adliterate

Nostalgia Blackmail

One of the defining features of this recession is the number of brands immersing themselves in utterly self-indulgent nostalgia trips in a desperate attempt to curry favour with increasingly cynical consumers. ]]> Hovis were first out of the traps last year with their British history lesson on speed that picked up where the flat cap wearing delivery boy and his bike left off in the early 1970s. Although by then Mars had already heralded the dawn in a new age of nostalgia by returning to their iconic ‘work, rest and play’ endline.

But recently the trickle of nostagia has assumed flood-like proportions. And there is clearly no better way to dish up a bit of ‘as good today as it’s always been’ than by celebrating a brand’s birthday, particularly if the number you can come up with is north of a century. All of which explains why flamboyant tours of brand heritage are flavour of the month in ad-land.

In a brief cease-fire in the hotly contested dine-in-for-a-fiver battle, M&S and Sainsbury’s are currently slugging it out to prove exactly how incredibly old they are. Although whether producing almost identical ads, right down to both supermarkets claiming to have introduced the avocado to British palates, was a wise idea is debatable. Especially as they both try to out Hovis Hovis in the sepia tinted film and street urchin department.

While over in the detergent category Persil is busy telling us they have reached the relatively modest age of 100 by re-running the ‘best’ of their historical ads. I put best in inverted commas because if this were a brand like Guinness a retrospective of their work would be a thing of pure and absolute joy. Not so Persil which has largely forgotten to make any memorable work while it has been doing such a good job washing our whites whiter.

Planners will tell you that these brands are rather cleverly exploiting the hoary old insight that in difficult times like war, natural disaster or in this case a slight downturn in the property market, consumers yearn for the comfort and certainty of the past and of brands that have been knocking around a bit. Hence the impetus to roll together a brand’s birthday with a sentimental trip down memory lane in advertising confections that can only be described at nostalgia blackmail.

Clearly a sense of a brand’s authenticity is important, especially when consumers can now spot a mile off a brand that has been conjured out of thin air in a NPD brainstorm. However, I struggle with the idea that recalling a time when our child mortality rate dwarfed that of modern day Sierra Leone and contracting Tuberculosis was our national sport holds much value for brands seeking relevance to people’s lives today.

Indeed brand heritage is totally over rated and really rather dangerous. Take a brand like Hoover that basked in its history as the original vacuum cleaner for decades until a better product in the form of the Dyson came along and ate its lunch. Or for that matter the fact that according to WPP the world’s most valuable brand, Google, has absolutely no heritage whatsoever being only 11 years old. Indeed the most powerful online brands, the ones that we are really taking to our hearts and that have assumed an almost effortless a role in our lives owe their success to the way they allow us to do things that we have never been able to do before and not because the are as good today as they have always been.

Reasons to be cheeerful 1 2 3

Image courtesy of Max Ferguson

Gripped as we are by the bloody teeth of recession and now with conclusive proof from ICM that Britain, of all leading nations is the most miserable and pessimistic about its economic future, it is perhaps peculiar that the most potent buzz word in advertising is optimism. We see it in our consumer’s actions if not attitudes, we see in in contemporary culture and increasingly we see it in the work from the T-mobile Dance event to Coke’s Happiness campaign.]]> Indeed some recent research we have undertaken at Saatchi & Saatchi suggests that the dominant themes in British culture at the moment are Love, Pride, Optimism and Generosity. How’s that for counter intuitive?

Now it is entirely possible that our new-found predilection for optimistic thoughts and deeds is a short term response to the doom and gloom around us. What was called the Blitz spirit but is best summed up these days in the mugs, T-towels and doormats so beloved of the Boden wearing classes that bear the phrase ‘keep calm and carry on’. Deep down we Brits obviously believe that it was our resolve, stiff upper lips, even stiffer tea and the ability to laugh in the very face of adversity that won the Second World War and not the Americans arriving on the scene. And clearly we believe that this sort of attitude that is just the ticket to face down our current economic difficulties. How else can you explain the wall of coloured denim that greets you as you walk down any high street?

