Opinion: On the Campaign couch ... with JB.(Jeremy Bullmore)(Interview)

Q: Dear Jeremy, Every month I read that certain TV ads have had viewer complaints upheld against them by Ofcom. In the light of the success that TBWA\London has had through having its fcuk work constantly pre-vetted by the ASA and with the recognised value that this PR could achieve, is an Ofcom investigation some mark of prestige that agencies could use to their advantage?

A: Thank you for this question. I'm planning to write a very long book, with pie charts and footnotes, on this very subject. It will be called either Mortgaging the Future or I'm the Vicar of Stiffkey ... Get Me out of Here!

For brands as for people, there's an easily achievable form of fame that demands a surprisingly small investment. Its name is notoriety. Max Clifford knows all about it and so do newspapers and the makers of reality television programmes. The Reverend Harold Davidson, former Vicar of Stiffkey in Norfolk, knew all about it 74 years ago.

Found guilty of consorting with dozens of fallen women, many of them under age, the Reverend was unfrocked and lost his living Resourcefully, he turned himself into a sideshow: sharing top billing on Hampstead Heath with a dead whale, reclining on a bed of nails wearing nothing but a loincloth and boldly venturing unarmed into a cage of lions.

His notoriety was extremely lucrative: as notoriety, for people as for brands, so frequently is. The snag, of course, is durability. Notorious people and notorious brands seldom enjoy the respect and affection of successive generations. The peaks of their popularity are achieved at the expense of future earnings.

It's possible, of course, that your clients would be perfectly happy to settle for such a strategy. Itinerant brand managers seldom think beyond the current fiscal year and instant notoriety may be welcome. If there's a subsequent price to be paid, it will be up to their successor to pay it. But before you commit your clients to a deliberate policy of provoking the ASA and Ofcom, do please make sure they fully understand the possible implications. As for the Reverend Harold Davidson, we can only surmise that he would have experienced an extremely short life cycle. One of the lions ate him first.

Q: We're a mid-sized agency having just gone through a large number of management changes. One of our flagship clients is threatening to review unless we drop our prices ...