The power of music.

The late Paul Arden once said that music is 50% of your script. Monty Propps' treatment of the Diff'rent Strokes titles proves it.

“Man’s greatest fear is not being inadequate, but powerful beyond measure”

There is a place for every brand in the universe, if only it has the courage to be something. Even if that brand's name is Joel Bauer.

New Work (sort of)

Our good friends at Fenton Stephens scored an invite on the Gruen Transfer. The brief? To sell synchronised swimming as a participant sport to teenage boys. Last count on the Gruen website had the Fenton boys as clear winners.

0.25% Compassion.

Every now and then we get asked to prepare an advertising campaign for a bank and generally the marketing problem is the same; 'people think we're money-grubbing pricks'.

Now partly this is a perception issue; banks do perform an essential function in society and do a lot of good. But the rest of the time, they have a tendency to behave like, well, money-grubbing pricks.

It's something they don't like to hear.

Take yesterday's interest rate cut by the Reserve Bank. To manage the ravages of the global financial crisis, in a climate of crumbling industry and lost jobs, the governers of the nation's monetary policy decide to reduce interest rates by 0.25%.

The aim of this policy was to reduce the financial pressure on households and get them spending again, to speed the economic recovery.

This event was widely reported, and the nation's families were eagerly anticipating the cut.

And the reponse of the banks? To keep most if not all of the cut as profit. Westpac, ANZ and CBA passed on just 0.1% of the cut while NAB passed on nothing at all.

The RBA fired it's best shot in the locker, only to see it almost entirely absorbed into the bottom lines of the Big Four banks, who've taken advantage of the GFC by buying up smaller lending institutions and consolidating their oligopoly on home mortgages.

The recession, and the near-perfect exchange of information enabled by the internet, has made this high-handed behaviour unacceptable to the modern consumer. As the article in the Economist says, it's compassion that people are looking for in brands now, not vaucous statements.

If you're going to behave this way, why bother running ads like the one below? You're treating your customers as less than stupid. And in the end, your bank's brand will be the one to pay.

It's more important to be interesting than right*.

Wouldn't it be great if your advertising idea was so interesting, that people would want to watch it, not just in the ad breaks but in the program too? (See the original Cadbury 'Eyebrows' ad here).


(*Thanks to Richard Huntington for this assembly of words.)

Change your tone, or change what you do?

Just as the Federal Treasury was printing Kevvie's $900 cheques, there was an article in yesterday's Financial Review about adopting the right tone of voice in your marketing (I'd offer up a link, but the AFR make you pay to view. Sorry).

Industry luminaries talked about whether you acknowledge the recession, or pretend it wasn't happening. The AJF Partnerships 'Times are tough. But Australians and Holden are tougher.' got a mention, as did the simple pleasure of Cadbury's 'Gorilla'.

It makes sense to take the GFC into account when plotting our strategies, but I'm thinking that maybe people are after a bit more substance from their marketing messages. Wanting to see something that's actually different, rather than the same thing painted a different colour.

Holden didn't actually change the build of their car to suit the times, nor did Cadbury alter the formula of Dairy Milk. But when Hyundai found new car sales plummetting in the US, they actually altered the substance of what they did.

Uncertainty about job security was leading many Americans to put off getting a new car, so Hyundai created Hyundai Assurance.

Essentially, if you lose your job within 12 months of leasing a new Hyundai, they'll let you out of it and take the car back. Covering up to $7,500 in negative value.

Sure there's a bunch of fine print, and no doubt there will be folk who miss out, but as a brand statement-wow!

Even if you weren't in the market right now, or even if Hyundai isn't your brand, you can't help but admire the audacity of the move and the understanding of where their customers are at.

Not too hard to write a compelling ad to that proposition.

How to not write copy.

Flicking through the Good Weekend last Saturday, I came across this ad for the HTC Touch smart phone. It caught my eye because it is so painfully wrong in so many excruciating ways.