This is all entirely possible. It is also possible that we are witnessing a longer term shift in the national psyche, that we are actually becoming a nation that is less cynical, less pessimistic and less selfish. Of course the proof of this pudding will be in our developing attitudes towards the Games of the XXXth Olympiad in 2012 which may yet be the first national project since the Festival of Britain to be greeted with a spirit of optimism and pride rather than a wall of defeatism and abject cynicism. And it is also possible, if you might indulge me for a moment, that this fundamental shift has had something to do with the internet.

For the healthier part of a decade we Brits have been doing something entirely unprecedented in our Island story, we have actually been sharing things with each other and most of the time with complete strangers. But in one specific location, online, where we have handed over our family photos, our movies, our comings and goings and our innermost thoughts to pretty much anyone who is interested. And that surely is the very definition of optimism, doing something in the belief that good rather than harm will come to you as a result of your actions.

I want to suggest that the current spirit of optimism has more than a little bit to do with a Nation that rather likes the generosity and culture of sharing that is shown to them and they in turn show to others in their online lives and now want to practice this in their offline lives. That a population now comfortable with the likes of flickr, twitter, facebook and youtube are now ready to take the next step and start to talk to people on public transport. And if that happened maybe we could finally conceed that the internet is not another channel as so many people in the advertising industry once hoped it would be, but a way of living that is now influencing the larger part of our lives.

That tricky second album

Life's for sharing. Image courtesy of maize

So here it is 48 hours after we wrapped the shoot, the second T-Mobile Campaign 'Sing-a-long'.

It took us a month, 13,500 people, 200 extras, 2,000 microphones, 8 songs, Vernon Kay and Pink to pull off. But we are rather happy with the results as so it appeared were the people in Trafalgar Square last thursday.

See what you think.]]> Here is the full length rendition of hey jude.

Here is the audience edit

Here is the life's for sharing youtube channel with this and much more on it.

The best way to see the rest of the event is from people's own films on you tube by searching for t-mobile Trafalgar Square.

Enjoy.

Context is king

Out of context is viewing online commercially valuable? Image courtesy of papa'rocket.

As we career head long into the economic car crash that is destroying jobs, crushing consumer expenditure and ripping the confidence and profitability out of both client and agency organisations, one performance metric has emerged above all others to guide us through these tricky times.

It’s not a measure of efficiency like cost per response, it’s not a measure of likelihood to purchase like brand consideration and its certainly nowhere close to a measure of return on investment. It is the number of people viewing a commercial online. ]]> Right now the advertising industry has become obsessed with this one measure of performance above all others, we even have our own chart at viralvideo.com to add a little competitive frisson between agencies.

Now, it is easy to see why ad people love online views, it is a pure measure of creative prowess. Of course a brilliant seeding strategy can turbo charge online distribution but by and large, unlike traditional media, you can’t buy the audience. Your content has either got what it takes or it hasn’t and that places real value on the thing that agencies value the most and get paid to deliver – creativity.

Of course we have to be realistic about the reach that online viewing can contribute. You have to have something pretty spectacular on your hands like the T-Mobile Dance ad or Cadbury Eyebrows spot to generate the big numbers that make online a serious contender as a distrbution medium. However, the counter argument is the value of an audience that elects to view a commercial message rather than one that is served it regardless of whether they are remotely interested or paying any attention whatsoever.

As a legendary house ad from the ad agency HHCL read while showing a couple going at it hammer and tongs on the sofa oblivious to the TV playing in the foreground, ‘research says these people are watching your ad, who is really getting screwed?’ It seems self evidently true that one voluntary and attentive viewing of a commercial is worth considerably more to the advertiser than the many potential views that a commercial break may or may not have delivered.

