According to this list of trades typically found in a medieval city, 14th century businesses had to muddle along without marketing consultants, social strategists, account people or creative guys. Makes you wonder how the hell anything ever got sold. On the other hand cursory analysis offers clues to the antecedents of modern day mavens, gurus and the denizens of adland.

A limner for instance was someone who illuminated manuscripts and is of course the natural forbear of those agonizingly pedantic fiddlers we call art directors (although there’s no evidence that limners were particularly avid purchasers of the more fashionable lines on offer at the spectaclesmaker). Whereas copyists, who copied books and documents and were often illiterate… well, they usually worked with limners.

A scullion, the lowliest servant in a household could be flogged, spat upon and worked until they dropped; in fact the poor scullion was available to be wickedly abused by just about anyone and so was the obvious model for the account executive. Today’s scullions work for latter day chamberlains, who waited on lords in the bedchamber. The chamberlain’s contemporary manifestation, the VP account director rarely gets close to the bedchamber (although may on occasion be called upon to deal with a client’s shit) and the serious fawning is now conducted in expensive restaurants or at major sporting events.

Medieval metrics were certainly no match for contemporary models of predictive perfection, but the pissprophet, who diagnosed disease from the sight, smell, and taste of a patient’s urine, surely demonstrated a level of commitment you would be hard pressed to find within the ranks of today’s planners and strategists.

Ragpickers rummaged through old rags looking for recyclables and are easily identifiable as the forerunner of the content curator. But even the lowly ragpicker was a rung up the social ladder from the dung carter who bears undeniable comparison with the content strategist.

Clouters fixed things. They were sometimes referred to as tinkerers, which as everybody knows is the primary preoccupation of the clouter’s modern equivalent, the brand manager.

Absent from this particular list are the simoner who sold nice little ecclesiastical earners, a bit like a modern day head-hunter and the universally despised pardoner who sold guaranteed results in the hereafter, which was the equivalent in the Middle Ages of ROI.

Oddly enough, there seems to have been no direct equivalent to the branding consultant. Then again, someone had to have been responsible for spreading the plague.

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By nightfall on August 2, 216 BC 48,000 human carcasses give or take, littered the Apulian plain in southern Italy after Hannibal and his heavily outnumbered Carthaginian army defeated the Romans at the Battle of Cannae. Or as historian Robert O’Connell in The Ghosts of Cannae calculated: around 6,000,000 lbs. of rotting carrion suddenly became available to the circling vultures.

On July 1, 1916 wave after wave of British infantrymen were commanded to walk slowly, across open ground, into a ceaseless raking storm of machine gun bullets. 20,000 of them would die on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, which, after four months, would consume the lives of more than 300,000 allied and German men; all for an allied gain of two miles of territory.

2,100 years of supposed advances in civilization and all that had really changed was the technology. The axiom, or lie if you take Wilfred Owen’s view, passed down through millennia that: dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori** (“it is meet and right to die for your country”) and the enthusiasm of nations for surrendering their citizens to mass slaughter, remained undiminished.

Here in 21st century civilization, with our democracy and individual rights and freedoms and mass media it’s hard to find compliant cannon fodder. And so, ever resourceful, we’ve found ways to slaughter the enemy with little or no risk to our chaps; raining high explosives from 40,000 feet or better yet, sending them in by remote control. A useful lesson I suppose from the incineration of Nagasaki and Horoshima.

When we get exercised about the indisputable evil of dispatching gullible young men and women as human bombs in the name of Islam, I sometimes wonder whether that lie is so very much different from sending young people to die for King and Country – or the emperor – or freedom – or democracy – or whatever bromide suits the time or place.

Sometimes I think this civilization lark is all a bit of a racket.

Some unsettling thoughts on re-reading Sebastian Faulks’ epic Great War novel, Birdsong and the the war poems of Wilfred Owen.

*Anthem for Doomed Youth. Wilfred Owen (1893 – 1918)
**Dulce et Decorum Est. Wilfred Owen

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Below is my grandfather’s account of his “joining the line” at the Battle of the Somme in August 1916. It’s a transcript of fading pencilled jottings in an army notebook, which is otherwise filled with lecture notes about “fields of fire”, deployment of sentries and such. The account simply peters out (as below) and I can find no further descriptive writing among his papers. He was selected for officer training early in 1918 and it would appear that this is the start of a reminiscence written during that time away from the front.

