The Sell! Sell! Blog

In your capable hands, Mr Warhol.

44 years ago Mick Jagger wrote the best ever creative brief.

Spotted on Circle's blog and shamelessly pilfered.

Lait D'Homme

"The Manly Chocolate Milk For Men With Added Man".

We like this campaign for WingCo. A lot.

They've obviously had a lot of fun with it which is always good to see.

Thumbs up and hats off to everyone involved at CHI and Arla.

This idea can run and run and run.

"Vampire Squid WPP wins holding company of the year at Cannes"

Heartfelt congratulations go out to Martin Sorrell on WPP’s “stunning performance” in winning the prestigious “holding company of the year” for the third year running at Cannes.

Of all the awards at Cannes, this surely is the pinnacle, the piece de resistance, the crème de la crème, the dog’s bollocks.

Or is all just a load of bollocks?

I know that the advertising world is ruled by the shape shifting lizards from holding companies, but it seems so ridiculous that such a category like “holding company of the year” exists in the first place.

It seems such a narrow, unrepresentative and self-serving definition of creativity to have an entirely separate category solely for holding companies to battle it out for such an arbitrary and meaningless title.

It can’t be anything to do with money can it?

I guess the Cannes organisers have figured out that they can generate piles of cash from entries from cash rich holding companies if they have a special crown they dish out every year.

Looking at this in the cold light of day it just seems odd and plain wrong.

It’s like there being a separate title for most awarded film studio at the Oscars that only the four biggest studios can enter. Or having an award at the Grammy’s that only the multinational record labels can enter.

Might be worth the Cannes committee considering other arbitrary awards for other sub-groups of agencies as an additional money-spinning exercise.

How about an award for “most creative company of the year with more than two vowels in its name” or “most creative company who have laid off more than 15% of its staff this year” or “most creative company with more than 6 million air miles”. I’m sure these random categories would encourage even more entries from WPP [although they’d probably struggle to win the first category, they’d argue it on a technicality that WPP originally stood for Wire & Plastic Products which is chock full of vowels].

Putting aside the distorted reality that Cannes promotes by pandering to the big networks, the most frightening thing about “holding company of the year” is that it perpetuates the dangerous myth that the big networks truly value creativity and are driven to produce the best possible work for all of their clients.

Awards schemes like Cannes are purely a smokescreen that the behemoth bean-counters can hide behind and use to pretend to journalists, clients and employees that creativity, rather than filthy lucre, is their reason for being.

Now, I’m not saying that making a profit isn’t important. It is.

And I’m not saying that networks like WPP aren’t capable of making great work. They are. [Grey’s work for the British Heart Foundation being a case in point].

The issue is more about the hyperbolic public myth-making that creativity is at the forefront of these business when the opposite is often true.

The campaigns that win awards for holding companies at Cannes aren’t the tip of the iceberg. They may well be great pieces of creativity in their own right but they are often isolated examples and they do not accurately represent the real quality of the creative output of those agencies.

One of our mantras here is “it’s not how good the best of your work is, it’s how good the rest of your work is”.

The depth of high quality creative work that an agency produces across the board for all its clients is the only thing that should matter. Not its ability to pull a rabbit out of the hat for the occasional client now and again.

I know enough unhappy people working their socks off at agencies owned by holding companies to support the view that ultimately it is the God of the stockmarket and shareholders who are being put first rather than outstanding creative work.

The two things shouldn’t necessarily be mutually exclusive but they often are. Phrases like “doing what the client says to keep them happy” and “only doing it for the money” are regularly bandied around by holding company staffers. This kind of culture and environment is never conducive to doing great work. And clients often suffer too as internal agendas and pressure to increase fees/generate more “revenue opportunities” can result in the promotion of nest-feathering activity that benefits an agency but is not necessarily in a client’s best interests.

Bob Hoffman’s already magnificently articulated the damage that holding companies are doing to the business here and here.

It’s high time this point of view got wider exposure but with things like Sorrell’s “WPP’s stunning Cannes performance” dominating the headlines, a balanced picture is unlikely to emerge.

In an attempt to redress the balance in our own small way, I leave you with this quotation. Originally coined by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone to describe Goldman Sachs, I think it could equally be applied to WPP…

A great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Harsh? Not Harsh Enough? You decide. Answers on a postcard.

Fuck 'Em

I find the whole Cannes ad festival quite unsavoury. It's just old order bullshit, establishment advertising clowns patting each other on the back while they rack up the gongs for the Gunn report. It's as far away from the real business of advertising as I can imagine. However, one thing of interest that did find its way back from the international festival of adwank was this quote from the great George Lois...

“Guys come to me and say, 'It must have been great back then, when clients would accept good work.' And I say, 'What the fuck are you talking about?' "You have to remember that it's not enough to have great talent, you have to force clients to accept the work. The minute you start doing bad work because it's 'forced on you', then you ain't worth shit. "At the end of the day, it's about finding clients who let you do great work. And if they don't let you do great work, fuck 'em.”

You've got to love George eh?

Mooooo-te point

In the Suri tribe in Ethiopia - women stretch their lips by inserting progressively larger clay plates. Many people have theories as to why this practise started - but now it is a way to measure a ladies worth: the larger the plate, the more cattle must be given to her family as compensation when she marries.

Smaller plates tend to get 20 or so cows - with the larger fetching in excess of 60.

So, applying the same logic - how many cows does a brand get if someone likes their Facebook page?

Sell! Sell! Gets Serious With ProSpreads

ProSpreads is a company with a serious product aimed at a very small but high-worth audience. They sit at the very top of the spread betting market, providing a professional-level platform for experienced, professional traders.

The most compelling part of what their platform offers is direct access to market prices - different to most spread betting platforms which create their own 'fake' market. We decided to make this the focus of the first wave of advertising, and did so by posing a negative question - Are you spread betting without direct market access? - it's a technique in this case used to nudge traders to critically assess the shortfalls of the spread betting platforms they are currently using, compared to the platforms they use every day to trade. It's often more powerful to suggest is someone is being denied something, and than to simply offer it. ProSpreads are the only platform that can then fulfil the desire for direct access.

We created very pithy print advertising targeting directly through City AM and financial publications, supported by tactically bought outdoor around the city. We developed a stripped-back look and a direct tone, with a heavy black border on all print work for impact – deliberately quite the opposite of the current fashion for full-bleed, touchy-feely photography and language favoured by financial brands.

This was supported by a series of short TV commercials running on the Bloomberg channel (which almost all traders have running throughout the day in their offices). The ads show simple sequences where a trader or city type mysteriously finds, or is handed by a stranger, a simple card, letter-pressed with the question Are you spread betting without direct market access?

Simultaneously, we used the actors from the TV commercials to actually go around the city, discretely handing the very same cards to traders and city types. Bringing to life, in person, what the trader had seen on TV.

The launch was followed up by another targeted press ad about direct market access, and subsequently by executions aimed at arcade traders encouraging them to use the ProSpreads platform, which focus on the lack of the compromises they normally have to suffer when using a spread betting platform.