19/05/2012 · 12:40 pm

Progress. At a price.

I was round my mate Geoff’s house the other day. He likes his gadgets, does Geoff. Old gadgety Geoff.

His latest was a Sonos sound system. Working via your home’s wi-fi, it lets you play music from your iTunes library and also from sources outside your house, such as Spotify and LastFM. The sound was deep and loud and rich, and the remote control was insanely easy to use. (This part was critical. Geoff’s previous foray into this area involved a system so complex that finding a song – any song – would take him ages standing in front of a huge screen and jabbing buttons on a paperback-sized remote control. The impenetrable operating instructions effectively excluded the rest of his family from ever selecting their own music.)

When I can next justify it financially, I thought, I’m going to get one of these Sonos systems.

Then last week I started noticing their ad campaign. No easy matter, as the adverts are discrete and understated virtually to the point of invisibility. But they got me looking for a stockist in Basingstoke, where I was working at the time, so the campaign worked to that extent.

The instore demonstration was pretty compelling. The guy showed me how the remote worked, talked me through the various systems and explained how to get the best out of it. Although my iTunes library probably wouldn’t be up to the job, he cautioned. Why ever not? Well, apparently when you import CDs to iTunes, it rips them at a less than optimal setting. For purposes of speed, I guess. For the least compression and hence the best quality, I would have to import all my CDs again on the Apple Lossless setting. Hmm.

Another thing that perplexed me was the set-up of the speaker. I belong to a generation conditioned by everyone from hi-fi mags to the Melody Maker to position speakers six to eight feet apart. That was the way to replicate a live performance and the best way to enjoy any stereo effects created in the studio. Mono? Pah!

How to listen to music

But here was a £350 system with only the one speaker. A backward step, surely? Not so, said the people at Sonos when I’d mentioned this very point on Twitter. Each Sonos system in fact included two speakers, left and right. You couldn’t separate them – separates are so last century – so the way to enjoy stereo sound was simply to buy two systems! You turn the left-hand channel off on one and place it to the right, and do the opposite with the other and bingo, stereo sound. (“You want to take a passenger on your motorcycle? No problem – just buy another motorcycle!”)

I thought about the number of times I actually sat down in the precise way recommended by speaker manufacturers and hi-fi buffs and realised that I didn’t any more. Not much, anyway. So the lack of true stereo might not be such a big deal after all. OK, I thought, I’ll take it. Just one problem – that store didn’t have one in stock in my choice of colour. (There are two: Apple white and Apple black.) But their Camberley store did have one. I got them to reserve it and headed back to the office.

During the afternoon, doubt started to creep in. £350 is quite a lot to pay for something which would involve me doing days and days worth of ripping. The ‘sound in every room’ sales schtick wasn’t that convincing either when I realised I pretty much had that already. And there was that whole back to mono thing. But on the other hand, the sound was truly amazing and the idea of using that chunky little remote control to summon up music from pretty much anywhere was  difficult to resist. So I made a deal with myself. If I get work for next week, I’ll buy it. If not, I won’t.

I checked my emails. Yay! I had work for the following week. A couple of days, anyway. So that evening found me in the Camberley hi-fi store, punching my PIN into the terminal and looking lovingly at the box of music that was about to be mine. I checked with the salesman. “It’s got the manual in there, I take it?” Manuals are a waste of paper, he glumly told me. There’ll be a CD-Rom in the box. I nodded. I prefer manuals. This idea that a manufacturing process involving polycarbonates and aluminium and a reading process that required a £500 computer and a semiconductor laser was somehow better than printing a little booklet was unconvincing.

“And the remote and everything?”

He shook his head. “There’s no remote. The remote is optional.”

That sounded odd. How am I meant to operate it without the remote? He told me it was done via an app on my iPhone, iPad, Android phone or a desktop interface. All very well for me, as I’m never far from my iPad. But Mrs Bravenewmalden doesn’t have any of those things. Well, she’s got a PC but there was no way she, or anyone else for that matter, would be prepared to sit down in front of a computer just to skip ‘Octopus’s Garden’.

“How  much extra is the remote control?”

What the salesman said next brought to a sudden end my brief flirtation with Sonos. “£280.” My jaw made a rich, room-filling sound as it crashed to the floor. No, that wasn’t a mistake. The remote represented 45% of the total cost of the system.

