Mixed up, muddled up, shook up world

 

I had a lucky childhood.

I grew up believing I could do anything or be anything I wanted. If I set my mind to it hard enough.

At the age of 3 or so (above) I was convinced I was a dog.

I wasn’t at all concerned about whether I was a male dog or a female dog - it seemed irrelevant. I didn’t have any dolls - just a pack of furry toys. Many of them were dogs.

My hair was cut short and I tended to wear my brother’s hand-me-downs. It was a question of practicality. I did have a blue party dress with a sticking-out skirt, which I hated wearing. Not because it was a dress, but because it was itchy.

The boys’ clothes continued into my teens. I grew my hair a bit longer in the 70s, but so did my brother and most of the boys I knew. I do remember us getting muddled up by an elderly relative, who’d thought “the boy was the older one.” He was in purple cords, I was in a Ben Sherman shirt and jeans. We thought it was funny, a bit subversive. 

If you look at photos of groups of young people in the late 60s, 70s and 80s, the boys and girls look pretty similar. From Woodstock to the New Romantics. I dug out what I think must be a book to accompany an exhibition, entitled 14:24 British Youth Culture. It was published in 1986.

You can see the effect in these photos of punks and skinheads by Nick Knight.

But something started happening just after my son was born, in 2000. When he was small, our house was a sea of yellow, blue and red plastic. I bought his clothes from flea markets.

But I did start noticing that the brand new toddlers’ clothes in H&M were sectioned off  into “boys” and “girls”. For  “Mummy’s little man” and “Daddy’s princess."

And Lego had started producing rather “girly” toys.

And our neighbours/fellow primary school parents would have parties where men and women sat in different rooms. Or even “women/men only” parties. This latter phenomenon I initially (rather snobbishly) put down to class or maybe educational level. Or possibly even an age thing, although this seemed unlikely as it didn’t seem to reflect any kind of progress.

And that “Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars” book started a whole industry of pop-gender-psychology. Excerpts from 1950s publications coursed around the internet, demonstrating how dreadful life was for women in the 20th century. I found these somewhat suspect - my mum had two degrees and was better academically qualified than my dad.

Ten years ago, we had the whole full-blown pink glitter pony stuff spilling from the kindergarten into adult life.  

And then came the whole #MeToo thing, the victim/oppression/patriarchy stuff and the omnipresent adjective “toxic.” 

I wondered why on earth I’d want to join a “women only” group from my college, that I’d deliberately chosen because it was mixed. And whether segregation really is progress. 

This data, published recently in the Financial Times, didn’t really surprise me.

But some of the extreme reactions I saw on LinkedIn certainly did. A lot of screeching about how this is evidence that all young men are unredeemable sexist and racist bastards.

Still, I can look forward with optimism. I hear there’s a brilliant new invention called “gender-neutral clothing” for children.

Whatever will they think of next?

Status Quid

 

If any British retailer represents the Status Quo, it’s Marks & Spencer. That’s why I was a little taken aback, then rather tickled, to see this TikTok ad which seems to have upset the Status Quo of the advertising world.

The origins of the film are interesting. Campaign rather sniffily just refers to it being “in-house”. But what actually happened is that M&S have been giving their store managers autonomy to do their own thing on social media for a while now. One young store manager - the chap who appears at the beginning of this video, who’d been doing his own TikToks for a while - put up his idea via the digital equivalent of the old-fashioned staff suggestions box.

Advertising types in trendy parts of London, predictably, find the result quite ghastly. And yes, it is cheesier than the counters of all the M&S Food stores put together, but that is its charm. Why is Barbie acceptable cheesiness, while this is not? 

But even worse than the creative types tearing out their rainbow hair are the pompous planners on their high horses about branding. I am at a loss to understand how this little film - it’s hardly a multi-million image campaign - can be detrimental to the brand.

The message is highly relevant to our current “counting the pennies” situation. It shows that the brand knows exactly where people are.

The jollity and exuberance of band, staff, influencers and customers will surely attract a few more people in-store rather than ordering online.

