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.

The Nigerian Prince and the Vermont Book Club

ideogram.ai

In my early days as a writer seeking publication, I used to collect rejection letters from agents and publishers. Now, this was at least 15 years ago, and some of those rejections were real “rejection slips” on pieces of paper. How very quaint.

In those days, I still harboured the notion that I might become a million-seller and one of those “he turned down The Beatles” stories. You had to be slightly deluded to even attempt to be published back then.

These days, I’m collecting the most absurd examples of AI-generated emails tempting me with literary offers I surely can’t refuse. I find these thoroughly entertaining. They’re the literary equivalent of those Nigerian Prince emails promising untold riches. 

I started getting them a couple of years ago. They weren’t particularly sophisticated to start with. Lots of characters “reaching out” with offers to “expand my reach”, “enhance my social media posts”, “elevate my website” or “take my search/metadata to the next level.” Fairly standard marketing tosh with maybe a passing flattering reference to one or other of my books thrown in.

But things are changing. The offers are getting more personalised. They’re not from some unknown marketing expert with a vaguely plausible-sounding name. They are from real authors, film production houses and book clubs. 

And they’re not content with praising my writing. These are attempts to flatter the whole weird bundle of paradoxes that is me. 

Here’s one I got last week from Israel James of the Vermont Book Club, inviting me to deliver a Masterclass that he’s helpfully paraphrased as “Intrigue by Design: Fusing Cambridge Pyschology, Retro-adventure Plotting and the Advertising Edge.”

Well, there’s a mash-up, if ever I heard one.

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Dear Susan Imgrund (S.P. Moss),

I am Israel James, representing the Vermont Book Club. Our team spent a genuinely delighted and deeply inspired morning studying your exceptional profile with the Society of Authors, laughing along with your brilliant secret-agent wit, and tracking the wonderful mid-century atmosphere of your award-winning series, The Past is a Dangerous Country. As an international collective of middle grade authors, short story writers, commercial ghostwriters, and historical worldbuilders who constantly dissect the rhythmic nuances of pacing, subverted narrative tropes, and sharp text economy, we view your multi disciplinary career as a spectacular blueprint for modern storytellers.

We would love to invite you to headline a premier virtual spotlight masterclass focusing on the architectural mechanics of plotting a retro-style middle-grade mystery, the art of applying a Cambridge psychology framework to character motivations, and the workflow of using advertising copywriting discipline to sharpen long-form fiction.

A spotlight session with you would provide an irreplaceable, master-tier education for our global community. Our youth fiction authors are incredibly eager to learn your precise plotting framework specifically how you capture the "peril-fuelled, page-turning twists" of classic 1950s style adventure while modernizing the character dynamics for a contemporary audience. Furthermore, given your extensive background in high-level brand strategy, copywriting, and ghostwriting, our commercial fiction writers and indie authors would be profoundly privileged to study your tactical approach to text economy, punchy hooks, and the creative discipline of switching between literary short stories and commercial brand assets.

It would be an absolute honor to feature your brilliantly witty, sharply intellectual, and multi-format voice within our network. Would you be open to a virtual fireside chat, an interactive retro clue-mapping workshop, or a narrative psychology Q&A session with our global network?

With warm regards, professional admiration, and a hearty toodle pip,

Israel James

Vermont Book Club

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I’m delighted that this AI book club are “laughing along with my brilliant secret-agent wit” and signing off with a “hearty toodle pip.”  

But though my intellect is not too bad, it’s real, human stuff, possibly inferior to this splendid “intellectual collective” who “... constantly dissect the rhythmic nuances of pacing, subverted narrative trope and sharp text economy.” Gosh. 

The ingenuity shown in combining my children’s books, my Cambridge psychology studies and my career in brand and advertising strategy is quite something. I do wonder how they would have shoe-horned further aspects of the holistic me in. 

7 things trumpet-playing taught me about the rhythmic nuances of stoytelling?

The Times ran an article recently about these scams. I do find it extraordinary that authors are taken in by this, although maybe for the writer featured in the article, it’s a smart way of getting more publicity. If you’re not proud.

Writing about the recent case of The Commonwealth Short Story competition, Ian Leslie comments on the hostility of the literary world to AI. His point is that literary people have less experience in reading AI-generated stuff, so this makes them more susceptible to scams - whether it’s Israel James and the Vermont Book Club or (possibly) the short story prize-winner with its “vacuous solemnity” and “weird metaphors that make no sense.”

