“The Voice” leading the way in Talent TV and beating Britain’s Got Talent to boot

Back in January wrote a post about how the talent show concept was evolving as viewers were getting tired of the formulaic mocking of the weak and vulnerable for the entertainment of the general untalented public.

This trend started to manifest itself with shows such as “Must be the Music” and “Got to Dance”. Both of these shows were relatively small as they were on Sky 1 rather than ITV or BBC, but they were definitely successful within the context of that channel.

It’s great therefore to see the ratings success of “The Voice” – beating Britain’s got Talent by 4 million viewers during their crossover and by more than 10% across the show. That is an amazing success for a show that is relatively unknown and that hasn’t built up a fanbase yet and it’s not a fluke based on the novelty factor – this week was the third in the row that The Voice beat BGT.

Rosie Millard of the Independent wrote the following opinion piece on the battle between the two – worth a read.

I’m excited by this change, both as a viewer and an advertiser. I work for a number of brands who want to be able to live out strong positive brand values and be seen to contribute to and improve the media they exist in. A show such as The Voice represents a set of values that hundreds of brands would love to be involved with and the one shame for us is that ITV failed to secure the show and so we can’t get near it. Hopefully that will mean it will spawn a series of competitors that take up these positive values and also allow commercial involvement.

P.S. I do actually hope that there is still a place for Britains got Talent though and it can stop being a freak show and start to celebrate true talent – otherwise, where will get to enjoy little gems such as this

If only Apple had been around in the 1880s, We’d have the fastest, prettiest iHorse ever by now.

I haven’t had an Apple rant in about a year, so those fanboys out there can look away now, you know what to expect. Except the next line might surprise you.

Apple’s NEW iPad went on sale last week to rapturous acclaim from all the Apple acolytes around the world, and for the first time ever, I wanted one. I’ve never truly desired any product made by Apple, (I know, I’m weird,) but when I saw this NEW iPad I had an irrational urge to own one. Well for about 5 minutes anyway.

After a period of soul-searching to try to understand this deviation in my character I realised that it was just one simple thing –

It’s “more” pretty.

That’s it.

OK if you are going to push it, it is prettier due to a really impressive high-resolution so called “retina” display.

And that is it. Just like the iPad 2 (and the original iPad) but a bit “More”

As far as I can tell the NEW iPad is nothing except a series of incremental improvements to the iPad 2 with one big incremental improvement to the screen. All the other improvements to camera and processing power are just to make sure that the experience of using the NEW iPad lives up to the experience of using the old one (because 4 times as many pixels requires a lot more processing power to render and photos from a 3 megapixel camera would look pretty crap on that screen)

As far as I can tell, there is absolutely nothing new or inventive or innovative about the NEW iPad. And yet people will buy it in their droves because of that screen. It is a truly breathtaking piece of technology with images displayed in the usual slick Apple way and people will have a visceral gut reaction to it that will overcome any rational objections to the rest of it. Apparently 16,000 iPad2s recently landed on ebay as all the leading majority decided that they just HAD to upgrade.

And that in a nutshell is what Apple do best. They make faster horses, because that’s what everyone wants. They’ve realised that they could spend vast amounts on R&D creating completely new product functionality 90% of which would be a commercial failure, or they can just wait for Samsung or Sony or Acer or Archos or HTC or even Nokia to develop something new that is a commercial success and then they’ll spend a couple of years thinking about it and eventually release it (in an admittedly perfect incarnation) as a great new innovation.

What they would never do for example is release something like the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1.

This is a new Android tablet from Samsung that incorporates a true digital stylus with a digitised screen (the technology used by CAD Draftsmen to design pretty much everything). It looks pretty amazing and I can see a huge amount of potential functionality that it provides that no other tablet can do. I also think that there is a good chance that it will be reasonably commercial successful. The original Galaxy Note has seen pretty respectable sales (after an admittedly slow start) considering that it is a fairly niche product that sits half way between a phone and a tablet and I actually think that the market for the 10.1 is significantly bigger. I’m pretty sure that I want one.

