by Peter Mayle
The product thinks he is a good public speaker; more that than, he considers himself an orator, a master of the inspirational speech, capable of setting his audience alight on any subject from the threats posed to the nation’s health by contaminated hamburgers to creeping development around Tuxedo Park. Give him any burning issue and he will expound on it with barely a pause for breath, at great length.
The difficulty here is that the rhetoric, when listened to with the critical ear of the image doctor, is a matted tangle of circumlocution, hedging, and repetition, and while repetition is often desirable in advertising, the other two mannerisms certainly aren’t. Brevity and clarity are what we’re after, something that will fit into a thirty-second spot or onto a poster, but years of waffling can’t be eradicated overnight. In any case, as the product keeps saying, the issues here are too complicated to be explained in two or three glib sentences.
Well, the rascal’s going to have to learn, because we in the advertising business know how difficult it is to get one simple thought into the public skull, let alone a whole mass of qualifications and escape clauses. The habits of a political lifetime will have to be modified. Keep it clear and keep it short.
Content
But keep what clear? Of all the available topics, there are always a few favorites that can be guaranteed vote-getters if a popular point of view can be memorably expressed, if you can take it and make it your own. This is the core of the campaign—what the product stands for—and to make sure there aren’t any hasty and ill-judged mistakes, it is usually necessary to send an expedition to rummage down among the grassroots and commune with the anonymous but influential consultant who is known as the man in the street.
He is regarded with mixed feelings by the advertising business because of his unpredictable nature. He has been known to miss the point of some damn clever campaigns, claiming that he doesn’t know what they’re talking about. He is suspected of harboring a certain mistrust of advertising, which he sometimes feels is trying to persuade him to buy something he doesn’t want, and yet—according to him—he’s far too wily to be influenced by it. The other mugs may fall for it but not him.
Nevertheless, he is flattered to be consulted, and once in a while he will be worth his weight in questionnaires because he will occasionally give his blessing to an advertising proposition. And when he does, the agency wheels him in as the definitive salesman. The man in the street thinks it’s great! Who are we to argue with the voice of the public?
In the case of political advertising, there is also what might be called in inbuilt negative factor that must be taken into account when analyzing research: If anything, the man in the street distrusts politicians even more than he distrusts advertising. But where he can cast his vote for one or none of a dozen or more brands of margarine, his voting choice here is limited to two or three possibilities, and civic duty requires him to vote for one of them. So vote he does, with enthusiasm or indifference, in a very restricted field.
The arguments against political advertising are usually confined to discussions about the oversimplification of an enormously complicated subject—what I would do if I was running the country—and there is no doubt that advertising has helped some mediocre men and women to squeak into office because of their ability to look sincere and intelligent for a few minutes in front of the cameras. A plausible fool has a greater chance of being elected than a more worthy candidate who is not as accomplished at self-presentation. But politics have probably always been like that; modern methods just make it more apparent.
It’s easy enough to see why politicians are attracted to agencies, and it’s understandable that some agency people are attracted, ideologically or for the base hope of future reward, to politicians. For most of the people in the agency, however, working on a political account is something of a trial. Every day is a crisis. The work has to be done instantly, and is changed constantly in response to polls or the latest pronouncements of competitors. The client is even more of an egomaniac than the chairman of Tissues International. And there is the ticklish question of individual political beliefs. It is inconceivable that every member of the agency would vote the same way in an election; and yet, unless a separate group of volunteers is set up, some people will find themselves working for a candidate they’d rather see deported than elected.
But for the top man, the ace communicator with his vital role to play in forging the nation’s destiny, it is sheer heaven. There he is, in the studio with the candidate, in the radio car with the candidate, up and down the country and in and out of Westminster or Washington with the candidate, maybe even photographed for the national press with (or three paces behind) the candidate. Peripheral fame! It was never like this with the Condom Marketing Board, and it’s heady, addictive stuff.
That side of it is rarely admitted. The official reasons for taking on a politician as a client are (for the press release) a conviction that the country would be a better place if the candidate was elected and (for the board meeting) the prospect of patronage if the campaign is successful. The agency that helps a politician into high office is very well placed when it comes to pitching for government business.
There is only one juicier plum for the image doctor, but unfortunately there is nothing much he can do about it in the way of speculative presentations or exploratory lunches. All he can hope for is that one day, one wonderful day, the client will realize that something needs to be done and that he is the man to do it. And when the call comes, as it might quite easily do, we will be able to see the traces of burned rubber all the way from the agency to the Buckingham Palace car park.
The Dance of the Leviathans
Short of a major war or an international recession of epic proportions, it seems that nothing can stop the forces of marketing from making the world a more convenient place to shop. The global village will have its global village supermarket, stocked with comfortingly familiar names, and one of the horrors of being abroad—having to adapt to the local toilet paper—will be completely eradicated. Our preferred paper (strong, absorbent, and three times softer than other leading brands) will be there on the shelf to welcome us, no matter where we roam.
