Why social advertising may not be good for your social life

One of my best friends at the age of about ten was a guy called Tom Hodgkinson. We lost touch sometime in our teens, but I kept track of his career from afar. Not only did Hodgkinson follow in his parents’ footsteps and become a top-notch journalist, but he also launched a magazine called The Idler, which celebrates laziness in all its forms. Its founder and editor took the downsizing philosophy to heart and headed out to the sticks, where he now raises a family in some rustic idyll, surrounded by chickens and foxes and other things that country folk tend to enjoy. Hodgkinson also eschews modern technology such as email. Or at least that’s what he claims in articles for The Guardian, which I’m guessing he must deliver by hand on occasional forays into town.

So, the connection between these whimsical reflections and a blog on advertising creativity? Well, a couple of days ago, Hodgkinson wrote a feature¹ on the subject of Facebook – the ubiquitous social networking site. I read the piece as I travelled home from a workshop I’d been running for the Chartered Institute of Marketing and some of his themes had a particular resonance. He was strongly critical, for instance, of Facebook’s “social advertising” strategy that was trumpeted by youthful networking entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg at a meeting in New York City last November.

In a nutshell, social advertising is a way of getting people to recommend products and services to their friends in the networking space. Johnny buys a camcorder from me at Woodford Enterprises. He then ticks a box that sends his ‘recommendation’ to his circle of friends, along with a helpful bit of promotional puff from the Woodford marketing machine. Initially, the thinking was that Johnny’s friends would have no say over whether they received his product endorsement or not. There’s been such a hullabaloo, however, that this platform (known as Beacon) has been the subject of quite a bit of backtracking and revision.

In Hodgkinson’s view, Facebook’s social advertising represents the “commodification of human relationships” and “the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships”. I fear that this may not be the first time in history that human relationships have commodified, but let’s set that to one side for a moment. There’s no question that people are concerned about the latest developments. The delegates at my workshop – all marketing practitioners and managers – were pretty universal in their condemnation of the social advertising concept too. This might surprise Hodgkinson, who clearly has a pretty dim view of our profession. Although marketers and advertising professionals recognise that personal recommendation can be very powerful, we understand that there’s a big difference between the spontaneous endorsement of a brand and a phoney endorsement that’s been generated by computer and sent to people who aren’t interested in hearing it.

The whole discussion ties in with a broader debate in the advertising and marketing community about the extent to which we intrude on the consumer’s personal space. All-singing, all-dancing banner ads that jump around web pages are now technologically possible, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who really wants to encounter them. I’ve seen students in focus groups react very badly to the idea of marketing via text message, which they see as an unwarranted invasion of their private world. At the same time, however, we’re in a quandary, because we know that many of our target audiences live their lives on their PCs and mobiles and we need to reach them somehow or other. Tom Himpe, a strategic planner at the Belgian communications agency Mortierbrigade, argues convincingly that brands either have to travel to where their audience congregates or, alternatively, entice consumers into their own world through so-called ‘experiential’ marketing². The old days where we used to meet in the middle – perhaps during a TV commercial break viewed by the majority of the adult population – are fast disappearing.

All these issues are brought into sharp focus by social networking sites, which potentially provide an opportunity for marketers and brands to get closer to their consumer audiences than ever before. There’s no doubt that corporate interests will play a big part in the development of these social networks, but the precise way in which they interact with the users is still up for grabs. If the global corporations push their luck, they find that they get a bloody nose.

At the moment, we’re in the early stages of the social networking phenomenon and I’m going to continue poking folk and writing on people’s walls and seeing how the whole thing develops over time. This is anathema to Hodgkinson who worries about the politics of the network’s founders and sees the project as one great big social experiment by neo-conservative libertarians. If it is indeed an experiment, then I think it’s been a rather successful one. And I can say that without too much fear of offending my old school chum, as he tells us he prefers to read a book than surf the net.

© Phil Woodford, 2008. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Faculty of Course Directors and lectures in marketing and advertising at Birkbeck College, University of London. His workshop, The Changing Face of Marketing Communication, runs in Dublin on 28th March 2008 and in London on 9th May 2008.

¹With friends like these… by Tom Hodgkinson, The Guardian, 14th Jan 08
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

² Himpe T, Advertising is dead! Long live advertising!, 2006, Thames & Hudson

Creative with real bite

Love the posters announcing the new season of ITV1's wacky, time-travelling dinosaur drama Primeval. We simply see a picture of a nasty looking critter with big teeth and a three-word headline that says it all: "Back for seconds."

The challenge of selling death and serious injury

Having spent a good chunk of my career in the niche area of recruitment marketing and employee communication - and still often working for agencies in this market place - I read with interest the recent press commentary regarding David Gee's report on British army recruitment for the Joseph Rowntree Trust.

Gee accuses the army of underplaying the risks involved in a military career. Their print brochures and DVDs are too sanitised, he claims, and tend to avoid nasty words such as 'kill'. I'll be honest enough to admit that I haven't seen the report itself yet - only the press coverage. Nevertheless, the central challenge - that the Ministry of Defence is sanctioning marketing material that presents a false image of army life - deserves to be taken seriously.

