...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...
"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."
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'...
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...)
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.
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...'
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.
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.
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.
If, as I believe, it's going to be through cross-disciplinary effort that we build successful, conversational communications between people and companies, we should get all sorts of different perspectives from across the board on the principle of bonfire building.
So, to that end, I decided to start asking a few folk whose opinion and work I think highly of about the principle, and their perspective on it.
First up, I'm delighted to say we've got Jake McKee, of Ant's Eye View, Community Guy and Lego fame...
Let’s start with something social… tell us about yourself…
I'm Jake McKee, co-founder and Chief Ant Wrangler at Ant's Eye View (www.antseyeview.com). I've spent my entire career on and around the Web trying to help businesses use new tech, people, and processes to improve the way that customers interact with the company.
At AEV, our focus is the same: helping clients improve customer experience and drive customer engagement by building strategies that tap into those new technologies, as well as age old improvements in people and process to truly improve the bottom line.
Outside of work, I'm an amateur photography, infrequent mountain biker, and a proud dad of an insane smart and funny 3 year old.
How did you get started in bonfire building?
I actually went to college for traditional 3D product design. Even in high school I was fascinated by the idea that people got paid to think about how people used things and to design products accordingly. I graduated about the time the Web started taking off and brought that product design thinking to Web development.
When I joined the LEGO Company in 2000, I lucked into working for a boss who encouraged me to own the relationship between LEGO and the adult LEGO enthusiasts. That led to a full-time gig at LEGO doing community work, helping to form the community development team, speaking about community work, and blogging at CommunityGuy.com.
How do you persuade others of the need to build social bonfires alongside setting off advertising fireworks?
The answer to this question is a bit different if you’re talking about being an employee of a company working inside the enterprise towards change versus working as a consultant helping those folks see change through to completion.
Looking at the work that needs to be done inside the organization (since that's where the buck stops), I've always talked about the strategy of "Success by 1000 paper cuts". Start with the smallest element you can effectively do with minimal budget, little managerial approval, and minor legal team approval.
Nothing breeds acceptance like success. Even tiny successes excite people to see more. Succeed, expand your efforts a little, succeed again, rinse and repeat. Before you know it, you'll be launching huge programs but with far more support than if you tried to launch a big program straight away.
Where do you see the balance between the bonfires & fireworks at this point in time?
Well, there's probably not much of a "balance" at this point! I think largely we're still seeing a vast majority of the social efforts being funnelled through the traditional marketing/advertising lens. With a sadly rare exception, most business people are struggling to get past their own training - we're all programmed to believe that protectionism is a huge business value.
That mindset was passed along in school, and backed up by nearly every business dealing we've had in our careers. Getting past that mental training is going to some time and some serious effort, but it will happen. With an entire generation being raised to expect a direct connect relationship with the companies they do business with, it's seriously only a matter of time.
That said, I don't think we'll ever get away from seeing fireworks. In fact, I hope we don't. Fireworks can be a lot of fun, and can do lots of great things... IF they are a component of a larger, social-infused strategy.
Finally, what do you foresee in the future for the bonfires and fireworks?
It's not terribly exciting, but I think we're going to continue to see the same progression we've been on for the last few years, just with an increasingly accelerated pace.
Companies and consultants alike are certainly still struggling to get to a more social-minded place, but the pace at which things are moving is picking up speed.
Success is leading to success, and we'll be seeing a lot smarter, bigger, more successful campaigns over time... ...success by 1000 paper cuts.
But of course, the way that you sell a book these days is you talk about it to as many different audiences as possible.
And the people who invite you to speak may choose to film these talks.
And if the people who've invited you to talk are Google, then they'll probably film them, and upload them to a Youtube channel, in a series of talks they've invited authors to give at Google.
So, courtesy of Google, here's Richard Thaler from last year talking about the ideas behind Nudge...
...and Barry Schwartz from 2006 talking about the Paradox of choice...
