The demise of Advertising

In the 70s and 80s, London’s advertising business enjoyed a golden age and was the envy of the world.​  Most people over 40 can remember dozens of famous campaigns that became part of the culture and social history of the time.  We still unthinkingly quote and refer back to old campaigns for Guinness, Carling, Heineken, Yellow Pages, oxo, Persil, VW, Coke, Pepsi, B&H and so on.

In the intervening decades a few things changed – driven by new technology, legislative oversight and competition.

Legislation and regulation addressed some of the financial anomalies. For example the 1987 Pliatsky Report which uncovered malpractices like over-charging for production, to claw back money sacrificed to win competitive pitches with low rates.

There was a massive growth in global competition – first from the US but later from everywhere.

Business culture evolved, with less appetite for risk and greater focus on efficiency and economy.  Less pain, less gain but more certainty. The industry became global and corporate. Boutique shops became the exception as the industry was dominated by massive global players like WPP and Omnicom.

Above all, technology leapt forward, shifting the emphasis from the unreliable world of creativity and ideas to the seemingly more dependable world of targeting and efficiency.  The creative industry became a media targeting industry.

We stopped making memorable campaigns and we started measuring click-through-rates.  For a proper commentary on how digital advertising and marketing has led us to take our eye off the ball, read Mark Ritson on what he calls ‘technoporn‘.

Ironically, advertising is significantly less effective now than it was before the technological revolution. For the evidence of this, read the analyses by Peter Field and Les Binet for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

Advertising is no longer an attractive place for  the most creative people to build a career.  We no longer attract the top talent.  

We no longer lead the world.

We no longer contribute to the culture.

The business imperative and the march of technology took us one step forward and eight steps back.

Have April Fools pranks had their day?

I was planning to write a world-weary rant on the futility and lack of anything remotely funny in April Fools Day pranks.

My first stop was a short whinge about Volkwagen’s pathetic effort this year (2021).

I’m writing this on April 2nd, but a week or so back, I stumbled across a debate on social media about the pros and cons of VW’s forthcoming rebranding in the US. According to reports leaked to the press (Reuters, I think), they were about to rename the brand as Voltswagen of America, as a nod to their new electric car strategy. Volt, geddit?

How we laughed.

Some commentators were getting oddly exercised about this. For me, it was a bit ‘ho hum’. but it’s the sort of meaningless gesturing that big global brands occasionally indulge in, so I didn’t think too much of it.

I later discovered it was an April 1st prank.

Well, let me explain why it doesn’t work:

1. It wasn’t April 1st, it was some time in March.
2. It wasn’t remotely funny
3. How does simply announcing something that’s not true count as a prank?

I despair.

Many years ago, I worked on advertising for Tetley Tea and every years we created a press ad of some kind for April 1st. The deal was that it had to be a reasonable joke, poking fun at ourselves and raising a smile. It was a novelty and people enjoyed it – they told us so in focus groups.

But in the intervening decades, the tradition has become dreary. It’s not a novelty any more, but feels like a chore. I suppose, in a world where no advertiser seems to have anything to say other than an unrelated story, April Fools ads are no less meaningful than the day to day promotional stuff.

I appreciate I am naturally a bit of a curmudgeon in these matters. Most so-called practical jokes leave me cold. People seem to have mistaken extreme wit for simply telling a lie.

Then everything changed.

I came across this offering from those endlessly wise-cracking funsters, the South Australian Police.

It’s everything an April Fools idea should be. Notably, it’s funny.

Come to think of it, this would be worth running regardless of any April Fools nonsense.

SAPOL, we salute you.

Reminded me, very strongly, of the campaign we ran at one of my previous agencies for an STI testing kit. You’ll spot the strong similarity.

This was nothing to do with April Fools. It was just a very funny way to draw attention to the product, which offered a distinct advantage over its competitors. You could test yourself for a sexually transmitted infection, it without everyone knowing about it.

Enjoy:

Don’t over hype social listening – it’s useful not revolutionary

The other day, I found myself, yet again, marvelling at the “that’s bleeding obvious, but so true and I wish I had thought of it’ wisdom of marketing professor, Mark Ritson.

He had written an article recommending that the best way to get a top job in marketing was to pretend to buy into vogueish, digital bullshit, rather than correcting your potential employer and giving a more balanced strategic perspective.