“So, that’s two motorcycles.Thank you sir. Now I suppose you’ll be wanting some handlebars, yes?”

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29/03/2012 · 7:24 pm

A sunny lunchtime in the park

“Ooo, this is nice. Where shall we sit?”

“There’s loads of space! How about over there, by that man?”

“The one on his own, reading the paper?”

“Yes. Come on.”

“Or we could sit away from the man. Over there, say? There’s more space there.”

“It must be nice where he is though, musn’t it? Otherwise he wouldn’t be sitting there, would he?”

“True. Come on then. ’Ere, what we gonna talk about?”

“I reckon general stuff. This and that, you know.”

“What, like ‘so he turned round and said, and I turned round and said’, and all that?”

“What did he say?”

“Who?”

“The geezer. He turned round and said something.”

“There weren’t no geezer. I’m just saying, we could talk like that when we sit next to the bloke over there.”

“Oh. Right. And I’ve got loads of funny things to look at on my phone. They’re hilarious.  ‘Ere, who’s got the dinner?”

“Well I’ve got the coke so you must have the crisps.”

“This is lovely, innit. ‘Ere, that man don’t look too happy, does he?”

“Probably just read summit bad in the paper.”

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21/02/2012 · 10:52 am

A rubbish idea?

Driving down the M1 recently I saw the following message on one of those giant dot matrix signs:

BIN YOUR RUBBISH
OTHER PEOPLE DO

Having precious little else to do, I thought about that for a while. The wording of it. (Not, for once, the punctuation or clumsiness of the language.) Normally, an anti-littering message will be along the lines of PLEASE TAKE YOUR LITTER HOME WITH YOU or simply NO LITTERING. This particular sign appeared to be using basic psychology to persuade people not to chuck litter out of their windows. Perhaps it was an example of the nudge theory we’ve been hearing about.

Will it work, though? Would the thought that you’re in a shameful minority encourage you not to litter? On the one hand, we like to belong and to conform to certain behaviours. On the other, some of us are utter twats and will remain that way no matter what we read on road signs.

Blogger Pete Faint is strongly of the opinion that the signs won’t work. But I’m hoping they have a positive effect, because the motorway and A-road verges that I’ve looked at during traffic delays are in a terrible state. It’s not all the fault of drivers. Lots of ripped plastic sheeting seems to have ended up on roadsides from nearby farms. Crop farmers use huge quantities of the stuff to wrap their bales of hay or corn or whatever, and some of it gets blown away to festoon trees and hedgerows for miles around. But mostly it’s fast food packaging, magazines, sweet wrappers and drinks bottles, right up to bigger stuff like furniture and pallets. Plus puppies in sacks.

In any case, how would anyone know if it’s worked or not? We’d only know if they did a split test. Signs would go up along one motorway that’s just been cleared of all litter and along another one that hasn’t. After a year, you look at the results. Instinct tells me that the Highways Agency doesn’t think like that, though. I could be wrong. Incidentally, this guy had a novel approach.

The ‘litter creates jobs’ argument

I was coming home on the Tube with a colleague once when I noticed him drop his copy of Metro on the floor of the carriage. I pointed out that he’d dropped it, and he responded that it was OK, he’d finished reading it. I tried to convince him that he was littering, but his opinion was that dropping Metros was acceptable because “they have people at the end of the line who are paid to pick them up.” He must have thought I’d find this difficult to believe because he added  “I know because I’ve seen them.”

It almost sounded like he’d made some sort of point. Without all those Metros to pick up (along with all the paid-for newspapers that are now being left behind on public transport, since the coming of Metro has conferred legitimacy on the dropping of just about anything), the newspaper picker-uppers wouldn’t have a job to do. Well, not THAT job. But using that argument, it would surely be better from an employment perspective if we were all to commit more crimes (extra police and judiciary) and cause more collisions (extra jobs in manufacturing, insurance and auto repair).

The other point to bear in mind, and I think it’s a valid one, is that I hate Metro. Especially its laughable claim to be ‘apolitical’.

Anyway, what do you think? About the motorway signs? Think they might stand a chance? I’m itching to hear your opinion.

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01/01/2012 · 5:29 pm

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,500 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

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13/12/2011 · 1:14 pm

This is one weird way to buy a phone

A 'carphone' 'warehouse'.

