New Ad for Patagonia Wetsuits

Lovely new print ad from Patagonia.

I noticed it, I read it. I now know more about wetsuits and what makes their product different, and they seem like they are doing positive things as a company.

If ever I need a wetsuit, I might buy one of theirs.







Stop Press: Peroni pull "Hat" campaign

They've replaced it with this corker.


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.

Forest Gump Title Sequence

As if it were gone done and did by Wes Anderson. (A Wes Anderson that hired bad actors, wasn't very good at lighting and didn't pay too much attention to colour grading.) Nevertheless it's still pretty funny.

Forrest Gump by Wes Anderson from Louis Paquet on Vimeo.


Sorry David.

Is it too much to ask for people to trust that David Bowie knows how to put a good tune together?

Here is a beautiful film for Samsung and the Association of Surfing Professionals by 72 and Sunny - not sure its a great ad, or even an ad atall - but it's pretty. It makes me think surfing is cool. I still think Samsung make gimicky shit.

This 'whispy-bint-with-plinky-plonky-piano-cover-version-shortcut-to-poigniancy' malarkey is a plague on Advertising.

Mute the first, play the second.





Has advertising got an attitude problem?

The nice people at Harpers Wine & Spirit Review  published this piece online last Friday. We thought it was worth giving it a bit more bit oxygen here on our home turf.


There is a prevailing school of thought in the advertising business that to change consumer behaviour you first need to change consumer attitudes [and by consumer behaviour we mean getting people to buy stuff].

This is baloney.

In reality, it is actual usage and consumption that is the thing that ultimately drives and shapes somebody’s attitude to a brand.

Consumers know much more about brands that they buy and use more frequently. Hence, attitudes and brand beliefs tend to reflect behavioural loyalty and purchasing patterns rather than operating as the things that stimulate them.

It’s a classic case of confusing cause with effect.

It’s not “I buy it because I like the brand”.

More “I like the brand because I buy it”

Unlike the chicken and egg, we know what came first. And it wasn’t a change in attitudes.

And it’s this mistake that’s leading agencies to produce a certain kind of advertising that treats consumers as feelgood-chasing, mouth-breathing morons who are bereft of any logic and reason when it comes to making choices about brands.

That can’t be a good thing, can it?

The belief that you must create an emotional bond with an audience to get them to love your brand and connect with them before they can consider buying seems to be treated like gospel.

The obsession that you need to reposition an audience’s mind before you can move them closer to buying a product seems to be treated like some kind of immutable law.

Why is this?

Well, for one thing, this kind of advertising is in fashion right now and is the only kind of advertising that most agencies want to make.

They cherry-pick whatever findings they want to from the world of behavioural science and cognitive psychology to justify their approach to creativity.

This usually ends up with fluffy, happy-clappy advertising desperate to own some kind of emotional territory.

This kind of advertising comes from their over-riding obsession with focusing exclusively on generating brand love to create a connection with an audience, rather than any overt focus on why the product might actually be of help, use or benefit.

And therein lies the problem.

Most agencies have forgotten what the point of advertising is.

Selling is now a dirty word in Adland.

If you’re not using advertising to give more people a reason to buy your product more often, then you’re not using advertising properly.

Despite this seeming like incontestable and uncontroversial common sense, this point of view is regarded as heresy by many.

The insanity loop continues as agencies continue to exclusively focus on what can they say about a brand to get people to like it rather than asking what can they say about a product to get people to buy it.

And so out come the kittens to supposedly manipulate the emotions of an audience lacking the intelligence and free will to make any kind of purchasing decision based on reasoning or logic.

There used to be a deal with consumers.

We knew we were using advertising to sell something.
They knew we were using advertising to sell something.

They were prepared to give us their precious time and attention, and maybe would even consider to be persuaded to buy that thing, if we entertained them with our message.

We would feature the product at the heart of this message and show in some way how it might help them or how they might benefit from having that in their life in some small way.

There was honesty, truth, integrity and transparency in this deal.
Everyone knew where they stood. Nobody was hiding anything.

Nowadays, it seems that that this deal no longer stands.

It’s de riguer to not even bother featuring a client’s product in a commercial. A logo bolted on to the end of some disingenuous, generic piece of film that could be for anything will suffice, thank you very much.

