Bairdyblog

You're only a client, so shut the f*&# up

Here's a funny film brought to my attention by some antipodean rec ad types. There's probably something ingenious about how it's made I should be sharing with you, but frankly I can't be bothered to follow the link. Enjoy it for what it is.

It reminds me of when I worked at Hallam FM in Sheffield in a department of (pretty cynical) commercial producers. Next to our office was a room in which the station did most of its client presentations. It was decorated with the kind of motivational signs that make intelligent adults bring up their breakfast - whales, mountains, tape-breasters, and so on.

Worst of all was a sign which said:'S*CCESS - we can't spell it without U!' One day someone wrote beneath it, 'Nor, for that matter, c*nt!', which we all thought rather splendid.

There hasn't been much posting here lately - I've been finishing the dissertation for my MA and even working in the real world, mostly for Blackbridge. But there'll be more action over the coming weeks. Incidentally, I've also been posting on another site which some of you might be interested in: it's called www.thefirmidentity.com and it's dedicated to branding-related issues in the legal market.

Oz construction firm calls spade a spade

Sometimes you have to hand it to the Australians - why bother poncing around with overly fancy headlines when something as straightforward as this tells the story perfectly?

I like to think that the two blokes in the picture are debating whether or not the headline adequately reflects the key principles of the VDM employer brand paradigm.

This is my second favourite 'Ronseal' job ad. At TCS, we once ran a client-written ad for BSI with the heading 'Looking for a job?' It ran in the recruitment classifieds, of course.

Thanks to Mel Hirst at ReAgent for sending this over.

Too much money makes bunny unfunny

Have spent the last couple of weeks doing employment marketing work, and I'm sick of it. So let's leave the world of sits vac for a while and look at this campaign for - deep breath - Cadbury Dairy Milk Caramel.  

For those of you who don't get it, this is the Caramel Rabbit who used to promote the chocolate bar back in the eighties. (When, as I recall, the name of the product had only one adjective, and not three.) So this is, essentially, a nostalgia opportunity for those of us old enough to remember the original - as evidenced by a couple of media commentary sites with men of a certain age hur-hurring each other about whether or not Caramel Rabbit is tastier than Jessica Rabbit.

And it's everywhere. It's on buses. It's wrapped around the BFI IMAX. It was the cover on thelondonpaper last Monday. Small children are having it stapled to heads and being paid to parade around the West End wearing it. Next week, when I go to hospital for an X-Ray, I fully expect to see a copy of it pinned to my large intestine. It's everywhere.

Model-wise, there are significant changes. La Rabbit is now wearing make-up. I suppose this is intended to make her look like a sexier older, thing - twenty years on but well-preserved in a male fantasy type way. (I imagine the lads working on this talked about RILFs when they drew her.)

Annoyingly, the adverts are carrying the 'A Glass and a Half Full Production' logo which I suppose is meant to be - um - the branding of the branding. This is an unforgivable sin and must be stopped immediately. It speaks volumes about the agency and marketing types behind this kind of work, strongly suggesting they're attempting to promote their own 'craft' and 'talent' above actually shifting product.

And look at the site - despite being much-lauded, am I really alone in suspecting the work isn't actually that good? Airport trucks and creepy pre-pubescent eyebrow artists? I'd expect that from Mark Wallinger but don't find much justification for it in a brand campaign. For chocolate.

Anyway, my main point was that the Caramel campaign almost has too much exposure. Here's how it worked with me. The first time I saw it I thought it was clever. The second, I possibly felt a slight stab of nostalgia.

The third, I realised that there was some connection between the image and my distant, adolescent awakening.

But the fourth time, I'm slightly bored by its lack and creative development, and even worse - I'm associating the rabbit and the chocolate bar with a whole world of zits, physical discomfort and sexual rejection. Hmm - is this what the people at 'Glass and a Half' had in mind?

You only sing when you're working

I was in the pub with Melanie Hirst from Aussie shop ReAgent last week, who reminded me of this oddity from Ernst & Young, which did the email rounds a few years ago.

Clearly, it's an artefact from days long gone, when HR departments were prepared to drop squillions on projects with no discernible practical benefit. But it's by no means an isolated example - the web is full of comparable misdemeanours. Spend ten minutes searching on YouTube and you'll find it hard to believe that the heads of E&Y, KPMG and PWC were not consciously vying with each other to discover who could make their organisations look like the biggest bunch of complete tits.

Corporate anthems - bad lyrics, bad synths, bad performances, great entertainment. You can find a load of them here. There's an OK piece of web journalism on the truly aw-ful/-esome KPMG song here. (I like it best when the funny foreign man says 'innowate' and 'wision'.)

I wonder if anyone ever held an international contest for corporate anthems? I imagine the irony quotient in such an event would have made Eurovision look like a state funeral.

Anyway, years before the internet, TV and dogging were invented, organisations would often encourage their workforces to star in industrial musicals. On this page you'll find an example written for Xerox employees in 1963. It's wonderfully produced and tremendously evocative, as you can probably guess from the album sleeve.

In our over-cynical world, laden with work-life balance, Gen Y professional promiscuity and the alienation of distance working, this could almost certainly never happen. But doesn't it make you just a little nostalgic for a better, more secure world; a time when men were company men, and practically all employees enjoyed the notion of a job for life?

Cryptic Crossword, Christmas 2008

This may well be the first cryptic crossword puzzle ever to focus on employment marketing. But don't let that put you off. And it's a lot easier than it looks. To try it, click on the page listing on the right or here. Send me your answer by January 5th and, if you're correct, you'll go into a draw which could net your chosen charity £50.

See you next year!

Gittin' down with da kids, Capgem stylee

An introductory video, I assume, for those attending Capgemini US campus recruitment events. Watch it. Now. Get pumped up.

