Who’d have thought that something so hateful as shopping (sorry to all you believers, out there) could be the focus of our likely escape from global meltdown and the goal to achieve social and financial salvation?
I’ve hated shopping ever since my mum used to interrupt my play periods out in the streets with all the other kids by shouting out of our kitchen window that she needed another can of beans from the co-op and here’s the money (coins wrapped up in a scrap of paper and flung from our fifth floor council flat). Which I used to try and catch without the package leaving a hole in my hands.
Branded in my brain was 14901…that was the number you had to tell the guy in the shops when you bought your beans. And anything else. To get your ‘divi’. The divi was — like an Austin Allegro if it had only called itself a hatchback, but it didn’t — a great idea whose time hadn’t yet come. But it was oh so close and it so nearly could have.
The Austin Allegro was a naff car because it had the wrong name. It still sold a fair few, was a good little runner but it never set the pace; never became a ‘forerunner’. The divi was the same: solid, dependable taken for granted. Loved, even. But destined never — especially at the co-op — to be a leader in consumer brands.
Then along came Tesco. And Green Shield stamps. And then Clubcard. I remember Sainsbury’s scoffing at the introduction of Clubcard, last millennium, that it was just “electronic Green Shield stamps.” Exactly, said Tesco, back to them. That was before ‘Doesn’t geddit’ related to something other than ‘understanding’ but Sainsbury’s just didn’t geddit back then. No matter that it actually was just an electronic divi.
But shopping is what we’re all supposed to be doing now to get us back on our financial feet. A 2.5% reduction in VAT, after all, is the stimulus we need. Shops have put the government’s regressive tax on the poor (who still have to eat but pay for their necessaries out of much lower net income) into miserly context by having anything up to 40 and 50% January sales now! In November and December! Should I now be anticipating the Summer Sales in the New Year?
Oh what ho ho ho it is to go shopping. Except it isn’t. It’s sparsely half-full of bargain hunters in ‘Shaun of the Dead’ environments. Go on, tell me Westfield is fun and I’m seriously missing out. I mean…it’s 50% Westlife after all!
Perhaps there should be the equivalent of a ‘Digital switch over’ campaign called ‘Retail switch over’ for people like me who really can’t be bothered to spend early mornings, lunch times, late nights or weekends shopping. I just don’t want to do that. Why not drinking instead of shopping. The weekly gloom of more pubs failing would be reversed and we’d all be a lot happier, at least temporarily, to boot.
So how come this feeble idea has become the foundation for future global reconstruction (plus about a million billion rewards squids for the international banking institutions’ failures) and has gained traction? If only I’d known this earlier. That when I was doing ‘0′ level economics, the answer to everything could have been not 42 — as Douglas Adams would have claimed — but shopping.
Where did it all go so wrong? Would I have got a better grade in economics? Or do I just not geddit? Let’s hope the rest of the population doesn’t share my views or we could be in for a very long recession.
If you’re a pygmy, in the jungle — and depending on where you may be standing in the long, long grass — the description you take back to your village if you may encounter an elephant for the first time would vary according to which angle you approached him / her from.
For instance: approach him from the side and an elephant is like…this (spread arms out very wide). Approach him front on… (show potentially punctured palms) then you will have formed a different impression from your sharper experience. Approach from the rear…OK, you get the idea. It’s all about experiencing only a limited picture which then becomes the whole.
So it seems is the description some people want to enforce upon you in respect of their views. Agencies, for example, are fond of talking about their client…even my client if you’re an ardent account person. Nothing wrong with this passion, of course. Bless!
Sometimes agency people will also claim a great campaign was ‘my idea’. Success has many fathers, as the saying goes.
Yet I can remember way back when our client was British Airways. We handled all the Exec Club work and we were oh so justifiably proud of this work. They were on our client list, they were on a retainer, they were (truly) our client.
Except that they weren’t. Because if you went and asked them to give you an endorsement or a quote, they wouldn’t. Why? Because we were a supplier. And BA doesn’t give suppliers endorsements (not way back when, anyway).