I guess the only choice you have now is whether to read the books, or just watch the movies...
Barcodes? The future of shopping? Is this some weird sort of retro post? Like when the newspaper does 'today in 1972...'?
Because, of course, there's nothing new about the barcode... it was first tested in US supermarkets in the sixties. As technology goes, it's as old as the hills.
So how on earth can it be the future of shopping?
Because what matters nowadays is not the barcode itself, but the reader...
Supermarkets (and now other high street chains) have been putting the control of scanning in the hands of customers for a few years now... not as an advantage to the customer, necessarily, but as an automation of a job that used to be done by checkout assistants.
(...the economic labour market implications of this helps explain why the five members of Girls Allowed had to find alternative employment...)
It's not really a move that's putting the customer 'in control' of course... the important part (price comparison with other possible competitors) is locked away.
With developments such as this, and through years of watching shop assistants at work, we've all been taught by the shops how to scan barcodes...
However... imagine you could take that barcode, and scan it with something else... something that lets you compare prices across every outlet, order it online... and essentially through market forces means that the price you pay becomes as low as possible...
Well, that scanner is here. And it costs £1.19. And it's an app for the iPhone 3GS called Redlaser...
It works like this; you fire up the app, and it uses the camera on the phone to take a picture of any UPC barcode you hold in front of it, as the video explains...
When I first heard about it, I expected it to work on things like books, CDs and the like... but then I tried it on baby milk...
...which quickly told me that our local pharmacy were charging £1.19 for something that costs £0.58 in Boots.
I still can't quite get my head around just how big a step this represents in the way our economy works... but it's taken me back to my Economics degree and a thing called Perfect Competition.
Like many things in Economics, Perfect Competition was just a theory based on unattainable assumptions... infinite buyers & sellers, costless transactions, zero entry/exit barriers and so on
...but the one assumption that is close to becoming fulfilled by Redlaser is Perfect Information; prices and quality of all goods in the market are known to every seller AND every buyer.
Perfect Competition as a theory has many ramifications... but perhaps the most important is this; it becomes impossible in the long run for any company in the market to do any more than cover their costs.
So for instance, if I have perfect information about everyone who sells Aptamil baby milk, and there is no 'transaction costs' which set any seller apart (e.g. I can order from all store in bulk via the internet), then I'll always just order the cheapest one.
Which means for both the retailer (Boots) & manufacturer (Aptamil), I'll only ever give them the least possible money for the baby milk.
If everyone did that, for every product, that manufacturers and retailers would only ever break even, as market forces will continually drive down prices...
(Now, that's not of course how everyone behaves now... but it's got me thinking of something that's worth a separate post. And I think there's more implications for the Perfect Competition hypothesis from the internet too, but I'll go in to them on another separate post too...)
So we'll all have perfect price information, but what about the other half of Perfect Information; the quality of products?
How can we possibly begin to share the information about a vast array of products across society in a way that bypasses manufacturers and retailers...
...oh, hang on, right you are...
Whatever it is you're buying nowadays, there's a discussion/forum/review on the internet from other people which will guide you as to the quality of the product you're looking at.
What does it all mean?
Well, in a world where people have access to Perfect Information about just about every market, what implications does this have for branding?
Is traditional branding a mechanism that only works to protect price premiums in a world of imperfect competition? Will I find out about the quality of products from other people, then the cheapest place to buy it via mechanisms like Redlaser?
I'm certainly going to be thinking about this a lot more in the weeks to come... probably at 4:00am when I'm feeding James with all this bargain baby milk we've been buying...
Well, hello again. After a couple of weeks being on paternity not typing very much at all, I thought it'd be a good idea to try and get myself back in the habit by liveblogging from the Guardian's Changing Advertising Summit.
I barely remembered how to switch the laptop on... I hadn't realised how much I valued sleep until this morning...
Anyway, I attended last year too, and it was a fine event... this year it's being positioned as "How to retain your creative, commercial and competitive edge in the downturn".
