To a posh Advertising Association party at Unilever House last week. There an engaging young man called Ed Vaizey, Minister of Communication, Culture and the Creative Industries, told us that this government thinks that advertising is absolutely marvellous so long as you don’t spend any money on it.
This has a familiar ring. We will build expensive aircraft carriers, but we can’t afford any jets to put on them. (Incidentally has it occurred to anyone else that you could get a lot of deck chairs on an empty aircraft carrier, and noticing that in Green Park serious money is paid for sitting on government deck chairs, why don’t we anchor the carriers off Southend and solve the deficit in no time?)
Ed made a charming speech in which he made all sorts of flattering comments about the size, importance and quality of the UK advertising industry, but then made it clear that this government are complete Philistines when it comes to understanding what advertising can actually do.
Like many misguided company CEO’s before them, they think that they can simply save the money and the net result of not advertising is all pure profit to the bottom line.
Ed also talked about “nudging” people, as this is apparently the first government in history, which has absorbed some of the language (if not the understanding) of behavioural economics. (There was also a half-hearted attempt to float the idea of the Big Society. Though there was no attempt to suggest how the advertising industry could help with this) It’s all very reminiscent of major companies who have from time to time decided that they will put all their marketing activity below the line and then gradually discover that ‘nudging’, or sales promotion as it used to be called, can be highly effective…but often at a much higher cost per contact than advertising.
Keith Weed proudly told us that Unilever had increased its investment in its brands during the recession and was now seeing significant benefit in improved sales, but I doubt if Ed was listening. Penny Hughes, the AA President should have hit Ed over the head with an outsized handbag, but she is far too nicely brought up.
Talking to several of the great and good gathered at the AA’s party I got the impression (perhaps erroneously) that even the HMRC’s campaign to encourage us to pay our tax in time and online has been axed, when it can surely demonstrate an immediate return on expenditure. And all the longer term healthcare campaigns that will actually save the National Health Service serious money over time have been thrown on a giant deficit bonfire.
No doubt the AA will slowly bring the Coalition government round to a better understanding of advertising. The AA has established a new think tank called CREDOS to find “creative ways to express the economical and social benefits of advertising”. One would have thought that there was already 30 years of evidence from the IPA Effectiveness Awards… and our own Judie Lannon edited a particularly fine selection of winning IPA public service cases into a book stacked full of evidence of how effective it is. But I guess modern Tory politicians only read The Daily Mail.
I suspect that the shrewd business to be in over the next few years is head hunting, because surely the very marketing and advertising people who are being chucked out of the COI will very soon need to be replaced – as this government stops playing to the Daily Mail gallery and starts to do some real thinking – and probably at much higher cost.