Oh no no no! NO WAY. Ask BA who their agency was and the answer was a simple one name twice…you can guess, can’t you: Saatchi and Saatchi. What not us…your dm agency? Huh…as if. We were that un-glamorous rather functional part of the industry, back then, called direct marketing. We did data processing and laser printing and hobnobbed with lettershops. We were their low caste supplier with a lower case ’s’.
OK, that was way back. But just last week a certain auto company was in the news. Not for going broke as all car companies are at the moment as too many cars chase too few buyers and they want to be rewarded for failure, like the banks, with taxpayers’ money so they are going to governments with cap in hand, no…they were in the news for reviewing their agencies. So I called then up. After all, this was an OPPORTUNITY!
Speak to our appointed agent, they told me very nicely, they’ll help. So I did. But they didn’t. Didn’t help, that is. In fact they told me we would be number 19 if they added us to their longlist and, ket’s be honest, their client wouldn’t want that, would they? Asked why we would be number 19 and was told because there were 18 agencies already on the list. Fair enough. I’m not very good at maths.
Yet, yet…I went back to our current treasure trove of awards and ratings and industry rankings and all the other stuff of which we are proud and… checked. I didn’t really have to as these numbers are lasered on my mind. I just wanted to find a reference to us, somewher, saying you are number 19. In the interests of objectivity and all that.
Here’s what I found: Marketing Week - ranked us Top Agency for Growth in 2008. ISP - awarded us their Grand Prix for the year and voted us Agency of the Year 2008. Campaign - put us in top position in their New Business Rankings, October 2008. Precision Marketing - ranked us 6th overall in the UK. NMA - ranked us 4th as most efficient marketing agency and 13th (not quite 19th) in the UK’s Top 100 Marketing Agencies. And we were only one of two agencies in the UK to get a Silver at the The Globes held in Toronto a few weeks’ ago. Not to mention all the other awards we have netted this year. Of which we are hugely proud.
So…I went back to said auto company with a little tailored booklet outlining our achievements. Ever so politely, of course. Sort of pointing out that we weren’t in 19th position in the UK by anyone’s reckoning, and would they like to consider us. Just doing my job, you understand. A little advance email to the company in question just to let them know, politely, that tomorrow’s post would contain…etc.
Possibly well under five minutes after I had emailed the auto company I have a call. It’s not them. It’s their appointed agent. Their angry appointed agent. In fact, I didn’t get a call, I got a message from our upset receptionist who wondered why she had been talked to quite so angrily from said angry agent. I was instructed to make an immediate return call, I was told. No voicemail messages, either.
Now, call me mathematically challenged, for sure, but I kind of know — you do, don’t you — when someone leaves you a message and you are instructed to call them back immediately, that they might just not be asking you to return their call because they have an urgent need to invite you round to their house and have Sunday lunch with them and their family this weekend. I knew that, anyway. But I called back. As instructed.
‘What are you doing talking to our client? I told you you were not right for them. I know your agency and I know your people and you are simply wrong for them. Don’t phone OUR client!’ That’s the gist, anyway.
Wow. Idiot me. I didn’t know it was ‘their’ client. I tried to point out that an auto company is an auto company. Probably, as such, desperate for business if my reading of the newspapers isn’t wrong. I didn’t know they were ringfenced, expropriated, off limits. I just thought…I’ll give ‘em a (polite) bell. And I did.
So it seems it really does depend on how you approach an object. My foolish world view was to have supposed an auto company might be innocently called in respect of their agency review. Should they tell me I was too late or not on their radar, that would be fine. We like grown up talk!
But it also seems there are some pygmies out there suffering from NES: naive empire syndrome. How dumb of me to think pygmies didn’t live in England!? I’m going to pay more attention to that long grass on Wandsworth Common as I walk home tonight! They may even carry blowpipes.
PS 10p goes to the person(s) who thinks they can name the correct name!
