September 2008 Archives

The British political conference season is upon us. Brummies who may have tried to walk through what they previously considered to be their own public square will be more than aware of this. The security lockdown for a conference by a party not even in power does seem on the wrong side of excessive. We can only hope that all those well-protected Tories are out using their discount vouchers in our clubs, restaurants & bars so that we do see a positive balance to our local economy.

Other than this visible intrusion there's barely a ripple of excitement caused by the conference or anything else in British politics, it is relentlessly dull. I suppose politics isn't really built for stimulation, even the arguments and petty jibes are yawn-inducing, and used so repetitively that they become ineffective.

The fact that politics touches all of our lives should make it relevant, important even. The presence of politicians essentially makes it quite the opposite. Politics is essentially practiced by people with no grasp on reality, people who've lived their entire lives within institutions - from higher education to the Houses of Parliament. These people have no idea how to engage with us, even when they've been repeatedly schooled in the practice. They are the essential proof that there is a massive difference between theory and reality.

Essentially now it's about leaders. Do we buy into the over-educated Etonian in love with his own soundbites or the principled but dour Scot who says one thing and often does something else entirely. Do we really have anything in common with these power-obsessed individuals?

I always vote but the very concept of casting favour in the direction of those who are so desperately needy for it seems alien to me. They may pretend to want to help you but really they're ego-driven-power-crazed aliens who want to be top 'man'.

Perhaps Dave could at least try to humanise himself by spending some time with me whilst he's in the area. We could take a brisk jog away from the sanitised areas of Broad Street. Head away from brindleyplace on the canal towpaths, away from the over-priced and under-sold luxury apartments, run under the Dudley Road and past all the disused industrial buildings, the scrap-yards and into the heart of what used to be a manufacturing industry before Thatcher.

Failing that we could just go to The Wellington on Bennetts Hill, have a few pints of Pig on the Wall and talk shite. Then we'll stroll down to catch the train from New Street and laugh at how run-down the station is, perhaps we'll also wonder how trains that are advertised on the trainline website can suddenly disappear. Or even muse about why the pre-recorded voices of the announcements weren't given phonetic pronunciations of some of the local place-names.

I doubt we'll have that much time, so maybe he can just come down the baggies with me. He can probably still afford to buy me a pint in the ground before the match, as I'm certainly not paying the £3 they want for it these days. Maybe after a few stellas he might agree to buy my Bradford & Bingley shares. Probably not though, he doesn't look quite that stupid.

Sometimes it's hard to feel sorry for international mega-stars, they have fame, adulation and money - but sometimes they also catch an unnecessary crock of criticism.

Witness Metallica, they took the unfortunate stance of opposing Napster & music-file-sharing at a time when everyone began to steal music and they've been whipping boys ever since. Whatever your opinion on this issue and the point that it's led us to in the decline of recorded music sales, surely they deserve a second-chance?

They're currently under fire (again) for two reasons and I have sympathy for them on one of these. Frontman James Hetfield took the time during their O2 gig (£5 entry and proceeds to charity remember) to ask people to put down their phones and just enjoy themselves. His comment was that "a 2 second blurb of shitty Metallica on youtube is not gonna make you famous". Naturally it ended up on youtube:

Obviously I believe in free will and free choice but this is one of those things that also irritate the hell out of me. Why is it that so many people feel the need to take photos or video when they're at a gig? Is it not enough to be there and to enjoy it? Do you really have to prove you were there? Do you really have to record a clip of video that shows nothing but some flashing lights and poor audio to remind you of a minute or two of a song that you missed because you were too busy f**king about with your 'phone?

I don't really understand 'art'. This may not come as a great surprise to you; possibly you already have me typecast as the archetypal black-country-bloke. I'm not about to burst that bubble at the altar of modern art, or any art from any era come to think of it. Or any altar.

