Bloody students

“I don’t like any of your ideas,” I told a roomful of advertising students on Monday.

“And I certainly wouldn’t show any of them to a client.”

Oh yes, I’m a tough macho no-nonsense badass from the planet Tellitlikeitis.

Didn’t manage to make any of them cry though. Just sulk. Which, since they were teenagers, was hardly much of an achievement.

Let me explain: agency founder Nick Thomas and I, in our role as creative gurus, help out with the local university’s advertising degree (him more than me).

And we’d given the new batch of students a charity brief to crack – a live brief we’re working on for an integrated campaign across TV, press and online.

It was a tough brief, in truth. And the students had made a good attempt at it, with some interesting, imaginative stuff that was nicely integrated, neatly scamped and very confidently presented (though often really badly spelled).

But I didn’t think any of their ideas were right because they’d all gone down the route of ‘borrowed interest’.

Which means that instead of work featuring human beings in need of support from the charity, I got storyboards featuring squirrels. Rugby players. Magic bottles of cure-all medicine. Coin-operated satnavs. Flocks of birds in synchronised flight. And Monopoly.

Not one of them had portrayed the world, the cause or the people as they really were.

Borrowed interest can work well, of course – when your audience has no idea what your product or service is, or its benefits, an analogy can be a useful way to show them "Our X which you don’t know is like this Y which you do know".

But clumsily done (as it so often is), borrowed interest suggests that, “We couldn’t find anything interesting to say about our own product / service, so we thought we’d show you this instead.”

For an example of borrowed interest in action, there’s the new Kronenbourg TV ad.

They’ve got ol’ Lemmy Motorhead at the bar singing The Ace of Spades in a slow, ballady re-imagining. With the endline ‘Slow the pace’.

Seems more like a concept for Guinness (who’ve made a virtue of the slowness it takes to pour their pint). Maybe Guinness turned the idea down, so they sold it to Kronenbourg instead.

Also seems like a strange shift in positioning for French fizzy lager. Are the French known for ‘slowing the pace’? Apart from when they’re on strike, obviously?

But, regardless of whether it’s good brand positioning, this kind of borrowed interest seems to work ok for a lager. There’s only so much you can go on about its ingredients after all. And very little else you can say, what with the alcohol advertising rules being what they are.

But generally, if someone shows you a concept that’s based on borrowed interest, ask yourself if that’s really the best way to bring the proposition to life. Or if actually, we should just dig a bit deeper and find what’s compelling in your actual product / service.

Anyway, students: not all of them are sulky of course. In fact, we’ve just taken on a graduate team from the university as trainee copywriter and art director. I’ll be giving them the ‘borrowed interest’ sermon on day one.

In my macho badass way, obviously.

What I Did On My Holidays

 

“I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. Never again.”

That joke courtesy of Tim Vine. The photo, however, is all mine – taken during my recent holiday in Mexico, where, taking my role as The Brit Abroad seriously, I managed to badly burn myself on the first day.

To the point where some of the American tourists would see me and exclaim “Ooh, red!” out loud. (This actually happened several times.) And now, back at home, I’m now peeling so much it’s like waking up in a bed of desiccated coconut.

Great place, mind – beaches (as you can see), history, weather, hotel and people all fabulous.

In fact I can only find two things to gripe about. Both of which I can (just about) contrive to link with fundraising.

Firstly: copy that over-promises. I remember liking Tesco’s ‘Every little helps’ line when I first saw it because it was nicely humble, not falsely grandiose.

Unlike the menu of my in-flight meal. Which described the roast potatoes as ‘homemade’. Come on. Aeroplane food that’s been made in somebody’s home? Reeeeeeeally? Next you’ll be claiming that the ‘Champagne’ is… Champagne.

I get stuff like that from charities all the time: I donate a fiver and they tell me what a superhero I am, saving thousands of lives. No. I’m really not. A fiver? I’m a miser.

Second: Nonstop pleas for ‘feedback’. I swear, the world has gone feedback mad. Some days it’s hard to do anything without being asked to comprehensively survey your experience afterwards.

At the resort, whichever of the 10 restaurants you went to, your after-dinner coffee was accompanied by a portable touchscreen computer housed in a wooden box.

And you were asked to use it to rate your meal. About 50 multiple choice questions. No exaggeration: 50. Covering things like the crockery, the lighting, the choice of wines, the waiter’s knowledge of the wines, the cut of his trousers, the width of his smile.

The first night it was a bit surreal. By the third night it was a bloody chore. By the fourth we were just leaving the tip on the table and running for it when no-one was looking, before the feedback computer arrived.

Being a proper curmudgeon, I can subdivide this feedback gripe:

1. Why should I? I’ve paid for the service, with money. I shouldn’t have to pay you with my time too, filling out a questionnaire of bizarrely-chosen, strangely-phrased questions. Not unless you’re giving me a 20% discount.

2. What are you really going to do with my feedback? Sod all, I’m guessing. If I rate the lighting as ‘poor’, are you really going to buy bigger table candles?

In fundraising there’s the same challenge: it’s all very well running a survey and asking lots of questions, but I can’t remember the last time a charity told me the results afterwards, or what they were going to do as a consequence of the feedback they’d gathered.

Yet if they did, I’d feel a lot closer to the cause. A lot more like I really was part of the charity, rather than just a cash machine.

3. Strange as it may sound, you can’t always discover what customers want by asking them. They often don’t know. For example, do you think that’s how Apple came up with the iPhone? They asked – and thousands of people said, “What I want is a phone without any buttons, so it’s harder to type. One that looks good, even if it’s at the expense of phone signal. Preferably one I can play ‘Angry Birds’ on”?

No, of course not. People didn’t know that was what they wanted until Apple came up with it. But now, every phone manufacturer in the world has a touchscreen phone.

Similarly in fundraising – you won’t come up with anything properly game-changing by simply asking your audience to feedback on what’s gone before. As the saying goes, “You can’t leap a chasm in two jumps”.

Anyway: Mexico ­– if you’ve never been, I recommend it. In fact, I’d give it an ‘excellent’ on the feedback form.