OK readers, who’s the dude in the middle with the tasteful mustard jacket, silk cravat and sideburns? None other than our old pal Harry Crane, head of media at Sterling Cooper Draper (we imagine the “Pryce” has been dropped after recent events, but you never know: Stanley Pollitt, of BMP, continued to perform miracles after he had been dead for years).
Anyway, back to Crane and the latest series of Mad Men, which returns to US screens (but not alas our own, unless we’re Sky subscribers) on April 7th. The trouble with Harry is he’s such a fashion victim – a weak personality seeking momentary identification with every passing sartorial trend. In the past, that’s mostly meant a new pair of outrageously over-emphatic adman’s glasses. But here, in series 6, the preppy-groovy look has completely taken over.
Not much sign of that in Roger, other than slightly lengthened sideburns. And none at all in Don, who retains a circa-1959 cool dress sense. Let’s hope he’s finally disposed of the fedora. We thought that went out with President Kennedy. But Don was still wearing his in 1966. It’s one of those few, painful, anachronisms that crop up in the meticulously researched Lionsgate series. Another solecism was the otherwise elegantly restrained Pryce’s table manners when he was (as he thought) wining and dining his future Jaguar client. Still more so Mrs Pryce’s faux pas when she uttered, in a perfect cut-glass accent, the word “gotten”. No one in England has used that word since about 1800; it’s “got”.
Still, let’s not quibble over what remains an excellent series. We’ll all be glued to the screen. Once, at least, the DVD is released.
Meantime, here are a couple more shots to emerge from the studio…
It’s over a year now since Peralta founder and CEO Alexandre Peralta expunged (literally so) the StrawberryFrog images sprayed all over the interior of his Sao Paulo hotshop. How’s he getting on in the wake of his split with mercurial and moody SF panjandrum Scott Goodson?
The other day I caught up with him and had a chance to find out.
Peralta, it may be recalled, is a copywriter by background who worked at some of the big multinational agencies such as DDB before moving to local Brazilian agency, Africa, as its creative director. When he set up shop with New York-based Goodson in 2007, the idea behind SFPeralta was to provide Goodson’s micro-network with an arm in the booming BRIC market and Peralta with access to international clients.
It didn’t quite work out like that. Peralta did indeed acquire international clients, such as PepsiCo’s snack business – but no thanks to StrawberryFrog, which became increasingly beset by financial and managerial crises. The result was an amicable (well, more or less) decision to go their own ways. Goodson needed the money (he had a 30% strategic stake in SFPeralta, but no managerial interest) and Peralta felt his agency would be better off without him.
Rightly so, it turns out. At the time, the Peralta Sao Paulo business had revenues of about $8.5m and was growing 50% a year. It has won new international business, including Bacardi Brasil (Martini and Grey Goose) and two Mondelez brands (i.e. Kraft of yore); more business from existing clients Pirelli and personal care company Natura; plus Vigor – the Brazilian dairy company giant. So much so that the agency is putting in place for the first time a chief operating officer.
The new COO is Jairo Soares, a partner and media vice-president of Peralta these past five years.
At the time Alexandre Peralta dissolved the StrawberryFrog link, his agency was being actively courted by MDC-owned CP&B. Nothing came of that overture, and Peralta Sao Paulo retains its independence. However, the founder remains open-minded on the need for a collaborator:
“An international partner can be welcome in the future if it is capable of improving our portfolio even more,” Peralta tells me.
There’s a lot going on under the radar in OOH – or posters, as we anciently called it. And I’m not simply talking of Omnicom’s Eric Newnham-fronted effort to crash the charmed circle of UK specialist buyers – namely WPP-owned Kinetic and Aegis-owned Posterscope.
No, what caught my eye recently was something entirely different. It concerned premium digital site owner Outdoor Plus and its opening of yet another of the landmark London locations in which it specialises – in this case The Spire, a 20 metre-high construct unmissably situated on the A40 exit from London.
The PR spiel, as conveyed in MediaWeek, was suitably gushing: access to a dedicated commuter and business audience; balanced male:female ratio; 60% ABC1; capable of targeting traffic both in and out of central London. What more could an advertiser ask for?
Very little, according to an excited Grant Branfoot, Outdoor Plus’s sales director: “The potential for advertisers is vast and through the addition of The Spire to our expanding digital portfolio (it includes The Eye in Holborn, the Euston Road Underpass and Vauxhall Cross), we think we can help advertisers exploit the immediacy, the creative possibilities and the opportunity for highly targeted messaging which is associated with large format outdoor digital screens.”
