4 Fuks Saké

Cheers Fred

In this post-Brexit era, one thing you’ll never take away from Brits is our ability to take the piss. Absolutely world class leadership right there with #WalkersWave.

Obviously you’ve seen it. The automated, boy-ish enthusiasm of Lineker (here in the Peter Beardsley, No 10 role) sets you up with cheer, positivity and warmth. He puts it on a plate – and bang – there’s the punchline. A smorgasboard of the world’s most depraved criminals – Fritzl, West, Britain’s most prolific sex offender Savile™, asking us to buy crisps.

As a self-appointed ‘industry leader’ – part two of this article should be 100 words about ‘lessons being learned,’ and “obviously our thoughts go out to the families involved.”

The real reason for the absolute glee of this isn’t the pain of the Walkers and client and agency team. God bless them, they’ve suffered enough.

The joy is in puncturing the pomposity, horrendous phrase ‘thought leadership,’ the pointless conferences, the every-Thursday-night award ceremonies, and second screen, hot-air bullshit that exists in creative marketing.

Inviting people to go to a football match in order to sell crisps ISN’T important. It isn't a real job. I should know I’ve been doing it for twenty years.

The brief. The strategy. The best practice workshop. The creative presentation. The amends. The PO. The build. The “we’re at crunch time,” panic. The sign-off and the eventual release. My “washup” would say that #WalkersWave is three, four, five months of tunnelled, bunker thinking – ignorant of a world beyond meetings rooms, and a Metro/iPhone on the tube.

We are privileged.

We are well paid.

Our jobs are fun.

We steal the tickets at festivals and Cup Finals.

We don’t save lives.

We don’t put our bodies on the line.

We think we know it all.

Fred West waving for Walkers is a gleeful wedgie to anyone that represents corporate brands/general Soho bell-endry; and a reminder to recognise to place our work in the real world.

Cheers Fred.

Televised Football But Not As We Know It

“Interesting. Very interesting!” screamed Barry Davies on Match of the Day back in the day. Who would have thought the same could apply to Adam Lallana running round in circles, or Martin Skrtel clearing his nasal passages?

On Wednesday evening Liverpool play Sevilla in the Europa League Final, Europe’s also-ran club tournament – and a chunk of UK football fans will be watching the game live on YouTube.

The match itself is unlikely to be memorable (although it’ll be enough for me to forgo watching the wash-up of Peggy Mitchell’s death). BT’s decision to make the game available as part of its “wider digital strategy”, throws up all manner of interesting thoughts and discussions about where sport, TV, digital platforms, broadband providers and hardware manufacturers are heading (other than the UEFA hospitality boxes in Basel).

There’s the digital platforms themselves. YouTube aren’t messing about, and their intentions are clear. CEO Susan Wojcicki got straight to the point with North American advertisers a fortnight ago, stating YouTube reaches “more 18-49 year olds during primetime than the top 10 TV shows combined.” Its claim for the mass audience – real people you meet in the pub, street or in the office – starts clouding things for the men running sports banking enormous cheques from TV companies.

Take the English Cricket Board for example. It picked up a BAFTA for its coverage of England’s last Ashes win, yet as Sean Ingle pointed out in The Guardian, more people watched a 1974 episode of Colombo on ITV3. In December, Joe Root failed to make the short list for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, and team sponsor Waitrose called it a day.

If YouTube is ‘normal TV’, where does that leave the likes of the TV companies currently staying in the game by borrowing money from the City?

It’s here we can poke around the “wider digital strategy” hinted at by BT. Whatever channel or platform the sport is on – it’s got to get into our home or onto our tablet somehow – and that requires a network. The greater the demand for content via a network, the stronger and more reliable that network needs to be.

So if you’re a telcomms company with a best-in-market broadband and mobile network, pumping stuff into peoples’ homes whatever its source; that’s not a bad place to be.

It also puts you in a more robust position. What happens if Tim Cook wakes up tomorrow and says, ‘right, next, let’s do Apple Sport?’ Or Google’s Eric Schmidt says to YouTube’s Wojcicki, “would you like me to call Richard Scudamore?”

On the one hand, they don’t need to. They may wish to wait and allow the sports bodies to continue to approach them. US sports continue to make overtures with the NBA big advocates of YouTube, and the NFL agreeing a deal to screen games exclusively on Twitter. Sport isn’t rational though – and it has a habit of making men do stupid things with their money, through the blind love of it all. Why else would we get up at 4am to go to Sunderland?

People in grey-glassed offices will start to shift uncomfortably – but for fans, that’s a day to be welcomed. More eyes on more sports at more accessible prices and on more accessible platforms? What’s not to love about that?

