Posts Tagged ‘advertising’

I’m taking part in a couple of debates in the next few days. First up is Risky Business: Risk and Reputation, an early morning debate on the nature of risk, this Thursday, February 11th, at the Cass Business School. Given the year just gone and the way the financial crisis has played out, it should be an interesting and possibly heated debate Read the rest of this entry »

I hope you’ll forgive me a brief bask in the news that The Fame Formula has crept back up the Amazon charts and is currently at number 4 in the Film and Performing Arts Bestseller list, as well as moving slowly back into the running in the overall chart.

It certainly seems like the Fame Formula is finding a life of its own again – I’ve recently received a number of emails and tweets from people who like the book. I’m humbled by their praise – and intrigued by one tweet that insists that the book has more to say about the ad industry than most books actually about the ad industry.
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Joe McElderry has lost out to Rage Against the Machine – it seems that a significant proportion of the British record-buying public really have turned on Simon Cowell and given him a festive slap under the miseltoe.

It’s an upset, but its significance lies in what the power of the Internet might achieve next. Motivational balladry versus an old, shouty agit pop record should cause a few smiles and quite a few more spluttering grannies in front of Top of the Pops on Christmas morning, but it won’t change the world. But the methods to get said agit pop record to number one could just help change the world.

Any number of ad agencies and PR companies say the understand the Internet and all its uses. This is little more than posturing; if we’ve learned anything from the net, it’s to expect the unexpected and that no-one can truly predict what uses people will put it to and what they can achieve if they put their minds to the task in hand.

If the Internet can be harnessed in a similar manner behind a cause like cutting CO2, behind the Climate Conference in Copenhagen or whatever comes next, then there is a chance that real changes can be made in 2010 and beyond without people running up huge carbon footprints going on a protest holiday. Playing with the charts is all very well, but the real business that social networking-savvy people need to address is the process of using this small victory to springboard significant changes on the world and fight the welter of greenwashing, disinformation and distrust.

Perhaps this is all a romantic dream – but if Rage Against the Machine’s trite but pleasing net-powered chart victory can be translated into actual societal change through like-minded people working together in the coming years, then it will have been worth it.

If PR firms, ad agencies and people eager to make a difference don’t get it together and work on making this happen, then the military industrial complexes will – they are, without doubt as I write this, working on ways of utilising the net for their own ends.

Trivial as the chart battle of Christmas 2009 may be, its knock on effect could be real, organised changes made via the power of the Internet. That’s my hope for 2010…

The Media Guardian published an article of mine in yesterday’s Media comment looking at the rise of Google’s SideWiki and what it will mean for the future of PR. To read the published version, click here. For the unexpurgated version, please keep reading!

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Given the amount of fear other Google innovations, like their library project, have caused, it’s surprising that alarms bells have not been heard ringing throughout the PR world since SideWiki’s launch in September. The internet is an evolutionary tool and for the world of PR, its daily use is as significant as the use of the wheel for stone age man. Except revolution has taken the place of evolution as the net brings about change at an astonishing rate.

Few people in PR, it seems, have considered the way that SideWiki will change the lives of beleaguered PR folk. I believe that, in time, this tool will significantly change the way brands strategize, think and exist. SideWiki is going to challenge PR by providing the masses with the tool for the ultimate expression of people power, something uncontainable that will need constant monitoring.

As the name suggests, this is a tool that allows anyone who wants to (and who has the right browser – Firefox or IE) to comment on anything on the web and have that comment displayed in a pop out window alongside for all to see. All they have to do is download the Google toolbar and they’re ready to go. SideWiki will change the way that everything is perceived, especially once it reaches more browsers.

A lot of the PR industry, however, is living like an ostrich with mange; only just summoning up the energy to bury its collective head in the sand. Too many PR folk are too busy pitching half-arsed ideas to see the real threat. The clear and present danger for sluggish PRs is the way that the net continues to develop and construct devices that enable individuals to increase their power. These devices shift as quickly as riptides and, at the moment, it seems that the only people that can survive them are the consumers they cater for.

SideWiki will make it impossible to promote one message and not be held to account. Organisations that have traditionally engaged only in one way conversations or broadcast models will struggle to survive in a SideWiki world. Angry at the latest government wrongdoing? Why not post your grievances next the department where everyone can see them? Find out the ethical practices of confectionary giant aren’t quite as ethical as its advertising suggests? SideWiki is there to help and any PR firm that fails to provide acceptable answers will be open to further public assault by irate consumers.

