Billington Cartmell News

BCL achieves in Best Companies Accreditation 2010

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:49:00 +0000

Billington Cartmell has achieved a "One to Watch Status" in the Best Companies Accreditation for 2010. Jonathan Austin - Founder and CEO of Best Companies says: "We would like to congratulate Billington Cartmell on their outstanding achievement...organisations like Billington Cartmell that have kept on engaging their staff and making sure they are involved in the business will be in a good position for the future and should be congratulated for their efforts".

In it for the long haul? – the paradox of marketing

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 10:51:00 +0000

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago - Warren Buffett said that, and the man has a very good point.

The brands that mean the most to us are the ones which have been carefully grown and nurtured over time to encapsulate a set of values that we find both appealing and relevant. Oxo has always held a knowing mirror to the family and its relationships. Kit Kat has celebrated the break through wry humour for over thirty years and, until recently, if you wanted the ultimate Teutonic driving machine then you had to look no further than Stuttgart. All these brands made continuity of personality and behaviour a valued brand asset.

For us to know a brand we need to understand what it stands for and how it will behave now and in the future - just like our friends, it's by acting consistently that we learn to trust them. Sure brands can evolve just like people do, but their central personality and values mustn't flex.

So developing brand assets and values is a job for the long term. You don't develop a deep relationship in a day; it takes time for consumers to learn and understand a brand. But marketeers aren't always focused on the long term and herein lies the dilemma.

Marketeers need to make a mark to build a career - a promotion is easier to justify if you have developed and owned an 'all new marketing plan' and its associated execution programme. It's by changing communications and 'challenging the thinking that has gone before' that marketeers build careers.

Who wants to do what the last chap did? That's not exciting and that's not going to get you noticed. So often pragmatically and selfishly the agenda for change is set.

Agencies too are all too quick to dismiss previous work even if, as is often the case, they developed the work themselves. New, it appears, is always better. This year's plan is always better than last year's plan. They are always 'building on new learnings'.

Of course evolution of any comms programme is a necessity to avoid wear out and over-familiarisation - but all too often brand teams and agencies indulge in wholesale reinvention of not just the execution, but the wider brand idea and often the brand personality too. The upshot is brands that people thought they understood and could rely on to act in a particular way are suddenly all-new, alien and 'supposedly better'.

In the real world this means consumers can't keep up - too many messages changing too often and executed across a myriad of ever-tempting fragmented media touch points.

Stella Artois - reassuringly expensive quality or an overt focus on natural ingredients? Or is that Beck's - or Carling? Actually it's all three. BMW talking about fluffy, happy 'Driving Joy?'. What happened to the precision of the Ultimate Driving Machine? (And anyway, weren't Honda talking joy three years ago?)

If these brands play fast and loose with their propositions and personalities how are we expected to know them anymore?

The way out of this constantly churning pot of messaging is to put a new and rigorous focus on consistency.

If consumers develop brand trust (and accordingly brand relationships) in the long term, then that's how we as marketeers should manage our brand assets.

Marketeers should be as true to brand personality as to brand proposition. Continuity of action is everything. Additionally, activation spaces should be identified for the long term and brand ideas selected only if they have the capability to last for years, not months.

Other brand touch points should also be audited for the long haul. A brand strapline should help consumers summarise their take-out of your brand messaging, whilst also confirming the brand source of that information. Why change it every 12-14 months?

Another reason there is so much changing of messaging and overstretching of brand personality is the time-pressured way in which strategy is developed against brand planning deadlines.

If you take away the temptation to change the communication strategy every year and focus instead on enriching a fully researched, longer-term 5-year brand idea, then the purpose of brand planning becomes more channel and execution-focused. An altogether more manageable task.

Wholesale change of proposition and/or personality should, in summary, only be entertained under exceptional circumstances and only when lessons have been learned from previous mistakes.

Change should come through the executional evolution of long-term brand ideas which develop and enrich already loved and respected personalities.

We should all be building brands with consumer-validated longevity rather than being slaves to reinvention, creating tactical pop-up offerings with familiar logos for our own vanity.

Now if you really want to make your mark - there's a real creative challenge.