They’re both clever, but they’re rude. Very. Most people know this. So the boys behaving badly isn’t a shock. Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand draw the audiences they deserve - it’s called self-selection. So why the big fuss about their rudeness?
Well, the BBC is supposed to differentiate itself from the commercial media (read ‘mainstream’). It’s supposed to be less dependent on the sort of puerile, smutty stuff that they pump out. That may sound a bit hard on all the other media but the Beeb is a ‘public service broadcaster’ and distinguishing itself from the others is supposed to be part of its mission along with playing some sort of ‘civilising role’ in society.
The other bit is accountability, I guess. When you receive £3.4bn from a ‘compulsory annual levy’ then you have a statutory duty of care to your public who contribute to your funding. That’s why the public can be rather demanding. The ’so that’s how you use my licence fee?’ is not exactly a new question. And rather incredible though it may appear, it’s the producers and even the BBC bosses who don’t seem to have realised their responsibilities in this.
The big mystery to me is why is everybody so agitated? I understand the bad boys’ actions were stupidly wrong and the nature of their message was seriously offensive. No question. Both to Andrew Sachs and his granddaughter, Georgina Baillie.
But Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand are simply who they are and everybody knows who they are. They are rude, bad boys. They are paid seriously lots to be rude bad boys. What else are they supposed to do…be the speakers on ‘Thought for the Day’? Present ‘The Sunday Service’? No. That’s why audiences self-select: it’s the content, stupid! You either hate ‘em or you love ‘em, as they say. They are two ‘brands’ who do what good brands are supposed to so: fulfil a promise; engage emotionally with people; and be relevant to their lives. What foxes me is why, therefore, they were on good old Radio 2?
The Club 18-30 ’segment’ probably think JR and RB are fab while anyone slightly older than that will think they’re awful. Over 30,000 of this latter group have complained. Love / hate. Amazing, really, that this happened on a Radio 2 programme. I don’t listen to Radio 2 because it’s always been so dull, so mums and dads, so Marks and Spencer. So, er, mainstream…!
Perhaps I will now, though. I didn’t realise it was so risque. It sounds like fun. Can anyone tell me where I can find it? And let’s hope the R2 producer keeps his/her job!
Despite its pretty advertising, Marks & Spencer — food apart — isn’t my sort of store.
It still carries all that mum and dad, insipid ‘variety store’, strip-light beige-ness for me. All twin-sets and jacquard knits and acrylic costumes and suits with two pairs of trousers and cable-knit cardigans like Mark Darcy early on in Bridget Jones’s Diary. All attended to by pink-rinsed, middle-aged ladies raving about the wonderful hairdressing deals the company offered them and the marvellous canteen. You may not have to have a Freedom Pass to shop there, but I bet it helps.
So when I do take a once-in-a-decade peek around M&S, stealthily, I am reasonably surprised that the stuff called ‘fashion’ isn’t so bad. But because my M&S shopping visits are so infrequent, during my most recent visit I was amazed at their size ranging — if that’s the term.
If you’re a man, don’t go looking for size 30″ waist trousers. Don’t bother. There aren’t any. M&S starts at 32 (or even 34) though they can, Sir, get a “special order in for you for the very smallest size.”
So much for impulse shopping, then.
Having mentioned this to a slim friend, I was told that’s nothing. Women’s wear, I was snortingly told, starts mostly at size 12 and often at size 14. What happened to size Zero that I thought every woman wanted, I asked, naively? Get real…we’re talking M&S women here, was the reply.
Is that M&S women as in Dove’s-Campaign-for-Real-Beauty-women, then, I wondered? Is it, perhaps, since women are from Venus, for a different race?
And it’s not just clothes. Take cars — and not just those Chelsea tractors. Put a 1980s VW Golf or a Peugeot 207 up against its modern-day equivalent and the difference is amazing. They may still be called the same car but, blimey, what’s in a name? Absolutely nothing in these cases. 1980s Golf looks like an anorexic waif against its modern, steroid-fuelled, muscular counterpart. Skinny little tyres, weeny lights, bodywork that looks so thin you could push your finger through it and seats that look like large child safety seats.