Now, not that I want to rain on the online viewing parade but I do want to encourage a moment of caution before we all drink the YouTube Koolaid. Caution inspired by the idea that it’s not only content that is king, context has a pretty good claim to the throne too.

When people watch an ad on the television it is delivered to them in a commercial break. A break in the content that is overtly signposted as an opportunity for people to sell their goods and services and understood as such. The audience has been conditioned to decode the content they then see as ads and that their job is to figure out what is for sale and who is selling it. No matter how eyewateringly creative or side splittingly enjoyable the work, this is clearly understood as a commercial transaction between advertiser and audience. And though it’s hard to quantify exactly, it is clear that this context adds considerably to the success of the content.

And that’s what concerns me about the hoopla around online viewing. Is an ad an ad when it’s viewed out of the context of an ad break? Or does it simply become a piece of sponsored content, engaging and enjoyable but neutered of its commercial power and therefore of dubious valuable to the Client’s business and a rather inappropriate a metric to be fixated on at this particularly mercenary time in the economic cycle.

Hat tip to Paul Colman who got me onto this and is undertaking some proper research on the subject as we speak.

Love it before it leaves you

Keighley Station on the Keighley And Worth Valley Railway, location for our latest Head and Shoulders ad. Image courtesy of Matt Ots

I know how much you all love it when I post new Saatchi & Saatchi work. But I kinda think that an advertising blog with no advertising is a bit silly and moreover if I am going to bang on about stuff online I should put up the work we are doing to be transparent and accountable.

So here is the latest work for Head & Shoulders. ]]>

r-e-s-p-e-c-t

Image courtesy of badjonni

I have a very cruel, but accurate, joke about why planners have adopted social media with more enthusiasm than others in the advertising business. In advertising only planners blog, account handlers have nothing to say and creatives have better places to say it.

]]> Indeed planners have taken to the world of online self-publishing with an alacrity they once reserved for pouring over extremely dull quantitative research. The same goes for virtually every other online or mobile tool that enables people to share their lives, photos, films and even powerpoint presentations. The online planning community is so vibrant that it even has its own name, the plannersphere.

This enthusiasm is very specific to the nature and role of planners. These are naturally the most geeky people in an agency, obsessed with why people do things and how to get them to do something else, so they have always naturally gravitated towards shiny new things.

They also crave community, since outside the major English speaking advertising cities planners are often on their own or in very small and isolated departments. The opportunity to join a network of people doing the same job and experiencing the same challenges has been a godsend to the planning diaspora.

There is also the distinct possibility that in many agencies planners lack a voice and and audience for their ideas and thinking and so have latched onto social networks as a way to ensure their ideas and opinions are met by welcoming ears.

Which simply leaves one critical question unanswered. How come there are precious few examples of brands using social media well? How come the great social media case studies of the moment start and end with Wispa and its army of Facebook fans. After all aren’t planners, as the architects of brand ideas and communications strategies, in a perfect position to influence brand behaviour online. Why haven’t planners translated their personal enthusiasm for blogging, tweeting, poking, uploading and sharing into the activities of their brands?

I maintain that it is precisely our familiarity with these tools that has placed a brake on their widespread adoptions in communication planning. It has always been the case in advertising that the more a medium means to the people in the business the more care we take over it. This partly explains why more love and attention has traditionally gone into TV advertising than into Direct Mail and Telemarketing.

So it is with social media, planners get what is going on and understand the nuanced etiquette that is expected of anyone wishing to participate in these communities. We understand the two key rules you must abide by if you are to take part in online social networks. That brands, like any of us, have to let go of the control they crave if they are ever to gain influence. And that social networks are built on simple human conversations, and a brand only has a role if it can make that conversation better. Above all we understand that the most rewarding presence that any brand can have is through the natural enthusiasm of its fans much like the devotees of Mad Men have done in twittering as members of the cast.

So forgive us for being slow in delivering plans that involve the mass adoption of the social networks that we love, it is precisely because we use and care about them that we are extremely cautious about the involvement of brands in this space. Meanwhile we will continue to use social networks in the way that best benefits our clients at the moment, as a means to listen to the conversation.