The post-rationalisation going on from Kahneman’s System Thinking that mistakenly assumes there is no place for rational or conscious decision-making has turned advertising into an industry of confidence tricksters.

Despite the proclamations of companies being organised to be completely customer-centric, nobody seems to be asking what the customer might actually want from advertising or how it might actually help them.

It seems that it is acceptable business to even disguise what is being advertised by not just plonking a logo at the end of an ad. It’s hardly surprising that we find ourselves in a situation where trust is eroded between clients and agencies [as well as between advertisers and consumers].

The tenure of the average relationship has shrunk to just under three years. Is it really any wonder when agencies steadfastly refuse to embrace the fact that they are actually in the business of selling?

Agencies are now a safe haven for pseudo-scientists, cod psychologists and wannabe sociologists all seduced by the intellectual stimulus provided by trying to get people to think something rather than trying to get people to do something.

It’s also much, much easier to get swept along by the allure of producing the kind of advertising that springs from the objective of changing attitudes and owning emotions. It’s also much, much easier to produce than a compelling piece of advertising that is actually true to the product.

Advertising an attitude. It’s the “just add water” method of creative development. Get yourself a Thesaurus, scour the zeigeist for a cultural trend, stroke your chin and think deep about some inner-directed values that your audience would aspire to and bingo you’ll have a list of meaningless adjectives to write ads about.

Integrity, depth of character, free-spirited, adventure, playfulness, happiness, fulfillment, freedom, escape. The list goes on and on.

Agencies will claim that advertising an attitude or an emotion that your brand can own is essential to help differentiation. All products are the same, we live in a parity world, so the argument goes.

Their party line is that it’s the emotional battleground is where brands fight it all out. It’s what people feel that’s all-important, not what they think.

We live in an age where companies spend millions of pounds just broadcasting brand positionings in the vain hope that their target audience will identify and connect with them. Agencies are brainwashing clients that there is no need to impart any relevant or useful information about the product as people just aren’t creatures of reason.

This obsession with chasing some kind of brand love is rarely reciprocated from a consumer perspective. They just don’t care about brands anywhere near as much as people who work in advertising agencies and marketing departments. And anyway, it’s bloody difficult for anyone to love a brand they haven’t actually consumed [also, isn’t it a pretty big degradation of the word love?].

It’s also eminently possible to buy a product without actually liking the brand.

I’m an o2 customer. I’ve got a tariff that seems fair enough.  Price-wise and service-wise, I think they’re OK. I do not, however, want to “Be More Dog”.

I like a nice pint of Guinness. Especially from establishments where I know it’s going to be poured well in a proper glass and left to settle properly. When I’m drinking it I do not consider it to signal to surrounding pub clientele that I am in fact “Made of More”.

I have never wanted any kind of emotional relationship with my bank and never will. So, my money is safe with my existing provider and I refused to be swayed by Santander’s charms and their claim that they are “A Bank For Your Ideas”.

In Byron Sharp’s book How Brands Grow, he demonstrates that most brand attitudes are very weak and rarely recalled. From extensive research he concludes that the influence of attitudes on behaviour is astonishingly weak while the influence of behaviour on attitude is very strong.  Sharp found that when asking regular brand buyers about their feelings towards a brand only 10% see it as different or unique. So, even people who purchase and use a brand regularly struggle to see it as being truly different.

Most buying decisions are made from what is a relatively narrow consideration set for any category. In Sharp’s view, the real battle of brands is not differentiation, it is to get into this consideration set by making advertising that is distinctive and consistent.

This leads to a very different model of advertising.

A model that recognises that consumers are not as controlled and dominated by their emotions as agencies like to think.  A model that credits consumers with intelligence and recognises that they are capable of making rational decisions, much more than they’re given credit for.

Brand associations are important but they should be based on characteristics that are important and relevant to the category and product.

However, there’s a current line of fashionable thinking permeating Adland that seems to misinterpret Sharp’s work and the findings of neuroscience to blanketly and blindly dismiss any kind of role for the product in helping to build memory structures that relate to decision-making.

People often tend to make out that featuring the product at the heart of the advertising idea makes you Rosser Reeves incarnate. That’s just lazy thinking because it doesn’t automatically mean you have to have rational USP based communication if your advertising makes the product the star of the show.

