Feeding the Puppy

Planning Is Invisible

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!

They aren't real! It all adds up! They aren't fucking real! They're just people who got together and worked out a way of using their very expensive degrees for something nobody can hold them to!

When you sit back and look at it, it's fucking genius! Imagine: your entire professional existence boils down to absolutely nothing because you've made yourself up!

It's sensational! What balls! What absolutely colossal balls! Bravo, planners! Bra-fucking-vo! I'm jealous. I'm jealous because I thought I'd created a job for myself that meant I could do what I wanted, when I wanted to do it and get lots of nice lunches along the way.

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'...

 

Bonfires, Sid Meier, Ice Cube & The Wire

Yesterday I spoke at Measurement Camp, a multi-discipline working project which looks for people to share their thoughts and ideas about measuring social projects.

I said I'd share the deck, and I've gone through it today and made it better. 

It features Bonfires, fireworks, Ice Cube, The Wire & Sid Meier. 

I may try and do a version in future that includes even more rhyming things (U2's 'Desire'... a pair of pliers...)

Anyway, enjoy...

Bonfires, Sid Meier, Ice Cube & The Wire

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

The Brand Hindrance

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?

iv) The Brand Hindrance

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? 

Social Production... my 'big idea'

I was invited to take part in yesterday's APG/Campaign Battle of Big Thinking (yes, an honour to be asked, thanks guys), and managed to carry the public vote in the innovation section...

I talked about Social Production... I've put it together as a slidecast here, I'd love to know what you think.

John V Willshire - Battle of Big Thinking 2009

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

Just click the green 'play' button at the bottom to hear the voiceover... 

...it's not the original audio, I quickly rerecorded a track this morning, hence it being longer than the allocated 15 minutes...

Bonfire Builders: Mark Earls

This week's Bonfire Builder is Mark Earls, author of Herd, formerly of St Luke's, BMP & Ogilvy, and "London advertising scene's foremost contrarian"... 

 

What are your thoughts on the social bonfire/advertising fireworks principle of ‘not either/or, but both…’?  A long term proposition, or just a step along the road to something else…

To be honest, I think that you're right about the need for both, but given human nature I also suspect that there'll always be more of a need to encourage businesses to do the hard yards of continuous daily interaction.

"Fireworks" seems so much more appealing if you're in the corner - as does magic, generally - but the real value comes from the daily commitment to the "bonfire" work.  To being open and responsive to the people-what-buy-your-stuff

Equally, I think this plays to the thoughts in my chum John Winsor's latest book: "Baked In".  We've allowed ourselves to believe that somehow the magic of communication can overcome mediocre product and service delivery. 

 


Just get the right ad, the right campaign architecture, optimise the spend etc etc... and it'll be sorted.

The truth is - and always has been, I suspect - that excellent communication can make the best of a bad job but the real value comes from making the job better.

Tesco is a great example here - while advertising has played a role and the strategy is good (though identical to the one that one Safeway received plaudits for in the 90s) the real value is created more in the way they keep on going - working out ways to make things better for the customer.

Bonfire communication enables this kind of approach to business - more two-way, more responsive, more human but much more hard work. By contrast, fireworks communication tends to be prone to the outbound dialling and pointless display!


You speak to a wide variety of folks around the world… who gets it, and who needs to get there quicker?

It's hard to generalise, but I think in the client community the biggest discriminator is probably those who see making communications as a factory function and those who don't.

By this I mean those who by dint of volume have had to professionalise and develop processes for communications development.  This tends to embed really unhelpful practices and ideas in the business (like "what's our message?") and make it harder to envision other kinds of communication.

It's also really hard to unpick the vested interests when budgets are huge - large amounts of money makes marketers conservative; they feel the need to not be seen to be p****** it up the wall.

For those who haven't professionalised communication as a core function of the business, it's easier to show how the bonfires approach can be embraced without entering the world of sharp suits and flower-arranging. 

Smaller, more entrepreneurial businesses tend to fall into this camp.


I guess the agency model we've ended up with doesn't always help.  I kind of see the purpose of a media agency like PHD being reframed as 'connecting companies with people', however that best happens.  It often involves talking to other people in organisations beyond marketing departments though (HR, IT, sales and so on...). 

Is it inevitable that marketing (and agencies) must break out of the 'mass communications silo' to take a much more company-wide role?
 
