Penny for your thoughts?

 

I’ve been writing an article for one of my clients about Christmas advertising. Because it’s for an international audience, most of the focus is on ads from the UK and other English-speaking markets. In Germany, Christmas advertising is a thing, but not such a colossal humongous thing (literally, in the case of this year’s John Lewis ad) as it is in the UK. 

You can see what I mean if you scroll down this article about German supermarkets’ Christmassy commercials. Apart from Edeka’s slightly weird meaty mumblings, there’s nothing really unexpected and many of the ads are a little lacklustre and conventional. 

There’s cuteness, kids,  magic and animals with Lidl and REWE. Some “get the tissues” from Co-op. And a bit of fun and nostalgia from Aldi with grown-ups behaving like big kids.

But that’s me with my London ad person hat on (also looking a bit lacklustre these days, to be honest). Time and time again, we hear that the ads that do well at Christmas are those that do all the cuteness, tears, smiles, entertainment and general warm fuzziness. And do it well.

So what the heck were Penny thinking? Over 3 minutes, entitled “The Kids” with the message “It’s our future, please listen to us.” Four youngsters, discontented, sad and angry about the grown-ups in their immediate family, or society in general. A girl forced into ballet when she’d rather dance freestyle. A little chap who can’t bear his mum’s social media obsession. A young lad upset by all the “six-pack” bodies he sees on his phone. A junior environmentalist striding around the house switching lights and appliances off.  

Then a montage of sulky glum faces, school protests, “Fridays for Future”-style activism clichés accompanied by a children’s choir rendition of a song from P!nk (I think).

Maybe it seemed like a good idea when the agency made this back in the Spring or Summer. But at this time of year, and given the news of the last few weeks, it feels completely tone deaf. As I said last year, no-one wants to be reminded of misery, hate and division. Especially not now. 

A long time ago, when I worked on P&G, I’d often have to steer the clients away from anything that felt like finger-pointing. I’d remind them that new mums often felt inadequate and hopeless enough without ads suggesting that if they didn’t use the new-improved super-ultra-Pampers (or whatever), they were a crap mother. Especially if they couldn’t afford better than Aldi.

That attitude from advertisers and their agencies is sneaking back into commercials, and this is a prime example. Finger-pointing, parent-shaming (if you like) manipulative stuff to make people feel lousy about themselves. Backed up by some sort of agency bullshit that they’ve “got out there” (where is “there”, anyway?) and listened to “real” children’s wishes. Well, I have my own experience of that.

I quoted an article from Richard Huntington in my last post and this was one of the stand-out sentences for me:

Everyone is trying in their own way to be a good person living a good life.

In the end, it shouldn’t be more complicated than that.

Perennial bloomers

 

The older I get, and the more years I notch up as a one-woman band here in rural Germany, the more amusing I find the antics of some of my marketing and advertising partners-in-crime. It’s that slight shake-of-the-head, roll-of-the-eyes kind of amusement with a muttered “what planet are they on?” under my breath. 

I heard a marketing director speaking on a panel discussion yesterday, who was (I think) seriously suggesting that the following could be a good idea. AI could, in the future, “serve” an ad featuring a person of the same skin colour as the recipient - presumably all in the name of personalisation, diversity and “feeling seen.” 

Where do I start on how wrong this is? What next? I’ll be “served” an ad featuring someone of exactly my age, so I don’t feel ancient, left out and invisible? What a ghastly notion!

Whenever I’ve ventured onto LinkedIn these days, there do seem to be plenty of people (at least in my feed) talking about bursting bubbles and getting back to reality. A recent WARC article by Richard Huntington is titled The Future of Strategy 2023: Marketing is in desperate need of a reality check. 

Richard makes the point that we both work and live in a parallel universe he calls Marketingland. I’d rather use that nasty, twee “Adland” moniker. By the way, when did that creep into the language? It’s not the word itself, it’s the way people use it, as if it’s some exclusive place to be proud of. Whatever, this universe is populated by the well-educated, metropolitan, relatively young middle class.

And why do people not just work but live there, too? Because this world is conjured-up “through distaste for the real one with all its ugliness, mess and complexity.” Richard then takes aim at various of Adland’s favourite tools (so to speak), including “the stinking edifice of generational marketing". This is described as “a charlatan’s business” and “should be given as much credence in sensible organisations as astrology.”

