Showing posts with label Nonsense.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nonsense.. Show all posts

Let Us Help You Define Your Brand Porpoise

If there's one thing we've learned about marketing and advertising over the last few years, it's that there are no shades of grey or nuances of approach when it comes to marketing – at any one time there is only one right way to do things, and everything else is old-fashioned, or dying. Now, this blind absolutism may seem extremely stupid, but hey, who are we to judge? Once a new fad starts to snowball, everyone wants to get in on the act. Pages and pages of copy are written and published daily by the marketing press on the fad, blog posts from eminent marketing twonks, tweets and hashtags aplently follow, plus, obviously a couple of people do speaking tours, and write books about it. Maybe you'll even get a whole conference dedicated to it, with people tweeting the sage advice about the fad. The aim, obviously being to work towards the moment when every brand in the world is doing exactly the same thing all the time. What a utopia!

Well, recently we have cottoned on to the fact that it is now impossible to be a brand in 2015 without having a porpoise. Yes, forget having a good product that people might want to buy, or a better service than your competitor. Forget solving a problem for the customer, in fact fire all of your product development staff, your engineers, fuck it, lay off the entire workforce – all you need to succeed is a porpoise. And that porpoise doesn't even have to be related to what your product or service is – you just need any old porpoise.

But why take a chance with your porpoise, when we can help you define your perfect brand porpoise with our unique Porpoise Definement Methodologizer (TM obviously)? We can find the perfect porpoise for your brand. But don't take our word for it – here are a few we've already done (everyone loves a case study don't they? Even if they might have been perfectly relevant solutions for the particular brand in question, but of fuck-all relevance to anyone else – if it worked for one client once, well surely it's right for every client in every category, right? That's the beauty of blind absolutism utopia!).

Here's the brand porpoise we recently found for airbnb...


It's name is Cuddles. Since we found airbnb's porpoise, things have really taken off for them. They don't have to worry about boring things like cost and convenience, or choice. They have cuddles.

Here's another brand porpoise, this time one we found for uber-cool taxi-driver disemploymentizing service Uber...


Uber's brand porpoise is a friendly little porpoise called Flipper. Now don't write in saying that Flipper is an unimaginative name – that just shows how little you understand about blind absolutism utopia. The point isn't to be original, the point is to just have a porpoise. And what a beauty it is!

Now don't be fooled into thinking that a brand porpoise is just for fancy-crazy new tech startups. No. Remember. It is right for everyone. Every brand. To demonstrate this, here are two brand porpoises (yes, that is the correct plural, sadly) that we found for functional, supermarket products. Here you can see them side-by-side, as you might in any supermarket aisle...


Now, before you write in and say Hold on, won't this be a tad confusing for the poor old punter? Two completely different brands, with quite different products that each have different functional qualities having what appear to be quite similar porpoises? We'll stop you there. Maybe you just don't get it yet? It doesn't matter. Every brand, to be successful these days, needs a porpoise. Don't argue. It says so in that marketing article online, and in that new book by that trendy bloke, and in loads of tweets and conference speeches. However, obviously defining or finding your brand porpoise isn't easy. Obviously. Obviously it takes a LOT of work, charts, presentations, worshops, away-days, idea-storms and brainsplooges to define a brand porpoise – all of which we can charge you through the nose for help you with.

And it pays to go to the experts. Take this for example...


To the untrained eye, that might look like a potential brand porpoise. But no. That is just a common-or-garden aquatic mammal. Don't make this mistake or your brand is destined to languish in the backwaters of the brand ocean for the next century. Come to us and we'll burn through hundreds of costly man-hours over the next twelve to eighteen months which our holding company accountants will give us hefty bonuses for help you work out exactly the right brand porpoise you your brand. And we'll maintain and feed it...


This is a picture of us feeding Coco-Cola's brand porpoise. Their porpoise is called Happiness. A bit twee, granted, but you know, when they're paying you this much it works, it works, right? This is where having an expert agency on-hand is vital – because a lot of people think that brand porpoises eat fish. In fact, a brand porpoise feeds on delusion. We have to keep them well-fed with delusion, with a bit of healthy misinterpretation on the side. We do a lot of research to make sure we have all the delusion we need to keep your brand porpoise looking great. Some silly people used to think that Coca-Cola's massive success was due to them being available on every street corner, constantly advertised to reinforce association with refreshment and taste, highly distinctive and having worked its way into becoming a product intertwined with American popular culture. But they could not be more wrong. Obviously their success is based on Happiness, their friendly brand porpoise.

