Like me

The Beatles may have believed that money can’t buy you love but

today it can sure buy you a boatload of `likes’. And I was reading in my

trawling of the interweb that there as many as 20 million fake follower accounts for twitter . I think that’s what I’m going to demand for my birthday –fake twitter followers. I think that would be better for my self esteem issues than the Old Spice body wash gift set I’m expecting and it will help me vent my impotent rage as yet another old friend I  reach out to in search of work gives me the old non-reply treatment. My fake twitter followers will re-tweet everything I post so that I can publicly humiliate the bastards and make it trend at the same time. If one fake tweet can devastate Wall Street my legion of twittery Orcs and their twitchy thumbs can cause some real damage. At $60 for five thousand fake followers I can command an army the likes of which has never been seen before. Not counting Justin Bieber’s fake followers of course. Bieber is King. And while I’m at it I can set up 2,500 likes for $34 on Facebook. Fake likes on my fake page? Yes I have a fake Facebook account doesn’t everybody? Now I want to connect my twitter followers and Facebook fans to it to my LinkedIn page and have a thousand recommendations for nothing and truly be seen as a leader in emerging media. There’s nothing new about this. It has been done before. About six hundred years ago actually.

Back then the Church had a practice of selling what they called `indulgences.’

Think of these as spiritual `likes.’ You hand over the cash and someone gives you a piece of paper setting out the value of your blessing. Indulgences were one of the things that had Martin Luther flipping his wig and breaking away from the church of Rome. This schism brought on what’s known as the Reformation. It was a pretty big deal that rocked the religious universe way back in the day. Can the fake friend controversy of today have the same effect in the work world of today? Possibly. Where’s the value in friendship when you can buy yourself a bunch of fake ones really cheap and let the true ones go to hell? 

Where's my beer?

What does Peroni, the Italian beer and Skegness the British east coast resort have in common? Nothing. So say the makers of the beer who refused to have their product sold in said sea side town because it didn’t fit with the brand equity.Now while its true that `Skeggy’ as its known to those who go there is no Biarritz or Miami by the same token Peroni is no Dom Perignon either. This is another sad mad example of a brand too consumed with itself that it’s forgotten that it exists to be consumed by the public. Successful brands today are exploring every platform and relevant outlet and letting the tone and manner with which they populate these places inform and amplify the brand equity. Is Karl Lagerfeld too

runway to refuse to be sold in H&M? No. Karl understands the difference between inexpensive and cheap. One magnifies his brand. The other he knows would destroy it.

Being in a discount clothing shop doesn’t mean compromising his air of exclusivity

Peronii is a beer of the moment. And those moments can be over very quickly.

It’s a premium beer mostly because of its price. One beer that shares this position and celebrates it is Stella Artois. Stella is available to everyone but affordable only to those prepared to spend the extra money. Someone drinking Stella wants you know that it isn’t cheap. It's a status symbol. Will the absence of Peroni in Skegness force visitors to go elsewhere? I doubt it. Do people reflect on the `equity’ of the beer they drink. I doubt that too.The absence of  draftt Peroni in Skegness won’t change Skegness. It’s just

a missed opportunity for Peroni.

Up to the test

Like many a creative before me I have a hate/hate even more relationship with the methods of testing advertising. I once worked as the personal slave to a grumpy old creative director who said on the agency reel no less that he didn’t write for consumers any more.Instead he wrote for Millward Brown. This highly esteemed and even more highly rewarded company is one of many who have a prescription for telling clients whether the advertising the agency has sold them will work. The old curmudgeon I worked for did have a point. After you experience the soul tearing bad reviews of your work by a company like Millward Brown or Ipsos or Neilson or any of the others you retreat bleeding to your cave and resolve never to let that happen again. So you learn their hit points, what scores and doesn’t and you produce work as nimble as a ballet dancer with lead feet. Every now and then, like the cicadas that crawl up from the ground every 17 years comes along a creative director determined to fight the system and produce work unconstrained by the laws of testing. It may be someone from the elite agencies we hear about around the campfire late at night, the agencies that don’t have to have their work tested and qualified to run. This person usually lasts for a few months by which time they have suffered a brain hemorrhage from trying to get his or her head around what the testing methodology is forcing the advertising idea to do. And it doesn’t help that many client brand teams have an interest in testing that goes beyond curiosity. I’ve known brand teams whose bonus is linked to success at testing. If the evil stopped at that I wouldn’t be so alarmed. What really gets me mad is when work that has done backflips to pass the testing goes on to bomb in market. No work goes out unless it has passed testing with flying colors. So how can it fail in market? What is the relationship between testing and actual performance? That’s something that probably needs to be tested. This disconnect is something that a lot of companies turn a blind eye to because it raises very fundamental uncomfortable questions. If testing can’t be a predictor of market success then why test. Equally ridiculous is the amount of weight given to the preliminary communication checks that involve 18 women in Hackensack NJ or the equivalent discussing the pro’s and cons of your work. Don’t get me wrong it’s an invaluable tool for uncovering new turns of language and potential communication disasters. But that’s it. Unfortunately many people report and stick to the verbatims as if they were delivered in stone from atop a mountain and represent the infallible word of god the holy consumer. When 18 sketchy folks in a room off an interstate somewhere are responsible for green-lighting your project it speaks a lot about the inability of the client to feel the work and trust their instincts and their agency. Like I said I have a hate/hate even more relationship with all testing and mostly because when work tests well and the gang of 18 love the work I am so creepily and pathetically grateful. I roll over for a belly rub like the pathetic ad-ho I am. A jury of genius’s  agree with me and love my work. Oh happy day.

