IS THIS REAL LIFE OR IS THIS JUST FANTASY?

I’ve been staring at a blank page for half an hour or so with that Queen song ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ drifting in and out of my mind. I don’t know the answer. We’re living in limbo and it’s very strange.

Will I ever wear a tie again? Will I ever wear a suit again or will I, in rebellion against dress-down-coronavirus, start to dress like a dandy – velvet suits, jazzy waistcoats and cravat? Perhaps a monocle. And certainly a cigarette holder? Dare I take up smoking again? Balkan Sobranie, naturally, if I do. Somehow or another I feel the rustling desire to make a dramatic, rebellious statement.

Watching television has been depressing. Terrestrial TV has run out of ideas. Has run out of ideas. Repeat that. And again. My splendid 98 year old mother in law laments the omnipresent Poirot and his blasted little grey cells and Midsomer murders…”I saw them all the first time and I didn’t much like them then.”

But it’s the tragic low budget, low-idea ads that are the worst of all. I spent twenty, happy years in advertising alongside or in competition with legends who created glorious advertising like that for Sainsburys, the Economist, Heineken, Carling, Araldite, Nike and Heinz. 

There is so little I like now. Back then clever people wrote great jokes or sumptuous ideas and film makers like Alan Parker, Ridley Scott and others then turned them into magic.

There was an exception recently for Brut. It’s amazing that this strong smelling lotion is still around. It was something we, at our agency, once advertised. The male perfume – “the great smell of Brut” – was launched with advertising featuring Henry Cooper. So we proposed creating new advertising to bridge the gap since it had been on TV with the theme: “Henry’s back with the great smell of Brut” featuring Lenny Henry. The client abruptly rejected it. Only now do I think it was because Lenny is black. 

That was 30 years ago. Brut is back on TV with hard man Vinnie Jones saying with a scowl in effect “stop poncing around with this glitzy ad you idiots it just smells good”. At this point a voice says “here’s the horse” and on walks a white horse to Vinnie’s disgust. There are advertising men through the ages who’ve wanted to get an irrelevant horse into a TV commercial and in lockdown it’s happened.

What will the high street look like when the shackles are removed? Well, expect an instant horror show of Poundland’s and Charity Shops but then a reinvention, balancing functional online with theatre and romance. In the rather tragic story of Mr Selfridge we saw a retail magician at work. What we shall need are magicians, impresarios and jugglers who create appetite appeal to seduce people who then buy online. Mere boring online will lose out as Apple brilliantly showed in their sexy Apple stores.

The hunger for fantasy and excitement is pent up and huge. The opportunity is for showmanship and pzaz. Curiously the desire to go out and shop “using real money” is acute. Restaurants that manage to charm and create that “let’s have another drink" ambiance will thrive.  Hurry back Corbyn & King. 

Real life we have learnt is rather dull. We are mostly sensible and rule abiding but at the back of our minds is the urge from time to time to be a bit naughty, to do something impulsive and delicious. Deliveroo and Amazon are the least naughty, geekiest operations I know.

Time soon to let our hair down.

Tequila!

HELP THE RADAR'S DOWN

Bad news for bookies, pundits and psephologists - the old fashioned way of predicting through balancing talent, achievement and form has gone out of the window.

As they might say in Iceland:  “Við þandir Englandi. Svo mikið fyrir mannorð þeirra.“

Does anyone know what’s going to happen next? We got the prospects for Corbyn, Brexit, Leicester City and Trump wrong. We seem to have lost our touch. Just as “Big Data” arrived to allow us to forecast with greater sureness something weird has happened.

Unpredictability rules OK …or have we just lost the plot?

The late founder of Body Shop, Dame Anita Roddick, said:

“Running a company on market research is like driving while looking in the rear view mirror.”

But that’s what all the big institutions have been doing for a long time.  Headhunters select candidates on the basis of where they’ve been rather than what they might do. Hence their arrival into (and thereafter departure from) similar jobs to the ones they’ve had before, showing how efficiently we recycle senior executives. The biggest change in our world is that mass movements like epidemics-of-extreme-opinion happen faster than we could have imagined in older and slower times. Apathy is dead. The silent majority has started to shout.

Some of the things that we couldn’t have imagined - everyone uncomplainingly wearing seatbelts, smoking being banned in virtually all public spaces, adult smokers down from 46% in 1974 to 19% in just 40 years and plastic bag aversion…. what’s effectively a “fine” of 5p per plastic bag has produced an 80% decline in uptake in Tesco alone.

The thundering herd embraces games and fashion too - Pokémon-Go for instance where the groundswell of excitement may burn out but the appetite for the next PG will be waiting for more.  We’re told we need leadership. Well, look at the leaders. Are the Trumps, Le Pens, Wilders, Putins, Erdogans and others what we really need in a civilised world? Aren’t they all just part of a wave of militant nostalgia?

We are spending so much time focusing on the past,  looking in that rear view mirror, rather than exploring the future.

But what we aren’t doing is looking at and listening to what Martin Lindstrom calls “small data” (author of “Brandwashed - Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy”). His thesis is small changes and phenomena make the difference and anticipate the tidal wave that creates trends. Like people beginning to think that smoking looked unfashionable and unusual was what it took to prick the nicotine bubble.

