As part of Omnicom, I was one of a select group of people yesterday invited to attend a panel discussion on the ability of brands (or lack of, depending on which angle or brand you’re coming from) to speak to a female audience.

Along with Omnicom UK CEO Philippa Brown, on the panel were Carol Potter (CEO, BBDO China), Joanne Lao (Managing Director, TBWA Hong Kong), Mark O’Brien (President, DDB North America) and Dianne Wilkins (CEO, Critical Mass).

We all know the score: as much as there are some companies that strive to be human, very frankly they’re not enough. You still have the likes of Bic pens’ ‘pink it and shrink it’ attitude as Philippa said, referring to Belinda Parmar (Ladygeek)’s rallying cry. It’s high time such insensitive brands woke up to smell the coffee, and we’re a long way off from an ideal situation. No wonder then that 90% of women feel that advertising in general doesn’t understand them.

As a proud feminist myself, it amazes me sometimes how clueless people can be. Some of it is, to be fair, probably coming from the right place but expressed really badly, such as Ogilvy’s ‘Digital Divas’ session also on Monday which looked at the influence in modern business of urban women who depend more and more on digital devices to control their multi-faceted lives, from using mobiles as digital shopping lists to asking friends for opinions on prospective purchases.

Let’s get the facts straight: a ‘diva’ isn’t really someone who you want to be spending a lot of time with if you met them face-to-face, at least in the modern sense of the word. I just wish the people conducting the research were a bit more sensitive to the audience when they come up with descriptors.

Back to the Omnicom panel on women and diversity, one of the interesting things mentioned was about the Chinese market: 20% of high-end cars costing over $300,000 are sold to women in the age group 25-40, and yet you have car manufacturers who think producing pink cars is the appropriate nod to the rising influence of that audience. So it’s not geographically-focussed, this problem of ‘pink and shrink’ brand mentalities – sad but true. In such a scenario, I think we as an industry have a lot of introspection to do to try and understand why this happens time and time again. The easy answer is that it is probably because men hold the reins in these campaigns, but I think that’s too simplistic. Whether it’s men or women at the helm, trying to produce answers to problems that are based on almost no insight to the audience will trip you up whichever part of the world you’re in.

As Joanne Lao said, in the olden times if you wanted to be seen to be independent, the image you’d go for is that of Mulan, the fictional warrior princess of Disney fame charting her own path to success. Today though independence is more associated with strength of character – neither of which have anything to do with specific colours (pink!) or for that matter physical outfits. Adidas #allofmygirls campaign and of course Dove’s recent work are all testimony to the power of true insight.

Philippa also mentioned the importance of understanding that people shouldn’t be stereotyped and easily labelled. Omnicom’s Ethnic division in the UK is about respecting the fact that there are multiple ethnicities living in the country; December 25^th may be Christmas but there are tens of other Christmases to be celebrated across the UK year in and year out, from Chinese New Year to Diwali. People belonging to these different cultural groups contribute a lot to the economy and businesses looking to grow should acknowledge and act on this fact before it’s too late.

At the end of the day though, whether male or female, Indian or British, what counts is the authenticity of the message. Technology serves us today to the point where a brand’s message can fall apart under the kind of scrutiny that is so easy for anyone with an internet connection to carry out; if you’re not prepared to defend your statement then don’t say it (that applies to individuals as much as it does to brands to be honest!), as most of the panel said.

Mark O’Brien made a valid point about a key charge levied against brands today: most marketing budgets would do well to very simply be diverted in aid of improving the product to be more useful to people, as for example Starbucks did when they shut down all their stores for 3.5 hours a few years ago so that baristas could learn to make coffee properly.

Carol Potter also said something that made me think: women, and mothers in general, are always made out by the media to be these incredibly worthy people when in truth they probably appreciate a glass of wine as much as anyone else at the end of a long day. On the one hand I thought of P&G’s Thank You Mum campaign which was beautiful and touching, a great example of a positive brand gesture. On the other hand I thought of Sarah Silverman in Droga5’s The Great Schlep campaign, which was targeted at grandparents I know, but a rare example of a female comedian in a sponsored campaign. Now it may be just me (maybe the sun made me a bit sluggish, good excuse right…) but there really are very few examples of women in brand campaigns I could think of that are funny and easy to connect with. That’s something for you to think about, all you brands looking to speak to women.

The panel’s closing advice? In the end, the companies that gain success with women will be those that are authentic, connect what they say with what they do both online and offline (or are ready to be found out thanks to social media), and are not patronising, because God knows we all have enough of that anyway.

Easy, right?

There I met Julian again who kindly introduced  me to various fellow independent agencies.

There were guys from all over the world.

China, Brazil and Amsterdam to name a few.

They all seemed to be loving doing their own thing but told me it takes time to build even a small shop.