Rage against the old brand planning machine

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:59:00 +0000

Brand planning needs to keep up with consumers

Rage Against the Machine's victory over the X Factor's Joe McElderry in the battle for Xmas number one is a fitting way to end the decade. That a rock fan from Essex can take on the might of the X Factor and win is further proof that this was the decade when power shifted from big brands to consumers, driven by the rise of 'my media', digital peer review and a massive decline in trust in brands. All this should be the final nail in the coffin of brand planning processes developed in the last century. Smart brands have to recognise that successful brand planning is no longer as simple as developing single-minded brand and campaign propositions and delivering them to the consumer neatly packaged up in a creative idea.

This doesn't mean that brand planning is dead, because successful brands still need the rigour, depth of analysis and consumer insights that it delivers. The opportunity is to hang onto the best parts of brand planning, discard the parts that aren't relevant any more and bring in new ways of working that fit new consumer mindsets and how they want to interact with brands now.

The much ridiculed brand onion and the brand key could be good candidates for the scrapheap, but the issue is more about how people use them, often as an intellectual exercise rather than a tool to get under the skin of consumers. They can still be good foundations and add rigour to brand strategies, but they have to be seen as a starting point in connecting brands and consumers, not a job to be done before leaping onto creative briefs and execution. More work needs to be done to truly connect brands with consumers, and more often.

Our approach to brand and campaign planning is to constantly ask 'what matters?' and to recognise that the intellectual leaps that come out of the planning process also have to be judged against whether they will connect with consumers – ideas have to be clever, but they also have to connect with real lives. It's also what matters at different points in the brand planning and campaign process – there are many consumer insights but what's the insight that we need to act on? There are many smart propositions but what's the proposition that comes out of the brand, is consumer-focused and is right for the context of a campaign, where it should connect with the consumer? Effective planning needs to recognise that the brand proposition is no longer enough, and that propositions need to be flexed for different contexts while retaining the essence of the brand.

Much more planning time needs to be invested in what really matters, and developing brand activation spaces is a more worthwhile approach than ever before. This is the sort of work that more time needs to be invested in during the planning process if brands want to matter in consumers' lives. There has been a big shift in power and the brand planning process has to recognise this, otherwise more brands will lose out to the mighty consumer, just like the poor old X Factor

Blogging – digital PR or strategic brand tool?

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:51:00 +0000

The blogging community has an incredible reach and a disproportionate influence over its audiences. It's estimated that well over 180 million people have started a blog, writing over one million posts a day and with over 350 million readers. It seems obvious that all brands should at least be considering how they tap into the power of blogging communities, but they also need to consider the model they adopt for doing this.

Blogging's success is partly due to the quality of writing, speed to publication and the clarity of viewpoints, not obscured by media owner interference. (The Huffington Post is a good example, with an estimated audience of over 45 million readers.) The success of blogging is also due to a shift in consumer attitudes, turning away from older, established conventional news sources and brands to 'my media', digital brands that they now have greater trust and belief in.

Given this shift in media power and consumer attitudes it seems strange to apply old marketing techniques to this new equation, particularly a digital PR approach. The opportunity for brands is to look at their approach to blogging in a new way, not as a short-term tactical tool, an extension to their PR strategy, but as having great potential as a strategic brand tool. Bloggers are not another digital tool to be turned on and off to fit the peak and troughs of marketing campaigns. They can be a brand's strongest brand ambassadors, but brands need to invest time, money and care into building ongoing relationships with key bloggers, essentially relationship marketing for blogging.

Stormhoek is still a great example of the power of using brand blogs to drive success. Other brands can learn a lot from it and the success of its 100 Dinners in 100 Nights approach to engaging with bloggers:

It understood, engaged with and flattered bloggers, rather than imposed the brand's worldview on them.
It acted on the insight that bloggers love other bloggers – using Hugh MacLeod as the force behind Stormhoek flattered bloggers, as it told them that they were considered to be in the same class as this top 100 blogger.
It didn't try to influence their views on your brand or product in the way that old-school PR did.
It let go control of the brand and let bloggers decide whether it was good enough.
It gave them unique content that made them look good in the eyes of their readers, another deviation from the classic PR press release approach.
They continued to nurture the relationships established with the bloggers.

