And.
on Sep 28 in Advertising, Writing tagged BMW, copy by Peter BlackmanIt’s the launch of the D&AD Copy Book today. I was invited - which was very nice of D&AD. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it as I have to write this blog piece do some work.
It would have been a pleasure to be there, if only to meet up with old friends and colleagues, and to show support for the importance and value of good copy. For as Claire Beale, editor of Campaign magazine, used her editorial last week to say - ”it’s perverse that the art of writing advertising copy, writing to persuade and sell, should have become less valued and excellence less demanded. Looking through the entries to our Big Awards last week, the judges agreed that the standard of writing was pretty depressing, copy lines on high profile, big budget campaigns were boring, hackneyed, sloppy, embarassing.”
I agree. A particular example of this sloppiness can be found in the latest BMW 1 Series commercial. I’ve singled it out because the lack of care attached to the writing can be pinpointed to one word. One tiny little word. A conjunction. And.
Before going any further, a little confession. I used to work at WCRS, the agency here in the UK which has done so much to build the BMW brand and help them grow from a niche to mass car manufacturer. I know lots of creative, talented people who will be as aghast as I at the betrayal of the cool, sophisticated and engineering focus of the ‘Ultimate Driving Machine’ campaign that this ad represents.
Leaving that aside, what really annoys me about it is that it is so hard to follow. Why ? Principally because of the visual edit, but also down to the careless use of one tiny little word. That conjunction. Let’s have a look at the v/o.
We start with “My brother Freddy, he’s an actor and a model”
We see a man. Driving a red car. Got it. So he, as yet un-named character A, has a brother called Freddy, character B.
That is then followed by “And my brother Adam, he works with architects”
Now this is someone NEW talking. It’s the brother Freddy, character B who’s just been referenced by character A. Freddy is now talking about Adam. Who we’ve just seen. Clear? No. Not for me either. Why? Because the sentence starts ‘and’. Which means that by all the conventions of reading, writing and listening to the English language that I have done since the age of five means that the same person is talking. So I now think that the driver of the red car has two brothers, one called Freddy and one called Adam. I am mistaken in this I know, but I now think that we are listening to a brother with no name, character C, who is talking about his brothers, A & B.
This makes the rest of the commercial, which is complicated and difficult enough to engage with, all the more unintelligible. AND. The fault for that lies with that tiny little word ‘and’, plus of course the way that the edit did not show visually that the narrator had changed. Important things words.
In terms of language however, it gets worse. ‘he works with architects’. With? With? What on earth does that mean? That Adam is their cleaner, their chiropodist, or even copywriter?
The v/o then rambles on with throwaway lifestyle burble, all the time alternating between A & B. Of course until doing this close textual analysis, I was still imagining that I was listening to C…..
“I like to work hard, play rough
Freddy on the other hand, he likes to play it smooth
Freddy orders some mini, skinny, latte. No milk. No sugar. No this No that
My brother just drinks espresso
Freddy loves all the attention that he can get. For me, being on my own, it’s wonderful too”
Memo to BMW.Noone talks like this.
He’s got his ways, I’ve got mine
to be honest you’ll never find me and Fred driving the same car”
AND. With that, it’s thankfully over. The brothers can go and share a coffee of their choice. Be together, yet alone. Which is “wonderful too.”
I know that things like this shouldn’t annoy me, but they do. Seeing outstanding, successful advertising campaigns built on great copy, art direction, and, yes, strategic insight, thrown away in favour of ill thought through, poorly executed lifestyle nonsense.
BOGOF
on Sep 10 in Random tagged by Peter BlackmanSo I’m in the chemists. Scratch that, let’s keep it real. I’m in Boots.
Boots the chemist.
I am buying toothpaste, plasters, nit combs, does it matter? No. I am also buying an item that still has some social embarassment attached to it. What could that be? You know - them. Those things. For that.
Anyway, I take my basket up to the till and I queue. I have my daughters with me, and they are bored and not at all interested in what is in the basket because I wouldn’t buy them some new foaming at the mouth bath foam. Or similar. So they won’t be asking any potentially embarassing questions about the item in question.
Long queue. Saturday. Lots of ladies. Beauty products you see.
So I get to the front of the queue and beep, beep, beep, the items go across the scanner. Then the item goes across. There’s a pause.
“These are on buy one get one free at the moment”
“What?”
“Two for £10. You can pop and get another pack.” , yes, I can run there, pick up another pack and run back, and everyone will look at me and know that I am buying them, and that one packet is not enough. I need two.
“No, really, it’s fine. I’m, er, in a bit of a hurry.”
“No we’re not Daddy”
“Yes we are”
“It seems a waste of money to not get the free pack” says the sales assistant. Unhelpfully she is still holding the item and brandishes it aloft like the Lady in the Lake presenting Excalibur to Arthur. For all I know she is about to shout out for assistant assistance. So I stop her.
“Please. We’re in a hurry.” I think something in my tone stops her yodelling across the store for more of them for the gentleman. I think it’s the desperation, flavoured with a hint of menace.
“Ok” she replies, shaking her head at my proligacy. Beep. I pay. We leave. At home I briefly look at the bill and realise how much of a saving I would have made with their buy one get one free. But there’s a time and a place for a BOGOF, and stood in a queue with a bored 4 and 8 year old, in a busy chemists on a Saturday afternoon, is not one of them. Not when you’re buying those. You know - them. For that.
Do One Thing Well
on Sep 09 in Advertising, Digital, Strategy tagged by Peter Blackman
“Times are tough. Marketing budgets are squeezed. Marketing departments are shrinking. While online media options are increasing, and offline media is evolving. The result?
Fear Of Missing Out. The monstrous spectre of FOMO stalks the marketing land, terrorising marketers into thinking that their brands must have be ‘across’ all media.
