Oi! Adland, let’s have more ‘British’ ads

Aside from a few notable exceptions, too many ads these days fail to capture, exploit or celebrate our unique sense of Britishness argues Dominic Mills. Where are all the witty, self-deprecating, self-doubting, cynical or just plain surreal advertisements? Marketers are really missing a trick here, especially post-Olympics when we’re still – just about – celebrating our nationhood…

“Why do all your Brit ads feature losers and weirdos?”, a New York creative director once moaned down the phone at me. And why, he might have added, do so many feature eccentrics, furry animals and surrealism (the latter two often combined)?

They’re good questions. The short answer is because a) we don’t take ourselves too seriously b) we prefer self-deprecation to self-aggrandisement c) it’s easier to laugh at and with those sorts of people and d) as a nation we’re especially fond of humanised furry animals.

You may have more reasons, but those four qualities at least are buried deep in the national psyche and can be used to inform advertising.

Of course there’s a lot more to what makes Britain, well, so British – brilliantly explored at Thinkbox’s TV Nation conference last week by Ipsos-Mori’s Simon Atkinson. You can watch his talk and the whole event here.

As Tess Alps, Thinkbox chair, noted: “the lure of using Britain and Britishness as a marketing platform is that it offers a big marketing tent into which, in theory, everyone could fit in. Understanding Britishness, Britain, and Britons is fundamental to being a good marketer.”

Quite right too, I thought, especially given the post-Olympic climate in which, you might say, we rediscovered our nationhood.

So I sat down to an evening’s viewing (Scott and Bailey, prime-time ITV, a bit of Channel 4 and so on), fully expecting to see the modern Britishness reflected in the ads. Surely this was something marketers would seek to tap into.

It is, of course, hard to define Britishness in advertising. I’m not, for example, especially fond of Land-of-Hope-and-Glory stuff, anything wrapped in the Union Jack (or any other home country flag for that matter) or the “long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, and invincible suburbs” as once envisioned by John Major. There was altogether too much of that stuff last year.

No, what I hoped to see was a collection of ads that, in short, contained elements of Danny Boyle’s brilliant 2012 Opening Ceremony – ads that weren’t patriotic, but witty, self-deprecating, perhaps with elements of self-doubt and cynicism, weird, sometimes just plain surreal, and honed in on some aspect of British culture or behaviour. You know one when you see it.

One test might be: could this ad have been made anywhere else? And could it have run anywhere else? Think Eddie the Eagle. This is a man who turned failure into an art form, and whose ad credits include Churchill, Specsavers, Ford and a contact lens manufacturer.

Nor need this be the exclusive province of British brands or those with some kind of British provenance. Everything Everywhere’s 4G launch campaign with Kevin Bacon, as explained by Saatchi and Saatchi’s Richard Huntingdon at TV Nation, is one that sought to – and captured, in my view – that quintessential Britishness and threw dozens of cultural references at us. And that from a Franco-German telecoms company using a Hollywood A-lister.

So what did I see? A mostly dire selection of rubbish, Euro and globo-trash. The best you can say is that they were dull and unmemorable.

Some exceptions: Paul Whitehouse’s Aviva series ticks the box for eccentricity, and he’s a bit of a loser too; the new Pimms campaign is likewise Britishly odd; the Pilgrim Cheese ads fall into the surreal camp, while Birds Eye’s Clarence the polar bear is yet another example of our enduring love of anthropomorphism.

MediaTel colleagues have drawn my attention to another current ad that probably could only run here – Ariel’s Date Night Pulling Shirt, a rare example of a global brand owner like P&G talking in a local tone of voice.

Is there much more out there? Please tell me if there is.

So why are marketers so often failing to tap into our sense of national self-identity? Money is one answer: some multinationals may conclude that Britain is not a sufficiently large market to make it worth targeting in such a way.

Some prefer to find universal truths and insights around which to base their marketing. And some probably don’t feel confident enough they can get it right without alienating some segment somewhere. It’s not an easy trick to pull off.

I’m doing my best not to hark back to the past, but if you want two ads that were 100% British, and 100% barking mad, remember Cadbury’s gorilla and Blackcurrant Tango.

Come on adland: try harder.

Microsoft: er, could they be the new good guys?

Microsoft’s C-suiters are, I imagine, high-fiving away as Google’s current travails over tax are plastered all over the media, especially as it coincides with Microsoft’s attempt to position itself as the people’s champion.

The sleight of hand by which Google books all sales revenue through Ireland is entirely legal. But it makes you wonder: what does Mark Howe, Google’s managing director for agency operations and country sales director, do with his time all day if he’s not out there selling? He must have the cushiest number in the world.

And if you want to buy a campaign off Google and chuck in, say, some cool YouTube stuff, do you have to get hold of someone in Dublin?

All this makes Microsoft, once the epitome of corporate bullying, look rather good, and its new privacy campaign – under the strapline ‘Your privacy is our priority’ – aptly timed. In fact, it’s been out for a month, but it didn’t catch my eye until last week.

But here’s the thing: it’s rather dull, isn’t it? If Microsoft wants to grab back some market share for Internet Explorer, Bing or Outlook, surely it should be going for the jugular with these ads. And it’s got one of those awful ‘nu-folk’ soundtracks which are now like a sonic warning: watch out, this ad’s trying hard to be cute and whimsical.

But if Microsoft thinks its privacy initiative (case unproven, but if not now, when?) is a significant competitive advantage, then it should be ramping it up. But this, well, looks half-hearted. Even the accompanying website and collateral material is just so corporate.

It’s not that Microsoft can’t do it. Here’s an internal parody of a Chrome ad that hits hard and low. Nasty, but fun.

Of course, if this went properly public, it might not do Microsoft much good either.