Older but no wiser?

A questionnaire landed in my letterbox yesterday, from the local council. They are looking to improve the offer for "older citizens" in our town.

There are questions about mobility (or lack thereof), whether I'd want to live in a care home, whether I attend tea dances for seniors and whether I have an internet connection.

I have a strong desire to write "I'M NOT THAT OLD!" all over it.

It seems I've been put in a box (yet again) and it's reminded me of some new start-ups I've observed in the last few weeks.

First and fearless is FEARLESS. An agency that believes creativity is ageless and promotes that belief with a provocative, badass/punk attitude.

On the either side of the pond is London agency Ancient & Modern - proudly proclaiming that they're "the oldest advertising agency in London" and championing care, craft and ideas rather than quick hits and performance marketing. The attitude (and experience) here draws on the golden age of UK long-copy and TV ads of the 70s and 80s.

Personally, I find the look and attitude of these two new agencies very appealing.

But I'm not sure what I'd think as an ambitious young marketing manager - or whether I'd know what "Ancient & Modern" referred to.

Another approach is to focus less on the demographic profile of the agency founders and more on the opportunity that's up for grabs - the huge discrepancy between the wealth/income that people over 50 enjoy and the minuscule % of the marketing budget that goes their way.

That's the angle the new consultancy Flipside are taking - which is seems a wise move to me.

And yes, full disclosure, I do indeed have a personal connection to the agency ;)

The constancy of change

Just before Christmas, I commented on a post by Paul Feldwick, of The Anatomy of Humbug fame.  He'd compared two quotes about young people and advertising, over four decades apart:

Audiences these days, especially younger millennials, are super adept at seeing through cheap efforts to sell to them. If brands want to engage they need to be authentic and subtle.
Andrew Mole writing in Campaign Sept 2016

The under-30 generation loathes sham and hypocrisy... ‘tell it like it is’ is the touchstone.... more wit, honesty, verve, self-deprecation and irreverence.
Lee Adler writing in Business Horizons, February 1970

Can you spot the difference?

As I was in the midst of the annual deluge of innovation and trend reports, almost all of which start with some commentary about the "pace of change," I asked Paul whether he knew of any quotes from way back then about the extraordinary pace of change. He pointed me in the direction of this:

Whang! Bang! Clangety-clang! Talk about the tempo of today - John Smith knows it well. Day after day it whirs continuously in his brain, his blood, his very soul.

You can read the rest of A.B. Carson's 1928 description of an ad-man here.

There's a certain amount of arrogance in thinking that we live in times of greater change than ever before. But even the ancient Greeks knew that the only constant in life is change. I should think John Smith and his colleagues back in 1928 believed that the the electric, jazz world of the 1920s was "peak change" or whatever expression they used. 

As I read yet again about autonomous this or that, gameifying whatever, cryptocurrencies, smart cities, extended reality, voice technology, facial recognition, artificial intelligence and all the rest, the real world outside continues to confound the shiny new world of the future where everything works on demand. 

Maybe it's a fall of snow that makes everything grind to a halt. Maybe it's artificial stupidity instead of artificial intelligence. Things don't work, things get broken, unpredictable stuff happens.

Annoying, yes, but charming too, in the way that perfection lacks soul.

OK, time to scurry off to catch that train.

Octogenarian Flaneuse

I do love a work of fiction about advertising and ad people, and recently enjoyed Kathleen Rooney's Lillian Boxfish takes a Walk. Before I get onto my review, the way I came upon this novel is also worth a mention. It was recommended by my long-lost pen pal from the US, who used the wonders of technology to seek me out and renew our correspondence after a gap of decades. One of the nicest surprises of the last year or so for me! Anyway, that's a whole other story.

The fictional Lillian Boxfish describes her career thus:

I wanted there to be something to do in life besides mate and reproduce and die, and advertising was that, or it was for a long while.

And here's what I thought of the story:

'Before Mad Men (and Woman), there was Lillian Boxfish, or in real life, Margaret Fishback, the 'world's highest-paid female advertising copywriter' in the 1930s. This book is somewhere between fact and fiction, taking the poetry and advertisements written by Margaret Fishback, plus some of the details of her career and private life, and weaving a fictional character, the sparky and spunky Lillian Boxfish, around them.

Being a fan of walking around cities and having worked in the advertising industry, I was charmed by the premise of this book, in which the elderly but sprightly Lillian takes a walk (in her mink coat) around New York on New Year's Eve, 1984, conversing with the various characters she meets while reflecting on her colourful life. She's a wonderful character, witty and acerbic, and it made a change to have to look up quite a few words in the dictionary while reading. Lillian remarks on how her long-copy ads, often in the form of verse, respected the intelligence of the reader, and I did wonder what she would have made of some of the dumbed-down advertising of today.

The book captures the sights, smells and sounds of Manhattan from the Jazz Age right through to the 1980s beautifully - the fire escapes, warehouses, smell of burnt toast, Italian restaurants - as well as the characters: not just the ad men and women, but taxi drivers, barmen, street gangs and shopkeepers.

*Slight spoiler alert* I was slightly disappointed with the last part of the story, which started to feel a little phoney and stretched credibility somewhat. For those who have read the book, I'm referring to what felt like a sequence out of 'Crocodile Dundee' which grated a little.

Despite that, I thoroughly enjoyed Lillian's reflections and observations on life, and the insight into advertising, writing and life.'

Mad women

Throughout my whole career in advertising - which now spans 4 decades (!) - debates come around again and again with the regularity of theories of 'How Advertising Works.' The 'Women in Advertising' debate is one such - not just the portrayal of women in ads, but the status of women in the industry.

