Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Comment, Crap Marketing Ideas From History!, Crap Products In History, Culture, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Money
A while back I wrote about how McKinsey advised a client that the best way to boost their sales was to incentivise their distribution network.
That wouldn’t be so bad if the client I was referring to wasn’t the infamous Sackler family – creators of Oxycontin – and the result of this decision wouldn’t be that tens of thousands more people would end up becoming addicted or die from what has been labelled as one of the most deadly over-the-counter drugs ever produced.
But I recently saw something that could be just as evil.
Maybe not so directly dangerous, but messed up all the same.
This …
What the absolute fuck?!
It’s bad enough someone decided to use Paw Patrol to sell some shitty kids drinks … but to then make that drink come in a bottle that has been purposefully packaged to resemble a champagne bottle is just asking for trouble.
How did this get through?
I mean, isn’t this just a modern version of candy cigarettes?
No doubt whoever is behind this horrible use of exploitation and manipulation is being watched with admiring eyes over at McKinsey right now.
But if you think that was bad, there’s worse.
Something that has confused me to the point where it feels my brain may explode.
Sure it doesn’t involve addiction or death – at least not directly.
And sure, it doesn’t revolve around making kids get comfortable with iconography that in later life may have negative affects on their health and wellbeing.
But at the same time, it’s even more messed up than all that.
Something that makes you question that values and tastes of all of humanity.
Here we go …
What the hell?
I mean seriously, what the hell!!!
No doubt Vaynerchuk will now be releasing copious amounts of video footage of him telling artists how they need to follow his ‘system’ to earn ludicrous amounts of cash for their work.
Who would pay this?
Worse, who would pay this for an NFT of his doodle?
And why? Why would anyone think this is a good idea.
Hmmmmmn, unless the person was Vaynerchuk in an act of PR gaining?
Now I’ve said it, you can picture it can’t you.
To assume any other reason is basically an admission we’re in end of days.
So while I apologise for ruining your week from the first day, please remember – I didn’t come up with this crap, I only write it.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Comment, Communication Strategy, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Equality, Honesty, Management, Meetings, Nike, Relevance, Resonance, Wieden+Kennedy
A while back I was interviewed by Bloomberg Business Week.
I know … what the fuck eh?
And more amazingly, it’s not the first time.
OK, so it has taken them 5 years to forget what a stupid mistake they made the first time, but they asked me what I felt was wrong with modern marketing.
I thought about it for a while.
Let’s be honest, there’s many things I could say … but after a while, I felt I had it worked out.
It’s the image at the top of this post.
Too many clients saying no to good ideas and too many agencies saying yes to bad ones.
There are many reasons for this but underpinning them all is a lack of trust and a blind belief in formats and processes.
Or said another way: Ego and confidence.
Either too much of it or not enough.
Of course, people will say adland have got what they deserved.
That they were indulgent and never cared about their clients business.
Which is – frankly – bullshit.
Not just because that abdicates any responsibility of the clients who hired the agency … gave the brief … and approved the work, but also because I’ve never known an agency who do not give a shit about their clients achieving success.
However somewhere along the line, things have changed 180 degrees and now we’re in this weird situation where everything is upside down … with the great irony being in this new world order of marketing, we’re making less work that is impacting cultures attitudes and behaviour and building fewer brands people give a shit about.
And yet despite this, both parties are carrying on, reframing the situation so they can both feel they’re doing the right thing.
It’s a bit like this scene in Spinal Tap where the bands manager attempts to reframe why they’re playing to 1500 seat theatres when on their previous tour, they were playing to 15,000 people in arenas.
Now please don’t mistake this as a ‘poor agency’ post.
Nor a ‘clients are evil’ bitchfest.
All I am saying is the best work and results always come from parties who trust each other, are open and honest with each other and want/value the same thing.
It’s truly that simple.
It’s why, for example, the Wieden and Nike relationship has not only stood the test of time, but has also consistently made great work.
