Let your fingers do the walking

Well it turned out last week’s thoughts on the middle class subsidy we call our libraries, stirred up a wee bit of a hornet’s nest. The Guardianistas ended up in a right lather over my heretical thinking. The good news is that no library is needed to read these thoughts.

But it should be pointed out that to prove said point last weekend Cicero hung around his local library to see if being used and by whom. And Cicero’s point is proven-the library was not being used by working class types keen to improve their literacy and education levels. They were no doubt too busy playing with on their Playstations and X-Boxes.

And in defence of the marketing profession who were also slated by last week’s Guardianista, we should point out that marketers do not manipulate anyone to buy anything. We present you with and edit for you, choice. It is still your right to choose to buy or not. We make it easy for you to do so. And in doing so we create value for our brands and our businesses which means our people, our companies and ultimately the nation all benefits through the taxes we collect and pay.

So you see marketing is of immense social benefit to the country helping our businesses generate the wealth to pay for the libraries that fewer and fewer people are using.

And back to this week’s lesson........

Cicero does not just do marketing and as you might expect Cicero can be a bit of a Renaissance Man in a metro sexual kind of way. He also does films. And according to Cicero no sequel ever in the whole history of cinema has worked as well as the original with two notable exceptions. Godfather 2 was every bit as good as the original Godfather, although even Martin Scorsese was unable to stretch the quality across three films.

And the other film? Toy Story which did manage to make three films of increasing quality though since this is a cartoon it is a moot point whether this is a film in the conventional sense of the word.

This principle that no film is a good as its original except in the aforementioned examples Cicero calls the Godfather Theorem.

Now if anyone can name another film which has managed to maintain its artistic integrity and celluloid quality across more than outing, we would be interested to know.

Now this detour into the realms of Claudia Winkelman has been occasioned by the arrival of the latest ad from Yell. Yell used to be known as Yellow Pages in the days when people used to look up phone numbers in big thick books. Remember those days?

Now for those of you who have no idea what we are talking about, here is a brief précis of the marketing plot.

Many years ago there used to be a Yellow Pages ad featuring a kindly old man trailing from book shop to book shop (and do we remember those?) looking for a book called ‘Fly Fishing’ by J R Hartley. He searches in vain before returning home tired and empty handed to be greeted either by his sympathetic daughter or his gold digging young wife who mops his weary brow and hands him a copy of Yellow Pages. Eventually after letting his fingers do the walking and umpteen phone calls he finds a bookshop with a copy in stock. ‘That’s great’, he exclaims in excitement, ‘My name? Yes of course. J R Hartley’.

Cue logo and end frame. And the ad enters advertising folk lore to be parodied and imitated through the succeeding years.

Well now Yell has re-made the ad. Only this time J R Hartley is a DJ called Dave Lately looking for a dance track helped by Yell.com and his teenage daughter.
Does it work? Frankly no and so Cicero’s Godfather Theorem still holds true.
Now it is interesting to Marketing Grand Fromages like Cicero to see ads going down the same route as films with sequels and re-makes but you should never go back. This is true for advertising as in life. It will only disappoint.

J R Hartley was a lovely old man and you really felt great warmth for him as he experienced the joy of finding his magnum opus before he joined the Great Fisherman in the Sky. He had a Werthers-esque warmth and humanity about him. You wanted him to be your granddad.

Our DJ hero in the re-make, Dave Lately, lacks the humanity and authenticity of Mr Hartley. We do not have the same level of wanting him to succeed in his quest. It is interesting but not engaging. And great ads are always engaging and totally authentic.

And there is another flaw. Today we are swamped with search engines. Surely it would have been just as easy to Google the track or pay a visit to Amazon to find it. These days why would you bother trekking the High St to find something? This is a great big gaping hole in the plot. Surely in this post J R Hartley day and age one would use Google to find not Yell. We use Yell to choose when we don’t exactly what we want like when we want to choose an electrician or a hotel or a plumber.

So if you are like Dave Lately and let your fingers do the walking, be careful. You might just find yourself up a dead end.

Now it might only be me.......but what is happening to us and our society, big or otherwise?

The other day I was told a story of a Friend who asked a Railway Porter to help a blind man. ‘What do you want me to do?’, asked the Railway Porter. ‘Your f$*&£ing job’, replied my Friend, before being reported for abuse.

I also read recently the report from the Care Commission on how nurses in hospital are abandoning and ignoring vulnerable old people by doing unthinking things like that putting food and drink and call buttons out of reach. One patient even asked the nurse to call her daughter to be told “this is not my job".

No wonder such reports caused one of the Two Ceasars' little helpers to say that ‘care standards still needed to improve.’ You reckon. With insight like that it is no wonder that you get elected to parliament.

Of course such attitudes as this and like the behaviour witnessed by my Friend at the railway station will be blamed on the Two Caesar’s refusal to spend more money. Naturally it will all be the fault of the Government. Heaven forbid that people should take some responsibility for themselves.

Now this is the bit that I don’t get. This is not about money. Or lack of staff. Or government cutbacks. No matter what some people might think. This is about caring for our fellow man. I am not the most caring or empathetic of people, yes I do have weaknesses, but even I know to go to offer help someone who is less capable and able than me, though in my case this means that I have to help just about everyone.

Seriously what has happened to common sense? What has happened to common decency? What has happened to giving a bit of ourselves to help others? To treating others as we would like to be treated?

It might only be me but nursing is supposed to be a caring profession. It is supposed to be about helping and supporting and caring. Or have I got that wrong? No nurse should ever say ‘that is not my job’, unless of course she is being asked to perform open heart surgery. No nurse should ever be looking at her watch and say I don’t have time for you. And no nurse should ever be as thoughtless and so lacking in care to leave vulnerable people thirsty, hungry and abandoned just because they never gave them a moment’s thought. Nurses like this should be run out of the profession before it sinks to the level of railway staff.

And as for the Railway Porter, we expect nothing less from these people. Help a passenger, me, don’t be silly.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.