Freiburg in southern Germany provided a beautiful back drop to the latest TAAN European meeting. Nestling near the Swiss and French borders in the stunning Black Forest region Freiburg is a friendly town and the sun shone the whole time we were there too. Agencies from all over Europe attended the meeting as well as one from Dubai and another from Tokyo and as ever the meeting was diverse, dynamic and stimulating. Continue reading
Author: John McCallum
Where Can You Get Good Fertiliser This Time of Year?
It must be autumn (Fall) round here again. It’s now dark in the morning when I get up and I found myself noticing farmers ploughing their fields last week whilst returning from a meeting out of town. Continue reading
O Would Some Power the Giftie Gie us…
The dangers of not continually supporting your brand were brought home to me this week in an unusual fashion; the US attack on our beloved National Health Service (NHS).It’s funny but I hadn’t long finished reading Gordon Hochhalters piece on the problems some US brands face abroad when this story broke over here. From a UK perspective it seems that the British National Health Service is being used as an example of how not to have a healthcare system. The UK media has ran headline stories this week telling of US senators attacking our health service, American TV commercials painting it as evil and future presidential hopefuls using it as a stick to beat the incumbent with. In the UK we’re both perplexed and appalled. How dare the Americans of all people disrespect our beloved NHS! If you fall ill in the US and you haven’t got any money you are left to die in the street in a puddle of your own filth whilst Texan billionaires and Manhattan socialites step over you on their way to the plastic surgeon, everyone in Britain knows this, we’re just too polite to mention it. Oh yes America you’ve touched a nerve over here!You see our NHS is something of a holy cow, politicians meddle with it at their peril. It’s roots stretch back to the 1940s and the end of the Second World War. Britain was nearly bankrupt (the more things change…etc), it had thousands of returning servicemen who had lived through the great depression of the 20s and 30s, seen the rise of both communism and fascism in Europe and wanted no part of either and were both mobilised and determined to change the society they had left at the start of the war. They promptly voted out the great war leader Winston Churchill by a landslide majority and in his place elected a left leaning government with fresh ideas (any of this sounding familiar?). Amongst a number of innovative social reforms they introduced through The Beveridge Report the creation of a free health service for all was by far the one that has had the profoundest effect on the UK. Suddenly every citizen had access to the same quality of healthcare no matter their personal circumstances or social background. This was truly revolutionary and Utopian in scale.Three generations later we now take the NHS for granted in this country, it is a birthright. In polls people continually put its perceived underfunding as their biggest political gripe and there is nothing like a local hospital closure to mobilise the normally apathetic voter. Anyone visiting the UK this week would assume that the NHS is a national treasure and we’ll be declaring war on the US very soon if they don’t cease knocking it. The reality is of course that every other week of the year the NHS is knocked, disrespected, ignored, complained about and used as a political football by us. It has grown from a Utopian ideal to a gargantuan behemoth, swallowing money, much of it wasted, seemingly employing more accountants than doctors. Many of the professionals who work in it are underpaid, undervalued, over worked and under appreciated. I’ve witnessed at first hand the abuse nurses take from patients they are trying to help. Because, for most of us, it has always been there and because it seems to be free we have allowed ourselves to put little value on it. We demand certain services and medications no matter the cost, we get patient charters and the right to complain, and boy do we use it.From a marketing point of view it is important we see the lessons in this. For the record the NHS is a staggeringly great service. All three of my children were born in an NHS hospital, as was I. They had the finest paediatric specialists in the country on call, less than 50 feet away, during their deliveries. Our longest serving employee and dearest colleague was diagnosed with cancer two years ago, he’s sitting upstairs from me just now thanks to the NHS. Everyone in the UK has stories like this yet we’ve allowed ourselves to forget just what a great service it is. By not properly marketing the NHS brand, by not continually reminding ourselves just what a lucky bunch we are to have it, by not eulogising the NHS and all it stands for we’ve allowed a generation, or two, to forget how lucky they are. Marketing to most is probably anathema to what the NHS stands for however without it the brand has been devalued. Every organisation needs marketing because every organisation has a story to tell and if you don’t tell it people will make up their own version, and that is rarely a good thing. It is the ultimate irony that it might take someone else knocking it to make us realise it. Perhaps we should be thanking America for that.
The Perils of not Recognising the Boss
My brother in law told me a great story at the weekend. Continue reading
Advertising To The Rescue?
It seems ironic that we are enduring a period where convincing companies to advertise is harder than ever and yet advertising seems to be providing the answer to one of the internet’s great conundrums; how to make money from it.I discovered Spotify last week.Spotify.com is the music industries answer to illegal downloads and it’s great. If you haven’t seen it yet you need to make it a priority because even if you hate music the premise behind it is clever and will affect you eventually. You are probably aware that the entire music industry is controlled by record labels, or at least it was until very recently. Record labels made or broke acts, they engineered bands, promoted albums and basically controlled an awful lot of what you and I listened too whilst taking the lions share of the profits from the music we bought. Whether this was a good thing or not is moot, that’s just how it was. The advent of the internet has not been good for record labels, some big acts such as Simply Red and Radiohead have dispensed with record labels altogether and sell their music themselves, online, very successfully. Social media sites have helped launch acts into the mainstream without the need for a record label marketing machine and, most importantly, music has been downloaded, illegally, free of charge. When this happens no one makes any money, however in many ways the record labels have only themselves to blame. They kept the price of albums artificially high for a long time and as you can now see if you can still find any shops that sell CDs they are considerably less expensive than they were a few years ago; that’ll be the power of competition for you then.So Spotify is their answer of sorts. Basically they’ve accepted that it is hard to get people to pay for something they’ve got used to getting for nothing, so they’re giving it away too. Their aim is to have every piece of music ever recorded available on the site, free of charge. You’ll never actually own it though, you can’t download it to your own computer, rather you listen to it from their site, you can save it to ‘playlists’ though so it’s there the next time you log in. And to make money from this they are carrying advertising. You listen to music and you listen to advertising, the advertising pays for the music and the people involved in operating the site. This is not a new idea, this is the business model for every commercial radio station in the world, you do wonder why it took them so long to figure it out.
Likewise The Guardian, the UK broadsheet bastion of left of centre, politically correct, hand wringers like me did something quite clever recently, it figured out how to make people pay for it’s online edition. Its online edition has outperformed its printed edition for some time now in terms of readers and it has invested quite heavily in its web presence. But the ad revenues just weren’t enough and of course as fewer people buy the printed paper ad revenues there drop too. So what they’ve done is give you the option of reading the online edition of the paper without any advertising; but for a fee. You basically pay not to see advertising. Again this isn’t a new idea, subscription cable TV stations have done this for years. And if you don’t want to pay you can still read all the content but with advertising in place.
Whilst both cases are different they are similar too. They both use advertising to pay for something their customers don’t want to pay for, and they are both harnessing advertising to fund the publishing of creative work. Both are using tried and tested business models too, just in a different environment from where we usually find them.
So what does this mean for us, the creators of the advertising; what affect, if any, will this have on us? If the business models work we can surely expect others to copy them perhaps leading to a plethora of new advertising opportunities and a further crowding of the marketplace, will this mean a greater need for advertising professionals than before? Will the reaction to the illegal downloading of songs actually be music to our ears in the long run.