My iPhone 3G has been getting very slow recently. It has to think about every action, much like a sluggish PC. Installing the latest operating system didn’t help. In fact I think that was a ruse by Apple to get all iPhone 3 users to upgrade to the latest model. And it worked. That’s why, a few weeks ago,  I found myself stepping into the local Carphone Warehouse.

The last time I was there was to buy my current iPhone and to switch networks from T-Mobile to O2. I remember the process being very quick and simple, leaving the store after around an hour clutching my new phone. The phone was great, the network less so. From Canary Wharf to Soho to Clapham Junction, there seemed to be vast swathes of London where the signal was weak or intermittent and where the 3G network may as well not have existed.

Hopefully, the combination of a new phone and a new network would provide me with the service I sort of expect for £35 a month.

It didn’t start well. Vodafone wanted to see various documents so that they could carry out a credit check. I had my driver’s licence and credit cards and business cards, but they were never going to be enough. The Carphone Warehouse sales guy said I’d need to bring in a bank statement or utility bill. For reasons of expediency,  I could email them.

So I went home, scanned in my driver’s licence and a bank statement and emailed them to the guy at the address he’d given me. The following weekend I returned to the store, looking forward to start playing with my new phone. You know what’s coming, don’t you?

“Vodafone have mislaid the documents I sent,” said the assistant. Apparently he’d received my email, printed the attachments, faxed them to Vodafone who’d promptly lost them. (I’m writing this in 2011, by the way, just in case seeing the word ‘fax’ makes you think that this is a blog from 1998.)

Thing is, I don’t think that straight when I’m cross. Otherwise I’d have asked him why he didn’t email the documents himself. Why he’d used a fax machine. Why, when he learned they’d gone missing, he didn’t simply send them again. Why he didn’t warn me against making a futile trip back to the shop. And why he gave me his hotmail address rather than a ‘guy@carphonewarehouse’ email address.

Instead, I made noises about hoping to get a better deal on the rental or the upfront cost as some sort of recompense for all the inconvenience I’d endured, and said I’d return the following week. My third visit.

This time, I rang the store before making the schlepp into Kingston. Just to be certain. That was the idea, anyway. In the event it was an utterly pointless precaution as I never managed to get through. My call was important to them, a recorded announcement kept assuring me, though clearly not so important that it would actually be answered. So I got on my bike and headed into K-town.

The store was surprisingly devoid of customers. The staff were milling about, chatting to one another. No sign of my guy. The manager was there, though, and he told me that the person I’d been dealing with had the day off.

“Perhaps you can help me, then.”

“Well, no, not really,” explained the manager. “You’ve been dealing with him. I don’t know anything about it. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Actually, I think ‘never’ works better for me.”

I must admit there was a swear before I walked out of the shop. But like I say, there were hardly any customers there to be offended.

So there we have it. A company engaged in the business of communications not answering phone calls. Not liaising with one another. Using fax machines. Encouraging their staff to give out personal email addresses. And one of Britain’s largest companies asking for private data to be transmitted via one of the most public platforms in existence.

I’ve packed letters off to both companies saying that they will be held jointly responsible if I become a victim of identity theft and I’ve also alerted the Information Commissioner’s Office. I’ve written this ranty blog. But I still don’t have a new phone, and now I’m not sure what to do  next.

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05/12/2011 · 1:28 pm

Bobby’s drawers

Had he not died, David Ogilvy would probably be the only person to have worked at Ogilvy & Mather longer than Bobby Norris. Originally an art director, Bobby worked with everyone from Fay Weldon to Tony Hancock and whose throwaway lunchtime comment provided the strapline for the long-lasting ‘Unzip a Banana’ campaign.  He should have retired years ago but Bobby, 75, insists on turning up for work two or three days a week in Ogilvy’s Redworks studio. And his colleagues should be grateful that he does, because Bobby is the agency’s unofficial quartermaster.

Say “Got a stapler, Bobby?” and Bobby’s likely to respond with “Standard, electric, long reach or booklet?”*

Here’s a look at what’s in Bobby’s drawers:

Robbie’s top drawer

Robbie’s middle drawer

Robbie’s bottom drawer

And here’s a look at what’s inside a freelancer’s drawer:

* No skin staplers, though. If you’re undertaking a bowel resection during colorectal surgery, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Edit: Bobby Norris died in 2014. Campaign magazine carried a brief obituary.

