of the pond and that’s Howard Gossage. There are a few devotees, especially in the planning community, but his contribution to our business and the world beyond is not as well known as it should be. ]]> Gossage came to advertising relatively late, founding his own agency in San Francisco aged 37 in an old firehouse in Chinatown. While Bernbach was making a stand against scientific advertising (or sciency advertising as Douglas Holt calls it) on the East Coast, Gossage took it head on in the West but with an output far more unusual and quirky. In away it puts me in mind of an HHCL of the sixties especially when you consider ads like the one for Fina Pertroleum in which he announces that they are to introduce pink air to inflate your tyres in a snub at the way other oil companies were constantly advertising strange new additives to their fuel. The Fina ads have the best call to action of all time in the sentence “The next time you are driving down the road and the station is on your side so you don’t need to make a U-turn and there aren’t six cars waiting and you need gas or something, please stop in”. He was also particularly fond of giving away stuff (like one size fits all Beethoven sweatshits for Rainier Ale) and his legal copy is a wonder to behold. The LA Creative Club has a wonderful sampler of his work here.

Howard Gossage's ad for the Sierra Club put an immediate stop to the US Government's plan to flood the Grand Canyon. Image courtesy of Bachspics.

However, he not only tore up the advertising rule book, he also was enormously influential beyond the world of communications, not only introducing an obscure Canadian academic called Marshall McLuhan, to a wider world but also helping to create Friends of the Earth having successfully opposed the plan to flood the Grand Canyon. As Gossage said “changing the world is the only fit work for a grown man”.

Anyway this story has also captivated a guy called Ashley Pollack a creative director and filmmaker who is making a feature length movie about Howard Gossage’s life. This is the trailer.

The Socrates of San Francisco: Howard Luck Gossage from ETIO on Vimeo.

However, the film is not quite finished so Ashley is also trying to raise £50k through the film and ideas funding website IndieGoGo. We wish Ashley well in making this cultural legend a little less overlooked.

Image courtesy of Rebecca Ellen

I have always been deeply suspicious of targeting in advertising.

I don’t really mean the practice of placing communications, engagement and utility into the lives of the people most likely to buy. That does seem pretty sensible. No, the thing that bugs me is an obsession with targeting and optimisation that either elevates this above the quality of what you create in that ‘space’ or sees it as the holy grail of advertising. Because the reality is that the theory of targeting is always far more compelling than the reality of it. ]]> I have always worried that over optimisation can lead to long-term brand and business damage because tomorrow’s prospects are never primed. Indeed this kind of targeting seems to have the primary effect of driving a brand underground where only those people thoroughly acquainted with it are ever touched. Loads of brands could absolutely do with a big dose of wastage so that a broader audience feels their presence – that’s one of the enduring joys of outdoor as a medium.

Then I got mildly concerned about the concept of addressable advertising that was ushered in by the set top box. This promised the ability to serve TV advertising at the postcode level using profiles of those areas to make sweeping generalisations about the audience viewing. The prospect of mainstream advertising becoming as irritating as database driven marketing filled me with horror but fortunately this doesn’t appear to have got much further than titillating the geeks at technology conferences.

But the thing that really gets my goat right now and is cut from the same presumptuous and arrogant cloth is search driven digital display. Clearly a whole bunch of people at digital agencies, client marketing departments and places like Google are cock-a-hoop at the cunning wheeze of serving you ads for things you have searched for recently. I mean why wouldn’t they be since they are all disciples of the targeting cult? Don’t get me wrong I understand that the idea of knowing what people want to buy before you serve them an ad is genuinely revolutionary. Or at least it would be if it actually worked.

The trouble is that all targeting makes assumptions about people and the harder that you try to make them the greater the likelihood that you will fall flat on your face.

John Lewis are up to it right at the moment. I recently searched for children's pyjamas on johnlewis.com and so they are currently using their display to serve me advertising for children's pyjamas, suggesting pyjamas that I might like to buy. Constantly. I can’t get away from advertising for children’s pyjamas. The problem is I made that search and bought the pyjamas two weeks ago. I don’t need any more children’s fucking pyjamas and it’s starting to get on my tits. Someone somewhere thinks they are being bloody clever but actually they are being fucking dumb and in attempting to target their advertising so well they are wasting their cash and pissing off their customers. Its like a digital equivalent of stalking or what it would feel like if you popped down John Lewis and bought something and then some bloke arrived at your doorstep two weeks later trying to flog you exactly the same thing.