It's Intelligent To Dumb Down

Here’s a picture of Benny.

His owner Richard tweeted his picture, and Bob’s your uncle, Benny’s “the world’s most famous dog.” (Mail Online). Mail Online, is the world’s biggest English language newspaper site. Benny’s been shared 697 times. A story alongside on it, on the reform of the British welfare system is shared 243 times.

Without stating the bleeding obvious, or building on what Siobhan Sharpe might say; there is, what is often referred to in a patronising manner, "a lesson here."

Agency planners are paid, and build their careers on their intelligence. It is in their personal interest to build their personal brands with the trappings of that evidence. Data, intelligent publications, tweeting Economist and Harvard Business Review links to clients all do their bit to build credibility and sell an idea. Creatives too, lean heavily on culture for commercial gain. Work emanating from art, design and theatrical studios in cities across the world, end up in diluted form for commercial gain within 12 months.

None of that is to be sniffed at – just as long as the intelligenzia that help to shift consume products recognise the power that comes from the lowest common denominator. It’s a world where the written word is simply not needed. The copywriter becomes surplus to requirements.

An image that makes you laugh, fantasise or cringe, is your passport to worldwide fame and access to eyeballs. Benny is living proof and by dint of statistic, cannot be ignored.

The ingredients of imagery - useful for any creative session - include:

• Cats & dogs (Benny).
• Animals displaying human qualities (PG Tips, meerkats, page 3 of Metro every day).
• Physical disfiguration, (Cheryl Cole, C4’s Undateables, war).
• Wealth extremes (Kardashians, Benefits Street).
• Class divison. (Binge drink vomiting montages, Ladies day at Aintree, Kardashians).
• A bikini (Every newspaper site, notably Mail Online’s sidebar of shame).
• Cleavage (ditto).
• Attractive women in dresses (ditto).

In the search for intelligence – it’s best not to overlook what stares you in the face every day.

Publicom And The Fatberg Of Online Self-Importance

Ten days ago two rich advertising men - closeted by a small, sharkish cabal of investment bankers sniffing a wedge - cut a deal. Ten days later, a fatberg of online bilge has spewed from hundreds of thousands of online sources in over sixty countries. Sift your way through all the opinion, comment and knowledge and two dominant terms emerge: “I” and “my.” No-one knew. But did that stop the advertising and comms industry telling you it knew? (Rhetorical).

Advertising and comms is an insecure and paranoid business. There is an endless race to be the ear that the CEO whispers an insight into, in the hunt for competitive and financial advantage. PR fares little better – in fact, the industry is fairly overt about it – whinging about its inferiority – rather than acting on it.

Perception and reality are two different beasts – as one would expect from an industry whose business is perception. On day two or three of Publicom, what began to grate was reading a stream of links from people roughly one hundred steps removed from the Wren/Levy meetings; giving their own seals of approvals on smartphones, thousands of miles away. 

“The more I see of this Publicis-Omnicom deal the more I like.”

“Here’s the downside to the Publicis-Omnicom merger.”

“Publicis-Omnicom isn’t a surprise for five reasons.”

“Wren’s been smart here..”

Wren and Levy’s surnames were dropped into posts with the ease and intimacy of football managers doing a deal over a £10million “Macedonian misfit,” or a “wantaway striker.”

The reality? No-one knew. Senior clients. Senior staff. Genuine rivals. David Jones memorably tweeted 48 hours before signature that “pigs might fly.”

My advice to the Radian 6, Sysomos and Adobe Socials of this world: for your next update, build in a bullshit filter for us. I’d upgrade.   

"Do Me A Favour Instagram. Oh, You Have."

5 times a week I'll use the phrase 'Oh for fuck's sake." It's been eight months since I've done that and then felt compelled to write something on my blog with the same name. It's Instagram again.

I refer you to my April post, about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs' ingenuity at duping people who wear expensive trainers for their own commercial gain. This week, they've said they're going to sell photos of your kids to McDonalds, who'll in turn advertise Big Macs. That's what I've understood it to be anyway. 

Four things.

1. This bloke nails it, citing this collective sense of self-delusion. Search #coffee and look: there's your shot of a latte, filtered in Hudson, alongside 450,000 others. 

2. Your photo was rubbish. Instagram made it look nicer, so much so, that you felt compelled to share it with others. As far as I'm aware, you haven't paid them since you opened your account.

3. Instagram have been stupid. The more avid a user of social media you are, the greater your propensity to attention seek. So attention seekers (their core audience) pour through social T&Cs with the meticulousness of a Manhattan lawyer. They do it for their own benefit, not the crowd. I don't believe Facebook and Instagram want to sell pictures of my kids to Exxon, nor do I think lawyers will allow them to. If they can, who's the bell end for putting them there in the first place? Howevere, if they want to sell pictures of my uncooked ribeyes or empty espresso cups, that's a fair deal for me.

