The Art of Persuasion. Inside ad land: 7 mantras from a world of tricks, shticks
and mavericks. When George Bush was asked what people could do to
contribute ...
The Art of Persuasion
Inside ad land: 7 mantras from a world of tricks, shticks and mavericks
When George Bush was asked what people could do to contribute in the fearful, unsettled days and weeks after September 11th 2001, he responded with a single word: “Shop.” Not that we really needed encouraging. Marketers and ad men have been ruffling, seducing and cajoling us into retail therapy with ever more elaborate ploys since the birth of commerce. And they’ve got very good at it. All around the world, men propose to their sweethearts with a diamond ring because De Beers started sponsoring love films in the 1930’s. Bang & Olufsen build weighted blocks into their remote controls purely so that they feel heavier and thus more worthy of their premium price. Car showrooms attain their scent of fresh leather out of a can. The stronger the smell, the more people will spend on a car. Wine shops have found that playing quiet French music overhead makes more people ‘choose’ French wine. Agencies create ads that make some of us as devoted to brands as others are to religion. Are you a Christian or an Atheist? A Mac or a PC? I took a temporary job in advertising some time ago and presumed that it was this, the ‘buy-‐ ology’ of the business, that would be interesting and useful in some way. Instead, much of what I learnt came from watching agencies charm clients and win pitches in the first place. How, in a highly competitive and oversaturated industry, they persuaded companies to hire them over someone else. I spoke to some of the most influential names in the ad business about the art of persuasion, and came away with 7 mantras.
1. Be brave. Very brave. British Rail was looking for a new agency to handle their enormous advertising account in the 80’s. It was the end of a long day of pitches when they showed up wearily at the door of London agency ABM. The receptionist was rude and kept them waiting. Employees were loitering around, flicking through newspapers and stubbing cigarettes out into chipped mugs. Bewildered and unimpressed, the clients were just about to leave when Peter Marsh, founder of the agency, marched onto the scene. “This gentlemen, is how your customers feel every single day,” he announced. “We are going to show you how to put that right.” The agency won the pitch. Saatchi & Saatchi weren’t shy either when they employed CIA tactics to give them the edge. The agency used to own a small fleet of taxis, which would pull up outside competitive agencies following big pitches and ferry clients round to subsequent agencies in the line up. Often by the end of the day, the drivers would have ear-‐wigged in, and reported back on, enough post-‐pitch discussion for Saatchi’s to tweak their own presentation to perfection. They must have won over a great many clients before being sprung some years later. 2. Employ the use of theatre. Tim Lindsay, who has headed up several top agencies in his time, chortled when he told me he “probably” won the Pirelli Tyre account for his agency Y&R on one blinding presentation alone. Hiring Cindy Crawford to pose as the receptionist and welcome the clients into the meeting possibly didn’t set things off to a bad start either. Saatchi’s once went the extra mile for a Toyota pitch by removing and re-‐ assembling the entire glass front of their building in order to park the prized Toyota model in their reception. The agency was laughing on the other side of their face when, not long after, a rival and next-‐ door neighbour by the name of TBWA paid them a surprise visit in the dead of night. Paul Bainsfair, President of TWBA at the time, recalls talking Saatchi’s security guard into submission before calling in his troops to plaster the front of the agency with an enormous branded arrow, which snaked round to the entrance of his own building and announced: “You’ll get a better reception at TBWA.”
3. Be prepared for epic failure. John Pearce, co-‐founder of CDP, Britain’s most famous and iconic agency, once said: “The greatest sin is invisibility.” One agency head thought he’d make a very visible point during a pitch presentation to Direct Line. His mission, he stated, was to completely do away with high street bank competitors. His stunt? To press a button on his homemade model of a miniature high street and detonate the banks in question with a small, ‘thrilling’ explosion. Thrill soon turned to horror when the fire alarm was triggered, and the Direct Line offices and adjoining call centre were all evacuated for the best part of an hour. Direct Line lost thousands of pounds worth of callers and the agency, unsurprisingly, lost the pitch. Saatchi’s starred in yet another ad land fable when they pitched for the BT account some years ago. The final presentation had gone extremely well. So well in fact, that a rare ripple of applause broke out from the clients at the end of it. The agency heads were asked to step out of the room and leave the clients to collect their final conclusions, with warm handshakes and thumbs up all round. They re-‐entered the room to a stony silence and were told they had lost the pitch after all. Their crime? Leaving a notepad on the table, on which one agency partner had scribbled to another in microscopic writing: “Watch out for the guy in the glasses. Looks like a total c**t.” 4. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Most ad men actually don’t, which is clever because it’s so charming. My boss was Johnny Hornby, widely acclaimed to be ad land’s closest thing to a poster boy. Clients who sign his bottom line effectively buy themselves memberships to a world of lunches at The Ivy, yacht trips to Cannes and access to his vast address book of media magnates, celebrities and politicians. It would be easy to tease him for being the walking cliché of a nauseating hot shot. Easy that is, if he wasn’t teasing himself all the time instead. Even Sarah Golding, Managing Partner at his agency and by far the straightest, hardest, most terrifying person I have ever worked for, has it right when she says: “Coming for a meeting at an ad agency should feel like double art on a Friday afternoon.” She means for the clients of course. “All ad men are schoolboys themselves,” says Paul Bainsfair. Pranks are rife. A particular favourite has been dubbed ‘The Phrase That Pays,” and requires them to smuggle increasingly inappropriate words into big presentations without clients noticing. I asked Kerry Glazer, CEO of London’s most esteemed pitch intermediary, whether she had ever noticed this and she laughed and said no, before adding: “Anything to take the heat off in these situations and to boost morale has to be a good thing.”
