Posts Tagged ‘advertising’

Last Thursday, I was fortunate enough to be asked to present at the Media Business Course in Brighton for the fourth year running- the only PR, I’m told, who has ever had the invitation extended. Usually, it’s a day of great value to me: being pushed up in front of the surprisingly intimidating face of the media industry’s freshest bright young things forces myself and others to ruthlessly update our thinking and present totally new material each time.

This year, however, something was missing. As per usual, I totally reworked my presentation, but found myself surrounded by other speakers from TV, Advertising and elsewhere flogging the same shtick they’ve been peddling the last couple of times round the track.

Perhaps I’m being unfair to my esteemed colleagues: they all succeeded wonderfully in making PowerPoint their bitch, fleshing out each point with whizzing animations, Technicolor wankfests and glorious info graphics to the point of turgidity. However, at heart, they were clinging on, and they were offering old thoughts to some of the newest minds in the country. Once again, it’s the PR world that’s at the front line of culture change.

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I respect Dave Trott.

He is an Ad man and Guru of considerable stature

I read and liked his book Creative Mischief.

Usually, Dave provides clear thinking and words of wisdom.

I’ve been preoccupied;

I missed his recent CampaignLive blog Stuntvertising.

I read the post, my heart sank.

This got my goat;

“Normally I’m not a fan of ‘stunt’ advertising.

The sort of thing that only runs once, in one place.

Hardly any real consumers ever see it.

This is really more PR than advertising.”

http://davetrott.campaignlive.co.uk/#ixzz1ZtOCZRUw

So Dave, please tell me what you really think of PR?

Actually, please don’t define the craft.

Correlation does not imply causation.

Instead, why don’t we meet for a lunch and discuss the issues.

I think it would be interesting.

Consider this;

PR folk in the modern world face a slew of fundamental challenges.

Its more about aspect, bearing and quality of status.

We fight to be heard because although we are more relevant than ever before.

Its a tough ask, as its farmed against a backdrop of outmoded cliché.

Its a daily challenge, forcing ‘the others’ to understand whilst projecting esteem.

More established disciplines in the marketing mix still fail to understand what we do.

To mash up a Groucho Marx’s quote “Anyone who says he can see through PR is missing a lot.”

I wish we could rid the world of all the PR clichés.

Guess it’s impossible in an age of land grab and the reason I created Borkowski.do

Here is a mash-up to end this succinct thought (big thanks to Duke Ellington)

Borkowski.do is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing

For those who’ve not heard, a Saatchi & Saatchi campaign for client Toyota has led to a $10m suit being filed against the ad firm and the car company, as well as various individuals connected with the campaign.

The campaign, which allowed people to sign up their friends to be ‘pranked’ with a serious of worrying emails from one of 5 colourful fictional characters, was a bungled attempt by the Saatchi suits to make the world’s most boring car company look radical. This is a textbook example of why forging the brand narrative is best left to the publicists: the creative excellence of Ad Agencies does not extend to long form narrative content.

In other words, it was a textbook example of advertising as insular and irrelevant communication. Instead of seeking to connect with any true brand narrative or profile, the Saatchi & Saatchi team betrayed their arrogance and remained convinced of their idea of what the brand needed, irrespective of what people actually wanted.

Ad folk lack understanding of the psyche of the news agenda: unlike PRs, they aren’t programmed to anticipate the downside, to work the worst case scenario into the fibre of their strategy.

Amanda Duik, the woman suing the company, was apparently targeted over a week long period with emails- genuine, for all she knew- from a football hooligan character called ‘Sebastian Bowler’, who came complete with his own S&S-created myspace profile and other web-based proofs of existence. She reckons she experienced sufficient mental distress over the terrifying period to sue for massive damages from all involved.

Those who don’t follow my thoughts closely might be surprised that I’m condemning S&S for this: what differentiates it from the kind of stunts perpetrated by myself and my influences? It’s certainly not because I’ve decided to clamber onto my high horse.

When classic Hollywood movie publicist Jim Moran placed a lion in a motel room under the name ‘TR Zan’ to promote the release of a strikingly similarly named movie, he caused a good deal more distress than S&S have here.

