Via Steal Our Ideas

It strikes me that one of the best things a forum like this can do is to promote the aspects of creativity that direct marketing is best at – the conversational, the tactile and tangible, the offer-led, the personalised, the charming. Where we’ve sometimes fallen down in the past is to act like advertising’s poor cousin – and over-value work that has advertising values. That’s why, for instance, Campaign Direct has tended to award poster campaigns with a response medium on the bottom rather than ‘real’ direct marketing.

The good news is, the world’s coming with us. Social marketing is a conversation medium, not an advertising one. Same with email, face-to-face, etc. Let’s be proud of having won the argument, and stop being envious of people who drive Porsches.

Reuben

The good news is that clients in a recession are more and more interested in a) getting a response and b) proving it.

But when your client is emailing, mailing, advertising, running a Facebook group and a Twitter feed, doing face-to-face and door-ro-door and word-of mouth, and when consumers are refusing to respond to your communications via the medium you want them to, how can you know what’s working and what’s not? In planning speak, how do you attribute a particular response to a particular channel?

The best answer I have heard yet: “It’s complicated”.

Reuben

There can only be one reason that the overwhelming majority of the Creative Directors (23 out of 28) who are registered authors of this blog have never written a word on here. After a whole year of struggle, debate and hard work, we got The Creative Forum blog up and running. One and a half years on, only five people have bothered contributing to it.

You know what – you actually don’t HAVE to write anything on here, ever. You can continue working your arse off in your agency day after day, night after night, weekend after weekend and forget sharing the knowledge. Bollocks to it – I’m too busy – no one reads this stuff anyway. And perhaps that’s true. Perhaps if Simon Veksner had thought that when he started Scamp, we wouldn’t have his entertaining, enlightening blog now. Or perhaps there’s nothing in Direct Marketing worth talking about. Perhaps it really is the poor relation to Mr Veksner’s brand advertising - the dirty side that no one really likes to admit they work in, so why would they write about it? By identifying myself with a post on here, aren’t I giving the game away that I work in dirty Direct?

When I sit and judge creative awards with my fellow CDs, the words flow fast and furious. It can be glorious, it can be brutal, it is never ever quiet. Everyone has an opinion and voices it with sincerity, experience and passion.

Shame they don’t have the same passion for soap-boxing here.

The industry is desperately in need of new thinking right now. Students are absolutely crying out to know how to get a job and where. Agencies are dropping like flies. Clients are walking all over us. DM is dead – long live Digital – yeah right. If there was ever a time to speak to the masses about positive directions and the learnings from experience, surely it is now.

Or have you lost your voice?

Chris Catchpole
Executive Creative Director
Domain

P.S. When looking for an image of a sewn up mouth for this post, I found one in Google images on the International Free Press Society’s website. Spookily, none of my browsers could access their site. Is this truly the end of free speech?!

About time too.

Reuben

We’re hosting a recruitment evening (’talent night’) on 25th March. We’d love to see you, particularly if you have relevant experience in our sector (good causes).

Drop me a line if you’d like to find out more: reuben.turner at thegoodagency.co.uk

A Client Services girl has just come in and said to a very senior Art Director in the office I’m working in - ‘The clients don’t really know what they want but they’ll know it when they see it’. I want to kill her.

Isn’t the job of the Account Management to interpret the client’s marketing problem, write the brief, come up with the proposition and get it signed off by the client? This way, the client has bought the work before they’ve even seen it so long as the creative matches the brief… Simple, isn’t it?

Tell you what love, we’ll do 100,000 ideas so your client can pick the one that tickles his fancy.

Give me strength.

I’m sure we’ve all seen the latest T-mobile flashmob TV ad – and this post is not about that ad per se. Rather it’s about the debate that seems to have sprung up around it.

Because the professionals seem to hate the ad, but the public just love it.

Look at the advertising blogs and you’ll see the same criticism again and again – “unoriginal”, “seen it all before”, “old hat”, “rip off”, etc.

For it’s worth, I don’t like it either, for much the same reasons. There are at least three other flashmob-type events at the very same station on YouTube.  And there are far too many obvious stooges in the ad for my liking and not nearly enough ‘ordinary’ people joining in, which is what flashmobbing is supposed to be about.

But as I say, that’s not really the point of this post. The question is, how important is originality?

We ‘professionals’ hold it very dear indeed. But it seems the punters couldn’t care less about borrowed ideas. Over 4.5 million hits so far on YouTube with almost universal approval.

You have to say that’s pretty impressive. People are clearly engaging with it, passing it on, copying it, enjoying it.

So why are we so obsessed with originality?  I know many of us would rather poke our eyes out with a stick than admit we have anything to do with actually selling stuff.  But have we gone too far down the road of “actually we’re artists, actually, and original thinking is the most important measure of artistic merit and creativity, actually”?

The people we’re aiming this stuff at don’t really seem to give a toss if something has been done before. They just want to be entertained, amused, informed and delighted.

I’m sure I remember reading somewhere that Ogilvy claimed originality was less important than appropriateness in advertising.  And perhaps it is just a measure of our discomfort at being labelled salesmen that leads to our obsessive pursuit of the unique.

Or does originality matter?  And if so, why?

Damien Parsonage