Brand Bullshit Week

An up and down week for brand bullshit this week. On the upside, Bob Hoffman takes the brand bullshitters to task in two excellent consecutive posts, the second of which brilliantly eviscerates Kevin Roberts' complete misunderstanding of what has made Apple successful. On the downside, we find a national newspaper mindlessly regurgitating a thinly-veiled agency promotion in the guise of misguided brand-nonsense survey. There's so much wrong with that survey, the premise behind it, and the assertions made on the back of it, it could easily absorb most of my day pulling it apart. So I won't. But here are just three quick bullet points:

- The whole premise of people 'loving' or 'hating' brands, and that in turn influencing their buying behaviour, is completely misguided. It's this very start point that's leading to so much bullshit and wasted money in advertising. If you are tempted to disagree with this point (and I suspect many in advertising and marketing might) why not treat yourself to a little read of some of Professor Byron Sharp's work.

- Conflating political parties and consumer brands is fucking nuts. Idiotic. Thinking of political parties as brands is the kind of shit that has got politics into the horrible state that it's in. They are ideologies, the approaches of which, people can genuinely (and violently) agree or disagree with. The idea that people have the same kind of relationship with political parties as they do with a brand of sandwich spread is beyond fantasy. This idea that 'everything is a brand' and everything a brand problem, is a moronic plague on our times.

- Let's just take the headline 'hated brand' (not including political parties) - Marmite. For christ's sake, do these people understand nothing? At least Marmite themselves, and their agency thankfully understand people's relationship with their product. The publishers of this survey clearly don't. People's 'relationship' (if you'll excuse the word) with Marmite is with the spread, the product, Marmite. Not the brand. Some people like the taste of it, some people dislike the taste of it. I really dislike it (I'd be in the 'hate' part of Marmite's excellent advertising slogan), I feel neither here or there about the 'brand'. In fact I don't mind it. They appear to know their product, and their advertising normally has charm and wit, and doesn't treat me like a moron. I'm fine with the 'brand' Marmite. I will never buy the product however, because I don't like it.

I'm going to stop myself there for my own sanity (and I have work to do). All I will say is, if you're a business owner or a marketing person, and your agency thinks that people's buying behaviour is influenced by their attitude towards your brand, and their solution is (inevitably) some brand advertising - for the love of god, get yourself a new agency, pronto.

Wednesday Double Dose Of Fail

Part One: Apostrophe carnage…

Part Two: Spoken word digital bullshit poetry…

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.

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.

Horsing Around

Deliberate, or not?

HORRIBLE SEVERED HAND? Er, no...

Is this a still from a particularly sunny remake of The Addams Family? No, it's a shoddy bit of photoshop in the Victoria's Secret catalogue, as found in this cracking blog dedicated to revealing photoshop blunders like the one above, and worse. Imagine being the poor geezer who was completely photoshopped out apart from his hand.

A cautionary tale for the digital age...

Hidden within this piece in this morning's Metro, lurks a cautionary note for everyone who uses the internet. In a nutshell, the story is about a 'wheeler dealer' who bought 25 animal figurines from India on ebay to sell them on for a profit. However, when the animals arrive - he realises they are in fact LIFESIZE figurines. So now he can't move in his home because it is stuffed with 25 life-size porcelain exotic animals. That's basically the tale. However, when asked about his mistake, the man explains: "I never thought they would be this big. When I looked at the 2D pictures on the internet they looked so much smaller". And there, dear reader is the thing to learn from this sorry tale. Note: THINGS IN PICTURES ON THE INTERNET ARE NOT NECESSARILY LIFESIZE. If you are looking for a house online - the houses you are looking at are not miniature houses for little ant-people, likewise cars on the auto-trader website are not tiny cars that would be impossible to drive. They are in fact pictures of things much larger in real life. Stay alert out there people.