Velvet PR

It might be unfashionable to say so, but I love Trinny and Susannah. You can’t say they don’t have balls.

Nor are they afraid to send themselves up or to fail at what they do. In their time they have been early web pioneers (ready 2shop.com – which morphed from a Daily Telegraph column on a similar theme) and have taken the rough with the smooth and constantly reinvented themselves.

Now they are taking the online video format by the scruff of the neck and injecting it with their “don’t mess with me” personality. Having watched the first two instalments of What Trinny and Susannah Did Next, I’m already hooked to this trashy yet high class mini series.  While our industry talks a lot about online video content that’s specifically made for the format, so far it’s largely been the preserve of teenagers in their bedrooms.

Trinny and Susannah might just be the magic ingredients to take the format out into the mainstream and familiarise a broader section of the population with watching “made for format” content online. T&S have proved to be pioneers on more than one occasion in the past. They might just represent the start of something really interesting in the online video content space.

Todays post is insprired by this article from the Times  (I find I’ve been reading it more lately, to make the most of it before I have to pay).

The bit of the article that you want is just after writer Sathnam Sanghera discusses the impossibility of explaining the internet to his mother. In case you’re reading this from the future, and there’s apaywall already up, here’s what he says:

A couple of months ago I interviewed Gelong Thubten, a Buddhist monk, who had just emerged from a four-year retreat, and asked him if he had noticed any changes about the world. His quick reply: “Screens. Suddenly, there are screens everywhere.”

He’s right. There’s absolutely no getting away from the damned things: they’re on office walls, in buses, constantly in our hands in the form of iPods and smartphones. And if there is one thing that represents our age, it is surely the unnecessary, blinking flatscreen TV, beaming out a bland image.

Nothing to disagree with there. Sanghera is right – the blinking things are everywhere.

An average trip from my flat, on the bus, to my local shopping centre (the massive Westfield) will include the following screens:

• The ticker at the bus stop telling me that I’ve inevitably got 27 minutes to wait until the next bus
• The rotating CCTV screen on the bus, showing the bald patches and coat backs of other passengers, the point of which seems to be to simply to let you know you’re being watched
• Two huge digital ad screens outside Westfield
• One huge and many small ad screens inside the shopping centre itself
• Screens in shop windows showing ads and clothing
• And my iPhone, which is pretty much 90% screen

I am no scientist and know nothing about the effects of the above. I can only note the increase. But this leads nicely on to another point which has struck me for some time.

Outside London, this proliferation doesn’t appear to be an issue. The same trip, from my family home on the outskirts of Nottingham, into the city centre, might yield one screen if I’m lucky enough to catch one of the new fleet of buses with legroom. This will show rotating ads promoting the local college, florists and other businesses, recruiting bus drivers and asking you not to eat, drink, smoke, play music or defecate on the bus. (Only joking! They let you smoke…)

This extends to other advertising too. A trip around the ring road in Nottingham – no ads, or at least a number close to zero. (I can’t remember the location of a single hoarding.) A trip around the A406? Ads, ads, ads, with a soundtrack of pirate radio interruptions. Of course it’s a busier road, and maybe the consumers trapped on the North Circular are more susceptible and valuable for advertisers. But the general effect is one of peacefullness (aside from the hundreds of cars and factories, of course) contrasted with busyness and noise.

Coming back into London, the advertising is the first thing I notice. It starts with the Nissan sign on the M1 saying ‘Welcome to London’ (never did a welcome seem less welcoming) and really hits at the Brent Cross/M1 roundabout. Then it doesn’t stop again until you leave London.

Another comparison: trains that leave the commuter belt (ie to Grantham or Birmingham) with those that serve Surrey and other suburban railways. And then compare both of these with the tube.

So which are more effective? The occassional ad in a city with very few? Or one of the approximately 270, all in a row, around the Brent Cross roundabout?

I’m not saying too many ads is a bad thing. But it is nice to leave London once in a while. It’s like giving your visual cortex a breather.

the fictional Baltimore Sun newsroom, season five of The Wire

You don’t need to work in PR, or have been a journalist, or be involved with all things digital to know about the furore around paying for online newspapers and journalism. So the fact that all three apply to me might mean I have different views in this area to most people.

But should the Guardian, Times, Brand Republic and, yes, even the Daily Mail, go behind a paywall tomorrow, I’d be happily paying.

