swirl

The strange death of modern advertising
By Maurice Saatchi
June 21, 2006, Financial Times

Sometimes I feel as though I am standing at the graveside of a well-loved friend called advertising.

The funeral rites have been observed. The gravediggers have done their work. The mourners are assembled. Most of them are embarrassed to say they ever knew the deceased. “Advertising?” they say, “I’m not in that business.”

At the age of only 50, advertising was cut down in its prime. Advertising holding companies used to boast about their share of the advertising market. Now they are proud of how much of their business is not in advertising. How did this happen?

The first stage in the illness, they said, was sociology – the family no longer gathered to watch television. So they said, the 30-second commercial was finished.

The next symptom was technology – because, they said, even if family members were all in the same house, they would not all be watching the same screen. Laptops, mobile phones, iPods, games – all brought more media fragmentation, more channels, more choice, more complication.

Now, the diagnosis is that it is all in the mind – it is all a question of psychology.

Today, social scientists divide the world between digital natives and digital immigrants. Anyone over 25 is a digital immigrant. He or she has had to learn the digital language. The digital native learnt it like you learnt your mother tongue, effortlessly as you grew up. The digital immigrant struggles and forever has a thick, debilitating accent.

The latest affliction, according to neuroscience – and this was the death knell – is that the digital native’s brain is physically different as a result of the digital input it received growing up. It has rewired itself. It responds faster. It sifts out. It recalls less.

This, apparently, is what makes it possible for a modern teenager, in the 30 seconds of a normal television commercial, to take a telephone call, send a text, receive a photograph, play a game, download a music track, read a magazine and watch commercials at x6 speed. They call it “CPA”: continuous partial attention. The result: day-after recall scores for television advertisements have collapsed, from 35 per cent in the 1960s to 10 per cent today.

So, they say, sociology, technology and psychology have put advertising in its box. If you are in advertising, you are about to be buried. What to do? There is only one option left: to pray.

Conveniently, a Bible has been placed beside you in the box. Because you are a God-fearing person, you open it. Through divine good fortune, it falls open at the exact right page to show you your escape route.

You find the way out in the gospel of St John:
In the beginning was the Word . . .
You read on:
. . . and the Word was God.

No copywriter could put it better. The word is the brand’s guide, protector, defender and saviour.

The word comes first and it is singular – one word, not several words. For a brand, the word comes before all actions, in all media, at all times.

Two words is not God. It is two gods, and two gods are one too many.

The word is the saviour because in each category of global business, it will only be possible for one brand to own one particular word. And some of them have already been booked.

Each brand can only own one word. Each word can only be owned by one brand. Take great care before you pick your word. It is going to be the god of your brand.

Try this simple test on your own company’s products or services.

Pick a brand. Any brand.

Now, think of what you are trying to say. Can you precisely describe, in one word, the particular value, the characteristic, the emotion, you are trying to make your own?

If it runs to a sentence, you have a problem. A paragraph? Sell your shares.

Why? Because nowadays only brutally simple ideas get through. They travel lighter, they travel faster.

What I am describing here is a new business model for marketing, appropriate to the digital age. In this model, companies compete for global ownership of one word in the public mind.

This is “one word equity”.

In this new business model, companies seek to build one word equity – to define the one characteristic they most want instantly associated with their brand around the world, and then own it. That is one-word equity.

It is the modern equivalent of the best location in the high street, except the location is in the mind.

For example, the word “search” is now owned by Google. For 20 years, “favourite” was owned by British Airways. Sony used to own “innovation”, but that word has probably now been taken by Apple. Royal Bank of Scotland, in its US marketing, will soon own “action”. The same applies to political parties or countries – Britain’s Labour party won three elections with the word “new”. America’s one-word equity is “freedom”.

The challenge is to find the word, the word that guides everywhere. And once it is found, never to forsake it. How do you find that word? There are 750,000 words in the English language. How do you know which is the right one? It is difficult.

To reduce the complex to the simple without being simplistic requires, in the words of Bertrand Russell, the painful necessity of thought.

The pain comes from the ruthless paring down of the paragraph to the sentence and the sentence down to the word. One-word equity is the most priceless asset in the new world of the new technologies. Discover it and you have the route to salvation and eternal life.

So says the advertising mogul who is the executive director of M&C Saatchi. I feel reassured that Swirl is just one word.