Today's Rant: The gorilla is a turkey

I must admit to a surge of schadenfreude as I read on Scamp's ad blog about the apparent failure of that drumming gorilla to sell Dairy Milk.

The original article is on Brand Republic, and reveals that while the percussive primate may have been a favourite among bloggers, Dairy Milk's market share has actually dropped. (While its arch-rival Galaxy has gained ground.)



I have to say, I never understood the fuss about Gorilla. I found the ad slow, the gorilla unconvincing and the whole thing bewilderingly unfunny. (Even bizarrely earnest.) So naturally I'm delighted, in a mean, selfish sort of way, that he's a flop.

Gorilla, like its successor, Trucks, is based on this 'brand idea' of 'Joy'. And it seems to me to demonstrate one of the pitfalls of modern-day branding. Having distilled the 'essence' of Dairy Milk down to that one idea, Joy, Cadbury's seems to have lost sight of what it's actually about, which is chocolate.

The idea that chocolate brings joy is hard to argue with (although hardly ownable by one brand). But joy, in and of itself, has no particular connection to Dairy Milk. The 'glass and a half' bit is still there, but feels rather lost, like a remnant of the past they felt beholden to include. (Pure joy or Brimming with joy or any similar line would have worked just as well.)

What you're left with is an ad which does kind of say 'Joy', and which apparently makes lots of people laugh, but which doesn't seem to have communicated very much about Dairy Milk.*

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I still think you need to tie whatever Big Brand Idea you're toting back to your product or service - not just in advertising but in any communication. We need to come away connecting the Big Brand Idea to what you're actually selling. Because it's not an ad for joy, it's an ad for chocolate.

For example, I'm one of the few people whose teeth grind every time someone says how wonderful the Guinness Surfer ad was - what a pompous, overblown lot of old cack, I mutter to myself - but at least the Big Idea still connects to Guinness: it's worth waiting for. It's particular to Guinness, rather than a generic emotion like Joy, which could just as well be the Big Idea for the iPod, or McCain Oven Chips - or even Guinness, which has certainly brought me joy for many years.

Those great campaigns of yesteryear, like For Mash Get Smash, understood this too. The Big Idea - Space Age Food - is nailed firmly to the product. It doesn't hurt that the ads are so completely charming, universally funny and entirely original.



There's a First Choice ad that's been running for a while. You've seen it: hundreds of children appear over the dunes of a beautiful beach, and scream down to the sea to the William Tell Overture. We learn that First Choice teach thousands of kids to swim every year. 'That's why we're First Choice.'

It's not a great ad. It's not going to win any pencils. It's not as 'creative' as a drumming gorilla (although let's face it, animals doing human stuff is a pretty well-trodden trope). It doesn't make arch, ironic use of crap music. And it's never going to be a successful viral.

But for me it wins over Gorilla, because it tells me something, in a way I find it difficult not to smile at - all those kids rushing for the sea, now there's joy. I bet it sells more holidays than Gorilla sells chocolate.

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* All this reminds me of that experiment, I think by the Guardian, in which they created a brand called, I seem to remember, 'Joy'. (I can't find any reference online, unfortuately - anyone know where it's hiding?) They created a campaign about it, even though it was nothing but a name. The ads looked fresh and appealing, and people quite liked them. They even said they'd be interested in buying Joy. But Joy didn't exist. It was just a brand idea without a reality. Superficially successful, but with no substance.

If lawyers can single-space, so can everyone else

David has alerted me to this splendid site, Typography for Lawyers. Often, one feels that legal documents must have some sort of immunity from decent typography, but clearly they don't. When I got to the page about double-spaces between sentences, I started cheering:



God, this drives me nuts. So many client documents come with these yawning gaps between the sentences, as if someone's hung the paper up in a firing range. If I'm editing some client copy, half the time my first job is a Search & Replace, substituting single spaces for doubles.

I just can't believe people don't look at what they've written and go, 'Urgh.'

What did they think would happen?

You ask a question like that, and then leave a nice, clear graffiti-friendly space. (The scribbler got a bit confused, but his/her question for God is, almost inevitably, 'What will win the 3.30 at Kempton Park tomorrow?')

If God did exist, I'd ask him whether he gets to approve his own advertising.

I know it's cheesy, but...

I walked past this yesterday...



...and thought what fun it would be if such a prestigious body was to allow itself to do this:

Big ticket item

This is my ticket for the D&AD Annual launch. Did it really need to be quite so huge? So much for tucking it into my top pocket. (Did somebody say 'style over function'? Surely not.)

Bloody students

Rather late in the day, I've discovered the D&AD blog. Scrolling back through time, I found a post from April about the D&AD Student Awards. It includes this picture:



Honestly, what do they teach them these days?

Why does it matter if we make less mistakes?

