Roses are red… and gold… and bronze

It’s always gratifying to be rewarded and awarded for our thinking.

We’re really proud to have won not just one, but two awards for our work with Midland’s based youth homeless charity St Basils last night.

The latest annual report and our ‘Donate your Homepage‘ campaign won Gold and Bronze respectively at the Roses Awards, and as you can imagine, we’re rather delighted with the result.

Even if we are a little worse for wear this morning… sign of a good night I guess.

A responsible approach to CSR

On Thursday, 11^th May, the CIPR and PRCA are joining forces and holding an event to debate the communications’ professional’s role in maximising CSR from the perspective of all stakeholders. Chaired by Midlands Insider editor Kurt Jacobs, speakers include Barrie Hodge – head of fundraising and communications for St Basils, Andy Holding – corporate responsibility manager at Birmingham Airport and Jonathan Fortnam – partner at Pinsent Masons.

We want to examine:

• Why do organisations do CSR, really?
• How do they measure its success?
• How to engage customers, employees and shareholders alike.

Scenarios that have been mooted in planning this session range from a slightly irritating case of the PR team being brought in at the last minute to get coverage for a ‘grin & grip’ giant cheque presentation to the somewhat more challenging request to secure a knighthood for the CEO.

Of course, charities need money and no fundraiser is going to turn down the proceeds from a cake sale or a day of wearing comedy clothing. However, this is really only tip of the proverbial iceberg. CSR can deliver so much more. Critically, an organisation’s CSR needs to be relevant and have a good cultural fit.

We are expecting some lively discussion!

To register for this free event on Thursday, 11^th May, 6pm to 8pm, at Malmaison in Birmingham, please visit here – thank you.

More about the speakers:

Barrie Hodge – Head of Fundraising and Communications St Basils

Barrie has worked with St Basils for the last two years. Prior to that, he’s spent most of his career working in commercial radio, producing shows across the UK. He has a vast amount of experience in communications and his passion is developing partnerships to tackle the increasing crisis of homelessness in the region.

Andy Holding – Corporate Responsibility Manager Birmingham Airport

Birmingham Airport has one of the largest community impacts of any UK airport, with tens of thousands of people living beneath its flightpaths. For more than 20 years, Andy has been closely involved in developing a wide-ranging CSR agenda, addressing issues surrounding environmental impact, education, employment and community investment. For him the CSR challenge is about maximising the economic and social benefits of aviation while minimising its impact on local communities and the environment – and all in a highly visible setting where stakeholders are many and everyone has a view.

Jonathan Fortnam – Partner Pinsent Masons

Jonathan is based in Birmingham and in 2008 was the vision behind ‘Starfish’, Pincent Masons’ corporate responsibility programme which is focused throughout its international network on ‘Inspiring Young Lives’. Starfish was BITC’s 2009 National Example of Excellence in Education and has in the last nine years been actively engaged in a variety of activities ranging from reading support in local schools to supporting a programme to get more girls in the Rajasthan state of India into school.

Jonathan’s current corporate responsibility interests are around what it means to be a responsible business of purpose to each of its stakeholder groups.

Gold at the Travel Marketing Awards

And we’re pleased to announce that we walked away with two awards.

A block of lime green perspex (a gold award) for our Christmas rail disruption radio ad now sits on the shelf. You can listen to the ad here.

We also claimed a runner-up spot for our Take A Different View TV ad. You can watch that here.

All in all, a great night and wonderful to receive recognition for our continued efforts to create something that stands out in the travel sector.

Ideas and paperclips

We think, we write, we doodle, we discard, we repeat this process over and over again, we present, we listen, we talk, we refine, we make.

So much of what we create never sees the light of day.
We think of solutions, we then bin them or if we think there’s a nugget in there we tell our oppo (in my case, the long-suffering Mr Elwell).
If we agree it has a ‘certain something’, we develop the thinking, discarding and rubbishing each others thoughts constantly in an attempt to achieve something better.

It’s a cruel, aggressive life being a creative, nowhere near as fluffy as those on the outside believe.

Very few other careers involve laying your soul so bare and open to criticism.
You learn early on that 99% of everything you think of won’t come to fruition.

Artists produce mainly for themselves. Often working alone. A big reveal to the world and await the response. Hopefully someone will put a red dot next to the canvas.
The thought of this terrifies me – no feedback until everything is out there. Months of work, love and dedication and then possible rejection.

At least we get the rejection out the way at scribble stage.

Musicians, writers and poets create draft after draft but never really ask for feedback until close to being fully formed. Then publishers, engineers, agents and producers help develop without really trashing.

In the constant strive to achieve better you have to be prepared to destroy your own thinking or have it ripped up and torn to shreds before your very eyes.
Every single day.

And we do this for fun. We love exploring varying avenues full of ideas. Seeing where things will lead.

A million years ago, we had a good education.
Two lecturers (Steve Dixon and Dave Bullers) ran the course we were on like a creative department – with them as joint CDs.
Always pushing to think beyond the first thoughts, the obvious.
They were ruthless in their criticism.
Dare to disagree? Fine, get yourself off to see an agency and wait for the onslaught there.
We quickly came to trust their judgement.

It worked, we learned the hard way that to survive in this industry you not only had to have a thick skin but also how to heal fast and come back stronger.
No arms around the shoulder telling us everything was going to be okay.
It was either rubbish or something that could be developed.

Start again or explore further.

