Ginger Joe is a new alcoholic ginger beer.
When we won the account back in August, they gave us the task of making their ginger moustache famous.
So we decided to make it hairy and stick it up on a 78ft long billboard.
Just don’t ask us where we got the hair from.

Go t0 the Ginger Joe Youtube page

Something struck me the other day listening to coverage of the goings on in Greece.

Namely that ‘the market’ – to which we all seem so happily in thrall – is in truth just a sanctioned adult expression of our repressed inner child.

And not the inner child we are urged to let loose every once in a while, so we can laugh and skip and take innocent delight again in the rush of just being.

Rather the impatient, unreasonable, relentlessly selfish part that we are taught early on to suppress so we can go on to become a responsible member of adult society.

It’s as if we all deeply resented being forced to give that up – the primal pleasure of throwing yourself to the floor and screaming ‘But I want it now!’ until someone gives in – and so have fashioned this adult version, ‘the market’, in which to indulge it anew – and this time ring-fenced from censure because it’s supposedly rational and to do with grown up stuff like economics.

There may well have been plenty of good reasons why Greece pausing to hold a referendum at this point wasn’t the best of calls. But the fact that the market wouldn’t have the patience to wait, that its need for certainty and  gratification NOW had to be satisfied, shouldn’t have been one of them, should it?

We teach our kids to be patient, that ‘I want doesn’t get’, that ‘good things come to those that wait’ etc, etc – but whenever the market even threatens to stamp its little feet we immediately hand over the lollipop.

If so, perhaps the only route to true reform and recovery is to unmask ‘the market’s’ true psychic identity and then agree that, like the kid rolling on the supermarket floor, it needs to be taught some boundaries.

Now you might at this point be wondering, yes, but what this has got to do with advertising?

Not much, probably.

But it’s not really all about advertising right now, is it?

This ad for Cuticura is currently on view at London Underground stations…

Nothing particularly remarkable about it, you might think; clear presentation of usage/benefit, big pack shot, category leader reassurance, etc.

A sensible ad for a sensible product.

But on second viewing, something else caught my eye – the presence of the Facebook logo in the bottom right hand corner.

Now I’m as big a fan of anti-bacterial hand gel as your next obsessive-compulsive.

It can be dead handy at things like festivals and when out and about with the kids. I’m glad it exists.

But why would I, or anyone even vaguely normal, want to connect with it on Facebook?

What could it possibly tell me on a regular, updated basis that I’d ever want to know?

Last time I looked, about 1700 people had ‘liked’ the brand.

This, I would suggest, is largely down to the fact that in return for doing so you can enter a draw for free stuff.

A large proportion of them are probably the sort of people who are willing to like anything on Facebook if it might lead to free stuff.

In which case, what benefit can the activity deliver to the company, beyond being able to feel pleasingly a la mode?

Surely the joy of simple, functional products like Cuticura is that there is no need to engage with them. They do a single practical thing and they do it reliably and well. Because they do, we all have more time in our life to engage with the people and things that we really care about. For that, we thank them. And we respect them when they appear to know us well enough to appreciate that’s the role they play in our lives.

But when they start asking me to make them part of my Facebook experience, then I wonder whether they really get me, or even themselves, at all.

Which makes me start questioning them altogether.

Even for just cleaning my hands.

GPs are, apparently, up in arms at the decision by the Department of Health not to run a national advertising campaign urging at-risk people to get a flu jab this winter.

The minister’s rationale is that such a general public campaign would be wasteful when it’s possible to reach the most vulnerable directly.

“There is no additional merit in a vaccination advertising campaign for the general population when there is already a targeted approach for those who need to be called – GP surgeries should contact those individuals in the at-risk groups so that they can be vaccinated”, argued a spokeswoman.

Hmm. I think the minister needs to come in to DHM to hear our ‘Public vs Private Media’ presentation.

We put it together because a number of our clients were trying to figure out if mass audience (‘public’) advertising still has a meaningful role to play in a world where it’s becoming progressively easier to go directly just to the people you want to reach. Why waste all that money engaging people outside your target as well as inside it when you now have the tools to avoid such waste?

Our response is that ‘public’ media channels will always have a vital role to play in effective communications because they add the all-important social factor to the complementary, targeted (‘private’) activities.

The more we’re learning from neuroscience and beyond about human nature, the more we understand the all-pervasive need of human beings to run with the herd – to make supposedly individual decisions of which we feel confident the majority will approve.

So the purpose of broadcasting to the many is often to signal to the few you really want to influence that this is something of importance, legitimacy, currency – so that when they, hopefully, receive the ‘private’ follow-up they have psychological ‘pre-clearance’ to act on it.

I guess we’ll see how the flu jab take-up among the at-risk turns out this flu season.

But if our theory is correct, the process won’t be as efficient as in those years when it was accompanied by all that ‘wasteful’ mass media support.

Without that public air cover signaling that this is something that other people right now are also worrying about and acting on, the risk is that each target individual will not make doing something themselves the priority it should be.

As Mark Earls so wisely puts it, the essence of individual psychology is ‘I’ll have what she’s having’.

Even when that’s a flu jab…

I know the government has all its official statistics, but for me there’s nothing like a bit of street level insight to help read the economic runes.

And if this piece of evidence lifted from the high street of Marlow on Thames yesterday is indicative, then the pressure on the consumer pocket has indeed taken another turn for the worse…

Still, on the positive side this will surely reassure those, such as the LibDems at conference this week, that the seemingly unstoppable north/south divide is starting to relent a little.

