THE NAME
Soho was once farmland, used as hunting grounds for the rich in the 1600s. The name Soho is believed to have come about from a former hunting cry, similar to ‘Tally-Ho’ which is also originally a hunting cry.
‘So-Ho’ was also used as a rallying call at the Battle of Seymour by the 1st Duke Monmouth, James Scott (an illegitimate child of Charles II).
If you read my Etymology talk from a  few weeks ago, you might remember the word ‘slogan’ was originally a battle cry.
It’s fitting then that Soho, a hub of advertising and media agencies, could have been named after a ‘slogan’.

THE SQUARE
Soho Square, a popular destination at lunchtime for anyone working in Soho on a sunny day, was initially laid out in the 1680s on land known as Soho Fields. It was granted by King Charles II for development and was originally named King Square, which explains the statue of him near its centre.
Behind the statue is a mock-Tudor little building, which is just a glorified tool shed built in 1895. More interestingly however, underneath this tool shed lies an old World War II air raid shelter (a bonus of working in Soho, depending on your level of paranoia).

THE JOHN SNOW
Over on Broadwick Street is a pub frequented by members of our industry, called the John Snow, named after a doctor who identified the reason behind an outbreak of cholera in Soho in 1854. He mapped the addresses of those that were sick and noticed they were mostly people whose nearest access to water was the pump on Broadwick Street (then Broad Street). So he managed to persuade the authorities to remove the handle to stop any more water being collected. If you’ve walked up or down Broadwick Street you may have noticed the replica water pump with a missing handle, it’s located near the original site of the pump on the opposite side of the street to the John Snow.

THE INHABITANTS
Our industry employees aren’t the only creative sorts that have inhabited Soho over the years. Intellectuals, writers and artists have been drawn here since the early 20th century.
Unlike the areas surrounding Soho – Oxford street to the north, Regent Street to the west, Leicester Square to the south and Charing Cross Road to the east, Soho never became a fashionable place for the rich to live, which meant it never got developed as much.
This lead to music halls, small theatres and prostitutes becoming its main attractions by the mid nineteenth century, firmly cementing it as an entertainment district. This, along with foreign nationals opening cheap eating-houses, began to attract more creative types, making it a fashionable area to eat and drink throughout the 1900s.
It’s also interesting to see how many famous names are linked to Soho, from musicians such as the Rolling Stones, Led Zepellin and David Bowie (who all performed in the Marquee club) to artists such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud (who drank in the Colony).

Last night a few of us went to see John Warwicker give a talk on ‘Growing old! (Alive)’. If you don’t know John Warwicker is the Co-founder of Tomato, a ‘member’ of the band Underworld, the first foreign member of the Tokyo Type Director’s club, Professor of Design at Monash University and, almost, a member of Duran Duran. He gave a thoughtful, fascinating view on how he (and Tomato) work.

This is him talking in 2010.

We’re hosting The Single Mingle on the 20th February, an event set up by the Young Creative Council to help young single creatives find a partner to team up with. The YCC put a lot of effort into helping young creatives to break into the industry and we’re more than happy to do our little bit to help them out. Tickets are limited and you can find out more about it here.

I happen to have plenty of wood type to hand, literally a shed load (my Dad managed to get hold of it way back in the 80s – an old print house was throwing it away and he kindly volunteered to take it off their hands). So I brought some of it in to do a bit of a show and tell.

Surprisingly the first record of wooden type being used was in the fifth century by the Chinese. Known as Xylography it involved engraving fixed characters into a single piece of wood and then printing it onto treated paper. This style of printing didn’t arrive in Europe until the 14th century, but was superseded by Gutenberg’s development of moveable type in the mid-1450s, which led to the advent of metal typefaces.

Wooden type therefore wasn’t put to use again until the early 19th century, as an alternative to metal type. Mainly in posters and advertising, as it was available in larger sizes.

Being carved individually in wood meant the characters weren’t as fine and couldn’t create the ultra thin lines that metal type could, nor could they match the smaller point sizes achieved with metal. Consequentally the styles created were much bolder and obtrusive, another reason they were popular with the smaller print-houses or ‘Jobbing’ printers as these were the main producers of posters, hand-bills and other types of low quantity print runs.

The fonts were known as Slab Serifs Fonts (the serifs on these were literally like slabs) and Dark Gothics Fonts (Gothics were sans serif). Another word used for the sans serif typefaces was Grotesque, simply because at the time they were unusual to look at compared to the more common serif fonts.
A composing stick (the rectangular piece of wood on the left in the photo above) was used to put the words together and to bind them before laying them in place in a metal ‘form’ before they made their way to the letterpress printing machines.

Fonts, metal and wooden alike, were always kept in individual wooden trays or cabinet drawers identified by font size and character. These trays, or ‘cases’ as they were known in the trade, were partitioned to allow for Capital and non-capital letters to be kept in seperate, easily accessible sections of the tray or ‘case’ – the Capitals in the upper partitioning and the non-capitals in the lower. The typesetter would know exactly where to select his type character by reaching for the upper or lower case sections, hence the use of ‘upper case’ and ‘lower case’ terminology used in typography when referring to Capital or non-capital letters.

