So what is the latest craza in Japan? Check this out!
Yes you’ve guessed right, a BRA for men! Hey I have no problem with that, whatever makes you happy that’s what I say!
But what made me really laugh was the marketing argument used by the sales representative from Wishroom when on TV asked about the product and its purpose.
“It’s there to give support” he answered.…
No my little chumps, not the kind of support needed by us bra wearing women, but apparently LIFE support!
“Wearing one is a way to avoid stress as the men feel more supported when they do so” says the owner of Wishroom in an article by Nouvelles Tendances and Technologies http://www.nouvo.ch/s-019
I mean really?!!! I have heard a lot of hilarious marketing arguments in my years, hell I am even the author of some of them…but this one beats them all!
However, having said what I have just said, (or giggled it) what do I know about not wearing one! Maybe I would feel a little mentally unsupported if I didn’t! I’ll give it a go next time I hang in my flat on a Sunday and let you know!
On the 26th of June the all inspiring Jonathan MacDonald described (in his blog post ‘Engagement? Yeah, We Do That Shiz’ http://www.jonathanmacdonald.com/?p=3550) an attempt to engage with an audience through a potentially clever technology, but a poorly planned and therefore a (probably) ineffectual engagement campaign.
The post made me ask myself a few questions…
I’m not sure how in the advertising industry we get ourselves in the situation where a technology drives the creative idea…or as in this case where there seem to be a technology and no real creative idea. Is it because we don’t understand technology but feel that we should ‘be doing some of that stuff’? Is it because technology companies are quick to give away free trials, and rather than putting in the time and effort to do something good with that free trial, Agencies make something just sort of happen between producing two 30 second ads? Both are wrong on so many levels:
- Doing something because it’s free is not the right reason to do anything.
- Doing it badly because it is free is even worse (if you are going to do something you may as well do it well!).
- Nothing is free…staff time costs, pissing people off that you are trying to engage with costs, misusing a brand costs!
- Not taking the opportunity to do your best and to learn from such an initiative is outright insane and idiotic!!!
These mistakes don’t just affect your agency, or the people you annoy, but they can also damage the progress of the communication industry. A lack of ROI on these activities will inevitably stop brands from trying again (well at least with you). Baring in mind that whether we like it or not this is the way the industry is going…would you not be better off guiding it, would you not be better of learning as quickly as possible, would you not be better of passing that learning on to your clients, in addition to benefiting from first mover advantage?
I have often said that it’s not an advertising agency’s job to know about, or understand, every technology out there. This is however not the same as saying that it’s not our job to understand technology, what it can do for us, and most importantly how people relate to, and interact with it.
Despite the fact that creative, media and technology is converging (this by the day), there is still an us versus them mentality We occasionally involve a technology company in our solutions, but mainly so we can tick the ‘yeah we do that kind of stuff’ box, but we don’t really cooperate with them…nor do we see them as an equal partner.
I think this is a dangerous strategy. Remember how the power used to be with advertising agencies and not media companies? Remember how almost from one day to the next this swung 180 degrees in favour of media companies? I would not put it past technology companies to get it right, with this I mean collecting data, understanding people and building relationships directly with them and brands, (it’s not like this is not already happening – think Google) and then what is left for the advertising agency but to become a production house!?
I know you could argue that many of them are already just that…..
I was glad to receive my ‘please feel free to check in’ reminder e-mail from Swissair this morning…knowing me I would have forgotten….but I’m not surprised or particularly grateful…it’s sort of expected from an airline now a days.
What I also expect is to, from the e-mail, be able to click on a link that gets me directly to, not only check in on-line, but check-in on line for Liri Andersson. But no, instead I’m taken to their website (despite the fact that I clicked on a link in an e-mail which was ‘personally’ sent to me), and have to fill in all my personal details (again).
Why I wonder, surely my booking reference should be enough?
But no, so details I fill in…and then I’m asked for my e-booking reference…no clue what that is…all I remember getting is a booking reference. I desperately look through my mails for the e-ticket confirmation. When I finally find it I can’t find an e-booking reference on the e-ticket, all I can find is a ticket number…
Surely this must be it, so I decide to use that nr…but clearly it’s not what Swissair was looking for…
At this stage I’m forced to find my wallet and my VISA card (which involved me getting up from my incredibly comfy sofa…me not happy).
(Note since writing this I realised that I never specified country of destination. This may be the reason why I could not get in, I dont think so, but if the case should this not have been highlighted to me?)
I’m finally in!!! (although at this stage there are about 100 windows open on my screen as each click takes me to a new window).
