Mercedes "Escape The Map"

This campaign has been going for some time now, with apparently over 72,000 people playing the Google Streetview-based dystopian maze game Escape The Map, aiming Mercedes at a younger (but presumably still affluent!) audience.

What's heartening is to see that the TV Ads stick strongly to the plot and theme of the game - they're notably different in tone to your average TV ad, and all credit to the client for going ahead with it and to AMV BBDO for the creepy, unsettling execution.

Where I'm not certain if it works is on viewers with no previous knowledge of the game. The "I need to escape the map" could have been taken further as a standalone concept, in the sense of "I use the car to escape the dullness of driving in a familiar city". But perhaps the advert was only ever intended to jog the memories of those 72,000 odd players - so it's only a minor, and possibly invalid, criticism.

"Think Of Me As Evil: Opening the ethical debates in advertising"

This report was recommended to me by Frank Krikhaar, Corporate Responsibility Manager at Aegis PLC. It can be downloaded for free here. Now you've got it, here's what I made of it...

It starts on an unpromising note, with a list of recommendations from just about anyone except representatives from the advertising industry. However the actual report starts on a very reasonable note, suggesting "it is incumbent on the advertising industry to demonstrate that the cultural impacts of advertising are benign (p11)", which seems fair.

It goes on to make the point that most criticism of advertising has concentrated on specific products rather than the impact of advertising as a whole. They conclude that "modern advertising's impact from on British culture is likely to be detrimental to our wellbeing... the balance of evidence points clearly in this direction (p14)". And this is where we hit the underlying contradiction.

You can't simultaenously claim that not enough study has been made into the impact of advertising, then draw confident conclusions from these apparently insufficient reports. Note the weasel words in the last quotation - "is likely to", "balance of evidence points" - these caveats pervade the entire document. "It seems", "this may", "whilst the evidence is not conclusive", "can be theorised to". It's not solid stuff.

That said, the strongest part is probably section 2, which quotes convincing academic studies that advertising does not simply redistribute consumption between brands, but increases the market. But this raises the second objection, which is that of realism. Are we really going to tell people they can't have goods they can afford? Are any of us really in a position to preach anti-materialism? The report refers to J.K.Galbraith's argument that "human wants must be contrived in order to achieve on-going demand for things, once basic needs have been adequately met (p18)" - but you can bet he had lots of lovely furniture in his house.

Section 3, "Is advertising simply a mirror of cultural values", is where the report really leaps off the firm cliffs of reality into the seas of conjecture. On one double page spread (p30-31), the weasel words "likely", "may", "seems", and "probably" and "possible" appear at least 16 times. If you're not sure, don't bloody write it.

Even when they do refer to actual reports, the argument is riddled with holes. They quote a study that showed that students in America who watched a news program with adverts as part of their school curriculum were found to be significantly more likely to hold "extrinsic values" - the need to conform, be successful, be attractive to others, etc. But there's a major discrepancy here. Earlier in the report, the authors made much of the fact that we are exposed to between 500-1000 adverts a day. And yet they seem to claim that just 2 minutes of extra advertising is making that huge difference.

There are two explanations. One is that something in the methodology and questions is suspect - did they ask the children shortly after viewing adverts? Are there other lifestyle factors that haven't been taken into account? The second is more interesting, which is that the context in which advertising is presented is more important than the advertising itself. In this case, there was an implicit endorsement by the school and by the teachers that these adverts were acceptable, and indeed the news program was provided along with significant audio-visual equipment for the school. I'll return to this issue of context at the end.

Section 4, "Is advertising purely about the promotion of choice", they draw attention to the fact that much communication does not happen on a conscious level. This is true and reasonable. But of course they bring up that evil word "subliminal". It's an easy stick to point at the industry, to turn it into a scapegoat, with misrepresentations and one-off examples used to back up conjecture.

