One of the ways that financial services businesses can rebuild trust is to show more of a human face. And that means real humans, not the weird people in the pinstripe suits. All too often, the hyper control freaks running most financial institutions prefer to rely on corporate anonymity, rather than allowing real people on the inside to talk to real people on the outside. This is also the reason why many struggle with social media, regarding it simply as another one-way channel to disseminate bland corporate puffery, rather than a platform for real dialogue.
All credit then to insurance company LV and its agency ThirtyThree for coming up with a means of allowing potential recruits to choose the actual call-handler they would like to deal with their enquiry. A series of posters will feature existing LV employees, who can be contacted via a mobile text message or email. A recorded message from the employee appearing on the poster is then sent to the potential recruit.
The Football Association has provided a perfect illustration of how tight news management no longer works in the age of social media. It had intended to formally announce the 23 England players selected to play at the World Cup on its official website, but failed to allow for the Twitter effect. Theo Walcott, who was surprisingly not selected, had already issued a statement via Twitter and the names of all of the players excluded from the final 23 were being shared over the internet, before the FA’s PR machine had finally cranked into action.
The FA discovered, like so many traditional institutions, that you no longer have the luxury of sitting on news stories for hours whilst you go through laborious approval processes and get your act together. In the old days you could issue a story under an embargo and be reasonably confident that it would be respected by the traditional media. Now, when everyone is a potential journalist (including footballers, their agents and random hangers-on), stories can emerge and spread in seconds.
Brand or company logos are highly precious things. Small armies of designers, brand managers and trademark lawyers spend their waking hours and huge amounts of money, creating, nuturing and protecting them. When they get it right, this core element of a brand’s intangible value can be worth hundreds of millions of pounds, which is why Greenpeace’s currently strategy of encouraging consumers to subvert the BP logo is a masterstroke. The pressure group has created a microsite www.greenpeace.org.uk/behindthelogoas a platform for professional and amateur designers to express their anger about the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and create their own versions of the BP helios logo.
This tactic has particular resonance because the ‘Beyond Petroleum’ tagline – the idea that this is a business committed to non-traditional energy sources - looks even less credible in the wake of the current environmental disaster. Greenpeace will now be hoping that the BP lawyers adopt the approach taken by their counterparts at Nestle, who thought it would be a good idea to block similarly customised versions of the Kit-Kat logo, on the grounds of trademark infringement.
All this succeeded in doing was to transform a relatively minor web phenomenon into a global media controversy. It will be interesting to see whether the lawyers at BP take the bait.
Gordon Brown was famously described by David Cameron as “an analogue politician for a digital age”, so it it interesting to see how wannabe Labour leader David Miliband has been quick to put social media at the heart of his leadership campaign. Gordon Macmillan in Brand Republic provides a great summary of his plans.
Next stop for Miliband should probably be Google’s Zeitgeist conference, which famously hosted David Cameron in 2007 when he was seeking to underline his digital credentials. Hopefully is he does attend, Milliband will avoid Cameron’s star-struck description of Google as “responsible for a large portion of the wonders of our modern world.”
For the record, I’m just about to put a bet on Andy Burnham as the next leader. A very clever politician and closer to the Labour Party heartland than the either of the Milibands.
You rarely have the opportunity to put tranvestites, alpaca farmers and hairdressers in the same sentence, but all of these groups are now working together to protect the US Gulf Coast. In a brilliant example of crowdsourcing – co-ordinated by the Matter of Trust charity – hair is being collected from hair salons in France, Spain, Brazil, Australia, Canada and the US, combined with animal fur from sheep and alpaca farmers and then stuffed into used nylon tights (some of which have been supplied by tranvestite group, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence). The resulting ‘hairy sausages’ (for that is what they look like) are then used as booms to help soak-up oil produced by the sunken BP platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s how AFP reported what has become my favourite empowerment story.
It is almost as if the UK population got together and worked out what would be the best way to annoy its political masters. “I know, let’s create a situation in which none of the political parties can put together a working majority … allow our vote to swing wildly from constituency to constituency & then throw in a Green candidate just to prove how fickle we are.” The fact that all of the political leaders and their advisors are scratching their heads trying to work out what to do next, shows how well the plans have worked. We have confused the buggers – not difficult after a night without sleep – and confounded the pundits.
This was the election for the subversive and contrarian spirit that lies at the heart of the British psyche – the same spirit that swept Boris to power in London and put Rage Against the Machine at the top of the charts. The people are ungovernable … & isn’t it great.
What motivates 1,000 people to take off their clothes, on a typically freezing Bank Holiday weekend, to appear in Spencer Tunick’s latest naked art installation? Exhibitionism, a spirit of collective action or simply the desire to participate in something that you could tell your friends about for years to come?
This time, Tunick was aiming to reinterpret the works of L.S.Lowry for an installation named ‘Everyday People’ – although judging by the photos, there weren’t too many matchstick people available. His work – or more significantly, the willingness of everyday people to appear in his work - is a perfect expression of our times, combining people’s desire for self expression with the spirit of collective action.
By Martin
|
April 30, 2010
The title comes from a typically profound piece of intellectual musing by those very clever chaps at the Future Foundation. Their argument is very compelling – the collapse of trust in all forms of institutional power and our willingness to challenge traditional sources of expertise and leadership, has created a situation in which the people are almost ungovernable.
Here are a selection of the best quotes from The Future Foundation paper:
“Authority has to battle for legitimacy every day; it can have no expectation of canned applause.”
“The truth as affirmed and broadcast by any institution is intrinsically, programmatically contestable. For every fact there is an anti-fact.” … & on a similar vein “Democracy is terrible hard work” … a sentiment that I am sure Barak Obama would all too readily endorse.
“It is noticable, in fact, just how hard it is these days for Governments to convert their programmes into policies.”
By Martin
|
April 29, 2010
In an interesting and wide ranging post, Chris Arnold, talks about the emergence of grassroots campaigning groups as a threat to traditional charitable institutions. He suggests that “there is some evidence that issue websites are gaining more followers than traditional charity sites in the States.”
We shouldn’t be surprised by this trend. Charities, like every other institution, are having to come to terms with the challenges posed by consumer empowerment. It has never been easier for passionate and creative individuals to start grassroots campaigns, focused on single issues, that are capable of securing mass support, generating donations and forcing corporates to respond. And the immediacy and novelty of these campaigns makes them feel far more exciting than many of the ongoing fundraising initiatives implemented by traditional charities.
We are now in the era of the ‘pop-up charity” in which the dominance of the institutional charities is challenged by short-term, highly focused campaigning groups, that recruit followers to their cause through social media, grab the headlines and then disappear, to be replaced by other groups, with equally short-term goals.
By Martin
|
April 21, 2010
Here’s the final proof, if it were ever needed, that clients are about to call time on their traditional creative agencies: Unilever has just announced plans to crowdsource creative work for 13 of its most important global brands. For a mere £7,000 (which is the prize for the suppliers of the winning idea), Unilever will be able to acquire hours of creative content. And even if most of it is complete rubbish, there is bound to be some decent material, and all for the cost of a typical day’s photo-shoot or a creative director’s bar bill at Cannes.
This isn’t about tapping into consumer empowerment or engaging customers (the vast majority of whom will be completely a of the crowdsourcing initiative), it is about driving cost out of the creative process. Agencies can protest that this undervalues the strategic thinking and creative originality that their expensively assembled teams can bring to a brief, but it is likely to fall on death ears. Make a note of the date: 21 April 2010 – the day the creative agency died.
