Wanted: Orphans willing to risk death daily.

Above is an ad for the Pony Express that ran in 1860 and one to which the legendary Buffalo Bill applied to and got.

Now obviously something from a bygone era, however don’t believe things have changed that much.

We regularly receive invitations to apply for ‘jobs’ creating branding, designs, ads, social and PR strategies that you really can’t quite understand how people have the guts to ask.

Want to spend $5 on a logo?

Get one off the internet.

Someone will do it.

You’re not investing in yourself or in fact the poor desperado who will spend 2 minutes sending you an email with an iStock attachment. But you’ll feel smug with yourself that you’re a canny business operator.

Except you’re not really, you’re a time waster. Both your own and others.

Even worse, just like the Postal chiefs, you’re an exploiter. Just see the backlash that Uber, Deliveroo and fiverr are receiving over treatment of people. Just because someone’s desperate enough to sell it, shouldn’t mean you buy it.

We were recently sent an invite to tender for a roster we sit on. The email asked us to log in to an online system to review the brief. We duly went to the appropriate URL, searched out the relevant lot and proceeded to download the brief – all 13 pages of it. 13 pages asking for two table top tent cards that followed a set artwork style and had copy supplied.

In all honesty, a £50 job, even a favour if we liked you and had an honest relationship.
But it’s just cost more than that to go through the process of accessing and reading the brief.
Then we have to submit designs (well, artwork) and costs. Be awarded the gig, manage the print and then manage the invoicing and payment side.
Who knows the cost to the client in having someone write 13 pages of background, requirements and deliverables.
What an utter waste of time and money, and this from a government backed inward investment agency – someone charged with promoting good business practices and support for the local economy.

Of course, like the Pony Express, they’ll find someone willing to do it.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if several respondents put in bids, all spending more on the tender than they can make. The tenderer will sit there patting themselves on the back, just like the $5 logo client, believing they have managed to get the best price for the job.

In the creative industries, we can often be viewed as doing it for the love, not the money. There’s some brilliant students and back bedroom freelancers out there that can do an amazing job for buttons. They’ll always undercut an agency because they don’t have the furniture and infrastructure to support. They may live with mum and dad, not in fact have dozens and dozens of mortgages to pay.

Fine if you’re a fledgling coffee shop or boutique vintage retailer. But if you’re serious about improving your business, if you are indeed a serious business, take it, well, seriously.

Work with genuine partners. Invest in the health of your agency both morally and financially. Yes, ask them from time to time to chip a bit off or do a freebie party invite for your daughter but understand they’re a business and as such, the better they’re doing, the better you’ll do as a result.
The investment you make goes into providing a better service back to you. Honest, it really does.

So, stop thinking that screwing your suppliers down makes you good at business and realise that in fact the opposite is true. Investment works for everyone.
In the end, it was investment in the railway that saved hundreds of orphans from being exploited by the fat cat postal chiefs.

More than a miracle.

In 1945 a farmer in Colorado was killing around 50 of his chickens with the axe. After beheading them, one continued to walk around.

Not such a novelty, as quite often a chicken will twitch and run around after meeting it’s fate.

Miracle Mike though was different.
Due to the way the axe had fallen, the majority of its brain stem had avoided being severed.
Mike went on to live for a further 18 months.
Fed on a liquid diet through a pipet and its gullet being drained by a syringe, Mike became quite a sensation as a sideshow act and was even the subject of a Life Magazine article.

Many, many chickens were slaughtered in the wake of her fame as people looked at the success and attempted to reproduce the results.

Quite a story and one that is replicated across our industry time and time again.

We take years building up brands. Spend vast amounts of money getting into the psyche of the audience. Achieve cut through and recognition and start to stand for something in peoples minds.
Then for one reason or another the axe falls on the marketing budget.
It may be tough trading conditions, price rises in raw materials, margins being destroyed or even “that campaign was such a success, we don’t need to do anything else for a while”.

At first, theres no discernible impact. The brand continues as if nothing has happened. Boardrooms and shareholders question the need for such expenditure and wonder whether any of it was worth it.
As long as we keep spending on PPC, it’ll all be okay.

The chicken is still walking around as if nothing had happened.

