People who need people

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Am I alone in finding focus groups toe-curlingly uncomfortable to watch?  The rational

parts of my brain knows how to filter out the irrelevant comments and it knows that we are here to look and listen for basic communication elements. The emotional parts of my brain, however, get angry at the slightest criticism of the execution and get defensive. I feel the overwhelming urge to bust through the two-way mirror and go all Bruce Willis on them waterboarding them into understanding. There are also those times when the army of clients on the dark side of the glass start freaking out about what they are witnessing and imagine their careers coming to an inglorious end thanks to the work the agency has put them in the position of having to validate. You’d think I would be used to it by now since I’ve been backstage at focus groups for many years. I’ve been to focus groups in Moscow just after Perestroika where it had a chilling resemblance to a KGB interrogation session because the moderator was anything but moderate. I’ve been to groups in Brazil where the interviewer got all her groups drunk and I’ve been in groups where the interview subjects have given the most precise and painful insight into my lack of a future in advertising. It’s always disconcerting to see the line-up of client laptop screens with clients all furiously tip-tapping away as the groups prattle on. I can’t help but wonder are they transcribing the groups verbatim? Or are they doing their blogs or facebooking? I know I am. I try and keep my emotions in check by stuffing my face with

the candy and snacks we have in the back room and by the end of the day I have a severe

chemical imbalance along with a headache and stomach nausea. And when the kids ask

`What did you do today Daddy?’ I snarl and go get a beer.

What's in a name

                                              Fast Moving Cauliflowers & Grapefruit


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I was creative director of McCann Manchester when I first heard the term fmcg.

Fast moving consumer goods. It was a category separate from financial services or pharma or retail or direct mail, all of which had their own specialists. To me there didn’t seem anything specialist about it. It was on a shelf at a store and my job was to get customers to put in their carts and buy it. Simple. The implication from the person who first enlightened me, however, was that fmcg was not what

award seeking creatives should do.  Top of the list were cars with shoots in the South of France and California. Then beer with shoots in the South of Spain and California. And then there was fmcg with shoots in a warehouse on an industrial estate usually somewhere grubby and freezing cold. It lacked the glamorous perks that creatives lived for.  Luckily for me I had the great fortune of working with a managing director (as they were called then) who saw no status with business. To him everything was a golden opportunity to bring fame and fortune to the agency. His enthusiasm was matched only by mine.

Fast-forward to New York and the acronym disappeared from my vocabulary as I worked

on Coca-Cola then Gillette then L’Oreal and then Johnson & Johnson. It only resurfaced

when a head hunter looking at my body of work said “Oh,so you do fmc?”

A little bottle of soda, a little box of breakfast flakes, a little box of hair color, a razor, a toothbrush, who knew these amazing brands had so much in common. It was my job to help them sell fast and frequently. I haven’t done car ads yet. But I think faster and more frequent sales wouldn’t hurt them. And the same with beer.  Put it in a box and stick it on a shelf and I’ll sell it.

Street talking

You don’t see a lot of great outdoor advertising in New York which surprises me.

I see a lot of websites with campaigns comped up to look like they ran in New York but there's a difference between the photoshop city and the real deal. Tramping around the streets I have to scratch my head to find anything that would even slow me in my tracks let alone stop me. It’s a shame because there’s a savvy wise-ass population who would engage in a positive way to wit and visual artistry. Obviously not. I used to commute by bus into Port Authority terminal and there on the edges and outlying corners off Time Square there are billboards on streets. They are, however, universally terrible examples of the medium’s potential. I grew up in the UK, which also has its fair share of eye polluting shit stuck up on the sides of roads and buildings. But there is also a regular occurrence of clever, funny, striking and thought-provoking work. Looking through ad sites I see the same is true of New Zealand and India. The U.S., which brought us the classic Burma Shave posters, has really bland offerings. I heard a client once dismiss outstanding outdoor concepts with the comment ` Oh we don’t see this medium ever in our fiscal.’ Put aside the pretentious use of language what he was saying was we don’t want to say bold things to people who are influencers. Put the same artwork online and now it’s a banner and that’s sexy and mod. Posters are like homeless people; Clients want to get past them without handing out any money.

A question of genitalia

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Disclosure. I am a man and I am not 25.

There is a tyranny of gender and age discrimination currently ruling in businesses and agencies and it has to do with creative talent. The top down thinking is thatonly 25 year olds can write for 25 year olds and only women can write for women. Management that is neither and has no insight or gut feeling usually dictates this for what is right or wrong and so depends on peer-to-peer creativity. Does the charge have merit? Is it impossible for an older man to write for a younger audience? Ask Mark Twain. Is it impossible for a man to write convincingly from a woman’s point of view?