This is not to say that I don't appreciate art, I recently stood in awe at the base of 'The Angel Of The North' and consider most of Gormley's work to be quite brilliant. I suspect that - like music - the concept of what we individually consider to be 'great art' is a hugely personal decision. And then there's the other stuff.

Every week or month there is some example of the 'other stuff' to inflame or amuse us, even when rational common sense demands that we should simply ignore it. This week it comes courtesy of Andy Savage and his lightswitches at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol.

In case you missed this story, Andy's 'art' is two normal light switches, one on the ground floor and one on the first floor at the gallery. The unpretentiously titled 'switch' has a twist - as the ground floor switch controls the lights on the first floor and the first floor switch obviously controls the lights on the ground. Genius.

I know a lot of people in new-build houses who'll be ecstatic to discover that what they'd originally considered to be an electrical design fault is actually a priceless work of art. Or possibly it only counts as art if it features in a gallery and was installed by someone who might have attended Art College.

The Mercury Music Prize is a weird thing, I'm not sure anyone can adequately explain why it really exists. Their website has a reasonable stab at it: 'The prize exists solely to champion UK music by promoting the 12 albums of the year by British or Irish artists'. Given this I'm not quite sure how the American Alison Kraus sneaked in this year, possibly under Robert Plant's greatcoat or behind Mark Lanegan, another American collaborator who was found on last year's list. I mention him as he's superb, around 6ft 6in tall and has the deepest voice on earth.

Anyway, back to the Mercury. It started 17 years ago as a sort of reaction to The BRITs which were considered 'too mainstream' - something The Mercurys could never be accused of. However, when you consider this as your rationale then having any pop albums in the shortlist seems something of a contradiction. In 1997 The Spice Girls' 'Spice' was on the shortlist which was surely an anomaly in every sense of the term.

I always figure that if I own or have at least heard around a third of the albums on the shortlist then I can probably still consider myself as contemporary or eclectic; every year I just about squeak by. This year I've heard five and probably still listen to three of them - so that's probably a result. Here's the list for your own analysis -

Adele 19
British Sea Power Do You Like Rock Music?
Burial Untrue
Elbow The Seldom Seen Kid
Estelle Shine
Last Shadow Puppets The Age of the Understatement
Laura Marling Alas I Cannot Swim
Neon Neon Stainless Style
Portico Quartet Knee Deep in the North Sea
Radiohead In Rainbows
Rachel Unthank & The Winterset The Bairns
Robert Plant & Alison Kraus Raising Sand

As one of my favourite bands once said, 'let's get this straight from the start': I'm not a sports commentator, I'm just a fan. I actually tried commentating once, for clubcall, I was useless. All you had to do (at the time) was update every 15 minutes and whenever a goal was scored. I think I was covering Shrewsbury vs Scunthorpe and it didn't help that one of the teams scored three goals in close succession - I couldn't update the phoneline quick enough, as I was concentrating on reporting the last goal another one would go in. I haven't tried to do it since - to be fair they haven't asked me.

Now there's almost too much coverage; too many media owners and sponsors pitching for the same slice of the same pie. Consequently the clubs get greedier and the price of admission gets harder to afford. We've seen this process escalating for a number of years now; just when you think it can't get any more ridiculous it does just that.

One of the ongoing debates has been whether the cost of football will eventually become beyond the man-in-the-street. To an extent this has already happened, my last football-related blog mentioned that the average fan had become both older and richer, the football spectator has gone from working to middle-class. With the credit crunch now starting to bite the cost of being a fan will soon be beyond most of us. If I hadn't already bought my season ticket there's no way I'd be stumping up £40 for a category A game at the Hawthorns. Cup matches have been the first to suffer, at all grounds these fixtures have been sparsely attended and they will become ever more so.

Currently I'm choosing to actively spectate rather than passively support, my money goes on the physical participation of attending the game and not the sedentary satellite subscription. One can see that the top clubs are thinking only in terms of the latter, with an increasing number of foreign owners flooding into the sport it's one of the only ways that they'll get to see what they own. In sport as in life, as the rich get richer the poor will eventually get shafted.