Farting in the elevator

So many pearls of wisdom have been attributed to David Ogilvy that it’s hard to trust the source of the one I’m about to quote.

Not that it really matters. When I first came to McCann in New York

I was a very gullible guy and a very senior and senatorial account man

used to open every presentation with quotes he’d attribute to either the original Mr. McCann or Mr. Erickson or Marion Harper Jr. and for a while I swallowed this shtick whole until he admitted in private that they were all completely bogus. He did it he said to add a degree of gravitas to whatever cornpone he was feeding his clients.

So this Ogilvy gem may be real or totally cubic zirconium.

`Getting attention is easy. Anyone who farts in an elevator gets attention.

Getting attention for the right reason is a more difficult task.’

Whether he said it or not the principle is right. I was reminded of it recently when I saw two commercials. One for Kmart where people use the word `Ship’ as though they are saying `Shit’. For example-`I ship my pants’  ` I ship my bed’ etc.

Another spot I saw was for an on-line travel-booking site called bookit.com and features the use of the word `Booking’ as though it meant `Fucking.’  For example –`Look at the booking room', `the booking view', `we’re so booking happy' and so on.

Is it possible that these campaigns were crowd sourced from a group made up exclusively of boys in first grade? But that only makes sense to me if the clients buying the work were also first graders. Then I could imaging what a laugh riot the presentation was,much rib holding and rolling on the floor ensuing. Alas the folks buying this work are all probably MBA alumni of some prestigious alma mater somewhere.

And their justification is probably that the work `tested through the roof.’

I’ll save my thoughts on testing for another post but I will say that having gone through the roof this work should have continued its trajectory and landed somewhere safely out at sea where it could mingle anonymously with all the other excrement out there.

I have no squeamishness about the use of the words fuck and shit. They are everyday words and in the right context bring authenticity to dialogue. In England where I grew up much coarser words are often used as terms of endearment. It’s the farting in the elevator aspect I don’t like. Yes you got my attention. I can recall it clearly not only because it makes you look stupid but because it assumes I am equally as infantile.

I wonder if in the presentation some slick account dude started off with the famous quote from H.L Mencken `Nobody went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.’

In which case it’s a pity David Ogilvy is in the great boardroom in the sky as he could have piped up `Never insult the customer-she is your wife.’

Ding Dong

According to the Top 100 Hits app on my phone the number one song in the UK today is `Ding Dong the witch is dead.’ from The Wizard of Oz. It’s a less than subtle show of power by those in Britain who are rejoicing in the death of Margaret Thatcher with a social campaign to cause maximum embarrassment to conservatives everywhere. The pop music charts are played every week by the BBC and this guerilla campaign leaves them with the choice of either playing the song and adding to its social impact or choosing not to play it and adding even more to its social impact. It’s brilliant. Thatcher would have thought it childish and petty which it is but that’s beside the point. It works because it has a very British sense of irreverence and refusal to be mature that is the hallmark of the British character. We are all school children at heart laughing at fart jokes. Some stiff upper lip types exist of course and they will be tut-tutting about it even as they slip into their talcum-powdered leather bondage suits and bend over for a good spanking from Mistress Cruella deLite. It is a display of people power over authority that worries people. I saw glimpses of it here in the US when viewers began seeing through the fakery of shows like American Idol and started voting for most talent less people just to mess with the producers. In the end it never amounted to anything because it wasn’t anything anyone could really care less about. Ding Dong is a simple piece of civil disobedience to tweak the noses of those who run the country and that are what keeps it fuelled. When I look at commercial social campaigns touted as game changing I find the majority of them not game changing at all because they lack that `fuelled by fury’ power that drives the Death parties for Thatcher. The real trick, and trick it is, would be to have a social campaign give people an outlet for their frustrations, a vent for their anger allowing them to make a point that other media denies them. And it should be funny in a satirical way. I don’t know if America appreciates satire the way the UK does. Satire is how the public reprimands those in power for getting too big for their boots. It works that way in France also. But in the US satire is more about intellectuals sharing jokes with fellow intellectuals. In Britain there was a show called Spitting Image, which featured grossly caricatured puppets of famous politicians and celebrities, and scripts that poked merciless fun at everyone in the public eye. It was how the commoner could laugh at his or her betters –to put it in a Downton Abbey context. Satire here is a show of slick intelligence by East and West coast intellectuals for East and West coast intellectuals. A true social phenomenon like Ding Dong would never emerge in this environment. Ding Dong is far too lowbrow. Like Harlem Shake and look what happened with that. The civil disobedience aspect of that was stomped on. Kids were banned from doing it in school halls and firemen were reprimanded for doing it in fire stations, which shows how wary the authorities are of ground up movements. Ding Dong is essentially a point of social focus. Can there be such a thing as a benign point of social focus encouraging an outpouring of emotion which a brand can ignite,take credit for or otherwise benefit from?

