HEAD BLOG » inspiration

Monday recipe: British Larder

Dom — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:42:54 +0000

When I sit down to write an ad or plan a campaign I can spend an hour or two browsing the Internet. Some people might recognise this behaviour as evasion but I like to call it the search for inspiration.

I’ll avoid the usual advertising temples and wander instead to sites that can take my mind away from the blank page before me. These sites could be great little bookshops or they could be this one, The British Larder.

I fully expect TBL to add ‘great’ into its title at some point because for me it is a haven of inspirational writing. Great recipes too, of course, but really, like a great menu, it is the writing which inspires.

On Saturday I cooked Maddy’s Horneado. And it wasn’t decided on the spur of the moment but rather considered over the course of the previous week. I’d read the diary entry which accompanied it and it had inspired me to give it a try.

The results were wonderful. I’ll be able to do it my sleep after a few more goes and I’ll refine the process so mine looks more like the one photographed by Maddy. The real warmth, however, is in the writing.

Recipe sites can be fairly dull. As extensive a resource as it is, the BBC Food site reads more or less like a Haynes manual. There is no inspiration. There is nothing to give the reader an insight into another mind. Occasionally we might learn that a dish used to be favourite amongst prostitutes but generally we don’t.

In the advertising world we aim to inspire, to excite. Hopefully we can do this by finding an element within the product that speaks to us and use that to inspire and excite others. I’ll often find myself sitting somewhere playing a little thought experiment, imagining how I could advertise whatever shop or product is in front of me. Usually this involves wanting the shop to do something human, to understand why it is I’m there in the first place and make my visit more personal.

With The British Larder I don’t have to. I can just wallow in a beautiful product: that of a personal, relevant and deeply inspiring cooking diary.

If only her taste in films could follow suit

Sell the adventure

Dom — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:00:44 +0000

We’re back on the sizzle today following a discussion about Scott Adams. Not the creator of Dilbert but the designer of video games from the early days.

Scott created adventure games, most memorable (to my retro mind) of which was the Quest Probe series. As I looked up at the games on the shelves of Games Workshop and W H Smith I remember marvelling at the packaging which promised so much, well, adventure. Designed to look like comic book covers they were everything I could ever want. Escape into a world of Hulk rampaging through a city? Yes please. The thought of Hulk’s wrecking ball fists swinging to my whim was a powerful lure. Could this be the game to send me into such a world?

No.

Of course not. These were the days of colour clash and loading times. This was before SID let alone Sam and Max. Reaching into the earth shattering world of Hulk would take a while longer.

All that didn’t matter; not to a young boy being sold the dream of high adventure. The cover was enough and some might argue it was too much. After all, there was no way the game could deliver on such a promise. Yet there was no feeling of disappointment, no sense of being cheated. The game told a story, illustrated by some simple images. And as any writer of radio plays will tell you: storytelling isn’t dependant upon technology. These stories were incredible.

The cover was just the beginning.

These days (and forgive me for sounding old) many game marketing companies don’t feel they have to sell the sizzle anymore (see, I didn’t say “all” – I’m not that old). What’s in the game is good enough. leave your imaginations at the door and step into our world they say.

The dream gets forgotten as we wake into a world of processing power and special effects.

And all this isn’t to undermine the games. Stepping into a fantasy town, onto an alien shore or even a football pitch, well that experience really is better, more real than anything that has gone before. Our imaginations are both simulated and stimulated.

It’s just that you generally wouldn’t know that from the cover. Games are a world into the imagination, not a technological demo. So when it comes to packaging we should be aiming to inspire, to sell the dream and encourage the consumer to bring themselves fully into the fantasy. Many now tell us exactly what to expect. If that happened way back when then Hulk’s impact would have been tiny.

Follow-me marketing

Dom — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:00:35 +0000

I get up, each week day morning, at around 5:30. That gives enough time for the usual ablutions and leaves me plenty of time to catch a lift to the station. I like a long, slow start to my day. Rather than take an extra hour in bed, thinking about the deadlines I’ll have to meet I like to get up early and lower myself into the day. Too much, too soon, could kill me.

As part of this extended ritual I take twenty minutes or so between dressing and leaving in order to watch a bit of TV. Sometimes it’s the news; a short series of rants against sofa news broadcasting and random weather reports gets me into the spirit where I can deal with my day. Some people hit the gym, I hit the rant.

At the moment my snippet of media is a Discovery Channel showing of Moonwalk One. This once lost film about the first moon landing has been sat on my Sky+ system for a few months. Incidentally, that’s not why it was classified as “lost”. I’m pretty sure mine is not the only copy in existence.

The reason I took so long to watch the film is simple: it’s three hours long. That a big commitment in fifteen minute slices and I kept putting it off. I’m glad I didn’t hit delete though. The film is proving to be a beautiful slice of documented reality viewed through the lens of perhaps the most magnificent event of the twentieth century. As cinematography goes, it ranks alongside Kubrick’s 2001 and has a similar, 60′s vibe to it. But I’ll defer real analysis on that level to my friend and colleague, Martin Riley of Lion Eyes Television whose passion is Kubrick. Just let’s not discuss AI.

Suffice to say I’ve been taken to the Moon with this programme. Its pacing has carried me gently upwards, retracing the era-defining journey. I cannot ever know what it felt like to witness the event as it happened but Moonwalk One makes me wish I could.

Back on earth, however (and here we might come crashing down) I see the adverts and take my usual detatched but professional interest in them. A lot of media observers are making a lot of fuss about one ad in particular: Compare The Meerkat. This tangential solution to a product whose late launch into a crowded market coupled with a wordy, cumbersome name, has performed beautifully. It’s a real example of how advertising can work. Finding a solution that sticks in the mind is what advertising can and should be about. Compare The Meerkat is an example students will discuss.

And where one ad goes, others are bound to follow.

Enter Go Compare. A brand that has been around for a while and featured some pretty bland, but probably quite effective, advertising. Now they seem, possibly in the wake of Compare The Meerkat, possibly as just another phase of their strategy, to be going “creative” with a fairly cringeworthy series of ads. That’s not to judge the ads on effectiveness of course but it does leave me wondering about follow-me marketing (you knew I’d get around to that eventually didn’t you?)

If Go Compare is reacting to the success of Compare The Meerkat then it is succumbing to follow-me marketing. And the danger of this approach is that people attempting to reach for the moon rarely make it out of the atmosphere. And it’s because they don’t aim high enough. If it wants to be on a level with Compare The Meerkat, Go Compare should be looking to the work which inspired that.

Find your own moon or reach for something even higher.