SORRY, I’M NOT FOLLOWING YOU

There are the sorts of blogs that are calm, reasoned observations of the world. Then there are the other ones - the acid-fuelled rants that come off a bit like Michael Douglas in “Falling Down”. Apologies, but this is probably going to be one of the latter.

And it’s all been triggered by such a little thing – seeing a line on the bottom of some posters for cereals and chocolate bars instructing me to “follow us on Facebook”.

So, let’s get this clear…you’re a cereal and you want me to add you to an intimate portal of my life where I share laughter, fun and interesting experiences with my friends?

Just to remind you of your role in life – you’re a breakfast cereal: your job is to get half a pint of semi-skimmed poured on top of you each morning. What are you going to do with me on Facebook? Tell me what movies you’ve enjoyed recently? Invite me out for a drink?

Now, I’m not arguing that there isn’t a place for brands in the social media playground - that would be self-evidently insane given its potency and importance in our post-digital age. But in order to play with me in this universe, you need to engage me, entice me, fascinate me…not just tell me to follow you.

It’s the equivalent of people walking round holding big placards inviting strangers to “please be my friend on Facebook” – it’d obviously make them look like friendless losers. It also smacks of Social Media tokenism – just whack a Facebook logo on there and it looks like you’re “down with the kids” and you’ve got that all-important SM box ticked off.

I think we need to distinguish here between putting a web address on a poster and a Facebook request. One is merely providing people with a link where they can access information, another is asking in a bare-faced way to become part of people’s lives.

In essence, there’s no doubt that, as marketing professionals, we need to find a way to engage people in the Social Media environment. I just happen to think we need to be a whole lot subtler in how we go about it.

THE WORLD’S LEADING PHILOSOPHERS SELL BEANS

Well, they defined western thought and made us question the nature of our very existence, but how would the world’s leading philosophers cope if they had to get their Don Draper on and apply their theories to something as mundane as selling a can of beans. We can only imagine:

SOCRATES

“The unexamined bean is not worth eating”

PLATO

“The essence of a good life is a good baked bean”

ARISTOTLE

“Happiness is the meaning of life, baked beans are the prime method of attainment”

DESCARTES

“I bean, therefore I has-bean”

HUME

“The effects of beans should be shared throughout society”

KANT

“Putting beans on toast is a categorical imperative”

HEGEL

“The beans alone are real, everything else is illusion”

NIETZSCHE

“Be a Superman – start your day with a plate of beans”

WITTGENSTEIN

“The pursuit of beans is a therapeutic activity”

SARTRE

“Eating beans requires total responsibility”

So there you have it, and now the essential philosophical question is, which one would you trust to be Creative Director of your real/imagined agency?

10 THINGS WE CAN LEARN ABOUT MARKETING FROM LADY GAGA

I realise I have the same relationship with popular culture as a mechanic has with engines. If something becomes immensely popular, I want to understand why. I want to look under the hood and discover what combination of forces have sparked off each other to drive immense amounts of people to go out and buy something (quite a handy obsession, given that I’m in advertising).

So when I don’t ‘get’ something that’s massively popular, it makes me even more curious about understanding it. Ergo, Lady Gaga – to me she just seems another in a long line of Madonnabees plying bland Europop. But there’s obviously something happening there that I’m missing. So I wondered what lessons we, in advertising, could learn from the Gaga phenom, here are my conclusions:

1) Style triumphs over content if it’s style at its most avant-garde

2) There’s a thin line between pure ugliness and fashionable beauty

3) A stupid name is no barrier to success

4) Edgy packaging can make a safe product appear more dangerous (turn off the visuals, and it’s generic beach bar music)

5) The Fortune 500 favours the relentless

6) Controversy is a partner that requires constant courting

7) A little mystery goes a long way

8) Talent/ability is never the whole story

9) Self-reinvention is many people’s secret dream

10) Never leave home without your meat purse.

THE END OF THE LINE?

CreativePool Network started an interesting discussion on linkedin “whatever happened to the brilliant strapline?” It’s an interesting topic which (I hope they don’t mind) I wanted to expand on further without clogging up their threads.