But then reality kicks in. Brands aren’t like Miracle Mike.
Make the cuts and things start to go downhill very quickly.
Suddenly all that hard work to be front of mind, to stand for something is forgotten.
Because very few people care about very few brands – unless they’re constantly reminded to do so.

Yes, occasionally you’ll survive axing certain budget lines and marketing always appears to be the easy option.
Eventually though it catches up and you can’t outrun the inevitable loss of voice but more importantly loss of recognition and consideration.

If you’re in the marketing team and you see the farmer coming towards you with his shiny hatchet, remind them that only a miracle will keep you moving forward once the head rolls.

Who’s up for a bit of moose dropping?

For 37 years, up until 2009, the small town of Talkeetna in Alaska ran a Moose dropping competition.

This involved painting up a Moose poo, numbering it and dropping it from a helicopter onto a target.

It’s strange things people do for fun but it was a festival that brought the whole town (population 876) together and tourism in.

That was until PETA got involved.

They’d heard about the festival and launched a campaign to stop the dropping of real Moose from a helicopter.

Many arguments ensued between the good townsfolk and the charitable organisation as they tried to explain what it was really all about.

Now we can mock the stupidity of their misunderstanding (and also the image of trying to cram a full sized 100 stone beast into an helicopter) but how many times have we all been here?

Sat in a presentation where you lay your finely crafted idea out for people to see and someone just gets the wrong end of the stick.

And that’s it, the whole thing is killed there and then.

Because quite simply they cannot see beyond their first interpretation.

No matter how much you plea with them to see it the right way, the way it was intended, to understand the genius – the damage is done and they simply won’t budge.

Suddenly it’s ’too complicated’, ’tenuous’ or that much hated phrase: ‘too clever’.

Everything is then thrown (not out of a helicopter but) into the bin of amazing ideas that never ran. After all, there’s no point wasting your time flogging a dead moose.

So we start all over again because ultimately, if people don’t ‘get’ our idea, whose fault is it really?

Time to wake up and smell the Espresso Martini.

Lloyds of London have just announced a ban on drinking alcohol before 5pm.

Now of course, even our own industry has moved on from the hedonistic 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s when a lost afternoon was commonplace. Now, more often than not, we work with clients who can’t drink during the day, nor would they see it as professionally acceptable to be asked.
Is this a good thing?

I’m not suggesting a return to the ‘good old days’. For one thing, my liver couldn’t cope.
From a creative perspective, The Drum conducted the ‘newtjudge’ experiment, where they split a group of 18 creatives in two, plied one half with booze and the other with water. While not extensive and certainly more fun than hard science, the boozers won the creative test.
Combine this though with my own extensive research carried out from ’94-’01 and I’m certainly convinced of its validity.

Seriously though, the ban raises another issue.
Facetime.
And I mean proper face to face contact. The kind of contact where you can build relationships and a wider professional social circle.

We used to regularly frequent The Bucklemaker, a local cellar bar around the corner from the agency. We’d go there with our then Creative Director, the late, great Geoff Tomlinson, have a couple of pints or glasses of the Chilean red, then return to our desks to crack the brief that had seemed so tough that morning.
While down there though, because it was known as the agency drinking hole, it would attract people in. Photographers, printers, illustrators, TV producers, clients and other agency heads would pop in knowing there was a good chance they’d bump into us.

We met and socialised with many names we’re still in contact with today.
Every week there would be an introduction like “Boys, have you met Pete? Pete’s the owner of….” or “Dave has just worked with an amazing photographer, let me get him to pass on the details”.
The circle of talent we met (from a wide range of ages and backgrounds) was invaluable to our career development. It taught us how to talk to so many different people, not just our friends and colleagues.

Today, this just doesn’t seem to happen. Agency and client folks are locked to their screens, rarely finding five minutes away from the desk to eat a sandwich. They appear to be fuelled by energy drinks and online chat rather than energised by a chance encounter and a picking of brains. How do the next generation build the skills and relationships if their interactions are always so professional?
Of course, you can always meet up after work but there’s so many family pressures on our time and we hardly work in an industry that closes the door at 5:30.

Times do change and with it certain cultures and habits die off (thank goodness smoking in offices was banned) but we all sometimes need a little release and opportunity to meet old friends and new faces in order to expand our circle out of the online echo chambers.

