Flitting from flower to flower in adland

I went to see my cousin and godfather, L Graham Browne  ‒ ‘Uncle Bill’ ‒ in the Birmingham office of his ad agency, to ask him to give me a job. I was nineteen, in awe of him, and fundamentally unemployable in the opinion of both me and my father.

‘You need to leave home,’ he told me. ‘Go to London. If you really want to work in advertising, I’ll give you the addresses of the leading agencies there. You’ll need to apply for the mailroom.’

A few weeks later I found myself in an interview with the head of traffic control at J Walter Thompson in Berkeley Square, Harry Garnell. It seemed to be going quite well.

‘Do you have any questions?’ he asked me.

‘What do you particularly have to have, to be successful in advertising?’ I enquired.

‘Well, you need more than anything to have a butterfly mind,’ he responded, ‘able to shift from one thing to another in an instant.’

How right he was.

 

All over for Facebook?

It's “all over for Facebook?” according to the Daily Telegraph, noting that the early-adopter young are now abandoning the site as their elders move in.

As a consequence it’s seen as “uncool” according to a research study conducted by Professor Daniel Miller of UCL: “Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it.”

Now researchers at Princeton are predicting that FB will lose 80% of its users by 2017, resulting in Facebook themselves, using the same logic, saying that by 2021 Princeton will have no students. Hilarious! 

Given that the flight of the young from the site, and its increasing adoption by wrinklier folk, means that its age profile is shifting upwards, I would imagine that Facebook’s management will be delighted to be able to sell advertising space to folk with real disposable income.

Upstairs on the buses

A mailboy at J Walter Thompson in the mid-1960s, the biggest and poshest of advertising agents at that time, I was told about the occasion the chairman walked out of our Berkeley Square offices with a client. No taxis in sight.

“Perhaps we should walk up to Oxford Street and catch a bus,” said the Great Man. And they did. “Let’s go upstairs,” he suggested.

“Will that cost more?” enquired Nervous Client.

This was an era long before our current obsession with Consumer Insight.

Happy New Year!

Getting a gong from the IAA

Last week, at a fun dinner in London (to celebrate their 75^th anniversary), along with several other worthies, I was given a gong for the contribution I had made to the International Advertising Association two decades ago.

I was elected world president of the IAA at a rather critical moment. First, the Soviet Empire was crumbling, and a whole new range of countries was emerging as market economies. And second, advertising was under attack, seemingly throughout the western world, with governments threatening to legislate for ad bans on all sorts of products that were legally sold.

At that time, in 1989/90, the IAA was the only organisation that could address these threats on a global basis, representing, as it did (and does) the three parts of the business ‒ the manufacturers, the media and the advertising agencies.

And yet, the organisation was clearly completely ill-equipped to create and implement the programmes necessary to defend freedom of commercial speech. The whole ethos of the IAA was not connected with advocacy, but rather was a global club, where the primary reason for belonging was to network.

So I embarked very early on a re-structuring of the governance of the organisation, reducing the executive committee from around twenty-five to just a handful of key players. Of course, this was much resented by all those who were being jettisoned.

And, together with the paid executives, director-general Norman Vale and his number two Richard Corner, we deployed three initiatives: first, to be alert to threats as they emerged, sharing best practice in dealing with each; then to create a roadshow that would travel through the emerging post-Soviet markets ‒ Russia, Czechoslovakia (as it was), Hungary, Poland and, importantly, China ‒ setting out the case for advertising, and inaugurating IAA chapters in each; and, perhaps most important, we launched a global “Campaign for Advertising” (together with tracking research), proclaiming the economic and social case ‒ the media space and time all donated.

I wonder how well the IAA would cope today, faced with similar opportunities and threats?

No junk mail

Distributing leaflets door-to-door is time-consuming but necessary if we want to attract an audience for a concert in our village.

It’s a task I undertake on a pretty regular basis, and I’m always rather shocked by the hostile notices that people put on their doors in an effort to fend off “junk mail”.

After all, whether the “junk” is coming from an impoverished local charity (as with our concerts), or from a major supermarket promoting its special offers, or from a local trader, it’s always distributed on a targeted basis and, compared with TV or press ads, is expensive on a per capita basis, both in terms of time and money.

