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:

Close, but no cigar

The Football World Cup (I can’t bring myself to call it the FIFA World Cup, as we’re supposed to nowadays) should be a fantastic opportunity for brands. In particular, it’s a place to borrow the passion and energy of the thing we all get most excited about.  No, not street-fighting and British self-loathing; I’m thinking of the football.

In the past, Adidas had its moments but Nike was King of the World Cup ad – despite not being a sponsor – clever eh?  More recently Beats by Dr Dre has excelled.

But Beats’ new 2018 version is a big disappointment.  It has many of the elements: big names; check, cool track, check, flashbacks, flash forwards, check, underdog story; check …..etc and so on.  But no banana; you just don’t end up caring one way or the other.

 

There’s still time for someone to step in and save the day with a new blockbuster.  In the meantime, let’s just luxuriate in the sheer amazing-ness of the last Beats World Cup ad from 2014.

 

 

That’s better.

Well what do you know?

When I was a child, I thought my Dad literally knew everything.  “I know everything” he said, on countless occasions.  Others have proposed that the naturalist, Alexander Von Humboldt, was the last man actually to know everything, and he died in 1859.  The ‘last man to know everything’ mantle has also been attributed to a number of others, from Aristotle to Francis Bacon.

Needless to say, in the modern world it’s impossible for any one of us to know everything, nor even a large part of the body of human knowledge.  We can’t even know everything about the many things that affect us directly on a daily basis.  And that’s a problem.

Even the things we do know, we don’t really know.  We believe them, but what’s the basis of that? Without going all epistemological, sometimes it’s through empirical evidence, but mostly it’s because we learned it from a source which we trust.

It’s increasingly a problem, because trusting others has become a risky business.  Well, actually it always was.  Take any piece of supposed knowledge you have and really interrogate it.  Take the laws of physics.  Some of the sub-atomic particles I learned about in school have been superseded by new, sexier ones which are even less easy to grasp and even more likely to be replaced. And those are the very foundations of matter.

When it comes to more mundane stuff, we’re on even dodgier ground.  I worked for many years in the energy business and everything I saw reinforced my belief that climate change is happening, it’s partly induced by man’s activities and that it will likely lead to the end of civilisation.  How long that doomsday scenario will take is uncertain, but probably within a few dozen generations.  However, some people genuinely doubt this.  In response, I commonly cite the fact that all the reputable scientists in the area agree with me.  But, if I’m honest, that’s only hearsay.  I’ve only actually spoken to a handful of scientists.  Anyway, scientific theories evolve and scientists change their prevailing wisdom over time.  That’s the nature of science.

And now, the rest of the world has cottoned on to this Cartesian doubt.  Encouraged by idiots people like Michael Gove (“People in this country has had enough of experts“) it seems anything goes, and authority is history.  Anyone can claim any old nonsense and there’s no requirement for evidence.  And consequently we’re right in the shit.  Because all this plays into the hands of the demagogues and the hate preachers.  Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and The Daily Mail.  And Brexit.

This has implications for brands and businesses too.  Corporate reputation is fundamentally based on trust.  Historically, that trust was built on the behaviour and ‘body language’ of a brand over time.  I think it still is, but the pillars of trust seem to be in flux.  Transparency is the vogue, but that means different things to different people.  One man’s transparency is another man’s clever manipulation.

Indeed the idea of trust itself can become a subject for a new brand promise.  I like the recent campaign for fruit drink Oasis, which takes this and plays games with it.

 

So there you have it.  Politics, philosophy, climate change and advertising.  Everything I love, all in one place.  We’re completely buggered, but there’s a neat insight for some ironic advertising.

The purpose of ‘purpose’

There’s an endless debate going on about ‘Brands with Purpose’ and I can’t help adding to it, even though a lot of the coverage is profoundly annoying.  A rare voice of sense on the subject is Nigel Hollis’s blog for research company Millward Brown.  In a recent post he addresses the seemingly gratuitous nature of many recent award-winning case studies.  This year’s Cannes Festival was awash with celebrated campaigns which are very beautiful and which address crucial social problems but appear to have nothing to do with marketing, or indeed business.  These include the Grand Prix winner ‘Fearless Girl‘, a statue created by McCann for State Street Global Advisors (who?) designed to help inspire more women to leadership positions.

