Ideas Made Well

This week saw the launch of Start’s latest brand campaign for Barclays, Barclays Ball Kids, at the world’s biggest indoor tennis event, the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals at the O2. As part of Barclays’ sponsorship of the ATP World Tour Finals event, they are launching Barclays Ball Kids, a nationwide search for the most talented Ball Boys and Ball Girls in Britain. The Barclays Ball Kids competition will involve a year-long search to find 30 ball boys and girls to participate in the next ATP World Tour Finals event next year.

The campaign developed by Start includes the Barclays Ball Kids brand identity, brand guidelines, and a wide-ranging on- and offline communications campaign. Start has also created a 60-second animated Barclays Ball Kids film which has been showing at The O2 throughout the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals event, to publicise the launch of the competition to both young tennis enthusiasts and their families.

www.barclaysballkids.com

CSR is a big thing these days and every company, however small, has to have a CSR policy of some description. The easy way to show that you have a CSR policy is to open your cheque book and write a cheque to a charity. That is a good thing to do but it doesn’t really engage your employees hugely does it? Unless, of course, it is a very big cheque. Most large companies now have a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), or CR (Social is so last year) department and their role is to be charitable in supporting causes that are close to an organisation’s heart.
Historically, one of the most popular activities would be to find a field near the head office and clean it up – lots of pictures of the CEO grappling with a Tesco bag caught in a blackberry bush and job done for another year. It is now getting a bit more serious however…

 
Quintessentially, the concierge company based right opposite Start’s offices, have taken their CSR responsibilities a stage further. They have created a pop-up club (along the lines of Soho House ) in an almost derelict site at no.1 Greek Street in Soho, owned by The House of St. Barnabas charity (that works to support the disadvantaged in Soho). Many employees of Quintessentially have given up weekends to paint the building back to its former glory and many people have played a part in providing services for free.
Fair of St Barnabas happens this week (25th Nov) and will be one of the highlights of the London social calendar. The fact that it has sold out, even at a recession-busting  £150 a ticket is testament to the number of partners (Start included) that have supported their efforts with more than just words. It is a great example of CSR as it should be done and I bet it has had a hugely beneficial impact on the staff and customers at Quintessentially.
Start are doing something else rather special to do with St.Barnabas, but it is currently top secret and won’t be revealed until after the Quintessentially Soho ball – this week belongs to Quintessentially.

Whatever you think of the man, there is no doubt that his track record is pretty impressive in predicting what consumers want in the future. However, he does appear to have lost the plot a bit with his obsession with charging people for accessing his newspaper’s websites. People are prepared to pay for things on the web, but with regard to everyday information ….the answer is a definite ‘no’.

Newspapers are about the news – online you have the advantage of being able to scour the most interesting articles from all the newspapers and the BBC and indeed 1000s of news reporting organisations, so many would argue that it is a richer experience online than is possible through a printed title. The size of the market for accessing online content that you have to pay for – even if the content is incredibly brilliant – will be small. Once the paid-for content is published, it will get distributed for free (in the same way that you can watch goals from any televised football game within seconds on YouTube). And for the person who bothered to film his TV to enable this, there is no financial benefit – this is consumer power in action.

So, in this case Rupert may have got it wrong. The talents of journalists are considerable – their expertise undeniable, and the reality is, that their insights could enable any number of businesses to flourish. The organisations previously known as newspapers will need to change, such that they monetise their insights by doing more with them than just reporting them. All sorts of additional skills will be required, that currently don’t exist in these organisations to any significant degree. The personal finance journalist of today will become the IFA of tomorrow, the travel writer of today will become the travel agent of tomorrow and so on..

News is a commodity. Insight never will be.

Trying to make news not a commodity is far harder (impossible?) versus the task of asking people to pay for insights. Rupert would no doubt argue that insight is what his newspapers provide – but an insight in itself is not hugely valuable unless you can do something with it.

