“You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think” Dorothy Parker I think aphorisms rock and make any strategy, presentation, brief, conversation go…
“Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless imitative style”. George Orwell
You see it all the time – Client briefs, agency presentations, awards papers – the great cop out.
This is a low interest category.
It’s the universal panacea, the ultimate excuse, the dog ate my homework of the marketing world.
No wonder the work is dull, the thinking is lame or the creative is vacuous it is after all a low interest category and we might as well all go home.
Image from ‘far from dull’ by Dominic Greyer.
“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative” Oscar Wilde – Aphorist par excellence
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.
My Grandparents were farmers in Somerset. They never really saw the necessity for television and indeed only got one in the early ’90s when my grandfather got ill. Consequently childhood visits were rather delightful since in the evenings we were required to make our own entertainment just as they had all their lives – the last vestiges of an Edwardian upbringing full of tennis parties, journal writing and the vigorous consumption of slim volumes of poetry.
And it rather tickles me to think that our sources of entertainment are coming full circle – back to ourselves and a world my grand parents might have been familiar with. But instead of keeping diaries we blog, instead of amateur dramatics we have You Tube and Googleidol and instead of dusty slide shows of people butchering endangered species with gay abandon we have flickr.
In my day we make our own entertainment.
None of that Lucozade nonsense here. I am trying to gather together set of utterly legendary repositionings from any part of culture or society. There are bonus points for total originality and deductions for mentioning the Fourth Emergency Service (tell me something I don’t know).
The World’s first planner?
A house ad for HHCL from the early 90’s proving that we have always known that ad avoidance is as endemic in the UK as avian flu.
I found this data on Ofcom’s website (the long winter nights simply fly by in the Huntington household). It got me to thinking how many real brands there are in the multichannel universe since it asks people in multichannel homes which channel they would chose if they could only have one (as good a definition of a brand as any). Clearly there will be a long tail but interesting that the big boys still rule (even the last gasps of ITV1). Note also the performance of Sky Sports – as many 16-24s would take Sky Sports as Channel 4.