It’s not as black and white as product = bad, emotions = good. Great advertising should do both.

It is possible to put the product at the heart of an advertising idea and generate important emotional associations at the same time.

Changing consumer behaviour without first changing attitudes isn’t some kind of rare event. By and large, it’s how the world works.

Showing a product in a great light can make a difference. Advertising can work —that is, to stimulate sales—by presenting motivating news or associations about a product.

It’s very dangerous to assume that there are any laws of advertising.

But it’s an even more dangerous assumption that advertising should work to change attitudes first rather than work to change behaviour.


Pursue that assumption at your peril.

SAAQ – Cable

Feast your peepholes on this drink driving ad from Quebec.

Simple idea, nicely done (with the exception of the over explanatory end line).

Drink driving is a mug's game.

SAAQ - Cable from La Cavalerie on Vimeo.

Hovis, Use Your Loaf.

One of the main stories on Marketing Week today was that Hovis are 'fostering a more lifestyle-oriented positioning through social media to elevate bread from being a carrier of fillings to the "wholesome" role it plays in peoples lives'

Elevate bread? Elevate bread?

Jesus wept.

Putting aside the serious question as to how this revelation actually constitutes news in one of the country's foremost marketing publications, this seems like just another depressing example of a client being taken on a social media wild goose chase.

You can read the whole article here if you can be bothered but the gist is that posts like 'Mum's dinnertime rules [No mobile phones at the dinner table!]' are hoped to illicit a stronger emotional and nostalgic reaction from fans, pushing them to share these posts with others.

To put it into some sort of context, Hovis currently has the grand total of 2,808 followers on Twitter.
Now that's not exactly a massive audience or demographic when viewed in pure propensity-to-purchase-bread terms is it?.

I'm sure every one one of those followers is no doubt hooked on the fun and wholesome chat lighting up their social media world but in the grand scheme of things this activity is little more than dust in the wind.

God knows how much time, effort and money must have gone into this re-positioning charade, but preaching to the converted to get them to share more posts really won't move the needle when it comes to impacting on things that matter like, er, sales.

Hovis is a great brand with a history of great advertising. But taking this kind of misplaced, desperate approach seriously undermines their credibility.

I'd wager that there is no shortage of better, more relevant, interesting 'lifestyle-oriented content' on this thing called the internet. Does anybody that commissioned this activity really, really believe in the heart of hearts that people will seek out and gravitate towards Hovis as an authority in this area.

It's bread for fuck's sake. Not Time Out.

In the grand scheme of all the many things in people's lives, it's a low interest category.

No amount of well-written Facebook Posts and 140 character tweets is ever going to change the fact that most people don't really give that much of a shit about bread.

I give you, Exhibit A, the fiasco of the unsuccessful and long-since binned Kingsmill Confessions campaign as prima facie evidence that people do not want to engage or interact with a company that makes things you can make sandwiches out of.

Just because you can have a social media presence, doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

If I was them, I'd ditch all this nonsense and just put the money into sampling instead.

Who knows? Getting people to actually try the product might just be more commercially successful than getting people to share 'wholesome' content with each other.

Owen Silverwood + BMW 4 Series

Photography fuel for my morning trouser explosion - by Owen Silverwood and BMW.

http://www.eastphotographic.com/artists/owensilverwood/bmw/




On-Brand

This Russell Brand clip chipped up on Ben Kay's blog.

 


Brand makes some really good points here regarding advertising today. I know many a creative or planner will be screaming "he just doesn't get it". Well I think he kind of does.

As mood films become advertising more and more all ads look more and more alike.
And  people in advertising will work harder and harder to explain that these emotional pieces work best, even if the consumer can't remember a) who it was for and b) why they should buy the stuff.  

I'm not sure what to say about Bob Dylan in the Chrysler ads. Maybe the answer is blowing about somewhere.

But then Russell has made some ads before for HP and I don't think they are too bad actually. Not earth shattering but in the same way Chrysler has the legend Dylan in them that will help re-call so HP had Brand to make their ad memorable. The ads are product demos really, what's so wrong with that? As long as they are done in an entertaining and cheeky way,as Brand does best.

Advertising Needs A Big Slap Across The Face With A Large, Wet Fish

This is adapted from a comment I left on Martin Weigel's brilliant blog in reply to another commenter...