'You may think we're a bunch of astrologers because we have the word 'Gemini' in our name. Or you may think we're a hedge fund because we have 'Cap' in our name.' No, I think you're a bunch of tossbags because you have a tw*t in your hiring video.

I can only imagine Capgemini were scared of the college market and latched upon the guy from CorpComms who believed he could make them look cool. Maybe they saw him at a firm karaoke and thought he rocked it live. But no. No, no. Not even the magic of Hairy Porter or the charm of Jer-waaard Dep-ur-doo (?!) could save this bizarre, patronising farrago.

Blessed are the Creatives, for they shall inherit the earth

Back from hols so finally catching up on what the luminaries have been on about on Ri5. Messrs Howard, Tarrant, Wilkinson and Gould all interviewed about the future of rec ad. (Any advance on that as a dinner party from hell?) No-one asked me, but I shall give you some thoughts anyway, and they are a little different.

As a circumlocutory introduction, watch this gem from The Onion.

YouTube Contest Challenges Users To Make A 'Good' Video

What this is about, of course, is deficiency of content. Hold that thought a moment.

Here are bairdyblog's predictions about the future of the industry.

1. Agencies, traditionally all about media, won't be for much longer: Four or so reasons why: clients won't need intermediation to post on job boards; social networking will develop, proliferating the 'free' attraction channels; fewer organisations will attract offline, where the commission value still lies; the recession may mean the collapse of volume rebates.

2. Content will be king. Content is what the clients can't do, where the value is. Clients will  increasingly look for agencies that understand brand development, the markets in which those brands operate, can produce whizzo creative platforms based on those brands, and offer sophisticated mastery of how to adapt content for online's myriad forms.

3. Retained accounts will become increasingly rare. Agencies will be hired on a project basis to build brands and deliver associated portfolios of attraction and engagement materials. Therefore, biz dev folk will probably be in demand more than ever.

4. These successful agencies will most likely be small affairs. One Account Director, a Biz Dev, a handful of writers and designers, programmers and channel analysts. Maybe a researcher if volume demands it. Many of these agencies will not be in central London: again, it's all about overheads. Some might even be properly virtual organisations.

5. Attraction will segue further into relationship management, induction, internal comms. We will be using our creativity to drive engagement and productivity, particularly.

6. George Takei will win IACGMOOH. His voice alone is too good to vote off.

Disbelieve if you dare.

Gen Y: Three Recruitment Tips

Now, I'm not really a big fan of all this Gen X, Gen Y, General Zod malarkey.

It seems to me that once you start bandying these terms around then you're likely to assume all individuals within a generation have the same interests and attributes. They don't. Gen Y aren't exclusively MySpacing, YouTubing, FaceBooking treehuggers, in the same way that the eighties generation weren't all mobile-toting, braces-wearing  entrepreneurs who snorted coke in trendy wine bars off the back of Phil Collins LPs.

But there are some tips worth bearing in mind when it comes to recruit marketing to Gen Y. By way of introduction, here's a recent film from the Onion News Network that highlights generational differences in the workplace. (If you haven't seen Onion videos before, you're really missing out.)

Study Finds Young People Remain Apathetic About Office Politics

Office politics? That's not what turns Gen Y on. The slow burn of long-term employment in an apparently socially worthless role is anathema to these conscientious, sceptical speed freaks.

To recruit them, consensus is that it's good to remember the following:

1. Peer networks are the best channel. Gen Y rarely listens to - and even more rarely believes - paid for marketing messages. Rather, it talks amongst itself for personal recommendations (hence the explosion of social networking). If you can use networks, preferably via an evangelist from your organisation who is themselves Gen Y, without artifice or top-down clumsiness, then do so.

2. Worthwhile work is the best message. These people want work that is important to the world. So think about your employee value proposition and what ultimate positive function the product/service of the organisation performs. (How does the organisation make the world a slightly better place?) Also consider corporate social responsibility: explain what you do in this area, but don't exaggerate.

3. Suggest rapid and meaningful advancement. These greedy little Y-ers won't hang around waiting for Buggin's Turn. They fully expect to be leading the organisation by ten o'clock tomorrow morning, or they'll be packing their beanies and heading off somewhere with better prospects. Make sure you tell as good a story as you can about how careers can develop, and at what pace.   

TMP exercises Perth control

Whilst trying to track down an old friend, I found my way to the TMP.com worldwide locations page.

The major news agencies have missed it, but TMP seems to have moved Perth (carefully, I hope) from its old position in Western Australia and plonked it bang on top of Hobart.

Usually copywriters whine about the art department not having a good enough grasp of English; looks like designers stateside could do with a brush-up in Geography too.

Loving an elevator

Most of us have come across the concept of an elevator speech - a short (ish) pitch designed to communicate the most compelling information about a venture or person in the shortest possible time. It's much beloved by cheesy sales gurus, earnest Dragon's Den contestants and (God help us) personal branding consultants. But what value can it have for recruitment?

A (mostly) preconsidered message consisting of your organisation's best employer value propositions can help recruiters quite a lot, especially in terms of:

• Networking. What do you say to your prospective candidate when you meet them in the bar, conference, awards ceremony, or street?
• Employee Referral Schemes. What pitch do you encourage your people to give when talking their friends and acquaintances into applying to you?
• Poaching cards. Similar to the above - what gets said when the card's handed over?
• Careers fairs. What do you say to stop potential candidates sauntering past your stand en route to a competitor's?

An elevator speech that has a story aspect to it is going to be particularly strong, as this will make it more memorable and repeatable. (Employer Brands need more stories. Stories are good. People like them.)

Anyway, to find out more about constructing yours, here's a video of a slightly scary man who ostensibly knows stuff about harassing venture capitalists in enclosed spaces.