Throw in the towel

Are you proud of yourself?

Proud of what you do for a living?

Not me. I’m feeling pretty ashamed of myself today. Let me tell you why.

Firstly, what do I do for a living? Well, it depends who’s asking.

An art director I used to work with would just tell people, “I work in an office.” He couldn’t be bothered trying to explain the ephemeral nature of how he earned his moolah.

And I can understand that: I was born in North Yorkshire, son of a farmer’s son. From a background of people who worked for a living, basically. And fought in wars.

One of their nieces is a policewoman. They’re very proud of her, understandably. But me? I could no more make them proud of what I do for a living than I could explain traffic jams to a Maldivian. It just doesn’t make any sense to them.

So, if I’m feeling self-deprecating, I might tell people “I write junk mail”. Which, since I don’t do that much writing any more, and we work in a much wider range of media than mail, isn’t particularly true. In fact the ‘junk’ bit isn’t true at all. Everything we create is excellent. I’m sure the people I write to put velvet cushions under their letterboxes, to cosset my falling post.

If I want to seem arty / pretentious I might say, “I’m the creative director of an advertising and marketing agency”.

And if I’m trying to impress a chickpea warrior, I might say “I help raise thousands of pounds for some of the UK’s biggest and best-known charities”.

So, three different things I can say to feel proud of what I do for a living. With “I work in an office” as a useful back-up if I get a blank stare.

However. Sometimes other people make it impossible for me to feel proud of what I do. By association, they make me feel grubby and shameful.

The people behind the ‘Feed my people’ junk mail for example. Which really is junk.

A copywriter at our place has received, in subsequent mailpacks of exploitative, manipulative, haranguing copy: a pair of socks, two rosary bracelets, a travel clock, a tea towel, and a pricey rollerball with her name printed on it.

What’s the reason for these gifts, which deduct god knows how much from the money raised?

Well, the tea towel pictured is enclosed “as a sign of hope and a point of contact for you and the struggling people of Africa”.

Yes, nothing says “hope” like a tea towel. Nothing makes me feel closer to the people of Africa than a tea towel.

Actually, the deluge of tat that Lizzie (the copywriter) has been getting purports to come from several different charities. None of which we’ve heard of. And all of which seem have the same Crawley PO Box as a return address.

So I’m not telling people I write direct mail for charities at the moment. If they’d seen the ‘Feed my people’ stuff they might tar me with the same disgusting brush.

No, for a week or two I’ll pretend to be something slightly less shameful. Like an England footballer, perhaps.

Pitch (im)perfect

What’s the best part of your day?

For people in the right job, it’s when they hear that something they’ve been part of has done really, really well.

For people in the wrong job, it’s Friday afternoon, when they're in weekend mode.

And for people far more shallow than you or I, it’s those sunny days when Claudia the receptionist (pictured) turns up to work dressed more for the beach than the office.

The top five best parts of my day are:

5. Having a great creative idea.

4. Doing something that does really, really well.

3. Getting great feedback from a client.

2. Winning an award.

1. Winning a pitch.

So: yes, I do love those precious brainwave moments when, staring at a tough brief and a blank screen, a moment of inspiration strikes and I have The Big Idea.

It’s also great discovering that something you worked on has just smashed a long-standing control.

Being a precious, emotional creative type, a pat on the back or a couple of words of praise are like manna from heaven to me.

And walking onstage to pick up an award while fellow creatives clap sourly is a particularly sweet moment.

But as I say, winning a pitch tops them all.

Why? Well, three reasons:

i. You have to put an incredible amount of work in to a pitch. So if you discover you haven’t won, you know the agency has spent thousands of pounds that it’s never going to recover. And that if you have won, it was all worthwhile.

ii. Pitches are very competitive. So when you win, it feels like a real achievement.

iii. Winning a pitch means you’re going to be working with a new client, often one you’ve always wanted to work with for ages.

As the agency’s creative director, I’m involved with the creative planning / creative strategy, I’m probably involved with coming up with some of the ‘big ideas’, I’m involved with directing the other creative teams working on the pitch, and I’m going to be presenting the creative ideas at the pitch.