The opportunity for brand owners is to think differently, engage with bloggers on their terms and then reap the rewards.

Can You Manufacture Good Character?

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:20:00 +0000

Despite David Mellor single-handedly debasing the Conservative's 'Back to Basics' crusade, it seems politicians rarely learn from history. About a year ago, David Cameron made a foray into the treacherous territory of political morality. Cameron criticised the political classes for "a refusal to make judgments about what is right and wrong behaviour".

But what makes people do the right thing? The answer is a mixture of our genes, our parents and our peers – these are the ingredients of character.

Character is of course a loaded term: it sounds Victorian and, if you're honest, as dull as scouting. However, a diverse range of policy makers, politicians and scholars are interested in what constitutes character on the grounds that a good society needs good people. And let's face, it society based on its current media portrayal needs all the help it can get.

So can you manufacture good character?

Over time I think you can – as long as your behaviour always supports your communicated values. Extrapolating this into the sphere of brands it's manifested in behaviour in response to pressure, be that commercial, macro-trends – eco, fair-trade etc. 'Character' being the final litmus test – the proof or otherwise of the true nature of a brand regardless of positioning or protestation.

As Abraham Lincoln said:

“Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.” – Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President (1809-1865).

M&S 'Plan A' posturing, while they still aren't focusing on seasonality, or food miles, is a manifestation of bad – if not fraudulent – character. No point looking at the shadow when the apple tree is in New Zealand.

Ecover, it appears, manifest good character as a brand in everything they do, with even the 6 sheets in the factory made from recycled posters from previous campaigns.

In these turbulent times, establishing a notion of Brand Character seems increasingly attractive. Richard Huntington's quote in Battle of Big Thinking seems to ring increasingly true - “No one is interested in your positioning, only in your position.” The difficult thing about character of course is that, beyond comms, it does require an adoption of steadfast behaviour. So if, like Ecover, brands wish to have genuine character, they do not change their tune under short-term commercial pressure, but stick to their values.

Consumers will respect them all the more for it and vote accordingly in future.

Applied Thinking - iPhone Apps 2010

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:06:00 +0000

"To the people who've got iPhones: you just bought one, you didn't invent it!" Marcus Brigstocke

The fact that this joke was voted into the top 10 funniest of the Fringe this year speaks volumes about the general attitude to iPhones. We know they were 'a game changing piece of innovation'; 'a phone that fell from the future'. We know that self-satisfied little look owners get as they 'tap, tap slide' their way to answers we can't hope to get off a 'normal' phone. We know we should be amazed as Shazam listens and then tells you the name of the track that's playing on the CD player. And we know that the technology is so irresistible, it apparently makes it OK to get iPhones out in the middle of a conversation.

In spite of all the hype, some in the marketing community remain reticent to join the iPhone bandwagon - perhaps because they've been burnt before. Marketeers who've never forgiven their ex digital agency for persuading them Second Life was in fact the second coming, can perhaps be forgiven at not immediately jumping at the new kid on the digital block.

As with many new marketing media opportunities such as Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, before thinking about what we 'could' activate, we might first consider whether we 'should'.

What's the commercial imperative to invest in this activity? This is where iPhone Apps and iPhone stats are becoming increasingly compelling.

Not only is the App store huge in volume terms (passing 2 billion apps downloaded this year) it's also a head turner in terms of the revenue it delivers. Pizza Hut's online ordering App generated $1m in incremental food sales. With charming functionality that lets you slide to the size of pizza you want, shake the toppings onto the pizza and then place the order directly with your nearest store. Pizza Hut also featured on the Apple ad "There's an App for that", thereby benefiting from millions of dollars of free ATL exposure. Far from being gimmicky, Pizza Hut's innovative way of connecting with early adopting consumers is benefiting the brand's image as well as the bottom line.

