karim rashid is not a wanker

Well at least not according to Designers are Wankers , who have kindly posted this interview which you can download and view. It is interestng that, while he advocates designers undertaking a planning process in their work, that account planning does not seem (at least from my limited exposure) to have evolved as a "named" discipline in the design industry. The folks at Desgrippes Gobe have brand strategists but they are used to sell consulting as much as design, and I am sure there are planners who just work under a different name. Maybe we can start organizing them for the APG :)

Library Thing

Library Thing is a great little place where you can catalogue your library, tag it and share it with others. It was looking for just this kind of place because, while a lot of planning/marketing blogs have a book list attached ot them, there is no central place to list, share, review etc. them. I went with the full intention of starting a planning group , online to find that the folks at Staufenberger had already done it!

So as my great grandfather might have said: "nemen dein tuchas online schnel"...or just post yer books and join in.

maslow '06

Maslow's hierarchy is perhaps the most (over) used psychological model around, so for some time it has felt blunt and old fashioned as a way of dissecting people's behavior. But then someone pointed me to this image , which uses Adlerian theory to blow out the self actualization part of the pyramid (as well as others). While there's nothing new here, it is a nice way to look at/group the different need states we all have and how we have to proceed through them. There's a nice reminder that (in Maslow's model) we need to achieve recognition or admiration (potentially via status) before we can truly achieve and create in a self-actualizing way. I would argue that this explains the recent moves (and successes) of some luxury brands (e.g. Prada) vs others (e.g. Rolex).


note: the image doesn't look great on screen but is much clearer when printed.

I was just re-reading Everything Bad is Good for You and realized that ambiguity can have as powerful effect on a brand or an ad as complexity can.

The advertising landscape is still littered with what Johnson calls"flashing arrows" (the greatest of which is the fact that people know it is an ad - but there is only so much you can do to, say, a 30 second spot). We have failed to show/convince many clients that it is not necessary to give consumers all of the answers, despite the fact that David Ogilvy told us about the consumers lack or moronity some 40 years ago.

Perhaps one way to cure this is to stop regarding the ad as a finite unit and to think of it as a longer, or even discontinuous, narrative. Yes, there are issues with this (will people see all of the ads?), but we already link ads shown in the same show. The famous "Frog" ads from Budweiser developed characters throughout it's series (albeit in 30 second long bites). Can we go further?

A further challenge in creating lean forward ads is that we are, in many ways, providing consumerswith an answer - it's why we end with the tag or the logo. This is why we focus making the beginning of a spot ambiguous or unexpected ("ooh I wonder what this is an ad for"), rather than the end. But why wouldn't we want to provoke thought with the whole thing? Mayeb by ending with more questions than we start we can do this - simply raising an issue and leaving people to fill in the blanks.

Our advertising evolved from an era when we had to give people all of the answers. People didn't know what was btechnologically possible, what a new refridgerator might have, what else they could do with bleach. Unfortunately, we ahve still not managed to convince clients that this is no longer our job.

'ave a go

Daniel Levitin has written what seems to be an interesting book titled This is Your Brain on Music . In it he examines what causes us to lvoe music and how the brain processes it, all form a neuroscientific point of view.

He made this interesting ovservation on his site:

"A couple of generations ago, before television, many families would sit around and play music together for entertainment. Nowadays there is a great emphasis on technique and skill, and whether a musician is "good enough" to play for others. Music making has become a somewhat reserved activity in our culture, and the rest of us listen. The music industry is one of the largest industries in the United States, employing hundreds of thousands of people. ... I would say that most Americans qualify as expert music listeners. We have the cognitive capacity to detect wrong notes, to find music we enjoy, to remember hundreds of melodies, and to tap our feet in time with the music - an activity that involves a process of meter extraction so complicated that most computers cannot do it"

Even in our business, there is a great emphasis on skill. There are more and more planning schools, more and more divisions between functions. Companies need best practices and case studies to operate on. Why not just have a go? It is ont good enough to embrace failiure - we need to have a go in the first place.

beck co-creates

Beck plans to let fans decorate his forthcoming album: "The Information," by providing four sticker sets and one blank album cover. Hopefully they will let people do the same thing digitally.

