Lucian’s blog

Big day for me yesterday.  A few months ago my friends at that admirable organisation The Financial Services Forum (www.thefsforum.co.uk) asked me to set up another in their family of Special Interest Groups, this one to concentrate on brand strategy, and yesterday was the group’s first event.  The title was Just How Different and Special Are Financial Services Brands?, and we had three excellent speakers addressing the question from three different angles:  Mike Hoban outlining some of the key issues involved in building brands in non-financial service markets (airlines, retail and so forth);  Tim Pile doing the same with a focus on fast-moving consumer goods;  and Justin Basini concentrating on financial services.  We continued this compare-and-contrast format in a good hour of discussion with the 100 or so people who turned up.

I must say, it all seemed to go very well, and as chairman of the proceedings I was extremely grateful to the three speakers who all did make excellent presentations and, equally important, didn’t over-run - and also to all those attending, who kept up a steady flow of questions and comments and spared me from any trace of anxiety about the whole session drying up and coming to an embarrassing close half an hour early.

Anyway, it seemed important to try to fabricate some conclusions from the discussion, so at the end I asked for some shows of hands - particularly on the question of whether building brands in financial services is a) harder than, and b) different from, building brands in FMCG or in non-financial services.

When it came to the comparison with FMCG, absolutely everyone thought financial services are harder and over 95% thought they’re different. And when it came to the comparison with non-financial services, everyone thought financial services are harder or equally hard, and about two-thirds of those voting thought they were different.

I was pleased with these results.  Way back in my early days as an FS specialist, I used to go on about all this a lot - in fact, I think I may even have once written an agency brochure on the subject called Not Like Baked Beans, my not-so-hidden agenda obviously being to discourage clients from being irrelevantly seduced by non-specialist agencies’ work for other clients in other markets.

After a while, I got bored, partly because almost everything gets boring after a while but also because clients paid this line of argument no attention whatsoever.   Still, with definitive and quantitative new evidence available, maybe I should summon up some new enthusiasm and try to relaunch the whole issue.  I could hardly be less successful with it than I was last time.

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Creative people - and I say this as someone who still counts himself among them, even though I pick up a pen in anger fairly rarely these days - are awful.  Selfish, egocentric, lazy, bad-tempered and, worst of all, just dreadfully conservative.  We hate change. We think things were brilliant in the past, are much worse in the present and will be absolutely awful in the future.

Which is why I respond extremely cautiously, to say the least, to the new Big Idea that has swept across a large chunk of my agency group (not, actually, including my own agency, Tangible, or at least not yet).

This new Big Idea is something called Co-Creation, and it’s championed by one of the agencies within my group, Face, who indeed describe themselves as Co-Creation specialists.  If you want to know more about it please visit http://ldn.co-creationhub.com/, but in a nutshell the Big Idea is that Big Ideas about brands - new products, websites, comms, ads, promotions, whatever - should be developed by means of a process that involves groups of people from the client company, from the agency and from the target market all working together in a collaborative process.

This is clearly an idea that brings multiple zeitgeisty things together into a single uber-zeitgeist. There’s the whole crowd-sourcing thing, the user-generated content thing, the interactive thing, the social networks thing, the collaborative working thing, the online research thing (Face are originally a market research company) and all sorts of other things you can read about in Revolution and New Media Age all brought together into a single process.  Face are doing very well with it - so well that various other parts of my group have decided that they want a piece of the co-creation action, and have joined together to establish the Co-Creation Hub thing whose web address I gave you a minute ago.

If you visit it for a moment, you’ll understand why I approach it with extreme caution - the kind of caution with which a platoon in Helmand Province approaches a bump in the road with wires protruding from it.  On the home page, for example, you’ll see a link to a White Paper called “Do Brands Really Need Agencies?”.  And although the white paper concludes that they may do, kind of, it certainly seems that they don’t need agencies’ creative departments:  instead, they need a series of workshops made up of clients and consumers and moderated by people from Face.

My problem - and, I suspect, the problem of 99% of creative people - begins right at the beginning, with the Co-Creation Hub strapline.  This says simply “Doing Things With, Not At.”  I get it.  Of course I get it.  I’ve read all the case studies, seen all the online co-created businesses, learned how you can harness the energy and enthusiasm of consumers to shape and build your brand.  (It also hasn’t escaped my attention that this is an extremely cheap way of maintaining a brand, a significant point in these tough times.)