So whilst some brands see Apps as a serious business, why are some loath to consider them as a medium? The primary objection historically to the iPhone in the UK was the exclusive distribution deal with O2, which was seen to make the audience too limited. However, with the recent deal to extend distribution via Vodafone and Orange, the iPhone will now available to 85% of mobile users in the UK. Add to this a potential ROI of 10 times the initial investment and it makes for a compelling commercial case to fully explore the potential of this exciting new medium. A potential that, thanks to iPhones future-esque functionality, can be as inspiring creatively as it is commercially

Top Five Functionalities Exploited by Apps:

1. GPS Locator - can link virtual order to real life delivery/purchase

2. Accelerometer - can dramatize the phone being tilted

3. Touchscreen - slide and touch elements

4. Bump Phones - Dynamic Data Transfer (Bluetooth/GPS)

5. Video overlaid with Augmented Reality (3.1. Software Release)

iPhone and its Apps should therefore not only be firmly at the top of most Christmas wish lists, but firmly on marketeers' agendas in 2010. With significantly increased distribution and potential for significant commercial delivery, iPhones and Apps are much more than nice to haves.

Old marketing for new media?

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:00:00 +0000

How do you maximise social media's potential for your brand? It does require new skills and new ways of thinking, but the danger is in throwing away everything else and forgetting marketing principles that are not only relevant but could also help you maximise the effectiveness of social media, particularly those within direct marketing and measurement.

Let's start with best principles for maximising social media:

Make sure the business is set up for social media - Lots of organisations get this wrong and Seth Godin describes this mismatch perfectly in 'Meatball Sundae.' Social media doesn't work in the same way as other channels; you're opening up the organisation and setting up consumer expectations that you are ready to engage in dialogue in all touchpoints, not just social media. Content and social media engagement also has to involve senior players. Habitat's use of a junior member of staff to implement their Twitter strategy was a good example of the consequences of getting it wrong - and this TechCrunch's take on organisations using Facebook or Twitter as sticking plaster back this up.

Make sure your brand is really social media friendly - let's not forget that the appeal of brands is built on their personalities and some brands are the sort of people you'd like to stop have a chat with on the street and some are not, they're more functional. More emotionally engaging brands such as Pot Noodle, Ribena and Starbucks are already welcome in social media - Starbucks has close to 4m Facebook fans. More functional brands have to work much harder, or decide to stay out of that space, because amplifying what they stand for or their creative work just won't do it. Brand owners need to understand where they sit and act accordingly, or they risk a sad and underwhelming presence on Facebook. Blendtec's brand perceptions may have altered drastically because of the phenomenal success of Will it Blend? (http://www.willitblend.com/) but if it had just started a Facebook page before then it would have been a failure.

Build relationships in their space, and play by their rules - You're in their world and you need to remember why they are there and play accordingly. Even if you hold on to the belief that the brand proposition is king, not something to be negotiated with consumers, you still need to forget it in the social media space, or you'll get caught out and exposed like so many before you.

These are good foundations to start with, but many social media strategies lack something more fundamental - clear objectives. Many marketing people would admit that they're in the social media space because their CEO has said 'why aren't we tweeting?' Not a good place to start and woolly objectives always mean woolly measurement, something that much of brands' social media activity is guilty of.

Too many social media approaches and measurement criteria are based on old school brand and PR success criteria - such as the number of consumers engaged (e.g. Facebook brand page membership and YouTube downloads), the amount of positive or negative chatter about the brand, using buzz monitoring tools, or keyword search behaviour. It seems strangely old marketing for new media.

But brands should consider other 'old school' models as well, e.g. bringing more direct marketing approaches and measurement criteria into the mix. Using such a conventional approach as direct marketing and applying to social media is heresy for many, but there's a strong argument for doing this and adapting for social media:

Most social media marketing breaks the first rule of smart direct marketing - Facebook pages for brands and many of the strategies behind them are guilty of investing marketing budgets in brand loyalists, who actually need less investment than those who buy into the brand as well as other brands. Of course, the smarter brands pick out the advocates and invest in them, but not enough brands do this.

