Redemption.

Southgate, you're the one. You still turn me on. Football's coming home, again.

Jul 12, 2024

Sometimes, my business partners wind me up. They don’t mean to, but they do. Back during the last Euros, Ben was codifying that unique Message First approach that’s so central to our way of working.

That work eventually turned into our re-launched website.

But it wasn’t Ben that wound me up in that halcyon summer of 2021. It was Martin.

Because he read all of Ben’s notes, and replied with an image. A meme. A football related meme of a man consoling himself as a younger man.

It’s a picture that came to mind Wednesday night when Ollie Watkins walloped one in to send England to a second consecutive Euros final.

It’s this one.

Now Martin wound me up because he’d read all Ben’s notes about our business’ unique selling point and replied with something from football Twitter. No wonder I was seething. Was he not taking it seriously? Was he getting sidetracked? It’s that Lockdown Lessons video about Cheltenham Town all over again...

Then, in an act of desperation/insight that saved our partnership, Martin followed the daft meme up with a bloody good question.

“Can Message First explain why this picture is so powerful?”

Ah. Who’s the fool now? Now I’m not miffed. Now I’m intrigued. Because I’m a writer. I don’t think in images. But if Message First can’t explain why that image of Gareth Southgate (2018) with his arm around Gareth Southgate (1996) is so effective, how can Message First possibly create anything that powerful?

I’ll tell you right now. Message First is the only thing that explains that meme, and the person who made it doesn’t even know it.

Because that image is the expression of a message that the entirety of England got behind in the summer of 2021. A message that’s come around again as Southgate Out turns to Arise Sir Gareth. A single, one-word message.

Redemption.

Why is Southgate consoling himself powerful? Redemption. A man who lost his chance at playing in a final redeeming himself by managing his team to the final.

It’s like the remix of THAT song says. “No more years of hurt. No more need for dreaming.”

That’s one way of putting it. Easier to just say “redemption.”

The message was in the air. A chance to exorcise the ghosts. To right the wrongs of the past. The surprise isn’t that Martin was so affected by the Southgate meme that he shared it with us. The surprise is that we didn’t all instantly, inherently understand the message of the summer of 2021.

Images like that, or straplines, or campaigns don’t come from jumping on bandwagons. They don’t come from doing what everyone else is doing. They come from a powerful message. From that simple distillation of a big idea into something digestible.

They’re powerful things, messages. Even when you don’t notice they’re there, they power everything. All our communication.

So why wouldn’t you put them first?

(A version of this post originally appeared on the HNW blog back in 2021. Forgive me. I’m still reeling from that Watkins-inspired hangover. As you can see from my uncle’s face, we partied. Luckily, as you can tell from my mate’s face, we did spill lots of beer celebrating.)

Five minutes after the match, flights to Berlin for the final were going for over £500. We were looking at trains, buses, cramming seven people into a Skoda Octavia and doing the Hull/Rotterdam ferry…

It got me in a transport kind of mood. Then I saw this from National Express. Dead simple, addressing a drawback of their main competitor - trains.

You can sit down on a coach.