Barclays has spoken. A multi-millionaire, aptly named after old money and fabulous wealth, is about to steer the bank back to the big time.

Casino Bob: Trust me I'm a banker

Bob Diamond, big Wall Street success story, is gonna make it happen over here now. BarCap investment banking success will be brought to bear on Barclays. And world beating, profitable organisations is what Britain wants right now. Isn’t it?

Er, no. That’s to say, not if they’re banks. They got us into this mess in the first place, didn’t they? Ask Vince Cable if you don’t believe me. First we bale them out with our money; second we watch them take stonking bonuses as we’re all forced to eat Quorn, queue on motorways for miles in order to staycation in rainy Cornwall. Huh…banks, who needs ‘em?

Such crass rhetoric that above para so I won’t even answer the question.

Some people like to argue what banks did is what we wanted: take our money and invest it in the best possible way so that we all got great returns. Sure we never complained when it all went swimmingly and we made dosh, but when it all fell apart and we lost money…well what they hell did they think they were playing at?

Goodwin won

So can banks win? That nice Mr Fred Goodwin — now ‘disgraced’ ex-CEO of RBS and also very aptly named to become naturally rich, it seems to me — won. Walked away with millions for helping sink RBS. So RBS ended up being owned by us. But we didn’t win. At least, not yet.

So maybe it’s not really the bank but the banker? For those of you who feel rich men with rich-sounding names do diddly squat for us ordinary named folk, here’s my Barclays Bank statement:

“I, Neil Cowan, formerly known as Flush Thriving, wish to apply for the post of CEO at Barclays. As my banking experience is limited I propose a piffling starting salary of, say, £1m rather than Bob Diamond’s reputed £11m. I believe my appointment will save Barclays millions (£10m on appointment, for starters). And I am the right man for the job. Thank you and when do I start?”

Would you go for that? I’m cheap, I’ve changed my previously moneyed name to ordinary bloke and I’m no fat cat. Of course you would.

But while you’re rolling your eyes and thinking this is trivia, let me say that the reason you’re doing that is because you don’t just want anyone to run a global megalomerate like Barclays, do you? You want a proven big hitter, head honcho, top man. Someone who is proven, track-recorded and demonstrably wealthy and will do the same for Barclays. And stands up at Premiership Title matches holding the Champion’s cup. So it is with regret that I withdraw my application.

But here’s the bank statement you and every other Barclays 16 million-odd customers should be making if you(s) don’t like what’s going on. It’s simple:

“I (insert name) hereby request you to close all my Barclays accounts forthwith.”

Now that’s what I call a statement. Bet not one of the 16 million lot of you makes it.

Fifa’s inspectors arrived to assess our bid to stage the 2018 World Cup last week.

Had they turned up this weekend, getting about our travel disrupted capital and then the rest of the country might have scuppered the bid before it had even started.

Fresh from their inspection trip to Moscow where the Fifa officials were treated to a red-carpeted welcome by holiday-interrupted Vladimir Putin, who was at Downing Street to kick-start the England bid and impress Fifa at the crucial moment: Nick Clegg, a tennis and skiing fan. A posh substitute, basically. And one who declared our bid as ‘Unbeatable’ which you’re not supposed to do as that rubbishes the opposition. Game, set and match.

How is it possible that three such fabulously important people as David Cameron, Prince William (as well as being royal is also the FAs’s president) and – really, really unbelievable – national treasure David Beckham be either on holiday or out of the country at such a time as this?

“It was just a technical visit” is what we’re told. Nothing important. Just a chance to check the grounds and make sure they’re actually there. Kick the seats. Tread the grass. Just like it all appears to be on TV, that is. So meeting all the big knobs wasn’t that important. Anyway, Ambassadors Rooney, Ferdinand and Capello turned up at Wembley to smile and kick a ball about. Let’s hope Rooney minded his ‘f’s and ‘c’s which were so evident in his World Cup performance.

But the really amazing thing about this story is that they actually went by tube – and made it – to Wembley. Did they have to buy their own Oyster cards?

Of the last 14 events staged there, seven have been affected by transport problems. Fulham have experienced problems in three of their last seven fixtures; Chelsea’s last eight have been hit four times. Twickenham (I know it’s not football) has suffered four times out of ten and Lord’s (I know it’s now not cricket!) has been affected by seven closures during its last 13 tests. I wonder what the betting was on that?