Beck's site is playing tracks off the enw album already. I have to admit, for such an innovative artist with such a good website, the album cover thing feels a little done (oh jadedness)

agency vs. consultancy

Richard Huntington of Adliterate has started a great debate/fight about how good brand consultancy strategies are vs. how good agency ones are. Some very interesting comments and discussion for all to check out.

My point is that, while I agree that agency strategies are generally more radical and interesting, brand consultancies often do a better job of understanding and acting on the business side. The overfocus on communication (in terms businsss model, hiring etc.) has an opportunity to evolve.

YouTube story corps

NPR has a great oral history project called Story Corps. A booth tours around the US and anyone is invited to drop in and tell a story about them or someone else.

But this gentleman is using You Tube for the same purpose.




Perhaps more interesting is the number of grateful responses he is getting from other viewers. This one in particular gave me a sense of the idealism that can surrond us when we encounter a post like geriatric1927's.




All of this makes me wish I had done this with my grandfather before his stroke. He is 95 and moved to London from Kiev as a boy in 1915. he wasn't allowed to go to Oxford (despite having a scholarship) because his dad wanted him to work in the family business.


Thanks to Influx Insights for the link

innovation is a cost issue

I have finally finished reading The Innovator's Solution (hey - there was a wedding, a pitch, family issues etc. between now and when I last posted about it, ok), and it is one of the best business books I have read. Not only well written, it covers a huge number of issues relating to innovation.

There are to many things that the book brings up to discuss in one blog, let alone one post, but here are a few of the issues that go to the heart of the book.

One of the points that Christensen and Raynor make again and again is the effect a company's cost structure has on the way it innovates. It drives the metrics for financial assessment of new innovation or businesses, and therefore the resource allocation process. It also drives a lot of the company's values.

This can be key when we are trying to reposition brands. If we don't understand the limits of company profitability and where they will truly be able (or be willing) to make money, we cannot understand the future dynamic of a brand. It will be more and more important to advise clients of how shifts in the way consumers are approaching brands will affect the whole business line, or where the limits of their innovation are.

Some could argue that this is outside of the scope of advertising and strictly speaking they are right. To me it is leaving money on the table. There is no reasons why plannersor accouint managers, with the right training and experience, could not have this conversation with brand managers. Consultants do all the time, and they have no fear of suggesting brand strategies either. What we lack in this is that training or networked person power to tap into the expertise.

Emergent vs. Deliberate Strategy

The authors make an important distinction between these two types of strategy: the former being the kind that arises from making smaller day to day decisions, and the latter beingmore thoughtful and analytical and often implemented top down.

Their research confirms that emergent strategy is more useful during the early phases of a company's life and/or when the future is unclear. One of the roles of emergent strategy for them is the ability to test assumptions about the marketplace (what people will buy, what job they want to product to do that isn't being done right now etc.) so that we can find out what does work. Specifically, the assumptions you make are the ones that have to be true for the business to win funding from an internal or external VC. Only once a working emergent strategy is found can a more deliberate, top down strategy be useful - one where employees and employers are really in sync about what the brand stands for, looks like etc. needs to be done at all levels of the company.

This seems to confirm a lot of the conversation going on in the planning world. As much as we pretend we don't know what consumer's will "buy" and haven't found a good way to research it without test marketing it. If we take the emergent route we try one thing but don't worry to much about changing strategy when we learn what the true state of the market is. It demands flexibility from us and from our clients, since consumers are certainly not interested enough in what we are doing to care.

