INTERRUPT ME NICELY

It’s not very often I get to give advice to Dave Trott.

 

The great man taught me pretty much everything I know about advertising (yet only a fraction of what he knows).

 

He was surprised to hear me say that his way of thinking is more critical to the advertising industry now, in the digitally obsessed world, than it ever was.

 

Sure, things have changed.

 

But the basic premise of advertising has not.

 

The single most important thing: You have to get noticed.

 

If you don’t, everything is irrelevant, and a waste of money.

 

We’ve been immersed in digital and social media for over a decade now, and agencies have invested in a lot of digitally savvy individuals, many of who are not people savvy.

 

They get how tech works; they just don’t get how people work.

 

So the terminology has changed.

 

Apparently old-style is ‘interruption’ and new-style is ‘engagement’.

 

WRONG!

 

Everything we do is interruption. Everything.

 

I’m scrolling through my facebook feed and your ad interrupts me: Fuck off.

 

I’m scrolling through my instagram feed and your ad interrupts me: Fuck off.

 

I’m scrolling through my tumblr feed and your ad interrupts me: Fuck off.

 

I’m about to watch a video on youtube and your ad interrupts me: Fuck oh…wait a minute, this looks interesting, I’ll check it out, and maybe even put you on my mental shopping list.

 

Make no mistake, we are ALWAYS interrupting people.

 

Point is, we can interrupt people annoyingly, or we can interrupt people pleasantly.

 

Same as we always did.

 

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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIKING SOMETHING AND ‘LIKING’ SOMETHING

Stardate August 7th 2558

There’s a growing realisation, finally, that brand interaction on digital is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Like the rest of us, I’ve been consuming messages (including ads) on sites like YouTube for a decade, as well as the ever-increasing number of commercial messages on the ever-increasing number of social media sites.

And for most of that period, Digital Ninja Turtles were trying to convince us that the Holy Grail was ‘likes’ and click-throughs, but you know, us that have been around a little longer than the advent of the i-phone had suspicions that this just may be, to use a technical term, bollocks.

The outing of Click Farms pretty much confirmed that was the case and it was easy to scam the whole system. So the King’s New Clothes were revealed and that puts paid to all digital advertising, now, let’s get back to normal.

In all those years of absorbing digital messages, I don’t remember ever clicking on one, ‘liking’ one, or interacting with any. And I haven’t become a ‘brand ambassador’ or ‘brand advocate’ for any brand, unless they pay me. Why should I?

But does the fact that I chose not to get involved with digital brand messages mean that I don’t actually like any? Do we have to rely on actual interaction data to measure the success or failure of our digital advertising? I don’t think so.
Plenty have logged in my brain and left an impression. Just like the tv ads I grew up with.

Of course there’s a role for digital advertising and I think we’re just starting to get the hang of it. As we’ve said all along, the medium is not the message, the message is the message. And Facebook has started advising advertisers to create messages that are interesting enough to pique people’s…well, interest. Sound familiar?

We used to say people were bombarded with hundreds of advertising messages every day and because of that we have to do something special to attract their attention. Not much as changed with that principle except that now we are bombarded with tens of thousands of messages per day, on smartphones, i-pads, laptops, on top of all the ambient stuff that assaults our eyeballs in our daily commute.

So the current generation, including my 16-year-old daughter, has evolved an amazing mental capacity. Not for accepting all this information, but for filtering it.

Yes, some digital coms require click-throughs, if they’re competitions or offers but even then, if the main message is interesting and engaging enough, it will still register the brand in people’s consciousness. And after all, isn’t that what advertising is about. What goes around comes around.

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THE DOUBLE GUESS.

Stardate June 28^th 2554*

Mind reading seems to be part of an account exec’s job description these days. So many of them seem know exactly what their clients want, and have an innate ability to double guess their reactions.

Except they don’t.

Most people have a hard time reading the minds of their partners, who they actually live with.