So the underlying emphasis being that we're still in the downturn, and will be for a while yet...
...though I read something a while back which I liked about it being too late to prepare for the downturn, as we're in it already; you should be preparing your company for what you're going to do when we come out the other side.
Maybe that's because I'm a glass-half full kind of guy.
Anyway, let's see what the fine array of speakers have to say on the matter...
--------------------------------
Introduction by Mike Southon, today's chair...
He does a nice upbeat talk called 'preparing for the next upturn' apparently... how oddly prescient, given the above...
...then it's over to the first speakers. First up, three opening keynotes from Babs Rangaiah (Unilever), our own Damien Blackden (OMG), and Samir Arora (Glam Media).
Babs Rangaiah (Unilever)
Likens the change that's happening to his prowess (his tongue is firmly in cheek here)... before he'd have to take out lots of advertising & PR telling people he's 'a great lover'... and now it's women telling other women via social media how great he is.
"You cannot market in today's world without living the space that today's consumers live in..."
Babs gives people he works with a digital IQ test... are you on Twitter, have you played with Wii etc... He asks the room who scores ten, and a few of us do (though only a few)... there are a good number of 8/10s though.
"Running banners and buttons all over the internet is not the change we're talking about..."
"...it's about reframing how we think about using channels, and changing our behaviour in those channels"
For instance, Unilever created an 'Axe wake-up' service... teenage boys select the 'hot girl' they want to wake them up from their mobile phone each morning... and download the app to do it. More on that here.
Babs then points out that it's not just a shift in the western world... the change is a global phenomenon... the phone in South Korea is EVERYTHING... tube pass, bank card, alarm clock etc etc.
You also need to 'penetrate the culture'... really get involved in what motivates and excites people in their cultural lives (I guess this is really important for FMCGs, given the potential for the products themselves to be 'low interest'...).
"Walk away from the straight interruption that advertising is... well, I shouldn't say 'walk away' as there's still strength in advertising..."
Next point; think webspace (where people are going, interacting, sharing etc) rather than 'website'...
...which is true, of course... we're just about over the era when every advertiser assumed that they could create a microsite that people would flock to and use instead of social networks (Bud TV anyone?).
(Though part of me feels that whilst this approach isn't right for trying to replace 'advertising' style numbers of a million+ users, there's still a role for companies creating niche spaces for niche audiences where they don't exist... imagine a car engineering forum run by BMW engineers for the petrolheads of this world... it wouldn't be hug numbers, but it would be a strong way to engage a specialised audience).
"It's Our Time; We have to actually DO IT... just talking about it and thinking about it won't help make the change happen..."
Damien Blackden, OMG
Damien opens up talking about the maelstrom we agencies find ourselves in... it's 'Darwinian conditions'.
Technological developments are driving key human behaviours... those of the seeking out of new entertainment and information, and the desire to share and discuss these... Add to this the economic travails we find ourselves in... and it adds up to the perfect storm.
So, Damien says there are three things that will enable a media agency to create success for clients...
i) Strategies, supported by purchasing data... it's about taking the data that's increasing inherent in everything, and measuring and managing this effectively
ii) Holistic planning by technique... attracting & retaining a range of quality people within an agency who can, together, create something compelling for clients
iii) Optimisation of international values and local relevance... creating systems and approaches that can manage a client's need to appeal, dynamically to the world, and a specific location in one country all at the same time
Samir Arora, Glam Media
Glam started because of the changes that had started happening in the media world, and was created based on 'vertical media'...
"there is one very big difference of online media vs other media... there is absolutely no control of distribution"
4 things have changed the definition of media...
- Fragmentation of content (200m+ nice sites) - Long-tail & mid-tail (Blogs, sites, social profiles) - Fragmentation of traffic (topics & articles as 'landing pages') - Death of portals (decreasing share of time)
How did Glam solve this problem? If sites are going to be this fragmented, how do we bring about an aggregation of audience in these places?
