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• I say, I say, I say - why aren’t Christmas cracker jokes funny?
• BBC have known about phone hacking for years
• How to solve the sovereign debt crisis
• TV channels - why not +24 hours?
• The myth of USP
• Go compare - the power of shouting

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QR codes on bus stops

2012-01-04 | Filed Under Thinking laterally |

Here’s an idea. Why don’t companies like TfL put QR codes on their bus stops that link you to a site (such as TfL’s countdown) that tells you when the next buses are arriving at that stop?

After all, most buses have GPS which is how the electronic signs work (on the few stops that have them). That way, companies won’t have to invest so much in putting up the signs and the customer benefits too. (I know it’s not great for people without smartphones but they’ll be no worse off than they are now).

I say, I say, I say - why aren’t Christmas cracker jokes funny?

2012-01-03 | Filed Under Just interesting |

I’m sure that everyone who has ever pulled a cracker has thought that they could do better at writing jokes. So why aren’t they funny?

The challenge is that the ‘joke’ has to be able to appeal to a 6 year old and to Granny. Both have to be able to read it out. Too clever or witty and someone around the table might not get it.

Instead, the shared groan at the appalling joke is a communal and bonding experience. Everyone is on the same wavelength. We all feel a little bit better.

So they might not be funny, but they’re actually quite clever.

So next time you get asked what do you get if you cross Santa with a duck*, sit back in admiration…

*A Christmas Quacker

BBC have known about phone hacking for years

2011-12-21 | Filed Under Communications |

The BBC was fully aware that hacking into people’s answerphone messages was a widespread journalistic practice as long ago as 1997.

If proof is needed, just watch this clip from the pilot episode of Jonathan Creek called ‘The Wrestler’s Tomb’ – produced by the BBC’s own in-house entertainment department, and aired on 10^th May 1997.

In the episode, Caroline Quentin plays the role of a freelance investigative journalist called Maddie Magellan.  In one scene  she taps into the answerphone of a character she is investigating, by entering combinations of the possible message retrieval code until she gets the right one.

For activities such as this to make it to a drama series, it has to have been pretty widespread and well-known.  Hacking into phone messages (albeit mobile ones) is at the heart of the current furore.  Which makes all the denials we are hearing during the Leveson Inquiry seem like complete hypocrisy.  It seems to me that it’s time for the BBC – and David Renwick (who conceived and wrote the series) - to explain where they got the idea from and how widespread the practice was.  After all, we’re talking 14 years ago. 

I wonder how many of the 9.31 million* people viewing the episode thought they were watching something that was wrong, let alone that would lead to the demise of The News of the World.

 VIEW IT HERE

(*and that’s just the first airing of this episode, which has also been aired on several PBS stations in the U.S. and on BBC America, as well as countless repeats on Watch in the UK.  Which begs the question as to whether there isn’t a touch of hypocrisy in the public’s surprise and outrage at such practices.)

How to solve the sovereign debt crisis

2011-12-18 | Filed Under Thinking laterally |

It’s time for some radical thinking now that it’s quite clear that the world is in a perilous place. 

The domino effect of the European debt crisis will first cascade across Europe, and this in turn will affect other countries outside the eurozone.

Affected countries can no longer service their debt as their credit rating falls and their economies falter.  Yet the world cannot afford some of the major economies to stagnate, let alone fail, but nor cannot the global system afford to cancel the debt.

What we need to do is press the reset button and kick start all economies across the world.  And maybe we can, with some radical thinking and a modicum of courage.

Why not consolidate all sovereign debt (including Africa and the developing world) and net this out? Consolidate all this debt in a global ‘bank’ that issues credit notes to all creditors.

Each country would then pay this debt off to the global bank at a specified rate (say 1% over the next 100 years, or 2% over the next 50 years).  They would also pay an interest rate of 1% of the initial sum for the lifetime of the debt repayment (in other words, as the debt decreases, the relative interest rate increases – so when they have paid back ½ their debt, they are paying the equivalent of 2% and so on).

This debt itself then has both a yield and a repayment schedule – and becomes a tradable commodity.  Creditors would be able to trade their debt, rather than seeing parts of their portfolio becoming toxic. 

We are removing part of the debt burden from economies, allowing them to invest for growth.  We are giving total predictability to the impact on their financial planning>

Perhaps most importantly, we are lessening the impact on future generations on whose backs we have been building the prosperity we have been enjoying until now.

TV channels - why not +24 hours?

2010-11-12 | Filed Under Communications |

Many TV channels are now broadcasting “+1″ - the one hour time delay to let you catch up on content.

But, apart from Sky2,  none of them seem to be doing +24.

Yet, if you think about it, broadcasters are doing more and more to exploit the power of PR and recommendation. Yet you don’t get to see the programme people are talking about from the night before unless they are on iPlayer and the like (or one of the interminable BBC repeats.

Why just a one hour delay?  Surely it would make much more sense to use this bandwidth to put a bigger delay in place and significantly improve audience figures…

The myth of USP

2010-09-12 | Filed Under Communications |

SP (Unique Selling Point or Unique Sales Proposition) is a useful concept, but is a poor description of a brand – and, inappropriately applied, fails to deliver what many brand owners want it to achieve. That’s because it can encourage narrow thinking about what a brand is, and how best to promote it.A lot of original brand thinking was done by ad agencies and I would argue that USP is a construct of the advertising mindset. Advertising requires a process of reducto ad absurdum, because it requires simplicity and single-mindedness of thought to get its message across in the limited time or space available.

But brands aren’t simple. They are complex and our reasons for inter-acting with them are often multifarious. The example I use in the UK is John Lewis the retailer. We don’t just use it because of – or only associate the brand with – ‘never knowingly undersold’. It’s also because of the range and quality of goods, the service, the ambiance to name but a few.

In other words brands are about a sum of knowledge - all the little things that we know and deem important to us. And it is all the touchpoints that confirm or force us to confront that knowledge.

The model I used to use was ‘brands as diamonds’. The top face might be the one we notice (the USP) but what makes it shine is all the other facets and how well polished they are.

Have you ever looked at the underside of an Innocent Smoothie bottle? To go so far as writing little messages there (I particularly liked”If you are reading this you must be really bored”) without ever talking about them in your marketing shows a brand that really understands itself and its consumers.

More recently I have been intrigued by the idea of brands as Velcro – lots of little hooks that people attach on to. A colleague - James Gordon-Macintosh - introduced me to this and has written about it here>.

I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between - brands aren’t just about lots of little hooks - but they aren’t just about the ‘one big thing’ either.

Go compare - the power of shouting

2010-09-08 | Filed Under Communications |

There was a time when I thought that ‘comparethemeerkat’ was a superb piece of advertising.  (Let’s ignore the fact that the meerkat campaign has lost its way - they are struggling to work out how to take it forward).  When it arrived it made comparison sites mainstream.  It was so unusual that it was hard to see how anyone could top it.

Then along came ‘Go compare’.  Now I’m not saying by any means that it’s a great piece of advertising from an aesthetic point of view.  But it’s hard to argue against the sheer compelling intrusiveness of the fat bloke singing.  A really bad (good?) jingle, repeated time and again and it has entered our consciousness.  The same with ‘we buy any car’. Naff jingle, but at least you remember it.

Luckily for comparethemarket the effect has probably been to grow the market and usage of such sites.

But the lesson for marketers is clear - for all the sophistication of the multi-media world in which we live, a good bit of shouting doesn’t half work

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