No other large-scale buyer of goods or services acts in this wimpish way. In short, we use our clients' money to pay newspapers to destroy our clients' businesses.
What is the point in spending £10,000 to buy an advertisement in the Daily Mail that says "Buy Stuff" if that £10,000 pays for the three adjacent articles that tell readers "Don't Buy Stuff!"
In the good old days before CSR, when US fruit firms saw supply chains threatened by pinko governments in Latin America, they paid their chums in the CIA to start an insurrection and install a fruit-friendly regime in the Presidential Palace. We should do something similar.
Group M and the other large media buying houses should withhold advertising money from British media until they learn to cheer up. Correspondingly, we should lavish advertising money on feel-good media.
Imagine the calls. "Hello, Daily Telegraph, we were going to give you £100K to run ads for IBM, but you ran an article on repossessions yesterday. So, instead we're sponsoring Dogs Do The Funniest Things on ITV3." That would sort the bastards.
We should also withhold all money from Rupert Murdoch until he launches Sky Good News, a 24-hour channel featuring kittens doing amusing things with wool.
The economic problem - what Keynes calls the paradox of thrift - would be solved in a month.
Rory Sutherland, http://brandrepublic.com/campaign.
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