The thing is, it’s fine to have a corporation that just make perfected, more expensive versions of products that other companies invented. It’s absolutely fine and frankly we deserve products that just WORK the way that Apple products do. It was absolutely great for Apple to be the way they are when they were the challenger brand, forcing Microsoft to stay honest.

The problem comes when that corporation becomes the biggest company in the world.

It’s a problem when they move from being a niche minority product for rich people to being the market leader that has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. It is a problem when their sales volumes are so high that they can actually price traditionally cheaper more innovative competitors out of the market. That is when you start to see a stagnation in innovation.

And I think that we are already seeing it. Take a look at the new HTC range. HTC has been a really interesting challenger to Apple’s domination over the past few years, but their recent showing at the technology expo’s is worrying. The new HTC One X is their new flagship phone and what does it actually do that is new? More pixels on the screen, better camera, faster processer. Sound familiar? It’s just another faster horse.

The problem also is an issue for Apple itself: Apple are the most valuable company in the world and yet they only really make about 4 products. There is zero room for failure in that model. If the next iPad or iPhone or Airbook came out and bombed, that would be 25% of their business in serious jeopardy. So they will always err on the side of caution and keep making faster horses rather than take any real risks. They’ve tried it once or twice with products such as Apple TV, but there was very little conviction in that effort. Apple are stuck in a cycle where they have to keep making the same product with just a bit “more” over and over again. They actually need the other companies to test new innovations on the public or they will have nothing to copy!

Well I for one will be supporting the true innovators, the companies that are willing to take a chance, that accept the fact that with true progress comes the chance of failure. I might end up buying a shit product, true, but I might just end up supporting something that actually moves the pace of technology forwards a tiny bit and I can feel good about that.

Giving the Finger to Rules of Thumb

I work in an industry where we seem to rely an awful lot on rules of thumb to make important and expensive decisions about how to spend marketing budgets. The next 1000 words are a bit of a rant about why I hate that, but also why it means I love my job! For those of you who don’t work in media or marketing this one might not be as fun as some of my other rants – don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Now rules of thumb are useful. They are useful so that you don’t have to start from scratch every time you look to make a budget decision. They are useful to spot something that is completely out of line with efficient and effective media principles. They are really useful when you are inevitably asked to pull together a recommendation by yesterday as they provide a shortcut to an answer which will probably be 70-80% correct (which is a damn sight better than if the client made it up themselves.)

Where they are really not useful, where they are in fact a hindrance, is when planners and marketers choose to abdicate their own intuitive sense and reasoning capabilities and instead use rules of thumb as planning LAW.

So some examples.

As a rule of thumb, IPA Datamine 2 (Marketing in an age of accountability) suggests that 3 media channels is the optimum number of channels to maximise the likelihood of delivering a positive business ROI for a campaign (This is also broadly supported in Datamine 3).

This is a useful rule. It tells me that if I spend a £20million budget exclusively on TV then I could probably improve my chances of success by diverting some of the budget into a different support medium. It also tells me that if my £10 million campaign has 8 different bought media channels on it then I should probably think about focusing or prioritising, ensuring that each of them is adding something new and valuable to the overall campaign. What it doesn’t mean is that a campaign which uses 5 different media is fundamentally wrong in all circumstances. From the graph we can obviously see that isn’t the case as over 50% of the case studies that used 5 media WERE successful, but it is just that the likelihood of success starts to decrease.

I was recently told that we shouldn’t add a “video marketing” strand to a TV campaign because we already were using press and radio in support of the TV campaign and so “online” would be an extra channel too far. This fundamentally misunderstood a) how the rule of thumb works and b) how people consume audio visual content in the 21st century. I’ve also been told variously that we shouldn’t include social media, PPC search and even SEO using the same rationale.

