The Telegraph's ‘Onion-style’ rebranding kicks off with Richard Dawkins article

The Telegraph’s rebranding as a post-ironic media-thingy has had a great beginning, say insiders.

The weekend saw the normally serious newspaper run a deeply incendiary article demanding reparations from Richard Dawkins for the crime of having had ancestors who traded slaves. Almost as bizarre was the focus on his clergyman ancestry.

When the Guardian covered the story, their readership went straight into enraged response mode, with thousands of dumbstruck comments.

But for the Telegraph, the pay-off was in the tens of thousands of unsuspecting Guardian readers – people who’d never normally darken the Telegraph’s online site – suddenly clicking their way to it out of sheer disbelief.

A leaked email explains all.

‘By delving into Onion territory, we keep everyone guessing. Satire or serious, truth or nonsense? Now we engage not only our own readership, but the readership of other newspapers too,’ explains a management email leaked to Fungal Copywriting Blog by an anonymous Telegraph insider.

The mail laid bare the logic: In a cunning move, the Telegraph's Dawkins article wasn’t open to comments. So visitors of a liberal persuasion were forced to track down other articles with comments sections to vent their spleen. So not only did Telegraph online registrations enjoy a monster spike, visitors were forcibly exposed to plenty of other articles – and advertisements – too.

Will the Telegraph run more Guardian click-bait? ‘Is Richard Dawkins a blood-soaked slave-trading Pope-molestor?’ was the response from a senior source.

The email leaked to Fungal Copywriting Blog was more of an issue. ‘Leaks? Intolerable, absolutely intolerable,’ replied another senior Telegraph director. ‘Had a leaky coffee mug the other day. Had to have my entire Pentium laptop replaced.’

The Barclay brothers, owners of the Telegraph, were not available for comment.

IngImage photo library free trial fail

This is how not to run a free trial promotion. Lesson courtesy of IngImage photo library.

So I got a ‘7 days’ free downloads’ email from IngImage the other day. Eight days ago, to be precise.

Was completely taken aback as I’ve never subscribed to or visited IngImage and although the email had no unsubscribe link and was obviously very promotional, it had somehow avoided Yahoo’s spam filter, which is normally highly effective.

But coincidentally I was in sudden need of some very particular images for a pro bono account (ie. family). So I think, what the heck, enter my PayPal details, make a note to cancel the account within seven days, and off I go.

Downloaded my allotted five images a day until I had everything I needed, then on the 7^th day after joining I try to cancel my membership. And discover there’s no way to cancel via the website. And, it being a Sunday, no-one’s answering the IngImage phone.

So, first thing on Monday (today), I phone them up and they say, aha, you can cancel today but because you’re into the 8^th day you’ll have to pay your first month’s subscription, £40 please kaching.

‘Were you answering phone calls yesterday?’ I ask. ‘No!’ she laughs, ‘it was Sunday!’

So I get bounced around the office until Marketing says OK, you don’t have to pay the £40, but if you’d gone to yadayada link on the yadayada page you could have cancelled. As I was online at the time, it took me half a second to establish that no, I couldn’t, and told him so and suggested that they insert a prominent cancellation link.

‘Hmm, there’s really no need for that,’ he says cheerily, ‘very few people cancel.’

Verdict? IngImage’s images generally aren’t in the same class as iStockPhoto, although they’re really cheap. But IngImage’s customer service is pitiful. So I got some free pics, wasted some time, and probably came out about even.

Although I’d still love to know whether that IngImage email evaded my spam filter by skill or by luck.

The great £8 note giveaway

I don’t know why the helicopters were late. But by the time they clattered into view, it was already past 2pm and Oxford Street’s lunchers were overdue back at their desks.

And the children that had been waiting – out of their brains with anticipation – were already in full meltdown, shrieking at their mothers in frustration. Sure, we’d all been told repeatedly that there’d be a helicopter over every high street, don’t make a special trip to London, but everyone naturally assumed that the Oxford Street drop would be the biggest and came in anyway. The family next to me had come in all the way from Clacton.