Yes, advertising appeals to intuition and emotion. But if advertising were removed from society, would we really be any less intuitive about brands? We would still judge them on their logos, their shop layouts and staff, their website, etc. Communication is not confined to the billboard or commercial break. And secondly, when the concept of "subliminal advertising" was at its height, mistrust of advertising was also at an all-time low, whipped up by Vance Packard's book The Hidden Persuaders (Andrew Cracknell, The Real Mad Men, p24).

I won't deal with the section on advertising to children, except to mention its main sources are David Cameron, the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, and the Bailey Report (produced by the leader of a Christian Charity). So much for balance.

In conclusion, this is an important topic that deserves a better, more thoroughly researched report. What could have been a sober assessment of the known effects of marketing on society descends with alarming regularity into conjecture, hypothesis, illogical conclusions, imbalanced sources of evidence, and scaremongering language.

But that's not to say we should be complacent. The industry should be pro-active in reframing its relationship with the public. As I said before, context is all important. An advert break in Coronation Street may be acceptable where an advert break with an implicit endorsement from a teacher is not. Product placement is equally troubling, as it places advertising in a context where we are not consciously aware of being advertised to. And in fact, although there's the usual kneejerk bleating about targeted ads in Facebook, they fail to recognise that increased personalisation could be the key to reducing the pervasiveness of advertising.

And that's our task at the School of Communication Arts. Work out how a new unspoken contract can be drawn up with the public about when, where, and how our paths meet. Make our communications relevant rather than intrusive. Make adverts that don't waste people's time. Make adverts that only the people who need to see them will see. Make them entertaining rather than unwelcome. No-one would complain about advertising if it was all good.

McVitie's Quirks - written as I eat a custard cream

I was going to blog about the social effects of advertising, but I haven't got through the entire 35 pages of conjecture that's been given to me just yet, so we'll just stick with a quick ad crit.

This effort from Publicis London is prime example of what I'd call a tight ad. It's not exactly funny or inspiring, but it has a job and does it neatly.

From the start you know its name, you're told that it's a biscuit, and it's from McVities. The concept of the ad, the name of the biscuit, and the content of the biscuit are all neatly aligned by that simple creative strategy: "Special on the inside".

It's a professional job, I just hope the creative team had something funnier up their sleeve that they couldn't get past the client.

Lexicographic Choice and Trains (Don't leave! This is interesting! Honestly!)

In my previous blog on Rory Sutherland, I talked about how when we make a choice with multiple factors, we approach it in a linear fashion, rather than weighing up all options.

What does this mean? Simply that if there are 2 factors in a decision, let's call them A and B, then we look for the option that scores the highest in A, and choose on that basis alone. We only look at the scores for B if there is a tie in A. If one option had a massive advantage in the B column, it wouldn't matter, even if it was only just beaten on factor A.

A quick example - choosing wine. The first factor is very often "red or white". Then, having eliminated the unwanted reds, we move onto other factors (price, familiarity, recommendations, etc) to choose between the white wine. The decision to have white wine is stuck to, even if they are a little pricey and there is a great bargain to be had in the red wines.

This is Lexicographic Choice. And it suddenly occurred to me that you can apply the theory to our old friends London Midland. I previously talked about how their tendency to promote trains from London to Birmingham on the basis of 3 factors rather than 1 broke the basic rules of positioning in marketing.

But we can see they break the rule of Lexicographic choice, too. Look at the page. There seems to be an implicit need to put ALL the information in front of the customer, so when they weigh up and combine these factors, they would surely conclude that London Midland is the train to choose.

But people don't think and act like that. The factor may vary, but most passengers will have just one value that they use to select which train to get to London. It might be price, speed, or frequency. But once they've found a winner in their chosen category, they are statistically unlikely to let other factors change their mind.

So saying that they have trains up to every 20 minutes is pointless, because other companies offer a more regular service. Mentioning the 20 minutes they've shaved off the journey time is pointless, because it is still slower than their competitors. These things are only worth mentioning as supporting factors to their one true advantage - their price.

