Russell Davies

Proper British miscommunication - me and HP sauce

So here’s a story about brands, blogging and PR people not really ‘getting it’. (While still being quite nice and quite smart.)

As many of you may know I have a couple of blogs about cafes. And I’ve written a book about cafes. And in there I talk rather fulsomely about HP Sauce. Which is, in my opinion, the king of sauces.

A couple of  weeks ago someone from a PR company contacted me and said that HP are thinking about doing a PR stunt about saving the proper British cafe from decline and fighting back against the Americanisation of the High Street and all that, and would I like to be their spokesman and publicise it on my blogs.

I eventually said no. For various reasons, discussed below. But I must confess to hanging on to see how much they would pay.

Which has led to all kinds of debate (in my head, nowhere else really) and confusion about the value of blogs, the relationships between what I do here and the commercial world and how irritating the average PR stunt is.

I don’t have a coherent argument to make here but some of the things that crossed my mind are these:

1. If they’d bothered to read the book or the blog they’d know that I don’t necessarily believe that cafes are in decline and I’m not against Starbucks or all those latte based places. Some cafes are going (especially the older style formica palaces, often because formica has a limited shelf-life, which is a shame, but is also how business works and cafes are, above all, businesses). But cafes are born every day too. I’ve yet to see any compelling evidence that there are fewer independent cafes now than there were 10 years ago.

2. When I raised these doubts about the basis for their campaign I was told they’d done online research (which sounded like they’d done an poll asking 50 people if they thought cafes were in decline). And they’d done ‘desktop research’ – saying ‘desktop’ like it was some special sort of research which only yields the truth rather than just typing the words ‘cafe’ and ‘decline’ into Google and Lexis/Nexis.

3. I absolutely hate this kind of faux-research nonsense. PR companies have learned that they can guff up some research to say anything they want to and that journalists are too lazy or ignorant to question the basis of that research. So you’ll get a quick fun item on the news based ‘research’ but it’ll be completely meaningless. Which undermines anyone who actually does some proper research.

4. I have to say though, I’m behind them doing a campaign on behalf of British cafes. I think that’s a good idea. If they’d just asked me to stick a link of the site and left it at that, I probably would have done. Though their idea of giving £5k to a winning cafe seems pretty cheapskate. That’s not going to keep the wolf from the door.

5. If HP/their PR company had done any homework they’d have realised that I love HP, love cafes, love many of the things they’ve done (like the Paul Smith limited edition sauce) and I spend my life thinking about brands and communications – and giving lots of that thinking away for free on this blog. Would it not have made sense for them to ask me what I thought they should do online? I’m probably just being arrogant about that but it might have been a good idea.

6. But I’m not a saint, I’d have put all these quibbles aside, and would have lived with it if they’d offered me enough money to be the spokesperson and do the link and stuff. Typepad have to be paid every month. But the fee they offered was just silly. Again, I don’t think I’m being arrogant, but I think I’ve built some real value in eggbaconchipsandbeans.com and I don’t think I should sell that cheaply. I might give it away, but I’m not going to sell it cheaply.

7. The PR bloke who called me wasn’t stupid or bad. He seemed smart and nice, if a little too busy and glib but I don’t get the impression that he understood the dynamics of blogging. I think maybe he thought there was some kind of lower threshold of caring with a blogger because I’m not a real journalist or author. Wheras I think the threshold is often higher, because this isn’t just a job, this is a passion (well, maybe passion is too much).

8. They told me this campaign was going to break last week, but I’ve been googling “proper British” and HP sauce and I’ve not found much, just the ad they did earlier in the year. (Quite good, filmed at the S+M cafe Ladbroke Grove, I think). Maybe they’re not going to do it. But it led me to the official HP site, which made me realise, for all their PR and sauce smarts, maybe they’re not that up on the live, personal nature of the blogosphere.

Anyway, thoughts anyone? Has anyone heard of this campaign? Anyone think I should have done it?

attentionomics testing and urban spam

You know those racks of free postcards you get in bars and places like that? A mixture of adlike stuff and promtions for clubs and shows and stuff?

I've always thought they're a great medium because they act as an alternative to urban spam, they're not that intrusive, they're part of the background, but they're offering you something of some value, if you want to use it.

But these things are worth paying attention to, because they're a model for the future of most communications. They sit, modestly at the edge of our attention-field and they'll only 'succeed' if they're sufficiently engaging, interesting or useful for us to want to march over and look at them, read them or ideally, use them. That's the way TV is going.

And most of these things, seem to me, to fail this test. Very few of them make you want to read, even fewer to take home, and I've never come close to actually using one as a postcard. But if I wanted to practise creating the CommunicationsStuff (TM) of the future I'd practise on postcards. Get good at these and you're ready for the challenges of the next 30 years.