I’m given my pre-assigned seat…a seat that can only be changed once I have accepted the one assigned to me …what is the point in this extra step I wonder?
I accept my seat, a new window opens, and I can now change my seat….
I’m tired of this process and I’m seriously starting to regret not getting up 20 minutes earlier tomorrow morning to check in at the airport….(I’m sure this is not the feeling Swissair wanted me to have).
A process that should have taken a minute ended up taking ten, and being as confusing and frustrating as possible. Lucky for them I had a vested interest in getting it done or I would have quit ages ago!
Not a great way to start my journey with Swissair. Not only did they miss out on a chance to wow me, but they did not even live up to my basic expectations. Expectations created by other airlines, actually by anyone online with a booking system.
There is really no excuse in today’s competitive market to not even match competition when it comes to customer experience… or anything else for that matter!!! But they took it a step further; they proved to be really annoying!!!
I sincerely hope their pilots and plane engineers are better trained than their on-line customer experience designers!!!
…and actually doing something about that problem, rather than addressing it at meetings and conferences, is a must in order to survive!!!
I’m sure everyone in media and advertising agrees with what I’ve just said…yet the meetings continue, the same conferences still take place, the same slides are shown and the same conclusions are made. After the conferences, or meetings, the same people get together to open countless bottles of wine, or to drink countless pints of beer… this to keep the old media (no pun intended) spirit going, or I wonder sometime if it is to drown their sorrows?!!!
So to the ones that still need a wake up call in order to accept that they have a problem…(as in today, not tomorrow), here are some excellent points made by Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.
- The global advertising economy has been permanently “reset” at a lower level.
“I don’t think we are in a recession, I think we have reset,” Steve Ballmer said. “A recession implies recovery [to pre-recession levels] and for planning purposes I don’t think we will. We have reset and won’t rebound and re-grow.”
- Media companies should not plan for revenues to bounce back to pre-recession levels.
- Traditional broadcast and print media will have to plan business models around a smaller share of the advertising market, as revenues continue to move to digital outlets.
- Newspaper publishers have failed to generate new revenues from the digital opportunity.
- He said that within 10 years all traditional content will be digital and yet, Google aside, publishers are failing to generate serious digital revenues.
(Source: guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 June 2009)
Of one thing I’m sure and that is that many of these points will appear on numerous power points around the country. I’m however less convinced that any new business models will appear on those slides any time soon!
If you need further proof of the fact that we ain’t in Kansas no more… Ballmer, ‘a soft ware company guy’ was just named media person of the year at the Cannes Advertising festival! I bid you farewell….while hoping that your reaction to that is “and why not?”
I’m not going to enter the age-old “how many ads we are exposed to a day” debate, suffice to say, a hell of a lot, too much, as in total over exposure and 100% wallpaper effect much of the time. Add to that all the other stimuli thrown at us such as street musicians and entertainers, shop windows, car radios blaring, etc etc etc…no wonder many of us walk around like zombies!
Basically it takes a lot in this world for people to stand up and notice, and even more so to stop and pay attention. Today in Canary Warf I saw something that did both those things (in a grand scale if I may say so!).
Edgar Müller (as spelt on sign on location) or Edgar Mueller (as spelt on his site) took his 3D street art to Canary Warf – Suit City.
I don’t know about you but I found this impossible to ignore!!!
Between us, I did not exactly have to queue to get a glimpse as I was one of the few people interested in Edgar’s artistic expression. Does this mean that it takes a lot more than a huge cave appearing where only pavement has been before for the City boys to stand up and take notice? Or maybe they are afraid to look, just in case their bonuses are at the bottom of it?!!!!
Check out Edgar’s site it is quite amazing! http://www.metanamorph.com/
It’s that time again, that horrid time when I have to pick a new pair of glasses. There is only one retail experience that fills me with more dread and that is buying a new bikini! This is probably why I have been putting it of for months. However, after having spent most of the morning trying to decipher what my mails on my phone were actually saying, I had to come to the painful conclusion that despite the glorious weather I had to deal with the eyeglasses situation!
Off I went to Mallon & Taub on Marylebone High Street where I to my surprise spent a glorious hour with Tom the optician, but even more so Tom the eyeglasses aficionado! Wow, I have rarely seen someone speak about something with so much passion, not even about cheese, baguette and wine (and I’m half French)!
During my time in the shop I was educated on facial shapes, position of noses, the latest fashion in frames (not only styles but the actual year the style was first created), the direction the industry is going in, the technological development taking place, the fact that handmade frames are coming back, and that people laid off six years ago when cheep frames made by fashion designers took over the market are now being hired back, and how these frame manufactures will only sell their products to real opticians as a point of differentiation…I mean I could go on!!!
