“I told you so”. Amidst the usual torrent of bilge, some things worth thinking about

“Back to the future”. What I suggested to Sir Martin Sorrell all those years ago. Did it make any sense then? Does it now?

When WPP put in a bid twenty odd years ago I was one of the two or three Ogilvy Group directors who voted against accepting.

Anyhow it all went through, and I got to know Martin a little. He is very charming, took me out two or three times and asked me to write a speech for him.

I did so. It was called “Back to the Future”, and I thought it was one of the best things I have ever done. He never used it, though, as I think it was too complicated for him.

I used clips from the film to make a simple point. This was that ad agencies had lost their way. They had given up whole areas of their business to specialist agencies.

Media planning and buying: where they had always made their money from commission. Sales Promotion – traditionally a source of extra gravy. Direct marketing. Public relations.

When I entered the agency business in 1957 we were expected to do all these things. None call for any marvellous intelligence or talent. All – and the profits – have been hived off to specialists. Today agencies make nothing like what they did.

How relevant, then, to see a comment made at the ADMA event in Sydney by David Morgan of Nestlé: ‘Marketers can’t do their jobs properly because they’ve become bogged down in “process management”, coordinating an ever-increasing number of agency relationships’.

Every day people are coming up with fancy new phrases designed to extract a few quid from marketers by carefully applied bullshit. To add to all the  nonsense, content marketing now has a sibling called Native Marketing.

Neil Ackland, boss of The Sound Alliance says they are “an audience specialist”  proving that native advertising works. It seems “native advertising is basically advertorial, but less clumsy and more thoughtful to the extent that it is relevant, interesting content.”

Hello, folks. Who told you clumsy, thoughtless content is the idea? I never wake up thinking the trick is to bore people. I  just try to write stuff that will interest people, and you can call it what the hell you like.

It could be a blog or article. It could be an email. It could be an ad or a piece of direct mail. You have to captivate and charm.

And in the world I’d like to return to a client would find one agency that could do the lot, trust them and let them get on with managing things.

What happens otherwise? I’ll tell you. Recently we spent five weeks exchanging emails with a client on what should be done. Leaving one week to do what we suggested in the first place – which incidentally involves translation into another language.

But a quote, also from Australia, shows you how bogged down most of these people are.

“We have to stop and reframe the market. This is a non-incremental approach to premix and it’s inventive. It’s a rethink of what pre-mix is.” – Diageo marketing director Matt Bruhn.

Woolly language leads to woolly thinking. How can someone who uses that sort of language be allowed anywhere near creative work?

If you want to know how to think right, plan right and write properly, you may find www.askdrayton.com a help – and a bargain. Quite a few other people do, as you will see if you have a look.