Welcome to Brand Tacticians

The Chairman of Ogilvy explains why you should come to Brand Tacticians instead of to a big ad agency.

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:56:55 +0100

Rory Sutherland - OK, he’s actually Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Europe - explains the power of small budgets, smart thinking and attention to detail can make a bigger difference than strategy documents, consulting and global brand campaigns. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Thanks, Rory!

Why advertising might be the wrong model for mobile advertising.

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 12:54:02 +0100

Mary Meeker is a Morgan Stanley analyst who was one of the bounciest cheerleaders of the dot com bubble. This week at Google’s mobile conference she has been hyping the rise of the mobile internet. This in itself is a sign. A smarter businessperson than me would take it as a signal to found a pureplay mobile consumer company with the thought of unloading it in an IPO in about 18 months’ time. A stupider businessperson than me would invest in it.

A lot of Mary’s figures speak for themselves: smartphones are ramping up far faster than PCs (not surprising: they cost about a fifth as much in real terms as a web-capable PC in 1995). Mobile internet use is exploding. I imagine it will continue to do so until the 3G masts are all overloaded. Which is any day now in parts of London like Soho and The City.

But for me the really striking figures in this deck are the ones about what the mobile internet is being used for. Facebook is the number one free app for the iPhone. Social media has overtaken email as a means of communication. I wonder if we’ve actually been driven away from email by the vast amount of spam: there’s a lot more signal and a lot less noise in the walled-garden world of Facebook.

What does this actually mean for noisemakers brand communicators? Yes, yes we like to think that our work will be actively sought out by consumers and enrich their lives, but only a fraction of it actually does that. Yet much of the rest of it still works.

For all their awards and self-congratulation, it’s not the creative agencies who have really cracked the problem of interruption in online advertising. It’s google. At their best, their ads are so relevant that they blend into your search and enhance the experience. If they’re irrelevant, you don’t notice them.

I wonder if there’s a similar micro-relevance approach to social networking. The model currently being touted by Twitter is basically an interruption one, where brands get to muscle in on your conversation and searches every now and then. But I think the answer might rather lie in sponsorship. The current sponsorship model is to take someone really famous, get them to wear your logo and pay them millions of pounds.

But what if Adidas sponsored me instead? If I twittered about my workouts, I could earn real money. Or at least, micropayments which could be redeemed for sports kit. You could be payed per follower, per retweet or whatever.

Demos wrote a really interesting piece a while ago on the rise of the pro-am economy. This kind of sponsorship might actually pay for a few pro-am people to raise their game. Not necessarily the best sportspeople on the scene, but the most interesting.

Simply auditioning for sponsorship, or attempting to rise up the sponsorship food chain, would be an event in itself.

Maybe Morgan Stanley could sponsor amateur tech analysts. They could call it Meekerseeker. Just a thought.

Welcome, Delicious friend

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:32:24 +0000

A while ago I got involved in doing a bit of writing for an extraordinary online game. Echo Bazaar harks back to the old Infocom games of the 1980s, before computer graphics were anything more than a few blobs, and the best, most engaging games used the player’s imagination. As Iain Banks says, when you’re writing, you have the biggest special effects budget imaginable. And as the makers of Infocom games said, they used the best graphics processor ever - the human mind.

Echo Bazaar is atmospheric. And it’s witty. What other game sets you tasks like, “Mock an insufferable poseur,” or “Seduce a struggling artist’s model”?

With only the simplest images to help, the game slowly reveals a rich, wonderful and beguiling world. JRR Tolkien wrote in his Essay on Fairy Tales about the concept of Secondary Worlds: the idea is to create not just a story, but a world which the reader’s mind can inhabit and expand. In a fairy story, the characters might take the path through the mountains, and not the path through the woods. In a great fairy story, the reader imagines that the wood is fully populated, that had the characters gone left instead of right they would have found a roundly-imagined population of characters.

Tolkien himself was a master of creating this illusion, with his constant references to history and places outside the ambit of the main story. Every place has a past and an internal reason to exist.

Here’s old Prof Tolkers

What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.

This is my problem with Harry Potter: the world just doesn’t seem properly thought-out. Why is Ron Weasley poor and dressed in shabby clothes, when even children seem to be able to conjure clothes out of thin air? Why go to all the trouble of having flying cars if you can travel from fireplace to fireplace? Why study magic when it all seems to come down to natural ability? These questions keep jerking us out of the Secondary World and back into our own.

