Michael Winner's No Loser

If you think "There's no such thing as bad publicity" is just a cliche, think again.

All week on both the radio and TV I have consumed stories about Michael Winner's inflammatory comments that northerners can't cook, that the food up north is terrible, that it's not fit for humans etc etc. 

I heard it first on Radio 4 and then saw it on BBC North West Tonight, BBC national news, and I heard it on Radio 2. In the following days the Lancashire Telegraph and various press and online media operations from Liverpool to Yorkshire were inundated with readers/listeners incandescent about Winner's outrageous comments. The old north south divide was back in the debating chamber. Emotions were max'd. The old flames of patriotism were burning bright.

Lo' and behold, browsing through the TV schedule on Friday, what do I find but a new TV series starting that very night. On ITV1. Called Dining Stars and starring Michael Winner.

Calm down dear. It's just a PR push.

By now, southerners love and northerners hate Winner. And there's no better way to ensure they all tune in. You only don't turn the box on if you're indifferent to him. And who could be so after the week's multi-platform onslaught ?

People calling in to on-air debates on the subject have totally "bought in" to the movement. Having invested in this manner, an affinity takes root. It's how humans are built.

If you don't believe it's all planned out and phoney then take it from someone who's done similar work. In 1999 I worked for Loaded magazine, published by IPC. To sell a new PlayStation game called Crash Bandicoot 3 (Warped!), I hired Battersea Park Children's Zoo for a morning and cast Joanne Guest to model the shoot. Jo was a member of the anti-fur lobby. I hired the photographer, hair and make-up, props etc but I then visited a sex shop in Soho called Libido and, armed with Joanne's measurements, I ordered a fake fur bikini for her to wear on set. 

Whilst the main photographer was shooting the take for the magazine promotion, the PR guys (from Jackie Cooper on Poland Street) organised a long-lens photographer to snap our activities through the bushes, as if to imply a non-complicit snoop by the paparazzi. The PR guys and the magazine (that's me) worked the whole project up from the ground together. Everything was planned and all parties were on the pay roll. Joanne was in the loop.

When the promo hit the magazine in the next issue, our long-lens chap made a call to the tabloid press to "leak" the fact that a known paid up member of the anti-fur lobby was modelling in fur to sell a PlayStation game. He was instructed to make a deal with the papers - that they could only run the story if they included a sentence which explained that the work involved the promotion of Crash Bandicoot 3 - Warped! by SCEE out now on Sony Playstation from all good stockist RRP £44.99.

Having paid me for the magazine page space and filming costs, this fake story ran across early pages in The News Of The World, The Sun, The Mirror and various other publications. All free. I calculated the like-for-like advertising rates for such publicity and filed it with the client. They'd spent about £30,000 and had generated media presence worth closer to £150,000. 

Job done. They'll be back for more when the need arises. Why go to FHM or GQ when the boys at LOADED will spin you additional tabloid "news" for free ?

This is how the system worked and this is how it still works, except everything''s been cranked up in the PR stakes since then, as the recession bites, reality TV grows ever larger to facilitate such activities and clients demand a higher and higher return on investment / bang for their buck. Call it what you will. 

I was responsible for that campaign and many others of the type, so let's be clear that I'm not rumour-mongering here.

The opposite of love is not hate

So would proud northerners tune in to watch Winner's new show, Dining Stars, after having taken offence at his remarks just earlier ? Yes.

Love and hate are both emotional connections to the target. If you have an emotional connection you have a connection per se , and if you have a connection you have a stake in the thing. And you will follow events as they unfold. 

The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference. Marketers know this. We learn it and see it. Hence, there really is no such thing as bad publicity. Because the opposite of good is not bad in this media world. The opposite of good is indifference. Capiche? 

You tune in, ITV sees it's audience figures rise, the ad sales guys at ITV get on the blower to BT and Coke and GoCompare and they sell ads based on audience size. Now surely everyone knew it all came down to the dollar. But I witness so much dumbfounding naivete from my fellow citizens when it comes to TV and its PR arm that I just have to lay it out as it is.

