Have yourself a schmaltzy little adfest

Guardian journalist Hadley Freeman posed a very good question last week.

When exactly did Christmas ads become such a big deal in the UK?

She was referring specifically to the much-awaited and over-hyped commercial for retailer John Lewis from adam&eveddb (“so soppy eyed it makes the Werther's Originals advert look like a gritty Ken Loach film”), but other high street names have been keen to get a slice of the action. Take M&S, for instance. Last year, they enlisted the support of all the X-Factor finalists to wish upon a star and, in 2012, have created a slightly jarring amalgam of different musical ‘hits’ to illustrate their broad range of products and target markets.

Conferring with my French students from Sup de Pub, we’re agreed that there’s no real equivalent to this phenomenon on the other side of the English Channel. In Paris, people don’t sit around waiting for ads featuring peripatetic, lovestruck snowmen. Freeman likened the hype to the American Super Bowl commercials, which – to a large extent – have become as an important a part of the sporting extravaganza as the game itself. Perhaps November is the new December? Once the John Lewis ad has arrived, Christmas is done.

From a marketing perspective, I really admire what the department store has done. They’ve created an ad which is more than an ad. It’s a cultural artefact which generates free PR. From a creative perspective, I am slightly frustrated by the way festive advertising has to run to an inevitable formula, which might be described as clichéd, saccharine, romantic and relentlessly optimistic.

Remember last year’s John Lewis ad, in which a young boy waits eagerly for December 25th, just so that he can hand his delighted parents a present? You won’t be surprised to learn that it led to parodies, such as this enchanting Yuletide vision from cabaret stars Bourgeois & Maurice. In 2012, a year wiser, the generous young lad probably didn’t bother waiting. He gave his parents the present as soon as the John Lewis snowman commercial went on air.

In an attempt to find an antidote to Christmas ads past, present and future, I’ve been on a hunt for those that treat the subject in a slightly different way. Saatchi & Saatchi’s recent commercial for Asda has run into some controversy for depicting mothers as the only people involved in organising the festive celebrations. Personally, I feel the ad is likely to be well researched and is designed to resonate with the target audience of busy, put-upon mums who feel they’re expected to do everything, while their husbands simply train their mince pies on the telly. It’s a welcome slice of realism served up with the annual plum pudding.

Asda’s rival Morrisons is not to be outdone. They take the same basic premise – that mum has far too many challenges to cope with – but give it a surreal twist. The female star of their commercial is seen grappling with a turkey in a wrestling ring and writing Christmas cards to people she met on holiday in Corfu back in the 1990s. So far, this ad has my vote as the most refreshing take on the seasonal celebrations that I’ve seen. It still ends, however, with a good ladle full of schmaltz over the family dinner. Mum may be frustrated and bewildered by what Christmas throws at her, but she ‘wouldn’t have it any other way’.

In the digital age, some people argue that the old story-telling model of advertising is falling apart. Rather than buying neatly packaged fables about brands, we instead look for tangible experiences that add real value to our lives.

Last month, George Prest – Executive Creative Director of R/GA London, wrote in The Guardian that we are ‘living in a world where non-fiction is as important as fiction’. He argued that the way brands behave is more important than what they say and the ‘metaphors they weave’. It’s a very interesting perspective, but one which is severely challenged by Christmas. In a sense, the whole season is built around myths. Not just the obvious ones such as Santa Claus, but the others we cherish about family, community and the altruistic spirit of humanity. This may be fiction that consumers are reluctant for advertisers to abandon.

Can ads really reinvent brands? Or just reinforce them?

Two ad campaigns have been troubling me lately. The first is the one created by Karmarama for the British high-street chain Costa Coffee and features a bunch of disembodied heads singing in a sea of coffee beans. I think it would be fair to describe the commercial as enjoyable, knockabout, surreal and quite entertaining. In other words, it is completely and utterly unlike the brand it seeks to promote.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but Costa Coffee is the kind of place where yummy mummies gather to shelter from downpours, busy executives finish their reports over double espressos and nothing - absolutely nothing - untoward or out of the ordinary ever happens. I wouldn't dispute that they serve decent enough coffee. But it's bought, sold and savoured in what I'd consider to be a pretty conservative and pedestrian environment.