5. Make allowances for creative genius. Legend has it that famous copywriter Terry Lovelock came up with the iconic ‘Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach’ campaign only after six weeks of producing no work whatsoever. In exasperation, his boss Frank Lowe sent the workshy fop on a holiday to Marrakesh with instructions not to return without an award-‐ winning idea. Terry obliged and the rest is advertising history. John Pearce was once asked by a client why the scruffy offices at CDP didn’t even compare to ‘the museums of interior design’ that his competitor agencies were, and replied: “We spend the money on salaries for the best people, not the décor. We believe they should have nice carpets on the floor in their homes. Not in the office.” A former head of the agency, Colin Millward, was said to highly value the chaotic environment and lack of schedule that seemed to cultivate great ideas in his creative department. Nevertheless, he remembers accosting Ron Collins, a renowned art director, as he strolled in at 11 o clock one morning and saying, not unreasonably: “Ron, you should have been here at 9 o clock!” to which Ron famously replied: “Why? What happened at 9 o clock?” Matthew Pam, a much-‐loved copywriter at the agency I worked for once snuck onto Johnny Hornby’s computer at midnight on a Thursday evening and sent an all-‐staff email to announce that everyone was to have Friday off as a treat. Harmful as this prank was for business when no one turned up to work the following day, Johnny couldn’t bear to part with him. He issued a stern warning letter instead, a framed copy of which hangs proudly in Matthew’s office to this day. 6. Be the underdog. Perhaps one of the greatest pitch turnaround stories of our time is that of London beating Paris to host the 2012 Olympic games. Paris was streets ahead in the race, and widely tipped to win. David Magliano, a former ad man who led the pitch, remembers taking to the stage in Singapore minutes before the live announcement of the winner. His team watched with resignation as the world press marched straight past them and started setting up their cameras at the other end of the stage, directly in front of the Paris team,
who were passing around magnums of champagne. When it was announced that London had triumphed by a margin of the votes, there was a stunned moment of confusion. The press were forced to launch themselves back across the room, dragging camera cables the size of small tree trunks in order to film London’s winning moment and Paris was forced to stuff Jack back into the box. David remembers it as one of the best days of his life. Part of what made London’s pitch so successful, he told me, was the fact that nobody thought they could win it. “Politicians took the back seat because they didn’t want to align themselves with probable failure. There were less stakeholders involved to knock off the hard edges,” he said. The resulting campaign? “Bloody genius, though I do say so myself.” Most of the advertising veterans who shared these stories were keen to reinforce that ad land has grown up in more recent times. Kerry Glazer says that the industry has developed “a strong desire to be taken more seriously.” With budgets tight and stakes higher, many agencies have weeded out the show ponies in favour of the workhorses. Jon Stuart, a former CDP ad man, thinks that advertising has suffered as a result. Paul Bainsfair laments “the death of the lunch.” When I asked the roguish Tim Lindsay if he would choose a career in advertising as a sparky, 20-‐something now, his answer was an assured “No.” He leaned forward with a twitch of a smile and continued, with his voice lowered: “Advertising isn’t dead remember. It’s morphing. It’s moving from Soho to Shoreditch. Those guys at the new digital start up agencies with their designer glasses, ironic t-‐shirts and asymmetric haircuts? They are set to inherit the world.” And thus he gave me my last and most treasured mantra: 7. Change is good. Most humans are pretty resistant to change. Most industries today are facing inordinate amounts of it. Most companies are afraid of it. Yet perhaps the most forward-‐thinking example of the art of persuasion I have ever come across was from the team behind Marlboro tobacco. What did they do when they were forbidden from traditional advertising altogether, and when smoking was banned indoors across much of the world? They poured their entire marketing budget into paying bars to fill their venues with Marlboro colour schemes, specially designed furniture that mimicked the logo and subtle allusions to the iconic brand. All to give smokers the urge to nip outside for a cigarette. A Marlboro cigarette. It’s an irony often forgotten that as a result of change, particularly the un-‐welcome kind, companies and their ad men are actually fast-‐forwarded into the future -‐ and forced to find new ways to survive. Of course, in the case of Marlboro, their customers might not be so lucky.