Use the value exchange principle to collect additional data, prioritise, segment and migrate to different communications streams - Absolute heresy for many social media experts, because rule number one is not to try to control the relationship, let them decide the terms of relationship and never, ever try to migrate them out of their social media space. These experts are probably the sons of marketing men who said 'why would I want a relationship with a brand?' when relationship marketing was in its infancy. If I am engaged enough with a brand in the social media space (obviously not in those cases prompted by antagonism towards the brand) why couldn't I be persuaded to tell them more about me and sign-up for dialogue outside the social media space? Once you've built these foundations you can start to make smarter considerations about where and who to reward in longer-term one-to-one relationships, even to skim off those with the greatest potential and migrate into more conventional relationship marketing.

Widen the measurement of the success of social media through ROI-based calculations, including life time value and transactional data - Isn't it possible within social media to treat those engaging with your brand in the social media space more as if they are customers who actually spend money on your brand, and setting out to estimate it, or even really measure it. Why not? Why can't you take the next step on from the value exchange principle and use social media as a relationship marketing recruitment tool and measure it accordingly? Sure, stick to all the other measures and engage and tackle brand issues in social media, but isn't it just rude, and bad business, not to move the conversation onto the next level, and measure whether they do put their hands in their pockets because of it?

Many brands are still in their infancy in putting in place their social media strategy, playing catch up with other brands. Rather than investing a lot of time and budget into catching up the smart thing to do could be taking a different approach, and thinking more around different marketing principles and models and measuring accordingly is one smart way to do it.

Billington Cartmell wins Marketing Magazine 'Agency Of The Year' award

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:03:00 +0000

A focus on environmental work, the addition of 21 clients and its creative thinking have helped the agency be top of the sales promotion pile for the second year in a row, writes Amy Golding.

“Billington Cartmell has proved itself again by becoming Marketing's Sales Promotion Agency of the Year for the second year running, showing the agency can succeed not only when trading conditions are buoyant.

During 2009, the agency successfully added another 21 clients to its books, including adidas, LG and Kingsmill.

To accommodate the growing portfolio, the agency has strengthened its operations and planning teams by bolstering its staff numbers and insight teams. The judges were impressed by its well-established management system, which has enabled it to consistently grow the business, even in difficult times.

The judges also praised the high levels of creativity the company continues to provide to existing clients, even when juggling its growing new-business list.

Billington Cartmell has proved it has the ability to survive during both good and bad industry times. Over the past three years the agency has gone from strength to strength. If its strong 2009 performance is anything to go by, the agency will once again be the one to beat next year.”

Marketing Magazine (Agency of the year supplement) December 2009

See some our case studies below.


Morrison's 'Lets Grow' VIEW CASE STUDY	Carlsberg 'Wembley' VIEW CASE STUDY	Lucozade 'Do More' VIEW CASE STUDY

Balance of brand and Consumer In Brand Planning

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:05:00 +0000

When you look back on various exams you faced over the years, there was one thing that was always delivered with unerring excellence. Something you can look back on and think, 'I really nailed that' (in all its colour-coded glory).

I refer of course to the revision timetable.

Now there is no doubt that proper planning is essential, (I'm not after a P45.) But it is also a question of balance. So often, marketers and agencies are guilty of spending so long worshipping at the perfect brand pyramid / onion / temple, that we leave precious little time for crux of what we should be doing - identifying distinct brand activation spaces and creating powerful communications ideas that inspire consumers to buy into our brand.

What is needed is a fundamental change in emphasis from what we, (as custodians of a brand), want consumers to do, to looking long and hard at what really motivates consumers. Thereby creating genuinely insightful activation space and consequently communications that really matter to consumers (in the context of real lives).

'We Make Brands Matter' is how we sum this up at Billington Cartmell. For us, it is about giving greater focus on discovering an enduring, ownable and valuable connection between brand values and consumers. This is made all the more imperative by increasingly hectic lifestyles and particularly by the revolutionary changes in communications channels. The rise and rise of digital communication gives consumers and marketeers an unprecedented number of channels and choices to communicate via - each with their own unique opportunities and pitfalls. Brands which get top marks, are no longer always about a rote 'matching luggage' answer fired off down the same old channels.

Rather, today's marketplace requires an approach that is sensitive to more consumer choice and greater potential to ignore anodyne messaging. This increasingly necessitates planning that strives to reach genuinely ownable activation spaces that define new culture, rather than follow it. (Don't surf a trend, create a tide).