The potential for advertisers is vast, is it Grant? More correctly, the potential for some, carefully selected, advertisers is vast. Many will likely get scarcely a sniff of a placement. The reason is somewhat complicated, and to do with Outdoor Plus’s curious shareholding structure. But don’t go away, readers. It’s worth the wait, really.
Outdoor Plus is a reasonably sized, reasonably well-run private company founded in 2006 by Jonathan Lewis – who remains its managing director. Turnover was about £15.42m in the year to December 31, 2011 – the latest financial figures recorded in Companies House. Group operating profits – of which Outdoor’s comprised the vast majority – were £1.8m, allowing the six directors to award themselves collective “emoluments” (or fees) of about £770,000.
The roll-call of these directors makes interesting reading. Among them are Philip Andrew Georgiadis, daytime job: chairman of Walker Media; and Marc Sydney Benjamin Mendoza, better known as head of Havas Media UK. In other words, principals of notable media-buying organisations whose job it is, inter alia, to oversee without fear or favour the negotiation of the most advantageous placements for their clients on UK OOH sites.
Turn to the share structure of the company and things get even more interesting. It emerges that Georgiadis is also a 5.3% shareholder in Outdoor Plus. Mendoza (pictured) owns just a shade more. And then there’s Mendoza’s cousin and, technically, his boss, Havas Media UK group head Mark Craze, who owns 3.2%. But we’re not quite over yet, because Stephanie Gottlieb, wife of Colin Gottlieb – the EMEA chief executive of Omnicom-owned OMG – also owns 1%.
Now I’m not suggesting anything illegal is going on here. At one level, you have to tip your hat to Lewis, who has been extremely shrewd in persuading these media luminaries to come aboard, thereby – shall we say – reinforcing his revenue stream.
Indeed, even if the shareholding of the Havas, Walker and OMG representatives were to be combined, they could hardly be accused of concert-party style manipulation.
None of that, however, quite expunges the whiff of conflicting interest surrounding this cosy media buy-side/sell-side coalition. Clients whose accounts are not held by Havas, Walker or OMG may well be the losers. And those whose accounts are need to be assured that they are getting the very best deal for all the right reasons.
Senior media executives, like Caesar’s wife, should be above suspicion.
During the early part of 1990, health officials in North Carolina, USA, made an alarming discovery. Some Perrier bottled mineral water, whose purity was so legendary they had used it to benchmark other water supplies, was found to be contaminated with minute traces of benzene.
Benzene is a natural component of crude oil. Ingested in sufficient quantities, it can cause cancer in humans. Of course, there was no question of that happening in North Carolina. As a Federal Food and Drug Administration official drily observed at the time: “At these levels there is no immediate hazard. Over many years, if you consumed about 16 fluid ounces a day, your lifetime risk of cancer might increase by one in a million, which we consider a negligible risk.”
But no one was listening to the FDA’s voice of reason. Panic broke out all over the USA – and not just there. Perrier, at that time world leader in the mineral water category, was obliged to withdraw its entire global inventory of 160 million bottles. Brand integrity was further compromised by the discovery that the “natural” bubbles in the bottled potion were actually added back later. Perrier never fully recovered: it lost its leadership and became just another branded mineral water, albeit still a famous French one. Commercially, the crisis was if anything even more disastrous. The independent Perrier bottled water company was, within two years, sold to Nestlé.
I think you know where I’m leading with this. Fast-forward 23 years, to a full-page ad that appeared in yesterday’s national newspapers. It was inserted by Malcolm Walker, founder and chief executive of leading UK food retailer Iceland. Its purpose was to divert responsibility for the horse meat scandal now engulfing our supermarkets by pointing the finger of blame at cheapskate procurement in local government, the National Health Service – and its equally unscrupulous counterpart in the catering industry – which has connived at bringing down processed food costs to their lowest possible denominator. Doubtless, judging from the ensuing squawks of indignation, the Iceland boss has a point – though how exactly his tirade exonerates the supermarkets from their own ruthless manipulation of supplier lines is not entirely clear. However, Walker does not stop there. Having scored some points on behalf of his sector, he then goes on to trash it by adopting a “holier than thou” approach:
“Iceland does not sell cheap food. We sell high-quality own label frozen food that is good value. We do not sell – and never sold – ‘white pack’ economy products.” Unlike, he carefully does not add, Tesco and Asda. And, just to ram the point home, he goes on to claim that “no horse meat has ever been found in an Iceland product”.
