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There’s been a bit of a hoo-ha about Abercrombie & Fitch recently. Someone discovered an interview from 2007 in which the CEO, Mike Jeffries openly talked about their discriminatory approach to marketing: “We go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive, all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”  The brand does not offer clothes for women over a US size 10 or anything over ‘large’. Read More »

Everybody’s heard of the code-crackers of Bletchley Park.  The boffins at this Buckinghamshire mansion were responsible for British Intelligence’s biggest breakthrough of all time and were instrumental in turning World War II in the Allies’ favour.  They deciphered the Germans’ infamous Enigma code, were hailed by Churchill as “the geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled” and have been immortalised in several blockbuster movies and books.

But they weren’t perfect.

One of their own codes – Naval Cipher 3 – was also cracked by the Nazis.  This was an occupational hazard, of course, so nothing to be ashamed of in itself.  However, in recent years it’s emerged that the British Intelligence services knew about their enemies’ breakthrough and simply did nothing about it.

The inertia stemmed from a mixture of organisational difficulties and divisions.  The boffins couldn’t – or wouldn’t – communicate their technical concerns to the suits.  They worried that no manpower would be made available, to develop a new cipher.  Changing the code would involve more work and administrative upheaval and it wasn’t clear whose responsibility this would be.  Whatever the reasons, Naval Cipher 3 was used for 10 long months, between August 1942 and June 1943, in the full knowledge that it wasn’t secure.  During this period, 80% of Admiralty messages were read by the enemy, 1,100 ships were sunk and 10,000 men perished needlessly.  A top-secret enquiry subsequently admitted that the blunder “very nearly lost us the war.”

What’s interesting about this story is that even very clever people sometimes stick with a methodology that they know is fundamentally flawed, because change would mean too much trouble.

It strikes me that a lot of advertising research is like this.  We persist with out-moded tracking studies, where the metrics don’t move for years, simply because we don’t want to lose the (worthless) trend data.  We use pre-testing models that we know are flawed, because we’ve built up a bank of (meaningless) norms.  We force different creative routes into the same type of stimulus, in the name of a level playing field, (even though this often creates the opposite).

My point is, we know all these things are wrong, and we have done for years.  And yet still we persist with them.  Because, like the boffins at Bletchley Park, we’re not prepared to take on the hassle of persuading our organisations of the need to change.

Now, at least in our case, the consequences aren’t deadly.  But they can be commercially disastrous – and if so, we have only ourselves to blame.

Think of that the next time your rigorously-tested ad sinks into oblivion in the icy, unforgiving waters of the real world.

Can I tell you about my local fish and chip shop? It’s excellent. The quality of their product is superb. The staff are friendly, helpful and seemingly loyal to their employer. The shop is always busy – it’s a thriving business. But get this. Amazingly, Mr Fish doesn’t have brand values. And what’s more – they don’t appear to need them. So, my question is this. Brand values – what’s the point? Read More »

My three-year old daughter has discovered swearing. Three-year old style swearing. Somehow she has discovered that ‘poo’ is different from other words and so occasionally, when you ask what she’d like for tea or what she wants on her toast, she’ll tell you ‘poo’. And then she waits for a reaction. She knows there should be one.

The desire to shock and the pleasure we derive from it seem to be innate in human beings. Shocking people can be fun. Everyone from Marcel Duchamp to the Sex Pistols has made use of it and advertisers are no different. At its best, the shock factor cuts through, causes a bit of a rumpus, attracts plenty of attention to the brand and the product and is brutally effective. At its worst, it’s just a lazy and unimaginative way of getting attention – like burping loudly in a restaurant. Read More »

Usually I find Klout perks quite lame, especially for those of us not based in the US. My highlight so far had been a ‘digital lottery ticket to play and share with friends’. But I have to admit that I did get quite excited when I read that my social media influence could be exchanged for free beer (well, for access to American Airlines’ business class lounge, including free wi-fi and free beer).  The airline is now offering those people with a Klout score of 55 or above a one-day pass to their fancy Admirals Club in 40 different airports. Perks also include snacks, showers to ‘unwind and relax’ and more importantly, the feel-good factor of climbing up the ladder of influence.

