Gorilla Of course it’s not a gorilla, it’s a lemon. And here is the ad that inspired. In it, Bill Bernbach – one of the godfathers of modern advertising, describes his client’s new product as a lemon; a dud, a reject, no good. Readers at first thought Bernbach was mad. Why would he possibly describe the VW Beetle like that? But they had never seen advertising like this before – advertising that engaged them and made them think. So, they read on. And DDB’s advertising explaine

As agency tenure has declined the new business market for agencies has, of course, naturally increased. In a busy new business market, the better agencies have to choose more carefully which pitch invitations to accept - they can’t afford to go after everything. But agencies are repeatedly told their market is oversupplied, and advertisers approach it like it's a buyers’ market. Ironically, is a shorter average agency tenure making it more of a sellers’ market? And, if so, ar

“False positive” is a scientific term. It’s used when something gets a positive result from a test that should have produced a negative result. In the world of medicine they are acutely aware false positives (and false negatives) and therefore they will often retest results before acting, particularly if the result seems unlikely and the actions are serious. In the advertising world, the term false positive has a place too. I find it a useful way to describe somebody who has

At first glance animals, children, and ad agencies might seem like an odd bunch to group together, but they have more in common that it might first appear, for example: Dog owners spend hours training their pets, and indeed they want them to perform well: to come when called, to sit when instructed, even attack - if it’s that kind of dog. Parents want the best for their children. Who wouldn’t want their progeny to perform well at school? To learn, to progress and to achieve t

The whole issue around client/agency transparency seems a little opaque. There appears to be an almost blanket expectation of total disclosure by marketing services suppliers to their clients, and that this should be considered normal, reasonable and fair. But as is the case in all good debates, we should first define our terms. What is transparency? The common expectation among advertisers is that transparency means the open disclosure by the agency of pretty detailed inform

Marketing procurement continues to get a lot of flack from the agency community, not least for heavy handed negotiation practices over the levels and terms of fee payments. There are lots of contentious issues that contribute to the cyclical debates between these two parties: What is a reasonable overhead calculation? What is a reasonable profit? How much should a middleweight creative team cost? How many billable hours are there in a year? Spreadsheets are calculated and rec

There is an inextricable correlation between an ad agency’s talent and the value the agency can create for their clients. It’s the primary reason many of the older agencies had the names of their founders above the door or recognized by their initials. These figureheads like Bernbach, Ogilvy and Burnett were not just trying to appeal to new clients as their reputations grew, they were also beacons to the industry’s best talent. There isn’t a machine (yet) that can develop eff

The laws of investment apply to marketing investments as much they apply to investing in starting a business or buying government bonds: you cannot increase your return on a reduced investment without increasing your risk. To put this statement into a context for the challenge facing marketers, and assuming past behaviour is a predictor of future behaviour, then the uncertainty facing British businesses in the face of Brexit will encourage many businesses to batten down the h

Einstein once sagely noted, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” As obvious as that might seem it is perhaps not so obvious to the marketing and advertising worlds, which appear to continue repeating their aggressive/defensive behaviour when they both wish for different and better results – at least according to the findings I’ve seen from the IPA report “From Mad Men to Sad Men”. (Campaign 24.07.15 From Mad Men to Sad Men

There was a time when it was enough to have a reasonable non-vocational degree from a reasonable university to make it in the advertising business – because you could learn the rest on the job. You’d learn about advertising strategies and ways of working, you’d learn about marketing, and you’d pick the rest up through some sort of process of osmosis. And on top of that you’d get a bit of training once every couple of years. It’s not enough though, really, is it? And I doubt i

OK. Guilty. In a slightly cynical manner I borrowed your interest with an offbeat headline, sorry. But please bear with me – I’ll get to an important point. Just pretend for a minute that my wife had been dating again. We might have had a conversation something like this: Me: “Have you got any plans for the weekend, darling?” My wife: “I've got a couple of first dates lined up, that’s all.” she replies casually. Awkward silence as the sense of incred

As we approach the ad-agency-contract-renegotiation-season there is a truth that should be known by clients for their own long-term good and for the good of the agencies upon which they rely: ad agencies sometimes do silly deals. There, the cat is out of the bag. To be fair it has been out of the bag in the agency world for quite a while. Most ad agencies are aware that some of them do silly deals with their clients. But this will be news to many in the client world - particu

(This article was first published in Campaign Magazine 23.12.2014) RFI submissions have somehow morphed from questionnaire responses into creative showcases, requiring significant investment of time and money. At a recent RFI awards ceremony a high-cost brochure clad in Perspex and one-off magazine with a video were lauded for their high-production values. I fear that we’re regressing to the beauty parades of the 80s and 90s, but just in brochure form. So what is the problem?

(This article was first published in Campaign Magazine 23.2.2012) Since clients and agencies made the departure from commissions, it was inevitable that agency fees would steadily get screwed down. Commission-based remuneration, although largely arbitrary, represented a ratio of investment in message to the media it would appear in – it was a value judgment. As soon as hours became the currency of strategy, creative and account service time became a measurable commodity with