Advertising needs a big slap across the face with a large, wet fish.

We have become confused about what 'craft' or creativity is in advertising.

Advertising creative craft at its best isn't merely styling, or thinking up a funny or entertaining thing with the product somehow involved – yes they are things that many amateurs or "kids in Australia" [reference to a Doritos ad] can do.

But that isn't good advertising creative craft, and probably that Doritos ad isn't really good advertising, it's just funny, or entertaining.

Proper, great, advertising creative craft is about searching for that thing in the product or service that will mean something to the consumer, it is about understanding what the consumer wants, what will motivate them, understand how people work, how they decide, and putting all this together in compelling ways that show the consumer what's in for them, in ways that are engaging, interesting, unexpected, relevant, intelligent and memorable, that are robust and enduring, that build companies and grow brands over time by getting more people to buy more product or service more often.

That is advertising creativity. It is only because we underestimate and misunderstand what real advertising creativity is, that we think "anyone can do it".

Proper advertising creativity isn't just creativity.

But the industry has downgraded a whole generation of creatives to merely being being stylists and producers of branded entertainment.

Advertising will not get itself out of the confusing fug it is in until we reverse that trend and remember what proper advertising creative craft is, and understand and re-engage with the value it can give to business, be proud and confident about it, and put that thing back in the centre of the business.

Thinner Than A Slice Of Cake Served In A Yorkshire Teashop

Paddy McGuinness has never struck me as a man burdened by an overflow of good material. And to his credit, he doesn't appear to let that worry him. After all, he's managed to get through seven (yes, seven) series of Take Me Out with a single joke.

But this video reveals something new. A chink in the armour of Paddy's previously impenetrable front. There is definitely something in the eyes that gives away that he's thinking what we're thinking - namely that the material in this is thinner than a slice of cake served in a Yorkshire teashop.

So this is Branded Content, is it? The brave new world of advertising. The thing that people like The Drum, the Sunday Sport of advertising news, keep crapping on about.

 

And the worst thing is, there's more of it. What were they thinking?

Here is the news again, for all of those brand loonies, brand managers and me-too marketing idiots: people don't care. They don't care about your brand, they don't care about what you care about, and they certainly don't give two shits about your crappy debate.

Wearable Technology Is Pants

Wearable Technology. Wearable Technology. Wearable Technology.

We're going to be seeing and hearing a lot more of those words in the coming months. Especially now that's there's even a specially dedicated Wearable Technology store on Amazon where you can buy revolutionary things like watches, pedometers and a smart sports vest that can monitor the amount of cheese you eat.

I'll reserve judgement on whether this will be the next big thing but I can't help feeling that Microsoft are one step ahead of the game with their "phone charging pants".

Yes, folks. They've invented what you've always wanted. A pair of trousers that can charge your phone.

God knows how much time and money they must have put into this project. I'm sure it'll be seeing a payback some time in 2675.

This wasn't some kind of spoof story on The Onion or one of those irritating corporate April Fool's Day jokes. It was actually written up as a proper story here on Forbes who've clearly got their finger on the pulse on current trends in the world of business/got nothing better to write about.

Now, I'm very well aware of the pitfalls of asking people what they want from technology because they just don't know. The Henry Ford quote of "If I'd have asked people what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse" being a neat summation of this case in point.

However, smart people at the forefront of technology do sometimes get things wrong.

Watch this space.

And keep your eyes out for Nokia's heat sensitive socks that can translate menus into Klingon.

Jimmy Chin

North Face + National Geographic Photographer Jimmy Chin is one of the most accomplished and sought after in his field. He is also incredibly humble. A rare and inspiring combination of qualities.

Listening to him talk about Photography is so refreshing, and a giant leap from the over sincere wannabe-profound bullshit that gets frequently spouted nowadays.










World Cup Stamps



This collection of stamps created for the World Cup is a lovely little project by Maan Studio. 









Now That's Not What I Call Music - Volume 1

Apparently, in the late '80's, a UK record company once put together a compilation of the worst demo tracks they had ever been sent.

Worth a listen for its hilariously sheer awfulness.

You'll never think of Nothing Compares 2 U in the same way again. This version will forever banish Sinead O'Connor from your mind.

Brace your ears.

Via Robert Popper or is it just him pissing around?