The problem (or one of many problems) with this is that nobody knows who the brand is responsible for this work so it can’t yield the brand any benefit.  That’s fine if it’s an act of philanthropy, but it’s not – or if it is then why is it entered into awards for excellence in marketing communications?

Hollis says purpose-led campaigns can deliver a good ROI provided they follow three basic principles:

1. Identify how the campaign will help the brand make more money.
2. Address a tension or issue meaningful to the target audience.
3. Ensure the purpose fits what the brand can/does stand for and offers opportunity to differentiate.

This seems enormously sensible to me.  What’s more, it gives me an irresistible desire to recount the story of an early, largely unsung precursor to these campaigns.

In the early 90s, Texaco was struggling to compete with the more established brands, particularly BP and Shell, who were part of the British way of life, whereas Texaco had the image of ‘A visiting American’.  The new Chairman dismissed the proposed retail campaign and demanded the agency create something that put Texaco on the map.  Desperate to impress, the two sister agencies DMB&B and IMP created a wonderful campaign ‘Children Should be Seen and Not Hurt’.

The company gave away, free reflective and fluorescent stickers from their forecourts.

Hollis’s principles could hardly be more apposite:

It made money because it attracted people to the retail site and a proportion inevitably took the opportunity to make a purchase.  For some it even sparked the habit of using that forecourt regularly.  It also addressed Texaco’s corporate reputation issue in that it presented them as ‘part of the fabric of society’ as the Chairman had prescribed.

It addressed a meaningful issue – road casualties among children was (and is) a hot topic and enormously emotive.  Research by the road safety laboratories showed that improving conspicuity (visibility) was the best way to reduce the number of accidents, which was in turn the best way to reduce casualties.

It was relevant to the brand because – as research indicated – people saw fuel retailers as ‘part of the problem’ along with car manufacturers and road administrators.

Research also showed how, even all those years ago, there was a very grown up response to this kind of initiative.  It was clearly ‘marketing’ because it invited you to go to a forecourt.  But it was also clearly ‘doing good’ because it was giving away free materials which might save a life.  The net effect on the brand was positive because on balance, even to the cynics, it was a n initiative that you wanted to succeed.  That’s the bit that seems to be missing in much of the more gratuitous, modern award-winning ‘purpose’ work.

We didn’t call it ‘purpose’ in those days, we called it marketing.  So next time you tell your friends what a good idea Volvo’s ‘Life Paint’ is, remember, Texaco did it first.

Brands with purpose; the story do far

‘Brands with purpose’ were all the rage for about twenty minutes or so.  Unilever said it was the right thing to do.  So obviously it was the right thing to do.

Then came Pepsigate.  An overzealous attempt to appropriate a world of virtuous resistance against all the evil in the world, while simultaneously calling for world peace, racial harmony and please can we all just start being nice to each other again.  Remember the anti-Vietnam war poster with the girl putting the flower in the barrel of the soldier’s gun?  Except Pepsi misjudged the popular mood and was ridiculed.

My own view is that, while Pepsi’s attempt to tap into this ‘purpose’ was pretty woeful, it wasn’t so much worse than a lot of other work from other brands who just about got away with it.  Pepsi didn’t have any credits in the bank here (as opposed to Coke for example who do) so once social media turned against them, the hole just got deeper and deeper.  Before they knew it, they were a laughing stock and had to withdraw the advertisement in question.  This in turn made them headline news and so doubly a laughing stock.

Harsh but fair.

This debacle has spawned a host of ‘told you so’ coverage.  Most of it is simply accountable to people wanting to score points by dancing on Pepsi’s grave (who wouldn’t?)  I’ve seen lots of other corporate pap which is equally risible, but escaped with barely a word of censure (special mention here for Hewlett Packard’s corporate video).

But I did quite enjoy this:

Moving on, in the wake of Pepsigate, brands should be getting very wary of doing the vision thing.  This idea for Heineken was, presumably, too far advanced to pull out.  In a worlds where Pepsi is ridiculed, this shouldn’t work either.  But it does.  Why?

Two reasons:

1. Heineken is a brand we like.  It has a history of entertaining us and being witty.  It’s not explicitly a crusading brand (like say, Dove whose influence is very evident here) but it’s well-meaning enough to be credible.
2. The craft.  It’s very nicely done.