In Harry Potter, I can’t help feeling that if the characters turned right instead of left at any time, they’d just bump into the back of the scenery. (See here for an entertaining full dismemberment of JK Rowling’s world by an economist)

The trick with computer games, as someone once said, is to trick you into thinking that you’ve played 50% of the game when actually you’ve played 95%. Just like fairy tales.

In Echo Bazaar, you’re constantly afforded glimpses of a world which stretches off in all directions. London has been transported 3 miles underground, with its buildings and its attitudes, snobbery and hypocrisy intact, but subtly twisted.

The Thames now runs directly into Hell, and it seems impossible to die. This gives us endless possibilities, not just within the gameplay, but to toy around with what this means for the Church, for government, and for private enterprise.

And for all my talk about Tolkien, don’t worry. There aren’t lots of dwarves, orcs, dragons or the other standard fare of lazy role-playing games.

Many of the players of Echobazaar don’t play other games. That’s because Echobazaar isn’t like other games. Time will tell whether it’s a nichy play for people who like knowingly-written gothic whimsy, or whether it’s something that goes mainstream.

Mainstream Facebook games are largely about ‘grinding’. They give you a number, you continually click a button to make the number go up. There’s a certain one-dimensional autistic pleasure to that, kind of like being one of Skinner’s pigeons.

Echobazaar combines that with the multi-dimensional pleasure of immersive stories and imaginings - there’s wide user speculation on forums about the shape that the plot is taking.

Anyway, enough from me. If you’d like to know more, then I’ll see you in the game. Watch your back.

Internet safety campaign goes live

Tue, 8 Dec 2009 14:32:22 +0000

I’ve been working with the Department of Children, Schools and Families on the proposition development and content of a ‘Green Cross Code for the Internet’. It was a fascinating campaign to work on - watching 13 year olds talk about their internet use made for some of the most enthralling focus groups ever. It’s great to see it actually go live. Creative development was by CHI.

SOWF: the movie

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:50:48 +0100

SOWF has reached over 40 000 young people, through over 20 in arts organisations through South London. Many of the practises we established are being rolled out nationally. To see a film about it, starring Tessa Jowell and Nicholas Serota, click play...

Chris Boardman: digital engagement champ

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:59:36 +0100

As you probably know, Chris Boardman is an ex-cycling champion who now puts his name to a range of high-end bikes which is available in Halfords. While the bikes have been praised for their good value (carbon framed road bikes for less than a grand...), they've had a poor reception from the cycling community. This is partially brand snobbery - the bikes are only available in Halfords, not a particularly cred store with the Lungs on Legs brigade.

But if you read cycling forums (welcome to my nerdy life) it's hard to miss the complaints about the poor service that accompanies the bikes. Often it seems they haven't been assembled properly, and the wheels break before they've been ridden home. Angry posts on forums like bikeradar have done enormous damage to the brand. I was certainly put off, and I was in the market.

Well, Boardman has responded in kind, with Chris Boardman himself posting a brilliant reply on bikeradar last Friday. Whether he wrote it himself or got a PR company to do it for him, it's a really great example of showing your customers that you're listening to them.

A lot of the posts I read were about these two issues and even after weeding out those that had an axe to grind, there were still too many legitimate issues, so I wrote to Paul McClenaghan, the Commercial Director of Halfords and attached a large selection of forum posts. As soon as he got the mail, Paul contacted me and we arranged to meet. This happened yesterday.

Paul and another board member, Andy Torrance (Store Operations and Logistics Director) had already got together and personally looked at every post. Andy's immediate response was that many of the issues raised were 'many of the issues raised were just unacceptable and below the standards that Halfords set' which was a good start. From this point, lots of ideas were discussed on how the service you receive can/would be improved/made more consistent in the stores that sell the Boardman range.

I am not going to hold myself responsible for how well or how fast Halfords tackles the issues, I would be making promises that aren't mine to keep but I can promise I will keep pushing them towards being World Class in this area, which is what they wanted, or at the very least make very clear to the customer what they can and can't expect from them. I'll keep you updated on progress and post actions that Halfords agree to put in place.

If you scroll down to the responses, people are so happy that someone (let alone a sporting hero) has actually listened to them and is doing something about their complaints.

Of course, the two big questions are: now that Boardman has acknowledged the problem, will they fix it? And second, is Boardman really reading the forums?