It is usually the job of the football fan to hate their club's owners of course and Mike Ashley at Newcastle has become this season's pantomime villain, with Dennis Wise as his evil-dwarf and an Icelandic ugly-sister from West Ham thrown in to keep a tight rein on the purse-strings.

I am interested in the psychology of marketing. I'm not proud of it, but a man's got to be interested in something (other than football & women) and it's better than stamp-collecting, train-spotting or morris-dancing. Although in its defence I understand now that morris-dancing is all about the beer; it's an excuse to go on day-long pub-crawls with your mates. Apparently wives don't mind as they know their morris-dancing spouses have no chance of pulling whilst wearing silly clothes, bells on their ankles and carrying sticks. They might want to consider the shame of having their loved-ones seen publicly in this pursuit though.

I digress. I can defend my interest in the mechanics of marketing as it's a by-product of my work. I have had cause to work alongside marketing-folk in promoting events or radio stations or the like. It comes to mind now as one of my key clients, Virgin Radio is in the process of changing its name. Consequently some of my friends and colleagues have spent many hours in, and out of, over-illuminated boardrooms agonising over whether the brand means more than its name.

Of course it does, but sometimes there is scant evidence to support this. Let's take some popular current media campaigns. You may have seen the Aryan-type racing a car around Germanic landmarks with Wagner blasting in the background, or the supporting press ads featuring the Eagle made of car-parts. You might possibly have been able to correctly recognise that this ad is for Citroen, or more likely that it was some French car-maker claiming to have learned something from the Teutonic race. Personally I feel that the possible reason that some people buy Citroen is that they're not German. They're buying them for their non-Deutsche features. Presumably if you wanted a car with German efficiency and features then you'd buy a VW or a BMW, or whatever. Why would you want to buy fake German?

My main worry (as someone interested in the psychology) would be that Citroen are undermining their brand. Are they suggesting that up to this point the cars they made were basically crap? That they needed to nick ideas from their European neighbours? Do Citroen play these ads in their increasingly-patriotic homeland? I doubt it.

By contrast the Germans seem to be on the run; the last BMW ad I saw seemed to be so similar to the recent Honda ads that I'd think they could be sued for plagiarism. The French want to be German but the German's know that drivers now think in Japanese.

Another, more subtle, example is Gordon's Gin. No doubt you've seen the billboards and press-ads. You may not remember them, because essentially it's just another picture of Gordon Ramsay with a slogan and a bottle. You see the link obviously, Gordon Ramsay - Gordon's Gin. Except, of course, it isn't Ramsay's gin - it's Alexander Gordon's gin, and was invented hundreds of years before Ramsay was even born.

I don't drink gin, and the presence of a potty-mouthed celebrity-chef wouldn't change that habit even if I do like him on TV. I guess they're playing on the concept that it's something to do with 'taste' - both Gordon's have it. To the untrained eye though I would suspect it just makes it look like Ramsay owns it. I suspect that he's also linked to a lot of other products, in and out of the kitchen. Consequently his impact is diminished and the brand is devalued.

What's in a name? When Virgin Megastores became Zavvi their profits actually increased, even though that looks like a crap name. Marathon became Snickers to align with its European branding which sort of makes sense, I didn't stop buying them. Now it's going back to being called Marathon which is slightly more perplexing as a whole generation will have grown up with Snickers!

Within a month when Virgin Radio definitively and decisively becomes Absolute Radio it will still have a similar music policy and key-presenters and the new owners will want to improve and promote if anything. Do people listen to a radio station because of its name? Fortunately the research says no. Like many Virgin-named brands, it hasn't been Branson-owned in many years, the name is licensed, and the new owners don't see the point in investing in a brand which they can never properly own. Many things in marketing confuse me, but this seems to make great sense. For the sake of my business I hope that everyone else agrees.