Ideas Made Well

Milliband vs Milliband is a weird contest isn’t it? Both seem very capable and as politicians go, Mrs Milliband should feel very proud that she has produced two such high achievers. But many people feel that it is slightly strange that two siblings should be set against each other in a leadership contest such as this. Surely they would have had a private chat and worked out which one should be leader, before voting actually started?Or leave it to the public to decide – a phrase aptly used by Big Brother.

Such internal competition though is prevalent in any large company. Not between brothers but between their corporate equivalent – different departments. This has been the case for a very long time. Accounts vs Marketing, Marketing vs Sale, Sales vs Commercial are all good, often highly productive battles that produce good results for many companies. It’s when individual departments start to fight among themselves, that it can start to go horribly wrong. So left of centre vs right of centre is a good debate. Brother vs brother somehow isn’t.

Yet this is precisely what is happening in many companies. The brothers in question are retail and digital.

It cannot make sense for people working in retail to want digital to perform badly or vice versa. Yet that is exactly what is happening within many organisations. The people working in a particular channel are each bonussed on outperforming the other channels and outperforming their historic performance. The reality is that digital channels are growing at a far faster rate than retail, yet retail is still dominant in most sectors.

The real objective should be to optimise how the different channels work together, so that consumer needs are best met, which in turn will lead to more business for the company. Most specialist agencies reinforce this insanity but this can’t continue. In the end, consumers dictate day to day strategy and they don’t do illogicality for prolonged periods. Enlightened companies are now recognising this and adapting accordingly, but it is quite frightening how many aren’t.

When Thomas Cook demanded a £1m upfront fee for the right to buy their media, it was a sign that at least one client had become fed up with the lack of transparency in how media agencies got remunerated for their services. Media agencies were strangely quiet in the ensuing debate, keen to keep their covert agency deals under wraps. But many others leapt in to chastise Thomas Cook for their approach, which admittedly is not a brilliant long-term solution. Rather like the Indian restaurants that double their prices and then offer a 50% discount, this type of arrangement does little to enhance trust.

Many other agencies then resurrected the condemnation of the payment by time methodology and sought to push the contribution of their agency to the overall success of the business. In theory this appears like a fairer way to establish a correlation between input and output. Yet few agencies want a basic fee that doesn’t even cover its costs and hence the potential for payment by results is normally only ever applied to the ‘profit element’ of an agency’s fee.

Putting aside the complexity of working out the specific extra contribution delivered by the agency in terms of isolating it verses any other factors, there are a whole host of questions that are begged. Why is the contribution of one agency greater than the marketing people, who briefed, oversaw and sold the campaign internally ?
Why is an agency’s contribution better than another agency, who didn’t get the job (and the fees) – if the agency managed to help lift sales by 10%, who is to say that another agency might have lifted them by 20%?

If an agency is genuinely part of a team of agencies, who worked in an integrated fashion, this makes isolating the contribution of one agency over the others even harder and probably not in a client’s interests.
The chances are that you would spend more time arguing the toss over who did what and quantifying the effect than you would ‘doing the doing‘.

A better approach is for clients to ask what they want out of an agency. What motivates an agency? What is the best way to achieve getting the most out of an agency? An accurate analysis of this is unlikely to result in a strong correlation between money and performance. True, agencies hate getting ripped off … just like clients. So avoiding any mutual ripping off is important. The way that agencies grow is by getting more and more business – by doing great work that works. That is a far more satisfying way to make money rather than fleecing a client.

Two key principles shine out.
1. Transparency. Only with an open approach to remuneration, will both sides trust each other.

2. Fairness. It is in the client’s interests to motivate agencies and it is in agencies’ interests to do great work. This is only really possible if agencies are allowed to make a reasonable margin.

The way that you obtain the best insights about an age group is rarely through research – it is often through experience. A stag do is sort of a mixture of the two. Research groups are never that much fun for the participants – whereas stag dos (like one in Antwerp) clearly are fun. A lot of fun. As well as being highly instructive… So here are the insights gleaned from a bunch of 35-55 year olds after a two-night celebration of Damian Schnabel’s forthcoming nuptials.