How many people sit through Jonathan Ross on a Friday night without the slightest inclination that the guests only ever crawl out of their Palm Beach pads twice yearly just to sell you another book/dvd/cinema or concert ticket ? Too many for my liking.

Wise up guys. Money makes the world go round after all. And that's no bad thing. But lets open our eyes, yeah ?

I wasn't involved in it, but a few years back marketers were back slapping at an edgy London PR firm for coming up with a plan to boost the ratings of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? British law can make ITV remove a programme from a prime time schedule if it's audience market share drops below a pre-set threshold. If you move out of prime time, your advertisers move out of your bank account and ITV simply couldn't afford this to happen. 

How could you get people to tune back into Millionaire ? It was time worn and on it's last legs with nowhere to go. The fake fur bikini in this case was a coughing member of the audience and an upper-class cheating contestant. All briefed beforehand and paid accordingly for their inconveniences, which included lawful arrest. The tabloid spin, the sheer multi-media noise that constituted the fall-out from such an ingenious execution was not priceless. For you could calculate it's worth, as I did for Loaded magazine, based on current advertising rates at the requisite media channels. But it was priceless in another sense. And it worked.

Fingers on buzzers. All your feedback is sought, prized and welcomed.

Data Capture

Have you been clubbed ?

Your store card gets you discounts. So what's in it for the store ?

Here's a thing or two you might not know about store cards. I know that because every time I get chatting to people over dinner or in a bar, and the topic arises, my disclosures leave them pretty gob-smacked. It occurred to me, then, that the smartest thing about store cards and their ilk is the blanket of stealth or ignorance (call it what you will) beneath which they operate.

But whose advantage ?

The Myth of Loyalty

OK. I don't mean that quite literally. In that Nectar and your Boots card in fact do make you more loyal to those shops or groups of member outlets. But think about this; if many people already get their health goods from Boots and their weekly food shop from Tesco, what does the loyalty card do for them ? It makes them shop there more often and it makes them spend more than they would otherwise. So what ? you might say.

The deal as it's presented to Jo Public runs something like this; You buy more and the shop gives you a (slightly or significantly) larger discount than you'd get if you bought less. A fair deal ? For sure. 

But that's not the thing......

The thing (the really clever thing) is that the store-card doesn't stop there. The idea that loyalty is the primer behind Clubcard and it's friends is the myth in all this. Because the real holy grail for the shop is data. Your data. That's what it's all about. And they ain't uttering one word about it now are they ? I wonder why?

Here's what gives; using EPOS (electronic point-of-sale technology) and having got you to willingly hand over your name, address, phone number and "permission" when you initially signed up for the card, the company behind the store can sit back and watch clever computers build an entire profile of you and your life. Your daily behaviour. Your likes and dislikes. Your extra marital activities (I'm perfectly serious), and so on. It's like Crimewatch profiling those criminals  but much more complete and intrusive.

In the business we call it "data-mining".

Each time they scan your card for the big shop it's you telling them that you're shopping for a hubby and two kids. That you prefer white wine and microwave meals. That you do in fact cook a good roast on a Sunday. That you have guests round occasionally. That your house has a small garden. That one of your kids is a girl in year ten. That you take a family holiday twice a year, usually for a fortnight ski-ing in January and somewhere sunny in August. And that when you're away on business once a month the old man get's the bit on the side round for the night.

Come again ? Well, besides sun tan lotion, ski goggles, baking flour, trowels and seeds, school diaries and a few bottles of pinot, let's just say that your Iain Banks travel reads for the flight, new make-up for the power meetings followed in a few days by a drop-off in your Radox bath soak and scented candles, coincide nicely with romantic flowers and chocolates, a new man's shirt and aftershave and a distinct absence of the weekly six pack of beers synonymous with couch potato syndrome. And a little sexy number from the lingerie department. He clearly knows what he's doing.