John Ashman died when I was two so I never got to know him. From what I can gather he was singularly unambitious during peace time. War it seems was a different matter and in 1939 he enthusiastically re-enlisted at the age of 42. Certainly as evidenced by this snippet, he believed it offered the chance to test one’s mettle and prove the manly virtues. It’s all a bit Boy’s Own and John Buchan (whose Richard Hannay novels he may well have read), a rather poignant reminder of the youth of most of the warriors.

In Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer the dichotomy between revulsion at the reality and a palpable sense of relief at having met the supreme test and “done one’s bit” is a pervasive theme, and I sense a bit of that here. There’s a further, rather quaint parallel: where John Ashman describes trench patrols as “an exciting hobby” and “one of the most sporting jobs of modern warfare… [where] a man can prove himself both in nerve and strength of self control”, Sassoon was notorious for capering off on one-man trench patrols armed with a “bag of bombs” and wreaking havoc on enemy emplacements.

The Great War is one of the most catastrophic consequences of nationalistic hubris and militarism. The carelessness with which political and military leaders simply threw away the lives of a generation of their fellow citizens is utterly repugnant. Nonetheless I can’t help but be moved by the implacable sense of duty displayed by many of the individuals who fought.

After 12 months of war, at the age of 18 my great wish to be a member of HM Forces was at last granted and I enlisted as a Trooper in the Warwickshire Yeomanry. I was sent to Warwick there to commence getting myself fit for the great struggle in which, with all boyish longing, not realising and not caring what hardships and dangers it would be full of, to take part. After a month at Warwick I was sent to Lidworth for training with the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards. It was here I first began to understand what the name and uniform of a soldier really meant. However there was a job to be done and do it I would. On July 1916 I was placed on draft for France with the Machine Gun Corps and was duly sent overseas. After spending five days at the base I was at last to belong to a fighting unit. This was one of the happiest moments of my life I can safely say. I was going to fight for England and be worthy of bearing the name of an Englishman. My mind was filled with boyish thoughts of glory as one may read in History books or Wild West stories. These thoughts I carried with me to the time I first had my baptism of fire. With the pride of a new crowned king I shouldered my pack and held my rifle with the cold steel bayonet hanging at my side. I was like a boy dreaming of all those heroes and with my one wish to try and do what they did.

After a wearysome [sic] train journey in cattle trucks with some 45 men in each truck I joined my unit, which was soon to take part in one of the great struggles of this great war, the Battle of the Somme. As we were going to battle we could hear the boom of guns and it all seemed like music to me. Here is where my great wish lay, here is where men made history and here is where the honour of England was being upheld by her sons, with heart of steel every one of them.

Soon I was to know what the meaning of battle (sic). It was not only glory, but death, pain and hardships. When we got in range of the German shells I began to understand and read the messages of death in those screams of the shells and whistle of the bullets. A shell dropped on a limbered wagon just in front of us and simply blew it to pieces. All the country round us seemed to cry out the horrors of war. Everything was down to the ground and nothing else but the splutter of machine guns, the boom of guns and the scream of shells all on some errand of death and destruction. Now some of my dreams began to vanish and I began to look at things in another light although there was only one idea in my head there was a job to be done and do it with a willing heart and was beant (sic) on going through it all with a smile.

The MG (machine gun) company I was with was in support of the Guards who were to make a big attack. Soon this took place and the string of wounded men started to come down. It was a ghastly sight to see, these men smothered in blood, but every one of them had a smile. Blighty was in sight for them and we looked upon them with envy. Towards evening we had to go in line to support them as their ranks had been thinned so much. After this we went out to get made up to strength again. When we were once again up to strength in the winter of [19] 16 – 17 we went into line again at Loos and occupied part of the trench system there. There were no big attacks here just simply minor trench attacks and patrols.

A trench patrol is a very exciting hobby, which to my mind is one of the most sporting jobs of modern warfare. It is here that a man can prove himself both in nerve and strength of self control

 

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Just below the published list of successful candidates for Part 1 of the Solicitors’ Law Qualifying examinations in the Times and the Daily Telegraph, and immediately following the “omissions” addendum, there would invariably be a small space ad for a “crammer”, or crash course for those of us whose names did not appear, not even in the omissions.

It was run by a man who was a dead ringer for Alistair Sim. He had been struck off the rolls (and detained for a few years at one of HM’s nicks) for defrauding the Post Office where he had worked as legal counsel. It transpired that his interest was not so much in the money as It was in the intellectual challenge of pulling off the scam.

