Category: Advertising

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

I have started quoting Rumsfeld rather a lot.

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

But this one.

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

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

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

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.

Image courtesy of Jaki Good

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.

Image courtesy of Stephanissimo

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.

A while ago I stole a chart from the planning chief at Grey, John Lowery, and posted it. Well John can’t have been too miffed as he has updated it for the 2006 data and sent it over. If you work in advertising (like me) the message is blatantly clear.

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.

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

And so it is with WPP conferences, especially those organised by David Muir, a man that in the parlance of the time ‘gets it’

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.

Collett, Dickenson and Pearce in all their venerable moustache wearing glory

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I am advertising’s number one fan. Despite all the issues that its faces it still delivers three things to businesses uniquely well – monopoly, magic and meaning. This article is based on a talk to the UK Financial Services Forum in February 2005 about which marketing discipline should get the lion’s share of the marketing budget and sets out this thinking.
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