NORTHERN PLANNER

The Edge Questionnaire asked in 2006, 'What is your dangerous idea?'. Something dangerous not because it's false, but because it might be true. It was posed to the worlds best thinkers, ergo not to the likes of me. Nevertheless, here's some dangerous ideas, not completely things I've thought of (as if!) but things I think about don't always say in certain company. What are yours? 

1. The world would be better run by women. They have a natural impulse to navigate life through building relationships, empathy and strengthening connections, rather than the male imperative for hierarchy and winning.

2. Fashion is good thing. It isn't a way to con women (or men for that matter) into feeling bad about themselves by spending a fortune on unattainable images, it's a source of profound pleasure and adventure, an escape from the humdrum of everyday life.

3. It just isn't possible for every to eat organic, free range, non-GM pure, fresh locally sourced food. Without mass production and science, even more people would go hungry than now. Either we turn back the clock, going back to much smaller populations living like they did decades ago or we look to strike a correct balance between nature and science.

4. Advertising in a paid for space is still the most effective way to persuade lots of people to become loyal to a brand. Brands are not important enough in our lives to make us want to spend lots of time with them.

5. It's true that old style advertising dinosaurs could learn a thing or two from the digital brigade, but that goes the other way too. 25years ago, ad agencies made a fortune because clients didn't really know what they did. It was easy too thanks to the hegemony of ITV. It's like that now with digital. There are some brilliant practitioners our there, who graft at finding good ideas that will work. Then there are the charlatans that blind others with jargon and get away with murder. For now, others don't quite understand the technicalities of what they do, but when they catch up, things will change.

6. Every agency and client should do a job swap once a year. Both would respect each other more for doing something the other cannot and wouldn't want to. The agency people be refreshed from the short hours, but glad to escape the boredom. The client would come back to the dayjob shattered, glad to escape the relentless pace and chaos, really pissed off at cancelling things at someone else's whim. The agency people would then appreciate that the client has their own internal clients and has to justify everything they do. The client people would be a little more patient, take more care to ask for what they actually want and less inclined to make impossible demands.

Considering this blog is at least a little bit about advertising I've just realised how odd it is that I've never posted about favourite ads. I avoid talking about other people's work if I can help it, without knowing the background, who really made the decisions and what the objectives were I don't think it's fair.

Can't resist posting my Top 10. This is as a human being by the way, not a planner, this is just stuff that affected me, that I remembered or I just liked.

1. This Nike tennis ad from the 1980's captured everything a teenager who hated being told to wear white, leave the court when the senior joined up….felt about the whole stuffy air of tennis – I just wanted to play. This ad made me a fan of Nike for life.

2. There's a pattern here, but Levi's Drugstore commercial captured a natural feeling of teenage rebellion, not to mention that fear a teenage boy has of a girl's father who knows perfectly well what you want to do to her. At the time I thought this was so clever. Don't ever try and tell me you cannot do product attribute in an interesting way.

3. Nike Hurt (sorry it's Nike again). This actually made me miss being  a proper athlete, training so hard I threw up, rage at losing races I should have lost, daily agony getting up at dawn. There's an intense joy in pain and failure that is very much a part of real sport and life too to be honest.

4. This Irn Bru ad was so funny at the time -poking fun at virtually every soft drinks ad of the time, imported from America with fake, unnatainable images of a teenage world where dating was easy and you always got the prom Queen. It even managed to keep the long running advertising conceit that Irn Bru made you hard/was for tough people.

5. I hate Tesco's now. I hate their size and their relentless march towards a UK with no wrinkles or bumps. But I loved them back in the 1980's when the Dudley Moore commercials ran. Really funny, witty and every commercial told you something about what they sold you didn't know before all on a premise that he was searching for some free range chickens. I didn't care then though, Mum did the shopping. I just liked them.

6. The Old 'Papa' Nicole Renault Clio commercials were great, but I remember the surprise and delight of Vic and Bob in the final one, I loved them, I loved the Graduate so I loved this.

