A relatively quiet week in How-Do Land this week with nary even a BDH senior executive clearing his desk and taking his (or her) pot plant home forever.
Scanning through the news for this week, I am struck by the tiresome familiarity of the client names doing the rounds – Prince’s, MFI, Crown, Wimpey and Taylor Woodrow to name but a few. It seems that certain clients are pre-disposed, whether by virtue of culture or budget, to view regional agencies more favourably.
Financial services and retail clients have long abounded in the North West – is this a tacit recognition by the clients in these sectors that bulk activity rather than creativity is the true order of the day for them? In short are these clients turning to agencies off the Tube network because they equate regional agencies with the lower creative standards that they feel sufficed to service their business?
The quirky Northern-ness and high creative standards of the region’s ever marching-on design sector has seen significant design “projects” pulled out of the capital in a way that genuinely creatively-led advertising (particularly that requiring a TV component) seldom is.
Project is a key term here, though: “Let’s give those northern design buggers a project; if they cock it up shift it back Soho-wards sharply!”
Risking a fraction of your budget on a project that will set a small Northern design agency’s glands a’salivating for more is one thing. Committing your entire above-the-line budget to an agency your mates in the Brasserie will see as staffed by individuals several steps lower on the evolutionary ladder than your average Norfolkian straw-sucker is a different thing entirely.
I wonder if a similar factor affects our friends in media independent-dom. This ever-swelling sector seems to have relatively little problem in securing sizable chunks of business regardless of geographical affiliation.
Is this because Northern media-buyers are seen as canny operators and shrewd negotiators? Is it because an agency outside the capital is more likely to secure non-precedent setting distress rates? Or is it because the majority of Manc’s media independents are now largely second string agencies to their London parent companies and frequently “win” clash clients handed to them by their conflictually-challenged head office? Ah, maybe we should be told.
Chris Ingram Associates MediaEdge Solutions Manchester
Talking of big wins, I like to think that in one corner of CIA’s (or Chris Ingram Associates MediaEdge Solutions Manchester – or whatever it’s called now) Castlefield office there sits a small but dedicated team. This team, tousled of hairstyle, agitated of manner and pallid of countenance, frequently snap at passing account execs and secretarial staff. “Shush” says MD Mick styles as he steers an unwary prospect past their desk, “that’s the Lil-lets team…”
It would be great if former chief executive Ray Sale was still alive, if only so I could run a “Winning period for CIA” headline in Adline just to annoy him.
It is perhaps a little unfair to assume that being the Lil-lets team will transform the hormonal status and behaviour of these keen media professionals, any more than it would be fair to assume that McCann-Erickson’s Durex team spend their entire day in a state of priapic abandon.
Wither the Capital of Culture?
However we do seem to have assumed that adding the European Capital of Culture tag underneath the word “Liverpool” will somehow transform the prospects, perception and every day reality of the North West’s first reserve city. I somehow think it might take a little more than a concert headlined by Ringo Starr and a “political updating of the Pied Paper story” to achieve these lofty aims.
I do like this idea that just giving the City a new strap-line is enough to transform its fortunes. I now fully look forward to Beijing being re-christened: “International City of Effective Public Transport” and Nottingham to become: “The East Midlands Metropolis Synonymous With Hardly Any Gun Crime and No Big Problem with Class A Drugs At All”. Whilst it can also hardly be only a matter of time until Sale town centre is referred to as “The Manchester Suburban Town Centre In Which Every Other Shop Isn’t Run For The Benefit Of The Sue Ryder Foundation”.
Smacks of short-sightedness Mike. Perhaps How-Do’s many creative readers can suggest a new strapline… How about “Liverpool, not nearly as cultural as it was this time last year” or: “Liverpool: the North West’s favourite number two…” You can take the boy out of Manchester, but you can’t take Manchester out of the boy…
Ads Wanted…
While I’m on a roll at alienating large parts of How-Do’s readership base, why don’t I spend a few paragraphs re-acquainting myself with my old sparring partners at the Newspaper Society? For a group of individuals who make their living out of publishing, they always struck me as somewhat over-sensitive to criticism being published about them.
