Big Al by any other name

I once launched an advertising agency with the snappy name Delaney Fletcher Delaney Slaymaker Bozell. Naturally this appellation was the result of intense negotiation and compromise. Five egos had to be massaged. Mr Delaney (the first), Mr Fletcher, Mr Delaney (the other one), Mr Slaymaker, and the deceased Mr Bozell, who owned the joint, all insisted on having their monikers on the door.

A few evenings later, I was at a private dinner party with a huge client. 'How on earth', the vast one asked the assembled diners rhetorically, 'can agencies have the f'ing cheek to give clients advice about branding when they are so f'ing lousy at it themselves?' Ignorant – or maybe well aware – of my presence, his bigness continued, 'a new agency has just been launched with the most interminable and instantly forgettable list of names imaginable. So forgettable I've already forgotten them. They went something like Delaney, Delaney, Delaney, Butcher, Filcher and Bustle. Plus maybe another Delaney. Can you credit it? And tomorrow I'll get a letter from the morons offering me the benefit of their marketing wisdom.'

At which point, as News of the World investigative journalists used to say, I hurriedly made my excuses and left.

In those days, advertising agency names were standing jokes. Any comedian could provoke gales of laughter by simply burbling Snatchi & Snatchi, or by bastardising the saintly Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Mind you, I never heard anybody bastardise Tragos, Bonnange, Weisendanger and Arjoldi. Nobody dared. With a name like that they were impregnable.

Personally, I never found these name games that funny. (If you grow up in a North London slum encumbered with the name Winston, you get easily bored with nomenclature jokes.)

But anyway, I did not find them that funny because it has always seemed to me perfectly sensible for agencies to be called after their founders. Agencies are personal service businesses, and it is downright sensible of clients to want to know who the founders of the agency are, or were. The founders determine the ethos – the philosophy – of the agency. And the best way to identify them is by their names. Or are there better ways?

But all this is manifestly old hat. Today's creative hot shops have zippy monikers like Glue, Eardrum, Quiet Storm, Dig for Fire, Karmarama and Big Al's – not to mention Nitro, Mother and The Red Brick Road. Doubtless the humungous one would have considered these far finer agency names than the boring, lawyer-like lists of yesteryear. Though if my unreliable memory serves me right, he eventually appointed Still, Price, Court, Twivy and De Souza.

WHY SONY MISSED THE iPOD

A vivid example of the silo problem, the failure of autonomous product and functional silos to cooperate, comes from Sony's incredible miss of the iPod market, as recounted in the new Wiley book Sony vs Samsung, by Sea-Jin Chang.

The iPod was a natural for Sony. It was theirs to lose. The company has long been the leader in portable music, from the Walkman, to portable CD players, to the mini-disc. And unlike Apple, Sony had a big presence in music. More generally, Sony has been the miniaturisation company ever since the transistor radios of the 50s, and no firm has been better at creating new categories than Sony.

At the huge Las Vegas Comdex trade show in the fall of 1999, Sony introduced two digital music players, two years before Apple brought the iPod to the market. One, developed by the Sony Personal Audio Company, was the Memory Stick Walkman, which enabled users to store music files in Sony's memory stick, a device that resembled a large pack of gum. The other, developed by the VAIO Company, was the VAIO Music Clip, which also stored music in memory and resembled a stubby fountain pen.

Both were flawed but provided the basis for a new product category. Each had 64 megabytes of memory, which stored only 20 or so songs, and were priced too high for the general market. Both also featured a Sony proprietary compression scheme called ATRAC3. Software to convert MP3 files to the Sony standard was not convenient and, worse, resulted in slow transfers. The fact that Sony promoted two different devices created by two fiercely independent silos, confused the market as well as the Sony organisation.

Another silo was also involved, Sony Music. A handicap instead of an advantage, Sony Music was concerned more with its ability to avoid piracy and freeloading than with the success of the new digital product. As a result, it inhibited the product's ability to provide access to a broad array of music and led to the use of the cumbersome uploading process, which turned out to be a burden.

Sony's three silos thwarted the efforts by Sony to create a new category and pre-empt Apple's iPod, which is soon to sell its 200 millionth unit. It is likely that a product that combined the energies, resources and customer insights of the three silos and was improved over time would have been successful, and that the iPod opening would not have materialised.

Sony has begun the process of changing the silo culture so that cooperation and communication replace competition and isolation, so that it can return to its innovation heritage, avoid other iPod-like misses and liberate synergy potential.

Source: David Aaker, author of Spanning Silos: The New CMO Imperative (Harvard Business School Press, 2008).

FAST STRATEGY: TOP TIPS

• 'Be predatory. Advertising is a zero-sum game. Nothing is going to be magically created from thin air. Whatever you want, you've got to take it from someone else. How do you take unfair advantage of your competition? Think creatively about who's got what you want and how to take it.'

Dave Trott, Chick, Smith Trott

• 'Strong brands – particularly challengers – have a strong point of view about the world. Work out first what your brand stands against, what it rejects, to help define what it stands for. Then consider whether you need to be a brand of “proposition” or “opposition” to break through.'

Adam Morgan, Eating the Big Fish

• 'Think of parallel problems in other markets; this can lead you to a new way of thinking about your problem – and a new way of thinking about the potential answer.'

Sarah Clark, CHI and Partners

HITTING THE JACKPOT

Sir: I have been trying to imagine how big the $1 trillion deal (£681 billion) to support world economies is in terms of money us non-bankers can understand. A typical lottery jackpot win is about £3m, so how many weeks would you have to win the lottery to win $1 trillion? The answer is that if you started winning every week from the time Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55BC, you would just about be halfway. To win $1 trillion you would have had to start winning every week from when Stonehenge was built at the end of the Neolithic age, about 4,000 years ago.

Source: Letter in The Week, April 2009

THE TRIVIA FILE

• More British households have two cars (27%) than have one car (23%)

Social Trends Office of National Statistics

• 60.6% of Twitter's 10 million worldwide users are aged 35 or older compared to 52.4% of Facebook users

The Times (April 2009)

• More than half of Britons think the countryside is 'boring'. One in ten adults are unable to identify a sheep and 83% do not recognise a bluebell

Farmers Guardian (March 2009)

• In the James Bond movies, a third of the women who sleep with Bond end up dead. Daniel Craig is the most dangerous 007 to sleep with; all of his lovers so far have died.

Daily Telegraph (March 2009) Source:

Source: Prospect, May 2009

WIKIPEDIA HAS CONQUERED

The English version of Wikipedia contains 2,822,233 articles. The linguistic diversity is phenomenal: 875,000 articles in German, 774,000 articles in French, 586,000 in Chinese, 5785,000 in Polish – to name a few. There is no way a conventionally edited, commercially financed operation could match this.

Source: John Naughton, Observer, April 2009