The Wardman Wire

On the subject of “people caught with their pants down by Not the Election” (and ignoring Mr Gordon), we can add Claire Beale the Editor of Campaign in her “Claire Beale on Advertising” column in the Viewspaper yesterday.

In a swooping tour-de-force there was one excellent point, one rather desperate point, a sideswipe at the Conservative lack of an advertising agency and an absolute Whopper of the sort that will have her colleagues chuckling for months.

Oh dear. Doesn’t work when you write a politically related column one week for the following Monday, and take the weekend off.

Excellent Point

Slam dunk:

Satisfaction, number 1: being able to say “told you so”. Children’s TV programming is in crisis, the television watchdog Ofcom moaned last week. Too many imports, too many cartoons, not enough diversity or investment. Told you so, said adland.

Told you so, time and time again. But did you listen? Too busy giving ear to the anti-advertising loudmouths obsessed with blaming adland for making kids fat. Never mind the national sell-off of school playing fields, the calorific crap that constitutes cheap school dinners, or push-over parents who can’t say no to pester-power. No, blame everything on advertising, why don’t you: easy target, and there might be some votes in it.

So they blamed it on advertising and banned some of it. Since the summer, any product high in salt, sugar or fat cannot be advertised on TV when a high proportion of children are watching. And so there was the writing. On the wall. When Ofcom banned “junk food” advertising, it trampled over the economics of commercial television.

You can’t slash the amount of ad money broadcasters can make from children’s TV, and still expect them to make lots of original, stimulating programming for our offspring. Commercial TV doesn’t work like that. It works like this: broadcasters make programmes that attract audiences that advertisers want to advertise to. So advertisers advertise. And broadcasters use the ad money to make more programmes that attract audiences that advertisers want to advertise to. Ad infinitum. Simple, huh? Stop the advertisers advertising, and you stop the money for programme investment.

A touch desperate, Claire … ?

Satisfaction, number 2: Few things in adland are as gratifying as a firm two-fingered gesture to a client that has dumped your agency. M&C Saatchi has just delivered a perfectly executed gesture of that sort to its old British Airways client, with its new television ad for the luxury business airline Silverjet…

The airline moved its advertising to Bartle Bogle Hegarty in 2005 after 23 years with the Saatchi brothers’ agencies; now BBH has just unleashed its first brand campaign for the airline, to much criticism.

Perfectly executed? Perfect timing? Two years later.

Really?

And the Howler …

Satisfaction, number 3: how smug the Labour Party marketers must feel watching the Tories scrabbling round for advertising advisers as speculation about the election mounts.

That would be smug as in:

“our man overplayed his hand, tanked, went down the toilet, re-emerged dripping, pretended he’d just been planning a little read of Schott’s Miscellany all along, and then put on an affected indignation when no one believed him except his own cat”.

Yep, when your column landed on my doorstep on Monday I was full of tension. I couldn’t eat my breakfast on Monday not knowing whether Mr Gordon was going to re-call the Election he had written off two days before.

Events. Two days is a long time in politics.

Tags: claire beale, campaign, claire beale on advertising, viewspaper, independent, offcom, election[tags]claire beale, campaign, claire beale on advertising, viewspaper, independent, offcom, election[/tags]