Image courtesy of Fiat Luxe

The start up plays an almost mythical role in the world of advertising. Start ups are not simply an outlet for the professional and material ambitions of the best in the business, they are absolutely essential to the health and vitality of the industry. If advertising has managed to adapt to the changing business, consumer and communications landscape over the past century it has been largely because of its start-ups.

After all it was start up agencies like Collett Dickenson Pearce that in the 1960s first got their heads around how to use the fledgling medium of commercial television. While successive start ups from Saatchi & Saatchi in the 1970’s to Bartle Bogle Hegarty in the 1980’s and Mother in the 1990’s all used their success to lead the advertising business in new directions. And in doing so frustrated those that repeatedly predicted advertising’s demise.

Of course, while the attractiveness of younger, more agile agencies takes its toll on more established shops and every generation sees many of these fall by the wayside, unable to compete with the new offerings, many others survive and prosper. And they do so precisely because their deep pockets and generous owners buy back the talent, energy and new practices that the start ups have pioneered. And so the young turks return to the fold and in doing so change the agencies they originally left with far greater success than if they had stayed on.

Recently, however, something has gone wrong. In the last decade there has been no let up in the number of new advertising agencies, yet those born in this period have conspicuously failed to maintain the pace of change upon which the survival of the business is so dependent. This has been cataclysmic in London which, starved of start ups with new ideas, has become a shadow of its former, world conquering, self. If you had said to your average adman in the 1990s that the agencies that we would most respect a decade later, would be almost exclusively American they would have laughed into their cinnamon lattes. Not since the 1950s has London adland doffed its cap to the US with such awe struck admiration.

For far too long the hallmarks of the start up - fearless audacity, challenging thinking and world beating creativity - have been rare qualities in the UK’s young agencies. And this has to change if London is to restore its fortunes as a centre of advertising excellence.

Maybe the latest crop of start ups will be different. 2008 has begun with a flurry of agency births, the most notable being Adam + Eve and AnalogFolk, both breakaways from large network agencies. Refreshingly they do seem to promise new thinking and new ways of working, and interestingly both have been quick to bring in talent from outside orthodox advertising agencies, all of which bodes well.

We have to hope that this year’s start ups can deliver real change where their immediate predecessors have not. Because if you want to point your finger at anyone for the advertising industry’s failure to adapt don’t do so at the established agencies - this was never their role - point it at the last decade’s start ups that have delivered so much cash to their founders but so little progress to the business.

This post originally appeared as a column in New Media Age.

Image courtesy of Liquidrosephotography

Monday this saw the IPA Strategy Group's fast strategy conference here in London.

All in all a rather splendid occasion.

The high point was the victory of the marvellous Richard Storey in a live head to head fast strategy challenge from the UK Government on Dog Registration. It was a good reminder, if anyone needed it, that Richard is one of the most accomplished creative strategists in adland. The Planning for Good team (Mark Earls, Jon Leech, Ian Tait and Chris Forrest) came second and were outstanding, if not quite as sharp as Richard's M&C team (here is the wiki they built that morning to help them). CHI was rather out-classed and brought up the rear.

Anyway, the event made me think about my top tips for getting to strategy fast so I thought I'd share them with you. I've done 17 since it seems such an unfashionable number. Some stuff will be familiar to regular readers - but when you are creating fast strategy it doesn't do to reinvent the wheel.]]> 1. Time is not the problem in creating strategy, ideas are. If you can find an idea the time will find itself.

2. Ideas first, facts second. Facts only make sense in the light of an idea.

3. There are only two criteria for judging your creative strategies - are they simple and are they interesting.

4. It is vital to be interesting, it is merely important to be right.

5. If you look in the same place as everyone else you will never find something interesting, no matter how clever you are.

6. Every great solution comes from a great problem. Make sure you understand the problem behind the problem that you are trying to solve.

7. Anything and everything can help you. Take a walk and think about how every shop, sign, ad, conversation and observation might help you solve the problem.

