How To Become The Largest Agency In The World

A few days ago, a fine fellow named Matt Bergman was kind enough to say some very nice things about me on LinkedIn.

Matt did a juxtaposition of excerpts from two different pieces about "branding." One was from WPP (the largest agency holding company on the planet) and one was from me.

Being the nice guy that he is, Matt said that both pieces came from completely different planets but each had something to offer.

Being the asshole that I am, I think the WPP piece is utter garbage. It is absolutely one hundred percent undiluted horseshit. Some sentences seem to be just random clichés strung together willy-nilly by imbeciles.

Now, to be fair, the excerpts are just that, excerpts. You can take pretty much anything and cut it apart and make it look silly. But this thing wasn't edited for that purpose. It was edited for the opposite purpose by someone looking for value.

In my opinion, it's a perfect example of the unspeakable jargon and hideous double-talk that the advertising industry has been force-feeding naive and impressionable clients. It's a paragon of the dreadful gibberish that makes agency brand babble so often a laughingstock among sensible people.

But I'll let you be the judge. Here's the excerpt in question from the WPP piece. You can find the whole piece at WPP's eReading Room:

"People expect their brand experiences to be relevant, customized and value-adding within the context of the touchpoint where they take place. They also expect each touchpoint to be inherently flexible, to play the role that they want at a given time... How can brands balance this with the need to stay coherent – and differentiate themselves from the other brands scrambling to offer every experience at every touchpoint?

...It is the emotional connection that brands are able to create consistently with their chosen audiences that gives them their power : an influence over both immediate, instinctive decision-making and more conscious rationalization of choices. When marketers talk about brand consistency, it is the components of their brand that produce these emotional responses that they need to focus on. When understood and managed in the right way, emotion can run like a consistent thread through the different experiences that a brand weaves for different touchpoints. Consistent emotions deliver consistent brand experiences...

Marketers must match the emotive needs of their target audiences with the emotive meaning that their brand represents...they can then plan to deliver relevant touchpoint experiences in a way that connects with this inherent emotive meaning."

If you haven't killed yourself by now, congratulations. You are a strong and formidable person.