'We Make Brands Matter' puts meaningful focus on the consumer and exploitation of new channels. But the emphasis is on meaningful. Many brands flag plant on Youtube, Facebook, Bebo and Twitter, but we must ask ourselves what value does the brand add to the channel and vice versa? If the answer is nothing, then you can expect a pretty robust, negative reaction. (Skittles placing its entire digital presence on Twitter without adding to user experience, was ignominiously greeted by this punchy one word tweet - "Shittles".)

We've all 'eaten the Big Fish' and 'tried the Purple Cow' - but again isn't this just more language to reassure us how clever we are? There are great principles in both books, but let's not make them our master - the consumer should be. As David Ogilvy so perfectly cautioned, "We sell...or else" and more often than not, brilliantly simple ideas sell best. Our ambition increasingly is to couch communications ideas in simple language that gives the brand and agency team a crystal clear understanding of the brand activation space and critically how that space connects with consumers. After all, if the idea's hard for us to rally behind, we won't stand a chance with consumers.

So planning is paramount, but to be successful in today's marketplace, agencies and brand partners need a philosophical shift that recognises and respects the changed nature of consumers and communications. Keep it simple, make it uniquely salient and sell. It's that simple. In the final analysis, we can have the cleverest revision timetable in the world, but it doesn't matter, if our output fails to impress our chief examiner: the 21^st Century consumer.

Morrisons Let's Grow campaign wins coveted Grand Prix at the IPA Awards 2009

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:03:00 +0000

"We're delighted to have played an instrumental role in the creation and activation of Morrisons Let's Grow campaign - winner of the Grand Prix at the IPA awards 2009. It's a great example of a truly integrated campaign that supports the brands proposition, delivers a genuine benefit to the local community and has achieved a stunning return on investment. We look forward to building on this success as we continue to develop the programme ".

Adrian Thomas, Director, Billington Cartmell

Celebrating the commercially-aware creative

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:10:00 +0000

In these times of heightened commercial awareness, it makes sound sense that our creatives should themselves be more commercially aware. So, by the same measure, shouldn't the awards we win be for ideas that deliver genuine commercial success?

Of course there are bodies that already do this - the likes of the DMA and MCCA spring to mind. But it's pencils and lions that creatives really covet, and more often than not these awards bodies - and many creatives - couldn't give a hoot how work's actually performed in the real world.

Let me say upfront that I'm not knocking ideas - quite the contrary, in fact. What I'm questioning here are the ideas that have been written by creatives for creatives, so we can sit back, slap ourselves on the back and say how clever we are - all the time ignoring the fact that a rather important person's been entirely forgotten in this process: our client, and their business's bottom line.

Maybe things are changing though. After all, there was a sign this year that the industry is starting to realise that the best ideas are ones which actually make a difference. For those of you who missed it, 2009's big winner was 'The Best Job in the World' campaign, where a team took a normal brief for a tourism authority in Australia and did a novel thing - they thought about what the client actually needed, rather than just going through the motions and using traditional advertising channels.

Now, I must declare a prejudice here - the idea was created by Ralph Barnett, a close friend and former colleague of mine. But, objectively, the reason the campaign is so strong is that it was a great idea that made a very real difference to its client.

Rather than just creating the usual poster and TV ads, they decided that people were desensitised to the traditional pieces they see plastered all over the place. So they got really creative and thought about their media before they thought about their idea. And you know what, it worked. Queensland Tourism Authority had set a measurable target of 400,000 visitors to their website over the duration of the campaign. In the first day alone, 200,000 people visited the site. And that was just the beginning.

In all, the site had more than eight million visits and 34,684 video job applications from 197 different countries. And if you combine the global news coverage, from CNN stories to BBC documentaries and Time magazine articles, the estimated media coverage is valued at more than £175million.

The onus to change shouldn't lie solely with awards though. Agencies have a duty to ensure that their creatives don't sit in an oblivious bubble. And Creative Directors have a duty to ensure the people they hire have more than a good book.

