a simple thought

The modern rules of advertising? AD BREAKDOWN The Magazine's review of advertising Men are tired of their portrayal in advertising, according to a new book by Michael Buerk. But images of men behaving stupidly is not the only cliche which irritates writer John Camm. Dad in muddy boots walking blithely across a kitchen floor just cleaned by an e xasperated mum who just gives a frustrated but loving smile to her giggly children, who cry out: "Da-a-ad!". Just one advertising cliche, and just one where no-one behaves like people really do. It's the kind of thing which irritates John Camm. "It's tiresome to see male characters in adverts who don't resemble anyone you know," he says. "But what's perhaps worse is the absolute reliance of advertising on its own regurgitated cliches." He has drawn up a list of seemingly unwritten rules which, he concludes, might as well be the Advertising Bible. Add your views to his list...

Over decades of working in PR, I have had occasion to meet practitioners who are obsessed about staying on message. They have a set of bullet points on a sheet or PowerPoint slides, and they repeat the points over and over. Ask any question that expands the points, and their response is the points. Try to get them off the points, and they come back to the points. The points are everything and if they say them often enough, they believe they will beat you down until you too believe the points. I call this plastic PR because it is a facsimile of relationship building that PR espouses and not real relationship building at all. In real PR, one listens to the other side and explains a message in as many ways as it takes to get the other party to understand. That, by the way, is staying on message too but in a more human way. Perhaps the most plastic of PR practitioners are those trained in political campaigns. They are reluctant to use any words but the approved ones because they fear -- an...

As the mass media descends into semi-irrelevance, blogging is ascending. Blogs have driven US Senator Lott from power, outed a GOP flack who was asking softball questions for Bush during press conferences and working as a gay escort at night, and caused a CNN executive to resign for remarks at an international conference. Even the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, now plans to offer a graduate-level course in blogs. As a result, branding executives must pay greater attention to blogs in three ways. First, they must distribute their story to blogs, for much the same reasons that they have sought to distribute their story to print, radio and TV media for decades. Second, they must use blogs as a corporate and crisis communications tool. Finally, they must use blogs as a periscope that can provide insights into what customers, prospects and even the disenchanted are saying about offerings. For those who seek to communicate a brand story through blogs...