But, like 99% of creative people, I don’t basically buy it.  I don’t basically accept that the best way to do creative things is “with, not at.”  From Romeo and Juliet to the Shake’n'Vac commercial, all the great flowerings of creativity have been done at, not with.   Like 99% of creative people I accept that up to a point, the consumer and indeed the client can play a valuable part in this process. We need to listen to them, engage with them, understand them.  But there comes a point where you have to send all those people away, close the door, wrap a towel round your head, and either on your own or with a trusted partner stay in that room until inspiration strikes.

After that, you may well go back to everyone - clients, colleagues, consumers - to make sure that your great idea works as you thought and hoped it would.  And after that, you may need all sorts of co-creationists (photographers, film directors, illustrators, actors, whatever) to give substance to your creation.  But the actual creative process itself isn’t with, it’s at.  And it isn’t co-, it’s solo.

In saying this, I know I’m sounding like a dinosaur.  At the very least I’m deeply, deeply out of fashion - Face are developing their co-creation business about 20 times quicker than any other part of the group, including my bit.  And actually, I’m almost certain that it’s worse than that.  This isn’t just a fashion thing, it’s a step change, and there’s no going back.

That being so, I’m delighted that my group is right at the forefront of the change.  And not least as someone who holds quite a few shares in it, I enthusiastically encourage everyone to visit   http://ldn.co-creationhub.com/, to get in touch with my co-creationist colleagues and, if you’re a client with a large budget, to allocate it to them immediately.

But as an agency creative who has been surrounded for decades by clients, account handlers, planners and researchers all bitterly resenting the way that this stroppy, difficult, lazy bunch of people get almost all the glory going despite playing such a limited part in the process, I can’t help suspecting that at another level, the success of co-creation reflects a long-sought opportunity for revenge.

With researchers, clients and consumers in charge of the whole creative process, it’s not that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.  On the contrary, it’s that the asylum is now firmly back under the control of the warders and the administrators.

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No big deal, this.  But I guess that when I walked past Saatchis’ offices in Charlotte St the other day, it must have been the day they were pitching to the owners of the west London shopping centre Westfield, or possibly the day they heard they’d won it, because their windows were full of a Westfield-related graphic.

It was a simple idea:  dozens of normal-sized Westfield carrier bags, together with some others carrying the Saatchi strapline “Nothing Is Impossible”, all funnelling into a giant Saatchi & Saatchi-branded carrier bag at the centre of the display.  As far as I can remember, there weren’t any other words involved.

A nice simple idea, you might say:  Saatchis “bagging” the Westfield account.  But, at risk of thinking about it too hard, isn’t there a trace of good old-fashioned big agency arrogance at work here?  It’s a question of who’s bagging who, or even whom:  has Saatchis bagged Westfield, or has Westfield chosen Saatchis?  It’s both, of course. But if I was the Westfield marketing director, and I saw my little normal-sized carrier bags being swallowed up in the maw of the giant Saatchi bag, I think I might wonder who’s going to be calling the shots in my shiny new agency relationship.

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Moneysupermarket and its agency, MCBD, must be disappointed by the lukewarm reaction to their new Omid Djalili campaign.  I think I know what’s gone wrong:  they’ve made what’s usually (though not always), a mistake, and gone ahead and shot the script that MCBD presented in the pitch.

I guess there’s some empirical evidence for this, in that the pitch wasn’t very long ago and here’s the film already, but actually it’s the nature of the execution itself that arouses my suspicions.

When you’re pitching, you’re under huge pressure of time, and you have to cut corners somewhere.  If you think of the creative development process as basically a game of three halves - developing a nice strong original insight, coming up with a big idea and then, usually, showing how it can play out across an integrated campaign - then at least one of those halves is going to get a lot less than a third of the time available, if you see what I mean.

The new campaign has been congratulated for its insight - namely, that we Brits don’t like to haggle.  It may well have taken some time to get there.  If I then had the responsibility of taking this insight forward into a TV execution, and only had a week, say, or indeed a day, or even possibly an hour, to do so, I would write a script with a presenter in it, because they’re the easiest when there’s quite a lot to say and nothing much to look at;  I’d choose a comedian as my presenter, because what else can you do except try to be funny;   and I’d look for a comedian from a culture where we think people are good at haggling, so that he can act as a sort of ironic contrast to us hopeless Brits.

I don’t think anyone actually knows exactly where Omid Djalili comes from, and if they knew he was from Iran I’m not sure if that would connect perfectly with the haggling thing (aren’t they more about ayatollahs, nuclear weapons and stoning adulterers?).  But hey, he’s some kind of Middle East guy and they all haggle over there - remember the gourd-buying scene in Life of Brian?

