Get your branding off my gadget

I've just picked up a new phone and for the first time used a third party to buy it - Dial-a-phone instead of straight from Vodafone. You know what? I'm never going to get a phone straight from the operator again.



It's not that Dial-a-phone are brilliant, in fact they were a bit weird and insisted I 'prove' where I work to get the phone delivered to the office. What's that all about? After they rejected the first letter-headed word doc I emailed (not my idea - it's what they asked for) I seriously considered mailing over a photo of me standing in front of the office with the front desk security guard and the date visible on that morning's copy of The Times...

Anyway, what they did to get me on board for next time is give me a phone with no branding, no Vodafone Live! no red apostrophe backgrounds and no attempts to get me to buy Beyonce ringtones every time I start the web browser.

What a lovely surprise!

Sorry Vodafone, you're a utility company. You own mobile phone masts and let me make calls. I don't want Thames Water branding on every drinking glass in my house and I don't want your corporate identity staring at me every time I text somebody. So until mobile phone companies give up on being lifestyle brands, I'm buying an unadulterated factory fresh phone without any crap on it from now on.

Oh and the phone? An LG Viewty Smart. Lovely bit of kit - I'd highly recommend it.

An angry analyst

It's time to talk about this chart. I've tried to ignore it, but it's everywhere. It turned up in two of our pitches recently and if it does it again, I'll be honest, I hope the audience crucifies whoever's presenting it.



My initial opinion, was 'well that's pretty poor, let's move on' but as well as our pitches, it's been on Flowing Data, the BBC, Freakonomics... the list goes on.
At least Flowing Data put it up to explain what's wrong with it. Others seem to be debating whether it's an acceptable visualisation or not.

This is very simple. No. It's not.

The problems with the graphic - it's absolutely not a chart - are well documented and range from having no units on the y axis and an inconsistent x axis (look at the sizes of the gaps between years) to no documented source for the data at all. Which, lets face it, is because there isn't any data - it's a picture that might as well have been sketched with crayons.

If it looked like what it is though, it wouldn't be on the BBC, or Freakonomics because then it would just be a sketch of one person's opinion on how media is evolving. And not even a particularly good one.

It's been picked up all over the place because it looks scientific. It looks like there's real data and research behind it. Look at those lines; they kink; if it was all just made up they'd be smooth, surely? Only real data looks like that.

If you're one of those people who thinks that media and marketing don't need proper statistics and real research, fine. Just don't talk to me. But have enough confidence in your beliefs not to resort to making up or using pseudo scientific rubbish like this.

The next Walkman (or not)

Sometimes, you look at a bit of ultra modern technology and can already see people in ten years' time laughing at it. My old Creative Zen MP3 player was a bit like that. Lovely bit of kit to listen to but a house brick even when it came out, it became embarassing fairly rapidly.

Remember the original Walkman? OK, that one's a bit of a design icon, but 80s mobile phones?

Here's my top five of 'things you think are cool, which the next generation are already laughing it.'

1. The iPod nano
See also any other ridiculously small gadget / MP3 player. We'll laugh that we thought they were small and we'll laugh that you actually had a separate gadget especially for music.

2. Keyless cars
You don't have to put a key in the dash, but you've got to have it in your pocket, so you've still got to remember to carry the thing. Seriously, if your car doesn't just recognise you, unlock the door, move the seat to your setting and cue up a custom playlist on the stereo, what's the point?

3. Facebook (no list of this type would be complete without it)
Crap at photos, crap at video, good at playing scrabble. Why did we spend so much time with this again? I keep banging on that Facebook's going to have a serious problem soon. When somebody connects people as effectively but gives them a better platform to do things (or connects different platforms) it's all over.

4. Digital Radio
UK radio will be digital only by 2015. Except it won't.
By 2015, we'll either be at or very close to a scenario where radio can be streamed easily via next (next) gen 3G mobile or wireless. When that happens, what's the point in digital radio?

Spotify is already there, the technology works.

5. Blu-Ray
Already dying.
Remember when movies came on disks and you had a whole shelf full? Hilarious!
Compared to a download to whatever is plugged into your TV in a few years' time, Blu-ray is fragile, cumbersome and expensive.

Netbooks belong on this list too, but it's a top 5. Got any more?

Good old Grauniad

I know Iran's been misbehaving recently, but surely most journalists aren't in jail there? Who's been writing my morning paper?

The original data visualisation

I'm sure that, once upon a time, a caveman painted exactly the number of animals he'd hunted that day on his cave wall, so this isn't really the original data visualisation.

It's a good indication of where our current obsession with data visualisation is going though. Posters. On the walls of mostly stoned students.

The Mandelbrot set may have uses, but the visualisation of it doesn't, unless you need something to stare at while you contemplate whether your munchies are enough motivation to get up and go to the fridge.

Still excited about zoomable, rotateable 3D air traffic control?

Some things don't polish

An email to Paramount from Michael Bay, director of the new Transformers film, has leaked out. Apart from being a grammatical car crash, it's interesting because he's complaining about a lack of marketing hype around his new film.

Good. This means somebody over at Paramount is doing their job properly.

One thing shines through from marketing statistics everywhere. You can't make a lot of people buy a bad product by spending more on marketing.

It sounds obvious, but when you've invested a lot of money in developing a product and it's turned out to be a dog, the temptation to spend another fortune trying to persuade people that it's not, is just too strong. Good money after bad. It doesn't work. Ever.

I'm assuming the pre-release survey results for Transformers 2 - Revenge of the Fallen were as bad as the reviews coming out now. Probably worse if you think they've re-cut it a bit to try to mend some of the least popular bits. Paramount marketing are applying some good, common sense and avoiding wasting money. Anyone would think we're in a recession.

There's no such thing as Brand and Direct

In the quest to better explain how advertising works, marketers have invented an artificial distinction between advertising that is 'Brand' and advertising that is 'Direct'. It was useful for a while, but like an overused metaphor*, is starting to make things more difficult to understand than they need to be.

Go to jail, go directly to jail...

The always excellent Ad Contrarian has a quote on his homepage, pointing to where the problem starts.

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

You can't run a 'Direct ad' in isolation. Give people a phone number using a low production value 10" spot in daytime and it might well generate low cost responses but it also generates a brand impression. That you're a bit cheap.

I've come across good few different blurred distinctions of Brand and Direct that make life even more complicated.

• We can measure direct, but not brand, so brand advertising is everything we can't measure


• Direct sells product but brand drives awareness and consideration


• Direct means cheap airtime


• Brand means expensive, peak airtime (but using the same daytime creative, obviously...)


• Direct means black and white press. Colour press is 'brand' because it costs more but doesn't seem to generate any extra response


• Our ad is a 'Direct ad', because it's got a phone number on it


• Our ad is not a 'Direct ad' even though it's got a phone number on it

There's only one useful definition of direct advertising and it's not related to branding. Direct advertising can be measured with a response rate - to a phone number, to a website, via coupons returned, whatever.... Crucially, this has got absolutely nothing to do with what effect the ad is supposed to have on consumers; it's a technical distinction about how we track response that has unhelpfully been blown up into some kind of model of consumer behaviour.

If your campaign will work harder with a web address in it, then put one in it. This doesn't fundamentally change the way the campaign works, it just makes it easier for people to find you.

An ad that is expensive doesn't suddenly start doing a miraculous unmeasurable 'brand' job just because it cost more. Peak time is just like daytime, only with different people watching the TV.

Of course there are benefits in consistency and there are benefits in high production values and these things are hard to measure, but they're just as true in your 'Direct' ads as they are anywhere else.


* Overused metaphor as a metaphor... I'm quite proud of that.