More work thats not bad

Bill Shannon makes the most of the street furniture of Buenos Aires

That'll be the latest outing for the 'Life Flows Better' campaign for Visa. It features the performance of Bill Shannon and was directed by Joey Garfield both of whom we came across last year while putting together the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors showcase.]]> Here is the 80 second ad.

The track is Come on Train by Don Thomas which we had remixed by the Go Team and is now available on i-tunes. You can listen to the entire remixed track here.

This is the Promo for RJd2 that we featured on the new director's showcase.

For more information on the artist here is Bill Shannon's site.

And this is the Lifeflowsbetter YouTube channelhere.

Overcoming our empathy deficit

Indifference by Azli Jamil

For those that know me personally, the idea that I have been thinking a bit about empathy may come as a bit of an out of character departure.
]]> The journey began when, dutifully in search of weird shit, one of the planners that works with me paid a visit to the amazing and most timely School of Life round our way. She brought back for me Empathy by Roman Krznaric. Goodness knows why - maybe she sees monumentally hidden depths in my character.

Roman Krznaric is the expert in empathy at the School of Life and he rather takes issue with the established notion of empathy as the ability to feel other people’s experiences. Rather he sees it as the ability to see the world through other people’s eyes and something that is in short supply. As Barak Obama is quoted as saying on the back cover, “we seem to be suffering empathy deficit - our ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes”. This might be considered bad news at any time however it is a much more pressing problem in an increasingly globalised world, where we have enormous amounts of contact with and are utterly dependent on people who see the world in a different way to us. For Kraznic, where the twentieth Century was a Century of introspection (Birth of psychoanalysis and self help), the 21st must be the Century of outrospection, one in which we attempt to more fully understand each other.

There are few more ready examples of what we are talking about than what is happening in Gaza, which is surely the most appallingly sad example of the absolute absence of any empathy on either side, the loss of which diminishes the humanity of all those involved.

But back to marketing!

I want to warm to a theme that we too suffer from a deficit of empathy in the way we relate to those we seek to influence. We may try to understand their lives but we never really try to see the world through their eyes. That’s partly because we are constantly trying to lump people together so that their incredibly disparate lives become more manageable for us. And when we aren’t doing that we are dividing them into horrifying segments and then, even worse, writing ghastly pen portraits about our imaginary lives.

Steve Henry used to demand that planners write briefs in such a way that he would end up loving and respecting the intended audience. Well that’s a start, but if revelation becomes our watch word for the insight in a strategy could we commit ourselves to real empathy in the way we think and talk about people?

I think this would involve a number of things.

We might bin the target audience bit on a brief.

We would have a section about the revelation - whether its about people’s lives, the brand, the category or the wider world. This wouldn’t waffle on about the audience it would get straight to the point about the astonishing disclosure at the heart of the brief

We would then perhaps have a collection of real and individual stories about people who are from the group we are seeking to influence. These would be real accounts of real people’s lives.

And to get those stories we would need a new approach to engaging with people directly and without fear. A post-research approach.

And I know that those from a research tradition always get annoyed when I say things like that. But the use of research is not going to go away it is simply losing its potency. And perhaps as a community you need to start to think about the longevity of qualitative research and a life beyond it. I’m now going to keep a score of the qual’ research debriefs I attend that contain a revelation and those the merely contain important information – necessary but not sufficient.

Krznaric suggests there are three ways to improve your powers of empathy. They may be a good start on our journey to a more empathetic relationship with people.

First he advocates empathy through learning. Building understanding through immersing yourself in the accounts of other people’s lives most especially from books (particularly autobiography) and film. Nothing much to argue with there.