Likely problems you'll have to solve:

1. You'll have to make something that's simple and captivating at a distance but rewards deeper, more prolonged inspection.
2. You'll have to make something that has actual, intrinsic value of some sort - independent of a brand - whether it's cultural, aesthetic, practical, whatever.
3. You'll have to make something that makes it more likely someone'll buy something, without making them feel like they've been spammed.
4. You'll have to make something that's open enough that someone's like to want to send it to someone else to represent them, not just as a token of a brand.
5. You'll have to do loads of them, all the time, constantly creating new stuff, to keep it interesting.

And then you should start working out how you do that with video.

clever headline to do with planning in romania

A splendid and enterprising Romanian has set up a great site here. If you don't know any Romanian there's still lots interesting interviews in English.

they've had another idea

This seems like a good thing.

russell's rabbit

Which of us hasn't realised that the missing link in their life is a wifi-enabled rabbit? Well, my life is now complete. This rabbit arrived a few weeks ago and I've been trying to get it to do various things on and off since then. It's French technology so it's, well, quirky. I love it but I suspect Nabaztag might meet with the same global success as Minitel.

So far I've got it to:

1. Tell me the time every hour (well, about 8 minutes after the hour, it's French)
2. Tell me when I've got an email
3. Flash a bit, make some funny noises
4. Read messages out that I type into my computer. Sometimes startling Anne when it reads them out after I've left for work

But I've completely failed to get it to read RSS feeds like it's supposed to. Or do Tai Chi. But it's got something of the future about it. I'm going to persevere with it, because

1. It's important to support and explore technological artefacts that aren't products of Japan or California. Its Frenchness is part of its charm, its provenance, its quirks are part of the point.

2. Information, communication has to get out of computers and into objects if it's going to be any use. Ambient devices aren't getting to Europe quick enough for me to play with, so the rabbit it is.

If you're a fellow rabbit owner send me a message - the 'pseudo' (which seems to be the French equivalent of username, perfect) is archibaldleach. And his email address is archibald at russelldavies.com

wyndcliffe

For those who've been kind enough to enquire how the holidays were, Anne has written about it very nicely here. And this is the cottage with the way-too-pale-for-relaxation-carpet.

And Anne, I think we all had a much more lovelier time than you've portrayed, and I think I speak for the whole family when I say thanks for booking the cottage, but is it healthy for us to be conducting our marriage via blog?

good name for a design company

Couldn't you imagine a design company calling themselves this? Like Neasden Control Centre?

youth marketing

Someone rang me today to ask me to speak at a youth marketing thing.

I probably sounded a little bit odd to them because while talking I was trying not to laugh at my own ridiculousness.

While getting their call I was uploading photos from my holiday, including the one above which, for me, defines holiday happiness - a vintage Roberts radio (Radio 4, of course), a nice cup of tea, a hot-cross bun and a large-print detective novel (my eyes aren't what they were).

Surely, I have no business talking about youth marketing. I'm patently a middle-aged fuddy duddy.

And yet, and yet, I do know a bit about youth marketing. And the fact that I can like all the above and still be OK at talking to 'young people' probably says something about the changing face of youth. Or maybe it just says I should start thinking about 'greys'.

fudgy wudgys

Fudgy Wudgys are sweet of the month for April. Delicious. And brilliantly simple. No strategic name development here. What's the product? Fudge. What's the name? Fudgy Wudgy. OK. Stick a couple of smiling kids on there and we're done.

get this week's new yorker

You should get this week's New Yorker. (April 10, 2006) (last week's if you're actually in New York.)

There's a splendid article about Muzak. Lots of good thinking from people who actually have to think hard about the non-verbal, non-wordy aspects of a brand. How does a brand sound? Does it like funk? Why does Armani Exchange get beatmatched segues where Ann Taylor gets a couple of seconds of silence?

And there's a great Malcolm Gladwell review of Why? by Charles Tilly. 'Why?' is about the reasons we give each other for the stuff we do and the type of reasons we give. It sounds like essential reading for anyone doing research about communications. Gladwell's illustrations sound just like the kind of mismatch you get when talking about communications with people. Their frame of reference is completely different to yours or the brand's so you get this failure to communicate - because we're thinking about different types of reason. I'm not making sense. Read the article, or better still the book, then you'll realise how clever I am for pointing it out. Honestly.

But the real reason for mentioning it is to sing the praises of Gladwell again. At the end of this review of this dry, academic book he almost had me crying on the tube. He's a genius. (Or I'm in a bad way.)