On reading of the death of Christopher Hitchens I was reminded of this character, because while I never doubted his ultimate sincerity, it seemed that Hitch really did relish the chance to fight from the ‘extraordinarily unpopular’ corner for the sheer intellectual and rhetorical hell of it (his very funny essay on why women simply aren’t funny, say). Predicting Hitchens’ stance on just about any issue was a mug’s game, like his beloved Orwell he was an intellectual original for whom dogged adherence to party line or political camp was simply anathema.

It feels impertinent to even think of eulogising a writer as exceptional as Christopher Hitchens, as it would be idiotic to try and paint a tribute to Picasso; so I won’t. Reading his last collection of essays I couldn’t help but note that Hitch’s highest order of praise was to describe someone, or their work as “imperishable”. Which perfectly describes how I feel about the man, his work and the influence he has had on my life.

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I’ve never met Jacoub Bondre, I know him only through his contributions to his agency’s blog and his twitter feed.

Jacoub is a high profile member of the Toronto advertising community. He is the Director of Innovation and Technology at Grip Ltd., one of the largest shops in the country, and to a great extent he is the face of that agency in social media. He has been a speaker at technology conferences.

Last week after a period of sick leave, he published this piece in which he describes his long struggle with mental illness, which now, thanks to an accurate diagnosis (that was an agonisingly long time in coming), can be fully controlled, allowing Jacoub to devote his considerable talent and energies to bringing up his young family and pursuing his career.

I urge anyone reading this, to read Jacoub’s story for yourself. In a business that regularly diminishes the meaning of courage by applying it to a client who buys a risky ad campaign, this represents a truly courageous act, motivated by his concern both for himself and for others, that the wholly unwarranted stigma which still attaches to mental illness remains one of the last bastions of potential discrimination in the workplace.

Coincidentally, this is from this Sunday’s New York Times, about a senior executive dealing with schizophrenia.

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Last week there was an interview on Radio Tundra with the CEO of Canada Goose. They make coats for killingly cold weather: parkas and anoraks really but he insisted on calling them coats. If Canada Goose had been around in 1912, Captain Scott and the boys would probably have made it home. Uniquely, these coats are made right here in Canuckistan. Unlike all their competition, Canada Goose has eschewed offloading production to third world sweatshops. And so they are also very costly coats.

The interviewer repeatedly lobbed openings for yer man to extol the quality of his coats: the sheer frost fighting, ice repelling, Arctic wind-cheating efficacy of these miracles of human insulation; how polar bears would kill for these coats, how you’ll never need to buy another winter coat (unless of course you’ve had a run-in with a polar bear), or more controversially perhaps, “Well really, what does your average 9 year-old Chinese kid know about thermal insulation?” But instead he blithered incessantly about ‘authenticity’.

”Why should people buy these expensive coats?” “Well Brian, we think people are really looking for authenticity…”. “But in these days of austerity aren’t you taking a big risk?” “Well Brian we think authenticity is really what people want to pay for these days.” “But if they can save money do you think people…?” “It’s all about the authenticity Brian, these are Authentic Made In Canada Coats.”

And I know that by now astute reader, you are thinking exactly what I was thinking as I listened to this load of cobblers awls: he’s had a fucking branding consultant in; the poor fucker’s shelled out a great chunk of the kids’ inheritance on a branding consultant. And the branding consultant after six months of brand auditing and focus grouping and power pointing and general fucking around, has told him that his fucking brand narrative is: ‘AUTHENTICITY’.

I expect the branding consultant also told him that heretofore, he should refer to his product as ‘coats’, in order to distinguish them from your common or garden Szechewan or Hunan parkas and anoraks.

No doubt Canada Goose is also having some ‘authentic’ ‘conversations’ with a view to ‘engaging’ ‘authenticity seekers’ and perhaps encouraging them to tell their ‘authentic’ stories or some such twaddle. And somehow, some day, perhaps one of them may buy a Canada Goose ‘coat’. Or not.

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Machiavelli described three fundamentally viable forms of government: autocratic, aristocratic and democratic. For each, depending on the state of the nation, he saw an indispensable and beneficial role. He also acknowledged the potential for any of them to turn malignant, as when autocracy becomes dictatorship, aristocracy becomes oligarchy or democracy collapses into anarchy.