The only people they are ever realistically going to attract are those who are looking for the low-cost travel. Anyone looking for, say, high speed travel is unlikely to say "well London Midland is slower, but it's cheaper, so maybe I'll put up with the journey time".

But then train companies are very often run by engineers, so what can you expect?

The best of Rory Sutherland

A bit of a lazy post, and as much as anything for my own future reference - a list of interesting and occasionally connected things said by Rory Sutherland in just one hour-long talk the other day at the School of Communication Arts.

If you're going to see a talk by him, he may well say similar things - so consider this your spoiler warning.

- Always remember that the problem you're trying to solve might just be a symptom of a bigger problem. So why not fix that instead? See the Inventor's Paradox
- Advertising has been under attack from a market-driven neo-classical economics approach to solving problems. Human insight is no longer valued as a way to create a competitive advantage.
- BUT science, research, economics, and logic can give weak answers. They tell us that 35 units is a safe amount of alcohol to drink, so we stick to it. Behavioural economics tells us that keeping a tally is difficult, self-deception is rife, it's hard to police or get others to police, etc. Instead you should just set a rule not to drink on 2 or 3 days of each week - which is a absolute binary choice, easy to remember, and can be done socially with friends or relations, each easily policing each others' drinking habits.
- God was the first behavioural economist, by creating a seventh day of rest.
- Procrustes was the first neo-classical economist.
- Binary absolutes are almost always the easiest rule to follow - "No work on Sundays" > "Only work 40 hours maximum", and "Don't eat carbs" > "Eat x calories per week".
- Eurostar spent £6bn making a marginal improvement on journey times (an engineer's logical improvement) when they could have spent a fraction of that installing WiFi on their trains, rendering the journey more enjoyable.
- "The invention of Angry Birds made Concorde irrelevant"
- "The annoyance of a wait is not duration, it's the uncertainty". London Underground's greatest innovation was dot matrix displays with countdown to next train. South Korea now has red light signals with a countdown to when the lights turn green which has apparently reduced accidents. See also the loading / progress bar in software downloads/installs.
- The best ideas combine technology, economics, and psychology.
- Giving people control and choice is more likely to get them to part with their money.
- Be aware of Heuristics - the rules by which humans come to a decision where a completely scientific and rational analysis of the choices and the situation is impossible (NB this is pretty much all of the time).
- A good heuristic example is our tendency to buy the second or third cheapest wine on the list. Or that in a group of 5 with varying price, the 2nd and 4th most expensive will be the most popular.
- We see things relatively - therefore changing the frame of reference can increase sales. People choosing between a £2 and £1 can of lager will choose the more expensive by 2 to 1. But if you add a 50p can of lager to the choices, the £1 can suddenly becomes more acceptable and more popular. Nespresso works by making people compare it to the cost of a cup from a coffee shop, not the cost from homemade ground or instant coffee.
- When making a decision with many factors, we tend to make it in a linear fashion. When buying a house, people often choose location, then choose the best they can find in that location. They don't think "well I'll keep an open mind in case there's one I love so much in location B that I don't mind not living in location A" - they just rule location B out. See Lexicographic Preferences.
- Behaviour drives attitudes, not the other way round. “When a man says, ‘my wife doesn’t understand me,’ it doesn’t mean he’s planning an affair. He’s already had one.” We post-rationalise. This is why it is easier to change behaviour (make recycling habitual and easy) than attitudes (make people care about the environment so they'll recycle).
- We are happier with limitations than infinite possibility. Spotify offers us unlimited downloads for a certain price, but how much is unlimited worth? If you said 500 tracks, you can make a comparison and feel like you're getting a good deal.
- Anyone engaged in a market research survey is unreliable, because they are acting as a "maximiser" all the time - consciously trying to decide what is best. In the real world, we are "satisficers" - happy with something that will not kill or maim us, break, or be embarrassing. This is why we go to MacDonald's - though you wouldn't take your wife there on a wedding anniversary, when you revert to maximiser.
- Therefore a focus group would analyse Red Bull and tell you that they would never pay 3 times more for it than coke costs. But in the real world, they just changed the size of the can, so people thought of it as a different type of product (see changing frames of reference above), and happily paid the extra.
- Statistically the best way to get sex is to constantly proposition people until you find one (on average, about 15 tries later) who agrees. However very few people, even if aware of the success rates, would be willing to put up with the rejection and social embarrassment in order to try it.
- English football fans are only marginally better than a foreigner with no knowledge of the English game at predicting scores. This is partly because the foreigner will just pick the team he/she has heard of to win. For the same reason, 62% of Americans know that San Diego is bigger than San Antonio. But 100% of Germans select San Diego as the bigger, because it's the only one they've heard of. It's the Fame Heuristic - recognition is a massive factor in prediction and choice.