In order for an idea to see the light of day, it must go through:

• I’ve got an idea, do I believe there’s anything in it? Y/N
• I’ll mention it to another creative, do they think it’s any good? Y/N
• Develop it, is it still on track? Y/N
• Show it to more creative minds, do they like it? Y/N
• Present it to the planner, is it correct? Y/N
• Talk it through with the account handlers, is it client friendly? Y/N
• Take it to the client, will they buy it? Y/N
• Have it ‘taken upstairs’ for approval, will it get the thumbs up? Y/N
• Wait as it’s shared with everyone from the cleaner to the Chairman’s daughter. Is it still a goer? Y/N
• Put it into research, will it land? Y/N
• Is it as good as it can be? Y/N
• Make it for real and put it out there for the public – will they buy what we’re selling? Y/N

At least 12 opportunities for every thought to be destroyed.
Millions of ugly and beautiful little thoughts tossed aside – never seeing the light of day.

Only one in every 20,000 paperclips are used to hold paper together.
But do we stop producing them? No, we buy 11 billion every single year. Because we may just need one to do the job.

We keep on returning to the blank page to think, to destroy, to create, to sell. This is the creative way.

Did the EU need a Marketing Director?

My God, you can’t move for BREXIT can you?

With what feels like 50 million articles written about Article 50, it seems to me that whichever side you sit on, the EU missed a trick by not communicating anywhere near enough with it’s target audience of 508 million citizens.

Picture the scene; there you are as a Commissioner, President or Diplomat watching your cherished institution rapidly lose its lustre within a major market (UK plus others) with the only people seemingly interested in what you do being your opposite numbers in Brussels or Strasbourg.

If this had been a commercial business looking at its brand health dials, the alarms would’ve been going off way before the need for a referendum. Just consider the shortcomings of the EU ‘brand’ for a minute:

• Lots of disenchanted customers with fuzzy understandings of what the EU actually does – so a BRAND PERCEPTION/RELEVANCE ISSUE.
• Rookie, competitor brands such as UKIP/La Pen, Geert Wilders and friends avidly pumping the hustings and gnawing away at your MARKET SHARE.
• A huge swathe of your subjects thinking that you’re a bunch of autocratic rip off merchants – so PRICE POINT/VALUE FOR MONEY issues.
• Distinct lack of ENGAGEMENT AND CONVERSION rates during European elections for MEP’s (at last count less than 40%).

Blimey – book some focus groups quick! We need to do something my Euro chums before our continental presence is diminished and our brand damaged immeasurably. What about conversing with our audience and making a case for what we do? What do we stand for beyond politics? What do people want from us to stem the disenchantment?

But no, nothing.

Save for a few more sign posts telling folks that this building or minibus was part funded by a EU grant.

It’s just a shame that no-one bothered to heed the bigger, more prominent warning signs that had been flashing for years.

This article was originally published on comms2point0

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.

Lines win pitches.

Slogans. I love them.

I love writing them. There is something really satisfying in summarising the musings of my very clever Planning Director into one strapline.

I also love politics and many a slogan has adorned a party conference stage or lectern over the years.

When people ask me my favourite strategy or campaign I don’t answer Nike, Guinness or the usual suspects, I say ‘New Labour’. For if there was ever a strategic masterplan aimed at changing perception, that was model thinking from Smith, Mandelson and Beckett (put that way, it sounds like an agency). Political slogans fascinate me and usually fall into two camps. Either seeking to unite or claiming the highground over ‘the other lot’.

Everyone remembers ‘Labour isn’t working’ from the Thatcher stable – the result of Maggie’s unflinching respect and trust in the Saatchi siblings and Tim Bell. Sometimes it gets personal and seeks to demonise or “Demon eyes’ – in the case of the Conservative negative campaign designed to out Tony Blairs more darker side.

 

 

Now and again however, they do buck the trend.

A few years ago, Michael Howard’s ill-fated general election campaign for the Conservatives asked voters ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’.

Deliberately ambiguous and admittedly very different to the usual bland ‘we are the answer’ type offering, critics quizzed exactly what it was voters were supposed to be thinking. To me it was designed to align and link common sense thinking between party and electorate but actually went on to realise quite the opposite.

Many interpreted the slogan as sneery, curtain twitching and Daily Mail like – divisive even in its connotation. Alas, Howard didn’t go on to win at the polls.

More recently, Trump adopted ‘Make America Great Again’ which is increasingly being re-interpreted as ‘Make America Grate Again’. What you can’t doubt is its power over the great disenchanted versus Hilary’s message of bland ‘togetherness’.

With two months to go to French Presidential elections, Marine Le Pen has adopted ‘In the name of the people’ which is ironic given her endlessly xenophobic policies.

At One Black Bear party headquarters, we seek to capture the very essence of not just what your brand is now, but what it strives to be. Not just pithy, hollow words but solid, strategic communication foundations of which everything else is built on.

That approach seems to be winning over lots of people so why not join the party?

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?

Faking it could be fatal.

Never, ever lie.

While the Trumpisms continue to flow and take us to new levels of disbelief/dismay/horror, there is one thing to thank him for (yes, there really is). A focus on fake news. And by implication the importance of the truth.

A few centuries ago, when I was a student at Leeds University, one of my fellow volunteers on student radio was an ITN reporter and his mantra was that news had to be: ‘New, true and interesting.’ Which has stayed with me ever since.

The pressures of instant, 24/7 reporting mean that speculation is sometimes inevitable, I guess, but truth creep really needs to be resisted. Not tenaciously seeking out the real facts is something that could easily damage a brand’s reputation – management of which is the PR practitioner’s job. And once a lie is out there, goodness knows where it will end. Just think about the banking crisis, both sides of the Brexit debate, and Trump on Sweden, for example.

My CIPR colleague Stuart Baird recently wrote a post about essential advice for PR newbies, and one of the gems he collected was: ‘Never, ever lie’. Too right. The public is generally forgiving of errors. Accidents happen. But lies should not.

Thanks for reminding us, Donald.

Image credit: The Blemish

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.