We learned this unpredictability in a rather dramatic way in the early days of dfgw, when we won Independent Television Commission as a client. The ITC were the official body to oversee (and vet) content on all commercial TV and TV advertising. ‘Censors’ in the old language.

The first thing they wanted us to promote was the ‘9pm watershed’, this being the time when more sensitive subject matter could be aired, on the assumption young kids weren’t watching.

So me and my partner Dave Waters came up with this idea of a young kid (8 or 9 yrs old) being seduced by a woman in her twenties, who was suggestively (!) undressing. We cut back and forth between the two, building up the tension. But the pay-off would be we pull out wide and see that it was clever editing and he was actually just watching her on telly. We naively thought it quite a provocative way to make the point.

The ITC were apoplectic. They were supposed to be seen as responsible. (The accompanying gag about them actually being responsible for the uproar if we ran it met with frozen smiles.)

They were too nice a bunch of people to actually say, “get the fuck out of our office and go and play on some railway tracks” but you could see that’s what their expressions said.

Undeterred, me and Dave argued with them for days that even the ITC needs to get noticed and remembered.

We’d have had more luck arguing with the electronic voice in their posh elevator.

Eventually we decided some drama queen behaviour was called for, so we, along with our MD and brilliant head suit Michael Finn, trudged around the corner to the ITC’s office, Dave carrying an A2 layout pad and some pens, me carrying a small typewriter (like I said this was early pre-laptop days, and we’d have looked even sillier storming in with a massive desktop computer), and Finn, like all the best suits, carrying nothing but an open mind.

They looked a little surprised, clearly not used to such prima donna antics inside their conservative establishment.

We sat down combatively across the table from them and said, right, we’re going to sort this out, here, now. Raised eyebrows all round but no one raised any objections, so we gave it one last shot, trying to write around their problems with the idea.

The outer brick walls of the building budged further. They were having none of it. The Boss said, “let me make it clear to you, we WILL NOT sanction any film that implies, infers, indicates, or any other ‘i’s for that matter, sex with a minor, even though it’s not.”

We’d reached a Mexican standoff (in Soho).

Then in a moment of pure anger and frustration, one of us said “well…what if we shot him then…?”

Complete silence as tumbleweeds rolled through the room (still in Soho).

The Boss sighed, shoulders sagged, and said “well, of course we can SHOOT him, that’s not a problem” as the rest of his side of the table came to life in agreement, wondering why we didn’t think of that in the first place.

So in front of them, I typed a script where the kid witnesses a brutal murder and then gets threatened and shot himself, Dave drew a quick storyboard and 30 minutes later we had a signed script to go into production. It also got into D&AD.

Who would’ve guessed that then?

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THE BLIND LEADING THE BRAND

Stardate June 13^th 2554*

 

Nearly every meeting I’ve ever been to about creative work has included a discussion about ‘branding’.

At some point during the many negotiations over ‘size of branding’ I realised we were actually having completely different discussions. Because the size or prominence of the logo has nothing to do with branding.

 

I learnt a lot in the ten years I worked for Dave Trott, but one of the very first things he ever taught me (and it defined a lot of the successful campaigns I’ve been involved with) was that branding is where your product is inextricably linked to the message – take the product name away and the line doesn’t work anymore. Or remove the product itself and the idea doesn’t work anymore. Could you replace your product with a competitor product for example?

 

He’d just done a campaign for an, apparently, unbreakable umbrella called Knirps.

 

Ker-what? Exactly.

 

He came up with a line “You can break a brolly but you can’t k-nacker a K-nirps” which I thought was bloody brilliant because suddenly I knew how to actually say the bloody name. (Bit of a barrier to purchase if you don’t even know how to say the name of the product, I’d say.)

 

Then we won the Toshiba tellys account. Another name problem. Back then, they were unheard of, and the few people that were aware of them would pronounce it “Tobisha” and say it was an inferior product to the well known Sony’s, JVC’s and Philips’s.