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27/10/2011 · 11:58 am

Manchester ‘lippy kids’ rocket triumph

The successful launch

A group of youths from a Moss Side housing estate have made history by building a working rocket after one of them heard rock group Elbow’s stirring paean to the country’s disaffected young.

“It came on the radio and something about the words made me think,” said Troy Harding, 22. “I nicked the single and played it to me mates on the corner and we thought, yeah, why not?”

Troy and his friends Liam, Connor, Ashley and Josh used their extensive knowledge of the local area to beg, borrow and steal the ingredients necessary for the construction of a 2m-long rocket.

“Some of it were easy, like nicking me mam’s sugar and getting hold of fertiliser. The potassium nitrate were a problem, though, and the guy in the corner shop looked at me funny when I asked him for some permanganate salts. But you’d be surprised how easily the sight of a simian stroll can persuade people to hand things over.”

The construction took over two months. “We worked from the moment we woke up right through to six o’clock each evening. That’s over four hours a day,” recounts Josh, 23 and, like the rest of the ‘rocket scientists’, one of the region’s long-term unemployed. “As the rocket took shape I remember thinking these days are right golden.”

The rocket was tested successfully last Friday. A sophisticated guidance system saw it land and explode in the Comet car park, a diversionary tactic that allowed the boys to strip the shelves of iPads, Sony PSPs and Nintendo 3DSs.

“Makes a change from stealing booze and hour-long kisses,” added Troy. “If I see that Guy Garvey, I’ll shake him by the hand.”

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12/10/2011 · 4:55 pm

Sort-of integrated campaigns

Have you seen this ad recently? You probably have. It’s everywhere right now. In the press and on 6-sheet and cross-track posters. Maybe other places too. In the ads, a woman or occasionally a man has been handed a parking ticket from a traffic warden. But instead of being cross about it, the motorist is happy. The traffic warden looks happy, too. Everyone’s happy.

In another execution, the happy motorist is shown with the ticket in one hand and talking into a phone that’s held in her other hand. There are smiles all round.

The phone bit made some sort of sense, in as much as it was an ad for a phone company. An ad for a phone company featuring someone using a phone wouldn’t be a bolt from the blue; a crazy juxtaposition making all your cognitives go into dissonance overload.

But it didn’t help me make any more sense out of the overall concept. And in any case, what could she be saying into the phone?

“You’ll never guess what happened, Mum! I got a parking ticket! Yes, another one! Well, they say good things happen in threes!”

According to the headline, there are ‘no nasty surprises with You Fix’. Did that make things clearer for me? A bit, maybe. Perhaps the motorists haven’t really been given tickets. Perhaps, in some inverted adland version of reality, the motorists are actually giving parking tickets to the traffic wardens. Fuck knows. Despite the posters and ads being all over the place, I soon decided not to bother trying to decipher them. It’s probably to do with some clever network joke that people in my demographic wouldn’t get.

I mentioned this to a friend the other day and he told me what the campaign’s all about. Apparently,it’s based around a TV commercial in which an actor dressed as a traffic warden gives fake parking tickets to other actors dressed as motorists. The drivers pretend to be upset, then pretend to be overjoyed when the ‘parking ticket’ turns out to be a £10 note. No nasty surprises. See?

It’s quite a good idea, if a tad derivative (although lifting stuff is officially Not A Crime Any More in advertising). Showing the absence of something is always a tricky brief to crack.

No, it’s not the idea that irks me about this, or the creative strategy. It’s the assumption that everyone who sees the posters or print ads will have seen the TV ad and will thus get the joke.

Doesn’t that strike you as odd? Not everyone watches Emmerdale or X-Factor. To make doing so a precondition of understanding your ad campaign seems, well, a bit wasteful.

It’s not a one-off, either. I was recording a radio commercial recently and questioned whether the call to action – which involved people texting a certain word to a particular number – was being said with enough clarity by the voiceover. The client, who shall remain nameless, said it wouldn’t matter if some people couldn’t hear it. They’d probably be able to read it on one of the posters.

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14/09/2011 · 11:13 am

A reflection on service, PC World style

I found myself watching an old sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus on YouTube the other day. Like a lot of Python’s work, the burglary sketch hasn’t dated particularly well, particularly for those sophisticated consumers who like their comedy edgy, dark and cruel.