A number of things are to blame here

1) there is a mis-understanding by marketeers of the term “media channel” in the Datamine study. Media channels as defined in that context are traditional paid for advertising channels that allow you to broadcast a message to many people. Unfortunately “media channels” has been applied by the marketeers to anything that is managed for them by their Media Planning and Buying agency. In a world where the media agency remit is expanding far beyond the 5 traditional advertising media, this needs to change. Marketeers wouldn’t lump PR or sales promotions or CRM or any of the other core marketing functions into this “only 3 media” rule, so neither should they with social media or search

2) There is another form of siloing happening here as well – In this example, online video marketing is seen as a separate “channel” from television. However if all you are doing is ensuring that your TVC is discoverable in all places that people view AV content then it is clearly just an extension of “TV”. Unfortunately, fear of the unknown causes people to create false media segmentation and in doing so can miss out on a golden opportunity for cost effective amplification of their core advertising message.

The fundamental problem here is that people aren’t interrogating the rule. They aren’t asking “Why is 3 the optimum number” they are just accepting it as a shorcut and lazily using it as “the answer”. I’ve even heard of agencies where the mandate from the very top is “we do not use more than 3 media channels in any campaign” and they take great pride in their lazy inflexibility. I agree with the principle of “do fewer things, better” but to have such a coarse rule offends my natural tendency to question, explore and push the boundaries of what communications can do.

It isn’t just in broad planning that we see these “rules of thumb” being used badly.

I’ve recently heard them used to justify quite specific media implementation. The product was an NPD for an FMCG brand that a colleague of mine works on and specifically it had a brand spanking new innovation which needed a bit of explanation. The team rightly identified that part of the role for communications was to demonstrate this functionality and so they allocated a portion of the budget for “demonstration” media. Where this fell down was by using rules of thumb badly. The logic went something like this

1) Digital media is good at “demonstration” because it can be animated (TV wasn’t an option due to budget constraints),
2) Women spend a lot of time shopping

ergo: We should do digital 6-sheet posters in Malls – obviously

To have gone ahead with this would have been completely wrong for a number of reasons: 1)the 5 seconds of animation on the poster simply wouldn’t have been adequate for the message; 2) the attention of the average Mall shopper is being demanded constantly by hundreds of more interesting items – primarily the shop windows that they are gazing into – they aren’t going to spend any time watching a reel of posters in case something relevant pops up; 3)this audience is in “fun” shopping mode, they are thinking about buying the stuff that makes them feel sexy/cool/young etc – what they aren’t thinking about is what they are going to feed their kids that evening. I could go on.

The point is that the “rules of thumb” suggested that this was a relevant media, but intuitively it is really clear that it would be a inappropriate use of marketing money against those comms objectives. The problem is that some people had just stopped at the answer that the rule of thumb delivered, without really applying any understanding of why the rule of thumb existed and whether or not it truly applied to the human behaviour in question.

And this in turn brings me to my final conclusion – Why I love my job. Yes I hate the way that too many marketing services professionals use lazy rules of thumb to make their media decisions for them, but the nature of the media industry means that there will always be a place for people to question received wisdom as we work in an industry that is constantly evolving and changing. Since I started in media 12 years ago, the media opportunities are virtually unrecognisable in so many ways. As new media channels constantly come to the fore, any “rule of thumb” inevitably has to be re-evaluated and there will always be a place for people who understand not just the basic rules about what works in communications, but for people who always ask why it works so that they can intuitively understand whether the latest greatest media phenomenon is actually relevant or a big noisy red herring. No computer or “Black Box” planning tool is ever going to be able to do that, well not in my lifetime anyway!

Bring on the next 12 years.

A Guilty Pleasure that I don’t have to feel so guilty about – how “talent show” TV might be getting a little less grubby

It’s time to come out of the closet and admit to what you’ve probably all suspected. I’ve long been a secret devoted fan of the talent show concept. Ever since my little sister’s childhood friend sang his stuttering heart out on the original Pop Idol (what did happen to Gareth Gates) I’ve been a little bit hooked by this televisual opiate. I was a sucker for the emotional manipulation, the sob stories, the “redemption” stories and along the way a few people who could sing.

