Print is petrified

Print advertising is by and large frozen in time. It’s not better than it was, and it’s not worse than it was. It’s just there, in a holding pattern.

The winners on display at the CLIOs last week demonstrated that the race to be best at filling a magazine page is over. The result is a virtual dead heat between hundreds of agencies around the world.

Cool visual employing weeks of photoshop. Laterally connected headline. Teensy packshot in left or right corner. Multiply by three in different colors if you want to enter your single idea as a campaign as well.

The good stuff is really good. It’s just not good in a way that’s different to last year’s crop, or even last decade’s.

The stasis is highlighted by the amount of innovation that is still evident in film, and of course the absolutely insane explosion in digital and ‘emerging medias’.

The next level of art, and this is where we could see print grow in the future, is how it can be used imaginatively as part of a well-orchestrated story.

Until then, print is marking time, waiting for its next revolution.

Image by Genista

If you can make it anywhere, you can make it anywhere

My first job in advertising was in a town called Brisbane, on the hot end of Australia’s east coast. That’s B-r-i-s-b-a-n-e.

That job, and the ones that seemed to lay out ahead of me until a projected booze-enforced retirement at the age of 46, consisted of doing ads for real estate developers and rip-cut-and-thrust retailers. Most of my headlines - that’s what we copywriters were hired to do - had either puns or exclamation marks. The really good ones had both. I paged longingly through my copies of D&AD, wondering how I could ever do work like that. All the true brand work in Australia was done in either Melbourne or Sydney. And that’s just the way it was going to be, forever. The very very best of the Brisbane work never even got a look in at the national shows. No matter how many entendres and screamers we could wedge in. Sigh.

But now look. The One Show has just awarded its Best Of Show to an idea from Brisbane. The ‘Best Job In The World’. Which, on a budget of a bit over $1 million, has been appearing in international headlines for four months now. And on a client I myself used to work on. I recall the best I ever got through was a quirky crop on a shot of a beach.

Final proof, as if it’s needed, that potential greatness is right in front of you, wherever you are, whatever you’re working on.

Image by aunwin

DVRS ARE KILLING (GOOD) ADVERTISING

Some advertising people, out of sheer principal, never use Tivo to skip commercials. Some.

Not me. Until recently I’ve lunged for the peanut every break, and for two reasons:

Reason one for biting the hand that feeds me - I could then experience the world of communication as a regular person would, ie., with as much commercial avoidance as possible.

Reason two - for an earnest creator of commercials, sitting through a parade of shoddy merchandise was always torture. The poor showing for my industry, the lost opportunities, it all pissed me off. And I’d forever be trying to make even the worst piece of crap better, at least in my head. “Gosh, that’s the wrong track to put with that flying logo cgi abomination. If only they’d…”

After a long hard day of trying to make actual good work better, it was not a relaxing outro.

I’ve recently realized my dreck-avoidance scheme, while making evenings more pleasant, has been lulling me into a place of disgusting complacency.

So, the thumb now stays off the FF. I sit through every second of every half hour. I gape. I gag. I re-edit. I fume.

And I come in to work the next morning, vowing to make my little contribution a good one. The spirit applies to everything I do, not just TV ads.

So force yourself to do what no sane person would do: stop skipping commercials.

Start seeing all marketing, not just the talked-about stuff, but the abhorrent majority.

You’ll know you can do better than them. You’ll know 99% of clients can be better served. You’ll be blissfully, productively angry.

Image from chikawatanabe

New continent discovered

Ideas are inspiring. But insights can be even more of a revelation.
Take as an example the winning entry in this year's PhizzPop challenge.
Whether you think the idea is brand new or not - a web site that enables the swapping of unused resources - the first minute and a half of the entry video is jaw dropping.
First time I watched it, I felt like someone had discovered a new continent, sitting at my feet all these years.
Cheers to Zeus Jones and Sierra Bravo. Minneapolis will rise again!
Read more here, and see the video here.