Focus is on Audience (women), Context (lifestyle), have a network of sites (publishers), and create a premium brand engagement (rather than just an 'ad'...
They are now at 1400 publishers across the network... and it's an 'exclusive' network. For instance, they could offer a Unilever brand like Dove an exclusive tie-in around 'The Oscars' or similar event.
Glam act like a restaurant franchise... they seek out opportunities to be locally relevant and powerful, but aggregate this across the world.
So Glam are fundamentally 'a technology company' who bring together content, applications, advertisers and agencies, audience and 'distribution'...
They've also built tinker.com... as opposed to following people as twitter would, it follows topics across many streams (it's a bit like addictomatic, to be honest...)
and now... a panel discussion featuring all three speakers...
Question from John Taysun (We7)... how does the industry reconcile the 'targeting' issues with that of 'media buying'... "brand managers want targeting, some planners want targeting, but media buying is still looking for 'scale' and accepts there will be 'waste'...
DB: Everyone is interested in better targeting... we are now taking direct data feeds (not research) from media owners, and building these into dynamic impression buying tools
BR: For FMCG brands like ours, we still need tremendous scale (which we get through traditional routes), but on the internet we want to be as laser focussed as possible... what differentiates one detergent from another is the marketing.
SA: TV is no longer the most effective medium in america to do large scale branding campaigns... it's now the internet.
Martin Loat, Propeller Group: "you mentioned in passing that the Dove spoof got more views than the proper ad... what does that say to us about consumers nowadays"
BR: I truly believe that as time moves forward that content created by consumers will rival that which is produced by professionals... (hence the moves by Unilever like crowdsourcing the Peperami ads)
DB: you have to be authentic, realise that what you put out there will stay out there, and have things in place that will enable you to listen and respond...
BR: The companies that handle social media best are the companies who've already been punk'd by social media...
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Andrew Freeman, Harris
Andrew outlines the sheer difference in today's media landscape (everything from press & magazines to outdoor), and yet the ways in which we measure these core media channels remains the same...
...nowadays people make many more decisions and choices to edit down their own media choices, so that broad targeting approach of old school planning.
So planners today need to navigate a much more difficult landscape...
In 1996, there were only 75m indexable URLs, and Andrew reckons that the entire downloadable content of it could be stored on every phone in the room here...
...now, of course, it's huge and growing exponentially... the reality of which means there are hundreds of thousands of people trying to reach people.
For agencies, just trying to navigate this landscape with the measurement tools of yesteryear can't be effective. Tools like Touchpoints, Media DNA and RSVP help to draw a new map to help us out... but there needs to be a lot more work done to make sure planners have the tools that mean they can plan properly in the world we live in.
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Chris Ward, Creative director Comic Relief
Has worked with Friends Reunited, Comic Relief, and is now working on 1Goal (make poverty history, based around the world cup)...
...he's doing a top twenty of how to be number one... (I bet I miss one. At least...)
2. Give up control... and still win. don't moderate anything... allow the conversation to happen
3. People don't REALLY care about your product OR your great ideas... people only care for a very short period of time (Comic relief facebook example... 25000 fans in 6 weeks, then 200000 in the next four days)
4. Before you launch (or relaunch)... read THIS and THIS
5. Become a coffice worker... you become aware of what people like, and don't like. Or work in a shop.
I'm a big fan of this one... as I outlined in this piece a while back:
6. Run a great campaign before anyone knows if your product is any good
7. If the product is no good... change jobs (or change sides)
8. Manufacture success (Viral Loop - How the Smartest Businesses grow themselves)
9. Be relevant (to people's lives)... (Queen Rania example of education for 1Goal)
10. Get someone better than you to do your job... get someone in the 'inner circle' (eg Richard Curtis)
11. Tweet. Whatever your product is.
12. Enable Journalists to show off... find an angle
13. Go to the public... they won't be bothered to come to you. where people first engage, they want to stay engaged
14. Rip someone off... Comic Relief eyebrows ad:
15. Love celebrities (everyone else does). Comic Relief facebook page changed image to Chris Moyles... doubled traffic overnight
16. Make sure everything is sharable (Creative Commons)
17. Be boring... make sure everything works on every platform
18. Be flexible... go with it, whatever it is... don't be a tanker...
19. Be real...
20. Throw enough mud. You don't know which one ISN'T going to work... it's all cheap if you work with the right people, so test what works and what doesn't.