“To put it more bluntly: if you are a proper marketer, your brain might answer a recruitment question correctly but you will consequently lose the role to a lesser marketer. So, ignore the technically correct answer and go with the vocationally prudent one instead.”

His premise – that marketers have been swept away by digital tactics, and have lost the plot when it comes to more rigorous strategic thinking – rings very true with me. The expression ‘digital first‘ marketing is the epitome of the tactical tail wagging the strategic dog.

One of the areas of digital hype in Ritson’s firing line is social listening:

“Social listening is a very cool, very unrepresentative real-time barometer of brand sentiment that you should look at but it should never be more than 5% of your insight pool “

This area – sometimes called online anthropology (cool eh?) has long fascinated me. I even attended the BrandWatch annual conference specifically to learn everything about social listening, so I could wow my friends with the most current buzzy techniques. I was disappointed, nothing genuinely compelling here, but concluded that I just didn’t get it. Simply not cool enough to capture the zeitgeist.

Then a couple of ears ago, I was working on a marketing campaign in a therapy are that was new to me – autism. In these situations, the first thing to do is to furiously hoover up every bit of research, medical coverage, editorial and opinion around the therapy area, so I immersed myself in all things autistic.

One research source, commissioned at great expense by the client, jumped out at me – a study which beautifully segmented the audience of autistic kids, teens and their parents. It was packed with insight. It described a spectrum of perspectives ranging (and I’m not remotely doing it justice here) from those who had limited horizons and were largely defined by their ‘condition’ to others who seemed to excel in many ways and could almost be said to treat autism as their ‘super-power‘.

For the purposes of developing an advertising strategy, this was a compelling piece of work. If the ‘super power’ angle was tenable, and if it represented an aspirational, yet realistic proposition, it was a massively fertile creative territory. The agency was salivating at the prospect. A host of exciting storylines rapidly presented themselves – the narrow line between madness and genius, the unsung hero (tortoise) who quietly excels ahead of the flamboyant charlatan (hare), the power of concentration to go beyond what was thought possible etc.

Being a bit of a research nerd, I was interested in the methodology for this segmentation, so I dug a bit deeper. It turned out the segmentation was based on a deep-dive, social listening exercise. What does that mean? It means they ‘scraped’ a large number of conversations happening online, around autism, and set about grouping the attitudes expressed, into segments. Nothing wrong with that – it was incredibly insightful, yielding some fascinating angles.

But there’s a huge assumption here – that the opinions expressed in this ‘scraping’ are in some way representative of the population concerned, in this case autistic kids, teenagers and their parents. A moment’s reflection confirms this is likely the opposite of the case. Online conversations, of the kind elicited by the researchers, almost certainly reflect a sub-set of our population who are atypical. They are by definition high-performing, literate, tech-savvy and opinionated. A brief dive into all the other autism literature tells us that this is very far from typical.

So when Ritson says social listening is “a very cool but very unrepresentative real-time barometer of sentiment” I can absolutely concur.

Unfortunately, we never got to create a campaign about autism as a super-power. It would have been a fantastic creative opportunity. But it would have been based on a tiny, unrepresentative insight based on a small, atypical sub-set of our audience.

Narrow escape or missed opportunity?

Can’t decide, but when it comes to social listening, I don’t feel so bad about ‘not getting it’ any more. Having said all that, it’s a technique that can add something really valuable to the insight armoury, For example, when good tracking study researchers report their findings, they often supplement the survey data on attitudes with concurrent metrics covering online sentiment. It makes perfect sense.

If you don’t believe the hype, this digital revolution can be genuinely helpful.

Keep your communications single-minded please

I loved this opinion piece penned by Imogen West-Nights in the Guardian a little while ago:

Go to the pub, but don’t come into contact with other people. Only meet in groups of six, but also sit in a restaurant with 30 other diners. Go to your office, but don’t go by public transport. Listen to the scientists, except when we’re ignoring them. Relax. Under no circumstances should you relax.

It is sometimes difficult, in the face of such mixed messages from the government, to resist the urge to crescendo directly into a full-throated scream on getting out of bed in the morning.

The government has an unenviable job in dealing with coronavirus, as the situation changes from day to day, but other governments have undoubtedly done it better. According to a June YouGov poll of 27 countries, Britons had the second lowest level of confidence in their government’s handling of the pandemic.

First because it embodies the most basic but crucial rule of mass-communicating, namely ‘thou shalt be single minded’. In advertising agencies, the common analogy was to talk about catching tennis balls: if I throw six balls to you at once, you won’t catch any, but if I throw one, you stand a good chance of catching it.

