The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

So today is the day we say goodbye to our tattoo’d love loser, Billy.

Even though it’s nice to know that life will be ‘smoother’ without him, the reality is we’re very sad to see him go because even though he showed none of it on this blog [haha!] he’s a very talented, smart, funny guy who has been absolutely brilliant for us, to us and with us.

In reality, it’s not really goodbye because like his nemesis, Bazza, we’ll still be seeing a lot of him as he’s joining [or should I say, re-joining] our friends at Crispin, however it will be a much quieter place without him and Andy in particular is finding the whole thing very hard to take, mainly because he knows no one else in the team will take his shit like Billy did, so he’s going to have to start being nice, ha!

Anyway, we’re very proud of all you’ve done and know there’s a lot of great things still to come, so go and show the World what you’re made of and never change because underneath it all, you’re one of the good guys.

Make sure you enjoy every second of your leaving party in Vegas because let me tell you, it’s the last thing you’ll ever be getting out of us, ha!

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PS 1: I know going out after 11pm is exciting for you George, but can you please remember public vomiting is never a good look at your age.

Now if that wasn’t scary enough, imagine how I felt when I saw this …

Yes, it’s a bed called NOTTINGHAM.

To add insult to injury, they then have the cheek to say “A good nights rest comes at a fraction of a price”.

Apart from the fact that I don’t want a good nights rest, I want a good nights sleep – the reality is that the only good night you’ll have in crime ridden Nottingham is either if you’re dead, or in a Police cell.

[That’s a joke BTBB, so don’t tell me off please!]

Trust me, I know how painful coming up with names for brands can be, but I can’t believe that NOTTINGHAM was the best thing they could come up with.

Jesus, I’ve just seen a box of elastic bands that was able to come up with a half decent name [‘TRUE FRIENDS – because we bond forever’] so I can’t believe a product that has real emotional value in the purchase decision [and costs more than 50 cents!!!] can’t come up with something abit better than a place in England with a serious crime problem.

I remember lovely Russell gave a little challenge a while back to come up with a new name for the North Sea.

If memory serves me correctly, the winner was “Ice Cream Sea”.

Rather than hide from the fact it’s a bloody cold bastard, they embraced it and associated it with something positive – Ice Cream – brilliant.

So here’s a little challenge of my own, if you were the guys behind the NOTTINGHAM bed, and were tasked to come up with a new name, what would you suggest – and no, Bedpost Notches is not appropriate, ha!

I am a huge believer in being able to quantify results because if you don’t do that, you can’t expect to get the money you believe you deserve.

I must admit in Asia, I’ve found it quite difficult to get clients to quantify their business expectations – not because of their ability – but because out here the role of marketing tends to be more about ‘producing stuff’, than ‘producing results’.

In other words the focus of the average brand manager is to create whatever promotional material their sales teams wants [demands] rather than drive ideas that can motivate the masses to do what ultimately their business [and their customers] want.

This situation might sound like a dream come true for certain ad agencies but it’s this lack of responsibility that I believe has contributed to the low value many companies regard adland with.

I know there are many people out there who think ‘awareness’ is a valid metric but I don’t.

Of course awareness can contribute to a brands success but that should never be enough of a strategic target because ultimately, clients hire us to make them more money and if we fail to recognize that – and put in place targets that can demonstrate that – we are failing our industry.

Instant Awareness By Cahobby 13

You see I don’t believe brand value and sales value need be mutually exclusive – infact in these hard economic times, I’d argue it is irresponsible to treat them as separate entities.

This doesn’t mean ads have to feature great big yellow fucking starbursts or pricing on every ad – it means embracing every discipline within marketing, including the sales, distribution and R&D channels because contrary to what some in adland think, they have as big an influence on how well your 30 seconds of CGI glory works as anything else.

Anyway, I’m going off tangent and whilst I’ve just said a lot of Asian advertising has little or no definable targets for its communication, not every company acts this way – which is why what I’m going to write now may seem abit mad … but hey that’s something you should be used to by now.

Calculating Retrenchments By Esthr

Right, an issue that is bothering me is organizations obsession with measurability.

Believe it or not, I’m not contradicting what I said at the beginning of this post … the issue I’m talking about is that too many organisations regard ‘measurability’ as the most important element of anything they do, rather than making the important things, measurable.

Am I making clear here?

Just incase, what I’m trying to say is that too many clients care more about measuring how many people see their campaign rather than what the communication actually achieves.

What this means is that companies are getting commended for their mass market mainstream communication strategies [ie: brainwashing] rather than rating it’s actual effectiveness which is probably contributing to the traditional approach to mass marketing and communication despite almost everyone in the industry accepting it’s effectiveness is not as powerful as it used to be or it should.

To be honest, I’m amazed companies seem to be happy paying continually higher and higher rates for less and less audience – but I guess when you are in a culture of risk adversity [despite what all the companies may say] it’s what is bound to happen.

Emperors New Clothes By Ecpica

One thing that really upsets me with all this is that the industry mags are seemingly perpetuating this madness by running columns that talk about ‘which ad has had the greatest recall’.

Week after week we see bland brands with huge budgets getting labeled as the most ‘effective’ interms of recall when the reality is either [1] that ‘recall’ is having little benefit interms of sales or [2] they own so much of the key distribution channels, that they’d get the majority of their sales with little or no advertising anyway.