8. Be prepared. Keeping reading the weird shit.

9. Keep your focus on finding out the things you didn’t know you didn’t know.

10. Call upon your latent strategies, the strategies that you have always wanted to use but have never had the chance.

11. Remember that the stale strategic idea of one category is the ground breaking step forward in another.

12. Jam with other people, online or face to face. But don’t engage that trojan horse of mediocrity, the brainstorm.

13. Ask yourself what the brand’s position might be about the something we all care about.

14. A position is an opinion. We live in an age of conversation and opinions are the lifeblood of all conversations.

15. Plan from within. How do you feel about the brand, category or the wider world? How do you explain your own behaviour? You are not unrepresentative, you live in the same brand landscape as everyone else.

16. Trust your instinct - its the most truthful resource you have.

17. Fast strategy is more about decisiveness than speed. Often we need strategic courage more than haste.

Image courtesy of Combined Media.

This is a little piece I did to publicise the Fast Strategy Conferencethat the IPA Strategy Group is running in a couple of weeks. It's about the need for us to think faster if strategy is to be of continued value and about the death of the ponderous planner.

The business world has little time for the desperately bright, painfully academic, socially inept and ponderous planner. Because, as speed to market and speed of response become powerful competitive advantages, the business world has little time for strategy that gets in the way or slows things down. The perfect strategy delivered to market shortly after the competition has taken you to the cleaners is of no use to man or beast.

Indeed, in our time squeezed environment it is tough to make the case for strategy at all. In many agencies we are witnessing the emergence of a ‘ready, fire, aim’ culture. Account people are drawn to this trigger happiness because of their preference for heat over light while creative directors love it because they can give their talent the maximum amount of time possible to bark up any number of wrong trees. And us strategists? Well we simply throw up our arms in despair.

And the problem lies in part with the exalted position we have given strategy within our industry. We regard planners and strategists as tortured geniuses as they wrestle with the thorny issue of differentiating parity products in the yellow fats market and we wait for the white smoke to issue from the Vatican chimney to show that their work is done. Great strategy is utterly desirable but in the heat of the battle, utterly dispensable.

The truth is that strategy is needed now more than ever – to simplify, guide and inspire. But if we are to combat the obsession with firing before taking aim we have to deliver great thinking faster, rather than asking people to wait while we deliberate.

Of course there is nothing clever about strategy, it is simply about having a plan. And a good plan need not take an age to develop, it simply requires a bit of inspiration and to safe guard a little time in the process.

And that’s the idea behind Fast Strategy. Fast strategy is about delivering powerful thinking quickly, whether in days, hours or minutes, so that strategy remains in the picture and we can at least aim our activity before squeezing the trigger.

Every great strategist has tricks of the trade that help them to deliver great thinking fast and this year’s IPA Strategy Group conference will throw the spotlight on some of these approaches. Not only will showcase the strategic shortcuts of 50 leading practitioners but we will also witness fast strategy in the flesh as three communications legends compete in real time to crack a live client problem.

Some will say that Fast Strategy dumbs down the contribution of strategists to the discipline of solving business problems. I suspect they will tend to be those desperately bright, painfully academic, social inept and ponderous planners whose time has passed.

Image courtesy of Below Zero.

Forgive this self indulgent post but I just wanted to say thank you to everyone that has helped adliterate stay the course for three years this month, whether commenting, linking or reading. Self evidently I couldn't do it without you.

In particular your comments that offer a thoughtfulness and intelligence often lacking in the original post! And at best they not only get the debate going but take us somewhere new and far more interesting.

Incidentally looking at the 2420 comments so far, the first was from Rob Mortimer as was virtually the last. That deserves the blogging equivalent of a carriage clock.]]> 2008-03-25T20:41:18Z 2008-03-24T19:49:59Z tag:www.adliterate.com,2008://1.235 2008-03-24T19:49:59Z

Image courtesy of Simon Lord

Every morning as I meander to work in Charlotte Street I fortify myself for the day ahead at the Caffe Nero on Tottenham Court Road.

And every morning as I hand over the cash they parrot the same old question ‘do you have a loyalty card’. And every morning I mumble a 'no' and move onto the next question which is always about muffins or other items from the pastry selection.]]> Last week I ventured a more adventurous answer to their inanities, ‘you keep on making good coffee I stay loyal, you stop making good coffee I sod off’ (naturally this endeared me to the staff no end).