If I'd never visited Costa Coffee and only had the advertisement to go on, who knows what I might imagine? But this brand promise of crazy passion and ingenuity would never be fulfilled if I walked into a store.

Let's constrast this approach, for a moment, with the other campaign I have in mind: Wieden & Kennedy's insipid spot for Facebook.

Now, Facebook is a place where many of us spend a lot of our time these days. We share jokes with friends, poke our noses into other people's business, talk about the day's news, watch videos, play games and 101 other things. It's a genuinely fun and spirited brand, which has grown over the past six or seven years to involve a billion people around the world.

This social networking site has transformed both our work and personal lives. Let's face it. People get sacked on FB and dump their boyfriends there in full view of their friends. It's a place for talkers and stalkers, for clowns and put-downs. The gossip capital of the world.

So how is this engaging and sociable phenomenon portrayed in the ad campaign? As something desperately sanitised and dull as ditchwater. When I watch 'The Things That Connect Us' (excuse me while I regurgitate my Costa Coffee into a wastepaper basket), I could be looking at a commercial for a bank or insurance company. It is corporate pap of the first order.

Perhaps Costa think they are going to reach out to new market places with their bold creative statement? Maybe Facebook thinks that it needs a 'safe' strategy to target the hard-to-recruit sceptics, who have so far eschewed the whole idea of online networking? Both strategies seem very misplaced. Marketing communication can indeed help to shift perceptions. But there's a big difference between nudging people 10 or 20 degrees in one direction and hoping that you'll spin them the full 180.

Perhaps the two brands could organise an ad swap? Rebadged, the creative would somehow seem more plausible.


Costa's ad is full of beans. But can the same be said for their stores?


I always meant to take out life assurance. Facebook's stiflingly boring 'Connect' ad.

Footage of a seminar at Unilever's London HQ about the engagement of employees and prospective employees through social media. My own contribution starts at about 56:00, although there were plenty of other interesting speakers if it's a subject that's important to you.

I'll be speaking at a seminar at Unilever's London headquarters on the afternoon of Tuesday 25th September. The theme is how to engage employees - and prospective employees - via social media. It's a topic which is obviously particularly relevant to those working in HR and internal communication, but there are wider implications for marketers and people working in other fields.

You can find out more about the theme at http://socialmediaweek.org/blog/event/inside-unilever-social-media-for-hr-and-internal-communications/#.UFxzT7JlRD0 and livestream the contributions of speakers at https://new.livestream.com/accounts/1379077/events/1431859

A store of ideas in East London

Communications agencies are known for their unusual and inspirational working environments, but Canoe Inc - a London-based PR business - has gone a stage further than most. Just around the back of Brick Lane, they've converted their offices into a store, showcasing many of the fashion and sporting brands they work with.

My students from Chelsea College of Art & Design were given a warm welcome when I accompanied them on a visit recently.

Bringing lifestyle to life: London agency Canoe Inc works with a range of big-name fashion and sports brands on PR, advertising and communications

Window shopping: Canoe's distinctive working environment in the East End

Visit Canoe's blog

The meaning behind the message

Advertising and branding are, at one level, fairly obviously about getting people to part with money. At the same time, however, they play an important part in wider culture – reflecting the values, myths and ideals of different societies and often helping to shape them. If businesses can understand the symbolism of communication and the way in which readers interpret it, they are surely destined to be more effective and successful enterprises. Alfie Spencer, Head of Semiotics at brand insight consultancy Flamingo International, talked to 108th Street about how he helps companies navigate the complexities of the modern world.

Flamingo's lead semiotician, Alfie Spencer








108St:
Can you sum up semiotics in a nutshell for people who aren't necessarily familiar with the concept?

