I don’t know what proportion of people’s savings – and specifically of what they think of as their long-term savings – goes into pensions these days. But I strongly suspect that in the era of auto-enrolment and pensions freedoms, the proportion is high and growing.

This, I suspect similarly strongly, is one of the reasons for the astonishing and alarming lack of financial resilience shown by so many people during the current Covid-19 crisis.  If they’re under 55 and their savings are in pensions, they can’t get at them – and so many seem to have no Plan B.

In the very short term, temporary interventions have largely hidden the scale of this problem.  The government’s furlough scheme, along with low cost loans and repayment holidays on various forms of lending (including mortgages) have kept financial disaster at bay.  But the reality is that these schemes will unwind later this year;  unemployment will spike;  and millions of workers in the gig economy will find their earnings much reduced.  Especially for people who are heavily indebted, all this adds up to an alarming outlook.

And, as I say, the one pot of money that many do have – their DC pension pot (or pots) – isn’t accessible until they reach age 55.

As this phase of the crisis gathers momentum, I can see one good thing coming out of it.  I expect a growing realisation that our cliff-edge model of pensions and retirement fits less and less well with the way people actually lead their lives.    The fact is that as people get older and their financial commitments increase, disruptions to their income have a more and more serious effect – and the need for a fairly substantial savings lifejacket, to keep them afloat in the short to medium term, becomes greater and greater.

I’m not sure about the mixed metaphor of cliff-edges and lifejackets, but, ploughing on, I should say that of course many people do have just such a lifejacket available.  There are billions of pounds – actually I think over a trillion – in personal savings and investments which are not locked away behind an age-limit restriction.  But, that said, I’d be interested to know what proportion of this amount is held by people who are actually older than 55, and therefore unaffected by the pensions lockdown anyway.  It’s people in their 40s and earlier 50s who are at the sharp end of this issue, and obviously the fact that they’re at or around Peak Outgoings is, in itself, the reason why they’re unlikely to be putting a lot away in non-pension savings.

Although I’m no expert in this sort of problem, I can dimly see the outline of a solution.  I can imagine how pension pots could evolve into something like Lifetime Savings Accounts, where the money is accessible at any time but there’s still a tax advantage in leaving it till later life.  If already in place, that kind of mechanism could come to the rescue of a great many LOBBLI – Lots Of Borrowing But Low Income – households over the next few years.

But obviously such a mechanism isn’t yet in place.  And the first step towards creating it is recognising that the need for it exists.

I was responsible for a lot of rotten ads in my 35 years in agency creative departments (the first few as a copywriter, then most of them as a creative director).  Looking back at them all, I see a pyramid – all those bloody awful ones down at the bottom, and then narrowing steadily towards a very, very much smaller number of good ones up at the top.

Right at the top there’s just one – probably the only ad for which I can claim some responsibility which I think is good enough to stand comparison with anything else, produced by anyone else, over that long period.  There’s a cropped and slightly blurry photo of its type area here, from which you can’t see that it’s the first of 20 or so that we produced in a campaign for an obscure children’s savings scheme called Jump, based on the more-or-less-equally obscure Witan Investment Trust.

And before I say anything else I should say that I didn’t write it.  Jenny Bond did, combining biographical details from her own children’s lives (being born blonde, swimming galas) as well as mine (being a Goth, being dragged off to France).   And the campaign was originated by Chris Wardle and his art director James Ellis, who I think was the only person to really get it despite having no kids of his own at the time.

But I think I can fairly claim to have had quite a lot to do with it, from the idea of developing a children’s savings proposition for Witan, through to the positioning designed to resonate among middle-class parents with ungrateful children, through to the creative brief which aimed to bring to life all the insights we had into that kind of family relationship (most of it, of course, drawn from personal experience).

From which came first Candida writes… and then the other 20 or so executions in the campaign. (Many of the others being equally good, but not of course being equally first.  And, I have to say, none of the others having the first line “I didn’t ask to be named after a fungal infection,” which to my mind is the best first line of copy in any advertisement ever.)

