That Was The Week That Was 16-20 May 2022
Half Wasted Advertising and Other Weasel Words
John Wanamaker, a US department store magnate from the turn of the last century, ensured his immortality by noting that he wasted half of the money he spent on advertising. The trouble was, he did not know which half. More than a century later, that remains the case.
Regular readers will know that last week we posted a poster seen on the London Tube of a sign encouraging Londoners to save their city by visiting Vienna. Well, to be fair, it was intriguing, but of course, it was an advertising campaign. The mystery of the campaign is that for every 100 people from London that fly to Vienna, on Austrian Airlines, Austrian Airlines will give one Austrian a ticket to a city in the UK. An Austrian in a UK city, or indeed in a German city, or Italian city – the campaign is running around Europe – will likely engender global understanding etc, but this buy 100-get-one-free approach is unlikely to see informal buying clubs being formed to ensure Austrian Euros save Britain. Still, to be fair, it piqued interest, so that probably counts as a win.
Now consider this new corporate image advertisement for Air France. It imagines aviation as if it was a perfume – Eau de Aviation, perhaps. It certainly does not take safety seriously, does not keep the aisles and passageways clear and apparently to get altitude you have to climb the stairs yourself, but it just screams FRANCE! at you. Or as the creator of this ad no doubt told the board when asking for funding, it has a strong aesthetic. It is good to see that all that State Aid was not wasted. The film industry of France salutes all European taxpayers.
Meanwhile, Star Alliance wants you to celebrate with it its 25th Anniversary with a mini documentary about dancers rehearsing a new work on Zoom. How exactly that promotes the benefits of a marketing alliance is perhaps less clear. Zoom seems to work very well. There was clearly no connection between the film crew and the choreographer, who was telling dancers around the world, working in huge rehearsal spaces, that they were constrained in small spaces. As a study of how dance is choreographed and notated it is interesting. All these centuries of classical dance and the overwhelming instruction is ‘do it like this’, followed by a demonstration.
On the other hand, it would be a tragedy if dance was reduced to using singular, soulless language to get ideas across. We leave that to the management consultants, who blather on in the most unintelligible garbage known as Management-Speak. It is lasting proof of Man’s inhumanity to Man. The sine qua non of this subset of inhumanity is of course McKinsey, an organisation that has never given any poor advice in the aviation area, and who this week, the week that was, published on its website advice on how airlines can increase sales to their corporate customers. Airlines are advised, and here I quote, to ‘Create a data-driven cockpit that provides visibility’. Not sure who should be the more offended there, pilots or corporate salespeople. Or what about ‘Equip sales staff with what they need to drive effective customer interactions.’ The alternative is not worth thinking about. But the taker of the cake has got to be ‘Break down the silos and coordinate the airline’s value proposition across all departments.’ So now you know.