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Monday

Lara King

Inside London’s transport time warp

The illustration shows a smiling couple on a yacht, the wind ruffling their hair and the coastline receding into the distance behind them. Above it are the words: ‘Work out of London – get more out of life.’ Something from the post-Covid work-from-home era, perhaps, or Boris Johnson’s 2019 ‘levelling up’ election campaign? No – this is the work of ‘The Location of Offices Bureau’, set up by the Tory government in 1963 and abolished by Margaret Thatcher. The advert appears on the wall of a decommissioned Tube carriage that’s one of many frozen in time in a warehouse in west London. In the latest issue of The Spectator, Richard

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

How emotions shape our decision-making

Ask any estate agent: most potential house buyers arrive with a detailed list of criteria for their new home, only to end up buying a property which meets almost none of them. The same is true of dating – few of us are married to people chosen on the basis of an initial checklist. Henry VIII tried this approach and it didn’t turn out well. You could dismiss this as mere whimsicality. However, the seeming messiness of such decision-making – the fact we refine our preferences in response to what we find available – is what makes consumer capitalism much more innovative than the faux-rational capitalism practised by large organisations.

Monday

Paul Burke

Spare us from podcast host plugs

I’ve spent most of my working life producing radio commercials. You might expect me to say this, given my job, but when hosts read out ads on their own podcasts, I find it embarrassing. On commercial radio and television, viewers and listeners have always understood that the ads pay for the programmes and they’re fine with that – on one condition. The ads must be separated from the programmes in a commercial break. This has always been the unspoken agreement between advertisers and their audiences: a programme might be interrupted but at least it stays honest to itself. Podcast hosts are trashing this time-honoured contract when they read out the ads themselves.

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The marketing genius of Jaguar

Woke it may be, but Jaguar’s ‘Copy Nothing’ video is a work of marketing genius. With its ungendered models, ungrammatical slogans (‘live vivid’, ‘delete ordinary’) and strange absence of cars, the 30-second ad has brought global attention to a brand that was dying for want of a new generation of customers, in an auto industry in turmoil over its stalled transition from carbon fuel to battery power. And a week later comes the reveal in Miami of the futuristic Type 00 electric concept car that the fuss was really about. Love it or hate it, the dictum of founder Sir William Lyons that inspired the video’s title, ‘a Jaguar should be a

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Nothing beats a 1980s brick phone

In the late 1980s, a story entered advertising folklore. A group from an ad agency had boarded an evening train from Newcastle to travel home from a client meeting. On boarding, they learned that the buffet was out of action, and they were hungry. Happily, one of them was carrying in his briefcase a wondrous new brick-sized device called a mobile phone. After a series of rebuffed calls, he managed to find a lone Indian restaurant in Peterborough willing to deliver to their train when it stopped en route to London; there our hero duly handed a wedge of cash through the carriage window before taking delivery of the food.

Paul Burke

Just do it

Am I allowed to mention Nigel Farage? Of course I am, this is The Spectator, and its readers enjoy analysing all kinds of people and ideas, even those they find unpalatable. Readers of Campaign, however, aren’t quite as broad-minded. Campaign is the trade magazine of the advertising industry, and when it published an interview with Farage some of its readers went into meltdown. Why? Surely Farage is the ideal subject for Campaign. He’s connected with millions of loyal consumers in ways other brands can only dream of. You’d think that people in the advertising world would want to hear how he did it, given that building brands and connecting with

Wednesday

Rory Sutherland

Is there such a thing as too much empathy? 