And that of course is the truth about loyalty.

Brand Loyalty is based on brand delivery, whether tangiable (great product performance) or intangiable (heaps of lovely identity value), it is not based on silly little loyalty card schemes or silly big loyalty card schemes for that matter. These are more accurately known as bribes and in a fairer world would be seen as a petty form of corruption. ‘Yeah I know that the product is shit, we are ripping you off and the service stinks but heres a bit of plastic that means for every half a million quid you spend in our store we will give you a half sucked polo mint and a bit of old string. Oh and occasionally we will send you a really poorly targeted bit of eCRM that will irritate the hell out of you but at least it won’t fill up your recycling bin like the other crap we send you. enjoy’.

OK, maybe I am a bit extreme as I refuse to take part in any reward programme as a matter of principle. But I am not content to simply pass up a free cup off coffee for every nine I buy, I really would like to see the whole stinking edifice of the loyalty business brought to its knees. For the simple reason that it perverts the behaviour of businesses.

For as long as organisations are focused on bribing their customers to continue purchasing from them they are not focused sufficiently on the real source of loyalty and that is providing a product that people find irresistible and refuse to substitute. And more than that, a product that people actively advocate in a slightly scary thousand-yard-stare kind of way.

Indeed I wonder how many brands or businesses that have these wonderful loyalty programmes actually have positive Net Promoter Scores - that’s where the number of customers that score the business 9 or 10 out of 10 for likelihood to recommend to a friend out-weigh the number that score the business 1 to 6 out of 10. With Net Promoter Scores you bin the 7s, and 8s as having a passive relationship with the brand and thus of no use to to man nor beast. Moreover, I wonder whether any of the brands that are really successful in creating strong advocacy have to bother with the bribes at all given their loyalty is based on far more fundamental relationships. Can you imagine an Apple Loyalty Programme?

So join me in my crusade against the business bribe, demand loyalty from brands rather than offering up yours for the price of a coffee and repeat after me ‘Loyalty my arse’, or as they might say in Cupertino if they weren’t so Californian and therefore allergic to bad language, ‘Loyalty my ass’.

]]>

United London's anti-salt campaign from last year. The four I's in action

I have been giving a bit of thought to a planning approach recently. Something that reflects they way I do it at the moment but nothing too heavy and contrived.

Naturally it involves alliteration and specifically the words ‘interesting’, ‘instinct’, ‘insight’ and ‘idea’.. ]]> I guess my professional mantra of late has been summed up in the phrase ‘it is vital to be interesting, it is merely important to be right’.

Strategists spend vast swathes of time desperately trying to be right with the result that the majority of strategic thinking is cliched, lame and dreary. So how about if you tried to be interesting first - to think of the most interesting idea possible for your brand, category or the wider world - and then worked out whether it was right? Or could be made to be right.

My faith in this approach is partly fueled by the belief that there are no longer right strategies anyway, merely ideas that engages people to a greater or lesser extent. ‘Dirt is good’ for Persil/Omo and ‘Turn to 30’ for Ariel are both great brand ideas. As are both Lurpak’s foodie strategy and Anchor’s free range approach

W+K's Lurpak work planned by the genius like Matt Boffey

Anchor from CHI

It is also because you don’t have to go to one of Russell’s conferences to believe that the principle currency of human interaction at the moment is ‘interest’. If that is the case, whether an idea is interesting or not should be the most important measure of how good it is - not the only one but the most important one.

So thats the basic philosophy - find the most interesting thing that you could possibly think about a brand, category or the wider world and then figure out if its right. Simple. It makes what we do both breathtakingly easy and phenomenally difficult - because everything rests on your ability as a strategist to come up with interesting ideas.

I have to say that as the person in charge of strategy at a large agency like Saatchi & Saatchi I also find it the most potent guide in my thinking about the work of other planners. When you are trying to comprehend the quality of thinking on a very large number of brands of which some are more familiar than others, it is incredibly simple to apply the interesting yardstick rather than try and figure out the right answer.

