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.

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.

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:

My drawer

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

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.”

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.

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.

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!

Death threat fills me with love and pride.

One day in 1997 I came home to find a postcard on the doormat.

Even back then it was decidedly retro, meaning it had probably been sent by either my brother or my friend Adam. Like me, both of them will actively seek out retro or just plain bizarre postcards when abroad or in secondhand shops. I scanned the image on the front…

…then turned it over to see who it was from.

I was mistaken. It was clearly my 7-year-old daughter’s handiwork. I recognised the writing and the drawing style. More than either of those, though, I recognised her sense of humour.

The card reads:

Dear Kevin

You are doomed for you will explode with dignomight.

Love Mr Shape man

Georgia had written the card at a friend’s house after school, then placed it amongst the other mail on the doormat for me to find when I got home.

I loved the postcard in 1997 and it immediately got blu-tacked to our fridge where it’s remained for the past 14 years. Yellowing with age, it’s now off to join greetings cards, old photos and other paraphernalia from my kids in a box file marked ‘Ahhhh’.

Georgia remembers writing the card. She said she almost gave the game away right from the start when she began to write ‘Dear Dad’, then changed it to ‘Keven’ before correcting the typo. The word ‘explode’ also gave her problems, and ‘dignomight’ was clearly a word she had heard but never seen written down. All the same, she made a valiant attempt to spell it based on word constructions she was familiar with (sign, might).

Then came another touch of beautiful surrealism with the signature. Where on earth did ‘Mr Shape man’ come from? Why did he want me to explode with dynamite? Georgia says that her 7-year-old self was concerned that I might get unduly frightened by the death threat, so had filled each of the shapes with a smiley face. To soften the blow, as it were. (My appalling scan has cut off the actual smiles but they are there.)

She spelt the address slightly wrong, too, and New Malden has never been SW anything. She was remembering the SW12 postcode from our previous house in Balham. I like the added sense of peril provided by her choice of stamp. I believe that only someone with a keen and highly advanced sense of humour could have thought to create this postcard. It’s one of the reasons I am extremely proud of her, despite the odd misgivings over the sentiment in the message.

Three years later, Georgia was enjoying a 10th birthday party with several of her friends at a bowling alley in Kingston. In fact, all the alleys were occupied by partying children. At one point, the bowling was stopped and an MC-type character with a microphone  went up to each of the birthday boys and girls and got them to answer a few questions about their special day. One of the questions was “Well Lucy/Joe/Tabitha/Josh, if you could arrange for anyone at all to come and visit you at your home this afternoon, who would you choose?”

The kids thought for a bit then came up with names such as Christina, Robbie, Justin, Britney and Kylie. Then it became Georgia’s turn. “Anyone at all?” she asked.

“Yes. Anyone in the world. Anastasia, Cher, Eminem, Michael Jack…”

“I’d like Gary Larson,” said Georgia.

There are plenty of adults who don’t get The Far Side. Georgia was a fan when she was 10 years old.

Where have all the staff gone?

I used to own a t-shirt emblazoned with the word STAFF. I’d wear it to work sometimes. Ironically, of course.

Then one day I was out of a job and wearing the t-shirt would suddenly have been very ironic indeed.

Was that around the time that the word ‘staff’ started to take on pejorative connotations? Because it seems that today, companies don’t employ staff any more. Well, they do, but they call them something else.

I think the John Lewis group was first. If you work for them, you are officially known as a ‘partner’. There’s a valid reason for this. The company is owned by a trust on behalf of all its employees, who each receive a share of annual profits. The difference between ‘staff’ and ‘boss’ isn’t as clear-cut as it is in most companies.

‘Staff’ doesn’t convey the necessary dynamism required of its staff by McDonalds, so they go by the showbiz-meets-gangland name of ‘crew’.

Mind you, they still get awarded 'Employee of the month'. (At once, both an achievement and an embarrassment.)

Who else is in on the act?

Call them baps, wraps, subs or snacks, but one thing Subway isn't famous for is sarnies.

There are staff entrances, and there are Marks & Spencer 'colleague' entrances.

You've heard of Team America and Team GB. Meet 'Team Door'. This is in a nondescript pub in London.

Are these euphemisms used throughout the company, do you think? Does Subway offer its staff ‘Artists’ Discounts’? Do McDonalds staff sometimes go on ‘Crew Outings’? (No.) Would that pub in London apologise for poor service and blame the fact that they’re ‘underteamed’?

While we’re at it, have you ever wondered what happened to ‘employees’? Well, they all left at the same time as the staff. In through the revolving door came their replacement, ‘human resources’. The personnel manager was replaced by an OH-SO-SINCERE VITUPERATOR…sorry, was replaced by a well-meaning human resources manager.

Or, more likely, by a whole department of them.

The decline of ‘personnel’ means this sign, from the Royal Festival Hall, clearly needs updating.

Surely 'Authorised human resources only'?

Ads from 21 years ago

At precisely 9.44pm on a hot and humid July 30th 1990, Georgia Mills took her first lungfuls of air in a maternity suite at St George’s Hospital, south London. Over the course of that busy weekend I made frequent trips to and from the hospital, was on the phone virtually non-stop and generally performed lots of new-dad duties.

I also found time to do something a bit unusual. I taped the day’s news onto the VHS recorder and gathered up a selection of Saturday’s newspapers. Then I stuffed them all into a thick black plastic bag, the kind photographers keep light-sensitive paper in, stuck a label on it saying ‘Do not open until 31st July 2011′, and hauled it up into the loft.

Fast forward to last Saturday evening and I’m in the garden with Georgia, her mum and younger sister. It’s Georgia’s 21st birthday and we’re drinking champagne while she opens cards and presents. Eventually she gets to the black bag and we all have a chance to peruse the contents.

There’s a Guardian, a Daily Star, a Daily Telegraph, an Express, Mirror and Sun. There’s also the VHS cassette and – I’d forgotten about this touch – all the congratulatory cards we’d received from friends, relatives and neighbours.

Had Georgia been born a few hours later the papers would have been of greater historical significance as they would have been full of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which kicked off the first Gulf War. As it was, the two parties were still having talks in Saudi Arabia aimed as resolving their crisis. This news occupied one column inch in the broadsheets (my, were they broad).

The main news in most of the papers was the peaceful resolution of a siege in  London’s ‘Tokyo Joe’ nightclub, although the Guardian went for ‘Trinidad gripped by chaos’.

I’m interested in this sort of stuff from a historical perspective. I especially enjoy reading the adverts. They’re a window into a world that can be strangely reassuring and utterly alien. Here’s a small selection, together with the front page of the Telegraph.

As a radio news bulletin, the front page alone would occupy more than 20 minutes of airtime.

Retro's nothing new, you know. Here's a retro ad for a fax machine, which is pleasingly ironic.

A rare colour ad. For £5,995 you got a stereo radio/cassette and 'special 'jazz' graphics'.

After 21 years, this is still very recognisably an ad for First Direct.

Whatever happened to Metro? Or Rover? Or the team responsible for this confection?

All that speed! All that power! To think, today's socks have about as much computing power

Finally, an ad from 1990 that you could easily run today without changing much.