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New telly ad here. What do you reckon?
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To fill the thick silence between people who have only just met there is often the most dreaded question in small talk:
"So what do you do?"
If you work in advertising, this question is to be dreaded. You'll get:
1.The armchair creative geniuses who love to pound you with reasons why they don't make any decent any ads any more ("What was that gorilla all about?"), before unleashing their own gems that will re-write the creative lexicon.
2. The (wrongly) envious, bored jobsworth who refuses to believe you don't enjoy a swanky, overpaid lark for layabouts while coked up to the eyeballs.
3. It's this one I'd like to draw your attention to. The 'no logo' protagonist. You know, the one who believes advertising is an evil capitalist conspiracy, hoodwinking defenseless people into buying things they don't need, that brands are evil and represent everything that is wrong with capitalism. And cannot resist letting you know.
Now, before I go further, I totally agree that capitalism needs to take a long, hard, look at itself. If the mess we're in right now proves anything, it proves that.
But advertising and 'brands' isn't simply about making people want things they don't need. It's everywhere and it always was. Information to help people make informed decisions has always been important. We wear wedding rings to advertise our unavailability, we wear religious symbols like the cross to communicate our beliefs and let others identify with us, or modify their behaviour. Clothes code all sorts of messages for us, what group we belong to, availability, mood and even rebellion.
Now of course, the easy response to this is that straightforward information isn't the same as artful persuasion intended to make us do things and think things. I say there isn't anything more carefully calculated and well executed as religious propaganda. But then there's personal propaganda too. A push up bra greatly distorts the truth and could be construed as false advertising (yes I know women dress for themselves a lot, but sometimes they really don't).
And what's the difference between a well crafted headline and the witty market stall patter?
Amazingly, within the same breath, there will be depictions of the brand alchemist, a terrifying magician capable of incredible feats of manipulation, followed by assertions that it's mostly an annoying waste of time.
The thing is, it mostly is isn't it. The public doesn't care about advertising, they don't lay awake at night thinking about brands. Nor should they. Most brand communication is annoying, crass and just not very good and doesn't really work.
But some do of course, very well. But we're making far too much stuff, we're buying far too much stuff and there's too much choice, we need a guide through the clutter. Without all this choice, brands and their communications help us navigate on our own terms.
Now we could do away with the choice, but the economy would grind to halt. If there was just one choice for everything, the jobs would disappear very quickly.
Even if we could find a way to just make one of everything and still make sure everyone is fed watered and have all their needs taken care of, I don't believe that's enough. We need novelty, we like choice, we want ways of both belonging and expressing who we are.
Many science fiction films depict humans eating food concentrates -convenient, simple and reliable. But no would want that, food is so much more than fuel. It's tasty, congregation, fun, novelty, surprise, discovery, indulgence. We don't need it to be that way, we WANT it to be.
We don't need sex (how often in your life have you only had sex to reproduce?), telly, more than a few clothes, sport, holidays, reading.
We could just go back in caves and hunt, but that's not fun, it's also bloody hard. Where's the play? Where's the joy?
We need brands and advertising because we NEED the things we DON'T NEED. It's the same joy as finding the perfect black dress, playing your favourite song (we don't need music either) or arriving in a new country for the first time. We need novelty, we need to dream.
Like we need people who are more glamorous than we are, like monarchs and aristocrats in the old days or film stars now, we want a release from the realities, the banality of everyday life, some magic dust spread over the humdrum.
If it's not brands, it would be something else. It still is… religion, sport all pointless, but very necessary releases from the reality of life. Life can never be perfect, so we all need to dream. Brands are a part of that. This. Is. A. Good. Thing.
Final point. Belonging, self expression, play they are all basic human needs. We all need to both discover who we are, express it and belong to communities who share our beliefs and interests. That's prettymuch what brands do for us, they both help us find who we are and demonstrate it.
By the way, don't worry, I don't bore people with this when they ask me what I do, I just try and explain what a planner does. The conversation tends to move on very quickly…
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Rob Campbell's posted the results to the Account Planning School of the Web. You should read it because:
The submissions are really good.
The advice from the reboubtable Mr C is useful to all.
Rob's a bald planner like me (but considerably more succesful).
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I will be of litte surprise to you that I bought this t-shirt. Naturally I'm a member of the Tea-Appreciation Society. Everything I love about the sacred brew and other stuff too. Lovely (as I'm writing this, I'm pouring my second cup of Earl Grey/English Breakfast blended in a warmed pot).
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You won't be after reading this.
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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.
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You may have noticed me mention I'm an expectant father.
Baby Northern is now the size of a cantaloupe melon. The little blighter is moving, eyes are virtually fully formed beneath eyelids that won't open just yet. Not long until October 11th, our due date.
Funny how it changes how I feel inside already, the job has become at once less and more important.
Less because I already know I'll resent anything that gets in the way of being home for bath time, generating market share growth or shifting perceptions just won't match seeing the first smile. Right now, nothing's more important than making sure a tired, hormonal Mrs Northern is okay.
It's bloody, massively more important than ever because I'm already stopping wanting things for myself and realised a, slightly cavalier attitude towards life will no longer cut it. I don't want my baby to want for anything (although in a grumpy, Northern way, he/she won't be spoiled either).
I just can't wait though, thinking about all the things we're going to do together. Hours spent in the kitchen cooking and baking stuff, tennis lessons, the fun we'll have going swimming (God help me if we have another good swimmer on our hands, transport to 5am training sessions and then a full day's work is a little scary), staying with Grandma and Grandad in Cornwall – digging in the sand, rowing in dingy and playing in the waves.
Not long, not long.
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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.
NORTHERN PLANNER 