Perhaps we have not quite reached that high point of civilization yet, but we will. There is an inevitability about the future that is plain to see after the progress that has been made during the past twenty years.
The giant clients will continue to root around in the marketing undergrowth of less-developed countries, setting up outposts and squashing or gobbling up small local competitors. And marching with them every step of the way will be the advertising conglomerates, taking over or merging with any agencies that have managed to remain independent, dousing them with money and shares until they can resist no longer.
Meanwhile, the international media organizations will carry on planting their satellites in space and their dishes on earth so that it will be technically possible to watch those patron saints of hygiene, the mad housewives from Cincinnati, comparing their stained garments anywhere in the world. For more literate consumers, the coverage of lifestyle magazines will expand, and Architectural Digest shall cover the earth.
Research companies will have the world’s likes and dislikes (graded on a scale of one to ten) stored in their computers so that statistical-probability curves can be produced instantly for anything from weaning Eskimos off blubber and onto fish sticks to the sales potential of high-fiber breakfast cereals in China.
The staples of life—soluble aspirin, carbonated drinks, polyunsaturated spreads, and tasty deep-frozen TV dinners—will be available everywhere. It will be a dream come true, globalization in full flower.
It is not unreasonable to assume that within the next two decades the advertising business will no longer be made up of hundreds of agencies chasing thousands of clients. After consolidating and rationalizing, there may be as few as twenty agency groups, billion-dollar leviathans circling each other as they look for an opportunity to lumber in and
steal one of the two hundred or so worthwhile global accounts. This situation will produce results that a few die-hard reactionaries might find offensive, but progress is never without its critics.
It is obvious that national characteristics will have to be modified if they don’t happen to fit in with the grand design. For instance, the French housewife’s ridiculously inefficient habit of buying fresh food every day from small shops will have to go. (In fact, it’s already going. In 1989, for the first time, supermarkets accounted for just over 50 percent of food sales in France.) And that is only one of hundreds of awkward little local quirks that have made the global village such an untidy, fragmented market in the past. With determination and perseverance, most of them can be dealt with. It’s just a matter of educating the consumer.
Unfortunately, there is one persistent inconvenience that may take a generation or more to get rid of, and that is the irritating problem of different languages. In an ideal marketing world, we would all speak globalese, and early examples of this media-efficient dialect can be seen gracing the walls of international airports and the pages of in-flight magazines. It is recognizable—barely, in some cases—as English, and it is based on the lowest common denominator principle of communication, the kind of message that a gifted six-year-old copywriter might dash off in between watching videos.
The Japanese, ingenious as ever, have been credited with pioneering the most distinctive style of mangled English, but other multinational marketers and their agencies have been catching up fast. It is not, as you might think, arrived at by illiteracy or accident, and if we visit the headquarters of a giant client, we can see how globalese is created.
Allied Biscuits (now renamed Global Biscuits) has markets throughout the world, and the board has been advised by the agency to consider the advantages of basing its advertising on a single theme. The agency has produced statistics showing that consumers in general, and biscuit eaters in particular, are traveling more and more. Habitual biscuit eaters (the heavy users) are likely to eat biscuits on their travels. These are the opinion formers in the biscuit hierarchy, and if they can be converted into brand-loyal opinion formers, they will convert others.
How do we reach them? There is a great deal of discussion about the cumulative international impact of one consistent message. It is a promotionally sound theory and—here’s one for the financial director—very cost-effective, since much of the basic material can be centrally produced and massive economies of scale (what a fabulous phrase) can be achieved. Also, a single worldwide campaign is just what we need to establish the product as an international biscuit, with all the inherent glamour and excitement associated with international products.
The board nods. It makes marketing sense. This is where the future of Global Biscuits lies. Rather than fritter away the world advertising budget on dozens of buckshot campaigns in dozens of languages sprinkled across dozens of countries, how much more… well, impactful… it will be to concentrate every resource behind one giant promotional thrust, a powerful single-language promise, irresistible to biscuit lovers everywhere.
Not all biscuit lovers, of course, are fluent in English. But 58 percent of Global Biscuits’ sales are in North America and other English-speaking countries, and most Europeans have a smattering of English. The rest of the world will soon get the hang of it if they see it often enough. There is almost a case here for an extra few million to be added to the budget, for educational purposes.
English it shall be, then, although we can’t afford to get too complicated. Brilliant simplicity is the thing, and so the agency is sent away to ruminate and give birth to something brilliantly simple.
The constraints on the creative department are considerable. Words of more than two syllables (with the exception of the magic word international) should be avoided. No puns or any wordplay of the kind that might puzzle a biscuit eater from Bologna or Dubai. No local references. No testimonials from local celebrities (the big Hollywood stars are acceptable, but it’s doubtful if we could get Sylvester Stallone to nibble biscuits). Nothing that might upset vocal minority groups. Nothing with old people, unless they are very picturesque. Nothing that demands a sense of humor to be appreciated. Nothing too subtle.