Now who fancies a pint?

Having a point of difference.

When everyone is doing the same, where’s the point of difference?

It was Dominic Chapman that once said: “I’ve got a real problem with that term [gastropub]; it sends a shiver down my spine. It’s been exploited, bastardised and devalued. I used to work at The Cow in London – that was a gastropub but now every Wetherspoon’s is meant to be a gastropub.”

It’s not the first phrase that has been ‘exploited, bastardised and devalued’. Organic, artisan, boutique – just three terms that have fell by the wayside.

And now ‘integrated’ has gone the same way.

Now every marketing agency is ‘integrated’. Integrated agencies promise to solve all your PR and marketing problems while nestled under one roof, but when social media is sat on one floor and digital are in the basement, how truly integrated are they?

That’s where One Black Bear is different, we have what we like to call a ‘Creative Communications Collective’, meaning that while all the different elements of a communications campaign may sit under one roof they also merge, blend and communicate with one another delivering fresh thinking and new ways of doing things.

By keeping PR, social, creative and digital together, we give a brand a single message and a single voice, rather than diluting the message with too many cooks spoiling the (gastropub) broth.

Do it first, do it best or do it different.

I’ll have a Big Lack and Demise please.

Local businesses for local people?

Loads of us over 35 will remember the first McDonalds opening in Moscow (1990) or a couple of years earlier, the first KFC flinging open its doors near Tiananmen Square. Queues of hungry folks eager to savour a taste of the west thanks to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the opening up of China to (selective) free market overtures.

Well things have changed a bit just recently.

KFC’s owner Yum, decided to chuck in the towel in China last year due to, among other reasons, fierce competition from more indigenous dumpling outlets. In January, McDonalds also sold a majority stake in its Chinese operation to a state owned acquirer. Returns for both Ronald and The Colonel in such quarters have been soggy for some time with revenues not matching the moreish nature of a large fries or a chocolate milk shake.

Have we lost our taste for such titans of the fast food world? Has global lost its allure?

Don’t be thinking this trend is limited to just fast food firms either – far from it.
Across virtually every sector, firms have seen their share of global profits dip from 35% a decade ago to 30% today. Even the folks who ship stuff around the world like Maersk (a Danish container shipping line) have seen profits halved from their peak. From local phone operators in India trouncing Vodafone to local banks in Brazil taking on big city names, the trend is towards the domestic beating the multinational.

Hard to manage, cumbersome and increasingly tricky to grow market share, multinationals have been battered because consumers demand a lot more than the standard, predetermined fayre they not so long ago used to be very happy with.

Our wonderful marketing sector has been (and still can be) very partial indeed to a ‘bit of global’. Our famous networks and groups straddle continents while us smaller, more agile players happily to co-exist. Others simply play at it by starting with a regional office then quickly adding a ‘satellite office’ in London – often without justification, almost always out of vanity. Some even add overseas offices without getting the product right on their own turf first but who cares as the press release screams ‘we’re global’.

We don’t and won’t ever pretend to ‘go global’ at One Black Bear. Leading businesses (some international) warm to our ‘brand of business’ rather than just defaulting to another franchised ‘brand’. And therein lies a whole world of difference when doing great business with an agency like ours.

Where have all our heroes gone?

Almost 20 years ago, Rich and I penned an ad to launch the Subaru Forester Turbo. Titled ‘Speed Camera’ it went on to win numerous national and overseas awards.

But more important than the gongs and the pay rises was a phone call from a hero of ours.

Richard Flintham, the creative genius behind Sony ‘Balls’, Cadbury ‘Gorilla’ and Skoda ‘Cake’ had researched who’d created the ad – remember this was kinda pre-internet – and he called up the office just to say that he’d seen it in the paper at the weekend and it how much he loved it.

We were amazed that he’d taken the time and had the energy to make the call and so honoured to receive his approval.

Over the following months we made several trips down to his then agency, Fallon, and used him as an unofficial Creative Director on a Banks’s Bitter campaign we were writing that cast Roger Moore as the lead.

We had met and unashamedly exploited the good nature of one of our idols.

Not for the first time.