Geddit?

Unfortunately, as succinctly demonstrated, Corona virus public-facing communications have been anything but single-minded.

I know my former colleagues in Government communications despair at the flakiness of current offerings. Analogies tend to be more often made with human body parts, especially those below the waist, hanging in a sack.

Secondly, and even more gratifyingly, because it represents the only occasion I have ever known where someone correctly used the term crescendo as a verb. Crescendo is not the peak you reach (that’s a forte or fortissimo) but the ascent to get there.

For that, I will be eternally grateful to Ms West-Nights.

Is this ad moving or is it an outrage?

Take a look at this ad, created by the McCann for Unfinished Votes – a quirky but highly emotive project brought to us by the anti-gun lobby. It was brought to my attention by the researcher Graham Booth, a marketing commentators I respect highly.

Now, I looked at this ad and immediately thought a couple of things:

Great use of AI – among the best I’ve seen of its kind.

Great cause – I am the kind of liberal lefty type who supports gun control.

Great to see the people I support matching their more cynical and malevolent opponents in using smart and progressive techniques to get their message across. I often despair that it often seems the more decent and principled the cause, the more lumbering and naive the communications (I’m particularly thinking of Brexit here).

What I didn’t expect to see was a response ‘below the line’ full of vitriol from those rejecting the message, the cause and the technique.

A few examples from YouTube:

Beyond disgusting. Shame on these parents

This is messed up and you guys are deranged

This is disgusting and hits uncanny valley lows unlike anything I’ve ever seen before

One of, if not the, most disturbing, creepy and horrible videos i have ever seen

And so it goes on; there are pages of condemnation. And it doesn’t, on the face of it, appear to be written by the reactionary, pro-gun militants but by regular people, genuinely disturbed.

I usually reckon I can predict when there’s going to be a backlash to advertising, but this took me by surprise.

Years ago, we used to tell clients they should aim to achieve controversy – it was a good thing disguised as a bad thing – a catalyst to spark a conversation.

Is that what we have here?

Or is it genuinely creepy and ill-judged?

I’m in two minds about it now I’ve seen the outrage. Makes you think, as we used to say.

Alert Alert !!!

My eyes are peeled. I’m scanning the horizon.  I check behind.  And to the sides.   Everyone I see will be scrutinised from head to foot, until I am satisfied they offer no threat.  Every vehicle will be checked.  Every house I pass will be noted and its details recoded.  Nothing goes unnoticed.  I am a coiled spring.

I am alert. So alert.  I am positively tingling with alertness.  Alert is my new middle name.  Beyond alert.  I’m more alert than Alert Ali McAlert, winner of last year’s ‘Mr. Alert’ competition.

I must be safe from the COVID-19 virus right?

If you didn’t know (because either you’ve been living in a cave, or somewhere outside Britain) this is the British Government’s campaign to keep the public safe from corona virus.

Stay Alert (what?) Control the Virus (er, how?) Save lives (but, who, where, how, che?)

My main question is this:  Is this the worst piece of public policy communication in history?

Seems like a no-brainer to me.  It’s the biggest stinker ever.

Why do I say that? (I don’t hear you ask)

Well for a start it makes no sense.  Staying alert will make no difference whatsoever to anything relating to the virus.  Or anything else, except I’ll be exhausted rather quickly.  Is alertness somehow relevant?  Am I at more at risk while sleeping than I am when fully ‘on my guard’?  I think not.

Controlling the virus is not something I know how to do, nor something it’s in my power to do so instructing me to do it leaves me floundering.

And saving lives, while undoubtedly a good thing, is not really in my remit – I don’t think I’m being asked to find someone in danger and rescue them, so what exactly is it I’m being urged to do?

Alice Bennett, a senior lecturer in contemporary literature, put it better than me, on Twitter:

“It’s a fantasy that we can ‘control the virus’, but we can’t actually control our attention either. ‘Stay Alert’ is the ‘Never Forget’ of public safety messaging: actionless, objectless, infinitely expansive”

Inevitably the authors of the campaign have felt compelled to defend it:

“The truth is that people really understand the message, people understand what ‘Stay Alert’ means,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program .

In fact, polling by YouGov, on the Monday following its launch, suggested only 30 percent of people knew what “Stay Alert” means — and even Tory MPs privately expressed dismay at the botched messaging before the key document was finally published at lunchtime on Monday.