I believe that is the real challenge. Instead of brands telling me what to do I want to use brands to inform the world about what I want to do. Brands that don’t let me do that are dead to me.

Ding Dong.

Hey hey we're the monkeys

Ron Johnson, Sergio Zyman and Margaret Thatcher

All three of these notable people impacted my career in advertising. I take no pleasure in the public stoning of Ron Johnson. Had Steve Jobs failed in his autocratic vision then madame guillotine’s glee would not have been so raucous,but because Steve begat Ron, Ron’s fall incited the pent up jealousy and dislike we secretly harbored for Job’s success. Ha! So there! That blueprint forworld domination is flawed, Stevie baby! Your boy Ron couldn’t make it work. What I found interesting is that for a while Ron’s plans had all other mass retailers shitting themselves.  If he could have taken consumers off the promotion treadmill it would have been the equivalent of the Russian revolution and America is not ready for a Russian revolution. Back in my pimply youth I worked as a sales assistant in a British store chain and a few years later at an agency that handled their advertising. I remember asking a buyer what `recommended retail price’ was and he couldn’t tell me. For him and for everyone the year in retailing was as traditional as the Catholic Church calendar. Seasons, specials, door-busters and sales always sales Year end sales mid-year sales. Red tag sales. Mother’s day sales. January sales. And more Sales. My favorite was a three-legged bed sale. A fiction was created that the manufacturer had messed up and all beds had only three legs. Upon purchase a complimentary fourth leg was given to the overjoyed customer. I thought retailing was is and forever will be like that. Then I discovered the Apple store. The combination of amazing display and the college-like lecture theater was just beautiful and it was full not just of customers but of tribe members. We were the Apple people. The associates didn’t have to sell. We bought. And I understood in one blinding flash the reality of push versus pull marketing. And that was Ron. It just wasn’t JC Penney. When I joined Saatchi they were working for the pre-Ron Penney and doing really nice work. But the management didn’t really get it.I can only imagine how Ron blew their wigs off. And like Ron, Sergio is another one to whom history will give the big razzie award . He was the driving force behind the New Coke disaster and created a text book case study in how not to market a new product that has gone into the annals of bad thinking. When I first came to New York to work on Coke the memory of this debacle was still fresh in the minds of the creatives who had worked in the bunker on this project. From what they told me no one group or agency was given a complete story on what was up. Each worked on a fragment of the idea with the plan being that Sergio would knit it all together into a victory flag that would wave from his chariot as he entered the gates of the citadel of success. Well, shit plan shit results. Years later I was in a meeting in Atlanta trying to present ideas for Diet Coke to him. It was an unusual meeting in that we were seated at a long table and two other meetings with him were happening simultaneously. It was like watching a chess prodigy play three games at the same time. He broke off one discussion to proudly show us a new can design featuring a silhouette of the iconic coke bottle. Like the Rock God he so believes himself to be he said to us worthless beings `This work you’re showing me I could get it approved it right this instant. To get this bottle icon onto a can has taken me months’

Yes F Scott Fitzgerald, the rich are different from us.

And then there’s Margaret or `Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher’ as they chanted in my youth when this rising star in the conservative party advocated banning free milk at infant and junior schools. Without Maggie there’d be no Saatchi. So I’d never have had the chance to work at a place so good they named it twice. Maggie used agencies because she believed in advertising and power of free market forces. She would have loved the social media craziness over her death and the free market forces they unleash. I wonder who’s had the balls to sponsor any of the death parties that erupted throughout the UK. As one graffito read `Iron lady –rust in peace.’