Well, almost none. At the bottom of the ad there is a mealy-mouthed admission that 0.1% of equine DNA was indeed found in two Iceland Quarter Pound burgers. But these don’t count, because the test, carried out by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, was not an “accredited” one, and the discovered traces of horse were “well below the current accepted threshold level” of 1%. So, yaboo sucks to any critics.
Nice one, Malcolm. You’ve managed to spread, or at least smear, the blame far and wide, and thrown into the processor just a hint of xenophobia. Ireland, Romania, France – these horse-eating monkeys, they’re not like us – not to be trusted, whatever their professions of rigorously adhering to EU-wide standards. But, leaving aside the lowly populism of his message, Walker, in waxing eloquent about the infinitesimal amount of contamination in his own burgers, has committed a revealing tactical blunder.
The current food scandal is not about parts per billion contaminants found in horse meat; it’s about trust in the brand. Just like the benzene found in Perrier all those years ago, consumers would have to ingest an awful lot of horse burger infected with “bute” equine painkiller (over 500 250 gram ones, to be precise) before experiencing any appreciable side effect. But that won’t prevent them passing summary judgement on those august brands – at the head of the supply chain – that have allowed this scandal to happen: namely the UK grocery multiples.
Possibly with devastating consequences for future sales.
One interesting aspect of this scandal is that its ramifications have now moved on from cheap lines of processed meat – in short, “poor people” – to ready-made meals. In the other words, the sort of thing consumed by affluent and articulate members of the middle-class. That’s bad news even for elite purveyors, such as Waitrose and M&S.
In all probability there’s nothing to worry about. But that’s not the point, is it? My local butcher tells me business has gone gang-busters over the past couple of weeks. And for good reason. In the past, there was a perception (false, as it happens, in many cases) that local businesses could not match supermarket fresh meat prices. Now, understandably, people seem a lot more concerned about local provenance. If you must have lasagne, it’s as well to see the meat being minced while you wait, rather than trusting the word of some supermarket about the integrity of its supply line.
Not all fairy tales have a happy ending. One such is the marriage of convenience between Brazilian hotshop Neogama, its micro-network affiliate BBH and Publicis Groupe. Readers of this blog will recall that, a little over six months ago, Publicis chief Maurice Lévy bought out the 51% of BBH PG did not already own. A useful by-product of the deal was that he acquired not only BBH’s 34% stake in one of Brazil’s hottest agency properties, but the majority shareholding of its founder and creative supremo, Alexandre Gama, at the same time. Neatly, Lévy solved the creative succession crisis at BBH with the same stroke of his pen – by appointing Gama as BBH’s global creative chief, replacing Sir John Hegarty.
Alas, the deal has worked out somewhat better for Gama than for Lévy and Publicis. Gama managed to bank his cheque, but Neogama has just lost about 40% of its revenue, and two of its principal clients. Or so I hear.
It is common knowledge that one of the reasons Gama was hawking his majority stake in the first place was that he feared his agency was too reliant upon a single account, that of Brazilian bank Bradesco. Indeed, rumours soon began to surface that the bank was about to review. Well, now it has: and placed the account with McCann.
For Interpublic, McCann’s parent, Neogama’s plight is, however, a double joy. Another major – this time multinational – client has also fallen into its lap. I mean Omo (“Dirt is Good”), which has moved to Lowe.
In retrospect, we can see this was an accident waiting to happen. As is well known, PG is a Procter & Gamble agency group, and Omo is owned by Unilever. Under the status quo ante, Neogama had an element of protection from client conflict, in that BBH – itself a major Unilever network – was still majority-owned by its founding partners (i.e., Nigel Bogle and Hegarty). All that ring-fencing was swept away by the Lévy deal.
It will interesting to see who gets the blame for this cock-up. My money is on Jean-Yves Naouri, the once but not future king of Publicis.
One thing you can be sure of: it won’t be the Silver Fox himself, who now seems comfortably ensconced in a permanent chairman role, despite recent protestations that he was – at 70 – on the point of retiring.
Roll up, roll up, for the most expensive ad in the world. Volkswagen is about to spend $10m on a single, minute-long air-time execution. Why so pricey? Well, it’s not production values that make it so – however meticulous the ad’s attention to detail – but the fact that it is airing during America’s premier annual sports fest, the Super Bowl, on February 3rd.