This coupled with the fact that each design looked amazing, and were individually picked out with me in mind (and not just randomly in the hope that one of them would fit) made the whole experience anything but the painful one I had expected. Au contraire, I was enthused and motivated (and a bit envious of his passion if I can be honest)!!!
So how much was this new face going to cost me? Apparently somewhere around £500 pounds. I have in the last couple of days made a promise to a very special person (you know who you are ) to stick to a reasonable budget. So with this in mind I walked to David Clulow on Wigmore Street.
I spent the next 15 minutes in a very clinical, personality less environment, staring at frames made by Fashion Designers who I can only guess know very little about the subject (or so I had recently been told). No special hand made frames in site and I found myself wondering, is this a real optician? (Tom your knowledge clearly made an impact on me) But more importantly I spent those 15 minutes on my own. No one seemed interested in helping me, not to mention educate or engage me! I tried several pairs of glasses, they all looked wrong (no wonder, what do I know about facial shapes and position of noses?).
There was another significant difference between the two and that was in the price. My guesstimate is that a pair of glasses here would cost me around £250.
As I walked out I made a mental calculation…a great retail experience clearly has a price tag. It’s apparently a minimum of £250 extra, or to put it in perspective, double the price! Not a bad business model by anyone’s standard!!!
I have always wondered how employees are supposed to be creative working for organisations that make them sit in front of a screen all day, preferably at some grey desk (of which there are 100’s), five days a week…9 to 5…. I understand that flexi time, allowing employees to work from home, or finding ways to decrease the dependency on computers can be seen by many as not only impossible to manage, but to achieve.
Since I have never been the CEO of a major corporation I will not challenge this opinion (having said this I will argue that, at the very least, buying a pot of paint, a few random chairs and some non corporate desk lamps should not be an impossibility – just as a start!).
This morning I was reminded of an old idea I used to advocate, the concept of organisations setting aside an ‘arts budget’, a budget aimed at exposing employees to the arts. Basically the idea is to in-source what I believe is a key ingredient to creativity – being shown something beautiful and inspiring and different through an artist’s passion, and most importantly something totally unrelated to business and every day work.
Why? It’s simple…to foster creativity and hence innovation.
This morning I found myself staring at my computer, stuck…I had nothing to say, no ideas, and there was really nothing I wanted to do. Probably a case of the Monday morning blues, which I have been known to cure with a massive Monday morning treble shot of Espresso!
Minutes later I find myself in a café, My Apple Mac and a coffee in front of me, and not exactly sure how, in the middle of a debate about Shakespeare with the man next to me (Ralph). Between us Shakespeare never rocked my boat, and I would never choose to go and see one of his plays… but this is the point… Ralph’s passion about the subject energised and engaged me, and when he recited Macbeth and Cleopatra with such intensity and love for the arts, Shakespeare all of a sudden started to mean something to me, and I felt all of my energy coming back.
D. Goleman, P. Kaufman were clearly right in ‘The Art of Creativity’ when they wrote ‘When the creative spirit stirs, it animates a style of being: a lifetime filled with the desire to innovate, to explore new ways of doing things, to bring dreams of reality’. My creative spirit was clearly stirred because I ended up cracking a work related problem that has been bothering me for ever– I’m not saying the next Google will come out of the idea I came up with, but whatever will is guaranteed better than if I had stayed staring at my screen.
So if an ‘arts budget’ could create one experience like this per person per month, and we were to multiply it with the total number of people in an organisation only God knows how many ideas could be generated (I know you will need to see some fool proof ROI – topic for another time)…..
However, we may have to send people to see a play though as I doubt Ralph is in a position to help. It was only half way through my four hours of working I realised that Mr Shakespeare was in fact Ralph Fiennes.
I hope he forgives me for not having thanked him for the inspiration he brought the world through Schindler’s List. The Constant Gardener, and the English Patient!!!!
From where I’m sitting you could think that disruption is all around us, and constant!!! Everyone wants to do it, are in the middle of doing it, or have already done it (some over and over again)!
I sat in two different meetings today, both with the same agenda, the desire to disrupt. One, a social application looking to disrupt…well to be honest I’m not entirely sure what….and the other a government body looking to disrupt their own organisation (sounds like a paradox to me).
Earlier this week I went to the Mobile Advertising UK event in London where again the word disruption was heavily used.
But is this really the case, is the world full of disruption? I mean really? If this was the case we would all suffer from disruption fatigue, this driven by the fact that industries would come and go on a monthly/yearly basis, technology would be relevant for a nano second (well that one is not entirely untrue), and we would all have to change jobs every week just to keep up with the change!