Anyway, so finally the helicopters arrived and the crowd roared into motion, trying to rush to where they thought the helicopters were heading. And obviously the office workers who’d gone off charged back into the thick of it. 

People went down like skittles, obviously.

Then the clouds of confetti erupted from the helicopters and the downdraft did its thing and suddenly it was like the last song of a Britney concert, a blizzard of confetti, except of course for the fact that these were £8 notes.

£8 notes, specially printed for the day and valid only for a week, designed to jumpstart the UK economy. As they fluttered around us I grabbed two out of the air, then got punched in the eye as someone grabbed one from in front of my face. Someone in a suit. No apology. As he lunged for another £8 note that was about to land in a child’s hand, I stuck my foot in front of him and he went down. The kid stood on him for a better reach.

As the helicopters flew away, the crowd noise became more audible, some yelling in excitement, some howling in pain, some screaming at each other over who had more right to a particular bit of paper.

Most were still picking up odd notes from the pavement, or chasing after notes that were turning in a sudden gust. That done, we looked around for a way to spend our newfound wealth. A large crush headed into HMV, sporting special ‘£10 for £8’ banners made specially for the day. I got in just as the crowd knocked over the first DVD stand… and like a domino effect, it just got worse.

After half an hour, the street was carnage, people walking about dazed like after some traumatic event. That was when I noticed the crowd around a tree. Someone was climbing it to get at the notes that had got trapped in the twigs at the end of a branch. Suddenly the branch broke and he landed with a horrible squelch. You can still see it on YouTube.

Some shops had had a great afternoon, some were simply raided. Tiffany’s had decided it wasn’t in their brand character to accept the quantitatively eased banknotes at all. They had to close for a week to repair the damage.

Everybody said it was a brilliant day.

It's D&AD fees time

“How much to enter D&AD this year?” I asked myself.

“Holy… cow” I answered.

So I’ve got a digital campaign I’m quite proud of. Here’s what it’ll cost me to be adequately recognised for my creative genius:

£395 to enter a digital advertising campaign.

Plus £215 for the campaign site alone.

Plus £215 for each individual execution.

Plus £215 for a copywriting craft award… for each piece… or £395 to enter the whole campaign.

Art direction? The same again.

Animation? Yeah, again.

So considering I’d enter 3 bits to make up the campaign, er… that’d be, um, £4,000 or so in entry fees? Plus the awards dinner for the client and myself, er, another £300 plus drinks?

Which is, altogether, more than the client paid for the whole campaign.

Times gone by, the creative director would solve the problem by simply replacing the most junior paid creatives with a placement team. Not an option when I’m the creative director. Of myself.

There was only one thing for it. I called a family meeting. Explained the situation. Let it sink in. Then turned to the little one.

“I’m going to have to let you go.” I said.

Later, as she was packing, she asked why there wasn’t a more humane option. Why D&AD couldn’t refund my entry fees if I won the awards I was applying for.

I told her that although it was too late to mount a campaign to get the rules changed, she was obviously the brains of the family. And then I went to have a difficult conversation with her brother.

You're amazing

I once spent some time working inhouse at a megabank in Canary Wharf.

Security down on the ground floor was pretty much like trying to board a plane (a notion that wasn’t contradicted by the view from my 25^th floor desk.) But the thing was, it was so much faff going out of the bank and back in again, most people just spent the entire day in the building.

There were cafeterias on every other floor, there was an internal retail bank, a laundromat drop-off and collect, and probably lots more that I missed. Which all meant that the staff really didn’t need to mix with the outside world unless they wanted some eccentric takeaway that the branch of Costa on their own floor didn’t sell, or needed to return their library books to the Idea Store (yeah, right).

So really, the staff could be forgiven for getting a little out of touch with the common man – heck, I did after just ten minutes sitting on my Aeron office chair (yes, everybody gets one, even the temps).

But after I'd caught the lift a few times, it all fell into place.

