Method and madness

You know, the great copywriters all talk about how there’s no method to advertising. George Gribbin (the man who once wrote that his friend Joe was now a horse) has a particularly pithy how-to that goes:

1. With the help of your art-director, create a picture that will make a prospect look at the headline.

2. Write a headline that you are sure will make the prospect read the first sentence of copy.

3. Write a first sentence of copy that you are sure will make the prospect read the second sentence.

4. Continue this process until you are sure that the prospect will read the final word of the ad.

5. Make sure that the picture and all these words add up to a story that will make the prospect's mouth water for the product.

You don’t say, good sir!

If you scour memoirs and interviews and Ad Age and the Cutting Edge series though, you’ll find that it’s always a toss-up between lots of research, knowing the consumer’s mind, filling pockets of desire, understanding the deep roots of social subconsciousness, and the eccentric who shuts himself up in a room with a candle and an Ogilvy idol to produce greatness.

The practice has been in the industry to move towards more market research, more in-depth knowledge. I won’t say that this doesn’t work in America where the battles are fought on shelves and with subliminal packaging, wars waged across broad swathes of educated, sophisticated consumers in mature markets. (Yeah, right.) But when it comes down to the postcard press ad or the thirty-second tearjerker that invokes the ineffable, subtle magic of brand-building (which is not to say that packages and shelf-space don’t; I have a fantastic product with fantastic packaging and okay advertising that’s losing market share daily thanks to poor shelving), it’s all up to creative genius. Two words that should probably be banned for overuse, but then we’d all lose our jobs.

Creative genius—and use for it—does exist in Bangladesh. And consumer marketing is still at that wonderful stage where a good television commercial can actually spike sales, and a series of good television ads consistently shown, therefore, will lead to an uphill curve. But the telecoms have bought up so much television time, and their style of advertising is moving so rapidly towards the advertising-as-art (i.e. advertising as aesthetic achievement and not plague that’s killing Europe, that “creative genius” is still subsidiary to product differences. Pathetic product differences like price and distribution chains that we marketers should spit on! We don’t want people to love the advertising, we want people to love the product! We want them to ask for the fucking product till the stores store it, we want them to twitch their upper lips fretfully at the thought of consuming a lesser product that’s essentially the same but priced less!

I understand that the people should love the advertising for it to do its best. But when creative (creative!) agencies love the advertising as an end in itself, that’s when we’re done for.

What is art? Art is beauty or terror or the sublime or any number of things that exist for the sole purpose of existing. I'm using the word "beauty" in all sorts of ways in this post, but I mainly mean aesthetic pleasance or something which is at least aesthetically profound. Art is never functional. Functional things might incorporate art, like say an engraved sword which is a killing instrument with pretty pictures. Or a watch with jewels on the outside, which is a pleasing way to tell time. But there are no functional benefits to putting a diamond on a gun.


A gun's purpose is to shoot at people, an advertisement's purpose is to sell product. If I can murder with panache that's great, but I need be a murderer first and debonair second. Ditto with advertisements: I need to sell product first; if it's a pretty way of doing so, all the better.


But most human creations (as opposed to creations of God: the sun is infinitely beautiful AND enables photosynthesis!) strike a balance between form and function. The day we all have ass-gun watersprays in our bathrooms, the bodna will become a thing of beauty and a joy to see. We'll have bodna exhibitions at Alliance Francais and the musical band Bangla will sing songs about the joys of natural anal cleansing. Head Office will give away brass bodnas to their special clients. But nobody will use the humble plastic bodna in their bathrooms any more.

The whole advertising as function and advertising as art problem manifests itself thus. We all want to make beautiful advertisements. And since we’re in this business because we’ve failed as novelists, artists and filmmakers, we all want to cauterize our past letdowns and dreams of youth into middling achievement. “I was all set to be the next Kubrick but look at the way I present melamine plates, is it not a searing indictment of our fin de siecle obsession with imperialist household furnishings? Ay me!” But the point of advertising is that it’s meant to sell product, and we’re consistently failing to do so in the proper ways.

Our failures are threefold. Those who want to create beautiful advertising (where beautiful = countercultural, revolutionary, any one of fifty-seven superlative adjectives that agencies write on their manifestos, the worst of which was hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian, but that was one of mine and I put it in as a joke) do it terribly. I have almost never seen a good press layout. Most TV commercials are the same hodgepodge and they’re either Amitabh or Faruqi and not stylized for the sake of any sort of narrative purpose. They all suck. They’re all the fucking same.

Anyway, ads these days follow this type of thinking:

“Well, so we’re giving away three product units with the purchase of one. Let’s be totally LATERAL and OUT OF THE BOX and show three completely unrelated things. Like, instead of three soapcakes, we’ll show three eagles. Yeah, motherfuckin’ EAGLES. And then we’ll have a line of copy that says ‘Take it easy with our Super Offer’ and the guy reading it will be like WOW, I expected they’re giving away eagles but actually it’s soap, fuck yeah! And then he’ll realize that Take it Easy is an Eagles song and he’ll be totally awesomized!”

This example, which is not hyperbolic, illustrates all three problems.

First of all, the ad isn’t creative or beautiful in any way. It’s an inaccurate simile. “The three soaps lie on your basin like three eagles soar through the sky.” It might be, through various accidents of fate, well executed. I won’t count on it. But just because it’s pretty doesn’t mean it has any aesthetic right to exist.