AS:
I typically say 'the analysis and interpretation of cultural materials to answer brand, advertising, marketing and content challenges'. Which basically means that I use cultural theory and the analysis of cultural texts in a business environment, mostly in order to help with brand building and communication.

108St:
This isn’t the typical kind of market research that everyone’s familiar with, is it?

AS:
The consumer's own voice has been primary within research. The industry is set up to find out what people think and what they do. Semiotics addresses issues the other way round; we don't think first about the consumer, but about the world – the 'cultural software' - that surrounds the consumer and how meaning works in that world. And we aim to control meaning more precisely and build brands that are more culturally relevant (and therefore more successful).

108St:
Is there a danger that by debating the symbolism of advertising, we elevate it to a level it doesn't actually deserve? Could we be reading too much into something that’s essentially ephemeral?

AS:
It strikes me that the real pomposity in our industry comes at another point in the process, where we start thinking about the 30-second TV commercial or broader campaign as an act that's emerged from sublime creative imagination. Advertising is interesting, but it's not as interesting as feature films or TV programming itself, or visual art or music (all done 'properly'). Brands are interesting, however. Too much emphasis gets put on ephemeral pieces of communication, and too little on the connections between the object, the mythology, the narratives, the experiences in the fullest sense, that a brand can create. I think that the industry needs more rigour and precision in its thinking, less fluff and in that sense, debates about 'symbolism' etcmight be useful (if conducted properly).

108St:
When you look at advertising from a semiotic perspective, all kinds of meanings may start to emerge. But what if none of these meanings were actually intended by the brand which is the source of the message?

AS:
In the kind of interpretation and analysis that I do, we're not really interested in the relationship between the producer/maker and their 'intentions' and a text/item of communication. We're interested in the relationship between the piece of communication and the cultural world it is a part of – at various levels, depending on what the challenge is. I don't, for example, think that the 'meaning' of a particular ad is contained in any one person's head – least of all the creative. As far as I'm concerned, the people involved in making an ad (numbering into the hundreds, I'm sure) are just vehicles of a culture speaking to itself, and that's my starting point.

Of course, it may turn out that a particular ad doesn't use the right codes or structures to achieve what everyone wanted it to – and it's often my job to find out what went wrong, and how it could be put right in future creative work. Buthow that is done is an art – a craft practised by the very talented people in ad agencies etc. And my small role is to show how that is working, and which levers to pull to achieve certain things… the way that it can be done, to give everyone more space and more opportunity to make a great piece of advertising, or a great piece of packaging, or build a great brand from the ground up, ideals and all.

108St:
Isn’t semiotics just a luxury though, for large brands with limitless budgets?

AS:
Quite the opposite – we're a very cost-effective solution with limited budgets on certain kinds of challenge. And increasingly, everyone is coming around to the real truth in my line of work – which is that often it's more important, in certain circumstances, to give your brand real meaning inside a culture, and communicate as effectively as possible within a culture, than it is to understand the precise workings of a consumer's life. You're often better off spending the money on semiotics to find out how you should talk to your audiences, rather than spending lots of money characterising in ever greater detail who your audience is and what they think about you.

108St:
Do you find that elements of your work are duplicated elsewhere? In the marketing departments of large corporates, for instance?Or in planning departments of advertising agencies?

AS:
Not really, but good planners, good creatives and smart clients get this stuff intuitively. In those situations, I just bring the conversation together with, hopefully, a little more precision and clarity than if I wasn't there – because I'm analysing and interpreting day in day out and know about loads of different categories and what's happening in the culture more broadly. It's interesting that no one really replicates the semiotician's role – because often planners and other agency folk aren't given the time to.

108St:
Are you ever frustrated with the compromises between your academic role and the commercial imperatives of clients?