Don’t agree? OK…take the modern ‘Mini’. Or the Fiat 500. Put today’s Mini alongside its 1960s predecessor and you witness an example of nano-technology before the idea was even conceived. Modern woman would have to be a latter-day Twiggy to get anywhere near a mini of yore, these days. It was a Dinky Toy. And although the current Fiat is a cutesy girlie car to die for, it still aint wot it used to be: a tiny and tinny little run-around with a size Zero engine and made to fit into a shoe-box.
All this has got me thinking: is our growing problem with obesity really our own fault? Are we to blame or are there more sinister forces at work? What if this were all a manufacturer-led phenomenon? That we haven’t been stuffing ourselves silly for no reason…we’ve just been trying to grow enough to be able to see over the steering wheel and to fit whatever clothes may be available instead of having to walk around naked? Like Parkinson’s Law about work expanding to fill the time available, are our bodies simply expanding to fill the spaces and sizes available?
Have I discovered another Gore-like inconvenient truth? Is this also the real reason behind the growth of flat-screen (aka wide-screen) telly? That it’s not just to show all that M&S food-porn advertising?
How else would all our growing wider population get a proper look-in?
I don’t mind admitting it: I’m a Classic FM listener. I get in from work and switch on to ’smooth classics at six’ (or is it seven?) and that’s my wind-down for the evening sorted. Make dinner, glass of vino, bit of Mozart or Ravel, scan the newspaper and…ahhhh. Oldie stuff. But it’s probably as good as it gets.
Now, I know that commercial radio depends on advertising. And I put up with that. It’s a kind of trade-off: I’ll keep tuned to you during the ads if you make the programme itself worth it. So although I don’t like the ads, I tolerate them.
But Volkswagen has changed that. And BGR Bloomer (or whatever their name is). The one about “Don’t cash in your endowment mortgage before you’ve talked to…” And also the one about accidents at work and how XXX (can’t remember their name because the ad’s so hateful I’ve screened it out) you could get a big pay out, blah, for no cost if you’ve been injured in an accident and it wasn’t your fault.
But the worst one, by a million miles, is undoubtedly the VW one at the moment. It’s awful. Firstly, it sounds like a cow in labour; secondly, it ruins any mood of serenity and peacefulness that Classic FM says it’s aiming to create; and thirdly, there ought to be a Room 101 for radio ads (like this) that you can vote off the airwaves and into oblivion. Like TIVO on the box. Gone! Or maybe the ads themselves should carry a warning up-front. Like cigarettes: ‘This radio ad can seriously damage your health (if your mental age is still less than 12 years old).’
And VW, for what it’s worth, please note: when I see Chelsea footballers advertising a Samsung product I will never again consider buying a Samsung product. Vastly overpaid and puffed-up footballers are not good role models for decent products. In the same way, when you make ads like this, VW, your credibility with me disappears. OK, tell me I’m not your ‘target audience’…that I’m too old for this youthful ad. Fine. But then why are you advertising on Classic FM? Check out Radio 1, guys! There’s a zillion boy racers there just waiting to laugh their heads off at your wicked ad.
Please, please, please Classic FM, stop playing this unbelievable, mood-ruining, junk. It’s unbearable and I fear I may have to return to Radio 3 if you don’t do something about it soon.
Ah well, King Kev is no more. Nor is it any surprise. I first penned a few unkind (but now proven to be not untrue) comments about this way back in March and now the man himself has parted company from Newcastle once again.
It didn’t need a great deal of wisdom to predict this. Newcastle footie club does have ‘form’ in this matter and KK’s previous stint there had also ended in tears. It just needed a bit of that thing called ‘common sense’ and a reminder of what the definition of madness is: doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
After all, there’s a tendency to do it in our business some of the time, too. Apart from at Chemistry, that is! Of course.
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