That rang true as after three months of chasing new business for Loaf & Egg I have three great leads and two meetings lined up.

All are for brands we’d love to work on and are products made int the UK which is also something I believe in passionately.

We ended the get together with a lot of business card swapping and might end up collaborating at some point in the future, so well worth going.

I then checked out the scene on the Croisette and was inspired by the stands.

There’s a lot of mobile activity which is a big trend this year and a fabulous blow up Lion.

Of all the eye catching stands you just can’t beat an inflated plastic mammal.

No doubt some drunken art director will try and capture it and take it swimming in the sea.

While the Hippies became disillusioned by the fact that the Age of Aquarius hadn’t ushered in a New World order of peace and love, the sense of hope wasn’t completely extinguished. The future (while not yet Orange) was at least brighter and generally cleaner – at least in terms of fashion.

Sci-fi shows such as Space 1999 predicted that in the future we’d all be wearing matching shiny threads. This tradition extended back to Sci-fi movies such as Forbidden Planet, and to the Star Trek series. Even in dystopian visions of the future like Logan’s Run or Rollerball, people generally wore matching gear.

As far as I’m aware, no one predicated the rise of the Hipsters, who make a virtue of the fact that nothing matches – except perhaps their beards and tattoos.

But here we are. Living in a world in which the Hipster has inherited the earth, or at least the advertising industry. There is nothing wrong with this of course (after all, some of my best friends are Hipsters). Despite their sardonic disposition and propensity to share images of food on Instagram, they are in my experience, a warm hearted set of people, with ethical values a keen sense of moral justice.

It is therefore somewhat surprising that as Hipsters increasingly populate advertising and marketing agencies in the UK, the industry as a whole stills struggles to reflect the diversity of modern Britain. 

Urban theorist, Professor Richard Florida convincingly argued over a decade ago in his seminal book, ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’, that creative people enjoy living in urban environments that rank highly on what he defined as a Bohemian index, Gay index, and Diversity index. He concluded that if cities want to attract highly productive creative people, they should ensure there is a good mix of cultural activities and tolerance for different sexualities and ethnicities.

His theory (although hotly contested) led to a sea-change in town centre planning and theories of urban renewal. The growth of coffee shop culture and the resurgence of independent stores in the trendier parts of cities and towns today are in part informed by his thinking.

While town planners and urban theorists leapt on Florida’s concept in an attempt to attract more highly valuable creative people to their neighbourhoods, the creative industries themselves have been slower to incorporate this thinking into their recruitment practices. As a result, many of the young Hipsters now working in advertising actually meet a more diverse range of people when outside of work than within it. Some agencies have recognized the need to change this, but many still lag behind. Fortunately there are increasing signs that change is going to come.

On the June 12, The Ideas Foundation celebrated their Annual Celebration at the IPA in London. In the centre of the event (which was designed by the Foundation’s Scholars Council), stood a ‘wishing tree’ upon which people could write their wishes for the future of the creative industries. The wish that summed it up best for me was: ‘Get more people involved in the magic!’

The event showcased the work of young people that the Ideas Foundation has worked with through its various programmes such as I Am Creative and Incubate, spearheaded in schools in the North West. It also featured a Q&A interview session with Sir John Hegarty, Creative Nerds CEO, Dirujan Sabesan, and Claude Borna, SVP Global Customer Strategy & Worldwide Commercial at Sony Pictures Entertainment.  The three interviewees represented different strands of the creative industries, but each spoke passionately about the need to find and follow one’s passions.

In the same week as this event took place, The One Club from New York held a week long Creative Boot Camp in London for aspiring Creatives, sponsored by the agency Mother and run by the amazing Director of Diversity, Traecy Smith. I was able to drop in on the final session on Sunday held at the London College of Communications and witnessed a large, diverse group of young people leaving fired up about the advertising industry and keen to make their mark.

Meanwhile, this week in Cannes, the Festival of Creativity kicks off. While Britain used to be disproportionately represented in the awards, over recent years our influence has waned as more international agencies walk away with the coveted Lions.

I believe that these events are not unrelated. For Britain to regain our position as a creative superpower, we need to learn lessons from the world of sports and open our doors to a more diverse pool of talent. I’m convinced that you’ll hear no complaints from the younger generation of Hipsters in our agencies – quite the opposite in fact. It won’t be long before our clients, like frustrated Football club owners begin to demand it.

We may not be living in the future we expected, but that’s no reason to hang onto the past. If we want our agencies to be filled with the brightest and best, we should heed the words of the prophetic reggae singer from the seventies – Nesta Robert Marley – and  ‘Stir it up’.

Jonathan Akwue is a Partner at Engine and Chair of The Ideas Foundation.