Now, the more I think about it there appears to be a series of stages to developing an idea, by which I mean a brand idea - or the idea behind the brand.

The first is to do with instinct.

Very often if you thing about a project at the beginning of your journey you will have an instinct - something that your gut tells you about the brand or category, or that you have always wanted to do with that brand or in that category. Loads of people think that you can’t possibly start your strategic journey with instinct, well I beg to differ.

For starters you will often understand the brand as a consumer does because you are a consumer. You live in the brandscape and as such your point of view (however representative or not) is entirely legitimate and its a great place to start. In many ways your instincts make the most real insights because they are very personally felt.

More than that, whether you are a strategist that has been doing this for a while or just starting out, you are progressively training your instinct to know a good thing when it sees it (much like the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to get good at something that Russell talks about).

The more you exercise your instinct the more reliable it will become for you.

Finally all this instinct stuff doesn’t negate the need to have a look see what the data (whether qualitative or quantitate) says. A spot of data might be exactly what your instinct need to lick start it.

On the Alcohol Harm Reduction project for the COI the planner an I were reading through reams of Client research and both came across the word Vulnerable. Nothing much more than instinct suggested that vulnerability seemed like an interesting place to start - casting binge drinkers as victims of alcohol in clear and present danger not perpetrators of an terrible social evil. It led to work that talked about the way in which drinking substantial quantities of alcohol made people vulnerable to harm.

That said when it came to relaunching the cereal bar Tracker it was pure instinct that suggested the answer lay in the brand name - Tracker simply had to be about the great British outdoors with it drizzle, kagools and yappy type dogs.

So trust your instinct, ask your instinct what it feels and train it to be perceptive and powerful.

Then use that instinct as the place to hunt for insight. In many ways your instincts make starting points for the most real insights because they are very personally felt.

An insight for me is a new way of thinking about the brand, the category, the wider world or indeed the consumer. A way that is both surprising in its originality but also in hindsight true. Insights are by definition new bits of thinking and nothing upsets me more in the world than tired insight.

On Lotus Freshness (an Aloe Vera impregnated toilet tissue from Georgia Pacific) the instinct was about turning it into Molton Brown or Aveda of loo roll. It felt that no one in the market was stepping up to the changed relationship that we have with our bathrooms, not least in the way the products that we buy for them are now on display because they look so good rather than being hidden in a bathroom cupboard.

That is not where we ended up but was without a doubt the starting point for an insight about toilet roll as part of the skincare market and relaunching Lotus freshness as a skincare brand.

The idea is how you crystallise this insight in a way that is powerful for the brand. At Saatchis this is called the Organising Idea, other places have their own versions of big idea, brand idea and brand ideal. And there is loads of stuff elsewhere on the site about what makes a potent Organising Idea.

On Lotus the Organising Idea became ‘Lotus. Skincare for your derriere’

On Tracker the insight that British families needed to get out more and enjoy the Great British outdoors led to the idea of “Tracker. The rucksack snack’.

On our salt reduction campaign for the Food Standards Agency the idea was ‘Is your food full of S**T?’. This was built from the insight that Salt is a hidden killer lurking inside prepared foods in unfeasibly large quantities. And if you really want to follow it back the instinct was about needing to get really tough about Salt. While it is essential for human life the average British male is consuming 11gms of salt a day against a maximum allowable daily amount of 6gms. The creative team spotted in a moment of God like genius that shit and salt are both four letter words beginning in S and ending in T.

Interesting, Instinct, Insight and Idea - not infallible but not a bad way to approach life strategically.

Charlotte Street, spiritual home of London's ad land. Image courtesy of Chaz Folkes

Thought I'd put up two new bits of work from Saatchis in London. Visa is hot out of the edit suite, you may have clocked Carlsberg already.]]>

Image courtesy of mytopography

I owe my career in advertising to an ad.

Not to an ad that inspired me but one that I responded to. It was placed by a long gone and deservedly forgotten direct marketing agency trying to find graduate recruits many months after the above the line shops had employed all the good ones. The ad read ‘By the year 2000 90% of marketing will be direct marketing’ and I was sold.]]> This was late 1989, storm clouds were gathering over the economy and the chronically unsustainable boom of the eighties. A recession was in the offing and most sectors were soiling their underwear, not least advertising that had enjoyed a decade of success and excess. All that hedonism was beginning to cause a headache and the ad business feared the worst.

