Philistine that I am I have to admit I haven’t exactly been jonesing for membership in the Alex Bogusky fan club.

Attending one of the Olympian confabs of the Scali McCabe Sloves creative federation years ago, I was struck by Pat Fallon’s admission (not to be confused with being struck by Pat Fallon which was also a faint possibility) that while he was proud of his agency’s notoriety and domination at the award shows, he was frustrated that they had yet to do great work for the likes of a Chevrolet or a Tide. Big brands in big, crowded and competitive categories with limited product distinctiveness, and where success can take years rather than a single awards cycle.

CP+B has always felt a bit like that to me, more like a promotions agency (albeit a brilliant one) creating a series of spectacular advertising ‘events’ but not necessarily making sustainable brand building campaigns. Which is perhaps a predictable outcome of Bogusky’s vaunted “show me the press release” dictum.

Well I was wrong about His Alexness. He’s a fucking genius. His note to MDC employees in which he explains the role of Creative Insurgent is a template for what agencies have to do to become genuinely valuable to clients again. Which is to reaffirm (to ourselves as much as to our clients) that our real value always was and always will be the objective creativity we bring to business. But at the same time, which is what I think the great one is suggesting, we have to broaden what we mean by ‘creativity’.

Clients assume that what they need are the familiar comforts of process, certainty, guarantees and accountability (and there’s no shortage of revenue starved agencies only too happy to fake it). But they’re drowning in process and accountability. What they don’t have is an ounce of objectivity or a scintilla of creativity. And when they do go in search of objectivity, they hire clones called consultants, merely adding blinkers to an already myopic view.

Well, Colorado’s answer to J.M. Keynes has been delving into real and weighty issues. Energy and sustainability, moral and ethical conundrums, pressures on commerce to give back to as well as take from society. And because he’s not burdened by the quotidian drudgery of making plan or constrained by the bromides of those consultant-clones hired to “address” such issues, it’s more than likely he’ll come up with some unique perspective and useful ideas.

At root our value is not strategy or planning or mass media or social media or technology or research or behavioural science or even making TV ads; our real value is that we’re different. We do all those things, but they are simply the applied bit in applied creativity.

As Alex, or the Mahatma as I now refer to him, puts it “We can feel the rightness and wrongness and not even know why.” The benefits of informed instinct and applied creativity are a tough sell to those who crave certitude, but instinct not research drives innovation and instinct is what most large institutions smother.

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According to his bio on BNET, Geoffrey James “has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men’s Health, Business 2.0, and… and… and…”

… And according to me he’s just penned his last. Because it is codswallop. Which is the sort of grand pronouncement Geoff seems to favour.

BNET is owned by CBS so I assume it has a substantial readership and a modicum of credibility within the business community. Which is the only reason I bother to call out clods like Geoff who make baseless, facile and sensational pronouncements concerning marketing and advertising. Like Mrs. Patrick Campbell, I don’t mind what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses, or in this case my clients.

His article is entitled Branding is Dead: Apple, Toyota, Leno & Obama Prove It. Geoff’s journalistic speciality appears to be the startling non sequitur. Viz. (all italics mine)

Apple, of course, is a highly visible corporate brand and has established numerous successful product brands. However, all the discussions after the announcement of the iPad were about the product, not about the brand.

Toyota has a highly-recognizable brand name that for decades has been associated with high quality products. However, the brouhaha over the recall shows that consumers are more than willing to change their perception of a brand for the negative, if the product no longer justifies that high opinion.

Both Leno and O’Brien are “brands” in and of themselves, but the reason that there was an argument in the first place was that, no matter how recognizable their brands might be, their products weren’t any good

The final event of note was Barack Obama’s state of the union address. Obama is more than a President; he’s a brand in and of himself… His speech was masterful — like all of his speeches — but in the large scheme of things, that speech is irrelevant because Barack Obama will be judged, not on his brand, but on the performance of the product.

You are so confused on this subject Geoff that I’ll let your random thought collisions speak for themselves. Most of my readers understand the difference between a product and a brand.

Think of it like the physical states of matter: a product is a solid, tangible thing, a brand is a gaseous ephemeral thing while your article is a liquid babbling thing.

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The least distinctive aspect of the Winter Olympics is the fact that insane people will throw themselves off mountains or hurtle head first down spiraling ice chutes. They do so with monotonous regularity on a quadrennial basis, invariably with spectacular mountain scenery as the backdrop and a lot of powdery snow shooting up at the cameras. And after mounties and moose, the most clichéd aspect of being Canadian is that we trudge our way through life enduring a crap climate.

The BBC’s commercial for their coverage of the Winter Olympics presents a more intriguing (because unexpected) image of Canada than all the domestically produced tourism and Olympics ads put together.