Image credits: Photo above, Leilani Akwue (aged 9). The Creative Boot Camp. Q&A interview session with Sir John Hegarty, Dirujan Sabesan, and Claude Borna. The Ideas Foundation Scholars. Top image courtesy of Flickr.

If you answered “COFFIN”, then according to a recent study cited in this month’s edition of The Psychologist, you have a higher-than-average anxiety about death – whereas if you answered “COFFEE”, you have a more positive sense of life and mortality.

So far, so trivial, you might say.  But where this study (which won the President’s Award at the 2012 British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference) gets really interesting is in the related finding that these feelings are, in turn, correlated with one’s disposition towards nostalgia.  In particular, the report contains the surprising discovery that people with a stronger sense of nostalgia are more likely to take a positive view of life.

The opposite might have been expected to be the case (nostalgia is typically seen as a somewhat negative rejection of contemporary times, and even as a psychological dysfunction).  But the study’s author (Constantine Sedikedes of the University of Southampton) explains the finding, using other tests to show that people with a stronger sense of their roots feel more socially connected and more securely attached, leading to a greater appreciation of the meaning of life.

I wish I’d had this research a few years ago, when we were relaunching Hovis.  Back then, the idea of using your roots to demonstrate modern relevance was considered madness (a surefire way to make an old-fashioned brand look even more dated) so it would have come in handy for a few presentations to the battle-weary salesforce!

Now of course, after a wave of copycats (“miaow”, I hear you say), the value of nostalgia in marketing is better established – almost to the point of over-use.  But the underlying rationale deserves repeating: because in our rush to embrace the new, we sometimes forget what’s gone before.

This study reminds us of a bigger point, whether or not a literal take on nostalgia is appropriate (it probably isn’t: just as you don’t have to dress up in your old clothes to remember your roots, you don’t have to set your ads in the past to make them feel grounded).  Namely that we humans feel happier setting off into the wild blue yonder, when we have a secure sense of where we’re from.

I’ve been to Cannes about eight times – some I can remember, others when I have had reason to celebrate are not so clear – but the one clear thing I always take away from Cannes is the sheer energy and collective passion people from all over the world we share.

Put aside all the good fun, sex, sun, pool parties, assorted bullshit and getting pissed with mates from round the world – and the one thing that glues everyone together at any Irish bar or posh venue is the work. No matter what language or how much free rosé you knock back, you still talk about the work and your desire to create new stuff in new ways.

This year I believe the work will really live up to that desire. I hope the work rewarded will mirror a big bloody leap forward from classical advertising to the new and diverse landscape of connected creativity and the merger of message and medium.

If last year was the year of rewarding good, I hope this year is all about “fuck the line all together” and rewarding the re-inventors.

This year I hope the Lions go to people who have embraced new ways of doing things, folks who find new ways of building bridges between brand and audience and reinvent the very nature of advertising itself. I am not talking about new ways of digitally delivering things but more about rewarding people who reinvent the very way we market, communicate, engage or story-tell with audiences. From jumping out of spaceships, to bringing countries closer together, to making context and content king.

Technology and new media might have been the catalyst to help this happen but audiences are waiting to soak up this sort of thinking and waiting to want to feel something about your brands but lets just see if Cannes is ready to reward the brave few reinventing and challenging the establishment.

I hope what I see at Cannes is people raising a cold one in the sun to work that gives procurement officers a bloody headache and audiences what they want.

Hope you’ll join me.

Wayne Deakin is Executive Creative Director of Jam. 

The reason that I think using the word ‘fluffy’ pejoratively in a marketing context is idiotic is that it’s based on the assumption that marketing is rational and scientific. The idea that selling more stuff to more people is a simple equation.

In fact, what the science will really tell you is that the way that human beings make decisions is highly irrational. Half the time, we don’t even know we’re making decisions and certainly not why we’re making them. Much has been written about this but Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Laureate , distilled his brilliant thinking on this topic in his book Thinking Fast & Slow.

Here’s a more low-brow example. In Location, Location, Location, when Kirstie and Phil show their prospective buyers around a house, they talk about getting The Feeling. People won’t buy a house unless they get The Feeling. That’s not their conscious mind providing a nice sensible rationale for why the property is right. It’s something else – the gut, the heart, the subconscious, the feeling in your bones – whatever you want to call it. When we ask ‘Are you feeling it?’ to mean ‘do you like it?’, it’s beautifully apt.

Brands need fluff. You need fluff. We all need fluff. Okay, I’m using the word ironically as a substitute for ‘emotional content’ but brands win with big ideas, big emotions. Things that speak to our hearts and desires. It’s easy to prove. Ask people about the ads they like. The brands they like or dislike. Hey – even the products they like or dislike. Most of what they talk about won’t be to do with features, technical specifications, value for money, endorsements from Which? Magazine, or the quality of ingredients or components. It’ll be emotional matters: they love this or hate that or think that other thing is amazing. Silly, unpredictable emotions. Highly subjective, very powerful and fundamentally human.

