I’ve been thinking about “cut through” a lot this week.
For those not in the know, “cut through” is an advertising term.
It means that in a world of noise, colour, advertising, bill boards, internet, magazines of every shape and size, text messaging and outbound calling, the human brain gets cluttered and full. Therefore if you’ve got a message you want to get across, you have to “cut through” the noise.
You have to get your creative execution to rent a space in the brain. The rental period may not last long but if effective will cut through all the noise and “lodge” in the psyche.
Something I’ve been agonising over, in the context of changing our name to Aviva – what a surprise!
Having spent a few hours the other Thursday thinking about “cut through”, I happened to bump into Andy Homer on Thursday night in darkest Maidstone. (You know, the Andy Homer who is an ex CU Guru, ex AXA Guru and now a Towergate Guru.)
He was covered in charm as usual (yes, charm I said). The cheeky smile on his face, his ready wit in his palm, his surrounding team hanging off his every word and twinkle.
And what was the first thing he said to me? (By the way, I was resplendent in a dinner jacket, black tie – when I say resplendent, actually I was looking a bit pale, white just isn’t my colour and Andy had just been on a glamorous holiday somewhere (using his Guru rewards) so was tanned and relaxed).
Anyway, the first words he said to me were (no it wasn’t about commission, small brokers, consolidation, rating), it was “Blog, you have a blog” (there were then a few expletives about blogs and are they worthwhile, but this is a family blog so I couldn’t possibly repeat the words here).
And then, all that Thursday night, that is what he kept repeating, “you’ve got a blog, I must have a blog (expletive) who else has got a blog?”
Eventually, he told me.
He was very, very, very aware of our advertising/communication (you would hope so as a Guru).
He was obviously reading it (despite his protestations).
His team all knew about it.
He obviously secretly admired the communication but just couldn’t bring himself to say so.
And he wished he’d thought about it.
I subsequently wondered whether to ask him to write a guest little ‘bloggette’ – who knows.
Later that evening, to show how seriously he had taken the name change, he changed the quiz that was being run that evening (yes, I should have explained that there was a quiz going on, we were in teams and the team that I was in obviously was “Norwich Union”).
So Andy went over to the “technical” people with such authority and changed the Norwich Union name to Aviva.
Now that’s what I call “cut through”.
So you see, as hard as the world is today, despite all that’s on Andy’s mind – and I bet he’s got lots on his mind, we managed to rent a small space in Andy’s brain around my blog, the name change, Norwich Union and Aviva.
Now Andy’s not “A – typical” (you can say that again) but “cut through” has to start somewhere and it has!
John.
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