Anyway, hey presto, a TV script, and hopefully the pitch timetable is back on track.  (What we can’t tell at this stage is how much time there was left to think through the whole campaignability/integration issue:  will future executions feature more of  Omid Djalili, for example, or will the campaign include other celebs from perceived haggling cultures like maybe Zinedine Zidane and King Abdullah of Jordan?   And what will happen in print, online and other media?  Will small-space mono press ads feature small and blurry photos of Omid, who at that size and resolution will look pretty much indistinguishable from Alexei Sayle?  Or will the strapline A Great Deal Easier - more than a little uncomfortably close to Direct Line’s A Great Deal Better, I’d say - act as a focal point for a much looser kind of integration?  We just don’t know.) 

We also don’t know if I’m right to build this tottering tower of speculation about what happened in the pitch process, and subsequently.  But what we do know is that nine times out of ten, for all the talk of selecting the right firm, and the right team, for a long-term business partnership, pitches are in fact painting competitions where the clients will choose the agency that comes up with the idea closest to what they think they’re looking for.

Nevertheless, very often, things happen subsequently which send the agency back to the drawing board - the idea researches badly, the Chairman doesn’t like it, it’ll cost too much to shoot, the brief changes, whatever.  But occasionally, the pitch work slips straight through into a finished execution without touching the sides.  And while it will occasionally be brilliant, more often than not it’ll have that moneysupermarket-like slightly-half-baked air.

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You can choose for yourself which advertising guru was the first to say that agencies are only ever three phone calls away from disaster.  No-one actually knows, so your answer is as good as anyone else’s.  Your choice will reflect something about your tastes, but also about your age (young people think it was first said in the current recession by some 28-year-old running a dotcom agency:  I first heard it the year before any 28-year-old was born, back at the beginning of Thatcher’s early-80s recession, and I suspect it was first said pretty soon after the phone and indeed advertising as we know it were invented, some 100 years before).

Anyway, whoever first said it, and when, it lives on because it’s more or less true.  In our case, we may have gone into this current recession in a state of slightly greater resilience than average, because when things were going well 18 months or so ago we didn’t have any very large accounts dominating our income or profit:  as a result, since then, we’ve probably taken not just three but at least half a dozen of those phone calls without being completely annihilated.  All the same, as you can imagine, by the end of this summer no-one was exactly rushing to answer the phone.

Now, though, it’s late autumn, and I think I do just about dare to say that things are a little different.  On the whole, touch wood, the phone has become a friend again.  You answer it, and find yourself speaking to nice jolly people wanting to do things, receive proposals, organise meetings, hold pitches.  From somewhere deep within your pre-recession memory, you remember that whoever it was who said that thing about being three phone calls away from disaster also said that you’re only ever three phone calls away from what I think he described as “triumph”.

Not quite sure exactly what “triumph” might look like, but in any case it’s probably something a little more than just a chance to take part in a 4-way pitch for a fifty grand fee.   But still, if you call the agency these days, I suspect you’ll find we pick up the phone a lot more quickly, and a lot less twitchily, than we did a few months ago.

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A little while ago I made some uncharacteristically cheerful remarks about Comparethemarket.com’s meerkat campaign, and how it just might lead to a general raising of creative standards at least in the direct insurance category, and maybe even in financial advertising more broadly.

Today, normal service is resumed:  I’m deeply negative and despairing about that ghastly new KitKat poster.

If I knew how, I’d include a visual.  But I’m sure you’ve seen it anyway:  hideously ugly, complete dog’s breakfast visually, and copy that plumbs new depths of stupidity and patheticness.  Beneath a large red flash that says “NEW”, the main headline reads (I can hardly bring myself to tell you this): OMG!.  Then there’s a smaller subhead which, unforgiveably, says: “MY CHUNKY JUST GOT FUNKY.”  The there’s a horrible cheap-looking pack shot, balanced on top of a horrible cheap-looking product shot, both of which finally get round to telling us that what we’re actually celebrating here is the launch of a new caramel version.

And then, in another, smaller, red flash along the bottom, as a terrible and tragic reminder of the fact that this is an ad for the bar that has the greatest advertising heritage of any product in its category, there’s a heartrending echo of past glories, “HAVE A BREAK, HAVE A KITKAT.”