Back in the 1970s, a less politically correct age, there was a standby formula for television advertising known as 2Cs in a K, which would feature two women by a washing machine engaged in unlikely conversation about some wondrous new detergent. Since The Spectator is a family publication, I shall pretend that 2Cs in a K stood for two ‘consumers’ in a kitchen, although it did not. If you are still trying to puzzle this out, the male equivalent is two dicks near a fence, a routine in which one man implausibly explains to his neighbour the many virtues of a particular woodstain, say, or one of those natty electric

Friday

Stephen Arnell

Mad Men in the movies: ten films about advertising

This week Mad Men celebrates the 15th anniversary of the show’s debut. Elmer Wheeler’s famous phrase about the science of advertising holds as true today as it did when he originated it almost a century ago: ‘Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle.’ Matthew Weiner’s series cast the advertising profession under a jaundiced eye, examining the mores and morays of Madison Avenue advertising executives from 1960 to late 1970. The show made Jon Hamm (as Don Draper aka Dick Whitman) a star, as well as boosting the careers of other regular cast members including Elisabeth Moss, John Slattery, Jared Harris, and Christina Hendricks. It would be fair to say that

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The myth of the typical Brexit voter

In Jake’s Thing, Kingsley Amis gave it a name: he called it ‘the inverted pyramid of piss’: ‘One of [Geoffrey Mabbott’s] specialities was the inverted pyramid of piss, a great parcel of attitudes, rules and catchwords resting on one tiny (if you looked long and hard enough) point. Thus it was established beyond any real doubt that his settled antipathy to all things Indian, from books and films about the Raj, to Mrs Gandhi… was rooted in Alcestis’s second husband’s mild fondness for curries.’ It’s high time this phrase was revived, because piss pyramids are everywhere. We assumed more data would help humanity settle its differences: in reality it often

Thursday

Anthony Whitehead

The irresistible lure of classified ads

The great thing about classified ads is that they have not usually been created by an agency — so what you get is the advertiser’s own best efforts to announce themselves, and what they have to offer, in just 20 words or so. You can glean a lot from what they say, and not always in the way intended. Take this particularly telling example from the Spectator personal ads a couple of years ago: ‘Looking to meet woman on HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy).’ That he added (and paid for) the last three words tells you more than he could ever understand. Others are far more engaging — like the ‘charismatic

Thursday

Richard Bratby

The Mozarts of ad music

It’s Christmas 2020 and Kevin the Carrot is on a mission. Snow swirls, ice glistens and roast turkeys and cold cuts wait on the table, bathed in cosy firelight. The visual symbols of Christmas are all present and correct in the big Aldi seasonal advert, but what pulls them together is the music. A hint of John Williams on a solo horn, a burst of swashbuckling rhythm; symphonic strings as our vegetable hero makes it home. It’s all there, sumptuously scored and precisely gauged to make you feel that in 30 seconds, you’ve experienced an epic. And then, of course, to go out and buy parsnips. ‘I was lucky, because

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The art of the public information ad

Bring back the Tufty Club. Bring back the Green Cross Code. Bring back ‘Charley says’. Bring back ‘Only a fool breaks the two-second rule’. Bring back Vinnie Jones and ‘Stayin’ Alive’. Bring back the Country Code and ‘Always take your litter home’. Bring back public information films. Bring back the Central Office of Information. For younger readers, I probably need to explain what the hell I am talking about. Tufty was created for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, and was an implausibly sensible young squirrel whose behaviour (in contrast to the foolish antics of the louche Willy Weasel) gave lessons to children on road sense. At its

Monday

Christopher Snowdon

The truth behind the election’s so-called fact checkers

All election campaigns see politicians exaggerate, stretch the truth and make promises they can’t keep. But if a report issued in early December is anything to go by, the 2019 general election campaign was a particularly dishonest affair – and one party was particularly guilty. On 10 December, Metro reported: Similarly, the Independent reported: Websites which make no attempt to be impartial were more vociferous. Under the headline, The Tory war on truth – and how to fight back, Open Democracy reported: Independent fact checkers have found that 88% of Tory Facebook adverts contain lies, while 0% of Labour’s do. After the election, the (admittedly risible) Canary asserted that: The 2019 election was won on the back of lies