So, Tesco has finally bowed to those who insisted they change their '10 items or less' signs. And, pedantic as it seems, I'm delighted.

Of course, no one was confused by these signs. Their meaning was obvious, and you could argue that the new ones, saying 'Up to 10 items', are minutely less clear. Where's the cut-off? At nine or ten?

So why does it matter which we use: less or fewer? It matters because sometimes things aren't as clear as a Tesco sign.

The other day, someone was telling me some fact or other about a nearby area. I can't even remember what, but it involved the phrase, 'because there are less affluent families there'.

What she meant was, 'There are fewer affluent families there.' Not that the families there were less affluent. It's subtle, but it makes quite a big difference. If she'd been in the habit of using less and fewer correctly, she wouldn't even have had to think about it, any more than she'd think about whether to say I am or I is. And she'd have said what she wanted to say.


Less money (an amount of something, like gravy or sunlight).


Fewer coins (individual things you can count, like stones or widgets).

When language is used badly in the public realm, as in Tesco stores, the mistakes take on a certain authority. They become more embedded in the collective consciousness. We stop caring so much about silly, pedantic points like less vs fewer. And our language becomes a little more blurred, a little less clear. We're less able to say what we actually mean.

That's why it matters. Not because The Rules Say So. (Indeed, anyone searching for a clear rulebook on English will have a long and frustrating quest.) But because it sacrifices clarity. It might not matter at the checkout, but when you go to a job interview, or want to write to your MP, or just tell someone something interesting, you might find it matters a great deal.

(I have to add that it's a shame to read Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign quoted as saying some people get 'really roused up' by the misuse of less and fewer. What a startlingly ugly bit of English.)

My sort of gym

My sharp-eyed sister Kate has sent me this shot of a bizarre and hilarious bit of corporate naming. What were they thinking?

Now my Orange payments are funding someone's musical road trip.

Oh good. Now some bloke is going round the country having a very nice time at my expense. Great.

I mean, supporting young bands: yes. All for that. But the whole thing is overlaid with this 'I am...' yuck, and the ongoing, 'Look at us, we're just achingly hip and funky and cool and nothing to do with mobile phones at all' branding. They're consistent, anyway.

Sorry. Come November and the end of my interminable Orange contract (assuming my phone lasts that long), I can stop grinding my teeth about them on here.

God bless pedants.

Picture pinched from the BBC homepage because this 'literally' thing one of my special bugbears.

You can rely on certain factions of the British public to get very hot under the collar about language. And I for one love them for it.

The BBC has listed 20 of the top language foibles its readers have griped about. Here's the short version, with notes:

1. Of for have, as in 'I could of killed him...'
2. For free, which is the one my father-in-law always gets excited about.
   
3. 12pm, which is splendidly picky. It doesn't exist, says the reader, and he's right, really.
4. Effect vs Affect
5. The grocer's apostrophe, of course. (Apple's, Banana's, etc.)
6. I vs Me, which is a favourite. (All you have to do is take out the other person. Should it be 'They made tea for Mike and I'? No, because you'd never say, 'They made tea for I.')
7. Yourself or myself instead of you or me. It makes this chap's blood boil. How marvellous.
8. None of them are vs None of them is. Like the reader, I thought the latter was correct, because 'none'='no one'. The BBC quotes Fowler to prove us both wrong. You're always learning in this game.
9. Another classic: different to (should be from) and compared to (should be with). Again, the BBC notes that Fowler is against this.
10. A wonderfully arcane argument against the common meaning of 'open fire'.
11. The literally thing, which literally makes my blood boil.
12. The whole It's vs Its conundrum. It's really not that hard.
    
13. They're / Their / There and To / Two / Too, which are driving a secondary school teacher to despair, God help us.
14. Due to instead of owing to. 'But then,' says the contributor candidly, 'I'm a pedant.'
15. Apparently children are increasingly saying lend instead of borrow. ('Can I lend your pencil?')
16. Amount of people instead of number of people. The BBC again calls on Fowler, and the argument, as with less and fewer, that you use amount for an uncountable mass, like gravy or sand, and number for countable things like coins or houses. But surely 'people' are countable, at least in principle? I agree with the reader, it should be a number of people, as it should be fewer people.
17. By foot instead of on foot. Blimey.
18. Another of the ones that gets me: singular nouns with plural verbs. So 'The team are ready', 'The audience get restless' or 'The group stand on stage'. Is, gets, stands!
19. One chap is struggling with prepositions at the ends of sentences. ('This is the town I went to,' or 'They're at the table I sat at.') This always seems to me an elegance question. If it sounds ugly the 'correct' way, don't 'correct' it. As Churchill apparently said, when corrected in this way, 'This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.'
20. Stadiums instead of stadia.
    

Staggeringly, none of them is/are about And at the start of a sentence. Perhaps my mailer has done the trick.