The present inequity in the US between workers’ and owners’ share of the nation’s prosperity is so pronounced and unprecedented that it might be seen as a descent into feudalism. Except that the medieval feudal system demanded a modicum of reciprocity from all the participants. In return for manorial rights land owners (or aristocrats) incurred obligations (taxes and manpower when required) to a higher authority (the King), and they owed responsibilities (food, shelter and a measure of protection) to their vassals in return for their labour.

But in 21st century America it seems, wealth and privilege obviate both obligation and responsibility. Which, in Machiavellian terms, means aristocracy has begun to metastasise into oligarchy. Today’s would-be oligarchs view the higher authority (government) as at best irrelevant, at worst the enemy. They treat their workers as disposable or tradable commodities. They deride and obstruct any attempt by government to impose on them either a burden of responsibility to their workers (in the form of a comfortable living wage) or obligation to the common weal (in the form of taxes, tax-funded healthcare, etc.).

Put another way, the knobs are making up the rules of the game; it’s time they got back in line before somebody loses an eye. Which is at root what the apparently inchoate Occupy Wall Street movement seems to be about.

Or in the words of the Billy Bragg song: “You poor take courage, you rich take care”.

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RIM is the Canadian business success story. Blackberry was one of the few real products to emerge not merely unscathed, but as a deserving and legitimate global powerhouse from the insanity of the Web 1.0 bubble. It spawned a thriving technology business in south western Ontario and was largely responsible for the transformation of a small, little known university into an internationally renowned centre for technological learning and innovation. And it was the source of a considerable fillip to the fortunes of any number of Canadian and other investors.

Without spending a nickel, the company rode a seemingly endless wave of serendipitous, high profile PR coups; really big stories like when Al Gore finally learned of his defeat to Bush on a Blackberry, or the US government was forced to re-tool its IT infra-structure because of the sheer ubiquity of Blackberries among law makers and their staffers, and then of course there’s President Obama’s legendary attachment to the device.

And like most of the brave new worlders of that calamitous fin de siècle boom and bust they had nothing but contempt for traditional marketing and the purveyors of same. The need to invest in brand image was a just penance for industrial age manufacturers of undifferentiated crud like cereal or toothpaste; technology was different and only they and their fellow travellers ‘got’ it.

Advertising was yesterday. In fact, in keeping with old school Canadian parsimony, advertising was somehow a bit louche, a precocious vanity. For years RIM didn’t have a real agency and put no advertising or brand building efforts behind Blackberry, instead relying on co-op deals with carriers and retailers who were only too happy to feature the undisputed mobile sensation in their ads and flyers.

But the flip-side of vanity is arrogance and it is arrogance that has ensured a free fall to the bottom of the heap every bit as dramatic as its rocket ride to the top. Arrogance as evidenced by Jim Ballsillie’s ignominious failure to subvert the authority of the NHL (itself not the most salubrious organization admittedly) in his attempts to secure a franchise. Arrogance as made public in the anguished wails of whistle blowers from within confirming an iron fisted rule by the founders and absolute intolerance for dissent. Arrogance that dismisses all ‘conventional’ marketing wisdom.

And now, if not from arrogance then from unforgiveable ignorance, millions of owners of a supposed leading edge piece of communications technology, are simply ignored during a prolonged and unprecedented collapse of service.

RIM emerged when email was still the first wonder of the web. And they created a peerless mobile email device. But email has long since been eclipsed as a medium of communication and in the absence of innovation in other areas, or at least developing an image that could buy them some time, as goes email, so goes RIM. Paltry efforts merely to stay in the game with inferior, me-too entries like Playbook simply reinforce a has-been status.

I’ve no doubt that for brilliant and driven individuals like Mike Lazarides and Jim Ballsillie, recognizing that they have outlived their usefulness is nigh on inconceivable. But failing to recognize it is killing the product they so brilliantly conceived and thrust upon an unsuspecting world, and irrevocably damaging their personal legacies.

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I’ve always thought Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” (the deus ex machina usually invoked to justify unregulated markets and limitless faith in the private sector) ranks with Neville Chamberlain’s “piece of paper” as a calamitous example of wishful thinking.

