I'm off on holiday now. I may post a few bits and bobs, but in case I don't...
...Merry Christmas to all you Feeding The Puppy readers, thanks for reading, double thanks for commenting, see you all in 2010*.
*We're calling it 'twenty-ten', yeah? Not 'two-thousand-and-ten'. Let's not go through all that again...
In my sleepy-almost-not-working state, I almost reacted to this post here on 'I Am The Client' (HT to Adlandsuit)...
...thankfully, I realised after reading a few more posts that it's a satirical blog. At least, I'm pretty sure it is...
The post is called 'Planning - I'm getting the fucking hang of it'.
I should have twigged immediately, in hindsight.
Here's a sample...
Planners. Don't. Exist.
Think about it! Have you ever seen a tangible something that a planner has produced? No! Me neither! I mean, sure, there are things written on paper, and powerpoint slides that look like Jackson Pollock got gang-raped by seven pie-charts and a calculator, but anything actually real? Never!
Now, good satire is always close to the bone; it works because it's so close to reality that it's not hard to imagine it being true.
And the whole post is certainly rooted in what you may come across in the worst kind of planning... confusing, bewildering PowerPoint documents that mean nothing at all. Making the simple complex, rather than vice versa.
But that first point is right; it's hard to identify what planners produce. But not because planners don't exist.
It's just that you shouldn't really know that they're there.
Planners should be invisible.
No, not literally. But they should provide something that's only noticeable when it isn't there, rather than when it is.
There are various analogies that have been used over the years to help describe this...
Will pointed me to the 'bass player' one from Russell Davies' blog a few years back...
"I'd add something. BE LIKE THE BASS PLAYER. Like Sting on Walking On The Moon. Like McCartney on tons of tracks. Be a backbone, keep it simple but unforgettable."
...which Will himself extended here in his Art Brut inspired 'we formed a band' post...
Planners then. We're quite clearly the bassists of the whole operation. Making sure the work hums along, is in rhythm with what the client and the audience want. Bands/Advertising can work without us (Sony 'Balls' is clearly an extended guitar solo of creativity), and we must never forget that. But with us, we can make the work groove along
But just to confirm to a planner stereotype, here's another analogy, spurred no doubt by the snow in Brighton today.
Imagine a lovely fresh Alpine mountain, ripe for snowboarding down...
...I mention snowboarding because as we've now got an eleven week old son, the chances of us going in the next few years are slight, so I'll live vicariously through my own analogies instead...
Planners aren't the snowboarders. They aren't the people carving and jumping all around the piste. That's the creatives, or the digital guys, or the direct guys, or the client themselves... anyone who's actually 'making' the visible things you can see.
Planners are invisible. They come out at night. They're setting out the poles at the edge of the piste, bashing down the snow, de-icing the lifts. They're creating the perfect space for everyone else to board down the next day.
They find new runs across the mountain, and improve the most popular ones... all the time creating space for people to rip down the next day.
They're only noticed when they stop doing it. Or do it badly. When the pistes are too boring, bumpy, dangerous or tame.
So if great planning should be invisible like this, we get to two problems.
Firstly, personal recognition and feedback is difficult for the invisible (wo)man.
Hence, no doubt, the number of planners who write blogs and talk at conferences... in an industry that thrives on recognition, the 'invisible planner' wants to be seen. Not an insurmountable issue, and not as important as the second one...
Which is this; thinking back to the 'I Am The Client' post, and the satire/truth issue...
...if clients (and in this day and age we're talking procurement folk too, remember) can't see the 'invisible planner', then how do/can we expect them to pay for planning?
Why would you pay for something that you're told is there, but is impossible to see if done well? From another perspective, it might all seem a little 'Emperor's New Clothes'...
After the Battle of Big Thinking a couple of weeks back, I've been doing some pondering on the nature of 'brand', and why (in some cases at least) this notion of 'brand' is now more of a hinderance than a help.
(For a quick recap, you can read & hear the presentation here)
i) A brief history...
I keep coming back to the fact that 'brand' was developed as a device for another age.
Interesting, complex, diverse organisations had to compress all of the interesting information into a 'statement of best fit' that would travel through the mass media system.
'Brand' of course could be many things; at it's simplest, it's a mark of consistent quality, a guarantee of a product inside that was as good as the last time you bought it...
...and at it's most complex, it's a 'transformational' device which lent the product intangible value when someone was drinking it because they believed in the 'brand', not just the product inside.
Which is why Coca-Cola always beat Pepsi in taste comparisons when you could see the brand, and Pepsi won out when the brands were hidden in the blind taste 'Pepsi Challenge'...