So let’s take Fifa to Wembley by tube…? Aaaargh…who could’ve dreamed that up?!! Couldn’t we have taken the officials by limo and said that’s the way everyone in England travels when they go to a footie match? Shown them a few ladettes out on the town in their pink stretch-limos necking vodka mid-afternoon and singing Ingerland through the open windows as proof? Where’s their imagination?

Everyone knows these top guys from Fifa know nothing about ordinary folk. Besides being treated like royalty (despite their revolution, comrade) in Russia and kings in Qatar on their recent bid inspection visits, they stay in galaxy-starred accommodation for the most part, insulated from the hoi-polloi. Apart from having to shake hands with the odd oick of a rags-to-riches footballer, they’ve have never met a properly normal person. I’m betting (along with the rest of the Pakistani touts) that they would have bought this.

I’m also betting that the real reason Pakistan’s final innings collapsed so ignominiously on Saturday was that they knew that if the match strayed into ‘rush hour’, what with it being a Bank Holiday Sunday the next day and all that, that the usual weekend engineering works and line closures and upgrade works and all the other guff that spews out of TfL for inconveniencing the entire population of London (but only at weekends when people don’t have to go to work) would mean they’d never have made it back to their hotel.

Don’t just take my word for it. Take That, Coldplay, Oasis they’ve all suffered from tube closures and engineering works when they played at Wembley. Ditto O2 too. More than 50% of its biggest gigs have been buggered due to the Jubilee Line upgrades. There’s more but this is getting dull.

While we don’t have 60-mile traffic jams in one place as was reported in China last week, what about nationwide and on a normal Bank Holiday weekend? Course we do. Road closures, engineering works, rail problems are the norm. It’s bad enough that business suffers every day but why do we put up with it every weekend as well?

And it seems the problem is not limited to the capital or England, generally. My local council (Wandsworth) insists on sending out refuse collection trucks which make the morning rush congestion problems ten times worse. Just wants to get in on the act, I guess.

Is it just me or is everything really crap? Come on England!

Three things are dead giveaways of an older person.

1. Their A-level results are mostly OK – but certainly not amazing and brilliant and fantastic and A-starred
2. Their written output is pretty good
3. They know where the apostrophes go.

These past two weeks has seen the usual favourite media topic resurface: “Exam results are getting easier”. If you’re a teacher or an exams board, then “Get lost, everybody. You just don’t geddit.”

If you’re an employer, always-improving A-levels and then GCSE results generate disbelief about how, while the percentage of exam passes is amazing, the ability for school leavers to understand percentages is, basically, appalling. As is their written abilities. And their general knowledge. And generally more or less everything while we’re at it, actually.

It’s become an annual, empty moan that exams are just being ‘dumbed down’. Today’s Daily Mail shouts “Children’s grasp of the 3Rs at its worst in a decade.” This from a newspaper with a reading age of about seven.

Exams may be the obvious subject for the inevitable dumbing-down swipe. But it seems we can easily justify all this simply by looking around us: everything else is being dumbed down too, innit? Or as the clever airport paperback title phrased it: “Is everything sh*t or is it just me?”

So, the usual co-offenders in the dumbing-down process; who are they?

Let’s start with newspapers – they’re just celebrities, gossip and nakedness, aren’t they. Anyway, who reads newspapers when all we need is online. Next: books – just chick lit, bonkbusters and Katie Price ghostwriter stuff. Music – hey we’re world leaders in pop but CDs…just compilations, Summerdance Top 100 Megamix (various artists) and MTV videos…! Then there’s theatre – just endless West End musicals for tourists. And lastly – how long have you got? – TV: reality shows, soaps, gardening, cookery, football, Big Brother, Deal or No Deal, Ready Steady Cook …Oh yeah, and movies…just dumb and dumberer.

So is it just me or is everything really crap? Socially, culturally and educationally, are we all really washed up and dumbed down?

Sure, as off-peak rail travellers, of course, we can’t get our heads round the complexities of a train operating company’s fare structures. But I doubt whether a school gym-load of A-starred exam results would help you understand that. Train companies specialise in making the complex complexerer.

Call me dumb-headed, then, but I don’t think ‘dumbing-down’ is getting a fair hearing. In our industry, we’re very fond of the phrase “We’re in the communications business”. When something may get misunderstood or when information may be poorly disseminated, internally, or if a client’s work may get wrongly interpreted we deploy the phrase accordingly: ‘Pshaw…we’re supposed to be in the communications business, aren’t we?’ The point being that someone didn’t do a good job in making themselves understood.