The invisible hands in my experience are more often the ones that deliver reverberating slaps from capricious and often unseen ‘management’ (sometimes even their wives and children), or the incessant prodding of the spectres that haunt the second guessers in brand management. There’s a lot of tosh talked about the inherent efficiency of private enterprise, however on close inspection torpid bureaucracy, inherent redundancy, received wisdom and defensive manoeuvring as often as not render the well oiled engine of private enterprise every bit as lugubrious as the clanking machinery of government.

Take for example this particularly horrible piece of advertising. (Sorry, for some reason I can’t embed videos here)

It’s the first work by TBWA, the new agency for WestJet (Canada’s other airline). The carrier recently shifted their account from TAXI, which launched the brand and whose work, while journeyman by their standards, was based around a solid idea and consistent execution that distinguished the brand from Air Canada.

TAXI’s very first campaign was actually killed off in an airport hangar in Calgary where, by presidential fiat, every fucking employee in the company got to give it a thumbs up or down (doubtless the insights of the grease monkeys and the cleaning staff were invaluable), which was a pretty fair indication of the esteem in which marketing and advertising expertise is held at WestJet.

I’ve no idea what soured the relationship with TAXI, but it was likely something tangential to the work (new CMO, insufficiently pliant account group, agency ‘arrogantly’ refusing to reduce its nugatory fee, extortionate photocopying costs, whatever). Come to think of it, the only advertising I can recall for WestJet latterly consisted of routes and prices (which I’m going to guess wasn’t the agency’s first recommendation). So one could speculate that at some point the president threatened to fire the marketing department if they didn’t do something about the disappearing margins. And the marketing department called an agency review to buy themselves some breathing room.

But the unhappy reality is that with all the human and financial resources expended on a doubtless ‘intensive’ review process, it all comes down to the thirty second waste of pixels above. All the rest is human foible and folly. The ad will almost certainly be excused as ‘interim’ (but of course the punters don’t know that), its real purpose being to give the planners time to conduct their brand audits, to arrive at their brand essences (which will probably be similar to something presented and rejected during TAXI’s tenure), to develop their creative brief, to kick off the agonising process (because the learning curve is so fucking steep for a new agency), to get to the real campaign.

Which will get canned the next time Air Canada reduces its prices.

And so, as the estimable Mr. Vonnegut wrote, it goes.

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Not long into my first job in advertising, a chain-smoking, draft dodging American copywriter explained to me how advertising worked.

Say you want to impress a dame at a party. D’you get in her face and start rhyming off how witty, suave and hung like a stallion you are? Course you don’t. You charm her into believing that perhaps you’re that urbane, sensitive man of her dreams (and hey, maybe even a tiger in the mattress department).

(OK, OK, it was a long time ago)

Sadly, he opined, the majority of ads fail to follow this rudimentary law of social attraction and repulsion.

I’m quite certain he didn’t invent the analogy. Carl Ally said something about punching anyone who spoke to him the way most ads speak to their readers, Burnett advised that you should write copy as if writing a letter to a friend, and Ogilvy suggested that the consumer is in fact the little woman (as she then was).

Which is why I was surprised when a respected Tundran strategist suggested that this article about brands becoming more “human” represents the “future of branding” (oh that abused, contentious and most confounding of concepts). Two of the examples to which the article links (Dos Equis and Old Spice) are inventively augmented TV campaigns, one (Pepsi “Refresh Project”) failed rather publicly to generate a return and was conspicuously consigned to the “lessons learned” bin. One (Domino’s Pizza) is an entertaining use of technology to heighten the “service” component of its “service” business.

I’m not suggesting that these are anything but outstanding campaigns (ex the Pepsi shemozzle) that make effective use of emerging communication and production technologies in order to improve their immediacy, relevance and appeal. But fundamentally they represent nothing new, or at least nothing that good agencies haven’t been counselling their clients for decades.

That new technologies allow us to improve service, listen and respond to customers, or enhance the agility of a medium like TV is indisputable. But that process of continuous improvement long pre-dates the internet. And while they may have been more honoured in the breach than the observance, axioms such as treating customers like humans, and using advertising and marketing communications to put a human face on an inanimate product or company have been around “since Christ was a kid”, as my American mentor would say.

The one massive change wrought by social media is that we now live in an eternal focus group (Prometheus actually chose the liver eating eagle over this fate) and marketers are now forced to confront the fact that bribery, trickery and outright falsehoods are thoroughly discredited tactics; that boring, bullying or berating the punters are demonstrably ineffectual when compared with charming or entertaining them; that continually improving your product and its delivery is now a price of doing business.

Halleluja.

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