In our early years as both students and junior creatives we actively sought the advice and guidance of those we admired. Paul Brazier and Peter Souter at AMV (we were too scared to approach David Abbott), Tony Davidson and Nick Gill at BMP (John Webster was too God-like) and Brummie legend Trevor Beattie, then of TBWA.

Now, not wishing to sound ancient and I certainly don’t want to sound like my parents frowning at the punks or my grandparents despair at the mod/rocker/hippy movements – and certainly not like the latest Simon Sinek rant circulating social – but we’re more and more finding ourselves talking to students on so-called advertising courses that don’t have any knowledge or respect for the industry or who creates it. This we believe is partly due to the courses not teaching advertising. They’re so wrapped up in teaching technical skills that prepare them for a life outside ad creation that they don’t focus at all on developing a knowledge, love and skill for ideas.

We were too late for the Bernbach, Ogilvy and Gossage era but we bloody knew who they were and what they stood for.

We absorbed as much as we could from the history and the giants of the industry as we could. Not to imitate them (oh to have an ounce of their genius) but to understand what made them and their work tick.

We scoured for hours on end the D&AD, One Show and Cannes annuals. We trawled through the industry mags week after week looking to see who had created what.

And we did it all in a library because knowledge wasn’t available at the click of a mouse.

This is partly where the problem lies. Back in the day, we had to earn our knowledge. Week in week out, making sure we were up to speed, the five minute search just wasn’t a thing.

Thus, this new generation don’t need to fill their heads with stuff that one day may come in handy. They’ll find it when they need it because it’s easy to get hold of.

These days I no longer have my finger on the pulse. I used to know who had created everything. Now I don’t know the names behind the John Lewis, Money Supermarket or the brilliant new Sainsburys campaigns. The agencies, yes. The creatives, afraid not. It’s no longer important to me but I bet I could find out in the next 20 minutes if I needed to.

Gerry Farrell has written a brilliant piece on TheDrum about how the youth don’t believe they can learn from their elders and Sir John Hegarty has been challenging ageism in the industry. The fact is though, through the last recession a generation of elder statesmen and women have been shifted aside. There’s always been young, fresh blood in agency creative departments but they always had their fair share of wise old heads too – guiding, teaching, pushing and reassuring.

As I look around I fear this is changing and once we lose these talents, it’s unlikely we’ll get them back.

I know every generation has its own way of doing things and this is key to moving forward but now our age group appears to be failing in passing on our experience.

We’ve failed to develop into iconic figures that inspire those following us as much as those that made us pick up the Magic Marker.

Maybe this is due to seismic shifts in technology that have made us nervous of our shortcomings or it’s witnessing the recession bloodbaths and budget shrinkages that have made those of us lucky enough to still be here cling on to and fight for our place on the payroll. We’ve become too nervous to teach and share. And who can blame us when clients start buying widgets over wonder.

Our old CD used to say we were ‘twenty years too late’. Maybe he was right, I don’t think he was as we had (and are still having) a great time and I believe still producing some amazing work which is, as our mantra goes – sometimes an ad. However, the new crop of grads need to be aware of what went before, not the drinking culture, lost afternoons and ridiculously long timelines to crack a brief but the key to why we’re all here. To have ideas that spark and change things.

Now pull up your trousers and get your hair cut.
We’re off to watch Trainspotting and then U2 perform the Joshua Tree album.

Does your CSR stack up?

Having a corporate consciousness with genuine integrity is becoming increasingly important.

Customers and employees alike want to see much more evidence than a bit of box ticking – and much has been written about the scrutiny, from millennials in particular, when it comes to assessing corporate credentials. Grin and grip photographs or a lunchtime spent painting a fence certainly won’t cut the mustard. CSR, corporate social responsibility, is exactly that – a responsibility.

Ethical sourcing, sustainability, lowering carbon footprints etc are all key, of course, but supporting community initiatives is an area that I feel can deliver results in a whole manner of ways.

My new agency One Black Bear has been doing great things for St Basil’s for a number of years. So along with my CIPR Midlands’ colleague Rachel Owen, we are now hoping to promote best practice for community activities with a big focus on St Basil’s.