I remember writing a fairly damning assessment of a campaign the industry body ran in the Summer of 1999 which featured senior media buyers across the country confessing to what use they put their local newspapers. Mike Williams, I seem to remember, used his to line a litter tray. For daring to question the wisdom of the campaign (devised by BDH), I received no end of whiney phone calls from individuals claiming that: “at least the NS is doing something and really shouldn’t be criticized for it”. Well bollocks to that.
The NS’s latest Endeavour is a survey called ‘The Wanted Ads’ which demonstrates quite credibly that readers trust the ads on regional press websites more than they trust other on-line advertising. Few would dispute that – after all how likely is that the Sale and Altrincham Messenger would conspire to mislead readers as to the start time of Pirates of the Caribbean III at the Trafford Centre or the availability of a reasonably-priced second hand-pram in Brooklands?
The sad truth about certain elements of the regional press – particularly the weekly freebies – is that many readers are not sufficiently sophisticated to distinguish between advertising and editorial content. A similar assertion could also be made of a number of the ad managers on these titles, who, based on the six months working on a freebie in the Midlands (okay it was The Dudley News) see editorial as nothing more than a lever to get more ads.
The regional press has a huge potential to develop community and campaigning issues – witness the sterling work done by the Liverpool Echo with its Liverpool Unites campaign . However, so often this potential is squandered through lazy and incompetent journalism and thinly designed ad-gets that serve readers and advertisers equally badly.
Surely even the most gorm-deprived fresher will spot early in his first term that far from being the home of giant insects and flea-infested polar bears, as the game suggests, Salford is in fact a “dynamic and cosmopolitan institution with a first-class reputation for real-world teaching and ground breaking research.” Good news about the “real-world teaching” – be a bit of a bugger to spend three years and 25k gaining unrivalled knowledge of the topography of the planet Krangor.
Couple of random thoughts to almost finish on...
First of all, MEN Media is pooling all of its recruitment advertising into one branded resource called “The Job’s Mine” – isn’t that what some 30 of its North West classified sales team were thinking until they were disabused of the notion this time last month?
Hmm, with a likely tightening of sponsorship regulations before the next Rugby World Cup, wouldn’t it just be less hassle for Paddy Power to rebrand its 130 Irish bookmaking outlets as “The Kingdom of Tonga” for the duration of the next tournament? There you are Fuse, you can have that idea for free – but remember where you heard it first; I don’t want any of this undignified “Julia Heineken” style-squabbling about its origin!
Finally, finally there has been sad lack of response to last week’s plea for pictures of top NW boardroom birds and blokes. However this has been somewhat compensated for by pictures of a number of Ex-Boardroom Blokes attending the mega-retirement bash of Cicero creative director, Dave Bailey.
Pictured at the event (among others) were the great and good (and MAP’s Pete Johnson) including Michael Barrington (ex-BJL), Dave Bailey (ex-Cicero), Martin Anderson (ex-BDH), and Steve Johnson (ex-BJL). I would like to see these gentlemen of the Fourth Age growing old disgracefully and mayhap starting their own dance troupe – more Ikea, than Chippendales though I fear – after all, judging from the pix, all the bits maybe there but the assembly work looks increasingly dodgy.
Tony Murray was rescued from the Dudley News by an Adline recruitment ad in the UK Press Gazette in early 1993. He then spent the next 10 years having lunch and charting the topography of the regional marketing communications industry (but mainly having lunch).
He has now taken the TEFL shilling and toils unrelentingly in West Beijing teaching the natives how to misdirect foreigners prior to the arrival of the Olympics.
A first for the North West - How-Do's Top 100 Marketers. These leading professionals help drive the creation and generation of prosperity in the region. READ
The North West’s media folk who in 2008 wield the greatest combination of influence, power and employment, primarily in the region but also, in many cases, well beyond. READ
The second year of the Top 100 Brands initiative - in association with Hill Dickinson, the CBI and the CIM - enjoyed a record number of votes from North West businesses and saw the Co-op sweep the board READ
The How-Do poll
Latest comments
Mr Sock: No CC did the TIF marketing for the GMPTE. The "We Vote Yes" with some rath...
READ
Comments (6)