Some 110 million people will be watching, and air-time costs are ratcheted accordingly: this year a 30-second network TV spot is estimated to cost just shy of $4m. But it’s not simply the numbers – the eyes of one third of the USA upon them – that stokes pressure upon advertisers. The Super Bowl is also a gruelling creative showcase – more brutal than Cannes in its way – that can result in abject humiliation for those who get it wrong.
VW has much to play for. Its US agency, Deutsch LA, has set the bar high in recent years with such memorable (and prize-winning) campaigns as “The Force” (aka “Little Darth”) and the “The Dog Strikes Back” (in which a dog takes fitness classes in order to chase a Beetle). This year it has junked the Star Wars theme for something altogether more experimental – indeed, weird.
“Get Happy” is all about a tall, Waspish mid-Westerner who inexplicably develops a broad Jamaican accent as he perambulates a typically gloomy Monday-morning office relentlessly spreading cheer. With me so far? It only makes sense at the tail-end, when we see him driving up to a meeting in a brand-new red Beetle with two of his colleagues, one white, one Asian – by now similarly fluent in Jaamaaycaan. All that’s missing is the ganja smoke. Premise: driving a VW makes you happy.
Credit where credit is due, VW has never been one for the clichés of automobile advertising beloved of its sector: cut, for instance, to car snaking at high speed over the San Vitello pass, sun glinting on the windscreen; or some glamour-puss lolling over the car bonnet (I’ll come back to that in a moment). You know the kind of thing: huge production budget in search of a memorable idea, and failing sadly.
And, no doubt about it, the ad has been meticulously rehearsed and shot. It’s directed by the same man, Tom Kuntz, who did the classic “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” Old Spice campaign featuring Isaiah Mustapha and a white horse. The attention to detail shows. Kuntz – who is rapidly shaping up as adland’s answer to Stanley Kubrick – is nothing if not an exacting taskmaster. Seven actors were stuck in a lift for four hours while he reshot the ‘elevator scene’ 100 times to achieve a perfect sense of Monday-morning misery.
Does it work? The ad is certainly worth a second viewing, though whether it will have the repeat value of “The Force” remains to be seen. And there’s also the enigma of the Jamaican accent, which seems to have baffled some social media commentators. For reasons that remain obscure, they have found fault with the ad’s “racist message” (some people are just waiting to be offended) and made a far-flung connection with Hitler (Ferdinand Porsche, who invented the Beetle, was not a Nazi, but did collaborate, even helping to build the V1 “Flying Bomb”).
Which brings me back to cliché in motor advertising, and its virtue. Mercedes-Benz will also be spending a reputed $10m on a Super Bowl spot – but with a much simpler mechanism in mind. Mercedes’ problem – in the USA as elsewhere – is its lack of trendiness. It is admired by, and bought by, rich gits – a status symbol for the already-achieved rather than the aspirant. How to appeal to the under-thirties? Simples. Just drape a décolletée (is she ever anything else?) Kate Upton over the swankiest four-seater in your model range – and pray. It works wonders – on YouTube at any rate:
UPDATE 31/1/13: Here’s Mercedes’ more worked-up execution – from Merkley & Partners – of the same youth-appeal theme, and the one that will actually air during the Super Bowl. La Upton is still in evidence, but playing a vignette role along with Usher, and definitely second fiddle to Willem Dafoe’s Devil:
It has been compared to bottoms – and also the most fiendishly complicated sex toy yet devised by Ann Summers. Yes, the new ITV logo, spearheading the TV station’s most ambitious rebrand in 11 years, has turned us into a nation of amateur psychologists desperately attempting to infer inner meaning from the Rorschach blot of its revitalised colour ways.
Let’s face it, we haven’t had so much fun since the London Olympics logo – that appalling camel of a horse designed by a committee – first surfaced in 2007.
My own theory? It’s an hommage to Sir Martin Sorrell, craftily contrived to lure extra advertising revenue from WPP media house GroupM in the wake of the Channel 4 spat. Look very carefully at the new logo and you will see – provided you stare long enough – an ‘L’ followed by a ‘U’ and a ‘V’. Spelling of course LUV – which those familiar with the Sage of Farm Street’s dicta will immediately recognise as the shape of the current recession!