Second he advocates empathy through conversation. This is more of a challenge for us Brits and it’s the about engaging others in proper conversation in order to more readily understand them. Turning strangers that we stereotype into people who we see as individuals. Theodore Zeldin has set up an online project with this aim in mind called the Oxford Muse. Here he is collecting written portraits of people from all over the world to better understand their lives and also facilitates conversation dinners where complete strangers meet and talk about the contents of the conversation menu. For a taster visit the ite and read the portrait of Alan Human a paranoid schitzophrenic who lives in Oxford on the ‘loony scene’. Another thought is to strike up a meaningful conversation with a complete stranger everyday – something that strikes fear into my own heart.

Thirdly he advocates empathy through experience. This is of course the daddy, going to actually experience the lives of others. My great hero George Orwell did exactly this when writing books like Down and out in Paris and London and the road to Wigan Pier. And If you do nothing else read the chapter in Wigan Pier called Down the Mine - that’s real empathy at work. Maybe we should be spending less time dropping in on people in the living rooms of recruiters and more time having dinner with them, taking their kids to school with them and generally just hanging out.

So that’s the plan then. More revelation in the insight department and more empathy in the target audience department and in the words of Blackadder ‘we will all be in Berlin by tea time’.

What's in a name?

It is not clear why, of all the things that might concern a business as we enter a year of economic and consumer uncertainty, changing your brand name would be number one on the list of priorities. ]]> It is even less clear why you would want to spend a considerable amount of your cash telling the entire British nation about it, the vast majority of whom have less concern about your little endeavour than they have about the political situation in Azerbaijan. And still less why you would attempt to dress this spot of administrative deckchair rearranging as a benefit to any one except those hoping to win some cost savings from the corporate signage budget.

Nevertheless, none of this appears to have been of concern to the good people at the insurance company formerly known as Norwich Union. Their name change campaign is now coming to an end, not only having informed us of their act of brand vandalism but also having insisted that Norwich Union was a lacklustre name and that now they are called Aviva they will be far more successful. Just like the handful of celebrities desperate enough to mouth such arrant nonsense as “sometimes a name change isn’t just a name change, sometimes its a chance to show the world what you have always wanted to be”.

And so with the stroke of their pens Aviva has consigned a 310 year old brand to the corporate scrapheap. All the history, all the associations, all the good will, all the familiarity and three centuries of marketing investment. Gone.

Perhaps no one cares, though I might if I was a shareholder. You see these brand things we work with are desperately fragile, you mess with them at your peril. They can be the source of enormous commercial advantage or simply a silly name and a pretty logo. Was it really such a smart idea to change the name of Virgin Megastores to Zaavi? A deeply challenged business had the last vestige of brand advantage clinically and cynically snatched away, hastening the chilly embrace of the administrator.

Now I’m not suggesting that brand familiarity and affection alone will cut the mustard in these interesting times. A brand has to have a clear and clearly articulated role in peoples lives, you don’t need to look further than Woolworth’s sordid ending to understand that. In fact, the businesses that are disappearing first and fastest tend to brands that lack a point and offer goods and services that are available more conveniently and cheaply elsewhere.

And I’m not suggesting that a new entrant to the brandscape, whether through birth or a change of name, can’t be very successful very quickly either. The last decade has witnesses the arrival of gargantuan brands both on and offline, from Google (that WPP rates as the world’s most valuable) to Dyson.

But the issue is to create a real role in people’s lives and to do so with a fresh brand requires one fundamental and terribly unfashionable ingredient, clear product superiority. And this is what digital businesses have always instinctively understood and understood far better than the offline brands. Whether it’s an instantaneous way to purchase music, an encyclopedic inventory of books or an easy way to share video product performance has always been paramount for online brands or brands seeking to engage people online.

Advertising of any kind will need to learn that its role going forward will be to help create and dramatise these differences and not simply attempt to build brands through ludicrously expensive awareness campaigns, particularly those that are name changing not game changing.