Not so my new found home of direct marketing. All across the land of lick and stick direct marketers were in buoyant mood and trying hard to hide their glee at the impending economic crisis. They were convinced that tougher times would favour a discipline that worshiped at the altar of accountability. Surely, they felt, a recession would deliver the coup de grace for the dinosaurs of advertising and their habit of spending vast sums of Client money on work that no-one seemed to feel obliged to correlate with business success. The philosophy of direct would be vindicated once and for all and, come the good times, healthier budgets would fall at the feet of the masters of Mailsort.

Well the shit did hit the fan and many advertising agencies had to send back the Porsches and send out the P45s as Clients cut their budgets and agency fees. However, in the recession of the early 1990’s more direct agencies went out of business and proportionally more direct people lost their jobs than in adland. By the year 2000 even the most generous calculations attribute no more than a third of marketing expenditure to the different facets of direct. And in the aftermath the arrogance of direct all but disappeared as its practitioners got down to building the new discipline of relationship marketing, quietly and without the hubris of the past.

The failure of direct in its plan for global marketing domination wasn’t because Clients walked away from cost per response, far from it. Businesses have always valued the ability of direct and now digital to show them what they get for their money, pound by pound. However, in my experience they also believe that there is more to life than return on investment. In leaner years advertising triumphs because it offers a little optimism, to the customer of course but also to organisations that are feeling the pinch. It is precisely at times like these that the power of a big emotional idea, expressed in the most potent way can help galvanise a brand, its people and its customers, delivering pride, purpose and preference for the companies that do it well. Visionary businesspeople have always understood this and usually come out of a recession in far better shape than the penny pinchers.

So digital friends, when you think about the current economic climate be careful what you wish for. Of course the Internet Advertising Bureau is crowing about the “perfomance and measurability” of digital and is enthusiastic that tougher times may allow digital to “gain over other formats”. However, I can’t help thinking of the way the direct marketing industry greeted the news of recession a shade under twenty years ago. An economic downturn will be bad news for the advertising agencies but can you really assume it means good news for you?

This post originally appeared in the 28th February edition of New Media Age

La Danaide by August Rodin. Image courtesy of Jahsonic.

It is one of the least edifying characteristics of planning directors that they spend alot of time creating a new briefing format for the agency or network. It is what my old boss Jim Kelly would call "displacement activity".]]> I don't know about you but I have never liked briefing formats and forms. The theory goes that if you fill out all the boxes on the funky new template that someone has spent the last six months of the agency's time putting together then you will miraculously end up with a brilliant brief. If only it was that easy.

I have always believed that filling out boxes on a brief reduces the process to something more akin to applying for a credit card and thus regarded the whole briefing form approach with utter derision. But some agencies seem to like it.

Fortunately neither of the places I have spent most of my career (AMV - the UK's largest agency - and HHCL - for a long time the UK's most interesting), had a briefing form. Both places felt that planners should write the right brief for the task in hand.

Lets face it we are all grown ups here and we can all write a brief without the help of some ridiculous form. I tend to write mine using a decidedly simple, decidedly old fashioned structure which I am minded to call the naked brief.

It is naked because the structure is so spare that it directs one's attention to the quality of the thinking and away from the quality of the form.

And this is how it goes:

1. The role for communications. Look mum, no background. Background is usually an excuse to dump a load of stuff that is not important enough to get in the body of the brief but somehow seems like it might be relevant. My advice is to bin the background and get straight into the effect the activity is intended to create. The role should get to the absolute heart of the problem. And when you have nailed it it is still worth asking yourself 'why' a couple more times simply to get to right to the root of the task.

2. Target audience. This is the stuff about the audience that is absolutely relevant to the task. And don't write it in a "Timothy and Samantha are both aged 24 and like to go out a lot, watch DVDs at home and have a very experimental attitude towards sex" unless you have actually met these people and you aren't just making up some ghastly advertising targeting confection. This sort of trite story is the 21st century equivalent of telling the creative team that the audience are ABC1, Men and Women aged 25-44 - the square root of fuck all use.