Joking aside, the mega-rebrand – however aesthetically regarded – triumphantly fanfares chief executive Adam Crozier’s dramatic turnaround of ITV’s fortunes only three years into his five-year programme of reform. In 2010, when Crozier moved over from a similar position at the Royal Mail, ITV was burdened by £2.7bn annual losses, a £1m pension deficit, staff demoralisation and seemingly intractable problems in transitioning from analogue to digital broadcasting.
But look at it now. It is debt-free, indeed harbours about £800m cash, and on track to announce £350m profits for 2012. What’s more Downton Abbey (and – who knows? – Mr Selfridge), not to mention the investigative exposé revealing Jimmy Savile’s systematic sexual abuse, mark a new confidence in programme-making ability.
These are not inconsiderable achievements for any chief executive to crow about. The question is: like the branding makeover, are they more window-dressing than real?
Crozier is master of the well-timed stakeholder-pleasing initiative – a quality all too appropriate to the former joint chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi (1995-2000). Wherever his career has taken him – latterly as chief executive of the Football Association (2000-2002) and the same again at Royal Mail – the result has been identical. Controversial reforms that gain grudging respect at the time, but on closer retrospective judgement lack substance.
Just so, perhaps, at ITV. Unlike the world of football management and passing the parcel, as a former media director, Crozier knew exactly what he was getting himself into when he took over from Michael Grade at the UK’s premier commercial TV station. In a sense, he only had to bide his time and exploit preternatural presentation skills.
ITV is a quintessentially cyclical business, its fortunes ebbing and flowing with the tide of advertising revenue. In early 2010, cyclically-depressed ITV had yet to emerge from the recession, but given time there was an inevitability about it doing so. True, it wasn’t quite the “licence to print money” it had been in its heyday, but the erosion caused by competition from proliferating digital channels was an irritant at the peak of the cycle, rather than a cancer. And for one very good reason: advertisers (for which read members of ISBA) continue to believe that, when it comes to branding a mainstream product, there is no substitute to airing it on ITV.
Time, however, was something that Crozier’s predecessor, Michael Grade, had run out of. The usually fleet-footed entertainer had, for once, made a pig’s ear of running a media business and, in effect, the City gave him his marching orders by severely depressing ITV’s share price.
Enter the slick Crozier, doubly endorsed by Asda’s peerless school of management: first by Allan Leighton, who had recruited him at the Royal Mail; and secondly by ITV’s new chairman, Archie Norman (there was also a Pedigree Chum connection: Crozier and Leighton had previously worked together at Mars).
Crozier airily announced a five-year strategic programme that would transform ITV from a single, highly volatile, profit centre based on display advertising to plural revenue streams, knowing full well that – with a bit of luck – all he had to do was sit back and wait for the financial tide to come rolling in.
And so – three years later – it has. With ITV’s share price riding high at about 110p, Crozier is well on his way to cashing in £4m-worth of share options this April. But what of the fundamental restructuring he promised? Well, yes and no. Crozier has certainly revolutionised ITV’s production department – profits are forecast to exceed £100m this year. But his target of 50% of revenues derived from non-advertising sources after five years looks as elusive as ever. Particularly lacklustre is the performance of ITV’s digital channels (ITV2, 3 and 4 respectively) which last year achieved an embarrassing £28m revenue out of a total of £2.2bn.
No amount of cheerful new colour ways can disguise the fact that ITV remains firmly planted in the analogue age.
League tables of achievement are as commonplace as turkeys right now. Why burden you with another one? Well, I’ve been asked to – by the good folk at More About Advertising. So:
Ad of the Year. Yes, I liked BBH’s “The 3 Little Pigs” and Creative Artist Agency’s Cannes Chipotle winner. Also, Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi’s work for – of all improbable B2C clients – air-conditioning specialist BGH. Of which this, directed by Juan Cabral, is the latest instance:
As MAA’s Stephen Foster puts it – “bleakly comic”.
My favourite, though, was “Follow the Frog”, a quirky satire of the desk-bound yuppie eco-warrior fantasising about making the World A Better Place. Writer, director, copywriter, art director is Max Joseph – clearly a bit of an Orson Welles in the making. The commercial was produced by Wander Films, a creative boutique in Los Angeles. The moral? You don’t need to go to the ends of the earth to save the rainforest. Just Follow the Frog by buying kitemark-certified Rainforest Alliance products. They’ll do all the ethical heavy-lifting for you: sustain the forests, uphold socially equitable farming methods, and guarantee that what you buy is economically viable:
It’s long – but isn’t nearly everything these days? The measure of the made-for-internet film is not its length, but how well it sustains our interest. On this criterion Follow the Frog succeeds very well. It’s got a good tale to tell, is directed with panache and enlivened by bold use of graphics. Oh, and it uses gentle humour to camouflage the piety of its evangelical message. Yes “Siri”, it get’s my vote.