4. If you don't like it, vote with your feet. Go to Flickr's new app or the next photo sharing network you've yet to hear of. They'll end up doing the same thing to you.

"Hey Guys, I'm A Bit Uncomfortable You Made A $1bn. Let's Have A Diet Coke And Talk."

I've held an opinion for a while that a large proportion of people working in social media had sand kicked in their faces at school. Technology has always been 'nerdy' and there is a revelling in the outsider term 'geek.' Naturally, social media in its infant years attracted the types who worked their way up from Star Wars figures through to circuit boards. 

Woe betide anyone that leaves the geek crowd and gets accepted by the in crowd. Backs will be turned.  

Like Instagram. They had the audacity to take $1bn off Facebook. They have "sold out."  People get fucked off and talk of betrayal. The issue seems to be that:

a) They took money off the big enemy, Facebook.

b) That Instagram made the user feel special and important, and now they don't.

I would suggest the following.

1. People come up with ideas and go to work to try and make money. That includes the founders of Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and whatever a couple of people in San Francisco are working on right now, that we'll fall in love with later this year or early next.

2. People with relaxed dress codes, white teeth, and nice smiles from California, are adept at making geeks feel special. Like the Instagram "guys" pictured. Wouldn't you just love to have a Diet Coke with them? They give them things to play with. Coax personal information out of them to make money, and then persuade them to promote the whole process.

3. If someone makes $1bn out of something like nice pictures of babies, cats and food - rather than oil or guns, then that's a good thing. 

4. If you are uncomfortable with Instagram making money in the social media industry, stop doing it yourself. Stop walking into publications and/or businesses asking for much smaller amounts of money to advise on how to use Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest etc...to make money. 

5. If you don't like Facebook, delete your account.

Congratulations to Instagram. I love your product, I love your work, and I'm glad you're making money. As Paul Carr, said "They didn't sell out, they just sold. They're a company, not the fucking Rolling Stones."

 

The Football Map Of London

I like this. From here. 

Tesco. Fat And Knackered.

I think they’re in trouble. Well, I say trouble. Tesco announced profits of £3.7bn in the UK this morning so they’re hardly in shit. More than we made last year. 

That said, shareholders aren’t going to take too kindly to days when the share price drops 16%.

The headlines say the supermarket's Christmas campaign failed to entice shoppers into store. This won't be a marketing issue, but an operational one. This is a company that is massive, bloated and listless. Its non-food businesses have done bonkers numbers in the last few years, and now occupy enormous acres of floor space. The shrinking core food business retracts apologetically, literally in front of the eyes of customers.

Its massive bloatedness and no doubt hideous bureaucracy, will be hampering clear thinking and communication. Its nearest and dearest rivals remain crystal in the conscious of the public. ASDA – price. Sainsbury’s – value. Waitrose – posh. Lidl/ALDI – cheap. Tesco? Huge and "I don’t know where everything is."

For a large of the population that’s the level of decision-making as the keys go into the ignition.

You've got to feel for CEO, Philip Clarke - the Wilf McGuinness to Sir Terry Leahy's Matt Busby. They’ve got a few issues in there, and they're not going to be fixed in a quarter. 

Pic: MrLomo/Flickr

A Nice Film About A Place I Used To Live

Racism: 140 Characters Probably Not Enough

It's not easy being a politician in 2012 for five reasons.

1. You are born with an in-built lack of humility based on your assumption you are qualified to govern. 

2. You're surrounded by people who are exactly the same.

3. You've done nothing with your life other than train to, or be, a politician. 

4. You cannot see the wood for the trees. 

5. That's it.

Reason 4 is the only explanation I can find for Diane Abbott choosing to use Twitter to pile into a complex debate around race, the day Stephen Lawrence's murderers are banged up. I - like many others - like her. She strikes me as someone who has three virtues you rarely see in a politician. She's honest, passionate and brave. (On bravery, how else to explain her Labour leadership bid?)

Politicians and Twitter are going to end up eating each other. Watch Question Time or listen to Any Questions, and it's not enough to listen to the views of 5 guests and an audience of 100 people. You have to have a Dimbleby stumbling over the term 'hashtag' before they start.

In its purest form, politics is about shaping a debate and influencing people within a larger narrative called society. Ideas and arguments need oxygen. They need room to breathe. They generally need more than 140 characters. Speeches, articles, print, blogs, podcasts. They're all there. And we do have time to think about these things.

Just use 130 characters and a bit.ly next time Diane. Save yourself a world of shit. 

(Pic: Flickr/Amnesty International UK)