That doesn’t mean there’s not debate, discussion and, at times, bloody arguments [for example the 3+ years I took the same idea into the same client every month to try and get them to say yes because I thought they were missing a massive opportunity] … but it does mean the conversations are about how to make the best work, not the easiest.
And while that is a rare relationship with a rare body of work, the principles of getting to that position are not that difficult.
However today, we seem to be seeing more and more clients choosing agencies on complicity rather than creativity. Dictating what they want and how they want it rather than identifying problems they want their agency to solve in interesting ways.
They may not realise they’re doing that, they may not want to do that … but they’re doing that, reinforced by countless ‘guru’ dot-to-dot strategies that seem designed to build the guru’s business than the clients who follow it.
What this has resulted in is an attitude where some clients think any agency who has a different – but informed – point of view is out to rip them off, which is hilarious given thinking differently is literally why you hire an agency.
The whole situation is horrible.
No one wins
No relationships gets built.
Instead we have clients using processes and procurement to dictate and control what they want and we get agencies fighting for the chance to do it, because they’ve sold the value of creativity so far down the river, that the only thing they can offer is speed.
What a waste of opportunity, potential and talent on all sides.
Thank god not everyone is like this.
Thank god there’s people, companies and agency relationships who demonstrate what you can achieve together when you trust each other. When you want the best for each other. When you are transparent and honest with each other.
Enough to say yes when it’s easier to say no.
And no, when it’s easier to say yes.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Apathy, Attitude & Aptitude, Comment, Confidence, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Differentiation, Effectiveness, Experience, Innovation, Insight, Perspective, Planners, Planning, Prejudice, Relevance, Resonance, Respect
For an industry that loves to talk about doing new things – chasing new things – it doesn’t half hate trying new things.
The moment someone dares suggest something different, more often than not, they are shouted down by people saying it’s wrong … it won’t work … it’s foolish.
Even before anything different has been tried.
Now I appreciate we live in a world where clients want effectiveness and so the margin for error is getting ever smaller, but no one who is suggesting something new has the objective of being less effective, literally the opposite.
But if we can’t explore then we can’t move forward and instead of blowing things up, it may be interesting if we started building things up.
I say all this because I recently read a quote from the Chairman of Crystal Palace football club.
This year they have adopted a totally new philosophy.
Not because the old one had failed – quite the opposite, in many ways it had exceeded expectation – but because context had changed [their long-term manager retired] and they thought this was the time to try something new.
And while some have immediately come out to say what they’re doing is utterly reckless to the stability of the club, their chairman – Steve Parish – countered it with this lovely perspective on the situation they have chosen to enter …
I love that. I love how he dismisses the validity of any criticism and simply focuses on the fact.
No one knows if Crystal Palace’s new approach is better or worse than what has gone before – at least not yet, and maybe not for a significant period of time – the only thing people do know is the approach is different.
Different.
Not better. Not worse.
A simple change to the usual approach.
A change that will reveal, in time, how effective it was. And even then, it is still only an indicator as there are so many external influences that may affect it.
But for a moment, imagine if it works.
Imagine if Crystal Palace do better than they ever have.
That they consistently elevate their standing and success?
It could happen. It stands as much chance as the opposite right now … and yet people are so quick to jump on the ‘disaster’ bandwagon.
Adland is exactly the same.
We like the idea of different but not the reality.
We choose to hide behind certainty and history, even if we didn’t have anything to do with the work we use to assert our argument. We grasp at learnings from other industries despite their context being vastly different. Or we state the fucking obvious but pretend it is an act of genius.
Maybe if stopped having the need to loudly proclaim something is right or wrong and just embrace the fact someone is doing somthing different, we may be more positive about change as an industry.
And maybe … just maybe … if more people focused on building things up rather than tearing them down, we may end up creating possibilities that encourages clients to embrace different rather than see it as an act of commercial defiance.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Comment, Communication Strategy, Confidence, Craft, Creative Brief, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture
For reasons I’m not exactly sure why, I was recently asked to present to a venture capitalist firm in the US about the creative process.