AS:

Not really – the academic humanities are having a bit of a rough time of it at the moment. Naturally, there are things I dislike about the front line of consumer capitalism. What I try to do is to bring together what's good about being in the 'market' so to speak, all the time trying to create the space for the freedom and curiosity of the academic world. I'd hope that that will end up as a 'best of all worlds' situation, but we haven't got there yet. The real truth is that everyone is compromised somehow – anyone who thinks they aren't is just lying – and the question is how you negotiate that and how you protect what is valuable. My academic commitments mean that I do better work for my clients – more rigorous, more careful, more daring. And the market forces me to work at a pace and with actionability that I think actually makes my work clearer and more intelligent. It can be a vicious or virtuous circle depending on which way you look at it.

108St:
Where do you stand on the 'advertising is dead' debate?

AS:
It depends what you mean by advertising. I think it's a question of losing the battle and winning the war. The 30-second TVC is probably dying, but the idea of a brand – the really big story in all of this – is here to stay. It will grow and grow and grow. And brands communicate; indeed, they only exist in their communication. When a brand communicates, that's advertising. So advertising will flourish. But I don't think it will have much to do with interrupting Coronation St. in the future. And that's a good thing.

When TV advertises itself

Creative inspiration: Emanuela Denti helps to drive Viacom's European trailer output for MTV and other brands

On a couple of occasions over recent years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with the Viacom team in Milan which creates promos for world-famous brands such as MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. As part of a new series of 108th Street interviews, I caught up with producer and art director Emanuela Denti who has a wealth of experience in conjuring up the trailers that keep us tuned to the TV. It was a chance to talk telly and to get her perspective on the creative process.

We’ve all grown up with TV promos and idents, which in many ways act as the glue that holds our favourite programming together. It’s easy to see how we can so often take them for granted. They’re an ever-present feature of televisual life, but they’re difficult to categorise. Not an integral part of the shows we enjoy, but not really part of the commercial breaks either.

Emanuela Denti was someone who actually took notice of the promos as a child and was impressed by just how creative they could be. Following a period in production at MTV, in which she worked on fashion and music shows, she’s now right at the heart of a busy creative team, producing a wide variety of trailers to tight deadlines for Italy and the wider European marketplace.

“I was always struck by the way in which promos successfully combined music, words and images,” recalls Denti. “The catchier the promo was, the more my curiosity was aroused. Today, I’m trying to do very much the same thing: make more and more people curious.”

Creating this sense of curiosity isn’t always easy when you’re dealing with a show that’s already been around quite a while. The parallel here is perhaps with ad agencies trying to reinvent a familiar brand and give it a new twist, but time pressures, budgetary restrictions and copyright issues can often be more intense in the world of TV trailers.

“We’re still waiting for a 72-hour day,” Denti jokes, “but we always try to do the best we can. When you’re thinking of ideas, you always need time to work in teams because, in my view, the best ideas always have more than one parent. When the time scales get too tight and people don’t have the opportunity to work together, it can be very frustrating. The danger is that the creative solutions are less powerful and innovative.”

Denti is particularly proud of her work for the MTV Gold Rock Legends strand, as she was able to apply a creative solution to what she felt was a pretty tough and predictable brief. With little money to play with and legal red tape meaning that she couldn’t feature actual video footage of musical artists for promotional purposes, she produced a visually striking piece in which the ‘legends’ were transformed into the kings of a card pack. It’s the kind of clever side-step and lateral thinking that’s often needed in her line of work.

But what about the challenges of working across Europe for multinational audiences? International marketing communications is a notoriously perilous business. Could it be that brands such as MTV transcend national boundaries?

“We live in a very connected world,” agrees Denti, “but the tastes and habits of MTV viewers are still very different, so the main challenge is always to create products that have a quality and an international effectiveness and, at the same time, give that wink to the local flavour.”

Short plays the long game

Harvest time: Indium Corporation's Rick Short has been ahead of the curve with B2B social media and is reaping the rewards.