I’m with him. The whole Generations stuff, beloved of lazy journalists and denizens of “Adland,” is more full of holes than a Boomer’s string vest. Or was it the lot before them that wore those? Not only do the generation years chop and change as often as the UK cabinet, but the whole thing is utterly US-focussed. Where you are born is just as important as when, as Ipsos show. And I’m quite tickled that “GenZ" are refusing to behave as many marketers want them to, as Nick Asbury points out.

What to do? Richard Huntington makes a call to “love and respect the people we serve”. I’d leave out the love part, personally, but respect and value their perspective (even if you don’t agree) - I’ll take that. As Richard says, “Everyone is trying in their own way to be a good person living a good life.”

Another perspective on the generations thing is to Adopt the Perennial Mindset as in this article by Tara McMullin. The thinking is based on a book by Mauro Guillén: The Perennials: The Megatrends creating a Postgenerational Society. This challenges the idea of linear lives, moving from play to learn to work to leisure/retirement, and “age-appropriate activities.” Getting rid of the concept of “milestones” beyond referring to babies and child development. A Perennial is defined as someone “not constrained by their age and what they’re ‘supposed’ to be doing at any given stage of life.”

Despite being a Planner, I’ve never been that great on planning my own life. I recognise the inevitability of change and the unexpected. But I liked what this article had to say about a broadened definition of work whereby people can stay active and connected to friends - work more along the lines of mentoring and support as one grows older and hopefully wiser. Tara writes that “the idea of retirement feels elusive to anyone under, say, 55 today.”

Well, that just proves a point. It’s a while since I was 55, and although I do have a bookmarks file of “retirement jobs” (mentoring, teaching, pivoting) the idea still seems pretty elusive to me!

I know this way of thinking can’t be a replacement for all that generations guff. Or indeed for media planning based on age breaks. But I do like the principle of getting away from pigeon-holing and rigid categories of age, life-stage, or when exactly you were born. Away from the sequential model of life. And from many of these frameworks when they are too strictly applied. I have said here often: The Map is not the Territory.

And, back to that panel discussion and what AI can do. One point that does give me hope are the increasing opportunities for contextual media planning. Catching me in the right mood, at the right place and the right time is going to be far more effective than “serving” me some old bag with pasty-white skin who doesn’t look a bit like me. 

RETROWURST: Nutella November 2005

 

Eighteen years ago, I was celebrating the 40th birthday of Nutella in Extrawurst, and my hm-hm-hm-hmth birthday. For those with a sweet tooth, here’s the history and cult status of the chocolate hazelnut spread as I saw it in 2005.

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As I have recently been celebrating my birthday, I thought I would write a piece about a brand that is celebrating its 40^th birthday this year in Germany.

 

On the subject of brands having birthdays, this does seem to have become “this year’s thing” for marketers here, perhaps in the absence of anything new to say. We had thirty years of IKEA last year and now every corner shop, local newspaper and frozen pizza seems to be celebrating some birthday or another. Just as the market here has been deluged with “flavour of the year/season” for the last few years, we now seem to be beset with birthdays. Most of it seems to be an excuse to dig out some “retro” pack designs and revel in the worst excesses of the 70s, 80s or whatever decade your brand was born into in a rather self-congratulatory way rather than offering people any new benefit or real reward for buying you in the first place.

 

In this case, however, I feel that the celebrations are justified: the brand in question is Nutella which I believe is one of the most “present” brands in the German psyche. Over 100 million jars of the stuff are sold per year with the average buyer consuming something like 1kg of the stuff per year (oh dear, think of the calories!) and Nutella really is a brand that one could say has achieved cult status in this country. A client of mine (non-German) recently made something of an error of judgment (in my opinion) when she recently turned down the prospect of a co-operation between her brand and Nutella on the basis that Nutella “was too unhealthy”. While, of course, she is right in thinking that Nutella is not among the list of top 5 healthy things to put in your mouth, what she missed is that Nutella is allowed to be unhealthy just because it’s so loved here – like  Bratwurst and Pils it may pile on the calories but it is an integral part of German culture – a rare accolade for a non-German brand!

 

Although officially only 40 years old, Nutella’s origins go further back: to the 1940s in fact. During the war years, chocolate was a rarity, a delicacy and cocoa was in short supply so the Piedmontese confectioner Pietro Ferrero experimented with making a cream out of cocoa and roasted hazelnuts. From the beginning onwards, Ferrero’s experiment was a success and even incorporated an interesting retail concept in 1940s/50s Italy whereby schoolchildren could go to the local corner shop with a piece of bread and get it spread with the forerunner of Nutella.