It’s why Honda’s brand line is ‘The Power of Dreams’, not ‘Really Well Made Cars that Are Excellent Value For Money’. It’s why Budweiser was able to sell beer on the basis of ‘Whasssssuuuuuup?’. It’s why Virgin Atlantic is all about ‘entertainment in the sky’, not how many routes they fly or the fact that they are 8% cheaper than American Airlines or BA.

Maybe I’m preaching to the converted. But watch out for those highly rational marketing folk (usually client-side and corporate, I must admit) who’ll talk about fluff and fluffiness as if it’s anathema to effective marketing. Brands are fluffy. The best brands are often really fluffy. I mean they reach beyond rational benefits.

Of course, we need to appease the rational mind too. But let me ask you this. Why don’t you drive a Skoda? They’re really reasonably priced, the emissions are low, quite nicely designed these days and, hey — they’re built by Volkswagen.

So why don’t you drive one?

Remember the value of what fools call ‘fluff’. It’s emotion that drives our decisions, not logic. They call it fluff, I call it ROI.

All together now: “The power of fluff…..a force from above….”

Looks like all sorts of professionals read my blog and I’m thrilled that the invites have come in.

Victoria Braham and Julian Boulding from thenetworkone have asked me to their beach networking event on Monday.

They look after Independent agencies and I look forward to learning from some fellow start ups their tricks of the trade.

Then on Wednesday Pip Lowe has asked me to The Mill’s pool party. I’ve worked loads with The Mill over my 17 years and look forward to meeting up with old friends. I’m expecting a lot of creatives and directors to be there but hope to bump into some clients there too.

On Thursday Johnny and Clare from Finger music have asked me to his pool party. We worked on Doritos together and his firm are amazing.

So I’m still free for a few days and any invites much appreciated.

I’m also after a free delegate pass if any are knocking around out there?

I need to keep my overheads to a minimum so have decided not to get one and am hoping that some kind corporate out there will lend me one.

After all, if you don’s ask…

Cilla Snowball advised us to wait and be picky.

It sets the tone and culture of your agency.

At Loaf & Egg we’re nimble, cheaper and have pedigree.

But it’s proving hard to get the bigger clients to take a risk on a small start up.

We’ve built a site with our creds: loafandegg.com

Contacted all the intermediaries.

And networked like crazy.

After two months we have two great meetings lined up after Cannes.

One big client and one small.

I hope to meet some great hungry clients out in France as long as the air strike calms down.

It’s a gamble and I’m not sure how it’ll go.

But as Woody Allen says: ‘Eighty percent of success is showing up’.

So I’ve packed my business cards, got my T-Shirts and am ready to leap into the festival.

If we can get one great lead that helps us on our way it’ll have been worth it.

He said that being a creative person requires acting like a sponge.

You must absorb all the stimulus and culture in the world you live in.

Then when a brief comes in you squeeze yourself and the drops of relevant creativity appear.

Working in London enables me to see life as I walk into work.

What people are doing in the real world.

Skinny jeans. Slick hair. Talking to their headphones.

I love watching and absorbing the now.

Then when I get in the office and answer briefs I squeeze my sponge, spark with Paul and create relevant work that’s fresh.

I encourage all the teams I work with to get away from Google and live life.

Then when it comes to their work, they’re writing from their own experiences.

Not borrowing from the net.

If you find something online and that becomes your idea, it’s not original.

It’s lazy and it won’t end up winning Lions because the jury will know it’s been done before.

It’s tough.

But the squeezing is worth it in the end.

Thanks Jeff.

You taught me well.

Heart before head if you like.

That’s why we always give clients an emotional organising idea that can grow their brand over time.

By building a connection with consumers we feel that when they arrive at the point of purchase, they’ll remember you and buy you.

What’s more as ads are intrusive it’s our duty to make sure we’re as polite and entertaining as we can be.

I met with a great research company called Brainjuicer the other week.

They have spent years researching the emotional benefit over the rational.

They’ve proved emotional ads are way more effective.

What’s more you don’t need to air emotional ads as often because people like them and remember them.

So you save a bundle on air time.

They’re bright guys who are on a mission to help creative agencies get strong brand ads out.

You’ve got to love them.

So all you brave clients out there should look them up: brainjuicer.com

Our industry needs strong brand campaigns.

Less one offs.

After all, investing in strong brand campaigns that last is the best way to grow your business.

I look forward to seeing the best of the recent crop in Cannes.

And hope to meet some clients who want to create the next batch.

All you need is love, da de da de dah….