I suspect you're right here. Part of the problem for all marketing services businesses is that their ability to create value is often limited by the clients they have - by the marketing clients in particular.

It's not just creative agencies who come across as florists and astrologers: marketing people are often seen this way by other business functions.

It's interesting, isn't it: while marketing's big ideas are now everywhere (brand, consumer etc), in most organisations marketing is no closer to real leading the company's activities than it was back in the 1950s and 60s.


One of the central things you talk about in ‘Herd’ is the need to ‘light many fires and see which one(s) take(s)’... 

 

..how’ve you found selling that into marketers who’re used to lighting fast working fireworks?  Any tips?

Boring answer: the place to start is probably by understanding where the marketers are coming from - what the other issues and conversations they are party to which are shaping the context to this particular issue.

Sometimes there's already a willingness to accept the relative ineffectiveness of past firework activity; sometimes not. Sometimes there's a willingness to accept the world is complex and inherently unpredictable so you'd better; other times this just scares the bejeezus out of clients.

Find out this kind of stuff and adjust your pitch accordingly.


HERD answer: seeing what other companies are doing always helps. Particularly successful ones.


Finally, what do you foresee in the future for the bonfires and fireworks?

I rather suspect that the future for fireworks advertising is going to be rather less rosy than many imagine.

Of course, we'll need these gunpowder-fuelled punctuation marks (and shows of corporate virility) but increasingly a combination of the bonfires model and the Baked-In idea (making things better and making better things) are going to prevail.

Less glamorous but rather more valuable to our clients - and for those agencies who do it well, too.

Space. No longer the final frontier.

Toshiba sent a chair into space.  Yes, yes they did.

(from here)

It seems that in the last year, lots of people have been 'sending stuff into space'.  Students from Cambridge, and Spain.

Then there was the MIT & Canon camera one. 

And I've just found out The Sun sent their 40th birthday edition up too.

 

(It looks kind of doctored, this image.  But there's more authentic looking pictures of them doing it here)

Anyway, I'd like to propose that 2010 is the year that nobody sends anything up into space.  Space is closed for sending stuff up into.  It's been done.  LEAVE SPACE ALONE.

It just goes to show you that Moores Law seems to work for Space travel too.  It now seems to cost $150 to send something up into space and have photographic proof that you did it.  Imagine how much that would have cost in the fifties...

Behavioural Economics (and the dullest blog post title ever)

Eh? 

Well, I'd put the ACTUAL dullest blog post title ever in, and just stared at it thinking 'who's going to read that', so thought I'd try and distract you with some humour.  Of a sort.

Anyway, here's the real title...
 

"Behavioural Economics and Measurement Anchoring"

(Told you it was dull.  The post itself may get more exciting)

A few PHDers and myself have spent the last couple of mornings at the IPA's Behavioural Economics (BE) workshops, run by Nick Southgate.

(As you may or may not know, Behavioural Economics is the focus of new IPA President Rory Sutherland; it's an exciting, innovative way to move the industry onwards I think, hence the continued Feeding The Puppy interest...)

The mornings focused on 'Choice Architecture' (just one strand of BE), and how we (as an industry) could begin to embrace this tenet to help achieve our clients' goals.

The one I was at was very thought provoking, even though I found myself in the 'how does this affect measurement and evaluation' group.

It's quite interesting when you start to think of what we do in terms of Choice Architecture, because it really does make you focus on the 'getting people to make decisions/take actions', rather the much more spurious, disconnected measures of 'awareness' and 'recall'.

But the thing that occurred in the group around measurement was not the BE tenet of 'choice architecture', but that of 'anchoring'.

 


A quick explanation; anchoring is basically where people are primed to expect prices, years or anything else number based to be at a certain level. 

So, for instance, if I kept talking to you about the values of various different smart phones on pay as you go contracts (£400, £500) then ask you how much you'd be willing to pay for a monthly contract, your answer will be higher than if I'd talked to you about the basic entry phones at £50, £55 and so on.

Read more on anchoring here.

Anyway, when it comes to evaluating marketing activity, why is anchoring important, and potentially troubling?

Well, when you're talking in terms of TV campaigns, you frame things in the language of 'reach'.  How many millions and millions of people will we reach with this?

But then when you start talking in terms of online & social activity, it's very rare that you'll get into the hundreds of thousands, never mind millions.

And yet the latter could be doing a better, more effective job.  But we've anchored clients, and maybe ourselves, to think in 'millions'.  Not thousands.  I touched on the 'thousands not millions' point before, you'll remember.