Our first initiative is going to be a CSR event for Birmingham businesses which will endeavour to ask businesses – and PR practitioners especially – how their CSR stacks up. And indeed, what sort of city do we want to live and/or work in?

St Basil’s fundraising is headed by the charismatic Barrie Hodge. Of course encouraging significant financial donations is part of his role, but Barrie is also on a mission to educate businesses about how else they can help homeless people in Birmingham. For example, getting homeless people into work is a critical part of regaining control of their lives. Businesses can obviously make a meaningful contribution here in a whole host of ways. Work experience. Mentoring. Apprenticeships. Much more useful than a lunchtime painting a fence that in reality might have not really needed painting because some other company had done it not so long ago in a bid to team build whilst ‘doing good’.

We are planning an event on the evening of Thursday, 27^th April (venue TBC but it will be central Birmingham) when Barrie will be speaking alongside other people who feel passionately about helping to make the city a better place, in a way that will genuinely pass the CSR litmus test – and engage customers and employees along the way. Win win win is the plan.

For more information, please email me at bron.eames@oneblack.com

Don’t be first, be better.

As we enter a new year you can’t help but be bombarded with articles about the next big thing. We’re told (as we are every year) that technology and innovation will change our jobs, lives and thinking.

Encouraged to be ahead of the curve, a cutting edge provider of new ways of doing things.
Clients want leaders, they want to be the first, seen as revolutionaries.

Except they don’t really.

In the main, clients and agencies want to tweak the edges. Make slight improvements and nuanced changes that shift the dial.

Because, revolution and leading the way is a dangerous path strewn with many pitfalls of huge failure.

It is our job to keep an ear to the ground, see what’s out there.
What has potential and where the dangers lie.

We have stats and figures in abundance but stats and figures so often lie.

The Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome is growing stronger and stronger.
Suddenly the data for all things digital and social is flaky to say the least and we’ll see how deep some of these new billionaires pockets are once the giant corporations begin demanding recompense for the money spent in good faith on dodgy reporting.

Remember this, John Loud invented the ball-point pen 50 years before Laszlo Biro got in on the act.
In fact by the time Biro launched his product, there were already 350 alternatives in the marketplace.
Biro’s worked and became huge, not because he was first but because his was the best.

We all pray for creative simplicity.

All across Germany this year, the jowly, dour portrait of Martin Luther will adorn public places as people commemorate 500 years of this German monk’s contribution to the Protestant faith.

Hardly a fan of the Roman Catholic Church, Luther had grown tired of the indulgences offered up by some of his clergy mates promising everlasting life etc. in return for people not playing up. You see, Luther believed it should be integrity of faith and not individual, remorseful actions that brought mortals closer to God.

Ostentation, not surprisingly, didn’t figure heavily in his hallowed code and was considered a ‘disgraceful distraction‘. Simplicity was key to ‘Lutheranism’ but as word took hold and his teachings spread across northern Europe. This man of the cloth saw the colours of his beliefs run into much wider areas such as architecture and even the advent of flat pack furniture.

Yes, you did read that correctly. Flat pack furniture.

Luther is today widely credited with inspiring the brutal, modernist lines of the Bauhaus art movement that shunned ornamental indulgence for function.
But as if that wasn’t enough, and as Luther’s teachings spread right across northern Europe, the Swedish town named after him (Lutheran) went onto become the birthplace of none other than IKEA.

And so it would come to pass that God subjected middle aged males to a life of DIY purgatory. And in no small part, you have a German monk to thank for that.

2017. The end is not nigh.

When pilots come in to land on an aircraft carrier, what do they do?

The natural assumption is that they’d slow the plane down to a gentle landing on deck then hit the brakes as hard as possible to avoid slipping off the end of the tiny strip of metal.

The opposite is in fact true.

As they touch down, it’s time to hit full thrust and speed up.

The reason they do this is that if anything was to go wrong with the landing, they’re already getting up to speed where they can successfully take off and attempt to land again.

A complex hook and rubber band system is essentially what brings them to a halt and stops them falling to the bottom of ocean.

This is how we’re approaching 2017 (happy new year by the way). No letting up, just a full throttle approach to all of the challenges that face us.