To help people understand, we have – obviously – created a diagram: The Anatomy Of A Brand Porpoise...


Please feel free to use this in your next meeting.
Don't get left behind.
Don't be a dinosaur.
Don't be different to any other brand.
Don't get caught with some stinky relevant dolphin.

Get yourself a brand porpoise.

We can help.

TellUsYourStoryItis

One of the most wretched diseases of current advertising and marketing is the highly contagious TellUsYourStoryItis.

This is the condition where deluded marketers and advertising types expect normal people to share their story or experiences of using the product - or even some tenuously related activity.

Suffice it to say that these things are generally extremely unsuccessful. That's because they are based on a deluded notion – that normal people care as much about brands and products as marketing types do.

Well sorry to say, they don't. The notion of people having an emotional attachment to brands that influences their buying decisions has been largely disproved.

But this doesn't seem to stop marketers and agencies from imagining that people have nothing better to do than share their story about bleach or apples.

Some mischievous soul has put together a tumblr of these bonkers campaigns – Tell Us Your Story – have a look through if want a laugh at someone else's expense – or if you're ever tempted to do one of these campaigns yourself treat it as a warning.

See also Brian's Open Letter To All Of Advertising And Marketing

Cannes Lions Advertising Own Goal

As any long-time reader of this blog will be aware, I'm no great fan of the awards schemes that have attached themselves like parasites to the ad business. Mostly I choose to ignore them completely, life is much simpler, and nicer that way.

But it's hard to ignore this, because it's a full-page ad in the most prominent ad industry magazine. What on earth were Cannes Lions thinking when they approved and ran this ad?

The lame, poorly stereotyped depiction of creatives does them no favours. But worse, what made them think it was appropriate to make a joke about making creatives redundant? I wonder if any of the people involved in the creation, making or approval of this has ever been around a company that is making redundancies? If you have, you'll know that it's a deeply unpleasant experience. And while it's true that some people say redundancy is the best thing that happened to me, for many it's upsetting and stressful and leaves them in a difficult position.

One of the great modern problems of advertising as an industry is its seemingly insatiable appetite for taking on hopeful young creatives on very low salaries, giving them little training, and encouraging them to work themselves into the ground before spitting them out the other end jobless.

This is a quite unpleasant ad, moronic and misguided – it makes Cannes Lions appear to be shameless money-grubbers who don't really give a shit about advertising or the people who work in it. Whether that's true, you can decide for yourself. Exhibit A...


Here Is Your New Ad Campaign

We are nothing if not thoughtful here at Sell! Towers. We'd like to save our advertising brothers and sisters from the effort of going through endless strategy presentations, rounds of development and research groups. So we've made this handy template for the new campaign that you're working on, to save you the trouble. Now the whole of the advertising industry can fuck off down the pub...





Advertising 2015: phoning it in, one cute animal at a time...

The Truth Is Stranger Than Satire

You know when the ad business has lost the plot when it's really difficult to tell whether something is truth or satire…



From the guys who brought you CatVertising…

Animals In Advertising Resource

Hello there kind reader! To help our advertising brothers and sisters in the pursuit of excellence, we thought it would be useful to put together a list of animals that have been used in advertising, and the brands and products they've been used to promote. I'm sure we've got a couple wrong, and forgotten many - so please let us know in the comments and we'll add to and amend the list...

SSE - Orangutan
PG Tips - Chimp
Cadburys - Gorilla
ITV digital - Monkey
Coco pops - Monkey, Alligator
Mr Kipling - Elephant
Money Supermarket - Cat, Elephant
Bristgas - Cat and Mouse
Diet Coke - Cat
Crusha - Cat
Cravendale - Cat
3 - Cat, Horse
McVites - Cat, Owl, Lemur
O2 - Cat, Dog
Walls Sausages - Dog
Andrex - Dog
Dulux - Dog
Churchill - Dog
Taco Bell - Dog
John Smiths - Dog
Tesco - Dog
Ki Ora - Crow, Dog
Thinkbox - Dog, Rabbit
Budweiser - Horse, Toad
Lloyds - Horse
Anchor - Cow
Laughing Cow - Cow
Compare The Market - Meerkat
Sofa Works - Sloth
Asda - Chick
Freedom - Goose
Easyjet - Rabbit
Caramel - Rabbit, Bee
Frosties - Tiger
Esso - Tiger
Google chrome - Squirrel
Schweppes - Jaguar
Cartier - Snow-leopard
Bosch - Tiger
Betfair - Octopus
Freeview - Budgie, Goldfish
Duracell - Rabbit
Guardian - Pig
Co-op - Sheep
Mercedes - Chicken
Geiko - Lizard, Gecko
Lamei - Lamb
Aldi - Mice
Carling Black Label - Squirrel
Barclays - Hamster
Guinness - Fish
Wolf Blass - Eagle
Privatisation of British Gas - Snake
BT - Chameleon
Ibis - Rabbit
Guinness - Snail
Penguin - Penguin
John Lewis - Bear, Hare, Assorted woodland creatures, Penguin
Hofmeister - Bear
John West - Bear
Bounty (kitchen roll) - Bear
Muller Rice - Bear
Coca Cola - Bear (Polar )
Fox's Glacier Mints - Bear (Polar) and Foxes
Cushelle - Bear (Koala )
Fox's - Bear (Panda)
Kit Kat - Bear (Panda)
Kit Kat - Fish
Old Speckled Hen - Fox
Virgin - Bear, Owl
HSBC / First Direct - Duckbilled Platypus, Lizard, Mongoose
Nando's - Ants, Anteater