Apart from that first line, why do I think it’s so good?  I’m not going to write a lit crit essay here.  If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.  But in a sentence, because in one small black-and-white picture and 71 words, it absolutely nails everything you need to know to understand how relationships work across half-a-million middle class families  spread across the country from Tunbridge Wells to Richmond on Thames to north Oxford to Wilmslow to Edinburgh New Town – and, what’s more, families and relationships of a kind that was then and still are now more or less unknown to, and unexplored by, other advertising.

OK, that was a longish sentence.  But here’s a shorter one:  the campaign always seemed to me to provide us with the key to a previously-undiscovered secret and magic garden, where we could always go to create more great campaigns for more clients targeting those same half-million affluent families with the same breathtaking freshness and precision.

Except here’s the regrettable part:  for some reason that I can’t explain, we never really did.  Never once.  Having found the key and unlocked the gate, we never came back.  The only time I sort of did was ten years or so later, in my one-man consultancy life, when I was responsible for the brand definition and development for the relaunch of what had been the National Counties Building Society, but which we re-invented as the Family Building Society.  This time it wasn’t just that I didn’t write the ads:  by then I didn’t even have an agency.  I worked with my friends at AML to bring the positioning to life, and although the “children” in the family relationships were at least ten years older than Candida and her crew, the genetic code was clearly similar.  And I had exactly the same feeling, that somehow here I was back in the secret garden again – and then, again, we left it and I haven’t been back since.

Either in reality or in perception (not sure which) most of the better-known creative talents in this business are known for mining a fairly narrow seam.  If we talk about a David Abbott ad, or a Bill Bernbach ad, or a Dave Trott ad, or whatever, we have a clear mental picture of the sort of ad we’re talking about.

Of course no-one has the faintest idea what a Lucian Camp ad might be like.  But if only I’d hung around that secret garden for longer, then with Candida’s help things might have turned out different.

I have literally lost count of the number of articles I’ve read recently in which financial advisers have been complimented – or, more likely, have been complimenting themselves – on their brilliant strategy for helping their clients weather highly-volatile investment markets.

This brilliant strategy is easily summarised:   do nothing.  Once the markets have plummeted and taken a 10, 20, even 30 per cent bite out of the clients’ portfolios, the smart adviser works hard to convince the clients – and indeed to convince him or herself – to take no action at all, just sit tight and wait for the markets to come back.  “You can’t time the markets,” they say.  And there’s another little saying which they like because it almost sounds quite clever, “It’s time in the markets, not timing the markets,” which most people don’t actually get because it just sounds like the same thing said twice.  And as the days of doing nothing pass by, the advisers congratulate themselves on doing a better and better job.

Now I’m not saying that they’re wrong about this.  In the long run, doing nothing may be the least bad option.  But if I’m not saying they’re wrong, I am saying several things of a distinctly dubious and lukewarm nature, such as:

1.  You see, for millions of ordinary people, there’s one of your biggest problems with investing right there.  All sorts of things can start going badly wrong – a meal you’re cooking, a movie you’re watching, a journey you’re making – but I can’t think of any others where no matter how horrendously wrong they’re going, the best and most expert advice available is just to strap yourself in, sit tight and hope it turns out all right in the long run.  It’s not how we like to handle such circumstances.  It feels powerless and pathetic.  
   
   
2. Also – and kind of on the other side of the same coin – there’s one of your biggest problems with expert financial advisers right there.  Leaving aside the obvious point that the financial adviser you really want is the one who gets you out of the market the day before it crashes 10, 20 or even 30 per cent, is it really true that there’s really nothing worth doing?   Even if, say, at this moment, you’re still invested in airlines, pub groups and cruise companies?  If that’s the case, what “do nothing” really means is “you and your adviser aren’t smart enough, or quick enough, to get out while it’s still worth it, so now you’ll have to stay put with the rest of the mugs and the sluggards.”  Probably true.  But not what you want to hear.
   
   
3. I know I keep making this point – it’s a consequence of my age -but it’s different in decumulation.    (That’s “different” in the sense of “worse.”)  If you’re drawing an income from your investments rather than adding to them, in falling markets you suffer from pound-coast averaging in reverse – pound-cost ravaging, some call it.  Sitting tight for years and waiting for markets to come back is a very unattractive option.
   
   
4. Finally – and sorry if this sounds a bit mean-spirited – “Do nothing” isn’t really the kind of professional advice that I expect to pay a lot of money for.  It may well be that it’s advice born of a lifetime’s learning and experience, and the fact that it’s only two words and doesn’t sound very inspiring is neither here nor there.  But it is only two words, and it doesn’t sound very inspiring, and I reckon it’s worth about £250 tops.