Let’s see now. Things Go Better with Global Biscuits? The Right Biscuit? The World’s Favorite Biscuit? The Best Biscuit Money Can Buy? Top Leader Biscuit for the Modern Man? The Biscuit of the Future? The Biscuit Lover’s Biscuit? The International Passport to Biscuit Pleasure?
Sadly, these jewels have already been claimed, which is a pity, since any of them could be used just as easily for biscuits as for soft drinks, liquor, airlines, or cigarettes. They all have that marvelously anodyne boastfulness that would have been perfect for our purposes. Ah well.
The search continues for the universally acceptable, universally comprehensible, universally persuasive phrase until something suitably harmless and all-embracing has been cobbled together, the millions can be unleashed, and globalese can take another step forward.
We might ask ourselves why the cream of the world’s copywriting talent should be content to spend weeks or months laboring in a verbal kindergarten, but their willingness to do so is only part of the global agency’s relationship with its global clients. Now that budgets are measured in tens of millions, the stakes are far too high to permit any more of that old-fashioned nonsense that happened in the cottage-industry days when agencies thought of themselves as equal working partners.
In the new mammoth agencies, there may be the outward appearance of power that comes from size, but in daily contact with their mammoth clients they must be careful not to forget their place. A certain suppleness is necessary, which, in anatomical terms, can be described as the posture of the bended knee.
This has always existed in advertising, and some packaged goods and automotive clients have been notorious for years because of their insistence on the master/slave relationship. With the arrogance of people in charge of large amounts of someone else’s money, they have been known to reduce entire agencies to nervous wrecks. It used to be a malady confined to relatively few agencies and their famously autocratic clients, and it was regarded with horror and disbelief by the rest of the business. But in this tough new world where the loss of one global account means the loss of untold millions of income, we are likely to see the posture of the bended knee reaching epidemic levels.
Visible results of the deep knee bend invariably show up in the advertising. Look behind any vainglorious and clumsy campaign and you will usually find a dictator in charge of the budget. (Very occasionally this can produce brilliant advertising, but brilliant dictators were always rare, and globalization will probably make them extinct.) A more polished but equally dreary piece of advertising—the marketing strategy set to music—is normally the product of committee work, and committees can be every bit as daft and bullying as dictators.
Why do clients like this bother with agencies? Why keep the dog if you intend to do all the yapping yourself? Because it’s less expensive. You don’t have to pay for those acres of office space, and you can fire agencies without any problems of redundancy compensation. And, as a recreational bonus, you can kick agencies around with complete impunity. They won’t kick back, and they’re never likely to be in a position to affect your career.
If this unpleasant development in client/agency relationships should become increasingly widespread, and there is no obvious reason why it shouldn’t, we will see some changes not just in the standards of advertising around the world but in the type of person who wants to work in the business.
Historically, advertising has attracted individualists, entrepreneurs, and talented misfits. They came to advertising partly because it offered larger and faster rewards than other occupations, but mainly because it was more fun than other occupations, and they felt at home in it. Informal, unpredictable, and dependent on individual skills and creativity, it matched their personalities. It was an interesting and lucrative way of living by
your wits.
But as the business becomes more structured, more respectable, more governed by money and corporate jockeying than by ideas, so it will lose its appeal for the individualist. A different animal will inhabit agency offices: The new advertising man, brought up on globalization and the need to maintain dividends and share prices, will take over. He will be good at meetings, adroit at politics, prudent, measured, solid, reliable—a carbon copy of his counterpart at Global Biscuits. And when that happens, working in advertising will be exactly like working in any other international business peddling an international commodity.
A ghastly prospect indeed, and it is enough to make the mythical young man with a bright idea think twice about trying to persuade a susceptible industrialist to give him a chance. And yet, human nature being relentlessly optimistic, it’s just possible that we haven’t quite reached the stage when advertising can be thrown into the same gray pit as insurance or the civil service. Perhaps all is not lost….
Somewhere in Tribeca, three young men are having lunch. Bored and frustrated with their jobs in mammoth agencies, they are planning to break away and start their own tiny but highly creative enterprise. Creativity has been in hibernation for so long that it could be awakened and sold as something new, something a brand manager has never seen in his working life.
There is reason to believe that one or two minor pieces of business, just enough to keep the new enterprise afloat, could be persuaded by a good-enough pitch to leave the mammoth and join the minnow. A friendly bank manager has been lined up. The future looks rosy. Another bottle of wine is ordered.
There is only one slight problem. Should the new agency be called Me, You & Him? You, Him & Me? Him, Me & You? It’s nothing to fall out over (not yet, anyway), but we all know what happens to the last name on the list.
About the Author
