A little Magic on a Coke can

The Big Idea is the holy grail for us in marketing, agencies are looking for it, creatives are looking for it, planners are making it up… In all the hoopla, we’ve forgotten that real change happens through small ideas. Things that make people smile, think about the brand in a warm manner. Do them continuously for a length of time and the effect on your brand will be greater than the biggest campaign you can come out with.

I recently saw this lovely barcode interpretation on a Coke Can in Indonesia and it brought a smile to my face. Its a lovely and gentle reminder of the nostalgia behind the brand on a cold aluminum can. I tip my hat to the client who did this, even if it was adapted from some other country, at least they went through with it, shows a client who really cares about the small details of making a brand come alive. Seeing this really brought home the point that we should be focusing on creating a lot of small ideas for our clients, they’re easier to sell-in and implement and collectively have the same, if not more, impact as a single big effort.

This is a new documentary that’s going to be released soon. Its about ad people who were laid off and were forced to look at their passion and do something ‘that matters’, as one of the guys in the video says.

And to me this perhaps, underlines why clients don’t trust us or, as a matter of fact, why even we don’t trust others in advertising. A lot of the people in the industry today aren’t in it because they’re passionate about it or believe that what we do does matter to the world.  There’s a sort of perverse pride we take in saying “It’s only advertising, not life or death” an attitude that shows in the work we do and the way we present it to clients.

The truth is that if you measure the importance of what you do only in terms of the immediateness of impact on individuals, you will almost never be good, much less great. Think of Van Gogh, was his painting a wilting flower in a vase going to really change the world? Was it a matter of life and death? The reason we acknowledge him today as a master and write about the impact of his work on European Art was because you could see the burning passion and the absolute dedication he had to pursuing it. Unencumbered by thoughts of the greatness of his work or even his talent, he simply focussed on what he did and put his life into it.

This isn’t a diatribe against people in the industry but merely a request for some introspection. If you really believe that advertising doesn’t matter, go find what you love and do it really well, or else, like the people in the film you would’ve wasted a large part of your life, with neither you nor the industry, benefiting from the time. Hopefully if over time we start hiring more and more people who have a genuine passion for advertising and communication we’ll gain back the stature we had in the 60s and maybe one day even match chefs in respectability and an association of the profession with passion and dedication.

For the simple truth is, only if you practice something like your life depended on it, will the output be powerful enough to change the lives of others.

Always start with an inquisitive and intelligent questioning session before you decide what is to be researched and why.

There’s a very good article in the Guardian today that further illustrates this point I have made often. Overdependance on research as a starting point leads to the kind of facts that distort the truth.

The article questions if illegal downloads are really killing the record industry as frequently alleged. The article starts and ends with some numbers, so I am not against facts or research. Marketing and advertising will soon be like the record companies who keep deluding themselves with irrelevant facts because they couldn’t be bothered to dig deeper, or more importantly start with an intelligent/inquisitive question.

So hopefully clients and agencies who spend a lot on research understand that the motive for it matters more than the scale of it. They would do well to remember that GM for one, spent a lot more on R&D than Toyota.

Ok, end of experiment. The reason I was absent from this blog was actually to see how long it takes to attract a visitor to your blog who’s outside your immediate friend circle… and the answer is  5 months and 29 days… thanks to Niko.

And now here’s something to distract you from the bad PR I am facing from my ex-boss.

BAD PR

Anyway I will be back here and try to be as regular as I can.

Brands are great, brands are wonderful, brands are the new legends of tomorrow some planner recently told me. The truth however, is that lots of people don’t want the brand appearing out of context, it’s not always appealing to be associated with brands, even if they were ones the audience thought as being very appealing and refelctive of their personalities.

And surprisingly at least one brand seems to understand that, and dare I say better than ad agencies do. Above is a complimentary bag given to the frequent flyer cardholders of Singapore Airlines, the client has actually overcome the urge to use this ‘Opportunity to create brand presence among the affluent audience’ and put the logo discreetly on a label inside the bag. This requires insight born from understanding the motivations and mindset of the customer. Even though all research would indicate that people look forward to, even want, free gifts from brands, they don’t want their peers to know it was something they got ‘Free’.

I tip my hat to the client responsible for this and invite the person to a drink on me, this indivual I am sure had nothing to the recent hideous ads being done by the airline. It may seem like a simple thing, and there may be other companies out there who do it, but for a premium brand to recognise human behaviour and apply it is a rare find these days.

Now, in contrast let’s look at the geniuses amidst us. Below is a jute bag (the ‘green’ option) that was given as a door gift to all delegates of the World Effie Festival. A place where award winning effective ideas inspire you, a thousand speakers went on and on and about the importance of consumer insights and how clients need to be brave to use them. And it was in celebration of this that the bag had the Festival logo huge and filling almost the entire surface.

Of course, not to mention that at the festival everyone was going on about the need to be single-minded, thus a bag with not just the logo but also a completely irrelevant environmental message, which never resonanted.

As you may guess I now visit Toys ‘R’ Us pretty often, I see wierd toys and mostly put them down to my being not in the target age. But this particular one somehow made me feel if this isn’t actually more dangerous than Al-Queda camps. Do kids really need to know about “Infrared Aim”? But then soon enough I saw another one which I think is the toy equivalent of a nuclear bomb on kids, here’s what I saw!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Alright, I did rant about research on Asia yesterday, but here’s something really funny from China. This is the window display from a Children’s store in Shanghai. It was Halloween, the newest reason for a promotion in China, so what better way than to give horrible pumpkin faces to otherwise adorable baby mannequins. Now, wouldn’t you want your kids to look like this? But then again probably some research company told them poor sods that pumpkin faces on babies were the biggest motivators for parents to buy clothes as proven by a focus group.

I was browsing through a really high end travel guide in Bombay recently when something caught my eye. They were actually advertising a SLUM TOUR! by a company called Reality Tours no less.

Honestly I am not sure whether to be disgusted by it, or in some wierd way be thankful that people who are out of touch actually get a chance to see how most of the world actually lives. At one level this seems incredibly rude that Asia’s largest slum is treated like it was some kind of theme park, I feel it may make all the suffering they see a ‘Fantasy’ rather than harsh reality which needs to be fixed. On the other hand, perhaps it will jolt some people to evaluate the lives they lead and the principles that they live by.

I am inclined more towards the former, as I think if at all this is to have a positive impact it can’t be offered next to a tour of the best textile shops in India, somehow that just strikes me as being very wrong.