This also brings up the question of once popular (now almost dead) use of test markets. It seems (from various conversations with US brand managers) that the industry is more scared today of letting competitors know about what they are up to than they are of making bad launch decisions) Yet competitors will not be able to react that much faster because of a one to two month test (especially if it is well disguised or a new brand launch). Yes they are expensive, but they are also the only real test out there.

bags

I've been out looking for a new bag to carry my stuff in and it was a little frustrating at first. Like the one third of adults who have back pain and herniated disks, my bad back needs lots of support and a comfortable way to lug a laptop. Although ergonomics is not a word on the tip if people's tongues the way it was a few years ago, there is an increasing need to replace one strap/handle carrying cases.




Despite Timbuk2's new store and customizable options, traditional messenger bags just didn't do it for me - to much shoulder stress. So I was glad to see they invented this Outtawhack bag - something that looks like a messenger and carries like a backpack more evenly on the shoulders, all with room for a computer.


Samsonite seem to be trying to go upmarket and have hired Marc Newsome to create a more modern line of luggage for them - the Black Collection. I found this backpack a great site Retromodern . It fits a 15 inch laptop and seems fairly compact. The only problem to me is that I would to see it in the flesh to feel how adult the fabric is (it seemed a little child like from the site).





Despite all the bellyaching about age, bad backs etc., I might not be able to resist this bag from Ting in London (sourced via Coolhunter . It's made from recycled leather, has a moleskine lining and is probably the kind of thing I would ruin way to quickly. But it feels very journalistic and academic so I may not be able to resist. Maybe I'll have to start yoga to make up for the back pain :)

CPC

The success of Adwords (and assorted competitors) has shown that cost per click (CPC) advertising is not just a matter of excess as space, but a way of making advertising more equitable (to advertiser and advertising medium)in terms of value vs. ROS, while also becoming more contextually accurate and accountable.

It is perhaps not surprising then that we now have cost per print couponing and cost per call advertising. Zixxo , an SF based startup is taking on the likes of established couponers (e.g. ValPak) by offering to charge clients only if their coupon is printed out. Ingenio charges only of the toll free number placed in the online ad is called (something very popular among lawyers, plumbers etc.>

Thanks to The Economist for the lead.

measuring advertising's effects

I have always been a little skeptical about the use of econometrics to measure ad effectiveness - espoecially in the US (this is not patriotic - I have just seen Brits do a better job). Having spent a fair bit with econometrics at university and beyond,I find it can be a very oversimplified way of looking at a situation where different endogenous factors influence each other, not just the outcome. Neural network analysis may solve this issue, but is not widely being used right now.

That being said, I have just seen some interesting econometric work that confirms a lot of underlying suppositions planners have and clients often don't. For example, just looking at the correlation between media spend and results underestimates the effect of advertising -adstock is a much better measure. This sounds obvious, but we still see lots of tracking studies that make this mistake. Another assumption they have proved is that advertising increases loyalty and makes people less price sensitive, whereas trade spending does the opposite. Again, not new news (Ehrenberg showed it some time ago), but advice not widely known or followed by CPG marketers in the US.

But confirming these results is not enough. Why, if these things are well know, are they not followed. My feling is that marketers elsewhere are involved in continuing training or belong to a central organization (e.g. IPA) that works on this stuff. In the US, the ARF is overly academic and the AAAA does not really work on this. APG US had the potential to do this work but never had the funding.

organizing mechanism?

rename planning

I was fortunate enough to meet with some folks from Dial House today (formerly known as Plan B). Part of our conversation revolved around the idea that, what planning is/should be is not so mucn consumer centric as it is culture centric (an idea shared by the likes of John Grant). And it struck me that perhaps we need to stop calling what we do planning.

The fact is that the name planning, in most people's minds, connotes a consumer centric approach. And while I am not advocating ignoring consumers, it seems to be more useful to look at the cultural context in which the consumer makes the decisions. As Dave Nottoli of OIA points out in this post actually getting different answers from a direct consumer reserach approach no longer works. It is why even clients are pushing for a more ethnographic approach to research.