In the otherwise minimum-stimulation environment of the silky-smooth elevators there was always a neat little poster. “Charity drive raises £12,000 for Barnardos” it would say. Or “Recycling up 40%”. Or “Volunteers build new classrooms for Kenyan school”. And so on, with the posters changing day by day.

The inevitable outcome: confronted with incontrovertible daily evidence of all the good they’re doing, is it any wonder that bankers are a little puzzled at the lingering public resentment towards their profession?

The cogs started to whirr. Back in my real world home a few days’ later, I lost no time actioning my new learnings from the corporate world. Which is why my family (and friends) now get to see a rotating menu of self-affirming PR when they visit the loo:

“Black bin less than half full on bin day!”

And: “56 days without a single mis-inserted fork stopping dishwasher rotor from turning.” 

And: “Alistair’s taxes paid in full, says taxman”

Although sometimes I wonder if I’m not missing something important in all this.

Integrity is everything

So we’re in a dark Dalston venue with our flat whites and the commercials director gets into his stride:

“Love your concept and like I was saying at our meeting the other day I think I can give you something really special, I’ve had a good think about it and drawn up this storyboard based on your concept."

He shows us the storyboard. We look at the storyboard. The client turns to me. “Um, you go first,” he says.

“OK, well, I’d just say that I think it’s probably not necessary to add all these extra scenes, um, you’ve added the couple walking into the restaurant, getting shown to their table, looking at the menu, ordering their food, getting their food and eating their food when we just want to show what happens when they get their bill?”

There’s an awkward moment. “Well, OK,” the director concedes.

“We really wanted to get some idea of how you’d treat the script visually?” the client asks.

The director perks up again and pushes a button on his iPhone. “Well, yeah, if you look at this commercial here, I really think we should be doing something like this, I mean it’s all very well to do video for a TV commercial but I think it would be more effective to do a series of stills.”

We look at the reference commercial, which has, sure enough, been executed as a series of stills.

“Um. Do you think a series of stills is the best way to carry off the comic interplay and dialogue between the characters?”

“Well yes, that’s why I’ve shown you this reference commercial.”

“Mm. OK. But… it doesn’t have any dialogue… and it’s not really a comedy situation..?”

The client steps in. “Last week we were talking about how the visual style used in Scrubs helps to create the kind of humour we’re looking for.”

The director curls himself into a foetal position. “Uh… I’m not… uh… I’m not sure… I mean I… I don’t think I’m your man… if you just want to… to copy something.”

Free media for all - I think

So the client phoned up in triumph: “Can’t wait to tell all those media planner and media buyers and media owners! We’re slashing all our media budgets to sod-all. We’re going to use free media – social media – from now on. OK? I mean why put our TV spots on ITV and have them fast-forwarded when we can put them on youTube and have everyone watch them for free?”

“Well, that sounds great,” I said. “It could save a fortune.”

“Exactly!” the client replied.

“There’s just one thing,” I said. “How will we get people to watch your TV commercials on youTube?”

“Ah well, they won’t actually be our TV commercials,” said the client, “We’ll get the, whatdoyoucallit, the Twitterverse or whatever to make them for us. Crowdsourcing! That’s the thing!”

“Ah, I see,” I said, wondering how soon my own services would be disposed of. “And we’ll give the – ah, Twitterverse, a brief..?”

“Fantastic! They’ll be falling over themselves to come up with the next HootieTootie viral! And it won’t cost us a penny!”

“OK, but we’ll need to publicise the brief somehow, won’t we?”

“Of course! And that’s the whole beauty of it! You do that on Facebook! Put the brief on Facebook, drive people to Facebook with Twitter, put the resulting virals on youTube and talk them up through Twitter again! Oh, and I guess there’ll be a microsite too!”

“Um, OK, but… at the moment… there’s currently about 0.005% of your market actually following you on Twitter… so… how do we realistically kick all this off?”

“Hmph. Well. Um. That’s your job, isn’t it. What do you recommend?”

“Looks like you need a TV campaign on ITV. And a national poster campaign.”