There is absolutely nothing - not a single square inch - of this poster that is anything other than criminal.  From the ill-conceived inanity of that hateful dad-dancing headline, “OMG!”, to the ridiculous crassness of presenting the packshot balanced precariously atop the product, everything about this poster screams uselessness, utter talentlessness and, worst, complete contempt for the public.  It’s pure visual pollution, a repellent sight debasing our urban environment as much as any graffitti, fly-tipping or Carpetright store.  If this tells us more about the future of advertising than the meerkat - which I very, very much hope it doesn’t - then God help us all.

The single most depressing thought, in this orgy of depressingness, is that this travesty may quite likely be the work of J Walter Thompson, producers of all that delightful witty clever KitKat advertising over the years and purveyors generally of civilised and entertaining campaigns for more brands and products over the years, I suspect, than any other UK agency except perhaps Abbott Mean Vickers.

I don’t know for sure, and it would be nice to think that this abomination actually comes from some sales promotion agency based in somewhere like Reigate or Slough or Hemel Hempstead.  But honestly, if that poster came from JWT, then it really is the end of civilisation as we know it.  Now the barbarians aren’t just at the gates:  they’ve invaded the agency and taken possession of the creative department.

Of course, the public face of JWT and the broader WPP group of which it’s a part is that delightful, urbane personification of all that’s good about that agency’s advertising, the inimitable Mr Jeremy Bullmore.  Like most people in this business, I’ve spent many years bowing to no-one in my admiration of him.

If that KitKat poster did come from JWT, then I’m bowing no more.  OMG indeed, Jezza.  OMG.�

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Many years ago, in my DMB&B days, we had the opportunity to pitch for the TSB account.  It was clear that the winning agency would be the one that figured out what to do about TSB’s then-current strapline, “The Bank That Likes To Say Yes.” 

This line was both the strength and the weakness of their existing approach - well-known, well-identified and generally positive, but, even in those distant days, more than a little paternalistic and patronising.  Keeping it didn’t feel like a winning move, but neither did dropping it.  Someone cleverer than me found the answer - turning it round, so that it said “We Want You To Say Yes.”

OK, it’s not as good, but the sentiment matched the zeitgeist far better.  It was about you, the customer, not about us, the bank.  TSB was no longer congratulating itself on its helpfulness, it was working to earn its customers’ appreciation.  It felt like a winning move.  It was.  We won.

Fast forward to the recent Halifax pitch.  No doubt the pitching agencies, as pitching agencies do, looked back over the bank’s past campaigns.  The one that would have stood out would have been the so-called “human house” campaign - the one with the big epic films set to famous pop songs in which large numbers of customers physically clambered on top of each other to build homes and achieve other big symbolic benefits of banking with Halifax.  Good stuff - memorable and popular.  But where is the role of the bank in all this?  Could we make it, well, a bit more self-congratulatory?  Could we dramatise our helpfulness a bit more clearly?

As you’ll have seen, in the new campaign, the big casts and the clambering are back.  But this time there’s a difference - it’s literally-serried ranks of Halifax staff who are making things possible, forming the roads and paths and ladders and bridges that enable the customers to move into their homes or get married or start drug-dealing businesses or whatever.  (OK, I was kidding about the drug-dealing.)

Once again, finding a way to flip an existing campaign property on its head was the winning move (unusually, in this case, for the incumbent agency, which is a particularly impressive and unusual outcome).  But the direction of travel was the exact opposite of the direction that won us TSB nearly 20 years ago.

What does this prove?  That times change, and what was right for then isn’t right for now?  That as someone famous once said, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction?  Just that life is random  and you never know what’s going to win a pitch?  Or that whatever the pitch and whatever the brief, finding a way of tweaking a famous advertising property that the client already owns is a pretty good way to win? 

I’m pretty sure it’s one of the above, but I’ve no idea which.  You choose.

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There’s one category of client for whom agencies do better work, try harder, offer better value for money and usually overservice.  This category, perhaps unamazingly, is made up of clients we like.

At the opposite extreme, there is also a category of clients for whom, try as we might, we really can’t find the motivation to do anything special for.  We’ll do what we’re contracted to do, but no more.  The stuff will be ordinary, the service sluggish and so far from going the extra mile, we’ll rarely manage an extra yard.  This category, obviously, is made up of clients that we hate.

There’s a whole other blog to be written about why we love some clients and hate others.  For now, let’s just say that it’s for more or less exactly the same reasons that we love or hate anyone else - reasons ultimately to do with what sort of people we think they are, and how they behave towards us.

But the point I want to make now is that if I was you - especially if I was you in this cash-strapped climate - then for entirely professional reasons I’d be working quite hard to climb up that likeability league table.   