Francis Rossi and his band are just as much a national treasure as Twiggy, Dawn French or any of the many M&S spokespeople - best of British and unafraid to take the p*ss out of themselves.

And the beauty of it is - as with top-notch humour - it unites people across generations. Rather like this rather more spectacular ad from Australia:

If Francis Rossi rakes in enough money to get a new guitar, I won’t begrudge him that.

Love, peace, piss-ups and brass music

 

Ten years ago, if you’d told me the gin market would shortly explode and still be gaining sales in 2023, when young people are allegedly drinking less alcohol, my head would have been surprised. 

But not my heart. I’ve always loved gin and know that it's a damned good thing. It just needed the right time, the right conditions and some clever marketing to get it back in vogue.

I came across something that reminded me this a few weeks ago, on a late summer holiday to Baska, on the island of Krk in Croatia. Something I had always loved given a bit of reinvention, a bit of borrowing from popular culture - and being lapped up like crazy by people young enough to be my grandchildren.

The event in question was Brass Palmas . This is the beach party event associated with the Woodstock der Blasmusik  . The experience was quite surreal. At one end of the beach at Baska there’s a nudist resort.

At the other there are trumpets, tubas, trombones, saxophones.

Buckets of beer and cocktails.

Dirndls, Lederhosen and plenty of Skipton Alfie-style loud beach pyjamas.

Imagine the slightly staid world of oompah music given a large shot of festival/club/Ibiza atmosphere, and there you go.  The kind of mix that sounds ridiculous on paper, but just works in reality - and how!

There’s a party boat, a pool party, and non-stop music, dancing and drinking from stupid o’clock onwards.

 

And behind it all is some very neat marketing - brilliant brand name and logo ... and of course all the merchandise you could possibly want.

It’s a blast!

Ve have ways of making your talk work

 

It’s awfully easy to get carried away with AI and machine learning and become convinced that us human-beings might as well give up and crawl back into the primordial soup. Especially if most of those breathless trend and future reports can be believed.

But every so often, in the real world, there’s an amusing reminder that the machines aren’t quite there, yet.

A couple I know (German) have an Alexa device. They’ve had this thing for a few years and it’s always been a source of immense frustration that it just doesn’t understand me. Or rather, my voice. The thing is, these friends have a different taste in music to mine, but every time they (kindly) offer me the possibility of choosing something, Alexa goes on strike.

But no more.

Last night, I discovered the secret.

Just for a laugh, I tried pronouncing the song titles and names of groups in a dreadful cod German accent, worthy of a 1950s British war film.

Was it my threatening tone, or simply what she was used to? Whatever, Alexa obliged, no problem.

From Vigvem Bem to Vair doo yo go to my lofley to Zree leetle birds to Shildren of ze revolusion, all my orders were understood and played by Alexa.

 Result.

Just have to remember now to ham it up next time I’m on the phone to the bank.

Why can't we live together?

At the end of 2019, I blogged about reconciliation, in the hope that 2020 might be the year, both on the political front and in the world of marketing, that we might be able to reconcile differences, establish common ground and move forward on this basis.

Unfortunately, the common ground that came upon us was something we hadn't wished for - a rather nasty and persistent virus.  The first couple of months did see some pulling together against adversity, which I think gave me renewed hope in humanity and what we can achieve if we work with what can unite us and leave divisiveness behind.

But unfortunately, the old divisions have crept back and new ones have come to the fore. And yes, I do believe that without differences and a certain amount of friction and tension, there's no progression, but in the world at large as well as the microcosm of marketing, there still seems to be a lot of black and white thinking going on.

Binary debates in marketing Source: Martin Weigel

Rather than aligning myself to one camp or another, I've learned along the way that the truth about these things usually involves "a bit of both", whether its human and machine, purpose and profit or brand-building and activation.