Apparently, the original intention was that the five letters making up ALERT would form an acronym for five actions people could take to prevent the spread of the disease.  But according to Politico, the graphics for the new campaign were leaked to the Sunday Telegraph, the weekend before, leading to what is known in the trade as a ‘botched launch’.  And no acronym was forthcoming.

No wonder the campaign has been met with a mixture of derision and confusion.

I couldn’t help take a quick peek at what some experts in Government communications thought about it.  A couple of senior staffers at the Central Office of Information (The Government’s centre of excellence for public communications, until it was broken up a few years ago) summarised their thoughts as follows (no names, no pack-drill):

“I wonder what was the thought process that went into the new slogan: BE ALERT, CONTROL THE VIRUS, SAVE LIVES.  This slogan is meaningless and confusing.”

“It’s a box-ticking exercise that clearly doesn’t give a shit about whether it actually changes behaviour or helps people.”

So far so utterly damning.  But there’s another side to this.  Because, if there’s one area where the current British Government is generally sure-footed, it’s mass communications made simple.  The Brexit campaign was a triumph of persuasion, where the case to be made was logically er flimsy at best.  And the last general election saw the Conservative Party wipe the floor with their opponents, despite a fairly iffy record in government.  All of this was achieved with a single-minded approach to communications based on a religious adherence to polling and feedback from focus groups.  It has been a thoroughly professional job.  They gave every impression of knowing what they were doing.  Until now.

So what went wrong?

Stay alert for further bulletins…….

Great advertising not dead after all; further evidence emerges

I’ve recently slipped into bemoaning the current state of advertising. No big ideas any more, all short term tactical guff, automated, no soul bah blah blah …

And then I saw this and I remembered why I wanted to work in advertising all those years ago.

 

 

 

What gets measured……my arse

We’re coming up to the ad industry’s annual celebration of effectiveness – The Festival of Creativity and Effweek; it’s all run or created or generally encouraged by the institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA).

According to the effectiveness gurus, Peter Field and Les Binet, communications are becoming less effective because we are focusing on short term returns over long term brand building.

There’s a deep irony in this. Field and Binet have tirelessly championed the  measurement of effectiveness.  But it’s exactly this emphasis on measurement which has led marketers to be more focused on evaluating campaigns – and that mostly means incorporating short (or at best short-ish) term metrics equating to return on investment.

The problem is long term measurement is really difficult.  Some years ago the IPA introduced a category in its effectiveness awards for ‘the longer and broader effects of advertising’.  It became a kind of holy grail in the effectiveness community and was won by some of he great advertisers of history like VW.  But it’s much easier to show that sales responded profitably to a campaign over the year when it appeared than to explain a brand’s sustained success over decades.  And typically people don’t stay in a job long enough to be that concerned about the long term.  So why bother?

It’s also more broadly true – beyond advertising.

Think about public policy issues like health.  We’re often reminded ‘what gets measured gets managed’ so metrics drive incentives and that’s what broadly speaking gets things done.  We can measure how many patients have been treated, how beds have been used and how long waiting lists are.  But the impact of better prevention or healthier lifestyles are hellish difficult to evaluate.  Maybe that’s why the authorities’ efforts in these areas have been so limp.

Yet we all know deep down it would be infinitely more efficient to improve our lifestyles than to treat illnesses.

Quite a conundrum, if you’re a policy maker.

It also explains why health systems are really sickness systems.  All about illness, not really about staying healthy at all.  And why they’re often accused of being driven by the interests of Big Pharma  – the companies who stand to benefit from treating more sick people rather than preventing them becoming sick in the first place.

Insert your own conspiracy theory here.

They don’t make ’em like this any more

Jeremy Bullmore once said that advertising has never been as much fun as it used to be.

I like to paraphrase that and say advertising has never been as good as it used to be.

Except that I do actually believe advertising is nowhere near as good as it used to be.

And just to make my point, I tried toi think of the best advertising of the last few years.

 

I came up with these two.  Turns out they’re both rather old.

 

 

 

QED.

 

Use your intelligence wisely

In ‘The Long Goodbye’, the classic Raymond Chandler crime novel, hard nosed, embittered private investigator Philip Marlowe describes recreating historic chess matches thus:

…. the most extravagant a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency

Advertising executives everywhere, I think you know what he’s talking about.