by: Karl Long
About a year ago Lord Maurice Saatchi, co-founder of the mega advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi gave a speech at Cannes on the “death of modern advertising”. He followed this speech up with an article on the Financial Times of the same title.
Now on the point that modern advertising as we know it is if not dead, certainly in intensive care, i’m in total agreement with Lord Saatchi, where we differ is on what to do about it. To mine, and many others amazement Lord Saatchi’s solution was to outline a brand strategy to own “one word”, something he called “one word equity”. Here’s a segment from the FT article:
Each brand can only own one word. Each word can only be owned by one brand. Take great care before you pick your word. It is going to be the god of your brand.
To be quite honest this seems like a rehash of 90’s brand strategy right out of Ries and Trout “Positioning, Battle For The Mind”.
I personally think this is a strategic move by Saatchi to try and stay relevant by trying to redefine the problem with advertising, so you can still use advertising. Sort of advertising is dead, except for when your trying to gain one word equity, because believe me you need a lot of tv ads to own one word. I really think he is playing on “big brands” fears of “if advertising is dead WTF do I do next” and Saatchi’s “one word equity” has one big advantage, it’s incredibly simple to understand and will probably seem like a life preserver to a lot of top marketing folks at big brands.
Advertising isn’t dying because companies aren’t owning the right words, advertising is dead because companies have become transparent and porous. Consumers are no longer limited to discovering a companies products through company controlled channels and media, their finding out about products through other people, through wikis, blogs, podcasts, youtube, myspace, facebook, yelp, flickr, email, im, twitter, tumbler, google, delicious, pounce etc.
Anyway, Lord Saatchi is pretty committed to this idea, and in advertising agency tradition has put a big flash site together at onewordequity.com so you can go and immerse yourself in what they think, funny, there is no where to leave comments.
See what other bloggers think of this:
one funny side note do a search on google for “saatchi speech” and this is the number one result “Lord Saatchi’s ‘Death Of Advertising’ Speech Is ‘Utter Rubbish’
Original post: http://experiencecurve.com/archives/one-word-equity-saatchis-brand-strategy
I fully appreciate Lord Richard’s call for one-word equity as a coherent summation of the brand meaning into a simple trigger that allow for brand appreciation
I believe that every great brand becomes stronger by integrating its multi-variegated points of mental association into a central word that can diffuse its substantive meaning to the consumers
Deb - when I read the original article about a year ago, I almost popped a vein, and barely managed to restrain myself from writing the worst, damning and insulting rant ever to appear on this blog :)
Lord Saatchi's 'One Word' approach shows once again the total lack of respect and insight in not just Gen Y or NetGen - it's total disdain for intelligent independent humanity.
The idea that us silly little earthlings would not be able to comprehend anything beyond a single word attached to a brand is so repulsive...
I've always been a bit apprehensive of the trend to reduce a brand to a single archetype - also because I think humans are capable of understanding more diverse meanings. I think of Apple as 'cool', 'great design'. 'easy to use', 'expensive' and 'pretentious' all at the same time, and no campaign is ever going to change that. But at least archetypes have a depth to them that can address this in part.
One Word is just arrogant, vile, meaningless and apprehensible.
And now I'm going to stop as that vein is starting to pulsate dangerously again :)
great post karl - much more thoughtful than my rant..love the google bit!