I went to Albion the other day to do a bit of honest non-execing and found the door locked in my face.

Hang
on, I thought. Have they finally figured out that I’m a useless fraud
and decided to keep me out of the agency at all costs ?

Would there be people with placards saying “Go Home Henry” ?

Well
as it happened, the door was locked not just to me but to everybody.
Because they’d done a bit of work so provocative that they needed
police protection.

It was a website that allowed you to
slap a video of Nick Griffin as he preached to the Ku Klux Klan in the
US. One of the creatives came up with the idea during the Question Time
programme and had built it by the following morning.

It
had to be pulled after 4 days because it was attracting  very
threatening calls to the agency.  But it had also attracted 22,145,836
hits -  Griffin was being slapped 2,000 times a second with a new
unique visitor every second. It was linked to from about 1,300 online
sources, the main one being Facebook with 22,000 referrals. There’s
also been thousands of tweets.

And the agency was threatened with physical violence, which was why the door was locked.

Now
for me this is EXACTLY what a great agency does. Get stuck into
culture, have an opinion, have a great creative idea, and get it out
there fast.

And make sure to stir it up. Using the wonderful world of social media.

I’m getting sick of saying this, but 90% of advertising goes out there and does nothing at all.

(I
heard a figure the other day for what the average ROI is for marketing
in this country. I can’t tell you the figure because I’ve been sworn to
secrecy for now – but it’s diabolically low.)

Only a tiny proportion of marketing comms are interesting enough to elicit a response.

Because
most approval processes are designed to try to avoid making “mistakes”
- a completely pointless exercise – as opposed to seeking to stand out.

If the partners at Albion had considered all the repercussions, they might have thought twice about doing this.

But they got 22 million hits.

Big ideas take risks.

It’s
strange really. We talk up the idea of entrepreneurs – but the ad
industry finds every way it can to take every ounce of risk out.

Entrepreneurs take risks.

Maybe
Millward Brown should rechristen themselves Millward Brown Trousers,
since the whole thing is just an elaborate and expensive way to cover
scared arses.

At GGT years ago, Dave Trott did a poster
for LWT that took the piss out of the Ayatollah Khomeini. He received
death threats and all the creatives working for him thought that was
fantastic.

(That’s come out slightly wrong. I don’t mean
we all wanted Dave to be killed by an Iranian hit squad. Just that we
loved the idea of an ad provoking that fierce a response. Although I
think one art director who’d been refused a pay rise that year, did
temporarily join a suicide squad.)

When was the last time your agency did something like that ?

More importantly, when was the last time it even wanted to do something like that ?