The Kevin Roberts debacle this summer stirred the debate again, and got me thinking about my experience as a woman and a mother in the industry. Maybe it's because I am a bit longer in the tooth than the average in what is a notoriously 'young' industry, or maybe people have short memories, but I notice that the players in each new wave of the debate seem to think they're the first to raise the subject.

For example, there a well-reasoned and thoughtful article this week in Campaign by Nicola Kemp, but at some point it references 'Back in 2014, when the conversation about the lack of women in senior positions was just getting started.'

In fact, while I was at Saatchis, in 1990, our then Head of Planning, Marilyn Baxter, was commissioned by the IPA to undertake a study as to why so few women were in top management roles in ad agencies:

I remember the study highlighting the woeful lack of women generally in UK creative departments, which was related to the extreme laddish/macho culture of the time. Ten years later, Debbie Klein updated the study. In 2000, her findings were rather more positive. Women in advertising were optimistic about opportunities for the future. Women made up half of ad agency staff, and compared to FTSE 100 companies, were four times as likely to reach a board position.

But since then, I've found references to reports that suggest that, although the 50:50 split of employees is there, the % of women in senior management is only creeping up slowly - 20% in 2009, 22.4% in 2011 and 25% in 2014.

The Nicola Kemp article rightly focusses on motherhood and paints a picture familiar to many women in advertising. All is well and good until you have children. Unless you are extremely lucky to work for an enlightened agency, or you take the decision to leave the upbringing of your children to your partner, or maybe a series of nannies, you are likely to meet what's described as  'toxic environment.'

And what's particularly alarming for agencies is that client companies are far more on the ball when it comes to flexibility for working parents. 

I don't like to be cynical, but I do wonder if, as long as agencies keep up their 'working relatively young (cheap) people all hours of the day and night to keep the client happy' business model, things will not change for mums in advertising.

And the agencies will miss out on a wealth of insight and wisdom - and potentially great creative ideas.

Hooray for Humbug!

I have lost track of how many discussions, arguments and debates I have had about how advertising works. How many articles, papers, blog posts and books I've read. How many talks, lectures and seminars I've been to. And at the end of it, there is no Holy Grail.

A breakthrough moment came to me a few years into my career when the agency Hall and Partners leapt into the UK market research scene with an MRS paper, a philosophy and methodology that seemed eminently sensible to me: advertising works in ways that may well be mysterious, but are certainly various. It can work through the mind, or at least rational thought (Persuasion), or through the emotions (Involvement) or through the senses (Salience). I've blogged about this here.

I've just finished Paul Feldwick's excellent book, which I mentioned in my last post, The Anatomy of Humbug. I had a similar feeling of a breakthrough on reading this - it's a review of advertising practitioner (rather than academic) thought from the 19th century onwards. Six ways in which advertising probably works (which are not mutually exclusive) are outlined. Please note, however, that Mr Feldwick mentions that six is simply a convenient number - these are in no way 'The Six Definitive Ways In Which Advertising Works.'

They include our old friends Salesmanship, Seduction and Salience, which correspond approximately to the three ways outlined by Hall & Partners. Then Mr Feldwick adds Social Connection, Spin and Showbiz.

The 'schools of thought' are illustrated by quotes and anecdotes from ad men and researchers through the ages, some I'd heard of (Bernbach, Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves, Stephen King, Ernest Dichter and showman P.T.Barnum) and others that I hadn't, who I now feel compelled to read up on ( Lasker, Hopkins, Starch, Bernays). At last, after nearly three decades in advertising, I know what 'Starch' and 'DAGMAR' refer to!

The book is refreshing to read - intelligent, witty, incisive and opinionated in a good way - a long way from the standard business book blah.  I liked the way that the book ends with 'Showmanship.' How often have you thought, or said, after all the posturing and pontificating and over-intellectualising - come on, it's only advertising!

I suspect that many of us are happy to be suckers. We know the rules of the game. We know about hype, but do we really care as long as we get value for money? To me, 'Showmanship' is a bit like 'Salience' - it's an immediate appeal to the senses, instant gratification, and not to be analysed or taken too seriously.

As another (fictional) 19th century showman (Mr Sleary, the circus owner in Dickens' Hard Times) said:

People must be entertained.

And maybe it's brands that should be doing that.

Small ads and Big Ideas

I read an article in the FT magazine from Ian Leslie recently, entitled How the Man Men lost the plot which rung a few bells for me. It starts off with ad man Jeff Goodby's observation that cabbies used to know about our ads and what we did, when the Saatchis were as big as Persil and 'we made famous stuff, and we made stuff famous.' The author poses the question: has the ad industry, through 'embracing the digital gospel... lost sight of what made it valuable in the first place?'

The internet has changed how the game is played, but certain rules still seem to hold. Mass marketing works. Fame works. Emotion works. And so does a long-term coherence in the sum total of what a brand says and does. All of these work to inject the brand into what the author calls 'the cultural bloodstream' - so that those cabbies know about the ads.

Reading through, it did strike me that in the past, we also had a mass of cheap, throwaway ads that even a member of the general public could afford and compose themselves. They were called small ads. But in those days, small ads didn't frighten the industry, neither did we try and use them for our clients, except in cases where we were being clever and disruptive and ironic. We concentrated on our skills, our talents, what we knew how to do.

We had big ideas, we used big, bold media that we knew would generate emotion and build fame.

Surely there is a parallel here?