But I have simple tastes and sometimes silly voices does it for me humour wise.

Although routinely described as zany, madcap and surreal at the time of its original transmission, it’s possible to detect a clear satirical streak in much of the Python’s work. The target? Basically, anyone the British public was forced to deal with in order to live their lives.

The gas man sketch was typical (while also being a barbed comment on union demarcation in the 60s and 70s), but the cheese shop sketch, buying a bed, the argument clinic and not least the dead parrot sketch were all riffs on the appalling service Britons endured as part of their day-to-day lives.

Since then, of course, British companies, utilities and local authorities have discovered the value of service. A great number of them proclaim themselves to be ‘customer centric’ organisations.

‘We put the needs of the customer at the forefront of everything we do’, they say. They have conferences about improving and enhancing their ‘service offering’, and run intensive courses for their staff aimed at discouraging them from treating customers with thinly-veiled contempt.

The manager at my local PC World was absent on the day of the course, or slept through it. She missed the conference, too, and never got to read the mission statement.

Part of my mission statement reads ‘try and avoid places like PC World’, but on this occasion I had no choice. I’d just bought £60 worth of kit and paid by card when I remembered that the pay station in the car park where I’d left the car wouldn’t accept £20 notes. So I asked the sales assistant if she could change a £20 note for me. She asked me to repeat the question. So I did, this time holding the note for her to see it.

I dd this so that she wouldn’t think I was the kind of weirdo who asks for change but doesn’t come equipped with the appropriate currency. Maybe such weirdos exist; I don’t know. But I also did it because I reasoned that the combination of the repeated question together with visual stimulii would enable her to understand the meaning of what I was saying, and thus formulate a response. It works with children.

“I don’t know, I’ll have to get the manageress.”

Oh. And off she went. Manageress, eh? Not that much of a PC world, then.

The assistant said a few words to an older lady who looked up, then turned to look directly at me. She walked over without acknowledging or saying anything to the shop assistant, who stood back and watched.

“Yes?”

No “Hi, how can I help?” or “Sorry, what was it you were after?” Not even a smile. Just deep suspicion, tinged no doubt with resentment that a customer had interrupted whatever it was that she was doing.

This time I explained why I wanted the change. Perhaps the implication that I’d been supporting the local economy would help my cause. I held up the banknote, then showed that I was a bona fide customer by also displaying my purchase. But somehow I knew what the answer would be.

“No, I can’t do that.”

“I don’t understand, is it technically difficult?”

“It’s not difficult to do it”, she said. “I just won’t.”

And that was that. What I should have done, of course, was get an immediate refund. Perhaps demand the refund in £10 notes. What I wanted to do was slap her, quite hard, across the face. But then I’d have had to contend with the fit-looking security guard – sorry, guardess – stationed at the door.

So instead I started mentally drafting this blog and anticipating the relish of knowing that it would be read by over a billion people.*

 

 

 

*Actual figure may vary.

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08/09/2011 · 2:30 pm

You want hard-working advertising words. That’s why we’ve identified two more.

I say ‘we’, because I wasn’t alone in spotting this comparatively recent trend. The estimable Tom Albrighton over on ABC Copywriting did all the heavy lifting back in May. Quick on his feet, that Tom. All I’m bringing to the table is a few more examples.

I’m talking about the ubiquity of the two words ‘that’s why’ in advertising copy. As Tom says, it follows the formula:

At A, we know how important B is. That’s why we C, which gives you D.

Or: You know this? That’s why we have this

It’s cropping up everywhere. It’s like every copywriter in town has been on the same course. Which would be strange, because copywriters don’t go on courses.

Here’s a few examples I’ve half-heartedly collected over the past two weeks. There are loads more out there.

'Find healthy'? Let's not go there.

One ad. Three that's-whys.

Oh, so that's why!

This is a bit of a non-sequitur, in my opinion.

Basically, we wanted to increase profits and hurt the competition. That's why we were compelled to make our products look and sound desirable. Otherwise we'd have just thrown together the first thing our designers came up with.

It's Sidney again, still looking for healthy. Hang on, wasn't he 88 in the previous ad? Time flies when you get old. (That's why you should try and enjoy every day as if it were your last.)

Cheerio!

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