Ooohs, Ahs and Apple Juice

 

I listened in to a webinar from eat big fish and System1 last week on "The Startling Power of Surprise". Surprise and its use in the world of brands and their communications is something I've often posted about, for example here and here. 

The webinar - and my surprise posts - pick up some big (and maybe unsurprising) themes about surprise:

First of all, the pursuit of seamlessness and consistency (rather than coherence), the predictability inherent in algorithms, the requirement to be formulaic so that you can be found by AI, all leads to a rather unhappy dearth of surprise in our lives.

And then there’s getting the balance right - novelty and the familiar - as mastered by brands like IKEA with just the right mix of innovation and ritual.

And finally, there’s surprise and surprise. What about negative surprise? The word is usually prefixed by nasty/unwelcome/unpleasant in this case, but how do you judge that? Then there are those cognitive dissonance types of surprises where things are so off-kilter/not fitting to the brand where the brain simply switches off and ignores it.

And there’s there’s plain old shock-value, just for the sake of it.

What I found particularly interesting in the webinar was the dictinction between surprise as a little creative flourish/an executional twist ,and surprise as a strategic tool. Adam Morgan calls this the “Oh!” and the “Ohhhh!”.

The long “Ohhhh!” has more lasting effect on the memory - and can reframe the category in people’s minds, or change their relationship with the brand. 

I was surprised recently by the design work by the Stuttgart agency Papa Tom for wildling apple juice spritzer. Most German apple juice/applewein brands tend to use artisanal/homely/countryside/traditional imagery and design, which gets pretty samey, especially once AI is let loose on it. 

But wildling is surprising in its approach - which includes the nettles in the product itself - it looks a touch dangerous, edgy, mysterious. Not something for a kiddies’ birthday party.

Gets a definite “Ohhh!” from me.

   

 

Boy meets girl meet IRL

I've been blathering on about what I call the internot for over eight years on this (ahem!) internet blog.

Sometimes I think it's because I'm old and jaded and view the past through Anglo bubble-gum pink glasses. 

But more and more, I get the feeling it's not just me. From digital detox to anemoia (nostalgia for a time you never knew) to AI vegans, there's a tangible weariness about all things internet.

Boy meets girl meets IRL is a popular theme for ads these days. Here are just three I've seen in the last week:

In the latest duplo ad, boy tries to get girl's attention with various internot devices. Finally, a paper aeroplane made from a duplo wrapper does the trick. 

For the couple in the Dr. Oetker Ristorante ad, "It's a Match" on the first IRL date:

And then there's Deutsche Telekom & iPhone 17 with an ad called "Unique Together":

The message of this one is - the whizz-bang tech of the iPhone and the Telekom network is all fine and dandy - but in the end, nothing beats meeting up IRL in a coffee shop. 

If there's one thing that AI has taught us, it's that you can't fake having lived.

Two-Facebook

 

I have an admission. I still use Facebook, although it's more out of inertia than anything positive relating to the "experience", which is going from bad to worse.

I've a few friends from the 2010s who I still keep in touch with there.

I've got a "Sickly Cakes" album that I like to update.

I'm in a few groups - writers, ex-colleagues, local busybodies - that it's worth keeping up with.

And I have my books page, The Bother in Burmeon & Chums, which has been bumbling along since 2012 and I see no reason to bring it to a halt.

But I may have to. Last week, after posting the gorgeous retro-ads from Punch 1968 here, I thought I'd put them on Facebook, too. It wasn't long before I was given a good ticking-off:

Your Page, The Bother in Burmeon & Chums, didn't follow the rules, so it isn't being suggested to other people at the moment.

Hi Susan,

Your Page or some of its content didn't follow our Recommendations Guidelines. These guidelines determine what content can be recommended to people. To be eligible for recommendations, either fix these issues or request a review.