Whether it was Pop Idol, American Idol, Britain’s got Susan Boyle, or X-factor, I was hooked.

That is, until this year.

In a post a couple of months back I highlighted this Daily Mash article a pertinent analysis of just how awful The X-factor had become, but to be honest it had been going that way for a long while. For too long, the Simon Cowell industry had been picking on the vulnerable, laughing at the weak and then glorifying fame-hungry mediocrity. And we’d put up with it. Initially it was guilty fun, and then after a while we were just watching hoping against hope for a Leona Lewis or Susan Boyle moment that never came.

This year when they put the banally talentless and mindless Frankie Cocozza through to the live stages of the show just to kick him off in a staged “scandal” (so that they could bring back the initial favourite in an effort to protect her in the run up to the final,) I knew that the show had long outstayed it’s welcome on my Sky+ box and it was time to quit. As far as I was concerned that was it, the talent show format was basically dead. It may thrash around for a while as Syco applies the defribulators, but it will only be delaying the inevitable.

Then something strange happened.

This is where it gets embarrassing. Don’t ask why, but a couple of weeks back I was perusing the Anytime+ offering on Sky and came across their version of the talent show : “Got to Dance”. Now these kind of shows are ten a penny, but like I say, I’m a sucker for them and so decided to check it out, expecting the standard deluge of idiots dancing badly, punctuated by someone who is a bit better but who is told “that’s the best thing I’ve ever seen” by a bunch of nonentity judges who are just towing the company line. I knew to expect that because that’s how the show was last year – why would it be any different?

But then something happened – The first auditionee was really good, chills down the spine good. OK, they just wanted to start well and then say “the good start couldn’t last long”, but no, the next act was pretty damn good too. As was the third and fourth. Then they stopped and did a bit of a background story on a geeky looking nerd. Obviously he was going to be rubbish. Except he wasn’t. He was pretty good, not excellent, but pretty impressive for someone who had learnt it from basically watching TV. And then the further surprise was that they didn’t put him through. They praised what he had done, gave him some solid constructive criticism, but didn’t blow smoke up his arse and tell him he was amazing.

This continued throughout. A series of surprisingly good or even excellent performances, followed by passionate “nearly” performances. The personal background stories were there, but they weren’t sob stories, the performances tending to tell you everything you needed to know.

The common thread through each and every performance was the participants’ genuine, heartwarming passion for what they were doing and the joy, originality and liberation that they expressed whilst they were doing it. There were no equivalents of the tone-deaf halfwits that you make up 75% of the X-factor audition stages. Even the 5% of people who were a bit rubbish were rubbish in such a vibrant fun way that you couldn’t help but enjoy and applaud their performances.


I was also really impressed by the attitude of the judges – it didn’t feel like there was any agenda or quota to fill and they made their deliberations and judgements on the true merits of what they saw. Even more enjoyable was the fact that they so clearly loved watching other dancers and seemed genuinely inspired by what they saw. When Simon Cowell sees that one special singer that makes people sit up and take notice, you know that all he is seeing is dollar signs. When the three judges on Got to Dance (Kimberley from the Pussycat dolls, Ashley from Diversity and Adam Garcia from um… some tapdancing thing) see the equivalent all they seem to be thinking is “Can they teach ME how to do that!”

OK I still feel slightly embarrassed about enjoying that so much, but I didn’t feel grubby afterwards, I actually felt excited and happy. OK I know I’m sharing too much, but I think it is important.

The reason I think this is important is that I’m hoping this is part of a bigger trend. For too long in this country we have celebrated mediocrity and allowed ourselves to feel superior by watching the failings of people who don’t know any better. And maybe, just maybe, someone has realised that we’re better than that. Maybe we want to be inspired and humbled by the endeavours of people who are really striving for excellence for it’s own sake. Maybe we can start to follow their example.

Maybe I’m being too naively optimistic, after all Sky1’s “Must be the Music” (a music talent show aimed at finding original new talent rather than derivative karoake singers) was cancelled after only one season. But I hope not.

