Why Does The Pedlar Sing? , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Paul Feldwick

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142 pages

English

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Throughout history, selling and entertainment have gone hand in hand - from the medieval pedlar and the medicine show, to generations of TV commercials featuring song and dance, comedy, and cartoon animals, right up to today's celebrities who launch their own multi-million dollar brands. There are good reasons for this; we now understand better than ever before the psychological and sociological reasons why apparent frivolity creates serious business benefits. And yet the advertising business today seems reluctant to embrace its powerful links with popular culture. Misled on one side by managerial myths of rationality and logic, and on the other by a cultish misunderstanding of 'creativity', it risks forgetting how to appeal to the public, and how to build successful brands. As a result, evidence suggests, today's advertising is less liked and less effective than ever before. But it is not too late to reverse this trend. Advertisers and agencies who read this book will rediscover why the pedlar sings, and despite what we've all been told, why people do buy from clowns. They will be inspired to make their advertising more popular, more famous, more fun again - and much more effective.'This is a fabulous book. ...It is possibly the book I would most highly recommend to anyone in marketing.'Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman, Ogilvy

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Marketing et communication

Advertising

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 février 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781800468993
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0748€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Copyright © 2021 Paul Feldwick

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1800468 993

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

O master! If you did but hear the pedlar at the door, you would never dance again after a tabor and pipe; no, the bagpipe could not move you: he sings several tunes, faster than you’ll tell money: he utters them as he had eaten ballads, and all men’s ears grow to his tunes…
shakespeare, The Winter’s Tal e, Act IV

Also by Paul Feldwick

The Anatomy of Humbug

Fascinating and superbly written. It takes us from the beginning of the modern era of advertising up to the present, with charming anecdotes and intelligent analyses of the people and ideas that have made us the struggling, bewildered ad hacks we are today.
Bob Hoffman, author of Advertising for Skeptics

No-one has previously discussed the various “practitioner theories” of advertising so comprehensively. It’s a great story, and I learned a lot.
Patrick Barwise, Emeritus Professor of Management and Marketing, London Business School.

An elegant overview of the history of advertising theory, with the added joy of being filtered through the immense wisdom, experience and brain of this advertising guru.
Tess Alps, former Chair, Thinkbox

A thoughtful and beautifully written reflection on the history of advertising practice.
Nigel Hollis, author of Brand Premium and former Chief Global Analyst, Millward Brown

The Anatomy of Humbug: How to Think Differently About Advertising
is available from Matador as hardback, ebook, and audiobook.

Contents
Preface A Serious Business?

Part One The Pedlar At The Door
Chapter One
Richard Latham’s Rug
Chapter Two
From Salesmanship to Showmanship
Chapter Three
Who Framed Sunny Jim?
Chapter Four
Because singers sell soap, Mr Norman

Part Two A Kind of Fame
Chapter Five
From Barnum to Brands
Chapter Six
David Beckham’s Sarong
Chapter Seven
Energy, Essence and Icons
Chapter Eight
A Face in the Piazza Navona

Part Three Four Facets of Fame
Chapter Nine
Broadcast to Go Big
Chapter Ten
Make the Monster Massive
Chapter Eleven
Give the Lion Wings
Chapter Twelve
Infinitely Multiply

Part Four What Kind of Creativity Do We Need?
Chapter Thirteen
The C Word
Chapter Fourteen
Blowing Shit Up
Chapter Fifteen
The Dark Interloper
Chapter Sixteen
The Trouble With Ideas

Conclusion Reclaiming Creativity

Bibliography

Preface
A Serious Business?

Advertising is a serious business, and advertisers spend serious money investing in it. Yet from the earliest times, much advertising has been far from serious in its appearance, featuring song and dance, celebrities, cartoons, talking animals, childish jingles, low humour, and all the other tropes of popular culture.

Indeed, its vulgarity has often offended commentators as much as its questionable morals. The Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, was a stalwart defender of the freedom to advertise, yet he believed that 1

Like all things designed to suit the taste of the masses, advertising is repellent to people of delicate feeling.

Sadly, those ‘people of delicate feeling’ have often included not just advertising’s critics, but many of its own clients, and even quite a few in the ad agencies themselves. Embarrassed by advertising’s all-too-obvious and inescapable links with popular culture, they have constructed for it an alternative persona – advertising as an honest salesman, which offers its audiences only sober facts and rational benefits.

This is not wrong, but it only represents a part of what advertising does – and perhaps not even the most important part. For many years, this double-think made it harder than it need have been to produce effective advertising; but it did not make it totally impossible. I worked for thirty years in an agency where we repeatedly succeeded in smuggling a cast of dancing polar bears, laughing aliens and singing chimpanzees past the barriers of selling propositions, consumer benefits and reasons why.

Today we probably understand the psychology behind the apparent fluff and nonsense of advertising better than ever before. Concepts like ‘mental availability’ and the ‘affect heuristic’, the largely unconscious nature of mental associative networks, the importance of the right brain hemisphere in connecting emotions, images, and memory, all these (as we shall see) begin to explain why puppies, clowns, or monkeys on bicycles create liking and fame, which are what build valuable brands. Thanks to the published research of Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk, Peter Field and Les Binet, Orlando Wood, Robert Heath and others, we know the importance of stories, emotions, slogans, music, and distinctive brand assets in making advertising that works.

All the more odd, then, that so many of today’s ad agencies and their clients appear to ignore all this, or even to do the exact opposite. While more money is spent on advertising worldwide than ever before, there’s evidence that it is now less effective, and more disliked by the public, than it has ever been. Thirty years ago, a majority of the British public agreed that ‘Sometimes the ads are better than the programmes’ – the proportion who agree with that today is vanishingly small. 2 Instead, the vast majority of the younger generation now deliberately avoid any exposure to advertising at all.

There will be those who object that the world has changed. That today’s techniques of individual targeting and personalisation in the digital space have superseded the old analogue needs to be engaging, entertaining, or memorable. But the reality is that, while the internet has transformed so many aspects of our lives and our commerce, it will never transform the fundamental psychology behind advertising and brands. Jeff Bezos knew, when he started Amazon, that 3 ‘Brand names are more important on-line than they are in the physical world’; the most important search engine remains the one in your head. 4 Meanwhile, those who fail to understand how humans actually make choices will go on wasting immense sums of money on the emperor’s new clothes.

So while advertising today has access to a wider range of communication channels than ever before, it is failing to make the best use of any of them. This is because there seems to be a greater gap than ever between our emerging theoretical understanding of advertising, and the cultural beliefs and fashions that direct the way it is actually produced.

This book is an attempt to bridge that gap. My intention is not just to review what we know today about how advertising works, but to illustrate its truth and bring it to life through stories and examples from advertising and brand history, including some from my own experience. I want to remind us all what so much successful advertising of the past actually looked and sounded like, to reflect on the processes and conditions that made it possible to create that kind of work, and to inspire advertisers and their agencies to adapt the same principles to the changed media landscape of today. I would like to encourage all those who work in advertising and brand management to suspend their ‘delicate feelings’ about what really creates popularity and fame, and to embrace the idea that advertising is at least as much showmanship as it is salesmanship.

Advertising is a serious business. So the advertisers who invest their