Radar can help us predict the future but having a sense of conviction as to where we want to go and being determined to get there matters more.  A long time ago Sarah Lee had a great idea for promoting their cake mix. “Just add an egg” they said.

We need to find the egg that’s missing in our lives and then - well - just add it.

BEATING THE DOOM OF JUNE

I’m starting this Jubilee Blog with an image to terrify any civilised person. It’s about poor old Greece. From the cradle of civilisation to a rather messy deathbed. The man scrambling through the skip for a few drops of olive oil is you and me. Middle class, probably a professional not so much down on his luck as suffering because of geography, nationality and politics. But read Michael Lewis’ “Boomerang” to get a vivid insight into what Greekness is. He says that even the Greeks don’t like each other.

And having shuddered at this in a kind of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I way,  thank your lucky stars you live here in Britain which is a great place to be.

Tim Smit from the Eden Project talking about the Big Lunch on Saturday Live on Saturday May 2nd was wonderfully irate about the doom merchants:-“I’m sick and tired of hearing ‘Broken Britain’. We can say what you want without being found dead in a ditch. We get free education, free health care and most people are really nice and get on with each other.”

Well said Tim.

And there’s one other thing that Matthew Parris noted. We currently have a marked “absence of crisis” this Jubilee weekend. All is not that well but it sure isn’t pear shaped or olive oil smelling. Absence of crisis may be boring but it’s calming.

 And talking about being able to say whatever you want can I make a strong comment about the marketing of cigarettes? As a consequence of Government intervention I really want to take up smoking again. Not slightly want to – I mean really, really want to. It’s that fabulous new packaging they’re going to bring in. I think they’ve got it all wrong. This is the biggest re-launch of fags ever. After years of their marketers fiddling around with designery stuff we’re going to get big bold plain packs creating a sort of Absolut for nicotine. Smokers kit not poncey brands.  Blank pack as role model. Note the words I’ve highlighted in red. Brilliantly satirical stuff….only they’re serious.

"WHAT IS PLAIN PACKAGING?

Plain packaging means that all tobacco products will be required to look the same. All brand names would have to be written in a standard typeface, colour and size. And all other trademarks, logos, colour schemes and graphics would be banned. 


As it stands, designed packs are the tobacco industry's last form of advertising. Shiny holograms, pretty pastel colours and wrappers are all used to attract children and lessen the effectiveness of health warnings on packs."

And then there’s Mr Krugman, the famous American economist who has won prizes for his insights and enraged opponents with his plain speaking.

I heard him speak and was dazzled especially when asked how he could be so rudely contemptuous of people who disagreed with him. He explained this was not the case at all, that he was only contemptuous of those whose views were contemptible. I could have listened to him for hours.

And finally in this world we are so lucky to inhabit where madness like plain cigarette packaging are provided as political comedy moments, where Paul “I am right and you are wrong” Krugman speaks with such beautiful certainty and where  the Queen is praised for her commonsense by PM Cameron  (sounds just like the school report that says “tries hard” meaning stupid but not naughty) I am going to drink some claret and dream of the future. Like the splendid Mark Twain did – why do the American’s have all the best lines?

'Twenty years from now you will more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines; sail away from the safe harbour; catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.  Discover.'

Happy weekend and catch those trade winds.

I THINK I'LL START SMOKING AGAIN

When I heard Andrew Lansley saying he wanted to see the end of cigarettes altogether in the UK,           I had this strange urge to light up and start swearing (which, no doubt, he also wants to ban together with satire – and if you don’t like satire stop reading this now.)

The trend to engineering what we can do and can’t do is misguided. We’ll get fat, smoke, drink too much and die or we’ll just die. But in the end we’ve got to stop banning stuff like advertising, cigarettes and drugs because we (in authority) know better. I keep on saying that the old command and control model is dead. No-one listens. I think we should make not listening illegal.

When smoking was rationalised

We have a bunch of underemployed MPs all looking for good causes to espouse. At least “Ban the Bomb” was a big idea whereas “Ban the Fag” or “Ban the Bevvy” seems a bit pathetic. And “Ban the Belly Laugh” is worse. Check out the response to the current satirical front cover of the Economist in Scotland. Swift would not do well in modern Britain.

The spirit of satire is alive and well

It was after the riots last year that I heard someone on Saturday Live on Radio 4 say he blamed advertising for the riots (ban all advertising) because – and his voice lowered conspiratorially – “we know those advertisers’ little tricks don’t we?” As someone who spent a bit of my career in advertising…er no…what are they? …wish I’d known.

There’s a whole constituency of do-gooders out there determined to ban anything that people like which isn’t wholly good for them. Let’s go for butter and Barbie, let’s go for Nike and nicotine, let’s go for gambling and Glenfiddich.

I could foresee, were I not an incorrigible optimist about the good sense of most people, a world in 2020 where Tom Watson was Prime Minister, where we had no free press, no advertising, no butchers, no pubs, no cigarettes (smoking even in private carries a three year prison term), no brothels, no toy shops, no loud music, no fast cars and no fast food.

Rory Sutherland columnist and ad man told the story of Attaturk who wanted to modernise Turkey by stopping women from wearing the veil. Realising a ban was a bad idea he tried another way. He made it mandatory for prostitutes to wear the veil.

Silk Cut anyone?  Cheers.

 Alcoholic and racist – double top!