Running training courses with marketers on a regular basis, one of the most frustrating misconceptions I encounter is the idea that social media doesn’t have much application in the B2B environment. Blogging, tweeting and Facebooking are all very well in consumer-facing businesses, so the argument goes, but quickly lose their appeal if you need to communicate with professional audiences. One company which has been proving the critics wrong is Indium Corporation – a materials supplier to the electronics and semiconductor markets. Their Director of Marketing Communications, Rick Short, spoke recently to 108th Street about the successful strategy they’ve adopted.

At first glance, Indium Corporation seems an unlikely social media player. Headquartered in Clinton, New York – but with a presence as far afield as the UK, Singapore, South Korea and China – the business provides the solders, fluxes and other materials that are so vital to circuit board assembly. In fact, a trip to their website would tell you that this description is only really scratching the surface. Their engineers and technical experts make a lot of stuff that is pretty obscure to most of us, but vital to making the world go around. By and large, it’s fairly remote to anyone who isn’t also a card-carrying member of the engineering fraternity.

The company is fortunate to have Rick Short on board – someone with a reputation for early adoption of new communication technologies and a serious approach to delivering results. Short is also one of those extremely rare creatures: a technical expert who just happens to be gregarious and a natural in the social sphere.

“Very early on,” he tells me, “I not only saw that social media could be extremely powerful, but I also realised that the barriers to entry were low. Time to market is critical in situations like this. I knew that the only advantage I had was to be an early adopter. And that was my inspiration for the work we’ve been doing.”

He was helped in his mission by the fact that Indium – ever since its birth in the inauspicious Dust Bowl era of the 1930s – has championed the idea of conversation. “Back in the day,” he observes, “social media meant discussing technology face-to-face at a conference. We truly are a team of engineers and technologists having conversations with other engineers and technologists.” Short observed that in the modern era, the engineers in his business grew up with those engineers who worked for his customers. They had been to high school together. They were college roommates.

“My target audience of engineers are much more comfortable with my engineers than they are with anyone from marketing communications,” says the MBA-qualified marketer, whose work has been featured in numerous textbooks. “When I figured all of that out, I knew I had to turn my company inside out and put my engineers nose-to-nose with my target audience, full-time and exclusively. That’s how the idea of “From One Engineer To Another®” was born.”

Although it’s trademarked, the concept to which Short refers is more than just a campaign slogan. It seems to represent the whole corporate ethos of Indium Corporation. In practice, it has led to a number of really interesting social media initiatives – including a team of expert bloggers who answer queries, solve problems and generally chew the cud with their client-side counterparts.

Short is scathing about ‘the would-be puppet masters’ who try to control social media or vet the content generated by their colleagues. He understands the importance of maintaining a reputation, but firmly believes it’s a company’s actions and results that the audience hears.

“Stop with the Wizard of Oz style attempted manipulations and trickery,” he says, “and get with transparency and authenticity. It is really hard to convert a shy, reclusive technological genius into an interesting, transparent, social media star. I don’t bother. I seek out people who naturally enjoy engaging with others. To them social media makes perfect sense. Fish swim, birds fly. Don’t fight it. Use it.”

Does this mean that marketers can simply let social media run its own course? Short accepts that there are boundaries.

“I occasionally remind certain individuals on my team to stay clear of anything that feels like commercialism. Ad-speak is so ingrained in us all that it is easy to drift there. And, rarely, I have to remind people to be sure to carefully guard corporate secrets. Scientists love to share, so sometimes they get a little over-enthusiastic. My team are all very skilled, careful, and responsible, so my role is miniscule in this regard.”

It’s a little hard to see how Short has achieved corporate buy-in for his extensive social media activity though, which includes the YouTube videos, Facebook and Twitter presence we’d more normally associate with a retailer or lifestyle brand. In what must be a fairly conservative sector, doesn’t it all seem a little rock and roll? Short’s clear focus on ROI is what tips the balance.

