BA: A quantity of quality

 

When I worked on the BA account, decades ago, the passenger survey struck me as one of the top reasons why quant surveys got a bad name. How could the categories of business or leisure really sum up the multiplicity of reasons for flying? Even (from memory) the third alternative, which may have been added later - visiting friends and family - didn’t add much. Well, that could cover anything from a wild and exotic party to your granny’s funeral.

I’ve been a bit sniffy about BA advertising in recent years, but since October last year, I’m sniffing no more. The brand launched their new campaign (by Uncommon Creative Studios) in October 2022. It’s based on the brand essence of “A British Original” - which is pretty neat, by the way, as the phrase can be applied to passengers, staff, journeys, innovations and the rest. The idea acknowledges that there are far, far more travel purposes than those described in the two boxes “business” and “leisure”.

This campaign is remarkable in its variety - 512 print, digital and outdoor executions plus numerous second spots. And, simultaneously, its coherence around one strong creative idea. None of the visual old or new cliches associated with airlines. Just great copywriting and clever art direction/use of media. The idea used contextual OOH - buses, tube stations - and also adapted to the weather, to the time of day, to news events. There were no surprises when it won the outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes.

 

This month sees an expansion of the campaign in OOH, print and social media with some clever contextual jiggery-pokery. From boat sails and jumpers ...

to cheese ...

And finally, BA isn’t the only big old mass-market brand getting it right with its advertising. I’m also a great fan of this cheerful follow-up to “Arches” for McDonalds.

Find your originality - then use it!

Grotto or grotty?

RETROWURST is taking a break this month because lazy little me didn’t write any articles in December back in the 2000s as I was probably too busy dashing and blitzing around doing Christmas shopping. But the series will be back in 2022.

Yes, Christmas shopping. There are reminders on the radio - have we bought all our presents yet? I have bought one, and was quite proud of having already done so in November before I heard all those smug so-and-sos with only one still left to buy. 

I am not relishing the thought. Somehow the magic of Christmas past and the twinkling welcome of Santa’s grotto is lost in a mire of masks, pandemics and it’s-all-easier-online-but-bad-conscience-haunting-me.

I’m not sure if the experience was ever that magical, anyway. My only memory of Santa’s grotto in Harvey’s department store in Camberley was being given an empty box. I think amends were made, but still.

But we can dream, and take a shopping trip through the streets, windows, lights and paper catalogues of the past:

There’s shopping in style, even when you’re on public transport. Just don’t spill mulled wine on those collars or cuffs:

Christmas didn’t have to be gaudy. Post-war shortages aside, this was a world where black and white was the norm, certainly as far as brand communications and broadcast media/entertainment went:

Hamleys was the mecca of tinsel and toytown. The 1926 ad offers a number of most suitable gifts for children including “The Crown Tavern”, a pup named “Looney” and what looks like an interrogation device. 60 years later, the store tried a "Teddy Bears’ Picnic meets 333 Men in a Boat” approach:

Does anyone have time or inclination in these pandemic days to linger looking at shop windows? Even war didn’t stop Selfridges in 1916:

This picture, of 1960s Regent Street, seems to sum up my earliest memories. A quick blast of Nina & Frederik, and I’m back there.

Underground Art

I'm not too sure how much of the "communications content" that I've been involved in over the last 30 years will be around in 80 or 90 years, if any of it. So let me take the opportunity of showing you some of my all-time favourite Christmas ads. They're all London Underground posters from the 1920s and 1930s - a less throwaway age - which I am sure did their job in their time, as well as brightening up people's days as they struggled from Hamleys to Fortnum & Mason. Above is a 1925 poster by Richard T.Cooper.

Clients had important messages back in those days too, of course, but no-one seems to have been insisting that the visual communicated the message as well as the copy. These examples are from Austin Cooper, 1923 and Horace Taylor, 1924.

Coca Cola didn't have the monopoly on the red-suited Father Christmas in the 1930s. This 1934 poster is from an artist named Anna Katrina Zinkeisen

And finally, from 1932, Dudley Dyer's Merry Christmas all around the town!