Part of this goes back to my “manifesto for sustainable communications”. I know it is just TV, but in their own way, shows like “Got to Dance” promote striving towards excellence (rather than being content with notoriety and infamy and fame for fame’s sake.) In doing so they may inspire the next generation to work towards excellence of their own, which in turn will create more role models for us to celebrate. That’s sustainable media, and we have a bit more of it maybe I can start enjoying more moments like this

The shame, a John Lewis TV advert made me cry!

I just saw the new John Lewis ad and I was all ready to be cynical and sarcastic about it, but I just can’t. It is truly lovely work and it got me all choked up – at my desk dammit! A first class representation of the industry I work in, thankyou Adam and Eve for restoring my faith a little bit.

I’m not going to say much more about it, just watch.

This is a lovely film, beautifully acted, scripted and shot, with a twist that tugs at the heartstrings and defeats all cynicism. John Lewis have lived up to their recent reputation of making excellent Christmas ads and are really standing apart from the crowd – particularly the god-awful Marks and Spencers X-factor spot.

Cringe-worthy boy-band actually makes for a half decent ad!

I’m a little bit late with this post, but I wanted to comment briefly on the recent Yeo Valley Campaign that launched a couple of weeks back.

For the second year in a row Yeo Valley “released” an epic musical number in the first break of the first live X-factor. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it featured a group of slightly too attractive “farmers” singing a Westlife style boy-band (the Churned) ballad (Forever) with a West-Country backdrop. This is the sequel to last year’s “rapping farmers” and whilst personally I don’t love it quite as much, I do think that this is a great example of sustainable advertising (see a couple of posts ago for more on this)

As an example of “sustainable communications” it is particularly nice in that it demonstrates that you can invest in and improve a consumer’s experience of their media without having to sponsor or ad-fund content.

I believe that this advert augments the enjoyment of people watching the X-factor because it clearly understands and plays to the specific frame of mind that those viewers find themselves in at that point. Cheesy manufactured boy-bands are the essence of X-factor and are the guilty pleasure of all who watch, so spending 2 minutes watching some bare chested boys do a tribute/parody to that is exactly what the doctor ordered for the commercial break. This relevant, informative and entertaining content delivered in such a timely fashion is a perfect example of the sustainable communications that I long to see more of.

Other things that they have done right –

1) there are not too many ratings behind this spot – they are primarily focusing on the X-factor and similar programming to ensure a tight fit with and maximum relevance for their core audience. This means they don’t have to worry about out-staying their welcome and starting to irritate and can focus on entertaining the audience that will appreciate it the most

2)They have made sure that a tangible product message is still core to the idea – (that Yeo Valley is made from milk that is sustainably farmed by West Country farmers who care about the countryside) – They have even included the lyrics in a karaoke style version of the ad that has followed more recently to make the message unmissable – Basically they have given me an actual reason to choose the product rather than to just “like” the TV ad

On an aside, I find it interesting that Yeo Valley have managed to create more noise than even Muller’s epic “Wunderful stuff” campaign that launched on the same day, in the same show and with a much more expensive ad and vastly larger advertising budget. The Muller stuff just seems to fall flat for me. It has all the theoretical ingredients for a viral hit, but viewers haven’t really fallen in love with it in the same way.

I think the difference is that Muller looks like it was made for the maximum entertainment of people who work in advertising, they’ve ticked lots of boxes of perceived retro cultural icons that are “cool” whereas the Yeo Valley work is all about appealing to my Mum (and is most definitely not cool.)

Yeo Valley have always made sure that even if their ad isn’t a massive cultural phenomenon it still communicates a reason to buy. Muller’s £20m campaign relies wholly on capturing our imagination and consumers “loving” the ad (and therefore by implication Muller) in the way that Cadburys managed with “Gorilla”, but if that fails, then what is my reason to buy their yoghurt?

Bad Science in Business

Last Summer I read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science and I’ve been a bit of a disciple ever since – for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure there is a great 20 minute TED talk right here that is a nice introduction to his philosophy.