As the Christmas High Street numbers come in, there’s more talk of economies slowing.
Add to this the political instability the world over and you’d think this year may be our last.
For some, this doom and gloom outlook will have them slamming on the brakes retreating to the hills and hoping that it all goes away while they ride out further turmoil.

However, I implore you all to be positive and full of optimism for the coming twelve months.
It will bring a multitude of challenges but more importantly, many opportunities.

It’s gonna be fun. Just as long as we all keep on accelerating.

2016… At first I was afraid.

Listen to pundits reviewing the past year and there’ll be doom and gloom over what a terrible 12 months we’ve just had.

Whether it be the talk of all the celebrity deaths (up about 15% on an average year apparently), the heart breaking tragedies in Syria that the West just stood by and watched or the political upheaval encountered both here and across the pond.

For One Black Bear though, (Birmingham’s largest full-service agency) rather than an annus horribilus it’s been an anno triumphantes.

We took 50 6ft pigeons to Trafalgar Square, put three drag Queens in Victoria rail station singing Gloria Gaynor and had seven cowboys gun slinging their way through Cardiff – all for our client National Express. Stunts that managed to actually shift the share price.
A client we were appointed as lead agency for back in January and had a TV ad and a new positioning in place by Feb.

New relationships have come through our doors in the form of working with Camping & Caravanning Club, National Grid, Siemens, Boost Energy Drinks, Eurolines and two other brands I’m not allowed to mention yet.
We already have six new business meetings/pitches in place for when we get back next year, so the long term programme of old fashioned DM we implemented must be working, along with our multitude of blogs and thought pieces.

You may or may not have noticed our new positioning ‘Sometimes it’s an ad’ which not only explains the breadth of what we offer but also represents the way we think and approach answering briefs. For us, the excitement of what we do lies in how differently we can solve the multitude of problems we face day in day out.

Some of our other creative highlights have included the ‘Donate your Homepage’ project we developed for local Youth Homeless charity St. Basils. We also designed their latest Annual Report (the third year running) and have just launched their free text service. Let’s not forget our topical Jeremy Corbyn ‘seatgate’ ad too.

Our award winning work for the NHS continues to change lives and preconceptions with new trusts getting on board. Spanning social, web, ads and PR to attract the very best talent. Not to mention successfully saving the organisation hundreds of millions of pounds.

We merged our Social Media agency (Shadow Giants) under the OBB banner and bolstered our offer with the addition of PR services.
This year also saw us introduce a new management team as we added the two Amys (Gouldson and Eddy) to join Rich and myself in helping run the agency and made massive steps forward by hiring two of the industries finest minds – Kate Hartsorne as our Associate Planning Director and Bron Eames as PR Director.

Big thanks to everyone who came to the ‘surprise’ party celebrating Rich and I working together as a creative team for 25 years. I know, we don’t look old enough.

Of course, all these ups can’t happen without the occasional down. We said goodbye to a few talented people and one account. After 22 years of working on the the business, we have parted company with Subaru. But as these things are cyclical, who knows, the relationship may reignite somewhere down the line.

There was also a couple of pitch time-wasters this year. This isn’t being a sore loser, we fully understand the process and I’m never bitter about things when conducted properly. Quite willing to accept defeat, as long as the process is conducted professionally and fairly.
But this year we experienced three of what can only be described as being some of the most ludicrously run pitches I’ve experienced in over 20 years.
These three alone will have cost us at least £40k in time investment. Multiply that by the four to six agencies involved in all of these (who will have put an equal amount of energy in) and the wasted resource is approaching £250k. It’s akin to the car insurance industry, all the bad drivers, criminals and faux injuries push the costs up for everybody else. We need to sort this out as an industry on both the agency and client side. That said, it’s an argument that’s been rumbling for decades and I don’t think 2017 will see a sudden change.

But it’s Christmas and should be about good will and optimism, so let’s concentrate on the seven gains vs one loss. We’ll take that.

Top visited blog posts of the year:

As our thirteenth year in business draws to a close, we’d like to thank all of those we’ve worked with and for. We’re excited about the prospects that 2017 holds (even with the triggering of article 50, a new President and further turmoil the world over) and look forward to meeting friends old and new.

We hope you’re one of them, so have a great break and maybe we’ll see you in the new year.