This is EXACTLY what it’s like:

First it was mission statements, now it’s company ‘philosophies’.

I guess the relevant definition of the word in this case is, ‘Any personal belief about how to live or how to deal with a situation’.

So it’s a corporate statement of intent.

Sounds innocent enough, but how and when did all this start, and how did the world cope so well without them for thousands of years?

The first one I recall was some load of guff about providing decent fast food that was stuck up in the window of every Pret about ten years ago (interestingly, it now seems to have disappeared), but now every company on earth feels as if they must explain themselves in terms of what they do and why.

Here are two from wildly different ad agencies. See if you can guess who says that…

We develop Creative Business Ideas. A Creative Business Idea combines strategy and creativity in new ways to transform the nature of a business. Creative Business Ideas arise from, and influence business strategy, not just communications strategy, and result in innovation, breakthrough solutions, and industry firsts – maximizing the relationship between consumers and brands. Creative Business Ideas generate profitable growth for our clients’ brands and business by injecting creativity at the heart of their business, enabling the development of new revenue streams, the expansion of brand franchises, the penetration of new distribution channels, and the creation of new and engaging connections with consumers.

And who says that…

The strongest brands represent a meaningful emotional relationship – they have fans not consumers. The most powerful brands are leaders, not followers – they reinvent themselves as fast, often faster, than their consumers. The most effective brands are provocative – they change people’s minds, they disrupt the market place, they change the consumer culture. And we’ve seen that brands like these deliver real business value.

I don’t know about you, but having read that, I’m none the wiser (by the way, the first was Euros, the second was W&K).

Recent posts on Sell! Sell! about an agency that tried to entice a client by telling them that they ‘ignited conversations’, and on Chronic Fatigue about the strange need to start or join the conversation, have made me wonder…

Is this happening because someone started it and now no one feels complete without one (I actually saw a potential placement team recently and even they had a ‘philosophy’ on their website)?

Or do companies really feel that they are expressing themselves in a way that is beneficial to them and potential employees/clients?

God knows.

I’ll admit we had one at Lunar, but at least it contained the sentence ‘we’d never claim to have anything as questionable as a philosophy’ and suggested one of the reasons people might be reading that page could be boredom.

Stay with it till the end.

Director: Peter Candeland of Passion Pictures.
x

Sorry, I don’t usually do politics, but have you read the first paragraph of Polly Toynbee’s Gordon Brown assassination on the front of today’s Guardian?

“Another engine breaks away from Gordon Brown’s fuselage, and the damage done looks set to bring him crashing out of the sky. Even if he can judder on, the injury done will diminish him further. Which other engines may now break away too? Those who would bring him down say the prime minister is beyond repair. The party faces a terrible choice it can no longer avoid.”

Look, you stupid turd, you could choose any metaphor you like for this belly-flop (there’s one) of a government.

In future, try not to use one that references the most recent tragedy in international news.

Jesus Christ…

As I wend my way through this delightful land we call ‘ad’, I notice a couple of things that pique my interest.

Today’s is, as the title of this post suggests, the idea that people often think of themselves as one or other of these two chaps:

For example (and these generalisations are for blog-writing purposes only) I have noticed that above the line creatives look down on their direct brethren.

They also look down on the digital guys, who try to pretend they’re looking down on the ATL dinosaurs but they secretly know they’re on a lower rung, otherwise they’d be paid more and ATL creatives would be trying to get their jobs.

Good directors look down on creatives.

Creatives look down on bad directors.

They also look down on all account management.

Planners look down on creatives like a motherfucker.

Actually, I think planners look down on everyone. I have a theory about why this is but it’ll offend some people I like so I’ll keep it to myself.

Agency management look down on their staff.

People who don’t work in advertising look down on those who do because our jobs are seen to be a bit frivolous and wanky.

But they look up to us when we say we’ve just done a V/O with John Craven or Patsy Kensit.

Copywriters look up to authors.

Designers look down on art directors for ‘selling out’.

People in award-winning agencies look down on people in agencies that concentrate on selling. This is because they believe ‘selling’ means Cillit Bang, whereas a Clio Finalist award is an indication of genius.

Despite D&AD’s best efforts to devalue its own prestige, winners of Silver Pencils look down on all other award winners.

Maybe I’ll fill a few more of these in as they occur to me.

Doris Willens seems to think so.

In her new book, ‘Nobody’s Perfect: Bill Bernbach and the Golden Age of Advertising’ she slags him off as an INSECURE man who didn’t write any of DDB’s great ads himself.

He was comfortable with the FAMILIAR, often eating the SAME FOOD and wearing the same sober suits.

He was even FRUSTRATED at not writing the BOOK he always wanted to.

Well, I guess that makes him like Colin Millward, Albert Einstein and virtually every copywriter who ever lived.

What a twat.

(Doris Willens, I mean. Not Bill Bernbach.)

When it comes to creating ads there are two schools of thought: come at the problem like a consumer, with no real knowledge of the product and category other than that which you’ve picked up in your everyday life; or immerse yourself in the product, learning every single thing you possibly can the better to educate the target market.

The position you take may depend to a degree on the extent to which you are lazy. After all, the former option can be done from the comfort of your desk, with little effort required beyond just being magical old you.

The second option might involve doing what we can express in a representative practice: the factory tour. Of course, today this might mean a time-consuming and taxing visit to the corporate website or a flick through any available corporate literature.

This can, however, mean an actual tour of a factory.

About five years ago I went on the factory tour of all factory tours. We were about to pitch for Birdseye, so all the competing agencies were invited to (I think) Suffolk to check out the Birdseye HQ.

Was it helpful? Ultimately not. Some twat from McCann Erickson spilt a large jug of orange juice across the large table we were working on. The resultant physical discomfort from the fallout of this spillage made walking round miles of frozen peas and fishfingers a fairly unpleasant experience.

But overall, I’d suggest that the more crap you can stuff in your head about a product, the more likely it is that something interesting is going to come out.

Here’s an example of an ad that was created by two teetotal creatives after a visit to the pub to enjoy a pint for research purposes only:

Good, isn’t it?

What on earth is all this about?

I mean seriously, WTF?

There’s bloody barking on purpose, like Rubberduckzilla:

Then there’s this effort that seems to think there’s an idea going on somewhere in the vicinity.

But I’ve looked with an electron microscope and I can’t find hide nor hair of it.