Brand integrity has to be at the core of brand thinking if the brands are to survive this transparency. Companies will be compelled to consider taking a real position and relate to a set of ideas the marketplace cares about – SideWiki will surely force their hand into a position of fundamental and overwhelming transparency. For fashionable PR execs this transparency will either be terrifying or inspiring. I hope that, thanks to SideWiki, we will see the death of the myopic PR clone and evolve to a position where serious strategic thinkers in PR will challenge the other marketing dinosaurs.

The recession has herded agencies into a pit; they have been humbled in particular by ad agencies who are moving in on proven PR processes, eager to keep making money but who aren’t necessarily experts in that field. The American company Crispin Porter & Bogusky declared in a recent Campaign article that they had asked the agency to stop writing ad script and start writing PR releases instead. Very 1980s. Also in the mix are highly creative and respected agencies like Fallon and Mother, who are taking a firm hand in the PR aspects of campaigns.

PR companies must offer and embrace sophisticated monitoring and tracking devices to keep their clients up to speed, offer solutions and encourage brand bravery and transparency. If they don’t, they will die.

Predictable PR is on the red list of endangered species. The evolution of SideWiki is a seminal moment, when the industry’s destiny is in its own hands. Development forces contributing to the evolution of the web are threatening PR’s demise. PR budgets on the whole bring about reactive, crisis thinking, based on negative responses that threaten their clients’ spot in the market.

The Innocent brand signaled the way forward back in 1997. Lacking bags of readies to spend on traditional marketing, they chose instead to launch a multitude of catalyst conversations around their packaging and experiential events. They were a word of mouth success well before the full web revolution and have paved the way for many more campaigns using the new technology.

Applying the ancient conventions and old codes of conduct of communications to the new world of parallel influence will only accelerate the inconsequence of traditional marketers. The Social Media world encloses our personal and professional actions – the only answer for PR folk is to take a more active role in being brand custodians, representing a higher degree of brands and reputation management.

Ad agencies once proactively shaped vision but now PR is demonstrably just as capable at understanding and cultivating future thinking, if not more so. PR has always engaged in a two-way conversation and should be capitalising on this to earn their clients’ trust. SideWiki is a call to arms – there is no excuse for complacency, as failure in today’s landscape is public, searchable, and enduring.

Now the dust has cleared – a little – in the wake of Jan Moir’s Mail article looking at the circumstances surrounding the death of Stephen Gately and the subsequent outpouring of Twitter anger, it’s worth asking what the difference is between Moir’s article, aimed at a certain set of like-minded readers, and the response on Twitter.

However ugly and unpalatable Moir’s insinuations were, there will always be celebrities and personalities in the public eye facing deconstruction, valid or not, and there will always be snarky columnists at the Mail. But it would help, if there is to be a mass outpouring of fury on Twitter in response, if it were more akin to constructive debate; it was disappointing to see that much of the response was simply mass retweeting of a few salient tweets from the likes of Stephen Fry.

It was an effective campaign, certainly, given that the Mail lost a number of high profile advertisers from the online article. But it was very much a case of an angrily bleating herd retweeting a few choice points – in much the same way as Moir’s supporters reiterated her views.

It’s interesting to note that the Mail have run a couple of big articles looking into the Twitter phenomenon over the weekend – they were clearly unsettled by the likes of Marks and Spencer pulling adverts – but I am not sure that, once the dust settles, the Mail will change its modus operandi significantly.

The only way that is likely to happen is if the masses use Twitter to voice their own opinions, rather than just relying on a few informed celebrities to dictate their opinions. The only way Twitter can become a truly democratic tool is if people find their own voice.

It will certainly be interesting to see what Moir has to say on Friday, once the dust has settled, and what reaction her response engenders.

You couldn’t move anywhere this morning without hearing something about Ben Southall, the British winner of ‘The Best Job in the World’ and the string of idyllic desert islands along the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, Australia, which will act as his home and office for six months. Not surprising, when the job is more like a paid holiday and earns him approximately £74,000!

The campaign, run by Tourism Queensland, is a fine example of PR left to do what it does best – spread a positive story as far and wide as possible in a glowing light. And you don’t get a much more glowing, positive light than in Australia, thanks to the ‘can do’ attitude of the Australians and the sunshine. The story behind this job spread virally throughout the world with a little careful placing on YouTube and Facebook – ‘The Best Job in the World’ was a fantastic hook to take advantage of social networking with.