Sunday

Rory Sutherland

The service station problem: it’s becoming impossible to correct a mistake

My first award for intelligent design this week goes to Dublin airport for displaying a sign which reads ‘Lounges. Turn back. No lounges beyond this point.’ It may seem like a trivial thing, but it takes a rare intelligence to think in this way. It’s one thing to put up a sign that says ‘Lounges, this way’. But it takes nous to think ‘yes, well and good, but what happens if people see the first sign but miss the second one?’ In all likelihood, they would end up walking 500 yards in the wrong direction, as I nearly did. Signage and wayfinding are mostly designed for people who never make

Thursday

Matthew Lesh

Tell us what we want

We live in a logic-obsessed world, from computer modelling of the economy to businesses run by spreadsheets. But we also know, from decades of behavioural economics and evolutionary psychology research, humans are not robots. The social world is not a machine but a complex system. In Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense, Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy and columnist for The Spectator, explains how to crack the magic underlying our humanity. Humans evolved to justify their instinctive decisions to others, not to prove what is right and wrong. Those who could defend their actions were more likely to survive. We use reason sparingly, selectively and

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The art of persuasion | 23 May 2019

People sometimes ask what slogan could have swayed the Brexit vote: the opposite of the touchstone phrase ‘Take back control’. There are many suggestions, my own being: ‘Don’t leave — it’s what the French want us to do.’ No Europhile committee would ever have approved a jingoistic slogan, of course; yet the feelings of committed Europeans are irrelevant. Those people will vote Remain in any case. Instead you need to reach the ambivalent, sceptical or mildly hostile. This raises the central question about communication: do you want to feel good about yourself, or do you want to change the minds of others? The art of sloganeering can serve two powerful

Tuesday

Timmy Fisher

Banksy’s stunt wasn’t even original – and why we should support ads on Sydney Opera House

It was announced last week that the woman who bought Banksy’s ‘Girl With Balloon’ will be going through with the purchase. And who could blame her? The prospect of owning a piece of ‘art history’, as she called it, is an enticing one to any investor, regardless of its condition. The video documenting Banksy’s triumph has clocked over 12 million views since it was uploaded to his Instagram account, and one could certainly argue it highlights the disconnect between the intrinsic value of art and that ascribed to it by ever-changing tastes. But it would be wrong to give artistic credit for what is essentially a publicity stunt. Not least

Thursday

Dan Hitchens

Deep and meaningless

Walking down the street on my lunch break, I sometimes pass a delivery man wheeling a large handcart of Japanese food. The cart bears a striking message: ‘Creating a world where everyone believes in their own authenticity.’ It raises some immediate questions: for instance, what does it mean to believe in your own authenticity? How would you go about creating a world where everyone does? And what’s it got to do with Japanese food? It’s unfair to single out the delivery service. Today, brands big and small have a Profound Statement to make. On my way home I pass a 30ft electronic billboard which displays a young couple embracing beneath

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Classified information

Now here’s a series that would make a brilliant podcast but is also classic Radio 4 — they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, why can’t podcasts be more like Radio 4? Programmes where the presenter’s role is to draw out the knowledge of experts, and the pace is measured, allowing the fascination of what’s being revealed to make an impact before leaping on, and where there’s no background music except when it adds to the timbre, the meaning, the purpose. Each episode of Classified Britain (produced by John Forsyth) is only 15 minutes long, so not too demanding of one’s time, and yet a lot of information

Monday

Martin Vander Weyer

Can WPP’s model survive without Martin Sorrell in charge?

I said last week that WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell was in ‘a very exposed position’. Sure enough on Saturday he resigned from the global advertising giant he created and had run for more than 32 years. ‘But he didn’t “create” it,’ one ex-employee told me, illustrating the internal resentments that seem to have contributed to Sorrell’s downfall. ‘He just made a lot of acquisitions and counted the pennies.’ Whatever he did or didn’t do, his departure was undignified and ill-explained. After he’d gone, WPP’s board announced that its investigation into an allegation of financial misconduct against him had concluded, but ‘did not involve amounts that are material’ and