I can’t speak for the rest of the team here, so this is very much a personal post.

I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately. You can’t pass a day, if you’re interested in this stuff, without reading another survey on the likelihood of paywalls being successful, or about Rupert Murdoch’s latest plans.

And the more I think about it, the more I realise that online news – reading it, interacting with it, sharing it – is something I couldn’t do without, and that quality journalism is worth paying for.

News is currency in social discussion places like Twitter – reading the links that friends recommend every morning means I find out what’s going on and see the world through a filter of interesting people. Not being able to read that information would make my life immeasurably poorer.

I also think that reading online can be a richer experience. I buy the Monday Guardian for the Media section, but I read Charlie Brooker online, simply because the snarky, funny comments below the article are as much a part of the experience as the writing itself. The paper version doesn’t come with annotations.

The idea that I’d be able to go elsewhere and get the news for free just doesn’t wash either. Someone needs to be paid for doing that. Blogs are great, but somewhere, someone needs to write the story that bloggers can comment on. You can’t keep doing that for free.

The latest thing to really make me sure of this opinion was the recent news from Haymarket, my former employer. Readers are going online and online ads just aren’t bringing in the money, with the sad result that a third of the staff in the section of Haymarket that houses Campaign and BrandRepublic are to lose their jobs.

At the moment, I buy one or two issues of the Guardian or the Times a week to read over lunch, plus a Sunday paper. We get the FT in the office (which of course, already has a very good paywall, giving you 30 free issues a month before asking for money), and get other papers too though not every day.

But the majority, I read online. If I was paying for news, I’d still buy the weekend papers – and in fact, I’d probably still buy an issue or two as well (I can’t read online in a cafe with my terribly mobile phone, though nor would I want to).

So my personal expenditure on papers is somewhere around £6 a week, or £312 a year. This is more than I spend on my mobile phone contract, and I could never manage without that.

I don’t know what I’d be willing to pay for online access, but given the figures above, I could probably work out my tolerance, given half an hour and a calculator.

In a way, I think there had to be a period of ‘free’, or people wouldn’t have got so used to the luxurious, immediate interactivity of online news.

But now payment has to happen, or we won’t have any news at all. And everyone has to do it. I really hope it works. But I know, and worry that most people don’t see it this way.

A grunting, sexually predatory bear on a heat run ruts and thrusts his way through a forest full of various gyrating animals in skimpy underwear in a Narnia-esque man-beast orgy. This isn’t a sequel to Animal Farm (not the Orwellian classic – the other one). It’s the deeply disturbing bestial ad for Orangina.

The ‘animal lust ad’ was produced by FFL, Paris, which was reportedly given the task of branding Orangina as the ‘beverage for perversion’. The ad was launched earlier in the year, but has been brought to Velvet’s attention again thanks to the Campaign website’s Top 10 surreal ads

The TV ad begins with the grunting bear stalking his way through the forest looking to satisfy his animal desires when – lo and behold! – he comes across a wooded enclave with a busty doe in a naughty little blue dress, coyly perched on a swing. Bear sniffs her ears then, clearly in need of refreshment, snatches the doe’s bottle of Orangina from her and pours it onto the ground.

A waste of tasty Orangina, you might think. But no! A blossom of red flowers burst forth from the ground and the doe tumbles off the swing to land on them. The flowers float up towards the camera in a scene reminiscent of Lester Burnham’s Mena Suvari fantasy in American Beauty. Naughty doe, you little bear-teasing minx.

Bear’s grunting gets louder, which is the cue for the horniest animals in the forest to join in.

We are introduced to pole-dancing flamencos, grinding giraffes in pink corsets and an octopus that gives the bear a lap-dance in time to the Latino rhythm soundtrack. The same squid then squeezes two halves of an orange all over her semi-exposed chest. ‘Oh yeah… you like that, bear?’

Bear, it turns out, loves the banter, and continues to lap up the ass-slapping, bum-wiggling, leg-rutting atmosphere. He grabs another doe in a tiny pink two-piece swimsuit and dirty dances on a giant upturned orange half. Then the beasts’ collective racing pheromones take over and it all goes off.

Orangina explodes forth from giant bottles straddled by writhing zebras in tiny pink bathing suits. They spurt their load all over the bouncing furry breasts of a corseted bunny, who writhes her way through it and shakes her tail at the second doe – who by now is herself enjoying a golden shower of the fizzy orange stuff.