 

These weren’t bars of chocolate you’d try out on a whim, they were expensive kit, and the fact was, Toshiba was actually superior technology to the competitors, but at those prices no-one was buying something they’d never heard of.  In John Hegarty’s book he says “your brand is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world – it occupies a corner of someone’s mind.” And sure enough, people would go shopping with the aforementioned top-of-mind list and they were not buying Toshiba’s in droves.

 

Dave came to me and played this wacky novelty song by Alexei Sayle “Hello John, got a new motor” and was going to change it to “Allo Tosh, Gotta a Toshiba” and what did I think? I thought he was fucking nuts, but he was my boss so I was polite: “with all due respect, Sir…”. Actually, that’s not true, I was a cocky bastard so I said “nah Dave, don’t be daft – tosh means rubbish, everyone will call it a load of tosh”

 

He ignored me and went and did it anyway.

 

Blueprint Man + catchy re-record by Ian Dury + name pronunciation = shitloads of Toshiba tellies disappearing out the stores (and this was before the days when looting became a trendy pastime).

 

Abject lesson. Never forgotten.

 

At dfgw, we used the principle very successfully when we launched the unheard of and unpronounceable Daewoo Cars in the UK, with “…that’ll be the Daewoo”. The fact that it was the most successful car launch ever in the UK, and got 95% unprompted recall after three months (more than GM Vauxhall, the biggest spender at the time, got after many years) didn’t surprise us.

 

Branding’s become slightly more sophisticated since then. But only slightly.

 

So it’s refreshing when you get a client that doesn’t see the words ‘logo’ and ‘size’ in the same sentence. Last year, me and my team did a campaign for Cornetto for our clients Tommy Wattimena and Nicole Sparshott at Unilever. I promised them a campaign that could only be for Cornetto, that wouldn’t work if you removed the product, that couldn’t be done for another product. There were no discussions about size (well not to do with the logo anyway).

The campaign is built around the ritual of unwrapping the product (you may say the ‘pain of’ or the ‘irritation of’ but the fact is it’s the only way you can get to eat the thing).

 

It’s the most successful Cornetto campaign ever in Thailand.
People remember the campaign and they remember the product because you can’t take the product out of the campaign. THAT’S branding.
Pretty basic stuff. But this is advertising, and under all the bullshit and powerpoints, it’s a pretty basic business.

 

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For Damon

Stardate February 13^th 2554

RON COLLINS

Damon, I just heard.

Of course, condolences, and I just want to give you a personal anecdote:

Back when I was teenager looking for a job with those old magic marker scribbles, our dear mentor Dave Trott had just started GGT and had no money to hire anyone, so he picked up the phone, had a chat with your dad and ten minutes later I was round the corner in Ron’s office.

Now WCRS was flying at the time, and Ron had a reputation as a fearful and brutal critic of student work. So I was nervous to say the least, especially since he’d been coerced by Trotty into seeing me at a time when he most definitely had better things to do.

He couldn’t have been (to me anyway) more different from his reputation.

He was delightful, incredibly helpful, kept me there about an hour and a half, giving invaluable advice and opinions (the legendary Sooty was not present that day so I’m never sure if that was apocryphal). He then brought in Andrew Rutherford to go through my work and then Robin, then showed me round his amazing agency and introduced me to Peter Scott.

I left, as inspired as I’d ever been in my life, thinking THIS is the business I want to be in, and he called Trotty, and the following day Dave hired me as the first GGT creative, even though he couldn’t afford my measly tuppence a week. Ron called him back and said “Tuppence?!?! You could have got him for a farthing!!!”.

And work-wise he was one of the true talents – his simple radio commercial for Bergasol taught me (and many others) how visual a medium radio can be. To this day I cannot think of a better spot.

I suppose the best we can all hope for is to leave some kind of legacy behind.

Your Dad, Ron, created one of the most dynamic and successful agencies of the era, during THE most creative period in advertising.

Best wishes Damon.

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Thorny Issue

Stardate February 12^th 2554

Advertising Age

Let’s be absolutely clear from the off – I’m the wrong side of 20.

Therefore you might say my views are biased (but surely if a point of view is not biased, it’s not a point of view).