Now I would simply make the following observations. We are a diverse society. We have never been faced with (‘bombarded with’ is the usual cliché) so many and so varied information sources. Daily. Whether that’s on the telly, on the radio or online. Or on what food to eat, on how we should exercise, on what supermarkets’ shelves hold for us, or on what the food-labelling information on packaged products on supermarket shelves are telling us, or on restaurant menus, or on freely-available online exam tips and suggestions if you’re a student. On and on – it seems relentless – we’re being forced to find out more and make more and more choices.

As a result, we all crave simplicity. Indeed, anyone who can make the complex simple around here is considered to be A-starred. Personally, I’d give anyone an A-starred certificate if they could explain why triangular sandwiches taste better than square ones. Or why if the fridge has a little light in it, why not the freezer?

So…deserved drum roll for our business, please: dumbing-down helps consumers make choices. Oh yes…informed choices, too. Because what we do doesn’t assume the consumer is simple; what we do is make the choosing of specific products and services simple. Tell me those cutesy little Fiat 500 ads don’t do this. Inspiring stuff.

How do we do that, then? Well, we’re in the communications business, aren’t we?

PS: If you’re still reading this, check the punctuation and guess my age: the teacher’s pupils’ families’ friends were chuffed with the school’s accomplishments. (Answers on a postcard and only two digits allowed.)

Alternatively, tell me I’m wrong. A lite lunch for two – that’s someone else and me – for an interesting and simple-to-understand response.

If you believe the figures, seven million of us are paying up to £480 a pop on packaged banking accounts that we don’t want and rarely use.

Worse…banks are ‘pressurising’ customers to open these inappropriate accounts. We’re being sold ‘packaged accounts’ when all we simply want is a common or garden current account.

What follows next might seem at first sight as scablike as a striking coalminer signing up to become a South Yorkshire police riot squad member. But think again if you think I’m breaking ranks with the great British public. Here’s why…

With the likely exception of the Chelsea-supporting, Samsung-shirted lady who took her three sons for a day out to mourn the death of Raoul Moat a couple of weeks back, nobody but nobody can still be ignorant about the role of the world’s banks in the global economic meltdown and the near total collapse of our financial and banking systems.

Or of the cost to each and every one of us this mismanaged profligacy which is now being visited upon us in the form of vengeful taxes, reduced council services, swingeing public sector job cuts and the end of free nursery milk to young kids. And that Gordon Brown was personally, 100% responsible for all this mess, as Vince Cable is now saying.

So with all the non-stop anti-banking ranting that’s been going on since Northern Rock collapsed in 2007 and Lehman Brothers in 2008, with all the criticism of banks not lending to businesses and in a week when all the major British banks have revealed stonking profits and the intention to keep paying big bonuses to their staff, is there absolutely anyone left on the entire planet that doesn’t loathe and detest the banks? As well, by the way, as really really loving them because they’re back in profit so our world will continue?

Now given this slight PR disadvantage and the constant deluge of negative news that banks may not be our best friends with our best interests at heart, why is it that anyone needs to feel they are being ‘pressurised’ into signing up for accounts they don’t want? How can anyone still feel they don’t have a right to question, however demurely, a bank’s salesperson’s intentions as to what they believe is best for us?

So why is it that we’re all so timid? So receptive of bank sales staff’s advances – either in person or when we phone up? We can’t all be zombies. Can it be all that direct mail we’ve been receiving? All those leaflets and TV advertising and other promotional materials telling us that banks are great…? Should we, the relationship marketing agencies of Britain, be held responsible for the duping of millions of the nation’s bank customers?

Which? magazine doesn’t pull its punches. It reports that ‘the way banks market these accounts is misleading and staff in branches must stop selling financial products to anyone whether it is appropriate or not.’ Can you imagine that? Staff are a critical sales channel for banks’ cross-selling success. Take them out of the equation and you seriously limit the banks’ abilities to get more product to more customers. Surely the banks won’t have a problem agreeing to that.

What I find most curious in all of this, however, is what appears to be complete customer gullibility. I thought we were all ‘savvy customers’ now. All informed, networked and socially connected and price aggregator-site experts. All forearmed and forewarned and in control with ‘Martin’s Money Tips’ tips.