7. Smash speaks for itself. Genius.

8. More recently, I love everything that Lurpak does. I'm a pretentious foodie who bought Flora now and again, Lurpak made me totally loyal. I knew what they were doing and I still couldn't help it. This Lurpak lighter ad says everthing I believe about healthy eating and fad dieting.

9. This is the best Cinzano ad. Followed a series of Leonard Rossiter constantly spilling his drink over Joan Collin's breasts. This couldn't have been made without casting these two, shows how well celebrities work if you use them right.

10. As an overly ironic, seventies/eighties nostalgic loving grown -up (ish) I'm going to cheat and pick two for number 10. The first is Orange's Darth Vader commercial, simply because it's ironically funny and it has Star Wars in. The second is this Old Spice re-launch – I'm at that grumpy age when I agree you can't do without experience and it's so funny (and I'm old enough to admit that Duran Duran were quite good at times).

This list would be very different if it was based on craft or a great strategy, but since I've loved and remember all of these beyond all reason, I would argue they must have both been pretty good.

What follows is stories of blokes trying to attract women. Both come from my time as a student. Both have something to tell us about brands and social networks.

The first concerns me, or the me I was back then. Shy, odd, and wonky (no change today). Fortunately, one of my best friends happened to be a girl who both both funny and cool. We used to go out a lot and I was even invited on girls' nights out.

What a revelation. There was none of the natural one-upmanship that typifies young men, none of the false bravado, you could talk about all sorts of stuff you couldn't with the lads. At that age, girls tend to be far more interesting than boys. A little more grown up, a lot less led by base desires.

Amazingly, there began some success with girls she knew and a little more from strangers. They even came up and talked to me, escaping the horrors of making a first move. The secret? Simple. Girls seeing boys around girls decide your 'endorsed', you must be OK if women in general like your company. You're 'let in'. This was no cunning stratagem devised by a dark mind, just happy accident, Every now and then, nice things happen to shy people. 

The next concerns someone I used to work with at a nightclub, where I earned precious beer money. This dashing fellow was something of a player. Confident, good looking, never short of something to say, he was funny if a little arrogant.

For two weeks, he was given the job of checking on the women's toilets. The girl that usually did it was away. He jumped at the chance, believing this was a goldmine to chat up all the lovelies just waiting to swoon at his unquestionable charm and dark good looks.

After two nights he begged for someone else to do it. His success was less than he had envisaged; not only did suffer zero pulling success, he was soundly abused, verbally and physically. Girls simply hated a bloke in their territory, where they re-applied war paint, swapped gossip and (still don't know why) went to the loo together.

So what's this got to do with brands and social networks? The breath- takingly tenuous link is the laziness, nay, arrogance of brands expecting something for nothing.

There is still an amazing contingent and marketing and creative types that believes it's easy to get people doing marketing for them for free, that the newly web enabled consumer (don't yu hate that word!) is impatiently waiting for them to turn up on Facebook with all sorts of spurious groups, apparently they're all salivating at the prospect of co-creating all sorts of stuff with brands, itching to tell all their friends how shiny and perfect the latest washing powder is.

But just like my colleague in the women's toilets, the breathtaking of trying to infiltrate and interrupt their territory with nothing if value, the hubris of expecting anyone to even pay attention, let alone even bother to get angry gets you nowhere. There is maybe a tiny minority of brands with fans who may do this, but they're incredibly rare.

If you want people to join in, or pass things on,you can't get away from creating something interesting, useful and rewarding. Seed it in the right places by all means, but if you're not creating anything of value, don't expect to generate anything of value. In other words, it doesn't matter if you're creating telly ads or something online, you can't get away with being lazy. Worse than being abused, you'll just get ignored.

Which brings me back to my limited success with student girls. If you make the effort to win genuine acceptance, don't pretend to be something you're not, good things can happen, but there's no such thing as a free lunch.