Why are there so few experienced people in creative departments?

Agencies love to been seen as cool and trendy so let’s hire some far-out digital dude who rolls with the kids.

Not CEOs mind, oh no, because THEY need to be responsible. For example Michael Roth was almost 60 when he GOT the top job at IPG. Was there no 25-year-old financial whizz-kid that could’ve done Roth’s job?

Can you imagine an agency hiring a 60-year-old ECD?

I think there’s a sense that in order to be creative in advertising you need to be childishly irresponsible, but personally, I’ve never met a client that would happily put his or her millions in the hands of someone they thought irresponsible.
And I always thought it was smart to listen to and learn from people who had more experience than me.

I’m not entirely alone – I recall a rumour that Mother, one of London’s best agencies hardly in need of help, put in an audacious bid to hire the late great John Webster, at the time in his 60s. They obviously recognized that, if you retain your enthusiasm for the business, experience only adds to it.

But by and large, advertising is one of the few creative industries I can think of that doesn’t always respect experience, at least in the creative department.

Looking at other creative businesses, the current biggest grossing music act is not this year’s Jimmy Osmond, Justin Bieber (thank God) but The Rolling Stones, and Madonna is the biggest female still.

I recently read a great response to a reader’s whingeing letter about Sir Paul McCartney in Q magazine. It said, “he wrote Paperback Writer, he made St Pepper and The White Album. He was in the chuffing Beatles! He can look as foolish as he damn well pleases.” Lovely.

But gosh, I still read…magazines???  How passé…

Don’t get me wrong – I love my i-pad. But I love magazines too (and I’d think twice before swatting the bloody mosquitoes here with my i-pad)

Ricky Gervais has become a global *fill in adjective here* in his mid-40s and said recently on CNN “why didn’t I do this when I was younger?” To which his missus Jane replied, “Because you wouldn’t have been any good at it”. It takes a good deal of experience to insult everyone in Hollywood in 3 hrs.

In publishing: apart from the short brat-pack period where it seemed the only people getting book deals were people who’d never written a book before, the best selling authors continue to be the ones with a proven track record.

Scorsese, Pacino and DeNiro et al still seem to be doing ok in the movies too.

So it’s clear creativity is not the preserve of youth.

I may be wrong, but from the outside, age doesn’t seem to be such an issue in those creative industries.

My dear ex once said to me “age is a privilege not everyone is fortunate enough to attain” (I wasn’t sure whether it was a threat but it sounded profound, so I assume she stole it!).

But, the very few obvious exceptions aside, where do the experienced and talented creatives in advertising go to?

Be careful before you disagree – you’ll be posting your own sell-by date.

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The Decision

Stardate February 7^th 2554 *

Year Of The Frightened Rabbit

“People might call themselves perfectionists, but at the bottom of pedantry is an abiding laziness. Raise enough objections and you never have to accomplish anything.”

A beautiful phrase from Paul Theroux’s Blinding Light. But doesn’t it sound familiar?

It reminds me of a client who could talk me out of the room with dazzling marketing wisdom. He’s a delightful guy, incredibly bright, and has never made a bad decision in his life.

Unfortunately he’s never made a good one either.

It’s all too easy to use the excuse of “it’s not quite there yet” to postpone the most important thing – The Decision.

Somebody clever called it ‘analysis paralysis’. So much information you freeze like a rabbit in the headlights, and do nothing.

For the first 18 months of dfgw, we did a simple tracking chart: We plotted every time we DID something (mail outs, cold-calls etc), and every time something HAPPENED (invitation to pitch etc…). The resulting chart was emphatic – every time something happened correlated perfectly with every time we did something.

Except for one small detail…the things we actually did never seemed to have any obvious relation to what actually happened.

So we simply deduced that Do Something And Something Will Happen.

Don’t obfuscate, ruminate, cogitate or any other kind of ‘ate, just do stuff. Make decisions, and even if you only get 80% of them right you’ll be going in the right direction.

