Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Audio Visual, Comment, Communication Strategy, Creativity
So back in the days when I was allowed on a plane, I was flicking through the channels to find something to watch when I came across something that had a proposition that literally screamed to be seen.
Seriously, if all creative briefs had such strong story, we wouldn’t be complaining about the standard of work ever again.
That said, if I was religious, maybe the shows description would put people off rather than pull them in … but then, given the alleged story of Jesus’ Mum, maybe they’d think it was a documentary.
It was a good too, one I would never have watched if that description hadn’t caught my eye.
OK, it’s not as good as the [fake] Dagenham Ford stuff from a few weeks ago, but whoever says copy doesn’t work doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Audio Visual, Authenticity, Communication Strategy, Confidence, Creativity, Culture, Cunning, Customer Service, Devious Strategy, Differentiation, Emotion, England, Experience, Food, Food For Thought, Football, HHCL, Insight, London, Relevance, Resonance
… is know your audience.
The second rule is let them know you know them.
For all the millions spent at agencies and consultancies, this food vendor at the recent Chelsea v Everton match. shows they get it more than most.
Now you may think, ‘who would shop at a place that publicly identifies them as a chubby’?
And I get it …
In these highly visual times, no one wants to associate with anything deemed socially negative.
But apart from the fact there are some people who take great pride in their unhealthiness, the reality is there’s something incredibly lovely about that name.
If you’re hungry.
If you need something to eat.
If you want something that’s going to make you full.
What better place is there than a food cart with the name Chubby’s.
Chubby’s suggests big portions. Lots of flavour [read: fat] Value for money.
But it’s more than that.
This is a food cart at a football match.
Food and football is never supposed to be fancy.
It’s supposed to be piping hot and insanely substantial …
This means even the most healthy minded individual can justify buying from there.
“It’s just this once” … they’ll say.
“It’s part of the footballing experience” they’ll claim.
And then, to make themselves feel less greedy, they’ll do what was the basis of one of my favourite ever campaigns – a bloody radio ad no less – they’ll go and order a Diet Tango to wash it all down with.
The weak and delusional fools.
[Cue evil laugh]
So while I doubt any naming consultancy would ever come up with such a choice of name for a football food establishment, I would say the owner of this cart is a better marketer than most of the agencies and consultancies put together.
And his hot dogs were a delight.
That is not a euphemism.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Audio Visual, Brand Suicide, Communication Strategy, Confidence, Content, Context, Corona Virus, Corporate Evil, Crap Products In History, Culture, Cunning, Daily Fail, Daily Mail, Marketing Fail, Media, Prejudice
Tomorrow I’ve written a positive post about some of the stuff Corona virus has revealed we are capable of being.
Today I’m writing about the worst of it.
Specifically The Daily Mail.
As we all know, they have become one of the most successful newspapers and internet destinations in the World thanks to their fear-mongering, shock-creating, prejudice-encouraging bullshit, all wrapped up in the illusion of being a family newspaper caring about family values.
If Donald Trump was a newspaper, he’d be The Daily Mail.
They have absolutely revelled in the corona virus.
Equally challenging the scientists viewpoints and then the people who don’t follow it.
They play both sides with such obviousness [see photo above] and yet they – like Fox TV – claim to be consistent, fair and balanced.
The fact they get away with it means either no one believes them or – as I fear – their readers don’t question a word they say.
While they like to focus their hate on minority groups, no one is immune from their hate.
Even the middle-England elderly readers – their core audience in the UK – cop it with headlines that suggest ‘they will all be left to die’ or ‘isolation till 2021’.
They are the embodiment of ‘take no prisoners’ …
For me, they are basically a far right political party.
However, unlike the far right, they have found a much more powerful way to operate.
They don’t openly show their hatred … oh no, they slowly and quietly infiltrate mainstream society so they can undermine the minorities, the unemployed and the poor by making prejudice, illness and poverty seem the words and beliefs of the irrational.
To be fair to them, they may not even realise it.
They are so myopic that they fail to appreciate other people have different circumstances.
Which is why they – like that other prick, Piers Morgan – don’t realise their commentary is so harmful because they’ve never experienced any of the issues they are so quick to either claim don’t exist or they would never advocate … like prejudice, racism and poverty.
As you’ll read in tomorrow’s post, corona has revealed the best of many companies and news organisations.
It has changed the dynamic between corporation and society.
It’s why I hope after this, the Daily Mail is seen for what it is, a social manipulator – a company who only acts in the interests of its owner and no one else.