“My mantra is ‘content-contact-cash',” reveals the Indium director. “That’s where the rubber meets the road.” He sees his lead generation work as focusing on the ‘contact’ part of the equation, although he recognises the absolute importance of content too. “Without content, you’re just a blowhard,” he argues. So, in addition to the predictable online metrics of visitor numbers, page dwell time and so on, Short has been gathering clear evidence that strong content drives the type of peer-to-peer discussion that ultimately leads to sales.

Where is Indium Corporation’s social media strategy likely to go in the future? Rather than give the easy answer and start reeling off vogue websites and mobile apps, Short is realistic. “Social media has settled down with regard to platforms. Right now I see progress occurring only in nuanced ways. So, the face of our programmes will remain unchanged for the foreseeable future.”

See Indium Corporation’s innovative approach to social media at first hand by visiting http://www.indium.com/blogs/ or search for the business on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter.

Are brand manuals toast?

Fit for a Queen: Allied Bakeries rename their Kingsmill brand in honour of Elizabeth II

Many marketers in recent decades have found themselves employed as ‘brand guardians’ – responsible for policing the dangerous felony of inconsistency. Armed with bibles that feature big red crosses through badly stretched logos, they watch out for any errant employee or supplier who has strayed from the straight and narrow.

The explosion of social media over the past few years has undermined the power of the brand cops. ‘User-generated content’ is pretty uncontrollable, after all. If someone designs you a whole new colour palette or shoots a parody of your recent TV commercial on the back of a bus, there is very little you can really do about it. Even when content online is defamatory or infringes your intellectual property rights, you probably have to think twice before taking further action.

The more confident a brand is, the more it rolls with the punches. Rather than react defensively, the guardians embrace the idea that people may want to interact with their business in ways that were previously thought undesirable or impossible. But the confidence can be taken to another level still. I’ve long been fascinated by brands which are so self-assured about their status and position in the market that they are prepared to play with their own identity.

In the branding manual, you have one logo. Ok, you may allow it to be reversed out or rendered in black and white where needs must, but there are clear rules involved. That logo is never going to be more than 4mm from the right-hand-edge of the page and it’s always going to look fundamentally the same. But what about Google? The search giant regularly creates ‘doodles’ which play with its very identity. When you’re a $multi-billion business that’s so certain of your supremacy in the age of the internet, you don’t worry that your logo has effectively disappeared for the day and been replaced by an interactive Moog synthesiser.

One of the most recent examples of this phenomenon I’ve uncovered in the UK is tied up with the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. The savoury yeast extract Marmite has renamed itself Ma’amite in Her Majesty’s honour. Allied Bakeries’ bread brand Kingsmill, meanwhile, has transformed itself into Queensmill.

In the latter case, the graphic design provides an element of consistency, of course, but there’s no mistaking the bravery and chutzpah involved. The name change may not be in the brand manual, but I suspect it helps to shift bread. And ultimately, that’s surely what the brand identity is designed to achieve.

A creative campaign which really delivers

I've seen some other nice promotions for the TV show Alcatraz - including the creation of dummy cells in a pop-up prison in London - but this elaborate exercise by Leo Burnett in Spain is particularly inspiring. The attention to detail with the art direction is very nice, right down the trays on which the mock jail grub is served. In the UK, these guys would get themselves right at the front of the phone directory as AAAAAAAAlcatraz.

No grizzling about this bear: ingenious creative for Tipp Ex from Buzzman

The creative in this campaign is truly breathtaking. It's hard to know where to start in terms of the number of boxes it ticks.

First of all, there's the sheer breadth of ambition. So many different videos set in so many different timezones. Second, we have the interactivity. Many brands believe they are doing social media simply by making use of video sharing sites such as YouTube or banging a page up on Facebook. Here, the aim is to 'gamify' the social experience, so that people have fun playing with the videos rather than simply playing them. Last, but by no means least, there's the relationship back to the product. They avoid a sledgehammer approach, but they don't ignore the fact that there's a commercial purpose to the communication.

The thinkers at French interactive shop Buzzman certainly know how to erase the creative competition.