I’ve never tried to get a genie back in a bottle. In fact anyone who knows me well could tell you that I’ve never tried to get anything back into a bottle at all – it’s strictly one-way traffic as far as I’m concerned.

So welcome to the genie that (according to some) is social media! The reason I mentioned the genie analogy is simple. The president of the social media agency Ignite, Jim Tobin, used it to introduce his thoughts re a comment entitled “what will you do when social media isn’t special anymore?” which claimed social media agencies would be a short lived phenomenon.

He took issue with this line of thought and pointed out that since the ‘big hitters’ in terms of marketing spend already used specialist social media agencies, they had obviously managed to carve out a significant piece of territory already and call it their own (as opposed to the lions share of the work being absorbed by the large, multi disciplined agencies as proposed in the original comment) and that this was not going to change anytime soon.

He also predicted that, instead of being threatened by the big agencies from above, specialist social media agencies like his would be more threatened from below, by individuals specialising in specific social media subsets. As had happened with advertising, PR and SEO services in the past.

The reason why I admire this man is that he made these comments in February 2009, just over three years ago, and has been proved pretty much spot on – lets face it three years is a long time in any kind of marketing, let alone in this most fluid of promotional worlds!

In retrospect it’s not hard to see that exactly the same thing would happen to this area of activity as had happened to every other element of the promotional mix, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I can clearly remember most of the business population thinking that this social media thing was a fad that would blow over, possibly good for a bit of PR and to show how up to speed they were, but nothing else.

Some of the others were busy enthusiastically following the siren call of the latest social media ‘guru’ busy selling their book, course or training – often at even greater cost to themselves in terms of both their time and business than simply doing nothing.

However, social media marketing has survived, thrived and is evolving every day. The good news is that Jim Tobin was right and there are specialist agencies, and talented individuals who can help you achieve success in this area.

The bad news is that there are still those out there without any talent or skill; who sell social media solutions as a numbers game and justify their fees on that basis. These will turn you into the online equivalent of the ‘pub bore’ and deserve to be given just as wide a berth.

Done properly, social media promotions can work really well. Done badly it can be truly awful. In the first instance it can engage, inform and encourage interaction with your audience like no other element of the promotional mix. In the second it can manifest itself as the worst kind of corporate chest beating imaginable, guaranteed to destroy most of your hard-won credibility.

A bargain isn’t a bargain if it’s not in your size. It’s a truism, but it’s a demonstrable fact that greed often puts common sense on hold. And before any men out there start to get too smug about who is the most vulnerable to the ‘it’s half price so I must have it!’ syndrome. Watch and see how many of them come away from a sale with a bagful of hardware ‘essentials’ destined to gather dust in their shed or the attic.

Imagine you’re interviewing a candidate for a job. You usher them to a chair and after the usual formalities you lean forward expectantly and say “So then, tell us about yourself.”

Branding is big business, so it’s no surprise to discover that the creation of a brand identity often comes with a hefty price tag.

I was sitting down at the weekend with a charming little ‘Vino Collapso’ (just to help with the creative process you understand) and my laptop to review a presentation on logo design that I’m due to give to an audience of SME’s in a couple of weeks and something struck me.

Yes, well, we all want to believe, but as you watched the re-runs of Only Fools and Horses over the holidays, I hope you remembered that Del Boy’s short-term tactics may be good for a laugh, but they rarely amount too much else.

It’s a horrible thing the Littlewoods Christmas ad.  A group of children singing the praises of mums who buy expensive presents in a quasi-nativity play setting is enough to put my teeth on edge at the best of times.

I’m not sure whether the immortal lines “Titter ye not”, “Just like that!” or “Tea, Ern?” (Catchphrases, as if you didn’t know, of Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper and Eric Morecambe) deserve to be literally set in stone, yet that is precisely what artist Gordon Young has done for them in the ‘Comedy Carpet’ installation he has created on Blackpool’s seafront as part of the town’s regeneration plan.

Getting older is a fact of life. Growing up is optional. Occasionally you come across an unreconstructed punk or hippie, but for most of us our tastes and outlook mature with age, and are reflected in our dress and grooming. Think of Vivienne Westwood, who practically invented the punk look, but who is now a doyenne of haute couture. In business terms, we rebrand ourselves.

