HEAD BLOG

As a writer, I find one of my natural instincts is to resist perceived wisdom. Sure as eggs is eggs, if somebody were to say something is true I find myself taking the opposite view. In defence, I might argue that it helps me resist cliches and view things differently.

Mostly it makes me annoying during any discussion.

One such slice of “truth” is that the old as-seen-on-tv sticker aids sales. Years ago, whenever I saw one, I would wonder at the sort of people who could be swayed by such a message, as though the marvel of TV was enough to add lustre to a product.

I was missing the point of course. This wasn’t one of those cliches to avoid or subvert. I only had to be asked to purchase one of those nice gooey chocolate puddings “off the telly” to understand, on a practical level, that it acted like a pack shot, aiding recognition to drive in-store sales.

That such a simple trick could have eluded me, that its use could be misconstrued as some kind of old fashioned trope best avoided, showed me the importance of not reacting against everything simply because it was in common usage. It is like avoiding rhyming couplets in a poem on the basis of them having been the mainstay of poetic form for hundreds of years. If they are appropriate,use them. Use them for the effect they have.

When exploring the form your message is to take don’t dismiss the obvious. And don’t throw out those “new and improved” stickers yet either.

When it comes to understanding technology I like to think of myself as no slouch. I’ve done my share of programming from Z80 Assembly to Action Script and I know how to set the video recorder. The washing machine baffles me and fax machines just plain annoy (which side down again?) but overall I’d say I’m comfortable with using it and discussing it.

Yet sometimes I understand how my mum feels.

The big companies mostly get it. Apple, Canon, IBM, even Cisco – they all know that you don’t advertise the technology, you advertise what it can do for you. What  works for hair care products doesn’t, oddly enough, work for products that boast the most advanced engineering processes on the planet. Maybe Intel’s next chip should feature pentapeptides, I hear they are very good.

Many companies don’t take this approach. Maybe it’s because everything is vetted by the chief technology officer whose knowledge built the product to what it is today or maybe it’s just a desire to impress us, like when the owner of a new car tells us what the engine is capable of. Hey, as long as it’s capable of moving then all I’m really interested in is whether or not it will keep my arse warm in winter.

Recently, a job slipped its way into Head First. It was technology based but not game related. It was the kind of job we love because it enables us to apply our experience in new ways.

Trouble is, at first I didn’t have a clue what the product was.

They said their product is “the market leading social media platform for brands and agencies.”

I said, “what?”

I felt a bit thick.

If I bought it, what was I buying? Was it something I installed or something I stood on?

What did it enable me to do?

I wasn’t sure.

After five minutes I understood. They built websites on which their customers could share ideas, stories, videos – anything they wanted to really.

So I said, “ah” (I did, I really did) “you mean that with your software I can be my own Facebook?”

They said “yes”.

So why didn’t they just say that?

It was the last place you might expect to experience marketing in action but really, it should have been amongst the first.

When I think of the word “marketing” I think of companies such as Nike or Coca Cola. Companies with millions to spend on advertising. I think of acronyms like ABTL and AIDA. I think of (and this is probably where I’m completely alone) ads directed by John Woo and the high production values of London agencies.

I also think of Head First of course.

Every time I think in that way I know I’m making the same mistake many agencies make. The same mistake many marketing people make.

I’m thinking marketing is somehow a profession.

So back to the first place I ought to have expected to experience marketing in action.

Back to my local butchers.

At the weekend I had gone to buy a cow-full of meat for a barbecue. I needed just enough burgers to pay my way into the party and gain me access to whatever booze other people had brought along.

The butcher, however, had other ideas.

It began with a simple request: “let me just show you our special offer in the cake section”. After that I was hit with a fast patter of friendly sales talk, low key enough to not be pushy and yet slick enough to make me salivate with everything those cakes could offer me. He was friendly, he was chatty, he was inquisitive. He was more than counter staff, he was a marketeer.

Two minutes later I was walking out (after paying) with far more than I’d intended to.

And I felt great about it.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. These kind of shops, rare though they might me, are the heart and soul of what marketing is. True to the origins of the concept they remain rooted in the traditions of the ordinary market place. They are fuelled by the spirit of patter and bargains, of quick deals and friendly banter. They are expert in knowing the customer and adjusting their pitch to remain appropriate. In an age where marketing companies claim to herald a new age of social marketing, they practise it on a personal level the likes of which social websites spend millions of tech dollars trying to emulate.

If you ever want to write an ad or plan a marketing campaign, my advice is to butcher it.

The more advertising I’m exposed to and the more I’m involved with writing it, the more I wonder who this is all for. The headlines, the imagery – so much of it seems to be aimed at the client not the consumer because it falls into the sort of glib tone which only a person of a certain, educated background could fall for.

It’s like those novels that roll along in a particular fashion that is easy to read, contains all the right references to history (usually as studied to A level) contain a shocking twist and which turn out, nine times in ten, to be written by someone with an MA in creative writing. They’re not bad,  quite the opposite in fact; they are just all targeted towards a very specific audience.

Advertising can also fall into this groove. Many of us want to write a VW ad or a Honda ad and, as a result, a tone can be detected when it really oughtn’t to be.

