Lucian’s blog

Since my last post, I’ve heard from scores of people wracked with remorse and regret, devastated by the idea that it’s their own lack of feedback and engagement which has brought these proceedings to a standstill.

In a desperate attempt to relieve this widespread trauma (well, a couple of people have kind of mentioned it), I really ought to admit that my grumble about the infrequency of comments from readers was a gratuitous sideswipe, not a big point.  The big points about the current interruption of service are that a) I’m too busy, and b) I can’t think of anything to say.

Although obviously I did find something to say just now.  Hmm.  Maybe the subject of not writing a blog gives me a whole lot of new things to write about.  How would that work?

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I’m not completely happy about this, and I retain the right to have second thoughts, but in my mind this date, 12th May 2010, is notable because:

a)  it would have been my father’s 84th birthday;

b)  it is the first day of the new Con-Dem-Nation government, bringing Messrs Cameron and Clegg together in their posh schoolboys’ alliance;

and c)  it’s the day on which I’ve decided to put this blog on ice for the time being.  (Isn’t it weird that in this blogging program, Wordpress, the only words with squiggly red mis-spelling underlines are “blog,” “blogging” and “Wordpress?”  Even “squiggly” sneaked through un-squiggled.)

My loyal reader may be disappointed, but I have reasons, albeit of an obvious and unsurprising variety.  First, I’m really busy at the moment.  Second, I fear that the blog’s readership, always minuscule, has now become mini-minuscule, especially since it stopped appearing on the Tangible Financial website. And third (obviously related to the second), I’ve never got very far in establishing the blog as a genuinely interactive medium, with about 90% of the few comments it has generated being written bymy old friend Simon Wood under a bewildering variety of aliases, but even by its historically low standards it’s fallen off the chart recently:  I haven’t managed to spark a single comment for over a month.  Oh yes, and one other thing:  not sure why, but I don’t seem to be able to think of anything to say at the moment.  Blogger’s block?

Anyway, thanks for reading.  I will be back, just as soon as I have a bit less of this bloody client work to deal with.

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It’s obvious.  To be honest, I don’t think anyone really knows what proportion of agencies repitching for business actually manage to hang on to it, but I think everyone does know that the proportion isn’t high.

True, it’s probably somewhat higher in so-called “statutory” repitches, when the clients claim (truthfully or otherwise) that they’re obliged to put the business up for review after a given period of time:  and that’s obviously a closer analogy with a General Election than the non-statutory kind.

But even though the announcement of a statutory review doesn’t necessarily indicate any actual dissatisfaction with the agency’s performance, the business still changes hands remarkably often.  And when you think about it, the psychology is pretty obvious:  forgive the rather complicated metaphor, but it’s a bit like three or four attractive and clearly very enthusiastic people of the appropriate sex pitching against the incumbent to be someone of the appropriate sex’s boyfriend or girlfriend.

The thing about the incumbent in this situation is that he or she is a known quantity, and that inevitably must mean that some of what is known is not good.  The newcomers are unknown quantities:  since they haven’t actually done anything yet, they haven’t done anything bad.  If the decision-maker is loyal, careful, fair and risk-averse, then he or she may take the view that the new candidates are bound to have imperfections too, so the incumbent’s failings shouldn’t loom too large.  But if the decision maker is a flighty, thrill-seeking hedonist, well, you can see what’s going to happen, can’t you.

The broader and somewhat more troubling question that arises from this is the extent to which any of us would really like to be judged on our track records.

I’m not thinking here about individual client relationships.  I’ve often been involved in teams working on particular accounts that have done an excellent job for their clients and could certainly go into any repitch with their heads held extremely high.  I’m thinking more in a rather middle-aged helicopter-overview way about the whole damn thing - the extent to which the sum total of what I’ve done over more than 30 years in agencies does justice to my abilities.

I’m not sure whether it’s usual or unusual, or for that matter a good thing or a bad thing, but I must own up to a pretty strong feeling that my career over all those long years undersells me.  I appreciate that I’m very probably quite wrong about this:  that even if I’m right to think that some of my strengths could have taken me further,  I’m silly and myopic not to realise that my corresponding weaknesses have inevitably held me back.

But anyway.  I’m writing this as election commentary, not therapy.  And mark my words:  assuming that David Cameron gets in on Thursday (and I’m quite strongly inclined to think he will, although whether with an overall majority is a much more difficult call), the biggest single reason will not be a long-lasting one:  it’ll just be because we don’t really know anything seriously bad about him.

Or not yet we don’t, anyway.

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Nothing much comes to mind just now, which is a good thing because I’m far too busy to write anything at the moment.