When the good people of Marlow have to be incentivised quite so heavily to spring for another magnum then it can no longer be denied that we are, as stated, all in it together.

Rob Campbell was quoted in Campaign yesterday lamenting the tendency of people to gravitate online towards views that exactly reflect their own, rather than exploit its diversity and breadth to hear and learn from those expressing a different way of looking at things.

How, in effect, a medium predicated upon openness seems, paradoxically, more to be fueling closed-mindedness than challenging it.

It was an interesting point.

But I guess what it says to me is that the most profound need of the many the internet satisfies is the longing to feel that we are not entirely alone in this world – to be reassured that at least someone, somewhere, also feels how we feel, thinks what we think, likes what we like.

Better, faster, more conveniently than any medium ever invented it helps us advance our desire to be mirrored.

So we don’t see it as the place to look for convergent voices (we’ve felt surrounded by those since birth.)

We see it as the place to seek our twin.

In which case, little wonder so many of us already feel we couldn’t live without it.

Last week Levi’s yanked its new global film from UK screens, at least for now.

It feared that a scene showing a lone individual confronting riot police might not play too well over here, now that the concept of resisting riot police has lost its air of romanticism.

Which was probably a wise decision.

At some point, when emotions are less raw, they will likely bring it back or run it out with that controversial vignette neatly removed.

But I hope the riots, and what they revealed, will provoke for Levi’s and others pursuing similar brand strategies a longer and deeper period of pause and reflection before returning to business as usual.

The expressed aim of Levi’s new platform is to ‘inspire people to unite to create a better world and to believe change is possible’.

Which, right now, feels like a very timely message.

Where it goes wrong is in associating the pursuit of this cause with the simultaneous wearing of Levi’s kit.

Because we all well know – including, I’m sure, the smart folk at Levi’s – that the opposite is the case.

In the quest for a better world for everyone, or even just a more authentic and fulfilling life for oneself, what we wear is a matter of no consequence.

In fact, concerning oneself about it has, it’s now clear, risen to become one of the biggest barriers blocking its possibility.

There can be no real optimism for a better future moving forward until we once again collectively agree, and are seen to agree, that the matter of whether you’re wearing Diesel, Levi’s or store’s own brand has no bearing whatsoever on your human worth.

There was a time when Levi’s were rightly admired as a symbol of freedom.

But thirty years on we no longer need freedom through our brand of jeans.

We need freedom from our brand of jeans.

So if Levi’s really wants to present itself once again as a pioneer, as a true original, then why doesn’t it now bring down the curtain on the old brand era and start the new one?

Ditch this campaign and create another one.

In it, again encourage the youth of the world’s desire for a better world.

But this time, tell them that as they pursue it they can wear whatever damn label, or lack of one, they like.

And show people in the ad doing just that.

It would capture the new spirit.

And, I bet, also sell a load more Levi’s jeans in the process.

Over in America it’s National Lollypop Day (surely you knew?)

The moment when lollypops finally get their much-deserved day in the sun.

Is there anyone out there reading this who can report on how the celebrations are going?

For instance, is everyone off work or are they juggling their normal commitments with today’s special lollypop ones?

Good to see that in all the creative excitement of this year’s Cannes Festival there was still time for a Darwin 101 refresher…

This was a slide from a presentation given at the festival by one of the world’s biggest advertisers.

I’m sure that in context it helped support a profound, original and compelling point. (It was Cannes, after all.)

Otherwise it’s a serious contender for the most fatuous powerpoint slide of the year…

After how many years does continuing to display a ‘pub of the year’ award plaque outside your premises give off the opposite signal?

Not sure exactly.

But it’s got to be a good many fewer than 40, hasn’t it?

I mean, imagine what might have made a great pub in 1971…

Serving both Double Diamond and Skol on draught?

Keeping the cigarette vending machine well stocked and the ashtrays clean?

Offering the full gamut of food choices, from pickled onions to Smith’s salt n’ shake?

Not too relevant to the discerning pub-goer of today, really.

Still, hats off to them for still being in business.

Bet Campaign’s 1971 ‘Agency of the Year’ isn’t…

When we were asked by the good people at Lüerzers magazine to produce a
campaign for their online archive, it was a great excuse to sift through some
of the best ads from the last 25 years.

BHH, Paul Belford, Tim Delaney, VW and Nadav Kander – we literally
couldn’t have done it with out you.

There’s a received wisdom in the communications 
business that less is more.
Headlines are a perfect example, a two word headline
is superior to a six word version. It’s four better.
But often the incredibly concise is incredibly bland.
E.g; ’50% OFF’ vs ‘PAY HALF NOW AND NOTHING LATER’.
Here’s a couple of examples where word count has gone out the window,
but no-one will be left in any doubt about the message.

(Happy Birthday Bob)

To be precise, it’s splattered all over the platforms, stairwells and escalators.
Since when did blood become such a big selling tool?
Was I away? Did I miss the memo?
I thought sex was the popular way to sell books and films.
Will the Advertising business follow suit?
Walls Sausages. Mashed up from blood covered bits of meat.
Bertolli Olive Oil – Freshley cut from vines by men who regularly nick
their hands with the cutting tools, blood often spurts out all over the place.
I’ll monitor this trend and let you know.

I guess it’s not easy to tell the boss that we won’t be displaying your book…

..but has anyone else noticed quite how well stocked the display cases always appear to be at every Starbucks branch?

Soon they’ll be handing out copies free with the purchase of any latte, to spare having to tell him the bad news…