However, his stunt did what good PR does: it tapped into the popular conversation and interwove the brand narrative with it. It spoke of wilderness and adventure, which was exactly right at a time when movies were reflecting the increasingly adventurous spirit of the American public. It had also involved significant calculation of risk, and understood that inevitable bad press would be absorbed by the whole daring nature of the thing.

In part it’s a question of money: ad firms, arguably, have too much. Insular ad campaigns are bred when teams have the time and the resources to ponder their angles until they’re warped out of all recognition, over-thought. PRs, by contrast, are fleet footed. Their spatial awareness of the publicity landscape is second to none because careers spent responding to repeated brand events in real-time have honed their instincts and trained them never to slip up.

It also adds weight to a pet theory of mine: of communications professionals, it’s the PRs who skew furthest to the right (creative) side of the brain. Rightbrained functions, both numerical and linguistic, are much more involved with the comparative, the contextual, the pragmatic. While the leftbrain has the advantage when rigorously pursuing a clear, single minded idea, it must be difficult to wrap a leftbrained mind around an idea as mutable and intangible as a brand narrative.

While I think that Duik is probably taking this rather too seriously, her lawsuit should come as a warning to ad folk everywhere. In the modern world, the hierarchy of ideas does not flow from the comms professionals to the public. Communications must be discursive, responsive, and above all, narrative. Nobody understands this better than a good PR.

The Media Buying world is clearly in need of some PR help to drag it out of the 1980s. I found myself reading, jaw dropping to the table, this Media Week article by MediaCom’s Claudine Collins. It’s as if it had been ghosted by Charlie Brooker, Chris Morris and Helen Fielding – it reads like an unholy alliance between Bridget Jones’s Diary and Nathan Barley.

Snippets like “Later, the Telegraph’s party goes to dinner at the Goring Hotel in Victoria, where I sit next to Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6 – it is a real-life James Bond moment” and “Back in the gym for 5.45am where my personal trainer Gary nearly kills me – but luckily he is gorgeous to look at so I don’t mind” really set the tone, if a tone can be found in amongst the slew of names of the successful, rich and famous. Read the rest of this entry »

It may be stating the bleeding obvious, but we all know the media is changing rapidly – every few months, something comes along that fractures the old order more and more. The latest is the iPad, one more thing in a long line of technological advances that are making it easier for brand and public to connect without the need of the old certainties.

So what will shape the future? And who will shape it? The screaming headline in PR Week warning of ad agencies encroaching on PR territory misses the point a little, I feel. A good PR agency is stronger than people think.

“Ad agencies have always been a threat,” a friend in PR admitted the other day. “WPP et al have been buying PR agencies for decades. What matters is contacts, culture, energy, creativity, bullshit and bollocks. And, of course, your last piece of coverage. And that means scum-sucking, news-junky, urban cosmopolite ambidextrous grasshoppers like us.” Read the rest of this entry »

There’s growing concern, and a fair amount of hand wringing, about alcohol advertising and the possibility of banning it. It looks like the glory days of inventive, witty and satirical booze advertising may be over for good. This would be very, very sad. Ban them and yes, you’ll get column inches. Keep them and you’ll bring thousands of people joy.

There have been some hugely influential, wonderful and funny booze adverts over the years – just think of the often-surreal Guinness campaigns, or of Carling and Heineken’s best efforts. It would be a terrible shame to lose these creative campaigns and some of the minds behind them to a health and safety-regulated puritanical streak. Read the rest of this entry »

How can you tell that the Tories are suffering in the polls? That the smile behind David Cameron’s airbrushed poster is turning into a grimace of fear? Simple: they’ve brought back the heavy hitters to run their campaign. M&C Saatchi have returned to try and work the magic they made for the Thatcher government.

It’s an interesting move in an uncertain time – M&C Saatchi are always capable of causing a political dust-up and have created unforgettable, election-winning slogans such as Labour isn’t Working. They helped win at least two elections for the Tories in the past. Read the rest of this entry »

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…