He has 3 key principles for spotting “Bad Science”

1) Beware articles that quote “authorities” to make their case – a definite sign that they have no real evidence to support it
2) Beware of studies that are run without control groups – they will almost definitely see a positive result due to placebo effects
3) Beware of collections of studies that show a lopsided range of results – someone is hiding the negative results from you. Basically – Make sure you have ALL the information, not just what other interested parties want you to have.

Since then I’ve tried to use some of those principles to help me make decisions about lifestyle and health etc. What I’ve recently found though is that the same principles apply just as well to the way I do business and the opinions that I hold.

The most important principle that Goldacre higlights is “Make sure you’ve got ALL the information”. It seems obvious, but it is all too easy to just take the data that you see first and run with it and you could end up doing exactly the wrong thing if you aren’t careful

Today I found a live example of study bias in the business world and a timely reminder of how easy it is to manipulate statistics to say what you want.

Yesterday the FSA (Financial Services Authority) released their 6 monthly “league table” of complaints in the financial sector. This first came to my attention whilst reading the Independent and then I also found this article on the mail online (I really started to pay attention when those two agreed with each other!)

Both articles left the reader in no doubt that consumers were still very angry with Banks and that banking services were the worst offender in the financial sector.

I would probably have stopped there (and come to the fairly obvious conclusion that something drastic needs to happen with banking services), were it not for the fact that this story is very pertinent to a client that I am working on at the moment and so I wanted to be able to discuss it with them – obviously I wanted to make sure I had my facts straight and so I dug out the actual report from the FSA.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by what I found, but I was.

The real headline from the study is that things are actually getting a lot better – complaints about banking services have actually dropped by 22% since last year and a whopping 60% since banking’s nadir at the end of 2009. Also banking is no longer the worst offender – Insurance services now have that honour. My conclusion now would be that we must be doing something right and we should find out what and keep doing it (Effectively the opposite conclusion to the one I would have made had I taken either the Independent or the Daily Mail at face value)

The reason I’m so suprised (or maybe even impressed) is that the media didn’t just exaggerate the findings for effect, they actually made out the opposite of the findings to be true because that was the story they wanted to tell (and the story that might keep their readers nice and angry.) “Banks a bit less shit” isn’t much of a headline I guess, although it would definitely be surprising!

Anyway, maybe this is blindingly obvious to all of you, but I thought it was worth sharing. Question EVERYTHING!

Sustainable Communications vs Media Exploitation – a Manifesto

I’ve been working in media and communications strategy for over 11 years now and I’ve been writing this blog for about 3 or 4 years on and off and I’ve never thought to write a manifesto; Something that puts in writing the basic principles of what I believe to be best practice in our industry and the fundamentals against which I hope to measure my own actions.

There are a few reasons why I haven’t done this:

1) It never occured to me before

2) Even if it had I wouldn’t have expected anyone to have any desire to read it

3) I didn’t really ever consolidate these “basic principles” in any way that didn’t involve a beer fuelled chat with media buddies in the pub.

Well that’s changed recently and here I am trying to set out my manifesto because:

1) It’s occured to me to do so

2) It doesn’t matter how many people read it, but many thanks if you are

3) I think that our industry really needs to start looking at the consequences of our behaviour and start to invest in the future.

The source of this manifesto (well it’s more of a mission statement really) came from a conversation with the Chief Architect of Bing in the UK, Dave Coplin. We were discussing recent developments with Bing’s equivalent of Streetview and he was outlining his strategy for ensuring that the privacy of individuals was protected as far as possible, whilst maintaining maximum utility for users (which could potentially invade their privacy.) What became clear is that he considered ” a right to privacy” (in the digital media world) to be an implied contract between individual and service provider. People actually give up their right to privacy all the time as long as they are getting clear value in return and they are in control of what happens to the information they divulge. What became clear in our conversation was the care and attention that Microsoft were investing in ensuring that the “contract” with consumers was always preserved -that they always knew what they were giving up and what value they were receiving in return.