We tell this to all our clients… “Oh yes, customers are so-o-o-o savvy these days…they’ll spot absolutely anything that’s not good for them a mile off…oh yes! We have to be everywhere where they are, engaging in conversations and definitely no selling messages.” Oh yeah?

Is it the banks’ fault that customers can be cajoled to attend one hour ‘interviews to discuss their banking arrangements’ and then be made to sign-up to packaged accounts that they don’t need? Or, in one instance, the fact that one customer – a young unemployed man with a monthly allowance of £70 from his parents – was persuaded to commit to a packaged banking account costing £7.95 a month. No…what I find amazing is that customers – savvy customers, remember – can allow this to happen to them when they know banks may have other motives. Like profit.

So how long before I make it seven million and one customers? As a simple current account customer I’m waiting for the knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

This book has been doing the rounds. Published mid-2008, it’s become the book for public service and care organisations to read and quote from – and act upon, no doubt – liberally. It’s was mentioned at COI, last year, as required reading. I don’t normally do ’serious’, but I do like a good read. And I thought I’d post a review, here.

I thought about this book while drinking Pernod in Paris. Just sitting and watching the Seine and the world flowing by, if you’re a francophile, makes you feel good enough to take a whole duty free bottle of the stuff home with you. Which if you’ve ever tried it, you’ll know is a big mistake. Pernod tastes good in Paris, and elsewhere in France, because we Brits like not so much the actual drink as the context in which we consume it. But at home…

Context is the main theme of Thaler and Sunstein’s `Nudge‘. The authors believe that by organising the context of a situation or environment where choices have to be made that those choices can be influenced in positive (or negative) ways.

There are some lovely opening touches in this book. Such as the default setting on phones which leads most people to believe this is the `best one’, the one which the manufacturer `recommends’, so they leave the settings be.

In the same way, a default option which automatically enrolls workers into an employee healthcare scheme or pension fund, rather than through coercion, also works well. It demonstrates the innate inertia that human beings have at heart. And why we – as an agency or any other organisation – always struggle when it comes to doing our job: changing human behaviour.

Briefly summarising, if you don’t know the book, the authors, argue that big changes can come from small `nudges’. Such as those above. And that these changes can be for better (or for worse, they stress) depending on the motivations of the person responsible for any communication. Be those communications to parents with young children, doctors advising their patients, employers informing their employees about health insurance or pensions, and financial institutions offering consumers mortgages or loans. And more.

Because we’re mostly all fallible humans who need help and advice, Thaler and Sunstein label anyone responsible for devising communications that advise or inform others to act as `choice architects’ (I love that) and that, against the normal rule of everything that we argue, `more is more’. By which the authors mean choice should not be restricted to achieve a positive outcome: that should be the preserve of design architecture working effectively.

They have a lovely term for allowing inclusiveness of choice rather than a mediated, shortlist of possibilities to channel people in particular directions: libertarian paternalism. This, the authors argue, embodies the dual principles of freedom to choose as the guiding ideology which should be made available to everybody; and the notion that no encroachment or leaning on individuals in any way must intrude at any point. In this way coercion or `requirements’ and `bans’ are off limits while incentives and nudges are rooted in free choices. You can see why organisations such as COI would love this book.

So libertarian paternalism encourages freedoms and more choices, the authors say, but delivered through a self-conscious design architecture that nudges individuals to act in their own best interests by changing their behaviour in a predictable way.

This is a great read, but it’s a flawed argument. It’s also a book in two halves. The first `half’ of the book sets up great situations, relates them to our experiences, looks at how experiments by psychologists and behaviouralists have tested human behaviour in certain situations and then draws conclusions about human activity and how it can be modified and improved upon by choices, nudges, feedback and incentives. The anecdotal and chummy writing style and the wide range of human activities it covers makes it entirely absorbing and the conclusions are generally thought provoking. Especially if you work in our business where we are continuously looking to understand and explain human behaviour. And to change it.

Where the book didn’t work for me was in its assumptions. Firstly, choice architecture is set up as the basic method by which better decisions from having to choose from a greater number of (supposedly libertarian) options can be made. Unfortunately, framing these choices – in linguistic, sequential and especially contextual terms – can be highly interventionist and hugely influential. Anyone who’s ever devised a questionnaire knows how important language, tone and word choice can be in driving different outcomes. Thaler and Sunstein never allow that choice architecture may be selective or censorious; rather that it will always be neutrally benign.