A great villain for a Bond movie, but not a great company for society.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Audio Visual, Comment, Cunning, Embarrassing Moments, Entertainment, Friendship, Loyalty, Management, Planners, Planners Making A Complete Tit Of Themselves And Bless, R/GA
So a while back, I wrote a post about Martin Bassot.
Martin worked for me at R/GA as a very talented comms/connections planner but then fucked off to Wieden+Kennedy.
Anyway, as part of his leaving present we gave him a jigsaw.
Of himself.
You see as one of his bucket list goals before he turned 30, he wanted to do a big jigsaw.
There’s 2 very big problems with the previous sentence.
1. He was incredibly talented and only TWENTY BLOODY NINE.
2. The other was he wanted to do a jigsaw as a life goal.
Christ!
Anyway, because I’m a bit of a prick, I found the photo of the one time he wore a suit for work [to pick up an award, the bloody corporate crawler] photoshopped it onto a pic of a ‘used car forecourt’ and made that the image of his jigsaw.
Zoom forward a few weeks and we caught up.
I told him it was because I wanted to see how he was doing, but it was really to make sure he was not letting Wieden down, as I still feel a ridiculous sense of loyalty to Dan, given all the mayhem I apparently caused when I was there.
So the call started off interestingly when the Crystal Palace supporting scum came onto the video chat sporting a background specially designed to provoke trouble.
[See photo at the top of this post]
He would have got away with it too had he not later sent me a photo of where he was at with the goodbye jigsaw.
Amateur mistake.
You see, at the time of writing this post, he has been gone from R/GA for 2 months.
THAT’S EIGHT WEEKS.
And not only was he working from home for most of that time, he had 2 weeks off sick …
That means, he had 1,344 possible hours to finish this jigsaw … and how much has he done?
This much …
And to think I thought he was one of the brightest minds I’d met.
Pah.
On the bright side, showing his jigsaw dyslexia to the World [or the 8 sad bastards who visit this blog everyday] is some sort of revenge for the Forest Shit zoom backdrop.
And yet I still like him and miss him.
I’m a saint. A bloody saint.
______________________________________________________________________________________
UPDATE:
Since writing this post, Martin sent me a message saying he had finally completed it.
Worse, he said it with a distinct ‘smugness’ in his tone.
OK, it was an SMS but I could still sense it.
So I sent him a 3000 piece jigsaw of this.
That’ll teach him.
Probably for the next year.
Cue: Evil laugh!
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, America, Attitude & Aptitude, Audio Visual, Authenticity, Black Lives Matter, China, Comment, Confidence, Content, Creativity, Culture, Diversity, Emotion, Empathy, Equality, Experience, Fatherhood, Food For Thought, History, Hope, LaLaLand, London, Minimum Wage, Perspective, Planners, Police, Presenting, Racism, Relevance, Resonance
So last week, I was invited to talk at GroupThink’s planning conference.
I like the people there and said yes.
Originally I was going to take people through an old presentation because I didn’t really have much time to write something specific for you. They were OK with it and so wrote it into their program.
Then the situation with George Floyd happened.
Following so shortly on the heels of other racist motivated murders, like Ahmaud Arbery – who was murdered in cold blood by a father and son while out jogging.
At this point, quite frankly, the idea of doing a presentation on strategy seemed so utterly pointless.
So 2 days before the day of the event, I wrote something new.
Something that was about why Black Lives Matters is the only thing that really matters to me right now.
How the ad industry HAS to change.
How the ad industry may talk a lot about diversity and inclusivity but its actions are racist.
I’m not saying that is their intention or that they even realise it, but it’s racist.
And I’ve been complicit in that.
Again, not intentionally, but still done it.
Anyone who is white has … because we’ve let our privilidge create a gap between our actions and our self awareness.
Finally, I talked about 6 things people could do TODAY to make a positive difference to any person of colour … whether that’s through education, responsibility, judgement or action.
Now I must admit I was scared to write this presentation.
Not because I was worried it would make people feel uncomfortable, but because I’m a white male who has had every privilege going and the last thing I wanted to do was come across as if I was claiming to be an expert on this matter or whitesplaining anything.
Which is why I didn’t write the presentation.
I co-wrote it.
In addition to capturing some of the lessons I learned from the brilliant people of colour I’ve worked with and known over the years [which is a lot given how long I spent in China and Asia], the main bulk of the presentation was put together – after seeking their permission – with the irrepressible, wonderful and take-no-shit-from-anyone-especially-me … Maya Thompson, Breanna Jones and Chelsea Curry.