1. Travel arrangements go wrong , even if the train booking is handled by an experienced travel booker. When travelling in a group of 20 though, any mistake on the ticket (like the wrong date) means that any chance of catching the scheduled train disappears.

2. This age group can turn on the charm however, meaning that it is possible to rectify things with a very nice Eurostar booking clerk (or customer interface manager or whatever they are called).

3. 35-55 year olds also don’t panic very much, as there was a remarkable absence of stress caused by the news that we had the wrong tickets. Instead, plan B was quietly hatched for a night in London. One reason for the lack of panic was probably more to do with the fact that there were no other halves there as much as age and maturity.

4. The conversational breadth of 35-55 year old men is extremely broad, ranging from the obvious (cars, women, beer) to the much less obvious. Apparently the UK eats far more pork (proportionately at least) than any other nation on earth. According to one stag , pork is in everything from rissoles to beefburgers (which he rapidly corrected to hamburgers) and you would need every digit on your body to count the number of everyday foodstuffs containing a bit of pig. Gardening is not a big topic of conversation for this age group, but for people outside London who have access to an allotment, there is a macho pride in the size of the vegetables grown. Such is the productivity of courgette plants, that courgettes may one day rival pork as a constituent of food products if allotments continue to increase in popularity.

5. People in Newcastle are different from normal human beings. They will talk to absolutely anyone, have no concept of the word ‘embarrassing’ and their ‘How to survive a day’s drinking from breakfast to the wee small hours’ guide involves not eating anything until dinner.

6. It is harder to herd 20 mature males than it is to herd 20 of any other demographic, except perhaps for cats.

7. Many people have karaoke skills in advance of their own perception. Many also have skills below their perception ……

8. The mankini is not a great invention, but it does create an incredible amount of interest, whether it be on a Eurostar train, a bar, a club or outside a club – when having just been ejected from the club.

As to insights pertainto Antwerp:
• The Belgians eat a lot of waffles and there isn’t a supply shortage of waffle shops or McDonald’s
• In the north of Belgium, including Antwerp, their loathing of the French is surprising extreme
• Their musical taste is 20 years out of date, just like it was many years ago – it’s just a different 20 years.
• The chips in McDonald’s over there are far more potatoey than the chips you get over here
• Hotels are cheap in Antwerp, but a ‘£25 a night in the middle of summer deal’ genuinely IS too good to be true
• Hiring an Antwerpian belly-dancer over the internet is very high risk and may end up in disappointment

So, if anyone out there has any briefs with a male 35-55 target (or that are based in Antwerp) then you know where to come.

When you read the headlines from the Deloitte report into post-recession US, you would think the right solution for brands would be to adopt aggressive pricing strategies. 79% of US shoppers believe that they have become “smarter shoppers” in the last 2 years, and 60% claim to have become more price conscious, utilising vouchers and coupons to a greater extent than previously.

However, there is a more interesting statistic from the same report – 75% believe that the financial crisis had caused them to realise which brands were important to them and which brands are less important to them.

This explains why the discounters have been doing well but also why the robust brands are doing well at the same time. The brands in the middle – the ones without a distinctive set of values – are the ones getting squeezed. Let’s hope that the natural instinct of consolidation in times of uncertainty doesn’t cause those brands to wither and die. This is a time for putting your best foot forward.

What do jokes, food recipes, perfume smells and fashion all have in common?

Well, it’s true that there are all thriving at the moment but the answer is that they have no copyright protection. So, it is totally legal for anyone to buy a designer dress and rip it off exactly and then sell it under a different brand name. In fact, many designers are now actively collaborating with the “fast fashion retailers”, who take their £500 T-shirt and do the £4.99 version of it literally days later. That designer makes zero money out of the £4.99 T-shirts.