“This is probably the first time that a campaign has achieved this sort of reach with so little advertising spend other than a few strategically placed job ads around the world,” Australian marketing analyst Tim Burrowes told the Daily Mail. “This has all been about the power of people passing things on, largely through YouTube. The main lesson to be learned here is that if you have an original, exciting idea that gets people talking you don’t need to spend huge on advertising.”

He’s absolutely right, but there are still too many people with great talent of great products out there stuck in relationships with advertising men who just don’t get this or who think that PR is ‘easy’. These are people who will hang on to a client by hook or by crook, telling them what they want to hear and not letting the story out to run free.

It’s amazing what free-thinking PR can do: Borkowski’s award-winning campaign for Wispa won Cadburys huge, nationwide coverage for the return of the iconic 80s chocolate bar and created a conversation with the people who actually bought the bars and wanted it to come back. Through social networking, they were able to be a part of the process. The same is true of the ‘Best Job in the World’ campaign – it spread virally because people felt they were part of it.

The final 50 candidates even competed to gather more followers on the web and interact with them, dressing in Scuba outfits and filming themselves walking through cities being one of the popular stunts. It’s appropriate, given that part of the job remit is to communicate with the world from the island. This, then, is a PR campaign that will just keep on unfolding.

If the ‘Best Job in the World’ campaign had stayed in the hands of advertisers who felt they could manage a little easy PR on the side, however, the story would have been far less likely to have the enormous impact it has had in a little over four months. PR needs to be let free to do what it needs to do – if the ‘Best Job in the World’ story had stayed in the hands of Machiavellian advertising men who are most skilled at managing a client’s expectations and keeping the client in a hole, who claim knowledge of PR when the client knows nothing of it, then it would have faltered at the first.

The campaign could also have easily faltered under the weight of stories about the other islands near to Hamilton Island, where Southall will be taking up residence as caretaker for six months. On the Today programme this morning, Chloe Hooper revealed the darker side of Australia’s relationship with the islands; she talked about Palm Island, founded in 1918 as a prison island for ‘misbehaving’ indigenous Australians – misbehaving meaning speaking their own language or asking about wages.

This is not an island the tourist industry would want known about, especially as indigenous Australians are still beaten and murdered there – Hooper related an incident from 2004 a drunken indigenous Australian swore at the white officer in charge of Palm Island and was found beaten with his liver cut in two some hours later – and the life expectancy is 20 years less for the indigenous population than it is for a non-indigenous Australian.

This story could well explode in the tourist commission’s faces – there is a curious dichotomy between the ‘can do’ attitude of the Australians and the institutionalised racism that survives in the country still. But, by allowing the positive story free reign, they have kept the negative angle at bay for now.

If they can use the waves of unleashed positivity to help address this negative aspect of the Australian psyche – and break down the barriers contained by the barrier reef – all the better, but it’s worth realising that, in the hands of an advertising agency which thinks it understands PR, there would never have been the vast positives in the first place, nor the room to address the darker side of Australia and its relationship with the indigenous population in a constructive, transparent manner.

I heard today that Howard Zieff had died – a name I’d not really encountered before, despite the fact that he’d directed a few breezy comedies like Private Benjamin, starring Goldie Hawn – but the obituaries made me sit up and take notice. It turns out that, when he started out in advertising, he was very much in the Jim Moran mold; a man who used wit to get people talking and whose campaigns kick-started the more realistic advertising and promotion of brands that has become so commonplace and important to modern advertising and PR.

Raised in the Bronx, Zieff’s major breakthrough was to use real people in the adverts he created, real people whose faces told a story every bit as clearly as the adverts themselves. His most famous advert was for Levy’s rye bread, which ran with the tag line: ”You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.”

“’We wanted normal-looking people, not blond, perfectly proportioned models,’” he told the New York Times a few years ago. And normal for Zieff, who grew up in the Bronx, was a wide, multicultural mix. The Levy’s advertisements, therefore, featured an American Indian, a Chinese man and a black child.

“’I saw the Indian on the street; he was an engineer for the New York Central,” Zieff told the New York Times. “’The Chinese guy worked in a restaurant near my Midtown Manhattan office. And the kid we found in Harlem. They all had great faces, interesting faces, expressive faces.’”