I’ve written and talked about them a lot.
They changed my life.
Literally.
I genuinely believe I can never thank them enough, but one way I try is to take on the issues I should have taken on years ago but thought not being racist was enough.
It isn’t.
So here it is … it’s my usual picture rubbish, but hopefully the bits that are there will make sense to everyone.
The real presentation starts at page 28, the previous slides were linked to the talk I was going to give so I could lull people into a false sense of security so they would get comfortable before I talked openly, emotionally and plainly about an issue that should be the focus of every human right now, but isn’t for a whole host of unimportant or self-serving reasons.
Should anyone want to know more about the presentation, please get in touch.
But most importantly, please act.
Black. Lives. Matter.
Slides 1-5: Just introducing me and why I am happy to be invited to present.
Slides 6-10: How the standard of work being created is generally very poor and how we are all contributing to it in terms of the things we are talking about. Which isn’t the standard of the work and sounds more like us trying to be clients than people valuable to clients.
Slides 11-23: Insights matter because people matter and if you want to make work that is intriguing, interesting, provocative and fresh, you have to care about people, culture and subculture or you’ll get nowhere.
Slides 24-27: I talk about how I was going to talk about the wonderfully crazy project we’ve recently done in China and how understanding sub-culture made building something specifically designed to look like ‘future Mars’ was perfectly sensible but ….
Slide 28: I need to pause the topic of the talk because frankly, the events of the past week have really upset me – specifically the reaction of many agency leaders – and I want to talk about something that matters more to me.
Slides 29-31: Black Lives Matter. There’s many lives that matter, but right now – for me – Black Lives Matter is the only one that matters.
Slides 32-34: Lived around the World, eventually moved to America and then met 3 brilliant women who changed my life. Maya Thompson. Chelsea Curry. Breanna Jones.
Slides 34-39: This is how they fundamentally changed my life for the better by helping me see how blind, stupid and complicit I’d been and then [with some values my Mum taught me] the journey we went on – and still go on – together.
Slides 40-49: Announce this deck has actually all been co-written by Maya, Breanna and Chelsea. Three main reasons for this. I don’t have credibility, I don’t want to come across as whitesplaining and I want any advice I give to be genuinely valuable to people of colour, not a white persons interpretation of what is valuable.
Slide 50: How my industry is racist. Doesn’t want to be. But is. And I use a recent ‘challenge’ put out by Cannes as an example. For the record, they launched a competition on how to attract more diversity into the industry and gave a media budget of £100,000. That’s right they were committing an amount of money most agencies would spend for dinners during Cannes for a topic that they claim is hugely important to them. They don’t intend to be racist but they – like the whole industry – is acting in ways that are.
Slides 51-58: What we have to do to stop being a racist industry including letting go of everything we thought we knew and starting again.
[Please note slide 54: Lots of people say they’re ‘colour blind’. By which they mean they claim they treat everyone the same. The point of this slide is that while we should absolutely treat and value everyone the same, we should do this in a way that acknowledges individual backgrounds and beliefs. Not doing this can result in one of 3 things. [1] We treat everyone the same but based on our definition of what ‘same is’. Which is often white, which means we expect people of colour to adapt to us and our standards. [2] We generalise groups for our convenience, so we call [for example] everyone who is black, “black” … ignoring the vast range of backgrounds, beliefs and nuances they could have BECAUSE PEOPLE OF COLOUR DO NOT ALL COME FROM THE SAME PLACE!!! Or [3] because of being ‘colour blind’, you see everyone the same [which we don’t, let’s be clear on that] so you end up making the same work for everyone thinking it will be resonant with everyone. It isn’t. See how Rihanna highlighted this when she launched her Fenty cosmetics and simply added colours for African American skin, fucking up the big cosmetic companies who had ignored this for decades]
Slide 59-60: Highlighting when you start from scratch it can work, because my son Otis is living proof of it. He has lived in 3 countries and loves them all equally, while accepting and respecting their individual differences.
Slide 61: If you need a commercial reason for why Black Lives Matter [and if you do, you’re a prick] it’s because people of colour can make this industry great again because on top of all influential culture being born from black culture, people of colour understand nuance, values, struggles and humanity better than anyone as they have to deal with this shit every day.
Slide 62-63: Thank you to all the people of colour who helped co-write this presentation – especially Maya, Chelsea and Breanna – and justice for George Floyd.