Emailing the fire brigade...

I know we're supposed to live in an "always-on, real time world" but isn't it rather ludicrous that emails have become the default way of contacting someone with an urgent request rather than speaking to them directly on the telephone?



Wednesday Double Dose Of Fail

Part One: Apostrophe carnage…


Part Two: Spoken word digital bullshit poetry…

Hats off to Peroni




















Looking at this giant poster it's apparent that Peroni have started making hats.

Just the thing to quench one's thirst on these humid and sticky days in the city.

I can just imagine the Powerpoint charts that exist to justify this approach as positioning Peroni as a chic, fashionable and premium lager that appeals to both men and women ['it's a fashion brand not a lager brand...'] but I can't help feeling that they's forgotten the most vital ingredient. The beer.

And they don't seem particularly bothered about emphasising the brand's Italian heritage either [and I'm not talking about the fact that it's most often sold with pizza in a certain high street restaurant chain].

We've banged the drum a lot about the product vs brand confusion that's plaguing modern advertising but plaudits must go to whoever got paid real money for making this campaign without an idea. Must have taken ages in creative development before the Eureka moment happened after they alighted on this scamp in the review session.



















Fair play though, it's a campaign that can run and run as these 'hot off the press' next executions amply demonstrate.




























































































Hats off to everyone involved.

It's Funny Because It's True

Every case study film for everything that won an award in the last five years...

The Car, The CEO, The Chief Engineer And The Marketing Director


The CEO of a well known car brand has called a meeting for their Marketing Director and Chief Engineer. 

CEO - Thanks for coming, I want to discuss with you the growth plans for us, in particular our advertising.

Marketing Director - Cool.

CEO - There seems to be some confusion to what we are about and how we are going to grow sales.

Marketing Director - Really?

Chief Engineer - Yes, if I could jump in here. I read your latest marketing plan and I am confused somewhat as to its goals and its underlying premises.

Marketing Director - Go on.

Chief Engineer - Well, it says here  ‘people buy things emotionally and that consumers in general act without reason and that in a product parity world, the real battleground is over emotional ownership’.

Hang on, I have the plans here. It says ‘we need to own an emotion because this is how people buy. Our goal in the coming years is to build our brand on emotional engagement as people only post rationalise decisions, they don’t actually make their decisions that way’.”

Marketing Director  - That’s right. My plans goes on more explicitly to suggest ‘that emotions of joy, optimism and love are key emotions to people’s decision making processes not reasons based on product attributes or benefits.’.

Chief Engineer - Are people not happy with our cars? What changes should we be making exactly?

Marketing Director  - No you misunderstand me. No need to change the cars at all. The feedback is very good.

Chief Engineer- Hang on a tad, what did the feedback say?

Marketing Director - Well, people say they really like our cars.

Chief Engineer - In what way?

Marketing Director  - You know, the new reversing alert system, auto engine shut off when stopping in traffic and other safety features, blah, blah, blah, but they are just post rationalising their emotional decision making.

CEO - Really, because I’d have thought that would be good news. We had the engineering team working on those things night and day for years. Are you saying that is not really why they bought the car, that these are just post rationalised by people who bought our cars?

Marketing Director - Yes, because when we asked if they’d ever consider buying our cars in the future they said yes, but only 50-55 percent of the time.

Chief Engineer - So we need to keep up or even overtake the competition by developing better cars?

Marketing Director  - No, we need to get them to love the cars, more. To have some brand stickiness.

CEO - How? Wouldn’t we do that by continually increasing the performance of the car in some way be it economy, safety, speed, styling, price and so on?