A panda’s corset is whipped away to reveal her wearing nipple tassels (of course she is). A horny lizard wraps his tongue around a swooning flower and Orangina erupts onto exposed, pulsating animal flesh from all corners of the forest.

We learn two things about Orangina from this ejaculatory effort of an ad:
1. It’s a potent bestial aphrodisiac
2. It goes down great as an accompaniment to lavish animal orgies

Bear – undoubtedly the star of the show with only a fig leaf covering his package – reminds me of the scene from Family Guy when Stewie daydreams about a beach holiday with his teddy bear, Rupert. Except in Stewie’s homoerotic daydream, Rupert appears with a toned human body wearing nothing but a pair of Speedos.

It’s a super ad, in a sort of Animal Farm meets the Chronicles of Narnia meets Moulin Rouge way. It ends with the tagline: “Orangina naturellement pulpeuse”. Pulpeuse, you see, means ‘juicy’ in terms of fruit but also means ‘fleshy, curvaceous and sexy’ if we are talking (or grunting, in bear’s case) about the female form.

So, now that’s all cleared up, I’m off to grab an Orangina and dry-hump the nearest deer.

Despite talks of the effect that the recession has had on the way we live our lives… mending and making do etc, it’s nothing compared to what was the norm in the 1960s and 70s.

The office cracked up when I described my mum’s “double-leggers”. This might be TMI for some readers (do we have any?), but imagine 2 pairs of identical tights, each with a leg with a hole/ladder. Rather than chucking said tights, my mum chopped a leg off each and left the bodies intact. Imagine a layering effect – 2 bodies, 2 legs, one per body. A rather sweaty affair, but definitely the product of a post-war mentality. And incidentally much, much worse than big knickers and Spanx on the embarrassment stakes.

There are plenty more examples….. how many of us still darn our socks, or tights (as was the norm among schoolgirls in the 70s)? And what has happened to the massive haberdashery and fabric departments that used to be a feature of all department stores? Sewing and knitting was massively popular 30 years ago, but today the lack availability of beautiful materials on the high street leaves me almost crying with disappointment.

Given global warming and our rapidly decreasing resources, surely thrift is a future we can be sure of. Before the gas and electricity shortages hit us, we might want to turn down the heating and invest in some thermals. Apparently Uniqlo have a great line. And while we are at it, let’s bring back that great 1970s invention the slow cooker to make the most out of those cheap but ‘good for you’ cuts of meat which allow you to feed a family for a fiver.

I’m not suggesting we adopt the “double-leggers” – even my mum has given up on these – but thrift is definitely sexy. We’ll be posting occasional “thrifty thoughts for the day” and if you have any of your own, we’d love to hear from you.

Until a few years ago, the only people who’d heard of the High Tech Computer Corporation (now HTC) were super geeky technophiles. And it seemed like HTC were happy playing behind the scenes – many of the phones sold under mobile operator brands (Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile) are actually made by HTC. They’re also the chaps that made the first Google Android phone, the G1 (HTC has championed the Android operating system and has now launched the HTC Magic, which also runs on Android).

Until recently, HTC’s marketing campaign was also relatively ‘quiet’, focusing on print and outdoor. However, last week, HTC kicked off a massive global ad campaign with its first ever TV ad:

I caught the ad while flicking through channels and instantly hooked by how the theme of how we interact with our mobiles – it’s a fact that we’re almost never outside an arm’s reach of our mobiles – and surveys have revealed the mobile to be the one consumer object with which we feel most connected (not surprising, given that it’s our primary method of communicating with just about everyone). I actually think it’s surprising that I haven’t seen any other ads that really take into account how we interact with and use our mobiles on a daily basis… More often than not, mobile ads focus on function (so, for instance, the iPhone might big up apps; other phones like Samsung or LG might focus on the camera or design).

Another thing that caught my attention with the HTC ad is that you don’t see an actual mobile phone until the very end. Instead you get a range of activities that demonstrate how we connect with our mobiles – and why we get so attached to them (I just loved the girl breaking off from a snog and reaching back into the cab to make sure she hadn’t forgotten her phone!).

And the ad’s closing line – ‘You don’t need to get a phone. You need a phone that gets you…” really captures the current feeling around mobile, for which we have the iPhone to thank.