So good luck to Aviva. Perhaps the loss of familiarity and affection won’t matter, perhaps the new name will be an overnight success and perhaps they have concocted a radically new approach to the business of insurance that will propel them into the brand stratosphere. Perhaps. My money is on this being a monumental act of corporate vanity and that it will take years and millions and millions of pounds for the business to recover.

Bursting with pride

The full T-mobile ad shot on Thursday morning and aired last night.

Allowing myself a small off topic moment of bigging up Saatchis. I think the phrase 'we're back' may be in order. More at the T-Mobile YouTube channel.

New year's revelations

Image courtesy of Henry Hingst.

It struck me recently that, although I place great store in the quality of an insight, I really had no consistent way of measuring how good one of them was and no way to help other people recognise a potent insight if they stumbled across one. That has all changed.]]> For me 2009 is going to be the year of the insight. That’s for a number of reasons. Our agencies need them, our creative people need them and most importantly our clients need them more than ever. In these difficult times, exclusive access to a powerful new way to think about people, a brand or the wider world is going to be of immeasurable commercial advantage to the businesses we serve.

But how do you legislate for good insights? how do you describe what an insight is? How do you know whether what you have on your hands is an insight of a piece of lacklustre intellectual guano?

Until now I have simply waffled on about insights being fresh ways of thinking about brand, category or the wider world. Indeed I had a go at talking about them a bit here. But I have never really satisfactorily nailed the little fuckers, certainly not in a way that created an action standard for myself and others.

So I had another look at Simon Law’s excellent presentation on insight and the answer was sitting there rather splendidly waiting to be nicked.

He uses the word revelation, which in a way was a bit of a revelation. Because revelation is spot on is it not? An insight is a revelation. It has to be, thats what elevates it from being simply an observation.

So I had a go at working up a little definition of revelation. To qualify as a revelation an insight has to be an astonishing disclosure about real people, the brands they use or the world they live in.

So thats it, after 19 years in this business I finally understand what an insight is and have an action standard to judge them by. Just as creative briefs must be simple and interesting, the insights in them must be a revelation - to the writer, to the team, to the client and to the people the work is intended for.

No revelation or astonishing disclosure, no insight. Simple.

Let's say that again, if you find anything masquerading as an insight on a strategy, in a document, in a research debrief, in a creative brief or in a conversation that does not appear to you to be a revelation get rid of it immediately. And pour scorn on the person or organisation touting it as such.

So where do these revelations come from. Well I’m offering you four potential sources - none of which go by the label of research or come from ‘the insight department’. Since the biggest criticism of research at the moment - particularly from our clients - is that it so rarely yields any insight.

Firstly, as I have always maintained, great insights come from within. From you, your behaviour, your anxieties, your perceptions and misperceptions. Your own experiences should always be your first port of call when thinking about insight. They may be useful, or they may prove useless but they should always be your starting point. And an ability to stay close to your instinct and experiences should be something you cultivate.

Secondly from real people not respondents. From spending time with people in their world understanding the things that are important to them. After a very long time using qualitative research I am really not sure that this can be done in group discussions and increasingly believe that it must be from real and empathetic immersion in other people’s lives. At Saatchi we call this xploring, but essentially this is simply a philosophy of engagement with people to find truth.

Thirdly from academics. Along time ago a particularly smart planner said to me, ‘why would I want to go and conduct six one and a half hour groups with the good people of Solihull and Sidcup when I can read the work of someone that has been studying this area for 20 years and written seven books on the subject. sounded reasonably convincing to me. So get into the cultural studies part of the bookshop and rack up some expenses.

And finally from what I have always called weird shit. That’s the places, conversations, websites and books that everybody else regards as rather peculiar but that often hold in them real gems about why people do what they do. I call this consumer fundamentalism because it is really about opening yourself up to the deeper and less palatable reasons for the way people behave.

Each of these places will help you discover real insight about real people and help you think more fundamentally about people and their behaviour. And I whole heartedly commend them to you.

So make 2009 the year that you commit to revelation as the key action standard by which you judge the quality of your insight. And think about different ways to depth charge your thinking with powerful new revelations.