  

So, what do we do about it?

Well, here's a thought.  Rather than simply measure media in 'reach', for our clients we should start to turn the currency into the effect it has...

Rather than a TV campaign being measured in millions of reach, you take the average of the last few campaigns you ran, and work out the average number of sales it delivers.  I'm sure all the econometrics that clients use nowadays could give us a rough indication of this per client.

So when we started evaluating which decisions we should make from a communications point of view, the options are all laid out on as level a playing field as possible, and the anchoring issue disappears.

It's the general problem with measuring media in 'reach'... any number with the word 'million' on the end contains a lovely, juicy slice of 'potential' in it... "imagine if we convert just a TENTH of those"...

Mediaweek & the scary thing about the vanishing point in media

It's really sad see today that Mediaweek is to stop producing a weekly physical copy, and it's sister title Revolution is to become quarterly supplement in Marketing rather than a monthly title in it's own right. 

Both were splendid titles, written by passionate, knowledgeable individuals, and they will be greatly missed.

Perhaps as you'd expect, there is a heartfelt outpouring of sympathy for all the people involved in the titles (on Twitter, unsurprisingly), and no doubt that a lot of the shock is at the sudden nature of the news...

...in comparison, when the Londonpaper & London Lite both announced they were ceasing production, it was some weeks before they disappeared (maybe due to the intense production cycle making an overnight winding down tricky).

No one expects media that they read or watch to simply disappear... but I guess the expectation of when media will disappear for reader or advertiser is later than when it actually will from a commercial perspective.

For example, if the money coming in is in decline...

 


...and the money out, despite continued cost cutting measures, finally exceeds money out...

 


...then people do accept that, at some stage, something's going to give...

...but the expected 'vanishing point' in the heads of the people who read or watch media, and the companies who buy advertising in it, might be down here...

 

Yet from a business perspective, if you think that the 'money in' is simply going to keep dropping, the best 'vanishing point' for you is here...

 

Hence the sensation of shock when things we like disappear...

It happens before we actually expect it to, even if in the long run we could 'see it coming'... it's a very real reminder about the state of flux we find ourselves in.

It did make me wonder though... will seeing some beloved media properties disappear make us more likely to save other we love?

I have, in the past, referred to the fact that "you're going to miss us when we're gone" is not a viable business plan... people can't imagine, or motivate themselves to do anything about, a world without 'media' in it.  So when companies say "but you'll miss us...", no-one really responds...

 

But there is perhaps the chance that when some things disappear, the shock they cause and the gap they create in people's lives will make them more willing to fund the entities that still exist, or indeed regenerate ones that they did miss.

If you know that a magazine or newspaper you liked had disappeared already, and another one was under threat, would you be more inclined to do something about it (sign up for a subscription, say)?



Anyway, it seems that both Mediaweek and Revolution will continue in online forms which, given the nature of the fast-changing world we find ourselves in, I think will work very well for them in the future.

(I'm particularly keen to here more about the proposed "new blogging initiative" for Revolution, which I can really see working as a high frequency news/commentary service like Mashable or ReadWriteWeb.)

And I'd like to wish all involved good luck for the future... see you all in meadja land :)

A short rant at eBay (and some Jedward love)

Dear eBay

Hi, how are you doing?  Oh, not well? 

Well yes, I kind of gathered that from the fact that at the beginning of the month you started to send me (no doubt as part of some sort of 'lapsed customer re-engagement program') an email EVERY SINGLE DAY...

....under the snappily titled 'Daily Deals'.  Yeah, I spotted that they were daily.  Nice.

  

Every day.  Every single day, without me asking for them.  Thanks for that.

Just quickly, I thought I'd list down what actually may be wrong with this...

...partially for you, and other companies, to think about when looking at big email databases full of emails (including mine) and wondering what to do with it...

...and partially as a cathartic rant from a new dad who had five hours sleep last night and just needs to VENT.

1. It's just spam

No matter what sort of relationship you've had with customers before, if you start emailing them more than they deem 'socially necessary', you take the 'relationship' and turn it into 'advertising'. 

Which may be what you want to do.  But to the customer, it just becomes more spam clogging up their inbox. 

Use advertising as advertising, and use emails as the opportunity to start a conversation.

PS. There are Nigerian Princes who would consider sending you emails daily as overkill...