That’s quite a lot of work to do for something you’re not being paid for. 

And it’s a lot of hours to find when you already have a busy day job.

So pitch work is often done in the evenings, working til midnight or even beyond. A diet of cold takeaway pizza. Coming in on Sundays.

Realising what you’ve got isn’t quite right and starting again.

Getting tetchy with the rest of the pitch team as you all succumb to stress and fatigue.

Worrying about whether your presentation on the day will do justice to the quality of thinking you’ve put in.

I’m not sure how many hours we spend on a typical pitch. I’m scared to look at our timesheets and find out. Thousands of pounds worth, that’s for sure.

Plus sometimes you need to call in freelancers to help visualise or mock-up the pitch work.

Hundreds of colour printouts, refining the work each time, at 40p a sheet or whatever our fancy printer costs.

And then the travel costs for the whole pitch team to rock up at the client.

Put it all together, and you could be talking about £10,000 worth of presentation. Which you’ve done for free.

We’ve had a couple of pitches recently.

One we won (I won’t be coy, it was for Macmillan). Brilliant cause, great brand and we put a tremendous amount of work into it. And since winning, we’ve discovered that the team there are really smart and ambitious, so the pitch win really has been one of the highlights of the agency year so far.

The other pitch… vanished. As in, every agency pitched, we got really, really great feedback… but then the charity had a change of heart and decided not to do the activity at all.

So in the end, every agency had gone through the enormously time-consuming and expensive pitch process I’ve just described for nothing.

Perhaps that’s why winning a pitch is my number one.

Because losing one like that sure feels number two. 

Be a bit Buddhist, bro

 
Have you ever thought, about a Christian, “Well that’s not very Christian,” about something they did?

No? Just me then.

When I know someone is a proper Christian who believes in God and everything, I expect them to always turn the other cheek / be a good Samaritan / not covet their neighbour’s ox. And I’m disappointed when they turn out to be as craven, selfish and flawed as the rest of us.

I mention this apropos of nothing, except: I work in an agency that specialises in fundraising. For people who work for charities.

And yet it never (particularly) occurs to me to expect everyone around me to be charitable types. Which is rather a shame really – that I don’t expect us to practice what we preach.

Yes, I have a few direct debits to various good causes. But is that being charitable?

Yes, one of the ‘begging letters’ I write will raise many more times the money than most people will donate in their lifetime. But that’s not being charitable either. It’s just being amazingly brilliant at my job.

Sadly I’m not building up to much of an epiphany here.

But I do know this. I shouldn’t do my job as if it’s pure fluke that it happens to be for charities. As if I might just as easily been working for companies flogging fags / booze / child labour-made trainers.

It isn’t, quite literally, good enough.

I’m not saying people who work for charities don’t care about the cause they work for – many do, passionately.

But are we charitable / humanitarian in the wider sense? Are we kind and giving and charitable to one another?

I’m not advocating some happy clappy kibbutz where everyone’s super-nice at the expense of getting things done.

But maybe it’s possible for us to be top-notch gifted professionals without behaving like we’re just working in an office the same as every other. Without treating each other with less thought and consideration than those we’re supporting.

Maybe we can remember that charity begins at home.

Maybe we can remember to be charitable to each other. More than you'd expect from people, say, who work for an insurance company. (They can just concentrate on behaving in a very risk averse way.)

I bet if everyone involved in working for charities was a bit more Dalai Lama about the way they interacted with each other, it’d mean better work.

And you’d get great people, from dozens of other sectors, desperate to join something where they really felt part of something gooood. 

Rather than, as can be the case, part of something bad that just happens to do good.

A little commitment

When my mum was a girl, not many young people had watches.

So they were a bit of a status symbol.

So in the summer, she and her friends would stick a watch paper template around their wrists.

Which would give them a watch tan line – so it looked like you had a watch, you just didn’t happen to be wearing it.

Then watches became more common. Mechanical wind-up watches were replaced by more reliable, less hasslesome quartz watches. Digital watches made the time easier to read and added new functions. Swatch made Swiss movements inexpensive and created fashion watches.

Soon, everyone had a watch.