Another of Zieff’s big, early campaigns was for The Daily News, which captured the spirit of Jim Moran on film; each advert featured a person reading the paper and becoming so engrossed that they accidentally did ridiculous things – a petrol pump attendant placing the petrol hose in his customer’s pocket rather than the car, for example.

He was also involved in bringing stars like Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman to the fore, thanks to his interest in strange and interesting faces rather than the perfection that was the norm of the time. Zieff, in the face of considerable opposition, created the template for a great deal of today’s advertising.

Modern advertising and PR, which has thrived on the witty, truthful and artfully homespun approach to promotion that Zieff instigated, often forgets one thing that he perpetuated, however; the determination to do something new and radical and his ability to get word of mouth out of it.

He created a buzz with his adverts using models from all cultures and walks of life, a stir that ran hand in hand with the mood of the times. He learned from the past and looked to the future, rightly assessing that in an era where Rosa Parks, JFK and Martin Luther King were changing the political landscape of America, brand promotion should not be far behind. He was always pushing at the boundaries to see where he could take his advertising next.

In an age of digital marketing and instant access to information, an age where that information is overwhelming, an age of recession, publicists and advertisers need to be taking the bold steps into new ideas that Zieff took or they are likely to be left behind.

It is no longer enough to rely on the ideas he created, which have become tropes and clichés thanks to their ubiquitous use. The past should be plundered, yes, but not for the ideas that have become stale with overuse. We should be looking at out of the box thinkers like Moran and Zieff and be inspired to think as hard, fast and wittily as they did, in the hope that we can create something new and exciting, something that will generate that holy grail of the publicity world; awed, surprised, astonished or even just amused word of mouth, something that people will talk about for years to come and that will, with any luck, become cliché in 40 years time.

In a world rife with the ability to keep an eye on where we are, with posters that are embedded with cameras that register how many people look at the poster for more than ten seconds and GPS phones that can traced their owners to within a yard or so, why is that that complaints are so few and far between?

Alright, there are the net conspiracies about social networking brands and how they are allegedly linked to information-gathering for the NSA (that’s the USA’s National Security Agency of course, not the UK’s National Sheep Association) but this is not a serious, concerted force; there are people leaping up and down about blind emails and viral marketing, but no complaints have really registered about how technology is monitoring people.

Monitoring is back in focus at the moment, thanks to the launch of Google Latitude, which is based on the Google Maps service. It allows people, through their computers and mobile phones, to keep tabs on their friends and family by pinging out their location to anyone who’s part of the service. Given that this is Google, and that they dominate the tech market, there is some fear as to what latitudes Google will allow themselves with the gathering of information and how they may use the data that such an application gathers.

In light of these concerns, Google have announced that they will not be keeping information on Latitude users who wish to hide their location, but is this the most effective way of managing the potential crisis in confidence for a company whose ideals were once trumpeted as being pure as the driven snow? The PR machine behind Latitude, both on and offline, is to be congratulated on the way it has so effectively quelled any seeds of unrest.

I’m surprised that there hasn’t been greater outrage about Latitude, however; Latitude seems to me to be little more than a covert widget to make Google’s advertising model more effective; one that impinges on the privacy of anyone using it. Added to that, a Latitude-enabled phone could be easily stolen and used against the person the phone belongs to. It’ll be interesting to see if any human rights group make like French lorry drivers and park a protest right in the middle of Google’s information superhighway in the near future.

The Financial Times report on a blog that’s gone viral, complaining about the food on a Virgin flight from Mumbai to Heathrow, apparently written by a creative at WCRS advertising agency. They asked me for my take on the matter.

“…some bloggers … suggest it was a viral marketing campaign by Virgin, a charge the company strenuously denies. Others believe it to be a shameless bit of self-promotion by the author, Oliver Beale, who happens to be a creative at advertising agency WCRS. But both Mr Beale and the agency seem keen to distance themselves from the e-mail.

“Mark Borkowski, public relations expert, believes it would be a foolish company that risked a viral campaign like this one. He suggests the contagiousness is down to more than providing light relief from a gloomy climate: rather, people feel frustrated at their complaints being ignored by companies, especially banks.”

To read the full article, click here.

Absolute Radio, the rebranded Virgin Radio has launched a multimillion-pound TV campaign,today . The station introduces the catchphrase “That’s good, that’s real good.” All a bit predictable, I remember the Dutch pirate station that ran an ad campaign with the tag “ We’re FUCKING GREEEAT. The series of ads touched the psyche and got straight to the point. History suggests the station was not as good as its hyperbole