And then there’s the book’s second half. This is largely devoted to dealing with how American institutions deal with a very wide range of personal, social and economic issues. Each topic is described in slightly formulaic detail by setting up the issue and then providing a number of well documented but very localised and lengthy examples to show how libertarian paternalism can provide the nudges which help Americans improve such things as their financial choices, healthcare, education and welfare entitlements, pensions contributions and more.

Yet for all its lengthy and localised but still positive detail in the latter part of the book, the authors have done a great job in looking at how major institutions need to keep their sights firmly set on what is best for the individual rather than what’s best for the state. The authors acknowledge, gladly, that technological advances and access to global information precludes simple state-organised edicts from limiting an individual’s precious right to choose. And that ultimately it is that `gentle nudge’ which will help inform and improve the fallible human’s ultimate best choice.

Maybe. Now where’s that bottle of Pernod…?

Foreign Office diplomats are to be retrained as salesmen. With immediate effect. Or if they can’t do the job, business leaders are to be appointed as ambassadors in their place.

David Cameron has said that’s it, end of, full-stop. No more Foreign and Colonial Office johnnies swanning around all over the place on exes. No more pool parties. The black ties, the white panama hats…they all have to go. Along with the unlimited supplies of Fererro Rocher.

From now on Britain means business, says our PM. As a nation, we sell more to Ireland than we do to Brazil, Russia, India and China combined. That has to change. Carry on thinking that Britannia might rule the waves if you must, but austerity rules the economy. We have to pay our way in the world. Being abroad means being a salesman for UK plc. Promoting Britain’s best. Unless you don’t want promotion, that is.

And you thought our second unelected leader of the Noughties was just posh!

So what’s a diplomat to do? How do you change the mindset of Uber Brit overseas and start to get down and dirty and sell UK plc abroad when most of your life has been spent carefully choosing charmingly inoffensive words and phrases over lunch and cocktail parties while consuming the finest of whatever it is that New York, Sydney, Paris or Rome has to offer, generally? Suddenly our ambassadors are faced with having to learn a whole other language: PowerPoint.

I’m guessing this may be somewhat, er…foreign to the Foreign Office?

Now, forgive the palpable immodesty, but we agency folk know a little about business and presentations and selling. And boy oh boy do we know about PowerPoint. Oh yes. You want charts and diagrams? You want flash animations and bullet points like you wouldn’t believe? Well, we are your men. And women.

So let me reassure any of those FCO ppt newbies out there to stop worrying. Help is at hand. And it’s available right now in not so foreign Fulham, West London.

In the spirit of helping our great nation become Great Britain once again, instead of being the USA’s and India’s ‘junior partner’, we’re happy to knock up a scintillating creds for our lads who may be located anywhere from Hyderabad to Hong Kong as soon as they’ve got their contact’s agreement for a short, informal creds on why working and investing in and buying UK plc’s products and services is absolutely vital for the success of their own country’s future.

And in the best tradition of dishing out free samples, please let me give all those diplomats-cum-business-professionals out there just two quick tips to bear in mind if they insist on making their ppt creds look absolutely irresistible. Here we go:

Tip 1: Unless you can’t absolutely and completely avoid it, don’t go anywhere near PowerPoint when you visit your foreign royals, heads of state, captains of industry, rich developing-world dictators and billionaire, Russian, yacht-owning classes looking to invest in UK plc. Or anyone else, come to that.

Most folks’ brains freeze faster than a British staycationer on a Blackpool beach in summer when they realise ‘the dreaded PowerPoint presentation’ is coming their way. They only sit there and feign interest because they are too embarrassed or too polite to say that they’d rather you just tried to have an intelligent, two-way conversation with them rather than ask them to read a 76-slide presentation full of wall-to-wall text, bullet points, charts and animations.

“You want me to buy Breeteesh jet fighters? Tanks? Why you not bring some round for me to play with?” Good old experiential marketing. Works every time.

Tip 2: Carry on doing what you’ve always been doing.

Keep going with the carefully-chosen charming words and phrases over get-to-know-each-other lunches and parties. Most people seem to like that. Indeed, our CEO is expert at it. In fact, if there is a vacancy for a business leader to replace an underperforming ambassador selling UK plc…I might just know someone who’s perfect for the job.