Now things are going the other way again. Fewer and fewer young people bother with watches. Because all most watches do is tell the time.

And what’s the point of that? Having something that only does one thing? Especially when you’re using your mobile every other second, and that’s got the time on it. As well as the date, stopwatch, alarm clock, calculator, voice recorder, MP3 player, weather, your exact location, photo album, Twitter account, internet access and 50 games on it.

Makes a watch look pretty lame. Like walking around with a separate watch, compass, stopwatch, calculator, dictaphone, GPS tracker, notepad, travel scrabble and so on.

So, things have come full circle in behaviour (young people not wearing watches). But the motivation behind each is completely different.

Looking only at behaviour doesn’t give you the full picture. Yet it’s often all we bother with, since motivation can be harder to work out.

For example, a charity is unlikely to classify someone who gives £10 as ‘high value’. To us, their behaviour has a fairly low value.

Yet they may be a pensioner on a low, fixed income. For whom £10 is a significant sum.

To them £10 is high value, and they’re giving it because they’re very engaged with the cause (and might even leave a legacy if we treat them properly).

Yet because we don’t judge their behaviour to be ‘high value’, there’s a good chance we won’t treat them properly.

Similarly, regular givers – people who give a monthly gift by direct debit – are often referred to in fundraising as ‘committed givers’. We judge their behaviour – this regular, dependable gift, as showing real commitment.

Yet, again, the reverse can be true.

People who sign up to a direct debit never have to make a conscious decision to support you ever again. Their bank automatically sends on the money without involving the donor.

So the donor may be a regular-but-not-very-committed giver.Which might mean we have to worker harder to keep them engaged than someone who makes a cash gift three times a year.

It’s why understanding motivation, not just measuring behaviour, can be so important.

And why people no longer buy watches to tell the time. But to tell you something about them.

Don't go changing

 
Want to know how to win the first round of a game of paper, scissors stone?

Hold a clenched fist out in front of you before the game starts, then put it behind your back as you begin counting. On 3, reveal your hand… still in a fist shape (ie stone).

Most people will be showing scissors. Rock blunts scissors, you win.

Although I have a degree in psychology, I can’t really claim to know why this works more often than not.

My theory, however, is that when you show your opponent your starting position of a fist, they do the same, because they follow your lead as to how the game should start.

Then, of course, they have a clenched fist behind their back, the count goes on and they feel the need to do something. And the most action you can take when your hand is in a fist shape is to change it to scissors.

Which means by ‘doing nothing’ and keeping your hand in a fist, you win.

This need to take action – and by doing so, lose – pervades many areas of life, including fundraising marketing and charity advertising.

Marketing directors change jobs every couple of years, and when they start somewhere new, feel the need to show they’re doing something – taking action – by changing the campaign that’s been running, regardless of how well it’s performed. Rosser Reeves (advertising pioneer and inventor of the TV ad) was once asked by a client what the 47 people working on his account were doing when the campaign hadn’t changed for 12 years.

“Keeping you from changing the ad,” was Rosser’s instant reply.

Nowadays, needless change can occur because of the way some big organisations work. Namely, that some of them insist that about 20 different people across 8 different departments have to approve every piece creative work.

And if you’re given some creative work to sign-off, how do you show that a) you’ve seen it and b) you’re adding value?

By changing something. You literally ‘make your mark’. And 19 other people do exactly the same, creating a ‘designed by committee’ nightmare.

Maybe we should champion the idea that sometimes, the best contribution you can make is to look at something, not find every detail to your own personal taste and still be strong enough to not change it. To leave it as it was intended, so it retains a single, strong voice.

The funny thing is, if you do refrain from making changes the creative team will work harder on your account, knowing more of what they put in will get out.

In 1962, Avis gave DDB their ad account.

The CEO of Avis wanted (and needed) great work to compete with Hertz, but they only had a small budget. Bill Bernbach, creative head of DDB, told him that if he wanted the creative team to work nights and weekends coming up with great work, all he had to do was to run the ads as they were submitted. No changes.

Avis agreed. The creative team worked like buggery, knowing what they created wasn’t going to have the life amended out of it.