We’re not deciding which slimy wiggly bit to remove in surgery, it’s just advertising. And most of us are good enough to intuitively know when to get it out there. You can always do Version 2.1.1 later.

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An in-depth critical review…

…FOR THE ADD GENERATION.

Stardate February 5th 2554

The new N-DUBZ album is wkd

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The difficult second album

Stardate February 5^th 2554

THE CAN-DO GENERATION

 

Brilliant isn’t it? Almost every time you ask for something now, the response is “can”.

 

We’ve become a generation of positive thinkers; nothing can get in the way of our gung-ho mentality.

 

Of course. Everybody likes to hear “can”, nobody wants to hear “can’t”. You don’t win business by saying “can’t”. You don’t get a job by saying “can’t”. So the automatic response has become “can”.

 

Like the Hollywood actors at auditions way back who quickly learned to say “can” when asked if they could ride a horse, knowing full well they’d have time to get a few lessons in before rehearsals.

 

There’s just one slight problem: not everyone can.

 

If you ask me if I can run the 100 meters in 9.57 seconds to beat Usain Bolt, yes, absolutely I can. There, I said it – I can! Sadly the reality is I’d struggle to run it in 40 seconds.

 

For quite a few years, our agency dfgw handled the BBC account, a brilliant client.

I recall being in 150-strong BBC workshops, where everyone in the room CAN be creative (and remember BBC has more genuine creative people than most corps cos it’s their product). But not everyone IS creative. Work out what you is.

 

The truth is, there are some things you can do and some things you can’t. And my question is: Is it better to under-promise and over-deliver? Or is it better to over-promise and under-deliver? (Yes technically that’s two questions, but you get the point.)

 

I’m not advocating laziness – absolutely aim high. Set tough but realistically achievable goals – how many times have I read “set unrealistic goals”?. Why? Why would you want to do that? So you can fail? Push yourself to your limits, and do the best you possibly can.

 

Because, bottom line, under-delivery will piss off clients, annoy your bosses, and ultimately lose business. Have you ever heard anyone complain that you over-delivered?

 

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WARNING: This site may contain material of an insensitive nature to English grammar.

STARDATE January 29th 2554*

(*it really IS 2554 according to the Thai calendar – it even says it on my tax return)

BE THE FIRST. OR DON’T BOTHER…?

I’ve lost count of the number of books I’ve read using the “who was the second man on the moon?” question to prove that being first really IS the only option.

Anyway, it was Buzz Aldrin Jr.

And thanks to Little Britain, we now even know the EIGHTH man on the moon – Bing Gordyn!

Yes, it’s great to be first. But is it the only option? After all, there can only ever be one first.

Gibbs SR toothpaste was the first ever TV commercial in the UK (Bulova watches preceded it in the USA). But really, so what? Sure it will always be the first, but it doesn’t exist anymore.

I would hazard a guess that Vorsprung Durch Tecnik wasn’t the first time anyone had used a foreign language in English advertising, but it’s certainly the most memorable.

People in the ad business trip over themselves in the headlong rush to be first.

If you’re not on foursquare, you’re soooosquare. Actually foursquare is so yesterday because Geonium is this morning but by this afternoon the ONLY way to go will be facebook ‘likes’ ads AAAAARRRRRRGH!!!

Twitter’s been ‘done’. Who was the first person to use foursquare? Who gives a fuck? Hardly a world-shattering event eh? Come to that, who wrote the first ever blog? Don’t know, don’t care.

We don’t even know who invented the wheel, a truly world changing innovation. What was his (or her) name? Urgh or Hnngk or something equally cro-magnon probably. But it WAS the first. However, I’d contend that my girlfriend’s 17” alloy, 5-spoke wheels, with Pirelli low-profiles, on her SLK, are better.

Take the most successful movie of all time, Avatar. Were there any firsts? A storyline ripped from Pocahontas; imagery ‘borrowed’ from Roger Dean, but who cares? Result – awesome movie!

It’s great to be first. But, failing that, it’s better to be better.

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