In response to one poster who said,

He wont be back, just copy paste and away he goes ;-)

Boardman replied

To quote the former Mr Universe (which is not something you do every day)

"I'll be back"

Chris B

Sounds like the real deal.

Green copywriting

Fri, 5 Jun 2009 18:45:29 +0100

Any copywriter will tell you that you can change people’s behaviour by writing insightfully. So can copywriters change consumers’ behaviour to make them think greener? I’m sure we can. But not in the obvious way by writing big punning ads (anyone remember those environ-mental posters? Only the ad nerds among you).

Rather, it’s in the way we start to make people think and feel about their actions. Advertising is manipulative. But there’s no reason why that should be a bad thing. As the philosopher Jayme White wrote recently, imagine if you only had one leg. How could advertising help your condition?

If I messed with your head so that you found standing on one leg immensely enjoyable, then I would have improved standing on one leg. If an advertising campaign messes with your head so that you find owning and driving a Lumberjack more gratifying, then it has improved Lumberjacks. After all, what makes leather upholstery so good if not the fact that we enjoy sitting on it?

Last year some psychologists messed with the heads of hotel guests, using differently worded tags on towel rails. You know the kind: “please re-use these towels and help us save the environment.”

They changed the wording on the tags. The one which got a 10% uplift in towel re-use said “JOIN YOUR FELLOW GUESTS IN HELPING TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT. Almost 75%
of guests who are asked to participate in our new re- source savings program do help by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow guests in this program to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.”

Lucky these boffins have a day job.

The insight here is that people are competitively environmental. If other people are being green, then they will be green too. Being green involves sacrifice (will the towel be slightly damp in the morning? The horror...) So we want to at least keep up with the sacrifices of the Joneses.

Another amazing example of creating this kind of competition is the World Bank’s Doing Business league, which measures how business-friendly countries are. Since its publication, developing nations have competed to move up the table. Some estimates say it may have lifted more Africans out of poverty than any aid initiative.

One obvious thing we could 'mess with people's heads' over is wind farms. Currently the big issue is that people think they look ugly. Really they're just new: I'm sure medieval Dutch people thought windmills blighted their landscape.

The agenda's been captured by local politicians who go on about 'visual pollution'. Rejected planning applications have cost 1000s of jobs in South Wales alone. Can we make them seem beautiful, and make people proud to have them on their horizon? I love them. Why doesn’t everybody?

More generally, advertising defines what people aspire to spend their money on. Not simply in the things we sell directly, but in the things we surround those products with. The Mondeo pulls up outside a Neutra-designed house on Mulholland. The watch is worn by the pilot in front of his stunt plane.

Simply by beginning to associate those kind of products with environmental projects, we can start the process of nudging public opinion towards acceptance of things like wind farms.

Have we had enough of corporate whimsy yet?

Fri, 15 May 2009 10:32:29 +0100

Over the last few years, it seems like every unimaginative company has wanted a bit of whimsicality to its communications, to be ‘a bit like Innocent’. Can the rest of the industry now move on from whimsicality, and leave Innocent to it?

(When I started as a copywriter in the early 90s, every unimaginative client wanted to be like The Economist. I actually wrote ‘Attracts Magnates’ as a headline for a Milton Keynes poster. They rejected it. The Economist ran it about 3 months later. Thinking back, I think the MK client was right.)

Francis Fukuyama once wrote that cool had been corporatised. Perhaps now whimsy has too. All those little bits of chat on packs about ‘Easy on the CHILLES’ and ‘Toss in a smidgen of PAPRIKA’ are beginning to sound like a default corporate-speak. Just as we no longer believe a company that tells us ‘We’re passionate about biscuits’. I’m not sure I believe that they really, really pour their soul into each and every custard cream.

Similarly, while I once enjoyed turning jars and bottles upside down to find cute little messages on the bottom, now it seems like half the products on the supermarket shelves from Tate and Lyle’s syrup to Waitrose own brand has turned into Eddie Izzard.

The tricky thing for Innocent is to remain a distinctive brand in a world full of Innocent impersonators. Charlie Chaplin managed it, by proving he was a great actor who also did physical comedy (though he once came second in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest).

Howell Henry managed it when they did the 4th emergency service campaign for the AA, and confounded the creatives who walked around saying ‘we should go a bit HHCL on this brief’, meaning they should do something wacky.
 The tricky thing for everyone else is to find a fresh, relevant tone of voice that talks directly to consumers in a genuine way. But then, that’s always been the tricky thing.