I'm always astonished when relatives of soldiers appear on the television complaining that their son, daughter, husband or wife has been caught up in a war. Did they really think that military service was all about trumpet playing, rugby fixtures and the occasional ride in a helicopter? Could it be that the career has been misrepresented to the recruit and their immediate family? In some ways, perhaps it has. But as a practising creative, I know that the options are pretty limited.

Let's consider for a moment a recruitment advertising campaign for a more mundane occupation. Accountancy, perhaps. Or IT. Many people probably die of boredom in these professions, but you'd be a fool to mention it if you were preparing a press ad or glossy brochure to promote the benefits of a career. The job of the advertising creative is to accentuate the positive and downplay or eliminate the negative. This isn't a lie. It's presenting a particular version of the truth. When a potential purchaser visits your house, do you mention the crack in the ceiling? Or simply point out the rather splendid conservatory you recently erected?

It would be perfectly reasonable to counter that military service is a unique occupation and one that comes with exceptional risk. But I remember writing recruitment ads for the London Fire Brigade ten years ago that never mentioned the dangers of fire. Indeed, there's a case for saying that the more inherently dangerous the job, the more the creative work has to compensate and offer a clear and positive benefit to the prospective recruit.

At the same time, there's a bloody-minded and argumentative side of me that wants to turn everything I've just written on its head. Perhaps we should be mentioning the dangers. Not out of any misplaced moral imperative, but because it might actually prove attractive to the target audience. Don't certain young people - and young men in particular - gravitate towards the military precisely because they hope to see action?

Whatever the rights and wrongs, I suspect we'll wait a long time to see a significant change in strategy, as creatives have a natural reticence when it comes to 'telling it like it is'. Towards the end of last year, I ran a couple of workshops for graphic design students at a university in London and set them an advertising brief to recruit women to the Royal Navy. Many of the creative responses were very good indeed and some of the students came up with compelling messages about escaping from the boredom of office life, learning a trade or even wearing a fancy uniform. Not one of the groups presented concepts though that made any mention of torpedoes, submarine attack or capture by the enemy. And this was despite the high-profile case in 2007 of a number of British sailors - including a woman - being arrested and paraded by the Iranian authorities. It would be interesting to know the type of marketing campaign these captives would devise. And whether they'd encourage anyone to follow in their footsteps at all.

© Phil Woodford, 2008. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a visiting lecturer in marketing and advertising at Birkbeck College, University of London.

When it all goes badly wrong

Some campaigns will always be stronger than others, but I think we still ought to highlight the true pups. Two concepts currently running on the London Underground have particularly caught my eye.

The first is for a product that fights fungal toe infections, called Curanail. In a wordplay car crash, the copywriter has decided that leaving your malady untreated would be "criminail". This gag is repeated three times in a short poster and laboured to the point of embarrassment in this God-awful TV spot: http://www.curanail.co.uk/tv-advert.html Although the agency creatives and account handlers have behaved in a criminail fashion, it's the client who surely deserves to be doing a stretch in the Scrubs.

I'd carve out another wooden spoon for Savanna Dry. The South African cider is running with some of the most convoluted ad concepts it's been my misfortune to see in a long time. Take this piece of copy, for example, which appears alongside a black-and-white photo of a tube escalator:

"Show your SUPPORT for people who don't know their RIGHT from LEFT. Put LEMON in your CIDER. Support a life less sweet. Savanna. It's dry. But you can drink it."

Enough taglines already for starters. But what exactly are they getting at? Answers on a postcard to Babco (UK) Ltd of Gravesend, who import the drink and obviously employ creatives who are struggling to recognise RIGHT from LEFT themselves.

A lovely piece of creative for The History Channel, executed here in a platform poster on the London Underground. It's promoting a new show called "Just Another Day", in which presenter Adam Hart-Davis investigates the history of everyday objects. The copy - which parodies a long-running Gillette campaign - is as sharp as a razor. And the art direction is a joy too.

Smashing read: Sam Delaney captures the spirit of London's adworld in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Back to the 70s for Life on Mars

If you’d arrived from another planet and were hovering above London’s Soho sometime during the mid 1970s, you might have been surprised to see a group of young, drunken and immensely wealthy humans having the time of their lives. These Bacchanalian admen had forged a revolution in their industry and had broken the monopoly of the suits and straight men who’d previously guarded client relationships on the golf course. As they experimented with their creative craft (and a number of illegal substances), they found themselves inventing ads about Martians in spacecraft. The Martians, however, weren’t interested in the admen. They were more concerned about potatoes.

Confused? Well, it’s time to take a look at Sam Delaney’s highly entertaining book Get Smashed, which documents the antics of the adworld from the buttoned-down days of the early 1960s, through to the hedonism of the 70s and the gluttony of the 80s, when the Saatchi brothers actually believed they were about to purchase the Midland Bank.