Ask Roddy Doyle. Writing is either good or bad. The author’s job is to inhabit the mind of the characters and audience. Some of the thinking behind the tyranny has more to do with the politics of gender representation in agencies and the clients and I agree there are far too few women. I have worked for women creative directors and found them all unbiased in their reaction to my work. It was good or it wasn’t. That was their only judgment call. I have also worked for male creative directors whose insecurities about making a call on work targeted to an audience outside their understanding has caused them to fall back to the peer-to-peer trap. Do we expect gay writers to be unable to write straight? Or African American writers to write white? Crowdsourcing doesn’t ensure the best work. Talent sourcing does.

wish it was me

Part 1 of an irregular  series of ads I wish I'd done.
This one is for Aldi. Its a discount supermarket that my Mum goes to in Liverpool.
And the spot was done by McCann Manchester which used to have me as their executive creative director many years ago. I love the writing,the casting and the performance. Outstanding.

Outsiders wanted

A closed shop is a phrase I remember from growing up in strike-crazy Britain.

It was a union-controlled workplace that never allowed any non-union or other affiliated worker to be employed. When I came into the ad world I found there was a reverse form of the closed shop in which people working in categories of advertising were not deemed capable of working on anything else.Those who worked on retail were only good enough to work on retail accounts and direct marketing creatives could only work on direct response business. FMCG (fast moving consumer goods –as opposed to slow moving consumer goods??) were never to go outside their world and so were creatives working on pharmaceutical accounts. The terms `above the line’ and `below the line’ defined areas as rigidly policed as the first class and steerage decks on the Titanic. No intermingling allowed. And then came the internet –thank you Al Gore. The opportunity to spill creatively into

this new world should have been like the hammers knocking down the Berlin Wall. But quite the opposite happened. Another closed shop set up. This time the division was between digital and traditional. Thirty-second dinosaurs versus the Web people. Anther first and second class caste system. It was like living in a bad B movie. To survive you had to understand both worlds, which

becomes intuitive, as the whole world has shifted to embrace all platforms all the time. 

Retirees are as conversant,if not more,than 16 year-olds on Facebook.  Now we creative workers consider ourselves `integrated’ because we think in ideas and apply the ideas to various platforms. The catchphrases come and go but   the important things remain constant. Creative ideas rule. Storytelling rules. Generating excitement rules. Because these truths are held to be self-evident a more encouraging trend has emerged. Now a lot of closed shops, those categories defined by insiders, are being invaded by outsiders. Agencies with beauty accounts, once seen as the domain of beauty specialists are opening up to having creatives with no category experience as they work to invent new ways of reaching a tired consumer. Healthcare agencies, which were once a secretive realm of code speaking illuminati are now admitting general market creative directors to breath fresh life into the work. Are these outsiders freshening up the gene pool of thinking or are they barbarians at the gates? They’re both.And both are good.

God what's that smell?

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Adam Levine, the lead singer of the pop group Maroon 5, is launching his own fragrance line and I smell a rat. Or maybe I’m on the scent of a new phenomenon-let’s coin a phrase for it –brand transcendence.  I like Adam Levine but he is more than a pop singer. He is a brand.

Brand Adam has gained Q-score points from being a judge on the hit tv  show `The Voice’.  He has gained wide market share by producing hit songs for his band and lending his skills to other pop groups like Gym Class Heroes and collaborating with artists like Alicia Keyes.He has also acted in cult t.v. shows like American Horror Story:Asylum And he has appeared nude with a super model on the cover of Russian Vogue. He’s an all-round talented guy. But he can't rest on those laurels.The search for brand optimization is always moving,like a shark in a tank.  Fragrance.  Then what? A fashion line? Cosmetics?  Pharma endorsements? A line of non-stick pans? The possibilities are endless for Adam to connect with us on every level of our existence. He’s a bit like Jesus. Poor old Jesus came at the wrong time. There just were not the media opportunities there are now. The birth at Bethlehem needed angels and stars moving in the sky to get promoted. No chances of cross-cultural immersive maketing unless you count the social media value created by healing lepers and talking to Samaritans or tax men.No guest appearances on other religious leaders’ shows. Imagine it, showing up at an event for the prophet Mohammed and doing a theology duet. Or hanging out with the Buddha. His disciples were definitely not into the integrated mind-set that’s a must for now. What kind of icon creates such a following and his only consumer engagement platform is crowd

sourcing. That’s what crucified him. Yes the brand has endured. There is a promise that he will come back to judge the living and the dead so maybe that will be the perfect time to exploit the other media options to make the Jesus brand truly 360. Take a lesson from Adam Levine. Jesus should have had the fragrance. I can see it now. Godsmell.