You see the ultimate problem with targeting is that for all the assumptions the hardest thing to do with any accuracy is to tell when people are in the market and why they are there. You can’t know that and the more you try the more irritating you become. Direct mail was bad enough but digital takes it to a new level of annoyance. To bastardise John Lewis’s endline this is advertising that appears to be never knowingly relevant.

Tango, undoubtedly Jon Leach's most famous planning hit, or was that the 4th Emergency service?

I don't often get to APG talks, to my eternal shame. However, yesterday I made a point of trucking up to the eternal ghastlyness of the Bloomsbury Holiday Inn for Jon Leach's talk on the mathematics of creativity. ]]> Jon has been working on this idea for a while now, whether you can explain any of the things that we intuitively believe to be true about our business using mathematics. The belief being that this would allow us to communicate the method in our seeming madness to our left brained colleagues - namely CFOs and Management Consultants.

Of course I love the substantiation that brainstorms are pointless because the social cost of interacting with so many people defeats the marginal increases in creativity that greater numbers bring. The ideal number of creative thinkers in a room being four.

And he talks about the need to find one in a thousand ideas because only the one in a thousand ideas have the power to stay in the mind and act on people for months into the future before decaying. Which is nice because it kinda justifies why we need time to think and create in agencies which often frustrates clients - because we are having to come up with hundreds and hundreds of ideas in order to find the one that is extraordinary.

Anyway he talked about an formula for running a successful creative business which I also really liked.

1) Create a preponderance of ideas in the risky (or chaotic) zone
2) Spot the gems and develop them just enough to knock off the rough edges
3) Stop before you grind them to dust

While this seems easy peasy, at every stage you need enormous amounts of experience and judgment to make the approach work. The sheer quantity of work out there that has never visited the chaotic zone of creativity and if it has, has been so sanitised by second guessing and testing is ample proof that these are rare qualities indeed.

So thank you Jon. Your talk was kind of geeky, but then us planners are the geeks of the ad business.

Image courtesy of Mike 926

I have just finished reading Creative Mischief by Dave Trott. I think its really rather good. He is a first rate storyteller with a no nonsense approach to business, brands and communication. He reminds us that we can get too obsessed with the new and newfangled and bypass common sense – you could read a load of stuff on neuroscience or simply remember that when selling its quite a good idea to create desire and give people permission to buy.

Which brings me to the new BA campaign – to fly to serve – by BBH.

I literally can find no one on this good earth that has a kind word to say about this work. I suspect that it hasn’t been turkeyed by Campaign magazine only because that’s very much against protocol where BBH are concerned – it would be like swearing in front of the Queen. Everyone thinks this work is shit. Shit idea, shit production values, shit VO from the Mastercard bloke that used to be in This Life and shit music.

Well I think this response smacks just exactly of the lack of professionalism of which Mr Trott speaks. Because it’s not shit, this campaign is precisely what the brand needed. Don’t get me wrong, it would have been better if this work had been made with any sort of executional panache but that alone doesn’t make it he wrong thing to have done.

Putting the BA pilots on a pedestal and invoking the power of the motto ‘to fly to serve’ is exactly the right approach. This after all is a brand struggling to elevate itself above the competition (or maybe even approach their altitude) that has suffered from a gruesome industrial relations episode and is up against the likes of Virgin at the cheeky chappy end of things and Emirates on the ring-a-ding bling end of things.

You see if I was having a go at the BA problem I'd start with the idea that Britain is no longer proud of BA, that its broken that bond and needs to get it back. Starting a journey on the back of the pilots feels like a smart way to go about this - assuming that there are some real changes afoot at the airline.

Indeed at a push I might almost call the campaign a 4th Emergency service kind of approach to positioning the airline. Because making successful work is not just about the pretty pictures, shock horror, its also about the means by which people change their behaviour in a category and that’s not down to executional prowess.

All of which puts me in mind of a little trick that the ex-HHCL planner Dave O’Hanlon taught me. I know I have talked about this before but it remains very handy in these situations. When you come across work that you hate, imagine that someone then pipes up that it is working brilliantly and then work out why on earth this might be given you dislike it so much.