So let's start a change. Instead of simply asking my next prospective employee how many awards he's won, I'll ask how many niche brands he's built into multi-million pound accounts. I'll ask him to present the work in his book. And instead of merely admiring a campaign's art direction and copy, I'll ask if it was measurable, and what effect it had on sales.

To many agencies, this approach would seem rather radical. But is it really such a big thing - after all, aren't results what our clients pay us for?

Scotland the Brand

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:07:00 +0000

Should Scotland have a world-class national brand?

It has historical provenance and national progression. The facts are all there: romantic history - check, jaw-dropping scenery - check, national cultural and commercial heroes - check, unique national personality and products- check, unparalleled inventiveness that continues today (telephone, television, penicillin, radar, free thinking, Dolly the Sheep, Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto) - check.

But is 'Scotland the brand' communication stuck in the past?

When the BCL Edinburgh office work for our famously Scottish clients like Bank of Scotland and Famous Grouse we steer clear of tartan, caber tossing, and shortcake clichés - focusing instead on brand propositions that are as relevant today as they were in 1695 and 1897.

The biggest Scottish brand campaign in 2009 attempts to lure expats to Scotland to celebrate Robert Burns' 250th birthday. A very interesting campaign platform, but if Scotland's favourite son were alive today, I suspect he would be reaching for his pen.

http://www.homecomingscotland.com/caledonia.html

An idea with brand building potential, but execution overdone with Scottish cliché and perplexing not quite singing/not quite talking from our biggest export Mr. Connery.

Quite simply, the campaign fails to project the zeitgeist of a nation.

Flipping the execution and events to draw from the past, but more importantly celebrate Scotland as a progressive 21st century nation - well that would have been a brand campaign, "That's sweetly play'd in tune".

5 Golden Rules for 'Olympic' Sponsorship

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:12:00 +0000

Sports sponsorship efforts broadly fit into one of two camps. On one side we have the 'Fred Goodwin School of Sports Sponsorship' - a corporate jolly designed to schmooze key clients, affording the cheque signer the opportunity to hob-nob with their sporting heroes, while simultaneously getting top class seats to their favourite sporting events. On the other side however, sports sponsorship can provide a platform for brand communications that can deliver powerful associations, inspire increased brand and company loyalty, and build serious brand awareness. Only one of these routes makes any difference to your consumer's perception of your brand.

Whatever the motivation for sport sponsorship, when it comes to consumer's relationship with your brand and its propensity to turn a profit, success lies firmly in your agency's ability to understand some key rules of sports sponsorship activation and exploit a new model (and tools) of consumer communication.

With the Olympics in 2012 fast approaching, what are the key principles that clients and agencies alike should be looking to implement to make sure that they get the very most from their sponsorship monies.

The Golden Rules of Sponsorship -

1) Produce a clear set of objectives as to what you want to achieve through association with your chosen sport and how you want consumers to see the partnership. Inmarsat, providers of mobile satellite to the aeronautical and maritime industries, cleverly used its sponsorship of the World Rally Championship to highlight products' capabilities. It provided groundbreaking technology to revolutionise the sport itself, making WRC the most data rich and advanced sport in the world, while at the same time producing an exciting real world case study for potential clients.

2) There has to be relevance for the brand to make the sponsorship bigger than just a branding exercise. Take Panasonic - who have been sponsoring the Olympics since it introduced its Olympic partnership program for the Calgary games - they see a fit with the games and their products and their functional and emotional benefits. From capturing golden moments with their broadcast cameras and delivering the excitement of the games to homes all around the world (best viewed/enjoyed in stunning HD on a Viera!!) to preserve their precious moments with Lumix cameras, or in HD on their own camcorders.