Chief Engineer - That’s the game, isn’t it? We are continually trying to reduce the tolerances on current parts which decreases costs. Which increases profits by decreasing our production costs and passing some of that saving on to our customers. Or we incorporate new technology to increase performance parameters. Which in turn benefit the customer so they know where their money is going.

Marketing Director  - What the hell is tolerance reduction?

Chief Engineer - Good question. As we get better at making component parts and fitting them together we have less waste.  So the parts last longer and in the production phase we have less waste too.  A certain percentage of parts fail to pass inspection so they have to be scrapped. If a part is scrapped we have wasted time and money.  Tolerance down is quality up and costs down. Therefore profits up. Not just that,  we compete with the competition, if our moving parts last longer, so we can guarantee them for longer.

Marketing Director  - Oh, but nobody knows about that stuff?

CEO - That is what we wanted to talk to you about. People knowing about us, is your job.

Marketing Director  - We can’t go around telling people about that sort of stuff. People don’t care about that sort of dry technical stuff.

Chief Engineer - It’s taken me most of my working life to get our cars to where they are today. I have people working here that could quite easily work at NASA, we file hundreds of patents to maintain an edge, who knows what we can do in the next decade. 

Marketing Director  - Oh, I didn’t know that.

CEO - How comes?

Marketing Director  - Nobody told it to me quite like that before.

CEO - So you’ve never walked around our plant or read our literature?

Marketing Director - Yes I have, but I don’t see what all this has to do with me. I deal with branding.

Chief Engineer and Marketing Director - Really?

Marketing Director  - Listen. I don’t want to get all defensive here, but you just don’t get it. People seek pleasure and or aversion from pain, they don’t consume for the reasons you want them to. We need to emotionally engage their herd mentality, their primitive brains with emotions.

Chief Engineer - Emotions about what?

Marketing Director  - Anything really?

CEO - What.  Anything?

Marketing Director  - Yep, we know that people buy things instinctively,not rationally. Once they feel emotionally engaged with a story that triggers the emotional part of the brain the amygdala they feel more engaged with the brand. They come to love it.

CEO - So what does that mean in terms of our next TV commercial?

Marketing Director  - Advertising needs to be an emotionally engaging story. We have some scamps done. In short it will be a story about a family that are going on holiday and have lost their luggage at the airport.  A man observing their crisis offers them somewhere to stay and drives them to his luxury home in one of our car. It closes with two families sharing a meal together. The strap line will be, Joy is other people.

Chief Engineer- Couldn’t anyone make that ad? Why are they in our car? What model is it for? Is it because of the boot size or the safety features or...?

Marketing Director  - You just dont get it. The consumer doesn’t think like that. And yes it could be for any model. This is brand not product advertising. We are engaging people emotionally. We need to become aligned with Joy. This makes it easy for people to select our cars over others. They'll love our brand.

CEO - So what happens when our competitors jump all over this emotional idea too and start chasing Joy as well?  I mean, what is stopping them?

Marketing Director  - Jesus! Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.

CEO - Seriously. So in the meantime what do I get the engineering and R& D teams to do? Are they wasting their time inventing? Right this moment the R& D team are working on reducing the cylinder capacity and increasing MPG whilst not reducing cruising speed or acceleration. We are still investigating fuel cell technology, driverless cars and much more. Should we stop?

Marketing Director  - Of course not.

CEO - Why not?

Marketing Director - People will love that stuff, makes my job easier too.

Engineer - But you said people don’t buy attributes?  And even though they say favourable things about them your view is that they’re just post rationalising.

Marketing Director - You just don’t get it do you!

CEO - That’s twice you’ve said that. Perhaps it’s time to look in the rear view mirror.

Tiny hamster eating a burrito



Coming to a television screen near you soon. A television advert featuring a hamster eating some small food in an attempt to emotionally engage you with a brand that has sweet FA to do with hamsters, or food, in a vain attempt to imbue their brand with joy, or happiness, or cuteness or something . They'll even make little hamster toys with mini food objects to give away via the social medias and make stupid clothing featuring the tiny hamsters. Probably.

If you liked that, you'll like this one where another little fella is munching on a pizza.

Treating Consumers Like Mouth-Breathing Morons?

It's been said that the current advertising bandwagon for making emotional brand campaigns treats consumers like mouth-breathing morons, incapable of logic or reason, bereft of the ability to make a logical decision, whilst agencies and advertisers dangle shiny trinkets in front of them. Well, I think this new campaign for biscuits puts that idea to rest, once and for all. And, best of all, it's impossible for other brands to copy.