This may seem rather perverse, but the reality is that everyone ends up better off. The designer sells more of their designs, because they have the kudos of being worthy of copying, hence increasing the appeal of an original. The target market for the £500 version is very different to the £4.99 version. Lots more people get access to the design itself. The fast fashion houses don’t have to use so many designers churning out unproven designs, and the fashion industry ends up making more money in total.

This is only possible because of the desirability of brands, which of course, are protected by copyright laws.

Conclusive proof, if it were still needed, that brands make the world go round.

Martin Sorrell has apparently admitted last week that growth prospects in the West are weak for the foreseeable future.

Governments all over the place are finding creative and not so creative ways of reducing spending and extracting more money into their coffers. Companies are cutting back wherever they can. Borrowing money for consumers is becoming harder and harder, with mortgages being particularly difficult to obtain.

Meanwhile Apple goes from strength to strength and many companies, like GroupOn, the shopping voucher company, continue to expand into different countries, seemingly untouched by the purveyors of doom and gloom. Indeed Start itself has expanded its geographical footprint in recent months with some really impressive results.

If economists are to be believed, then the key to success is to keep on innovating and expanding when everyone else is retrenching – a sure fire way of gaining a competitive advantage.

Yet why is this so hard for companies to take on board?

The depth of evidence in history is extraordinarily in support of the case for investment behind innovation. It’s a bit like someone being shown all the evidence that 2+2=4, yet deciding that in fact they are going to go down the strategy equivalent of 2+2=3. You could understand it if there simply was no access to money, but for most large corporations, this isn’t an issue. It is, instead, a mindset; an aversion to any form of perceived risk, that drives this illogical behaviour.

The ultimate irony is that the bigger risk will be faced by those companies who ignore growth opportunities at this time.

This week, there is more anticipation in the air than there is oxygen.

The World Cup starting on Friday is the event that dominates all the news bulletins and much of the pub chat (except in Scotland of course). The Isle of Wight festival also starts this Friday and as most football fans would testify is as good a place as any to watch the World Cup. Wimbledon is just around the corner, and with Andy Murray, represents another opportunity to demonstrate national pride (particularly in Scotland), but conversely is a rubbish place to watch the World Cup.

But the other big thing happening this week is of course Big Brother. It’s not as big as it used to be of course, and its top of mind saliency has diminished considerably from the days when the tabloids each vied with each other to be the ‘official’ Big Brother paper and ran multi-page special pull-outs, reflecting the enormous interest in watching ‘not a lot’ happen.

This series of Big Brother will be different from all the ones that have preceded it, if only because it will be the last ever one.

Whether the audience floods back to historic levels seems unlikely given the competition, but the last ever Celebrity Big Brother earlier in the year performed particularly well in terms of viewers.
Channel 4 have been brave to cut it as it produced so much revenue for the channel, allowing it to fill huge quantities of its schedule with very low cost programming. “Everything has a shelf life and Big Brother had become very tired”. Whilst this is true to a certain degree, it is also true that no one is forecasting the demise of the World Cup or Wimbledon or Glastonbury. These ‘formats’ have stayed pretty similar since they began, yet they go from strength to strength.

Could ‘Big Brother’ have escaped the axe and maintained its mojo?
When they changed it a bit, to keep it fresh, the true Big Brother devotees screamed in horror. Others barely noticed the difference, and over time became bored with the format. The web played its part by providing all sorts of similar content, that meant that Big Brother lost its point of distinction in the last few years, such that most people will be unaffected by its passing.

The big launch tonight will be treated with derision by many, focussing on the collection of weirdos who will make up the contestants. Yet, this undervalues the impact Big Brother had on television and also, not to be dramatic, but on society.

The idea of Big Brother was far bigger than voyeurism. The irony of ‘Jadegate’, which led to Channel 4 being censured, was that the issue of racism was discussed more than a lifetime of Panoramas would have achieved. This was Big Brother’s great strength, the ability to let a set of ordinary people talk – or shout – about everyday issues in an entertainment format that was real. There are many copy-cat formats, which have become less and less real and the issues have become somewhat less interesting: who fancies who on a desert island is not exactly that compelling.