On the whole Canadian marketers are slavishly literal and woefully unimaginative. The amount of money we waste on showing customers what they already know is perhaps only equaled by the amount of money we spend on research to confirm that they in fact know what we think they know.

If advertising dies anywhere I predict it will be in Canada. And it won’t have anything to do with a disrupted mediascape or the triumph of the conversation over the marketing monologue, it will simply die of boredom.

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Instead of misspending my youth justifying membership in the wrong crowd I should have been studying to be an ophthalmologist? Or a dental technician. But back when I eschewed academic advancement in favour of drinking for Essex I thought very little about demography. Our generation bifurcated quite nicely along the lines of mod or rocker, hippie or skinhead.

I’m sure that right now, false teeth fitters, opticians and chiropodists are scooping up the two-up-two-down Suffolk cottages me and the wife have circled in the Guardian’s “Downsizing” homes section for our genteel if penurious retirement. And driving prices so that the proceeds from our Canadian real estate would barely afford a bathroom reno in a des. res. in Dedham.

The Globe And Mail’s Doug Saunders recently wrote about Hania Zlotnik, the lady who heads up the UN population division and who holds real answers to really important questions – like third world poverty. Demography is wonderfully concrete and revealing information. And of course it holds equally valuable clues for those of us who huck beer or biscuits for a living.

Back in 1996 demographer David Foote of the University of Toronto published Boom Bust & Echo. In it he demystified the marketing shibboleths that companies like Yankelovich would share with clients for about the price of a 2-bedroom apartment in downtown Toronto.

In 1966 the vanguard of the baby boom hit 20, while the last of them were babes in arms. Hardly surprising then that beer was the biggest game in town from 1966 to 1986 as hordes of spotty faced lads surged through adolescence on a tsunami of testosterone. And that, 25 years on, beer plays second fiddle to wines and spirits, eyewear, adult diapers and prepaid cemetery plots, now that the younger boomers’ kids are growing up and we older ones are reluctantly but inexorably fading to black.

Trying to decode the human mind is a mugs’ game. A recent survey says that the most trusted name in US news is FOX. Meanwhile Forbes declares the most trusted celebrities to be the likes of Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington. Well, for all we know Hanks regularly snorts coke off hookers’ tits and gives the little woman a good slapping once in a while. We know nothing about these men. People trust the roles they play in movies. Which is ineffably sad.

It doesn’t take a PhD in demography to understand that an aging population would follow Snap, Crackle and Pop if they could be depended upon to condemn every threat to the comfy status quo, give voice to their righteous indignation at anyone who appears to be doing better than them in the life lottery, and chivvy the President for spending tax money on healthcare for the poor. And having shucked off the cocoon of religion in which their ancestors found solace and having spent their days acquiring everything and learning nothing, the only models for good are celluloid images of men playing soldiers or impersonating stout souls.

Getting to the bottom of the bizarre and labyrinthine processes by which people arrive at how and what they think is the work of many lifetimes. Predicting what they need is considerably easier and probably a whole lot more profitable.

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There is a lovely speech that Chief Seattle of the Squamish tribe is supposed to have delivered at a meeting to discuss the sale of native land to white settlers (the actual text of the speech and even the event itself are the subject of considerable dispute among historians, but I like the sentiment anyway). It begins:

“The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?”

Saffron has been appointed the branding agency for London. Which is a crying shame for London and yet another abuse and distortion of the hitherto useful commercial concept of branding. Here at Grumpy Manor, the idea of branding London is indeed strange to us.

You can’t brand the ocean, you can’t brand nature, you can’t brand Caravaggio, or Mozart, or Shakespeare. You can’t brand the atom bomb. Or Einstein. Or Plato. Or John Lennon or Charles Dickens. Or Germany or Paraguay or the Matterhorn. And those God brand wars have been an unmitigated fucking disaster.

Branding is about imbuing trivial, generally inanimate things with emotional attributes (and yes, in the scheme of things the sacred iPad and BMWs are trivial things) and convincing people to pay more for them than the cost of their manufacture and sales. It’s brilliant; it keeps the economy ticking over and the money going round.

Why didn’t someone challenge brand-mad Boris and say something to the effect of, “Look you shambolic Etonian git masquerading as a charming buffoon (that might actually be a tautology), what do you really want to accomplish? Jack up visits to art galleries? Get businesses to fill up your office towers? Hype the Olympics? Sell more tickets to the opera? Fill the Ripper tour buses? Convince Americans to stay in overpriced hotels and shell out for the pricey seats at the football? Twickenham? Wimbledon? Fill the pubs and restaurants?”