Now that’s the kind of professionalism that even Trotty might appreciate.

Downstream - where planning is heading. Image courtesy of SunnyUK

I had the absolute privilege of judging the Account Planning Group Creative Strategy awards recently. I love the APG Awards, they showcase real planning and great planners in a way that the other so called planning awards do not. And for me this year saw a return to form for the awards. In all there were 26 presentations from some of the best in the business, delivered in person, which is one of the reasons the awards are so special – for planners and judges alike.

That said I think there was a clear difference in this year's papers and presentations. A lot less brand planning (though there are some splendid examples) and a lot more micro-planning. I have no problem with the downstream approach to planning, it has always represented proof that the planner is more than a brief writing machine and is capable of and welcome to bring their skills to bare on the more executional facets of a campaign. This is particularly the case when real time planning is required as a campaign unfolds and evolves.

That said it seems a shame to me if planners are walking away from, or unable to deliver, ‘upstream’ brand planning. Planning that either repositions a brand in the marketplace (such as Matt Boffey’s Lurpak work or Craig Mawdsley’s Sainsbury’s thinking which both won in 2007) or shapes a communications campaign with a clever reframing of the problem or sharp proposition (think Richard Storey’s Met Police campaign or Stuart Smith’s Positive Hate thinking for Honda).

So why are we seeing a lot less brand planning and a lot more micro planning? Indeed this year’s particular theme was the selection and prioritisation of celebrities according to their social media reach. Worthwhile but not really award winning. Personally I don’t think it’s the quality of our planners, I rather suspect it is the quality or nature of the briefs that we receive and in particular the pitch briefs that we get.

Once upon a time in a land far, far away clients would issue pitch briefs with the commercial problem they were seeking to solve and ask a selection of agencies at the top of their game to answer that problem by any means they felt necessary to meet the objective. That was a brilliant time for planners because our role was to work out how to use brand and communications and their meaning and content to change people’s behaviour and thus solve the problem. That’s why Craig Mawdsley’s Sainsbury’s paper is so good and won a Grand Prix, it starts with a commercial problem and shows why asking people to try something new today would and did deliver incremental sales to Sainsbury’s.

However, this kind of pitch has become rarer and rarer. For one thing the this shoddy Government has turned its back on communications led behaviour change after decades of success in doing this – there were a lot fewer UK Government papers this year (though notably the Governments of Iceland and Columbia both retain a faith in what we do). But more importantly Clients are arriving at our doors having done the planning bit – whether this is good, bad or indifferent. Often this has been with some kind of branding agency or research company and it’s rarely that edifying. Clearly every client has the right to do this but it means that Agencies are given briefs to execute work to a brand idea not to solve a commercial or social problem. In one pitch this year the planning had been done entirely at the previous incumbent and then the creative brief shipped out to a selection or new agencies – which must still stick in that planners throat, especially as the thinking was award worthy but severed from the creative work by the review.

Micro-planning, downstream and real time planning have all been a welcome addition to the capabilities and remit of the strategist. However, these approaches should have been in addition to our role in providing the first moment of transformation in a brand’s future or in the success of its communications rather in replacement of it. Call me old fashioned but I’d still prefer to be delivering exciting new futures for brands not just fiddling with the execution of the creative work.

The APG Awards are announced on Thursday 6th October.

Think Small. This version by Helmut Krone and Bob Levenson.

I have just received the most delightful book in the post from Switzerland. 'Think small, the story of the World’s greatest ad', written by Dominik Imseng, tells the full story of DDB’s iconic Think Small press advertisement for the VW Beetle. And the emphasis is on the word 'full' here since it traces the journey that brought this ad into existence back to the birth of both Bernbach and the Beetle. One in to a Jewish family in the Bronx and the other to the world’s most infamous anti-semite in Berlin. No matter how well you think you know this ad and the campaign it launched, im telling you, you only know half the story.

For starters it’s small and chunky, a bit like the Beetle, its format is landscape like a 48 sheet poster, and it’s set in Futura like the original VW ads. As Roberts also says, the threadsewn binding being on display, with no hard back or dust cover, “reflects the honesty of Think Small”. The result is a book that looks and feels as good as it reads.