I started a wild goose-chase around Facebook and ended up not much the wiser about which particular rules hadn't been followed. This shed a little more light on things, but only a sliver:

No humans seem to have been involved in the decision. I'm certainly not guilty of trying to sell weapons, odd kidneys, body parts of protected species. Or depicting graphic violence or pornography.

The closest I come to "promoting the use of certain regulated products" is that my post featured some rather quaint 58-year-old print ads for cigs, booze and razor blades. 

Ho hum.

And I would have forgotten all about it by the next morning had I not received a slew of pushy messages prompting me to make an ad out of the offending post:

Oh, good grief, I thought.

It's rather like those telecoms companies where they're banging on about purpose and sustainability on the one hand and trying to get you to upgrade your tariff with more and more super-mega-giga data volume on the other. 

Maybe it's no wonder that I'm at my happiest living in the past.

 

RETROWURST: Wizard ads, old boy (March 1968)

 

Chocks away and time for a swift flypast of the world of print advertising in the 1960s. Some of my earliest memories of advertising trace back to this era. I've had a delightful trip down memory lane in the pages of Punch, the RAF Fiftieth Birthday Number, dated 13th March 1968.

I'll start with the two best-placed (and most expensive) ads. Back cover and inside front cover. These were the pole positions back in those days. And it's no surprise that they're occupied by two of the brands most associated with pilots and derring-do:

I love the sheer heroic aplomb of these ads. There's a supreme confidence about them, a simple assuredness, rather reflecting the character of the (idealised) target audience.

The colour ads in the body of the magazine are a little more subtle. The reader has to be momentarily distracted from the cartoons and articles and find something intriguing enough to look further. Here are two booze brands - Martini and Guinness:

The advertising spans the expected categories - ciggies, booze, clothes, cars, travel, banking - with brands such as Senior Service, Glenfarclas, Courage, Wolseley, Church's Shoes, Trevira, Lombard Banking, TAP Airlines, Pure New Wool/Woolmark and High Speed Gas (remember that?)

And there were job ads, too. I expect this wasn't designed to be an interactive ad, and it's probably as well I didn't pursue a career in Art Direction:

Punch, like many of the brands featured, died with the 20th century. 

But there's a useful archive here , should you want to see what raised a chuckle or two in the days when pilots weren't on automatic.

Fizz Buzz Pop!

This rebranding design for Mirinda is gob-smackingly good, in my view. Often global (as this is) means bland and lowest common denominator, but this pop-art pageant of funtime fruitiness hits the highest common factor in the unashamedly day-glo world of soda pop.

It's been a while since I've been in the market, I know (the price of a sweet tooth is catching up with me and I have to watch it). And, according to the marketing press, this new global platform ("Smile Please") is aimed at GenZ (sic) and their anemoia (nostalgia for a time you've never known) for the 80s, 90s and early 2000s before Smartphones took over everyone's lives. 

And yet, this speaks to me too. Even though I am as old as Mirinda itself:

Fizzy drinks have a proustian madeleine effect on me. The first one I remember drinking was this:

On the beach, from a glass bottle, with a straw. And, a couple of years later came Fanta. Another glass bottle, another straw. This time in a marvellous cafe in College Town (Sandhurst) with sausages and crinkle-cut chips. A treat indeed.

 

A childhood in 1960s and 70s England meant a rainbow-load of fizzy pop. The milkman used to deliver Corona, then there was Tizer and R. White's. I was quite fond of the cream soda - I can remember the taste like yesterday, but still don't know what on earth it was meant to taste like, apart from sweet. 

It's a wonder I have any of my own teeth left.

Holidays brought further fizzy delights. In Canada, root beer and Welch's Grape Soda. And the very sophisticated Canada Dry which my parents would drink with Canadian Whiskey. 

Mirinda, I expect, was something I came across on holiday at some point. It was launched in Spain, but bought up by PepsiCo and marketed worldwide, under various names, hence the focus in the re-design on visual rather than text elements.

The name Mirinda comes from Esperanto originally. But I think the rebrand has done something very clever.

