Apologies for the radio silence....

You'll find my latest blogs have moved here.....

Pub law

There are lots of things that go towards making a good pub. Beer, generally, is a plus. Location, atmosphere and either very good food or, better still, no food at all - these all help too.

But you can have all these things and still only be a good pub. To be a great pub requires one more thing - a complete demographic mix. Posh types, raffish types, old folks, young folks, policemen, crooks - even women. These need not all be sharing tables, but they do need to happily coexist. Everyone must be made to feel at home.

That is what makes a great pub in every respect better than a club. A club is something you keep to yourself and your kind: a great pub is something you share.

This is why you find more great pubs in the country than you do in towns. And why you rarely find good pubs in recently gentrified parts of London where old and new inhabitants have reached an uneasy stand-off. It's why no All-Bar-One or City pub or Clapham pub can ever achieve greatness.

Is this also true of brands nowadays? Certainly no major online brand (Amazon, Google, Yahoo, eBay) seems to have a demographic weighting distinct from that of the internet user-base as a whole. The whole cost-base of the internet drives businesses towards an "everyone welcome" model. Offline, even Tesco's great success in many ways lies in its ability to reach across demographies. The customer base of Argos (bad advertising but a very interesting brand) supposedly perfectly mirrors the UK population. And more and more successful brands seem to have a relatively class-neutral position - think easyJet, Starbucks, Wagamama or John Lewis.

These brands are wonderfully open. And elsewhere venerable luxury brands are learning to love their rapper clientele every bit as much as those from the Almanach de Gotha.

Against this backdrop, new brands which attempt an up-market positioning (as opposed to inheriting one) can seem a little bit, well, haughty and arriviste. Even with long-standing posh brands.... well, writing American Express Platinum copy simply isn't as easy as it was.

Adland seems to react with horror when brands such as Burberry and Abercrombie & Fitch go after the mass market. But would you really have wanted to occupy their traditional market segment? We even laugh at Bentleys for being a footballer's car. But how many people have bought a Maybach?

Okay, let's admit it. All of us have pet "club" brands we'd hate to see advertised widely or becoming more widespread. Brands where the very mystique depends on a secret, rather personal relationship. For me it's Alden shoes, Grape Nuts, Oxxford clothes. As a twenty-year cravat wearer, I even winced with dread on seeing David Beckham wearing one of the same last week.

Yet idealistic brands work like pubs not clubs - we want everyone to join. "Dirt is Good" and "Campaign for Real Beauty" are truly open to all - and seem to cross traditional barriers rather painlessly. A great pub and a great ideal seem to be open to all. For brands that's no bad thing.

A mischievous thought....

...just struck me this morning. Sir Martin Sorrell can't be making many friends among aficionados of specialist hard-core pornography. Only a few weeks ago they could simply type "dwarf+nympho" into Google and be immediately rewarded with a few hundred pages of agreeably deviant filth. Now they'll have to wade through fifteen pages about WPP first.

And they think Americans are crap at Geography

The man's own ignorance on this question I can forgive. We all have off days and blind spots. The audience's ignorance is extraordinary from a nation which patronises Americans for not knowing where Latvia is.

I think I would prefer to be invaded by creationists than flat-earthers.

Some Divergent thoughts about Convergence.

I am taught as a creative director to be contrarian and perverse. And that's exactly what I plan to be now.

You see convergence is one of those words that makes me instantly suspicious. Because it is a word widely used by analysts, engineers, commentators and specialists to justify all manner of expensive projects, investments and salaries. And yet the general public do not use the word at all - indeed they seem to have no need for such a word. I suspect there is a reason for this - that they have no need for the concept which the word describes.

We have been here before, of course. Remember when banks started offering mortgages, and building societies became banks? "Imagine", said everyone, "How much extra business we can generate when we cross-sell all our customers everything". I am sure that wildly extravagant projections were made for the extra business accruing - with many pointless mergers making investment bankers rich on the proceeds.

All of which overlooked one thing. That most people have one mortgage and one bank account. That they are just as happy to have both with a building society as with a bank. But, in many cases, they could leave them apart. The human brain does not have infinite capabilities, but if there's room enough in that brain for a vocabulary of 20,000 words, there's probably room to remember "my mortgage comes from a building society and my chequebook from a bank." Just as I seem to cope in my kitchen with the fact that I boil water in a kettle and make toast in a toaster without any urge to combine those two confusing devices.

But at least this effort was not as destructive as, say, the convergence between Gas and Electricity - where the consumer benefit was, er, cheaper gas or electricity. Rather like the much heralded Triple Play, convergence in these industries operates as a form of giant sales promotion - a kind of BOGOF. Pay us a tinceywincey bit more for the service we think is important - always the incumbent's main line of business, incidentally - and we'll give you two other services for less. This creates value how, precisely? Lowering prices to gain market share is not an innovation. Lowering prices merely to swap your customers around and turn them into price-driven switchers is just silly.

Just because convergence seem sensible, that is no guarantee that people will adopt it. Women's fashion is far more in need of convergence than technology - imagine the savings that would result if womenfolk could standardise on just two or three shoe types, one or two dress types and fewer colours. Yet, irritatingly, my wife shows no signs of doing this.

Maybe people buy lots of gadgets for the same reason women buy clothes - they just like them.

In any case there already is a perfect convergence device which is mobile, can handle all kinds of entertainment media and offers multiple connectivity and communication capabilities combined with being a powerful gaming device. I am using it right now. It's my laptop.

The sad fall of ITV Play

It would be easy to say good riddance to those late-night quiz shows driven by premium-rate telephone calls. But, aside from the loss of a £1bn industry that was stemming the losses of many TV channels, I feel a poignant loss at the thought that we shall no more be treated to moments of transcendant comic genius such as this....

Peculiar adland axioms

One peculiar assumption in our business is that creative people would never work for a media agency.


I would.


1. You would work with people who still know how to have a good time.


2. You would be awash with tickets to sporting and cultural events.


3. Most important of all, this - about three times as much of your work would actually run.


There are other adland axioms that everyone seems to believe with no good reason. "Give people the freedom of a tight brief" is my current hate - as it effectively suggests creative people should abdicate 90% of their job description in favour of gilding propositions. Give us the freedom of a tighly defined problem - yes. But not a prescriptive brief.


And that planner story about the Sistine Chapel is a lie.... Michelangelo, as a proper creative should, rewrote the brief.

"The pope wanted to see paintings of the 12 Christian Apostles; the result was more than 3,000 figures."

More daft adland axioms please......