phew... got 'em all
Mike Parsons, Tribal DDB
"Grasping the bigger picture"... four thoughts that will help in the 'big new media world'.
When you're thinking cross-platform, and how a message can travel across paid, earned and own media... spend seems to be migrating from paid across earned and own media a lot more... brands understand how they might become publishers in this world.
Rule 1 - have a compelling insight...
The VW GTI project; the 24+ turbocharged male doesn't just love cars... they love the scalextric they grew up with.
So they recreated a mythical development room at Volkswagen, built a scalextric track there, with a scale model of the new car, and let people race the cars online...
Rule 2 - Be compelling...
Was way above any other casual gaming experience you could have online...
Rule 3 - Reach out to influencers
By finding influencers who are listened to by the audience, you can do so and make it scalable; the VW team reached out to just 20 people, who had enormous influence across the website, and then provided them with content to share
Rule 4 - Be brave
There is inherently more risk as you move away from paid for media... but there are rewards out there for the advertisers. this was the first time VW had ever launched a car without TV. 25% of the spend was on paid media, the rest was on the creation of the idea. And they sold 1000 cars in a depressed car market as a result... (no idea what the overall spend was, though...)
Barnaby Dawe, Turner
Demonstrating the role of TV in the new world... talking firstly about Ben 10.
One in FIVE toys sold in the UK is a Ben 10 toy. Wow. All product lines based on the TV series, which is really the revenue generating part of the business model.
A launch of a new Ben 10 series, with a 'Golden Ticket' style invite to 'The World's Largest Kids Premiere'. They engaged kids through Binweevils and Swapitshop... and produced over £2m of PR-ness.
Now talking about Turner Classic Movies... needed to revitalise the channel with newer films for a younger generation (Lost Boys, Caddyshack etc). Needed to engage with these people...
...so put all the budget behind 'Capture Your Classic' - getting people to shoot their own version of classic film moments... think Johnny Vegas and Denise Van Outen recreating the street scenes from Fame...
They managed to shift the average age of the channel from 55+ to 35+... and generated £4.8m of PR coverage.
They're nice case studies... but I disagree with Barnaby's point that it's showing that TV 'isn't dead' though... the ideas very much live online rather than TV, selling TV as a product, not an advertising medium.
Ajaz Ahmed, AKQA
Ajaz is going to share, for the first time, the internal things that power AKQA.
It's based around 'the fab four'; innovation, service, quality and thought. He then shows a video of... err, award titles they've won. OK then...
Anyway, 7 trends shaping the landscape...
- On-demand reality is here - Media fragmentation and ad-clutter is everywhere - Consumers customise and create - The profound rise of channel me - Marketing and product have converged (e.g. Nike+) - Entering the age of perfect information - Virtuality is reality
And then... another video. Which my friend sitting next to me tells me is also the global Nike video, so I guess AKQA made it for 'em.
It is best described as 'well weapon'...
Next up... the microwave Xmas card they did... which is pretty clever, I liked it a lot then and still now...
Then the Fabregas TV show, and another Nike user generated content video...
He then shows the US postal service thing they've created using augmented reality which is one of the best uses I've seen... it's a real, practical application:
Another video, for Nike Football+, then for Gap 's store locator app... in fact, the creds clips go on so long, there's no time for any Q&A session for the last four speakers. Hmmm, seems unfair on the other guys.
Here we go... it's a rock'n'roll presentation from...
