Yes! We are all different! … (I’m not)

Even though he wasn’t the Messiah, but a mixed-up mixed-race naughty boy, I Reckon Brian Cohen was right: we are all individuals, who should think for ourselves, and shouldn’t let anyone tell us what to do. And that includes Latin teachers.

In perhaps a surprising but related way in the middle of the last century, the US Military discovered the flaw of averages (thanks to this brilliant article for that headline). Despite taking 140 measurements of more than 4,000 pilots to better design the cockpit of their fighter planes, they found that, even consolidating data to just 10 metrics, literally no one was in the average range (middle 30%) on all dimensions. Even taking just three dimensions only improved that to 3.5%. They concluded that

If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.

The End of Average, Todd Rose, 2016

This led to a whole new approach to design and engineering, creating adjustable seats, helmets and controls, meaning that each distinctly un-average individual pilot could make their cockpit fit them better. In real terms, this made planes more comfortable and easier to fly, leading to significantly fewer incidents and accidents.

Which might help explain why, after decades of limited technology and increasingly frustrated attention spans, marketers are now pursuing the apparent Marketing Nirvana that Steven Spielberg presented 20 years ago in Minority Report, of entirely personal ads, the mythical audience of one, seeing the right message for the right product at the right time, every time.

Of course we’re not here yet, nor do we want to be. 6 years ago KPMG had already identified a wide spectrum of attitudes towards this in their Creepy or Cool? study. Whatever futurists might think, many of us think otherwise.

And despite this professed desire for brands to get closer to individual customers, offering more personalised experiences with tailored and relevant content, the real world doesn’t seem to be working that way. This has long been obvious in the convergence of cars (especially mainstream Family SUVs) into almost identical shapes and sizes.

As a recent article by Alex Murrell brilliantly illustrates, we have somehow descended into the Age of Average.

…from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.

Alex Murrell, The Age of Average, 2023

There’s an Airbnb design aesthetic, which is paralleled in contemporary offices and cafés in towns and cities everywhere. Indeed, city skylines and residential developments are more and more similar.

I bet you’ve stayed here, or at least somewhere like it…

And it goes on; media, book covers, even people are looking more and more alike – as Instagram-Face starts to dictate what ‘popular’ people look like, and want to look like for maximum clicks. Always reflecting and jumping on any given bandwagon, marketers have almost relentlessly homogenised their brands in recent years. While this might be more obvious for tech brands, I Reckon it seems at best counter-productive for ‘iconic’ fashion brands… is it really that important to be ‘easy to read online’?

R U OK, Marketing People?
The excellent people at BBH Labs talked about this 5 years ago too, lamenting the growing industry trend to devolve brand strategies into self-help manifestos. Fuelled by a dangerous cocktail of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, saturated markets of near-identical products, and the accelerating bandwagons of Diversity & Inclusion, countless brands have hitched a ride on the train of Encouraging Consumers to Be Whomever They Want To Be because, you know, WE SUPPORT YOU.

It’s easier and safer for marketers to let you work out if you like their brand, than it is for the brands to actually express any kind of personality or opinion. Because you might not like it, or someone on TikTok might be triggered, or something.

And then this happens (this is a joke, but only just).

Well I still believe in the doctrine of Distinctive Brand Assets, as preached by most of the Wise Marketing Types I like to pay attention to. Standing out so you can be more easily recognised and remembered, so associations are formed between brand names and logos and design and products. Which is why, for the longest time, I was a massive admirer of Audi’s marketing. From their amazing depiction of BMW-drivers as arrogant w**kers to the wonderful insight of “I’m a great driver, it’s everyone else that are the problem”, their ads had been witty and compelling, all based around the very German Vorsprung durch Technik. Now, Future is an Attitude, whatever that means.

Average in, Average out.
But there’s a snag in trying to stand out or be distinctive, because algorithms reward popularity, not plucky outliers. Popular-but-Inoffensive trumps Interesting-but-Quirky. So brands start to exist in echo chambers of their own making. They encourage their ‘audiences’ to express themselves, but for the purposes of our primitive Minority Report targeting they do that less in the places they go, the clothes they wear, the people they’re seen with or the cars they drive, but in their Likes and Shares. Brands suck in that information and chase it, anxious to reflect whatever it is they think that we like today. But they only get a fraction of what we like, as if the US Military had measured pilots’ head circumference but not their leg length.

The machine-learning AIs that control what we see, read and hear can only recognise that very partial incomplete version of self-expression and show it back to us, but they base their knowledge on everything they see, read and hear. And as Alex Murrell and others have made very clear, the places, clothes, people and cars they can see, read and hear about are converging towards homogeneity.

So that’s what we’ll see, and like, and they will show it back to us, and hope we like it, and them. And when we do, because we will eventually, they will congratulate themselves that they have connected with us, and we have engaged with them. But really, if different brands look more and more like each other, how will we know which one we liked?

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It’s not really my style…

Oh dear.

As if it were choreographed to follow on from my last collection of Reckons about marketing, Audi has launched its new global advertising campaign.

Future is an attitude

IMHO, I Reckon that even on first reading, this is ‘a bit off’. Why no definite article? Is this like the banking ads that are trying to make ‘money’ into a verb?

Or, maybe it’s just a play on words that nearly works but not quite, like the Ineos Grenadier proposition ‘Built on Purpose’. I think I know what they’re trying to do, but it’s just not English as most normal people speak. As the cycling pundit and podcaster John Galloway commented

‘Built on Purpose’ just means you meant to build it, you didn’t set out to make some drop scones and accidentally ended up with a couple of tons of pollution-belching Land Rover

In any case, the line is only just the start of the problems. It’s possible this is the apotheosis of a brand talking without listening, or simply being so overwhelmed by their own brilliance and importance that they truly have lost touch with the rest of the world.