The words “value exchange” are bandied around an awful lot, but in Dave’s eyes it was fundamental to Microsoft’s entire relationship as a media owner with consumers.

This formed the spark for the philosophy and manifesto that I’m about to deliver so here goes:

Here’s what I believe:

1) Human attention is a valuable natural resource, allowing us to learn about the world around us, adapt our behaviour for optimal utility of that world and to evolve our attitudes for maximum enjoyment of the world

2) Human attention is NOT an infinite resource, there is only so much new information we can take in at any time and only so many things that we can be persuaded to care about

3) All marketing and communications require that we capture that human attention

4) Human attention naturally concentrates and clusters around certain content and media because of the value it contributes to their lives, NOT because of the amount of advertising they find there

5) Just like any natural resource, over-exploitation of the human attention to media will inevitably lead to the dilution and eventual destruction of that attention and make it impossible for us to harness it any way, positive or negative.

(Yeah I love that pic!)

6) It should therefore be the responsibility of advertisers to not just exploit a medium for the audience that it attracts, but to invest in that medium with sustainable communications to ensure that it continues to deliver value to consumers and in turn provide a continuing resource for brands to communicate to those audiences.

Some advertisers might claim that they already do this – by paying to advertise in a medium they say they are investing in the quality of content that medium can provide.  And maybe that used to be true. Maybe some consumers do watch advertising in the knowledge that they are entering into a contract with the media channel to “pay” for the content they choose to watch by also watching content that they would rather not. However I think we are deluding ourselves if we think this is true of most advertising messages.

As advertisers we “buy” an audience that media owners “sell” to us. Because of that we think we have a right to put pretty much anything we can get away with in front of that audience and we approach every consumer contact with the question  “what can my brand get out of this?”.

A perfect example of this is the recent news story that Ford had “secured” a corporate page on Google+. What I found remarkable about this was that a) Ford had ignored Google’s request for advertisers to back off until they had worked out how to showcase corporate accounts and b) No-one seems to have a clue what Ford are doing there and what they hope to get out of it. All that they seem interested in is the fact that there are 10 million+ people already signed up and that it is currently unexploited so they get to be first. No-one knows how people are using Google+, what it is all about and what they can get out of it, but Ford are happy to steam in and plant their corporate size 9 footprints over everything.

This shouldn’t be surprising. As soon as an emerging technology develops into something that looks a bit like a “medium” then every client I have wants to know “How should I be using it?” There is an assumption that if there is an audience then we should be exploiting it. The same happened with Twitter and I can’t even think about doing a campaign without being asked “what will my facebook page look like”.

I also look  at the dead and dying media brands that have failed to keep up with the ever increasing demands of advertisers and investors and so have been abandoned by the wayside. Internet brands such as Myspace that has effectively been ditched – at a loss of half a billion dollars –  because no-one could work out how to make it work for advertisers.

I start to feel an element of responsibility for this. If every  new medium is disected and assessed solely based on it’s ability to generate advertising income then potentially viable media products and businesses that could have had another business model are simply allowed to fade away.

Now maybe this isn’t a problem whilst there is a steady flow of sacrificial lambs for us to exploit, plunder and destroy, and maybe it is fine when consumers don’t have a choice whether or not we target them, but I believe the days of being able to exploit media with impunity are numbered. Consumers have more and more tools that enable them to choose whether to engage with advertisers or not and the longer we abuse their good will and force interruption to their media consumption with unwelcome messages, the quicker they will learn how to switch us off. Indeed there is legislation coming which will force consumers to make that choice (see anti-cookie European legislation)

So here’s where I start my campaign for sustainable communication (I got here eventually!).

I believe that the most successful advertisers in the next 20 years will be those that understand that we have a duty to respect the contract between advertisers and consumers and deliver true value in our communications.

We need to ensure that we are investing in successful media, not just by buying media space, but by delivering content and messages that in and of themselves increase the value that consumers take out of that media space. Rather than saying “what’s the next big thing” all the time, we should be saying “how do we make the current big thing work better for consumers” so that we don’t have to start all over again when we have bullied them out of the media that they used to love.