Branding is not a synonym for marketing. Any and all of those things might be accomplished with creative marketing and communications programmes. But you can’t brand London because no one has the capacity to imagine all the things London is or can be. Branding is about reducing something, simplifying it. Which is an extraordinarily dumb idea for London. The story of London is millennia in the telling. I’m pretty sure there isn’t an evolving trans-media brand narrative that will come close to capturing it.

This is from the Saffron’s website:

This is a call for authenticity. For keeping it real. We come across too many new brands that don’t feel right for a company we know well. This is because these brands are not authentic.

I suspect yet another “non-authentic brand” “that doesn’t feel right” is about to be foisted on a brand weary world.

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In turbulent times there’s a tendency for people to put their brains into sleep mode. Fear dampens the spirit of inquiry and heightens the appeal of easy answers. No more middle ground: you’re either with us or against us.

Tom Asacker thinks that branding is an industrial age concept that’s long past its sell by date. He suggests that, “GM, Hertz and Sprint are close to collapse due to the psychological weight of branding.” He draws this conclusion because brands grew out of mass production, either to create distinction where there was none, or to con people into buying up excess inventory through deception.

His argument is syllogistic: branding has been used in the past to create false value, consumers now demand real value, therefore brands are an outmoded concept. Much as I hate to borrow from the NRA, brands don’t deceive people, brand managers do. As Luke Sullivan so concisely put it, a brand is an adjective. And just because adjectives can be used to exaggerate or mislead, it doesn’t follow that adjectives are obsolete.

Mr. A. further suggests that brands are “holding back marketing thought and organizational action”. He chooses not to share with us exactly what it is they are being restrained from doing. Hiring chief cultural officers perhaps which is all the rage right now (at least for those too young to remember when marketing people saw being in touch with the zeitgeist as part of their job).

The fundamental problem is that industry gradually lost touch with the idea that commerce is a transaction of money in return for the equivalent value in goods or services. Instead they came to think of it as a byzantine shell game, the sole goal of which is the pursuit of “shareholder value”. So marketing and strategy went out of fashion, manufacturing, sales and service got shipped off to the orient when possible and whatever else could be done to slash costs and boost sales in time for the quarterly analysts’ call became the endgame.

The fact is, the deception of customers, not to mention self-delusion as to the whole point of the enterprise under this scenario, is infinitely deeper than when companies simply made stuff, packaged it up into an attractive brand and made ads to convince people their shit was better shit than the competitor’s shit.

Now that the fundamental incompetence of former powerhouses like General Motors has been exposed and the shell game is seen for the fraud it actually is, customers are using their new found power to voice their discontent. This is not so much profound change as it is (as they say in the financial industry) a market correction.

And so the fear sets in and everyone starts looking for some easy (or at least new and impressive) answers. But the problem isn’t so much that the old way of doing things is fundamentally wrong, it’s more that no one remembers how to do it.

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When Foster’s launched into the Canadian beer market we used to sit in the interminable focus groups that are the price you pay for raucous nights in strip joints and luxurious production budgets, listening to punters recite their spots verbatim. They couldn’t get enough of the chipper croc wrestler, Paul Hogan.

But Foster’s barely made a dent in the market. Ever. No one said they didn’t like the beer, Hogan was certainly not lacking in beery credentials and they loved his spots. They just didn’t buy the beer.

I’ve been reading Saatchi’s Kevin Roberts’ blog. I’m on record as having said I think he’s full of shit so it’s incumbent on me to read what he has to say. KR thinks ROI should stand for return on ‘involvement’ rather than return on ‘investment’.

He suggests Saatchi’s T-Mobile flash mob things and Euro’s Evian Babies as proof positive of his theory. But the only ‘return’ he cites is the 26 million and 55 million hits respectively that these campaigns garnered on the internet. They may well have boosted sales to unprecedented heights, but the problem is, KR glosses over such minutiae in exhorting their success.

So here’s the thing KR. If your BMW dealer (or Jaguar or Maserati or whoever manufactures your wheels of choice) told you that your vehicle was giving you the highest return on id (as measured by the number of times per dollar paid that people said: “Nice motor Kev”) in answer to your assertion that the only thing you could hear at 60 miles an hour was the sound of the gearbox disintegrating, you’d probably tell them to… whatever it is you tell people to do when you’re really, really cross.

There are countless instances of well-received ad campaigns, promotions, events, sponsorships and so on, having no positive effect on sales.

When it comes to commerce, absolutely no one gives a shit about return on anything other than their investment. And it will ever be thus.

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I am afraid I have to carry on where my pal Peter Holmes of Reason Partners sensibly left off in excoriating the following from Marketing Magazine’s 2010: Industry Expert Predictions. Pete is far more polite than me, so I’ll begin by saying that the quoted ‘expert’ is one Andy Krupski, veteran suit, former BDA president-thingy and currently partner and President of the Hive.

It’s not just jargon laden it is, quite literally, nonsense.