Nick Manning at Billets... on, yep, ROI...
He starts with the example of the Tevez poster... just one poster, but it produced loads of PR, UGC versions, response from Alex Ferguson and so on... all for just £23k.
And then brings up everyone's favourite country & western airline bashing video... Dave Carroll's United Breaks Guitar song.
Two good examples about how the digital world re-defines marketing communications... it's no longer just about advertising.
How is the agency world doing at delivering this? The answer according to Nick is '...not that well at all' with a few exceptions.
The new currency in this world is 'data'... interaction is the key thing to understand, not a 'coverage and frequency' measure for the internet.
In Billet's view, communications strategy should be built around ROI... measurement via data analytics across multiple disciplines.
Their new model seems very cyclical... you start with what's been proven to be the most effective ROI channels, create a strategy within those channels, prove they work again, and use it to inform your future work.
.....HOLD UP...
How do you ever do anything new in that framework? Neither of the examples he gave at the start of how the world works fits in the proposed model.
Then he shows a pie chart of media split which suggests that TV should, for FMCG goods, not account for around half of spend... but in fact two thirds. There appears to be no space in his pie charts for online, mobile etc... I'll try and get the slides and look at that again.
I've no idea how the two ends of this presentation tie together... oh, hang on, here we go: "is it all about numbers and ROI... no, absolutely not... it's about ROI and also about using creativity to deliver the solutions that are a better return on your investment".
It's not one big recession, of course... it's about 23 million different recessions for every household in the UK... everyone reacts differently.
Now that marketing is much more adept at targeting more discreetly and at niches, we can actually communicate to people according to their recessionary circumstances...
Now, people who advertise in a recession are more likely to come out of that recession fighting fit... yes, there's a degree of self selection, but it's back to the 'prepare to come out' point again...
There's a 'marketing law of gravity'... growth/decline of brands is inexorably linked to category share of voice... if you outspend the market in a recession, it's actually very effective SOV to buy...
...but, wait, here we go... that's just ONE solution... and it only works if you have the money to spend at the expense of jobs, investment etc etc.
What's the other solution? Disproportionality.
Well, instead of the 'elephant' approach (invest everything in reproducing ONE elephant over 12 months, then caring for it) try the dandelion approach... produce lots and lots of spores, and a few will survive and thrive.
The digital world makes this behaviour much, much more achievable. TV is still an 'elephant'... costs a lot to get into.
"In the old world, success was proportionate to the amount of money you gave to Rupert Murdoch..."
"Before, marketing was a casino where you would put all your money on red... now you have to decide how much you put on each individual number..."
"Once you're given a large budget... you start looking for large budget things to spend it on..."
"Consumers have no sense of proportion..." ...so they'll appreciate
"I will have succeeded when people come and talk to advertising agencies when they don't have any money... there's a lot of creativity in advertising agencies, media agencies, digital agencies etc that creates ideas that don't need any money to be spent with Rupert Murdoch..."
Small behavioural tweaks can have massive impact... and in a recessionary environment like this, developing and implementing these ideas is hugely important.
Is there a way you can improve the services you offer through the provision of information?
Is there a way you can offer price discrimination, so the cash rich and time-poor people happily pay more?
Is there a way that you can ask people to help you make your service more effective? (He uses an Ocado example of the Green Van selection for delivery arrangement)
Finally... the most important thing we must use this recession to do is to move some degree of human understanding of business back away from the 'arithmocracy' of the financial people back to some sort of influence of the marketers... business without any understanding of their customers barely deserves to be called a business at all...
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Casey Harwood, Turner Europe
Talking about more of the work Turner have been doing working on cross-platform solutions...
If people approach TV the same way the do music, and stop buying 'albums' (channels) and only buying 'songs' (programmes) then the TV industry will have to rethink the complete structure...
"The days of the regulated EPG are over..."
Measurement is key; retail, business, travel etc have all become dominated by data, and it's now media's turn... Turner have responded with a new way of understanding the nitty gritty of the numbers that come their way.