I have written headlines I don’t like. They don’t appeal to me in the slightest. And every time I write such a line, I feel as though I’ve done something well. Something appropriate. Because I’m not every type of consumer and some products aren’t aimed at me. And even when they are, they aren’t just aimed at me.

Creatives need to look beyond “like”. That often means understanding the kind of person we wouldn’t, under normal circumstances, be seen dead associating with.

Recently I overheard two young women talking on a train. They were well educated, studying to work in Law from the sounds of it, and clearly financially quite privileged.

They were talking about women who had a tattoo on their back, the sort just above their backsides and which can often be seen peeking out from under a short cut T shirt.

You might know what I’m going to call these tattoos, I hadn’t heard of them referred to in this way before but you might.

They called them “tramp stamps”.

It was a magnificent, condescending put-down. Not just of the women who had themselves tattooed in that way but of a whole class of people. By drawing attention to them so quickly, I was given a clear picture of the clothes, the music, the backgrounds of these women.

I don’t mix with anybody who could be snubbed in that way but I do know I’d be able to write ads for them. And enjoy doing so. Because I know they have their likes and dislikes, their cultural reference points and motivating triggers the same as the two women whose words so comprehensively dismissed them.

There is more to writing ads than coming up with a clever line to appeal to broadsheet readers and University students. When we write ads for well educated clients and ignore the wonderfully diverse audience out there, creatives can be just as dismissive.

There was a period, a long period, back in the history of advertising when certain things held true. An ad could give advice, for example, or have an opinion and the agency would be pretty certain it would be received as intended. If they made a claim that doctors smoked cigarettes because they were good for your health then you and I would simply just accept this as a fact. If the agency, on behalf of their corporate overlords, assured us that the oil pouring out of a hole in the seabed was actually beneficial to the sea life, well, who could doubt the printed word?

Authority was absolute. At least for the purposes of selling.

The change in behaviour, however, was coming. Our relationship with consumerism and the companies which provided us with product after product was bound to be affected by mass media which showed us different cultures and the impact of our actions upon them. We were given the means through which we could see, test and then question the decisions our political leaders made and we could organise like never before.

These insights into how authority operated affected our relationship with advertising. Like seeing the flaws in a parent as we get older, so were we able to see how misleading the claims of advertising could be.

The past ten years has seen change of this sort again but at an unprecedented pace. The Internet has begun to affect us in ways we were not prepared for and still don’t truly understand. It may well be decades before we adjust to modern life, if such a thing is even possible anymore.

Businesses, and the advertising agencies which represent them, have reacted in different ways. A tiny few have embraced, and appear to understand, the responsibility granted by social marketing but many still adhere to the Authority model, filling their pronouncements so painfully with jargon as to make it appear archaic.

The reasoning, I believe, comes from too much love.

The people who work with these brands all respect the process too much. If a decision is made to make bottled water from tap water then, because they understand the process then they respect the decision. It’s the same logic that swallows the line about a company’s interest being its customers so why would it ever do anything to jeopardise that interest.

The balance comes not from cynicism, however. This leads to being unable to sell what the company has to sell. A cynical creative is one not in a position to see the good in a product that might lie beyond the jargon-filled nonsense.

The balance comes from questioning authority, from demanding it to explain itself in terms you can understand and by using talking points and conversation starters, not declarations.

My phone isn’t very good at making calls. I wouldn’t swap it for another.

I have a computer that isn’t very comfortable to type on. But that’s ok. Because I have another that is. That one just doesn’t show video very well.

Luckily I have a solution for that. I have a third computer that is perfect for typing and has a great screen. Everything looks amazing on it.

Only, it’s not portable.

Many people won’t go to these extremes of course. Many people will have one computer that does more or less everything they need, more or less satisfactorily.

I have a TV like this. It’s not flat. The colour is fading and the sound gives the sensation I’m sat in another room.

I’m ok with that.

Most things in life are about balance, about finding the one thing that matters most to you and just accepting the failings of the rest.

Sometimes advertising has to face up to this fact too.

You listen to a bunch of really cool things about a product and you realise that for every cool thing, there will have been a compromise. It could be screen size, it could be portability.

It will be something.

The trick is to understand what matters most and focus on that.

You can’t be everything to everyone.

I’ve been riding a bicycle. After more than thirty years I thought it time to saddle up and try again. Ok, that’s not strictly true. After more than thirty years I was persuaded to try it again.

And yes, they lied. You do forget.

Still, the excitement remained the same. Triggered from the first sound of the chain ticking ; an over-wound clock catching up the years since my last, childhood ride.

It’s a powerful thing, memory. Try as we might to hold onto a moment we find it can slip away whilst other, less desirable memories hold on.

I can’t remember my first kiss even though that is the one thing everyone claims to remember.

I do remember the first time I snuck a book beneath my pillow and, as the sound of footsteps receded, brought out Bobby Brewster and his typewriter to read by the fading light. I remember it because I went to the library on my own that day. I know I wouldn’t have cared about holding on to the memory. I just did.