So why is it that home-delivered mail arouses such hostility? In some way, it seems to me that people feel violated by it, but not by all the other ads that come into their lives and homes more indiscriminately on a continuous basis.

The lure of the dredger

When I was in the advertising business, travelling around the world a lot, I used to get irritated by the fact that everyone on aeroplanes seems to have opinions on the morality and otherwise of the business, mostly very similar. (Are people still so allergic to adverts arriving through their mail boxes?)

So in an endeavour to stem the flow, when asked on flights “What do you do?”, I tried to come up with an answer that would put a dead stop to the conversation.

For a while I was in marine insurance. This did quite well. Then, mid-way between Brisbane and Sydney one day, I was asked the usual question by a bloke and came up with the winning formula. I was in dredging.

A long look of puzzlement followed. But words failed him.

 

40 Years On with Fox’s Glacier Mints

Everywhere I went in Manila I was astonished to encounter Fox’s Glacier Mints – made in Indonesia.

And, a while ago at home in England, I noticed a TV commercial on air for the brand. It caught my attention because the campaign is now one of the few survivors from my long and very happy career in the advertising business. One of the greatest aims in advertising is to come up with an idea that is “campaignable” – one that will be constantly adaptable and last for several years.

We were originally awarded the account by Rowntree’s following their acquisition of the brand, I think around 1971. So, rather extraordinarily, the campaign has now lasted, in a somewhat low-key way, across four full decades.

I recall so clearly the internal meeting when the idea first surfaced. Every creative team in the agency had been invited to come up with submissions, so the creative director’s office was packed with writers and art directors and their aspirant ideas.

In the midst of a stream of presentations, the youngest, newest copywriter mumbled his way through a five minute scenario: the bear on the mint (representing management) was verbally assaulted by the fox (an angry trade union leader), who simply could not understand why the bear was in what should be his own rightful place up top of that mint.

The creative director of the day told the young man, rather sarcastically, that five minutes was a ridiculous time-length. What was needed was a 30 second campaign. So we moved straight on to the next submission. It was beginning to look as though we had no real winners among them.

It struck me that the rivalry of the fox and bear could run and run – a really big, relevant, adaptable and simple idea. And I said so.

A bit reluctantly, it seemed to me, but because I pressed him hard, the CD asked the oldest, wisest, most experienced writer in his department to pick up the idea and try to turn it into something more practical. This he did. Went on to several important prizes for creativity. And soon got a better job in another agency.

But who was the brilliant young writer whose original idea it had been? I’m ashamed to say that I don’t remember his name. Anyone know?

Promise, large promise: the soul of an advertisement

I have been lucky enough to have had a number of teachers and coaches who were very influential in my life, none more than David Bernstein. He was then Creative Director of Garland-Compton (who were to become Saatchi and Saatchi). They had hired me at twenty-three to be an assistant account executive on one of their biggest clients, Rowntree. And I was in deep need of help and guidance.

At the heart of David’s approach to advertising was a simple mantra. To be effective, ads (in any medium) had to have four qualities:

V: Visibility (they must stand out from the crowd - if folks don’t notice them, there’s no point in spending the money)
I: Identity (your ads must be clearly, inextricably, for your brand and no other)
P: Promise (as Dr Johnson put it in the 1750s, “Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.” Nobody said it better than the doc, Bernstein would add.)
S: Simplicity (so many ads try to do too much and fail in consequence)

VIPS. Clear, memorable. Bang on the money. It served me well through a quarter century in that business. And, since that time, working in innovation.

Brown’s Job

Advertisements are not generally heart-warming. This one is that and highly original too.

It was written in 1920 by FR Feland of BBDO for the agency’s own house magazine, and it was later placed as a full page in the New York Times. Feland was not a copywriter, but treasurer of the agency. For me, its style is reminiscent of Raymond Chandler in more tender mood. Chandler’s work was to come a few years later.

Although not PC by today’s standards, it says more about the employer’s attitude to colleagues than any amount of the usual HR strategies can.

Do give it a read-through. Click on the image to enlarge it.