Well…it’s finally gone and fulfilled its owner’s promise. From last Friday, if you want to look at The Times online, you have to pay. No more footie reports or business updates or a quick menu idea for tonight’s dinner for free. Congratulations Family Murdoch! Let’s see if other titles follow suit.

Free to fee isn’t new: the FT and its sister publication, The Economist, have been at it for some three or four years, now. Ditto the Wall Street Journal. But they’re so-called specialists. And revenues from their digital subscribers are increasing healthily.

But for ordinary newspapers, this is all advertising’s fault. Our fault, actually.

The decline in print advertising — particularly classified ads — started the slide. But online ad revenues have also declined, from a peak of 20% year-on-year growth in the mid-noughties. Now the story is of online banners and classified giving way to search.

So, here’s the thing. We in marketing actually share the same sentiments as those which drive newspapers to erect online paywalls. They, the newspapers, say they are giving away their creative talent and product for free. To people who are used to getting it for free. And they simply cannot afford to do that any longer if they wish to be more than an industry sector in ‘managed decline’. Despite the fact that polls here and in the US maintain that up to 80% of readers of free stuff now would up sticks and abandon their providers if they started charging for it. Just as they said they would do, by the way, if broadcasters charged for TV.

That’s what they newspaper readers say, anyway. However few there are actually left of them in the world.

This boils down to the concept of ‘what is free’ or what does free mean? For most people, free means fab. IWOOT! And if it’s free then IWOOT right now! But free can also mean something has no perceived value. This is certainly the case with something as ephemeral and available as ‘news’.

Sky Sports isn’t free. OK there’s no real competitor if you want to watch Premiership footie. But other multi-channel stuff like Pay- TV, specialist newsletters, research papers and journals come with a price tag , too. And they’re booming. Even when there are free alternatives available. So I guess it all comes down to that thing called content.

We in marketing — who love our content with a passion — are way behind the newspapers. We love the idea of free when we’re browsing and searching and researching and sharing to our heart’s delight. But we give all our creative IP away for free, complainingly but silently, when it comes to the crunch. Indeed, when we pitch, we are often contractually bound to make no charge for it. And we actually agree, in writing, to such iniquities.

Yet we never ever think our free creative content has no value.

No doubt there’s an article in The Times analysing and justifying all this in some detail. But I can’t link to it as I don’t want to pay for it. I hope others won’t, either. But here’s one from the Telegraph.

Please send your cheques in support of this article and in appreciation of its content to the address on the website.

Working late, even weekends, can be the curse of our industry. But we make it up with fun times elsewhere. The occasional small drink, etc., etc. Anyone who doesn’t understand this really shouldn’t be in our business.

Presenteesim, that’s just hanging around in the hope of appearing to be ‘working late’. Absenteeism, well that’s just duvet days and snow days. Same with hangovers.

We’re not talking alcoholism, here, but there’s an interesting story in the news today about our views on being hungover.

And this is something we know quite a bit about ourselves. Especially as today is quite a big one for us after last night’s IPM (nee ISP) Awards at the London Hilton.

Yep, we struck Gold (twice) and Silver last night. And two Bronzes, too. And today we are remembering the five-medal Olympian experience with some discomfort. With some hangovers, in fact.

So while we think we have a justifiable reason to go out, booze and then boogie til 4am on a Thursday morning and then come into work craving sympathy and soothing words for such selfless heroism, every occasional now and then, it’s comforting to know that almost one in ten people in Britain say they go to work with a hangover at least twice a week. That’s almost half a million people at work with hangovers every day!!! Were they all out winning awards, too?

And one in five of those admits — they actually know this, they are remarkably ”drink aware”, in fact — that all this boozing works to their disadvantage and has an adverse effect on their work, according to research from Drinkaware. And here’s the frothy truth about the dregs at the bottom of the glass: the World Cup = more drinking (surprise) = plummeting productivity and ‘hangovers at work are likely to increase’.

I’m beginning to understand what economists mean by a double-dip recession. Perhaps putting and end to awards evenings might be a good thing for our industry and our output. In the meantime, I’m stocking up for the World Cup before that may get banned, too. Cheers.

Hmmm…I see there’s now to be a Radio Amnesty. Trade in your old analogue radio and get up to 20% discount off your new digital radio purchase.

Nice idea, but want to know where it first appeared…? Here. On this very blog exactly one year ago. Check it out: Scrap Age (20 May 2009). Says it all.

