Wake me in 100 years: the English National Ballet proves that the best ideas are often the simplest. The flier promoting their Sleeping Beauty tour comes in the form of a do-not-disturb sign. Click to enlarge.

Trouble in the Balkans needn't be painful

Spreadbetting company Capital Spreads provides some evidence that the age of intelligent and witty copywriting isn’t necessarily over. In the company’s current campaign on the London Underground, they pose a series of questions to readers.

“The Chinese wrap up mineral rights throughout West Africa,” reads one ad. “Do you (a) Get on the blower and order a 21, two 16s and some butterfly prawns. (b) Start buying copper and enjoy the ride.”

Another execution tells us “There’s trouble down in the Balkan regions. Do you (a) Arrange a private screening with your GP, just in case. (b) Seek temporary refuge and buy gold.”

It’s rare these days to see a textbook piece of advertising that ticks all the boxes. Here, the writer has a clear idea of the central insight and proposition – that potential spread betters pride themselves on their ability to read markets in turbulent economic and political times. They then dramatise the proposition through different dilemmas, which use appropriate humour and are likely to engage the target audience. They achieve consistency across the various executions, by following a recognisable pattern, but giving the creative a unique twist each time. This allows them to take over, say, the Waterloo & City Line and actually encourage passengers to read every single display card in their section of the carriage.

Finally, but significantly, they draw on cultural reference points and language that reflect the milieu of the likely customer. Chinese restaurants, double entendre, the use of the old-fashioned word ‘blower’ to describe a phone.

It's all done with type and the ads aren't much to look at. But I still looked at them. Art directors take note.

© Phil Woodford, 2008. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford lectures in marketing and advertising at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Winging it with the creative

I’m not sure I can make head or tail of the current British Airways advertising campaign. One poster shows a street vendor rustling up some food on hot plates and runs with the headline “You can’t smell a city from a coach”. Quite why this is an argument in favour of plane travel in general – or using BA in particular – is beyond me. You can’t smell a city from a plane either, guys. In fact, it’s probably necessary to alight from any form of transport to gain full olfactory satisfaction.

The proposition is clearly that travelling by coach prevents a passenger from experiencing everything a destination has to offer. You’re whisked from place to place, with no time to explore on foot. Fair enough. But the dramatisation of the idea fails miserably at a logical level. If you wanted to explore London on foot, you’d be hard pressed to do it from Gatwick. Unless you’d packed a few blister packs and had a couple of extra days to spare.

Same idea done better: we see bewildered people staring out of blurred coach windows as they hurry through bustling city streets. Even now, we still encounter a logical problem. If the target audience decides coach travel is unsatisfactory (and they may simply favour it at the moment because it’s cheap), they can still choose to go by car, ferry, train or some other means of transport.

No, it’s back-to-the-drawing-board time, folks. I’m afraid I smell an ad concept that just doesn’t work.

© Phil Woodford, 2008. All rights reserved.

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

Sometimes it pays to keep your creative ideas under wraps

I recently spent two days with a group of design students at a London university and set them a challenging brief. Could they come up with an advertising campaign that would reverse the fortunes of US Presidential candidate, John McCain? I asked them to set aside any preconceptions, as if they held opinions about the US elections, I judged it likely that they would be favourable to McCain’s Democratic opponent, Barack Obama.

Behind in the polls, the self-styled ‘maverick’ McCain seems unable to reach out to undecided voters and even has trouble retaining the rock-solid Republican base. He’s battling against the unpopularity of George Bush and a financial crisis on a scale unseen since 1929. Can advertising really make a difference in this kind of context?

Much to my delight – my creative delight, that is – the students came up with range of interesting ideas to boost McCain’s flagging campaign in the dying days of the election. “Nothing comes between me and my country” read one of the lines, showing a picture of former fighter pilot snuggling up in bed with an American flag. Another pair of would-be creatives came up with the slogan “I’ve been there” – demonstrating McCain’s heritage not only as a warrior, but also as a family man and Senator.

Two of the young designers likened the Republican candidate to a trusty pair of denim jeans or the reliable “little black dress” – something that was always there and could always be called upon. Another group changed his name to read McCan, emphasising how his experience could be brought to bear on the problems facing the US today. Perhaps my favourite was line which read “The everyman for everyone”. It was accompanied by a TV storyboard that was plausible enough to be presented to staffers at the McCain-Palin war room tomorrow and reinforced the notion of Obama as an aloof intellectual standing against someone who was just a regular guy.

Enough to turn an election around? Maybe not. But I’d bet my bottom dollar we could knock a point or two off Obama’s lead. My own political leanings mean that I’ve tucked the ideas safely away in a locked drawer until after 4th November.

© Phil Woodford, 2008. All rights reserved.

The credit crunch needn't be a creative crunch

Not a lot of blog activity this year, I’m afraid, due to pressure of work. Exactly how long the work will keep flowing though is something that’s quite difficult to predict. We’re clearly entering a significant period of recession and one of the first industries to feel the pinch is always advertising. In fact, advertising spend is usually a very good barometer for the overall health of the economy.

At the UK Conservative Party’s annual conference earlier this month, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne made an interesting observation: "In the private sector when times are tough you take out the overheads. The consultants are sent packing and the advertising budget is cut. Government should do the same. We are going to put caps on Labour's wasteful consultancy and advertising bills."

At one level, of course, Osborne is right. Businesses do cut back on advertising in a recession. But it’s a mistake to view this practice uncritically and assume that their decisions are somehow based on logic or common sense. In a time of intense competition – when many businesses are fighting for their very survival – effective marketing communications can make the difference between life and death. Some would argue that it’s the time to expand the advertising budget rather than contract it.

Creative agencies and media buyers find that fewer clients are spending. And those who are tend to be spending less. Although this can be disconcerting – perhaps the money isn’t there for that high-profile TV or poster campaign – every creative cloud has a silver lining. We’re all forced to think more laterally about communication strategies. For people such as me who work on behalf of a number of smaller, niche design, advertising and direct marketing agencies, it’s no great shock, as I’m frequently told that budget is non-existent anyway. And that’s in the good times.

The good news for marketing communications professionals is that the landscape of the late noughties recession will be completely different the one we encountered in the early nineties. Seventeen or eighteen years ago, email hadn’t yet become a ubiquitous feature of business communication and the web was something only familiar to computer geeks and nuclear scientists in secure bunkers. These technologies mean that an advertising message can now potentially be sent instantaneously and at virtually no cost. So cutting back on advertising spend needn’t necessarily mean cutting back on advertising.

My prediction (hardly a revelation) is that for the next 18 months we’ll see a further downturn in traditional press and TV advertising, which spells bad news for mainstream media outlets, media buying agencies and publishers. But we may well see an upsurge of interest in the already booming media of email, online forums and social networks. TV and press advertising tends to be based on a tried-and-tested formula, whereas credibility and effectiveness in the newer media demand more inventive and ingenious solutions. Perhaps there will be work for the creatives who can supply them?

© Phil Woodford, 2008. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford lectures in advertising and marketing in the Faculty of Continuing Education at Birkbeck College, University of London.

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.