FOMO produces what we laughably call ‘integrated campaigns’ featuring abandoned twitter feeds, neglected facebook pages, quick and dirty, cheap and nasty radio campaigns, print work with it’ll do photography and copy.
So here’s a thought. Just do #1 thing well. Embrace the idea that brands can be successful through telling the consumer one thing. In one media.
Using examples from all over the world, and from diverse brands and media, Giles Davis and Peter Blackman will demonstrate the power of doing just one thing really well.”
Ok, so that was the official sales pitch for an event that I’m going to be speaking at in October. Why should you come?
Here’s an additional piece of copy from an e mail I sent to someone about it….
“This is a manifesto presentation, and as such, is not a sales pitch for either of us. Rather we’re trying to stop charlatans and salesman fleecing clients for budget when the brand would be better served by doing one thing well, not trying to stretch itself across every media platform.
For we believe that ubiquity does not necessarily generate success - that exclusivity of media channel can do that just as well.
That a false friendliness has become the default position of insecure brands and their owners or managers - and a return is needed to single minded focus, do one thing well, and talk about it in a confident way .
We can show using our own experience on famous, successful brands how:
- global brands have been built through single minded proposition and ruthless exploitation of one, single media
- and that though the media environment has fragmented, brands can, and should still do this.
- because it delivers success - be that ROI or other measures.
Basically, Giles and I have been lucky enough to have been trained and worked at agencies where strategic and media neutrality were sacrosanct. Where the start point was ‘what does the brand want / need to achieve?’ and then look to develop a strategy accordingly. We’ve both been increasingly frustrated by seeing brands pursue a weak willed (and minded) approach to their relationship with the consumer. All that seems to matter these days is to cosy up to consumers on social media, taking care not to stand for anything that might risk offending anyone. Or to spread campaign blandness in more traditional media - never mind what you say, as long as you say it in a faux sub-Innocent drinks ‘hey, shucks we’re real people’ tone of voice.
Man up BRANDS!”
Never ask a question if you don’t know the answer.
on Sep 09 in Frivolity, Random tagged by Peter BlackmanIt’s a famous legal expression. Never ask a question if you don’t know the answer. Why? Well, in a courtroom cross examination, the last thing you want to be doing is experimenting. It’s safer to avoid the question than to chance that the answer will harm your case.
The same is true in advertising. I’m looking at a piece of print from a new business prospect. It says:
‘Who has time to go the gym anymore?’
Now the answers to that are myriad. From ‘Well, actually I do’ to “I know what you mean, but I make time’. From ‘I tried a gym once, you won’t get me there again’ to ‘I’ve never been to a gym, I find the whole idea of them repugnant’. Only a very small section of the audience might respond with the answer that the client wants. No, I’m not saying what that is….
Asking open questions of consumers is fraught with danger for brands. If you’re having to ask the consumer what you stand for, or what your consumer insight should be, then at least do it in a research environment, not in public media.
I suppose some social media consultants might argue that simply getting consumers discussing your brand with you is ‘valuable’ and ‘building a dialogue’, but from my point of view it just means that the PR or journalist sat at home in his underpants running your twitter and facebook is simply chatting to people who won’t ever buy your brand.
No, if you must ask questions, better to make them closed. Ones which you know the answer to, and which if the consumer answers yes to, immediately creates a desire in them to want to know more. As the people at The Fast Show so memorably asked…
“Do you like cheese?”
“Do you like peas?”
“Then you’ll love new cheesy peas!”
The Tomorrow’s World Problem
on Sep 06 in Random tagged by Peter BlackmanThe technology now exists to change the way that you change your ways in almost every and anyway imaginable.
All of which means that this - this here - is going to be big. Huge.
It’s going to revolution-arise the market. Become something like a phenomenon. For it’s a truly unique fusion of new and old. It’s the end for shoes / soft drinks / sourdough bread, as we know them.
Yes, we’re in another new business meeting, hearing about the new fangled and spangled thingimmyjig.
Don’t quote me on this
on Sep 06 in Random tagged by Peter BlackmanQuotations are rubbish. You can quote me on that. Quotation websites, generators, lists, automated tweets, Linkedin updates - they’re strangling the internet, wrapping their stiff little choking fingers around spontaneity and wit and squeezing tight and trite.
What’s more, as we become contemptuous of the best of them through familiarity, so the quotation makers seek out more and more obscure examples to keep themselves in business. Where once we were quoted Winston Churchill or Sun Tzu, it’s now Simon Cowell or T’Pau.
Of course the reality is that all this rather pathetic late night anger (time now, 01.24) is simply because I’ve always been rather rubbish at quotations. Especially when it comes to the work environment. An English literature degree has left me with passages of Keats and Shakespeare (to name but two) that I can recite, but I soon learnt as a grad trainee that the client does not want their briefing document described as ‘the weariness, the fever and the fret’, nor does your account director want to hear ‘I have of late but wherefore I know not–lost all my mirth” when he asks how your day is going.
Other than literature, all that I have to offer on the quotation front is an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Airplane! movies, Blazing Saddles, and Black Adder series 1-4. These are as problematic and dangerous as the pieces of literature that pop into my head. Such as when someone says something as innocuous as ‘Any questions?’ I always feel a powerful urge to ask “What’s the fastest land mammal? Should I fake my orgasms?” (Airplane 1) or if someone asks ‘Is that a good sign?’ and I respond ‘It does the job’ (Airplane 2). Both of these I have said out loud, to people who have not the slightest idea what I am talking about.
So I don’t quote anymore. My view on quotations is very much that delivered to Howard Johnson in this scene from Blazing Saddles.
“Nietzsche says out of chaos comes order”
“Oh blow it out of your ass Howard”