And it is a good read. For anyone with an innate fascination for the genesis of the creative revolution in 1960s adland, this book offers a glimpse into the moment of conception of that revolution’s most famous ad. A glimpse that goes beyond the stuff of advertising folklore because it uses first hand accounts from some of the surviving characters in the story from Julian Koening and Bob Levenson (the two copywriters involved in the many iterations of the ad) to George Lois and Carl Hahn (the client at VW).

And why should you care? I mean it’s a press ad that’s half a century old for a product and campaign that have long ceased to exist.

Well I guess for me it’s about understanding where we have come from and why we think the things we think and do the things we do. It’s so easy to dismiss our past or to see it as irrelevant and old fashioned. I was at a D&AD talk recently and showed a bunch of students the Pregnant Man ad Saatchi’s created for the Health Education Council in the early ‘70s. Though this is one of the first uses of an conceptual idea to communicate a powerful public service message and is regarded as one of the finest pieces of creative thinking of that or any other era, they couldn’t have been less interested. And I’m sure their eyes would have similarly glazed over if I had talked about the meticulous, not to say obsessive, efforts Helmut Krone went to to perfect the art direction on Think Small. And I think that’s a shame. The solutions on display in this work may seem tired and outdated (although some of the best DDB VW work still appears startlingly fresh to me) but the ambition to rewrite the rules, challenge orthodoxy and create better, more intelligent work certainly isn’t. We call it the creative revolution because a revolution is exactly what it was and whether we acknowledge it or not it shaped the world view of most people in this business. For that reason alone it is worth understanding how this work came about and what it took to make it happen, so that we may do the same thing in our own era.

Nice emergency service, shame about the brand extrension. Image courtesy of Ruth Flickr.

The Peter Principle maintains that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence" in other words as long as people remain competent they continue to be promoted until they reach a level of incompetence where they stay. I think the same thing happens with businesses and brands, they continue to expand their scope of operations and to stretch their brand until they reach a level of incompetence thus threatening all the respect and love they have diligently earned over the years. In other words the brand facilitates extensions that through operational incompetence then compromise loyalty to that brand in its core operations – what is technically known as an ‘own goal’.]]> There are a couple of brands I have had dealings with recently that are guilty of the Peter Principle, Boots and the AA. I have enormous amounts of respect and love for both these brands – they might almost qualify as lovemarks given that both enjoy a considerable amount of loyalty beyond reason from me. Both are in a perfect position to generate additional revenue from this relationship through brand extensions because I’m kinda up for it. However, both have threatened this core relationship through the operational incompetence of a new service.

Boots is a mass-market healthcare and wellbeing retailer. Like many retailers at the moment it is facing extremely tough competition most especially from the supermarkets, so added value services look attractive because they promise higher margins than the day to day business of selling toothpaste. Hence the rapid expansion of the optical offering from Boots. Boots started to offer optical services in 1983, however, until recently it has been a very small part of their operation and they weren’t a significant presence in the market. However, in 2009 Boots acquired D&A for a nominal sum creating a real rival to market leader Specasavers and an estate of over 600 optical stores (somewhat reduced with the ultimate closure of the D&A operations). At a brand level optical services appear to make sense for Boots as it has a medical tradition through its pharmacy heritage and it’s a brand built on legendary levels of trust from consumers. And while I am not a customer by choice but because boots bought me in the D&A purchase my relationship with Boots means I am quite comfortable with taking optical advice from the brand. That is until one actually experiences the service or lack of it. The opticians themselves are still very good, they have to be as they are professionally qualified but the people and systems around them are a disaster area of epic proportions. Poorly trained staff using very poor systems compromise the service of opticians whose churn rate is so high that good opticians from round the network have to be parachuted into branches for a few days a week to stabilise the practice and the customer base. I had one delightful moment recently when I had been asked to come back for a contact lens check up in a couple of weeks by the optician but couldn’t book an appointment because the rotas hadn’t been done for that week. The operational incompetence of an organisation that is bloody brilliant at retailing but has no experience or expertise in service has compromised not only the success of the new operation but also my relationship with the core brand.