The Annual Traveling Auto Museum

There was an uneasy silence at the Minnesota Convention Center this weekend. That's because it was the culminating weekend of the annual auto show, and everyone in attendance, exhibitors and visitors alike, walked around displaying the quieter stages of grief.


Gone were the boisterous side rooms featuring blinged out Escalades.
Hummer simply had a few models sitting on the floor, not like years gone by when the cantilevered models and rugged display-topographies exuded a wall of muskiness.
In fact the whole GM presence was anemic. Most of their displays were car only, and disbursed far apart from each other to make the space look as if it's filled, like entry-level hair plugs.
The Saturn anchor/presenter thanked an empty expanse of carpet for its attention. Chevrolet bleated its best about the number of its old school combustion-only engines were actually new school ethanol-able engines.
Saddest was the human dynamic. Past years, you could feel the buying process in the room. Brochures were gathered. Serious, engaging questions were asked of the company reps. This year, it was more a feeling of combing through the wreckage of some beautiful multi-billion dollar disaster, cataloging what could be useful in the future and what is now just a rueful memory.
The smiles from the company reps were as brilliant white as ever, but you could almost hear them hissing through their bared teeth a pained "I know... I know..."
Hyundai - a brand in ascendancy, one that not only has the economy coming to it, but that is also doing something about it - owned the day with aggressive messaging all around the show. One floor decal with a visual of footprints advertised their Assurance+ program. 'The most support your feet have had in a long time' it said.
And in one small corner of the vast wasteland, a dozen collector's cars. Here was the most interesting find of the entire night. Two electric cars, one from the early twentieth century, and the other a 1960 Henney Kilowatt, capable of 60mph and a range of 60 miles on a single charge. That's fifty years ago. What happened since?
To re-capture our lust, cars have a lot of progressing to do.


The market never lies

A few of us are back from a long and fruitful trip to California, where the word Mexico cannot reach its second syllable without all those present flinching and checking the shadows for drug assassins.


The gigantic underground market for illegal drugs has brought a war to our doorstep.
Take away the market and the war is over.
Not that we're pro drug here at Persuasion. Noooo. We sure are anti-crime, though. Take away the crime, and so go the criminals. No doubt you'll either violently agree or disagree, as these things tend to be.
Or car audio systems. Once they were designed to be proprietary to a given vehicle, the market for stolen racks disappeared. That's why your window hasn't ended up on the sidewalk so often this past decade.
Then to advertising, where the market is yet to shift. So long as there are buyers for the type of service offered by the big agencies, not much will change. ANA speeches are words, calls for change are well and good. But really, the power lies in the pocketbook. And if that power is not being exercised, what are the reasons?
Either:
The complaints are mere venting.
The complaints are negotiating postures.
The big agencies are changing to meet the demands.
The alternatives just aren't viable solutions.
Got any more?


Saab was different

What has happened to Saab over the last twenty years is a lesson in authenticity, or lack of it, in this case.


I had the good fortune to work on Saab for a few years back in the early 90s. None of us really knew it at the time, but Saab's glory days were already well and truly behind it. Though GM had bought in, the initial 51% ownership gave Saab enough control to stay Saab.
So we chose to ignore that GM influence. Okay, so they were taking an Opel platform and putting it into the new Saab. It seemed a smart business move. Didn't hurt at all.
The big brand work we did back then (which never saw the light of day - that's another story) was themed 'Saab is different'. Because it just plain was. Different in where it came from, how it sounded, looked, felt - and yes, where you put your key in to the ignition. The Saab drivers were 'rugged individualists' as one of the senior writers would say, the non-joiners, the contrarians. They saw themselves in the car.
Well, it turned out those first GM operating efficiencies were kudzu sprouts. Before long, the car became a mishmosh of parts, and, in one case, entire other vehicles.
The essence of Saab was completely lost. It was no longer authentic. It was no longer different. The brand was as much of a facade as the sheets of metal they were wrapping around someone else's technology.
The auto business is brutal even in the best of times. Saab would have struggled even if it had remained on story - and to be fair would have likely gone out of business if it weren't for GM's investments.
It's just a good reminder to me - stay true, stay true.