Oh Come On, #SMWLDN, Grow A Pair

If you had too much time on your hands, you might have noticed this tumblr yesterday, taking the piss out of the inane tweets emanating from the Social Media Week London conference.

It's worth a look, because it is funny, and it's funny not least because it's true.

Twitter is plagued by these kind of glib soundbites masquerading as insight - often they are put out into the world as if they were the words of fucking Descartes.

And often they are just thinly veiled sales pitches for what that so-called expert is trying to push at the time.

Even just the idea of a bunch of social media gobshites getting together for a great big talkathon makes me involuntarily clench.

But the spurious outpourings onto twitter are surely the worst examples of how to pollute the medium?

So I was glad to see someone doing a healthy bit of piss-taking.

But then I was befuddled to see one of the conference goers gnashing and wailing about the 'haters'.

I mean, come on. The world needs the checks and balances of piss-taking and satire, to keep people honest.

And let's be honest, the world of marketing needs it more than any other field I can think of.

And within that, the field of 'social media experts' surely must rank pretty close to the top of the bullshit charts?

So suck it up, social media types. And stop the wailing.

Maybe, just maybe, it would be a good time to stop and take a cold, hard look at the things that are being laughed at.

Maybe if you actually took a moment to look at what you're saying from an outside point of view, you might be able to improve the way that you're portraying your business, and your field.

Because more often than not, when someone finds it easy to take the piss.

It's because the subject actually demands the piss being taken out of it.

Exciting Update: While Our Website Is Down...

Thanks to the lovely people at Daisy Group, the infamous Sell! Sell! website has been down since Saturday (more info on how and why below if you're interested*) so for those who might be looking, here's the important info:

Phone: Our main office phone number is 0207 0333 999

Email: You can email doubles [at] sellsell dot co dot uk with any general enquiries.

Work: If you're looking to see some Sell! Sell! work, you can either look on the blog: Sell! Sell! Work, or on Haystack and Creative Brief - on both of which you'll also find company details and other contact information, case studies and stuff.

*Apparently they've had some monumental meltdown on two of their servers, which they claim almost never happens, which meant that not only did ours and a lot of other people's site become internet mincemeat, but somehow the backup also ended up in the same mess. Luckily, being the forward thinking types that we are, we have our own backup. Hopefully, once Daisy have their new servers up and running, the Sell! website will be up and running again sharpish. Obviously, if anyone out there can recommend a very good and reliable alternative to Daisy for hosting a business website, we are all ears.

Are Agencies Attracting and Therefore Increasingly Staffed with The Wrong Kind Of People?

I've been mulling this one over for a while, and a few comments recently on post on this blog, and on Ben's have really made me wonder. Let's give this some context, there is the general feeling that the output of the industry has declined in quality, and alongside this, the relationships between client and agency have shifted. At the same time agencies have become very different places to work, more corporate, more fear, more late work, weekend working, more service culture.

There is a lot of debate about these factors and how they relate to each other, the relative cause and effect and so on.

I have a theory that at least part of this is down to the type of people who work in the industry today, and the type who are increasingly being recruited. Creative departments are almost exclusively staffed by people (mainly white, middle-class males) who went from school, to college, to an advertising course, then into the industry, child-like creatives to who seem happy to be treated like a tame crafter. Planning departments seem to attract and be staffed by scholarly theorists who are "intrigued by the human condition" or some such shite, with very little appetite for getting their hands dirty commercially. And account departments increasingly composed of people who quite like the idea of advertising but lack any discernible skills other than ability to say yes to everything.

People are encouraged to get on, collaborate, and be professional. Those who follow the line are promoted, those who question or make life difficult are cut down. In turn, this cycle encourages those safe types to hire more people like themselves, and foster the same play-it-safe, play-by-the-rules approach.

Who is standing up and standing out? No one, it seems. Just a bunch of boring yes-men too scared of losing their jobs to do anything about it, even if they wanted to.

Agencies, and the advertising industry, used to be defined by the dangerous, maverick thinking and attitudes of their people.

Conversely, these days advertising people seem to have adopted the servile, faux-service industry attitude of the agencies that employ them. Whilst the bean-counters run rough shod over the lot of them.

It's all arse-about-face.

If any of those descriptions above sound like you, maybe you're not actually a victim or symptom of the industry's malaise, but actually part of the problem.

This could have as much to do with the ad industry's decline as anything.

The New Advertising Landscape

Following recent developments, the shape of the advertising industry is pretty easy to navigate for clients...