Vertical spacing in text set with with wood type was achieved by placing thin strips of wood of varying thickness (like the strip of wood on the right in the photo above) between the lines of text. With metal type the same method was employed, but using metal strips instead of wood. This metal is the same as used for the type itself and was commonly called lead, which it isn’t. Nevertheless the spacing metal was called lead and the word ‘leading’ today is used to identify the space between lines of text.

Smaller printers could not always maintain a complete set of fonts because they degraded after repeated use. So posters created with multiple type styles and sizes may not have been the designers choice, more of a necessity.
Wood type today is used mainly as an alternative to computer setting, either to make something more gritty or just to have genuine print imperfections you won’t achieve with digital printing. Some designers use it purely out of appreciation for the process. The old method of printing took much longer than it does today, so mistakes made came with the consequence of having to find the time to repeat the process, as opposed to hitting a simple ‘Apple Z’.

The skill of hand carving them in reverse and the different colours of the wood when they’re clean make them nice objects in themselves, which is why they’re also used as wall decoration or customised into furnishings.

Liam and Matt just spent a few weeks with us on placement. Click here if you’d like to see more of what they do.

I’ve recently been reading a book on Etymology (the study of the origin of words in case you were wondering) by Mark Forsyth.
I thought it would be interesting to go through and find words we come across in advertising nowadays (not including ‘nowadays’).

The Etymologicon is full of  interesting facts about word origins, so
I recommend it.

CAMPAIGN
Campagne originally comes from the Latin word campus, which meant field.
Old armies would spend winters in quarters and only take to the ‘field’ to seek battle in summer.
Therefore an army would fight a summer campaign, this term was then picked up by politicians, and now we use it in advertising.
The very best in the field would be called campiones, from which we get champion.
So when you say the ‘champion of the campaign’, technically you’re saying the best in the field of the field.

SLOGAN
A slogan was originally a Celtic war cry usually consisting of a personal surname or the name of a gathering place.

MAGAZINE
The Arabic word for ‘storehouse’ is makhzan, its plural is makhazin.
The word found its way to Britain as magazine, still retaining its original meaning of storehouse.
A man called Edward Cave wanted to print something periodically, that would contain stuff ‘on any subject that might be of interest to the educated of London’.
He had two names for it, one was ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine’ and the other was ‘Traders monthly Intelligencer’.
His goal was to imply that it was a storehouse of information.
The first issue came out in January 1731 and was filled with mostly stories of murderers and executions. It was a big hit.
By 1733 Cave dropped the Intelligencer name.
If he had dropped the magazine name instead, we may have been calling magazines intelligencers.

SPAM
SPAM was originally an American product launched in 1937 (spiced ham).
It became popular in Britain during the Second World War as tinned meat wasn’t rationed as much as normal meat.
After the war it remained popular, especially in cheap cafés.
In 1970 Monty Python made a sketch about SPAM which involved a group of Vikings in a cheap café singing a song with the only lyrics being the word SPAM.
Monty Python was apparently popular amongst computer programmers in the 80s.
In the early days of the internet, computer programmers would use the internet to show each other programmes they had written.
One of the more popular ones was a very simple practical joke.
The first command in the joke was that the computer should print the word SPAM, the second command was to go back to the first.
The result was the lyrics of the Monty Python song scrolling down your screen and you couldn’t stop it.
So by 1990 SPAM had become programmers slang for anything unwanted on the internet, and gained wider currency in the early 90s.

THE GRAPEVINE
The grapevine telegraph was a secretive method of communication used during the American Civil War.
It was called grapevine because the telegrams were generally circulated with the bottle after dinner.
But when the telephone was invented the word telegraph became rather old fashioned.
Which led to unofficial communication becoming known simply as ‘the grapevine’.

(Feel free to print this post off to hand out as a substitute for small talk around the canteen table this afternoon.)

This impenetrable looking equation is a very good piece of news.

The Advertising Association commissioned a report from Deloitte to look at advertising’s contribution to the British economy. The sum above is the model they built.

The startling result this model produces is £100billion a year for the British economy. For every pound spent on advertising Deloitte have calculated that £6 is contributed to our GDP. Putting it in context they point out that for most industries only £2 to £4 is generated for every £1 spent.

Further they estimate that advertising contributed 7% of total UK GDP in 2011.

This means that we’ve now got an answer backed up by facts when we get the perennial dinner party question ‘But what does advertising actually do?’, or we’re under attack from people who contend that advertising does nothing for society other than make people buy things they don’t want.

It also puts us in amongst those businesses who are regularly held up as drivers of the economy and are taken seriously, discussed and reported on in the press.

Thanks to the Advertising Association we now have an opportunity to use the new information we have to help raise advertising’s profile in the media and drive a positive message about our industry in broader society.

If you want to read the full report and see the workings out it’s available at www.adassoc.org.uk/advertising-pays

You can read the full story in Campaign here.

Go to the Ginger Joe Youtube page

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?

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.

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…

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.

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.