He might as well have said: “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/did gyre and womble in the wabe…” But then he’d be Lewis Carroll and a genius and he wouldn’t be quoted in Marketing Magazine, not to mention being 112 years dead on Wednesday. The quote reads as follows:

People will continue to buy and pay more for reliable brand reputations that enrich the depth and breadth of their own identity. The future belongs to any product that can give users a unique identity and place, be it real or virtual. 2010 will be about combining an engaging story with an immersive experience so that the brand becomes an avatar and the communications investment becomes an extension of the brand experience. Communications technology is now the enabler, source and subject matter of human entertainment as a result the concept of the “Avatar” has crossed the chasm into mainstream culture and branding.

As best I can make out this random assortment of nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions and such translates thusly:

Brands will continue to be a favourite with people who like them best. But any product that can offer customers a place in a witness protection program is definitely on a hiding to nothing.

Actually, the really interesting thing about 2010 is that brands will become earthly manifestations of deities [I assume line extensions will take the form of succubi and incubi] and in an unprecedented outpouring of corporate generosity, will distribute their entire marketing budgets among their customers.

In other news, “Avatar” looks certain not only to rack up a trillion or two at the box office, but will spawn a plague of flat-faced, blue-hued spokespeople on everything from cereal boxes to tampon commercials.

I’m only sorry that this wasn’t available to be entered into TAC’s 2009 Bully Awards. I think I could have placed at least.

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Sycophantic doesn’t begin to describe this interview with Alan Mulally. And he certainly seems to be feeling the love, albeit the strictly butt slapping, high fiving, circle-jerking kind.

Former cockpit designer for Boeing, Mulally is the CEO of Ford and the keynote speaker at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Which I’ll grant is a nifty PR move on his part, given the apparent centrality to Ford’s marketing platform of the new open source version of the Synch “in-car communications and entertainment system”.

Despite his “special forces-casual” appearance, he actually sounds like a reasonably smart chap, with firm ideas about distinguishing Ford product around the customer. But talk about an unsustainable benefit. Quite apart from the likelihood that most in-car communication devices will be legislated out of existence, these are gimmicks that, if they prove popular, will be knocked off by every competitor within a couple of years.

There’s a world of difference between the need to simplify the myriad data required to pilot a flying apartment block at approximately the speed of sound (his apparent inspiration) and the needs of the “always on” bozo, beetling between work, home and the gym. Information of the digital kind is about as important to driving a car as a functioning cigarette lighter.

A recent study came to the staggeringly elementary conclusion that the single most motivating factor in selecting a car is design. As in people don’t want to drive ugly cars. Dig a little deeper and you’ll probably find they want them to be zippy, reliable, safe, comfy and reinforce one of the following self appraisals: “I’m rich”, “I’m a pimp”, “I’m a jerk”, “I’m rugged”, “I’ve got a small dick”, “I’m a soccer mom,” “I’m an oleaginous spiv”, “I’m green” (actually green with envy of the oleaginous spiv in the fast lane).

My guess is “I tweet” is pretty low down on the list.

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By and large clients are timid beasts.

Well let’s face it, marketing is a lousy job. No one has a clue what you do, but they know they don’t like it when they see it. Your budget is the first to get cut when money’s tight and your work is the first to take the blame when sales are off. You labour mightily and fight ferociously with the agency, only to have the hard won result rejected by the sales VP’s little woman or the CEO’s precocious brat. Frankly I’m surprised marketing people aren’t up there with dentists in the self-immolation league tables.

I’m constantly amazed at how hard we seem to be working to further complicate their lives, giving them even more unlikely activities to explain to sceptical colleagues.

“So Frank, are you doing a promotion to support the fall sales push?”

“Well no, this year we thought we’d try an immersive trans-media brand experience.”

“You wot?”

“Yunno, we’re enhancing our branded utility by experientially engaging our consumers.”

You could call this an immersive brand experience that expands brand utility…

… or, you could call it a promotion. Actually it’s a fun extension of a perennial promotion when for once it appears the agency managed to get the PR people to do something useful.

Of course, I’m just an embittered old ad guy desperately pissing into the winds of change. Well sort of. The internet and its furiously multiplying spawn provides a glorious parallel universe wherein we can do what we’ve always done, freed from the constraints of traditional media. But what we’re doing is still what we always did: ads, promotions, PR, giveaways, BOGOs, research, customer service.

It might seem as though we’re adding scientific heft to the infuriatingly nebulous business of marketing communications when we surround it with jargon that makes quantum physics sound positively prosaic. But what we’re actually doing is confusing the crap out of clients so that good old integrated marketing strategy is cast contemptuously aside in favour of worrying about their twitter strategy or whether they should be crowd sourcing their next pack design.

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