Calling time on digital's cult of accountability

Image courtesy of Aussiegall

Occasionally I have the enormous pleasure of judging New Media Age’s Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards. And a very splendid awards scheme it is too, with this year’s kings of the digital castle crowned in some style last month. I get invited to fill the ‘enthusiasm-over-experience’ role of digital-curious advertising outsider. This usually involves gobbing off in a cavalier fashion and then being slapped down by people that actually know what they are talking about.]]> However, there is one territory on which I feel on more solid ground, and that is campaign accountability. And in particular the ludicrous way in which the digital community generally sets about proving effectiveness, a not inconsiderable criteria, both in judging these awards and in the current business landscape.

Let’s be direct about this. Judging by many of the less successful entries, the standard measure for return on investment would appear to be the difference between the cost of the campaign and the cost of reaching the same number of people in more conventional media. That is not a return on investment, that is the sort of haphazard disregard for accurate accounting that precipitated the current global financial crisis.

Indeed, any effectiveness metric that does not tell you the incremental profit that your marketing activity generated for the business isn’t worth the paper it is written on. Not click through, not cost per impression, not cost per response, not page views, not dwell time, not fanciful measures of engagement. Incremental profit. And if that seems an extraordinarily difficult thing for most digital campaigns to demonstrate, I’m heartily sorry. But it doesn’t make it any less imperative the industry resolves this question, because it isn’t going away.

And I lay the blame fairly and squarely on digital’s cult of accountability. Accountability sounds like a thoroughly noble endeavour because it suggests an appropriate use of the client’s budget and an ability to show what happened to it. It is also a really handy stick with which to beat advertising agencies and their big production budgets and legendary levels of media wastage. However, accountability is a bottom up measure of success, and in truth it measures efficiency not effect. If digital agencies show client how wisely they spent the budget against the competition and versus last year, advertising agencies look at what happened to the business and then try and show how their activity contributed to that success. In other words they approach effectiveness from the top down, a fundamentally different world-view.

In fact it is precisely this cult of accountability that is getting in the way of the digital community progressing from clever marketing handymen to the architects of brand success. After all what Chief Executive is really the least bit interested in how responsibly any one has used their money? What they tend to be concerned with is whether their marketing is having an un-ambiguously positive effect on the growth and profitability of the business. In response to Lord Leverhulme, who cares if half your marketing budget is wasted if the other half is shifting shed loads of product?

So long as the digital community clings to its obsession with accountability over effectiveness it will remain in the unedifying position of creating engaging brand fluff on the one hand and highly measurable but largely pointless direct response advertising on the other. If that sounds like a future to you then fine but I’d suggest changing the fortunes of a client’s business is a finer ambition to hold. And that is going to need proper measurement.

Great ideas can come from anywhere, my arse

Image courtesy of Markus Nielsen

There are many terrible cliches that lurk like sewer rats in the daily effluent of the advertising industry. And much like sewer rats they are always close to the surface, wholly unpleasant and bloody difficult to eradicate.
By far the most pernicious and destructive is the now widely held belief that ‘ideas can come from anywhere’. What this annoying little platitude means is that anyone engaged in a project whether client or agency and regardless of their discipline may be the person that cracks the big idea. ]]> So far so good and of course like all cliches it did have a use at one time. By the 1990’s above the line advertising agencies had become so overwhelmingly and unjustifiably arrogant that they effectively acted as a block on any form of collaboration or innovation. Whether within those agencies, between agency and client or between the different disciplines that were beginning to partner the advertising agency to deliver integrated campaigns.

Against this approach there was real mileage for those in the market that refused to indulge prima dona behaviour, that had more fluid and collaborative working practices and who were far more open to partnering other agencies. As a sales trick, suggesting that an idea can come from anywhere worked a treat, and indeed some clients more interested in the process of making work than the quality of the end result, lapped it up.