We all look at the same world, but we all look at it in a different way.
Some see a concept, we see potential.
Some just see sheer speed, we see inspirational engineering.
Some just see beautiful lines, we see character.
Some see a new light, we see a new vision.
Some see a factory, we see progress.
Some see a new motor, we see a new era.
Some see what’s there, we see beyond.

Source: Audi Ivory Towers, 2020

Pitched somewhere between a perfume ad and a Christopher Nolan movie, I Reckon this is a brand disappearing inside itself. It’s literally not about the customer, the driver, people in the real world, it’s all about Audi and how bloody wonderful, different and better than the rest of you they are. You only see beautiful lines…? Poor deluded creature, how we sneer at your lack of, well, everything. It’s as heavy-handed as Hellboy’s right fist.

This is how the Audi ad makes me feel. Both of them.

And in all the posturing about working towards a better world and a new era of motoring, Audi has just one fully electric car available in the UK. The e-tron starts at £61k for the basic model, or £70k for the model shown in the film. The monthly payments are higher than many people’s mortgages. The RS Q8 model that catches the lady’s eye in the near-deserted city costs £105,000. Thanks Audi! Starting the revolution for us all!

And all this from a brand that has created two of my favourite all-time adverts. More than 25 years ago their ‘yuppie’ ad hit me immediately, because it’s based on a real insight. In 1994, the idea of a brash City w*nker was no longer an aspiration to most, but an embarrassment, an attitude too far. People with money didn’t want other people to think they were w*nkers.

Audi took that and doubled down, making the w*nker the ‘hero’ of their ad, and all the time the viewer is appalled (or at least I was) – what are they saying…? Until the final payoff, where it transpires he probably drives a BMW, because w*nkers like him would, wouldn’t they? It’s a hugely brave campaign, and lives or dies on the main character’s tremendous performance. I lived and worked in London at that time and I could have sworn I’d actually seen him in any number of bars. And 6 years later, when I had the choice of a BMW or an Audi A4 as a company car, I knew where I was going; I’m not a w*nker.

More recently, in 2017, Audi wanted to promote the new technologies it was developing to improve driver safety, like all-round sensors, assisted braking, blind-spot alerts and so on. These were by no means unique to Audi in 2017, and they’re now virtually standard across many brands.

But again Audi landed on a terrific insight. For more than 30 years research has shown that as many as 80% of drivers rank themselves as ‘above average’. So the challenge to make these technologies compelling and worth paying for is not that they will make you a better driver, because, you know, you’re already a very good driver. The problem is everyone else; the couple arguing, the guy on his phone, the person doing their makeup, or eating. They’re the problem. Audi’s clever technologies are the solution.

But here they are now, seeing beyond 2020 to a vacant place that would feel more human if it had been entirely created by Artificial Intelligence. I Reckon they’ve created something that is BOTH bland and meaningless, like those ‘inspirational’ prints about Passion or Excellence, AND that the “Tell Charles I’m on my way… TAXI!” w*nker would think is, yeah, like, pretty cool. Which is, I suppose, some sort of achievement. Just not in a good way.

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It’s not about you, it’s me…

I’ve always believed that marketing and advertising works best when it delivers some kind of emotional connection between whatever is being ‘sold’ and whoever is supposed to be doing the buying. Like Don Draper gets it in this fantastic scene from the first series of Mad Men.

I can’t think of too many car adverts that I like, except perhaps this absolute classic from Audi…

IMHO this is blindingly good, subverting our expectations until the final frames. The emotional connection resonates all the more strongly… BMW drivers are w**kers. You’re not a w**ker. So drive an Audi. Lovely. It has humour, style and personality. Taken alongside the years of tremendous ideas that brought vorsprung durch technik to life, it connected with the soul of its audience (I’m NOT a BMW w**ker) as well as the engineering-led design beauty…

Perhaps it was the years of this sort of perception (the Audi ad was true in the 1990s and probably still is…) that persuaded BMW to create the execrable “Joy is BMW” advert, which I first saw a few months ago. I hated it the moment I saw it.

I dislike this most of all because I can so clearly see the brief writ large all over the screen. There’s every demographic in the book (many of whom could barely afford to hire a BMW, let alone own one), there’s every location in the book, there’s sunshine a-plenty, there’s old retro-models (must display our heritage), there’s a designer and wind-tunnel (technology), there’s Patrick Stewart (full of gravitas yet human and approachable), and there’s the godawful script. It’s an internal corporate video that should be playing in reception at BMW HQ, that is shown to new employees to fire them up. It’s not a bloody advert because it says NOTHING about who it wants to buy the cars. It doesn’t seem to care who buys the cars, as long as someone does. It’s all about how bloody marvellous BMW is.

I’ve always thought The Ultimate Driving Machine was a perfectly excellent  idea for BMW, that appealed to the ego and self-importance of the BMW driver as well as showcased the terrific technical achievements of their engines. A car for drivers by drivers.

And then this week, I saw something potentially even worse. Renault’s Drive for Change campaign…

Rather than simply crowing about how great their cars are, Renault associates itself (through the car itself) with the progress of human history, and then starts preaching about how it’s not fair that some people don’t have cars. Which made me think, well you could always donate some of your massive profits or the cost of your Formula 1 team to improve the state of the planet and humanity. Don’t get me started about the big “YES” and “NO” signs. And as for the wavy-haired guy at 1’10”, shouldn’t he be driving a BMW?

These films feel like corporate arrogance to me, barely even acknowledging there are any people who matter. The Renault script is full of cliches, it’s trying way too hard. Hint: show me how you’re making a difference, don’t just make vapid assertions and expect me to believe them.

I’ll take Don Draper over this expensive, meaningless rubbish every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

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