 

In 1964 the nut-nougat crème got the name Nutella. Ferrero Germany had already opened its doors in 1956 and introduced Nutella in 1965. Nutella really created a whole new market in Germany for a country used to either jam or honey as sweet spreads for the breakfast bread.

 

There are now several generations of Germans who have grown up with Nutella – it’s rather like Marmite in the UK but it doesn’t have quite that extreme love-hate relationship: everyone loves Nutella except for a few extreme health campaigners. Nutella signifies childhood and family: there is something very motherly and reassuring about the name, the pack design (almost unchanged from the original of 1965), the shape of the jar and the sweet, creamy product itself. And, unlike Marmite, it is pretty versatile stuff: you can make cakes with it, slap it on pancakes and Nutella seems to be a fairly major component of most of the confectionary products that Ferrero produces these days.

 

The cult status of Nutella in Germany is observable through the sheer presence of the brand in Germany. It’s not just on practically every breakfast table but also highly visible on pancake stands in the city centre or at Fests, on T-shirts (the aforementioned unchanged pack design), in bookshops (“Das große Nutella Kochbuch”), on e-Bay (collectors of promotional jars or giveaways) and there are even Nutella cafés in some city centres where you can have a cup of coffee and eat your fill of various Nutella concoctions – all this in addition to the expected supermarket and classic media presence. Of course, anything that is successful and cult spawns cover versions. In Nutella’s case they are numerous and quite blatant in their copying of the mother of all hazelnut spreads, from Lidl’s Choco Nussa to Aldi’s Nutoka but none of them have quite managed to copy the subtleties of Ferrero’s secret recipe.

 

Of course, cult status brings you more than your fair share of urban myths. In Nutella’s case these include the positive (“Nutella is a wonder cure for cold sores and other forms of Herpes.”) and the not-so desirable (“Nutella gets its colour from cow blood.”). But none of these myths seem to be so extreme as those associated with McDonald’s or Procter & Gamble’s brands – maybe Nutella’s “Italian Mamma” personality makes it less vulnerable to attack than those brands which are assumed to be run and controlled by George W. Bush doppelgangers.

 

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Nutella’s cult status is that much of this comes not so much from TV advertising but from in-store and on-pack promotions. While there have been some memorable TV campaigns (involving some of the usual suspects here such as the ubiquitous Boris Becker), it is the special promotions that have become collector’s items. A 2kg jar was available in 2000 for the millennium, for example, and the 40^th birthday promotional packs were soon sold out. These included stencils of characters from Asterix concealed in the lid which was a repeat of a promotion originally from the 1970s or 1980s.

It seems to be fitting, then, that Nutella celebrated its 40^th birthday with a spectacular promotion: the biggest breakfast in the world. No less than 27,854 Nutella fans turned up to the event which earned Nutella a place in the Guinness Book of records. So, here’s to the next 40 years unless the extreme healthy-eating killjoys get there first!

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Only a few months after writing this article, I suffered a public humiliation that I’ll never live down. I took part in an on-air radio quiz and was asked to name which German football players featured in the Nutella ad for the 2006 World Cup. I didn’t know. Me, working in advertising, with a football-crazy husband. 

I still hang my head in shame.

As for Nutella, well, the healthy eating police are still stomping around, but not to any great effect. The latest member of the Nutella family is biscuits.

And me? Sorry, but I still prefer Marmite. I’m not that German.

  

Miss you

Is British advertising getting its mojo back?

I've noticed a couple of ads - very different but on the same theme (or insight, if you will) that have made me wonder if British humour and general silliness is making a comeback after all those dreary plinky-piano angsty offerings.

I mentioned Yorkshire Tea's Skipton Alfie in my last post.  And now, along comes this one from Heinz - "Too Good to Leave Behind."

Now, of course, I don't see "someone who looks like me" in this ad. But, boy do I identify with it!

I've suffered delayed luggage recently and can seriously understand this chap's pain on missing his beans. My trips to the UK usually involve stocking up on various comestibles. This article - not sure how old it is, but its probably from the last couple of years, lists the Top 10 most popular British products globally, via The British Corner Shop. And the Top 3 are Warburton's Crumpets, Heinz Baked Beans and Cadbury's Flake. So Heinz and their agency, Wieden & Kennedy London, have even done the data-fuelled, fact-based thing, yah, boo, sucks!

None of my absolute favourites made the Top 10, funnily enough. No Marmite, Colman's, or Gordon's Sloe Gin. But maybe these are acquired tastes, given that this is global sales.

I do hope that the ad world will see a return of self-deprecating, batty British humour post-Brexitpermacrisisetcetc. After all, it is Too Good To Leave Behind. 