There were two truly influential agencies in the transitional period of the 1960s. The first was Doyle Dane Bernbach in New York City, which is perhaps best remembered for selling the Nazis’ favourite car – the Volkswagen – to an American nation that had been happily shooting Nazis a couple of decades previous. The other agency was London’s Collett Dickinson Pearce. Both traded in single-minded ideas, strong art direction and an unshakeable belief in the creative product. CDP were so certain of their proposals that they only ever took one concept to a client, who could choose to take it or leave it. Few agencies today would be so bold.

I was talking recently to Glenn Tutssel, Executive Creative Director of branding agency Enterprise IG, who’s been kind enough to host some of my students on a few occasions now. In his view, it’s only big ideas that are truly memorable. If something’s big enough and strong enough, it’s the kind of thing that you can sum up to a friend in a sentence the next day. An example he gives is the famous poster from Jeremy Sinclair at Cramer Saatchi who’d been briefed back in the 1970s to promote sex education on behalf of the government. His picture of a man with a bulging stomach was accompanied by the line “Would you be more careful if it was you who got pregnant?” Tutssel rightly makes the point that this idea stands the test of time. Take away the 70s haircut and cardigan and the basic premise is still incredibly strong. And when you mention the advertisement to a friend, it’s simple. It’s the poster of “the pregnant bloke..”

Another strong theme of Delaney’s book is the way in which advertising was a training ground for luminaries of the movie industry such as Alan Parker and Ridley Scott. This was an era in which advertising ceased to be a science and took on a new artistic and cultural significance. People were exploring and experimenting. Perhaps that’s why the story is packed full of outrageous anecdotes of transvestite chauffeurs, wanton acts of violence and Serbo-Croat account handlers who’d only ever address fellow agency staff in Ancient Greek. I’m sure it all happened, just the way they said it did. Unfortunately, I arrived a generation too late.

© Phil Woodford, 2007. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford lectures in copywriting and creative writing at University of the Arts London.

Get smashed: the story of the men who made the adverts that changed our lives by Sam Delaney is published by Hodder & Stoughton: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Get-Smashed-Story-Adverts-Changed/dp/0340922508/ref=sr_1_1/026-0379973-1636424?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188515810&sr=1-1

Word up

Who’s the daddy? The copywriter or the art director? It’s a battle familiar to anyone who’s worked in an agency environment. Designers are notoriously frustrated by the inability of their writing partners to contain their purple prose and horrified when 50 words of lorem ipsum in a dummy press ad become 150 a week later. The scribes, on the other hand, want as much freedom to express themselves as their artistic colleagues. After all, how difficult can it be to change a layout?

In the early days of advertising, the copywriter was definitely 1-0 up. That’s because the whole idea of art direction was actually only borrowed from the movie industry at a later stage. Yes, design was recognised to be important, but it wasn’t institutionalised within agencies. In a world where traditional press dominated, it was something that was often left to staff members on newspapers and magazines, who tended to have very conservative ideas. By the 1920s and 1930s, there was more understanding of issues such as the importance of typography in conveying messages to an audience. And with the later explosion of colour photography in print and the dawn of the TV era, the balance started to shift in the direction of the artists.

The old adage that a picture speaks a thousand words can certainly be true. I remember an ad for Frazzles crisps that I saw a year or so ago which contained no copy apart from the brand name. (Frazzles, for the benefit of readers outside the UK, look and taste like little rashers of bacon.) The ad showed a cartoon pig who was mistakenly sticking a knife in an electric toaster. It’s an extreme example, but there’s undoubtedly a vogue in this era of texting, email and truncated conversation for advertising copy to be reduced to an absolute minimum. The belief is that no one will tolerate lengthy, explanatory copy of the type that was common in the 1970s and 1980s.

There’s a lovely ad for Royal Ascot on the escalator panels of the London Underground right now. The upmarket racing event is known for its sartorial glamour and elegance, particularly in respect of the costumes and hats worn by the female visitors. In the foreground of the ad, we see a lady dressed up to the nines, with the brim of her hat shading her ample cleavage. In the background, a horse appears to have been distracted by the alluring guest and is glancing towards her. The line simply reads “Heads will turn”.

Hats off to the art director, because this is an ad in which design is king. It looks classy, witty and conveys an idea beautifully. But the three words - “Heads will turn” - are still essential. And this is a point that I labour in my copywriting and advertising classes. The very best ads are still the ones where words and pictures combine to create something that is more than the sum of their parts. An example I often show is an ad for a domestic violence charity in the US that was created by award-winning writer Luke Sullivan. It shows pictures of flowers on a coffin and runs with a headline that says: He beat her 150 times. She only got flowers once. There is a shock value because of the confusion between flowers as a symbol of romance and flowers as a token of affection after death. But it’s a confusion that is only created by the combination of the photograph and the writing. Words alone don’t cut it, because without the image of the coffin, we don’t have the association with a funeral. But the picture of the coffin on its own is meaningless in this context and doesn’t necessarily have a relation to domestic violence.

My conclusion is that copywriters and art directors have to learn to live together and will be much happier if they do. If they could manage a smile for the cameras in Northern Ireland after centuries of conflict, I think we should be prepared to bury our own hatchet. As long as it’s understood there will always be a need for some words.

© Phil Woodford, 2007. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a former advertising creative director who lectures in marketing and advertising at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Faculty of course directors.