Agency of the Year. I won’t beat about the bush: it’s got to be Wieden & Kennedy. International networks frequently produce isolated instances of brilliance (Del Campo being an example within the Saatchi organisation). Exceptional work, simultaneously executed on a number of fronts, is another matter. To take an investment analogy, W&K is a momentum stock outperforming in all its main markets. Whether that’s Clint fronting for Chrysler at the Super Bowl:
… London winning the £110m Tesco account – but also producing some of the most interesting creative work since “Grrr”:
Or Amsterdam’s slick spoof for the latest James Bond film, which neatly segues into its current Heineken campaign:
Person of the Year. Tempting to mention the name of Joel Ewanick, isn’t it? No one can be said to have made a bigger splash in the world of marketing over the past year. Arguably, however, the now-dismissed chief marketing officer of General Motors made headlines for all the wrong reasons. A change agent he certainly was, but were any of his changes for the good? And what sort of permanence will they have? We hacks miss him, but I suspect the wider marketing community will not.
Instead of anti-hero, therefore, I’ve plumped for a gritty go-getter: marketing services’ answer to Daniel Craig. Like Craig, he certainly wouldn’t be everyone’s first choice as the archetypal smooth operator. But his coolness under fire cannot be doubted. Step forward Jerry Buhlmann, chief executive of Aegis Group plc. If there is one thing archetypal about Jerry, it’s that he’s a self-made media man. He started off in the “five to one” slot, in other words the lowest of the low in the full-service agency hierarchy, at Young & Rubicam in 1980. Nine years later, he was setting up his his own media-buying outfit BBJ – along with ultimately less successful Nick Brien and the downright obscure Colin Jelfs. BBJ – nowadays Vizeum – though successful (it handled for example the BMW account) was originally a “second-string” shop for conflicted WCRS media. Buhlmann’s career really took off when WCRS’s Peter Scott had the inspired idea of acquiring Carat – Europe’s largest media buyer – and floating off the combined operation as a separate stock market entity, rechristened Aegis. Buhlmann and his company were soon swallowed up by the independent media specialist, which offered him much wider career opportunities.
But was he a man capable of capitalising on them? While no one has ever doubted Buhlmann’s single-minded ambition to succeed, a lot have wondered whether he had the competence to do so. Yes, he had a mind like a calculator and razor-sharp commercial acumen, but where, oh where, were those human skills no less essential for making it to the top of the corporate pile? There was much mirth in the senior reaches of the media industry when Buhlmann got his first big break as head of Aegis Media EMEA in 2003. “It’s like William Hague trying to emulate Margaret Thatcher” was a typical response to his promotion. Then, as later, Buhlmann’s critics completely underestimated his ability to learn on the job. When he became group chief executive in 2010, the reception was scarcely less friendly. The master of ‘focus’ and ‘detail’ was incapable of taking the broader view vital to successfully running a publicly-quoted company, it was said. And then there was Jerry’s far-from-diplomatic demeanour: how long before he rubbed the City up the wrong way and had to be dispensed with?
It wasn’t as if Aegis was an easy company to run, either. As a (near) pure-bred media specialist, it was susceptible to squalls in the media every time the inevitable financial scandal broke. Inevitable, because media buying and peculation are bedfellows and peculation distorts financial performance – meaning in Aegis’ case it had to resort to highly public mea culpas every now and then. Other major media outfits, by contrast, have been able to rely on defence in depth from the much bigger marketing services organisations to which they belong.
Not only that, Aegis’s card was marked as a public company. For years, it laboured under the strain of being a takeover or break-up target. The strain became nightmarish when Vincent Bolloré, the shareholder from hell, took a strategic stake in Aegis and began engineering a series of boardroom coups.
Some of the credit for Aegis’ eventual soft-landing – a 50%-premium, £3.2bn cash deal with Dentsu, sealed last June – must go to Aegis chairman John Napier. But that still leaves a lot owing to Buhlmann himself. Not only did he keep all the plates spinning in difficult circumstances, he also demonstrated a strategic clarity which eluded his predecessors. He ruthlessly pruned the company of its lower-margin research operation (by disposing of Synovate to Ipsos), but at the same time bolstered its pure-play media-buying profile with the geographical add-on of Mitchell Communications.