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!

RETROWURST: Du bist Deutschland October 2005

 

Well, this month’s rummage around the Extrawurst files has turned up a cracker. Eighteen years ago, the mood in Germany was at a pretty low ebb. To the rescue came the Du bist Deutschland  campaign, masterminded and funded by a consortium of media owners and ad agencies. 

While I thought the strategy was smart, I was a touch catty about the creative - and the logo. I didn’t mince my words eighteen years ago. While I’d probably put things a little more diplomatically these days, I stand by what I wrote. This film is so painfully worthy and unfortunately, this style of advertising has spawned a plague which still infects screens today. Even if you’re just advertising bog roll or deodorant.

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Since Monday, 3rd October, the public holiday to celebrate German re-unification, a new multi-million advertising campaign has been the talk of the country. Now, Germans don’t usually talk about advertising much except perhaps when the advertising comes from Audi or Mercedes. However, this time, the advertising in question is about a subject very close to everyone’s hearts and tear-ducts here: the country Germany.

 

That the general morale in Germany is at a pretty low ebb and has been for the last few years should be no surprise to regular readers of Extrawurst. The recent election fiasco and embarrassing performance of the national football team have hardly helped matters but now at least it seems that an effort is being made to get Germany back on its feet again and the very fact that the campaign is being talked about is a good first step.

 

The campaign itself, “Du bist Deutschland” (“You are Germany”) was initiated by Gunther Thielen, head of media giant Bertelsmann a year ago. Together with ex-colleague Bernd Bauer, the two kick-started a sort of Band-aid action by getting all the heads of the blue-chip media owners and a few advertising agencies together to discuss Germany’s plight and a possible way out, by doing what they knew best. The result is a €34m campaign, involving 25 media companies who have given space and airtime with a concept developed by two of Germany’s leading advertising agencies. This is the biggest public information campaign that has ever run in Germany and will run from October through to January next year. The campaign itself can be seen on the website www.du-bist-deutschland.de .

 

It is certainly true that Germany needs something to give it a kick up the Arsch if you’ll excuse my Deutsch. A survey from an insurance company (who I’m sure relish these sorts of results) this month found that 52% of Germans are “very afraid of the future”. A comparable figure for 1991 was 25%. With unemployment over 10%, no clear line from the government (or indeed, no clear picture of who or what the government is), German companies re-locating and producing overseas and a talent-drain, it is no surprise that “German Angst” is well-known the world over.

 

The objectives of the campaign are fine enough. The idea is to prompt a new mood of “can-do” and trust in every single person’s own strength and capabilities throughout Germany. The concept behind the campaign is all about small actions having big effects and is expressed in a “Manifesto” which appears on the website and is the text for the TV campaign. The idea is to lead with a “big bang” in national TV and print and for this to have a catalytic effect then for local activity and action: that each individual at the grass roots level should pick the thing up and run with it. Strategically, the concept seems OK to me although I would question the media strategy, especially as self-reliance and “picking something up and running with it” isn’t very German - they are not terribly good at rugby!

 

So far, so good. The Media-Aid guys have identified a problem and found a way to solve it. Good for them, even if the problem was blindingly obvious and the solution was borrowed from someone else twenty years ago-but this is not the place to split Herrs. But now we should really take a look at the creative work itself: you can see it for yourself on the website and you don’t really need to understand German or know who all the people are to get the idea. I will start with the so-called “Manifesto” which is the core of the campaign and the text of the 2-minute TV spot and attempt a translation. The manifesto starts with that well-worn cliché of catastrophe theory – that all-powerful butterfly, which I am not sure is too appropriate given the recent spate of horrific worldwide natural disasters:

 

“You are the miracle of Germany.

A butterfly can unleash a typhoon. The air moved by the flap of its wings can uproot trees a few kilometers away. Just as a breath can become a storm, your deeds can have an effect.

If you think that’s unrealistic then why do you cheer on your team in the stadium if your voice is so unimportant…You are Germany. Your will is like fire in the loins. It lets your favourite striker run more quickly and Schumi drive faster…”

 

I am sure you get the idea. This priceless prose goes on and on with more mixed metaphors about people being hands which are going to get dirty and being trees, which other hands (I assume dirty German ones) are going to pull out from the roots. There are more references to speed and no speed limits on the German motorways and the inevitable reference to the Wall and tearing it down. 