This last point doesn’t mean that advisers should generate complex programmes of activity which only make things worse, simply in order to justify a bigger fee.   

Perish the thought.  That sounds like the sort of thing that only a marketing consultant might do.

Impressively early in the coronavirus drama, even if I say so myself, I wrote a notably grumpy blog on the subject of “peace of mind.”  A huge proportion of financial advisers claim to offer it, I said, but in reality, remarkably few of their clients really enjoy it – especially at times when our world is becoming dramatically pear-shaped.   For most of us, I said, peace of mind is conspicuous by its absence.

Ever since, I’ve been hunting around the echo-chamber of stuff that will confirm and reinforce my views for evidence that I’m right about this, and some highly confirmatory consumer research has just come my way.

Blue Marble, the innovative and insightful research firm run by my old friend Emma Partridge, has set up its own programme, combining qual and quant, to look at post-coronavirus consumer behaviour in different parts of their lives.  The last round, just a few days ago, looked at financial behaviour.

Two questions – or rather, two answers – jumped out at me from the quant.  Among a nice big nationally-representative sample of 2000 adults, over half said they felt “more uncertain about their future” than before the outbreak (rising to over 60% among under-35s), and 39% said they were “more worried about money” (rising to over 50% among under-35s). 

These figures are high – certainly high enough to cast doubt over that “peace of mind” nonsense – but if anything I was surprised they weren’t higher.  Who are these 40% of under-35s who aren’t more uncertain about their future?

The clue to this, I think, is in the qual.  What this is telling us, in short, is that for the time being we’re too worried about the present to have the head-space to worry about the future as well.  I should say that there are some who are working from home, getting paid as usual and actually taking some pleasure from the enforced saving of a locked-down lifestyle. But the majority – whether students unable to find holiday jobs, pensioners with savings “in tatters,” furloughed workers, or self-employed people worried about whether their customers will pay their bills – have real anxieties in the here and now.    Combine that with the lack of any clear sense of where we’re going with all this, and whether (and when) something approaching normality may return, and it’s no big surprise that for some, the time to start worrying about tomorrow hasn’t quite arrived yet.

I think we all know that this will change, though, and when it does the role of financial services providers will be important.  At the moment, it doesn’t seem that it’s very important at all:  the second main theme I took out of the research is to do with another absence.  The fact is that so far in this crisis, the role and the actions of the entire financial services industry haven’t made much of an impression on Blue Marble’s respondents.  While just under half of the quant respondents say that supermarkets have responded to the crisis “very well”  (those loo roll shortages obviously fading from memory), only 9% say the same of banks and building societies.  In the qual, there are a few shoutouts for “good communications” – Nationwide, M&S and John Lewis picking up the odd positive mention – but on the whole it’s a case of the curious incident of the dog in the night time.[1]  Of the respondents with a financial adviser, for example, only one claimed to have received any communication (although I think in fact others must have received 10%-drop letters), and the one solitary strong positive across the whole study was a comment from a delighted motor insurance customer offered a partial refund to reflect reduced car usage.

There’s nothing terrible or scandalous here.  Very few respondents had anything seriously critical to say:  the most widespread grumble was to do with the perceived “hypocrisy” of lenders maintaining unjustifiably high rates while claiming to act in the national interest.  But equally, beyond that small handful of scattered positives, there’s nothing impressive or admirable either.  No institution, and no sector, seems to have seized the opportunity to capture positive attention by doing something – anything – to stand out and capture customers’ imagination.  Heaven knows plenty of financial institutions – actually almost all of them – claim a “focus on the customer,” or to be “truly customer-centric,” or to “put their customers first.”  But given a great big rather scary opportunity to prove the truth of claims like these, Blue Marble’s  research tells us that rather like that empty promise to give us “peace of mind,” fine words like these are mainly delivered from safely below the parapet.

[1] “But Holmes, the dog did nothing in the night-time!”  “That, Watson, was the curious incident.”

I mentioned that I’ve been involved recently in helping a client choose an agency, and so for the first time in a while I’ve been on the receiving end of a bunch of creative presentations.