Since this is not the case something else must be going on….
12 years ago Christensen brought the word disruption, or rather disruptive technologies, to the mass market in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. It is a must read for anyone claiming to be involved in anything disruptive.
If you learn only one thing from reading this book it should be that disruption is not synonymous with innovation, it’s not synonymous with change, or with new product development. Those things are part of every day business, things you are expected to do…and really the basics of staying competitive, or even in business.
But because we live in a (business) world handicapped by marketing myopia, filled with such incredible fear of failure and apathy, any type of innovation, any type of change, hell in some cases any type of action (just having done something) gets elevated to the status of a disruptive act!
The word disruption comes from Latin disruptus, past participle of disrumpere, from dis- + rumpere to break. It is synonymous to burst; rupture, split up; rend asunder, and finally to the world turmoil! When you disrupt, or are disrupted, the paradigm shift is so big that it can’t be missed. Ask GE Medical and Kodak if they noticed Stentor, a tiny medical software company I worked with in the early 2000, who very much disrupted the mentioned incumbent’s medical diagnostics business! I bet you their answer would be ‘Hell yeah!”.
We all know these type of paradigm shifts are rare. So what is going on, why does everyone think they are disrupting or about to?
It’s simple. We are clearly obsessed with saying (words) rather than doing (action). The business world is like a series of buzzwords. We have gone from emotional intelligence to Just In Time (JIT) to re-engineering to… with very little actual change. (Feel free to look through 15 years of The Harvard Business Review, and you will be able to map out the buzzword of the month step by step).
So despite the fact that change and innovation is one of the hardest things to do, and happens rarely, it’s no longer enough …why…because the word is not exciting anymore. And when a word goes out of fashion, what do we do? We simply bring in another one. We no longer want to innovate we want to disrupt…well at least we say that we do (because if we knew what it actually meant, and what it would take to achieve, most of us would stay home the ‘day’ it is supposed to happen)!
So to these disruption crazy companies I say, let’s be really boring, old fashioned, unexciting! Let’s focus all our thoughts and energy on coming up with new products and services that people value, and subsequently on bringing them into the market place successfully.
Basically let’s leave buzzwords out of business and stick to the knitting of getting every day business right… just for a little while…now that would be disruptive!
I don’t know about you but for a while I have been asking myself if there is any point in reading The Guardian anymore? Today I thanked my lucky star for choosing to still do so. If I hadn’t I would not have been blessed with the knowledge of how to kill a fly (Courtesy Obama showing off his fly-swatting ability on a CNBC interview).
This may not sound like a big deal to you, but if you had been to my flat you would know why this is making me very happy! Due to its position under the roof the flat gets very hot and is therefore, yes you’ve got it, a fly magnet!!!! I have therefore, for a few weeks, been poisoning everyone around me by spraying Nippon fly killer spray all over the flat.
But due to page two of The Guardian, and Obama’s strategic abilities, I now know that it is possible to kill a fly with, yes only my bare hands!!!!
But the good news don’t end here, the article even comes with it’s own ‘how to kill a fly’ user manual!
The relief I feel from the knowledge that I will finally be able to breathe freely in my flat again stops me from asking any deep philosophical questions such as “What the heck is an allegedly respectable paper doing dedicating the whole of page two to such a story?” I thought this is what we had the old reliable Metro for!
I’m all for having a sense of humour, but something tells me that prime newspaper real estate like page two would not be used by the editorial team for a bit of a laugh, and that this is in fact seen by them as journalism.
So if I was not sitting here looking forward to no longer having to die from fly killer spray poisoning, I would ask some simple questions – “If The Guardian is going to take Metro’s place, then what is the future for Metro (and by that rational what is the point in commuting in the morning?!)?”, and also “What is the future for the media industry as a whole if this is how seriously The Guardian takes educating it’s audience, who we know primarily works in the media industry?!!!”
P.S Having read about this all day and seen it on the internet, I realize it is not just The Guardian who has gone mad but the entire world press. Can’t wait for the 21.00 o’clock news!!!!
It is a tough day when you have to rely on a regulatory body’s understanding of creative advertising work to point out to you that what you thought were an ad spoof is actually a real FT ad! (see previous blog entry).
So I will save the FT brand manager some time and slap myself on the hand. This while thanking my wonderful friend at Ofcom for discretely pointing this out to me and also for sending me the continuation of what is clearly an ad campaign.
Well done Mr Brand Manager, you got my attention!!!
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(see previous blog entry).