2. It's not even targeted

I've used eBay a fair few times... I'm not any sort of power user, but there at least 25+ transactions that may give you a hint about the sorts of things I like.  Guitars, gadgets, and other random micselleany.

I imagine you have all this saved up against my profile, and could use it to target the 'deals' you show me a bit more cleverly.  Instead, the things you've told me that I can buy (and therefore think I may be interested in) include amongst other things...

5-1 Disney Hair Styler
WWE Smackdown 2010 for Xbox OR PS3
Stila Make-up set and bag
Mega Bloks Streetz Construction set
Jedward T-Shirt
Hannah Montana Sleepover pamper kit

I don't know what I did in the past to persuade you that I was a Disney fixated, crossdressing wrestling fan who was supporting Jedward in this year's X-Factor, but I'm now kind of worried.

Either that, or you're just sending me a random list of shit that's available to buy in eBay. 

Oh, it is the latter?  Phew.  I can't let people know about my Jedward fandom...

 


...on which matter, now that we're talking about it, I'd like to confirm that Jedward are the single most likely entity to save music...

...as it's entirely possible that when they win X-Factor this year on charm and showmanship alone, it'll bring every eccentric in the country out of the woodwork and into audtions, and next year's competition and all those after it will simply resemble the clown school that the X-Factor actually is...

...which means people might actually having to look elsewhere to listen to music.  We can but hope, anyway.  Meanwhile, back to the point...

3. It's NEVER-ENDING

...ok, I exagerrate slightly.  It can be ended, as you helpfully point out near the top of the emails.  But rather than an instant 'if you don't want these emails, click and we'll stop', it instead has the following message:

"If you no longer wish to receive our Daily Deals emails, no problem,
just click here and you will be removed within 4 working days."

Oh eBay, I worry about you for two reasons. 

Firstly, you've clearly got such awful automation in your system that if someone does click on the link, of of your guys at eBay has to manually look through the database and switch off the link.  There's no other excuse for it taking four days.

Which means that secondly, if someone does think (like I did) that they really don't want to get an email with two pointless offers every day, then they have to go through another four emails of something they clearly don't like or want.  Which isn't really a great way to make people like you.

So, eBay, please understand that yes, you were kinda fun and useful once, but now that you have taken to treating me to daily spam, I shall from hereon in have to reciprocate with growing indifference, annoyance, and an increasingly small likelihood to ever use you again. 

Kindest regards 'n that

John

PS. Say hi to Boo.com when you see her...

Is Idea Bounty our 'Myspace'?

There was all sorts of kerfuffles kicking off over on Amelia's blog yesterday in response to her post on the whether "Crowdsourced Advertising can work"... the chief protaganists in the story are Idea Bounty and the Peparami brief that Unilever famously put on there...

  

You should go on over and have a read of all of the points of view that people contributed around the issue... it's clearly one that, unsurprisingly, has niggled away at a fair few people.

My contributution wasn't really to do with the ins and outs of how the crowdsourcing works in this form, who spots the best idea, asking people to create a derivation of existing agency work and all those sorts of things.

It was more of an overall thought, and thinking about where this trend might end up...

What we do know about digital information on t'internet is that whenever things become digital, they lose 'value', no matter that they cost the same to 'produce' as they did before.

Music tracks being a prime example, of course.

And if there's a place where these newly digitised pieces of information can be gathered at almost no cost to the creator, that place will become swamped with stuff that just crosses that threshold of 'good enough'.

 
Like Myspace, for instance. The home of a million 'ok' bands (mine and yours included).

...so...

...do we run the risk of making the main thing our industry has to sell (the 'ideas') into our equivalent of MP3s? Hosted in the idea equivalent of Myspace?

Or does it not matter, because every advertising/media/digital agency could never monetise 'the idea' anyway, it was always about product/commission/build etc?

It's been gnawing away at me for the last day or so too, so I thought I'd take the comment, put it on here, and see what you all think.

If we digitise the 'ideas' part of the industry, and create an open, democratic, myspace-esqe platform open to all ideas, will we indeed drive the 'price' of ideas down like MP3s did to music?

And what happens to 'quality'? 

When the process of submitting ideas is as quick and painless (and most importantly as CHEAP) as this, will it just encourage many environments around the internet to spring up and become 'the home of OK ideas...'?

Or is it the turn of agencies, like record labels, to realise that the world has changed and the way that they once made their living isn't as viable as it once was..?