Teressa Iezzi in her brilliant book The Idea Writers argues that The Big Idea is dead and it could be argued that the traditional big advertising message pushed through mass media is no longer the smartest or savviest way to communicate with people. So, if the Big Idea is dead, you’d think its natural companion, the endline, would be on its way to the chopping block too.

Well, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that the strapline has been an endangered species. Tim Delaney, the acclaimed writer and Creative Director, has always famously been no big fan of straplines and it didn’t hinder him from winning award after award for ads that featured unadorned client logos in the bottom right hand corner.

I also feel that if straplines have petered off into irrelevance, in many ways it’s our fault as an industry. We’ve all seen those international car commercials where, just when you think the ad is over, an over-designed computer graphic appears, portentously proclaiming some meaningless corporate signoff like “born with passion, driven with precision.”

But examples like this merely taint the idea of what a strapline should be in its purest and most perfect form.

And that is – a simple expression of a brand’s DNA, a mantra for the brand’s eternal values that can remain constant through wind, hail and departing Marketing Directors.

A strapline like “just do it” sums up a spirit of athletic fortitude that shines through every piece of Nike communication whether it’s shown or not shown, said or unsaid.

Or Apple’s “Think Different” (again as mentioned in the Idea Writers – no I don’t have shares in the book, I just think it’s rather good) that was created as a stopgap when Apple didn’t really have a convincing offering, but which their subsequent products have exemplified to a T.

Or Marmite. Was “you either love it or hate it” a strapline or an insight? Whatever it is, it’s become an established idea and part of our language to the extent where you can now refer to someone as “a bit of a Marmite person” and everyone gets it instantly.

So I’d argue that the old-fashioned, portentous corporate strapline – some meaningless aggregation of the words “passon”, “innovation” and “the future” - could quite happily go the way of all flesh.

But the brand mantra – the carefully chosen words that encapsulate a brand’s core emotional essence– is more important than ever in this splintered communications age.

And how can you identify a brand mantra from an old-fashioned irrelevant strapline? One is the strong glue that holds together every word or image that a brand puts out into the world. The other is just blu-tack.

OH BEHAVE! SOCIAL MEDIA ETIQUETTE

Most of us have various different social personas that we adopt throughout our lives. It’s something we do instinctively. For instance, we wouldn’t tell the latest pub joke while enjoying tea with an elderly aunt, and we wouldn’t start talking serious shop while on a stag do. So how come these roles that we adopt so fluidly in the real world are things that we blithely ignore in the virtual universe?

I find it amazing that people seem to just click ‘send’ and blanket-share their thoughts across several social media platforms instantly.

When I go to Linkedin, I am entering it in a professional frame of mind, looking to make useful new connections or learn some interesting things about what’s happening in the field of marketing and communications. It’s not the place where I want to receive updates about people’s hangovers or posts about how their constipation has flared up again.

Similarly, when I go onto Twitter, I go on it to find interesting new things – new films, new ideas, new and interesting ways people have found to get under people’s radar. I don’t particularly want personal updates from people who I barely know and are just sitting in an office somewhere. Sure, if I’m following Katy Perry or Russell Brand I might expect those kind of posts – they’re celebrities, we know who they are, we understand their personal predilections, we can share in the joke. But Stephen Fry sharing an amusing observation isn’t the same as some worker drone venting their frustration at the office photocopier.

Facebook, on the other hand, is the Las Vegas of social media – where the most outrageous and silly stuff can have a natural home and we can smile knowingly at it, without judgement or condemnation. What happens on Facebook, stays on Facebook.

However, to me, someone posting Facebook-style updates on Linkedin is like someone turning up to an important business meeting wearing stained leisure pants, sucking on a doobie.

A lot of the people I’m connected to socially work in advertising/marketing.

As professionals, we’d never allow our clients to display inappropriate messages in the wrong channels. So why do we do let ourselves do it?

So, to sum up, here’s my handy guide to Social Media etiquette:

TWITTER

APPROPRIATE:

Pfizer find interesting new app to market Viagra (link)

INAPPROPRIATE:

Took a Viagra and sure put a killing on my old lady last night LOL!!!

LINKEDIN

APPROPRIATE:

Does anyone know of any job opportunities for Senior Writers in the Bristol area?