But even this is not the solution. For a start, the ethnographies are false - a 2 hour encounter with a consumer is not anthropology. We need to either observe decision making or understand the things influencing decisions, rather than just ask people what they think. This is maybe not new to some inside advertising, but it is new(er) externally, and harder to sell (internally and externally) when we are thought of as planners. Maybe, if our job is to bring in new ideas or ways of thinking to the agency, that this should be the basis of our name.

Simialrly, if we keep calling ourselves ad agencies, we will keep selling ourselves as ad agencies and keep making ads. No, it is not that simple, but if we have a different name for ourselves, we usually have a different phjilosophy, and that is a start.

Update...

Check out this interview from if! with the founders of Risque - a new research agency - on the problems with traditional research.

Real Feedback

John Moore at Brand Autopsy put up this interesting post about the most effective channel for employee feedback at Starbucks.

This reminds a little bit of the Vault site in it's heyday, which was a great way for job candidates to get the inside scoop on a company and for companies to find out what employees really thought. Both this and the Starbucks example show how hard it is to capture true employee thinking or feedback when doing direct research. This is the power of arming employees with blogs. Of course, as the post point out, management needs to have the self confidence to trust employees to provide this feedback. But in the case of a company like Starbucks - which is one of the few to really invest in hiring and training - this should not have been a big issue.

One potential cause is that company's are all too ready to believe the feedback given in employee satisfaction surveys (and market research surveys for that matter), without digging deeper. One hopes that with blogs so readily available (and technology like MotiveQuest to monitor it), companies will increasingly observe comments under a more realistic light rather than the artifice of research.

outsource your kitchen

What do you do when you are a working Mum, maybe one who doesn't love cooking, doesn't have time to learn it, but still has to feed the family?

Dream Dinners gives you recipes, a place to cut and pre-cut ingredients. It is the antidote to "curbside" restaurant ordering if you are a busy parent - and still lets you in the kitchen. One of the great things about this experience is that it allows you to enjoy the cooking without any of the other stresses surrounding mealtime (e.g. kids under foot, phone calls etc.).

new creative

I just came across this quote from someone at US CPG company:

"One thing I'm sure about is that the skills of a creative in the digital domain go way beyond the stereotypical visually oriented. I'll take a musician or a math geek any day when it comes to creating something novel in multidimensional, non-linear, global, information space like the internet. If "technology", when sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from "Magic", then one avenue to create magic is an advanced knowledge of technology."

Now, while I am loath to comment on comments about creativity from P&G-esque companies, why shouldn't we mash up the skills of modern creatives? If I remember correctly, St. Lukes had an artist in residence - why shouldn't we bring in musicians, mathematicians and software designers, tell them a bit creativitytivity and let them fly (Project Runway for advertising???).

But a bigger question is why aren't agencies doing this with existing staff - mixing up hiring practices or at the very least training. At this point we invest very little in R&D or tools and people. The obvious answer is that competition and client "power' has shrunk margins to the point where that investment ios deemed unfeasible by the market. B ut one would have thought that shrewd minds like John Wren would start to realize that, with fewer and fewer acquisition targets (and higher acquisition premiums), growth of the large holding companies will have to be organic. And that means either acquiring talent or growing it. Unfortunately, because acquiring talent can produce shorter term results, that is most likely what will keep happening.

El OC

If you want to understand the Hispanic influence in SoCal, it's easier to open your ears than your eyes.

Driving down here and hitting the scan button, 4 out of 5 stations are Hispanic. This fact is maybe less surprising when you learn that, from 1998 to 2003, the number of Hispanic radio stations in the United States grew from 302 to 598, according to the BIA Financial Network. A different perspective is, as this NPR report illustrates, that the HIspanic audience is the most catered to minority in terms of media.