The layout is dreadful (seven shots of the same phone and a target market Gen Y-er in his Dad's jacket), two or three pointless headlines and two logos specifically placed to confuse and disorientate the reader.

But as a copywriter, it was the words that really hurt me.

I'm no expert, but I understand that the HTC is actually a pretty good phone.

But being a touch-screen 3G gadget it's playing in a sandpit dominated by iPhone. So this ad should be weaving a pretty convincing argument as to why I should shun that beloved device and choose something that looks liken every other phone in the Telstra shop.

So how did they go?

Let's start with the headline;

'HTC TOUCH 3G. THE POWER & THE PASSION!'

Hmmm...the 'power' here helpfully explains that the Touch runs on electricity, not steam or uranium like other, less modern telephones. A quick scan of the ad doesn't reveal where the 'passion' comes from unless it refers to the Gen-Y'er, by whose glazed smile we can presume is watching downloaded Japanese porn on his 2.8-inch screen.

Look if you're going to have one, the headline is where you set out the stall of your argument.

HTC's biggest brand issues are that;

(a) nobody knows anything about them

(b) it runs on Windows, which everyone loathes, and

(c) it's not an iPhone

This headline adressed none of this and was a waste of 1.23 seconds of my Saturday morning.

To the first line of copy;

'HTC, one of the world's leading designers and manufacturers of smart phones, brings you the Touch 3G, a phone that combines their innovative TouchFLO interface technology with the awesome power of 3G.'

Crap. Until six months ago nobody outside the industry had ever heard of HTC, and most still haven't.

A quick Google reveals it to be a Korean company that made its name making components for other phone companies.

HTC stands for 'High Tech Computers', a name that conjures up a dusty PC shop off the Oakleigh high street before a global colossus striding the smartphone stage.

And bin the self-adulation; 'world's leading', 'innovative', awesome'. That is your puffed-up opinion of yourself, not a fact that will persuade the equivocating buyer.

Next;

'The category-HTC Touch 3G (no, the iPhone defines it) powered by Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional (I hate Windows on my computer, why would I want it on my phone?) takes your touch experience to the next level (there's that puffed-uppiness again).'

'With next-generation TouchFLO (if it's next generation, how can this generation have it? Waste of words), voice and text communications (you know, talking to people), web browsing and media playing are now more intuitive than ever before (how? How? Are you going to tell me? No.).

The touch-reponsive interface of Touch 3G is designed to respond perfectly to finger gestures (yes, it's a touch screen, you've already said that) helping you navigate seamlessly through contacts, media and web pages with speed and precision (so it doesn't take you to the wrong places, slowly? Wow!).

Look, there's a whole other paragraph of this rubbish and I can't be bothered going though it all. But it doesn't get any better.

If you're going to interrupt somebody's Saturday morning with a wad of words, try to make it something useful or funny or informative.

Tell me why Windows is better for a phone that OS/X. Give me the ammunition that will persuade my friends at the pub that this is cooler than an iPhone.

Tell my why HTC are better at making smart phones than Apple.

George Orwell once raged agains words that were mindlessly erected into sentences, 'like pre-fabricated henhouses'. Lord help any battery chook that has to live in this.

People like stories.

Adidas recently launched House Party, a new campaign celebrating 60 years of decking the world out out in triple stripe.

Directed by Nima Nourizadeh, the centrepiece is a 160 second long spot shot at a (you guessed it) house party where everyone’s dressed in adidas. In amongst the beautiful plebs are celebs like David Beckahm, Missy Elliot, Katy Perry, and behind the bar shaking Martinis a very unlikely Ilie Nastase.

For a campaign that ends with the line 'Celebrate Originality', it's not a terrifically original idea. (Check out this Coke ad from the 70s; instead of Becks, they've got Brocky!) But it is a nice vehicle that uses online and offline spaces to build the idea nicely.