They've also invested in a new way of delivery content cleverly and automatically across their entire portfolio, then offer holistic opportunities to advertisers.
He starts with a couple of the first virals he ever saw... the guy blowing up the dingy, and the guy kicking the crap out of his computer... then the Trojan Games one..
...so what does the future hold, if that's the past?
20 hours of content are uploaded to Youtube every minute... it's not just about the video, it's now about creating ideas that will move through EVERY medium...
Like "The Best Job in the World"... starts with recruitment ads, getting people to submit videos, driving uptake through facebook, twitter etc... but only really 'scaled' when the mass media picked it up... and the BBC made an hour long documentary... they got over £100m worth or PR (apparently...)
Or like the Fiesta Movement... they gave various people a free Fiesta for six months, and set them missions to fulfill and film... pure online activity got 4.3m Youtube hits, which turned into 50,000 interested people...
Why is there so many bad virals out there? Quality control, says Ajaz... and of course thirteen year old kids are better at telling stories through this media.
Does viral still have to be naughty or disruptive to be successful (like the Polo that decapitated the cat)? Richard says now... shocking and funny still helps, but things like the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty...
Dan from Nokia says the benefit is that with twitter you can now get your message out a lot more quickly, but now sustaining the conversation is a lot more difficult...
...then Dan references the Bonfires & Fireworks analogy... it takes time, effort, and participation in not just your own bonfire, but joining in other people's...
thanks for the props, Dan :)
Katy from Tate has content (copyright allowing...), and so placing that content in provoking new places becomes quite compelling and people will join in, make their own versions, interactions, add commentary etc...
Dan's first viral piece for Nokia was 3 years back for NGage... edgy, provoking, and not something that everyone will have seen...
(I don't know what it was... but I just found this from N Gage, which is the first time I've ever played Bricked-Up with real people...)
in order to make it effective for more marketing more mainstream products, they're now using a balance between own, earned and bought media... starting conversations that people will feel that they themselves can take and run with, build on etc.
Richard complains about the clients who come to them with a piece of video and ask for it to 'be made viral'...
Dan: "I quite often will be sent something and asked 'can you send this out to your bloggers'... and I'll say'll no, because it's of no inherent value to them..."
Ajaz: The key role of marketing is to create familiarity... which means making sure every part of the experience from beginning to end is perfect. Red Bull is an example of an exceptionally managed brand...
Dan: The idea that everything has to be simple is wrong... we wanted to do a really complex ARG style game for the launch of the N97, and the broad comms team said no... they split the handsets available between the two teams, and there was way more coverage from the 7 devices used in the ARG than there was from the 90 used in traditional 'giveaway' comms...
Ajaz: "...that's because you didn't treat your consumers like dumbos"
Katy: Interesting... Tate are partnering with Miniclip, to 'swap' audiences so the Miniclip kids will play the games on the Tate Kids site and vice versa...
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Panel on 'Economic Fallout' - Iain Johnston, Loewy, Rob Grimshaw, FT, and Tim Lefroy of the Advertising Association
(Chaired by Mike Southon)
IJ: The old order is dead, and very little of it will be coming back in the future... the criteria that people are using to assess their marketing behaviour are really basic again; sales, revenues...
MS: Are the big budgets EVER coming back..?
IJ: The big budgets will still be there, but they will be parceled down into small, precise parts rather than huge £20m slugs of budget...
RG: From the FT point of view... "we're optimistic, but there is cause to be afraid... the downturn is secondary to the huge shift that has been going on across the industry for years... in the US all print in Q1 06 is worth $47bn, and in Q1 09 it's worth $31bn... it's seismic"
RG: "...it's not going to come back, the world is different, and publishers just have to respond to that..."
RG: "...there's a huge cultural change for the industry... publishing is a fundamentally conservative industry which has done the same things for a hundred years... I'm spending a lot of my time getting the teams in the business to be entrepreneurial, creative, pioneering..."