You're calling home from your business trip at nine every night. Tucked in to your executive suite in the South of France (Tesco Mobile) but he's got the patter all prepared and everything's as it should be. In fact he appears to be putting a deposit down on a little cottage in the Cotswolds (Tesco Finance) but maybe you're not in on that particular project. No worries, the computer simply flags up a divorce in the making and a Do-It-Yourself divorce pack is already winging it's way to your other half in the post courtesy of the Tesco Legal Store.

How's that store card looking right now ? Still friends with it ?

The third party company that managed Tesco data from the early days, Dunn Humby, soon came to realise it was rather powerful in terms of the demographic and behaviour profiling it was holding on pretty much a sizeable chunk of the British public. Old Soviet block dictatorships had nothing on this, I like to think. Tesco came in and bought a chunk of the operation. It couldn't very well have Dunn Humby going it's own way with all that juice on it's computer servers, now could it ?

The point is that "data capture" is, and has been for some time, the chief driver of behaviour of the "loyalty card" variety. So much so that the concept of "loyalty" as the project header is misleading at best, and a sham at worst.

This blog is about advertising, and where advertising crosses the line of moral acceptability. At first one might think that all this talk of data capture is a bit of a digression. But hopefully now you can see that in actual fact, data collation of this ilk is really a very clever guise of the classic ad man. It is in fact advertising in reverse. Rather than the traditional method, whereby shops advertise their wares, here we have customers advertising their future needs, so to speak. If you ever considered that Tesco et al getting you to do your own packing, cutting down on till staff and no doubt pocketing the wages savings is a blend of mischief and subtle ingenuity, then know that they are also getting customers to do their own advertising these days. Each time you purchase skin cream, cleansing balm and make-up remover you are effectively sticking your hand up and shouting "Talk to me about health and beauty products! I'm a buyer!" Thanks to store cards, they have all they need to know and your in-depth profile is ever increasing in size and sophistication.

You got a pay rise, a baby on the way or an au pair in residence ? Guess who knows ? It's all in the data. Oh it's just beautiful.

I used to work for a large British data company where everything was done by the book and above board. So I'm not talking about cowboys. Having collected and cleaned the data (people's emails, age, location, marital status, income bracket, choice of car etc), I could often "rent" or "sell" that same data onto third party companies who could target the people on the lists about buying their products too. If I ran an online mechanic getting people to tell me just three things in order to enter a competition to win an iPod, and those three things were email address, their phone network and the date of expiry of their phone contract, and say if I got permission to sell on this data, by making it a condition of entry to win the prize that you ticked the "yes" box where permission was sought, I could then collate all the (let's say) O2 contract holders whose deals expire in the next three months, and I could sell them to, for example, Vodafone. 

Data isn't about loyalty. It is gold in it's own right. I speak from experience in the field.

Writer's Eye View; The Whitbread Group's Costa Coffee is getting in on the act. This is Sunday 7th March in The Lowry Outlet, Salford Quays, near Manchester. The Coffee Club roll-out is in full swing.

Laws do exist to ensure that each person on such a list has given their "permission" to be contacted, but I have used quotes marks over that word because it's not permission in the real sense. It's often awarded unwittingly by the individual in the small print T&C's (Terms and Conditions) that internet users will usually skim or skip over before clicking the "yes" or "opt-in" box. Or permission is acquired venally (see how it was won in the above "win an iPod!" competition two paragraphs back).

Tesco, as far as I'm aware, don't sell your data onto third party companies. They keep it for themselves. But if you've got a weight problem say, and the Clubcard's giving them the whole story so they'll know this, then it doesn't matter whether they're contacting you (by email, post, text etc) with double points for diet products or double points for cream cakes, the point is they know your weak spots and they're hitting you with them for the up-sell.

You have, by now, submitted control.

Tesco is looking at launching a new high street bank this year. It already sells finance, petrol, mobile phone services and a whole range of other stuff besides most groceries. Much like Whitbread PLC which owns Costa Coffee (the above photo) and is also the UK's largest hotel and restaurant company. Although they don't sell your data on, they are free to pass it within the group and given their diversity and size it amounts to the same thing. Your data will be seen and used advantageously by commercial operations much removed from the original service which gleaned the information from you. 