3. Proposition. Call it what you will but this is what you are trying to communicate about the brand. Propositions work with the role for communications. The role for communications sets the challenge the work must meet and the proposition is the idea that we want to land about the brand.

4. Support. The stuff that convinces you that the thinking can be supported, will convince the creatives and ultimately will convince the consumer. This is not the repository of all knowable information on earth but the stuff that makes the thinking compelling.

5. Tone. Only if it makes the difference and you can elevate yourself above the cesspit of statements like "businesslike but not formal". On Tango briefs I used to write that if the work wasn't so funny that it made you piss blood then the work wasn't right.

6. Requirements. What do we know we have to do. If it is prescriptive then tell the team what the media agency has already bought. If this is a campaign that can achieve its aims by any means necessary then keep it open.

7. Mandatories. This is not the place on the brief to get creative. It is the place to communicate the stuff that is non-negotiable.

8. Creative starters. Use this to road test your thinking and to open up the ambition of the brief. Ensure that a couple are media starters, and if the requirements are open guide the team about the nature of potential solutions - digital applications, events, promotional ideas - whatever it takes.

It's as boring as hell but that is the point. Minimum time spent designing a funky new creative brief and maximum time spent on the thought or thinking that goes into them.

A while ago I introduced the idea of brand ecosystems. These are a group of mutually reinforcing brands, usually from different sectors that co-exist and often co-operate with a high likelihood that a customer of one part of the ecosystem will become a customer of the rest of its members.

Well I have been thinking about this a little more recently.]]> The prompt was a newletter from Good Energy along with my electricity bill. But interestingly the subject also came up in a client meeting this week.

I have banged on about Good Energy before as one of the collection of Dynamic Micro brands I am interested in. They are the only electricity supplier in the UK delivering 100% renewable electricity to customers and I love them - not bad given they are a power utility. Indeed you could absolutely suggest that they are a Lovemark of mine because my loyalty to them is beyond any kind of reason (they charge rather more than other electricity suppliers).

Good Energy has a very clear set of values and opinion on the world and this means that locating other brands in its ecosystem is relatively easy - they are the ones that share some or all of its values. In the case of the newsletter the two ecosystem co-habitees are Able and Cole (the organic delivery people) and Howies (the legendary clothing label from Cardigan). Both very naturally share the values of Good Energy and both take electricity from them. Able and Cole use Good Energy in their head office and distribution depot, while Howies use it in their Carnaby Street flagship store.

Howies' lovely and now renewably powered flagship.

These relationships are very different to the old model of brand partnerships. They were based on very rudimentary approaches like 'they make something cool it would be good to offer in a prize draw', 'they offer a platform that will help us connect will loads of people and make us more famous' or 'their customer base is like our customer base maybe we could cross sell loads of shit'.

Brand ecosystems, on the other hand are about shared values and often about co-dependence (selling stuff to each other not to each others customers). Sure they are also about shared customers but here I like the idea that they cross pollinate each others customer bases rather than cross sell to them.

In truth there was a bit of cross selling between Able and Cole and Good Energy but the reference to Howies was just a shout out on the basis of respect.

And this whole subject came up in a client meeting recently because I guess they realised that once you have a proper brand idea (an organising idea in Saatchi language) based on your position and not your positioning then understanding your natural ecosystem becomes much easier - because you know what you stand for at long last.

Perhaps it is time to map out your brand's ecosystem. Presuming that it has a set of values or point of view that makes this possible. Otherwise you are back to buying people's databases and trying to cross sell to them. Good luck.

Never surrender to lacklustre thinking, always know you have a better idea. Image courtesy of asboluv

I like Skunk Strategies.

Or rather I like them in the absence of anything else. And you might find the approach useful especially if you are working in a difficult sector, on a difficult piece of business or at an un-inspiring agency. ]]> We don't always get to work on dream projects with loads of latitude and the freedom to create the thinking that we feel is the most interesting. This is especially the case at the beginning of our careers or with client organisations or agencies that set their strategic sights low.

