The Campbell Academy Blog (49)

Why?

There is a super famous episode of The Simpsons from the first few seasons called Mr Plow.

It is an extraordinary episode, as almost all of them are. In this particular one, Homer enters into a competition with his best friend, Barney, about who can have the best snow plough and gain the business in the town.

Homer is Mr Plow, but Barney becomes Snow King. So they enter into an advertising battle where Homer instructs some high-level advertising company to make a television advert, which is abstract. He has no idea what it means when he watches it.

This is one of the dangers of being caught with your head up your arse while you meet the marketing people and spend your money out of ego and for your own self.

And so whenever you produce anything that's talking about the place that you have or the thing that you do, the risk is that you enter into head-up arse mode and become Mr Plow with the advert in The Simpsons episode.

There is an alternative to this, though. It is possible to talk about why you are somewhere and what you do with passion, empathy and honesty, and as I've written here many times before, the premium cycle brand Rapha has been able to do that in literally hundreds and hundreds of videos, but never better than in the Rapha Why Video.

And so, about two years ago, when we were long-term planning some of our marketing assets and strategy, we wanted to put a video together about our patients and to let our patients talk about what it was like to come to The Campbell Clinic (which you can view here) we realised that the third thing in our plan, in our content strategy, would be to try to do our own version of the Rapha Why video to tell people why we were there and what it was for.

I've loved the Rapha video for a long time as an example of how it's possible for someone who owns, runs and founded a business to talk about it honestly without seeming like a pr*ck. So we wanted to try and put a video like that together, but I'm not the best at these things and feel very self-conscious when talking about stuff like this, and therefore I didn't know whether we were able to be able to pull it off.

We instructed Gurmit Samra to help with this, and if you ever want to do anything with him, then get in touch here.

He is a genius, a brilliant guy, and super kind to my son, Callum, separately from this.

He knew what we were trying to do, and he came back and forth with us to do different things for over a year to get this video right or at least to achieve what he thought was right (I can always pick holes in this stuff and cringe when I see parts of it).

One of the things that we did, though, which seems classic artistry, was I walked upstairs to the Clinic one day when Gurmit and Harry were there, and he just said to me that he wanted me to come upstairs to the staff area just for five minutes.

He sat me in a chair in front of a camera with him and Harry and told me to look into his face and answer a few questions.

I was straight out of surgery, totally unprepared, and that forms the basis of my discussion in the video overall.

I don't often like photographs or recordings of myself, but I can be happy with that one and accept it.

And so, you can make your judgement about this.

It's designed for people who don't know anything about us, who find us on our website, and who wonder what we're all about.

It will polarise opinion.

Some people will think it's complete w**k, and others will really like it.

I'll let you decide, but at least I hope you watch it.

We've got some big projects we're thinking about to continue to spread the word, but this is where we've got to so far.

I hope you like it, but it's cool if you don't.