Secondly, it’s not communicating the core benefit of the offer, which is that Company X likes you so much and wants you to be so clean that he or she is prepared to give you three soapcakes for the price of one. Instead, we get “three is a cool number.” (Seriously, just sit in on any brainstorming session.

Thirdly, it does not build the brand. Soap X might communicate its beautifying qualities, it might be the cheapest, wash the whitest, get rid of germs. Eagles do none of these.

Which is not to say that exceptions don’t exist. The Djuice free-running ad used an internationally current and popular stunt (B 13, Casino Royale), and the dialogue turns it completely Bangladeshi. What’s beautiful is how Bitopi’s Awrup and Tanvir manage to take a shitty product benefit and use its commercial as such a powerful branding tool. The ad becomes an ad for the Djuice life and fuck the free minutes. They also make the free minutes appear attractive but that’s secondary. I love the thought behind it so much that I won’t even go into Kisloo’s excellent direction of the commercial itself.

Obviously, there IS method to advertising. If there weren’t, all our advertising wouldn’t have been so predictable and banal. The method—controlling madness, if you will—is easy, since this industry does support people like me in relative comfort. Over the next few posts, I’ll try and explain how perfection, glory, art, effective sales results, are all possible. Not always easy perhaps, but possible if you put your mind to it.

But right now I must flee. Work needs to be accomplished and boy are we gonna to lateralize the fuck out of some milk packaging!

My Warid rant

I’m the real target consumer. I don’t watch television, travel within limited distances, I don’t read magazines unless someone pushes one in front of my face. But I am not yet thirty; I possess capital. Reach me and you’ve got revenue gold.

So let’s have a quick look, find out what the big spenders have been doing to get my money. Nothing, huh? Well why the fuck not!

Warid’s a lost case. I know of so many people who want to make the switch to Warid but aren’t doing so simply because they don’t know what Warid is offering. Our Mid-east mavens waited a whole fucking day to see whether their much-vaunted N-gen network and technology based strategy would work (remember how that’s all Warid execs would talk about in the months prior to launch?), and then jumped right into counting paisas. Trout and Ries should reunite into a suicide pact just so they can die and spin in their graves for this. And what counting paisas—do they not realize that 25 paisas for 15 seconds adds up to 1 taka per minute, which is a significantly more powerful proposition to own?

But why are they even going into price-based warfare (without in fact having the lowest priced package)? Word on the street says that Warid launched because they had to. Understandable, so did Hitler invade Poland. When you launch “because you have to” (flashback to the FM wars of 2006), you are expected to build your resources. Cover the whole country first, offer an unlimited data package, tell people about your wonderful post-paid package, something.

I’ll break out branding theory because the Bangladeshi telco squabbles have proven that the strongest brand wins. Banglalink owns the cheap call rates position. They’ve been trying to get into GrameenPhone’s “who else can love our country like we do” arena but people still lovingly know them as the cheap option. Aktel, which will suck your dick and sleep with your aged father for his second pulse, is the cheapest. They’re known as nothing really, except for their short-term gains of Joy, Power, Foorti, etc. They’re the “red and blue brand”.

Enter Warid, red and blue like Aktel, trying to own cheapness like Banglalink, and with Bangladeshiness-exploiting advertising like GrameenPhone. (Way to go Pakistan!) What do they do to distinguish themselves as a newcomer in a price-war-ridden telecom market?

Communicate call rates only! (And that too using Aktel’s color schemes.)

Add to that the one thing they share with Grandpapa Citycell. They have a shitty tagline.

Citycell: Because we care.

Warid: Be heard.

I mean, I have friends in Warid. I know for a fact that, at least as far as the Dhaka market goes, they have a superior product. Warid uses a different technology from the other GSM providers, has a better SIM card (did you see all those options?). They can upgrade and update their system without massive Aktelesque outages. They’re going to cover the country soon. As far as VAS go, Warid is what the Big Three want to be.

And hello, here’s a new cell phone company in a mature market where companies own cheapness, nationalism, all sorts of things, but nobody tried to position their cell phone brand as technologically superior. Which Warid fucking is to begin with!

The only product which tries to appeal to the tech-savvy is GrameenPhone’s Business Solutions campaign. It’s an incredibly weak campaign. GrameenPhone by its very nature cannot own both technology (unnecessary in their case anyway) as well as “covering every village with love and pride”.

And Warid sits on its ass, waiting and waging petty price-based skirmishes. While cell phone manufacturers, whose high-tech products are essentially useless without the service provider backbone, throw parties at the Radisson and connect the world with music and “the thump”. How could Nokia or Sony-Ericsson, who don’t even have offices in Bangladesh, whose markets and therefore budgets are limited by their product price, battle for a proposition that Warid should own?

Warid bigwigs, I know you guys Google your brand every day, so here’s some free advice. Read up on a bunch of case studies on how markets work and how brands have these things called “positions” which own “qualities” in the consumer’s mind. Look at how the Bangladeshi telecom industry has worked from 2005 onwards. Hell, retake Marketing 101 or—best yet—pay me lots of money to make your strategy for you.

And then, once you’ve done all that, go back to Tajwar Center and shout at your cronies: “We must own technology! Let us own information throughput! Let’s make it easy for the consumer to understand just what the fuck it is we offer because once we make the sale we can keep them!”’

I mean, you'd think they'd save the paisa ads for when the competition starts taking you seriously. And then you can move on to the CONSUMER!!!