One can argue how accurate Klout is and if it means anything at all. There was an interesting article on Wired a while ago about Calvin Lee, a graphic designer from L.A, who, in order to keep his score up would tweet up to 45 times a day, to the extreme of worrying about his Klout score going down while on holiday. Lee’s current Klout score is 73 and yes, he has already claimed his AA lounge perk – instagraming it on the way. If we look at Lee’s Klout score and compare it with, let’s say, Warren Buffet’s, 61, does that mean Lee is more influential than Mr. Buffet? Read More »

So we’ve moved into our first office, at 24 Greville Street in Clerkenwell.  Everything’s new – from the fridge (there goes the first month’s budget) to the ‘phone (which I can only assume is broken, as it hasn’t rung yet).

But the building itself is actually pretty old.  In fact, it’s mentioned in Oliver Twist, as the site of Fagin’s Den – a fact which some friends have suggested we should play up in our creds.  Now, given the fact that Fagin was a grotesquely anti-Semitic caricature of a conniving, child-exploiting criminal, I suspect we won’t follow this advice.  But the character’s creator, on the other hand, would be an excellent role model for us all.

You see, although Dickens is the quintessential Victorian writer, he also had all the traits that a modern creative company should aspire to.

He was a relentless innovator, both in terms of format (for instance, his pioneering of serialisation) and content (for example, his revolutionary use of dialect and slang).

He created big ideas that worked across all sorts of formats, from magazines to books, public readings to plays, cartoons to musicals and (ultimately) TV and film.

He championed great causes and made sure that his output was always opinionated.

He worked in real-time, exploiting the periodical publishing model to improve things as he went and using the public’s reaction as a guide (hence why the first 38 chapters of Oliver Twist contain 257 references to “the Jew”, while the last 15 have virtually none).

In short, he was a master storyteller: as commercially successful as he was creatively lauded.

Like I say then, not a bad role model.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if he hadn’t died 6 years before the invention of the telephone, his might have been ringing quite nicely.  Might grow the old sideburns a bit more and hope that a tiny smidgeon of his luck rubs off on us…

Over the weekend, I was discussing with my husband and some friends whether or not the author William Gibson was a prophet, especially as relates to technologies like Google Glass. Where does the influence lie? Is it that these technologies were already nascent and Gibson heard about them? Or is it that clever and inventive people read books like Gibson’s (and others’) and make things happen? Is it the chicken? Or the egg? Read More »

One of the great clichés of starting your own business is that it’s an extraordinarily liberating experience.  As I take the plunge with my partners, I can confirm that this is indeed the case: so far, our little enterprise has already relieved me of all my money, time and holidays…

But the upside of this newfound freedom is the ability to choose who you work with.  (Including the right to screen out pedants who would point out the two grammatical errors in that sentence).

Obviously, it’s not just start ups who have a monopoly on good people: all the agencies I’ve worked for have been stacked with talented folk.  But there’s something delicious about assembling a team and network from scratch, from the accountants to the production guys.

Actually, like all the best things in life, very little assembly is required: the really nice thing is that good people come to you.  We’ve been inundated with offers of help, from premises to people, IT to HR, data to design.  The fact that some of these overtures have come from direct competitors simply shows how unique our industry is.

Of course, we know it won’t last forever.  As Sir Martin Sorrell recently remarked, “It’s like hand-to-hand combat in the trenches” right now.  So this outbreak of goodwill is the equivalent of the football match in No Man’s Land, at Christmas 1914.

But before we go over the top and normal hostilities resume, I’d like to say thanks to all of you who who have lent a hand (or just an ear).  At a time when the industry feels a little bit beleaguered, it’s refreshing to be reminded that it’s full of big hearts as well as great minds.