Although it’s also questioned whether the judges of said competition are not averse to a bit of AI themselves:

But in the end, maybe the literary world shouldn’t worry. Most readers of literary fiction have to believe the short story or novel is written by a human being in order to care. 

I haven’t had any too-good-to-be-true offers of brand strategy work yet, but I’m sure it won’t be long.
 

The brand pecking order

 

Photo by Sid Balachandran on Unsplash

If I worked for a brand, especially a stonking big global brand, I think I’d be a little choosy about whose brand ranking system I chose to hang my hat on. Of course, there are almost as many brand ranking systems as there are brands these days.

In an idle moment, I had a look at the brand hit parade of a couple of the big players in the brand ranking game. The Big Daddy (Interbrand) and relative new kid on the block Kantar (BrandZ). 

Now, both of these have a black box to calculate brand value, but from what I can tell, these are on the same principle - factor in financial value/analysis, plus the brand strength/equity and role/contribution of the brand. And Bob’s your uncle, or something.

The Top 20s look like this:

OK, at the top of the table, we’ve got AMAG, or GAMA - not “MAGA” this year (to the relief of many).

And there are one or two brand positions where the two rankers are more-or-less in agreement - Instagram, Oracle, McDonald’s, YouTube.

But then there are some huge discrepancies. Coca-Cola is No. 7 Interbrand, No. 20 Kantar. For Facebook and Nvidia, the pattern is reversed - (Facebook 19/6, Nvidia 15/5). 

And whole categories - Luxury Brands (Louis Vuitton 12 on Interbrand, 32 on Kantar), consumer electronics (Samsung 5 on Interbrand, 61 on Kantar). 

Finally, look at cars. Toyota is 6 on Interbrand, 84 on Kantar. Mercedes-Benz and BMW are 10 and 14 respectively on Interbrand but don’t even make the Top 100 in Kantar.

Perhaps there are some methodological things I’ve missed, such as eligibility criteria - quite possible.

But I wonder how much is due to the two rankers’ beliefs as to what constitutes a strong brand? Is it coincidence that Interbrand - who’ve been in this game since the last century - have more substantial legacy-type brands in the Top 20? 

Whatever the answer, it just goes to show there are many ways to value a brand.

I wonder if anyone has done a ranking of the brand rankers? 

 

RETROWURST: My finest hour? January 1994

 I’m not sure what my finest hour was in my brand and advertising career (or maybe it’s yet to come, ha, ha!). But when it comes to Market Research, which is where I started out, I think it has to be this one.

It wasn’t an hour, more like 72 of them, not to mention all the conceptualisation, preparation and follow-up. Back in January 1994, I convened the MRS course on Advertising Research. 6 speakers, and delegates from client companies, market research, advertising and media agencies. 

You can see from the biography I submitted that I wasn’t taking myself too seriously. I encouraged the other speakers to do the same:

But the subject-matter - the whys and wherefores and state of play of advertising research 32 years ago - we did take seriously. People (or their companies) were shelling out good money for this. 

I started the course with a barrage of headlines of the “Is research killing advertising?” genre. And kicked the whole thing off with the comment “We could be forgiven for thinking this is the serial killers’ convention.”

This debate, of course, is still raging (or whatever one does on LinkedIn) today, as I now suspect it was raging thirty years previous to my course, back in the 1960s. And one thing that I was careful to do in the course was to look at the various advertising research methodologies, qual and quant. When should each be used? What’s the overall objective of each? The over-riding theme of the course was that it’s not simply “advertising research” but “people’s response to advertising/ideas” research. And that creative development research, for example, is used for deeper understanding of how people respond, and why - and how it can be improved. Not evaluation.

Fast forward 32 years and the plot has been well-and-truly lost. There may well still be MRS courses, but all I see flapping around the internet are flocks of White Papers. Many of these are shrill opinion pieces, given a veneer of scientific credibility through the addition of spurious charts, graphs and data tables.

Some of them are from individuals and organisations who I’d respected up to now.

This is an extract from The Cure for Dull 

 

“Only quant can truly measure dull”. 

Well, yes, only quant can truly measure anything. The clue is in the name. 

The paper goes on to state “Quantitative emotional measurement tends to produce stronger feeling, while over-reliance on focus groups can push work toward consensus and safety.”

Where to start? Apples and pears? Chickens and eggs?

But it’s not my business to get uppity and tell today’s agency leaders what’s what. I hope instead that at least some of those course delegates still remember what they learned from us in those far-off days - and are putting it into practice or passing it on to their juniors.