Not a bad result, all in all, for the man once dubbed the king of the second-string.
You don’t have to look far for this year’s Big Theme in the Epica creative advertising awards. After 25 years as a Eurocentric awards scheme, with a nod now and then to the wider EMEA hinterland, Epica finally went global, welcoming entries from the dynamic emerging markets of Brazil, Argentina, India and China – not to mention the biggest creative challenger of the lot, the USA.
A recalibration of award winners – agencies, networks and countries – was only to be expected. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that three out of the top four awards – the Epica d’Or or grand prix – went to countries that had never before won a grand prix.
What didn’t change was the judging principle. Epica is unique in representing the choice not of the creative community itself but of experienced journalists drawn from trade magazines in over 24 countries. I would not wish to give the impression that their judgement has been skewed by an influx of jurors from the new world, because that would be entirely untrue. The panel remains, for now at least, what it has always been: essentially European. The new challenge is the enlarged scope of their perspective.
Enough of the preamble. Who got the big prize? That’s normally taken to mean the film Epica d’Or. And the answer is: a total outsider from Denmark. When I say ‘total’, I mean total: the campaign was produced not by an agency, but by the in-house communications team of coach operator Midttrafik. Simply stated, the problem with coach travel is it appeals to the head, not the heart. It offers a no-nonsense, value-for-money alternative to other modes of transport, but “cool” it is not. The creative solution proferred by Midttrafik is a piece of burlesque called “The Bus” that humorously highlights coach travel’s unglamorous practicalities: comfy seats, panoramic views, acres of space, 24/7 availability, special bus lanes, and experienced, reliable drivers who take the strain. See the film a couple of times and you too will be saying, “Ja, still cool,” and “Yeah. Din es ‘street’” with a Danish accent. Watch out for the young guy on an orange motocross bike: his expression is a treat.
While the campaign creatives may be amateurs, direction and production are slickly professional. Step forward Marc Wilkins/RARE and M2Film respectively, who managed to make the whole thing on a budget – I’m told – of only €200,000. “The Bus” also took top prize – as it must do to qualify for the Epica d’Or, a gold – in the transport & tourism category.
Runner-up for the top prize – and also winner of the corporate image category – was Marcel Publicis’s epic “Cartier Odyssey”. Filmed with icy majesty, it is a lapidary hommage to the life of Louis Cartier on the occasion of his 165th birthday (165th? Don’t ask why – we’re talking high fashion here) which deploys the watchmaker and jeweller’s iconic panther as its leitmotif. Beautiful – and yet there is a chilly emptiness at its heart. What exactly is the point of this 3 minute 30 second historical travelogue, supposedly made for the cinema?
For my money a good overall winner would have been “Follow the Frog”, devised by the Rainforest Alliance and Los Angeles agency Wander. But it was scored in the public interest category, which by definition excludes it from consideration for the top film or print prizes. The Rainforest logo is a kind of kite mark, reassuring consumers that the product in question has signed up to a prescribed set of environmental standards. The campaign – long enough for cinema but meant for viral – needs little other explanation. As you will see:
Long, isn’t it? Indeed, if there is a general criticism of this year’s film crop – which is considerably better than last year’s – it is encapsulated in the word “overblown” – too long, too self-indulgent and too reliant upon humour. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about from Canal+ and BETC, “The Bear” – which won the direction and cinematography category and was a runner-up in media:
It’s a mini-film in its own right, which is all very well if you’re the next Ridley Scott with designs on Hollywood. But whatever happened to the discipline of the 30-second spot? Well, it’s here, in this Aldi/McCann Manchester offering (actually 20 seconds long). Not new, I know – but as a seam of inspiration it’s seemingly inexhaustible. It won gold in the confectionery & snacks category:
Print winners: what can I say without a despairing note in my voice? It’s a fading format, with one or two redemptive examples of excellence. The overall winner this year – a first from Finland – was McDonald’s “Large Coffee”, devised by DDB Helsinki:
It’s probably better as a candidate for the outdoor prize, but no matter. That went to the Microloan Foundation’s “Pennies for Life”, devised by DLKW Lowe. Think wishing-well meets poster in an innovative digital format and you’re half-way there. Microloan is a charity that supports women in Africa setting up their own business. The idea is that you contribute virtual spare pennies via your smart phone, and watch the digitally-generated poster image take shape as the coffers swell:
While on the subject of outdoor, one of the cleanest examples of the genre was “Stop Trying”, a gold winner in the household category devised by Herezie (a French agency) for Vapona. Not desperately original, but classic: strong, simple colourful imagery is complemented with unmistakable branding in the bottom right-hand corner. Brownie points to Herezie for pulling it off in a difficult, low-interest category:
And finally…
Germany once again topped the rankings, with a total of 66 awards, including 9 gold winners.
