Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand Suicide, Comment, Communication Strategy, Crap Campaigns In History, Creativity, Culture, Embarrassing Moments, England, Government, Marketing, Marketing Fail
Just as the UK Government announced the second wave of COVID rules – ie: work from home and stay at home, despite the fact a couple of weeks earlier, they had announced go to your offices and go out and eat and drink with people – I saw this ‘ad’ on Twitter.
Comic timing genius.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Maybe it’s not ridiculous after all.
Maybe it’s designed to inspire Brits to visit their country when the Government do their next u-turn on thinking again.
Or maybe it’s an example of the brilliant ‘direct to consumer’ targeting we hear so many companies go on about.
But if that’s the case, I would suggest they made a mistake targeting me, because surely the individual they should be talking to is Dominic ‘I visit castles’ Cummings?
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Audio Visual, Authenticity, Brand, Brand Suicide, Comment, Communication Strategy, Confidence, Content, Context, Creative Brief, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Emotion, Empathy, Fake Attitude, Focus Groups, Honesty, Imagination, Innovation, Insight, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Martin Weigel, Planners, Planning, Point Of View, Positioning, Relevance, Resonance, WeigelCampbell, Wieden+Kennedy
This is a topic that I’ve been bothered by for a very long time.
I touched on it last week in the post about my recent webinar for WARC.
It also formed part of the presentation I did with the amazing Martin Weigel at Cannes in 2019 … also for WARC.
Frankly, I’m seeing far too much work that is literal.
Literal in the problem.
Literal in the strategy.
Literal in the execution.
It’s like all the work is repackaging the client brief and just adding some fancy words, a bit of a gloss and that’s it.
No real understanding of the culture around the category.
No real distinctive expression of the brand behind the work.
No real lateral leaps in the creativity to make people give a shit.
It’s dot-to-dot communication based on lowest common denominator logic … and while I get it will pass research processes and client stakeholders without much pushback … what’s it actually doing for anyone?
Few will remember it.
Even fewer will respond to it.
And no one feels good at the end of it.
Don’t get me wrong, we have to make work that makes a difference for our clients.
I get that.
But that means finding out the real problem we need to solve rather than the solution we want to sell. Means finding out what how the subculture really uses the category in their life versus how the client would like them to use it. Means allowing the creatives to solve the problem we’ve identified rather than dictating the answer. Means being resonant, not relevant. Means having a point of view. Means dreaming of what it could be rather than what it already is. And – most of all – means letting people feel rather than just be told.
It’s why you remember Dancing Pony over that Vodafone spot.
Because while I’m sure both overcame all manner of research obstacles and client stakeholders requirements, there is one thing one campaign remembered, and it’s what Martin once said:
“You can be as relevant as hell and still be boring as fuck”.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Audio Visual, Brand, Brand Suicide, Communication Strategy, Creativity, Culture, Egovertising, Imagination, Innovation, Marketing, Perspective, Relevance, Research, Resonance, Stubborness
So recently I saw the above scoreline posted by a sports platform.
8-0 is a pretty emphatic win.
But then I saw the sports platform in question had stated FCB had won.
No shit sherlock, even the amazing Stevie Wonder could see that!
And it’s this sort of state-the-obvious statement that reveals so much about the state of research, clients and agencies.
Because somewhere along the line, a bad research company has told a bad client that they need to order their poor agency to put a state-the-obvious fact within their carefully crafted piece of communication because there’s a 0.000001% chance the message they want to convey is not quite clear enough.
That, or because the client wants to ‘own’ a particular word in their category – and it will be evaluated by post campaign research – they want to make sure they say it as many times as possible to increase the odds … regardless of the fact that in the real world. no one ever uses the words ‘vitality’ or ‘efficacy’.
ARGHHHHHH!
Years ago I watched a documentary called Z-Channel about the early days of cable television.
One of the networks, Z-Channel, was very avant-garde … playing programs featuring all manner of obscure content.
When asked why, they said this:
“Too many play to the lowest common denominator. We want to play to the highest”.
If only more research, clients and agencies remembered that, then maybe we would make more work that respected the audience and aimed to enthral, inform and entertain them rather than bore them into submission via work that treats them like village idiots.
Filed under: Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand Suicide, Communication Strategy, Crap Campaigns In History, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail
Watch this.
Watch it all the way through.
And if you can genuinely guess who it’s for before the end – or even which category – then you are either an absolutely twisted bastard or … nope, just a twisted bastard.