Ultimately, agencies have three motivations to work for clients:  to make money, to do great work and to enjoy ourselves.  In a perfect client relationship, we achieve all three.  We’ll settle very happily indeed for two, and actually we’re pretty satisfied with one:  but if the relationship really isn’t delivering against any of them, then it’s only natural a) to wonder a bit why you’re doing it, and b) to do it with less than 100% enthusiasm and commitment.   

It may simply be impossible to make your account profitable at the moment.  It may - although I have my doubts - be impossible to get great work through, especially if your firm has particularly complicated and bureaucratic approval processes.  But it’s never impossible to make life more enjoyable - and, I promise you, for every extra unit of enjoyment you can bring to the proceedings, you’ll get back ten units in creativity, energy, commitment and service.

So, in short, my advice to anyone who wants a better agency is, quite simply, to try being nicer to the one you’ve already got.  And, yes, of course, I can see that the same advice applies in reverse to me and all my colleagues on the agency side whenever we long for a better client.

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Crispy bacon and scrambled eggs at 1 Lombard St today, a “full Scottish breakfast” (basically a full English with haggis) at the Southern Cross Cafe in Edinburgh yesterday, and some agency coffee and a couple of chocolate biscuits in one of our meeting rooms on Wednesday.

Bad for my waistline, needless to say.  But quite good for morale - because more often than not breakfast meetings mean busy clients, clients who can’t spare the time to catch up during the main part of the working day.  And busy clients usually (though not always) have work for agencies.

Such was, indeed, the case with all three of my breakfast guests this week - two working flat out on major new business and brand development initiatives, with big budgets and big backers, and the third working just as hard on redefining the brand of an existing business, crunching his way through an endless series of staff workshops trying to make sure that the fine words and pretty pictures in the brand guidelines document follow through into real behaviours on the part of real people all round the organisation.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of these busy and upbeat people are working in parts of the life industry, probably the least desperate part of retail financial services at the moment.  (A message to any agency person who’s had three consecutive breakfasts with representatives of the banking or investment industries recently:  you’re wasting your time and money, mate, they’re just cadging free meals.)  And there is talk that the storm clouds that have held their position over the banks for such a long time now are just starting to show signs of drifting to a new position above the insurance industry:  if so, my breakfast companions may be back in the lunch, elevenses, afternoon tea and close of play drinks market sooner than they currently expect.

Let’s hope not.  If that was to happen, I’m not sure which would be worse:  the business effects on the agency, or the dietary effects on my waistline. �

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At quite frequent intervals, I’m reminded how much the marketing community - as well as the target market - loves the Innocent brand.  This morning, for example, it comes third in a list of most-admired brands in a poll among marketers in Marketing magazine. 

I’m told, also, that if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the Innocent guys get flattered a lot, and most sincerely, by their fellow fmcg marketers.  In much the same way that everyone working on financial advertising got sick to death of the Red Telephone brief (brand icon, link to the logo, hero of the advertising, works in all media) I gather that people working on fmcg brand development and packaging are now equally sick of the Innocent brief (attitude and authenticity, quirky copywriting, reflect clients’ “passion” for the product).  (See the blog about passion, below, for more on this.)

Anyway.  I don’t actually know if people working in fmcg get the Red Telephone brief, but speaking for ourselves at least I have to say that we haven’t yet received the Innocent brief.  No client or prospect beating a path to our door has yet wanted any truck with Innocent-style attitude, quirkiness or “passion.”

Considering how many financial brands these days do quite desperately want  a) to be different, and b) to engage much more than hitherto with consumers, I think this is a) surprising and b) a shame. 

When it comes to being different, every agency creative knows that the simplest and most effective trick in the book is to treat a product in market sector A as if it was a product in market sector Z:  treat a carpet cleaner like a hair conditioner, or a chocolate bar like a foreign holiday, or for that matter an investment fund like a fruit smoothie, and something interesting is almost bound to happen. 

And when it comes to engagement, quite frankly Innocent’s quirky and attitudy tone of voice is wasted on detailing of fruit drinks’ largely self-evident ingredients:  much better, and much more challenging, to tackle a grown-up subject like retirement planning or the need for life insurance.

So come on you financial marketers, can we start getting some Innocent briefs soon please?  Don’t be put off by the fact that they might look like a bit of a cliche to the more progressive thinkers in the fmcg world - after all, if you let a little thing like that deter you, there’d be no more than a handful of financial briefs at all.

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