There is a similarly sorry tale over at the AA. This has not been a happy organisation since its demutualisation over a decade ago but the breakdown operation (once dubbed the fourth emergency service) is still phenomenal and while this ought to be a commodity insurance purchase somehow how for me it still isn’t. When I need help I want that yellow van and that patrolman or woman with me by the roadside – and I pay for the privilege of my brand convictions. So it must have seemed an absolute wheeze to create a home repair and servicing offering. After all they know when a repair is required because a patrolman was called out to rescue the driver and they have a gargantuan database of car owners all of whom need their cars regularly serviced. AA home repair and servicing should be a killer app for the AA and an important new source of revenue. The trouble is that the operation is shockingly poor from the first call to the call centre to the shouting match once the whole job has been botched. Again this is not a brand issue – the brand should be able to offer this service effortlessly, its an operational one – the organisation is not set up to offer this kind of customer care. The AA is an emergency service, they are brilliant at responding immediately to a breakdown and then doing just enough to get you going again if this is possible or get you to a garage and your family home if it isn’t. They aren’t about booking you in to the system a week in advance, working round your life when your car isn’t a top priority, following up on enquiries, getting back to you and all those tedious things we expect from a service organisation. Service of this sort is simply not in their blood in the way I’m fire fighters hate popping round to check your smoke alarms.

In both cases the business is operating in territory the brand facilitates but the core competencies of the organisation do not. And this ought to be a lesson to any marketing department hell bent on innovation and eagerly eyeing up its brand and its capability for stretch. For the truth is that these day’s brands are often far more flexible than the companies behind them and that often the inevitable outcome of innovation is to confirm the Peter Principle for business, that every great brand gets stretched to its level of incompetence.

Image courtesy of Johnnie Walker Espana.

“Do not go gentle into the good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light”
Dylan Thomas.

Sir John Hegarty’s thoughts and memoirs, packaged together in Hegarty on Advertising (Thames and Hudson), must be amongst the most eagerly awaited stories from the world of advertising. This is a man who, in a career spanning nearly 50 years, has given us some of our most loved and successful work, helped build immeasurable value into numerous brands from Levis to Audi and created what is undoubtely the most respected advertising agency on Earth. He is also a bridge. A bridge between the increasingly mythical world of late 20th adland – the adland of Bernbach, Collett Dickinson Pearce, the Brothers Saatchi, and today’s advertising landscape with its 21st Century angst, technological tsunami and procurement misery. So when Sir John, an art director by trade, puts pen to paper a degree of expectation is created and a degree of respect is due, which I offer in spades. But all in all this is a curious work. ]]> Hegarty on Advertising is a book in two parts which is strange in itself, either suggesting that the story of his professional life from Art School to head of the BBH Empire was not thrilling enough for the publishers or that his musings on subjects like creativity, ideas, brands and technology were not suitably substantial to make a business book in its own right. This is rather a shame because for people in ‘the business’ the story behind a legend like Hegarty is mesmerising, a reminder to all of us to get off our collective arses and raise our game. While for people simply in business the first section offers a perspective on issues that face any organisation from a man who they won’t know of but with whose work they will be intimately acquainted.

So who is the book targeting? Adlanders or a wider audience?

The truth is that adlanders will love the second section because it documents the cut and thrust of creating a legendary advertising brand (even if some of it is a bit airbrushed at times), not to mention an impressive collection of stories about a formative career. I particularly love the story about Charles Saatchi getting a picture of his creative department on the back page of the Times in 1972 because he had them insured for £1m and had instituted a transfer fee if any other agency tried to poach them.

But my guess is that what I’m sure should have been the meat, the first section will leave agency people a little cold. While Hegarty’s point of view on ideas, brands and audiences, agencies, creative directors, briefs, pitches, storytelling and technology are undeniably both right and important they seem very familiar. Reading them felt as if I had already absorbed what he had to say and this was a little like déjà vu. And then I realised that I had. Indeed it is impossible to have spent any length of time in the advertising business and not have taken on board John Hegarty’s perspective on these issues, such has been his profound effect on all of us whether we are aware of it and whether we live up to his ideals or not. What you and I know and feel to be true about our work at its best – the combination of intelligence and magic in advertising (the book's subtitle) – in many ways we know and feel to be true because of the influence of both Sir John and his agency. If any of what he says seems old hat that's because it's his hat.