There a super article from Tom Roach here, which looks at the false choice between long- and short-term marketing or brand/performance. The approach is to harmonise short-term sales and long-term growth, with "share of search" as a promising metric to predict market share that both camps (if we really have to have these camps) can get behind. Thus selling "both immediately and forever" as Jeremy Bullmore put it.

Mark Ritson has summed all of this up rather well in his article about "Bothism" - the rare capacity to not only see the value of both sides of the the marketing story, but actively consider and then co-opt them into any subsequent marketing endeavour in an appropriate way.

And yes, I do have The Beatles and The Stones, Oasis and Blur in my music collection. As well as a lot of other weirder stuff, which is another story.

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 ;)

Unmistakeable

The other weekend, I slunk off on my own to the cinema to see Stanley Nelson's documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool. Some reviews have suggested the film is a little pedestrian with its cradle-to-grave and talking heads approach, but I found it fascinating.

What struck me most of all throughout the film was the contrast between complexity and clarity. We talk about change and the VUCA world today, but when I think what changes culturally, socially and technologically Miles Davis lived through in his (rather-too-short) life, it's quite extraordinary. The quick-cut stock-footage introductions to phases of Davis' life that Nelson uses are tremendously effective in bringing this home.

Parallel to the evolution of the times was the evolution in Miles Davis' music - influences, collaborators, band, styles - from hard bebop to cool jazz to funk fusion, and all the rest.

And super-imposed on all of this is the complexity of the man himself. He was complicated: a genius artistically, cool, proud and brave, but also arrogant, violent and jealous, anti-social and drawn into the self-destructiveness of drugs and alcohol.

I came out of the cinema with all that complexity swimming around in my mind, but above it, a sound. An unmistakeable, clear, non-vibrato, melodic trumpet singing "simple, pretty notes" (just 12 of them).

What's this got to do with brands? To me, it's yet another demonstration that brands are not "like people." Who in their right mind would attempt or even want to hang a personality like that of Miles Davis onto a brand?

But yet, who wouldn't want a voice as clear and distinctive as that of Miles Davis' trumpet for their brand? Forget the complex personalities and archetypes and character profiles: to make your brand distinctive, nail the voice and be true to it, whether you're playing funky stuff or lonely ballads.

My favourite example of a clear brand voice at the moment? Burger King.

Polish up those tin signs

I was rather cheered to read in the JWT trendletter that analogue marketing, or the "renaissance of non-digital mediums (sic)", is back.

On closer inspection, the article is more about music and musicians - Coldplay and Radiohead's Thom Yorke, bringing new albums out on cassette and advertising them in quaint old-fashioned ways, such as small ads in local papers, or personally-typed postcards to fans delivered in the good old post.

But there's no reason to stop there. There are so many ways to advertise your brand or cause in real life, from posters to trams to vans to blimps - even on bricks and mortar.

I did learn a new word from the article that I'll have to use somewhere soon: anemoia - nostalgia for a time you've never known.

In the meantime, let's market like it's 1899!

DO shoot me - I'm the piano player, or composer, or somebot

I've remarked on these pages often recently about the modern tendency to throw pull-on-the-heartstrings plinky piano music into advertising to evoke the "made me cry" reaction.

Here's a prime example, and here's the plinky piano music's depressing partner-in-crime - the ominous cello music. And here's an ad that takes the mick out of it all.

Seems I am not the only one who's crying with inappropriate laughter at all this tear-duct-squeezing mawkish music.

Here's what could have been a clever creative idea, ruined by the execution, particularly the plonky-plinky soundtrack. As the writer says, "best use of Generic Sad Piano Film Trailer Score #647" - could be a new award. There are enough contenders.

I blame all those clever people who suddenly discovered that human beings don't make decisions primarily based on their rational thoughts, but on their feelings, ergo we have to make an "emotional connection."

But why do emotions always have to be morose and mournful? Whatever happened to the jolly jingles of yore? I still remember them decades afterwards, and if that's not an emotional connection, what is?

So go ahead, shoot that plinky piano player. And I don't feel in the least bit mean or cruel saying that as in all likelihood it's just a robot anyway.