Noisy Thinking: Is Fame a Strategy?

‘Fame’ is one of the most talked about and most referenced communications ideas in our industry. It makes daily appearances on briefs, full of passionate ambition but often with little guidance about how you achieve fame at all.

At Noisy Thinking, we aim to give knotty subjects like fame a good airing by inviting speakers who can give us a new perspective, as well as experts from our world who have advice and frameworks for understanding it better.

We were lucky enough to entice Alison Phillips, former group editor of the Mirror and Richard Huntington, CSO of Saatchi & Saatchi, to slog it out under the intelligent and urbane guidance of PR strategist Dan Deeks-Osburn of MHP Mischief.

This short piece contains the main ideas that were discussed, some useful, broad frameworks for approaching fame as a strategy and some reflections on how refreshing it is to discuss big topics in a room, live with real people!

Let’s start with the context, as outlined by Dan.

What does fame mean for strategists now?

We all want to create fame because fame is so obviously valuable to brands. 

Binet and Field’s fame chart is one that every strategist should know. Dan reminded us of how they defined fame: 

Fame campaigns – campaigns that emotionally inspire consumers to the degree that they share their enthusiasm with others (buzz) – are the most effective and efficient of all.

Dan suggested that, under this definition, brands have to earn media to achieve fame. We should not confuse confidence, coyly flashing your distinctive assets, or flashy stunts with fame. Brand fame should try to learn from ‘real fame’ and ruthlessly focus on earning media. 

Changing your mind 

One of the extraordinary aspects of the evening was how the views of the speakers changed after hearing each other’s perspectives and interacting with the audience. 

For me, that is evidence of how important it is to do live events and interact with real people in real time. Intelligence is in part to do with being able to change your mind and adopt alternative points of view.  

As Richard said at the start of his speech: Strong opinions lightly held are the name of the game.

Indeed, the debate in the room expanded beyond the initial questions to take in politics and society and included a lot of reflections about how some manifestations of populism have poisoned our politics and our social contract.

There aren’t many ways to counter the negativity of populism for society but healthy debate surely has to be at the crux of our fight back.

Fame in the ‘real world’

Alison started with a cold shower of insight from the real world of the media and newspapers (which is precisely why we wanted her there).

She admitted that she never ever thought about brands when she was editor in chief and that’s the real world beyond the agency where all we do is obsess about advertising and brands.

So, her perspective was about the nature of fame in culture and how it accrues to people who are essentially active. You get famous for doing something, for creating an experience that people can share. And there has to be an emotional connection for the experience, and hence the fame, to resonate.   

She also emphasised how important it is to have a strong visual association. We don’t need to read Trump or Boris Johnson’s names or even see their faces to know what is going on, as the image of Trump talking to Zelensky at the Vatican during the funeral of the Pope demonstrates.

A ‘real world’ prescription for fame 

This to me is a really useful initial framework for thinking about fame:

• The brand or person has to be an active participant in your life (or the life of your audience)

• You need to have an emotional connection with them (could be visceral hate OR love – it just needs to be there)

• There needs to be an identifiable visual association.

Ambivalence about fame

Richard admitted an uncertain view about fame; on the one hand, hating it as a strategy because of the lack of precision in our definition. Famous for what? And amongst whom? But at the same time, asserting that fame is what we do. 

Advertising is nothing without fame as we try to seduce, attract and intoxicate our audiences. We are in the business of manipulating desire and this mercurial power at our disposal is something that our clients can’t replicate. 

And our pursuit of fame is what marks us out from other marketing disciplines.

Fame and shared meaning 

So why and how do we pursue fame? Richard sees it as a collective endeavour; the creation of shared meaning rooted in universal experiences in the way that newspaper front pages used to set the agenda because so many people saw and interacted with them. 

He believes that fame is a very positive thing for us as communications people. It is essentially the meta strategy; as Gordon Gecko said: The point is fame.

But what do we do to create fame where there is no shared meaning?

We know how strong a force polarisation is in our and other societies. Echo chambers have always existed but we now have to work harder to find facts that we can all coalesce around. So one way of creating shared meaning is to focus on real life experiences and bringing communities back together.

For Richard, social cohesion and fighting division are the central issues of our time and brands have an important role to play.

Fame and generosity

One way of achieving this is being famous for doing good. This has a mercurial mix of ingredients including generosity and public spiritedness.  

This was the part of Richard’s peroration that I really loved. It seems to me to have a genuinely helpful perspective on fame and how to go about achieving it for brands.

He argued that fame can seem narcissistic and selfish but you can see it positively, as a catalyst to giving something away to other people – giving joy to millions by sharing your talent and your joy (Taylor Swift).

Or the unlikely fame of Dom and Tom on the ‘Rest is History’ podcast: Two middle aged historians sharing their passion and expertise and building a community of millions of dedicated supporters by chatting knowledgeably about history.

Richard’s idea of generosity is important. Where vacuous celebrities give titillation, Cadbury’s guarantees quality. 

John Lewis’ ‘Never knowingly undersold’ is a guarantee on price offered by its partners (the staff) to their customers. It essentially articulates the generosity of those partners.

This model for thinking about fame is a really helpful way of unlocking new strategies for fame.

Getting the words right

Articulation is another important part of fame.  Why is Nigel Farage famous? He has found a way to articulate peoples’ anger at democracy that is not working for them. He is giving people something.

Why isn’t the ad industry famous? 

The ad industry, as an industry, has been relatively silent in popular culture. We should be known for having a powerful perspective on society and culture but we’re scared of holding companies and clients so we remain quiet. For example, couldn’t we be more vocal about things like HFSS? Surely the legislation is part of the social contract we should have with consumers.

And we need to somehow make advertising itself famous – not just try and make famous campaigns. For example, RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) made Kevin McCloud and Grand Designs famous and thereby put architecture at the centre of culture in a new way. 

So what are the lessons for brands and communications?

• When managing brands you need to do a lot of stuff. Be active. Be noticeable. People of action are quite thrilling – use that when planning your brand’s activity.  

• Determine your brand point of view. Think about the implication of being pointed or opinionated (with the possibility of alienating part of your audience) vs appealing to a broad church with a unification strategy. Which works best for your brand?

• Lean less on data. Stop outsourcing gut instinct and free yourself and your thinking to connect with people on a broad, emotional level. Create shared meaning and experiences.

• Be generous with your expertise, craft and imagination.

• Think about achieving fame through a lens of generosity.  

Sarah Newman

APG Director

APG Noisy Thinking in partnership with Canvas8