The trouble is that while there may be some truth in this belief - theoretically great ideas can come from anywhere, just as theoretically a sufficient number of monkeys equipped with typewriters will create works of great literary merit - it is a disaster for clients and agencies alike.

Maybe the odd idea can come from anywhere but from whom are breathtaking strategic, creative and executional ideas more likely to come? Who is more likely to be the architect of a ground breaking piece of strategic thinking? Who is more likely to find a creative expression that dramatises it in a way that has never been experienced before. And who is more likely to create an executional approach that mesmerises people? It could be anyone involved in the project but my money is on those people that do this every hour of everyday of their professional lives, people that instinctively know when something is verging on greatness or just a pile of tat.

And what on earth is the future for any company in the ideas business that pays its people and its rent by creating ideas no one else can possibly come close to, if they believe that actually its a piece of piss and anyone can do it. After all you don’t find architects running around suggesting that anyone can design a building or even that any other architect can design a building as well as they can. An agency might as well pack up shop and go home if it doesn’t have enough self respect to think that, although anyone might come up with an idea, no one is likely to come close to the God like genius that they can rustle up.

Clients value great ideas, they pay us for great ideas and they stay with agencies that consistently author great ideas. Any agency worth its salt will ensure that, while there may be a scintilla of truth in this hoary old cliche, the greatest ideas only come from them.

Welcome back America - we missed you

The power of emotion

Image courtesy of awwwww.cc

A couple of weeks ago I gave a little talk on the power of emotion in advertising. I thought I'd share a little of it because there are some nice examples.
I have also included a handy little PDF on emotions from Robert Plutchick that adds more depth than in the presentation I gave. In particular it shows our evolutionary response to those emotional stimuli. For example in the case of being presented with an unpalatable object (say a cigarette full of gunk and not tobacco) we appraise that as poison which stimulates digust. Our reaction to disgust is to vomit and eject the poison. And that model helps us to understand why disgust is sucha powerful emotion in advertising if you want people to change behaviour (like give up smoking) and not just change their attitudes.]]> I kicked off with a quote that we love at Saatchi & Saatchi because it feeds directly into the philosophy behind Lovemarks and helps people understand that emotional potency is a better route to effectiveness than pure rational communication.

"The basic difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions". Its by a chap called Donald Calne who plies his trade as a brain scientist.

I then backed this up with some data from the excellent IPA book by Peter Field and Les Binnet on Marketing in the Era of Accountability. There is a whole chunk of stuff that uses the IPA Effectiveness dataMINE to show that on virtually any conceivable metric emotional involvement beats rational persuasion in getting result delivered. Seriously worth getting a copy from the IPA.

Then I wanted to talk about fundamental human emotions rather than whitter on about the sort of emotions we write into the usually pointless and bland tone section of our creative briefs. I wanted to show that communications can create an intensely emotional response in the viewer and that meant understanding real emotions not marketing emotions - remembering of course that emotion is the highest form of interaction. As luck would have it in a rather serendipitous moment I stumbled across Paul Ekman who apparently isolated five fundamental emotions in the early seventies. He did this studying tribespeople in Papua New Guinea because they were free from Western cultural conditioning.

So here are the five commericals each representing one of the five emotions. Clearly I reckon you feel the emotion very clearly but that may be because I'm a sensitive old soul. See what you think.

Joy

Anger

Sadness

Disgust

Excitement

Remember this is not about what you think watching these films but what it makes you feel. You don't have to be excited by the idea of football to feel you pulse racing.

I kind of wrapped it up though by making a plea for more than executional emotion (utterly powerful though that is). Rather that at best brand should be emotional to the very core.

And that it pure Lovemarks territory. In other stopping using communications to get people interested in the stuff brands care about and instead re-engineering brands to care about the things we all care about.

Which returns me to my traditional gig about brands having a position and not a positioning.

You may thinks all bullshit - but it works for me.

Here's the PDF of Plutchick's work.

It looks like this which is quite funky.