INAPPROPRIATE:

Am well bored at work, considered stabbing myself with a pencil to stay awake : (

FACEBOOK

APPROPRIATE:

3 beers, 3 cocktails, 2 pills last night. Absolutely monged!!

INAPPROPRIATE:

Diageo in £3m Direct Marketing push, read more…

THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED

It’s funny how significant even the most glib media-coined words and phrases can turn out to be.

All the talk of the Social Media “revolution” over the last few years appears powerfully prophetic in the light of the role that social media has played in the unrest and regime change that has dominated the news recently.

When the Egyptian and Tunisian governments are actively blocking access to Facebook and Twitter, it’s obvious that they’ve become far more powerful weapons than baseball bats and the odd artfully lobbed rocks ever were.

And when even “sleepy London town” (as Mick Jagger once referred to it) is inspired to embrace the Parisian student spirit of ’68 to protest against rising fees, you realise how seismically social media has shifted both personal and political action.

But what is it that has turned places where you once merely put up silly photos from the Christmas party and links to funny videos, into entities that have governments quaking in their military boots?

I’d argue that a principal reason is that they’ve brought back a sense of connectedness and collective identity. We know that the old-fashioned concept of community is a thing of the past and the Union’s power has been battered and eroded over the years. But the advent of social media seems to have allowed people a chance to re-discover a sense that “we’re all in it together” and reminded us that when we choose to exercise our collective will, it’s a mightily potent force.

And when status updates go from “feeling bored : )” to “just brought down a government”, it’s about time we all started taking a bit more care in how we utilise this digital revolutionary that’s sat on our desks, patiently waiting to change the world.

A PERFECT (BRAIN)STORM

On paper the concept of ‘brainstorming’ sounds profoundly sexy – reminiscent of over-running the Winter Palace of your consciousness and firing off on all synapses like a crack rifle squad.

The reality? All too often, it comes down to a put-upon Account person attempting to decipher a couple of pages worth of tatty flipchart paper filled with inane ramblings.

So in an attempt to avoid the latter depressing scenario, here are my top 10 tips for better brainstorms.

1) CALL IT AT THE RIGHT POINT. Better to wait ‘til you have an inkling of which direction you want to go rather than have an open-ended free-for-all based around a vague understanding of a client’s business.

2) INVITE A SELECT BUNCH OF PEOPLE. This will serve to make everyone present feel they have a responsibility to contribute to the session. It will also make those who weren’t invited more curious about what went on and more eager to participate in the next brainstorm.

3) STATE A TIME FOR THE SESSION. Make this no longer than 20-25 minutes.

4) SET AN ALARM CLOCK IN THE SESSION. If people know a bell is going to go off when the time’s up they can relax knowing that the meeting won’t drag on and suck their time into a black hole. (N.B. make sure you end the session when the clock goes off.)

5) SET OUT THE BRIEF IN NO MORE THAN 2 MINUTES. You don’t want them to know every nook and cranny of the business problem, just enough to get them started. I’ve been in brainstorms where the briefing took so long I’ve forgotten what I was there for by the end of it.

6) MAKE YOUR CREATIVE OPENER CREATIVE. If you want to get the creative juices flowing, start with a genuine brain-teaser like “how would you feel about shopping if brands didn’t exist?” rather than some bland stunner like “how do you feel about shopping in general?”

7) HAVE A LONG LIST OF QUESTIONS. You need a constant source of stimulus to keep the ideas flowing and new thoughts to lob in when the energy gets low. Think of it as having to keep people’s brains spritzed throughout.

8) ENGAGE THE WHOLE GROUP. If anyone isn’t contributing, draw them in - they might have something amazing to say that they are a bit shy about sharing.

9) DON’T JUDGE. Don’t say “any idea is a good idea” and then start editing the thoughts in the session.

10) SHARE THE NOTES. Make sure the brainstorm notes are distributed to all the invitees, highlighting any particularly interesting ideas or thoughts that have the potential to go further. This will make people feel as though they haven’t wasted their time.

So, there it is. Now, here’s to future of brainstorms. Here’s to buzzy, engaged sessions not looming, time-eating events on the computer calendar.