Channel 4’s editorial team were well and truly castrated post ‘Jadegate’ and Big Brother was never the same again.
Big Eunuch was unlikely to be a ratings winner, so we will need to wait for the next big thing.Let’s hope it makes as large (see I know when to stop stretching the pun) an impact as its predecessor.

It wasn’t so long ago that media fragmentation was all about finding unlikely places to put advertising messages: petrol pumps, parking meters, and even people’s foreheads each had their 15 minutes of fame. As digital grew, and enabled a level of measurement that went far beyond the capabilities of other media, more and more budget was diverted away from traditional media. Now money is being diverted away from traditional new media (such as banner ads), and mobile/games consoles have become this season’s ‘must do’s.

Ironically, at the same time, the election debates demonstrated not just the value of television as a communications medium, but also the value of journalism (even if the physical sales of newspapers continue to slide), so it is a brave and foolhardy person who predicts their imminent death.

There is little doubt that media fragmentation will continue, probably for ever more.

And while it is as true as ever that you shouldn’t throw out the baby (traditional media) with the bathwater, the way that new media are used is far more important than the act of using them. There are some truly pedestrian iPhone apps in existence, some positively damaging uses of Facebook and Twitter, and millions of dire uses of email. The recession hasn’t helped as marketers have been under pressure to make their budgets go further and clearly there has also been pressure from non-marketers ‘to get the selling messages across as blatantly as possible’. Which, of course, in many ways is precisely how you shouldn’t use many of the new media, which rely on people wanting to interact with something about the brand.

So the business of sorting out which medium to use for which objective, as well as understanding how best to use those media, has become more and more complex, and in all likelihood will continue to get more complex.

There’s no doubt that a strong enough idea can work across multiple media and across different objectives, but these tend to be rare.

Often, an advertising idea is shoe-horned into ‘working’ across multiple media. Campaign ideas though, come and go, so even if you come up with a brilliant idea for a campaign, what happens next? Cadbury’s Gorilla was truly brilliant, but was then followed by some truly dire communications, ruining the impact of the original campaign.

This new era of media options calls for some new thinking.

Critically, this can’t just be new thinking in a silo – there has to be a more coordinated approach for it to work effectively or else you could end up with an unruly mess.

Understanding brands is therefore more important than ever, and having ideas that work across media (although not necessarily all of them) is equally important. Agencies can no longer rest on their laurels. If they are a specialist in a particular discipline they need to evolve into specialists in more than one discipline. The ‘one stop shop’ model has rarely worked, but that is a different beast to a more integrated approach that genuinely pulls together a number of different expertises across a defined area of disciplines.

Only with this capability will agencies be able to look at media fragmentation as an opportunity rather than a threat.

A decade or so ago, festivals were not things that troubled brands unduly. Glastonbury was still very faithful to its hippy roots, ‘T in the Park’, backed by Tennants Lager, was successful but it took months to sell out, the ‘V Festival’, backed by Virgin , was similar – successful but not manically so.

Various other festivals came and went, struggling to reach critical mass, and from a marketing perspective festivals were seen as an indulgence rather than a core means of reaching the music loving public. Fast forward 10 years and the situation is very different.

Tennants and Virgin have been followed by brands too numerous to mention, and festivals have lost their reputations as dens of iniquity and become shining beacons in the marketing plans of brands that want to connect with a youth/youthful audience.

So much so, that each festival is in danger of being subsumed by brands. Thankfully, the festival promoters have, in most cases, resisted the temptation to take the money and run, and have imposed severe restrictions on what brands can and cannot do. Add value to the festival experience and you are welcomed. Go on a tree-branding mission and you will be castigated.