That’s my opinion today.  If it gets lambasted and withdrawn tomorrow, I will of course disown all of this and claim I was being ironic.

And you fell for it right?

Two cheers for IKEA

 

I’m sort of loving the new TV commercial for IKEA.  Mostly.  Well, largely.  If I have a quibble, it’s that this looks like an idea that has been sitting in someone’s bottom drawer for a while waiting for an opportunity to be wheeled out.

Creatively fabulous, but strategically?

IKEA’s proposition of informality is simple, relevant and attractive.  It’s also ownable for them and it’s creatively fertile.  I see the new line is ‘Let’s relax’.  Fair enough.  That’s also succinct enough to be memorable.  It’s just that poking fun at our obsession with sharing food photos or seeking approval from others is funny and insightful – but it  isn’t really a statement about informality.  Do you post food pics on Facebook because you crave others’ approval?  I don’t think so.

National Treasure

I was lucky enough to attend a talk last night by Tony Hall, Director General of the BBC entitled ‘Why I love the BBC’.  If the boss of any other organisation was billed under such a title, it would appear at best sycophantic, at worst deluded.  But for the Beeb it’s the most natural thing in the world.  It is simply the most loved brand you will ever come across.

Bizarre then that the last few weeks have been riddled with news stories about how the authorities (Ministry of Culture and stuff) was keen to make fundamental changes, increasing government control, slashing funding and so on.

Happily, the White paper announced yesterday appears to have missed most of the main demands of the attack dogs.  But it’s weird that such a revered institution has seemingly been under fire in this way.

Martin Kettle wrote a nice piece in the Guardian, in which he says:

Be very clear about the BBC white paper. In almost any other country in the world this would not be happening at all. Beyond Britain the BBC is universally revered. It stands for excellence and independence; and because of that excellence and independence, it stands above all for reliability. There is no other engine of soft power to touch it on the planet.

There’s only one country in the world where the idea that the BBC needs shaking up, taking down, and kicking around has any serious currency. That country, to the disbelief and consternation of much of the rest of the world right now, is Britain.

BBC white paper: key points at a glance

As for the talk itself, Hall was inspiring. You often hear business people and politicians tell us how passionate they are about some issue or other.  The old adage “show don’t tell” comes into play here.  It should be communicated by how you speak and what you say.  You shouldn’t have to say it out loud.  Well Tony Hall is clearly as passionate about the BBC as you can get.

He pointed to three areas where the BBC is uniquely attractive:

1) It’s for everyone

Sounds obvious but if you reflect on BBC content there really is something for every taste.  This is paradoxically how the Beeb has the capacity to popularise seemingly obscure issues.  Hall talks about “the Brian Cox effect” where they have taken science to the people.  He also mentions “The Helen Archer Effect” where a soap storyline raises a social issue that’s hard to broach – in this case domestic violence.  And at the other end of the spectrum, they still have huge scale ‘Appointment to View’ events (I’m thinking ‘Strictly’).

Over 200,000 people contributed to the consultation.  That scale of response is unheard of.  It’s because people care.

2) It’s about trust

The BBC is the most trusted broadcaster – by a mile.  In the most recent surveys, it is ‘trusted’ by 58% of Brits.  The next highest brand scores 11%. Compare that to the scores achieved by the most dominant brands in other markets.

This trust is most obvious when it comes to news coverage.  The government may have a view that the Beeb is unduly critical, but to everyone else across the world, the BBC’s news service is respected as honest, rigorous and impartial.

As Hall noted, “from broccoli stems to the EU referendum, the people come to us to understand the issues.”

On a side-issue, trust has two elements here.  There’s trust in an organisation’s competence (functional trust). “I trust them to do a good job”.  But beyond that is a deeper trust (‘affective trust’) which means “I trust you to do the right thing” (even if it’s not in your best interest).  This is what separates the few brands that we truly value, and this is what the BBC has more than any other.

3) It’s all about the content

The stuff they make is simply very good.  There’s an expression from Reithian times “we make the good popular and the popular good” which summarises it neatly.  Most of us recognise that even the stuff we’re not interested in (nobody is interested in everything) is high quality.  As one Telegraph journalist  said “I don’t like Gardener’s Question Time or Thought for the Day” (frankly, who does?)..”But I’m glad they’re there.  Nobody else would make them”.