RG: "You absolutely can charge for content online, because we do, and you can place advertising into those spaces, because we do..."
...I'd challenge that it's because of the nature of the FT's content...
...it's timely by it's nature, and demanded by an audience who have billion pound organisations who will pay for that content for them...
...I don't believe that the same model works for 'normal' news...
IJ: The laziness and lethargy of big agency approach was rife... the harsh wind of economic reality meant agencies had to wake up and smell the coffee... nowadays though there are a lot more bits of the industry and traditional agency groups who are looking to solve problems with something that isn't a TV ad...
TL: It's half the fault of the agencies, and half the fault of the clients... because of the influence of procurement in an oversupplied market, clients are demanding good people at a cost that doesn't let agencies deliver those good people... how that's fixed industry wide is a good question though.
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Lennard Hoornik, Sony
"It strikes me how hard it is to delearn... forget what it is you 'know'..."
The one problem with mobile devices... they are all becoming very very similar... the world of 'touch mobiles'... your value chain can only be defined by your users, if you try and do it yourself, you're in trouble.
You have to have a very clear idea about who your competitors are, what you're there to do, what direction you're moving in...
Everything is moving really fast, and new competitors emerge (Apple, Android, Dell...).
We expect our media partners, creative partners, digital partners to move and learn fast.
So why is everybody going mobile? It's the most personal, and it's in your face most of the day, it's with you all the time, it's always on...
Every mobile phone is no longer the same... as soon as it's bought, it changes, and is constantly evolved and augmented by the user... it's a gateway, not a finished product. And they power the social media world in the future...
Why did Sony E end up where they are in 2009 (market share down etc)? Because they admit they spent their time improving things that people didn't want. They didn't sell many walkman phones, so concentrated on making EVEN BETTER WALKMAN PHONES...
...which he likens to the TV landscape... if a TV ad isn't working, DON'T SPEND YOUR TIME AND MONEY MAKING AN EVEN BETTER TV AD... understand that it's a massive change, and TV ISN'T COMING BACK...
So, what are they doing?
Sony Ericsson has put the consumer back at the heart of the company... and in their advertising, internal communications, and brand.
Rightly, and in line with the Communis Manifesto stuff, they've realised it's about starting a movement INSIDE the company first...
...because if you as a company don't care, why would anyone else?
Their transformational strategy for the company is:
MAKE.BELIEVE
This new brand is "optimistic, playful, energetic and beautiful"...
...it's based on:
1. Be innovative 2. Be human 3. Be entertaining 4. Engage Communities 5. Enable Communities 6. Collaborate
...all the examples are nice, and you definitely get a sense of how they've changed their approach based on how the world really works now... it's heartening to see.
And by starting things in the heart of the company itself, I guess they have a much better chance of producing great phones again (they did used to have some awesome phones...).
"There's never been as an exciting time to work in this agency as now..."
...and it's another outing of the Socialnomics video... it was played earlier today by Babs, though with a different soundtrack...
Maybe everyone should talk about which videos they're going to play before conferences.
Talking about Obama, and activating communities... over a six month period, he went from outside long-shot to President of the USA.
"If we take traditional 'brand shouting' and put it inside social networks, people don't want this... people don't want brands in Facebook, Bebo, Myspace... that model doesn't work in these markets, we have to reinvent it".
Blake's friend Stephen asked his friend on Facebook for book recommendations... not Amazon, not a book store, not book reviews in newspapers... his friends.
"Anyone in advertising... if you're not involved in social media, you won't understand what's going on..."
The social graph is something that's existed for the whole of history... but only now is it being mapped, connected and enabled via technology... Facebook now has 300m users and STILL GROWING... 15% of pageviews, and 20% of all time spent in the UK on the internet is spent on Facebook...
...or, really, time spent with your friends and loved ones.
...speaking of which, I'm off home to spend a little time with this little fella...
