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

But is it true?

I don’t know …

What I do know is that it’s an argument that has encouraged an incredible amount of companies to adopt a ‘zero tolerance to risk’, even if in many cases, the risk they are being asked to consider is unbelievably negligible.

The real issue is defining ‘what is a mistake’.

For many, it’s anything that can cause a negative view of their company to occur … even if in reality, very few companies even register in people’s consciousness, let alone are front of mind.

While it’s true a major incident can have long lasting, negative effect … even then it doesn’t mean your reputation will be destroyed forever.

The reality is people make mistakes.

All people.

And companies are made up of people so it’s perfectly natural for it to happen – the issue is [1] why it happened and [2] what you do after it’s happened.

The reason I say this is because Dave Luhr – one of W+K’s ubermen – once said something to me that I think adland needs to remember:

“Every piece of new business lets you redefine who you are”.

He’s right.

As an industry, we like to categorise agencies into buckets of creativity that seemingly never change and yet the opportunity to ‘fuck the system’ is there each and every day.

FCB can – in theory – become the new W+K.

BBH can – in theory – become the new GREY.

It’s all for the taking … or the losing … and that’s why I think, as I wrote ages ago, why BBH & W+K are consistently good, because they know their reputation is built on sand and if they’re to maintain it, they have to keep pushing for greatness.

Sure, the longer you maintain a good – or bad – run, the stronger the opinion people will have of you, but the key thing here is that contrary to popular belief, it’s rarely a state of permanency [unless you’ve done something really, utterly shit/brill – but mainly shit] and so regardless of how good – or bad – you may think you, your agency, your client might be, you have the power to change it or maintain. The rest is down to you.

Some of you might not know this, but many years ago, I was a cold caller.

Sorry.

I’d just moved to Australia, needed a job and – for minimum wage – I became one of those annoying bastards who calls up random people trying to flog them stuff … except in my case, I was calling random businesses and my ‘product’ was a low cost, long distance phone line from APP.

I think I managed to stick it out for about 6 weeks before getting a job back in adland – for another 6 weeks in a media department [talk about from the frying pan into the fire] – however looking back, what I found interesting was there was no ‘script’ to speak to, it was all down to how you chose to interact with the person on the other end of the phone.

It shames me to say that I was quite good at it – though the real reason has far more to do with it actually being a decent offer at a time where the whole concept was new, rather than my gift of the gab – however I did realise that one of the best ways to not get the phone slammed down on you after a torrent of verbal abuse was to not pretend you were their friend, but to say upfront you’re trying to sell them something and that you just would like 3 minutes of their time before they can tell you “to go to hell”.

[I used to literally say “you can tell me to go to hell” and it was amazingly – and weirdly – well recieved, which highlights how people love the idea of being able to give ‘abuse without consequence’]

Anyway, since that experience, I’ve been sort-of intrigued by the whole cold calling methodology – especially when I continue to get such crap calls from call centers despite reading how they all have ‘amazing and tested systems’ for success – so I’ve decided to take the plunge and enroll in a cold calling course so I can find out once and for all if it’s all bollocks [check out the worst David Brent video of possibly all time] or a skill only the true masters can pass on.

So from next month, I’m going to be learning from this man …

I have no idea what will happen … I have no idea what/if I’ll learn … I have no idea how I’ll be able to actually ‘test’ my [alleged] new found skills, but if you start getting random phone calls from me, you’ll now know why.

Well it’s been viewed over NINETEEN THOUSAND TIMES.

NINETEEN THOUSAND!!!

Fuck me.

Now as nice as that is, there are a couple of points that are slightly worrying …

1. None of the presentations I’ve written on my own have got anywhere near that amount.

2. None of what we said was really new … it was just a consolidation of a bunch of facts we have all known about as an industry for a long time.

Which begs the question, does adland have the memory of a goldfish?

Seriously, why does a presentation that talks about issues that the industry has been muttering about for literally decades, become so popular.

OK, so I am using the term ‘popular’ in relation to my other presentations which are anything but, but seriously, what’s going on?

Debates regarding television vs internet … pre-testing … social media … the relevancy of US/UK ad models for other markets are hardly new themes, so why it is an issue that has seemingly got so much interest?

I’ll tell you why, because too much advertising is done to appease clients not to drive business.

Sure, a client has to buy into what you’re doing so that it can be executed as powerfully as possible, but sadly it appears too many clients are only interested in doing work that allows them to go into their review and say ‘they’ve executed their goals’ than do something that quantifiably helps their business grow.

I’ve said it before, but what’s more worrying than adland losing their seat at the boardroom table [which is our fault as we decided it was best to not talk about issues the board were actually interested in] is the fact that too many marketing directors have also been kicked out of the top floor room.

Instead of being charged to ‘market’ their company to groups who can fundamentally ‘change their commercial future’, their role seems to be to ‘satisfy the ego of the board’ … which is why our industry seems to have now ended up doing so much work that encapsulates everything we know is wrong, even though it is contributing to our own downfall.