What do you think might happen if you took all of the self-proclaimed social marketing or branding experts in our region and sealed them in a dark room (one can only dream!) until they all calmed down?

The science fiction world of interactive advertising imagined in Stephen Spielberg’s film ‘Minority Report’ has taken a step nearer reality at Tesco’s virtual supermarket in Seoul, South Korea, which featured widely in the national and trade press this week.

In the film, Tom Cruise’s character walks through a shopping mall where an electronic poster calls out to him: “John Anderton! You could use a Guinness round about now!”

In Tesco’s virtual supermarket posters with pictures of well-stocked shelves runs the length of a subway platform and allows commuters to shop by scanning the product QR codes with their smart phones. The shopping is then delivered to their homes.

Following the advent of internet shopping and the recent proliferation of self-checkouts at the big supermarkets, it surely can’t be long before outdoor media follows suit.

Indeed, QR codes are already appearing prominently on estate agents flag-boards, giving passing home hunters a direct link to their specific details.

Could combining the twin obsessions of ‘shopping till you drop’ and mobile phone fixation be the instrument we’re looking for to reboot the economy and lift us out of recession? It would be cheering to think so.

For those who fear that on-line shopping threatens the future of the high street, there’s also encouraging news from ‘Forever 21’, the US fast fashion chain, which has plans to open 100 new stores in the UK.

“The global high street is growing” says Linda Chang, the group’s head of marketing. “People enjoy shopping, it is not an ‘either or’. Lots of our customers visit both our website and our store.”

The Marlboro cowboy and his stablemates could be in for a rough ride in the coming months as the Australian government enacts new laws that will require tobacco companies to remove the branding from their cigarette packs and replace them with disturbing images of gap toothed mouths, diseased lungs and anaemic children: the ugly legacy of smoking related cancers on a bland olive green box.

The tobacco giant Philip Morris, is understandably alarmed, not least because this is no maverick steer that is threatening to gore them, but an out and out stampede: New Zealand, Canada, the European Union and Britain are all considering introducing similar plain packaging laws.  More importantly, Australia is just a wee bit too close to some of those emerging markets that the tobacco industry is looking to exploit.

So far the tobacco lobby has been pretty robust – with a threat to sue the Australian government for projected losses at the end of June, and by running a TV campaign asking Australians if they want to live under a ‘nanny state’?

You can see where the Australian government is coming from, and as a non-smoker myself I’m all in favour of measures designed to protect the public health – especially the health of children in emerging countries that possibly don’t have the advertising standards and safeguards that we do.  But are our Australian friends breaking the law to make the law – riding roughshod over the legal rights of tobacco companies?

Certainly Philip Morris would – and do – say so.  They say the proposed legislation would infringe international trademark and intellectual property law. They also point out It would also prevent them from distinguishing their product from that of their rivals, destroying brands that have taken them over 40 years to establish.
To play Devil’s advocate, there’s also a whiff of hypocrisy about governments – including our own – who are prepared to enact law against tobacco companies but are happy to go on creaming off substantial amounts from them in purchase tax.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and I suspect that will be the burden of Philip Morris’ legal action, should it come to that.  On the other hand, Jurgen Kurtz, director of international investment law at the University of Melbourne, says that if the claim is heard, the government could win on the grounds that the legislation was designed to protect public health.

Either way, both sides are agreed on the power of branding, for good or bad, as endorsement or stigmatisation. And whilst all seems to have been quiet in the headlines for the last couple of weeks, the stage is set for a battle of the brands that promises to make marketing history.

www.roystonsimpson.co.uk

Poor little Barbie, the ubiquitous Mattel toy, must be searching through her accessories for a miniature bottle of Valium right now.

She who could once do no wrong is feeling increasingly got-at and unloved.  Fresh from a scathing attack by Greenpeace on her ‘rainforest destruction habit’, her makers were on the defensive again at Marketing magazine’s ‘Appeal to Kids and Sell to the Parents’ conference in London on the subject of the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood.

Ruth Clement, head of strategic insight and business intelligence at Mattel UK held that the ‘over sexualisation’ issue was based on a false ‘assumption that children assess the world in the same way adults do’, and that marketers should ‘look at things through a child’s lens’.