And the ‘We try harder’ campaign became one of the longest-running, best-known and most successful of all time.

New is so old

Heard of ‘crowdsourcing’?

It’s one of those shiny new things. People are like magpies: we love shiny new things. Even if the new things aren’t as good as the old things. We just get infatuated with their newness.

Sometimes I think that’s why marketing isn’t advancing as quickly as it should. Because someone comes along with something new that doesn’t bother building on what we’ve already learned. It just starts again.

We reinvent the wheel. And this time we try it with sharp pointy bits.

Crowdsourcing is a new way to do creative work.

You put your brief online, you invite anyone and everyone to come up with ideas to answer it, and the best idea wins a prize.

Brilliant. Instead of seeing just three concepts, you see hundreds or even thousands.

Admittedly, most of them will be appallingly bad, and you’ll go mad having to sift through the piles of bad puns, borrowed interest, plagiarised, off brief, brand illiterate, old or just plain terrible ideas.

But on the plus side, you’re getting lots of people, including your target audience, to submit ideas, so you’re bound to get infinitely more surprising and original ideas than you’d get from an agency.

Aren’t you?

Peperami is one of the biggest names to have tried this new gimmick recently. They offered a first prize of $10,000 and a second of $5,000 for a TV and print campaign idea.

They sent out the brief, they judged the entries, they chose the winning work.

And then discovered that the winning entry had been submitted by a professional copywriter. And that the runner up was from an ex-creative director.

Who’d have thought that?

That highly-trained, highly-experienced, highly-skilled professionals are better than a random collection of amateurs?

That creatives are better at thinking like the target audience than the target audience is at thinking like creatives?

That the Emperor isn’t wearing incredible new clothes, but is in fact naked? 

Bolluxtorkium

I bring news of three incredible breakthroughs.

Bolluxtorkium, Madeupium and Sudosyencium.

What do you mean, never heard of them?

Our nation’s best scientific brains – bored of minor challenges like finding a cure for cancer or cheap renewable energy – have been working tirelessly to unearth these modern miracles.

Inspired by nature, these incredible discoveries... make your hair shiny. Really shiny.

So shiny it looks healthy (even though it can't be, since hair is dead).

So shiny you wake up not with bedhead, but looking as if Cheryl Cole’s team of stylists have been attending to your follicles throughout the night.

So shiny that an Amazonian tribe will begin worshipping your ’do as a new god.

It’s amazing what you can pick up from a TV ad for shampoo.

Mainly, that the laboratories of Garnier (Paris) seem to discover new elements on the Periodic Table on a near-weekly basis. They take great delight in describing a mythical new molecule (‘Nutrilium’ for example), while showing you a model with perfect hair that isn’t even hers – she’s got hair extensions.

I’m not sure how it came to be that one sector is allowed to stretch the truth so rapaciously.

In fundraising comms, we take the truth a bit more seriously. Because a charity has to have trust and credibility with its audience. 

There's a caveat, of course (there's always a caveat).

Us scribblers and scampers in the creative department rarely have the ideal raw materials to create the most powerful, compelling work.

So personally, for example, I’m in favour of using composite case studies. (Which means cutting and pasting several real case studies together, to get one really strong story - which also protects the identity of who you're talking about.) I’m in favour of using model photography and recreations where necessary. And I’m in favour of talking about a specific area of work even though the donation is for unrestricted funds.

We point out that some names and details have been changed, but that the feelings are real, and we say that their donation will go wherever the need is greatest.

So, is there a difference? 

Different charities have different views, but I certainly think so. With fundraising comms, you’re simply compensating for a lack of raw materials to illustrate a genuine, truthful need. You’re often talking about distressing events that no-one took a picture of at the time. So you have to recreate it.

Shampoo salesmen don’t have that problem. They can show the effects of their product on someone with real hair any time they like.

But they don’t. Instead they choose to show Cheryl as she carefully enunciates why they pay her millions to have fake hair of a gleaming glossiness no shampoo had a hand in creating.

“Beecuz ahm wurth it, leik. Pet.”

Hirsute fundraising

Have you ever tried to grow a moustache? 