So now I want to be the first to propose we go one step further. That we, true to our values of being an independent agency, offer something unique to our would-be clients: scrap your current analogue marketing and we’ll allow you a trade-in value against your new digital campaign with us. Even if it’s video…digital video, that is.

Good idea? ‘Course it is! TV may have created a shiny new image for Nick Clegg but it was online what done it. More than 40% of us were influenced by online messaging, videos and exchanges ‘to a fair or great degree’. And the bulk of those influenced were young. Quite a claim but not really a surprise, is it?

So forget your cars, your radios and even your TVs and boilers. Nothing wrong with a scrappage trade-in but it’s so-o-o-o last year. But discounted deals for your new marketing campaign…hey, that could be a whole other story.

The explosion of online video needs no introduction from me. YouTube’s mix of amateur clips and professional content to Demand Media ’s how-to films, has switched advertisers’ TV budgets to the Internet.

As everyone knows, advertisers have been moving away from 30-second ads to “original branded entertainment”: a mash of content and advertising that brings programmers and advertisers closer since the origins of radio soap operas.

But offers like ours don’t turn up every day. I hope I don’t have to wait until 20 May 2011 to see someone taking this up! I’m just an email reply away…Advertising Amnesty.

Old-fashioned dm evangelists used to rail at old-fashioned ‘above the line’ agencies. Just telly addicts — and maybe press, we said — who put brand and image before everything and couldn’t even spell repsponce.

And as new media has grown and the sheer numbers of social media activists has exploded, the cries of ‘we’re all online now’ and ‘telly is so-o-o-o last millennium’ have drowned out any naive hopes that TV would ever again become the dominant mass medium it once was.

So consider the 9.4 million of us who tuned in to the first TV leaders’ debate just over two weeks ago: was it just a complete coincidence? Was it simply the novelty factor? And when the Lib Dems started jumping for probable premature joy about their ten point upswing following the debates, is it possible to say that that response was down to the telly? I think it is. So have we all been guilty of ‘groupthink’?

We all thought this was going to be a new media election. Just like they had in the US. Email and blogging and social media and Twitter was going to change everything this time. Barack Obama had shown us the way.

But it hasn’t happened like that. TV still has incredible reach: 9.4m Brits is almost 40% of prime-time viewing. Also doing what it was set up to do — reach a truly mass audience — has been the national press. Newspapers may be in terminal decline but audited figures show that more than 8 million people ‘read’ the Sun every day.

So while 9.4m of us remember the TV debates and over 8m of us each day — and that’s just Sun readers — scan the various political parties’ progress (or disasters in Gordon Brown’s case) what happened to the brave new world of online? The world in which we work for our clients on a daily basis, actually! The answer is not much.

Think about it this way: the TV debates each lasted 1.5 hours; a newspaper (even the Sun) commands its readers’ attentions for about 30-40 minutes each day (I’m not going to say anything about Sun ‘readers’) and probably twice that much at the weekend. How many seconds to read an email? How many nano-seconds a tweet? It’s not difficult to conclude where real so-called ’stickiness’ exists and why?

OK, OK…like us, you still want to justify new media. Here’s the get out: it’s for young people. Bless. It’s true that almost 50% of live TV debates’ viewers (certainly the first one) were watched by oldies over the age of 55. These are roughly the same sort of reader demographics of the Mail and the Telegraph. But, hello…these are also the people who actually tend to vote.

Think of an email, or a tweet, something on your wall, that affected or infected you to reconsider / change your mind / go shout about it. Unlikely, isn’t it. And why should you have such hazy memories? Because the likelihood that you saw anything worthwhile wasn’t ‘out there’.

So let the numbers do the talking: of the candidates who have used Twitter in over 100 highly marginal seats (according to ‘Get Elected’) only 45% of them had a Twitter account. Their average following attracted just over 600 followers. As at yesterday, 4th May, President Obama had some 3.9m followers, but he’s special. Like Mourinho. An ocean of difference.

One final figure: the average constituency has some 74,000 voters. It seems like all 0.8% of them will be making their Twitter-informed views well heard. Be afraid, huh…?

It’s telly that has delivered the message. Tomorrow will deliver the numbers. And if the Lib Dems don’t do well then we can revert to our previous thinking: telly really is just about image.

See you again in four months’ time for the replay?