Did you?
If you didn’t, go back and do it.
EVERY SECOND OF IT.
Seriously, what the fucking fuck eh?
I mean, maybe it could be a contrived bank ad.
Or some bullshit life insurance company.
But Subway.
SUBWAY!!!???
That said, I do admire how they identified and expressed so many of the little things young boys do as they grow up.
Not necessarily the perv stuff, but definitely the hygienically questionable.
Which is appropriate, given this 2016 piece from Brazil, is definitely questionable.
I can’t help but feel the people behind this, should have studied this chart before they went off and made this piece of insanity.
Seriously, this is the sort of stuff that gives advertising people a bad name.
That we’re out of touch and out of our minds.
And not in a good way.
Thank god we have Uncommon’s brilliant B&Q work to remind people we can be good. We can be really, really good.
Or how people of a certain age react to having a £1 Viennetta after 25 years.
But my god, this Subway ‘thing’ is bad.
Like destroy-the-industry bad.
And while I appreciate different cultures have different ways of communicating. And brands can be seen very differently by different cultures … this is Subway.
The 6″/Foot long sandwich makers.
There’s no place in the World where they are considered servants to humanities quest for progress and understanding. Though I must admit I would love to shake the hand of whoever sold this Subway idea to the client – as well as the client who approved it.
Not because I want to congratulate them on pulling off something so stupid, but because I want to wish them luck trying to get their next job.
Filed under: Advertising, America, Apathy, Attitude & Aptitude, Authenticity, Brand Suicide, Comment, Communication Strategy, Confidence, Corporate Evil, Crap Campaigns In History, Crap Marketing Ideas From History!, Crap Products In History, Creativity, Culture, Devious Strategy, Honesty, Influencers, Legend, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Premium, Relevance, Resonance, Scam
Recently we’ve been seeing a lot of collabs between brands and artists.
I don’t mean bullshit influencer social content, but proper collaboration in terms of product creation … albeit that it often ends up being just ‘logo swapping’.
Of course that is still marketing, but it’s a bit more effort than a celebrity just fronting a TV or print campaign.
Or is it?
You see, while the people at the brand all think they’re going to become cool and rich by associating with someone influential with millions of fans, the reality is somewhat difference.
Maybe once upon a time that was always the case … and when it’s done right it can absolutely still be the case … but for a lot of the bullshit collabs we’re seeing being pimped out by certain brands [you all know the ones, especially the tech bros desperately trying to look like they’re part of youth culture even though all they are is a fucking ‘productivity tool”], they don’t understand the artist and their fans have a very different view of the ‘partnership’.
To them, the association is not an act of endorsement.
Nor does it make the brand partner cool.
And it absolutely won’t define their loyalty.
The reality is the association is nothing more than a ‘get rich quick’ scheme for the artist and their fans love them for it.
Unlike previous generations, they don’t see it as an act of selling out.
In fact it couldn’t be more opposite because they see it as an act of awesome.
Taking millions off a brand for a moment in their day.
Something that will be forgotten as soon as it’s done.
A novelty for the fans to buy but not to keep buying.
Basically, playing the corporations at their own game but they end up the real winner.
That’s success right there.
Not that most brands understand that.
Most of them still think they’re playing the artist. That money means they can get whatever they want out of them. Why wouldn’t they, brands have been using, abusing and stealing from artists for decades.
But it’s very different now.
Years ago, I was working with a very famous brand who did a collab with a very cool, up and coming rapper.
The brand were beside themselves because they thought this association was going to change their fortune forever.
On set, the artist was a bit of a nightmare – not saying or doing anything the brand wanted them to do – in fact they even used their social channels to tell their fans they weren’t doing this because they loved the brand, but because they were getting big money.
Unsurprisingly, the brand team were not very happy about that, but they reasoned that the association would still be worth it for them in terms of awareness and sales.
And maybe it was … but the real winner was the artist because their fans thought what they’d done was even more cool.
Talking shit about the very people who had hired them and still getting paid millions upon millions for a few hours work.
That’s power.
That’s influence
That’s a life goal we should all have.
So while collabs can be cool when done for the right reasons and the right ways, many brands need to understand that while – at best – they may have a boost to their short-term profits, the cool doesn’t actually rub off on them. In fact, if anything, their desperate desire to look cool to millions has just made them the laughing stock to the very millions they wanted to appeal too.
Because while they think they’re hustling the artist, the artist and their fans are hustling them.
Welcome to the new definition of power.