So we acknowledge that the confection on the table is somewhat lacklustre in the thinking department, though we are nominally responsible for it. Sure it's no 'positive hate' or 'tolerate mornings' but it's a damn sight better than the original pile of rubbish the client or agency management was determined should sit in the middle of the brand bagel or whatever they happen to be using. And we then reassure ourselves that it is actually quite good for this category.

Everyone can understand why these kind of disappointing outcomes happen. What is unforgivable is when we don't have an alternative strategy under our hats that we love and tried to sell instead.

Whenever I come across thinking that simply doesn't excite me but where there are extenuating circumstances for why the strategy is as it is, I always ask the planner for their skunk strategy. A skunk strategy is that alternative bit of thinking that they really wanted to land. Who knows, with a following wind we might be able to create some new energy around it and even if this isn't possible it is a reassuring sign of professional pride and personal standards.

I heartily recommend this approach whenever you feel that the piece of thinking on the table simply underwhelms you. I mentioned a few skunk strategies - particularly from pitches in the Strategy Safari post I did a couple of years ago.

Incidentally I named Skunk Strategies after an approach we took at HHCL on big pitches. There would be an official pitch team and a skunk pitch team with the later freed from the obligation to follow the pitch brief at all.

When pitching to hold onto the Tango business I was in a skunk team that was concerned with putting the 'orange' back into Tango and used the strategy 'Its the oranges stupid' in honour of the note that Clinton had pinned around the place in the run up to the 1992 presidential elections. One route was based on the observation that Tango contained the whole fruit a bit like economy pies contain the whole pig. The line was "The whole orange from snout to arsehole" and the work depicted the ghastly abattoir where Tango was made. Hey ho.

Here's the Folger's 'tolerate mornings' ad by the way - still think its great.

My father and I were talking recently and he suddenly produced a note he has carried in his wallet for the last 30 years. And this is it, 'the workers plea', in all its typewriter written glory.

I thought you might be interested in it whether you are an employer or an employee. It seems to encapsulate a basic code of conduct between people and hell it might even work in other relationships. For what it is worth the conversation we were having was actually about the relationship between the governed and the state.]]> 2008-03-08T09:38:30Z 2008-01-24T20:26:11Z tag:www.adliterate.com,2008://1.222 2008-01-24T20:26:11Z

Image courtesy of boo cru

This is my first NMA column for the year and its about measuring the effectiveness of digital campaigns. Obviously there is quite a tongue in cheek theme about bringing the digital geeks and the research geeks together but the serious points are about looking beyond intermediate metrics, the folly of accountability and need for greater ambition in digital campaigns.

As ever, enjoy.]]> It goes without saying that two of the words digital people seem to loathe the most are ‘advertising’ and ‘research’. Advertising because digital-kind believes itself to be above such a grubby and discredited approach to selling things. And research because this hardly suits the buccaneering spirit of the digital frontier where gut feel and instinct get results.

So it was no great surprise that at a recent conference on advertising research run by the eminent people at the World Advertising Research Centre there wasn’t a single soul from the digital fraternity on the delegate list.

Now, the truth is that attending a conference like that wouldn’t have even begun to flicker across the minds of most people in the London digerati. I mean, who in their right mind would swap a slap up lunch at Shoreditch House for listening to a bunch of boring research people droning on about how you evaluate engagement online? However, this sort of disinterest is symptomatic of the chasm that exists between the digital world and the research community. Which is a shame because you could be so good for each other.

Sure, many research people carry the pallid complexion of those that spend too long sitting ruminating in dank basements, emerging blinking into the light merely to collect data or submit a paper for peer review. Sure, they tend to wear suits that were mildly fashionable in the years preceding decimalisation. And sure, they have a curious way with Powerpoint that involves cramming so many words onto a slide than you’d have difficulty reading them with the Hubble Telescope. But they might, just might, have the answers that you are looking for, or at the very least a way to help you to find them.