Curious then that there is Hispanic "discount" for paid media and interesting that (judging by the numbers) radio seems to be the easiest (or most popular) way of reaching this audience vs. say TV. But whatever the media outlet or it's cost, it seems that Hispanic is increasingly country neutral - i.e. not Mexican, Puerto Rican but just Hispanic - and this can bring the community together to make it a more potent, influential force. The demonstrations against the US Congress's immigration bill, and the role of radio in galvanising turnout for those events, seems to be proof that this is already happening.

Fakation

Fakation (~Fay~kay-tion) n. The use of holiday time for an event that is not really a holiday, usually visiting family.

Someone came up with this term in a meeting last week and it was to perfect not to talk about. With families spreading out all over the US, a lot of the people I talk to and work with are using up their very small number of days off to go and visit their families on the other side of the country (or, I suppose, have them fly out). Either way, it usually ends up being a fakation for one adult in the family or, with the way families can be, a stressful experience for both grown ups.

The stress is doubtlessly not very different from going away with another family (or your extended family). But even though people in the US are talking more and more about wanting to strengthen family bonds, there was definitely frustration about how much effort had to go into a family visit.

It's just a little reminder of the perils of living in a big place (I certainly don't get to see my brother and cousins in NY that much, never mind the folks in Europe), but also how easy and "expected" it is to move around the country for a job. Maybe I am just the poster child for this, but everywhere we move to, there are more and more people who are "first generation" into the area. This is very different than even 20 or 30 years ago - so much for the Internet allowing people to work over distance :)It would be interesting in another 20 years to looks and see how these new migration habits have affected local culture (does anyone know if it is being done now?)/

teapartay

If you haven't seen this, you should.

And remember - high tea in the parlour makes the ladies holla.

New Warfare

Strategy has it's most famous origins in war. So (thanks to the SF Chronicle) it was interesting to see how the theory of war has evolved, what the new theories have in common and what the parallels are for how marketing and business are evolving.

New theories of war - such as netwar and fourth generation warfare - talk to a form of warfare which introduces non-linear tactics, designed to bypass and infiltrate the enemy and collapse it from within. Netwar in particular, talks to a form of war conducted by leaderless, network like organisations rather than hierarchies. Even before the web (which obviously enables this type of organization), the IRA was a relatively shallow networked organisation that manage to sustain a conflict for almost 30 years.

It seems easy to draw parallels between this kind of warfare and where we are going in marketing. Yes we have guerilla marketing, but this has devolved into more of a medium than a strategy. An in today's world, a full frontal assault (no matter the medium) is no longer as effect as small surgical strikes, and going around consumers defences is even better.

Netwar organisations strike frequently and in seeming random ways in order to prevent detection. This is an interesting comparison not only to illustrate a way a brand should be built, but also the constraints we face. When media planning is or needs to be done in advance or on an annual basis (e.g. through the upfront) it makes opportunistic action to be hard. Even if this kind of planning is not an issue, most planners are trained to repeat a medium or effort to build up impressions vs. making one big splash in many places at many times.

There is also an interesting parallel from an organisational perspective. Marketing is organised around co-ordination, but if we were to take the netwar idea to extremes, maybe we should consider working along team lines, each with a separate objective.

Say's Law and the Long Tail

Lee Gomes in The Wall Street Journal seems really determined to skewer Chris Andersen's Long Tail theory. In a new article in Wednesday's Journal he find more data to support his argument that hits are more important than ever - from Pirates of the Caribean to music albums.

The problem I have with his argument is that it is a misuse of data. Just because there are hits today does not means that hits are the way of the future. As 19th Century econimst Say (as well J. M. Keynes) said: "Supply Creates its own Demand". The more minor hits come onto the market, the more people will be able to fill their time with things that they are truly interested in vs. what is agvailable.

It's also not just an issue of supply but of social communication. Hits are hits because of the herd effect - if everyone is going to see it we feel compelled or more motivated to go. So one of the reasons for Long Tail phenomena occur is that there are more "herd" communication mechanisms (e.g. " Amazon's dynamic reccomendations).