Britain moved up from fourth to second, at the expense of France and Sweden, which were third and fourth respectively. It won 56 awards but an unsurpassed 13 golds.
Top agencies were Jung von Matt Hamburg, with 16 awards (including two golds), followed by last year’s winner Forsman & Bodenfors, Gothenburg, which captured 10 awards and two golds.
Most successful network was DDB, with one Grand Prix and 8 golds. Next in line were Leo Burnett and Publicis Worldwide.
Whatever are the people at Sodastream complaining about? Having their ad pulled from television by the donkeys at Clearcast, the TV advertising vetting service, is a gift. It’s the sort of thing Rupert Howell and his team at HHCL used to have wet dreams about – the possibility of the regulator stepping in and banning their latest offering for Tango. Think of the attendant publicity, a priceless multiple of the original advertising budget.
And all the more so in Sodastream’s case. Back then, in the Tango era, YouTube and the viral were waiting to be discovered. What’s more Sodastream seems to have a case based upon rectitude rather than meretricious provocation. Any reasonable man on the Clapham omnibus would have difficulty in understanding the legitimacy of Clearcast’s complaint. Judge for yourselves:
What I see in this ad is each squirt of Sodastream saving you (and the environment) the cost of thousands of eco-unfriendly glass bottles a year. The claim is a trifle exaggerated perhaps, unless that squirt is a metaphorical one signifying a year’s usage of the soda-water maker, but its basis is surely unexceptionable. To any, that is, but those sitting in judgement at Clearcast, which represents the 5 major UK commercial TV companies.
And which bit of the governing Code of Advertising Practice (CAP), do the regulators believe Sodastream has transgressed? Well not, interestingly, 3.12 ”Advertisements must not mislead by exaggerating the capability or performance of a product or service.” No, they’ve gone for: 3.42 ”Advertisements must not discredit or denigrate another product, advertiser or advertisement or a trade mark, trade name or other distinguishing mark.”
Come again? Let’s look at that ad, in slow motion. Where’s the “product, advertiser or advertisement or a trade mark, trade name or other distinguishing mark” – unless that last be a glass bottle? I’m one with Fiona Hope – the former Coke executive ultimately in charge of Sodastream’s UK advertising – here: it’s very hard to see how Clearcast, and subsequently its appeal committee, a) arrived at the notion that the ad “denigrates” the bottled drinks industry; and b) in what way article 3.42 of CAP is relevant justification for that view. Oddest of all is the fact that nowhere else in the world has the Sodastream campaign, devised by Alex Bogusky’s new advertising vehicle Common, fallen foul of the regulatory authorities.
One possible explanation for Clearcast’s bizarre behaviour is that the advisory committee suspected Bogusky of mounting a veiled assault on Coca-Cola – no small TV advertiser. As is well known, Bogusky – the former “B” in CP+B – was once creative servitor of the Coke Zero account. Now the breakaway wunderkind – and healthy-living freak – seems intent on war to the knife against his former paymaster. Note, for instance, this recent video for the Center for Science in the Public Interest that pillories Coke in all but name.
Clearcast, as a matter of tactics, would surely have been better advised to let the Sodastream ad air and allow the “bottled drinks industry” (whatever that may be) to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority – the proper forum for this kind of debate. Instead, the stubborn intransigence of its appeals committee has left Clearcast staked out in an indefensible Alamo.
Roll on Hope’s legal challenge to Clearcast’s judgement. Whichever way it goes, Sodastream can be confident of acres of free publicity – which should help UK sales no end.
OK readers, who’s the dude in the middle with the tasteful mustard jacket, silk cravat and sideburns? None other than our old pal Harry Crane, head of media at Sterling Cooper Draper (we imagine the “Pryce” has been dropped after recent events, but you never know: Stanley Pollitt, of BMP, continued to perform miracles after he had been dead for years).
Posted by stuartsmithsblog 
