A cynical look ... at my cynical look ... at New Year's Resolutions

I’ve never had a New Year’s resolution. That is because I’ve always had a cynical attitude towards them. I feel if there’s something about your life that you feel you need change, change it!! Why do you have to wait until New Year? And on top of that, people hardly ever keep them anyway. They really are completely pointless in my eyes.

But I am willing to accept that I may be seeing the world through grim-tinted spectacles. A lot of people may well keep their New Year’s resolutions, but the aspect to my cynicism that I want to address is the “why wait until New Year?” aspect. History is defined in years, and it isn’t such a bad method for measuring the way that things change.

An example we can all relate to is, perhaps, school. Although the “years” in which it takes place are from September to July, every year is different, and you can set yourself challenges based on the experience you had last year. In a workplace field, like marketing, it may make sense to have a policy like this at the beginning of every New Year. Whether they meant to or not, a number of companies seem to have benefited and learned from this approach in the last few years.

For example, in 2016, an article in Forbes magazine concluded that better online marketing is something that 2017 will benefit from, such as interactive marketing, VR, improved chatbots and short-lived, snapchat inspired content.

One example of something to avoid, that I personally thought of at the time, was the (while often being well-intended) use of celebrity deaths to advertise products and services. In a year of celebrity deaths (2016), it was often used, and failed miserably. For example Homebase tweeting 'Good morning everyone, happy Friday. If you need our assistance we’re here until 8pm today, get tweeting. Have a good day. #RIPPRINCE' or Cheerios tweeting 'RIP Prince' with a Cheerio punctuating the i.

I did defend these terrible moves because I don’t like shame culture (I thought that the people making the tweets were probably very gutted about the deaths and ended up trying to weave this into their working day) but I also concluded that they’re only ever going to be met by either anger or cynicism. However, shortly after I made this argument, this tweet appeared from British Gas in early 2017: ‘Morning all. A year today since we lost a pop icon David Bowie, time flys don’t it? We’re here till 10pm if you need anything. Thanks, Paul #RipDB.’

As I would have predicted, British Gas’s hapless Paul became instantly famous before the year had barely started for tweeting the worst tweet of the year and the target of Twitter Trolls. The spelling and grammar’s bad enough, never mind the awkward subject matter. Either Paul broke his New Year’s resolution pretty quickly, or he didn’t realise that ‘not using celebrity deaths for marketing purposes’ might have been a good one to have in the first place.

However, perhaps the lesson was learned when 2018's dead celebrities were not intwined into the marketing of paint, cereal or boilers. After all, in a new year, you can always make sure to fulfil your New Year's resolution from last year when you look back on your failures.

But 2018 didnt't seem to 100% get the message because, despite years of people despising the use of genuinely brilliant pop culture fictional characters in adverts (I'm looking at you DirectLine), Halifax released a truly awful Ghostbusters advert that was definitely a contender for worst of the year.

But ... 2019 then brought along Sky's Christmas ET advert which fans adored, reducing many to tears and no doubt having people flocking to Sky to buy subscriptions for Christmas. Maybe Sky's New Year's resolution was to use pop culture in advertising ... properly? Or maybe they didn't pay any heed to the mistakes of other companies, and in this case it paid off? Maybe I need to take a cynical look ... at my cynical look ... at my cynical look ... at New Year's Resolutions!