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable occasion, only slightly marred by the audience insisting on standing and applauding with shouts of ‘bravo’ as Hall stood down.  I resisted the temptation to say “It’s not the bloody Opera”.

But I did leave with a sense of confidence that the UK’s best-loved brand is in safe hands.

Boaty McBoatface: joke or humiliation – you decide

This week, Mark Ritson, Marketing Professor, Marketing Columnist of the Year and general Wise Man of Marketing took exception to the public’s choice of Boaty McBoatface in a crowdsourcing exercise to choose the name for the National Environment Research Council’s (NERC) new polar research ship.  Up to this point, most commentators had seen it as bit of harmless fun.  It  restored their faith in the British public’s sense of humour and their desire to prick the balloon of pomposity that generally surrounds these things.

Ritson believes this story proves the public would rather humiliate your brand than engage with it.  As he puts it:

“The NERC’s competition to name its new boat is the latest in a cavalcade of crowdsourcing disasters, demonstrating that consumers are a bunch of brand-haters.”

Even worse than that, as he warms to his theme:

“In the happy, completely detached world of digital marketing there is a common fallacy that the sarcastic brand-hating bastards that populate the planet are actually an army of jovial optimists who simply cannot wait to engage with your organisation on social media.  Unless you grasp the dystopian nature of consumer culture, you miss the inherent danger.”

I’m a great respecter of Mark Ritson and I think I understand what he’s driving at.  There’s a lot of nonsense talked about brands and social media.  Brands are an unwelcome intrusion in social media just as they were “the unwelcome guest in your living room” when we were talking about TV ads in the old days.  But it’s overstating it to say we hate brands (except maybe Marmite – truly the Devil’s work).

As Plan B said “Hating takes too much energy”.  We’re simply not that bothered.  And if we get the chance to take the piss and suggest a daft name for something we previously never knew existed – so much the better.  How we laughed.

The point here is that in the real world, brands aren’t such a big deal.  They exist mostly to make our choices easy – to provide defaults and heuristics (sorry, jargon alert, won’t do it again, and I definitely won’t launch into Andrew Ehrenberg’s weak theory of advertising). They’re only really there so we don’t have to think about trivial stuff.  And honestly, it doesn’t get any more trivial than the name of the NERC’s polar exploration vessel.

As Ritson points out, there is some previous on the ‘daft names’ front. Take a look at the following – this is what happened when US juice drink Mountain Dew asked for suggestions to name a new apple drink:

I don’t think they used the name.  But I hope NERC do.

 

 

Told you so

This blog has previously celebrated the marketing genius of Protein World.  Last year they harnessed the outrage of the chattering classes, shooting from obscurity to become a household name on a marketing budget of five and a half pence .

It’s debatable whether they actually set out to achieve any of this with their fabulously outrage-ready poster on the London Underground – ‘Are you beach-body ready?’

Either way, they were laughing all the way to the bank and very sensibly, they’ve followed up by building on the theme.  This year they will be sponsoring Geordie Shore and Ex on the Beach.  I’m not a regular viewer of these series but I do have teenage children so I’ve picked up the basics: I’m assured that hot women (and men) wearing very little figure prominently.  Bikinis?  Tick. Flesh?  Tick.  Sexual tension?  Tick Tick Tick.  Outrage? Meh.

 

 

Mike Ashley: marketing genius?

Let’s hear it for one of marketing’s great ideas that’s almost universally unrecognised.  Yes it’s the humble Sports Direct mug.  You’ve got one.  I’ve got one.  We’ve all got one, possibly several.  Every time you buy something (come on, you can admit it, we’ve all been there) from Sports Direct online, you get one of these oversized mugs, like it or not.  And even though it’s frankly rather ugly (and it tells the world  you shop at Sports Direct) your sustainability-driven conscience won’t let you throw it out. So you keep this tiny advertisement for Mike Ashley’s sports empire on show in your home for ever. The cost to him is about a quarter to a fifth of bugger all.  And your lovely home even gives Sports Direct a kind of genteel respectability.  It’s utterly brilliant.