There were a ton of points, but one that got them the most bemused was this:
In essence, the point of the slide was if you spend your energy focused on what someone else has done, they’ve won.
The reason for the bemusement was they didn’t see creativity in terms of forging new opportunities, but exploiting existing ones.
Make something slightly better than someone else.
Leverage others efforts to be cheaper than someone else.
Ride trends to grow faster than someone else.
But in all cases, it was using creativity to build on others efforts rather than create their own.
On one level I get it. Fast followers is a business strategy that has grown all manner of companies … from Hollywood to Apple. However for a VC it was kind of strange to me until I looked into the numbers involved, and understood why it was starting to be much more preferable to go to the zoo than to keep looking for Unicorns.
That said, they kept asking me why I thought comparison was wrong.
And of course it isn’t.
Comparison can have many benefits from increasing standards to ambition.
However, in the creative development process, it can be a real danger.
Because when someone looks at work in the early stages of development and starts using comparative language … the result is ideas get undermined because of it.
The focus is shifted.
Clarity is distorted.
It hands control to the commentators not the creators.
Of course people are entitled to their opinion, but too many rush in and kill the potential of something by judging it as finished when it’s still in creation.
What makes it even worse is when that judgement is done by comparing the work on the table to something someone else has done – however loosely – at some point in time in history.
When that happens, those people are not just robbing the creatives of the excitement they have about creating something new, they’re robbing everyone of the potential of what something can become if it’s allowed to breathe.
It may be inconvenient to project management, timesheet obsessed, bean counters … but ideas grow, they’re rarely born fully formed.
So if you want to stand a chance of creating something that can change everything, then the best advice is trust the talent, support the work and stop being a fucking joy vampire.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Apple, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand, Comment, Craft, Creativity, Culture, Distinction, Innovation, Loyalty, Luxury, Management, Marketing, Packaging, Standards
I know lots of people are questioning Apple’s innovation … but apart from the fact the rumour is they’re going to be launching all manner of exciting new things – from Apple glasses to Apple cars – the reality is many organisations evolve into something different over time.
Part of this could be because of technology.
Part of this could be because of a new interest.
Part of this could be because they’ve just lost their hunger.
But whether it’s brands like SONY going from innovation to perfection or Queen going from rock stars to entertainers, evolution doesn’t necessarily have to mean a bad thing.
I say this because we recently bought a new Apple desktop.
Please note I said BOUGHT … no freebies here. [Damnit]
Anyway, when it came we were struck by a couple of things.
First of all, the packaging was even more beautiful.
Let’s be honest, in terms of iPhone etc, while nice … their packaging has become far more simplistic, but for the desktop, it was a celebration of cardboard engineering.
Everything was beautiful and precise … you felt the effort and time that went into it, ensuring from the moment you opened the box, you felt you were getting something truly special.
A celebration of purchase, so to speak.
The second moment was the cables.
Jill wanted a yellow desktop and while everything was as simple and elegant as ever, the cable just captured the classic Steve Jobs ‘paint behind the fence‘ philosophy.
Look at it …
Having a yellow outer makes sense, but the fact they made sure that extended to the inside of the cable is something that just smacks of attention to detail.
No one will see it once it has been plugged in.
It probably wouldn’t even be noticed if they hadn’t done it.
But by making the effort, it not only stood out … they reminded us that what we have just bought isn’t simply a computer, it’s something that has been crafted by people who care about what they do.
It helps justifies the cost.
It reassures the quality.
It defines the brand and brushes aside the competition.
For all the modern approaches of marketing spouted left, right and centre … it’s amazing how simple things done extraordinarily well supersede all the approaches, techniques and buzzwords.
And while this is all possible because the company behind it is united by an idea, an identity and a set of values that defines who they are in definitive terms, anyone who says the little things don’t matter doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.