For years a central part of any Proctor & Gamble marketing strategy has been to get the key insight, then productise it. Newspaper organisations are brilliant at discovering the key insights but can they make shampoo and conditioner? Time will tell. To begin with though, they need to understand what their role is – and one thing is definitely true, it is not the role they had 5 years ago. This is true of an increasing number of businesses (brand and digital agencies being no exception), and it takes real guts to recognise the need for radical change. Charging for online content, that used to be free, is not the answer.

Later this month about 400 people will attend The Economist Innovation Summit . One of the topics being discussed will be the value of innovation in a recession. The answer, of course, will be that innovation is hugely valuable in a recession and the lesson for all companies wanting to gain a competitive advantage is to innovate in a recession. Hurrah! The same lesson should also be applied to marketing communications, and indeed the last year has been full of articles in the marketing and advertising press about the benefits of increasing rather than decreasing spend in a recession. Yet the vast majority of companies won’t heed this advice, and marketers will proudly tell their board of their prudence in spending less – in some cases, a lot less – than last year, in line with the missive sent down to curtail all unnecessary spending. You do wonder just how proud they really feel – marketing people are capable of making a far bigger impact on a company’s fortunes than almost any other discipline, yet it is still the first port of call for cuts when budgets come under pressure.

Part of the reason for this is that innovation is undervalued. The bits of a marketing budget that are easy to cut in a time of crisis are those with an unknown outcome; in other words, those activities that haven’t been done before, that have no track record and that are, probably, the most innovative part of the whole budget. Activities such as when Virgin decided to sponsor the V Festival back in 1996, which not only has resulted in huge brand benefit for Virgin over the subsequent 13 years, but has also spawned a lot of imitators, which continue to thrive. Or adidas’ “MiCoach Core Skills” in-store interactive fitness testing that engages and astonishes customers in store. These really innovative ideas are “easy meat” for the finance director: unproven in terms of appeal, costs could increase due to not knowing the take up , and are considered to be just basically ‘high risk’.

So things like the Innovation Summit are important, as a means of spreading the word that innovation can actually create a transformational ROI (return on investment). This is as true for communications as it is for product innovation. Those companies that have decided to go ahead deserve our respect for overcoming the hurdles that are always put in the way of investing in innovation. They deserve to succeed in a world where so much emphasis is put on ‘just maintaining the status quo’.

We all need to not only respect the innovation of others but create our own set of innovations for others to follow.

Talking of which, love this link.. www.xtranormal.com

With Firework’s Night rapidly approaching , there are many things that the public would like to consider blowing up.

MPs (again – they are probably more culpable now than in Guy Fawkes’ day), and  bankers spring to mind. If you work in the communications industry however, you may consider looking a bit closer to home. Despite the rise and rise of digital, it is amazing how many clients and agencies still see it as a necessary evil rather than something to be embraced. True, many agencies have added a digital arm to their offering but often it is left as a silo , whilst business as usual occurs in the rest of the agency.

It is the same with “Brand engagement”; too many ad agencies reckon that a TV advertising campaign with a url linked to the campaign thought, is enough to warrant a “Brand engagement” case study. So it would be good to blow up some of the  “mutton dressed up as lamb “ claims that are made by people who can’t really deliver. The emergence of new media should have changed agencies more than it has. In many casesthe tried and tested way of doing things still prevails – but for how much longer?

Strategic brilliance has got the capability to genuinely transform companies, yet it is given away free on the assumed proviso that, as a client, you buy the execution from that same source. Kodak used to sell their cameras at well below cost because they would make money out of the prints. No longer. The digital age has smacked Kodak around the face. To their credit they have moved to printers as a source of revenue.

The lesson here is a very simple one – stand still and you will die. Adapt and you stand a chance of surviving. Yet how many agencies are really adapting rather than paying lip service to the changes happening all around us?

So on to the bonfire should go the agency dinosaurs that see change as a threat. Change should be seen as invigorating by any genuinely creative business.

Over the next few months and years those agencies that embrace change will be the ones that thrive – fight it and agencies will end up like the record labels, who buried their head in the sand for so long that recovery has become an unlikely outcome.