I possess, in sum total, a Nero's coffee shop card and a Waterstone's card. One is data free, ie it's non-membership oriented, and the other is, in essence, for a one-line product outlet (books, obviously). So I don't get too pestered or feel that my privacy, integrity and control is being compromised too much. But the point is that I am making an informed decision. I'm going in with my eyes wide open. That's just because I happen to have worked in the industry. For most shoppers, however, the wool is being pulled. Loyal shoppers are blinded with the smoke and mirrors of "loyalty cards" where they are really anything but. And moreover, they don't even know it.

Supermarkets famously place fresh fruit and veg back-lit with green lights at the entrance point to their stores to create a fresh wholesome impression, and pipe the smell of baked bread through the store, putting "pester power" kids sweets at kid's eye level at the check-out (where kids, like everyone else, have to stand still and wait), and alcohol at the back or far aisle (dedicated drinkers may nip in for the odd bottle but end up checking out with a tasty gamut of fayre having had to walk through most aisles to reach the booze).

Most of us knew about these time-honoured successful tricks of the trade. But loyalty cards are a pretty novel genre, so just think on. They can be a real bargain but the cost of them isn't always what you'd think. The cost is more than loyalty. It's privacy. It's manipulation of the information brought to light when that privacy is flouted and it's all this without your knowledge. Well you know what they say about the truth. Every little helps. 

I have run predominantly with Tesco in the illustrations above but the argument applies to most big-box discount stores and hypermarkets, nationwide chains and household names. The wider the range of products they sell, the deeper the data they can mine and the more intrusive and manipulative they can be. I shop often in Tesco but I don't carry a Clubcard, simply for all of these reasons.

Data capture is as stealthy as land banking*. Personally, I have lots of respect for the marketing genius of these key players. I am a marketer after all. It has been my career and it will be so again, I'm sure. There is intellectual fulfilment in the laws of marketing and it's application. But I'm also a public champion with a vision of transparency. Academic intellect is one thing. But sometimes advertising crosses a line.

Double points on feedback for a limited time only! File your thoughts in the comments space below.

* Big stores are known to buy all surplus land in a town when they build their superstore, thereby preventing competitor stores opening nearby. Tesco was alleged to have refused to yield on this strategy even when local government bodies needed the land in question for schools and local amenities.

Get Fit With HFSS !

The best laid plans, and all that..........

What kind of product endorsements do you expect to find in your gym ? Cereal bars, beauty products, healthy lifestyle accessories ?

Well how about Burger King and McDonalds ?

Fresh fruit....check, water.....check, Burger King? Worth a double take!!!

Above is what has greeted me for the last fortnight in my local health club. 
So I'm doing my work-out and I'm seeing fastfood logos on clean white backgrounds of A4 paper, supported with a beautiful display of product packaging  just in case I don't know what a BigMac might look like.

Now, having worked at the heart of media promotions for many years, it strikes me that there are two main consquences of this type of promotion in the heart of an urban branch of one of England's main health and fitness chains;

Consequence 1:

Club members (most of them, to my mind) will walk past the display (it's on the gym's main thoroughfare) and notice the logo's and product placement, but they won't look closer. This itself is classic "host endorsement" of foods that are controversially HFSS. We all know this. No need to elaborate on this point. The simple message, often stored subconsciously runs something akin to "McDonalds must be OK. My gym have their products and branding displayed in their outlets."

Consequence 2:

Club members (the more curious and time-free breed) will stop by and read the promotion literature. Behind each brand logo is a table of nutritional information for various product ranges offered by the respective brand. 

So I read that a BigMac has 520 calories. Now, before I had read this, I was of the impression that such food is to be steered well clear of. Afterall, one of my aims at the gym is weight loss. And if you'd have asked me yesterday to hazard a guess at the calorific content of a BigMac I'd have come in around half your recommended daily intake (that's about 1,250 cals for men, on average) at least. But now, I'm thinking, well, turns out a BigMac is only 520 cals, so if I forego the hefty lunch tomorrow, I could fit one of these babies into my diet without much fall-out. 

