It’s tough out there!
On behalf of the captain and crew I’d like to welcome you aboard this British Airways flight to Paris.
As your cabin crew and the captain are not being paid by British Airways to operate this flight for you today there are just a few routine changes to the normal agenda and I would be grateful for your attention while I point these out. Continue reading ‘Staff fly for free’
One of the surprising growth phenomena of this recession has been the tendency of emailers to suggest shortcuts to everything in ten (or fewer) steps.
If I count up all the tips and cures and reasons and guides that have been suggested, unsolicitedly, to me from absolutely anyone and everyone I might easily have 1001 things to do (or more) which could sort out my entire life. Continue reading ‘10 things you can do with your List’
There are certain essentials in business life, especially when you’re travelling, that you just can’t do without. Mine are simple: an Oyster card, in London; plentiful Caffe Nero outlets (I love their so-easy loyalty card); and clean fingernails if you really want to show off your socialised side when you meet people. Continue reading ‘It’s the system, stupid’
Have you heard the robot-sounding, extremely grave voice in AXA’s ’sympathetic’ radio ads asking “If you can’t bear the sound of all the crashing and the crunching…?’ Or something along those lines. It’s for insurance. It’s awful.
The ad is meant to resonate with us, I guess. To make us say ‘Ah, yes…the credit Continue reading ‘“G-o-o-o-d porcelain dog!”’
Fat-free VAT-free potato crisps (aka Pringles) are suddenly in the news. They’re not VAT-free any longer.
Does this matter to anyone? Well, yes. It matters to Procter & Gamble, for instance, who manufacturer the lovable, stackable favourite. P&G are going to find themselves on the wrong end of a £100m VAT bill.
So you thought food products were zero-rated? They are. But there are — Continue reading ‘Pringles problems’
What a wonderful idea. Junk your old car and get £2k off a new one. Things don’t get better than this, do they? Mr Mandelson thinks it’s a ‘wonderful bargain‘, too.
And that may well be the case. All I have to do now is come up with the extra £10k, £15 or maybe £20k it’ll take to get my hands on the shiny new metal.
But hold on…what’s so radical about this idea that it can be said to ‘kick start’ the Continue reading ‘Scrap Age’
How many hours did John Higgins take to win his Snooker World Champion title during these past 17 days? Or Shaun Murphy, the runner up?
I don’t know the actual number – can anyone help? — but it’s a lot, lot more than other sportsmen have to play to win fame. Golfers possibly excepted.
But this is a question I do know the answer to: how many times did he complain to the referee or utter an expletive? Answer: none. Ditto every other player.
And this, in a nutshell, is snooker’s problem. How will the game ever be more than a minority interest ‘sport‘ until the players learn how to scream and shout and throw proper adult tantrums about everything? When will they learn that silent, uncomplaining servility leads only to undignified anonymity?
It is, funnily enough, every ad agency’s problem, too. For an industry of incessant talkers, we are just too polite.
Consider John MacEnroe: he transformed toffee-nosed, geriatric Wimbledon protocols into teenage scream fests. Footballers have been doing it for years, of course. Even the ladies footie final on Bank Holiday Monday, won by Arsenal, saw one of their strikers screaming F*** in open-mouthed, repeat slowmo action after missing a good chance. Cricket chaps are also currently practising the ignoble art when they’re not ‘interfering with the ball’.
Cue the snooker supremos: they say nothing. They remain completely, expression-free, water-sippingly silent for hours and hours on end. Black ball to centre pocket for a final killer lead…missed it…oh gosh. Nothing. Not even the hint of a furrowed brow. Just chalk and no talk.
Before you ask “What is wrong with these guys?” just think of us poor agency folk. We get invited to pitch, do hours and hours of work (lots of hot air and talking at this stage, of course). Do the pitch and, when we’re unlucky enough not to have won, we say… nothing. We don’t complain, not publicly, anyway. Sometimes we even thank the client for their having allowed us the opportunity to work with them. We are all polite and socialised humility. Good luck to your winning agency. Hope it goes well in the future. Of course!
So — snooker players — the game is crying out for a personality. Why haven’t you spotted the opportunity for a really big break? The opportunity not merely to screw back and canon off the side cushion but to really screw everybody in the audience and on TV — all the old grannies and snooker gurus and past champions and friends of influential other snooker friends and the seven or eight viewers on BBC2 — and treat the Crucible to its first ever outpouring of HORRIFIC LOUD CRITICISM AND EVEN A STREAM OF FOUL AND UNMENTIONABLE WORDS??? Maybe even spit and smash a cue or two in a storm of unreasonableness over the glowing green baize of table top tranquility?
That way lies true, instant and YouTube-secured, world-wide fame. It’s got to be better than pussy-footing around in carpet slippers and a dicky-bow and being nice to everybody for hours and hours on end!
And, if anybody’s looking, maybe we should do the same after we next come second in a pitch? The trouble is, we’ve just won the last three on the trot. I guess we’ve just gone and snookered ourselves.