 

This prose is spoken, sentence by sentence in the 2-minute TV spot by a mixture of well-known and less well-known German faces against a variety of backdrops showing the diversity of the country and its people. All the usual suspects are here if you’re tuned in to German popular culture although those that live in other countries for tax reasons are conspicuous by their absence. Interspersed with the famous faces are a few “heroes of everyday life” - the proud lady toilet attendant, the matey shipbuilders and the stressed but optimistic Mum of many in a high-rise flat. The background music is pinched from the mawkish Hollywood blockbuster Forrest Gump.

 

The whole thing is, being kind, rather like one of those 1980s corporate ads to fend off takeovers that went on about “there is a company that…” in a droning posh voice where the shareholders dearly wished that they could have the millions that the production and the posh-voiced actor cost in their pockets as dividends instead. Or one of those awful charity record videos where each superstar tries to outdo the last in caterwauling in a really concerned and earnest way. Unfortunately, to my rather cynical English eyes, the spot looks and sounds rather like the opening credits to Little Britain. This is the major problem with the whole thing. The first step on the road to recovery when you’re down in the dumps is to be able to laugh at yourself, even in Germany. Unfortunately, the whole campaign is so toe-curlingly ernsthaft that I’m afraid that the viewer reaction is going to be to reach for the sick bag rather than the desired goose pimples.

 

One of the most toe-curling scenes, in my opinion, is one where an actor with Down’s syndrome, a gay folk singer and a coloured pop star get together in the holocaust monument. You sort of know what they are trying to say but unfortunately this ultra-political correctness raises all the wrong signals. The print campaign to go with this is even less well-executed, in my view. At least the TV takes present-day personalities, but the print harks back to specially selected heroes from the past: Dürer, Goethe, Einstein and -you’ve guessed it -Beethoven. 

 

Of course, no major campaign of this type should go logo-less and there is a nasty little logo with a sort of Mr Blobby effect character in the colours of the German flag, who is either doing hurdles in clown’s trousers or a goosestep and Hitler salute, depending on how you look at it.

 

I don’t really like to be so cynical, and I really did want to like this campaign but unfortunately the execution lets it all down. Even the media approach of big bang then trickle-down feels wrong. My instinct tells me that this would have worked so much better if it could have been built up, partly via clever word-of-mouth from a grass-roots level with activities and events on a local level which could then be celebrated in a big national whistles-and-bells spectacular. I also have the feeling in all this that actions speak louder than words. Too many celebrities pointing the finger, however gently, to tell me that I’m master of my own fate is just likely to upset the Germans further, rather than inspire them, as it might the Brits or the Americans. At an even more sinister level, although the campaign is apolitical, some critics have seen it as the government (whoever that is) finding the perfect way to shift the blame for the state the country is in back onto the individual. If you’re unemployed you only have yourself to blame and it’s up to you to get out of the hole you’ve dug.

 

Maybe I’m wrong, but I can’t really see this campaign doing the trick. What might get Germany back on its feet again is winning the World Cup on home ground next year. But, fortunately for the rest of us, that is one thing that the media barons won’t be able to manipulate or buy, one hopes.

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Well, I was almost right in my prediction. Germany didn’t win the World Cup in 2006 but they played a blinder when it came to hosting. Known as the Sommermärchen here, it was a summer of a brilliantly-organised football-love-peace-and-harmony-fest. And then we had Angie, and for a few years everything seemed to be going swimmingly.

But history always goes in cycles and what with Covid, war, recession and Germany not really getting its act together on the digital stuff, we’re now the Sick Man of Europe (or the World?) again. And the national football team is rubbish.

44% of Germans would rather live in the past, compared to 18% who’d rather live in the future. And nearly 60% of the 18 - 29s say they’d prefer the past (maybe 2006?).

But, but, but ... there’s always that thing about history repeating itself. 

Germany is hosting Euro 2024 next year. Can it work again?

Opening up to possibility

 

This 10,000 word essay may be the best thing I’ve read this year related to my work. Here’s my review:

I can thoroughly recommend this essay on the nature of the two brain hemispheres - what they do and what they’re like. Why we need both and why as a society we’re becoming left-dominated, with less appreciation of tone, irony, metaphor and humour.

Forget the simplistic, convenient explanation that “the left brain is rational and the right brain is emotional” - this isn’t the point. In McGilchrist’s own words, “one way of looking at the difference would be to say that while the left hemisphere’s raison d’etre is to narrow things down to a certainty, the right hemisphere’s is to open them up into possibility.”

Wise, erudite and indispensible.

Next step - investigate the website . I see that the excellent Orlando Wood is featured.