So by supplying hits at low distribution costs and having ways of "creating" or amplifying a herd effect, content in the long tail should be profitable to. And to me (at least), this is the point of the theory - not that hits will disappear.

brand knowledge

Don't ask me how I started thinking about this (though the 4 hour plane road home tonight probably had something to do with it), but in our business we take brand knowledge for granted a lot.

Imagine if we were trying to measure the strength of brands by asking people if they would pay a price premium for it. If it were brands of TV, many people might say Sony or Hitachi for example. But many of those respondents will never of owned one of these brands? In all likelihood a large percentage of them will not - their feeling is based on reputation, second hand knowledge.

That knowledge has to start from somewhere. And it is knowledge that I don't believe advertising can create - not with the diversity of media and the cynicism of the public being what it is. Maybe instead, our role (especially when re-launching or re-positioning a brand) is to change the context or way in which the brand is encountered. Maybe it is by introducing it (literally) to new people without advertising being involved. This changes the way I would describe a planners role a little: how to do you get creatives to set up a nice date between the brand and the target by telling them about who the target is (BTW an ad is not a date - it's a lecture)?

In researching (and procrastinating) this post, I found a nice quote on Holy Cow's blog. Brands do fill in the knowledge gap - but we cannot assign them meaning to do that. We can on only create encounters and let consumers do the rest.

Lifestyle

There was an interesting and provocative piece on NPR's Fresh Air on Monday talking about the term lifestyle, particulately the misuse of the word.

One of the most telling quotes was: "not everyone gets to have a lifestyle". This is very true - when do we talk about the lifestyle of the working poor, or undocumented immigrants. Maybe this is because we have substituted the original definition of lifestyle (literally, a style of life framed by a set of beliefs), for a symbolic image that can be bought.

More worryingly, this change in the term seems to have happened because marketers have latched on to any new lifestyle as a direct source of material. The alternative (original design or less directly derived work) is either to risky or two expensive to produce. Of course there is always room for a company like Zara to knock off that original work. The program noted that term lifestyle became popular at the same time as "marketers took over from social scientists as the new cartographers of society".

Maybe we, as planners, should not focus as much on describing a target's current lifestyle, but on creating a new lifestyle for a diverse (relatively undefined) target.

The Innovator's Solution

I have just been reading Clay Christensen's "The Innovator's Solution" (follow up the "The Innovator's Dilemna"), in which the author makes some telling points.

One of the most interesting is his discussion of how you form a good theory about management. To him, the key is to categorize the observations or phenomena you make correctly and he chides consultants for advising the same soltion that has worked for a few excellent companies (since it is very rare that many companies are in exactly the same circumstances). Unless you have exhausted the circumstances of when and where the solution won't work, you haveb't got a complete theory and can't describe what is truly happening.

Unfortunately, this mistake happens all the time in agencies and consultancies. We glibly cite Starbucks, Nike etc. as paragons of great advertising and proscribe them as solutions. But to few of us really understand why things worked when they did (except for thos on the client side or who worked on the business). This is the problem with the whole concept of best practices - best for what when.

Incidentally, Christensen uses a similar argument to take on segmentation in a riff that is similar to previous articles in Nilewide. He criticizes segmentation on attributes (of products or people) because the mathematics involved only look at the correlation between attributes and outcomes. Applying his argument, we need to segment on the circumstances of the job customers want a product to fulfill (emotional, functional, personal) vs focusing on the product or person.

Circumstancial marketing was used by Sony's Akio Morita to drive that company's innovation ro disrupt the market (e.g. Targeting cheap portable radios at teens in the 1960's because any music was better than none). When Morita left, Sony stopped doing this and they haven't really had a disruptive innovation since ( e.g. PSP was a late market entrant vs a first)


PS Sorry for the lack of font changes etc. I'm emailing this in from a plane :)