(If you don't know about the disaster that was 'New Coke' that came about because of the Pepsi Challenge, read about it here)
By and large, Paul Feldwick's description of brands as...
'a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer'
...held true.
People learned about brands through advertising in between the mass media entertainment they watched, read and listened to.
That 'collection of perceptions', if you skipped from person to person, would be largely the same.
Which is the principle we built our industry upon...
ii) Compress & Repeat
Advertising, Media, PR, even Digital to some extent... we all still are bound in by this construct of 'brand'.
We get together in rooms with and for our clients, and make the best sense of it we can, so that we can compress things down, and create and disseminate endless repeats of that simplification.
Which is when we get to places like this...
"...we are currently in a brand anchoring process where a brand cube will be formulated"
(something Ben overheard and put in his twitter stream today)
What the fuck does that even mean? We should step back and listen to ourselves sometimes...
Anyway, here's the thing... we create these brand pyramids and onions and cubes and so on like everyone is still holding the same set of perceptions as everyone else in their heads.
The brand cube probably worked enough when everyone thought the same three things about a brand, and it let agencies get on and do stuff.
But nowadays I fear that trying to compress and repeat leads to us discounting and throwing away great ideas that would deliver value, just because it doesn't precisely match the rest of the luggage.
We're still missing the fact that people are not as homogenous as they once were.
iii) The jar of marbles
Where once people were all exposed to a limited set of information largely via mass media, nowadays we have so many different sources of information about companies and products (not least each other), that the notion of 'a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer' is redundant.
Imagine the 'collection of perceptions' in your head for a brand were like marbles in a jar.
When the different kinds of marbles that existed were limited (and companies & agencies were in control of what the marbles looked like), then you could go around every marble jar in the land, and find a limited number of variations on a theme.
Now, Jeremy Bullmore said in a 2001 lecture that 'no two people, however similar, hold precisely the same view of the same brand'. So maybe we always knew that, as an industry...
...but in the mass media landscape, the variations were limited enough that creating a central 'brand' based on five marbles was good enough... people were likely to have at least three of those marbles in their jar.
Nowadays, there are ever-increasing numbers of marbles about your 'brand' that people can collect and store. Only a minority of them are designed by you, or distributed by you. The rest come from Amazon reviews, facebook updates, mumsnet posts, videojug instructions...
...the list goes on, but what it adds up to is a jar of a lot more (and a lot more varying) marbles in everybody's head.
Which means that trying to create a brand campaign that has 'five marbles' to it is increasingly unlikley to resonate in as many heads.
So what do we do now?
I don't think that the first part of Feldwick's notion of the brand as a 'collection of perceptions' is the 'hindrance' nowadays.
Instead, it's the phrasing of the back half... "in the mind of the consumer".
In the past, we assumed all consumers were they same. So we assumed the perceptions across their minds were the same.
Which meant we built 'five marble brands'... everything conformed to this 'matching luggage' theory.
It's not 'brand' that's the hindrance.
It's the way agencies and marketers think about (and produce marbles for) brands.
v) Some solutions
There are lots of thinks I think you could suggest doing to break this institutional thinking up I think.
...give separate teams across a company a marketing budget, rather than having it all held by a small team of 'brand guardians'.
...break the budget into 'calendar months', where you have twelve distinct and interesting projects running through the year.
...create an marketing 'dragons den', where every quarter anyone from across the company and appointed agencies can picth to a panel of CEO, MD, FD & Marketing Director for cash support for their idea.
Really though, I think it comes down to to things;
i) realising that the world has changed, and a lot of the things your boss told you when you started don't hold true any more
ii) having the confidence to say 'well, if that doesn't work as well as it used to, let's try something different...'
What do you think?
Oh my giddy aunt. I talked before about how the digital applications of phones will increasingly replace the solid hardware we've grown up used to...
...I used the example of the iPhone camera apps which replaced the functionality of Lomo style cameras and so on.
Now, via Mark, I've just seen Square for the first time...
It's basically a 'square' device that plugs into the standard jack socket of ANY mobile device smart enough, and lets you receive payments for goods or services. Yeah, I know. REALLY.
So anyone from a street vendor to a design freelancer has an instant payment system available to them to receive their money.
Which in turn means everything from the chip & pin systems in shops to the invoice process for freelancers can now change, and be wrapped up in the device folk carry with them anyway.
If this isn't huge, I'll eat my hat.
Then buy a new one, from a guy in the street who's using the system that was even better than Square and hence freed him up to set up his hat stall...
I can't blog much at the moment, due to spectacular technological circumstances...