Just as our 21st century Esperanto is Emojis, these design elements are surely the international visual language of fizzy pop.

 

 

Paying, buying and selling attention

It's book review time again. This is one I've been meaning to read since it came to my (ahem) attention at the beginning of the year.  I think it may even have been recommended in The Times. 

It's an important topic, but I was disappointed. The Friends of Attention seem to be a group of intellectuals living in an arty-farty bubble somewhere away from the real world. Anyway, here's my review.

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This was one of those books that I had high hopes for. It started well, but I soon got rather bogged down and irritated by the way it's written. I probably should have paid more attention to the sub-title. I worked in brands and advertising and both “manifestos” and “movements” were flavour of the month in the late 90s and early 00s.

The topic is an important and thought-provoking one. What is our relationship as humans with (Big) tech? Is it a fair “value exchange” or more a case of the tech companies extracting (“fracking”) human attention and spirit?

The “Friends of Attention” are clear where they stand on this question. And there are some insightful ideas in the book - for example, maybe what’s often called “distraction” in negative terms is better for us than the sort of “attention/engagement” that the tech firms want to capture.

But the way the book is written feels too dramatic and over-the-top. Italics and capital letters are splattered all over the place, and reading it feels like being shouted at by an over-earnest, slightly unhinged Rik Mayall- type student.

The solutions offered seem somewhat naive and the sort of things that any normal common sense person does anyway. Making things, playing instruments or chess, home cooking, voluntary work ...

Right. I’m off to band practice.

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If you still feel tempted to have a read, it's probably wise to look at their website first. If you're intrigued by statements like "The astonishing reality of things and persons", "Practical mysticism is not impractical" and "Freedom of attention may feel like unfreedom", then do go ahead.

I did like the Spirograph patterns, though. Wish I'd kept my set.

RETROWURST: Viva La Vida (June 1987)

                                            Me and colleague, Ragley Hall June 1987

I read a depressing, but I imagine all-too-frequent account in the Sunday Times yesterday. This concerned a student who'd already accepted a graduate job from a strategy consultancy and was preparing to move to London once he'd finished his final dissertation. 

But then he received an email saying that the consultancy had withdrawn the offer. Further investigations suggested that the company would be "employing" AI rather than graduates to do the job. 

I'm thoroughly pleased that I started my career when I did. The past seems like a foreign country now - we did things differently then. 

The photo is me in my 20s, not much older than the young man in the article. 

The event was the Millward Brown summer party, in June 1987. The venue was Ragley Hall, Warwickshire. Just down the road from where the research agency was based, in Leamington Spa. 

It all looks very glamorous, in a 1980s way. And it was. Even as market researchers, we were wined and dined and treated as royalty. Was it over-the-top? Possibly, but it certainly built up good client:agency relationships and made feel we were valued clients, whatever our level in the pecking order. 

The 1980s market research landscape was full of names that have long since disappeared into the WPPs, Bains and other big conglomerates. 

Taylor Nelson, BMRB, Mass Observation, The Research Business - and all manner of boutiquey qualitative agencies. And most of these would lay on a party, or a dinner at some point in the year. 

Fast forward to 2026. I've had a recent invitation from what-was-Millward-Brown, now Kantar. It's not Ragley Hall, rather somewhere on the Bockenheimer Landstrasse in Frankfurt. And I don't think it warrants a ballgown, as it's not a ball, not even a dinner dance. 

It's a 2 hour awards ceremony aka presentation, run by Kantar, giving out Advertising Effectiveness Awards. There will be "drinks and snacks" afterwards. 

This is how it works these days. The big agencies call the shots - get the right scores on their traffic light system and you might pick up an award if you're lucky, and get to chink glasses with a Kantar director of something-or-other. 

Having answered the invitation and said yes, that would be interesting, I had a reply. I am on the "waiting list." Well, I think I'll find something more constructive to do with my time that day. I expect AI sifted through the replies and composed the "waiting list" email, too.