Hopefully both of these difficulties will disappear simultaneously some time soon.  Otherwise, either I’ll have lots to say and no time to say it, or - worse - huge amounts of my time (and yours?) to waste on saying absolutely nothing at all.

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(I quite like the idea of this as a regular, but obviously nothing like daily, strand.)

The ads on the escalator to the Victoria Line at Warren St currently feature a total of 46 people, as well as two muppets.

44 of the people, and both muppets, are smiling.  The only two who aren’t are the women in the two ads for an abortion counselling service.

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My daughter says that she had completely the wrong impression of Al Pacino for years, thinking of him as a man with an impressive line in designer neckwear through his description as a “scarf ace.”

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Long-standing readers of this blog (sit down, you must be exhausted standing all that time) may remember that I like words, names, web addresses and so forth that you can word-break incorrectly to mildly comic or confusing effect.  (My favourite is the sight-seeing tour bus company BigBusTours.com, or was that BigBustOurs.com.)  We need a name for these, and I suggest WordBrokes.

On the 134 bus there are ads from the operating company, Arriva, promoting a website seemingly welcoming visitors to that large river in the Caucasus, ArrivalOnDon.co.uk.  Or maybe not.

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I care about writing.  It’s more or less the only thing I can do better than average - and, not by coincidence, it’s the thing I’ve done most and for longest.  So, naturally, I’m always interested in reports from the copywriting front.  What’s going on out there?  Is writing in, or out?  Is it getting better, or worse?  And commercially, is it a buyer’s or a seller’s market?

Right now, the messages are mixed.  Big picture, the news is more good than bad:  the rise and rise and rise of email, texting and social networking mean that billions of people are writing trillions more words than they did, and even if these words are very largely badly chosen, mis-spelt and poorly punctuated at least they’re words.

In close-up, the picture is more confusing, with random signals from different parts of the battlefield telling an extremely fragmented story.

The other day I was pleased, for example, when a close copywriter friend at another agency told me that their winning move in a pitch for a big investment account recently had been to concentrate on copywriting:  for clients sick and tired of having to fill in all the grey lines on the layouts themselves this was exactly what they wanted to hear.

On the other hand, I am noticing some more and more illiterate stuff out there - stuff that not so long ago someone would have picked up at an earlier stage.  You’d think, for example, that given their current troubles Toyota would want to take every opportunity to reassure on their quality control standards:  but the writing in the full-page mea culpa ad that’s been running recently is truly horrible, the first couple of paras in particular being so hopeless that they confirm all your worst fears of their accelerator linkages and braking systems.

And on the third hand (not sure quite how to accommodate ths trend, but still) I notice what seems to be a slightly troubling reluctance, on the part of clients at least, not to write but to read.  These days, on average, I’m finding that of the time available to produce a piece of work that includes a significant amount of writing - a brochure, say, or a website - something less than a quarter of the time is available for me to write it, while over three-quarters is reserved for the clients to read it.  At the extreme, it’s even worse:  I can think of one brochure which I had to write in less than a week, but where I’m still awaiting comments two months later.

What does all this mean?  Whatever you want it to mean, really.  But even the biggest writing bear would have to accept the fact that I’m writing this, and you’re reading it.  So that means there are at least two of us left with some kind of interest in words.�

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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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It’s interesting when meetings turn into sociology experiments before your very eyes.  I went to a big meeting this morning - I’ll have to disguise this one a bit - where a speaker presented the results of a pilot project to a large group of people who all supported the initiative, and wanted the pilot to be a success so that it would make sense to go national.

The thing is, I’ve seen string vests with fewer holes than the report on the pilot.  I’m not saying it was trying to hide the fact that things hadn’t gone terribly well, but it certainly raised many times more questions than it answered.

And how many of those questions did the assembled group actually get around to asking?  Yes, obviously, not a single one.  This skimpy, partial and wholly inconclusive presentation was greeted with wild cries of enthusiasm, with everyone present trying to outdo everyone else in adding their own note of acclaim.

I should emphasise that the people in the audience this morning didn’t actually have any executive responsibility for the project, and had no direct control over whether it goes ahead or not.  Maybe if they did, and it was their multi-millions of pounds at stake, they’d have reacted a bit more cautiously. 

But I must say, from now on, on the fairly frequent occasions when I see a hopelessly misconceived new product or service and find myself wondering how on earth a group of intelligent and conscientious people could possibly have failed to see the hopelessess of the position, I’ll remember that group this morning and the way they were all happy - no, make that the way we were all happy - to keep our more difficult questions and challenges to ourselves, and join in the general hoopla.

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