Many of the most successful activations of brand activity have not been ‘on site’, but have been treating festivals as a 6- or even 9-month programme of marketing that culminates in the festival itself. A good example of this has been how the Guardian, by being the main Glastonbury media partner, has been able to give added weight to its festival coverage, which starts as soon as the sun comes out in spring and provides thousands of column inches by the end of the summer.

Or there is Virgin’s policy of offering tickets to its customers before they go on sale to the general public, a tactic now embraced by O2 for all the venues it sponsors.

Virgin Mobile also launched an ad-funded series on Channel 4 called ‘Road to V’, which featured unsigned acts all vying to get the ultimate prize of a slot at the V Festival, which ran in the two months prior to the festival itself.

But by being brilliant on-site, in other words adding value to the festival experience, as brands such as Bacardi have done with their Bacardi bars or Walls ice-cream have done with their sand-filled beaches, you absolutely can stand out from the other brand activity on site; it is much harder if your effort and your return on investment relies on just a couple of days’ activity. And if you just do something bog standard on site, then you will drift into the background as easily as a member of the crowd.

So, what does it take to succeed?

Do you have to do something brilliant and spend a fortune in order to stand out?

No you don’t. What you do need to do is to understand the mentality and needs of the festival-going public. For instance, an astonishingly large number of people don’t go to festivals to listen to the music. The repeat purchase percentage is very high. with people going back to the same festival year after year. They don’t want brands that don’t belong there, cr*pping on their festival. Again it comes back to how you, as a brand, can add value to their experience. So a tethered hot-air balloon, that is used for branding purposes, would go down like a lead one. A tethered hot-air balloon that is used to help punters see the festival site from the air would be seen in a far more positive light .

In many ways, festival marketing is no different to normal marketing. It’s just that your audience will applaud you louder if you get it right, ignore you if you don’t make an effort and laugh at you if you get it wrong.

Thank you and goodnight.

When the clocks went back last week, and everybody got a bit overly excited about the fact that there was a chance that you could now go home at the end of the working day in daylight, it reinforced how strong the feeling of optimism is among us Brits.

The fact that there was snow in most of the country, and that London experienced driving wind and rain did little to undermine the feeling that summer was just around the corner. We are, apparently, laden with more debt as a country than ever before and the economy is shot (although that is not being felt at Start Towers at the moment). The next few years will be grim according to economic analysts, and we have the prospect of an election that may well result in a hung parliament, meaning that the immediate prospects for us all are more doom and gloom than uplift and inspiration.

Yet the British sensibility is that we treat such things as run of the mill. We treat the advent of spring/summer as momentous. I swear that the number of smiles in London has increased by a factor of three in the last week and it is purely down to the extra hour of daylight.

This is pure, unadulterated optimism. The prospect of long summer nights suddenly becomes attainable. The end of grey days, grey skies and grey moods.

There is a lot to be learnt from this. Brands that don’t take advantage of their equivalent of the dawning of summer are missing a huge trick. Tapping into optimism is always going to be a cost-effective marketing strategy, whether your summer is in fact summer or winter. Music festivals are a great case in point – people love the idea of festivals more than the actual experience, yet the totality of the experience including the many months leading up to the festival once you have secured your ticket outwieghs any negatives with the experience itself. Holidays are another example – how many people get more out of their holiday when they are still at work versus the holiday itself?

On paper, this may seem incredibly obvious -a very early morning flight demanding that you are at the airport at 6 in the morning, a two-hour transfer from the airport, buffet lunches galore and horrendous decor in your room, the German towel syndrome and constant heckling to do a horrific tour all point to a bad experience. Yet we still boldly book the holiday, highlighting the positives: “Amazing beaches. Crete (or wherever) is so nice at that time of year, and the people are fantastic”.

The fact is, we are a nation of optimists. And consequently we respond well to messages that tap into optimism.

How many people prefer pessimists to optimists?

The thing about about optimism though is that it is NOT about showing happy smiley people enjoying your product or service. It is a spirit rather than an action. The smiling faces are the outcome rather than the means of communication.

Will this be a summer of sun to remember? Of course it will.