3) Understand that it's not just a one off hit. The reach of sponsorship opportunities, like the Olympics itself, far outlives the event. Brands must have an idea as to how they want to run a programme of activity and how you can keep it fresh. The opportunity to advertise and generate awareness of the games starts as soon at the last event is over. Campaign momentum should build and there should be a mixture of tactical amplification in addition to the use of the local and worldwide Olympic organization collateral (logos)

4) Interaction and engagement - Sport is about movement and involvement and any campaign activity should encourage consumers to engage with the property and your brand wherever possible. Nike have done this brilliantly with their sponsorship of leading world class footballers, challenging consumers to take ownership of the ideas, run with them and make them bigger than the sum of their parts, check out their The chain campaign for just one example of their executional excellence - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI5JfwHsrM8

5) Work closely with other sponsors and the local organisation - you will be able to maximize opportunities, leverage shared brand values and tap into a wider audience. Nationwide Building Society scored major points with their 'Fan Embassy' at the last World Cup in Germany. Helping fans with vital information on the ground, near the tournament, their activity was a physical manifestation of their brand promise - as official supporters of the England team

With every kind of sponsorship situation - don't expect the association on its own to deliver the benefits. There has to be a creative and executional purpose to the exercise. Remember the sponsorship is just a door pass to get you in with the fans…once you're in, you have to continue to deliver on promise.

The Currency of Music

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:32:00 +0000

A year or so ago David Byrne wrote a really great piece about the various new routes open to artists who wish to distribute music. These will seem familiar stereotypes now; the Radiohead route, the Madonna route, the Starbucks route, a plethora of routes that claim to empower unknown artists and so on.

He put a couple of points very eloquently;

Firstly what is called the music business today is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases and that business will soon be over.

Secondly "Music"; what is it we're talking about here? In the distant past, music was something you heard and experienced - it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity, or even hear it again.

Humans will always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic. Byrne suggests that this urge is part of our genetic makeup.

The currency of music is also the prevailing promotional currency. We generally don't suggest brands offer music CDs as rewards anymore and increasingly we treat downloads within a context of peer to peer file sharing and music subscription models.

Recorded music is fast being perceived as "free" in a similar way that we perceive TV to be free (although we most likely pay for it). It is likely that a subscription model of some sort will become the norm; in fact I already like the idea that for a set fee I could obtain all the music I want from Sky, especially when this becomes genuinely portable. I don't think that this fee is as much as £9.99 a month, so I don't believe subscription has been completely cracked yet.

So if recorded music is "free" then the original meaning of music as a social currency and experience is King again. This should be the cornerstone of our current thinking. Finding cost effective solutions isn't easy; although it probably isn't a "play us (or even worse upload) your band's music and we'll make you famous" concept, the absolute knee-jerk.

Rewarding customers for their own taste is one area we've been looking at in the social currency area; interestingly without making it "all about you". Finding routes into experiences this way is also bearing fruit. One industry that is currently entering the same sort of flux as recorded music was 5 years ago is ticketing, the gateway to experience. Like recorded music, you may have thought this to be a closed shop but the opportunity is as great - if not greater - than it was with recorded music.

Humans will always want to use music as part of our social fabric; so frankly the challenge isn't about to go away because recorded music purchase has.

BCL is a multiple ISP award winner…again!

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:30:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that BCL won 5 ISP awards at last week’s awards ceremony. Our ‘Spinning Fork’ and ‘Food Fight’ campaigns for Pot Noodle both won gold, while we also took home silver awards for our ‘Lets Grow’ campaign for Morrisons, ‘Cooking for Schools’ for Flora, and our Colgate ‘Max White’ work.

To hear more about these campaigns and how our award winning thinking can help your business, why not give Marc Rigby or Vanessa Fawcett a call on 020 7471 1900.

BCL Group climbs 28 places in Campaign Top 100 Advertising Agencies

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:07:00 +0000

Our advertising billings for 2008 (as measured by Nielsen) have grown by 50%, up to £11.7m from £7.8m in 2007 (the second biggest rise in the whole top 100). This is thanks to the continued growth of advertising within our integrated campaigns for Ribena, Carlsberg, Lucozade and Nestle Purina and many others.

Neil Davidson joins Billington Cartmell

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:10:00 +0000

Billington Cartmell has hired Neil Davidson to head and develop its planning department.

Neil will have a strong client-facing role, while leading the strategic planning department and developing solutions right across the agency’s business.

Neil previously worked at the The Farm as the strategic planning director and spent several years in direct marketing, as well as working for numerous ad agencies.