No, this isn’t going to be a tirade against Twitter.  Or a paean to the days when creatives threw TVs out of windows, while snorting coke from the rolled up manuscript of their latest novel.

The thing that’s puzzling me is why there are so few advertising-created characters these days.  Years ago, the industry churned them out and we can still remember the best of them.  So we had the Milk Tray man, the Scottish Widow, the Flake girl, the Oxo Family and the Secret Lemonade Drinker.  We had a veritable menagerie of Dulux dogs, Andrex puppies, Anchor cows, Duracell bunnies, Hofmeister bears, Esso tigers and Lloyds horses.  We had double acts like Latham and Boff, Papa and Nicole and the Gold Blend couple.   We had a kindergarten-full of Milky Bar kids, Bisto urchins and Hovis boys.  We had Martians, for God’s sake.  Funny, potato-eating Martians.

So why do we no longer create characters like this?  Well, one reason might be that media and budgets are too fragmented to build momentum nowadays – although one could argue that using a recognisable figure would actually help on this front.  Another explanation might be that consumers are more sophisticated these days, and would reject such devices as superficial – although one could equally retort that they’d welcome the simplicity.  Or perhaps agencies avoid them because they feel old-fashioned and creatively limiting – although the few exceptions that exist today (such as the Old Spice guy, the PG Monkey or the Cravendale cats) suggest that this needn’t be the case.

At any rate, it’s interesting to watch how characters have been adopted by another industry, just as we’ve dropped them.  Mario, Sonic, Pokemon, Lara Croft, Angry Birds, Moshi Monsters and the Master Chief from Halo have helped sell billions of games between them.  They have created vast franchises beyond the core product, spanning magazines, movies and merchandise.  They have built an industry that is bigger than Hollywood.  And one that is considered more modern and creative than our own.

In short, characters don’t seem to be holding them back.  And while I’m obviously not advocating them as a formula for success, maybe we shouldn’t see them as a recipe for disaster either. “Simples”, as another one of our honourable exceptions might say.

The idea that it’s “not what you say, but the way that you say it” has been around for a long time now.  So why is “Tone of voice” invariably the least well written part of any creative brief?

There’s a delicious irony that the section that’s supposed to be all about personality usually turns out to be a charisma-free zone.  The same old descriptors abound (“confident”, “positive”, “down-to-earth”, “trustworthy”, “contemporary”, “fun”, “empowering”, “optimistic”).  Words that nobody can argue with, but that do nothing to inspire creatives or give brands a unique voice.

In contrast, I was always proud of our definition of Hovis, as being all about “grit and goosebumps”.  These words were incredibly evocative: they immediately conjured up a world of cobbled streets and coal mines, spirited kids with scabby knees and snottery noses, faded posters on gable ends and decaying hilltop farms.  They brought to mind other creative influences too, like Kes, This is England and the beginning of Great Expectations.  But perhaps most of all, they were words I hadn’t seen on a brief before: least of all together.

Thinking about this, I think we should all dig around for a new vocabulary for our briefs.  Banning the words listed above would be a start.  But why not go one step further and try to use qualities that feel plain wrong?  After all, it’s often a personality’s flaws that make them interesting and cherished (e.g. Amy Winehouse’s vulnerability, Jack Dee’s pessimism, David Mitchell’s priggishness or Sir Alex Ferguson’s grumpiness).  Likewise, it’s often a negative quality that gives a brand a uniquely appealing tone of voice (e.g. Ronseal’s bluntness, Pot Noodles’ filthiness or Blackcurrant Tango’s belligerence.)

If Honda can make “Hate” loveable and Three can make “Silly” smart, then it suggests that there is scope for much more variety in this area.

I look forward to seeing all your sad, disturbing, pompous, arrogant, amateurish, shy, lurid, dumbass, ludicrous, sleepy, cowardly, cruel, flirtatious, bitchy, pervy work….