The new HTC strapline ‘Quietly Brilliant’ is also fantastic. The old strapline used to be ‘Smart mobility’ – which fit their earlier branding targeted to specific business/enterprise users. ‘Quietly Brilliant’ really is quite brilliant ‘cause it reflects HTC’s identity as a company that, to date, hasn’t really used marketing exercises to make a splash, but has let its products (and its expertise) speak for themselves…

Great stuff – I can’t wait to see what they follow this up with.

Earlier this month, I went with my vintage motorbike-loving Dad (and long-suffering Mum) to this place:

The London Motocycle Museum in Greenford.

And it was great, if you like old motorbikes, which my Father very much does.

But out the back, in one of the old barns that isn’t full of bikes, was the ‘Greenford Heritage Centre’ – a museum, costing £1 to get in, run by a retired chap and stuffed to the gills with dusty household paraphernalia from the past 100 years. Surely the best type of museum there is.

Here’s a rather rubbish camera phone shot of the place. There are more of these to come.

The best thing in there, for my money, were the old branded products – how they reflected on the brand through its history, and whether old slogans and logos were still in use and relevant. This was the first thing that caught my eye.

Yes, it’s a Boot’s chamber pot and bottle. The logo is the same and the product was instantly recognisable, although it was bizarre to think of people using branded chamber pots.

Household products featured heavily – here’s the museum’s ‘gravy’ section:

And here’s a brand that hasn’t changed – as far as I can tell – one iota (though why this has ever been popular is beyond me)

Here’s an iron.

The logo here has changed completely – this is what it looks like now.

I’d always imagined the current logo was old fashioned, as it looks retro and 1950s/60s ish, but, in 1953, Morphy Richards was rocking a futuristic typeface. It could have changed the week after this iron was made, for all I know, but it’s a lovely snapshot.

Here are some brilliant bottles telling you how to drink milk and what to eat with it.

And here are the cigarette and tobacco brands. It’s not surprising these haven’t changed – I’d guess that if you want to get someone to form a habit for life then you’d make sure the branding and packaging don’t change too much or your addicted customers will switch allegiance.

Ahh here’s something I remember from my childhood: a 1995 mobile phone and once the height of technological wizardry.

What a brilliant, eccentric place.

Somewhere, someone at Lindt saw a warehouse full of Easter bunnies and had a brainwave…

Yes. Those appear to be Lindt Easter bunnies with antler painted on the sides of the ears. Genius.

Even if you love advertising, with a PVR in the house, you don’t watch much of it. Live TV is a bit of an event in our flat, where box-sets (currently The Sopranos and Arrested Development) and recorded stuff (hello Peep Show) rule.
So it was with some horror that during Jamie’s American Roadtrip the other night, that I saw this ad for Go Compare:

Swiftly followed by this Money Supermarket one

I finished the break with my jaw hanging near the floor.

Of course, I can see that these ads have their merits. Peter Jones is a fairly well-known TV personality, here behaving like a bit of an arse and sliding around on a trolley in what appears to be an actual Money Supermarket. So I sort of understand the proposition and it stuck in my mind or else I wouldn’t be blogging about it.

Similarly the GoCompare opera singer also stuck in my head, but in the way that the 118-247 ads (it’s directory heaven!) did, and in the early days of the internet, the hamster dance song did, for weeks on end. In each of these cases, the act of it sticking in my head makes me want to cut my head off. So again, it’s memorable.

But compared to everyone’s favourite Meerkat, I can’t see these ads inspiring much affection. There’s no one going round pretending to be a fat opera singer and or trilling out memorable Peter Jones catchphrases.

I feel very sorry for any comparison site that is not Compare the Market right now. How can you possibly compete? Right now, the only brief must be to get back our bloody users who are rapidly defecting. How can you do that?

Well, creating  or using a much-loved character is a hard job and Monkey is currently taking the PG Tips dollar, so you can’t have him. So Money Supermarket has gone for a celeb, Peter Jones (though I initially wondered what the ad had to do with BT Business, such is the danger of this route).

So the alternative is to try and be memorable – and as Cillit Bang will tell you, being irritating or catchy is an damned effective way of doing this. So while I hope that bloody opera singer helps Go Compare get some customers back, I really hope that I never have to see these two in the same ad break ever again.

…of sorts, and we’ve started a blog.

As we specialise in marketing, branding and cool entrepreneurial stuff (in fashion, beauty and all sorts), expect to see plenty of that up here.

I know. I can’t wait either.