On how he got into advertising and what's changed in the industry over the years
The BBC was making a documentary about Oxford University and they broadcast a bit of the revue I’d written – produced by Ned Sherrin and starring Maggie Smith - called ‘Oxford Accents’. And it happened to be seen by George Butler, who was then head of the art department at J Walter Thompson. Ned and I went for interviews and George had totally forgotten why we were there. He was very vague and only interested in art directors and we had an amiable drifting conversation. As I left he remembered they had something called the copy test, which I took. I was then offered a job at JWT London where I stayed for the next 30 something years. I can in fact trace everything that’s happened to me, including sitting here with you, back to a bad piece of verse I wrote for Isis [Oxford student newspaper] in 1950-something. The reason George Butler made the call in the first place, was that they were very aware that independent television was coming, and because he’d seen this work on television, he wrongly assumed that we knew something about it. In fact it was just a televised stage show. This was 1954, ITV came in 1955, so I was involved in television quickly and quite soon I was a writer/ producer.
I am astonished at how little has changed since the so-called digital revolution and how poor online has been at brand enhancement. There is still no mass-market brand that has been launched or maintained online, which surprises most people, but it’s true. So you might say what about Amazon? But it’s an online brand, a tech brand and it became famous when offline media started talking about Amazon.
Alexei Navalny, the besieged, potential challenger to Putin, said a few years ago. “The big change is that I stopped being an online challenger and became an offline challenger.” And there’s something about non-online media, which appears to be open and universal. You see one 48-sheet poster and the assumption is that the whole world can see that poster. You see something online and you don’t have the same assumption. Big brands are big brands because they have “salience” or “fame” and it comes almost entirely from mass, unselected, undiscriminated, untargeted, unsegmented media. That can’t change because that’s how people form their views about objects.
Les Binet and Peter Field wrote some years ago that the strength of digital is in direct response in the same way that coupons are – and so easily measurable. Back in the 1970s Stephen King wrote about the Scale of Immediacy and how different ad approaches could be distinguished by how quickly they were designed to have a sales effect – from direct response to brand maintenance. You can apply this today and see that online advertising is at its most effective at the top of the scale of immediacy and least effective when looking for brand glory. Brand glory is what maintains those brands as deliverers of profit for the foreseeable future.
Also, really successful brands present themselves in such a way that individuals want to approach them. The digital zealots seem to believe that all the work has to be done by the brand, so you use data to pursue individuals relentlessly. I think it’s like dating. It doesn’t work like that. So much digital work is pushy and based on the belief that you can eliminate waste.
However, there is virtually no waste in mass-market advertising assuming you have a mass brand. It doesn’t have to be universal. There is a value in non-users knowing about your brand. It’s very hard to measure but there’s no question about it.
There’s also long-term value. My old mate, the late Len Heath, took me out for lunch after selling a share in his agency and insisted on giving me a lift home. [Len was the H in KMPH, later Kimpher.]
Outside the restaurant there was a brand new Aston Martin and he said, “Do you know why I bought this?”
I said, “I assume because it’s a wonderful car.”
“I bought it because I saw an ad. But the real point is that I saw that ad when I was 14.”
How do you measure the value of an ad when it’s still delivering after 30 years? There’s no question that Len was not the only person at the age of 14 who thought, one day, one day... And that’s not going to change. That ad made him want to move towards the brand; it wasn’t the brand pushing itself to him.
Jeremy Bullmore has been writing his Chopping Block column in Market Leader since our very first issue, 20 years ago.