Hang on a minute, let me get this straight. I consider myself a discerning shopper. I see through the "I'm Loving It" hype on the telly, the radio, the press, the tube exit staircase and so on, choosing to exercise discipline and not let the junk food guys get their argument in. I'm not open to persuasion. The tough road to successful living, but worth it.

And yet, here is McDonalds, getting it's two penneth in and swaying me the other way, courtesy of my health club! Is this what I get for my membership fees ?

There is a third consequence, which is that the promotion gets ignored, But given it's prominence and positioning, such will befall a very small minority, if any, of my fellow gym-goers.

Now, in my eyes, that's a whopper!

The Interview

So I had a word with the employee who set this up. (names of staff and gym are omitted at this stage while I give them a chance to make good. But watch this space for changes/updates)

I pointed out the above. I asked if any money had changed hands (The PR offices of those respective brands, for want of a better phrase, couldn't buy such publicity in such an environment). And I pointed out that even if this was not the case, and even if intentions were wholesome, the opposite will happen/is happening. I explained that I work in media marketing, thinking this may reassure the chap that my comments are knowledge-based good advice.

Let me say right now that he did assure me (and I believe him) that this is a non-commercial project to highlight nutritional data on popular foods and was carried out in a purely pragmatic and neutral manner with brands being selected simply on the basis of local presence.

(There's also a string of decent restaurants nearby so why the burger bars get featured rather than balanced dishes of fish, meat and veg who knows ? Too much effort, perhaps ?)

I pointed out that the project was, and I quote "naive at best" and at worst, damaging in that it promotes junk food. I also said that your good intentions and hopes and aims pale into insignificance compared to your actions. Actions are all. If you mean well but act in a way that inadvertently has the opposite effect, it's just as damaging as if you were malicious. I suggested he remove the big brand logos for those HFSS giants and also remove the product packaging. (I'd sooner the burger boys pay through the nose to get product placement on Corrie than get it gratis through, of all places, my own gym!). 

But I was dismissed on site and nothing happened. ( I popped back in an hour later and all is as all was).

The replies I received were wholly unsatisfactory to say the least and included:

" I disagree"

" Well, that's why you (ie me) don't work in fitness because I know what I'm talking about"

and finally

"I'm not going to discuss this any more."

Clearly, personal offence was taken and emotions were roused. But this isn't good enough. And as to the second comment above, although the chap is a fitness expert, he has clearly strayed into the esoteric minefield of marketing and is refusing to accept either the fact of the matter or my advice.

The bottom line, and I speak from experience, is that bringing full colour oversized brand logos and product packaging into the gym is not the best way to raise a discussion about a healthy diet.  All publicity, to some extent, is good publicity, and this is a sure-fire way of bringing these brands under the health umbrella. Like it or not, blending this type of product seamlessly into the cardio room does not inform, it subliminally promotes. 

Reasonable questions to be raised are:

Is this some kind of co-marketing push ? Is it in any way commercial ?

Have any permissions been sought and received from the brands in question ? BK et al are not exactly in control of their own marketing destiny if you just put this stuff up on a whim, after all.

What are the rights and image licensing ramifications of such a stunt ?

Have you thought about the positive perception you are creating for unhealthy food ?

Are you not in any way aware of the power of endorsement from a gym to its members ?

I'm going to look into this a little further and raise the issue with a few bods and see what gives. So stay tuned for updates.

My interviewee did mention that, having run for a week or so, the campaign is due to be taken down on Sunday February 28th 2010. I just wanted to make this last point and to snap a photo or two of the promotion (as featured above) because, call me a cynic, but if at a later stage this complaint reaches higher levels I want to pre-empt the defence/mitigation argument that the promo has now being removed - implying that lessons have been learned and that I have been listened to. In fact, I was dismissed rather contemptuously and this campaign will have run it's full intended course, begging the question, whatever next? Lambert & Butler full colour branding in the spin theatre perhaps ? Crikey!!!

Have you had similar experiences from your health clubs? I'd love to hear about them.