Our brief asked for a big (or biggish) idea that could be executed across a number of different executions.  The ideas we saw took me back instantly to my long years as a creative director, and to the single comment I remember making most often in response to the thousands of ideas I was shown.

This was, almost always, “Sorry, but we need a Type 2 idea and this is a Type 1,” or, much more infrequently, “Sorry, but we need a Type 1 idea and this is a Type 2”.

From which you’ll gather that there are two types of campaign ideas.  You may be wondering what they are and what’s the difference between them, so I shall explain.

A Type 1 idea is a campaign idea that lets you say the same thing in lots of different executions.  The great Heineken campaign  Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach is a Type 1 idea.  So is Should’ve gone to Specsavers.

A Type 2 idea is a campaign that lets you say lots of different things in lots of different executions, but in a way which is recognisably part of the same campaign.  Tesco’s Every little helps is a Type 2 idea.  So are Alexsandr and Sergei the meerkats for Comparethemarket.com.  So, in a slightly different way, was what is still the greatest body of work ever produced for a  single client by a single agency, Doyle Dane’s 1960s US work for Volkswagen:  there wasn’t exactly an idea, but there was a ruthlessly consistent look and feel and tone of voice, and an extraordinary attitude which said that in 1960s America, the home of the giant chrome-trimmed V8 gas guzzler, VW would revel in being ugly, small, cheap and slow.  

The fact is that for all their fame and for all the awards they’ve won, there are very few Type 1 campaigns.  There’s a simple reason for that, which is that very few brands can afford them.  Only big brands in big categories can swallow the cost of making campaigns consisting of big, single-minded, simple brand messages famous.  Back in my early days in Big Advertising I worked on a few – but ever since, I’ve worked in a world of Type 2 ideas.

Almost every brand that uses marketing communications needs a Type 2 idea.   A Type 2 idea provides some consistency, recognisability and distinctiveness to a whole bunch of messages in a whole bunch of media.  For example, an asset manager might need some “hurry hurry” ads reminding people not to miss the ISA deadline, an ad in the trade press about winning an award, some thematic messages about how active management adds value, a mailpack inviting intermediaries to a seminar, a series of digital Market Outlook pieces from the fund managers, and so on and so on and so on.

But here’s the thing:  creative people would infinitely much rather come up with Type 1 ideas.  There are two main reasons for this.  First, on the whole, they believe that Type 1 ideas are “proper” advertising, especially if they appear on TV.  Considering how few of them there are, Type 1 ideas win an awful lot of awards.  And second, they’re much, much easier to do.  Coming up with the idea in the first place is hard, but once you’ve done that you can bash out a hundred scripts by tea-time.   Or, perhaps more to the point, before down-the-pub time.

Want to put this to the test?  Probably not, but just in case, here’s your idea:  someone can’t do something, they drink some Heineken and then they can do it.  A hundred ideas by tea-time?  Well, I suppose it depends a bit on what time it is now, but if it’s before 2.30 I’d say you’re in with a chance. 

(I should add that most of those hundred ideas won’t be any good.  Writing great Type 1 scripts is harder than it looks, precisely because the idea is so clear and obvious:  as a result, good scripts have to include some kind of twist or surprise to make the commercial worth watching.  If you know from the first frame exactly what’s going to happen, it’s not a good script.  But we’ll save this more advanced discussion for another time.)

Type 2 ideas work the other way round.  It may not be so hard to come up with the original big idea – quite a few, as in my VW example, are little more than a look and feel, a tone of voice and an attitude.  (Usually, also, a strapline, although VW didn’t bother and didn’t need one.)  But then you’re going to need to come up with further ideas – smaller ones maybe, but ideas all the same – for every single execution.  When you have an ad to do for VW about the reliability of the air-cooled engine, your look and feel, tone of voice and attitude don’t tell you to write How does the man who drives the snowplough get to the snowplough?  But if you do come up with that idea, you know you’ve written a VW ad.

We almost always need Type 2 ideas.  In my recent agency selection project, that’s certainly what the pitch brief specified (although, I should say, without these unfamiliar Type 1 and Type 2 labels).  But altogether, in the tissue meetings and the final presentations, the three agencies must have showed us over a dozen different concepts – and of those, all but a couple were Type 1.