Category: Provocations

I am not given to pessimism about this business but I had a premonition the other day.

Wagner’s Ring Cycle (Der Ring des Nibelungen) – considerably less likely to induce boredom than this years IPA effectiveness shortlist.

How ironic. Just as we were wrapping up our discussion about the efficacy of the Honda ‘Power of Dreams’ idea the IPA announces their shortlist for this year’s effectiveness awards.
As awards shortlists go it is as thrilling and exciting a compendium of advertising achievement as it is possible to muster and I can’t wait to read each and every one of these powerful case studies.
In opposite land!

I’m enlisting good women and men ‘husky’ or not for the big push, the ulitmate scrap, the conflict to end all conflicts. As we know the run-in with the management consultancies was a mere skirmish, the real deal is the mother of all battles brewing between the ad agencies and the brand consultancies.
They want our lunch and they are no bloody good at it – handy with a logo but when it comes to business changing ideas they are woolley thinkers every man jack of them and slow and expensive into the bargain. Here is my opening salvo – a letter that appeared in Campaign this week.

Brighton Pavillion, described by Lady Sydney Morgan as a ‘toyshop of royal bad taste’ and like most advertising pretty but useless.

Advertising’s ills are many, manifest and increasingly well documented. Many people out there blame the inflexibilty and self interest of the agencies (and I post extensively on this) but how about the clients? I have become increasingly concerned that the greatest threat to advertising is the way clients use it – not as a business tool but as a corporate bauble.

The First World war didn’t end on the 11th November 1918. This was merely an armistice. The war ended a year later with the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles that followed.
I think that it is high time that the armistice maintained between creative and media agencies since our historic schism in the mid 90s be concluded with a peace conference and final treaty.

David Lloyd George, architect of the Welfare State and the greatest radical in British politics.

I hold something to be true. That radical thinking, particularly radical strategic thinking works.

This blog – unlike many ad blogs that talk about the future – has always set itself against both the Ostriches and the Lemmings. Of course we all loathe the Ostriches, those who continue to find succour beneath the sands of the status quo. But I have an equal amount of contempt for the Lemmings.

I’ve been thinking a bit about a concept that I introduced in the ‘meme doctors’ article. That of vaccinating your brand against competitive memes.
Brand vaccination might be a smart new way to think about your brand’s competition and what you can do about it.
Rather than thinking exclusively about aggressive strategies to attack and counter attack the competition, maybe thinking about how to vaccinate your brand against competitive memes makes for a much more interesting start point.
For instance one could argue that what Sky needs to do in the UK is not only to propagate its brand meme so that it is attractive to consumers but also vaccinate itself against the Freeview meme which is attacking it, that of BBC endorseed multichannel TV with no ongoing subscription.
I guess its a kind of defensive approach to life but how many times has a brand’s competitiveness in the market been undermined ‘at home’ while it was playing away aggressively trying to attract new customers?