Football is the world religion. Obviously. And football brands command such loyalty that their supporters rarely — if ever — lapse, change allegiances, or fail to pay homage to their brands, whether in person at their team’s sporting temple or at home on their electronic life support machines popularly known as TVs, at least once a week. Continue reading ‘When loyalty costs you more’
If you happened to have examined the moon through a stethoscope recently (or a synthesiser), or argued that a picture of a clock showing the time at 9.35 meant that the ‘closest’ hour was nine o’ clock, or made to choose which was heavier, 1.6kg or 1.607kg…well, you may have been taking – and failing – your Science or Maths GCSE. But you weren’t, of course.
Similarly, if you were confused watching the BBC’s evening news on Monday and wondered what a stylishly graphed 27% increase in teenage pregnancies actually meant against the unusually overlaid colour-coded previous year’s PowerPointed figures showing a slight decline of 11% against 2006 meant…well, as approximately 46,000 teenage girls have already done in 2007, join the club. But you didn’t.
And if that wasn’t enough to baffle you, did you follow the arguments behind the small percentage increases and slight percentage decreases in stabbings among 18-24 year-olds over the past three years? Thought so…you followed it.
So why didn’t you fail the exam questions or join the growing number of likely baffled viewers? Easy, you were taught percentages and graphs and maybe some statistics and some logical reasoning at school. Unlike schoolkids today, it seems
So who’s the BBC talking to with its graphs and charts and colourful, flashy Mac presentations? Answer: a small minority. Not your average teenager, that’s for sure. So what if I mentioned the Financial Times and suggested ‘What do you think…will they have made it dead difficult for Clapham Omnibus Joes to follow their complicated stuff…all figures and percentages…’ Come on! No need to even think about it, is there? It’s obvious. The FT is not for turning pages in excited anticipation, is it?
Well, here’s what…think again. Here’s an extract from yesterday’s FT about regional newspapers going down the pan as a result of advertising revenues having dried up:
“
‘And do you know what the problem is, in one word?’ asked the
“Overall advertising income will decline by about 50% from £2.7bn to £1.4bn between 2007 and 2012.”
So this all gets back to who’s the (news) media actually for these days? Newspapers have become so unappealing to web-preferring punters that they have had to go colour and tabloid and Berliner and sectional and online in their efforts to survive. And many people say they just don’t read newspapers any more – other than the freebie celebrity news ones. Telly on the web – just the good bits, the celebrity and sports and funny and entertaining bits – is what people really want when it comes to ‘news’. Nicely, visually, pleasingly packaged and updated.
So why are newspapers in terminal decline? The FT does a better job than the telly, yet… Pity those poor clients and prospects who have to sit through some of those excruciating and confusing PowerPoints, then, from time to time.
More than 1,000 serving police have criminal convictions ranging from assault to burglary, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
This is, self-evidently, a bad thing. Our police should be paragons of virtue and exhibit the qualities of good conduct and probity that we deem appropriate for the defenders of our society.
But delve a little further. If you have a leaking pipe at home, you’ll definitely want the services of a good plumber. So, would you call in the services of an electrician or a roofer? Unlikely. You want someone whom you can trust to carry out your urgent work effectively.
Indeed, it’s a fair bet you’ll want the services of a qualified and experienced plumber. Someone whom you can trust to do not just a good job, but an excellent job. And someone, under the circumstances, whom you wouldn’t mind even paying a bit more for. You want someone, of course, with proven expertise and a good track record.
Ditto our clients and our prospects. When our clients and those clients we haven’t yet met want their marketing managed properly, what are they going to do? No… not ‘Ghostbusters’…they search for what they feel is a responsible, creative, commercial, proven agency with a track record of getting things done effectively for other clients with similar — and in many cases different – needs to theirs. They search for competencies, opinions, reputations and stories that indicate success in dealing with problems and issues that they have. Not forgetting the people and a work culture that they can relate to.
So why am I surprised by this quote: “The public entrust the police with the use of legal force precisely because they are self-disciplined and restrained, which is why anyone convicted of a violent offence should be dismissed. I cannot see how a police officer convicted of dishonesty can perform their duty effectively.”
Maybe because it’s too obvious. Think: if you want someone to tackle a vicious drug-pusher with a knife or a gun…who ya gonna call? Or if you need to deal with a bank robbery, a violent strike, a street riot, the occasional breakout of gang warfare or inter-racial disharmony…who ya gonna call?
In each case the answer is not, again, Ghostbusters. It is, of course, those people whose duty it is to uphold law and order and to protect you, your family and your community from harm. And those people trained to deal with these emergencies is, da-da, the police. Of course.
So now comes the tricky bit. Do you want your police nice and civil and polite and honest? Yes. But do you want your police to be able to deal with very tough situations in a demanding and, sometimes, ruthlessly efficient — even vilolently-assertive — manner, if that solves the problem? Yes, I guess. Ergo: do you want properly-trained, resourceful, capable-of-standing-up-to-hardened-and-violent-criminals (like they do in the movies) or do you want pleasant but ineffective wimps? Proven track record — even if that sometimes means getting down and dirty — or no track record?
You’ve seen the parallel I’m making with agencies, of course. And just for the record, we do have form. So who ya gonna call?