Phew, that’s a relief then. There we were thinking that our idea of kitting Barbie out with a miniature Ann Summers wardrobe would be inappropriate for her pre-teen owners, when all along kids’ innocence and wide-eyed wonder at the world is immune to such blandishments!

Hello, is anyone at home? We appreciate that in the wake of the official Bailey Review on the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood Barbie and her ilk have come under closer scrutiny, and that Ms Clements may feel that attack is the best form of defence. But to say that sexuality is all in the eye of the beholder – especially when the beholder is a child – is to abdicate all responsibility for the social impact of your marketing activities.

Which is fine if you want the industry to forfeit its privilege of self regulation. But not if you want to prevent the Government from setting up a Hay’s Office style vetting agency  – which it’s capable of doing at the drop of a decolletage.

Brands are hugely influential in shaping social norms and behaviour patterns, especially children’s –and if you don’t believe that you’re obviously in the wrong business.

The potency of ‘pester power’ was the premise behind the whole Marketing conference. Either marketing works or it doesn’t. And given that it does, brand leaders have to take an adult view of the world and balance their power with responsibility.

I’m sorry Barbie, baby, but it’s time you grew up.

www.roystonsimpson.co.uk

If I have to suffer another ‘how to get rich quick with (buzzword to go here)’ pitch it will definitely result in a “Geoffrey Bernard is unwell” type of situation.

Instead of being still drunk/ hung-over however, I’ll be being held at Her Majesty’s pleasure for taking the next social media guru I meet, wrapping him in the plans for my luxury villa investment in the Algarve (believe it or not, they’ll sell before they’re built!) and setting fire to him with biofuel from the large field I was offered just last week (“Just give me £12,500 now and in ten years’ time I’ll give you £90,000)!

It’s nice to suppose that those who offer these “amazing offers” that have popped up recently simply haven’t kept up with the tough times that a lot of people are going through at the moment, and are only trying to help others through the selfless application of sound business practice.  It’s also nice to suppose that Bambi’s mother didn’t really die!

What’s probably true is that when times were on the up they at least had a chance of working.  It’s just that when times are tough it’s even harder to resist the siren call of these offers and with our logic circuits short-out through desperation we will jump at any “too good to be true” opportunity.  So at the very time when we can’t afford to speculate, we do.

I hate to disappoint but there is no Magic Marketing Pixie Dust, ‘cheap’ branding solutions just look cheap, and hoping that things will work out in the end is not a plan!

Actually, I suppose in some ways I should be grateful, as it makes those of us who have been successfully building clients brands over the last thirty years look positively legal, decent, honest and truthful which, of course, we should!
Premature – Oh yes!

Hats off to Lynx for extending the ‘premature perspiration’ advertising campaign that launched last month by launching two new interactive games involving the glamour model Lucy Pinder.

The games, created by TMW, are named ‘Pindering’, which allows players take control of the model in an array of situations, and ‘Ctrl X’, in which she removes articles of clothing.  The ‘Pindering’ game is available to play on the brand’s YouTube channel and will be supported by banner ads.

A spokesman said: "This latest push forms part of a more sophisticated approach to our marketing strategy.  This is a really creative way of engaging directly with our target audience and allowing guys to connect with the brand in a personal way.”

Well, sophisticated it may not be, but I have a feeling that the campaign as a whole will engage the target audience (15-25 years I believe) more readily than the ‘Top Gun’ ad campaign of last year.  Yes, I know that was probably answering a very different brief. But let’s face it; Top Gun was released in (wait for it) 1986.  they might as well have chosen to parody of Ivanhoe with sweaty knights in armor battling it out for a ladies favors instead of their mums favorite movie.  What teenager would admit to relating to that? !

www.roystonsimpson.co.uk

A brand is more than a badge. Simply changing the name of a product does not alter its essential content or character.

I could change my name to Elvis and do a tribute act down my local pub but it wouldn’t be to shouts of ‘Elvis Lives!’, nor would the rebrand do anything for my image, which would be revealed as irretrievably naff.

I’m old enough – though probably no wiser than ever I was – to have lived through some seriously business-life changing developments. I can remember being asked ‘what did we do before the fax machine?’ working on layout pads and drawing boards before the advent of desktop publishing and, of course, the advent of the internet and the subsequent social media explosion.