As well as the Big Telly execution, there's a YouTube channel packed with extra content like the invitations going out, Becks and Kevin Garnett killing time before the party and a paint fight at a Ting-Tings gig. Even a Simpsons parody. Naturally, there's a website where you can buy all the gear.

It's all hopelessly self-conscious and tries a bit too hard. But the track's infectious and there's a lazy, veging-on-the-couch kind of charm about it. Best of all, it all fits and there's a story that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It piques the curiousity, egging you onto further exploration, unlike Smart Energy's 'Zoetrope' spot which starts with a nice positioning before undoing all its good work.

Genius or accident? Cadbury Gorilla meet Johnny Farnham.

Last night, while watching the gyrating mammary parade that is 'Underbelly' my wife and I saw the Cadbury 'Gorilla' ad, local version. Instead of Phil Collins' 'In The Air Tonight', the popular primate twirls the sticks to Johnny Farhham's 'You're the Voice'. From it's launch in the UK in 2007, this ad has caused controversy, and the result was no different in our household. "What's that got to do with chocolate?" chocolate-loving Mrs Baker said from the sofa, "What rubbish!" The truth is, it has everything everything and nothing to do with the stuff. Chocolate is of course, all about chocolate. But it is also about joy and sharing, and this ad is nothing if not all about these two qualities. YouTube proliferates with home-made remixes (check out the Deep Purple cover), the Gorilla facebook page has more than 100,00 friends, while the old-school broadcast version is still provocative enough to generate discussion on the Baker family couch. But did it work? In the UK, sales were up after a bleak year for the company, while the campaign scooped the pool at all the creative award shows. Working in advertising agencies, we sell our clients on process and rigour, as if funding enough focus groups and territory boards was a guarantee for market success. Sometimes it does, often it doesn't. But this campaign works, just because it does. Rather than telling you what to feel about the product, it simply makes you feel it. And that's rather nice, isn't it?

Joy. What else do you want?

There's not enough joy in the world. Here's a little more. If I was with this phone company, I'd feel a lot better about it.

The power of posters?

There's an outdoor site where they hang 24-sheet posters just around from where we work in Melbourne. It's on a busy corner, and there's room for about 5 diferent posters.
Now, due to the GFC, the outdoor advertising market is having a bit of a tough time, and the same posters, presumably on a 2-3 month buy have been up for 6 months or more.
Last week they were torn down, presumably because the bean counters frothed at the mouth about clients getting something for free.
So now, instead of a corner of five well-produced posters, there's a wall of scrappy half-torn, half-glued paper.
Now, presumably when the sales team are out there trying to sell outdoor to their cash-strapped clients, they talk of visibility and passing traffic and brand impressions.
Let's then presume that the half-convinced client then drives past this highly visible site...hmmmmm.
If you spend your life trying to convince others of the persuasive powers of outdoor, use the medium to sell itself.
If you have no paying clients, show work of good photographers or artists. Tell a joke. Start a competition to best use the vacant space. Get people talking about your product.
Anything but this.
Because when the recovery starts, you're already behind the curve.

RailCorp: dill of the week.

In case nobody noticed, the game has changed. Companies and corporations are no longer the custodians of their brands, their customers are. Marketing managers and advertising professionals don't get to decide what a brand is, and what it is not. What we get to do is divine what people will or will not permit us to be, and then be that to the best of our ability. Which makes NSW's RailCorp the dill of the week. When a bright young spark created an application to allow commuters to check on Sydney's (notoriously unreliable) timetable on their iPhones, the Bureaucrats got all medieval on his ass. Legal letters were issued, threats to sue were made. After mumbling some crap about timetables being 'copyright', the government institution then issued other threats against makers of similar applications. No doubt a shiny new TVC will be out soon extolling the virtues of the Sydney rail system, and how grateful Emerald Citysiders ought to be that 90-something percent of their services run on time. Which will only rub salt into the would of the poor viewer who's just got home an hour late. Despite what lawyers might say, marketers and corporations don't own the 'copyright' to their brand attributes. The public can withdraw it just as fast as they give it.