And what are we left feeling about the great man? That he is a great man, a little doting about the agency he gave birth and life to but then what parent isn’t and a perfect gentleman. Indeed the irony of Sir John invoking the spirit and words of Dylan Thomas when talking about the need to fight mediocrity is that, within these pages at least he rages against very little. That is with the exception of two things. Two issues seem to rile Sir John so much that the mild mannered man falls away just twice as he erupts into powerful and visceral loathing.

Firstly about tissue meetings. Let us all agree right now that we hate tissue meetings, while created (by Jay Chiat in the US and HHCL in the UK) to help introduce and sell in more brave, interesting and difficult work once they were hijacked by the intermediaries that govern our world and act as the single most powerful means to dumb down work the advertising industry has ever invented.

This is Hegarty on the wretched tissue meeting “Have you ever had to suffer a tissue meeting? All of us in advertising have at some point, haven’t we? For those that don’t know what I mean, count yourself lucky!...Whoever came up with the completely stupid idea of tissue meetings should be taken out and shot. They are the invention of a predictable mind trying to make the unpredictable predictable. Tissue meetings were created to keep clients happy and to make them feel we are in complete command of what we do, which we’re not”. Well you’ll find no quarrel with that form me and I rather suspect the vast majority of right minded people in the business.

Hegarty also goes to some lengths to take issue rather brilliantly with fashion and fragrance advertising, largely for its obsession with style over substance. Once again the mild mannered adman that is on display in virtually every other page of the book falls away to be replaced by something far more interesting and powerful.

Here is what Sir John has to say on the vacuous world of perfume advertising “The fashionistas who’ve created this work have obviously looked up the word ‘profundity’ in the dictionary, thinking it spelt ‘pretentious’. These commercials are invariably shot in black and white because their brains haven’t quite grasped the concept of colour. But worse of all are the scripts. Now when you are writing a script, it’s best to have and idea – that small incidental phenomenon that drives communication. One dictionary definition of an idea is: ‘a thought or plan formed by mental effort’. I think the key phrase here is ‘mental effort’. Gelled hair and three-day facial hair growth are not ideas.”

He goes on to create and entire spoof script for a fragrance called Stalker from the house of cliché, so manifestly angry is Sir John about the world of perfume and fashion advertising.

And in those brief moments of visceral anger we perhaps hear the real Sir John. The Hegarty of tense creative reviews with his teams, the Hegarty fighting for great work against lacklustre people inside and outside his agencies, the Hegarty that has forged some of the most powerful pieces of communication the business has ever created and the Hegarty that tore his own work up for the Health Education Council brief when he saw Jeremy Sinclair’s Pregnant Man ad about to be presented to Charles Saatchi. In recording his ideas and life John Hegarty paints a picture of urbane gentleness but I think we all know that this is a man that has done all this precisely because he has so consistently raged against the dying of the light.

Hegarty on Advertising is published on the 13th June by Thames and Hudson

And here is my all time favourite BBH commercial. Was there ever a more perfect minute of storytelling, acting, direction and editing, not to mention the outstandingly good musical score? Enjoy.

Chateau Petrus, sadly the '78 is missing. Image courtesy of cDubya.

One of the key tenets of behavioural theory is that we value more the things for which we pay more. The more expensive the wine, the greater quality we believe it to be and the more that we value it. So how come this idea doesn’t seem to hold water when it come to clients and the value they place on agencies.

Conversely, the clients that pay an agency nothing at all seem to value it far more highly and take its recommendations rather more seriously, so called pro bono clients. Now this could simply be out of gratitude for the time that the agency is investing for no financial return but I think it goes rather deeper than this.

Bizarrely, the less commercial the relationship the more professionally you are seen, as if the exchange of money demeans your engagement with the client, your sense of partnership and the objectivity of your advice. Unpaid, you are seen as truer business partners.

Is this unique to advertising? Are we the only industry where the greater we are remunerated the less professional we appear and the less like partners we are treated, as if clients are saying ‘well you’ve got your money, now do what we say’? I can’t see this being the relationship that McKinsey or Foster Partners enjoy with their clients where the cost of their advice is directly correlated to its percieved quality. Whereas hiring a great agency and then making them produce tat is rather like putting the Chateau Petrus 1978 in your spaghetti Bolognese.