And of course number one on the list of questions that need answering is how to prove the effectiveness of digital campaigns and specifically the value of engagement. Not with terminally intermediate metrics like click-through, pass-on rates, average dwell time and the like. Nor the entirely reprehensible habit of multiplying visits by length of visit, finding out the cost of buying that ‘engagement’ with conventional media and calling the result of this sordid little calculation ‘Return on Investment’. But real attempts to prove the commercial value of immersing people in a brand’s world and having them interact with this world and share it with others. Not to mention the means by which to model the sales effect of digital activity and prove its contribution to the client’s bottom line.

Now you may feel that you are happy with your click--throughs, pass-on rates and average dwell times. After all aren’t they proof of digital’s accountability? And isn’t that what clients are looking for?

Well in my book accountability is rather over-rated. What clients really want is an effect – a real sense that the marketing activity they undertake is selling goods and services. Not shifting a few here and there but manifestly affecting the momentum of their business. Advertising agencies have always understood this and not only have they historically valued bigger and longer term effects over short term movements in the metrics but they have set out to get them, and develop the research tools and models to prove that they have been delivered.

If digital wants to move beyond mere accountability and prove that it can deliver the real results clients are looking for, it must engage properly with the research community. Digital folk, it is time to discover that the boring people sometimes have interesting things to say.

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Image courtesy of Casual clicks

Now that I am safely ensconced in my new advertising home I thought I'd put up some stuff from United London - the short lived but rather fun shop that closed its doors in April last year. While it bore very little resemblance to HHCL, the agency from which it was formed, one of its key qualities was that it retained a ferocious commitment to top draw planning that was one of the reasons that HHCL was so good in its day. ]]> Here are some of the United case studies in the format we used for cred's and using the problem, position, promise and brand idea approach which regular readers will be very familiar with. Like all good case study formats it could really do with a results section.

I thought I'd show them as they are live examples of the way the approach worked in practice. Possibly interesting for planners - presumably as dull as ditch water for everyone else.

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Oh here is some nice radio for Tracker - not quite Sony balls but I like it.

Rucksack Snack

Crunch Goo Chew

Map Snack

Springtime

Image courtesy of Threeminds.

Ah yes, the advocate. I have let it fall a bit by the wayside recently but the new year seems a good time to get it going again and on Cadbury’s of course because we can now start to get a feel for whether the work was strategic folly or enormously well endowed in the selling department.]]> You’ll remember that the idea of the advocate was to identify work that we think is important from a strategic or creative perspective and then to look at whether it is working. This contrasts with the standard practice of effectiveness awards which gather a collection of random campaigns that agencies can prove worked and hope there is something of merit in there to learn from.

And of course the burning question last year was whether Cadbury’s Gorilla was getting the tills ringing or and amusing waste of cash. Right form the beginning I believed that Gorilla was doing the business with nothing more than a planners nose for effective work to go on. Indeed I spent a lot of time trying to convince people that this was the finest tactical ad on earth. Maybe some of you were out there doing research and knew one way or the other but I was loafing around between jobs so had to rely on instinct alone.

And the news is it seems to have done the business.

Now, some of you may consider that isn’t news at all. Indeed Cadbury Schweppes reported the first sales success of Dairy Milk in a statement in early December. However, it completely passed me by in the pre-Christmas frenzy. So this post is for you if you are reading it outside the UK or if, like me, you have a very poor relationship with the zeitgeist.

We will have to wait until the Cadbury’s annual results in February to get a fuller picture but we can start to say with some certainty now that Gorilla has been a real sales success. Actually Cadbury's had a stonking year in the UK, partly because of the relaunch of Wispa and partly because of the success of their Trident chewing gum brand. Nevertheless the 9% growth in sales of Cadbury's Dairy Milk since the campaign launch must have done a lot of the heavy lifting for the company's confectionary business and is all the more impressive given the brand's recent past which has been somewhat difficult to say the least. Of course purists like us would like to know what this 9% actually means - up 9% on the same period the previous year? up 9% on sales in previous month? etc. - but maybe we can worry that out on the comments.

Whatever the detail it is clear that the client certainly attributes the sales success to the Gorilla campaign and has consequently raised city expectations of its revenue growth ahead of the final results in February.

So stuff that in your pipe Gorilla cynics.

Here's Word Up by Cameo - Gorilla Style.