And that's just the bits I managed to jot down legibly. You can't say he's not good value.

My work - British Acupuncture Council

A little spec work I produced at the School of Communication Arts with Olly to promote acupuncture. The brief was to demystify it and make it more accessible for a western audience.

Probably not something the client would ever buy in real life. In fact, they can't really do advertising at all, because they, you know, basically sell a lie. But never mind, here we go...

The Seat Portmanteau

Here's another entry in the "if a friend mentions it on social media, it must have done something to penetrate their consciousness, so I'd better blog about it" category.

It's Seat's latest slogan.

Needless to say, my friend was critical, and he's right. It works technically, and imparts a clear message, but it's too clever-clever. It's simply not how normal people talk or make jokes.  It's... how can I put this... just advernnoying.

It's the Behavioural Economy, Stupid

Like clunky TV exposition or the smell of marijuana, Behavioural Economics is one of those things that as soon as you know what it is, you notice it everywhere.

Case in point - topping up your Oystercard at a ticket machine. I think TfL are missing a trick. Because every time I top up my card, it goes through the same process:

- touch card to reader
- machine displays balance
- select top up and amount
- make payment with card
- touch oyster card to reader again
- off you go

Except it doesn't happen like that. Every time it tells me "your card has been successfully updated", for some reason I don't trust it, and I have to wait for it to go to the new customer screen, and touch the card to the reader again to display the balance. Just so I can be 100% sure it works.

I'd put this down to my own distrustfulness, but I've now started seeing other people do it as well. The 2 girls in front of me in the queue did the same thing.

So, what's the solution? Surely all it needs to do is say "Your card has been successfully updated - your new balance is £xx.xx" - and I think most people would trust it. I'm pretty sure I would. It doesn't sound a lot, but when you consider the number of transactions made at ticket machines every day, it could be quite a timesaver.

My Work - spec Barnado's copy

This was a copywriting challenge at the School today - to come up with words for a Barnardo's advert to go with the image. The image was from BBH's "fuck off" print ad, but we didn't know this until after we'd produced our version.

This is mine. Note that the Art Direction is mine, i.e. very shoddy, so just concentrate on the words.

(click to see full size)

A gem from Giffgaff (and special guests)

This is a peach. Thanks to Albion for this.

There's logic behind the lunacy. Their "Unlock A Phone, Unlock A Chicken" campaign is a neat metaphor, and although Orville may be a duck, the human-avian pairing is the perfect medium for the message.

Oh, and it also works in the real world. Who doesn't want to free a battery hen? And it's a great product too, the low cost of a contract with the flexibility of pay as you go (yes, I use them, it's great).

Oh, and it's got Keith Harris rapping. What more do you people want?

My work - Toyota Auris Hybrid

Here's a little spec work I produced at school with my parter Olly Wood.

There's definitely room for improvement. I think the fantasy idea can be made more dramatic and exciting in the actual ads, though that's partly down to execution. We also need to make sure they're not too similar to a couple of ads that are already out there. But generally I'm happy with the creative strategy and think this one could end up in the end-of-year portfolio.