My Window Garden

I read an article in the New York Times about being more productive by doing less work.
The more stressed we get the more work we do and the more stressed  we get and the sooner we burn-out.That seems to be the gist of the story although in fairness I never finished reading t because I was too guilty it was taking time away from stuff I had to get finished. The picture above is an orchid that I have in the office I occupy in the ad agency I'm working at. It's flourishing -the orchid that is-don't know about the agency.I got the orchid from an art buyer who had a number of the plants for a print shoot.It had one flower.And within days that fell off leaving me a stick with some leaves at the bottom.Then,with a little love not to mention water and an office that reaches equatorial temperatures by noon in January,suddenly buds appeared and one by one new blooms came forth. The lesson I take from this is that the plant wasn't stressing.It was just doing what came naturally and in a nurturing environment it was no effort to thrive. I find the same with work.If the atmosphere is supportive and you're just doing something you love to do and that comes naturally to you then doing it is no sweat.
Many people hate what they do.Its just a money earner. I love what I do pretty much a lot of the time.
There are moments when it 's a chore, a drag, a drudge and mindless.In those moments I look out the window and know there are people who don't get the high that I do when my job is great.They also don't get the depression I get when it sucks. But that's what makes me do better next time.I would go nuts doing less work.The more I do the more i want to do.And that's because I don't see it as work.
I see it as producing flowers.

It's not the gettysburg address

There is a certain. 

Style of writing. 

For certain kinds. 

Of television commercial. 

It’s filled with. Pregnant pauses. Lots of them.

And sentences that begin with `And’.   

And it’s the soundtrack.  

To images. Such as American flags.  Military personel. And trucks. American trucks. Lots of American trucks. 

Writing like this.  Is believed to convey intense sincerity. 

Writing like this. Is believed to be deeply emotional. 

Writing like this. Often repeats the same phrase three times. 

To make a shallow thought sound serious. 

This repetition is what speech writers call the clap-trap. 

Because the third time you repeat a phrase. Is the signal for applause.

The delivery. Of this type of writing.  Has a distinctive rhythm. 

One sentence ascends. Can’t you just feel it going upwards to dangle an uncalled for question?  And then its followed.By short lines.  

Which creates a plateau.  Before a third sentence takes you rolling and tumbling down to create the impression of a deeply felt conclusive moment. Then there’s a pause. 

Or two.   

Before the whole journey starts all over again. 

The words `America’ and `folks’ and `real’ are featured a lot. 

And often you hear this delivered .  By a famous Hollywood actor. 

Or Oprah. 

Accompanied by a moving passage of music. 

And it will be two minutes long.   

Because nothing. 

As important as this. 

Can ever. 

Be. 

Rushed.

Give me a break

Does anyone remember Second Life? Is it still going? If I cared I would

Google it and see. But I don’t. I remember years and years ago seeing a presentation on this on-line alternative world where your avatar could fly or ride a bike or go shopping and buy virtual property and talk to other avatars. It was future and famous brands were setting up there. It was all very sf come real. And we’d all be living there.The only thing that got in the way was having to work and sleep and commute and have a life in the real world. If only we had 48 hour days. I did dutifully set up an avatar who looked a bit like Jar Jar Binks and I set off to embrace the experience. I flew around a bit and typed some words for my avatar to say to another avatar who looked like a Beach Volleyball chick with an elephant’s head. That was the extent of it. I didn’t spend real money to have virtual money to go to the virtual Gap store to buy a virtual T-shirt that would somehow be delivered to me in the real world. Call me lazy. Working 12 hours a day and commuting for 2 , eating and drinking for 3 and then sleeping for 8 pretty much used up all my time. Maybe I’m just a slacker. No such slur could be aimed at Nick Spalding.Well,maybe. He set out to write a book in 24 hours and took at least 30. Lazy bastard. Having recently gone through one of those periodic cranked-up work schedules wherea team of us worked for 11 days straight breaking rocks in the advertising quarry,

I know how the word exhausted doesn’t do the feeling justice.I haven’t done that since I was 25 and could write until 4 am and drink beer at the same time. Now I’ve discovered the great secret and should you climb up the gigantic ego mountain upon which I am perched I will deliver it to you. Life is in the breaks. So there.