Advertisers plunder our memories mercilessly. The first kiss image is used time and again to urge us to relate to things things they want us to imagine never forgetting. The not so subtle implication (and why should advertising be subtle?) being that their product is unforgettable.

As a creative it is often important to be able to find that common demoninator of human memory in order to leapfrog the work needed to make people understand the relevance in your message.

OK, I’m going to shock you. You may not survive the process. You may find your world has been irrevocably destroyed.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Advertising isn’t new.

Don’t shoot the messenger. It’s the plain and simple truth.

Yet many people think it is.

They must do.

Because when it comes to advertising on the internet, they seem to throw out all the experience we’ve collected over the past hundred or so years.

Perhaps in the early days of Flash, after seeing nothing but blue hyperlinks, white text and grey background, people saw image led advertising as new, as a drink of water in the desert. Perhaps.

These days there is no such excuse. The prevalence of ad blockers show that we are, in the main, quite used to advertising on the internet and hold it in the same, suspicious regard as all other forms of advertising.

So where are the messages.

And why do so many ads not only avoid supplying us with a reason to buy but actively discourage us from making an informed decision on the purchasing process by holding of on the information until we ‘clickthrough’?

It must be a new form of advertising.

And I’m not sure I want to buy into it.

At Head First, something we are always mindful of being is outsiders. It may seem strange to say this when most of our work is taken up with conveying the excitement of being a Japanese Samurai, a rampaging Marine or a MotoGP rider. Who amongst us is not an outsider when it comes to such rarefied pursuits? Certainly those of you reading this as a person uninterested in any sort of gaming outside football or snap! might suggest that the games we are charged with promoting are more akin with simple candy at a store in that children (for who else buys such tartly coloured things anyway?) will be drawn to the biggest buzz or lumbered with the budget title bought for them by a well meaning grandparent.

Somewhere in between all of this lies the duty of the outsider agency. Understanding where that buzz is created (and just how much money it can take to generate) is only a tiny part. In the vast, interconnected web of our consumer lives the real effort goes in knowing the many different faces of the gamer and seeing the product as they would see it rather than how the product manager would.

Yet being an outsider isn’t as easy as it might at first appear. In reality the outsider agency must not only be an outsider, but every outsider. And what a lot of outsiders there are.

A child, a teenager, a father, a mother, a single twenty-something – even that list, quickly generated, can spiral out of control and, in reality, tells us nothing. Take one: the father. Who is he? Why is he looking to play a game? What is he looking for? Does he go to the cinema? Does he buy books? Did he play games as a child and so is familiar with terms and conventions easily as complex as those of the Internet (and there’s a future article in itself)?

A person could sit down to a multiplayer game of Metro 2033 and be paired with a person they would all but despise in real life. The markers that resonate enough for them to choose something as simple as a shirt will be wildly different which leads to choices in design as to what terminology to employ, what nods to make, what visual cues to activate.

In such a world the question of how alien the main player character is takes a backseat. Indeed understanding the intricacies of the product itself can also take a backseat as our audience becomes as alien and unknowable as any blue skinned warrior robot could ever be.

Here, the outsider agency must arm itself with wit and a genuine interest in portraying the open, honest coolness of a product and fire it into the hearts of whoever walks on this strange digital battlefield.

Apple’s recent announcement of the iAd system was designed to further desensitize us to use of the lower case “i” in a bid to trademark the letter and prevent us all from talking about ourselves.

It also had the effect of exciting an awful lot of media buyers who know that wherever Apple walk, premium pricing “opportunities” are sure to follow.

The system was heralded as something new, as adding value to advertising as only Apple can by being more than than just animated text over a background – something most marketing people seem happy with when it comes to online advertising.

It’s a welcome move.

But it certainly isn’t new.

The Great Enemy – Flash – is capable of doing everything Steve Jobs demonstrated. It just isn’t done very often. All creative advertisers (not just Head First) understand that people don’t really want to click through because, well, they were on that page for a reason. Enabling consumers (or people, as we like to call them) to be diverted but not distracted is something we would all love to do because we’re people too. I’m reading a story and I like the cut of your ad. That doesn’t mean I want to marry it. I might explore a little further, see what the rollover state is but really, I’d like to carry on reading.

iAds “solves” this by not taking you out of the App space. It has the benefit of working within a fixed frame, thereby ensuring designers can make full use of space rather than be restricted to 300×250 or 728×90. And creating a mini-site within the ad, with all the hooks into the system is a great idea. It’s what closed systems can excel in.

But it’s not new.

Our recent ad for MotoGP 09/10 enabled people to choose from a variety of different trailers depending upon their interest in the game – from balls to the wall action to the more strategic coolness the game offers.

Much like the iAd proposition, it didn’t demand that you visit the website in order to explain why you really ought to buy the game. It showed you what was cool and then left it to you to decide.

We think that’s sensible. We know it helps sales.

Not all briefs enable us to this of course. Some briefs are written so that the client can increase traffic to the website.

And that’s ok too.

iAds will be a lovely advertising system. But it’s not new and certainly not innovative. All products can benefit from such an approach if they opt to bring the sales message to the person, not send the person to the message.