If you're a woman, probably not. I grew one for Movember a couple of years ago (a really charming, £30 million idea in aid of prostate cancer). It was bloody itchy though.

But in the 80s, moustaches had a resurgence in popularity. Because blokes wanted to be like Tom Selleck.

If you can’t remember (or are too young to know) why, just look at the TV title sequence for his famous Ferrari 308GTS-driving detective : http://bit.ly/HK7cw

Awesome.

Now: fundraising. 15 years ago, few charities had brand managers. Now, they all do. They recognise that in a crowded market, with every good cause petitioning every good soul with good reasons to support them, their brand is an important differentiator.

It’s an important way to codify their values, so a potential donor can see if the brand resonates with their own values, and if so, to support them.

Yet, weirdly, we don’t see that much well-branded stuff in the third sector.

Oh, most charities communications look the part, right enough. But that’s just following the visual identity guidelines. The font, the logo, the colours, the layout.

Following the visual identity doesn’t mean the work is ‘on brand’. Any more than having a bushy moustache makes you Magnum PI.

A brand has got to be about the experience. The feeling it gives you. The values it portrays. The way it connects with you. Its personality. Its tone of voice.

I think some of the agencies working with charities have too narrow an experience. They’ve only ever done hard-working, technique-driven stuff, or only worked in a narrow range of media, or they haven’t got enough commercial experience to know how to really get under the skin of a brand.

So they end up doing the same stuff they’ve done many times before.

With a comedy moustache stuck on it.

Puppy love

My phone rang, showing a number it didn’t know.

“I hear you’re interested in having one of our puppies,” said a female voice.

“Err… no,” I replied. “I don’t know anything about that. I think you must have the wrong number.”

“Well, this is the number I’ve been given,” she replied in uppity tones.

It was difficult to know what to say.

I got the feeling she was expecting me to answer, “Oh, in that case I’d better take the dog then.”

And I was left feeling rather discombobulated for the rest of the day.

Because her ‘stop wasting my time you silly little man’ tone was rather at odds with the content of our conversation.

I’ve started getting a few fundraising communications like that.

Where the tone is at odds with the message. From some little-known American charities that seem to have been targeting innocent old Blighty recently.

The content is that of... well, a good cause.

But the tone, oh my life. The most awful, exploitative stuff you’ll ever come across: copy that gives emotional blackmail a bad name.

Allied to stacks of tacky incentives (badly illustrated greetings cards, key rings, blankets, umbrellas etc) which are positioned almost as goods you need to pay for.

But the worst thing about some of these ‘charities’ is how much money they spend on admin charges.

In the UK, reputable charities typically spend less than 15% on admin charges – a very modest amount.

Yet the worst I’ve heard of from these unknown, underhand US mass-mailers was a charity from Tennessee called ‘Youth Development Fund’. Where apparently – wait for it – 91% of all money raised went on ‘fundraising and administrative expenses’.

And that’s more shocking than anything they write in any of their appeals.

PS If you're interested in adopting a puppy (not in any way house-trained), let me know.

Name calling

It’s not trendy to say ‘trendy’. Saying ‘fashionable’ hasn’t been for some time.

‘On trend’. That’s what you say now. Amazing what you can pick up reading old copies of Heat magazine in a doctor’s surgery.

My background is as a copywriter. But I’m still impressed – stunned, sometimes – by the power words can have on the perception of a thing. They can change its value utterly. Even though the thing itself hasn’t changed at all.

Asking your donors to come up with the ideas for you, that used to be called ‘being lazy’.

Now, depending on whether you do it by focus group or by putting a prize-incentivised brief online, the on trend phrase to use is either ‘co-creation’ or ‘crowd-sourcing’.

But as I flicked through that dog-eared Heat (honestly, I didn't buy it), I was struck by how one of the words they use has had a recent effect on charities.

Because nowadays, according to fashion, old clothes aren't 'second-hand'. 

They're 'vintage'.

Which means they’re suddenly more valuable. So more people are choosing to sell them on eBay or to small ‘boutiques’.

Which may be why so many charities are despairing of a dearth of donated clothes to sell in their shops.