Crowdsourcing adverts

We had a mentor round at SCA the other week, who was starting up a website where brands could invite anyone to pitch creative ideas, and get paid if their ideas were chosen. Exciting stuff, although it turns out there is a site in America running along similar lines called poptent.net - it'll be interesting to see how they differ.

Here's an example of one of these crowdsourced ads, for Jolly Rancher by a director called Olivier Agostini.

There's a neat idea in there - that a crunchy outside and soft middle could be represented by a turtle. But after that insight, he lets logic go walkies and the ad descends into tedious "surrealism". It's also unclear whether the acting and editing were intentionally bad or not.

As Jolly Rancher are made by Hershey's, a giant in US confectionary, one can only assume that crowdsourcing an ad like this was more of a PR ploy than a serious strategy. Let's hope that our friend's as yet unnamed site will be taken more seriously in Britain.

Things Clicking Into Place

It's amazing how long you can go learning something without actually getting it.

I learned and played guitar for years and years, but when I gave it up recently (or at least gave up being in a band), I felt I was only just getting what it was all about - playing the right part at the right time. That's all.

It's not something you can really teach. I'm sure I could teach a kid to play guitar OK, but who really wants to hear "this is how you keep time with the drummer" when you can learn cool solos to impress your friends?

Well it's the same in advertising. We're well into Term 2 and I'm only just getting what it's all about. It's not about great lines (though they help) and it's not about sudden flashes of inspiration (again, not to be sniffed at, but not always necessary).

It's about finding a Creative Strategy. Once you've done that, you'll produce work that will look to outsiders like a flash of inspiration without breaking a sweat. It's this illusion that adverts are created in a sudden lateral brainwave that is the equivalent of kids wanting to learn guitar solos before they can play rhythm.

As King Charles I once said, "don't rush to execution".

What The Shitting Fuck #6 - VW Beetle Star Wars Fuckwittery

OK, I know I'm just adding my voice to a general chorus of disapproval, but this effort by Deutsch LA (made for the SUPERBOWL, for god's sake) just had to go in the WTSF category. I mean, do they really think we're that stupid?

Suffice to say that the Star Wars section is about as welcome an addition to the advert as Jar Jar Binks was to the Star Wars franchise.

Unbelievable Brand Personalities

Following on from a talk by Mark Palmer from Maverick Planet (and former Head of Strategy at Bates, OMD, WCRS, and BMP), I found myself getting nostalgic for my own job.

He'd been speaking about how brands can establish a personality - but that this identity must always derive from a genuine aspect of the company's activities. Tango, for instance, could credibly lay claim to being a "fun" brand, as drinking sugary fizzy drinks tends to bring out the best/worst in your average child.

The problem lies when a company just decides to adopt a personality that has no relevance to their product or working methods - usually because they've seen an unrelated organisation (Apple and Innocent the most likely culprits) achieve success and praise and want to emulate it.

As an Account Manager I used to work for a train company, who had somehow decided that they wanted our marketing to make them quirky and fun, showing us marketing from Ben & Jerry's as the style they wanted to go for. No-one seemed to have the heart to tell them that eating ice cream is fun, whereas nothing in the process of travelling on their trains remotely approached it.

They even asked us to add animals (zebras and giraffes) to the illustrations (of a train in the English countryside), because they liked the cows in Ben & Jerry's marketing. Again, no one felt it appropriate to mention that cows and ice cream have a close connection that isn't exactly present in zebras and trains.

Why more people - actually working in Marketing - don't get this kind of simple education is a mystery.

Durex - classy condom ad

This one is a beauty. A great idea and a simple message that's sexy but not smutty, well executed with straightforward semiotics - the pink and blue, the records spinning in sync when it goes well, etc.

It's from Euro RSCG, and clearly they've decided to position the product as sex aid rather than just contraception. Kudos to them for doing it with such wit and class.