My laptop has contracted a fantastic piece of malware that, in claiming to be 'anti-virus', prevents me from doing anything, claiming the thing I'm trying to do is 'a virus'... Even opening the task manager, or an Internet browser.
So on the London Brighton Blogging Express I'm left with an iPhone, using the pretty shitty Typepad app.
But here's the first bit of change that's coming...
I'm switching to a Macbook Pro. Did I spend a long time researching, reading the apple site, looking at advertising? Course not, I asked lots of friends, through facebook, through Twitter, and through email. Anthony Mayfield even sent me a detailed email on switching from PC to Mac for 'plannery types'.
It's the second piece of change; It occurs that we no longer have to do all the research ourselves on the Internet when shopping for goods... by connecting to enough people we trust, who will be more informed and opinionated on other subjects than ourselves, we can save that time too (assuming we trust our specially assembled crowd).
So when the said Macbook Pro arrives, I will no doubt turn into one of those scary evangelists and bore you all senseless, tweeting this, blogging that.
But in turn, no doubt it'll slightly help convert a few more folk in the way that I was converted.
I used a Hive Mind metaphor in my IPA dissertation last year; the more connected we all are, the less we have to know about everything as the information is being 'stored' in a different part of the hive mind.
It might have always been true, to Gladwell's point about 'mavens'... There were always people you'd ask about cars/computers/cooking etc.
But by speeding up the connections between people, we're actually starting to live in a world where we can make quick, efficient use of that information, like a brain would.
Which brings me to the third piece of change... Where does the 'advertising' model sit in a world like that? Russell Davies once said (as Neil Perkin reminded me last week) that...
"All this web stuff is going to look like a picnic compared to the horrors that will be dealt to the agency and media businesses when every product has a communications channel built right in"
Now every customer you have has an inbuilt media agency, ad agency, an PR agency. But they're not being paid by you to spin positively on your behalf. They call it as they see it. So you'd better be as nice as possible, and make amazing things for them...
...sorry, I'm going on, I know. The lesson here, I guess, is that macro blogging doesn't really work on an iPhone unless you want to write long train-of-thought diatribes.
Normal service will be resumed next week, when the Mac arrives. Consider this the 'rail replacement service' of blog posts... :)
The musician's lot is not a happy one. We know this, we've seen plenty of evidence, but here's another piece (via Dan) that just might give a sense of just how futile the act of making money from music is becoming...
Over on TorrentFreak (a blog covering all things around bittorrent
technology), there's a report on how much money Lady Gaga made from
Spotify for a million plays of her songs...
How much do you think? Go on, guess. A MILLION plays.
How about $167?
Or, if you prefer, 0.017 cents per play, or to bring it back to real money, 0.01p per play.
Now, you maybe don't know if that's a lot or a little, compared to what musicians may be used to receiving for plays of their songs.
Well, not so long ago in 2003, if a song of yours was played on Radio 1, you'd receive a massive £18.44. PER MINUTE (though of course the amount was less if you were on regional or local stations).
But still, one 3 minute play of a Lady Gaga song would make her £55.32.
Or indeed a THIRD of the totally amount of money she's receiving for a million plays on Spotify.
Much as I love Spotify, I really can't see how it's going to continue if the people who're making the content for it only receive such paltry rewards for their efforts. It's barely better than piracy...
-------------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE...
So, the ever-on-the-pulse Dave Stone points me in the direction of this on Music Ally... a rebuttal, of a kind...
“Firstly, any payment to STIM would only represent a fraction of the payments rights holders receive and only for music played in one country (in this case Sweden) as we pay not only collecting societies, but also publishers and the record company to play their music,” says a spokesperson.
“Secondly, the figure (unrepresentative as it is) is from a short period just after our launch last year, way before we’d established ourselves as a music service and built up a large user base. Specific payments are of course confidential, but this is certainly wide of the mark.”
There's obviously more to this than meets the eye. Yet until someone clarifies how 'wide of the mark' it is, we'll never know whether artists are getting a good deal or not. I wonder if anyone will come out with some real figures..?
------------------------
ANOTHER UPDATE
So, Mat has found this... from Steve Lawson's blog, who's also done some quick maths on this, but using some sources suggestion that the real figures are ten times this (as the $167 is just a royalty payment... there are other things to include).
So maybe the decimal point needs to come forward a place... 0.1p per play.
And it points out that's she's also had 20 million paid downloads...
...but that this is a TOTAL figure across every platform, not attributable to Spotify, but rather to the promotional effort as a whole. She's not done badly, either way.
My point on the whole affair remains this though; compared to what they used to receive from listens to a song, there's another whole chunk of musician income that's disappeared.