For my part, whenever I am asked to consider a new media opportunity, I am going to endeavour to start with the question “How can I make that media better for the consumers who are consuming it” rather than “How can I make a quick buck here”. And let me be clear – another generic TV ad with animated animals or a beautiful woman selling perfume does not make my experience of that medium better. Most ads that your average advertiser likes are frankly wallpaper for your average consumer.

Over the next few weeks and months I will be adding examples of campaigns that are either examples of great sustainable communications or worrying examples of media exploitation.

Please feel free to send me any good examples of either.

As a starter for 10, please check out the mediaweek award shortlisted Panasonic Advertiser funded programme “How to take stunning pictures”. This was a piece of TV content on channel 5 that out-performed it’s alloted programming slot and was hugely popular with consumers and client alike. In addition Panasonic were able to clearly convey their commitment to helping the average photography enthusiasts get the most out of amateur photography. And it sold Panasonic Lumix cameras – lots of them.

In #myextrahour I’ll disect this new twitter campaign

I returned from new York last Sunday to discover this campaign from Europcar had cropped up all over London.

For those of you not in London, the basic premise is that Europcar’s new service “FreeDeliver” will save you time, essentially giving you an extra hour in your day to do with as you will. I first saw this campaign on a fairly standard panel on a train and noticed at the bottom it suggested that I should twitter what I would do with #myextrahour.

My initial reaction was somewhat cynical “Really? People are going to bother tweating about Europcar? and are Europcar’s audience really on Twitter anyway?”. I believe that social media can be a powerful force in the right campaigns, but it has to be an organic process. Surely the UK public aren’t going to fall for this are they?

But the general commentary amongst my peer-group was pretty positive and when I looked into it, this was a well structured media campaign. The static posters drove people to twitter, but in turn their tweets were being displayed on Digital 6 sheets and billboards across London allowing consumers to broadcast their ideas for how to spend their spare time. I also thought that this was a pretty brave approach and at least they are trying to do something a bit different. It definitely stands them apart from their competitors.

But then my cynicism kicked back in and I decided to follow #myextrahour to find out what people were saying. I discovered that people tweeting it divided up into 5 groups

1) People who work for Ogilvy (the creative agency running the campaign) complying with the spirit of the campaign and suggesting activities for the extra hour that ranged from the banal to the inane
2) People who work in social media and web marketing hooking up with Ogilvy in a mutual love-in and orgy of self congratulation
3) People who suggested defacing the campaign in their extra hour
4) People trying to get past the moderator and get profanity onto a London Billboard
5) One guy who was using it to send people to a competitor site (enterprise) and lots of people re-tweeting the “Corporate Twitterbot FAIL” that ensued.

oh and 6) Europcar

In total since Saturday there have been about 60 tweets, and I can’t find one that is from an actual member of the public who has engaged with this campaign in a non-cynical and genuine way.

This a) makes me happy because I was right and b) makes me sad because I was right.

I just don’t think that a brand like Europcar which has no defined brand identity or personality (or none that exists outside of their own marketing team) can drive a social media movement in this way and expect people to actually bother engaging. We are a cynical bunch, particularly in London and we won’t be told what to think, what to share or how. Fundamentally people don’t have an overwhelming urge to engage with advertising campaigns and to get them to do so you need to deliver a great deal more value to them than this campaign does.

Whenever I look at campaigns like this I revert to my standard motto which is “what does the consumer actually get out of this”, and in this case, I really have no answer.

I also think that if you insist on trying something like this you need a much clearer call to action and use a media that can really bring “an extra hour” to life in an emotionally engaging way. This seems to be crying out for a full-on “Bisto” style emotional TV treatment that might just cut through our cynicism, bring a moment of laughter, joy, nostalgia, etc into people’s lives and maybe, just maybe get people to share some truly inspirational and worthwhile thoughts.